The original edition of the Xultun Tarot and its companion book The Maya Book of Life: Understanding the Xultun Tarot by Michael Owen are available from Kahurangi Press at www.xultun.com

The Xultun Tarot was created by New Zealander Peter Balin in 1976. It is also known as the Maya Tarot or the Maya Book of Life. It consists of twenty-two cards of the major arcana plus two cards representing the masculine and the feminine principles and fifty-six cards of the minor arcana (Cups, Jades, Staffs and Swords). The Maya “x” is pronounced “sh” so Xultun is pronounced “shool-tun.”

Where did the tarot come from?

The Maya Book of Life: Understanding the Xultun Tarot challenges the Western-centric notion that archetype of the tarot belongs solely to one geographical place and one historical period.

Tarot cards first appeared in Renaissance Italy in the 14th century. With the late 19th century esotericism of the Order of the Golden Dawn, for example, the cards and their interpretations tended to become more and more arcane as with the Rider-Waite or Crowley decks. Early European decks, such as the Marseilles Tarot, give us a clearer view. Unlike many later tarot they are not burdened with self-conscious symbolism nor do they attempt to make the cards conform to a particular metaphysical or psychological theory. In the last twenty or thirty years there has been an explosion of New Age tarot decks. Unfortunately, most of these have little or no connection to the underlying archetypal structure of the tarot and are often a collection of pictures that solely reflect the author’s conscious intent.

Western culture emerged from the last physical Ice Age over 10,000 years ago but in the last 2,000 years it has succumbed to a spiritual Ice Age. The tarot first appeared in Europe when it was being ground under the glacier of Christianity and had been almost completely severed from its indigenous and instinctual roots by 5,000 years of “progress” and “civilisation.” We shall see the significance of this historical time period and the year 2012 in the Planet Earth card. When spirit and nature become estranged in a rational culture, as had occurred in medieval Europe, the result is that divination and other non-rational pursuits have to live in the shadows. At the same time they become increasingly needed, not to foretell the future but to bring about balance between spirit and nature, this world and the other world, head and heart.

Carl Jung said, “The ideal of spirituality striving for the heights was doomed to clash with the materialistic earth-bound passion to conquer matter and master the world. This change became visible at the time of the Renaissance.” It was a time when scholars had returned to the only roots they could find that they thought were “civilised” enough and were in the neighbourhood—classical Greek and Roman culture. Their desire was to be reborn into an age of light out of the ignorance and superstition of what they called the “Dark Ages.”

The brilliant but highly specialised consciousness of the Renaissance later became the “Age of Enlightenment” of the 17th and 18th centuries. This philosophical and cultural movement, seen in the writings of John Locke, Rene Descartes and Thomas Hobbes, for example, had an abiding faith in the power of reason to engender progress and enlightenment. However, this enlightenment came at a price. What was of the earth, the feminine and nature fell into the collective shadow. Just as a dream compensates for the one-sidedness of personal consciousness so archetypes compensate for the one-sidedness of cultural consciousness. The tarot emerged from the collective unconscious during the Renaissance as a compensation for the excesses of what was to become “Western” culture.

The tarot is a gift, created not by any individual consciousness or particular culture, but by spirit or, in psychological terms, the collective unconscious. It was not invented but emerged in response to a need for balance and beauty. Not balance between humans but for humans to be able to hold the balance between nature and spirit within themselves. The tarot allows spirit and nature to come into balance through the intercession of humans, a theme we shall return to throughout the book.

When an archetype emerges from the collective unconscious it arises in different places and cultures and historical times. The form of the archetype may be different but the essence is the same. We see the same archetype that underlies the tarot in the Cabala with its 22 Sephiroth, alchemical manuscripts like the Rosarium Philosophorum with 20 woodcuts and Splendor Solis with 22 paintings, the biological structure of DNA and the 20 or 22 amino acids, the Maya vigesimal system based on the number 20, the teachings of the Twenty Count, and the 20 + 2 cards of the Xultun Tarot major arcana.

What is the tarot?

The tarot is an aide-mémoire for the soul. It is an archetype in itself as well as a series of archetypal images that tell the story of the stages of spiritual and psychological development that are possible over a lifetime. It is the story of the flowering of the soul and how it participates in the great cycles of creation. It is a symbolic depiction of the soul’s journey from spirit to substance and back to spirit, from heaven to earth and earth to heaven, and finding heaven on earth and earth in heaven. If we look at the major arcana we see the Great Light at the top of the deck above the Fool and the Sorcerer. At the bottom of the deck we see the zigzag design symbolising the earth. All the human action happens in between and in the process both spirit and substance are changed.

The tarot embodies two principal archetypes. First, the archetype of the Self and how it manifests over a lifetime. Jung defined the Self as the organising centre of the psyche or the “God-image within.” Second, the archetype of number which Jung said was the archetype of order become conscious.

Differences

The Xultun Tarot is similar to other tarot decks in that there are twenty-two major arcana and fifty-six minor arcana. However, it differs in several important ways.

The names and numbering of the Xultun cards differ from the European tarot. Rather than Roman numerals, the Xultun cards are numbered at the bottom of each card using the Maya notation where a “dot” is one and a “bar” is five.

The Xultun is the only tarot where the major arcana, when laid out, form a picture. This is not an artistic convenience or an aesthetic gloss but a reflection of the fact that the tarot is an interconnected whole with multiple cross-connections between the cards. Although the illustrations in this book show a two-dimensional picture, the Xultun Tarot is actually a spherical, 3D hologram. Each card resonates with all the other cards in specific patterns that we shall explore further in the Loom of Time chapter.

As well as a richly cross-connected web, the cards also form a linear sequence that tells the story of the transformation of the soul. Many interpretations of the tarot lean towards considering the cards individually in isolation from each other rather than as part of a coherent and connected developmental sequence. Because the European tarot do not emphasise the developmental sequence of the cards they have blurred the difference between the first and second halves of the deck. The cards in the first half of the Xultun Tarot, from the Priestess (2) to the Balance (11), have more to do with personal and collective processes whereas the cards in the second half of the deck, from the Hanged Man (12) to Planet Earth (21), are more concerned with impersonal and archetypal processes.

The Xultun Tarot was the first tarot not based on traditional images derived from the medieval European tarot or the Western occult tradition. The imagery and teachings of the Xultun Tarot are indigenous to the Americas so the cards are less encrusted with the layers of European tarot interpretation that have accrued over the centuries.

Finally, because of its imagery the Xultun Tarot reveals more clearly the archetypal pattern that underlies all tarot decks.

Beginnings

Peter Balin was born near New Plymouth, New Zealand. A self-taught artist, he travelled widely and by the mid-1970s was living in Los Angeles. In a talk he gave in 1977 he relates how, on the evening of December 21, 1975, some friends came to his house and one of them had a tarot deck. It was the first tarot deck he had ever seen and Balin thought it was sort of medieval and uninteresting. Later in the evening one of his friends suggested that he should draw a tarot deck but Balin thought it was a silly idea and said so. Right in the middle of his protestation:

“Something occurred which had never happened to me before in my life, and which is extremely difficult for me to explain. The only way that I can do so is to say that it approximated a colour slide going on in my brain. That is all of a sudden, I was telling her how crazy I thought she was, and the next minute… Voom! I should say about like that, it’s very difficult to describe because it was not quite like that either. But this large thing appeared in my head it seemed, or somewhere inside of me, I just really don’t quite know where.”

The image was of the twenty-two cards of the major arcana assembled to make one picture and all the figures were in Maya dress. The next morning Balin had a tremendous urge to paint. He took a sleeping bag to the art gallery where he worked and slept on the floor. He painted almost day and night for three months. Balin said, “Apparently I had a lot of the qualifications necessary to be able to make this deck. One of [which] was that I knew nothing about the Tarot. Because if I did, obviously I would be tripped up by what I knew. There would be a great battle in my head.… Within a year of the time that the original cards were painted, they were printed and out on the market. Obviously something somewhere felt that it was very important to get these cards out.”

For the 2010 edition Kahurangi Press have reproduced the cards in their original size and vivid colours. And, in cooperation with Peter Balin, they have redesigned the back of the cards in cinnabar red with a new feathered serpent design and the box in green with a blue feathered serpent encircling it.

Historically, almost all tarot decks were named after their creator but Balin didn’t want the deck named after him. So he made a list of Maya place names and selected Xultun, the name of a Maya site near Tikal in north-eastern Guatemala. Sometime after painting the cards, Balin discovered that the word xultun also means “a storage place” where the Maya stored water or maize. The limestone of the Yucatan peninsula is so porous that no water collects on the surface. The only sources of water are a few cenotes—deep, steep-walled sinkholes with water at the bottom. So the Maya had to dig bottle-shaped cisterns or xultun beneath the ground. These had broad, sloping surrounds, plastered with limestone, to funnel rainwater into the cistern. The bodies of human sacrifices were thrown into abandoned xultun and in shamanic healing ceremonies the conjured evil spirit was cast into a xultun. So the Xultun Tarot is a storage place, a container for the light and the dark, and a repository for seeds of knowledge.

Another other use for the xultun was as a star-tube. The Maya created a sophisticated astronomical calendar for marking the progression of time. For them, time was alive and events were conducted on dates that were most charged with ch’ulel or life force. To make their calendrical calculations they observed the movement of the stars during the day as well as at night. The Maya priest sat at the bottom of a xultun looking up at the sky through its narrow neck. [xultun] Here, even at midday, he could see the stars quite clearly overhead. In the early 1600s the Italian astronomer Galileo used a similar method for observing stars during daylight by sitting at the bottom of a deep well. So when we open the Xultun Tarot we are looking through the star-tube of the tarot, in the daylight of consciousness, at our stars—the patterns of our soul’s movement in time.

Balin had lived for some months in a small Maya village with many ruins close by. He spent the summer of 1972 sketching images at Tikal. The first six figures in the cards (Fool, Sorcerer, Priestess, Consort, Ruler and Priest) are all drawn from wooden lintels in Temple III at Tikal as are the glyphs running across the base of the platform that the last three figures stand on. The glyphs between the second and third rows come from Stela 26 at Tikal. Additional designs are taken from Stelae 1 and 31. A stela (Latin for standing stone) was an upright stone slab or pillar often carved with glyphs. Maya called them tetun, or “tree-stones.”

Balin said he did find a way of signing the cards. He was born on a farm on the slopes of Mount Taranaki in the North Island of New Zealand. At the bottom left hand side of the Sorcerer card we see the same mountain.

Twisted Hairs

Beginning in the early 1970s, with the publication of Carlos Castaneda’s books, a loosely-connected body and lineage of teachings which had previously been an oral tradition became accessible to the public. Since the mid-1970s they have been taught by Harley SwiftDeer Reagan and written about by various authors such as Teisha Abelar, Lynn Andrews, David Carson, Florinda Donner, Jamie Sams and Hyemeyohsts Storm.

The source of knowledge was a teacher or teachers to whom the author apprenticed or a tradition or lineage from which the teachings came. For Andrews it was Agnes Whistling Elk and Ruby Morning Star from Saskatchewan, for Castaneda it was Don Juan and Don Genaro, for Storm it was Estchimah and the Zero Chiefs, and for Reagan, who studied with Storm, it was Navajo medicine man Tom Two Bears Wilson and the Twisted Hairs Medicine Council of Elders.

Traditionally, Twisted Hairs were medicine people, shamans and storytellers who travelled throughout the Americas (Turtle Island). What differentiates a Twisted Hair from a traditional medicine person is their ability and desire to seek knowledge from outside their tradition. These men and women gather knowledge from every direction of the wheel of life in order to find their own centre and come into alignment with the Creator. Hair symbolises knowledge and a Twisted Hair is one who braids knowledge from all traditions and ways into his or her Path with Heart and makes it their own knowledge. Their purpose, their dream, is to preserve the beauty and integrity of the web of life that has been dreamed by the consciousness of this planet. They hold the breath and blood of this first dream, so that we can feed it, remember it and dream their dream onwards.

The name Xultun has Twisted Hairs associations. At its height Tikal was the largest Maya city with a population of 90,000 people but was abandoned around 900 CE. Tikal was the name used by the local Itzá Maya people and means “Place of Voices” or “City of Echoes.” But this is not the original name of the city. The name glyph of Tikal was recently deciphered by epigrapher David Stuart as Mutul. The glyph appears in the Sorcerer card. A name glyph was like a national flag or coat of arms for a Maya city-state. The central part of Tikal was called Yax Mutul which means “Great Green Bundle.” The surrounding area over which Tikal ruled, which likely included Xultun, was referred to as Mutul which means “knot of hair,” “hair bundle,” or “hair twisted or coiled and tied into a bun.” The Temperate Man, the number 14 card, is one of the most important cards in the Xultun Tarot and he is a Twisted Hair.

Some Twisted Hairs carried a medicine item similar to the Xultun Tarot in their medicine bundles. These “cards” were made of sandpaintings on thin wood and covered with animal glue and contained something from each of the Mineral, Plant, Animal and Human Worlds. It was known as the Book of Life or the Children’s Fire. The Xultun Tarot is the Holder, Keeper and Teacher of many of the Twisted Hairs teachings (or Shields of Knowledge) in symbolic form.

[Michael Owen is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Tauranga, New Zealand]

Cover image: The White Bird by Michail Grobman, 1987
Painting and gouache on paper

Human Development and Tarot Hermeneutic

by Inna Semetsky

This book originated as an action-research project conducted between 1992 and 1994 under the auspices of the Californian Behavioral Board Science Examiners when I was a postgraduate student enrolled in the Masters of Arts degree program in the area of Marriage, Family and Child Counseling and Human Development at Pacific Oaks College in Pasadena. Unbeknown to me at the time, my study was to be a type of research analogous to what Jungian scholar Robert Romanyshyn will have called more than a decade later “research with soul in mind” (Romanyshyn, 2007). Yet back then in 1992 I was not only ten years away from the subject matter of my future doctorate in the area of philosophy of education and cultural studies, but also quite undecided on the topic of my Masters thesis that was eventually to be called “Introduction of Tarot readings into clinical psychotherapy: a naturalistic inquiry”.

