Roam through the 600 years of tarot history with the Fool, raiding the treasure houses of art, history, poetry, literature, theatre, film, folklore, fairy-tale, myth and mathematics with Fern Mercier. We won’t pin her/him down but we can widen and deepen our appreciation of The Fools’ irrepressible wisdom and wit.

Nothin’ ain’t worth nothin’, but it’s free

Skipping apart from the ordered procession of the other Major Arcana, the tarot Fool has no number.

Is s/he first or last in the Arcana sequence? It is irrelevant, for the Fool is a nothing – it is neither below one nor less than one – it is no- one! The zero of the Fool suggests s/he moves before or after, above or below, in and out of the other personages in the cards. Metaphysically and psychologically s/he is a wild card.

The fool is a holy nothing – a whole, a zero. The zero is as contrary as the tarot’s Fool for it is a universal symbol of absence or negation, but also a symbol of completion. Nothing is null and void, insignificant, empty, absent, insubstantial, worthless. It is the ether, the immensity of space, a point, a hole, yet also conversely, the whole.

For every culture uses the circle as a representation of unity, perfection and cyclical movement.

The circle symbolises spirit and a circle describes the cosmos – everything unified in the vast realm of the uni-verse, the one song of life. A circle is alpha and omega where there is no beginning or end. The ancients said God is a circle whose centre is everywhere and circumference is nowhere. So the circle is a vision of limitless possibilities, just like the Fool in perpetual motion, ever restlessly roaming the world.

The Fool is embryo in the womb of the World

Where did you come from, baby dear?
Out of the everywhere into here.

Where did you get your eyes so blue?
Out of the sky as I came through.

Where did you get that little tear?
I found it waiting when I got here.
(George MacDonald 1871)

The circle with the dot inside shows us the idea that new life arises spontaneously, unique and fresh, – separate yet inseparable – from the heart of the chaos of everything. The circle is the cosmic egg as well as the womb where the embyro is birthed. The original Mother Goose was the Egyptian goddess Hathor. She laid the golden egg that was her son, the sun god Ra. The ancient creatrix produced the universe in the primordial World egg.

So in the tarot’s circle, the Fool is the embryo’s thrust to begin life’s journey that completes within the World card’s circle/mandorla/egg/womb. The World card holds and reveals the eternal beginning and ending cycle of life, the circle out of which The Fool pops.

Thus the miracle of birth and death is bounded in the idea of nothing – a circle that is a zero: a cosmic wholeness with comic loopholes.

The Fool reminds us that the center of the universe is here where we are now and there wherever the Fool might show up next.

In the great game of life, Tarocchi was the most popular card game for over 300 years throughout Europe. Games played with the tarot used the Fool as an expendable card, playable at any moment, yet incapable of taking any tricks or of being taken, valuable in points only if held unplayed.

The modern Joker in playing cards, invented by the New York Poker Club as a ‘wild card’ to make the game more interesting, is apparently not related to the tarot deck’s Fool – so the authorities say. But it does serve a similar function to the tarot Fool and to the Court Jester – it’s wild, powerless and free. Paradox rules its being.

Playing ROUND with Number Nothing

Nothing comes from nothing.
Everything comes from nothing.

Zero contains a wealth of concepts and yet it is nothing. The biggest questions in science and religion are about nothingness and eternity – the void and the infinite. Zero has been rejected and exiled and yet it has always defeated those who opposed it.

Nothing is a profound problem. It has the potential to unsettle the very foundations of thinking in physics and philosophy – it forces us to ask the ultimate questions of the meaning of life.

Zero provides us a glimpse of the ineffable and the infinite – it is in fact infinity’s twin both equal and opposite, paradoxical and troublesome.

The Tarot assigns infinity to The Magician and Strength cards who both employ the symbol of infinity in their headgear. In a deeper reading we might assign The World card to infinity, whilst The Fool is given zero.

Nothing really matters
(Freddie Mercury)

We moderns know that Nothing – no-thing – is really something because it occupies space and contains power. Our computer keyboard affirms this reality.

Yet in the West, during the late Middle Ages when tarot emerged, zero was a dangerous idea to be feared and outlawed. For nearly two millennia the West could not accept zero. It had had no place within the Pythagorean framework.

What shape could zero be? Its irrationality made non-sense of the Greeks neat and ordered universe, so Pythagoras and Aristotle rejected and ignored it.

The Medieval Christian scholars, who imported their ideas from the Greeks and Romans, included this fear of the infinite and horror of the void.

Satan was considered literally Nothing. The circulus – little circle – was the brand burned into the forehead or the cheeks of criminals in the Middle Ages.

You ain’t seen nothing yet
(Al Jolson)

In other parts of the world however, zero was embraced very early on. The Indian Hindus readily accommodated a wide variety of concepts about nothingness. Unlike Christianity and Judaism who sought to flee from the void as it was considered a state of poverty and anathema – the Indian religious traditions accepted non-being on an equal footing with that of being. Zero formed a coherent whole. Nothing was a state, from which one might have come and to which one might return. Furthermore, these transitions might occur many times – without beginning and without end. In Buddhist teachings, one sought to achieve Nirvana – the being at oneness with the cosmos.

O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams”
(Hamlet by W. Shakespeare.)

Nevertheless, zero wormed its way into European society, firstly through its use by traders and merchants. The Muslim world had long accepted the wonderful zero and convinced the Jews that the Arabic counting system was far superior to Roman numerals. Throughout the 13th century, Italian merchants began to put commercial pressure on their governments to eventually accept zero in the business world.

Then artists took up zero’s cause. At exactly the time tarot appeared in Northern Italy, an Italian architect Filippo Brunelleschi demonstrated the power of the infinite zero by painting a vanishing point. In 1452 he placed a zero point in the centre of his drawing of a Florentine building and thereby magically transformed Western art, turning two dimensional work into 3 dimensions.
Eventually the church and its scholars were forced into the realization that the earth is not the centre of the universe. Nicholas of Cusa and Nicolaus Copernicus cracked open the nutshell universe of Aristotle and Ptolemy.

Among the great things which are found among us, the existence of Nothing is the greatest
(Leonardo da Vinci)

In this millennium, the 2000s – the age of the ‘naughtys’ – the zero has become commonplace. There are many more zeros around today than when Tarot emerged into being and in fact, than anytime in history. Because of binary arithmetic, computer calculations and codes, astronomy’s billions of stars within the known universe, not to mention national debts – we are accustomed to the ubiquitous zero.

In our mathematics, we announce each decade with zero as that circular no-thing recycles and ushers in the next cycle ie from 9 to 10 or 19 to 20 and so on.

By adding a few zeros we increase our source of income. Add a few more zeros and the banks and speculators move us into hyper-inflation. We assume that zero moves us into infinity, as we take for granted that zero increases a number 10-fold, a hundred fold and on and on ad infinitum….

Much ado about nothing
(Shakespeare)

Is it first or last in a sequence ? Where does The Fool fit?

Zero is neither below nor less than one. If we count forwards we generally start with number 1. Except for the Mayans, nobody had a year zero or started a month with day zero. To Europeans, that seems unnatural. Yet if we count backwards, it is second nature. – 9,8,7 … …O – we have liftoff! The bomb goes off at ground zero. An important event happens at zero hour not at one hour.
Zero has become a commonplace – we name Year Zero as the time when the unspeakable began in Cambodia and Ground Zero in New York City marks an historical spot.

A baby turns one after a year’s life which surely means the baby was zero years old before that first birthday?

It is a silly, childish discussion and only exposes the want of brains of those who maintain a contrary opinion to that we have stated
The Times (London) December 26th 1799

We Westerners left the Fool out when our calendar was devised – there is no year zero. Hence the wonderful joke of the third millennium with its spectacular world-wide opening ceremonies taking place a year early on December 31st 1999, when really it began in the year 2001.

The Fool’s Title

The Divine Bum
(Paul Huson)

The word fool comes from the Old French fol from the Latin follis meaning a “pair of bellows” or “a windbag”. The tarot Fool indeed often carries an inflated bladder. Today’s clowns sometimes carry a pair of bellows maintaining that ancient connection with the windy folly of their origins.

Buffoon from the Latin buffo means toad and the Italian buffare means “to puff” also suggesting a windbag.

The Fool’s French name Fou means madman and is cognate with the word fire, echoing the connection with light and energy. Folle means madwoman and Folie means folly. In the Swiss deck, the Fool is called Le Mat meaning “the dull one”. In Italian Il Matto – the Mad One.

Often court fools were mentally retarded and therefore considered to have a special relationship to the spirit. Affectionately called “God’s folk” the village idiots were cared for by the community as they were considered under protection – touched by God.
Silly once meant blessed. To be “silly” in a Medieval sense meant to be holy and sensitive to religious impulse.
Frequently the image of The Fool is shown in medieval and Renaissance engravings as a child of the Moon (La Luna ); the Fool as a luna-tic. The 17th century Fool in the Mitelli deck from Bologna may be a lunatic.

Jester is a word that comes from the French and originally meant “someone who recites gestes or heroic tales”. This suggests an earlier role of fools being all-round Minstrels and troubadours. Many centuries later, the 20th century “song and dance men” of Vaudeville, Burlesque, Music Hall, both pre-and post-television and moving pictures have entertained the masses royally.

The Fool was also at home in the Medieval Morality plays, free to move on and off the stage, improvising both with the other actors as well as with the audience. Harlequin and his mates Pantaloon, Scaramouche and Pulchinello of the Italian Commedia Del’ Arte complete with their hectic slapstick craziness, derive from this foolish, time-honoured, theatrical tradition.

Clown is a native English word probably from the Celtic meaning “ a boorish rustic” and cognate with the word “clod” meaning “country bumpkin” and used interchangeably with Fool” in Elizabethan times. Circus clowns are known for their droll buffoonery.
There have been many names for the Fool as there are colours in his crazy clothing. Buffoon, Harlequin, Joker, Droll, Zany, Punch, Vice, Puck, Jack Pudding and Merry Andrew are a few of his names in English.

Folly, Sister to Wisdom

Hain’t we got all the fools in town on our side? And hain’t that a big enough majority in any town?
(Mark Twain in Huckleberry Finn)

Images of the Fool were common in the Renaissance at the time the Tarot appeared in Europe. Literature, theatre and people’s daily life abounded with Fools.

The Fool was celebrated in folk Festivals. Our modern April Fool’s Day is a pale left-over from the outrageous anarchic carnivals and Mardi Gras of Medieval times when the Lord Of Misrule overturned the strict hierarchies of the times at the Winter Solstice and on Holy Innocents’ Day. Foolery, drunkenness and cross-dressing ruled the day. Every small town and large city held a rowdy parade that a crowned Fool headed in triumph. Topsy-turvey ruled, gender-bending expected when even wives had license to beat their husbands.

In the literature of the time, the Fool’s mother was called Folly and it is she who is sister to Wisdom. Shakespeare’s motto that a wise man knows he is a fool, recalls the famous assertion of Socrates, wisest of the Greeks, who said he knew only that he knew nothing.

It is a profitable thing, if one is wise, to seem foolish.
(Aeschylus)

Tarot artist Brian Williams re-launched 15th century Sebastian Brandt’s wonderful Das Narrenschiff – The Ship of Fools – (1494) with his Tarot of Fools deck in 2002. The allegory of foolish humanity all in the same boat sailing oblivious through the world, seems especially poignant in this environmentally fragile era of our global village.

Erasmus the great Dutch humanist portrayed Folly as Goddess in his masterpiece “In Praise of Folly” published in 1511. To Erasmus, Folly encompassed all forms of Unreason and defended the “creative vital instincts of humanity against the encroachment of the analytical reason.” For although Folly “may have no altars or temples, she is nevertheless the most universally worshipped and beloved and obeyed of all the deities who bear sway over human affairs.” Folly “fosters the pleasing allusions which make life possible”.

Erasmus asks “What would work without Folly? What would sex be? Folly is the very giver of life for is not the very act that brings humans into existence filled with folly?”

