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The Tarot |
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TAROT AN INTRODUCTION
Tarot (Tar-oh) is a system of symbolical
images. Whatever their original significance, they have been used since they
first surfaced as much for divinatory purposes as for trick taking card games.
Tarot is currently used as tool for reflection on one's personal life, as well
as an aid to meditation. Tarot is normally embodied in a deck of 78 cards,
similar to a regular set of playing cards. In the English-speaking world, tarot
is widely seen as a form of cartomancy. In France, tarot is most often employed
as a trick-taking card game; see Tarot (game). Tarot has long been regarded as
taboo, due to obscure associations that predate its 19th-century occult
associations. Roman Catholic sermons inveighing against the evil inherent in
cards can be traced to the 14th century.
A Latin sentence said:
"Rota
Taro Orat Tora Ator", which can be translated to: "the
wheel of Taro speaks the law of Ator", the reference is to the
pharaonic Goddess Hathor who personified nature.
The earliest extant examples of Tarot decks are of North Italian origin and date
to the mid-15th century. Soon afterward comparable decks were used in the game
of Tarocchi. This card game developed as a form of cartomancy and in the 19th
century became the object of occult studies, initiated by Etteilla". The
set of 78 images is considered by students of this form of Tarot (tarotism) to
be independent of details of any particular representation.
THE TAROT DECK
The conventional
78-card deck is structured into two distinct sets. The first, called the Major
Arcana, consists of 22 cards without suits typically referred to as
"trumps". The second, called the Minor Arcana, consists of 56 cards
divided into four suits. The cards in each suit are numbered 2 through 10 with
four "face" cards and an Ace (not dissimilar from the structure of
playing cards). Arcana is the plural of the Latin word arcanum, meaning
"hidden truth" or "secret knowledge". Alternate names are
the Minor Trumps and Major Trumps, or simply the Minors and the Trumps. The
traditional Italian suits are Swords, Batons, Spheres and Cups, although in
modern decks Batons are commonly called Wands or Staves, and Spheres are often
Pentacles, Coins or Discs.
DIFFERENCES AMONGST DECKS
Tarot cards serve many
purposes, and this leads to a variety of Tarot deck styles. Some decks exist
primarily as artwork; art decks often contain only the 22 cards of the Major
Arcana. Esoteric decks are often used in conjunction with the study of the
Hermetic Qabala; in these decks the Major Arcana are illustrated in accordance
with Qabalistic principles while the numbered suit cards (2 through 10)
typically bear only stylized renderings of the suit symbol. In contrast, decks
used for divination usually bear illustrated scenes on all cards. The more
simply illustrated Marseilles style decks are used esoterically, for divination,
and for game play.
The most popular deck today is probably the fully illustrated deck confusingly
known as the Rider-Waite-Smith, Waite-Smith, Rider-Waite, or simply the Rider
deck. The images were painted by artist Pamela Colman Smith, to the instructions
of academic and mystic Arthur Waite, and published by the Rider Company.
According to many accounts, Aleister Crowley also had substantial creative
input. While the images are deceptively, almost childishly simple, the details
and backgrounds hold a wealth of symbolism. The subjects remain close to the
earliest decks, but usually have added detail. The chief aesthetic objection to
this deck is the crude printing of colours in the original: several decks, such
as the Universal Waite, simply copy the Smith line drawings, but with more
sophisticated colouring.
Probably the most widely used esoteric Tarot deck is Aleister Crowley's Thoth
Tarot (pronounced tote) the artist of which was Lady Freda Harris. In contrast
to the Thoth deck's colourful artistry, the illustrations on Paul Foster Case's
B.O.T.A. Tarot deck are black line drawings on white cards; this is an
unlaminated deck intended to be coloured by its owner. Other esoteric decks
include the Golden Dawn Tarot, which is based on a deck by SL MacGregor Mathers,
the Tree of Life Tarot whose cards are stark symbolic catalogues, and the Cosmic
Tarot, which is unusual for an esoteric deck because it is fully illustrated.
The Marseille style
Tarot decks, used for playing the game of Tarot, generally feature suit cards
that look very much like modern playing cards. The numbered cards sport an
arrangement of pips indicating the number and suit, while the court cards are
often illustrated with two-dimensional drawings.
