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 weaving thoughts surrounding this legend with aspects of relatively recent political developments in light of Rudolf Steiner’s Christology… some of which will undoubtedly seem a little stretched or far-fetched to some. Still, here goes…

The Wandering Jew

The legend ultimately derives from a passage in Matthew that was expanded in typical mediæval fashion in order to begin to make sense of the words given therein. Mediæval Christian thought provides us with numerous wonderful stories, from infancy ‘gospels’ through to quite sophisticated theological treatises forming a substantive foundation for much that is still current in contemporary Christian understanding (for example, numerous contemporary works that are ultimately derived or in part based on the works of Augustine or of St Thomas Aquinas).

Let’s turn to the biblical source first and then make brief diversions elsewhere. The following is found in Matthew 16:27-28

For the Son of Man shall come in the glory of his Father, with his angels, and then he shall reward each according to their deeds. Truly I say to you, there be some standing here which shall not taste of death until they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.

From this arose a legend that finger-pointed not only to an ‘identifiable’ individual Jew, but also, through a sequence of thoughts, to the Jewish people as a whole. For example, in the fourth century Prudentius writes:

From place to place the homeless Jew wanders in ever-shifting exile, since the time when he was torn from the abode of his fathers and has been suffering the penalty for murder, and having stained his hands with the blood of Christ whom he denied, paying the price of sin.

Of course, in the above description it is in light of the destruction of the second Temple in the year 70 when Judea was under Roman annexation, effectively describing the increasing diaspora of Jewish life and the appalling view of Jews as ‘Christ-killers’ (seemingly at the same time forgetting that all early Christians, as well as Jesus himself, were of course Jewish). The Jewish folk were, in so many ways, ‘homeless’ or, rather, without a home in their own right in the promised land of their forebearers. The quote from Matthew also lead, in addition, to the specific query as to whom it was that Christ spoke. And here the legend points to a local dweller in Jerusalem at the time of Christ’s crucifixion. According to what is probably to most common tale, as Christ was passing by bearing the cross on his way to Golgotha, a local leather-smith ‘taunted’ Jesus urging him not to dawdle, for which Christ replied that whereas He was indeed stepping to his death, the taunter would now have to ‘wait and continue living until I return’.

There is an interesting twist in the story as it develops through time, as by the 17th century the taunter is named Ahasver – ironically the Persian fool-king mentioned in the Book of Esther and the basis of which forms the Jewish festival of Pushim.

In any case, we have by this stage both an individual as well as a people who are destined to walk the Earth without homeland until the second coming of Christ. Truly, one could say, a possible depiction of an itinerant wanderer that walks and is chased as an unwanted beggar-fool.

Christ’s return: Rudolf Steiner’s approach

Notwithstanding the various Christian views as to when this is to take place, Rudolf Steiner has a specific Christology that incorporates two particular characteristics: the first is that the return is as described in the Gospels, with directly piercing through the veil and seen by those who ‘have eyes to see’; the second is that a time is specified and has already taken place (and continues to so do). Let’s briefly look at these two points.

Again the reference is principally from Matthew, in this case 24:27-30 (though I skip 28-29 in what follows):

For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. […]

And then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.

This is very much an image similar to that usually represented by trump XXI in the earlier Marseille type: Christ in the ‘clouds’ (or bursting through a mandorla) also used for representations of the transfiguration and for ‘Christ in Majesty’ (as a side-note for those interested, the first section of the quote references Steiner’s ‘Foundation Stone Meditation’).

As Steiner describes the appearance or return of Christ (in, for example, The Reappearance of Christ in the Etheric), he gives a date that effectively sees the ‘piercing through the clouds’ begin in the 1930s and continues from that time on. In light of this, for Anthroposophists (and others who similarly consider that the ‘Second Coming’ occurs in such a realm and began prior to WWII), the legend of the wandering Jew, if taken seriously, would see relief in his liberation through a well deserved and long overdue death. For the ‘wandering Jew’ collectively (in other words, as a people), it probably seems obvious that the establishment of Israel in the 1940s would provide some kind of ‘confirmation’ that Christ’s ‘return’ has taken place: the place of their home has been re-established and now provides rest in the promised land (albeit still all too tumultuous!).

By Joep van Loon

Filippo Maria Visconti Bianca Maria Visconti Francesco Sforza Gian Galeazzo Sforza

As all human made concepts, Tarot has not been created immediately in its final form. In the beginning of its existence, in 15th century Northern Italy, there were a lot of different stages before the Tarot crystallized in the form we know it today, with 4 suits containing 10 numeral and 4 court cards and completed by 21 numbered trumps and 1 unnumbered picture card, the Fool. The four suits were derived from early Arabic card games, the trumps were an invention during the Renaissance period in Italy. No references are given in this article, most of the information given here can be verified on the excellent website trionfi.com, some other information comes from Andy’s Pages (a_pollett.tripod.com). The first card game with separate trumps was probably ordered in the early 15th century by Filippo Maria Visconti who became Duke of Milan in 1412 at the age of 20 years. The painter was Michelino da Besozzo. The images of the trumps were based on the classical Roman mythology with 12 Gods and 4 Heroes or Half gods. We don’t know the number of cards of each suit, we only know that the highest suit card was the King and that the four suits, containing 10 numerals each, were distinguished by eagles, phoenixes, doves and turtle-doves. None of the Michelino cards have resisted to time, the information comes to us through the writings of Martiano da Tortona, the scribe of Visconti, who died in 1426. The probably oldest Tarot game that survived time (partially) is the game actually known as the Cary Yale Visconti or also as the Visconti di Mordrone. It was probably created by Bonefacio Bembo in 1441 at the occasion of the wedding at the age of 16 years of Bianca Maria Visconti, daughter of Filippo Maria. She married with Francesco Sforza, who was at that time 40 years old. The suit signs were Cups, Swords, Coins and Arrows. Every suit had 16 cards, 10 numeral cards and 6 court cards. Probably there were, like in the Besozzo game, 16 trumps, of which 11 have survived. At least four trumps had a symbolism different from later Tarot games, Faith, Hope, Charity and Fame. From the second oldest surviving Tarot game, called the Brere Brambilla Visconti, only 2 trumps survive, the Emperor and the Wheel of Fortune, too little to conclude anything about its structure. It had the same suit signs as the Visconti di Mordrone, but with only 14 cards in each suit. The third game painted by Bonefacio Bembo, known to us as the Visconti Sforza, was ordered in 1450 by Francesco Sforza, probably at the occasion that he became the Duke of Milan, 3 years after Filippo Maria Visconti died without leaving a son as legitimate heir. The suits signs were now Cups, Swords, Coins and Sceptres. There were 14 cards in each suit and probably only 14 trumps, who have all survived. It was only in the last quarter of the 15th century that another painter, maybe Antonio Cicognara, completed the Visconti Sforza game with another 8 Trionfi, of which only 6 have resisted to time. At that time the Duke of Milan was Gian Galeazzo Sforza, grandson of Francesco, who became Duke of Milan in 1476 at the age of only 7 years. During its development, there were a lot of influences on the imagery of the Tarot. We mentioned already the classical influences with the Besozzo trumps showing images based on Roman mythology. Another influence was the 14th century writer Petrarca who wrote a poem called ‘I Trionfi’, In this poem he describes a procession of 6 chariots, in which the driver of each chariot is triumphed by the driver of the next one (Love → Chastity → Death → Fame → Time → Eternity). It is this poem, ‘I Trionfi’, that gave its name and its internal structure to the trumps, with each trionfi triumphing over all lower trumps and triumphed by all higher trumps. Next, as in most Renaissance Art, a very important influence on the Tarot imagery was the Bible. Its tripartite view of the nature of man, distinguishing body, soul and spirit, might have been of influence on the structure of the Tarot. Also the writings of Plato influenced the structure of Tarot. In book 4 of his work ‘The Republic’ he describes the nature of Justice in human beings. Long before the Bible, he had a tripartite view of the human soul. He divides the soul in three levels, an appetitive, a spirited and a rational one. The appetitive soul deals with sex, hunger, pleasure or in general with physical satisfaction and must be controlled by practising the virtue Temperance. In the human body it corresponds with your belly or your genitals. The spirited soul deals with self preservation, anger, honour and victory and must be controlled by using the virtue Courage. Its correspondence in the human body is your heart. The rational soul deals with truth and wisdom. Its corresponding virtue is Prudence and in the human body it is symbolized by your head and mind. Only someone who has these three virtues united can practise the virtue Justice. Prudence and Justice are often combined in one, because someone who practises the virtue Prudence is able to practise the virtue Justice.

The structure of the Visconti Sforza in 1450

As stated before, the trumps section in the original Visconti Sforza consisted of 13 Trionfi plus the Fool. The final version of this Tarot game consists of three distinct levels, a first level describing the structure of society, a second level describing the journey of the human Soul through life and a last level, describing the ascension of the human Soul to Paradise, after its separation with the human body. This third level is completely missing in the early Visconti Sforza. It is highly unlikely that all the cards of one distinctive level were lost after a couple of years and that they have been replaced. It is much more probably that the creation of the last level took place in a later development stage of the Tarot. So my theory is that these cards are the original cards and not some sort of replacement. In fact, the third level is not missing in the original Visconti Sforza, it is represented by one single pair of cards depicting Justice.

So the Visconti Sforza in 1450 had only 14 Trionfi that described the organisation of human society and the development of the human soul through life. Both levels consisted of 3 pairs of 2 closely related cards. A seventh pair described the nature of Justice, the world’s justice associated to the human society and God’s justice associated to the human soul. The order in which I will describe the cards is governed by this division in pairs and supported by the images themselves.

Level 1 : Human Society

The society level in the Visconti Sforza is divided in three sub levels. The first one shows us some ordinary people. The second one represents the authorities and the third level portraits our moral leaders.

Pair 1 : Ordinary People

Village Fool & Street Performer

The first pair in the Society level is formed by two cards depicting ordinary people. On the lowest card, we see a man in ragged cloths. He has an empty mind, represented by the seven feathers in his hair. Behind him some mountains, representing obstacles in our live. Green mountains represent obstacles in the real world and blue mountains obstacles in our mind. The big wooden club on his shoulder represents his force, but it is a force without intelligence. The man is clearly a Village Fool, and his mind is closer to heaven than to Earth. The Village Fool has such a low level that this card was not even able to triumph over the suit cards.

The second card shows a Street Performer. His red coat and shoes symbolises his activity. In front of him there is a table with several useful objects to trick the public. The two dices remember us that life is not written in advance, chance has a role to play. The Street Performer is seated on a cubic box symbolising that he’s a stable person. In his left hand a tiny wand, reminding in this context a magical wand. The Journey into the Tarot begins here, there are no obstacles in sight, the future is open, as indicated by the dices, everything is possible. The Street Performer is the first and lowest Trump, but it has a high value. It represents Birth and Creation.

Village Fool & Street Performer

To illustrate the close link between these two cards we make a small side step to the town of Ferrara, ruled by the Este family. Like the Visconti and the Sforza families, the Este family admired card games. They even bought in 1437 a card printing press. The famous Dick sheet, dated tot the end of the 15^th century, might have been printed on this press. According the account books of the Este family, Jacopo da Soncino, also called il Sagramoro, got on the first of January 1441 some money for producing 14 figures for Bianca Visconti, 14 figures that might well have been the 14 trumps of a card game. The first mention of the name Trionfi for the trumps appears one year later in the same account book. One of the oldest card game for the Este family that survived partially time is the Tarot of Ercole 1 d’Este. It was made probably in 1473 at the occasion of the marriage between the Duke of Ferrare with Leonora d’Aragon, princess of Naples. The heraldic symbols of both families figure on some of the court cards. The Village Fool and the Street Performer on this game are particularly interesting. Both cards are showing a scene in the same environment, probably a village party. On the Village Fool’s card we see some small children with absolutely no respect at all for this foolish man who appears almost naked. The children tear his few cloths further down letting appear his genitals, a detail that has been blackened out in later times. The two children appearing at the right on the Village Fool’s card are also shown on the Street Performer’s card. But on this card there is a big difference, they have a lot of respect for the clever man who captures fully their attention. The same children appearing on both cards emphasize the strong link between these two cards, it is clearly a closely related pair of cards. The children on this pair of cards symbolize our childhood and the beginning of our live cycle.