The Court Jester

The revelation of laughter

T’were better Charity
To leave me in the Atom’s Tomb –
Merry and Nought, and gay and numb –
Than this smart Misery.
(Emily Dickinson)

Fools played a large part in medieval life and were an integral part of every feudal court. Sometimes they could even attain certain renown. Mattello was one such famous fool. His name is derived from the Italian matto and he was the court fool to Isabella d’Este, Marchioness of Mantua.

Great Lords and Popes found a place for a Fool in their households and there s/he was kept in an honored position. The Fool’s job was to entertain their master and mistress and to remind him that like Caesar, he was only human and open to error. Theoretically at court, the poor Fool was the one person immune from retribution for quips at the master’s expense. However all too often s/he became the butt for cruel jokes, for s/he was also a scapegoat.

Fools came in all shapes and sizes, often absurd, grotesque physical specimens, which emphasized their role as an outsider. There were giant fools and dwarf fools. Jimmie Camber who lived in the early 1500s and was the pet dwarf of King James 5 of Scotland was said to be “just over a yard high and two yards in girth” (round the waist).

Both male and female could play the Fool. In the 1600 Mathurine was the favorite fool of three French Kings.

There were learned fools who specialized in clever wordplay. Some university professors took part-time jobs as buffoons to supplement their meager teaching salaries. Buffoonery could pay so well, that many could give up teaching entirely. Some dwarf fools were prominent in other professions and many were lawyers. Our modern-day equivalents – of which there are many – are easy to spot! Each country and time period has ‘em. Our modern media is full of Fools.

Fools Kings and Popes

The Emperor, The Hierophant and The World in Cap and Bells

The Fool and the Priest have a special relationship as evidenced by the Fool’s headgear, which seems to have hidden a shaved head, a parodying imitation of the monk’s tonsure. The hood itself is a grotesque illusion to the religious cowl. Nevertheless, Fools were often welcome among the clergy. Pope Leo X loved his jokers so much they could enter his chambers unannounced anytime they wished. Visiting officials were not so privileged. They usually faced long delays before they could see the Pope. It was jested throughout Rome that an official who wanted to see the Pope quickly should dress up in fool’s motley.

The dwarf- fool Querno was a poet, musician and wit. He lived in Naples and had an amazing ability to make up rhymes. Leo, patron of buffoonery heard about Querno and wanted to add him to his collection of fools. He summonsed Querno to Rome – a great honor for the tiny fool. To create a sensation, Querno made his entrance into Rome riding an elephant and wearing as a joke a crown of vines, cabbage leaves and grapes. From the top of the huge beast, Querno shouted funny Latin verses that he had composed with the Pope in an earlier meeting on the outskirts of the city.

The relationship between Fool and King is best illustrated with Shakespeare’s play, King Lear. In this great and absorbing tragedy, we are exposed to the ultimate exposure and defeat of the King who is degraded to the status of the meanest of his servants. We watch the royal sufferer being progressively stripped, first of extraordinary power, then of ordinary human dignity, then of the necessities of life, to physical nakedness, helpless and abject as any animal. Then as the king’s very sanity dissolves, the great reversal occurs. On the heath the poor mad king is turned into fool and beggar, guided by his half-witted court jester. Shakespeare crowns the Fool and invests the king with motley. Throughout, the Fool remains the mouthpiece of truth, of real sanity, an impartial critic.

In his dotage the tragic hero Lear cries “When we are born we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools”.

So the Fool/Jester plays at the court of the king as well as pope. In tarot talk the Emperor and the Fool as well as the Hierophant and Fool are partners. Sometimes the Fool speaks in riddles, which encode a truth the king accepts even when he can’t accept any honest declaration. The Fool’s wit or buffoonery reverses the edicts of authority and officialdom, so that the highest dignitaries of State or Church appear as fools themselves and the State, the Church and even the World herself, is revealed in cap and bells.

Bottom or Simpleton

Taboo is the Fool’s terrain

The Fool, slippery as s/he is, can be divided roughly into two types, although s/he has the capacity to be in both camps.

The Buffoon, like the clown is Shakespeare’s John Falstaff or Sir Tony Belch. They make lots of noise, and they’re spiteful, rapacious, lying, deceitful, greedy and drunken. We laugh at poor Bottom wearing ass’s ears in Midsummer’s Night’s Dream. He reminds us of our own worst fears – being laughed at for our ignorance.

We are familiar with the buffoon in drag in Pantomime or at university Capping concerts and transvestite and Queer festivals. All Fools love to cross-dress and confound sexual stereotypes. Australia’s own Dame Edna is a marvelous modern Buffoon/ Fool.
Buffoons thumb their noses and show their bottoms at convention and authority. Their tomfoolery includes iconoclasm, disrespect and subversion.

Jennifer Saunders and Pamela Stephenson in the TV series Absolutely Fabulous are two buffoons spilling venom at the fashion industry and all other aspects of the filthy rich’s lifestyle. The two Fools laughter directs derision toward society and society’s derision is flung like stones back at them.

Then there is the Holy Innocent, often a simpleton or saint-like Forrest Gump character. The Idiot in Dosteovesky’s book by the same name is a beautiful example. Prince Mishkin is an epileptic who “sees” things with a heightened awareness and personifies the redemptive power of simplicity plus faith. Mentally and physically abnormal, a Fool is always an outsider who is set apart and therefore views the world in a different way.

Without guild and malice, naïve, usually celibate the holy Fool is often used as a foil to show up a corrupt society, the only person to speak but with no power to change the world. Parsifal from the Arthurian legends was a great Fool, relying on his naive intuition. He was fool enough NOT to ask and eventually then to ask the one simple question that was needed to redeem the Wasteland.
Like the foolhardy youngest brother or sister in fairy tales who rushes in where angels fear to tread and by doing so, wins the hand of the prince/ss and the kingdom, the Fool’s approach to life combines wisdom AND folly, which can result in miracles.

The Fool shows us how the sublime and the ridiculous are one and the same. Either or neither, idiot or jester, s/he unites Shakespeare’s Caliban who is lurking, willful and dark – with Ariel who is quixotic, brilliant and light. Both are servants and both desire freedom.

The Fool, like zero, employs and embodies paradox, the exception that does not deny the rule, but manages to escape or break it. S/he blurs distinctions, especially in the area of sexuality and spirituality. An ambiguous figure of fun, s/he can be both grossly obscene and (w)holy innocent. The Fool criticises the ego while celebrating the self. The Fool scatters certainty about sexual identity.
The Fool often represents the marginalized and the dispossessed. Taboo is the Fool’s terrain. Nothing is sacred and comedy is his/her map and journey.

The Fool is our guide who does not know where or what s/he is. A medieval text tells of the Fool Philip, who was given a new shirt by his master. Philip put on the shirt and ran all through the house asking everyone who he was, for he did not recognize himself in his new clothing.

And then there’s the child in Hans Christian Anderson’s tale The Emperor’s New Clothes” – who speaks like the jester without punishment or censure… to the whole community trapped in illusion…. “But the Emperor is wearing no clothes!”

The Fool is the revelation of laughter and the embodiment of mirth. Laughter happens when we are totally involved, absorbed in the moment and/or looking on as an observer, standing quite apart from the moment. Laughter breaks us out of ourselves and may restore proportion, whilst reflecting skepticism and credulousness. Often though, a fit of the giggles does NOT restore order, but increases the silliness of the moment. The Fool scorns our orthodoxies, and substitutes absurdities, encouraging us to believe them because s/he does.

The Fool’s Clothing

‘Motley: – an assortment and variety of types, the costume of a jester.’

In early tarot decks, the Fool was sometimes portrayed as ragged and unkempt, sometimes simply a beggar, sometimes in complete jester’s panoply with bells, cap and bladder. A Fool sports a medley of colours, baubles and bells.

In medieval drama, the fool’s costume traditionally consisted of a tight-fitting hood with long ass’s ears at the sides and sometimes a cockscomb trimmed with hawk bells on the top. Sometimes he sports horns from his cap. The flaps of her coat frequently ended in bells and the trousers were often of variegated colours, the favourite tints being light green and yellow.

Sometimes the Fool has feathers on his head as in the Visconti-Sforza deck (1450) where Il Matto is a beggar in penitential white. Feathers can be found in other Renaissance paintings such as Giotto’s Folly in the Arena Chapel in Padua. Cesare Ripa in the Iconologia tells us feathers are a symbol of foolishness. However, maybe they also emphasize his connection with the heavenly spirit. The movie Forrest Gump begins and ends with a feather drifting from and to heaven. Here the feather alludes to the foolish Forrest Gump as being a feather on the breath of God.

The horned hat in the Marseille deck links the Fool to the God Dionysus who was born with horns on his forehead. This linked him with the young kid or goat – a suitable sacrificial offering to the gods in the ancient world and gives an undertone of scapegoat to the insouciance of the Fool. Dionysus was said to have gifted wine upon human beings – and wine is one of the great doorways to ecstasy and revelry. April Fool’s Day is a remnant of the great drunken holidays when the Fool reigned supreme. Annual carousing in public on New Year’s Eve in New Zealand has become a Fools’ paradise for many, while Authorities wring their official hands.

There are a few particular animals associated with the Fools clothing. Asses (the ears on his cap) and cocks (his hood is called a coxcomb) – remind us of the Fool’s infamous lustiness, for both these animal’s names have become semi-taboo. In polite company we call them donkeys and roosters. Interesting to note that both animals are implicated in the sacrificial imagery of Christ’s story; it was a humble ass that carried Christ to triumph into Jerusalem to his death, and a cock that crowed three times to announce Peter’s betrayal. Do we take this to mean that the Christian Lord is a Fool?

Dionysus also celebrated his birthday at the winter solstice and was an ancient god of sacrifice.

The English Morris and Mummers’ Fool frequently wore a fox’s skin which may link him to Reynard the Fox, a trickster of European origins and hero of the 12th century beast epic Roman de Renart. Reynard like the Fool is canny, amoral rebel pitting himself against all authority – foxy indeed.

The Fool’s traditional bauble is a wand he carries, that is usually an inflated bladder filled with rattling beans or peas. It would often look like a phallus – like the manic Punch who has a colossal penis. The Fool’s bauble has two pendant balls and is obviously his tool, a fertility symbol. At the same time, as a scepter it connects him directly with the King as his alter ego. If you get hit with the Fools’ bauble, the joke is on you. His slapstick is the defenseless Fool’s only weapon.

Women Fools could carry a leather dildo called a Baubo. This name alludes to the cathartic and healing function of the bawdy Dionysian comedies which are associated with the Greek myth of the Goddess Demeter. She is pulled out of her grief by laughing uproariously at the grotesque crone Baubo’s dirty jokes. Baubo also entertains the Goddess by showing her bare rump and genitals.
Lewdness and fertility are associated with the Fool, although Love itself doesn’t sit easy with the poor Fool…… “in love everybody plays the fool’ or ‘I’m just a fool for you “ etc

The Fool’s Dog

Hounded by our instincts

The Fool, like the hero in the Fairy tale, is almost always in every deck walking with an animal companion, usually a dog who represents the forces of nature, our instinctual self, our desires driving us on, leading us into success or misery, happiness or failure.
The dog is our familiar, our domestic companion, our guardian. In the Marseille decks the dog is attacking the Fool’s bottom (who seems oblivious nonetheless).

Perhaps the idea being conveyed here is that the wandering Fool is a stranger in our midst and our animal instincts are warning us to be on guard?

Perhaps the dog represents our animal desires that are driving us onwards?

Perhaps we should be listening to the watchdog’s barking? What has it got to tell us? What is dogging us?

Perhaps the Fool doesn’t care his backside has been exposed by his animal drives? The Marseille Fool’s bottom is bared and yet his face is unembarrassed and shows no shame.

We seem unaware or ignorant of the dog’s power to make an exhibition of ourselves.

Perhaps ignorance is bliss?

If our head is in the clouds and we doggedly pursue a quest like Don Quixote, we will tilt against reality, fall prey to accidents and crazy whims.

