Association for Tarot Studies

Journeying the Sixties: A Counterculture Tarot

William Haigwoodwww.counterculturecreations.com
“The thing itself is unreachable, but its phenomenon can be apprehended through the structures of thought.”
–Immanuel Kant
“To have a new vision of the future, it has always been necessary to have a new vision of the past.”
–Historian Theodore Zeldin

When I recently wrote and created The Counterculture Tarot I finished a [...]

1701 Dodal restored!

Jean-Michel David
www.fourhares.com
I like to imagine what it will be like in 300 years hence: perhaps one of Flornoy’s decks survives, having been found in one of Melbourne’s museums, and perhaps a mastercraftsman has picked it up, obtained high resolution images thereof, and seeks to remake it afresh for all to enjoy. Some of the colours [...]

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 in [...]

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 available by [...]

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 [...]

Tarot Trumps and Hebrew Letters:
variety and divergence

Jean-Michel David
www.fourhares.com
In looking through various decks and reading across a reasonably broad variety of books on tarot, divergent claims are made for trumps and various correlations. One of the most persistent is the claim that somehow trump cards and letters of the alphabet have correlations.
If the earliest extent tarot cards have any such letter attributions [...]

Review: Jean Payen Tarot 1743 / 2008

Jean-Michel David www.fourhares.com
There are a small number of decks which many amongst us have longed to see re-printed or make it to publication. The Jean Payen Tarot is one of those, and that for a variety of reasons, not least of which it forms an important link in the lineage of tarot during one of [...]

Tarot and Freemasonry: an amorous chasm

Jean-Michel David www.fourhares.com
I’ll begin boldly: modern Tarot arises in France in the mid-17th century; whereas modern Freemasonry arises in England in the early 18th. Neither knows of the other and the two are not seen in any manner as related nor as connected.
I suppose I should justify a little my dates as they are undoubtedly [...]

A History of Egyptian Tarot Decks

Mark Filipas
In 1781, the French author Court de Gébelin referred to the Tarot as a book preserving the pure wisdom of ancient Egypt. This is the first written suggestion that occult wisdom had been encoded in the cards – in spite of the fact that they had already been in use for over 300 years.
It [...]

Whither Directing Your Course?

Jean-Michel David
If the ‘Whence come you?’ can be said to often be asked of tarot, its complementary question seems often overlooked.
Painting upon a broad canvas the development of tarot, we find its genesis in the region that is now Northern Italy, amidst influences from neo-platonism and neo-aristotelean thought. During the 19th century, its adaptation [...]