Interestingly enough, and once again in accordance with Romanyshyn’s imaginal approach, my topic was about to choose me rather than the other way around! Referring to the imaginal, Romanyshyn emphasizes the role of this “third” dimension between the senses and the intellect as enabling an embodied way of being in the world within the context of complex mind reaching into the whole of nature. It was Henry Corbin who coined the imaginal world – Mundus Imaginalis or mundus archetypus, the archetypal world – as a distinct order of reality corresponding to a distinct mode of perception in contrast to purely imaginary as the unreal or just utopian. Yet, it is our cognitive function enriched with imagination that provides access to the imaginal world with a rigor of knowledge specified as knowing by analogy.

The method of analogy that mystics around the world have practiced for centuries defies the privileged role allotted to the conscious subject that observes the surrounding world of objects – from which he is forever detached – with the cool “scientific” gaze of an independent spectator so as to obtain a certain and indubitable knowledge, or episteme.

Mystics and poets (from whom Plato used to withhold academic status) historically played a participatory, embodied role in the relational network that forms an interdependent holistic fabric with the world thus overcoming the separation between subject and object. This dualistic split has been haunting us since the time of Descartes, confining us to what Corbin calls the “banal dualism” of matter versus spirit. As for the “socialization” of consciousness, it pretends to resolve the dilemma by making, according to Corbin, a fatal choice: either myth or historical reality. Either facts or fiction! This book avoids the binary fatality of either/or choice: we will see in Chapter 3 that Tarot renders itself to explication in both mythical and real historic, cultural, terms.

The sociological dimension is significant: Philip Wexler (1996, 2000, 2008), pointing out the current importance of religion and spirituality for socio-cultural life, ascribed the status of symbolic movement to sociology of education that aims to bring spirituality to secular, long-disenchanted and alienated, contexts so as to satisfy their hunger for meaning.

Wexler emphasizes an approach from within long-standing religious tradition and focuses specifically on Jewish mysticism. He calls for the “broad-scale revitalization…of the culture of modernity, a re-articulation of ancient religious traditions, and…the anti-institutional, but religiously-oriented movements of everyday life that we often referred to as instances and heralds of a ‘new age’” (Wexler, 2008, p. 9).

I share with Wexler his conviction that our present postmodern age calls for revision of the pre-modern traditions of theory, interpretation and understanding and especially in terms of following “the new age…tendency [by means of] opening the reservoir of the cultural resources of traditional, religious understanding… [in] mystical, experiential and spiritual aspects: from Hinduism, Tantra; from Islam, Sufism; from Christianity, mysticism; from Judaism, Kabbalah and Hasidism” (Wexler, 2008, p. 10).

This book will not only have added Tarot as a spiritual, both metaphysical and practical, system to Wexler’s list of multicultural traditions but will focus specifically on Tarot hermeneutic or on the art of, using the term from popular culture, Tarot readings. Etymologically, the Greek words hermeneuein and hermeneia for interpreting and interpretation are related to the mythic god Hermes, a messenger and mediator between gods and mortals, who crosses the thresholds and traverses the boundaries because he can “speak” and understand both “languages”, the divine and the human, even if they appear totally alien to each other.

As a practical method, Tarot hermeneutic allows us to relate to something essentially other but nevertheless understandable, knowable and, ultimately, known. The relation thus established between the generic “Self ” and “Other” in our real practical life is significant and has both epistemological and ontological implications. The dimension of the foremost importance is however ethical, considering that we live in a time of the multiculturalism and globalization when different values appear incommensurable and continuously compete, conflict, and clash!

In our current global climate permeated by diverse beliefs, disparate values, and cultural conflicts, understanding ourselves and others and learning to share each other’s values is paramount for the survival of our species. This requires an expansion of our consciousness using all available means, including the knowledge of the symbolic language of Tarot pictures that are worth more, as the saying goes, than many thousands of words. Classical Russian author Ivan Turgenev pointed out that a picture shows at a glance what it can take dozens of pages of a book to expound. Without making grand metaphysical claims concerning Tarot, this book will focus on its practical side as comprising my empirical research data. Yet, important theoretical stepping stones will be laid down through chapter 1 to chapter 7 to ground the empirical data that will be presented in minute detail in chapter 8. Chapter 8 will comprise the fifteen actual Tarot readings that have been documented as constituting the core of my research and published with the written consent of all participants.

So, coming back to 1992, I remember the day when I took the November- December issue of The California Therapist out of my mailbox and my eyes fell on the letter to the editor. The author of the letter was interested in learning of other professionals who were encountering in their practice people who were more interested in learning about their past lives and going to psychics, as the author put it, rather than discussing their parents and more recent childhood. The author felt that she and other therapists working with quite a number of “new age” clients needed more publicity.

When I read the letter written by a qualified mental health professional and published in a respected professional periodical, my first feeling was that of belonging. Wow! I am not alone in my pursuits! At that stage, being a postgraduate student, I did not widely publicize the fact that I was a Tarot reader. Yet the very fact of being a reader is what originally motivated me to want to become a professional counselor and to invest my time, money, mind and soul into the intensive research culminating in the book you are now reading.

Many years ago, eager to listen to anyone who would have provided any guidance to me in my seemingly vicious circle of then current life-tasks, problems and issues, I turned to readers. Nothing seemed to help, and I found myself going from crisis to crisis and losing the thread of connection with not only the external world but myself as well. Moving from one counseling room to another, I did not feel understood, and more and more doubts about my own integrity started to occupy my mind, further contributing to the loss of that connection, that fragile link, which enables one to know oneself.

It was the ancient “Know Thyself ” maxim that was inscribed on the temple of Apollo at Delphi and, as philosopher of education Nel Noddings (2006) reminds us, still remains the necessary, even if often disregarded, goal of education. It was the quest for meanings and evaluation of life-experience – an examined versus unexamined life – that Socrates was calling for.

Noddings is adamant about the importance of self-knowledge as the very core of education: “when we claim to educate, we must take Socrates seriously. Unexamined lives may well be valuable and worth living, but an education that does not invite such examination may not be worthy of the label education” (Noddings, 2006, p. 10, italics in original). Still more often than not education is equated with formal schooling (for children) or perpetual training (for adults) thus a priori marginalizing the realm of lifelong human development and experiential learning situated amidst real-life situations.

For me, such an informal – or, rather, post-formal (Steinberg, Kincheloe, and Hinchey, 1999) – education grounded in an existing cultural practice began when, on the verge of despair, I found myself sitting opposite a man who was a genuine Tarot reader. It was his reading that precipitated a catharsis: something that subconsciously I did not want to know or accept, that was repressed and stored away in my unconscious mind and thus not dealt with, was brought to my awareness, then explored and discussed by my reader and me, becoming in this process a meaningful reality.

I left that reading session fully aware that I had to deal with the emergent information as this new knowledge was me, my selfhood that so far has been denied, displaced, or sublimated. This process of informal guidance by means of a Tarot reading, that transgressed the boundaries between education and therapy, facilitated a process of development and personal transformation. This developmental, at once healing and learning, process is still going on, and in this quest I was and still am accompanied by the wonderful world of Tarot: I became a reader, in the parlance of popular culture. Or, in terms of academic discourse, a “bilingual interpreter” who can translate the “language” of the unconscious, projected in the array of Tarot pictures (chapter 7), into verbal expressions; and I consider this one of the richest and most liberating experiences a person can have in life.

The word education derives from Latin educare that means to lead out as well as to bring out something that is within. The word therapy derives from the Greek therapeia in terms of human service to those who need it. Education and counseling alike involve either implicit or explicit inquiry into the nature of the self and selfother relations. Carol Witherell notices that, ideally, each professional activity “furthers another’s capacity to find meaning and integrity” (1991, p. 84) in lived experience. Importantly both practices are “designed to change or guide human lives” (Witherell, 1991, p. 84).

In the area of human development, which is the focus of this book, the rigid boundaries between those apparently separate, in the contemporary context, disciplines of education and therapy become blurred: both are oriented to creating meanings for our experience that includes the realm of the yet unknown and unconscious. The role of unconscious learning has been systematically addressed by the Australian higher educator Marian de Sousa (2008, 2009) especially as a means for focusing on emotional and spiritual intelligence grounded in “the processes of feeling and intuiting” (de Souza, 2009, p. 681) in the combined context of education and mental health.

Tarot hermeneutic provides an unorthodox epistemic access to the realm of the unconscious analogous to Carl Gustav Jung’s analytical or depth psychology, to be addressed in chapter 2, when the effects of the archetypal dynamics comprising the field of the collective unconscious – a theoretical construct posited by Jung – is analyzed in practice. Jung’s biographer Laurens van der Post, in his introduction to Sallie Nichols’ book Jung and Tarot: An archetypal journey notices her contribution to analytical psychology by virtue of the “profound investigation of Tarot, and her illuminated exegesis of its pattern as an authentic attempt at enlargement of possibilities of human perceptions” (in Nichols, 1980, p. xv).

Contemporary post-Jungian scholar Andrew Samuels mentions “systems such as that of the I Ching, Tarot and astrology” (Samuels, 1985, p. 123) as possible even if questionable resources in analytical psychology, and quotes Jung who wrote in 1945: “I found the I Ching very interesting…I have not used it for more than two years now, feeling that one must learn to walk in the dark, or try to discover (as when one is learning to swim) whether the water will carry one” (p. 123). Irene Gad connected Tarot pictures with the stages of human development in the context of Kabbalistic teachings and alongside the Jungian process of individuation towards becoming authentic selves. She considered their archetypal images “to be…trigger symbols, appearing and disappearing throughout history in times of transition and need” (1994, p. xxxiv). Such historical and socio-cultural value of Tarot hermeneutic in the context of collective – not solely individual, but social – consciousness will be addressed in Chapter 9.

This book will demonstrate that Tarot, as an existing, albeit marginal, cultural practice traditionally located at the “low” end of popular culture, plays a significant role in the process of self-formation or construction of human subjectivity, thus becoming a means for the re-symbolization of the Self. Philip Wexler introduced the concept “resymbolization” as focused on the “collective symbolic or cultural work” (1996, p. 115; italics in original) constituting a process of cultural, societal change due to the reinterpretation of human subjectivity as grounded in “the interactive dynamics of relationality” (Wexler, 1996, p. 115) especially as it pertains to Jewish mystical teachings, Kabbalah, which is literally translated as Tradition. It is a relation as ontologically basic (versus an isolated and self-centered moral agent) that is also central to Nel Noddings’ ethics of care in education.

Hasidic philosopher Martin Buber, whose concepts were instrumental for Noddings, referred to the “wordless depths [when we] experience an undivided unity” (1971, p. 24; brackets mine) between the two people at the soul-level in the form of the famous I-Thou relation. These depths are filled not with words but with images, and the task of this book is to elucidate the images, to articulate them, to appreciate their role in the re-symbolization of the relational Self at both individual and collective levels.

For Buber, it is the lived world that engenders the personality of a particular individual. It is the world comprising the whole environment, both natural and social, that “‘educates’ the human being: it draws out his powers and makes him grasp and penetrate its objections” (Buber, 1971, p. 89). Buber deliberately puts the word educate in quotation marks to distinguish his new mode of the relational, shared, erotic educational experience from the old one-sided model based on the will to power and authority that neglects “experiencing the other side” (p. 96). It is the integrative dynamics between self and other, between consciousness and the unconscious, between I and Thou that constitutes an element of inclusion comprising education in which educator “is set in the midst of the service” (p. 103).

A relational, integrative approach is also a formidable Zeitgest in the area of another human service profession, that of psychological counseling and therapy (Corey, 1991). In the early ‘90s, Corey has been already advocating an integrative perspective taking into consideration therapists’ willingness to look into the expansion of their own outlook and into possibility of widening the range of techniques to accommodate a diverse population. Including rapprochement, convergence, and integration in the psychotherapeutic Zeitgeist, Corey envisaged that the current “Zeitgeist…will continue with this trend toward convergence and integration and that there will also be an increased emphasis on a spiritual perspective” (p. 429).

Michael Murphy (1993) also called for the integral practices that encompass a wide variety of domains in human nature in a comprehensive way; including somatic, affective, cognitive, volitional and, importantly, transpersonal dimensions. Edward Whitmont (1985), in the context of post-Jungian practices of psychotherapy, pointed out that solely verbal or reflective methods may not be sufficient. Acknowledging the limitations of just “talking therapy”, he emphasized that the development of psychic awareness achieved a new quality in terms of a novel relation to spiritual meaning. Whitmont pointed out a new developmental phase in the evolution of consciousness that demands a broader scope of awareness encompassing but not reducible to intellect alone.

Understanding that human consciousness undergoes evolution, growth, and expansion is an important premise in the present approaches to education for spirituality, care and wellbeing (De Souza, M., Francis, L., O’Higgins-Norman, J., and D. Scott, 2009; Gidley, 2009). Jean Gebser, a French polymath, referred to the evolution of human consciousness in terms of its intensification by means of progressively going though the archaic, mythic, magic, and mental structures to be finally superseded by the integral consciousness, which will have incorporated a spiritual dimension. Gebser pointed out that mythical bards like Homer are represented as being blind because their task was not to observe the visible world with the organ of sight, the eye, but to use insight, “a sight turned inward to contemplate the inner images of the soul” (Gebser, 1991, p. 271). It is an insight into the meanings of Tarot images, as this book will demonstrate, that leads to intensification, expansion, and re-symbolization of consciousness.