Doggone!

Contemporary Fools

….. fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
(Alexander Pope. Essay on Criticism.)

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
Fools rush in where wise men never go…
(Elvis Presley)

The demise of the fool – at least as an institution and as an accepted part of the ruling classes everyday life – began in the 17th century. The 1790 image shows us a stern nymph admonishing the fool in ass’s ears. “Know Thyself she instructs…. Tut tut – the Age of Reason(?!) and political correctedness is upon us.

Of course the Fool is still within and without, and of course in the modern age, Fools abound. They’re all around us. Popular culture is their playground and they pop up wherever you may least expect them – in our music, on the radio and TV, and of course in the movies.

Nothing is real – Strawberry Fields Forever
(The Beatles)

Some of my favorite Fools are:-

Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carrol is a fabulous Fool as is the Book itself.

Charlie Chaplin like Don Quixote tilting against reality, the little tramp is the quintessential fool… with his gift for self-mockery, exploiting his own absurdities without any apparent loss of self-esteem.

Marilyn Monroe played The Fool in most of her movies where the Hollywood macho machine forced her into being the dumb child blonde. However she transcended her sex-objectification in roles such as Some Like it Hot or Diamonds are a Girls’ Best Friends with her comedic sense of timing and naivety in taking things at their face or literal value. Her waif-like vulnerability was often ingenuously/ genuinely funny.

Buster Keaton, Peter Sellers, Mae West, Judy Holliday, Lucille Ball, Guiletta Masina (Fellini’s wife in her role in his masterpiece movie La Strada.

Danny Kaye – one of my all-time favorite Fools. Spike Milligan.

And then there are the groups of fools and eccentrics, the Buffoons, the Keystone Cops in the 1930s the Carry On Films from the 1950s, The Goons 1950s, Dad’s Army and The Hillbilly’s 1960s TV, The Young Ones 1980s etc etc.

The Marx Brothers

And the inimitable Monty Python – their classic ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life (and Death)’ as they swing from the crosses of Gethsemene in the Movie Life of Brian

The great Sammy Davis Junior, Vaudeville and Music hall “song and dance man”

Jack Nicolson’s The Joker in the movie Batman. He has no past and is never seen without the wild make-up of a joker in a deck of cards.

Billy T. James in his brilliant rendition as The Mexican Kid in the immortal NZ movie Came a Hot Friday.

Jim Carrey in The Truman Show plays a classic Fool, Peewee’s Big Adventure.

And then there’s real life.

The hippies and the young at heart of all ages wearing a medley of colours affecting rags and patches, baubles and bells. Maybe the motley of psychedelic colours of the ‘60s and ‘70s presaged a new dawn of consciousness for all of us? Remember those cries – oxymorons all – of “free love” and “make peace not war” while sticking flowers down the barrels of the soldiers’ guns…. Ah how foolish we were! Pied Pipers and Peter Pans all.

Backpackers, wanderers traveling around with all their worldly goods slung over their shoulder. Tramps, hobos, transvestites…. Fools are punks, the social outcasts, the homeless, the bawds, the drunks.

The centre of reality is wherever one happens to be, and its circumference is whatever one’s imagination can make sense of.
(Margaret Atwood.)

The King and his court can be a lovely symbol for the inner world of our psyche. The child/Fool criticizes the King, who stands for our adult ego – while celebrating the innocent self. S/he is equally at home in the everyday world of ‘reality’ where most of us try to live most of the time, and in the non-verbal world of the imagination where we visit not nearly enough.

Like Puck, King Oberon’s Jester in Midsummer’s Nights Dream, our inner Fool revels in moving freely between these two worlds, mixing them up to make fun of the waking consciousness.

“Lord what fools these mortals are!”
(Shakespeare)

The Fool’s world is often bizarre and delights in illusion and the imaginary. It is the Cheshire cat’s grin. It destroys logic and entertains in puzzle. It lies in the singularity of the Big Bang and the heart of black holes. The Fool will always have the last laugh.

Let us celebrate and crown our own Fool. “Ask ourselves where’s the Fool in my life? Who’s the Fool in my family or workplace, the community, the funny old world?”

Let’s skip into and through our own lives, looking for the Fool, playing the Fool, being the Fool.

“Esser come il Matto nel tarocchi” (to be like the tarot Fool – all over the place, at home everywhere and nowhere)

The Fool Spread

Devised by Fern Mercier

A circular spread with Number 7 sitting alone in the middle of the circle
Remember Folly is sister to Wisdom.

1. What kind of fool am I? This describes me and the journey I’m on.
2. Specifically in what area of my life is my folly located?
3. The Dog – my instincts/desires – that are driving and accompanying me?
4. The Knapsack – my baggage/resources – what am I carrying?
5. What in my wildest dreams do I want to be?
6. What is grounding me?
7. One card in the middle of the circle – what is my greatest Folly?

Bibliography Books and Magazines – (authors listed alphabetically)

FOOLS PLAYS A study of Satire in the Sottie by Heather Arden. Cambridge University Press 1980.

THE BOOK OF NOTHING by John d. Barrow. Vintage 2000.

SAMBO The Rise and Demise of an American Jester by Joseph Boskin. Oxford University Press 1986.

THE KING’S FOOL A Book about Medieval and Rennaissance Fools. By Dana Fradon. Duttons Children’s Books 1993.

THE FOOL – THE CLOWN – THE JESTER by Fred Fuller. From Gnosis a Journal of Western Inner Traditions No. 19 Spring 1991.

THE DEVIL’S PICTUREBOOK by Paul Huson Abacus Press 1971.

MYSTICAL ORIGINS OF THE TAROT From Ancient Roots to Modern Usage by Paul Huson. Destiny Books 2004

JUNG AND THE TAROT An Archetypal Journey by Sallie Nichols. Samuel Weiser Inc 1980.

ZERO The Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife. Souvenir Press 2000

CRAFTSMAN OF CHAOS by Lynda Sexson from Parabola. Myth and the Quest For Meaning. The Trickster Vol 4 No. 1 Tamarack Press.

THE WOMAN’S ENCLYOPAEDIA OF MYTHS AND SECRETS by Barbara Walker. Harper San Francisco 1983.

FROM THE BEAST TO THE BLONDE On Fairytales and Their Tellers by Marina Warner. Chatto and Windus 1994.

THE FOOL His Social and Literary History by Enid Welsford. Gloucester Mass. 1966.

BOOK OF FOOLS by Brian Williams Llewellyn Publications 2002

WOMEN ON TOP Symbolic Sexual Inversion and Political Disorder in Early Modern Europe. From Society and Culture in Early Modern France by Natalie Zemon Davis. Sanford University Press 1975.

www.clownbluey.co.uk

Images

1 IJJ Swiss Fool
2 Playing Card Joker
3 January 1st 2000 cartoon
4 Mitelli Fool 17th century
5 Ship of Fools
6 Velazquez Dwarf Jester
7 Fool and the Priest
8 Cleopatra and Fool Jacob Jordaens 1653
9 Keying Up Fool William Merritt Chase 1875
10 Absolutely Fabulous
11 Charlie Chaplin
12 Fool Laughing Anon Dutch c.1500
13 Visconti-Sforza Fool
14 Rahere, Last Jester to Henry 1 and Mathilda 1100.
15 Fool Tickling Woman’s Fancy
16 Marseilles Fool with Dog Jodorosky and Camoin
17 Nymph admonishing Fool
18 Charlie Chaplin
19 Buster Keaton
20 Danny Kaye and Bing Crosby (2 images) and Danny Kaye as Court Jester
21 Marx Brothers
22 Monty Python
23 Jack Nicholson as The Joker from Batman
24 Billy T. James
25 Jester in Motley – modern image

by Jean-Michel David

There are a few cards in the sequence that were especially influential in sending me scurrying through historical connections and developments. This is one of those, the other two being XVI and XXI. Not that other cards lack such aspect, of course.

The Wheel has numerous details worthy of careful attention and reflection, not least of which are the beings depicted on its periphery, and yet it is these that had proved amongst the most elusive. Certainly numerous authors exegete the animals in various ways, what I found ‘strange’, however, is that even amongst the earliest of depictions there was consistency, yet no apparent explanation.

This article is in large part extracted from a chapter from my online course (and book), and the main points which arise further down have also been posted on forum.tarothistory.com, and the more general ones on Aeclectic’s tarotforum.net.

Let’s first go through some historical antecedents for sourcing the card’s imagery

Boethius

We need go no further than Boethius’s immensely influential early 6th century Consolation of Philosophy (or, more aptly, ‘Consolation of Philosophia’, as Philosophy is therein allegorised.) to find the basis for the Mediaeval (and later) European pervasiveness of the image and allegory.

The whole text is image rich, and it is no wonder that it formed one of the most popular works in Mediaeval times and that it was translated in various vernacular languages (including English by both Chaucer and Elizabeth I, as well as in Old French and German). In Italy, it was highly influential in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Llull, Boccaccio, Malory, as well as the works of Chaucer and of Shakespeare, and indeed the very imagery used on major Lumière (‘Gothic’) Cathedrals, all show direct evidence of his incredible importance and influence. Furthermore, the manner in which Aristotle came to be understood by the scholastics of subsequent years was in large part via Boethius – though in this case his other and earlier philosophical works rather than his final prison-written work.

The opening section of Book II of the Consolation of Philosophia is of principal import when it comes to Fortune herself:

‘If I have diagnosed the cause and nature of your condition, you are wasting away in pining and longing for your former good fortune. [...] I know the many disguises of that monster, Fortune [...].

If you are trying to stop her wheel from turning, you are of all men the most obtuse. For if it once begins to stop, it will no longer be the wheel of chance.

With domineering hand she moves the turning wheel,
Like currents in a treacherous bay swept to and fro:
Her ruthless will has just deposed once fearful kings
While trustless still, from low she lifts a conquered head;
No cries of misery she hears, no tears she heeds,
But steely hearted laughs at groans her deeds have wrung.
Such is the game she plays, and so she tests her strength;
Of mighty power she makes parade when one short hour
Sees happiness from utter desolation grow.

Here Boethius listens to Philosophia (c. 1460):

Such is his influence in the world of philosophy and of ideas that I personally rank him as one of the most influential European thinkers of all time. And the work for which he is best known remains readily accessible to readers from a wide variety of background (unlike, I would suggest as an example, many of the works of Aristotle).

To be sure, the concept of Fortuna antedates Boethius – the works of especially the neo-platonist Proclus and Plotinus are influential. What Boethius does, however, is raise Fortuna to a specific mental picture such that what becomes of great noteworthiness is not the figure of Fortuna herself, but of something he really brings afresh and anew: the wheel upon which we inevitably travel throughout our lives. In contrast, Fortuna was Tyche (‘luck’) in Ancient Greece, a concept at times overlaid with the workings of the three fates.

Looking at the image (above) of the Wheel of Fortune adjacent which Boethius speaks (or listens) to Philosophia shows well some of the various other aspects I also discuss in other parts of my course: it draws us in to participate in the event, especially if we read his text at the same time. Also, the very words used, viz, “if it once begins to stop, it will no longer be the wheel of chance” (or, in the words of another and earlier translation: “if Fortune begin to stay still, she is no longer Fortune”) brings our imagination to active participation. For it is Fortuna that is represented, and for that the wheel must move.

Yet, she is capricious and inconstant, unlike the ‘eternal’ movement of the stars which can be forecast by their constancy. Whereas the celestial realm moves and is constant, here below Fortune may play and move with erratic fickleness. This, for the Ancients, was very much one of the key factors in not being able to predict the future unless ordained by one of the gods. Either it was ordained and hence able to be communicated by the sibyls (or equivalent), or it was left to the vicissitudes of Fortuna.

Noblet

Compared to the other TdM’s, Noblet shows some clarity of spokes that appears to have slowly eroded over time. Let’s see what I mean: The card images below are from, respectively, a Visconti-type, the Noblet, a Dodal, and a Conver.