Pair 2 : The Authorities

The Empress and the Emperor

The second pair in the society level represents the authorities of the world, the highest card representing the Emperor and the lowest card his wife, the Empress. They are clothed in blue and gold symbolizing, when used in this combination during the Renaissance, royal persons. Their cloths are richly ornamented with symbols related to the Sforza family. The Empress carries several symbols relating to power like the sceptre in her right hand, the imperial eagle on the shield that she is carrying in her left hand, the crown on her head and her royal posture on the throne. The Emperor also has a sceptre in his right hand. In his left hand a globe surmounted by a cross (the globe represents the Empire over which the Emperor is ruling and the cross the Christian religion of its habitants). He is wearing the imperial eagle on his head. The Emperor is much older than the Empress maybe referring to the situation of Francesco Sforza who surpasses his wife Bianca Maria Visconti with 25 years. The Emperor does not have the same royal posture as his wife, in fact, the relation of Francesco Sforza as Duke of Milan to the Holy Roman Emperor is not at all as close as in the time of Filippo Maria Visconti. Francesco Sforza kept the Emperor’s symbol in the cards, but in changing his posture and presenting the Emperor as an old man, he emphasizes the diminishing power of the Emperor in advantage of his own power.

In the same way as you could compare the first level with your childhood, you can compare the second level with the productive part of your life. The Emperor and the Empress represent symbolically not only the authorities of a country, but also the authorities in a family in the person of a father and a mother.

Pair 3 : Moral Leaders

The highest level in society is formed by our moral leaders, servants of God devoted to Religion. Even the highest ruler is subordinate to God, so the moral leaders trump over the authorities. In the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, it was still a habit that the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire was crowned by the Pope in Rome. On the Visconti di Mordrone, this level is symbolized by moral values, the lowest card representing the virtue Faith and the highest card the virtue Hope. Faith and Hope are the lowest Theological Virtues, that will disappear in Paradise once the human Soul has been reunited with God.

The Female Pope and the Pope

Francesco Sforza disagreed with Filippo Visconti in the way how to symbolize Religion in the Trionfi game. He decided to use symbols that were much closer to our society in depicting a female Pope and the Pope himself. On the female’s Pope card we see a woman in the simple clothes of a nun. Here face radiates peace and the closed book in her left hand was used in the Renaissance to symbolise Faith in God. This woman beliefs profoundly in God and she has an absolute Faith in Him. This card is a clear symbol for Faith in God. In this way it is also a symbol for the Roman Catholic Religion. The triple Tiara symbolises the divine trinity and provides a close link to the second card in this pair that portraits the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, the Pope.

The Pope is the leader of the Church, so the Pope card symbolizes the Institute of the Roman Catholic Church rather than the Roman Catholic Religion. The Pope is successor of Peter, first disciple of Jesus and first Pope of Rome. So the Pope is in fact the successor of Jesus. Jesus, who gave by his Death and his Resurrection, hope into Eternal Life back to humanity. Finally Faith and Hope are present in a disguised way The message is the same as on the Visconti di Mordrone, but it is given to us in a much more subtle and still easily recognisable way. Continuing the comparison of the society cards with the stages in a human life, this third pair represents the mature part of your life. One has retired from work and people profit from your wisdom. In the same way we compared the first pair with our childhood and the second pair with the productive part of our life, the Pope and the Female Pope represents our grand-father and your grand-mother.

Level 2 : The Soul’s Journey though human life

I skip for the moment the Justice card, who had his place here in the first Visconti Sforza deck but belongs to a different level, to go directly to the second level, representing the Journey of the Soul through human life. In this level we have 3 pairs representing the appetitive Soul, the spirited Soul and the rational Soul. The appetitive Soul is represented by mastering yourself. The spirited Soul is represented by the passage of time, and the rational Soul is represented by the transition of the Soul to after-life.

Pair 4 : Mastering yourself

Marriage and Victory

The first level of the Soul according Plato is the Soul of appetite, that has to be purified in practising the virtue Temperance. This level concerns physical satisfaction like sex, thirst, hunger and in a wider sense also the lust of power. More positively, it concerns also the appetite of a child to learn. So the journey of the human Soul is starting here in childhood.

When becoming an adult, you need to master your physical needs. On the Visconti Sforza this level is symbolized by two cards expressing this need to master yourself. On the card at the left, we see two people giving a promise of marriage to each other. For the Italian Nobility, marriage was an affair of State and had nothing to do with love. So the promise of marriage between two noble people symbolizes the victory over our sexual desire. Cupid, who is holding his arrows in his hand instead of shooting down, is just a powerless spectator. The eyes of Cupid are banded to symbolise that Love is blind, but I this case Love can do nothing, the pact between the man and the woman is stronger than love.

On the second card we see the same woman, this time portrayed as the Empress. She is seated on a Victory Chariot that is led by two winged white horses, symbolising the persons mind that is ready to overcome all eventualities of life. It is a positive card indicating that this person will use her power in the benefit of her people instead of for her own benefit. So the victory described by this card is the victory over your lust to power.

Pair 5 : The struggle against time

The Wheel of Fortune and Time

The second level of the Soul is the Soul of Will, and according Plato you have to practise Fortitude to master this level. This second part of the journey of the Soul through human life describes the working phase of a human life, the part of life when we have responsibility over our family and over our work. So this pair deals with the hardship of life and the mental force you need to pass through this period. In the Visconti Sforza this period is symbolized by the struggle against time. No one can win from Time, you need a lot of force and courage to withstand to the effects of Time.

In the first card we see Lady Fortune. Lady Fortune has her eyes banded to indicate that good luck and bad luck act in the same way for the rich as for the poor. On the top of the wheel a boy in royal blue and gold who is saying ‘I reign’. He has the ears of a donkey to indicate his ignorance, he’s stupid enough to think that he will reign forever. On the left side a boy that climbs and shouts ‘I will reign’. And at the right a boy with the tail of a donkey who says ‘I have reigned’. Below the wheel an old man who says ‘I don’t reign’, he never had the good luck. The Wheel is representing the time that is turning, on everything comes an end and the old man carrying the Wheel of Time is carrying in a symbolic way the burden of time.

The same old man is portrayed in the next card. He holds an hour-glass in his hand, symbol of Time itself. This old man is father Time himself. Time is acting on everybody and is stronger than the strongest army.

Pair 6 : The transition to after-life

The Hanged Man and Death

The highest level of the Soul is Reason, a level that has to be purified by the Virtue Prudence. In the Tarot this is symbolised by the journey of the Soul passing through the final phase of human life. The Soul is becoming wise by now and is waiting the next step, the transition to After Life.

On the first card we see a hanged man. His legs are crossed, remembering the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. The hanged man symbolizes that your life has been irreversibly reversed. You have retired from work and something bad happens. Maybe you got a bad accident, maybe your wife died, maybe you got a heart attack or another very serious illness, in any case, your life will never be the same and you have to prepare for the inevitable, the transition to your After Life. Note that the mountains in the background reappear to reinforce these difficulties and that there is one blue mountain symbolizing the difficulties in your mind that you have at this moment to accept this new situation. The hanged man has a very serene expression. He knows that death is close and he accepts the inevitable.

The last card of this level is Death, symbolizing this transition to After Life. Death is standing passively. He has a bow and arrow in his hand, but he isn’t chasing. He is waiting for you, he knows you will come, your time has gone out. That this period will not be easy to accept is symbolised by the blue mountains in the background. Maybe you are not afraid for Death, but everybody has some fear for the process of dying that is extremely difficult to accept.

Level 3

Pair 7 : Justice

Justice and The Last Judgement

In the original Visconti Sforza, the third level is formed by one single pair of cards describing the nature of Justice. Justice, that is according Plato the highest virtue, here combining all other virtues in one single card.

On the first card we see the Virtue Justice with her usual attributes. In her right hand she has a balance to show that justice is impartial. The balance has to measure between good and bad. In her left hand she has a sword that symbolises that justice has to decide. Even with insufficient data, Justice will decide between good and bad. Behind the Virtue Justice we see a knight who is carrying out the decisions of the worlds Justice. In the 1450 Visconti Sforza Tarot, this card has to be placed before the first pair of the second level, just behind the Pope.

On the second card we see two angels resurrecting the Dead from their grave. The resurrected people are naked, the human soul has nothing that it can hide in front of the last judgement. Behind the Angels we see God, represented as an old man with a sword in his hand. He will decide on every Soul, and be aware, his justice is just, God does not need a balance to decide, he has all the knowledge necessary to decide if a Soul is ready to go to Heaven.

The structure of the Visconti Sforza in the last quarter of the 15^th century

Even with such a logical and coherent structure, the Italian Nobility wasn’t very satisfied yet. The tripartite view on human nature was there, but it wasn’t optimal. The two groups of six cards in this structure could be compared with the first two levels of human nature, body and soul, but the last pair failed to take into account the third level. There was a need for a supplementary more spiritual level. So a new level of seven cards was designed and every level incorporated now its corresponding Virtue. This new level described the journey of the Soul after Death, from the horror of Hell unto the peace of Paradise in Heaven.

The first card games that were showing the new cards were probably the Tarot game of Ercole 1 d’Este and the Charles VI game. Both decks are dated between 1470 and 1480.

Pair 7 : The lower cardinal virtues

At some time, the Sforza family asked another painter, probably Antonio Cicognare, to complete the Visconti Sforza Tarot. Several dates have been mentioned between 1470 and 1484. The most probable date seems to be near 1484 when the ruling Duke of Milano, Gian Galeazzo Sforza, grandson of Francesco was at the age of fifteen. The two Virtues Temperance and Fortitude were added and replaced the Justice virtues as moral values guiding the first two levels. In the Visconti Sforza, these two Virtues were portrayed in a blue upper cloth with reddish shirt and shoes. The dark mountains behind both virtues remind us the difficulty for human beings to really master these moral values. Temperance replaced Justice on top of the first level depicting Society and representing the appetitive part of the Soul. Fortitude replaced the Final Judgement on top of the second level representing the journey of the Soul through human life. Then Justice was shifted on top of the newly created last level describing the journey of the Soul between Death and Resurrection and the Final Judgement was placed on top of the three cardinal virtues

Temperance and Fortitude

Temperance is portrayed in almost the same way as we see her in today’s Tarot, as a woman with long blond hair, diluting one liquid with another to temperate the force of the second one. Traditionally it is interpreted as wine being diluted by water to annihilate the effects of alcohol.

David slaying a lion

Fortitude is portrayed as a man slaying an animal resembling a Lion. This scene is quite unusual, normally the virtues are portrayed as women. On the Visconti di Mordrone we see a woman opening the mouth of a lion, an image that will survive unto our time. The image on the Visconti Sforza has been related to both the story of Samson and and the Lion of Timna (Judges 15:5-6) and to the story of Hercules and the Nemean lion, the first of his twelve labours. The weak point in these comparisons is that in these stories both Hercules and Samson killed the lion with their bare hands. Personally I prefer to compare the scene on the Visconti Sforza Tarot to the story of David slaying a lion (Samuel 17:34-37). This story is traditionally illustrated in exactly the same way as we see on the Fortitude card, illustrated here by a silver plate dating from the 7^th century Constantinople and conserved in the Metropolitan Museum. The story of the young boy killing a lion to save a lamb is much more in agreement with the significance of the Fortitude card who indicates that ordinary people needs a lot of courage to withstand the hardship and life in our battle against time.

Level 3 : The journey of the Soul in After-Life

The new third level of the Tarot, called the level of Light, describes in three pairs of two closely related cards the ascension of the Soul from the depth of Hell to Paradise in Heaven.

