“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.

THE SUN – LE SOLEIL

The preceding Arcanum—"The Moon"—confronted us with the task of human intelligence to liberate itself from the magical enchantment which separates it from spontaneous wisdom, and to unite itself with the latter, i.e. to arrive at intuition. The nineteenth Arcanum—"The Sun"— is that of the accomplished union of intelligence and spontaneous wisdom: the Arcanum of intuition.

Intuition is what results from the intimate and profound alliance of intelligence and spontaneous wisdom. Now, the Card of the nineteenth Arcanum represents two children placed under the sun, where the one puts his right hand on the neck of the other as if he wanted to draw his head near to himself, whilst the other touches with his left hand the place on the body of the first where his heart is to be found. [...] One could hardly better represent the relationship of intelligence and spontaneous wisdom brought into play in intuition than as it is in the Card of the Arcanum "The Sun". For this relationship presupposes such purity of intention as is found only with a child, and it postulates such reciprocal confidence, without a shadow of doubt or suspicion, which belongs naturally to children. Lastly, this relationship excludes tendencies to domination and authority — to pose as a pontiff and to pride oneself on the eminence of the guru or master whose favours one enjoys[...].

"The children who are fraternising under the sun correspond all the better to Gemini because this zodiacal constellation brings in the longest days to us"—says Oswald Wirth (Le Tarot des imagiers du moyen age, Paris, 1927. p. 208), thus locating the nineteenth Arcanum in the zodiacal circle of twelve cosmic mysteries [...].

Now, the teaching-impulse called "Gemini" can be expressed by paraphrasing a little the first statement of the Emerald Table of Hermes:

May that which is below be as that which is above, and
may that which is above be as that which is below
to accomplish the miracles of one thing.

This is the principle of analogy put into practice, taking its point of departure from the principle of cooperation. It is the opposite of that of the struggle for existence advanced by Charles Darwin as the principle of evolution called "Sagittarius". Nature furnishes us at the same time with a great number of proofs of the principle of cooperation in the process of evolution —perhaps as many proofs as there are of the struggle for existence. The proofs are of a kind such that one could uphold the principle of cooperation to be worthy as the directing principle of natural evolution with the same justification as the principle of struggle may be upheld.[...]

Bees and flowering plants cooperate. Air, light and plants cooperate in photosynthesis, where the miracle of the transformation of inorganic matter into organic matter takes place—where "stones" are transformed into "bread". And, lastly, if mankind had not cooperated more than it had struggled, it would not only not have achieved the international civilisation of our time but it would probably have been annihilated.

There is therefore no doubt that the principle of cooperation has at least the same rights to be considered as the directing principle of evolution as that of the struggle for existence advanced by Darwinism. In other words, the diurnal principle of Gemini plays a role at least equal to the nocturnal principle of Sagittarius in natural evolution.

One of the highest aspects of the principle of Gemini, the principle of cooperation, is that which is present in intuition: that of the cooperation between spontaneous wisdom and intelligence. Here it is a matter of a state of consciousness where intelligence advances from formal knowledge to material knowledge, i.e. from knowledge of the relationships of things to knowledge of the things themselves. Now, the "knowledge of things themselves" entails two functions: on the one hand what Henri Bergson happily designates as "sympathy", and on the other hand a sustained and profound deepening in that with which the sympathetic relationship is established. [...] Here is a concrete example:

You venerate (i.e. you love and respect) a non-incarnated being —a departed person, a saint, or a hierarchical being—in a disinterested manner. Your veneration —which includes love, respect, gratitude, the desire to conform, etc.—cannot fail to create an invisible link of sympathy with its object.[...]

The meeting is thus the realisation of the relationship when it is borne to the limit of the intensity of clarity. According to the case, it can take either the character of a "conversation through forces" or that of a "conversation through words". In the former case it is not precise and articulated thoughts or images which are communicated to you, but rather "forces" or impulses —spiritual and psychic seeds impregnated germinally with moral ideas and judgements. In the case of the "conversation through words" a revelation of articulated thoughts and representations takes place. [...]

Now, the meeting whose character is "conversation through forces" always resembles the experience of the "star" of the mages from the East, and that whose character is "conversation through words" always resembles the experience of the shepherds of Bethlehem. The "star" does not speak, it moves; and it leaves to the subject of its revelation the work of research in the domain of intelligence and facts. The meeting whose character is "conversation through words", in contrast, moves and teaches — it bears also on the domain of intelligence and facts. It guides. [...]