If in the Visconti we still have the very traditional depiction of Fortuna actually included in the image (in her slightly less usual form as hoodwinked) and turning the wheel directly with her hands on the spokes, by the Noblet, not only has she disappeared, but there is now the common wheel axle and handle and, instead of four figures around the wheel, only three remain.

These three figures also seem to lose detail over time. In the Noblet, they appear more like an ape or monkey-like figure descending, an ass-like figure ascending, and a human-like crowned figure atop. By the time of the Conver, the three are far more difficult to distinguish – yet still sufficiently clear if the symbolic meaning is known (to which we shall return shortly).

These animal-figurines are quite different to the more classical depictions showing, generally, all human beings in different parts of the wheel (though there are exceptions to which we shall also return).

The images I show above also have distinct differences of direction of rotation: the TdMs move counterclockwise (as judged by the orientation of the side figures, presuming, to be sure, that the head leads movement). In contrast, the Visconti and the other two previous images have the figures move clockwise – though, again, there is no universality of represented direction even in very early imagery, something that can be seen from the image below.

If we look at the centre of each wheel, what is striking in the TdMs is that the ‘hub’ is depicted as a representation of the world – or, to be more precise, the Earth, divided in the mediaeval three-fold division encountered both in mediaeval maps as well as in the Empress’ and Emperor’s sceptres. Admittedly, the both the Dodal and the Conver already show the loss of clarity of detail retained by the Noblet.

Platform as stability

If we look again carefully at the card, there is something different about the position atop the Wheel: it appears to have a platform upon which the individual is seated.

If there is indeed a platform, it may be that this also stands, though located atop, as untouched by the Wheel’s rim and its constant motion.

Such equipoise requires a sense of inner tranquillity, acceptance and equanimity, together with a certain control of thoughts and action, perseverance, as well as tolerance to what may be heading one’s way and impartiality to its provenance (Cf Steiner’s Knowledge of the Higher Worlds) These, of course, also form part and parcel of some of the virtues to be cultivated by each of us as we meet destiny’s onslaughts.

The Ass and the Monkey

As already mentioned, there remains clarity and consistency that the two figures on the sides of the TdM Wheels are of Ass (or donkey) and of Monkey, with the former seeking to ascend, and the latter in the descending (or ‘falling’) position.

For many years I considered that such must have been of symbolic significance, yet no tarot book (nor other materials I had read) satisfactorily addressed this aspect. It is only during a revision of the course a couple of years ago that the specific details emerged. I mention this as there are still numerous details to tarot that have yet to be unveiled which only careful attention to detail, familiarity with early decks, and an increased understanding of symbolic representations in use in late mediæval and renaissance imagery will bring to light.

For myself, it was not ‘just’ that these animals are consistent across various TdMs, but also that they are evident if one looks very closely at the 15th century Visconti decks: not the main image, but the gold-leaf bears lines that makes of the ascending figure an ass, and the descending one have a monkey’s tail.. To be sure, other similar details are also included on that card, such as ears also appearing on the crowned figure atop, and Fortuna being winged. (see the close-up below).

So what of these?

I suspect that this is one of those ‘transformations’ of human-to-symbolic animal that was ever-so ‘natural’ to those of the times, and that the ascent as Ass and fall as monkey were more commonly understood than we may even presume.

According to the mediæval Physiologus, the devil was ‘simia Dei’ (God’s monkey), and the monkey was associated with humanity’s fall and continued to represent human sin into the Middle Ages (Cf, for example, Corbey’s Metaphysics of Apes, p.66 – on a different note, that the monkey was considered a representation of the fall was perhaps another, albeit unconscious, reason for viewing evolutionary theory with some trepidation and suspition)

As for the Ass, it probably derives from a joke that confounds ‘Bisodia’ as the name at times used for Christ’s Ass but also infers fantasy (or more properly speaking phantasm). The Ass can also therefore be seen to represent false aspirations (the Ass upon which Christ sat is not to be confused with the Christ).

So we have, on the one side, the striving ascent beyond the natural position of the ass; and on the other the fall (as monkey) by his own disobedience to divine precept. Yet each, by the whim of Fortuna, may also find itself in a position inappropriate to its ‘natural’ position!

Further details

The above shows that many details from early standardisations display a wealth of meaning, some of which have yet to be re-discovered. With this card alone, as example, one of the details that remains to be clarified through reference to contemporary notes is precisely what is depicted atop.

Of all decks, in terms of the standardisation of tarot, the Noblet also remains unique: though some details are definitely of poor rendition, there is no other deck that maintains the precision is contains. Antecedent decks, such as the Visconti, remain of course highly important in the development of tarot yet, as is shown by this card, it also remains a ‘pre’ standardised pattern.

What would be incredible would be to find a full deck exemplified by the World card found in the Sforza Castle!

When I embarked on this journey of creating the 22 Major Arcana in ceramics, it was a commitment to developing my imagination and finding a way to express the lessons of my life through these ‘windows’. Prior to this I did not have any real knowledge of the Tarot. I was inspired when a Tarot reader friend of mine once said that all the stories of the world are to be found in these 22 Major Arcana.

Before I created each sculpture, I read what I could and then explored the character in my imagination. I needed to sense its soul mood, or the fundamental gesture that is expressed. I asked questions such as -What is the particular life perspective for that character? Can I sense this from the inside out? Sometimes it would take months before the character emerged for me. I would often realise later that I had needed to have particular life experiences, in order to help open the doors to inspiration.

From a practical point of view, I have developed a process of building the sculptures from the feet upwards. In that way the sculpture grows in relation to the dialogue between me and the clay, dependant on the forces of gravity, balance and the essential core. I choose not to use any armature to support it and so must find a way to form it so it can stand in its integrity. I have discovered that when it doesn’t stand, I have to rebuild it until I find the centre of energy of that character in myself. For example, when I created the lion for The Charioteer, I rebuilt the lion about nine times before I could access within myself the core energy of his ferocity that enabled him to stand strong.

The Fool This character speaks to me about the first step in any journey. I could so easily relate to what it means to take the first step in initiating things. Over the past 30 years I have initiated projects, founded organizations and jumped into developing new things with energy and no ready-made path or recipe. Embarking on this particular journey in ceramics was just such a leap of faith for me. My Fool is balanced on one foot, flexible, arms wide, open to the world and leaping without a care for what lies ahead. At first when I made him he was a solitary figure and I realized he needed to have a contrast between his carefree joyfulness and a representation of danger and fear –his unconscious shadow. I found it so enjoyable to make the dragon with his scaly body, his spikey wings and purple gums and teeth. It definitely added dramatic tension to the sculpture. It was ironic in terms of the content, as the Fool was made very carefully and consciously and making the dragon was a quick and spontaneous experience. The Fool is a being of youthful enthusiasm, gay abandonment and no fear for the future. He leaps with his rose in one hand and in the other hand, an impossibly small bag to carry his worldly belongings. The rose is an image of the Ideal world, while the small bag of possessions represents his very frugal needs. The Fool, for me, is an archetype for all beginnings. We never feel prepared enough, but have to let go of fear and trust that whatever happens will be for the best.

The Magician For me, he is a mediator between the Fool and the world, a mercury-type character. In my life I have been involved in facilitating learning processes and building partnerships within and between groups of people. I have often felt like a juggler of many elements. I tried to ‘catch’ the juggling magician in clay, in the middle of his movement, while he spins the objects in a lemniscate around his head. The lemnicate I made with copper wire. I give him the wings of Mercury at both of his ankles to express lightness and mercurial agility. His belt is represented as the Ouroborus, the snake with his tail in his mouth, the Egyptian symbol of infinity. The Magician can stand in all worlds simultaneously without losing his centre or his purpose. I sensed a very powerful but gentle spirit in the nature of the Magician. I could relate very easily to what that magical juggling means in life, being mother to five, development worker, artist and traveler, while trying to find balance and presence of mind. The magical aspect in life particularly comes from finding helpers miraculously along the way who manifest just when needed.

The Empress Nature with its feminine foundation is what inspired me for the character of The Empress. Mother Earth, an archetype of prolific fertility and nurturing, is a dreaming being, deeply involved in creation. The Empress is the Fool’s physical mother being that manifests all the seasons. I began the sculpture by creating the woven chair for her, which contained her pregnant belly. From there I built the figure upwards and downwards, and lastly created her head and face. I experienced a wonderful sense of play and childhood while I created the manifestations of nature around her, the old dead tree, the fruitful pomegranate tree, the river, water lilies, corn and the bird.

The Emperor The Fool’s physical father figure in my journey is The Emperor. I spent some time trying to live into what it must mean to be truly masculine, earthed and strong. I sensed that The Emperor would be conscious and aware, as opposed to the dreaming feminine nature of The Empress. I imagined a scene that would call on the most courageous attitude. For instance, what kind of courage and steadfastness would it take to face a very large army of soldiers, knowing that you are outnumbered and still go forward. My Emperor was built up from very strong legs and a large sword resting on the ground creating a threefold foundation. To contrast with The Emperor’s solidity and stability, I wanted his cloak to look as if it was lifted by the wind, to suggest a sense of softness and vulnerability behind him. It was surprising and rewarding to experience the ability of the clay to actually express lightness. I made a number of attempts to form the face of The Emperor until I was satisfied he looked mature and experienced enough to express the gravity, strength and courage of his character.

In addition to these four sculptures, I have completed a further six sculptures so far. I look forward to the continuation of my journey with the Major Arcana. I have just recently immigrated to Australia, which is the biggest leap so far in my life, and I am intrigued to see how my sculpture work will be affected by this change.

“The thing itself is unreachable, but its phenomenon can be apprehended through the structures of thought.”

–Immanuel Kant

“To have a new vision of the future, it has always been necessary to have a new vision of the past.”

–Historian Theodore Zeldin

When I recently wrote and created The Counterculture Tarot I finished a journey: one taken nearly 50 years ago but left forgotten in a box of old news photographs. Among the images were this journey’s beacons, waiting to form a map to the experience of an influential and controversial time, very roughly a decade of the last century referred to simply as The Sixties. Opening this box released a flood of human and historical experiences, revived in photographs not widely seen and, therefore, free of accumulated iconography. Like the Tarot, these photographs told many stories. Some framed experiences of life and death, some of revolution and retribution. Some expressed the triumphs of personal freedom or revealed incipient hints of a dramatic cultural shift yet to come.

I was stunned to discover that many of my photographs fell naturally into the order of the Tarot that for centuries has served to display and interpret through its rich symbolic structure a limitless range of human consequences. The 500-year-old Tarot apalogue, reproduced through the centuries in remarkable card variations, awakened for me a new view of the Sixties and its most significant and original development: the Counterculture.

A few years ago I found a slender pamphlet by Theodore Roszak, entitled Fool’s Cycle/Full Cycle: Reflections on the Great Trumps of the Tarot. Those who recall the Sixties may remember Roszak as the author of The Making of A Counterculture (1969), a book that offered, more than any other of the time, an original cultural analysis of the period’s signature generational revolt and linked its promptings to other Romantic movements of the West. Roszak notes in Fool’s Cycle that the Tarot has been surrounded “with congested systems of astrological, numerological, alchemical, and mythological correspondences.” Yet he confesses to an irresistible fascination. “In spite of the occult clutter that I found surrounding the Tarot,” he writes, “the twenty-two great trumps continued to haunt me. The Fool, the Magus, the Hanged Man, the Tower…there clings to such images the peculiar attraction of all great symbol systems.” Roszak, too, links the Tarot with astronomy, alchemy, the I Ching, and the iconography of major religions. “All have acquired over the generations a compelling glamour, a vast rhapsodic resonance, along with a tantalizing elusiveness.” Great symbols, says Roszak, are uniquely commanding presences that seem to say, “Yes, you make our meaning as you go along. But that is because we are the themes on which your life plays its variations.” And he concludes that “in a much deeper sense we are their projections–each of us becoming one of an infinite number of possible readings that give these universal motifs a particular historical enactment.”

