One of the reasons that research on Tarot cards is so small is the lack of a unified system of meanings and standards for the interpretation of cards. This is not surprising, because during its long existence, the phenomenon of Tarot cards has been refracted in the minds of numerous practitioners and theorists of occultism, each of whom has made some of their own author’s touches into the tradition existing at that time. As a result, today we have several thousand Tarot decks, various schools and trends, as well as the author’s explanations of how the system works.
On the one hand, such diversity seems to be a wealth of tradition, but on the other hand, it poses very serious obstacles for any scientifically oriented research on the Tarot phenomenon. When we say: “Hermit means …”, it is not clear in what tradition, in what deck and in what practice. How to collect statistics and evidence base when there is not even a hint of unity?
Nevertheless, there is a way out. Bialiauski Group is currently busy compiling a Unified Tarot Frequency Scale. For this, a selection of card connotations is made from numerous literary sources, a semantic and synonymous analysis of these connotations is carried out, and the frequency of certain connotations is calculated for each Arcana of the Tarot. This is a long and meticulous work that is necessary for the study of the Tarot phenomenon to become possible at all. The resulting scales will not only help to determine for each individual practitioner how much his/her vision of the card corresponds to the majority or unique, but will also allow connecting the statistics tool to the subsequent study of Tarot cards.