Pair 8 : Battle against Evil

The Devil and God's Anger

The first level in the level of Light, consists of two very negative cards, portraying on the first card the Devil and on the second a burning building, called the Tower, Fire or Lightning and sometimes even the Devil’s House. These two cards did not survive in one single collection of cards from the Italian nobility, only the second card survived in the Charles VI Tarot. So as an exception I cannot show the Visconti Sforza cards for the simple reason that they did not survive. Did they ever exist? I believe so, they are present in all the uncut sheets of the end of the 15^th century. We show here an example that is preserved in the Rothschild collection in the Louvre Museum in Paris. Their origin is not Milan but probably Bologna.

The Devil is consistently portrayed in the Renaissance as a hairy monster with horns, bat wings, the claws of a bird as feet and often a second face on the genital area. The second scene is generally portrayed as a building being destroyed by fire, sometimes struck by lightning and often with one or two people falling down. This scene reminds us to the disasters striking the Earth at the opening of the Seventh Seal in the Apocalypse. Personally, I prefer to call this scene God’s Anger.

In the ascension of the Soul during After-Life, these scenes represents the bad acts we have committed in life. All our bad acts, symbolised by the Devil will be remembered and punished, symbolised by the Anger of God. This process of self knowledge and self cleaning is necessary before a human soul can raise to heaven.

Pair 9 : Growing light

The Star and The Moon

After the passage of the Soul through the darkest places in After Life, lights begin to appear. First there is the twinkling of the stars, then the brighter light of the Moon is appearing in the darkness. The Star and the Moon are symbolized by the Roman goddesses Venus and Diana. They are both dressed in the same colours as the Virtues Temperance and Fortitude and behind them there are the same dark mountains remembering us our difficulties to respect the moral values.

The Star represented on the Visconti Sforza is thus Venus, goddess of Love and the brightest star in the night. In fact, the Morning Star is a traditional personification of God’s Love representing here that he’s forgiving our bad acts. The Moon is the Goddess Diana. This card emphasises that you have to know darkness in order to recognise light. You have to know the darker parts of your inner self, and correct these bad parts, before you can be a light for other people.

The Star and The Moon

The Tarot of the Este family threats the subject on a different way without changing the signification of the cards. On the card representing the Star, we see a very bright Star and two astronomers calculating its trajectory. In Fact, the star on this card is probably the Star of Bethlehem that announces the birth of Jesus, the son of God, who has been send to Earth by love for human mankind and to save the human race for eternity. Here the Star represents thus also God’s Love. Love is, after Faith and Hope, the third and most important Virtue directly related to God. Note that Love is often replaced as a Virtue by Charity in order to differentiate Love for your neighbour from physical love.

On the next card we see an eclipse of the Moon and again an astronomer performing some calculations. The eclipse of the Moon is the perfect symbol for the passage through the darkness before you can see the light. The astronomers on both cards reinforce the close relationship between these cards.

Pair 10 : The lights of Heaven

The Sun and The World

The last pair of the Visconti Sforza is the most beautiful, representing all positive aspects of light. In the first card we see a naked and winged boy reaching for the Sun, source of live on Earth. In the second card, the same boy, assisted by a second one, holds an image of the New Jerusalem, symbol for Paradise in Heaven. The dark mountains on the card are now far away, indicating that the previous difficulties are now only a far memory. In fact, these two cards, representing the ascension of the human Soul into Paradise, are by far the most positive cards of the whole Tarot deck.

The naked boys symbolise absolute innocence. The Soul has returned to the state of innocence that it had at the birth of a child, with an absolute purity of mind. The Soul has accomplished the cycle of life and is ready for Rebirth

Pair 11 : Justice

The original pair 7 became finally pair 11, with Justice as the Virtue governing the third level and the Last Judgement on top the three Virtues. While both Justice cards were already existing, there was no place for the Virtue Prudence. In any case, this was not of great importance. In the Renaissance both virtues where often exchanged, and someone who practises one of these two virtues, automatically practises the other.

The Tarot Wheel

So the final structure of the Visconti Sforza tarot is the following. We have three levels with in each level three sub levels consisting of a pair of two cards. The three levels together are describing the cycle of human life. The easiest way to emphasise this cycle is to arrange these eighteen cards in the form of a circle.

Each of these three levels is governed by a moral value, the level of Society, representing the Soul of Appetite is dominated by the Virtue Temperance. The three sub levels in Society are represented by three pairs of two cards, respectively ordinary people, symbolized by the Village Fool and the Street Performer, then the Authorities, symbolized by the Empress and the Emperor and finally the moral leaders, represented by the Female Pope and the Pope. The place of Temperance is above the first level of three pairs of cards, so we place her there as the first spoke of the Tarot Wheel.

The next level describes the Journey of the Soul through human life, representing the Soul of Will. According Plato, its corresponding Virtue is Fortitude. Again we find three pairs of two cards, first the Victory over your sexual desire, symbolised by a promise of marriage and secondly the chariot of victory, that stands for mastering your lust of power. The second pair is related to Time, with the Wheel of Fortune, just as the Tarot Wheel, a symbol for the human life cycle followed by the Old Man or Father Time himself. The third pair is standing for Transition with as first card the hanged man, representing a major irreversible incident in human life and next Death, representing the transition of the Soul from human life to After Life. The Virtue Fortitude is placed above this group of three pairs of cards as the second spoke of the Tarot Wheel

The highest level of the Soul is the Soul of Reason. It is represented in the Visconti Sforza Tarot by the journey of the Soul through After Live, from the deepest darkness of Hell to the brilliant light of God in Heaven.

The first pair represents terrors of Hell, with the first card showing the Devil representing our bad acts and a second card showing the Anger of God destroying the Evil of the Devil representing the punishment for these deeds The philosophy behind is that we have to be aware of our acts and that we have to regret and repair the damage we have done before we can rise to Heaven.

In the second pair light is appearing in the darkness with as a first card the Star, representing God’s Love saving us from evil and secondly the Moon, representing knowledge of your inner self. You need to know your inner self before You can see the Light and appear in front of God’s Justice.

The highest pair represents this Eternal Light with the Sun and the World, the World representing Paradise in Heaven. At this level we know our inner self and the Soul found back its state of purity that it had at our Birth. This purity is symbolized by the innocence of naked children. The Soul is ready for the Judgement of God for Rebirth or Eternity.

According to Plato, in order to purify the Soul of Reason we need to practice Prudence. Those who are practising Temperance, Fortitude and Prudence, are also practising Justice. Because the Justice card existed long before the other two virtues, it replaces here Prudence, and we find above this level the Virtue Justice as a third spoke of the Tarot Wheel.

Finally in the axis of the Tarot Wheel we find the image of God himself resurrecting the Death and judging the Soul, deciding between Rebirth and Eternity. Rebirth for those whose life wasn’t perfect and Eternity for those who lived as a Saint.

And this brings us to the last image of the Visconti Sforza Tarot, presenting the Tarot Wheel. Nine pairs of two cards form the Tyre of the Wheel. Remark the place of the Village Fool, both before the Street Performer as the first card of the human life cycle and next to and after the World representing reincarnation. At the next level, the three spokes of the Wheel are formed by three cardinal Virtues, Temperance, Fortitude and Justice. And finally on the highest level, in the axis of the Wheel, the Last Judgement with an image of God judging the human Soul.

The Tarot Wheel

Remark the importance of the number three in this arrangement. As a tyre we have 3 groups of 3 pairs each. The whole structure consists also of three levels, the 18 cards representing the human life cycle from birth to rebirth forming the first level, the 3 virtues representing the moral values as a second level and last but not least, the last judgement, representing God’s Justice, forming the third level. Tarot in the Renaissance was certainly a game, but is was also a educational tool to explain the structure of Life.

And here ends my theory about the internal structure of the Visconti Sforza Tarot. This structure is based on the analysis of the images themselves. Can this structure be used for other Tarot games? It surely can, but because each author had its own view on the Tarot, the resulting Tarot Wheel differs from game to game. In the context of this article, the space is not available, but this fascinating story about the original structure of the Tarot will be further extended to the Tarot of Marseille during the Tarot Convention in Sainte Suzanne in September this year [2011].

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 of careful attention and reflection, not least of which are the beings depicted on its periphery, and yet it is these that had proved amongst the most elusive. Certainly numerous authors exegete the animals in various ways, what I found ‘strange’, however, is that even amongst the earliest of depictions there was consistency, yet no apparent explanation.

This article is in large part extracted from a chapter from my online course (and book), and the main points which arise further down have also been posted on forum.tarothistory.com, and the more general ones on Aeclectic’s tarotforum.net.

Let’s first go through some historical antecedents for sourcing the card’s imagery

Boethius

We need go no further than Boethius’s immensely influential early 6th century Consolation of Philosophy (or, more aptly, ‘Consolation of Philosophia’, as Philosophy is therein allegorised.) to find the basis for the Mediaeval (and later) European pervasiveness of the image and allegory.

The whole text is image rich, and it is no wonder that it formed one of the most popular works in Mediaeval times and that it was translated in various vernacular languages (including English by both Chaucer and Elizabeth I, as well as in Old French and German). In Italy, it was highly influential in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Llull, Boccaccio, Malory, as well as the works of Chaucer and of Shakespeare, and indeed the very imagery used on major Lumière (‘Gothic’) Cathedrals, all show direct evidence of his incredible importance and influence. Furthermore, the manner in which Aristotle came to be understood by the scholastics of subsequent years was in large part via Boethius – though in this case his other and earlier philosophical works rather than his final prison-written work.

The opening section of Book II of the Consolation of Philosophia is of principal import when it comes to Fortune herself:

‘If I have diagnosed the cause and nature of your condition, you are wasting away in pining and longing for your former good fortune. [...] I know the many disguises of that monster, Fortune [...].

If you are trying to stop her wheel from turning, you are of all men the most obtuse. For if it once begins to stop, it will no longer be the wheel of chance.

With domineering hand she moves the turning wheel,
Like currents in a treacherous bay swept to and fro:
Her ruthless will has just deposed once fearful kings
While trustless still, from low she lifts a conquered head;
No cries of misery she hears, no tears she heeds,
But steely hearted laughs at groans her deeds have wrung.
Such is the game she plays, and so she tests her strength;
Of mighty power she makes parade when one short hour
Sees happiness from utter desolation grow.

Here Boethius listens to Philosophia (c. 1460):

Such is his influence in the world of philosophy and of ideas that I personally rank him as one of the most influential European thinkers of all time. And the work for which he is best known remains readily accessible to readers from a wide variety of background (unlike, I would suggest as an example, many of the works of Aristotle).

To be sure, the concept of Fortuna antedates Boethius – the works of especially the neo-platonist Proclus and Plotinus are influential. What Boethius does, however, is raise Fortuna to a specific mental picture such that what becomes of great noteworthiness is not the figure of Fortuna herself, but of something he really brings afresh and anew: the wheel upon which we inevitably travel throughout our lives. In contrast, Fortuna was Tyche (‘luck’) in Ancient Greece, a concept at times overlaid with the workings of the three fates.

Looking at the image (above) of the Wheel of Fortune adjacent which Boethius speaks (or listens) to Philosophia shows well some of the various other aspects I also discuss in other parts of my course: it draws us in to participate in the event, especially if we read his text at the same time. Also, the very words used, viz, “if it once begins to stop, it will no longer be the wheel of chance” (or, in the words of another and earlier translation: “if Fortune begin to stay still, she is no longer Fortune”) brings our imagination to active participation. For it is Fortuna that is represented, and for that the wheel must move.

Yet, she is capricious and inconstant, unlike the ‘eternal’ movement of the stars which can be forecast by their constancy. Whereas the celestial realm moves and is constant, here below Fortune may play and move with erratic fickleness. This, for the Ancients, was very much one of the key factors in not being able to predict the future unless ordained by one of the gods. Either it was ordained and hence able to be communicated by the sibyls (or equivalent), or it was left to the vicissitudes of Fortuna.