Roszak offers his interpretation of the Tarot as a cycle, a vision that he confesses came to him in a dream. “There at the beginning of the cycle was the Fool, giving his non-number–the zero–to the equilibrium line. There, at the center was the card of the Wheel of Fortune acting as pivot point. There, at the bottom of the downward curve was the card of the Devil. There, at the end of the journey was the card of the World. And with this striking configuration came the strong impression that, yes, this was the Fool’s journey, this was the course that consciousness must run in its evolution.” The striking feature of Roszak’s Tarot “cycle” is its movement along the path of a moving point; a concept that Roszak notes appears “uniquely in modern Western mathematics.” It results in the plotting of oscillations against time, “of blending the circular with the linear.” And he notes, “only a culture uniquely gifted (or burdened) with a deep historical sense could recognize that what repeats may also develop.” The cycle, for Roszak, is a circle that “gets somewhere” and therefore has drama, a narrative, a beginning, a middle, and end.

As I sorted through my photographs to plot the historical trajectory of the Counterculture, I recognized that countless oscillations had contributed to its narrative; that all these oscillations had each begun at a particular point and returned to a different one; that they comprised a much larger cycle of nearly imponderable diversities that rumbled into existence with a collective rush and then scattered out again in the wake of ever more oscillating cycles. And in the Tarot I saw symbolic touchstones for these oscillations that converged on events, personalities, ideals, intentions, and conflicts, and that shaped the contours of an era. Moreover, I found in my photographs symbolic points of departure for many of these experiences, points that—like the Tarot—responded to the plotting of a path and to the aggregate qualities and events that describe it. In response, I used some of these photographs to create a Tarot deck. And as I weighed the qualities and experiences represented by each new “card,” as I researched and wrote about each image and what it came to represent, I became a pilgrim on a new Fool’s Journey. The journey seemed to follow old trails, but the Tarot’s compelling map illuminated them with new understandings.

To address an apparent contradiction—a narrative journey spread across the otherwise mapless oscillations of so many experiences—is to wrestle with a view of history. The attempt here is to explore the Counterculture as a non-fiction narrative by using the symbolic structure of the Tarot. As people live their lives they seem, at any number of points, to bring these lives together in waves, or—to use Roszak’s term—oscillating cycles—of commonly created momentum. And the mechanism, especially where ideas and experience intersect, may be entirely idiosyncratic. If this is so, one can think of the Sixties, or any other era, as countless people in their own oscillating cycles, their own fool’s journeys, cycling together and apart, swinging in and out of each other’s orbits and, to a degree not commonly acknowledged in most histories, engaged in a quantum expression of experience across time and space. Despite our confidence in history to express the flows and trends of human progress, it is really no easier to deconstruct these many moments of experience, these infinite, symbolically described journeys, than it is to measure the speed or location of a subatomic particle. Even as the shadow of zeitgeist gives human history an apparent, if approximate, time and place, history itself—as much literature as social science—is not fully measurable. But this does not mean a story cannot be told.

In describing this work as narrative, I draw on ideas developed by historiographer and critic Hayden White. In 1973 White published Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe, a book that called into question claims of fact and objectivity in historical works. The demands of narrative presentation, not the least of which is the use of language, introduced for White a bundle of postmodern challenges to the idea that historic truth is anything but an unattainable teleological vagary. Good histories, in fact, are studied for a glimpse of the times in which they are written at least as much as they are for the subjects they are written about. And while White goes very far to claim that historical narratives are comparable to literary fiction, it is fair to say that, at best, historical fact is provisional. White’s caveat about historical narratives has constructive value. White wrote that, with a need to appear scientific and objective, history “had repressed and denied to itself its greatest source of strength and renewal.” This “greatest source” is the creative process that constantly reframes human experience to both explicate and to understand it. Indeed, White wrote that historical explanation “can be judged solely in terms of the richness of the metaphors which govern its sequence of articulation.” Tropes and poetic structures are welcome. Good history, if it mirrors human experience, can’t elude ambiguity or contradiction or the broad range of impacts that batter successive generations, however inchoate or submerged these may be. In fact, compelling historical narrative should make every effort to include them.

White’s metahistory is manifest in many modern historic narratives. Poetry and documentary appear together in a variety of recent historic works. One of my favorites is Theodore Zeldin’s An Intimate History of Humanity (1994). Zeldin structures his unique work as a series of conversations with French women about what seem at first mundane subjects: work, marriage, children, family, friends, money, aging, etc. But these women, who have taken Zeldin into their trust, share deeply personal feelings that Zeldin then frames as historical problems. This approach produces chapters titled “How humans have repeatedly lost hope” and “Why there has been more progress in cooking than in sex,” which may seem whimsical until one digs in to find that Zeldin has used his dialogues to explore a vast range of historical influences on interpersonal human relationships. Zeldin quickly makes it clear that it is the emergence of women, the rise of feminism (which he values as a profound historical change) that has provoked a new consideration of how humans feel about each other. It is a subject that Zeldin addresses with an encyclopedic and panoramic explication of history that rests entirely on the investigation of difficult modern emotions. “You will not find history laid out in these pages as it is in museums, with each empire and each period carefully separated,” writes Zeldin in his introduction. “I am writing about what will not lie still, about the past which is alive in people’s minds today…”

The issue of probability is a popular refuge for the divinatory impulse, whether that impulse belongs to an historian or a fortune-teller. Both are tempted to explore the ways that synchronous experience, combined with probable momenta, might offer a map to the future. It is undeniable that trends and inclinations emerge from broad samplings of human cultures and that science has made enormous contributions to the intentional inventories initiated and maintained by the social sciences. And while the existence of a cycle seems to be the first measurable human reality (as described by Mircea Eliade in The Myth of Eternal Return) and one with enormous practical applications (the birth control pill, for instance), it cannot with any certainty predict the future. For all their thoughtful preparation, social scientists know no better than physicists what they really measure. History, while in the words of George Santayana may be something we are doomed to repeat, is also, as Stephen Daedalus describes in James Joyce’s Ulysses, “a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken.” The ponderous burden of history lies in the challenge of fleshing out crucial moments of a period’s vibrant self-creation, even while conforming to a shared, skeletal, reality. But rather than being chronicled in static frames of reference, historical events discussed in The Counterculture Tarot, whether iconic or idiosyncratic, coalesce around nodes of human experience.

And what are these nodes of experience? In The Counterculture Tarot they are the 78 cards of the Tarot, first reframed with photographs I made during the era and then interpreted through real events aligned with each card’s traditional and reflective symbolism. Thus, we revisit the Counterculture, not as a chronicle of incidents but as an expedition of adventures, or a “trip” in the era’s popular sense of an all-embracing journey with deeper psychological meanings. And our signposts along the way are not the turnings of the years but the full range of Tarot markers of experience that includes The Magician, The Empress, The Lovers, The Hanged Man, The Devil, The Sun, Judgment, and The World. These iconic touchstones play out the Sixties without regard to time. The Lovers card dwells on emerging changes—and choices—in the nature of human relationships. The Hanged Man brings forward experiences of personal suspension derived from drugs or incarceration. The journey begins with a Fool (Neal Cassady perhaps, or is it Abbie Hoffman?). Death arrives in the middle and not at the end, its sacrifice of Vietnam soldiers and civil rights workers a bitter but necessary step toward renewal.

Beyond the 22 most familiar cards of the major arcana (the “Fool’s Cycle” that so intrigues Roszak) there are 56 more cards divided into four suits. These of the minor arcana are as rich as the major cards in offering nodes of experience and I have addressed each of them with much detail (at least as much as that given the major cards and sometimes more). Below four arching umbrellas of experience (that parallel in their ancient and elemental structures the continuums evident in many approaches to inquiry) these cards represent fire, earth, air and water. The four suits also have been interpreted as Jung’s four sensing functions (sensation, intuition, thinking and feeling), or as the four fundamental forces of nature, or as other quaternary structures in philosophy, religion, and science. In The Counterculture Tarot these suits become inspiration (Wands), attachment (Cups), conflict (Swords), and tenacity (Pentacles). The suits address the responsive details of experience: deceit, despair, happiness, security, discontent, ruin, etc. and the actors (pages, knights, queens, and kings) who project them. Through the Wands suit we experience the clash of ideas that inspired the Counterculture. In the Cups suit we examine the attachments and lifestyles that formed new ways of having feelings and relationships. The Swords suit wrestles with the era’s conflicts, the cultural backlash to the Counterculture and its wars in the streets. And the Pentacles describe what remains, the material and spiritual remnants of the era, what was lost and what was kept.

The intricate and ancient structure of the Tarot presents a continuum of existence in which no experience ever ends. At points of crucial reflection we interpret the apparent facts of our lives through poetry and metaphor, in the reprise of a popular song, for instance, or a regarded homily, or the characterizations of fantasy and fiction. These points of reflection are animated by the memories of experience that return again and again, in which death comes well before the end and in which everything, including doom, oscillates without permanence. We are in constant search of the thousand joys that are unavailable without the consequent experience of a thousand deaths. As Tarot historian Cynthia Giles states, Tarot cards are “snapshots taken in the imaginal realm” or as depth psychologist Mary Watkins says in Waking Dreams, her study of the phenomenon of the active imagination, “Images inhabit each thought and occupation.” The Tarot is famously a way of looking at the future, as cards are spread and interpretations symbolically posture possible outcomes. Here the Tarot becomes another way of recalling the past, of recognizing how oscillations of recent human history cluster at the nodes of eternal human experience. If these placements seem arbitrary, it is important to remember that the Tarot has accumulated a rich and nearly limitless literature of interpretation at these nodes and that living life with poetic imagination was a regarded Counterculture objective. The Counterculture Tarot is not entirely a history, even as it is laden with facts and primary material drawn from historical and journalistic resources. Rather, it is a kind of “reverse inquiry,” a selective—if still broad—inventory of events that views the Counterculture’s primary, oscillating experiences through the lens of a reactivated psyche. It is a return trip and the cards of the Tarot, reformed anew from recovered photographic fragments of the era, are its signposts.

I like to imagine what it will be like in 300 years hence: perhaps one of Flornoy’s decks survives, having been found in one of Melbourne’s museums, and perhaps a mastercraftsman has picked it up, obtained high resolution images thereof, and seeks to remake it afresh for all to enjoy. Some of the colours have faded, some of the cardstock is damaged. Perhaps there is even a card ripped with part of its image then missing.

For myself, holding Flornoy’s restoration of the Dodal deck is somewhat akin to the joy that a future cardmaker may have brought to a fellow enthusiast and traveller of the times.

Already having the photographic (and size-reduced) reproduction of the Dodal (now long out of print) published by Dussere, and having, a number of years ago, held one of the two known remaining Dodal decks when visiting the British Museum, it especially strikes me that this restoration is superb. Of course I’m also going to be critical, and Jean-Claude and Roxanne Flornoy undoubtedly expect this. So let me spill my critique in what I trust will be taken in the best way possible.

Card stock

When I first held the original c. 1701 British Museum [BM]-held deck, what especially struck me what the relative thinness of the deck. Unlike, for example, the 1963 imprint of the Grimaud deck, this 300 year old deck was, truly, ‘fine’ – which in the French has more of the literal ‘thin’ as its meaning. What Flornoy has managed is to get a cardboard quality that approximates, as much as is feasible, the thickness of the original. So a very pleasant surprise here! It’s not only the overall card size which has been more or less matched, but also its ‘grade’.

From left to right: Grimaud Marseille 1963; Flornoy 78-card deck; Dusserre photographic reproduction of BN copy

In the image above, the left-hand deck is the Grimaud from the 1960s, the central deck is Flornoy’s Dodal, and the right-hand deck, slightly thinner, is the photographic reproduction by Dusserre of the Dodal held in the Bibliotheque Nationale [BN].

