To begin, I would like to dispense with two of the most prevalent myths about the Tarot, one on either side of the credibility divide:
Myth #1: The Tarot was invented in ancient Egypt and passed down through secret societies like the Templars and the Masons until emerging in Renaissance Europe. Alternatively, the pictures on the 22 so-called "Major Arcana" refer to secrets discovered by the Crusaders, or some other tale. Essentially, the basic notion here is that the Major Arcana existed, as a complete set of symbols, long before the appearance of the cards in Europe, and the cards were used for centuries to pass along and teach esoteric wisdom hidden under the guise of a card game.
Truth: All the way back in 1909, A.E. Waite, who at the very least commissioned and to some extent helped design the cards drawn by Pamela Coleman Smith that have become the dominant images by which the Tarot is known today, completely demolished the claims by Court de Gebelin that the cards have their origin in ancient Egypt. Waite went point by point through de Gebelin's "proofs," showing each one of them to be unfounded, and proving that one of them, at least, was a complete fraud. There is, in fact, no Egyptian word "Tar" meaning "road," no Egyptian word "Ro" meaning "king or royal," and Tarot does not mean "The Royal Road to Wisdom" in Egyptian or any other language. He simply made it up to bolster his claim to have discovered the Egyptian nature of the cards, knowing that no one could contradict him since no one knew anything about the ancient Egyptian language. The Rosetta Stone would not be discovered for another 18 years, and by the time anyone knew enough to prove de Gebelin wrong, the myth was so firmly entrenched that it still persists today.
Waite also dismissed other claims to ancient origins, summing up the history of the Tarot as follows: "We shall see in due course that the history of Tarot cards is largely of a negative kind, and that . . . there is in fact no history prior to the fourteenth century." Nearly a century of scholarship has largely confirmed this, and narrowed it a bit: there is in fact no history prior to the fifteenth century.
This offends some Tarotists, who feel deeply the need to believe that the symbols are ancient -- and indeed some of them are. But the Tarot as an oracle, as an intact set of symbols with esoteric and occult meanings, used in divination or contemplation toward spiritual advancement or for focusing magical intent, cannot possibly be more than half a millennium old, and has developed significantly, changed and grown and altered in character over time, and continues to do so. The oracle is a living tradition of fairly recent origin, rather than a static revelation passed down from the ancients.
Myth #2: There is nothing to the Tarot that is at all oracular or of occult significance. The cards were invented in the 1400s to play a game, and was never anything else until the occultists discovered it and attributed all sorts of ridiculous things to it.
Truth: This one is frankly harder to dismiss, but I think it's wrong. For the most part, those who have not had personal experience with phenomena that can't be easily explained by current scientific theories of the nature of the universe would do well to listen to the skeptics, because there are far more delusional and fraudulent messengers among the supposed cognoscenti then there are conduits of worthwhile and useful information.
On the other hand, those of use who have had such experiences know that there are things that are not explainable by our modern scientific theories of the universe. And the skeptics are too often insistent on disbelief, instead of truly having open minds.
The skeptics are right to say that the Tarot was not invented to pass on secret information. They go too far in insisting the cards were without symbolic meaning in their earliest days, and the symbols often included things we would today think of as "esoteric" or "occult," though the game players didn't think of them that way.
What I mean by that is that many things we associate with the "occult" today (although little is really "hidden" in our Internetted world) were once part of everyday life. The Popes of the period that saw the birth of the Tarot regularly consulted the stars, either for themselves or through astrologers. To suppose that the more educated and affluent players, at least, would be unaware of fairly obvious references to such things is absurd, although it's also absurd to say that they used a card game to cover up their interest in such things for fear of being burned as witches.
The Tarot developed from a card game rich with symbolism into an occult tradition gradually over time. We really don't know when people started using the cards for fortune telling, but it seems pretty clear that the Marseilles traditions reflect to some extent occult sensibilities, and they were established by the middle of the 1600s. Certainly there is no reason to doubt Etteilla or de Gebelin on the existence of an ongoing tradition of fortune-telling with the cards at the time they were writing, in the late 18th century.
The traditions of the Tarot developed gradually, with no clear beginning and no end in sight, but with a few solid reference points. That the cards began as a game with undoubted but fairly superficial symbolic content can no longer be doubted. It is also now apparent that for the first century of their existence the suit of trumps varied from deck to deck more than previously acknowledged. However, many of the eventual settled order of trumps were present fairly early on, and certainly by 1500 a set of trumps existed that would be passed down more-or-less intact, although the order would be changed and some of the pictures altered. Alongside this stable tradition, however, there existed also a tradition of playing the game with trump suit that bore no relation to the familiar Tarot trumps, with decks that are usually now referred to as "Tarock" decks to differentiate them from the more familiar symbolic cards. And this tradition turns out not to be a later degradation, but present from the very beginning -- indeed, it now appears that the very first deck of cards, the very first version of the new game from which Tarot evolved, contained not symbols like Death and Fortune but Greek gods. And there were only 16 of them.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. The point is that there are no ancient and absolute meanings behind the symbols in the Tarot, and while this doesn't quite mean that the cards mean whatever you want them to mean, it does mean that anyone who tells you they have the absolute truth about them is either a liar or a fool.
If the Tarot cards, and in particular the 22 so-called Major Arcana don't represent ancient wisdom passed down intact from the ages, if the cards don't symbolize specific things that we can point to and learn absolutely and rely on, what's the point? How can they be meaningful to our lives, or have any answers for us when we consult them?
There are two answers. The first is that any set of cards, representing any number of ideas either in words or pictures, shuffled up and dealt out together, could be used as an oracle, because the power of the oracle is not in the cards themselves, but in yourself or at least in the connection between yourself and whatever you believe oracles such as the Tarot help you connect with.
The second answer is more subtle, and more specific to the Tarot: although the symbols are neither ancient nor unchangeable, they are also neither wholly arbitrary nor without tradition. After several hundred years of intense concentration by those who at least thought of themselves as adepts, in one fashion or another, the cards have accumulated a real power not easy to explain to the skeptical but not available to the reader using non-Tarot oracle cards or ordinary playing cards -- although both of these can, in fact, provide useful answers in readings. The fact that various authorities have imputed differing and even contrasting meanings to the cards does not vitiate the real psychic energy accumulated by the fact that so many highly attuned individuals were paying attention to the cards, which alone would boost their profile on the cosmic scale.
There will be those for whom the last paragraph seems completely nonsensical, either because they do not understand it or because they understand it but do not believe such things to be possible. If you are among them, you are welcome to strike it out and go on as if I had not written it, as it is not necessary to my thesis. I do ask that you not hold it against me, the way I seek to allow myself to be open to the wisdom of even those writers who open with the absurdities of de Gebelin's Egyptian fantasies. Not everyone who says foolish things is a fool, and even the fool may speak wisdom.
I may also say that wisdom can come disguised as apparent foolishness, and advise the reader to be open-minded even to things that may sound strange at first, but most of my readers will already be aware of that.
Saturday, October 15, 2005
Friday, October 14, 2005
Still more on Tarot origins
In addition to the far-too-many Tarotists who blithely pass on completely discredited misinformation about the history of the Tarot, either from ignorance or chicanery, there is a slightly smaller group that does at least recognize the value of historical scholarship, but is so heavily invested in the belief that the Tarot represents "ancient wisdom" that they endeavor to keep as much as possible of the traditional mythology of Tarotic origins without violating known facts. Their tortured theories, however, regularly violate Occam's dictum that the simplest explanation is usually the best.
Personally, I have no problem realizing that the Tarot is a relatively modern invention, and that to the extent that it contains traditions and symbols that have been around for centuries before the cards were first invented, for the most part those things have been put into the cards gradually over time. They were not invented as a means of passing that knowledge and those symbols on surreptitiously under cover of a card game. They were invented as a card game and developed into something much more. To me, this does not make the Tarot any less useful, any less important, or any less real.
On the other hand, some Historians tend to discount the very real importance of the symbolic content of the Trumps, at least, among the players of the game in 15th Century Italy. And while the cards and those meanings were never "secret" or "occult" in the usual sense of those terms, it's also true that many ideas that were abroad at the time, including some related directly to the game of trumps and the symbols it used, were what we would today label "esoteric" or "occult" (although the original meanings of those terms is pretty ludicrous when applied to things available to anyone on the Internet!).
Both sides in this debate would do well to remember that the late Middle Ages, segueing into the early Renaissance -- the period that produced the first trionfi cards that eventually became the Tarot -- was a period of intellectual ferment, philosophical debate, heretical religious exploration and deep superstition. Many things now identified with the "occult" were ordinary knowledge then, and not hidden at all.
The most obvious example here is Astrology. As late as the 16th Century -- long after the Tarot cards were in existence -- a newly elected Pope put off his formal investiture by three weeks to make sure that it took place on an astrologically auspicious day. It's true that the Church formally frowned on astrology, as well as most other forms of divination, but belief in them was widespread, among educated and intelligent folks as well as the masses, and the Church did little to fight it. It wasn't hidden. It wasn't secret knowledge known only to a few -- although obviously some knew more than others, and to some extent the ability to cast horoscopes and plot the movements of the stars and planets could be said to be "esoteric."
Much more than just the obvious symbolic content of having a skeleton with a scythe represent the concept of death was at work from the earliest beginnings of the game of trumps, and that the oracle we have today is in many ways a natural, perhaps even an inevitable, extension of that.
Personally, I have no problem realizing that the Tarot is a relatively modern invention, and that to the extent that it contains traditions and symbols that have been around for centuries before the cards were first invented, for the most part those things have been put into the cards gradually over time. They were not invented as a means of passing that knowledge and those symbols on surreptitiously under cover of a card game. They were invented as a card game and developed into something much more. To me, this does not make the Tarot any less useful, any less important, or any less real.
On the other hand, some Historians tend to discount the very real importance of the symbolic content of the Trumps, at least, among the players of the game in 15th Century Italy. And while the cards and those meanings were never "secret" or "occult" in the usual sense of those terms, it's also true that many ideas that were abroad at the time, including some related directly to the game of trumps and the symbols it used, were what we would today label "esoteric" or "occult" (although the original meanings of those terms is pretty ludicrous when applied to things available to anyone on the Internet!).
