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 [...]

The Renaissance and the Birth of the Tarot

by David Brice The Early Tarot Images When Dante Alighieri began writing his Divina Comedia in 1306, he envisioned himself moving through a universe composed of a series of concentric circles. It began with Hell, inside the spherical earth and consisting of nine circles culminating in a red-hot core. The earth itself, enclosed in its [...]

Meditations on the Tarot:
A Journey Into Christian Hermeticism

book by Anonymous written in French by a Russian ex-patriot living in London, 1967 Review by Jean-Michel David (originally written in 2002 in light of the new release of the book) As the Robert Powell 1985 translation of this book has just been published for the third time, I thought it timely to write this [...]