Card size

This is especially pleasant, and undoubtedly has meant that the printers have had to use a greater number of card sheets than is usual. Flornoy’s meticulous and uncompromising focus here is examplary. If anything, the border ‘added’ surrounding the card images means that each card (not its image) is a little larger than the known decks. If a woodblock had been used, of course, then this would not have arisen as the ‘space’ between cards would not have allowed for such extravagance. What’s interesting (for myself at any rate) is that this printed version has images a little larger than the hand-made trump-only edition.

Dodal decks from left to right: Flornoy 78-card deck; Flornoy 22 trump-only hand-made deck; Dusserre photographic reproduction of BN copy

Colours

Not sure what to say here. Of course, one of the features of Flornoy’s decks is that they are crisp and seek to reflect the colours as the original designers may have intended them to be. I frankly do not have sufficient access to the details of both the BM and BN decks to be able to properly ascertain how closely these colours have been matched but, knowing Flornoy, I am confident that he would have, to the best of anyone’s ability, carefully considered both these decks and tried to bring out the colours as they would have been used at the time. Colours… not tone, however: personally, I suspect that the red used by Flornoy’s printers was rather more pinkish than expected… but then again, variations occured quite a lot with the imprints of the 18th century!

Card backs

Perhaps many will very much appreciate the pate-d’oix reversals that Flornoy has introduced, but, sadly, not I. Whereas he was careful to preserve the non-reversibility of the original decks in the hand-made version of the Dodal (previously released in a trumps-only edition), it’s as if he has succumbed to what is misguided commercial marketability and the preferences for those who are also readers amongst us: yet surely someone who values this deck would have been happy with the upright design!

Dodal decks from left to right: Flornoy 78-card deck; Flornoy 22 trump-only hand-made deck; Dusserre photographic reproduction of BN copy

Perhaps it’s only a small point which remains, for me, something that is somewhat of a disappointment.

Line details

The style of deck, being originally a woodcut, implies that the image is primarily based on outlines which are then overlayed with colour stencils. This gives the black lines themselves somewhat more importance than if the figures were painted. In fact, in observing and comparing various types of early woodcuts, what is often primarily done is a careful comparison of the lines, rather than of the colours (which may, after all, alter from imprint to imprint).

Many lines remain ambiguous as to their intended ‘meaning’ or representation. In simply assessing Flornoy’s new restoration, what is striking are the number of minor alterations that have occured between this deck and the earlier one he made for the hand-crafted one some years ago. This reflects something that I think is highly important, especially in a work of restoration: that Flornoy is not stuck to his previous work, but rather willing to carefully revise his previous work based on careful re-visioning of the two extant decks.

Admittedly, in the trump-only hand-made version, Flornoy only had access to the BN version. I recall, when we had the pleasure to visit Roxanne and Jean-Claude in 2005, mentioning to him that I had then recently looked through the BM deck, but I was then unable to answer his questions regarding various minor details of comparisons to the BN, not having had my Dusserre copy with me at the time from which to make such comparisons. That he subsequently obtained images from the BM for the purposes of accurate image comparison, including usage of colour across those two decks, says a lot for Jean-Claude’s integrity as card-maker.

In the image that follows, I have not included all alterations between the newer and the trump-only lines used on each deck. For example, in that section of that card, attention could also be given to the more curved nature of the sleeves; the pupils of the eyes of the figure; her hair as it meets the ‘collar’ on the right hand side… and yet other details! Still, even with paying attention to ‘only’ such details as the eye of the respective eagles, the triangular form sitting atop her heart, the colouration of the base of her sceptre, and the undulating patterns on her ‘collar’ – these give sufficient evidence that with this deck is was not simply a reprint of their earlier work, but a re-composition based on what we can only hope and surmise is careful study.

Flornoy 78-card deck on the left; his 22 trump-only hand-made deck on the right

Booklet

I am not here going to compare in any detail the booklet that came with the trump-only deck with the newer one issued with this full restoration, save for one point, well worth considering. In the older booklet, Jean-Claude says that (my translation):

From a graphic perspective, the Lyonese tarot of Jean Dodal and the Avignonese tarot of Jean Payen are strangely similar, to the point of confounding them. My conclusion is therefore simple: it is the same engraver to whom we owe these two tarots from the beginning of the 18th century.

As he mentions therein and again in the newer booklet, there is a distinction to be made between a carver and a cartier (or ‘cardmaker’). I agree with him entirely on this – and emphasise this due to what is to follow. In the newer booklet, he also names that the engraver as Jacques Mermé without mentioning his sources. Given that this information is not readily accessible, it would have been useful to include sources for those amongst us who wish to check the precise nature of the claim: how much interpretation is being presented?

Personally, I too see it as likely that the carver of the Dodal and the (Jean) Payen is the same – though I personally also take it a step further, and would claim that not only is the Dodal carved by the same hand as the Payen, but that the ‘I.P.’ on the the Moon suggests that the carver is either still in the employ of Payen, or that the Dodal is carved ‘under contract’ with Payen. There is likely, therefore, more than simply a matter of carver moving from Avignon to Lyons and working for two separate houses, but also a connection at the level of the cartier-houses of Payen and Dodal.

Another small, but still very significant point, is a statement that is repeatedly made, including by Flornoy, about the supposed destruction of woodblocks: though this was indeed the case for cards in general, tarot woodblocks were specifically exempted from this otherwise legal requirement.

Enrique’s preface

Finally, I cannot omit some comments on Enrique’s suggestions for reading tarot. As Enrique well knows, we have much in common (with many others, of course) in advocating a careful looking at what is presented. Not just glancing, but rather beholding as fully as possible the imagery and its inter-relationships.

Yet it is not so much that which is here important, but rather that he manages to capture what is effectively a whole book in poetic seed-form.

With his preface together with this deck by Flornoy, we have a source of deep and essential tarot.

The Box

The design is the second of Robert Mealing’s tarot boxes, each, as far as I’m aware, constrained by the pre-determined physical box that was to be used. In other words, the visual design is his on a physical cardboard box not of his own design.

If the box is considered as an efficient storage for both marketing and collectables, then its basic structure is ideal. If the user intends to use it as a long-term enclosure to be carried around and used daily then it will need to be exchanged for something a little sturdier or (conversely) more flexible.

Given the constraints (to return to the visuals of the box), Mealing has produced, as he had for the Flornoy Noblet, an excellent and attractive package, managing to capture the deck’s essential information within the limitations of the space.

Overall

This is the deck that Marteau, I strongly suspect, would have used for the Grimaud historical revival of tarot had he had access to such between the two world wars in the first part of the 20th century.

I many ways, it is regretful that he did not, as some of the most important tarot works later written, such as Meditations on the Tarot, have instead based commentary on what is a 1760 Conver restoration.

Where to obtain a copy of the deck

It’s really somewhat sad to even have to write the above sub-heading: it should be available wherever tarot is stocked and sold!

Nonetheless, here is a brief key list.

If located within or near Europe, then I would suggest obtaining a copy directly from the Flornoys:

> www.letarot.com

If in North America, I would suggest either TarotGarden or from Enrique Enriquez (I presume they each have some in stock!):

www.enriqueenriquez.net
www.tarotgarden.com

If in Australasia, I have a few copies available:

www.fourhares.com

If elsewhere, then you’re probably the best judge of the manner in which postal services from France, the USA or Australia manage to reach you, and also the current value of your local exchange rate.

In any case, this is a(nother) deck I would without any hesitation highly recommend!

Jean-Michel David
www.fourhares.com

When the French author, priest and Freemason Antoine Court de Gebelin (1719-84) in 1781 advanced the allegation, that the tarot deck constituted the Egyptian god Thoth’s ‘Secret Book’, he cast a seed to something, which during the next couple of centuries should grow to immense heights. Tarot was an ordinary card game in many parts of France, but not in Paris, where Gebelin lived. One day, when he noticed a group of tarot players, he intuitively grasped the idea, that he had here discovered something far more than an utterly simple deck of playing cards.

Gebelin put forward his discovery in volume eight of his nine volume work ‘Le Monde Primitif analisé et comparé avec le Monde moderne’. The deck of cards used by the players that Gebelin watched, was presumably the Marseilles standard pattern. Playing card terminology defines a ‘standard pattern’ as a set of images, with none or only minor differences, produced by many different card makers in various localities’. The Marseilles pattern fits very well into this definition. It was produced by many card makers, not only in France but also in Italy. By and by a number of local varieties developed, like the Tarot Bolognese, the Sicilian Tarot, the Tarot Piemonte and Tarot Milanese. Distinct variations saw the light of day in France, Belgium, Switzerland. All with their own characteristics but all with the Marseille pattern as a distinct background.

Gebelin’s seed was slow in germinating, development took its time. The first, who took up the concept, was the Parisian fortune-teller Etteilla. Inspired by Gebelin, he saw the tarot cards as a sort of expanded fortune-telling cards, which he, however, did not find completely satisfying. So he started ‘improving’ them by adding interpretative texts, visual symbols and small vignettes, as we know them from ordinary fortune-telling cards. He also published books with practical instructions on how his ‘tarot decks’ could be used. Etteilla’s ‘tarots’ have in general been considered reprehensible but, maybe, time is now ready for a further study of their symbolism.

With Etteilla’s intervention, the seed from the big tree in the wood, the Marseille pattern, had finally began to sprout and from now on it grew quickly. We now come to the French esoterist, Alphonse Louis Constant, writing from about 1850 under the name of Eliphás Levi. Levi rejected Etteilla’s ‘improvements and ‘corrections’ and returned to the Marseilles tarot in its pure form. Levi’s books, which described quite a number of esoteric systems, like kabbala, alchemy, astrology and tarot, started a wave in the world of esotericism. At this time a tarot deck, which rightly can be called the very first created for a solely esoteric purpose, saw the light of the day. Swiss Oswald Wirth (1860-1943), a competent artist, student and secretary of another of the occult characters of the time, Marquis Stanislas de Guaita, was by him encouraged to create a tarot deck, cleaned of Etteilla’s ‘improvements’. Wirth’s tarot, with relatively simple stencil coloured images, was for the first time produced in 1889. The cards, still with the Marseilles pattern as a basis, had the Hebrew letters, essentially for the tarot correspondences with the Kabbala and the Tree of Life. Here I feel it necessary to add the remark, that the deck currently marketed as ‘the original and only authorised Oswald Wirth Tarot deck’, has nothing what so ever to do with Wirth’s tarot. The images are not Wirth’s original (but drawn by a Michel Simeon) and Wirth’s deck did not comprise a minor arcana, which was not a part of his scheme of things. The ways of tarot publishers are past understanding.

Gebelin’s seed had found its ground. Tarot moved from France to England in the second half of the 19th. Century and dumped right into the Victorian era, where occult- and esoteric lodges flourished. In particular Tarot found a home in ‘The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn’, established in 1888. The basis for Golden Dawn’s order work was, in particular, the writings of the French esoterics as they were expressed in Levi’s books. The order papers, which were granted to the adepts as they raised in the order grades included, at the time the adept was admitted to The Second Order, instructions which would make it possible for him or her to create their own tarot deck. At a time a prototype, drawn by Moina Mathers (married to Samuel Liddell Mathers, one of the GD’s founders), was available for copying. Tarot as a card game was not known in Great Britain and even to get a Marseilles deck was near to impossible.

In this environment, a big and vigorous tree grew out of Gebelin’s seeds: the Waite-Smith Tarot, created by the man of letters, Arthur Edward Waite and the artist Pamela Colman Smith, both members of the Golden Dawn. Right now in December 2009 we can celebrate the Waite-Smith Tarot’s 100 years anniversary. How many other tarot decks will ever come to celebrate a 100 years anniversary? None, in my opinion. The time was the early 20th Century, during which tarot, unpredictably, should come to grow to immense heights.