Both sides in this debate would do well to remember that the late Middle Ages, segueing into the early Renaissance -- the period that produced the first trionfi cards that eventually became the Tarot -- was a period of intellectual ferment, philosophical debate, heretical religious exploration and deep superstition. Many things now identified with the "occult" were ordinary knowledge then, and not hidden at all.
The most obvious example here is Astrology. As late as the 16th Century -- long after the Tarot cards were in existence -- a newly elected Pope put off his formal investiture by three weeks to make sure that it took place on an astrologically auspicious day. It's true that the Church formally frowned on astrology, as well as most other forms of divination, but belief in them was widespread, among educated and intelligent folks as well as the masses, and the Church did little to fight it. It wasn't hidden. It wasn't secret knowledge known only to a few -- although obviously some knew more than others, and to some extent the ability to cast horoscopes and plot the movements of the stars and planets could be said to be "esoteric."
Much more than just the obvious symbolic content of having a skeleton with a scythe represent the concept of death was at work from the earliest beginnings of the game of trumps, and that the oracle we have today is in many ways a natural, perhaps even an inevitable, extension of that.
Thursday, October 13, 2005
More on Tarot origins
That many Tarotists still quote de Gebelin's version of where the word "Tarot" comes from (see last post) is unfortunate, not only because it reveals those individuals to be ignorant of a subject they presume to lecture others about, but because it gives the Historians ammunition to paint all Tarotists as careless about facts. Indeed, far too many Tarotists dismiss the importance of historical evidence altogether, blithely making all sorts of wild claims that cannot be supported, and either completely ignoring the record or arguing that since the "secret doctrine" was passed down through secret societies, no record of it can be expected.
In fact, most of the "secret wisdom" of the Order of the Golden Dawn was gathered by MacGregor Mathers from the rare books collection at the British Museum. Nearly all of it was written down, and nearly everything that isn't traceable through a chain of documents is, in fact, highly suspect. Not necessarily false, all of it, but highly suspect. And much of it is false, like de Gebelin's Egyptian fantasies.
On the other hand, the contention of the Historians that there is nothing to the Tarot is demonstrably false, though not all witnesses will perceive the evidence the same way. Those of us who have had experiences -- with Tarot or otherwise -- that are not explainable by reference to mundane explanation know that there is more to our lives than current science allows for. Those who have not, or who willfully ignore such happenings, can never be convinced that we are not all either liars or delusional. They cannot be reproduced on demand in a laboratory setting because they are more akin to the inspiration that causes a painter or composer to create than to combining chemicals in a test-tube.
In fact, most of the "secret wisdom" of the Order of the Golden Dawn was gathered by MacGregor Mathers from the rare books collection at the British Museum. Nearly all of it was written down, and nearly everything that isn't traceable through a chain of documents is, in fact, highly suspect. Not necessarily false, all of it, but highly suspect. And much of it is false, like de Gebelin's Egyptian fantasies.
On the other hand, the contention of the Historians that there is nothing to the Tarot is demonstrably false, though not all witnesses will perceive the evidence the same way. Those of us who have had experiences -- with Tarot or otherwise -- that are not explainable by reference to mundane explanation know that there is more to our lives than current science allows for. Those who have not, or who willfully ignore such happenings, can never be convinced that we are not all either liars or delusional. They cannot be reproduced on demand in a laboratory setting because they are more akin to the inspiration that causes a painter or composer to create than to combining chemicals in a test-tube.
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
Another take on defining Tarot
The Tarot is an oracle, which means it is a tool for getting in touch with something or someone outside our ordinary human consciousness. Some believe they are communing with God, others that they are merely dredging up things from deep in their own subconscious. Still others theorize that the Tarot puts us in touch with pagan gods, or mysterious but natural forces we don't yet understand. In any case, if the Tarot works for you, it is because you are making contact with something or someone that is separate from the "you" that thinks and asks and makes decisions.
On the other hand, there are those who say that the cards are nothing more than a game, invented in 15th Century Italy, upon which occult figures, beginning in the 18th Century, imposed esoteric meanings, passed along and expanded by deluded followers and deliberate tricksters. There is no such thing as an "oracle," or if there is such things are not to be found in a pack of cards.
These two diametrically opposed points of view -- let's call them "Tarotists" and "Historians" -- have battled each other fiercely in print and online for the last two decades or so.
The Historians point out that there is no evidence to support the assertion that the 22 so-called Major Arcana existed, as an intact group of related symbols, at any time prior to the 15th Century. Indeed, there are some indications that they weren't even all present in the earliest decks of trionfi cards (Italian for "triumphs," the original name for the decks, the Trumps, and the game played with them). No one mentioned the possibility that the cards were of Egyptian origin until Court de Gebelin published Le Monde Primitif (a large work of several volumes and many hundreds of pages remembered now only for those portions dealing with the Tarot), and his theories are not only unsupported, at least one of his most famous assertions is demonstratably false. Not only that, but the strong likelihood exists that he was not duped into believing it, but invented it himself, passing it along as "secret knowledge" he was privy to, which casts doubt on everything he wrote.
I'm speaking of the oft-quoted etymology of the word "Tarot" as consisting of the ancient Egyptian word "tar," meaning road, and "ro," meaning king or royal, thus revealing the Tarot to be the "royal road to wisdom."
It's utter nonsense.
There are no Egyptian words matching that description. And de Gebelin almost certainly knew it, although there remains the (very) slight possibility that he was told this and believed it. Probably, he wanted to bolster his "insight" that the cards were ultimately of Egyptian origin by some real evidence, so he manufactured it. Writing years before the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, when no one had any knowledge of ancient Egyptian, he could say anything, claim to be the inheritor of a "secret tradition," and no one could prove him wrong.
That many Tarotists still quote his version of where the word "Tarot" comes from is unfortunate.
On the other hand, there are those who say that the cards are nothing more than a game, invented in 15th Century Italy, upon which occult figures, beginning in the 18th Century, imposed esoteric meanings, passed along and expanded by deluded followers and deliberate tricksters. There is no such thing as an "oracle," or if there is such things are not to be found in a pack of cards.
These two diametrically opposed points of view -- let's call them "Tarotists" and "Historians" -- have battled each other fiercely in print and online for the last two decades or so.
The Historians point out that there is no evidence to support the assertion that the 22 so-called Major Arcana existed, as an intact group of related symbols, at any time prior to the 15th Century. Indeed, there are some indications that they weren't even all present in the earliest decks of trionfi cards (Italian for "triumphs," the original name for the decks, the Trumps, and the game played with them). No one mentioned the possibility that the cards were of Egyptian origin until Court de Gebelin published Le Monde Primitif (a large work of several volumes and many hundreds of pages remembered now only for those portions dealing with the Tarot), and his theories are not only unsupported, at least one of his most famous assertions is demonstratably false. Not only that, but the strong likelihood exists that he was not duped into believing it, but invented it himself, passing it along as "secret knowledge" he was privy to, which casts doubt on everything he wrote.
I'm speaking of the oft-quoted etymology of the word "Tarot" as consisting of the ancient Egyptian word "tar," meaning road, and "ro," meaning king or royal, thus revealing the Tarot to be the "royal road to wisdom."
It's utter nonsense.
There are no Egyptian words matching that description. And de Gebelin almost certainly knew it, although there remains the (very) slight possibility that he was told this and believed it. Probably, he wanted to bolster his "insight" that the cards were ultimately of Egyptian origin by some real evidence, so he manufactured it. Writing years before the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, when no one had any knowledge of ancient Egyptian, he could say anything, claim to be the inheritor of a "secret tradition," and no one could prove him wrong.
That many Tarotists still quote his version of where the word "Tarot" comes from is unfortunate.
Monday, October 10, 2005
What is the Tarot?
Here are two definitions of Tarot:
1) The Tarot is an oracle -- that is, a tool for getting in touch with something or someone outside our conscious minds -- consisting of 78 cards, 22 of which have symbolic pictures that are rich with symbolic meanings and reference ideas, entities, and/or forces that have been known to at least the intellectual and spiritual elites of all ages and places. Most people who use this definition believe the pictures and symbols to have been handed down by secret societies like the Knights Templar and the Rosicrucians from some ancient time far earlier than the first historical appearance of the cards,
2) Tarot cards developed in northern Italy in the 15th Century to play a game originally called trionfi, or "trumps," referring to the innovation of the addition of a fifth suit that could "triumph" over the other cards and which was the forerunner of all modern games involving trumps, such as bridge or pinochle. The first historical mentions of the cards in an occult or esoteric context are from the second half of the 18th Century. Most people who use this definition firmly believe that the cards have no esoteric or symbolic meaning (other than the obvious symbolic connotations of "The Pope" or "Death") prior to the injection (some would even say "infection") of occultism into the cards by Court de Gebelin, Etteilla, and other 18th and 19th Century Occultists.
Although these two definitions point to world views so dissimilar as to be antithetical, the fact is that they can be reconciled, especially if you leave off the last sentence (the one starting "Most people") of each of them.
For many Tarotists, believing in the ancient origin and secret transmission of the Tarot, or at least of the truths contained in the Tarot, is an important part of their belief in the cards as a whole. They simply cannot accept the idea that the cards they love began as a card game to amuse nobles in 15th Century Milan, because that calls into question the fundamental basis for how and why Tarot works, as they understand it. This is unfortunate, because these people pollute the waters with false claims -- claims known to be patently false and rejected by the most esteemed occultist writers, much less the historians -- and worse, dismiss the whole notion of historical research as having any value, since these things were supposedly handed down in secret, so of course the historians can't find evidence of it.
It's true that evidence of absence is not necessarily absence of evidence, but it's also true that there is, in fact, no ancient Egyptian word "Tar" meaning "way or road" and "Ro" meaning "royal" or "king," and Court de Gebelin's famous etymology of "Tarot" as meaning the "Royal Road to Wisdom" in Ancient Egypt is completely and entirely bogus, invented to bolster his claim to have found Egyptian imagery in the cards, and published at a time when no one had any knowledge of Ancient Egyptian (the Rosetta Stone had not yet been found and deciphered) and therefore no one could gainsay his supposed "secret" knowledge of it. That's just one example, and you'll find it not just in the anti-occultist books of Michael Dummet and the like, but in "The Pictorial Key to the Tarot," by Alfred Edward Waite, published in 1910 and written by one of the foremost occult scholars of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, whose designs for what was then a new deck, brought to life by Pamela Coleman Smith, have become the standard, familiar Tarot that everyone thinks of when they think of "Tarot cards" today.
