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.