Association for Tarot Studies

Meditation on the Nineteenth Major Arcanum of the Tarot

extract from the book Meditations on the Tarot 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 [...]

A Century with the Waite-Smith Tarot (and all the others…)

K. Frank Jensen 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 [...]

The Tarot – Jesus’ New Testament

Russell Sturgess www.beattitude.com.au 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 [...]

Christ, the World and Sin

Jean-Michel David www.fourhares.com Unless living in continental Europe and knowing what to look for and where, it is only since the nineteen-eighties that images from older decks became easily accessible with Kaplan’s first volume of his now four volume (and I hear soon-ish to be five) Encyclopedia of Tarot. Even with the first two volumes [...]

Petrarch’s Triumphs and the creation of tarot

by Robert Mealing forum.tarothistory.com Years ago, when I first started exploring tarot history, I came to the conclusion that Petrarch’s Triumphs were probably a key element in the creation of tarot. Petrarch was a major influence on his time, and tarot was born not too long afterward. To see this connection wasn’t a new or [...]

Ovid, Egypt, Hebrew and Tarot

De Gebelin and le C. de M*** by Jean-Michel David I must admit that whenever I look again at the essays on tarot in De Gébelin’s 18th century Monde Primitif analysé et comparé avec le Monde Moderne (“Primitive World analysed and compared with the Modern World”), I am struck not as much by De Gebelin’s [...]

The Jean Noblet Tarot,
restored by Jean-Claude Flornoy

by Robert Mealing Over 350 years ago, in the fashionable Faubourg Saint-Germain section of Paris, France, a cardmaker named Jean Noblet produced what was probably considered a fairly ordinary deck of tarot cards. Tarot historian Michael Dummett suggests that “A million is probably a highly conservative estimate for the number of Tarot packs produced in France [...]

When the Devil is not the Devil

by Jean-Michel David Some weeks back I was looking through the shelves and display of Oracle, a local shop in Sassafras in the Dandenong Ranges just outside of Mebourne – a great shop to visit, by the way – and my eye was drawn to a rather unusual statue that reminded me so much of [...]

Thinking out loud about tarot history

by Ross G. Caldwell Le Bateleur, from Jean-Claude Flornoy’s reproduction of the 22 Jean Dodal trumps (Lyon c: 1701/1715). Concerning Bembo Bembo is certainly the artist of 68 Visconti-Sforza cards, as well as the trumps of the Cary-Yale. He is probably not the artist of the Brambilla. If Bembo painted the Cary-Yale trumps in 1441, [...]

A thought on the Cardinal Virtues in the Tarot Cards

featuring the Bible of Notger by Eguchi Koretaka Originally presented on Eguchi’s site The earliest known tarot decks are “Visconti-Sforza”, hand-painted in early fifteenth century. But these splendid pieces of fine art were minorities because of their artistic quality; such extavagant decks were for the aristocratic pastime in a palace or castle. The streets and [...]