There is no better example of the state of Tarot "scholarship" among the majority of those who "believe in" the cards and use them for purposes other than simply playing the game of Tarock (and it has become known to disassociate itself from it's less respectable cousin, the oracle), than the fact that I have in my possession a 1971 copy of Waite's book, in the introduction of which you will find the Egyptian origin of the cards and even de Gebelin's bogus etymology quoted approvingly! Either the introduction was written by someone who had never actually read Waite's book, or he was counting on the reader not to do so!
In between those who wholeheartedly reject all pretense of historical accuracy, either in denial or oblivious to its findings, or possibly even fraudulently attempting to hoodwink their audience, and those who reject out of hand all notion of oracles and spirit guides and fortune telling or advice from cards, lies a middle ground, occupied by two different groups that are both, I think, more reasonable than either of the more radical positions.
The first moderate group basically tries to hold on to as much as possible of Tarot tradition, wanting to believe that that tradition is, in fact, more than 200-250 years old, that there is some truth to the idea that secret societies passed knowledge down secretly. Working within what is absolutely known historically, but pointing out huge gaps in the historical record, they seek to rehabilitate as much as they can of the tradition.
I understand that point of view, but I do not share it. It is not necessary for me to believe that the cards are ancient, or that the symbols and pictures were passed down intact as some kind of secret wisdom. What matters to me is that the cards work. I can use them to see patterns in my life, and in the lives of others, that can assist us in making better decisions. I also know that the cards can be used to focus magical energies.
I like studying the history of the cards because I think that it makes my appreciation of the symbols richer. Realizing that the meanings of the cards are something that developed over time, and are to some extent arbitrary, frees you to use your own insights to adjust your reading of them. You might even say that the cards mean whatever you want them to mean.
Well, that's not quite right. The cards mean whatever they mean to you. But you can't just decide that in your conscious mind and impose it onto the cards, which are primarily hooking into parts of you that you're not fully in control of. One of my biggest pet peeves is with people who try to deny the reality of the Death card. It's true that it seldom -- possibly even never -- means directly the Death of the person the reading is being done for, and seldom even means an actual physical death of a human being close to them (though occasionally it does). But even if it "only" means a change as many modern Tarotists like to teach, it will be a change that will be traumatic, and it will mean the loss of something or someone that will be mourned. It really is a "bad" card, in the sense that it almost always indicates something painful, even if the final result is positive. The most positive possible spin on the Death card is that it might come up with someone who is trying to kick a habit -- to quit smoking, for example. In that context, it would seem to indicate success -- the habit will be broken, that former way of life will be put aside. But no matter how much you may desire that change, it will still be painful, and you will miss cigarettes for a long, long time (it took me years to quit wanting cigarettes, and I still occasionally dream that I'm smoking and liking it).
So I fully embrace both definitions that we started out with. The cards have no history prior to the 15th Century, and were invented to play a game. The symbols may be ancient, but many of them could have been imposed on the cards as they changed and developed over time. Only the basic, obvious symbolic meanings were there from the beginning -- and they weren't always the same, and we don't know how many of them there were, and the whole notion of today's 22 "Major Arcana" being passed down intact seems ludicrous in the face of the differences between different packs just in the 15th Century. But that doesn't make the "esoteric" or "occult" meanings (odd words to use about something as freely available as information about Tarot) any less real.
The High Priestess card, formerly The Popess and generally referred to here simply as "The Priestess," is a case in point. There is no evidence that she represented, or was thought of as representing, the Goddess, or an aspect of the Goddess, or a priestess of the Goddess, or almost any of the things she is usually said today to represent. Originally, the card was The Popess. She may have represented the Church, the "Bride of Christ" (although she does seem paired with the Pope, rather than with Jesus). She may have been an anti-Catholic slam aimed at the legends of Pope Joan. She may have been a heretical reference to Manfreda Visconti, who was elected Pope of a small sect referred to in obscure histories as the Guglielmites and burned at the stake in Milan in 1300. She may simply be the consort to the Pope as the Empress is consort to the Emperor, in an age that celebrated love and winked at the pretense of priestly chastity.
Or maybe she stands for Sophia, Wisdom, specifically the Wisdom of God, depicted in ancient and medieval thought as female. That's one other possible meaning she may actually have had at the time the card game began -- because it's clear that the game itself was one that involved symbolic meanings of the cards, and the fact that they "trumped" each other in sequence was based on the concepts the pictures symbolized.
That even the Pope, the highest temporal authority on Earth, was trumped by Love in early orderings of the cards is one reason why I think the Popess started out as nothing more than a ribald and mildly blasphemous joke. But Sophia is also a real possibility defendable within the limits of what we know about that time and place.
She was not, in any direct way, an esoteric symbol of Hidden Knowledge.
Yet, that is what she is to me today. She is the Priestess who guards the hidden knowledge, which is the wellspring of the unconscious mind and the soul-connection of the world. Now, that has some connection to the concept of Sophia, the Wisdom of God, but it's not quite the same thing.
Sophia, Mother Church, the Goddess, the Unconscious, these are all symbols that can be found in this card, depending on your philosophical bent. All of them can be useful. I believe that the best card reader is a lifelong student who will eventually make these and other historical connections part of his or her repertoire of associations and connotations to call upon during readings. But none of them is the "real" meaning of the card, in the sense that there was some secret meaning the card had in 1420 that was handed down in secret through the various occult writers to be available to us today. It just doesn't work that way.
1) The Tarot is an oracle -- that is, a tool for getting in touch with something or someone outside our conscious minds -- consisting of 78 cards, 22 of which have symbolic pictures that are rich with symbolic meanings and reference ideas, entities, and/or forces that have been known to at least the intellectual and spiritual elites of all ages and places. Most people who use this definition believe the pictures and symbols to have been handed down by secret societies like the Knights Templar and the Rosicrucians from some ancient time far earlier than the first historical appearance of the cards,
2) Tarot cards developed in northern Italy in the 15th Century to play a game originally called trionfi, or "trumps," referring to the innovation of the addition of a fifth suit that could "triumph" over the other cards and which was the forerunner of all modern games involving trumps, such as bridge or pinochle. The first historical mentions of the cards in an occult or esoteric context are from the second half of the 18th Century. Most people who use this definition firmly believe that the cards have no esoteric or symbolic meaning (other than the obvious symbolic connotations of "The Pope" or "Death") prior to the injection (some would even say "infection") of occultism into the cards by Court de Gebelin, Etteilla, and other 18th and 19th Century Occultists.
Although these two definitions point to world views so dissimilar as to be antithetical, the fact is that they can be reconciled, especially if you leave off the last sentence (the one starting "Most people") of each of them.
For many Tarotists, believing in the ancient origin and secret transmission of the Tarot, or at least of the truths contained in the Tarot, is an important part of their belief in the cards as a whole. They simply cannot accept the idea that the cards they love began as a card game to amuse nobles in 15th Century Milan, because that calls into question the fundamental basis for how and why Tarot works, as they understand it. This is unfortunate, because these people pollute the waters with false claims -- claims known to be patently false and rejected by the most esteemed occultist writers, much less the historians -- and worse, dismiss the whole notion of historical research as having any value, since these things were supposedly handed down in secret, so of course the historians can't find evidence of it.
It's true that evidence of absence is not necessarily absence of evidence, but it's also true that there is, in fact, no ancient Egyptian word "Tar" meaning "way or road" and "Ro" meaning "royal" or "king," and Court de Gebelin's famous etymology of "Tarot" as meaning the "Royal Road to Wisdom" in Ancient Egypt is completely and entirely bogus, invented to bolster his claim to have found Egyptian imagery in the cards, and published at a time when no one had any knowledge of Ancient Egyptian (the Rosetta Stone had not yet been found and deciphered) and therefore no one could gainsay his supposed "secret" knowledge of it. That's just one example, and you'll find it not just in the anti-occultist books of Michael Dummet and the like, but in "The Pictorial Key to the Tarot," by Alfred Edward Waite, published in 1910 and written by one of the foremost occult scholars of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, whose designs for what was then a new deck, brought to life by Pamela Coleman Smith, have become the standard, familiar Tarot that everyone thinks of when they think of "Tarot cards" today.
There is no better example of the state of Tarot "scholarship" among the majority of those who "believe in" the cards and use them for purposes other than simply playing the game of Tarock (and it has become known to disassociate itself from it's less respectable cousin, the oracle), than the fact that I have in my possession a 1971 copy of Waite's book, in the introduction of which you will find the Egyptian origin of the cards and even de Gebelin's bogus etymology quoted approvingly! Either the introduction was written by someone who had never actually read Waite's book, or he was counting on the reader not to do so!
In between those who wholeheartedly reject all pretense of historical accuracy, either in denial or oblivious to its findings, or possibly even fraudulently attempting to hoodwink their audience, and those who reject out of hand all notion of oracles and spirit guides and fortune telling or advice from cards, lies a middle ground, occupied by two different groups that are both, I think, more reasonable than either of the more radical positions.
The first moderate group basically tries to hold on to as much as possible of Tarot tradition, wanting to believe that that tradition is, in fact, more than 200-250 years old, that there is some truth to the idea that secret societies passed knowledge down secretly. Working within what is absolutely known historically, but pointing out huge gaps in the historical record, they seek to rehabilitate as much as they can of the tradition.
I understand that point of view, but I do not share it. It is not necessary for me to believe that the cards are ancient, or that the symbols and pictures were passed down intact as some kind of secret wisdom. What matters to me is that the cards work. I can use them to see patterns in my life, and in the lives of others, that can assist us in making better decisions. I also know that the cards can be used to focus magical energies.
I like studying the history of the cards because I think that it makes my appreciation of the symbols richer. Realizing that the meanings of the cards are something that developed over time, and are to some extent arbitrary, frees you to use your own insights to adjust your reading of them. You might even say that the cards mean whatever you want them to mean.
