Yet another new beginning

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.