Another memory comes to mind. It is summer of 1993. I am busy working in my clinical internship in West Hollywood. The client population in the area, and accordingly in the agency I am working for, consists of mostly gay men. I am having a counseling session with “John”, in his thirties, and HIV positive. We are discussing his outbursts of sudden anger in the relationship with his live-in boyfriend, when abruptly John switches the issue: “I saw my spiritual guru yesterday,” he says. “She said she didn’t see a speck of death in me.”

The impact of that phrase on me, and the timing of it, was like a turning point. It brought a paradigm shift in my professional relationship with John. The session became illuminated by what was of paramount importance, significance and value in John’s painful and uncertain internal world. It redistributed the weights of issues he was overwhelmed with. It indicated that John was reaching out to whoever could understand his hopes and fears, acknowledge them, reflect back and help him in working through his problems. It happened to be his spiritual guru who cared about him and was able to provide him with the necessary reassurance.

This emotional desire as “the longing to be cared for…is manifested as a need for love, physical care, respect or mere recognition – [and] is the fundamental starting point for the ethics of care” (Noddings, 1998, p. 188). Such was John’s internal subjective reality – and this reality was addressed and mirrored in his spiritual quest. I began to wonder about the ambiguity of my professional role in this situation: what response or intervention could I, in my capacity as a counselor, provide in agreement with the framework of the behavioral-cognitive approach advocated by the agency I was working for?

What could one do within the limitations of a solely cognitive orientation aiming to behavior modification for this particular person whose initial assessment, according to his intake form, indicated an early stage of dementia? Desperate and overwhelmed by the turn of events in his personal experience, he turned to somebody outside this formal counseling room, to somebody he perceived as a spiritual guru. My immediate feeling was: if only I could introduce into our counseling sessions a spiritual dimension – and specifically by means of Tarot readings – John may very well benefit! At the very least his world view, which obviously included spiritual aspects, would be validated; at the very best, the meanings of the events in his life and the value of his personal experience, however tragic, would become open to his awareness.

Slowly the idea emerged. Nothing should prevent an existing phenomenon from becoming the subject of inquiry. The phenomenon of Tarot readings does exist; the shelves in the bookstores are crowded with popular publications; there are more than two hundred and fifty various decks available. There is a variety of advertising in popular media. TV channels have their own “psychic networks”; yet all of this exists mainly at the level of popular culture.

As noticed by Emily Auger (2004) in her research on Tarot and other meditation decks in the context of aesthetics, Tarot decks represent a popular, or “low”, rather than “high” art forms such as painting, architecture, or sculpture. Yet, it is Tarot that was to become the subject matter of my postgraduate research in the area of behavioral sciences, thus transgressing the borders between popular and academic cultures. Similar to Robert Romanyshyn’s “wounded researcher” (Romanyshyn, 2007) I was ready to step into the untapped unconscious field and to explore the many “wounds” underlying our perceptions and judgments.

There was no aim to prove or disprove anything, to qualify or disqualify, to compare or contrast. This study grew out of a desire to bring light to the often misunderstood realm of Tarot which is so much richer and valuable than its reductive popular role as a fortune-telling device, yet which is more often than not considered as such. The main “objective” of my study was, is, and will remain, the wellbeing of those who are seeking Tarot counsel.

A Tarot deck consists of seventy-eight pictorial cards, or Arcana. The meaning of Arcana (or Arcanum, singular) is that creative, but often missing, element in our lives, which is necessary to know, to discover in experience so as to be fruitful and creative in our approach to multiple life-tasks situated in the midst of experiential situations, events and our complex relationships with others. If and when discovered – that is, made available to consciousness – it becomes a powerful motivational force to facilitate a change for the better at our emotional, cognitive or behavioral levels and thus to accomplish an important ethical objective.

What is called a Tarot layout or spread is a particular pattern of the picturesque cards with a variety of images that are full of rich symbolism. Each position in the sequence of pictures constituting a particular layout has some specific connotations that will be addressed in detail in chapters 7 and 8. Tarot pictorial symbolism embodies intellectual, moral, and spiritual “lessons” derived from collective human experiences across times, places and cultures.

As such, Tarot “speaks” in a mythic format of symbols, the metaphorical universal language full of deep, even if initially opaque, meanings. The interpretation of Tarot images and pictures indicates a specific “hermeneutic, composed from the juxtaposition of disparate elements, [or] what Freud called pictographic” (Grumet, 1991, p. 75). As a symbolic system of reading and interpretation, Tarot is oriented toward the discovery of meanings for the multiplicity of experiences that would have otherwise appeared to lack meaning and significance. Thus the readings necessarily “honor the spontaneity, complexity and ambiguity of human experience” (p. 67).

The educational function derives from the holistic dimension embedded in experience that transcends the dualistic mind-body split and the scope of which expands to also incorporate the spiritual, transpersonal, domain. We thus acquire a better ability for self-reflection, self-knowledge, and a sense of value, purpose and meaningfulness of our experiences. Importantly we achieve a better understanding of what may appear to be the otherwise irresolvable moral dilemmas and which subsequently leads to the choice of right action and developing a better-informed, intelligent, decision-making ability.

In their monumental study, Crawford and Rossiter (2006) equate young people’s search for meaning, identity and spirituality with their very reasons for living and point out that meaning and identity are the same psychological reality looked at from different perspectives. From the viewpoint of meaning, it is an explanation of individual intentionality. From the viewpoint of identity, it is the individual’s distinctive self-understanding and self-expression (p. 33).

Noticing the link between the search for meaning, personal identity and spirituality, Crawford and Rossiter suggest that teachers should help their students “to look on their experience of education with a greater sense of its value” (2006, p. 321). It is a noble task, indeed, but it should be performed by teachers equipped with at least an equal if not greater sense of value and meaning of their own professional practice and their own personal development in terms of what Jung called selfeducation (chapter 2). Nel Noddings (2002) keeps reminding us that the aim of moral, holistic, education is to contribute to the continuous education of both students and teachers, in the dynamics between selves and others embedded in the caring relation.

“The attitude of care” (Noddings, 1991, p. 161) is characterized by the presence of attention or engrossment and is especially significant in the context of Tarot. Noddings refers to the story of the Holy Grail as told by Simone Weil (1951): In the first legend of the Grail, it is said that the Grail…belongs to the first comer who asks the guardian of the vessel, a king three quarters paralyzed by the most painful wound, “What are you going through?”… It is a recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a collection, or a specimen from the social category labeled “unfortunate,” but as a man, exactly like us. … This way of looking is first of all attentive. The soul empties itself of its own contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as he is, in all his truth. Only he who is capable of attention can do this. (p. 115).

Yet, John was not asked the question, “What are you going through?” within the agency’s behavior-modification approach. Nor that he would have been able to – consciously – answer this straightforward question anyway or wanted to engage in an explicit dialogue so as to intentionally share his pain and suffering with me. The counseling sessions under the adage of behavioral modification of the agency were supposed to “instruct” John to not get into arguments with his boyfriend. John’s referring to a conversation with his spiritual guru was an indication that he was looking for an alternative way to be cared for, to get attention especially because the probability of his early passing was his very reality.

To connect with the Other at the soul level means to connect via corpus subtile – the subtle, spiritual, “body” of emotions and feelings that are so often difficult to articulate precisely because they are buried deep in the unconscious, in the psyche. Their expressive language exceeds and spills over the limitations of our conscious discourse. It is the Tarot hermeneutic as the metaphorical, symbolic, quest for the Holy Grail that helps us in articulating what otherwise betrays words. This takes place because of the symbols’ functioning to bring the unconscious wounds and pains to the level of cognitive awareness, therefore engaging with the psyche and making it whole, healing it.

The psyche becomes filled with the new meanings of experiences and the acquired sense of not only interpersonal connection but, ultimately, spiritual communion. The plurality of evolving meanings express themselves indirectly, in symbolic form, and symbols act as transformers capable of raising the unconscious contents to the level of consciousness, therefore ultimately performing what Jung called the transcendent function when the implicit meanings become explicit by virtue of “becoming conscious and by being perceived” (Jung in Pauli, 1994, p. 159). The readings described in chapter 8 of this book were conducted in the spirit of what Jean Watson (1985) called, in the area of nurse education, the occasions of caring. Noddings explains that the occasions of caring constitute the moments when nurse and patient, or teacher and student, meet and must decide what to do with the moment, what to share, which needs to express, or whether to remain silent. This encounter “needs to be a guiding spirit of what we do in education” (Noddings, 1991, p. 168); such a guiding, relational and caring, spirit ontologically preeminent in Tarot hermeneutic.

Referring to “a hermeneutic lag [as] a poor reading of cultural tendencies” (Wexler, 1996, p. 5) that has become frozen in the dominant structures of the over-rationalization of knowledge, Wexler calls for the cultural, theoretical, and educational renaissance. His intent is to gather the holy sparks of the Kabbalistic creation myth told in the mystical Judaism as “the vital residue of an uncontainable supernal light [that] remain glowing in the dross of fragments of worldly vessels unable to contain them. So it is with…reinterpret[ing] ancient traditions in contemporary fields of thought. We have some glimmering, but only within the prevailing cover of opaque and limiting fragments. What I hope for…is an opening toward those premodern traditions, and their inspirational ‘sparks.’” (Wexler, 1996, p. 113) To reclaim the divine sparks at the level of human cultural practices is a challenge that this book intends to meet. The restored light as the central metaphor will have contributed not to the over-rational Enlightenment of modernity but to a postmodern spiritual Illumination that would defy pessimism and the frequent fatalistic resignation currently permeating individual and collective consciousness, locally and globally.

In the remarkable book Educating for Intelligent Belief or Unbelief, Nel Noddings (1993a) comments that some of the new age criticism appears superficial and “lacks the intelligence” (p. 39) which she encourages in her work. Noddings points out that this type of education will put “great emphasis on self-knowledge… that… must come to grips with the emotional and spiritual as well as the intellectual and psychological” (p. xiv). Analogously I encourage an intelligent and open attitude in the book you are going to read.

Furthermore, you will discover that Tarot hermeneutic paves a road toward such expanded self-knowledge and that using Tarot symbolic system as an educational and counseling “aid” enables us to learn from life-experiences hence becoming able to acquire intelligence and wisdom, indeed urged by Noddings. Philip Wexler suggested that many of the assumptions underlying the new age culture should be deeply deconstructed into the ancient core religious traditions from which they perform their bricolage. The next chapter 2 will focus on the notion of bricolage per se as constituting a theory-practice nexus in which the Tarot hermeneutic is embedded.

[> purchase copies of Re-Symbolization of the Self]

Review by Bonnie Cehovet
www.bonniecehovet.com

Author: Robert Swiryn
Pau Hana Publishing
2010
ISBN 978-061530438-0

The history of the Tarot is quite an interesting one, and one that is often traced by the imagery in the cards. In The Secret of the Tarot, Swiryn attempts to show that somewhere along the line the Marseilles Tarot (a specific style of Tarot that has its roots in early Italian decks) may have come to carry the story of the Cathars, a thirteenth century sect of religious heretics.

In his preface, Swiryn notes that in his opinion, the Marseilles Tarot carries what he terms a classical look, as opposed to more modern decks, which he feels have drifted away from historical authenticity. In his personal studies on medieval history, Swiryn began to recognize connections between historical characters and events of this time period and the images in the Tarot cards. He goes on to say that he feels that both the story of the Cathars, and their spiritual message, seemed to have found a place in the cards. The thesis he formed was that a person, or group of people, found a way to use the Tarot of Marseilles as an instructional vehicle to preserve the story of the Cathar persecution by the Roman Catholic Church and the King of France.

What Swiryn presents here is the story of the Cathars (a look at the Albigensian Crusade, the subsequent Inquisition and the fate of the Cathars), and the supposition that this story is concealed within the Marseilles Tarot imagery.

The book is in two parts: the first part covers the history of the Cathars through the lens of the Roman Catholic church, the medieval Languedoc and the Counts of Toulouse, the Cathars themselves, the Albigensian Crusade and the development of the Tarot. The second part covers the twenty-two Major Arcana of the Tarot, and attempts to look at what the creators of the Marseilles Tarot had in mind when they designed their cards. Through the lens of historical context, Swiryn attempts to show the connection between the spiritual beliefs of the Cathars and the imagery in the deck.

A great deal of research has gone into this book. People familiar with the Tarot world will recognize names like Robert O’Neill, Stuart Kaplan, Michael Dummett, Paul Huson, and Alfred Douglas. The specific Marseilles Tarot that is used throughout this book is the Nicholas Conver deck. Other illustrations are used to show the symbols and imagery used during this time period, such as a stained glass of the Virgin Mary in Majesty from Notre Dame de Chartres, the bell tower at St. Sernin, and the martyrdom of St. Sernin. These are all reflective of the times that the Cathars lived in.

Would it have been possible for the story of the Cathars to be imbedded in the Marseilles Tarot? On the surface, yes. Cathars could have worked amongst the artisans that cut the wood blocks for the Tarot cards. Probable – no. And if the story of the Cathars was embedded in the cards, it may have been done after their time, by someone else, to simply keep their story alive.

In Part 2, where the cards are presented, the connections that Swiryn makes between the Cathars and the Marseilles Tarot images are, in my opinion, tenuous at best. Tenuous, but worth considering. In the Lovers he attempts to make the case that the imagery was significantly altered from older decks to give it new meaning.