Well, that's not quite right. The cards mean whatever they mean to you. But you can't just decide that in your conscious mind and impose it onto the cards, which are primarily hooking into parts of you that you're not fully in control of. One of my biggest pet peeves is with people who try to deny the reality of the Death card. It's true that it seldom -- possibly even never -- means directly the Death of the person the reading is being done for, and seldom even means an actual physical death of a human being close to them (though occasionally it does). But even if it "only" means a change as many modern Tarotists like to teach, it will be a change that will be traumatic, and it will mean the loss of something or someone that will be mourned. It really is a "bad" card, in the sense that it almost always indicates something painful, even if the final result is positive. The most positive possible spin on the Death card is that it might come up with someone who is trying to kick a habit -- to quit smoking, for example. In that context, it would seem to indicate success -- the habit will be broken, that former way of life will be put aside. But no matter how much you may desire that change, it will still be painful, and you will miss cigarettes for a long, long time (it took me years to quit wanting cigarettes, and I still occasionally dream that I'm smoking and liking it).
So I fully embrace both definitions that we started out with. The cards have no history prior to the 15th Century, and were invented to play a game. The symbols may be ancient, but many of them could have been imposed on the cards as they changed and developed over time. Only the basic, obvious symbolic meanings were there from the beginning -- and they weren't always the same, and we don't know how many of them there were, and the whole notion of today's 22 "Major Arcana" being passed down intact seems ludicrous in the face of the differences between different packs just in the 15th Century. But that doesn't make the "esoteric" or "occult" meanings (odd words to use about something as freely available as information about Tarot) any less real.
The High Priestess card, formerly The Popess and generally referred to here simply as "The Priestess," is a case in point. There is no evidence that she represented, or was thought of as representing, the Goddess, or an aspect of the Goddess, or a priestess of the Goddess, or almost any of the things she is usually said today to represent. Originally, the card was The Popess. She may have represented the Church, the "Bride of Christ" (although she does seem paired with the Pope, rather than with Jesus). She may have been an anti-Catholic slam aimed at the legends of Pope Joan. She may have been a heretical reference to Manfreda Visconti, who was elected Pope of a small sect referred to in obscure histories as the Guglielmites and burned at the stake in Milan in 1300. She may simply be the consort to the Pope as the Empress is consort to the Emperor, in an age that celebrated love and winked at the pretense of priestly chastity.
Or maybe she stands for Sophia, Wisdom, specifically the Wisdom of God, depicted in ancient and medieval thought as female. That's one other possible meaning she may actually have had at the time the card game began -- because it's clear that the game itself was one that involved symbolic meanings of the cards, and the fact that they "trumped" each other in sequence was based on the concepts the pictures symbolized.
That even the Pope, the highest temporal authority on Earth, was trumped by Love in early orderings of the cards is one reason why I think the Popess started out as nothing more than a ribald and mildly blasphemous joke. But Sophia is also a real possibility defendable within the limits of what we know about that time and place.
She was not, in any direct way, an esoteric symbol of Hidden Knowledge.
Yet, that is what she is to me today. She is the Priestess who guards the hidden knowledge, which is the wellspring of the unconscious mind and the soul-connection of the world. Now, that has some connection to the concept of Sophia, the Wisdom of God, but it's not quite the same thing.
Sophia, Mother Church, the Goddess, the Unconscious, these are all symbols that can be found in this card, depending on your philosophical bent. All of them can be useful. I believe that the best card reader is a lifelong student who will eventually make these and other historical connections part of his or her repertoire of associations and connotations to call upon during readings. But none of them is the "real" meaning of the card, in the sense that there was some secret meaning the card had in 1420 that was handed down in secret through the various occult writers to be available to us today. It just doesn't work that way.
Saturday, September 03, 2005
The Tarot Trumps
Here are a list of statements "by" each of the Tarot trumps, with some possible alternates:
I - The Magician - I shape (I work, I manipulate, I assert, I make, I will)
II - The Priestess - I know (I comprehend, I perceive, I understand, I believe, I intuit, I feel, I conceal)
III - The Empress - I give (I bestow, I nurture, I cultivate, I develop, I support)
IV - The Emperor - I rule (I order, I command, I regulate, I organize, I administer)
V - The Pontiff - I teach (I initiate, I indoctrinate, I induct, I accept, I permit, I civilize, I refine)
VI - The Lovers - I love (I choose, I value, I believe, I cherish, I communicate, I embrace)
VII - The Chariot - I control (I triumph, I discipline, I guide, I manage, I achieve)
VIII - Justice - I judge (I distinguish, I discern, I assess, I decide, I evaluate, I weigh)
IX - The Hermit - I enlighten - (I reveal, I advise, I wait, I report, I retire)
X - The Wheel of Fortune - I revolve (I raise up but also I cast down, I rotate, I spin)
XI - Strength - I persevere (I endure, I persist, I overcome, I maintain, I prevail)
XII - The Hanged Man - I overturn (I swing, I hang, I sacrifice, I transpose, I transfigure, I undo, I redeem)
XIII - Death - I terminate (I complete, I conclude, I eliminate, replace, I regenerate)
XIV - Temperance - I moderate (I combine, I balance, I adjust, I blend, I temper)
XV - The Devil - I pervert (I corrupt, I distort, I acquire, I amass, I keep, I enslave, I obscure)
XVI - The Tower - I transform (I fall, I upset, I change, I liberate, I reverse)
XVII - The Star - I inspire (I influence, I stimulate, I encourage, I sustain, I assure)
XVIII - The Moon - I mystify (I enchant, I bewilder, I unnerve, I conjure, I invent, I dream)
XIX - The Sun - I exult (I delight, I rejoice, I glory, I exalt, I ennoble, I glorify, I anoint)
XX - Judgment - I renew (I absolve, I release, I rejuvenate, I acquit, I excuse)
XXI - The World - I am (everything) (I accomplish, I achieve, I am whole)
I - The Magician - I shape (I work, I manipulate, I assert, I make, I will)
II - The Priestess - I know (I comprehend, I perceive, I understand, I believe, I intuit, I feel, I conceal)
III - The Empress - I give (I bestow, I nurture, I cultivate, I develop, I support)
IV - The Emperor - I rule (I order, I command, I regulate, I organize, I administer)
V - The Pontiff - I teach (I initiate, I indoctrinate, I induct, I accept, I permit, I civilize, I refine)
VI - The Lovers - I love (I choose, I value, I believe, I cherish, I communicate, I embrace)
VII - The Chariot - I control (I triumph, I discipline, I guide, I manage, I achieve)
VIII - Justice - I judge (I distinguish, I discern, I assess, I decide, I evaluate, I weigh)
IX - The Hermit - I enlighten - (I reveal, I advise, I wait, I report, I retire)
X - The Wheel of Fortune - I revolve (I raise up but also I cast down, I rotate, I spin)
XI - Strength - I persevere (I endure, I persist, I overcome, I maintain, I prevail)
XII - The Hanged Man - I overturn (I swing, I hang, I sacrifice, I transpose, I transfigure, I undo, I redeem)
XIII - Death - I terminate (I complete, I conclude, I eliminate, replace, I regenerate)
XIV - Temperance - I moderate (I combine, I balance, I adjust, I blend, I temper)
XV - The Devil - I pervert (I corrupt, I distort, I acquire, I amass, I keep, I enslave, I obscure)
XVI - The Tower - I transform (I fall, I upset, I change, I liberate, I reverse)
XVII - The Star - I inspire (I influence, I stimulate, I encourage, I sustain, I assure)
XVIII - The Moon - I mystify (I enchant, I bewilder, I unnerve, I conjure, I invent, I dream)
XIX - The Sun - I exult (I delight, I rejoice, I glory, I exalt, I ennoble, I glorify, I anoint)
XX - Judgment - I renew (I absolve, I release, I rejuvenate, I acquit, I excuse)
XXI - The World - I am (everything) (I accomplish, I achieve, I am whole)
Friday, September 02, 2005
Monday, August 29, 2005
Starting Over
I'm starting over from the beginning. If I ever write the book, this is where it will start:
Whenever I pull out a deck of Tarot cards, there are a few questions everyone not already familiar with the Tarot immediately asks me:
My answers vary to some extent, depending on my mood and the tone of the question, whether it is casual or sarcastic, for example, but generally I say something like:
Inevitably, if the person is really interested -- not just in getting a reading but maybe in learning how to read the cards for herself (and it's more often "herself" than "himself") -- the next question is:
The answer to that is both simple and complicated. There are 78 cards in a standard Tarot deck, and each one of them is distinctive and different from all the rest, and they all mean something right side up and something else upside down, and for many of them there is more than one possible meaning to be read from them in either position, depending on the situation in which they are found, their position in the layout, their relationship to the cards around them, etc. Learning to read the Tarot takes a lifetime, in the sense that someone like myself, whose relationship with the Tarot has lasted close to 40 years, can not only still learn but occasionally feel like a beginner. On the other hand, someone with little training or familiarity with the cards at all can fairly quickly learn enough to dazzle friends with insightful readings (though at first she may need to keep a book close by for occasional help).
When I was about 12 or 13 year old, I first started reading cards, using a standard poker deck. I made up my own layout and made up the meanings I assigned the cards, though it was informed by growing up in a family of card players and absorbing by osmosis some traditional associations with certain cards and suits. Some are so obvious as to be universal in our culture -- hearts are obviously love, and diamonds must be money. Spades I thought of as bad luck, and the Queen of Spades in particular I had somewhere heard was supposed to be the Death card (probably part of why I associated the suit with bad luck).
It was all just fun, until I gave a reading for my mother. Not only did that Queen of Spades turn up, but it turned up next to the Jack of Spades, and in another part of the reading, the Queen of Hearts was surrounded by more spades. A cold feeling came over me and I felt absolutely certain that my mother was going to lose the baby she was carrying. I can't tell you why I thought that -- even accepting my reading that the Jack of Spades indicated a young boy was going to die, and that he was someone my mother loved (the Queen of Hearts), you'd think it could just as easily been my own death that I was seeing. And I did think of that, afterwards. But at the time I saw it clearly as her losing the baby.