Noblet

Compared to the other TdM’s, Noblet shows some clarity of spokes that appears to have slowly eroded over time. Let’s see what I mean: The card images below are from, respectively, a Visconti-type, the Noblet, a Dodal, and a Conver.

If in the Visconti we still have the very traditional depiction of Fortuna actually included in the image (in her slightly less usual form as hoodwinked) and turning the wheel directly with her hands on the spokes, by the Noblet, not only has she disappeared, but there is now the common wheel axle and handle and, instead of four figures around the wheel, only three remain.

These three figures also seem to lose detail over time. In the Noblet, they appear more like an ape or monkey-like figure descending, an ass-like figure ascending, and a human-like crowned figure atop. By the time of the Conver, the three are far more difficult to distinguish – yet still sufficiently clear if the symbolic meaning is known (to which we shall return shortly).

These animal-figurines are quite different to the more classical depictions showing, generally, all human beings in different parts of the wheel (though there are exceptions to which we shall also return).

The images I show above also have distinct differences of direction of rotation: the TdMs move counterclockwise (as judged by the orientation of the side figures, presuming, to be sure, that the head leads movement). In contrast, the Visconti and the other two previous images have the figures move clockwise – though, again, there is no universality of represented direction even in very early imagery, something that can be seen from the image below.

If we look at the centre of each wheel, what is striking in the TdMs is that the ‘hub’ is depicted as a representation of the world – or, to be more precise, the Earth, divided in the mediaeval three-fold division encountered both in mediaeval maps as well as in the Empress’ and Emperor’s sceptres. Admittedly, the both the Dodal and the Conver already show the loss of clarity of detail retained by the Noblet.

Platform as stability

If we look again carefully at the card, there is something different about the position atop the Wheel: it appears to have a platform upon which the individual is seated.

If there is indeed a platform, it may be that this also stands, though located atop, as untouched by the Wheel’s rim and its constant motion.

Such equipoise requires a sense of inner tranquillity, acceptance and equanimity, together with a certain control of thoughts and action, perseverance, as well as tolerance to what may be heading one’s way and impartiality to its provenance (Cf Steiner’s Knowledge of the Higher Worlds) These, of course, also form part and parcel of some of the virtues to be cultivated by each of us as we meet destiny’s onslaughts.

The Ass and the Monkey

As already mentioned, there remains clarity and consistency that the two figures on the sides of the TdM Wheels are of Ass (or donkey) and of Monkey, with the former seeking to ascend, and the latter in the descending (or ‘falling’) position.

For many years I considered that such must have been of symbolic significance, yet no tarot book (nor other materials I had read) satisfactorily addressed this aspect. It is only during a revision of the course a couple of years ago that the specific details emerged. I mention this as there are still numerous details to tarot that have yet to be unveiled which only careful attention to detail, familiarity with early decks, and an increased understanding of symbolic representations in use in late mediæval and renaissance imagery will bring to light.

For myself, it was not ‘just’ that these animals are consistent across various TdMs, but also that they are evident if one looks very closely at the 15th century Visconti decks: not the main image, but the gold-leaf bears lines that makes of the ascending figure an ass, and the descending one have a monkey’s tail.. To be sure, other similar details are also included on that card, such as ears also appearing on the crowned figure atop, and Fortuna being winged. (see the close-up below).

So what of these?

I suspect that this is one of those ‘transformations’ of human-to-symbolic animal that was ever-so ‘natural’ to those of the times, and that the ascent as Ass and fall as monkey were more commonly understood than we may even presume.

According to the mediæval Physiologus, the devil was ‘simia Dei’ (God’s monkey), and the monkey was associated with humanity’s fall and continued to represent human sin into the Middle Ages (Cf, for example, Corbey’s Metaphysics of Apes, p.66 – on a different note, that the monkey was considered a representation of the fall was perhaps another, albeit unconscious, reason for viewing evolutionary theory with some trepidation and suspition)

As for the Ass, it probably derives from a joke that confounds ‘Bisodia’ as the name at times used for Christ’s Ass but also infers fantasy (or more properly speaking phantasm). The Ass can also therefore be seen to represent false aspirations (the Ass upon which Christ sat is not to be confused with the Christ).

So we have, on the one side, the striving ascent beyond the natural position of the ass; and on the other the fall (as monkey) by his own disobedience to divine precept. Yet each, by the whim of Fortuna, may also find itself in a position inappropriate to its ‘natural’ position!

Further details

The above shows that many details from early standardisations display a wealth of meaning, some of which have yet to be re-discovered. With this card alone, as example, one of the details that remains to be clarified through reference to contemporary notes is precisely what is depicted atop.

Of all decks, in terms of the standardisation of tarot, the Noblet also remains unique: though some details are definitely of poor rendition, there is no other deck that maintains the precision is contains. Antecedent decks, such as the Visconti, remain of course highly important in the development of tarot yet, as is shown by this card, it also remains a ‘pre’ standardised pattern.

What would be incredible would be to find a full deck exemplified by the World card found in the Sforza Castle!

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

> pdf version (355 KB)

[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

> pdf version (1.3 MB)

[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

Given my personal and professional interests, I am at various times asked whether Rudolf Steiner talked about tarot in either his books or his lectures – or was at least aware of tarot. It should be brought to mind that amongst the thousands of recorded lectures he gave between 1900 and 1925, many have yet to be published, and even more to be translated into English. So it is possible that a number of references are not yet in the public domain.

A case in point is one of the references I include below, having discovered when I last visited Dornach in Switzerland and, already familiar with the specific dates during which he would likely have talked about tarot, discovered a small entry in his private notebooks… but we’ll come to that a little later.

Much of what follows is extracted from a page on my fourhares.com site specifically addressing tarot and Anthroposophy. Of note also is that an increasing number of books on tarot make either direct or indirect reference to Steiner. Some of these, however, and despite even frequent quotes by Steiner, either misrepresent Steiner’s view or attempt to support their own peculiar viewpoints by quotes taken out of context.

The only major Anthroposophical work dealing with tarot of which I am aware is Meditations on the Tarot, written anonymously by a Russian Roman Catholic Anthroposophist during the mid 1960s, and published posthumously. The English translation is by Robert Powell, an astrologer, Eurythmist and Anthroposophist who also developed an integrated ‘dance of the Cosmos’ to the service of Sophia, combining some of Steiner’s suggestions for the Eurythmic planetary and zodiacal forms, but worked in a circular form to music. It is clear from some of Powell’s works that part of his inspiration derives from the works of the author of Meditations on the Tarot.

Rudolf Steiner’s reference to Tarot

There are very few times that Steiner appears to have directly referred to Tarot. In fact, only three sources have thus far come my way. Those who are familiar with especially some of Steiner’s untranslated work may come across other sources, and I would be very grateful to be informed of these.

As will be obvious from what follows, I strongly suspect that further material from the 1906 period is yet to emerge.

The only currently published source within Steiner’s works (ie, apart from my own website and this Newsletter) is from a Christmas lecture given  in 1906.

GA 96 Christmas Lecture 17th December 1906

For ease of bibliographic reference, Steiner’s works have been numbered as part of his overall ‘collected works’ – which in German abbreviates to ‘GA’. GA 96 therefore forms part of Volume 96 of his collected works. In 1906, there were still many lectures that were not short-hand recorded, especially some of the lectures intended for members of the Society rather than open to the public.

In a lecture on the festival of Christmas given in 1906, various symbols were displayed on a pine Christmas tree:

Steiner explained the symbols, from the bottom up, in the following manner:

The square is the symbol of the fourfold nature of man: physical body, ether body, astral body and ego.

The triangle is the symbol of the higher man: Spirit Self, Life Spirit and Spirit Man.

Above the triangle is the symbol of the Tarot. Initiates of the Egyptian Mysteries knew how to read this sign. They also knew how to read the Book of Thoth, which consisted of seventy-eight cards on which were recorded all world events from beginning to end, from Alpha to Omega, and which could be read if they were joined and assembled in the right way. The Book of Thoth, or Hermes, contained in pictures the life that fades in death and again sprouts forth anew into life. Whoever could combine the right numbers with the right pictures was able to read it. This wisdom of numbers and pictures has been taught since primeval ages. In the Middle Ages it still played an important role, but today there is little left of it.

[Note that a mildly different version of the above is recorded further on, from what appears to be a different source]

Above the Alpha and Omega is the sign of Tao. It reminds us of the worship of God by our primeval ancestors because this worship took its origin from the work Tao. Before Europe, Asia and Africa were lands of human culture, our ancestors lived on Atlantis, which was submerged by a flood. In the Germanic sagas of Niflheim, the land of the mists, the memory of Atlantis still lives. For Atlantis was not surrounded by pure air. Its atmosphere was filled with enormous masses of mist similar to the clouds and mists in high mountains. The sun and moon were not seen clearly in the sky, but were surrounded by a rainbow, and sacred Iris. At that time man still understood the language of nature. What speaks to him today in the lapping and surging of the waves, in the whistling and rushing of the wind, in the rustling of the leaves, in the rumbling of thunder, is no longer understood by him, but at that time he could understand it. He felt something that spoke to him from everything about him. From the clouds and waters and leaves and winds the sound rang forth: Tao (the I am). Atlanteans heard it and understood it, and knew that Tao streamed through the whole world.

Finally, all that permeates the cosmos is present in man and is symbolized in the pentagram at the top of the tree. The deepest meaning of the pentagram may not now be mentioned, but it is the star of mankind, of mankind developing itself. It is the star that all wise men follow as did the priest-sages in ancient ages.

It symbolizes the earth that is born on the Night of Consecration, because the most sublime light radiates from the deepest darkness. Man lives on toward a state when the light shall be born in him, when one significant saying shall be replaced by another, when it will no longer be said, “The Darkness does not comprehend the Light” but when the truth will resound into cosmic space with the words, “Darkness gives way to the Light that radiates toward us in the Star of Mankind, Darkness yields and comprehends the Light”.

This shall resound from the Christmas celebration, and the spiritual light shall radiate from it. Let us celebrate Christmas as the festival of the most lofty ideal of the Idea of Mankind, so that in our souls may rise the joyful confidence: Indeed, I, too, shall experience the birth of the higher man within myself. The birth of the Saviour, the Christos, will take place in me also.

Rudolf Steiner Signs and Symbols of the Christmas Festival [lecture III] GA 96, 17th Dec. 1906

It is obvious from the above quote, as will again be apparent below, that Steiner in large part took his source from Eliphas Levi (the symbol clearly has that derivative) as well as, very likely, Book II (Chapter III) of Paul Christian’s History and Practice of Magic from 1870 (therein the reference to tarot linked to Egypt falsely attributed to Iamblichus). Even that, however, is likely derived from a comment made by Yarker in his Arcane Schools, which talks briefly of tarot thus:

The learned French writer [Paul] Christian considers that the 22 symbolic designs of the Tarot cards embody the synthesis of the Egyptian Mysteries, and that they formed the decoration of a double row of 11 pillars through which the candidate for Initiation was led, and that these designs further correspond with the 22 characters of all primitive alphabets.

Within a page of that quote, Yarker also notes and discusses Freemasonic ‘Marks’ that include the Square, Ankh, Triangle, Pentagramme, and but few other marks (and has them illustrated therein).

Given that Steiner had a copy of Yarker’s book and that, further, his warrant for the Co-Masonic Memphis-Misraïm Rite derived from Yarker via Reuss, and that, further, 1906 roughly coincides with the ‘pinnacle’ of Steiner’s involvement with Freemasonry (it was earlier that same year that Reuss and Steiner signed an accord), it seems highly likely that the tarot reference stems from the same sources.

More notes on the theme – 12th December 1906

One of the few people that completed his PhD on the works of Steiner lives not far away from me. Whilst he was still working on his dissertation, I asked if he would keep an eye out for any references he may come across that either mentioned or appeared to mention tarot. His knowledge of German, together with the access he had to unpublished documents, would, I had accurately hoped, unravel more reference than the single mentioned above in GA96.