For example, Swiryn surmises that just as the two figures Lovers card in the Visconti-Sforza Tarot are generally accepted to represent the two families, the three figures in the Lovers card of the Marseilles Tarot may point to historical figures within the Albigensian story. He posits that the third figure may represent the French Regent (Blanche of Castille), intervening between Raymond VII (the middle figure) and Beatrice (the younger woman on the right). Another theory presented here is that the Marseilles version of the Lovers was sometimes referred to as the Two Paths, with the figure on the left representing the institutional church, and the figure on the right representing Love.

There are many other instances of information that is offered from a slightly different viewpoint than is generally considered. At the least it is interesting, including the thought that if Cathar history has been encoded in the Marseilles Tarot, that it was done hundreds of years after the demise of the Cathars, perhaps by Cathar sympathizers that were involved in the printing of the decks.

The Secret of the Tarot is written on a level that makes it readily understood by all levels of Tarot student. Between the footnotes and the bibliography, it is easy to see where Swiryn is referencing his material, so that anyone interested in following up with studies of their own may do so. There is one minor glitch, in that Robert O’Neil’s e-book Catharism and the Tarot was inadvertently left out of the bibliography, but it is acknowledged in Swiryn’s footnotes.

For anyone interested in the history of the Cathars, in the Marseilles Tarot, or in Tarot history, this is a book that I would recommend. The ideas presented here may not be universally accepted, but they do offer food for thought.

© December 2010 Bonnie Cehovet

A new book by Robert M. Place

Jean-Michel asked me to include an excerpt from my new book, The Fool’s Journey: The History, Art, & Symbolism of the Tarot, in this, the September issue of the ATS Newsletter, but first I would like to explain the focus of my book. The book started as an exhibition that I curated from the Craft and Folk Art Museum, in Los Angeles. The opening was on January 24, 2010. It had record attendance and received much praise, including from two articles in the Los Angeles Times. This exhibition was designed to focus on the Fool and the twenty-one trumps in the modern occult and divinatory Tarot as it is popularly known in Western culture. To fully understand and appreciate the Tarot’s symbolic and artistic heritage, however, we must look into its history and ask ourselves what the artists who first created these decks, containing these enigmatic images, were expressing.

The Tarot was first created in 15th century Northern Italy to play a trick taking game that is the ancestor of Bridge and, although evidence suggests that cards of all kinds have also been used for divination, the Tarot was primarily designed for game playing and continues to be used for gaming in many parts of Europe today. Like other popular art forms in the Renaissance, the Tarot was influenced by alchemy and Hermeticism and captured the Neoplatonic, mystical philosophy of the period. The Tarot can be seen as a window into the Western mystical tradition: a pictorial conversation between mystics and artists that has lasted over five centuries. It has continued to inspire mystics, occultists, and artists to create new decks and works of art based on its symbolism.

The Tarot’s mystical allegory is expressed in the enigmatic parade of images called the trumps. The term trump is derived from the Italian trionfi, which means “triumph” and refers to a type of procession or parade. This parade originated in ancient Rome and was revived in the late Middle Ages. By the Renaissance, it had taken on a mystical symbolic character and artists commonly made reference to it as an organizing principle and a means of illustrating an ascension to greater and greater spiritual truth.

The Fool and the 21 trump cards are unique to the Tarot and are designed to express the universal human progression to spiritual fulfillment. Through the trumps, the Fool encounters signs of inspiration, suffering, and death on his way to the final trump the World. A mystical vision of the purified soul, the World, is represented by a beautiful nude surrounded by symbols representing the throne of God. When the soul dances on the throne of God, time and death are conquered, and the Anima Mundi (the Soul of the World) is revealed. Now that the Fool, who is our representative on this journey, has achieved the highest spiritual goal, we may share in his tranquil wisdom.

The Fool’s Journey was designed to bring appreciation of the Tarot and its mystical tradition to a wide audience and to replace false notions about the Tarot with real history and insight. Once the exhibition ended, on May 9, 2010, I decided to that to further its goals and reach a larger audience I would create a book based on the exhibition. Also, in a book I could provide more information on the history and symbolism of the Tarot and illustrate it with more examples than were possible in the limited space of the museum.

The full color book begins with introductory chapters on the history and symbolism of the Tarot, a listing and discussion of the decks represented, followed by a chapter on the Fool and each of the twenty-one trumps. These chapters open with an illustration form my Annotated Tarot of the Sevenfold Mystery (a set of images that I completed just for the exhibition) and then present examples from Tarot decks that represent key points in the Tarot’s 500 to 600 year history, side-by-side with related illustrations from the Renaissance. Alchemical texts, occult sources, and ancient Egyptian works of art. The decks included are the hand-painted 15th century Visconti-Sforza Tarot, my facsimile of the circa 1465-500 woodcut Tarot of Ferrara, facsimiles of the earliest Tarot of Marseille Tarots, created by Jean-Claud Flornoy, the first occult reference to the Tarot, the first occult Tarot, a first edition of Pamela Colman Smith’s modern popular Tarot, the first New Age Tarot by David Palladini, and my Alchemical Tarot, followed by examples from several modern designers, including: works by Paulina Cassidy (the Paulina Tarot), Chatriya Hemharnvibul (the Fenestra Tarot), Evan Lee (the Twilight Tarot), Ciro Marchetti (the Legacy Tarot), Thalia Took (the Alphabet Tarot), and Patrick Valenza (the Deviant Moon Tarot).

With this article, I am including sample pages from the opening of the chapter on symbolism and the full chapter on the Wheel of Fortune. As you will see, the discussion on the ladder of the planets in the Symbolism chapter complements the Wheel of Fortune theme. I chose this trump instead of the more obvious Fool or World because I feel that it represents the essence of the journey and the problem that challenges the Fool.

Robert M. Place

II. The Symbolism of the Tarot

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[Figure 2. From Earth to Heaven, the Seven Ancient Planets as the Cosmic Soul Centers]

The Tarot is a creation of the Italian Renaissance and evolved into its modern form throughout the 15th century. All of the images that appear on the trumps are related to the art of that century and to the century before. Like all art from this period, that of the Tarot was meant to have both body and soul–physical beauty and symbolic meaning. The Tarot, like other artworks of the Renaissance, is a product of the rebirth of ancient Classical culture that gave this period its name and, like other aspects of this reborn culture, it derives from a synthesis of art, philosophy, religion, and mysticism. Tarot images and themes are therefore best understood in relation to two mystical philosophical concepts that originated in the Classical world and influenced Medieval and Renaissance thinking: the ancient view of the cosmos and Plato’s concept of the soul. Both of these concepts present a model for the mystical purification and ascent of the soul and that ascent is the message of the Tarot’s allegory.

The Ancient View of the Cosmos

Of first importance to the understanding of Tarot images is the ancient view of the cosmos and its mystical significance for the individual. From the ancient world to the Renaissance, the earth was believed to be a sphere located at the unmoving center of the universe and the fixed stars, formed into constellat ions, were thought to revolve around the earth from east to west. Between the fixed stars and the earth, ancient astronomers placed a series of seven crystal spheres fonning seven layers, each one encasing the ones be low as they ascended toward the stars. On each sphere there was a planet that orbited independently from the fixed stars. When viewed with the naked eye, these are the only objects in the sky that seemed to do this. The planets were each named after a god and, by the Hellenistic period, their order was determined by the speed of each planet. From the bottom up, they were: Luna, Mercury, Venus, Sol, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. The planets were also believed to form a ladder between heaven and earth that the soul would descend at birth and, as it did so, at each planet it was given certain qualities by the god of the planet. Once the soul made it to the Earth plane, it was clothed in a body made of the four elements: Earth, Water, Air, and Fire; and subject to mortality and fate or fortune. This cosmic theme was described by Plato (429-347 BCE) in his “Myth of Er” in the last chapter of the Republic, commented on further by Cicero ( 106-43 BC) in his De Republica, included in On the Daimon of Socrates, by Plutarch (50-120), and was incorporated into the mystical worldviews of the Neoplatonists, Hermeticists, alchemists, Sufis, Kabalists, and mystical Christians.

The seven planets of the ancients were also thought of as the soul centers of the cosmos and corresponding soul centers could be found ascending the spine, from the sacrum to the crown of the head, in the microcosm of the human body. The Neoplatonist philosopher, Iamblichus (250-325), tells us in his biography of Pythagoras (580 or 572-500 or 490 BCE) that this older mystical philosopher developed the diatonic music scale with seven notes, marked by the seven vowels of the Greek alphabet, to capture the sound that each planet made as it orbited the Earth. This harmony was called the music of the spheres. Further, Iamblichus tells us that Pythagoras used this scale in a musical treatment to bring the human soul centers into harmony with the planets. Effectively, these notes functioned like virtues meant to cure the imbalances, or vices, located in each soul center.

Ancient mystics looked at the ladder of the planets as a two-way path. They believed that by entering a deep state of contemplation they could climb this sevenfold ladder while they were alive, let go of the seven endowments of the planets, and in this purified state enter the heaven beyond and receive a vision of their true immortal nature. This process is described in the first book of The Corpus Hermeticum, “The Poimanders of Hermes Trismegistus.” As we can see, astrological beliefs were intimately connected with the philosophical Hermetic goal – the achievement of enlightenment – and the process involved letting go of or healing the seven vices attributed to the gods of the seven planets: Luna’s force of increase and decrease, Mercury’s evil cunning, Venus’ lust, Sol’s arrogance, Mars’ audacity, Jupiter’s greed, and Saturn’s falsehood.

In alchemical texts, which also looked to Hermes Trismegistus as their initial source, the seven planets were equated to a hierarchy of seven metals: lead to Saturn, iron to Mars, tin to Jupiter, copper to Venus, quicksilver to Mercury, silver to Luna, and gold to Sol. The alchemists believed that all of these metals were made of one substance but impurities caused their diverse qualities. Lead, the most impure, fell to the bottom of the list but through alchemical processes it could be purified and transformed into the ascending purer forms of metal until it became gold, the most pure. Therefore, the alchemical quest to transmute lead to gold can be seen as a manifestation of this same mystical purification and ascent of the soul.