I stammered and stuttered, not wanting to say what I thought I saw and trying to come up with something else to say when that was all that I could think of. I don't even remember what I ended up telling her. But two weeks later, my mother did have a miscarriage. And the baby, if it had been born, would have been a boy.
I eventually did have a baby brother, so the story had at least a bittersweet, if not entirely happy, ending for my mom and dad. But that's not why I bring it up here. I bring it up to illustrate a few important points that anyone should know who is thinking about embarking on a relationship with the Tarot cards.
The first thing is something that I realized even as a child: don't tell people something horrible is going to happen to them. For one thing, you could be wrong. In my experience, absolute predictions like that are extremely rare, so when you think you see one you should think twice and even three times about it -- and even them you should keep it to yourself.
Generally, the cards dispense advice. This is likely to happen if you continue on your current course, but you can avoid it by doing this. Those are the kinds of predictions you generally see in Tarot readings, and you should always keep in mind that the reading should be useful to the person it is for. Otherwise, what's the point?
The second thing is that the Tarot is a tool for your intuition, not a mechanical device for producing answers. Some people believe it is indeed the latter, that there is some kind of magical property in those little cardboard rectangles that gives them the power to answer questions all by themselves. I think this is a complete misunderstanding of how Tarot works. The Tarot focuses your own mental, emotional, and spiritual energies toward developing assistance for the person who is asking for the reading, and also the energies of that person, as well, who is a participant at least to the level of formulating the question and cutting the cards, and often emotionally and even verbally involved in the interpretation.
If you want to just open the deck and layout the cards however you feel appropriate and read them just by looking at the pictures and deciding for yourself what they mean, fine. I think you will eventually want to do more than that, but starting out that way is every bit as valid as reading a book or taking an online course or any other method of starting out.
I'll go further than that. If you have a strong association with a card that is at odds with every other source you can find as to the meaning of that card, your interpretation is right. For you.
Let me give you an example. I have a friend who looks at the Six of Swords in the familiar "Rider-Waite" deck by Pamela Coleman Smith and sees a woman and her son on the way to her husband's -- the son's father's -- funeral. Moroever, the husband has been killed. If pressed, she'll point out that the boy is young, and most men with such young boys don't die of natural causes, but she didn't really come to this conclusion by a rational process of logically figuring out the story elements in the picture on the card. She looked at the card and saw a woman and her son on her way to her murdered husband's funeral. That doesn't mean that when the card comes up in a reading that she believes it means that the woman she's reading for is about to lose her husband to murder. What if she's reading for a man? No, while her response to the card is quite powerful and specific, in a reading to her it means grief and loss and the aftermath of violence. In some fashion, those things will intrude into the life of the person she is reading for, she believes, when she sees this card.
You'll find a very different interpretation of the Six of Swords here when I get around to it. You couldn't look at the Crowley-Harris Six of Swords, with its keyword "Science," and understand how anyone could think the Six of Swords could possibly mean that, although it certainly does fit with the picture on the RWS pack.
But my friend's interpretation is absolutely right for her. The powerful nature of her immediate and visceral response to that card the very first time she saw it trumps the meaning assigned to this card by whatever authority you want to look to (pun intended, for those of you who get it). There are no absolute authorities. There is no "one right meaning" for any of the Tarot cards. If you want to be absurd, you could probably come up with wrong meanings, things that were so outrageously at odds with any reasonable assessment of either the significance of the card's place in the deck or the picture on its face (if it has a picture -- not all Tarot cards have pictures on them, though all Tarot decks have cards with pictures) that you could get me to say, "OK, that's just wrong." But on the whole, interpretations of the Tarot are neither "right" nor "wrong." They are useful or not useful. If they are useful to you, then they are right.
And one final lesson illustrated by my story of my first powerful reading (I'm not sure how many I had done before that -- not many, but it was not my first; my first deck of Tarot cards was purchased not long after): the world is a strange place.
If you're the type of skeptic who thoroughly disbelieves in the supernatural and psychic abilities and is sure that there is nothing to Tarot or Astrology or any of that New Age nonsense, you probably think I made the story up. And I certainly can't produce any evidence to convince you otherwise. My mother passed away this year, and in any case I don't know that I ever told anyone about it at the time, and by the time I did, well, it was already after the miscarriage and indeed after my little brother came along a few years later and even if I found someone who remembered me telling it then, that would only prove to you that if it's a lie I've been telling it a long time.
But if you yourself have had such an experience, if you have had the hairs on the back of your neck stand up as something happened to you or in front of you that just can't be explained by the rational laws that the skeptics insist answer all the questions of the universe, then you know exactly what I mean, and how I felt. This is one of those things that separate people into two camps, seemingly. Either you've felt the presence of the unexplained or you haven't. If you have, no one can convince you that the universe is nothing but atoms and electricity and forces we understand and can manipulate at will. If you haven't, no one can convince you that there is anything beyond what you yourself perceive.
I can only offer that to assume someone must be lying because his account of his experience is at odds with your understanding of how the universe is structured is not really the sign of an open mind. You suspect I may be lying? Good. I have no problem with that. But that's one of dozens of experiences I have had that you would be hard pressed to find a "natural" explanation for, and several of them were shared and witnessed by others. Are we all lying? Are we all mad?
I'll climb down off my high horse now, because I doubt if many reading this are truly so narrow-mindedly rejectionist. If you're reading a blog called "Tarot Musings," you probably have some interest in the subject. So I'll stop here and call it a night.
Whenever I pull out a deck of Tarot cards, there are a few questions everyone not already familiar with the Tarot immediately asks me:
"Why are there pictures on them?"
"Can you really tell the future with them?"
"Can anybody do that, or do you have to be psychic?"
My answers vary to some extent, depending on my mood and the tone of the question, whether it is casual or sarcastic, for example, but generally I say something like:
"The pictures are symbols that impart information."
"Occasionally, but more often I can offer advice about what may happen."
"I believe everybody is psychic, just some more so than others."
Inevitably, if the person is really interested -- not just in getting a reading but maybe in learning how to read the cards for herself (and it's more often "herself" than "himself") -- the next question is:
"So what do all those different cards mean?"
The answer to that is both simple and complicated. There are 78 cards in a standard Tarot deck, and each one of them is distinctive and different from all the rest, and they all mean something right side up and something else upside down, and for many of them there is more than one possible meaning to be read from them in either position, depending on the situation in which they are found, their position in the layout, their relationship to the cards around them, etc. Learning to read the Tarot takes a lifetime, in the sense that someone like myself, whose relationship with the Tarot has lasted close to 40 years, can not only still learn but occasionally feel like a beginner. On the other hand, someone with little training or familiarity with the cards at all can fairly quickly learn enough to dazzle friends with insightful readings (though at first she may need to keep a book close by for occasional help).
When I was about 12 or 13 year old, I first started reading cards, using a standard poker deck. I made up my own layout and made up the meanings I assigned the cards, though it was informed by growing up in a family of card players and absorbing by osmosis some traditional associations with certain cards and suits. Some are so obvious as to be universal in our culture -- hearts are obviously love, and diamonds must be money. Spades I thought of as bad luck, and the Queen of Spades in particular I had somewhere heard was supposed to be the Death card (probably part of why I associated the suit with bad luck).
It was all just fun, until I gave a reading for my mother. Not only did that Queen of Spades turn up, but it turned up next to the Jack of Spades, and in another part of the reading, the Queen of Hearts was surrounded by more spades. A cold feeling came over me and I felt absolutely certain that my mother was going to lose the baby she was carrying. I can't tell you why I thought that -- even accepting my reading that the Jack of Spades indicated a young boy was going to die, and that he was someone my mother loved (the Queen of Hearts), you'd think it could just as easily been my own death that I was seeing. And I did think of that, afterwards. But at the time I saw it clearly as her losing the baby.
I stammered and stuttered, not wanting to say what I thought I saw and trying to come up with something else to say when that was all that I could think of. I don't even remember what I ended up telling her. But two weeks later, my mother did have a miscarriage. And the baby, if it had been born, would have been a boy.
I eventually did have a baby brother, so the story had at least a bittersweet, if not entirely happy, ending for my mom and dad. But that's not why I bring it up here. I bring it up to illustrate a few important points that anyone should know who is thinking about embarking on a relationship with the Tarot cards.
The first thing is something that I realized even as a child: don't tell people something horrible is going to happen to them. For one thing, you could be wrong. In my experience, absolute predictions like that are extremely rare, so when you think you see one you should think twice and even three times about it -- and even them you should keep it to yourself.
Generally, the cards dispense advice. This is likely to happen if you continue on your current course, but you can avoid it by doing this. Those are the kinds of predictions you generally see in Tarot readings, and you should always keep in mind that the reading should be useful to the person it is for. Otherwise, what's the point?
The second thing is that the Tarot is a tool for your intuition, not a mechanical device for producing answers. Some people believe it is indeed the latter, that there is some kind of magical property in those little cardboard rectangles that gives them the power to answer questions all by themselves. I think this is a complete misunderstanding of how Tarot works. The Tarot focuses your own mental, emotional, and spiritual energies toward developing assistance for the person who is asking for the reading, and also the energies of that person, as well, who is a participant at least to the level of formulating the question and cutting the cards, and often emotionally and even verbally involved in the interpretation.
If you want to just open the deck and layout the cards however you feel appropriate and read them just by looking at the pictures and deciding for yourself what they mean, fine. I think you will eventually want to do more than that, but starting out that way is every bit as valid as reading a book or taking an online course or any other method of starting out.
I'll go further than that. If you have a strong association with a card that is at odds with every other source you can find as to the meaning of that card, your interpretation is right. For you.
Let me give you an example. I have a friend who looks at the Six of Swords in the familiar "Rider-Waite" deck by Pamela Coleman Smith and sees a woman and her son on the way to her husband's -- the son's father's -- funeral. Moroever, the husband has been killed. If pressed, she'll point out that the boy is young, and most men with such young boys don't die of natural causes, but she didn't really come to this conclusion by a rational process of logically figuring out the story elements in the picture on the card. She looked at the card and saw a woman and her son on her way to her murdered husband's funeral. That doesn't mean that when the card comes up in a reading that she believes it means that the woman she's reading for is about to lose her husband to murder. What if she's reading for a man? No, while her response to the card is quite powerful and specific, in a reading to her it means grief and loss and the aftermath of violence. In some fashion, those things will intrude into the life of the person she is reading for, she believes, when she sees this card.
