The Fool as Wandering Jew

by Jean-Michel David During Mediæval times, the legend of the wandering Jew gained popular recognition. I have previously (around 2003 on Aeclectic’s TarotForum) written some comments that indicates possible connections between the Fool and the Wandering Jew – what we shall be briefly looking at here are not only some of those references, but also [...]

Tarot as Christian Art

by Jean-Michel David No doubt simply due to that I recently had to summarise and review the first 460 pages of Meditations on the Tarot in completing the monthly studies that have taken us through the first sixteen trumps, I found myself reflecting on not only some fundamental principles taken for granted in the book, [...]

Boethius, Fortuna, the Ass and the Monkey

The Wheel of Fortune by Jean-Michel David There are a few cards in the sequence that were especially influential in sending me scurrying through historical connections and developments. This is one of those, the other two being XVI and XXI. Not that other cards lack such aspect, of course. The Wheel has numerous details worthy [...]

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 [...]