Other modern decks invented since the mid-20th century vary in their arbitrary
conventions. Cat-lovers may have the Tarot of the Cat People, a fairly standard
deck complete with cats in every picture. The Tarot of the Witches and the
Aquarian Tarot retain the conventional cards with varying designs. The Witches
deck became famous/notorious in the 1970s for its use in the James Bond movie
Live and Let Die.
Other decks change the cards partly or completely. The Motherpeace Tarot is
notable for its circular cards and feminist angle: the mainly male characters
have been replaced by females. The Tarot of Baseball has suits of bats, mitts,
balls and bases; "coaches" and "MVPs" instead of Queens and
Kings; and major arcana cards like "The Catcher", "The Rule
Book" and "Batting a Thousand".
Computing professionals might find the Silicon Valley Tarot most intelligible,
which offers online readings. Major arcana cards include The Hacker, Flame War,
The Layoff and The Garage; the suits are Networks, Cubicles, Disks and Hosts;
the court cards CIO, Salesman, Marketeer and New Hire.
SYMBOLISM
The Tarot has a confusing
and rich symbolism because it has a confusing and rich history. Not
impenetrable, however; much of the fog around the symbolism can be dispelled if
one bothers to study sources other than occultists with a vested interest in the
mystery of it all. We'll do some dispelling further on; in the meanwhile, the
most important thing to note is that modern, occult readings of the cards often
have little to do with their meaning in their original context -- and that,
given the modern uses of the Tarot, this is actually a good thing.
Today's Tarots have become far more interesting, expressive, and psychologically
resonant today than their ancestors were. Interpretations have co-evolved with
the cards over the centuries: later decks have "clarified" the
pictures in accordance with their perceived meanings, the meanings in turn
modified by the new pictures. Both images and interpretations have been
continually reshaped, partly at random and partly in conscious or unconscious
efforts to help the Tarot live up to its mythic role as a powerful occult
instrument.
See, for example, the Rider-Waite-Smith Strength card. We can know more about
the symbolic intentions of the designer here, since he conveniently wrote many
books on the subject. As with its Marseilles-deck ancestor, the card shows a
woman holding the jaws of a lion, but this picture is far more elaborate. The
strangely shaped hat of the Marseilles card has traditionally been interpreted
as a symbolic lemniscate: the sideways-figure-eight representation of infinity.
In the newer card, this symbol appears explicitly. Other symbols are included: a
chain of roses symbolizing desire or passion, against a white robe symbolizing
purity. The mountains in the background demonstrate another kind of strength.
Even here there is room for interpretation: the card is sometimes considered as
showing intellect triumphing over desire, sometimes as the equal union of
intellect and passion, sometimes just as a symbol of mental strength or
endurance.
The twenty-two cards
in the major arcana are: Fool, Magician, High Priestess [or La Papessa/Popess],
Empress, Emperor, Hierophant [or Pope], Lovers, Chariot, Strength, Hermit, Wheel
of Fortune, Justice, Hanged Man, Death, Temperance, Devil, Tower, Star, Moon,
Sun, Judgement, World. Each card has its own large, complicated and disputed set
of meanings. Altogether the major arcana are said to represent the Fool's
journey a symbolic journey through life in which the Fool overcomes obstacles
and gains wisdom.
There is a vast body of writing on the significance of the Tarot. The four suits
are associated with the four elements: Swords with air, Wands with fire, Cups
with water and Pentacles with earth. The numerology is usually thought to be
significant. The Tarot is often considered to correspond to various systems such
as astrology, the Kabala, the I Ching and others.
PSYCHOLOGY
Carl Jung was the
first psychologist to attach importance to the Tarot. He regarded the Tarot
cards as representing archetypes: fundamental types of person or situation
embedded in the subconscious of all human beings. The Emperor, for instance,
represents the ultimate patriarch or father figure.
The theory of archetypes gives rise to several psychological uses. Some
psychologists use Tarot cards to identify how a client views himself or herself,
by asking the patient to select a card that he or she identifies with. Some try
to get the client to clarify his ideas by imagining his situation or
relationship in terms of Tarot images: Is someone rushing in heedlessly like the
Knight of Swords perhaps, or blindly keeping the world at bay as in the
Rider-Waite-Smith Two of Swords? The Tarot can be seen as a kind of algebra of
the subconscious, allowing it to be analysed at the conscious level.