You'll find a very different interpretation of the Six of Swords here when I get around to it. You couldn't look at the Crowley-Harris Six of Swords, with its keyword "Science," and understand how anyone could think the Six of Swords could possibly mean that, although it certainly does fit with the picture on the RWS pack.
But my friend's interpretation is absolutely right for her. The powerful nature of her immediate and visceral response to that card the very first time she saw it trumps the meaning assigned to this card by whatever authority you want to look to (pun intended, for those of you who get it). There are no absolute authorities. There is no "one right meaning" for any of the Tarot cards. If you want to be absurd, you could probably come up with wrong meanings, things that were so outrageously at odds with any reasonable assessment of either the significance of the card's place in the deck or the picture on its face (if it has a picture -- not all Tarot cards have pictures on them, though all Tarot decks have cards with pictures) that you could get me to say, "OK, that's just wrong." But on the whole, interpretations of the Tarot are neither "right" nor "wrong." They are useful or not useful. If they are useful to you, then they are right.
And one final lesson illustrated by my story of my first powerful reading (I'm not sure how many I had done before that -- not many, but it was not my first; my first deck of Tarot cards was purchased not long after): the world is a strange place.
If you're the type of skeptic who thoroughly disbelieves in the supernatural and psychic abilities and is sure that there is nothing to Tarot or Astrology or any of that New Age nonsense, you probably think I made the story up. And I certainly can't produce any evidence to convince you otherwise. My mother passed away this year, and in any case I don't know that I ever told anyone about it at the time, and by the time I did, well, it was already after the miscarriage and indeed after my little brother came along a few years later and even if I found someone who remembered me telling it then, that would only prove to you that if it's a lie I've been telling it a long time.
But if you yourself have had such an experience, if you have had the hairs on the back of your neck stand up as something happened to you or in front of you that just can't be explained by the rational laws that the skeptics insist answer all the questions of the universe, then you know exactly what I mean, and how I felt. This is one of those things that separate people into two camps, seemingly. Either you've felt the presence of the unexplained or you haven't. If you have, no one can convince you that the universe is nothing but atoms and electricity and forces we understand and can manipulate at will. If you haven't, no one can convince you that there is anything beyond what you yourself perceive.
I can only offer that to assume someone must be lying because his account of his experience is at odds with your understanding of how the universe is structured is not really the sign of an open mind. You suspect I may be lying? Good. I have no problem with that. But that's one of dozens of experiences I have had that you would be hard pressed to find a "natural" explanation for, and several of them were shared and witnessed by others. Are we all lying? Are we all mad?
I'll climb down off my high horse now, because I doubt if many reading this are truly so narrow-mindedly rejectionist. If you're reading a blog called "Tarot Musings," you probably have some interest in the subject. So I'll stop here and call it a night.
Wednesday, August 24, 2005
Tarot Symbolism - The Suits
I've decided I'm not really ready yet to unveil my theory of the origin of the Tarot deck (still got a few things I need to work out). So I'm going to jump right into the symbolism and meaning of the cards.
First, let me make an important point: I do not believe that the cards original creators had any intention of using the suits to symbolize the four elements of alchemy; indeed, it is quite clear from the historical record that all such assignments are arbitrary at best and at worst injurious to understanding either the native meaning of the suits, the deeper understanding of the element, or both. The very fact that there has been so much disagreement over which suit goes with which element goes to show that there is no such thing as an "inherent" correspondence between them. I realize that those whose primary research tool is the World Wide Web might not be aware that there has been serious disagreement about this over the years, because the Golden Dawn schema has become so pervasive over the last 20 years that nearly all the Internet resources -- which are, after all, mostly relatively new (though there is some old material that has been made electronically available) -- follow their lead.
So if you think that Wands=Fire and Swords=Air, well, you're welcome to think that. Many people do. I'll be demonstrating later why I believe it's wrong to do so, but for now let's just say that any such attributions, even when they prove useful, should be taken with a large dose of salt.
Because it has been pretty firmly established now that Tarot grew out of ordinary card decks by way of the game of Trumps (Italian Trionfi), we must begin our examination of the suits with the Mamluk cards, from which early Italian cards were derived. The Mamluk cards had four suits, which I believe can be best seen as representing the activities proper to an Islamic gentleman of the Mamluk empire:
Swords: warfare
Polo sticks: amusement
Cups: consumption
Coins: commerce
When the cards first appeared in Italy, no one knew what the polo sticks were, so they straightened them and called them bastoni. Also known as "staffs" or "wands," and presumably the forerunner of the modern suit of clubs, bastoni actually has a connotation missing from the French and English interpretations. The common reading of the suit symbolism comes from France a few centuries after the cards first appeared, and it sees each suit as representing a different class of society:
Swords: Nobility
Staffs: Peasants
Cups: Clergy
Coins: Merchants
There is one fairly major problem with that analysis, however. The early Italian bastoni are not crude clubs but ornately decorated symbols of office. They are carried by the Emperor and Empress, for instance, in both of the earliest partial decks known to exist -- the Cary-Yale Visconti and Pierpont-Morgan Visconti-Sforza decks. Indeed, the Pierpont-Morgan puts bastoni in the hands of no less than eight personages among the Trumps, while only Justice and Judgment carry swords.
So staffs, bastoni, originally symbolized power and authority. That is the suit, then, that would seem to represent the nobility.
If so, then what do Swords represent? And what suit represents the peasantry?
To answer the last question first, I think the peasant were ignored completely, a not uncommon practice. Because there was a class in Northern Italy at the time cards were first introduced there that was very important, one that is left out if you follow the French attributions: the condottiere, or mercenary soldiers. One of them, Francesco Sforza, became the son-in-law and heir of Filippo Maria Visconti, by whom or for whom the game of Trumps was probably invented, and the most famous and most complete set of 15th century cards was probably painted for him.
I believe, therefore, that the suits actually were originally seen as corresponding to the classes thusly:
Staffs: Nobility
Swords: Soldiers
Cups: Clergy
Coins: Merchants
This may seem to be a small difference of little matter, but it has a bearing, particularly on the appropriateness of the Golden Dawn's elemental system -- which it supports, but which there is still a problem with. Because staffs being power works better with fire, but swords are essentially conflict, and only secondarily represent any element.
First, let me make an important point: I do not believe that the cards original creators had any intention of using the suits to symbolize the four elements of alchemy; indeed, it is quite clear from the historical record that all such assignments are arbitrary at best and at worst injurious to understanding either the native meaning of the suits, the deeper understanding of the element, or both. The very fact that there has been so much disagreement over which suit goes with which element goes to show that there is no such thing as an "inherent" correspondence between them. I realize that those whose primary research tool is the World Wide Web might not be aware that there has been serious disagreement about this over the years, because the Golden Dawn schema has become so pervasive over the last 20 years that nearly all the Internet resources -- which are, after all, mostly relatively new (though there is some old material that has been made electronically available) -- follow their lead.
So if you think that Wands=Fire and Swords=Air, well, you're welcome to think that. Many people do. I'll be demonstrating later why I believe it's wrong to do so, but for now let's just say that any such attributions, even when they prove useful, should be taken with a large dose of salt.
Because it has been pretty firmly established now that Tarot grew out of ordinary card decks by way of the game of Trumps (Italian Trionfi), we must begin our examination of the suits with the Mamluk cards, from which early Italian cards were derived. The Mamluk cards had four suits, which I believe can be best seen as representing the activities proper to an Islamic gentleman of the Mamluk empire:
Swords: warfare
Polo sticks: amusement
Cups: consumption
Coins: commerce
When the cards first appeared in Italy, no one knew what the polo sticks were, so they straightened them and called them bastoni. Also known as "staffs" or "wands," and presumably the forerunner of the modern suit of clubs, bastoni actually has a connotation missing from the French and English interpretations. The common reading of the suit symbolism comes from France a few centuries after the cards first appeared, and it sees each suit as representing a different class of society:
Swords: Nobility
Staffs: Peasants
Cups: Clergy
Coins: Merchants
There is one fairly major problem with that analysis, however. The early Italian bastoni are not crude clubs but ornately decorated symbols of office. They are carried by the Emperor and Empress, for instance, in both of the earliest partial decks known to exist -- the Cary-Yale Visconti and Pierpont-Morgan Visconti-Sforza decks. Indeed, the Pierpont-Morgan puts bastoni in the hands of no less than eight personages among the Trumps, while only Justice and Judgment carry swords.
So staffs, bastoni, originally symbolized power and authority. That is the suit, then, that would seem to represent the nobility.
If so, then what do Swords represent? And what suit represents the peasantry?
To answer the last question first, I think the peasant were ignored completely, a not uncommon practice. Because there was a class in Northern Italy at the time cards were first introduced there that was very important, one that is left out if you follow the French attributions: the condottiere, or mercenary soldiers. One of them, Francesco Sforza, became the son-in-law and heir of Filippo Maria Visconti, by whom or for whom the game of Trumps was probably invented, and the most famous and most complete set of 15th century cards was probably painted for him.
I believe, therefore, that the suits actually were originally seen as corresponding to the classes thusly:
Staffs: Nobility
Swords: Soldiers
Cups: Clergy
Coins: Merchants
This may seem to be a small difference of little matter, but it has a bearing, particularly on the appropriateness of the Golden Dawn's elemental system -- which it supports, but which there is still a problem with. Because staffs being power works better with fire, but swords are essentially conflict, and only secondarily represent any element.
Saturday, August 20, 2005
History of the Tarot - Part 3
I'll get into the actual symbolism and meaning of the Tarot cards later. For now, I'll just say that the original cards depicted a fairly standard Christian allegorical sequence of the time. Those who find hidden Neoplatonic, residual pagan, alchemical or astrological symbols in it are both right and wrong. Right, because those things are inescapably part of the symbolism involved. Wrong, because they are hardly hidden, nor would hiding them have been necessary at the time. Much of what passes for "occult" or "neo-pagan" was not thought of as inimical to Christianity in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance - nearly a century after the Tarot was born, newly elected Pope Julius II put off his official investment for three weeks so that it could be held on an astrologically auspicious day. Besides, the strictures placed on philosophy by the Church were beginning to lose their power anyway. In 1373 Bernabo Visconti (for whose descendants the oldest existing Tarot cards were made) not only laughed at the Pope's bull of excommunication but forced those carrying it to him to eat it!