The Wheel of Fortune

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[Figure 130. Fortuna, The Annotated Tarot of the Sevenfold Mystery, 2009] Because of its name, the Wheel of Fortune may seem to symbolize fortune or good luck but, as we saw in the frontispiece for the Triumpho di Fortuna (Figure 86), the Wheel of Fortune is symbolic of the wheel of the zodiac and represents time and the physical world. The traditional symbolism of the image has more to do with the problem of fate and mortality than luck. This is the temporal world that the virtues are intended to challenge. The Wheel of Fortune is one of the two trumps present in the oldest existing Tarot, the Brambilla Tarot created between 1420 and 1444. The Visconti-Sforza Tarot contains a symbolically similar image. Winged Fortuna stands blindfolded, symbolizing ignorance or indifference, in the center of her wheel. Four men, symbolizing the four stages of life: youth, maturity, old age, and death, are positioned around the rim. The man on the left ascends the wheel and is sprouting ass’ ears, which are incised in the gold leaf background. Also incised in the gold, a ribbon issues from his mouth with a written statement that when translated reads, “I will reign.” On top of the wheel, a man sits holding a mace and an orb. He is crowned with full-grown ass’ ears and declares, “I do reign.” Descending the wheel headfirst, a man with an ass’ tail but no ears bemoans, “I have reigned.” Finally, at the bottom, a bearded old man crawls and says, “I am without reign.” These four figures illustrate the foolishness of chasing worldly fortunes and fame. This image is a standard Christian icon that was often found outside of the Tarot. An example can be seen in the illustration from Liber de Sapiente (Book of Wisdom), a Parisian book on philosophy published in 1510. On our left, blindfolded Fortuna sits insecurely on a sphere balanced on a plank over an open grave. She is holding a wheel that is similar to the Visconti-Sforza Wheel. On our right, Wisdom or Pmdence s its securely enthroned on a stone cube. She holds the mirror of wisdom, a symbol of self knowledge. On the rim of her mirror are five stars, a sun, and a moon, representing the seven ancient planets, that similarly precede the World tmmp in the Tarot. Also as in the Tarot, the virtue Pmdence or Wisdom is dep icted tmmping Fortuna. The same four figures, representing the four stages of life, but without Fortuna, are depicted around the wheel on the Tarot of Ferrara trump. Here, the ascendant has an ass’ head, the figure on top is a complete ass, and the descendant has an ass’ tail. Below, there is a prostrate old man with a beard. They each have a ribbon bearing the Visconti-Sforza quotes in abbreviated form. In the Tarot of Marseilles, the Wheel of Fortune depicts an allegorical wheel suspended from a stand by a rod with a crank handle. Except for the top figure in the Jean Noblet Tarot, the men on the rim have been reduced to foolish monkeys. The ascending one with ass’ ears and a tail, the surmounting one with a crown, a cloak, and a sword/scepter, and the descending one with an ass’ tail. The figures symbolize the three states ruled by Fortuna’s three daughters: Clotho (who rules the past) Lachesis (who rules the present) and Atropos (who rules the future). De Gebelin recognized this figure as the Wheel of Fortune. He, however, interprets the three figures as humanlike animals: (from left to right) a monkey, a dog, and a rabbit. De Gebelin correctly describes the image as a satire on those who chase after fortune. The Etteilla a Jeu de la Princesse, influenced by de Gebelin’s words, depicts a wheel with a rabbit ascending, a monkey on top, and a man descending. The Wheel of Fortune in the Waite-Smith Tarot is again strongly influenced by the occult teachings of Eliphas Levi. The monkeys have been transformed into Hellenized Egyptian deities. The human figure with the head of a jackal is Hermanubis, a syntheses of the Greek god Hermes with the Egyptian Anubis. He is the guide of the soul and represents the good. The snake is Typhon, the Greek name for Set, who is the evil brother of Osiris. The Sphinx on top represents wisdom and equilibrium. The letters on the rim of the Wheel may read ROTA (Latin for wheel) when read from the bottom, TARO, when read from the top, and TORA, when read from the top counter-clockwise. Between the Latin letters are the four Hebrew letters that spell the name of God, the Tetragrammaton. Levi calls it the wheel of Ezekiel, which explains the inclusion, in the corners, of the Four Living Creatures, which are included in the Old Testament prophet’s description of the Chariot of God as well as representing the evangelists. The alchemical symbols on the cross bars of the inner circle are, from the top: mercury, sulphur, solution, and salt. The dragons on the Wheel of Fortune in The Alchemical Tarot are inspired by an engraving in Abraham Eleazar’s Donum Dei (God’s Gift), 1735. It is a detailed representation of the double ouroboros seen earlier in the Hierophant’s book (Figures 75 and 76). The scaly, red, masculine serpent on the bottom represents the Fixed State, and the white, winged and crowned, feminine serpent on top represents the Volatile State. Each serpent is transforming into the other as they swallow each other’s tail. This process had to be accomplished over and over changing the contents of the retort from gas to solid, and back, as the work spiraled to completion. The four elements in the corners refer to the elementary wheel of the sages in which the alchemists transformed one element into another until each element was realized. In alchemy, the Wheel itself was the means of conquering fate. On the Wheel of Fortune in the Deviant Moon Tarot a morose thick-bodied Fortuna turns a carnival-like wheel of fortune to determine the fate of a suitably panicked imp sitting on a stool. Above, a devil raises two wands. On the wheel, there are images of heartbreak and death interspersed with a lucky star and a magic hand. This image accurately captures the Renaissance fear of Fortune’s unreliable gifts and unexpected downturns. This message is emphasized by the fact that the floor in the scene is a tombstone. Evan Lee’s trump also depicts a nightmarish scene, with his male figure immersed in a sea of industrial cogwheels and, although David Palladini’s trump is influenced by the Waite-Smith example, he has managed to set a sinister tone with a stern Egyptian head topping the Wheel and serpents rising on either side. On this trump in the Tarot of the Sevenfold Mystery, a blindfolded Fortuna stands in the center of the wheel of the zodiac. As in the Renaissance, Fortuna’s wheel is the wheel of the year. Between her and her wheel, are seven stars, representing the seven planets of the ancients. In the four corners, are listed the four humors, which represent the manifestation of the four elements in the human body. This image represents the mythical world of matter that was presented by Plato in the last chapter of The Republic, in which the soul descends from heaven through a gate in the zodiac and down the ladder of the planets to be incased in a body made of the four elements. Fortuna is the same figure that appears on the final trump, the World, but there she is uncovered and radiating her true essence. images on the left: Figure 131. Fortuna and Sapientia, Charles de Bouelles’s Liber de Sapiente, Paris, 1510 Figure 132. La Ruota della Fortuna, Visconti-Sforza Tarot, c. 1450 Figure 133. Cunning and Time turn the Wheel of Fortune, Albrecht Dürer, c. 1525 Figure 134. La Ruota della Fortuna, facsimile Tarot of Ferrara, 1465-1500 Figure 135. La Roue de Fortune, facsimile Jean Noblet Tarot, c. 1650 Figure 136. La Roue de Fortune, facsimile Jean Dodal Tarot, 1701 Figure 137. The Wheel of Fortune, Monde Primitif. 1781 Figure 138. The Wheel of Fortune, The Etteilla Jeu de la Princesse, c. 1870 Figure 139. The Wheel of Fortune, The Waite-Smith Tarot, 1910 Figure 140. The Wheel of Fortune, The Alchemical Tarot, 1995 Figure 14 1. The Fixed and the Volatile, Abraham Eleazar’s Donum Dei, 1735 Figure 142. The Cherub of Ezekiel, The Ritual of High Magic, Eliphas Levi, 1855 Figure 143. Blind Fortuna, Gregor Reisch’s Margarita Philosophica cum Addiliollibus Nouis, 1517 Figure 144. The Wheel of Fortune, Aquarian Tarot, David Palladini, 1970 Figure 145. The Wheel of Fortune, Twilight Tarot, 2006 Figure 146. The Wheel of Fortune, Deviant Moon Tarot, 2008

[Mary Greer will be the Keynote speaker at the ATS 2010 Tarot Convention to be held at over the first weekend in July in Brisbane, Australia. The following contribution first appeared on her weblog: Mary K. Greer's Tarot Blog]

An issue came up on one of the forums about which is the best book from which to learn about the Crowley-Harris Thoth deck. The answer for almost everyone is, without question, Aleister Crowley’s Book of Thoth. This, despite the fact that, for most beginners in esoteric studies, it seems impenetrable. Books by Duquette and Banzhaf are proposed as intermediaries and I agree they are excellent choices, but a problem occurs when Angeles Arrien’s name comes up. Her Tarot Handbook: practical applications of ancient visual symbols takes a completely different approach to the deck, which is often characterized as the “make up anything you want” variety—though it isn’t that at all. I should mention I took several classes with Angie on the Thoth deck starting in 1977, and so I’m not at all objective in my views.

Angie’s approach is based on Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious and the meaningful repetition of archetypal images and themes across world-wide human cultures. The statement by Arrien that probably infuriates people the most is: “I read Crowley’s book that went with this deck and decided that its esotericism in meaning hindered, rather than enhanced, the use of the visual portraitures that Lady Frieda Harris had executed.” Of key importance was that Arrien experienced a powerful response to the deck that did not arise from an esoteric OTO or Golden Dawn background. It was not specifically a rejection of Crowley, though it is easy to take it as such.

Instead, Arrien recognized most of the symbols from her study of anthropology and mythology. As a result she felt that “a humanistic and universal explanation of these symbols was needed so that the value of Tarot could be used in modern times as a reflective mirror of internal guidance which could be externally applied.” She believed that the Thoth deck symbols could be read in an other-than-esoteric way—specifically, as cross-cultural psychological symbols (archetypes from the collective unconscious). Her book offers this alternate perspective, based on the work of Carl Jung, Marie Louise von Franz, Joseph Campbell, Ralph Metzner, Mircea Eliade and Robert Bly.

In essence, Arrien asked: What do these symbols tell us if we strip away the esotericism and look at them purely as symbols and archetypes from the collective unconscious reflecting myths and images that have appeared across many cultures?

I see this simply as an alternate reading of the deck—not as a demand that we discount Crowley—but, rather, asking what can be seen if we do ignore Crowley? Is there anything else to this deck? Do real ‘true’ symbols transcend fixed definitions? Can they transcend any and all dogma?

We might also ask: If Crowley’s book were lost (along with all other esoteric texts), would future generations be able to reconstitute and find anything meaningful in these 78 images? Would this deck still offer something capable of informing our thoughts and actions?

It turns out that this is a valid question, for at least one person involved in the online discussion (and perhaps many others) felt that the Thoth deck is based on a specific language of symbols, defined by Crowley, such that, without his text the symbolism and the deck become meaningless. To remove Crowley, then, is to kill the Thoth deck—to make it worthless. In fact, as explained to me, symbols contain no meaning outside of the stated definitions of an individual. Strip symbols of definition and they either convey no information or they mean anything one likes.

This is absolutely contrary to the understanding of symbols held by such people as Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, the French magician, Eliphas Lévi, and countless others who have written extensively on symbolism and who believe that the meaning of the symbol is inherent in its nature. “Symbols can thus be understood as metaphors for archetypal needs and intentions or expressions of basic archetypal patterns . . . which are ultimately inherent in the human mind-brain” (Anthony Stevens, Ariadne’s Clue: A Guide to the Symbols of Humankind).

Furthermore, symbolism is a sacred, living language that reflects divinity through like vibrations. From this principle arose the occult ‘doctrine of correspondences,’ which says that something that is red, for instance, shares some kind of energy and meaning with other things that are red. Thorns that pierce are the protective weapons and barriers to the alluring rose whose scent also draws the bees. Even an esoteric interpretation takes such elements into account.

Many spiritual teachers do not fear the subjective, for they see each person as partaking of the Divine. The esotericist Manly Palmer Hall wrote in The Secret Teaching of All Ages: “Like all other forms of symbolism, the Tarot unfailingly reflects the viewpoint of the interpreter himself. This does not detract from its value, however, for symbolism is one of the most useful instruments of instruction in the spiritual arts, because it continually draws from the subjective resources of the seeker the substance of his own erudition.”

Certainly Crowley’s erudition is great, and we benefit from the knowledge that he put into the Thoth book and deck (his book is magnificient!). But, if we stop there, we have not done our own work. There may be other interpreters of the Thoth deck who can also point us down what has been called “the royal road” of Tarot. Still, eventually we must make the path our own—there’s no getting around that.

The Egyptologist, R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz in Symbol and the Symbolic tells us that symbols are different than an abstract alphabet in that we can reconstitute their meanings: “Any manner of writing formed by means of a conventional alphabetical, arbitrary system can, over time, be lost and become incomprehensible. On the other hand, the use of images as signs for the expression of thought [hieroglyphics] leaves the meaning of this writing, five or six thousand years old, as clear and accessible as it was the day it was carved in the stone.” In The Temple in Man, Schwaller de Lubicz talks about the living quality of the symbol that can not survive too rigid of a definition: “To explain a symbol is to kill it; it is to take it only for its appearance; it is to avoid listening to it. By definition, the symbol is magic, it evokes the form bound in the spell of matter. To evoke is not to imagine. It is to live, live the form.” (See Schwaller’s Egyptianized Tarot Trumps here.)

Most of all I appeal to Oswald Wirth who created the first truly esoteric Tarot deck (1889; revised in 1926) that is a significant influence behind all that have followed. Wirth, in Le Symbolisme Hermétique (translated by P. D. Ouspensky), wrote that symbols are meant to awaken us to our own freedom:

Each thinker has the right to discover in the symbol a new meaning corresponding to the logic of his own conceptions. As a matter of fact, symbols are precisely intended to awaken ideas sleeping in our consciousness. They arouse a thought by means of suggestion and thus cause the truth which lies hidden in the depths of our spirit to reveal itself. . . . They especially elude minds which . . . base their reasoning only on inert scientific and dogmatic formulae. The practical utility of these formulae cannot be contested, but from the philosophical point of view they represent only frozen thought, artifically limited, made immovable to such an extent, that it seems dead in comparison with the living thought, indefinite, complex and mobile, which is reflected in symbols. . . . By their very nature the symbols must remain elastic, vague and ambiguous, like the sayings of an oracle. Their role is to unveil mysteries, leaving the mind all its freedom.

“. . . Leaving the mind all its freedom.” It saddens me that the fears and anger provoked by Angeles Arrien’s book indicate a deep mistrust that the Thoth deck can survive the common touch of the “masses,” or that it has any worth whatsoever outside of Crowley’s text. It is felt that the mistakes and misconceptions in Arrien’s book (of which there admittedly are many) could create a devastating sense of betrayal in those who eventually find out that Crowley intended something different. This supposedly-fearful juxtaposition, however, led me to a much deeper appreciation of Crowley, while Angie encouraged independence and freedom in how I work with the deck and its symbols (not a good thing to those who see Crowley as the absolute and only fundament).

Although Crowley professed love for “the scarlet woman,” yet he feared the prostituting of his work, insisting that the deck and book always be sold together (it isn’t) and describing the deck’s potential use in fortune-telling as being a base and dishonest purpose (here – see text at the end). In fact, it seems that Crowley feared even the thought that anyone might claim independent insight into his deck for, despite her working diligently for five years with him to produce the deck, Crowley made clear that his student and artist, Frieda Harris, at no time contributed “a single idea of any kind to any card, and she is in fact almost as ignorant of the Tarot and its true meaning and use as when she began.” What hope is there, then, for the rest of us?

But, hope does exists, for the ever-contradictory Aleister Crowley (using the pseudonym “Soror I.W.E.”) wrote in the introductory biographical note to the Book of Thoth, that “the accompanying booklet [this book] was dashed off by Aleister Crowley, without help from parents. Its perusal may be omitted with advantage.” And Frieda Harris’ innovative use of Steinerian ‘Synthetic Projective Geometry,’ described here, certainly deepens the effect of its imagery on the psyche.

I can only hope that, if you care about the Thoth deck, that each of you are brave enough to make up your own minds and feel free to “do as you will.” I leave you with this thought from old Aleister:

Know Naught!

All ways are lawful to innocence.

Pure folly is the key to initiation.

THE SUN – LE SOLEIL

The preceding Arcanum—"The Moon"—confronted us with the task of human intelligence to liberate itself from the magical enchantment which separates it from spontaneous wisdom, and to unite itself with the latter, i.e. to arrive at intuition. The nineteenth Arcanum—"The Sun"— is that of the accomplished union of intelligence and spontaneous wisdom: the Arcanum of intuition.

Intuition is what results from the intimate and profound alliance of intelligence and spontaneous wisdom. Now, the Card of the nineteenth Arcanum represents two children placed under the sun, where the one puts his right hand on the neck of the other as if he wanted to draw his head near to himself, whilst the other touches with his left hand the place on the body of the first where his heart is to be found. [...] One could hardly better represent the relationship of intelligence and spontaneous wisdom brought into play in intuition than as it is in the Card of the Arcanum "The Sun". For this relationship presupposes such purity of intention as is found only with a child, and it postulates such reciprocal confidence, without a shadow of doubt or suspicion, which belongs naturally to children. Lastly, this relationship excludes tendencies to domination and authority — to pose as a pontiff and to pride oneself on the eminence of the guru or master whose favours one enjoys[...].