It certainly seems that no Anthroposophist of the early 20th century paid much attention to tarot, for there appears little evidence of secondary material developing there and then (apart from the later Meditations on the Tarot). Perhaps it was picked up with greater zeal by members of the co-freemasonic order under his jurisdiction. Freemasonry, however, is similarly an area that appears to have had relatively little coverage outside of the series published as Temple Legend, Occult Brotherhoods, and Freemasonry and Ritual Work (Cf also my page ‘Steiner and Freemasonry’ on my Fourhares.com site).

Certainly a few days earlier than the GA96 quote mentioned, and during a lecture at an esoteric session, Steiner mentioned tarot. During those lectures, notes were not made. Afterwards, however, notes were made by various participants. These were made perhaps simply to jolt memory for what may have been considered significant, or simply for the sake of later recollection.

The entire session, given on the twelfth of December 1906, is summarised by one participant (and that record is the only one I am aware of) in just forty words, given below – and I must here again thank Adrian Anderson for both alerting me to the notes, and providing me with both a copy of the German as well as its translation:

The Book of Thoth of the Ægyptians consisted of 78 cards that contained the secrets of the cosmos. One knew this very well in the Egyptian Initiation. The cards used as playing cards derive from this origin. The designations King, Knight, Tower-guards, Commander are Occult names.

What is of significance is that if this summary is of the whole lecture or session, then, presumably, Steiner devoted at least a whole session to working with Tarot, and that to a highly select group. That the brief note seems somewhat garbled is more likely a reflection of the person recording the session. After all, if the whole session was on tarot, and the person making those notes was unfamiliar with the deck, it would be rather unusual for clear card designation to emerge. It may be, for example, that ‘King’ refers to the Emperor; ‘Knight’ to the Chariot; and ‘Commander’ to the Pope – who is ‘Master of the Arcana’ according to P. Christian.

Given this reference, it seems likely that Steiner was at that period working a little more intensively with tarot – and certainly more intensively than has been recorded: if he gave a whole esoteric session on the subject, even if in the context of the ritual Freemasonic Memphis-Misraïm work.

Freemasonry and Ritual Work

The last book mentioned in the previous section, Freemasonry and Ritual Work, contains again the two references already mentioned. As it is there quoted in mildly different form, for the sake of completion, I will present the entire brief section (p 375 – 376):

The Book of Thoth (Tarot)

(footnote: The way the cards were used is not recorded)

From an instruction lesson, Munich, Dec. 12 1906

The Egyptian Book of Thoth consisted of 78 card, which contained the world secrets, This was well known in the initiation rituals of Egypt. The names of the playing cards come from that – King, Knight, Keeper of the Tower, Commander-in-Chief are esoteric denotations

From a lecture, Berlin, Dec. 17, 1906

Those who were initiated in the Egyptian Mysteries were able to read

(the symbol for Tarot). They could also read the Book of Thoth, which comprised 78 cards, in which all world events were depicted from the beginning to end, from Alpha to Omega, which one could decipher if they were arranged in their proper order. The book contained pictures of life, leading to death and arising again to new life. Whoever could combine the correct numbers with the correct pictures could read what was written. And this number-knowledge, this picture-knowledge had been taught from earliest times. It also still had a great influence in the Middle Ages, as for instance on Raymond Lully, but nowadays not much of it remains.

It is at times the small differences in the notes that bring to light something or other that is omitted from another record to helps to shed light on sources and what may have been at play. Here, the mention of Raymond Llull is, to say the least, interesting, and adds another dimension to not only what Steiner was working with, but also the manner in which tarot may have been viewed. I’ll leave it at that for now, only to mention that Llull’s works on the ‘Ars Combinatoria’, implied in this reference, is instructive.

Steiner’s NoteBooks – December 1906 – ref. 222

Given the dates at which Steiner delivered the above two references, I took the opportunity when I was last in Dornach, Switzerland (the week after Easter, 2008), to check out Steiner’s personal NoteBooks from the period – and was both pleased to find a reference and at the same time disappointed that not more notes, however peripheral, were made. In fact, the whole entry is the following:

Perhaps we can note two small important details from this: the first is that Steiner spells ‘tarot’ in the French manner rather than in the German as was made by the stenographer of GA-96 above; the second is that the position of the Alpha (a) and Omega (w) is inversed in relation to their placement when it came time to positioning these on the Christmas Tree (shown earlier). That these, incidentally, were in his notebook in lower-case rather than capitals I personally consider without significance.

These details again point to Eliphas Levi as an influence, though it should be noted that Levi appears to only have used the capitals (though, again, I do not think this is of significance), and that Levi positions the Rho ‘P’ so that the ‘head’ is above the horizontal of the ‘T’, unlike Steiner. Perhaps the influence is therefore, again, indirect, via manuscript works derived from Reuss, Yarker, or even various people associated with the likes of E. Schure (whom he met in Paris), or Papus, whose Tarot of the Bohemians, which includes multicircular ‘keys’, is reminiscent of Llull’s work.

One avenue that may be worth pursuing are references — or rather imagery — that may have been used for tarot by Reuss or Yarker. That, of course, is work that has yet to be undertaken.

Let me start by asking what everyone in the tarot world is wondering: do you remember your first kiss?

Oh yes!

How did that first kiss compare to the moment in which you ‘got’ the tarot? I mean that moment in which the whole tarot suddenly made sense to you.

These are moments of exceptional intensity, rare in a lifetime and much alike. Suddenly the sky rips open and you are sent into a state of fusion with the surrounding world: it suddenly becomes meaningful and is understood. You hallucinate, give thanks for the beauty of the world and fall head over heels in love with the tarot, or Britney Spears.

Now, you probably didn’t marry the first girl you kissed, but you became a master card- maker. How did that come about?

First of all, on December 6, 1986, the day I experienced this moment of fusion, I started to write an autobiography. In my vision, all my life had recapitulated before my eyes to the rhythm of the tarot, in precise, quasi-surgical slices of life. So I wrote my experiences, while “remembering myself”, according to the arcana. The basic link between experience and image, essential for the tarot, was accomplished. The rest was easy. “Remembering oneself” means to relive the past as an observing/observer, with the savor of the moment’s energies. It is a “Madeleine of Proust”. This book is finished, but I have given up on finalising it.

At about the same time, I started doing readings using the deck I had stowed away when I was twenty. Each arcane is a graphic programming of a “place of consciousness”, or as Castaneda might have said, a precise “assemblage point”. So, when my visitor drew the Lover, I could break into the tears of a 16 year old. If Force was turned up, I felt again the ambition of my 30 years. I was in sympathy (in the Greek etymological sense: suffer with) my visitor and it was therefore very easy for me to evoke and transmit the energetic quality needed for finding a way out of her existential crisis.

Then, in 1995 a Parisian theatre commissioned me to make scenery using the 22 majors of the Marteau tarot. Each measured 2.50m x 1.20. The theatre had financed the materials and I had got as far as Temperance when the production was cancelled. I was left with my work and a surfeit of the Grimaud tarot. It was then that I began a serious historical study, painted my canvases white and started over with the Conver. I enjoyed the work very much, and the year and one-half immersion changed me. Among other things, I was able to observe the incredible operativity these images exercise in such formats. Then I took on the first 8 majors of the Noblet. Since the ektachromes for the others wouldn’t be available from the Bibliothèque Nationale for a year, I did the Dodal majors and then went back to finishing the Noblet. In the course of these projects, four completely “unusual” Viévilles (XVI, XVII, XVIII, XIX) were also produced in large formats.

You have given us restored versions of the Noblet and the Dodal, first in limited, hand-stencilled editions and now in full, mass-printed versions. I know how important it is for you to preserve the correctness of the original decks, but how much of you do you think there is in these decks?

The minimum!

I see none in the Noblet. And few in the Dodal: the reversible back, still a debated question, and two errors in color placement: one accidental (on the Moon), the other deliberate (Soleil).

Of course, an industrial edition requires that the card dimensions be standardised. The original inner-frame dimensions vary by 2mm in height and by 1mm in width. I chose the maximum height as reference. Around this is a 1mm black frame and then an outer band of 3mm. This last space is imposed by the printer for technical reasons, and is not determined by whether the corners are to be square or rounded.

In your reconstruction of the Dodal you had access to the two only existing originals: the one at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and the other at the British Museum. Did you work with both of these decks?

Yes

What differences did you find between the two?

First of all, the colors on the English copy are in better condition, but soiled and dull. The English print is more charged with ink, as well.

Then, three cards come from another, probably earlier block: the Ace of Batons, Ace of Swords, and the Valet of Batons. For our edition of the Dodal, the choice was made according to which card was more carefully engraved. The English copy was selected for the Ace of Swords, while the French deck was retained for the two others.

How is it technically possible that three cards came from a different block?

The stocks! At that time, people didn’t hesitate to re-compose complete decks from disparate sources, even using decks from diverse workshops. Worse, they were often re-cut. We will probably never know if the tarot moulds controlled by the of the Généralité de Lyon marked «français pour l’étrange» (“French for export”) were included or not in the royal destruction edict of 1701. We only know that Dodal began a new production in that year. In those days, little was wasted: everything was used and re-used. So, leftovers from an earlier edition could have been used in another.

As for the inscription “F.P. LE.ETRANGE”, T. Depaulis suggests it could mean either “Franc pour L’Etranger” or “Fait pour l’Etranger”, both appellations exonerating, from French taxes, decks destined for export.

Could Dodal have added an i to his name in order to promote the sale of his decks in Italy?

How long did it take you to finish this re-construction?

More than two years.

How long do you think it could have taken for the original engraver to create these plates?

I would imagine a maximum of two to three months, but I’m not sure.

I often wonder how much care was really put in the manufacturing of these decks. What is your feeling about that?

The engraver as free and independent person always worked as cleanly and conscientiously as possible.* In the workshops, printing the black line was mostly carried out by highly qualified professionals. Colors, however, were often put on negligently, sometimes by children in deplorable conditions. I have read in the Sainte-Suzanne archives that in 1792 the local carterie started stencil work at midnight, employing children who applied the colors by candlelight.

When printing your version of this deck, you had to settle for a color palette. Would you say that the final result is closer to the French or to the British deck?

Closer to the French.

I find a strong graphic resemblance between any of the Dodal images and the images in the Noblet. I am talking about the posture of the characters. This is especially clear in the court cards: Pages, Queens, Kings and Knights. The Dodal knights seem like loose versions of the Noblet’s horsemen. Do you think that it is possible that the Dodal was made by copying from the Noblet?

No, the graphic style and significant details are too dissimilar. They draw the same thing, the same theme, but each has his own personal style. On the other hand, one can use the word copy for the later tarots made in Marseille from about 1720/30. As elsewhere, there is no more re-actualisation.

When I showed the restored Dodal to a couple of people their reaction was “So… it is the same deck you already have, only bigger, right?” In a way I understand what they are seeing, but at the same time I think they are missing the point. In your view, why was that restoring the Dodal made sense? What are people going to get from it that they won’t get from the Noblet?

The Dodal generates a flash, or energetic short-circuit of the unconscious, different from that of the Noblet. A tarot image opens a door, and the landscape behind it is different depending on the door. As I mentioned before, the image is a programming of a “place of consciousness”, the precise assemblage point of a particular inner regard. Depending on the arcane and the engraver, they resemble each other a bit, much, or not at all. It’s like a chocolate Charlotte made by two chefs: one will be sweeter, the other juicier.

Tell me a little bit about the term ‘companion’. Is that a term you use to define all medieval guilds, or do you mean something else by it?

The “companions” entered into a “Compagnonnage” fraternity like one joins a religion or the Communist Party. Work was organised in the modern way, almost as a trade-union would, with sectors devoted to mutual aid, recruitment or intense in-house techno-spiritual training. As a craftsman you must have manual skill and a highly-developed feeling for materials, but also practice, all at the same time, the 6 other basic traditional qualities: courage, patience, generosity, humility, obedience and sense of responsibility. With time and application, these 6 qualities progress together with one’s skill.