In the next section, I will detail my own theory of how the cards came to be, but I want to finish up this section on their history with what happened to them after 1450.
There is no doubt that for the first few decades of their existence, the cards were primarily, and probably solely, used to play a game. There is no hard evidence of any esoteric or "occult" use of the cards until the late 1700s, nearly four centuries later. But more on that in a moment.
It's likely, for reasons I will go into in the next section, that the cards were originally created at court. But they spread soon to the masses through the medium of printed cards that could be quickly and cheaply made and sold for a fraction of the cost of a hand-painted deck. The intellectual rigor of the original game is shown by the fact that the surviving printed cards and/or woodblock printing plates all have labels or numbers or both on the cards, while the handpainted originals have neither, part of the original game being a test of the players' ability to remember the proper order of the trumps.
You will often read things by card historians that make it sound like it has been firmly established that Court de Gebelin and Etteilla made up the entire nonsense about the cards being used for fortune telling. But that is extremely unlikely, and in fact we know that ordinary playing cards were used for fortune telling as early as the 16th Century, so there's no reason to believe that Tarot cards weren't also used this way.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, particularly when you are dealing with an "underground" activity of the common people. We know for sure that playing cards were used for fortune telling, yet there are very few actual references to the practice. Does that mean that very few people ever engaged in it? Not necessarily.
It's important to note that Etteilla and de Gebelin were writing at about the same time that philosophers were talking about the inborn rights of the common man and folklorists were beginning to gather evidence of how they lived and the stories they told. Up until the late 1700s, the world of literature and art -- the world that left a rich and deep historical record behind -- was the world of the elite, with almost no attention paid to the peasants that tilled the land or the laborers in the cities.
We don't know whether telling fortunes using Tarot cards was a widespread practice that stretched back to shortly after they appeared or whether it was a recent innovation primarily centered around Paris, but there is absolutely no doubt that by the late 18th Century in that part of France an entire tradition of such fortune telling had arisen and attracted two very different men for very different reasons to investigate it. One of them would become the first professional Tarot reader, the first modern to design his own set and the first person (as far as we know) to design a set specifically for the purpose of divination. The other would invent a phony Egyptian etymology that persists to this day as part of a mistaken theory of their origin. But it's almost certain that neither of them would have been drawn to the cards in the first place if a rich tradition of their use by fortune tellers and association with secret meanings and the supernatural had not already existed.
We don't know when exactly that may have happened. We do know that the cards used in Paris at the time were essentially the same as those now known as the Marseilles deck, which differs significantly in a few respects from the original cards made for the game, though certainly still sold at that time primarily to game-players. We don't know if the changes were thought of at the time they were made as symbolically significant, nor if the Marseilles designers were aiming for the injection of esoteric meaning into the cards. There is little reason to suppose they might have been, but certainly no evidence that they were not. The fact that the cards originated in Italy, grew to their highest popularity as a game in Germany, yet it was in Paris that we know for sure they were being used for fortune-telling in the 1700s does make one wonder if this notion began in France, and if so when and where.
The big break for the Tarot came in 1910, when Alfred Edward Waite commissioned Pamela Coleman Smith to design a new deck and issued them along with a book containing his scholarship on their history and insights on their symbolism. We do not know whether drawing representational pictures, rather than just illustrations of the symbols, on the 40 "pip" cards was Waite's idea or Smith's own, but it was an inspired one. The "Rider-Waite" deck, as it is unfortunately known (Rider being the original publisher, but Smith probably having more to do with the designs than Waite as well as certainly having actually drawn the pictures), has certainly the most popular and influential deck for the last century, and the explosion of interest in the Tarot in the last 30 years has seen dozens, if not hundreds, of new decks whose pip cards also have pictures, and whose pictures are loosely or wholly based on those found on the RWS (Rider-Waite-Smith, a compromise name for what should properly be called the "Smith-Waite" deck in my opinion).
This is, of course, a mere sketch -- a whole book could be written on the history of the Tarot -- indeed, multiple books have been written on the subject. But aside from airing for the first time my own personal theory of how the present Tarot deck came to be I shall rest here.
In the next section, I will detail my own theory of how the cards came to be, but I want to finish up this section on their history with what happened to them after 1450.
There is no doubt that for the first few decades of their existence, the cards were primarily, and probably solely, used to play a game. There is no hard evidence of any esoteric or "occult" use of the cards until the late 1700s, nearly four centuries later. But more on that in a moment.
It's likely, for reasons I will go into in the next section, that the cards were originally created at court. But they spread soon to the masses through the medium of printed cards that could be quickly and cheaply made and sold for a fraction of the cost of a hand-painted deck. The intellectual rigor of the original game is shown by the fact that the surviving printed cards and/or woodblock printing plates all have labels or numbers or both on the cards, while the handpainted originals have neither, part of the original game being a test of the players' ability to remember the proper order of the trumps.
You will often read things by card historians that make it sound like it has been firmly established that Court de Gebelin and Etteilla made up the entire nonsense about the cards being used for fortune telling. But that is extremely unlikely, and in fact we know that ordinary playing cards were used for fortune telling as early as the 16th Century, so there's no reason to believe that Tarot cards weren't also used this way.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, particularly when you are dealing with an "underground" activity of the common people. We know for sure that playing cards were used for fortune telling, yet there are very few actual references to the practice. Does that mean that very few people ever engaged in it? Not necessarily.
It's important to note that Etteilla and de Gebelin were writing at about the same time that philosophers were talking about the inborn rights of the common man and folklorists were beginning to gather evidence of how they lived and the stories they told. Up until the late 1700s, the world of literature and art -- the world that left a rich and deep historical record behind -- was the world of the elite, with almost no attention paid to the peasants that tilled the land or the laborers in the cities.
We don't know whether telling fortunes using Tarot cards was a widespread practice that stretched back to shortly after they appeared or whether it was a recent innovation primarily centered around Paris, but there is absolutely no doubt that by the late 18th Century in that part of France an entire tradition of such fortune telling had arisen and attracted two very different men for very different reasons to investigate it. One of them would become the first professional Tarot reader, the first modern to design his own set and the first person (as far as we know) to design a set specifically for the purpose of divination. The other would invent a phony Egyptian etymology that persists to this day as part of a mistaken theory of their origin. But it's almost certain that neither of them would have been drawn to the cards in the first place if a rich tradition of their use by fortune tellers and association with secret meanings and the supernatural had not already existed.
We don't know when exactly that may have happened. We do know that the cards used in Paris at the time were essentially the same as those now known as the Marseilles deck, which differs significantly in a few respects from the original cards made for the game, though certainly still sold at that time primarily to game-players. We don't know if the changes were thought of at the time they were made as symbolically significant, nor if the Marseilles designers were aiming for the injection of esoteric meaning into the cards. There is little reason to suppose they might have been, but certainly no evidence that they were not. The fact that the cards originated in Italy, grew to their highest popularity as a game in Germany, yet it was in Paris that we know for sure they were being used for fortune-telling in the 1700s does make one wonder if this notion began in France, and if so when and where.
The big break for the Tarot came in 1910, when Alfred Edward Waite commissioned Pamela Coleman Smith to design a new deck and issued them along with a book containing his scholarship on their history and insights on their symbolism. We do not know whether drawing representational pictures, rather than just illustrations of the symbols, on the 40 "pip" cards was Waite's idea or Smith's own, but it was an inspired one. The "Rider-Waite" deck, as it is unfortunately known (Rider being the original publisher, but Smith probably having more to do with the designs than Waite as well as certainly having actually drawn the pictures), has certainly the most popular and influential deck for the last century, and the explosion of interest in the Tarot in the last 30 years has seen dozens, if not hundreds, of new decks whose pip cards also have pictures, and whose pictures are loosely or wholly based on those found on the RWS (Rider-Waite-Smith, a compromise name for what should properly be called the "Smith-Waite" deck in my opinion).
This is, of course, a mere sketch -- a whole book could be written on the history of the Tarot -- indeed, multiple books have been written on the subject. But aside from airing for the first time my own personal theory of how the present Tarot deck came to be I shall rest here.
Thursday, August 18, 2005
History of the Tarot - Part 2
We have some idea of what these allegorical processions were like from a poem by Petrarch called "I Trionphi" (an alternate spelling), in which we are presented first with the figure of Love in the form of a beautiful woman. But the poet's Love for this woman is no match for her Chastity, which triumphs in this life. But even the best men and women must fall prey to Death. Ah, but her Fame may last beyond her Death, thanks to Petrarch's own words! But Time will, alas, eventually erase even such fleeting immortality, and the only way to truly triumph over death is through the church and its offer of Eternity, which is the final chapter of Petrarch's poem. So the sequence goes Love, Chastity, Death, Fame, Time, Eternity, each new image triumphing over the one before.
We can easily see how the familiarity of such series of images could have led to the idea of a series of emblematic cards that do the same thing. The fact that the game in its early years was universally called "trionfi" (or "triomphi" or some similar spelling -- medieval Europeans were not prone to consistency in these matters), and the fact that many of the cards are practically identical to illustrations of carts from such triumphal processions, make it all but certain that these parades were indeed the inspiration for the Trumps or so-called "Major Arcana" of the modern Tarot.
So from the very beginning, this new game of Trumps involved symbolism and allegory and deeper meaning within the confines of a game. To help us understand how a game can have serious symbolic content, Tom Tadfor Little has proposed an analogy to the modern game of Monopoly, which is, as he points out, "a simulation of capitalistic real estate that draws its essential scheme from Atlantic City real estate trading in the 1930s."
When he was young, says Little, he was vaguely aware that the components of the game symbolized something in the outside world, but he wasn't that interested in it, nor was it necessary for him to learn the minutiae of real estate trading in order to appreciate the game -- "What mattered is that I knew that Marvin Gardens was more expensive than St. Charles Place."