"The children who are fraternising under the sun correspond all the better to Gemini because this zodiacal constellation brings in the longest days to us"—says Oswald Wirth (Le Tarot des imagiers du moyen age, Paris, 1927. p. 208), thus locating the nineteenth Arcanum in the zodiacal circle of twelve cosmic mysteries [...].

Now, the teaching-impulse called "Gemini" can be expressed by paraphrasing a little the first statement of the Emerald Table of Hermes:

May that which is below be as that which is above, and
may that which is above be as that which is below
to accomplish the miracles of one thing.

This is the principle of analogy put into practice, taking its point of departure from the principle of cooperation. It is the opposite of that of the struggle for existence advanced by Charles Darwin as the principle of evolution called "Sagittarius". Nature furnishes us at the same time with a great number of proofs of the principle of cooperation in the process of evolution —perhaps as many proofs as there are of the struggle for existence. The proofs are of a kind such that one could uphold the principle of cooperation to be worthy as the directing principle of natural evolution with the same justification as the principle of struggle may be upheld.[...]

Bees and flowering plants cooperate. Air, light and plants cooperate in photosynthesis, where the miracle of the transformation of inorganic matter into organic matter takes place—where "stones" are transformed into "bread". And, lastly, if mankind had not cooperated more than it had struggled, it would not only not have achieved the international civilisation of our time but it would probably have been annihilated.

There is therefore no doubt that the principle of cooperation has at least the same rights to be considered as the directing principle of evolution as that of the struggle for existence advanced by Darwinism. In other words, the diurnal principle of Gemini plays a role at least equal to the nocturnal principle of Sagittarius in natural evolution.

One of the highest aspects of the principle of Gemini, the principle of cooperation, is that which is present in intuition: that of the cooperation between spontaneous wisdom and intelligence. Here it is a matter of a state of consciousness where intelligence advances from formal knowledge to material knowledge, i.e. from knowledge of the relationships of things to knowledge of the things themselves. Now, the "knowledge of things themselves" entails two functions: on the one hand what Henri Bergson happily designates as "sympathy", and on the other hand a sustained and profound deepening in that with which the sympathetic relationship is established. [...] Here is a concrete example:

You venerate (i.e. you love and respect) a non-incarnated being —a departed person, a saint, or a hierarchical being—in a disinterested manner. Your veneration —which includes love, respect, gratitude, the desire to conform, etc.—cannot fail to create an invisible link of sympathy with its object.[...]

The meeting is thus the realisation of the relationship when it is borne to the limit of the intensity of clarity. According to the case, it can take either the character of a "conversation through forces" or that of a "conversation through words". In the former case it is not precise and articulated thoughts or images which are communicated to you, but rather "forces" or impulses —spiritual and psychic seeds impregnated germinally with moral ideas and judgements. In the case of the "conversation through words" a revelation of articulated thoughts and representations takes place. [...]

Now, the meeting whose character is "conversation through forces" always resembles the experience of the "star" of the mages from the East, and that whose character is "conversation through words" always resembles the experience of the shepherds of Bethlehem. The "star" does not speak, it moves; and it leaves to the subject of its revelation the work of research in the domain of intelligence and facts. The meeting whose character is "conversation through words", in contrast, moves and teaches — it bears also on the domain of intelligence and facts. It guides. [...]

With respect to the nineteenth Arcanum of the Tarot, we find it again in the work of Jung in the guise of the active cooperation of intelligence and transcendental revelatory being, which cooperation is not only the mature fruit of the work of his long life, but also it is the principal thesis of his method of work in the domain of depth psychology, which he openly advanced and maintained. The intuition postulated by Henri Bergson as necessary in order to be able to understand life and the world was practised by Jung in order to understand and to heal the life of the human soul. He did not commit the error of the mages of the Orient. He did not consult Herod and his people. [...]

In writing of the force of soul resulting from faithfulness to the "star"— the force which manifests itself in the power to resist the weakness of revolt (for revolt is a weakness where one lets oneself be carried away by the current of emotional impatience — the fundamental weakness of all rebels, including religious reformers as well as political revolutionaries and the most celebrated social reformers) and in the power to procure peace between two aspirations which are, or are believed to be, opposed to one another —it is difficult for me not to pay homage to two Hermeticists of our century, notably Francis Warrain and Dr. Paul Carton, both avowed Hermeticists.[...]

Intuition is therefore the cooperation of human intelligence with superhuman wisdom. It is what creates the link—or the "intermediary gnosis" and "intermediary magic"— between the absolute and the relative, between the supernatural and the natural, between faith and reason. Now, intuition can be developed only by people who have faith and who have reason. It is reserved for believing thinkers. Whosoever believes and does not think will never attain it. Whosoever thinks and does not believe will never have the certainty of transcendental things that intuition alone can give.

Intuition combines two certainties: essential certainty (that of essence), and consistent certainty (that of consistency). The former is of a moral order; its force of conviction resides in the good and the beautiful. The latter is of a cognitive order; its force of conviction resides in consistency in the vision of the relationships of things. Intuitive certainty is therefore "faith at first hand" combined with "intelligence at first hand".[...]

Now, it is postulative faith become faith at first hand (mysticism) which arrives at the perfect certainty of intuition as a consequence of the help of intelligence. John the Baptist still had need of this latter in order to have complete certainty. For this reason he —who had seen the Spirit descend upon Jesus —sent two disciples to Jesus to ask him, "Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another?" (Matthew xi, 3). And Jesus had to reply in the framework of intelligence alone: "Go and tell John what you hear and see" [...]

This is the briefest and most complete characteristic of intelligence and its role. Its role is immense, if one considers that intelligence is called to constitute an integral part of intuition [...].

This role was understood in the Middle Ages in the ecclesiastical milieu of the West. [...W]hat is at the root of scholasticism is the desire for the fullness of intuition, i.e. that of "baptising" intelligence and winning its cooperation with faith. [...]

Dear Unknown Friend, do not scorn mediaeval scholasticism. It is, in truth, as beautiful, as venerable and as inspiring as the great cathedrals that we have inherited from the Middle Ages. To it we owe a number of masterpieces of thought—thought in the light of faith. And, like all true masterpieces, those of mediaeval scholasticism are beneficial. They heal the disorientated, feverous and confused soul. [... I]t is this elevation above psychological complexes which is the salutary effect —even the healing action —of occupation with scholasticism, when one reads in the style of scholastic meditation.

[...] Why not mathematics? Doesn’t mathematics have the same effect of detachment and elevation above personal psychological limitations?

Without doubt mathematics also has a salutary effect. But it does not so engage the whole human being as does the totality of scholastic problems, and consequently its salutary effect does not have the same significance. What is at stake with scholasticism is God, the soul, freedom, immortality, salvation, good and evil. The triumph over psychological factors here is something quite different than triumph over the same psychological factors through occupying oneself with quantities and their functions alone.[...]

No more is it true that the mystical impulse from the end of the thirteenth and into the seventeenth century was purely and simply a reaction against the "dry intellectualism" of scholasticism. No, the flowering of mysticism during this epoch was the fruit and the result of scholasticism, prefigured in the spiritual biography of St. Thomas Aquinas himself. Notably, St. Thomas towards the end of his life arrived at mystical contemplation of God and the spiritual world and said, on returning from this ecstasy, that his written works now appeared ro him "like straw". Indeed, he wrote nothing after this.

The believing thinker thus became a seeing mystic. And this transformation did not take place in spite of his work of scholastic thought, but rather thanks to it —as its fruit and its crowning glory.

[...] Now, it is the nineteenth Arcanum of the Tarot which invites us to occupy ourselves quite especially with the "star" of Hermeticism in the heaven of intuition. What is this "star"? The Zohar says:

And God made the two great lights. . .originally, when the moon and sun were in intimate union, they shone with equal luminosity. The names JEHOVAH and ELOHIM were then associated as equals.. .and the two lights were dignified with the same name: MAZPAZ MAZPAZ. . .The two lights rose simultaneously and were of the same dignity. But. . . the moon humbled herself by diminishing her light, and renounced her place of higher rank. From that time she has had no light of her own, but derives her light from the sun. [...I]t was only after diminishing herself that she took the name ELOHIM. But her power is manifest in all directions. . .EL being "the dominion of the day", IM being "the dominion of the night" and HE in the middle being the remainder of the forces ("the stars"), participating in both dominions. (Zohar Bereshith 20a)

It is left to us only to cite another passage from an ancient source —from the eleventh book of Apuleius’ Metamorphosis —in order to have all the elements necessary to grapple, sufficiently equipped, with the problem of the "star" of Hermeticism and "The Sun" of the nineteenth Arcanum of the Tarot. Apuleius summarised his great vigil at the temple of Isis — the "arcana of the sacred night" (noctis sacratae arcana) —in the following way:

I approached the very gates of death and set one foot on Proserpine’s threshold, yet was permitted to return, rapt through all the elements. At midnight I saw the sun shining in its brilliant radiance; I entered the presence of the gods of the under-world and the gods of the upper-world, stood near and worshipped them. (Apuleius, Transformations: The Golden Ass)

Let us now seek for the reality, having in view the above-cited passage from the Zohar and the statement made by Apuleius. The Zohar tells us that the moon "renounced her place of higher rank"—that of equality with the sun —and that "from that time she has had no light of her own, but derives her light from the sun; nevertheless, her real light is greater than that which she radiates here below". Here below, therefore, the moon reflects the light of the sun, whilst above — where her name is ELOHIM —"her power is manifest in all directions… EL being ‘the dominion of the day’, IM being ‘the dominion of the night’ and HE in the middle being the remainder of the forces (‘the stars’), participating in both dominions."

Now, the moon, in so far as she is the nocturnal luminary here below, reflects the sun, but in so far as she is the nocturnal luminary above, she shines with her own light, and it is the sun which reflects her. In other words, the moon is "solar" above and "lunar" here below, whilst the sun is "solar" here below and "lunar" above. It is in this sense that EL, the radiant part of the moon’s name above, has "the dominion of the day",i.e. it is the visible sun — reflecting the invisible moon during the day. Similarly, the visible moon reflects the sun (become invisible) during the night. The spiritual moon is therefore the sun which shines at midnight. And it is the spiritual moon — or Isis-Sophia — that Apuleius "saw shining at midnight in its brilliant radiance". For the long vigil in the Isis temple resulted in a vision of the cosmic principle of Isis, i.e. the spiritual moon or the "sun at midnight".

All these things, although presented to us in mythological clothing, relate to the profound reality of the relationship of intelligence and wisdom, and their union —intuition. For intelligence corresponds to the moon, wisdom to the sun, and intuition to the restoration of the "intimate union" of the two luminaries. [...] "The Sun" of the nineteenth Arcanum is the "sun at midnight", i.e. the "sun" that Apuleius "saw shining at midnight in its brilliant radiance", and it is this "sun" which is the "star" of Hermeticism across the ages. It is the principle of intuition, or the intimate union of transcendental intelligence and wisdom.

The Arcanum of intuition is therefore that of knowing how to raise to creative intelligence the intelligence which reflects, and how to effect its union with wisdom, i.e. that of the work of re-establishing, firstly, the union of intelligence of diminished light here below with the intelligence of complete light above, and then the union of intelligence-thus-reunited with divine wisdom (see figure).[...]

Just as the impulse of scholasticism, on the historical ladder of western civilisation, did not lead to a perfect system of scholastic philosophy, but rather to mysticism, so does individual intelligence, on the ladder of individual development, lead to intuition and not to a state where it knows all and explains all. Intelligence is not the absolute aim; in developing, it is transformed into intuition. It is called to effect the passage from argumentative reasoning to comprehensive intuition. [...]

The Zohar and Apuleius speak of the moon and the sun joined —the sign which is the sign of Isis. We find this sign again in the apocalyptic vision of the woman enveloped by the sun and with the moon under her feet. But the apocalyptic vision adds here a third element: the twelve stars.

In other words, intelligence united to wisdom in intuition still does not signify the achievement of the work of the reintegration of consciousness, if it is not crowned by a third element, which corresponds to the "stars" just as intelligence corresponds to the "moon" and wisdom to the "sun". What, therefore, is this third element?

In order to understand its role and nature it is still necessary for us to look at — and this time more closely — the experience of spirits who turned from intellectualism to intuitionism. [...It is] the German philosopher [...] Schopenhauer [...] author of the celebrated book The World as Will and Representation, who made the decisive step from Kant’s thesis (that phenomena hide the essence of things, and that the essence remains inaccessible to intelligence as such) to the intuitive introspection of the essence of one thing —the Self—a thing that represents and contains the other things of the world.

This intuitive introspection allowed him to arrive at the conclusion that it is the will which is the essence of things, and that things are only representations of the will. Therefore the world is, according to Schopenhauer, a unique will which represents or "imagines" the multiplicity of things. And as Schopenhauer found that the same experience gave rise to almost the same conclusion in Indian mystical philosophy—above all in the Vedanta, based on the Upanishads of the Vedas — he said: "The Upanishads were my consolation in life, and they will also be so in death".

Thus, the mystical philosophy of India is the original and prototype of intuitionist philosophies of the West —such as that of Schopenhauer, Deussen and Eduard von Hartmann [...]. Let us therefore examine the fundamental experience and principal conclusion to be drawn from the mystical philosophy of India, as represented by the Vedanta of the Advaita ("non-dualist") school.

This philosophy is founded on intuitive-introspection -as method. This is based on the one hand on experience of the will as the element underlying all intellectual, psychological, biological and mechanical movement, and on the other hand on the experience of the "inner eye" or detached transcendental Self, which observes the movements produced by the will. The will creates the multiplicity of mental, psychic, biological and mechanical phenomena, in contrast to the unity of "the Seer in seeing" (the transcendental Self). The transcendental Self does not move, therefore it does not change, therefore it is immortal, therefore it is not an entity separated from the real essence of the world, and thus it is one with it. The true Self of man and the essence of the real world— or God— are identical. Aham Brahma asmi ("I am Brahma") —this is the formula which gives a summary of the experience and conclusions drawn by the Vedanta.