But what was it that these fraternities were asked to build? Athanors, alchemical crucibles: collective trance machines intended to transform a whole population and carry it to God! We are in the realm of technological shamanism! So the “companions” within “Compagnonnage” on their building sites, whatever their trade (mason, stone mason, carpenter, sculptor, glass-maker…) are part, whether they know it or not, of a permanent school of wizard/technicians worthy of Harry Potter. The companion becomes Master when it knows he is one. We are a far cry from the later guilds which only served to structure the privileges of professional castes.

I was talking to a woman who has restored a few Thangka paintings from the 12th Century. We were talking about how there is an underlying visual knowledge in a Thangka painting that we can also find in the stained-glass windows of a European cathedral, or the illustrations in a Medieval manuscript. I am talking about an understanding of shape that it is also an understanding about how to use shape to move the human spirit. At a technical level, a Tibetan artist and an European draughtsman knew the same things, they just lent them to different belief systems.

Exactly!

In your text you wrote “the wisdom underling the tarot is a pragmatic professional philosophy”. Are you talking about that same knowledge?

Yes, but not only that. There is also the idea of progressive improvement in which work and the spiritual world are inseparable. For a craftsman/artist, the more you make beauty (the beautiful is operative, direct like a punch, creates an astonished destabilisation and opens the doors to paradise), the more your soul is beautiful!

How would you describe the “operative science” you see in the tarot?

Operativity is what the apprentice is learning to acquire. For the image-maker in a sacred period, it is a question of using an image to program the unconscious to a precise meditation. The state it focuses on, the arcane under consideration, is defined by the graphics and above all by the colors. Thangkas and the tarot function on the same operative level.

Whether we like it or not, colors manipulate us. The art is to consciously distribute them in a meaningful way.

Now, mandalas invite our mind to take a spiritual/psychological voyage. Would you say the tarot does the same thing?

Yes

In this case, do you think the tarot intends to take us all to a specific place?

Yes, it it has been doing that discreetly for centuries. It would seem that today there are still amateurs for this variety of shamanism, and a very modern one it is. The source tarots behave like a GPS. They all lead us to the same place, but for some it will be springtime in a crowd while others will experience loneliness and winter. The tarot is above all experimental, so I have often chosen to use the word psychonaut (or tarotnaut!) to indicate this “spiritual-psychological voyager”. Aren’t we all sailors on the ocean of the soul?

There is an idea, behind contemporary art, about taking our mind for an illicit spin.

“Art” and “illicit”: these words remind me of the interminable and highly Parisian discussions I participated in when I studied philosophy in university. “Illicit” seems to stand for the courage, which would like to see itself as exceptional, to accept crossing the barriers of conventional regard, and to let oneself be carried on towards an unknown. Illicit, in my opinion, simply means “random”. The GPS precision is lost, and one is tossed about wherever the emotional winds choose to carry us. I fear that with contemporary art we are certainly operative, but like a crazy compass!

Materials and symbols have an experiential meaning,

Meaning isn’t exactly the right word; power would be more appropriate.

but although each artwork would set some collective coordinates to start our trip, the arriving point is both individual and unexpected. How do you see that happening with the tarot?

With the tarot we approach precise states of consciousness, valid for all and validated by many generations. This is not the case with highly egocentric and anarchistic contemporary art. As long as we are discovering a territory, the landscape varies according to the seasons, to our position, our mood and the taste of our first kiss. It is a permanent innovation in perpetual motion. The goal of the tarot is to indicate an itinerary of the soul, undertaken one foot in front of the other, and not to toss us about on the tides of emotion.

In your writings I detect a notion that interest me a lot, but I would say it has been more developed in the Eastern world than in the Western world: any craft can be a spiritual path.

Yes, but let us not forget that culturally we are descended from a quadripartite system of social organization :

Producers : artisans/peasants: batons
Merchants: shopkeepers/financiers: coins
Warriors: aristocrats/soldiers: swords
Savants: doctors/priests: cups

The tarot is its reflection. What fundamental difference can we perceive between the castes of the Hindu orient and the “colleges” of the occident? None on a theoretical level, more with respect to action. What characterizes a fraternity of the Middle Ages is the recognition by one’s peers, through ritual and ceremonies, of a progress towards excellence, as much technical as (we would now say ) shamanistic or spiritually operative. Modern western Sufism comes closest to this genre today.

When you say, for example, that The Star card shows an eye in the belly of the woman as an allusion to the stone cutters’ “eye of the master”, their ability to feel the stone and know how to place it, are you talking about a craftsman’s ability to intuitively understand the nature and limitations of the material he is working with?

Still more, to feel them physically! In the course of an apprenticeship comes a moment when you are taught how to place your attention, both in the here and now (seeing the instant as it occurs; letting it happen while observing it) and in a particular corporal sensation, a sort of attraction/repulsion, related to the sense of the stone. This trick is useful to a craftsman, but the essential thing is learning to attain a state of observing/observer. One can also call this state “second attention”, and its automatic practice is what makes you a master.

I would think of Jackson Pollock, and how he understood painting to such a extent that he could take it beyond the limits of representation.

He seems to go beyond symbol or meaning and speak directly to the unconscious. All depends on what he has to tell it!

Pollock is an interesting example in that some physicists have now established that all of his paintings follow a fractal structure. He seemed to have painted in tune with the rhythm of nature, and as such one could see his action painting as the by-product of some sort of spiritual momentum.

The golden section had this function. To me, certain modern artists seem have gained the worlds of operativity by breaking and entering, in an illicit way, loaded down with a whole pack of more or less convoluted, neurotic and egotistical material. Others open the Doors of Paradise for us.

But I am also thinking about Chang Canasta, a magician who devoted the last decades of his life to painting. When he was asked why, he answered: “I believe in something called talent. Once you have it, you can apply it to everything.”

Idries Shah named this “learning how to learn”. Once you’ve learned how to learn, in 6 months to a year you can achieve excellence in a profession previously unknown to you. He went on to say that in a well-filled life it was necessary to have practised at least 6 trades at the highest level! Serghiu Celebidache was the celebrated orchestra conductor and the respected mathematician and rug expert and pheasant breeder and exceptional linguist speaking 7 languages…

Talent here is, again, an understanding of form, rhythm and pattern that a guy like Canasta could use to present a card trick or to paint a landscape. As soon as we understand proportion, balance, symmetry and contrast, we can apply that knowledge to all areas of our experience. Is it that the tarot intends to teach us, beyond the iconographic choice of imagery: mastering your craft is mastering yourself?

You have perfectly summarised the mission of the tarot. It goes even further: «mastering yourself» in order to participate in the Soul of the World.

You also mention in your text that “All master engravers during the second half of the 17th century were instructed in the inner meaning of the tarot – Mermé is their last representative.” How do you relate that affirmation to the idea of the Dodal being the last tarot that was consciously permeated by the companions intention?

It is the flame of Maison-Dieu which induces me to say that.

The tarot emerged from a Platonic-type mental world of philosophical immanence: the individual can, by his own achievements, put himself in a position to join the worlds of the Spirit. The flame is thus ascending, and to my knowledge Dodal’s is the last tarot to depict it in this way. All the other significant details confirm how well-understood the “pilgrimage of the soul” was, and how at that time the procedures of transmission were fully-functioning and conscious.

Later, the flame billows down from above, raising the question of  divine grace and its intercessors: we are in a philosophy of the Aristotelian type. The inner meaning is lost; what remains is reduced to recollection and hearsay. The same applies to the other meaningful details. At best one installs them by copying, while at worst “fantasy” takes over. The engraver of Nicolas Conver went so far as to settle his accounts with nascent freemasonry by placing 3 dots on the chest of the Devil: freemasonry is a she-devil! These mid-eighteenth century quarrels mean nothing to us today. Respect for a tradition vanishes, the overall consciousness of a civilization shifts and the pre-industrial era dawns.

Cartouche of Haultin l’aîné, cardmaker at La Rochelle attested in 1680

Dodal furnishes only meaningful details and signs with the Master’s chrism. Resembling a stylized 4, this figure evokes measuring instruments and has been the prerogative of image-makers, carpenters and stonemasons since the Middle Ages.

I am asking you this because I am not familiar with the companions’ tradition, but I am familiar with what I would call the ‘Marseille Lore’. To me, this lore consists of a series of footnotes added to certain images, without their necessarily being in accord with the image’s original iconographic intention. I take that lore to be a fundamental part of the Marseille tradition, and by tradition I mean the narrative/divination use we made of these cards. To mention a couple of these footnotes, there is the idea that The Fool is the card without a number and Death is the card without a name; so when you overlap both, Death becomes The Fool’s skeleton.

If I remember correctly, it is to Tchalaï that we owe this idea.

That lore is the reason Jodorowsky said, in a preface to his first deck edition or in one of his books, that having been raised on classic Marseille lore (Grimaud), “killing the father” was the condition on which he could produce his deck. Numerous bad “good habits” had been acquired because this was the only historic deck on the market. Along the same lines, there is Tchalaï’s fine discourse concerning the comma on Force’s hat. But this comma was the result of damage to the woodblock!

When I began work on the Conver, after having painted over the Marteau images, I underwent the same temptation: make my own deck. For example, at first I painted the figures in Soleil naked, then put on vines with green leaves…then became annoyed with myself and dressed them back in their shorts! When Jodo liberated himself from the Marseille/Grimaud lore, he went into an egotistical creation frenzy. Considering his talents, this choice was regrettable.

There is also the idea of the person who is emerging from the grave in Judgement being, graphically at least, composed of two halves of two visibly different persons, or the idea of The Hermit containing a visual pun in that a man who looks at his lantern blinds himself instead of finding anything.

This pun is part of the essence itself of the Hermit. But within this lore, some details are significant, like this androgynous figure in Jugement, or the Hermit’s cane which resembles a spine, while others are not.

Your book is full of these great “narrative spells”. I call them ‘narrative spells’ because they are these little stories that validate a detail in a card, but at the same time they get validated by that same detail, in some sort of symbiotic loop; but these little tales don’t seem to amount to a coherent code one can read through the whole sequence,

These stories are there to bring into relief a particular perceptive state, explain certain experiences, or highlight a detail. They don’t add up together, and are indeed like footnotes.

I am a little bit septical about their historical validity.

You are right to be sceptical. Certain stories come from my own stock of experiences and I can validate them, while others are visions drawn from the memory of the world. These are from time to time corroborated by other people in strange ways. For example, I received a mail explaining that the “caterpillar trance” was an exercise practised in simplified form by people studying phosphenism.

For one thing, these descriptions can’t be found in books. They spread by word of mouth, it seems. So, what I want to know is, what is your take on that lore?

For the last 150 years, and it is barely older than that, this Lore has been fed at best by visions, at worst by the analyses and pronouncements of its spokesmen. The word-of-mouth transmissions have been interrupted for centuries. Only the world’s memory remains, that strange source phenomenon which is the tarot’s gift to its faithful enthusiasts. The memory of Jean Noblet or Jean Dodal is present still, and the path has been cleared of underbrush. These ancient masters can still flood you with their spirituality. It is for us to make contact. The stories issued from the world’s memory have an incomparable savour, leading you into a consciousness where doubt doesn’t exist. Here direct transmission comes into play; it is the storyteller’s talent. As a tarot reader, you often enter into visions and know how to share them. You already exercise this talent.

It is that lore part of the message from the companions,

Yes, direct transmission was part of the Compagnons’ teaching in times past. Today the younger generation is thirsty for stories, as it is these that transmit. In any case, what choice do they have? There is no longer any techno-spiritual instruction available through a profession.

or is that an embellishment on the way we describe the images that happened later? Do you think that such lore may have influenced the way the images were drawn?

Significant details were transmitted and utilized. The other details, those nourishing the lore, are late and intellectual, mostly dating from the middle of the 19 th century.

I like that lore a lot. In fact, at some point I mentioned to Roxanne that one of the reasons why I enjoy working with the Dodal more than working with the Noblet is precisely because many of these footnotes can’t be seen in the Noblet.