For the members of the secret societies and lodges, for the magicians, who strived for controlling the forces of the universe and for the kabbalists, who wanted to explore the scheme of things to understand the creation and man’s place in the universe through the Tree of Life’ spheres and paths, tarot was the tool par excellence. For many decades the Marseille pattern tarot had been that tool. The tarot deck’s ‘divinatory’ aspects, those of ‘seeking the advice of the Devine through a mantic method like casting of lots, dice, runes, tarot..’ were considered inferior, that was not what tarot essentially was for. Now a new and different tarot was available, a tarot which also changed the concept of tarot over the next century, more or less away from that of being a tool of recognition to that of being a tool for an upcoming craze of ‘card-reading’. While the number cards in the Marseille patterned decks depicted only the relevant number of the suit symbols: wands, cups, swords and coins (fine enough for the Kabbalists and numerologists), the Waite-Smith tarot depicted four series of action pictures, with people engaged in various activities. There were other differences from the Marseilles tarot, but not so obvious at a first glance. Waite’s had, however, changed the sequence of the majors, compared to the Marseilles deck sequence. Waite was not only a man of letters, he was also a man of secrecy and this was his secret which he did not want to reveal. Essentially it was all about making a more relevant correspondence with the astrological signs which each major arcana card related to. These correspondences were considered being secrets available only to Golden Dawn adepts (secret societies need to have some secrets to guard), and Waite was afraid that he, if he published any details in the book accompanying the deck: ‘The Key of the Tarot, being Fragments of a Secret Tradition under the Veil of divination’, he would have broken his oath to the Golden Dawn. For the same reason of secrecy, he did not include Hebrew letters in the card design, as Wirth had done it.

The Tarot Forest’s underwood continued to grow steadily but slowly over many decades. Pamela Colman Smith’s drawings were unrestrained copied and redrawn. Waite’s book was soon copied and sold under the name of an American ‘author’. The Tarot Forest had, by and by, got a low undergrowth of tarot decks, more or less based upon the Waite-Smith Tarot. The next seedling to become a powerful trunk in the Forest of Tarot was Crowley/Harris’ ‘Thoth Tarot,’ which came alive in 1944 after five years cooperation between the esoterist, magician, provocateur, eroticist and drug-addict Aleister Crowley and the artist and upper-class housewife, Lady Frieda Harris. Tarot was still for the few.

With the Waite-Smith tarot the world had got a comic book in loose leaf format and an endless combination of comic strips could be created and read as a story by mixing the 78 card and placing them in one of many patterns. The flower power era, named by the American poet Allen Ginsburg, that erupted in the American counterculture during the late 1960s and early 1970s stimulated this new way of looking at the tarot and several packs showed up, published by alternative publishers. In the early 1970’s it, however, went wrong. Greedy capital interests took over the Tarot Forest, like they took over the South American rainforests. Tarot was turned into an industry, a massmedia that could be compared with the continual flow of comic books. Every week its comic book, every week its tarot deck and each ‘tarot-reader’ felt that she too had to create her own tarot deck. We had come far away from the tarot of the Golden Dawn adepts. All sorts of tarot decks appeared, all subjects, which had no whatsoever with tarot to do: Norse mythology, Red Indian lore, the Vikings, the Celts, the Saints, the Mayans, the Angles, the Gay, the Witches – the list is long – , were forced into a tarot structure of 78 cards. Most of them with voluminous books that tried to explain why exactly this subject reflects the tarot. Many privately published and personal decks appeared too, which was fine for the persons, who created them and their own circles, but essentially of no common importance. In my own collection I have about 1400 tarot deck up to the year 2000 (divinatory and fortune telling packs not included), a huge industry of tarot. Only occasional seedlings gained foothold in the tarot underwood, particularly those drawn by artists with a capital ‘A’ like Pamela Colman Smith and Frieda Harris. The major part of the underwood flourished only for a short time to perish soon, which also is the main purpose of capital interests: to create a continuous turnover.

Rider Waite Tarot, Rider Waite-Smith Tarot and latest Smith-Waite Tarot (!), we have many names for the things we love, but that doesn’t necessarily make a name appropriate. These three names are all constructions attributed to the deck by USGames Systems Inc, who took over the publication in the early 1970’s. The original publisher, William Rider did never connect his own name to the tarot, and why should he. It was simply named ‘Tarot Cards’ in advertising; no other tarot decks were available in England at that time. Rightly it should be named the Waite-Smith Tarot, as a tribute to its two creators. Publishers are publishers, they are in it for the money and need not be given a credit for that. A good and easy way to honour the two creators right now, where the deck’s 100 years existence can be celebrated would be from now persistently to call the deck Waite-Smith Tarot. For reasons I am not aware of, several of the best known American tarotists continue to include ‘Rider’ in its name. It is certainly not to honour William Rider, the publisher, but rather the person, who named it ‘Rider-Waite’ years later.

Lately, voices have advocated for, that Pamela Colman Smith is the ‘real’ creator of the Waite-Smith tarot. My own book ‘The Story of the Waite-Smith Tarot’ has also been used as an argument for that. Sorry, but no (and this is not to minimize PCS’s work, on the contrary), but without Waite, there would not have been a tarot deck illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith, while there very well could have been a Waite tarot illustrated by another artist. Quite a different deck, of course, but still based upon Waite’s concept.

This is the anniversary year, which we certainly shall celebrate. A lot has lately been written about the Waite-Smith Tarot and tarot conventions reserved time for WST-related talks. USGames Systems Inc. did it their own way by publishing a package called ‘The Pamela Colman Smith Commemorative Set’. Not much honour for Waite here, since the package only included a twisted version of A.E.Waite’s ‘The Pictorial Key to the Tarot’, twisted in the way that the pictures’ were simply cut away. The pack includes also a tarot deck (this is where the name ‘Smith-Waite Tarot’ comes in) which is a likely twisted ‘reproduction’ of the first published Waite-Smith Tarot, the one with the roses and lilies backpattern. In this case the reproduction work is muddy and the original back pattern is substituted by a stylised monogram. The only gem in the package is a small book depicting colour reproductions of other works by Pamela Colman Smith.

For my own part, I have initiated a mail art project by mailing 22 small books, illustrating in b&w all 78 WST-cards, to tarot artists and mail artist around in the world, asking them to transform the book in whatever way they want.

In a few years, the copyright to Pamela Colman Smith’s artwork for the Waite-Smith Tarot comes to an absolute end, regardless of what attempts are made to hide that fact. Maybe then a tarot publisher will at last present the tarot world for the true facsimile of the original pack, which has long been wanted.

Back in 1995 when I ‘discovered’ that two early Waite-Smith tarot decks, I happened to have in my collection, actually were quite different when looked on at close hand, no one had cared for details like that before, even though questions like “How were the original colours” had been asked. My book “The Story of the Waite-Smith Tarot” was published in 2006. When I should find a name for it, I considered calling it “The True Story of the Waite-Smith Tarot” but gave up the idea again. There were too many gaps that still could not be filled in. Meanwhile the interest for the deck has grown and the few copies of the early decks that come up for sale fetch extraordinary high prices. The research goes on and the most remarkable late discovery is that of Piero Alligo, one of the two owners of Lo Scarabeo who, supported by careful analyses of the printing technique used, has found a likely printing sequence in contrast to the publication sequence I present in my book. By accepting the existence of both sequences several questions are answered, questions like “why was the deck redrawn several times”, “why are early editions accompanied by a later dated “Key” and “what does that strange line on the Sun-card mean”. The biggest question of them all has, however, never been answered: ’What happened to Pamela Colman Smith’s original artwork?”

We are now at the end of the Waite-Smith anniversary year. Are we also getting nearer to the end of the tarot era? Have we reached a boundary, where enough is enough and where the tarot market is becoming satisfied? Where we have to realize that the many, who became familiar with tarot during the last four decades of the 20th Century have grown older, and that young people of today have other interests to occupy themselves with. Additionally, we are in a current economical crisis and it looks like there signs of that the tarot factories have slowed down the production.

Three big tree trunks reach still high and solid and robust up over the Tarot Forest’s crumbled and withered underwood: the progenitor, the Marseille-tarot, followed by the Waite-Smith Tarot and the Crowley-Harris Thoth Tarot. They are here to stay and what more does a serious tarot student actually need?

One can ponder about what tarot would be today, had not Court de Gebelin back in 1781 caught the confused idea, that an ordinary playing-card deck was an Egyptian god’s secret book. Tarot would, undoubtedly, still be a cardgame but would it be more than that? I doubt. Maybe the time is now to place flowers on the gravestone of the so far rather discredited Antoine Court de Gebelin.

K. Frank Jensen, November 2009

See also my web-site: www.manteia-online.dk for new details on the Waite-Smith Tarot. Here you can also find my review of ‘Twenty Years of Tarot: The Lo Scarabeo Story’ including my comments to Piero Alligo’s article on the printing sequence of the early Waite-Smith Tarot decks.

Documentation of ‘Asta Erte’s Waite-Smith Tarot Mail Art Project’ can be found at the same web-site from late December 2009.

I had a problem with reviewing the Magic Manga Tarot.

It kept reviving the ‘What is Tarot’ topic, a topic commonly bandied about on the electronic forums.

Then there was an evening here a while back when I sat with Robert Place discussing, “What is Tarot”. With his knowledge of symbolism, it was a great in depth discussion. I had a difficult time keeping up.

My inability to ‘keep up’ was further enhanced by my dabbling in Manga and Anime based Tarot, an appreciation for the Asian Tarot market. There’s that question I like to ask people, “If River Tam used a deck, what would it look like?” I like to move Tarot out into the future, when man lives amongst the stars. Add five hundred years to the calendar. What does Tarot look like?

We have expectations; we have ideas and concepts about what Tarot is. It has certain symbols, placed in certain orders, many predating A.E. Waite’s sweeping influences.

Back in 1970, David Palladini produced the Aquarian Tarot. Some images lacked the expected symbology, instead depending on character pose and expression to convey the elementary emotions that the symbols that we count on would project if they were present. It was the dawn of the Character Driven Tarot.

Then a few years back, something even more unexpected occurred.

Tarot began to sweep like a grass-fire across Asia.

There are myths that Europeans have created for and about Tarot. Although we’ve tried to correct them during the last thirty years, they have begun to sprout as facts, in the Asian markets. Some Asian Tarot books include (with new experts and photographs) the revelation that Tarot comes from Ancient Egypt….

Western symbols don’t carry the same meanings or weight in Asia. Asian numerology and astrology developed with differences. And some things don’t translate well, variances occur, changes occur in both directions of translations.

When I first began to explore Asian Tarots a few years back, I was at once captivated and shocked by the imagery. The Clamp X featured pictures slapped onto seventy-eight cards willy-nilly, with complete disregard for traditional ‘card meanings’ regarding suit, numbers, placement in a sequence.

But let’s not get too excited yet. Not all Asian Tarots are character driven. Some pay very close attention to accepted Western symbology and meanings. Some (the Derakkusu ban Hihou Tarot is an excellent examle) pay such a dedicated homage to western numerology, that westerners often fail to understand the subtlety, which may be closer to Ikibana than standard pip arrangement.

Evan Yi Feng’s Lunatic Tarot mirrors WCS in a specific manga art style.

Some folks go on about the Tarot Archetypes and ‘bringing them (the Archetypes) into our lives.

An ‘archetype’, and more accurately an archetypal image, by definition is an image that ‘means’ the same thing regardless of cultural interpretation.

Eastern Archetypal Imagery makes us rethink such statements.

They (the images) do not stand-alone and plainly convey the intended emotive reaction. Either images are not archetypal, or they do not fit the meanings, or our definition of Tarot is too narrow and restrictive.

One could make the mistake of assuming that Asian deck designers are careless by looking only at decks such as the Full Metal Alchemist and Clamp X.

The Magic Manga is a deck that will convince the astute user that our current definition of Tarot is far too narrow.

The Trumps are somewhat reminiscent of traditional western trumps, Strength is a stern looking woman either wrapped in a lion-skin or embraced by a lion (numbered in the continental fashion as XI), the Hierophant bows behind a Japanese cenotaph, the Fool is in Motley….

Some make us stretch our minds; Temperance holds a pendulum – and has both a black and white wing, the Hanged Man is enveloped in spider webs, the Devil shows only the victim sporting wrist restraints, and the Empress trims a rose standard.

The minors contain some vast variances.