It is instructive to note, however, that the older decks such as the
Visconti-Sforza and Marseilles tend to have a cruder and less general
"algebra" than the modern ones. This is not merely an illusion of the
modern eye, it reflects the general direction of evolutionary change in Tarot
art over the centuries, and especially since 1900. The Tarot symbolism has
rather successfully universalised itself from parochial origins.
STORYTELLING AND ART
The Tarot has been known to
inspire writers as well as visual artists. Novelist Italo Calvino described the
Tarot as a "machine for telling stories", writing The Castle of
Crossed Destinies with plots and characters constructed through the Tarot. T. S.
Eliot's poem The Waste Land uses only superficial descriptions of Tarot cards, a
few of which are genuine. Random selections of Tarot cards have also been used
to construct stories for writing exercises and writing games.
Tarot decks hold a significant role in fantasy writer Roger Zelazny's Amber
series, where most characters carry a magical deck of Tarot cards, representing
other characters, or locations. A Tarot deck inspired from the Amber series has
been published.
DIVINATION
Divination, or fortune
telling, is by far the most popular and well-known use of the Tarot. This is
sometimes seen as an extension of the psychological use mentioned above. It can
be argued that we sometimes perceive the signs of future events subconsciously
only. For instance you might be subconsciously aware that a relationship or job
is in trouble, before you admit it to yourself. In that sense, it might be said
that the Tarot can give you insights into the future without having any
supernatural or occult aspect at all. Meaning may emerge even from purely random
patterns, as chance selections force you to consider concepts that you'd
normally ignore, and the density of meaning is great enough that meanings can
emerge from almost any selection of cards.
That point of view is rare among those who practice Tarot. Tarot diviners
generally believe that Tarot cards simply allow them to exercise an innate
psychic ability to see the future. It’s popularly believed that the cards take
on the "aura" or "vibrations" of someone who touches them.
The cards are therefore "insulated" by wrapping them in silk or
enclosing them in a box, and only touched by the diviner and person for whom the
reading is done: the "querent".
There are many variations, but in a typical reading the querent shuffles the
cards, then the diviner lays out the cards in a pattern called the spread. The
most popular spread is the Celtic Cross. The cards are then analysed according
to their positions, their relationships and whether the cards are upside-down.
An inverted card has its own set of modified meanings; sometimes opposite,
sometimes weakened, sometimes twisted.
Divination may be seen as magical in itself, but the word "magic"
usually refers to the use of Tarot cards in a magical ritual designed to achieve
some end. This is much less common than simple divination, however.
LAYOUTS
In Tarot divination, results can be
achieved with analysis of just one card, but for more thoroughness combinations
of several cards in set patterns are usually used. These patterns are called
spreads. There are many, many spreads, although the Celtic Cross is by far the
best known, and is often taught to beginners as their first spread. More
experienced practitioners will use their own spreads, assigning their own
meanings to the relevant positions represented.
THE GREAT CROSS ("CELTIC CROSS") LAYOUT
One of the best known
of spreads, its most common version consists of nine or ten cards. The first one
representing the person or situation (this is sometimes considered optional,
thus the spread can also consist of 9 cards), the next five are laid atop and
around it in a cross shape, and the final four in a column to the right.
ORIGIN AND HISTORY
The origins of the tarot are
obscure, and it has not been easy for historians to strip them of the occultist
associations that developed in the 19th century. Roman Catholic sermons
inveighing against the evil inherent in cards can be traced to the 14th century.
No mention of playing cards in the context of gambling and other marks of
dissolute life precede the sudden appearance of a barrage of hostility in the
1370s: a sermon by the Swiss Johannes von Rheinfelden, Tractus de moribus et
disciplina humanae conversationis states that "the game of cards has come
to us this year" (said to be 1377, in the 15th-century surviving
manuscript) without inveighing against them, but prohibitions against cards were
issued by John of Castile and the cities of Florence and Basle that same year
and by the city of Regensburg the following year and in the Duchy of Brabant in
1379 [1] ( http://www.snopes.com/history/world/cardking.htm
). Bernard of Siena gave a sermon reviling
cards as the invention of the Devil in 1423.