Noblet is a bit dry, and close-fisted with details, while Dodal’s engraver is savory, his details are numerous and imaginative! Compare their versions of the lady in the Star: Noblet made her half adolescent/half man to illustrate the virginal-purity/force-maturity of the master, a very strict and masculine definition of the canon. Dodal makes her pregnant to emphasize the transmission of essentials, and gives her a double regard to signify that she understands from within and without – a very supple and feminine description of mastery.

This leads to my next question: you make a distinction between the Noblet, the Dodal and the Viéville and the rest of the decks within the Marseille tradition. For you the Dodal is the last deck within the Marseille tradition in which some details were purposefully added.

Yes.

Now, for the untrained eye, like mine, when it comes to certain details the Dodal is more similar to the Conver than to the Noblet. The Noblet seems to be the odd one.

That is exact, and I feel the same way. I think the answer has mostly been covered: it is the “Marseille lore”. Noblet undoubtedly is part of it, but from afar and in a strange way. He gives the impression of being an ancestor from another planet! One sees that the basic teaching is the same, but the two seem not to have had the same professor.

How do you manage to see such distinction between the Dodal and the following decks so clearly?

Dodal’s engraver knows what he’s talking about from experience, or transmission, or (as I believe) both. After him, one speaks of things because at best one has heard them spoken of. It is hearsay: my cousin told me that his brother had heard this or that… As long as the engraver has not lived the inner process of transformation to mastery, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and can only copy. With Noblet and Dodal, we are in the same world, but not with Conver and even less with those who follow him. We know their mental world by heart, and let me say we are very glad to be rid of them.

Finally, I wouldn’t like to end this interview without knowing: what will be next? I imagine that right now you and Roxanne may be feeling ready to rest a little bit and rejoice in the enormous accomplishment you have made but, what will you do when you get restless again? What is next?

Viéville, if I manage to extract myself from the historian’s quandary I’m mired in. I am convinced that this tarot was made “as mirror” by necessity, by an impossibility to do otherwise, and not to confer a particular meaning. Furthermore, why perturb and confuse the coming generations with all these images conforming to the Marseille pattern, but reversed? As for the 4 or 5 unusual arcana, they alone justify the effort. These “exceptions” confirm the rule and are the major interest of this tarot. The question deserves reflection by the community of historians and enthusiasts.

So yes, I would like to edit the Viéville in the classic Marseille order and direction. This would indeed be an illicit act. Will I have the courage to deliver myself up to massacre by the purists?

New-York / Sainte-Suzanne

Originally posted in February 2010 on Enrique’s site: tarology.wordpress.com

At the date of his marriage, he worked for another Master Card-maker from AVIGNON, ÉTIENNE BLATEROND. JEAN PIERRE PAYEN and BLATEROND confirmed his declarations on that day.”

SOURCES: Archives Départementales du Vaucluse. Étude Charrasse.
Posted by Yves le Marseillais here

“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 journey: one taken nearly 50 years ago but left forgotten in a box of old news photographs. Among the images were this journey’s beacons, waiting to form a map to the experience of an influential and controversial time, very roughly a decade of the last century referred to simply as The Sixties. Opening this box released a flood of human and historical experiences, revived in photographs not widely seen and, therefore, free of accumulated iconography. Like the Tarot, these photographs told many stories. Some framed experiences of life and death, some of revolution and retribution. Some expressed the triumphs of personal freedom or revealed incipient hints of a dramatic cultural shift yet to come.

I was stunned to discover that many of my photographs fell naturally into the order of the Tarot that for centuries has served to display and interpret through its rich symbolic structure a limitless range of human consequences. The 500-year-old Tarot apalogue, reproduced through the centuries in remarkable card variations, awakened for me a new view of the Sixties and its most significant and original development: the Counterculture.

A few years ago I found a slender pamphlet by Theodore Roszak, entitled Fool’s Cycle/Full Cycle: Reflections on the Great Trumps of the Tarot. Those who recall the Sixties may remember Roszak as the author of The Making of A Counterculture (1969), a book that offered, more than any other of the time, an original cultural analysis of the period’s signature generational revolt and linked its promptings to other Romantic movements of the West. Roszak notes in Fool’s Cycle that the Tarot has been surrounded “with congested systems of astrological, numerological, alchemical, and mythological correspondences.” Yet he confesses to an irresistible fascination. “In spite of the occult clutter that I found surrounding the Tarot,” he writes, “the twenty-two great trumps continued to haunt me. The Fool, the Magus, the Hanged Man, the Tower…there clings to such images the peculiar attraction of all great symbol systems.” Roszak, too, links the Tarot with astronomy, alchemy, the I Ching, and the iconography of major religions. “All have acquired over the generations a compelling glamour, a vast rhapsodic resonance, along with a tantalizing elusiveness.” Great symbols, says Roszak, are uniquely commanding presences that seem to say, “Yes, you make our meaning as you go along. But that is because we are the themes on which your life plays its variations.” And he concludes that “in a much deeper sense we are their projections–each of us becoming one of an infinite number of possible readings that give these universal motifs a particular historical enactment.”

Roszak offers his interpretation of the Tarot as a cycle, a vision that he confesses came to him in a dream. “There at the beginning of the cycle was the Fool, giving his non-number–the zero–to the equilibrium line. There, at the center was the card of the Wheel of Fortune acting as pivot point. There, at the bottom of the downward curve was the card of the Devil. There, at the end of the journey was the card of the World. And with this striking configuration came the strong impression that, yes, this was the Fool’s journey, this was the course that consciousness must run in its evolution.” The striking feature of Roszak’s Tarot “cycle” is its movement along the path of a moving point; a concept that Roszak notes appears “uniquely in modern Western mathematics.” It results in the plotting of oscillations against time, “of blending the circular with the linear.” And he notes, “only a culture uniquely gifted (or burdened) with a deep historical sense could recognize that what repeats may also develop.” The cycle, for Roszak, is a circle that “gets somewhere” and therefore has drama, a narrative, a beginning, a middle, and end.

As I sorted through my photographs to plot the historical trajectory of the Counterculture, I recognized that countless oscillations had contributed to its narrative; that all these oscillations had each begun at a particular point and returned to a different one; that they comprised a much larger cycle of nearly imponderable diversities that rumbled into existence with a collective rush and then scattered out again in the wake of ever more oscillating cycles. And in the Tarot I saw symbolic touchstones for these oscillations that converged on events, personalities, ideals, intentions, and conflicts, and that shaped the contours of an era. Moreover, I found in my photographs symbolic points of departure for many of these experiences, points that—like the Tarot—responded to the plotting of a path and to the aggregate qualities and events that describe it. In response, I used some of these photographs to create a Tarot deck. And as I weighed the qualities and experiences represented by each new “card,” as I researched and wrote about each image and what it came to represent, I became a pilgrim on a new Fool’s Journey. The journey seemed to follow old trails, but the Tarot’s compelling map illuminated them with new understandings.

To address an apparent contradiction—a narrative journey spread across the otherwise mapless oscillations of so many experiences—is to wrestle with a view of history. The attempt here is to explore the Counterculture as a non-fiction narrative by using the symbolic structure of the Tarot. As people live their lives they seem, at any number of points, to bring these lives together in waves, or—to use Roszak’s term—oscillating cycles—of commonly created momentum. And the mechanism, especially where ideas and experience intersect, may be entirely idiosyncratic. If this is so, one can think of the Sixties, or any other era, as countless people in their own oscillating cycles, their own fool’s journeys, cycling together and apart, swinging in and out of each other’s orbits and, to a degree not commonly acknowledged in most histories, engaged in a quantum expression of experience across time and space. Despite our confidence in history to express the flows and trends of human progress, it is really no easier to deconstruct these many moments of experience, these infinite, symbolically described journeys, than it is to measure the speed or location of a subatomic particle. Even as the shadow of zeitgeist gives human history an apparent, if approximate, time and place, history itself—as much literature as social science—is not fully measurable. But this does not mean a story cannot be told.

In describing this work as narrative, I draw on ideas developed by historiographer and critic Hayden White. In 1973 White published Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe, a book that called into question claims of fact and objectivity in historical works. The demands of narrative presentation, not the least of which is the use of language, introduced for White a bundle of postmodern challenges to the idea that historic truth is anything but an unattainable teleological vagary. Good histories, in fact, are studied for a glimpse of the times in which they are written at least as much as they are for the subjects they are written about. And while White goes very far to claim that historical narratives are comparable to literary fiction, it is fair to say that, at best, historical fact is provisional. White’s caveat about historical narratives has constructive value. White wrote that, with a need to appear scientific and objective, history “had repressed and denied to itself its greatest source of strength and renewal.” This “greatest source” is the creative process that constantly reframes human experience to both explicate and to understand it. Indeed, White wrote that historical explanation “can be judged solely in terms of the richness of the metaphors which govern its sequence of articulation.” Tropes and poetic structures are welcome. Good history, if it mirrors human experience, can’t elude ambiguity or contradiction or the broad range of impacts that batter successive generations, however inchoate or submerged these may be. In fact, compelling historical narrative should make every effort to include them.

White’s metahistory is manifest in many modern historic narratives. Poetry and documentary appear together in a variety of recent historic works. One of my favorites is Theodore Zeldin’s An Intimate History of Humanity (1994). Zeldin structures his unique work as a series of conversations with French women about what seem at first mundane subjects: work, marriage, children, family, friends, money, aging, etc. But these women, who have taken Zeldin into their trust, share deeply personal feelings that Zeldin then frames as historical problems. This approach produces chapters titled “How humans have repeatedly lost hope” and “Why there has been more progress in cooking than in sex,” which may seem whimsical until one digs in to find that Zeldin has used his dialogues to explore a vast range of historical influences on interpersonal human relationships. Zeldin quickly makes it clear that it is the emergence of women, the rise of feminism (which he values as a profound historical change) that has provoked a new consideration of how humans feel about each other. It is a subject that Zeldin addresses with an encyclopedic and panoramic explication of history that rests entirely on the investigation of difficult modern emotions. “You will not find history laid out in these pages as it is in museums, with each empire and each period carefully separated,” writes Zeldin in his introduction. “I am writing about what will not lie still, about the past which is alive in people’s minds today…”

The issue of probability is a popular refuge for the divinatory impulse, whether that impulse belongs to an historian or a fortune-teller. Both are tempted to explore the ways that synchronous experience, combined with probable momenta, might offer a map to the future. It is undeniable that trends and inclinations emerge from broad samplings of human cultures and that science has made enormous contributions to the intentional inventories initiated and maintained by the social sciences. And while the existence of a cycle seems to be the first measurable human reality (as described by Mircea Eliade in The Myth of Eternal Return) and one with enormous practical applications (the birth control pill, for instance), it cannot with any certainty predict the future. For all their thoughtful preparation, social scientists know no better than physicists what they really measure. History, while in the words of George Santayana may be something we are doomed to repeat, is also, as Stephen Daedalus describes in James Joyce’s Ulysses, “a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken.” The ponderous burden of history lies in the challenge of fleshing out crucial moments of a period’s vibrant self-creation, even while conforming to a shared, skeletal, reality. But rather than being chronicled in static frames of reference, historical events discussed in The Counterculture Tarot, whether iconic or idiosyncratic, coalesce around nodes of human experience.

And what are these nodes of experience? In The Counterculture Tarot they are the 78 cards of the Tarot, first reframed with photographs I made during the era and then interpreted through real events aligned with each card’s traditional and reflective symbolism. Thus, we revisit the Counterculture, not as a chronicle of incidents but as an expedition of adventures, or a “trip” in the era’s popular sense of an all-embracing journey with deeper psychological meanings. And our signposts along the way are not the turnings of the years but the full range of Tarot markers of experience that includes The Magician, The Empress, The Lovers, The Hanged Man, The Devil, The Sun, Judgment, and The World. These iconic touchstones play out the Sixties without regard to time. The Lovers card dwells on emerging changes—and choices—in the nature of human relationships. The Hanged Man brings forward experiences of personal suspension derived from drugs or incarceration. The journey begins with a Fool (Neal Cassady perhaps, or is it Abbie Hoffman?). Death arrives in the middle and not at the end, its sacrifice of Vietnam soldiers and civil rights workers a bitter but necessary step toward renewal.

