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:

"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.

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.

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.

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)

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)

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.