The Two of Wands displays for us a stern teacher mid-sentence, the Two of Swords has a nurse displaying two scalpels, the Five of Wands shows a tightrope walker, the Four of Cups an indifferent ship captain, the Eight of Cups a woman in mourning, the Five of Cups a scientist mid-experiment who has just had a florence flask shatter.

Now each of these images actually illustrates the accepted standardized modern meanings. But each does so in a method that makes sense to the western mind with study and some pretty free-form thought association.

The Five of Cups makes sense when one considers there are levels of ‘disappointment’, or spilled milk. There are different types of leaving for the woman in the Eight of Cups, but what about that Four of Cups?

Take a look at the Four of Cups in the WCS. Three cups sit in the same configuration as the man’s contact with the ground. Three points of contact, a tripod. A fourth cup is introduced. But above. Like the man’s head that rests above the three points of contact. This is actually an illustration of the Z-axis, or three-dimensional geometry. This is something that man would have noticed once he began sailing. It is the first instance of human evolution where the Z-axis becomes crucial (awareness keeps one from capsizing).

The two scalpels for the Two of Swords? The aspect usually overlooked in the WCS Two of Swords is that of mastery. To sit with two swords at the ready while blindfolded implies a certain mastery with swords.

The Magic Manga is created in a warm and soothing palette. The deck and LWB are in Deutsch, Français, English, and Español.

“The cards should look like vintage prints. Thus the color parts are even (no soft gradients, structures or painted-like surfaces) and partially decorated with patterns. In order to avoid too bright, colorful and mawkish cards, I decided to use only four slightly discreet colors (winered, bottle-green, pale yellow and dark grey-blue) and mixed them and added some pattern” says Viviane, who drew the Tarot art in the style of Kaori Yuki (of Angel Sanctuary fame).

I really really like it. It could be a new benchmark for Asian Tarot art. It could have a few cards that five hundred years from now – would appear on a Tarot deck out in the black, where constellations no longer exist, and Earth is far behind, only legends of the old exist.

> www.tarotgarden.com

Years ago, when I first started exploring tarot history, I came to the conclusion that Petrarch’s Triumphs were probably a key element in the creation of tarot. Petrarch was a major influence on his time, and tarot was born not too long afterward. To see this connection wasn’t a new or original idea, I think most historians certainly see a relationship between tarot and some sort of triumphs, in fact, it’s been a standard foundation of research for at least several decades. The original name 22 cards that distinquish tarot from a regular deck were called "trumps", a shortend version of the word "triumphs", and the general idea of the game of tarot was that the higher numbered trump would triumph over the lower numbered trump; so for instance the Pope would triumph over the Emperor or the Sun would triumph over the Moon. The question really is whether Petrarch’s triumphs match cards from the tarot, and specifically Petrach’s most famous series (see this excellent site for more information, http://petrarch.petersadlon.com/trionfi.html). The traditional series of triumphs is Love, Chastity, Death, Fame, Time, and Eternity, here are early prints illustrating each triumph:

The Triumph of Love

The Triumph of Chastity

The Triumph of Death

The Triumph of Fame

The Triumph of Time

The Triumph of Eternity

I think three are easy to match, (here with the “Charles VI Tarot” from the 15th century).

The Triumph of Love with “Love” (or sometimes called “The Lovers”).

The Triumph of Death with “Death” from the Tarot.

The Triumph of Time with “Time” (or sometimes called “The Hermit”) from the Tarot.

By the way, I’m not necessarily trying to match these two sets of images graphically (although by nature there would be some similarity) as much as generally associating the iconography and concept.

Let’s consider matching The Triumph of Eternity with “Judgement”:

Generally, I think this is a pretty good match. It’s easy enough for me to see how “Eternity” would be expressed with the image of the dead rising from the graves on Judgement Day. If we go with this, then I would suggest that The Triumph of Fame would probably be a good match for “The World”:

In this case, the iconography does strike me as somewhat similar, certainly there is something about the posture of the main characters that feels related.

Overall, matching Eternity with Judgement and Fame with The World feels pretty good to me, and I generally feel comfortable suggesting this. Recently, when I was looking at the image of The Triumph of Eternity shown here (there are many, many other versions, just google “Triumph of Eternity”), I realised that this image actually reminded me a little of The World as seen on the Marselle Tarot. This time, I’ll set the image next to the Jean Noblet Tarot from 1650:

The most striking similarity is the inclusion of "the four evangelists" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Evangelists): the Eagle representing St. John, the Bull representing St. Luke, the Lion representing St. Mark, and the Angel representing St. Matthew. There is also some conjecture if the figure on the Marselle Tarot World card, in some early decks (like the Jean Noblet, Jean Dodal and Jean Payen), might be a representation of Jesus Christ. In the Jacques Vieville tarot from Paris, 1650, the figure is even more masculine and most notably has a halo, as far as I know an attribute unique to this deck:

So, maybe the Triumph of Eternity is better matched with The World? I think many people would agree. The Triumph of Eternity is the last in the series Triumphs, just as The World is the last in the series of Tarot trumps.

What can we make of Fame then? The most obvious card to assign to The Triumph of Fame would most likely be “The Chariot”, which was also sometimes called “The Triumphal Chariot” in early references to the card. Let’s look at this pair:

This image of The Chariot from “Charles VI Tarot” shows what appears to be a war hero dresssed in armor, carrying a battle with sword at side. It’s not much of a match visually to the triumph of Fame, I think substantially less so than the match between Fame and The World card. Yet, conceptually it is a pretty good match with the war hero returning home triumphant and we can assume, famous.

My dissatisfaction with this arrangement is that I want to “use” The Chariot elsewhere… I want to match it to the Triumph of Chastity. For this, I’m going to use The Chariot from the “Cary-Yale Visconti” Tarot dated to the mid-1400s.

Several other early decks feature a woman in the Chariot, but the person is quite changable, through time portrayed as Venus, Mars, Mercury and others. One reason to like this arrangement is that The Chariot almost always follows Love, just as Chastity triumphs Love. To be honest though, when comparing this image with the Triumph of Fame, I’m back to thinking that they might make a better match after all:

No matter how I arrange the cards, I never get a completely satisfactory match. If I were going to suggest a combination, for me the most successful one would be:

The Triumph of Love with The Lovers

The Triumph of Chastity with The Chariot

The Triumph of Death with Death

The Triumph of Fame with The World

The Triumph of Time with Time

The Triumph of Eternity with Judgement

… but that’s just a guess based on what feels right, to me, right now. Probably, the simple answer is that there is not a direct relationship between the tarot and Petrarch’s Triumphs. Like so many other facets of the inconography of tarot, the Triumphs of Petrarch was probably just one of many influences. Still, I can’t seem to shake the feeling that the relationship was somewhat more intimate, so I’ll continue to explore, rearrange the matches, then rearrange them again. I’m always open to a new theory, so if you see an arrangement that make more sense, please drop by the Tarot History Forum and share it with us.

Robert Mealing hosts the Tarot History Forum at forum.tarothistory.com.

“Form Follows Priority”

Jordan Hoggard is an architect (principal for J. Jordan Hoggard Design in Denver, CO), artist, and creator of “The Mystereum Tarot”. Definitely a Renaissance man! I had the privilege to meet Jordan while taking a teleclass given by Tarot author/artist Robert M. Place. I was very excited to hear that Jordan was independently producing a deck of his own, and highly intrigued when I saw the “back story” material. I think at times that we pay so much attention to the material produced – whether it be a Tarot deck, book, CD, or DVD – that we don’t even think to look for the muse that initiated the creative effort, and fueled it to completion.

Where does the story begin? Does it begin when he was a child, with his mother’s familiarity with the Tarot? Does it begin when he presented his stepmother with a book which he created containing pictures that he painted to accompany a poem that she had translated (which prompted her to say that he should become an illustrator of children’s books)? And how does architecture play into this?

Let’s start with architecture. After an interesting experience flying over the handles of a bike, Jordan was gifted with a full blown passion for the subject. He takes architecture down to its Greek roots, arche and techne. Arche is defined as the first spark of an idea – it is the place of inception. It is formless. Techne is the place of conception, the place where form begins. Jordan associated the Magician with arche, the “first spark”, and the High Priestess with techne, the giving of form. He paid intermittent attention to the Tarot, reading text and history when he could, or whenever it crossed his path, for a period of years.

In the summer of 2006 he was gardening, and paused to look up at his turn-of-the-century Victorian house (1906). In an “Aha!” moment, he raced inside and opened the Tarot folder on his computer. There they were … in his own words “The Empress carrying to full term, and the Emperor overseeing!” He suddenly realized that here he was, in the middle of the largest scale project that he had ever undertaken, and living the Tarot as he worked the soil in his garden! As he puts it, this was the equivalent of the Judgment card having a Hanged Man moment!

The world of architecture provided the springboard for this deck, but does not really define it. For Jordan, the Tarot cards act as wonderful trail-markers, as well as storytellers along the path that is life. He sees the Tarot as archetypal image references, as a seat for the mind, a place “giving place” to your story. Jordan references a four-point mode that he uses for the purpose of general architectural analysis. I looked at this, and found that if you replaced the word “building” with the word “psyche”, that the Tarot connection falls right into place.

1. How does a building stand on the ground?
2. How does a building extend to the sides?
3. How does a building open and close?
4. How does a building meet the sky?

A vector-based architectural drawing program called Archicad was used to create the “Mystereum Tarot”. The format makes use of geometric form and strong presence of color. The deck is vibrant with basic colors (yellow, red, blue, orange, green, brown, and white) – in part due to the limitations of the system – only 99 color hues are available, based on the primary colors. In a review on his blog site (www.alchemywebsite.com), Tarotist Adam McLean notes that “The limitations of the architectural CAD system, impose a clear geometrical structure on the imagery in the cards, and this is of course the intention of the artist. Thus many forms are broken down into circles, arching forms and structured regular curves. This does not mean that the artist keeps to simple forms, indeed many of the images are very complex.”

The card backs come from a client’s window project. The window acts symbolically as a portal into the wisdom of the Tarot – with use made of white blinds, blue background, beautiful gray leaves, and a reflection from the top of the window to the bottom.

The card border also acts as a window, or portal into the energy of each card. The border is dark blue in the upper right and left hand corners, a lighter blue, with a thin orange inner border, defines the top of the window. The sides and bottom of the window are a dark orange.

The thought “How do they inform them?” acts as a device to pull the Major Arcana characters into the Minor Arcana. There is so much esoteric imagery to see here, including the lemniscate over the “O” of the Fool; the black hole eyes of the Fool’s – very reminiscent of Johanna Gargiulo-Sherman’s “Sacred Rose Tarot”; and the four pillars (a recurring theme) in the Lovers, acting as a backdrop to the two figures, with the symbol of a cup in the third eye area of one of the figures.

A great effort has been made to make this deck, and the material surrounding it, available to everyone. The deck can be purchased from Jordan’s site (www.mystereum.com) , using Pay Pal, personal check, or money order. There is a LWB (Little White Book), and a foldout cardlet that accompany the deck. Images of all 78 cards, along with text, can be seen at www.cafepress.com. Imagination Primers have been published for all 78 cards a www.lulu.com. There is a 157 page full color book covering all 78 cards with images and text, entitled “The Fool Loves … Journeying”, and five individual books: one for the Major Arcana; one for each of the four suits; and a spiral bound book entitled “The Mystereum Tarot: Study Size Card Images”. There is a video (entitled “Flowing Through Inner Essence”) of the card images that is quite nicely done, that can be seen on the “Mystereum Tarot” site (www.mystereum.com), or on Leisa ReFalo’s Podcast site (www.tarotconnection.net), where you can also listen to an interview with Hoggard (Episode 84).

For people like me who clamor for more, there is something else quite exciting that is in the works: a no holds barred, full color coffee table book that hopefully will be out by the end of the year! I hope that you are right there with me on the “Mystereum Tarot” site, watching for updates on this happening!

Dream the big dreams … they can come true!

© September 2008