Beyond the 22 most familiar cards of the major arcana (the “Fool’s Cycle” that so intrigues Roszak) there are 56 more cards divided into four suits. These of the minor arcana are as rich as the major cards in offering nodes of experience and I have addressed each of them with much detail (at least as much as that given the major cards and sometimes more). Below four arching umbrellas of experience (that parallel in their ancient and elemental structures the continuums evident in many approaches to inquiry) these cards represent fire, earth, air and water. The four suits also have been interpreted as Jung’s four sensing functions (sensation, intuition, thinking and feeling), or as the four fundamental forces of nature, or as other quaternary structures in philosophy, religion, and science. In The Counterculture Tarot these suits become inspiration (Wands), attachment (Cups), conflict (Swords), and tenacity (Pentacles). The suits address the responsive details of experience: deceit, despair, happiness, security, discontent, ruin, etc. and the actors (pages, knights, queens, and kings) who project them. Through the Wands suit we experience the clash of ideas that inspired the Counterculture. In the Cups suit we examine the attachments and lifestyles that formed new ways of having feelings and relationships. The Swords suit wrestles with the era’s conflicts, the cultural backlash to the Counterculture and its wars in the streets. And the Pentacles describe what remains, the material and spiritual remnants of the era, what was lost and what was kept.

The intricate and ancient structure of the Tarot presents a continuum of existence in which no experience ever ends. At points of crucial reflection we interpret the apparent facts of our lives through poetry and metaphor, in the reprise of a popular song, for instance, or a regarded homily, or the characterizations of fantasy and fiction. These points of reflection are animated by the memories of experience that return again and again, in which death comes well before the end and in which everything, including doom, oscillates without permanence. We are in constant search of the thousand joys that are unavailable without the consequent experience of a thousand deaths. As Tarot historian Cynthia Giles states, Tarot cards are “snapshots taken in the imaginal realm” or as depth psychologist Mary Watkins says in Waking Dreams, her study of the phenomenon of the active imagination, “Images inhabit each thought and occupation.” The Tarot is famously a way of looking at the future, as cards are spread and interpretations symbolically posture possible outcomes. Here the Tarot becomes another way of recalling the past, of recognizing how oscillations of recent human history cluster at the nodes of eternal human experience. If these placements seem arbitrary, it is important to remember that the Tarot has accumulated a rich and nearly limitless literature of interpretation at these nodes and that living life with poetic imagination was a regarded Counterculture objective. The Counterculture Tarot is not entirely a history, even as it is laden with facts and primary material drawn from historical and journalistic resources. Rather, it is a kind of “reverse inquiry,” a selective—if still broad—inventory of events that views the Counterculture’s primary, oscillating experiences through the lens of a reactivated psyche. It is a return trip and the cards of the Tarot, reformed anew from recovered photographic fragments of the era, are its signposts.

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 have faded, some of the cardstock is damaged. Perhaps there is even a card ripped with part of its image then missing.

For myself, holding Flornoy’s restoration of the Dodal deck is somewhat akin to the joy that a future cardmaker may have brought to a fellow enthusiast and traveller of the times.

Already having the photographic (and size-reduced) reproduction of the Dodal (now long out of print) published by Dussere, and having, a number of years ago, held one of the two known remaining Dodal decks when visiting the British Museum, it especially strikes me that this restoration is superb. Of course I’m also going to be critical, and Jean-Claude and Roxanne Flornoy undoubtedly expect this. So let me spill my critique in what I trust will be taken in the best way possible.

Card stock

When I first held the original c. 1701 British Museum [BM]-held deck, what especially struck me what the relative thinness of the deck. Unlike, for example, the 1963 imprint of the Grimaud deck, this 300 year old deck was, truly, ‘fine’ – which in the French has more of the literal ‘thin’ as its meaning. What Flornoy has managed is to get a cardboard quality that approximates, as much as is feasible, the thickness of the original. So a very pleasant surprise here! It’s not only the overall card size which has been more or less matched, but also its ‘grade’.

From left to right: Grimaud Marseille 1963; Flornoy 78-card deck; Dusserre photographic reproduction of BN copy

In the image above, the left-hand deck is the Grimaud from the 1960s, the central deck is Flornoy’s Dodal, and the right-hand deck, slightly thinner, is the photographic reproduction by Dusserre of the Dodal held in the Bibliotheque Nationale [BN].

Card size

This is especially pleasant, and undoubtedly has meant that the printers have had to use a greater number of card sheets than is usual. Flornoy’s meticulous and uncompromising focus here is examplary. If anything, the border ‘added’ surrounding the card images means that each card (not its image) is a little larger than the known decks. If a woodblock had been used, of course, then this would not have arisen as the ‘space’ between cards would not have allowed for such extravagance. What’s interesting (for myself at any rate) is that this printed version has images a little larger than the hand-made trump-only edition.

Dodal decks from left to right: Flornoy 78-card deck; Flornoy 22 trump-only hand-made deck; Dusserre photographic reproduction of BN copy

Colours

Not sure what to say here. Of course, one of the features of Flornoy’s decks is that they are crisp and seek to reflect the colours as the original designers may have intended them to be. I frankly do not have sufficient access to the details of both the BM and BN decks to be able to properly ascertain how closely these colours have been matched but, knowing Flornoy, I am confident that he would have, to the best of anyone’s ability, carefully considered both these decks and tried to bring out the colours as they would have been used at the time. Colours… not tone, however: personally, I suspect that the red used by Flornoy’s printers was rather more pinkish than expected… but then again, variations occured quite a lot with the imprints of the 18th century!

Card backs

Perhaps many will very much appreciate the pate-d’oix reversals that Flornoy has introduced, but, sadly, not I. Whereas he was careful to preserve the non-reversibility of the original decks in the hand-made version of the Dodal (previously released in a trumps-only edition), it’s as if he has succumbed to what is misguided commercial marketability and the preferences for those who are also readers amongst us: yet surely someone who values this deck would have been happy with the upright design!

Dodal decks from left to right: Flornoy 78-card deck; Flornoy 22 trump-only hand-made deck; Dusserre photographic reproduction of BN copy

Perhaps it’s only a small point which remains, for me, something that is somewhat of a disappointment.

Line details

The style of deck, being originally a woodcut, implies that the image is primarily based on outlines which are then overlayed with colour stencils. This gives the black lines themselves somewhat more importance than if the figures were painted. In fact, in observing and comparing various types of early woodcuts, what is often primarily done is a careful comparison of the lines, rather than of the colours (which may, after all, alter from imprint to imprint).

Many lines remain ambiguous as to their intended ‘meaning’ or representation. In simply assessing Flornoy’s new restoration, what is striking are the number of minor alterations that have occured between this deck and the earlier one he made for the hand-crafted one some years ago. This reflects something that I think is highly important, especially in a work of restoration: that Flornoy is not stuck to his previous work, but rather willing to carefully revise his previous work based on careful re-visioning of the two extant decks.

Admittedly, in the trump-only hand-made version, Flornoy only had access to the BN version. I recall, when we had the pleasure to visit Roxanne and Jean-Claude in 2005, mentioning to him that I had then recently looked through the BM deck, but I was then unable to answer his questions regarding various minor details of comparisons to the BN, not having had my Dusserre copy with me at the time from which to make such comparisons. That he subsequently obtained images from the BM for the purposes of accurate image comparison, including usage of colour across those two decks, says a lot for Jean-Claude’s integrity as card-maker.

In the image that follows, I have not included all alterations between the newer and the trump-only lines used on each deck. For example, in that section of that card, attention could also be given to the more curved nature of the sleeves; the pupils of the eyes of the figure; her hair as it meets the ‘collar’ on the right hand side… and yet other details! Still, even with paying attention to ‘only’ such details as the eye of the respective eagles, the triangular form sitting atop her heart, the colouration of the base of her sceptre, and the undulating patterns on her ‘collar’ – these give sufficient evidence that with this deck is was not simply a reprint of their earlier work, but a re-composition based on what we can only hope and surmise is careful study.

Flornoy 78-card deck on the left; his 22 trump-only hand-made deck on the right

Booklet

I am not here going to compare in any detail the booklet that came with the trump-only deck with the newer one issued with this full restoration, save for one point, well worth considering. In the older booklet, Jean-Claude says that (my translation):

From a graphic perspective, the Lyonese tarot of Jean Dodal and the Avignonese tarot of Jean Payen are strangely similar, to the point of confounding them. My conclusion is therefore simple: it is the same engraver to whom we owe these two tarots from the beginning of the 18th century.

As he mentions therein and again in the newer booklet, there is a distinction to be made between a carver and a cartier (or ‘cardmaker’). I agree with him entirely on this – and emphasise this due to what is to follow. In the newer booklet, he also names that the engraver as Jacques Mermé without mentioning his sources. Given that this information is not readily accessible, it would have been useful to include sources for those amongst us who wish to check the precise nature of the claim: how much interpretation is being presented?

Personally, I too see it as likely that the carver of the Dodal and the (Jean) Payen is the same – though I personally also take it a step further, and would claim that not only is the Dodal carved by the same hand as the Payen, but that the ‘I.P.’ on the the Moon suggests that the carver is either still in the employ of Payen, or that the Dodal is carved ‘under contract’ with Payen. There is likely, therefore, more than simply a matter of carver moving from Avignon to Lyons and working for two separate houses, but also a connection at the level of the cartier-houses of Payen and Dodal.

Another small, but still very significant point, is a statement that is repeatedly made, including by Flornoy, about the supposed destruction of woodblocks: though this was indeed the case for cards in general, tarot woodblocks were specifically exempted from this otherwise legal requirement.

Enrique’s preface

Finally, I cannot omit some comments on Enrique’s suggestions for reading tarot. As Enrique well knows, we have much in common (with many others, of course) in advocating a careful looking at what is presented. Not just glancing, but rather beholding as fully as possible the imagery and its inter-relationships.

Yet it is not so much that which is here important, but rather that he manages to capture what is effectively a whole book in poetic seed-form.

With his preface together with this deck by Flornoy, we have a source of deep and essential tarot.

The Box

The design is the second of Robert Mealing’s tarot boxes, each, as far as I’m aware, constrained by the pre-determined physical box that was to be used. In other words, the visual design is his on a physical cardboard box not of his own design.

If the box is considered as an efficient storage for both marketing and collectables, then its basic structure is ideal. If the user intends to use it as a long-term enclosure to be carried around and used daily then it will need to be exchanged for something a little sturdier or (conversely) more flexible.

Given the constraints (to return to the visuals of the box), Mealing has produced, as he had for the Flornoy Noblet, an excellent and attractive package, managing to capture the deck’s essential information within the limitations of the space.

Overall

This is the deck that Marteau, I strongly suspect, would have used for the Grimaud historical revival of tarot had he had access to such between the two world wars in the first part of the 20th century.

I many ways, it is regretful that he did not, as some of the most important tarot works later written, such as Meditations on the Tarot, have instead based commentary on what is a 1760 Conver restoration.

Where to obtain a copy of the deck

It’s really somewhat sad to even have to write the above sub-heading: it should be available wherever tarot is stocked and sold!

Nonetheless, here is a brief key list.

If located within or near Europe, then I would suggest obtaining a copy directly from the Flornoys:

> www.letarot.com

If in North America, I would suggest either TarotGarden or from Enrique Enriquez (I presume they each have some in stock!):

www.enriqueenriquez.net
www.tarotgarden.com

If in Australasia, I have a few copies available:

www.fourhares.com

If elsewhere, then you’re probably the best judge of the manner in which postal services from France, the USA or Australia manage to reach you, and also the current value of your local exchange rate.

In any case, this is a(nother) deck I would without any hesitation highly recommend!

Jean-Michel David
www.fourhares.com

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.