In Pietro Aretino's witty
16th-century dialogue Le carte parlanti ("The talking cards: dialogue in
which gaming is discussed in a congenial fashion") there are frequent
references to tarot symbolism: "The temptation of the hermit is the
devil," and some irony on their uses: "...They reveal the secrets of
nature, the reason for things, and explain the causes why day is driven out by
night and night by day." [2] (http://www.tarothermit.com/more.htm)
The oldest surviving Tarot cards are three mid-15th century sets all made for
members of the Visconti family, rulers of Milan. The oldest of these existing
Tarot decks was painted to celebrate a mid-15th century wedding joining the
ruling Visconti and Sforza families of Milan, probably painted by Bonifacio
Bembo and other miniaturists of the Ferrara school. Of the original cards, 35
are in the Pierpont Morgan Library, 26 cards are at the Accademia Carrara, 13
are at the Casa Colleoni, 4 cards being lost (the Devil, the Tower, the Three of
Swords, and the Knight of Coins). This "Visconti-Sforza" deck, which
has been widely reproduced in varying quality, combines the Minor Arcana (suits
of Swords, Staves,
Pentacles and Cups in their original form, and face cards
King, Queen, Knave and Page) with Major Arcana that apparently express versions
of some already traditional iconography. The considerable artistic license
displayed in the set is a sign that the original significance of the designs was
already lost in the 15th century.
More simply drawn decks survive from Marseille, France, perhaps from the early
16th century, though actual surviving examples are no earlier than the 18th
century.
The designation of "Arcana", signifying "hidden meaning," is
as old as the tarots themselves, but whatever that meaning has been, was lost
before the earliest surviving sets were painted. There is no reason to be
confident that the surviving sets of Major Arcana are complete. Any viewer will
notice that, of the four Classical Virtues, only Fortitude, Justice and
Temperance remain. Can Prudence have always been missing? The Christian Virtues
that would ordinarily complete them (Faith, Hope and Charity) are missing,
however. The presence of the Fool and the Magician have often suggested a
portable catechism for the illiterate, which survives in cartomancy. All the
heavenly sources of Light, so important to Dualist heretics, are present in the
Major Arcana, without any planets that would have been required for any meaning
associated with astrology, the usual context for heavenly bodies. Indeed, of any
possible signs of the Zodiac, only the dual-natured Twins are present. It is
unlikely that their Zodiac context is being referred to, in which case all the
others would have to have gone missing. Traces of medieval dualist heresy, such
as the Bogomils taught, or the Cathars, whose centres were precisely where the
earliest Tarot surfaced in Piedmont and Provence, can be also detected in the
paired balance, not merely of Emperor with Empress, but, significantly, by Pope
with Popess, with echoes of the Pope Joan myth and of the Gnostic Pistis Sophia.
The substitution of a more neutral "Hierophant" designation for the
nameless high priest is a modern one. Steven Runciman, in The Medieval Manichee
(1947), doubted the Catharist connection: "There seems to me to be a trace
of Dualism in the pack, but it has since been overlaid with debased Kabalistic
lore." He recognized the traditional interpretation of the Devil as the
embodiment of the evil natural forces of this world, holding a naked man and
woman in chains, and suggested in the Tower struck by lightning, a Cathar view
of a Catholic church.
Study of the iconography of the earliest tarots via standard
comparative-historical methods suffices to pin the origin of the depiction of
Death as after the Black Death, because the skeletal-death-with-a-scythe motif
found on effectively all versions of Trump XIII does not predate the plagues.
Before then, skulls in pictorial art were primarily symbols of scholarship and
learning.
MYSTICAL ASSOCIATIONS
Since
the Egyptianizing ruminations in Le Monde primitif by Antoine Court de Gebelin
(1781), which soon inspired the occultism of "Etteilla," it has been
believed by many that the Tarot is far older than this. Based on similarities of
the imagery and reinforced by the added numbering, some associate the Tarot with
ancient Egypt, or the Hebrew mystic tradition of the Kabbalah, or a wide variety
of other origins. This is all, however, pure mythology.
In fact, the earliest Tarots seem to have been depictions of the carnival
parades that ushered in the season of Lent. These elaborate productions layered
then-fashionable Graeco-Roman symbolism over a Christian allegory of sin, grace,
and redemption; notably, the earliest versions of the World card (the final
Trump, XXI) show a conventional image known from period religious art to
represent St. Augustine's "Heavenly City", and it is not coincidence
that this closely follows the Judgement card.