Now, it suffices on the one hand not to identify with the will and its movements and on the other hand to identify with the transcendental Self—"the Seer in seeing"— in order to attain to the real being and essence of the world in the intuitive experience of Vedanta adherents and German intuitionist philosophers. But one could ask: Is the intuitive experience of the transcendental Self truly final and complete, so that nothing follows it or surpasses it? Is the experience of the transcendental Self truly the nec plus ultra ("the ultimate") of knowledge?

Indeed, it lacks something important: the whole spiritual world, i.e. the Holy Trinity and the nine spiritual hierarchies. The "great portent" of which the Apocalypse speaks indicates beyond the sun and moon a crown of twelve stars on the head of the woman.

The intuitive experience of the transcendental Self—sublime and stimulating as it may be —does not suffice, alone, to let us perceive, and to render us conscious of, the spiritual world. The union of the "moon" and the "sun" alone, in the human spiritual microcosm, still does not signify the experience of the spiritual macrocosm. It is not sufficient to elevate oneself to the transcendental Self; it is necessary, still further, that this transcendental Self perceives and becomes conscious of other "transcendental Selves"—many of which are higher than it. The transcendental Self of man, as eternal and immutable as it is, is not the ultimate summit in world evolution.

[..] Judaeo-Christian Hermeticism, which ranges itself on the side of Sankya with respect to the negation of the identification of the "transcendental Self with God, is intensely occupied with the third "luminary"—the "stars"—in the three aspects of astrology, angelology and trinitarian theology, which aspects correspond to the body, soul and spirit of the third "luminary". Judaeo-Christian Hermeticism is thus the sustained effort across the centuries to know and understand the three luminaries in their unity, i.e. to know and understand the "great portent which appeared in heaven — a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars" (Revelation xii, 1). It is the woman in this apocalyptic vision who unites the three "luminaries"— the moon, the sun and the stars, i.e. the luminaries of night, day and eternity.

It is she —the "Virgin of light" of the Pistis Sophia, the Wisdom sung of by Solomon, the Shekinah of the Cabbala, the Mother, the Virgin, the pure celestial Mary—who is the soul of the light of the three luminaries, and who is both the source and aim of Hermeticism. For Hermeticism is, as a whole, the aspiration to participation in knowledge of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and the Mother, Daughter and Holy Soul. It is not a matter of seeing the Holy Trinity with human eyes, but rather of seeing with the eyes —and in the light —of Mary-Sophia.[...]

The Athenians, also, had an analogous feminine triad, which played the principal role in the mysteries of Eleusis: Demeter—the Mother, Persephone —the Daughter, and "Athena the bringer of salvation" (cf. Olympiodorus, In Platonis Phaedonem commentaria = "Commentary on the Phaedo of Plato"; ed. W. Norvin, Leipzig, 1913, p. Ill)—where Athena was at the same time the "community of Athens" or the "soul of Athens" as it were, analogous to the "Virgin of Israel".

Historical analogies and metaphysical parallels alone, however, do not suffice to attain the complete certainty of intuition: it is for the heart to say the last decisive word. Thus the following "argument of the heart" proved to be decisive, twenty-five years ago, to the one who writes these lines.

There is nothing which is more necessary and more precious in the experience of human childhood than parental love; nothing more necessary, because the human child, alone, is not viable if it is not taken from the first moments of its life into the circle of care of parental love or, lacking parental love, its substitute-charity; nothing more precious, because the parental love experienced in childhood is moral capital for the whole of life. In childhood we receive two dowries for life, two assets from which we can draw during the whole of life: the vital biological asset which is the treasure of our health and vital energy, and the moral asset which is the treasure of health of soul and its vital energy—its capacity to love, to hope and to believe. The moral asset is the experience of parental love that we have had in childhood. It is so precious, this experience, that it renders us capable of elevating ourselves to more sublime things —even to divine things.[...] For it is the experience of parental love —and it is above all this —which renders us capable of loving the "Architect" or "First Cause" of the world as our Father who is in heaven. Parental love bears in itself true senses of the soul for the Divine —which are, by analogy, eyes and ears of the soul.

Now, the experience of parental love consists of two elements: the experience of maternal love and that of paternal love. The one and the other are equally necessary and equally precious. The one and the other render us capable of raising ourselves to the Divine. The one and the other signify to us the means of entering into a living relationship with God, which means to love God, who is the prototype of all paternity and all maternity. [...]

Similarly, it is so with the rosary prayer, where appeal to the two aspects of divine paternal love in the prayer addressed to the Father and the Mother is made during meditation on the mysteries of the Joy, Suffering and Glory of the Blessed Virgin. The rosary prayer is — in any case for the Hermeticist — again a masterpiece of simplicity, containing and revealing things of inexhaustible profundity. . a masterpiece of the Holy Spirit!

Dear Unknown Friend, the Arcanum "The Sun" with which we are occupied is an Arcanum of children bathing in the light of the sun. Here it is not a matter of finding occult things, but rather of seeing ordinary and simple things in the light of day of the sun —and with the look of a child.

The nineteenth Arcanum of the Tarot, the Arcanum of intuition, is that of revelatory naivety in the act of knowledge, which renders the spirit capable of an intensity of look not troubled by doubt and by the scruples engendered by doubt, i.e. it is the vision of things such as they are under the eternally new day of the sun. It teaches the art of undergoing the pure and simple impression which reveals through itself—without intellectual hypotheses and superstructures —what things are. To render impressions noumenous— this is what it is a matter of in the Arcanum "The Sun", the Arcanum of intuition.

You will understand therefore, dear Unknown Friend, that in speaking of parental love and of its two aspects, in speaking of the practice of the novena and the rosary prayer, etc., we are in no way estranging ourselves from the theme of the nineteenth Arcanum of the Tarot; rather, on the contrary, we are penetrating to its very heart. For we are endeavouring to advance from an understanding of what intuition is to its exercise, i.e. from meditation on the Arcanum of intuition to the use of this Arcanum.

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.

It is blasphemy! Imagine someone having the gall to suggest that the Tarot, which was referred to as the ‘Devil’s Book’ in the Middle Ages, is presenting the same gospel as Jesus’ New Testament. For this to happen there would have to be two significant paradigm shifts. One shift would require a new understanding of Jesus’ New Testament, and the other, a new understanding of the Tarot. And this is the seat of the problem. Christianity, the religion that emerged in the century following Jesus’ death, monopolised his teachings and declared that its interpretation of Jesus’ teachings, was in fact, the only valid interpretation. A similar fate unfolded with the Tarot. A set of images that were created during the 14th century as a sacred map, where trivialised a hundred years later into a card game and system of divination.

What if the original gospel taught by Jesus had been radically distorted by a religion that declared itself to represent his doctrine? What if the Tarot was not a divining tool but a sacred map? What if the Major Arcana of the Tarot was the primitive, pre-Christian teachings of Jesus recorded in picture form to preserve the integrity of his teachings, during a time when his gospel of love had been distorted by power and greed? If these questions were plausible, then one could assume that the symbolism of the Major Arcana would reveal a dimension to Jesus’ teachings that have been forgotten or ignored for hundreds of years.

If this is in anyway conceivable, then its ramifications will be enormous. This would challenge the validity of Christianity, especially if the doctrine revealed by the Tarot is significantly different to the teachings currently represented by Christianity. This would put into question the position that Christianity represents Jesus’ authentic teachings. Would this make Christianity obsolete? It’s hard to imagine a world without Christianity. But there would have been many people anciently who thought that religions like Mithraism (second century B.C. to fourth century A.D.), and the Eleusinian rites of Demeter (13th century B.C. to fourth century A.D.), would never disappear. No wonder the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages declared the Tarot heretical and went to great lengths to exterminate the ‘heretics’ responsible for their creation.

This radical proposal rests solely on the idea that the Major Arcana of the Tarot reveals a more primitive and original understanding to Jesus’ New Testament than what is contemporarily accepted by Christianity as the New Testament. The Major Arcana (the word arcana meaning ‘secret or mystery’) is made up of 22 picture cards, which originally appear to have been a stand-alone set of images. The earliest references to these images arose in Northern Italy, in the region of Milan, around the middle of the 14th century. This was during the time when Milan was under the control of the Visconti family. Taking control of Milan at the end of the 13th century, Otto Visconti was appointed as the archbishop, however, he became a self-declared heretic, which saw Milan, along with several other Northern Italian cities, being ‘excommunicated’ by the church. The void of religious instruction that came as a consequence of the Catholic Church’s actions was filled by the Cathari and Patarini heretics, who the church attempted to exterminate thorough the Albigensian Crusade and the Inquisition. It appears that Milan became a refuge for the fleeing heretics and their form of spirituality appealed to the Italian nobles, just as it had to the nobles of Southern France from where they were fleeing.

It is thought that the inspiration for these sacred images, which later became known as the Major Arcana of the Tarot, may have come from these religious heretics. A set of images arose that later became known as the Marseille Tarot. It is widely accepted that the style of these images predate all other sets of Tarot cards, which are currently known to exist. These days, Tarot cards come in all forms and in most cases hold no resemblance to the primitive images of the Marseille Tarot. This rejection of the Marseille symbology was indicative of the shift which occurred in the 15th century, which saw the images that were originally designed to be a sacred map, become a tool for divination. It is worth noting that the declaration by the Church that the cards were the “Devil’s Books” appears to predate their use for divination. This would suggest that the Church’s banning of the images was a consequence of some other form of heresy.

All of these images lend support to the idea that the Major Arcana of the Marseille Tarot were created during the 14th century. It also would suggest that the creation of these images took place in the region of Northern Italy. However, what of its doctrinal relationship?

The Cathars believed that this world was an illusion, in fact, they believed that a lesser deity was the God of this world. Their goal was to awaken from this world in order to enter the kingdom of Heaven, and believed that the Sermon on the Mount, in particular the Beatitudes, explained how that was possible. The images of the Major Arcana were designed to explain the whole process of transformation, but the part of the process which related to Jesus’ Beatitudes was depicted in cards 12 to 20. In his teaching of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus explained to his audience (which was primarily Jewish) that what he was teaching them was not intended to do away with the old testament (the law or the prophets which included the temple rituals), but that he was there to make them more meaningful. He was challenging his audience to adopt rituals for a temple ‘not made with hands’. His new testament was a form of spiritual psychology, which he goes onto explain in detail in his sermon. This was such a new concept to his Jewish audience that the last verse in the scriptures relating to the Sermon on the Mount explains that the people were ‘astonished at his doctrine’.

The core structure of his psychology was explained in the eight Beatitudes. These statements summarised the transformative process required to overcome the world of illusion in order to find the kingdom of Heaven. Cleverly, the Cathars created images that explained that process.

The Christian church was unable to align itself with this version of Jesus’ gospel because it required detachment from power (control) and wealth, the important things of this world. It necessitated righteousness, forgiveness, charity and peace as the only priorities. This version of Jesus’ gospel taught that in Christ consciousness there was “neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female”. This form of Jesus’ gospel has not been practiced in two thousand years, with the exception of the few who truly understood his primitive teachings. The Cathars were one group who honoured his primitive teachings. In an attempt to salvage these teachings, Jesus’ New Testament was transposed into a set of 22 images that would later be referred to as the Tarot. It is very possible that the Tarot was in fact Jesus’ New Testament.

Russell Sturgess is the author of the book Metanoia: Renovating the House of Your Spirit from which this article is derived. Russell is also the director of education for beAttitude, which presents a system of education based on the primitive teachings of Jesus, in particular the eight Beatitudes.

When I first obtained volume 1 in 1985, it had already been in print since 1978, the internet did not yet exist, and the variety of tarot decks available in any location was a reflection of the views of those in that region: in France, basically only the playing cards, the Grimaud Marseille and some Etteilla were available; in contrast, in the USA it was basically the Waite-Smith or the 1jj, both marketed by US Games, the owner of which, Stuart Kaplan, is simultaneously the author of this Encyclopedia.

Matters of tarot were also rapidly changing. Numerous new decks were coming out, and the ‘crystal craze’ appeared to be replaced by an emerging ‘tarot craze’. Neo-paganism in its various forms was already the rage in many parts of ‘Western’ countries in which English was spoken, and, to also provide a totally contrasting perspective on the way in which tarot was looked upon by the populace, Michael Dummett (not yet ‘Sir’) had also already published his massively influential (though still seldom read) The Game of Tarot (1980).

It wasn’t until nearly ten years had lapsed since the first volume had appeared that volume II of the Encyclopedia was published in 1986. By then, the tarot ‘furore’ was in full swing, and it took merely another four years for volume III to appear in 1990.

These ‘volumes’ are also perhaps not to be thought as pre-organised, planned and structured as one may expect an encylopædia to be: establishing clear guidelines and structure across a number of volumes that would see later editions amend errors or omissions occuring in its antecedent edition. Rather, and, I would suggest, out of necessity at the time, the first volume sought to encapsulate as a resource all decks and writings about tarot that was known at the time, simultaneously aware that much was in the process of being published which would, of necessity, form the basis of a later volume in which could also be included decks and writings from earlier times that had since been uncovered… and likewise for volume III.