The analogy, like most, falls apart if examined too closely -- as originally played, an understanding of the underlaying meaning of the symbols involved was, in fact, essential, because the earliest cards we know of had neither numbers nor labels on the cards. You had to understand the concept, understand that the Pope "trumped" the Emperor, for instance, in order to play the game. And, as mentioned, the elite of 15th Century Italy was more intellectually oriented, and the concepts and symbolism involved was of a much higher level than found in Monopoly. Still, one can see that something can be a game and also contain symbolic content with real intellectual and philosophical underpinnings.
(more later)
We can easily see how the familiarity of such series of images could have led to the idea of a series of emblematic cards that do the same thing. The fact that the game in its early years was universally called "trionfi" (or "triomphi" or some similar spelling -- medieval Europeans were not prone to consistency in these matters), and the fact that many of the cards are practically identical to illustrations of carts from such triumphal processions, make it all but certain that these parades were indeed the inspiration for the Trumps or so-called "Major Arcana" of the modern Tarot.
So from the very beginning, this new game of Trumps involved symbolism and allegory and deeper meaning within the confines of a game. To help us understand how a game can have serious symbolic content, Tom Tadfor Little has proposed an analogy to the modern game of Monopoly, which is, as he points out, "a simulation of capitalistic real estate that draws its essential scheme from Atlantic City real estate trading in the 1930s."
When he was young, says Little, he was vaguely aware that the components of the game symbolized something in the outside world, but he wasn't that interested in it, nor was it necessary for him to learn the minutiae of real estate trading in order to appreciate the game -- "What mattered is that I knew that Marvin Gardens was more expensive than St. Charles Place."
The analogy, like most, falls apart if examined too closely -- as originally played, an understanding of the underlaying meaning of the symbols involved was, in fact, essential, because the earliest cards we know of had neither numbers nor labels on the cards. You had to understand the concept, understand that the Pope "trumped" the Emperor, for instance, in order to play the game. And, as mentioned, the elite of 15th Century Italy was more intellectually oriented, and the concepts and symbolism involved was of a much higher level than found in Monopoly. Still, one can see that something can be a game and also contain symbolic content with real intellectual and philosophical underpinnings.
(more later)
Wednesday, August 17, 2005
History of the Tarot - Part 1
If the Tarot was not intended as a way to secretly transmit esoteric wisdom under the noses of the Church, how can it also be true that there was symbolic content indicative of deeper meaning in it from the very beginning?
To understand this seeming paradox, you must understand the world in which the Tarot was born, a world quite different from our own. It is hard for those of us living in a culture so aggressively anti-intellectual that the most powerful man in the world has deliberately cultivated a reputation for malapropisms and mispronunciations (and if you believe young George W. grew up saying "nook-you-ler" at the dinner table of George H.W. and Barbara, you're terribly naive), but in Renaissance Italy nearly every rich and powerful man fancied himself a poet, a philosopher, and a connoisseur of fine art. And every member of the small but growing middle class aspired to the same status.
Even in their pastimes and amusements, these men -- and women, because as we will see, the growing status of women in the late medieval period was an important component in the creation of the Tarot as a game and in the symbolism of Tarot as a device for meditation or divination -- reveled in intellectual challenge and delighted in displaying their erudition and subtlety. To some extent, this attitude extended down into the populous, and to some extent it was not even a new thing but a remnant of the glory of Rome, and the remembered glory of having once been part of the greatest civilization the western world had yet known (even though many of the inhabitants of these great cities were in fact descended from the barbarian hordes who had destroyed Roman civilization rather than its citizens).
In ancient Rome a great festival was celebrated every year called the Saturnalia. There were remnants of that celebration in the annual carnivals with which medieval Europe welcomed the beginning of Lent, familiar today to Americans as Mardi Gras. Part of the celebration in Milan (and other Italian cities) included a parade called Trionfi, the plural form of the Italian word for "Triumph." These triumphs were depicted in a series of "carts" -- similar to our modern-day floats, wheeled carts pulled by horses that carried figures in costume depicting allegorical figures, each of which was seen to triumph over the one before (just as captives were led before the conqueror in the triumphal parades of ancient Rome).
(more later)
To understand this seeming paradox, you must understand the world in which the Tarot was born, a world quite different from our own. It is hard for those of us living in a culture so aggressively anti-intellectual that the most powerful man in the world has deliberately cultivated a reputation for malapropisms and mispronunciations (and if you believe young George W. grew up saying "nook-you-ler" at the dinner table of George H.W. and Barbara, you're terribly naive), but in Renaissance Italy nearly every rich and powerful man fancied himself a poet, a philosopher, and a connoisseur of fine art. And every member of the small but growing middle class aspired to the same status.
Even in their pastimes and amusements, these men -- and women, because as we will see, the growing status of women in the late medieval period was an important component in the creation of the Tarot as a game and in the symbolism of Tarot as a device for meditation or divination -- reveled in intellectual challenge and delighted in displaying their erudition and subtlety. To some extent, this attitude extended down into the populous, and to some extent it was not even a new thing but a remnant of the glory of Rome, and the remembered glory of having once been part of the greatest civilization the western world had yet known (even though many of the inhabitants of these great cities were in fact descended from the barbarian hordes who had destroyed Roman civilization rather than its citizens).
In ancient Rome a great festival was celebrated every year called the Saturnalia. There were remnants of that celebration in the annual carnivals with which medieval Europe welcomed the beginning of Lent, familiar today to Americans as Mardi Gras. Part of the celebration in Milan (and other Italian cities) included a parade called Trionfi, the plural form of the Italian word for "Triumph." These triumphs were depicted in a series of "carts" -- similar to our modern-day floats, wheeled carts pulled by horses that carried figures in costume depicting allegorical figures, each of which was seen to triumph over the one before (just as captives were led before the conqueror in the triumphal parades of ancient Rome).
(more later)
Tuesday, August 16, 2005
What is the Tarot?
Despite what you may have read elsewhere, the Tarot did not originate in Egypt as the "Book of Thoth," nor was it devised by a gathering of magi in Morocco in 1200. It was not a medium for the secret transmission of dangerous esoteric knowledge during the centuries of Roman Catholic dominance in Europe.
Originally, the Tarot was a game.
What we now call the Tarot began somewhere in northern Italy in the first half of the 15th Century, probably in Milan. The oldest Tarot cards in existence were painted by hand for the ruling classes, but we don't know if that's because the game began that way and spread later to the masses, or if the hand-painted cards we have were more elaborate versions of already-existing printed cards which have since been lost. The ephemeral nature of playing cards -- both in the materials and workmanship involved and in the attitudes toward them held by their owners -- makes printed cards of any kind more than a couple of hundred years old rare indeed, while hand-painted cards were valuable enough to have been named in wills even back in the 15th Century when they were new.
Card-playing was relatively new to Europe at the time, having been brought into Spain and Sicily (and perhaps Venice and a few other places) by Muslims playing "Naib," a game that involved a pack of cards very much like our modern poker decks, with a couple of important differences I'll get to later on. Someone -- we will almost certainly never know who, nor precisely where or when -- made some alterations to these decks to create a new game. It is all but certain that the designer's intention was amusement, and perhaps gambling, and neither fortune-telling nor acquisition of esoteric wisdom entered into the creation in any way, shape or form.
Does all this mean that there is "nothing to" the Tarot, that modern-day cartomancers either deluded idiots or fraudulent hucksters, reading meaning into meaningless pieces of pasteboard? Not at all. As will be seen, the existence of symbolic content and "deeper meaning" was, in fact, inherent in the game from the beginning, not to mention the fact that the modern deck differs substantially from those first early decks. Most importantly, though, the Tarot has been invested with power by its practitioners, first and foremost, for your own deck, will be you yourself. If you develop a relationship with the Tarot, you will find yourself receiving answers from it that will astonish you. If you insist that it is "just a pack of cards," you will be losing an enrichment that is available in relatively few forms and places in our modern world.
Why this should be so, given the decidedly mundane origin of the cards and the fact that they are, when all is said an done, nothing but rectangles of stiff paper printed with designs, is a deep mystery we will examine but not expect to answer. Suffice to say that anyone who has had much real experience with the Tarot knows that it is so.
Originally, the Tarot was a game.
What we now call the Tarot began somewhere in northern Italy in the first half of the 15th Century, probably in Milan. The oldest Tarot cards in existence were painted by hand for the ruling classes, but we don't know if that's because the game began that way and spread later to the masses, or if the hand-painted cards we have were more elaborate versions of already-existing printed cards which have since been lost. The ephemeral nature of playing cards -- both in the materials and workmanship involved and in the attitudes toward them held by their owners -- makes printed cards of any kind more than a couple of hundred years old rare indeed, while hand-painted cards were valuable enough to have been named in wills even back in the 15th Century when they were new.
Card-playing was relatively new to Europe at the time, having been brought into Spain and Sicily (and perhaps Venice and a few other places) by Muslims playing "Naib," a game that involved a pack of cards very much like our modern poker decks, with a couple of important differences I'll get to later on. Someone -- we will almost certainly never know who, nor precisely where or when -- made some alterations to these decks to create a new game. It is all but certain that the designer's intention was amusement, and perhaps gambling, and neither fortune-telling nor acquisition of esoteric wisdom entered into the creation in any way, shape or form.
Does all this mean that there is "nothing to" the Tarot, that modern-day cartomancers either deluded idiots or fraudulent hucksters, reading meaning into meaningless pieces of pasteboard? Not at all. As will be seen, the existence of symbolic content and "deeper meaning" was, in fact, inherent in the game from the beginning, not to mention the fact that the modern deck differs substantially from those first early decks. Most importantly, though, the Tarot has been invested with power by its practitioners, first and foremost, for your own deck, will be you yourself. If you develop a relationship with the Tarot, you will find yourself receiving answers from it that will astonish you. If you insist that it is "just a pack of cards," you will be losing an enrichment that is available in relatively few forms and places in our modern world.
Why this should be so, given the decidedly mundane origin of the cards and the fact that they are, when all is said an done, nothing but rectangles of stiff paper printed with designs, is a deep mystery we will examine but not expect to answer. Suffice to say that anyone who has had much real experience with the Tarot knows that it is so.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)