Several other early Tarot-like sequences of portable art survive to place the
Visconti deck in context. Later confusion about the symbolism stems from the
Marseilles decks, which began a process of steadily paganizing and
universalizing the symbolism to the point where the underlying Christian
allegory has been almost completely obscured (as, for example, when the
Rider-Waite deck of the early Twentieth Century changed "The Pope" to
"The Hierophant" and "The Popess" to "The High
Priestess") It is notable that between 1450 and 1500 the Tarot was actually
recommended for the instruction of the young by Church moralists (reference is
urgently needed here); not until fifty years after the Visconti deck did it
become associated with gambling, and not until the 19th century and "Etteilla"
with occultism.
In the Anglo-Saxon world today, the Tarot is usually seen as a means of fortune
telling. However, early references such as the sermon refer only to the use of
the cards for game playing and gambling; and in some European countries such as
France, Italy, Switzerland, Austria and Germany; this is still seen as the
primary purpose of the Tarot today.
The relationship between Tarot cards and playing cards is often said to be
unclear, but in fact the history is tolerably well documented. Playing cards are
first recorded in 1321 in a Swiss monastic chronicle that notes their recent
importation from the Orient; they thus predated the earliest Tarots by a
century. They may have evolved by mutation from circular cards used in India to
play a war game called "Chaturanga" ("Four Kings"); some
very early decks, including one preserved in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul,
were circular.
Early European sources describe a 52- rather than 78-card deck, like a modern
deck but without jokers. 78-card Tarots were what happened when the 21 Trumps
were merged into early 52-card gambling decks. Why this happened is not
completely clear, but there is some evidence that it may have been done as an
end-run around anti-gambling laws that targeted the 52-card deck.
The Tarot cards eventually came to be associated with mysticism and magic. This
was actually a late rather than early development, as we can tell from period
sources on card divination and magic. The Tarot was not widely adopted by
mystics, occultists and secret societies until the 18th and 19th century. The
tradition began in 1781, when Antoine Court de Gébelin, a Swiss clergyman and
Freemason, published Le Monde Primitif, a study of religious symbolism and its
survivals in the modern world. De Gébelin first called attention to the unusual
symbols of the Tarot de Marseille, and asserted that the symbols in fact
represented the mysteries of Isis and Thoth. De Gébelin furthermore claimed
that the name "tarot" came from the Egyptian words tar, meaning
"royal", and ro, meaning "road", and that the Tarot
therefore represented a "royal road" to wisdom. De Gébelin wrote
before Champollion had deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs, and later Egyptologists
found nothing in the Egyptian language that supports de Gébelin's fanciful
etymologies, but these findings came too late; by the time authentic Egyptian
texts were available, the identification of the Tarot cards with the Egyptian
"Book of Thoth" was already firmly established in occult practice.
It was first practically
applied by a charlatan named Alliette, aka "Le Grand Etteilla", an
ex-barber who reversed his name and marketed himself as a seer and card diviner
in the Paris of the French Revolution. Etteilla designed the first esoteric
Tarot deck, adding astrological attributions to various cards, altering many of
them from the Marseilles designs, and adding divinatory meanings in text on the
cards. The Etteilla decks, though now eclipsed by Smith and Waite's illuminated
deck and Aleister Crowley's "Thoth" deck, remains available.
Etteilla's best known successor was Marie-Anne Le Normand, whose cartomancy
became fashionable during the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte, due largely to the
influence Le Normand wielded with Joséphine de Beauharnais, Napoleon's first
wife. After the fall of Napoleon and the restoration of the Bourbon kings,
interest in cartomancy declined.
Interest by more serious occultists came later, during the Hermetic Revival of
the 1840s in which (among others) Victor Hugo was involved. The idea of the
cards as a mystical key was first seriously developed by Eliphas Levi and passed
to the English-speaking world by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Levi,
not Etteilla, is the true founder of most contemporary schools of Tarot reading;
his 1854 Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (English title: Transcendental Magic)
introduced a new system for interpreting the cards. While Levi accepted Court de
Gébelin's claims about an Egyptian origin of the deck symbols, he rejected
Etteilla's innovations and his altered deck, and devised instead a system, which
related the Tarot to the Kabala and the four elements of alchemy.
The breakthrough into mass popularity began in 1910, with the publication of the
Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot, which took the step of including symbolic images in the
minor as well as the major arcana. (Arthur Edward Waite had been an early member
of the Golden Dawn) In the twentieth century, a huge number of different decks
were created, some traditional, some wildly different. |
