IsleVue

Articles by John Iacovelli

Wheel

This project is a Zodiac wheel containing the planetary, elemental and qabalistic symbols, their Tarot “assignments,” and the divinatory meanings assigned them. I used the Golden Dawn’s set of meanings both because they are a major source for the Waite Colman Smith deck, and because they are not bound by copyright. The latter is important because if it’s useful to me, it’s useful to others, and this means anything I put together as part of this project can be “sharable.” The Wheel is offered under the Creative Commons Attribution license. I offer it to all who think they may learn from it. I also offer the “source” so that if there’s a part of it they disagree with, they can make their desired changes and create their own wheel. the post entitled “Tarot Wheel of the Zodiac version 1.x Official” is the best place to download it from, because it contains any new release notes. The scalable vector graphics version which appears in all the one page guides is automatically updated as well, so if you “Save As” from there, you have the latest .SVG version.

Wheel 2.0 RWS Feature Image
Tarot
John Iacovelli ,

Tarot Wheel 2.0.0 beta – the RWS Spin

Those familiar with version 1.0 of the wheel may recall that version was focused on the Golden Dawn. This is version 2.0 (beta). I have redone everything, and consider it appropriate as an RWS “spin.” I have replaced the descriptions taken from the Book T with excerpts of the divinatory meanings from The Pictorial Key to the Tarot. I’ve kept the Golden Dawn’s esoteric names for the minors.

The main reason for the update, actually, was to move the “source” document out of Microsoft Visio. It is now a scalable vector graphic (.svg). As such, free and open software such as InkScape can work equally well to edit the source document as proprietary software such as Adobe Illustrator. The Tarot Wheel carries the most liberal of the Creative Commons licenses (attribution type) expressly because I hope to see others pick it up and customize it. It would make a splendid platform as a “Little White Book” for a new deck. In addition to the finished wheel, I am making a completely “empty” one, i.e., no text, no colors, just shapes, available as well.

I hope that this will help those new to tarot, especially. If you’re in RWS land, i.e., the Waite-Smith tarot and other decks derived from it, you may find it of use.

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