By that stage, the style of each volume was well established. It took another fifteen years before volume IV emerged in 2005. By then, US Games had become one (though its largest) amongst various tarot publishers, and a large number of new decks had also emerged from an unexpected source: in Japan in various Manga and related styles. In Europe, K. Frank Jensen had already established what is likely to be the most complete collection of 20th century tarot decks (in addition to completing ten years of his Manteia); the Musée des Cartes a Jouer was opened in Paris; Lo Scarabeo was emerging as a major player in card production and variety of design; quite a number of early decks had been re-published (often in limited runs) by the likes of Flornoy, Grimaud, Il Meneghello and Héron; and, importantly, the advent of the Internet had made not only deck variety well known and often partially readily available, but also enabled those interested to communicate with one another across the globe and, at times, purchase decks that may have simply otherwise been locally unavailable.

I personally think that it is in that context that the volumes have to first be considered and assessed for not only their worth, but also their influence and future development. On the subject of their future development, a brief mention should here be made that volume V is apparently in preparation. Personally, I strongly suspect that such will be the last of the series – at least in that form.

Structure of books

I have been using the volumes in what may be considered semi-frequent but regular ways since obtaining that first volume now (…how time flies) nearly 25 years ago. By far the volume that has seen the most wear (simply because of my usage) is volume II. I must admit that I still find their structure somewhat confusing.

One way to describe their structure in a nutshell is to consider that each volume has a three-fold division, the central one being its most visual and likely its main selling point: firstly, there is (or are) some tarot essay(s) of note, each volume focussed on different essays; secondly, there are listings of numerous tarot decks with representative imagery from each; and thirdly, and not to be dismissed, what is perhaps collectively the most complete tarot bibliography, usually briefly annotated.

The Essays

The essays make their appearance usually at the beginning of each volume, though volume IV is a little distinct in this regard. Also, volumes I and II have essays towards the end. Still, in essence, the essays provide some view on the development, the interpretation, or some other consideration on tarot. In general, they each provide good synopsis of the main views they advocate in the context of research of the times in which they were published.

Volume I, which, it must be recalled, was originally published in 1978, provides a good synopsis of the views of a large variety of authors, though in some cases makes statements that assumes the veracity of the views promulgated by the Golden Dawn.

The chapters that follow on early references to playing cards and to tarot, as well as the references to the Visconti Sforza emblems, still provide (together with volume II) one of the most accessible reference work as a foundation to that area of investigation – despite the work that has taken place over the past thirty years, including at least one PhD.

The essays at the end of the book, on card interpretation and on spreads, reflects the times in which they were written and the scarcity of readily available equivalent material at the time. From my point of view, the ‘interpretations’ provided, as well as the card-position meaning of the various spreads, appear a little fixed. To be fair, on the other hand, especially the second essay can be taken as reporting on the spreads found in other works.

In volume II, the essays on various things historical are a real mine for research regarding early considerations pertinent to tarot. There’s not much out there that is comparable and that easily accessible. If for no other reason, it makes this volume – for myself at any rate – indispensible.

Volume III’s essay on Pamela Colman Smith appears (to me at lesat) to lack due acknowledgement to Melinda Parsons’s 1975 MA dissertation. The essay is nonetheless well worth reading, but it has to be taken in light of the incredible amount of work that has emerged over the last few years. As such, it forms one amongst a number of such materials, including, of course, Frank Jensen’s 2006 Story of the Waite-Smith Tarot (though this admittedly hit the press subsequent to volume III which, it must be recalled, was published some sixteen years earlier in 1990).

With volume IV, there are no essays of comparable breadth or depth as in the other volumes. Still, worthy of mention is a one-page description near the end of the volume which includes the number of permutations possible for a given ten-card spread (basically, 78!/68!).

Overall, it seems to me that though some of the essays (such as especially the ones in volumes II and III) have their proper place in the series, others would be better presented in different media – such as a journal or Newsletter.

The strength of the volumes lies not, in any case, in the essays, and doubt that anyone would purchase the Encyclopedia (with the possible exception of volume II) for that content.

Annotated Bibliography

I next jump to the last section of the Encyclopedia simply to make brief mention and then return to the central content. Yet, though brief, it should not be underestimated!

This still remains a location which not only lists publications as near comprehensive as can reasonably be expected but, more importantly, still remains uniquely so!

The annotations are also, though brief, of merit. This is one area I hope to either see somehow reflected online (whether on Tarotpedia or elsewhere) or as on ongoing updated and separate volume of its own.

Tarot Decks

What makes the Encyclopedia wonderful for many remains, of course, the ease of access to representative cards from hundreds of decks. Yet this is also its own downfall: until volume IV, there was effectively no other means these were able to be accessed in one place with relative ease. These days, not only are most of the images from those same decks online in a variety of places, but also in colour.

Again, and through this aspect alone, the Encyclopedia, in its current form, shows its age and its past merit.

If it has not as yet been surpassed online, it is more that comparable work has to be systematically undertaken by not only someone who has the passion required, but also the resources. At the moment, this is spread across a number of individuals working in different locations across the world in non-coordinated ways and, as such, the Encyclopedia, despite the awkward manner in which the decks are arranged, remains in a unique position.

I say the decks are arranged in an awkward manner and yet, to be sure, I cannot say what other way they could have been better presented. The way they are grouped together suggests, for each volume, a logic that makes sense, even if across volumes new finds, new decks, or new styles cuts across groupings from earlier volumes.

It should be recalled that volume IV, as an example, does not arise out of a plan before volume I was completed, but rather is itself a consequence of the inevitable omissions of the previous three volumes.

If the whole four volumes were to have been written today, then I certainly would expect their overall arrangement to differ greatly with greater focus on earlier decks in the earlier volumes and greater sub-groupings with decks that have emerged since 1980.

Overview

So, in a nutshell, what do I think of them? Firstly, I sincerely hope that the set gets a fifth volume as many amongst us expect. Irrespective of their limitations, it is a set that will remain for years to come a testament to the diversity and richness of not only tarot in general, but also of this period in its history – and it seems to me that its closing volume has yet to appear.

For tarot enthusiasts and researchers, the set, irrespective as to whether most images also become available online and whether Tarotpedia or something similar develops to the extent of the volumes of the Encyclopedia of Tarot, remains a fount of reference material that is both relatively affordable and (still) readily accessible.

There are, of course, other books on tarot that any bookshelf ought to include. These, however, remain amongst that select group.

Bibliographic details

Encyclopedia of Tarot vol. I (isbn 0913866113 ), 1978
Stuart R. Kaplan
387 pages + 8 colour pages
images from 250 decks
30 page annotated bibliography

Encyclopedia of Tarot vol. II (isbn 0913866369 ), 1986
Stuart R. Kaplan
552 pages + 16 colour pages
images from 300 decks
28 page annotated bibliography

Encyclopedia of Tarot vol. III (isbn 0880791225 ), 1990
Stuart R. Kaplan
694 pages + 16 colour pages
images from over 550 decks
6 page annotated bibliography

Encyclopedia of Tarot vol. IV (isbn 157281506X ), 2005
Stuart R. Kaplan & Jean Huets
802 pages + 16 colour pages
images from over 800 decks
32 page annotated bibliography

> www.usgamesinc.com

Publishers Lo Scarabeo arouse a variety of feelings among tarot aficionados. Their decks are immensely popular, but have their detractors; some feel they are too “commercial”; some feel their decks “stray too far” from “true tarot” – whatever that is; some feel their decks are too much alike one another (seeing a house style that to them seems to breed similarity – and it is true that you can usually spot a Lo Scarabeo deck in the crowd, if only by the multi-lingual titles !); some just seem to resent their success. But no-one can deny that they are the primary publishers of unusual tarot decks, and have taken many risks to put them on the market. And there can be no doubt that without their input, the tarot world would be much the poorer. Twenty Years of Tarot tells their story; it is captivating and fascinating, and in itself unusual.

The cover was a shock. I’d expected something far more colourful; it is beautifully understated in the extreme, and the reader is almost forcibly drawn to open it to see more. Inside, it is so lushly illustrated that it’s hard to concentrate on the text at first; the pictures draw you through. It is less of a book to be read from start to finish than a collection of very well illustrated essays. Each chapter in it – they are by a variety of authors – can stand alone. This has led in some areas to repetition of information, but I don’t find that matters at all; on the contrary, it means it is possible to immerse yourself totally in one chapter and not feel the need to check back on what was said many pages before. There is a degree of unevenness in quality and level of research, but again, with a number of different authors this is inevitable.

For me, a collector since long before they put out their first deck, it is also something of a trip down memory lane. I have many of the decks in my collection, and it was lovely to read The Story Behind The Dream, and learn how each deck came to be. I had had no idea of the story of Lo Scarabeo: that it was a dream for Pietro Alligo, the founder of the company – a multitalented man with a vision, for which he abandoned a successful career, and persuaded friends and associates to come on board his new venture. He was determined to write

“a new chapter …… in the long-standing history of tarot, making cards that blended esoteric culture with artistic research. In fact at that time, few publishers offered anything really new or interesting.”

I was already collecting by then; this is very true. I well remember the first Lo Scarabeo deck I ever saw – the Universali di Sergio Toppi. I went back to my dealer and bought all the others he had received by then. I knew these were something special.

One thing that shines through when reading this book is the passion and commitment of everyone in the company. The description of the deck creation process is fascinating; while it sounds a little like “deck by committee”, the details of the thought and planning that have gone into every single deck, including those rejected, beggars belief. The detractors who say that Lo Scarabeo just churn out anything they can to make money are clearly well off the mark. No-one can expect to like everything they do, but after reading this, no-one can doubt that this charge is totally unfair.

A Historical Path, a chapter by Giordano Berti, gives a thorough and solid history of tarot without being controversial – there are a number of theories and “facts” but his account is authoritative, interesting, and reads very well. I particularly enjoy the little details you’d never find elsewhere, such as the reference to “cheaper decks equivalent to a cobbler’s monthly salary” being produced for the Este court in the 15th century. Berti is also responsible for the fascinating chapter The Esoteric Path, tracing the rise of the use of tarot for esoteric purposes that began with de Gebelin.

Pietro Alligo’s chapter about the Waite-Smith First Edition and his search for its origins is lavishly illustrated, perhaps bringing a part of the history of the deck to life even more than the recent book by Frank Jensen (The Story of the Waite-Smith Tarot) to which Alligo refers. And The Artistic Path describes the way Lo Scarabeo go about creating a “tribute “ deck to an individual artist – such as Botticelli, Da Vinci or Bosch. It is no mean feat to create a deck of this type while remaining true to tarot imagery and it had never occurred to me to wonder about the process by which this is achieved.

In this chapter, almost as a passing remark, is the statement:

“…the continuous adaptation of the twenty-two Major Arcana from the 15th century to the present shows how admirably this system can withstand endless transformations and reinterpretations that take the Arcana, in some cases, to the extreme limit of identifiability. This is why Lo Scarabeo is always asking: when can this transformation no longer be acceptable? In other words, when does a deck cease to be a tarot deck?”

There is also a reference to illustrated pip cards and the difficulty of balancing the absence of limits and adapting tarot to new themes against the risk of “losing the thread”. This is the line Lo Scarabeo has always walked so well; it underpins everything they do, and it is the attitude that has led to their pre-eminent position in tarot publication. The book shows in great detail the agonisingly thorough process by which they try to ensure that ever deck they produce is a “real tarot” – whatever that may be. Balance comes up again in A Cultural Path, where there is discussion of the need for translation of the archetypes of different cultures, and evocation of an appropriate state of mind for a culture – whether historical or ethnic. This, too, supports the idea that tarot is a living, evolving tradition, one which can illuminate other cultures, even including those we don’t know (like that of the Etruscans.)

And then there is the chapter about the decks which got away. Mark McElroy shows us decks which are not yet finished, describes a few ideas that are as yet little more than ideas, showcases some discarded versions of decks that were published – (some decisions I agree with; others I regret !) as well as one or two decks which a few enthusiasts are now clamouring to see completed…

In some areas the book does read a little like a catalogue, but it is impossible to avoid this when telling the story of so many decks, and it is no real problem. The company has issued more than a hundred, alongside a number of books, and to tell its history, it would be hard to decide which decks not to mention. As well as this, there is information on the link with Llewellyn in the US, Lo Scarabeo’s playing card department, their comic strip decks – there is so much information here that perhaps people should just buy the book than rely on a review.

One small thing that isn’t mentioned in the book is the number of names the company gave itself as publisher; I have decks from: Lo Scarabeo Fantastico, Lo Scarabeo Mignon, Lo Scarabeo Azzurro, Lo Scarabeo Fantastico, Lo Scarabeo Dell’Arte, Lo Scarabeo Bizzarro and Lo Scarabeo Antico, as well as a few published by “Ideogramma (Pietro Alligo)”. I would have liked to know more about this.

The only major flaw in the book is the rather large, I’m afraid, number of typographical errors, particularly in the captions for illustrations. Most are not serious and just irritate a bit, but the fact that there are so many slightly obscures the one serious one – the misspelling of Etteilla (as “Ettellia”) throughout one chapter, which does suggest an error by its author, rather than a typo. An index might have been useful – although in a book of 127 pages it might perhaps seem unnecessary, there were occasions that I would certainly have found one helpful. An appendix listing every deck produced, with dates, would have been nice, too.

This lovely book does just what it set out to do; it tells the story of one of the world’s favourite tarot publishers. It is a worthy “anniversary party” for a company that has a great deal to celebrate, The illustrations are excellent. And as I say, the passion for tarot shines through. It is also a valuable reference book, with a wealth of information beyond the story of Lo Scarabeo, and it paints an excellent picture of how Tarot, in general, is changing and evolving. Tarot is not set in stone, and if one company can be said to be pre-eminent in making sure that it never will be, that company is Lo Scarabeo.

This is a book that deserves to be popular among tarotists at all levels. Lo Scarabeo has done us and itself proud.

[review by E.C.]