With respect to the nineteenth Arcanum of the Tarot, we find it again in the work of Jung in the guise of the active cooperation of intelligence and transcendental revelatory being, which cooperation is not only the mature fruit of the work of his long life, but also it is the principal thesis of his method of work in the domain of depth psychology, which he openly advanced and maintained. The intuition postulated by Henri Bergson as necessary in order to be able to understand life and the world was practised by Jung in order to understand and to heal the life of the human soul. He did not commit the error of the mages of the Orient. He did not consult Herod and his people. [...]

In writing of the force of soul resulting from faithfulness to the "star"— the force which manifests itself in the power to resist the weakness of revolt (for revolt is a weakness where one lets oneself be carried away by the current of emotional impatience — the fundamental weakness of all rebels, including religious reformers as well as political revolutionaries and the most celebrated social reformers) and in the power to procure peace between two aspirations which are, or are believed to be, opposed to one another —it is difficult for me not to pay homage to two Hermeticists of our century, notably Francis Warrain and Dr. Paul Carton, both avowed Hermeticists.[...]

Intuition is therefore the cooperation of human intelligence with superhuman wisdom. It is what creates the link—or the "intermediary gnosis" and "intermediary magic"— between the absolute and the relative, between the supernatural and the natural, between faith and reason. Now, intuition can be developed only by people who have faith and who have reason. It is reserved for believing thinkers. Whosoever believes and does not think will never attain it. Whosoever thinks and does not believe will never have the certainty of transcendental things that intuition alone can give.

Intuition combines two certainties: essential certainty (that of essence), and consistent certainty (that of consistency). The former is of a moral order; its force of conviction resides in the good and the beautiful. The latter is of a cognitive order; its force of conviction resides in consistency in the vision of the relationships of things. Intuitive certainty is therefore "faith at first hand" combined with "intelligence at first hand".[...]

Now, it is postulative faith become faith at first hand (mysticism) which arrives at the perfect certainty of intuition as a consequence of the help of intelligence. John the Baptist still had need of this latter in order to have complete certainty. For this reason he —who had seen the Spirit descend upon Jesus —sent two disciples to Jesus to ask him, "Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another?" (Matthew xi, 3). And Jesus had to reply in the framework of intelligence alone: "Go and tell John what you hear and see" [...]

This is the briefest and most complete characteristic of intelligence and its role. Its role is immense, if one considers that intelligence is called to constitute an integral part of intuition [...].

This role was understood in the Middle Ages in the ecclesiastical milieu of the West. [...W]hat is at the root of scholasticism is the desire for the fullness of intuition, i.e. that of "baptising" intelligence and winning its cooperation with faith. [...]

Dear Unknown Friend, do not scorn mediaeval scholasticism. It is, in truth, as beautiful, as venerable and as inspiring as the great cathedrals that we have inherited from the Middle Ages. To it we owe a number of masterpieces of thought—thought in the light of faith. And, like all true masterpieces, those of mediaeval scholasticism are beneficial. They heal the disorientated, feverous and confused soul. [... I]t is this elevation above psychological complexes which is the salutary effect —even the healing action —of occupation with scholasticism, when one reads in the style of scholastic meditation.

[...] Why not mathematics? Doesn’t mathematics have the same effect of detachment and elevation above personal psychological limitations?

Without doubt mathematics also has a salutary effect. But it does not so engage the whole human being as does the totality of scholastic problems, and consequently its salutary effect does not have the same significance. What is at stake with scholasticism is God, the soul, freedom, immortality, salvation, good and evil. The triumph over psychological factors here is something quite different than triumph over the same psychological factors through occupying oneself with quantities and their functions alone.[...]

No more is it true that the mystical impulse from the end of the thirteenth and into the seventeenth century was purely and simply a reaction against the "dry intellectualism" of scholasticism. No, the flowering of mysticism during this epoch was the fruit and the result of scholasticism, prefigured in the spiritual biography of St. Thomas Aquinas himself. Notably, St. Thomas towards the end of his life arrived at mystical contemplation of God and the spiritual world and said, on returning from this ecstasy, that his written works now appeared ro him "like straw". Indeed, he wrote nothing after this.

The believing thinker thus became a seeing mystic. And this transformation did not take place in spite of his work of scholastic thought, but rather thanks to it —as its fruit and its crowning glory.

[...] Now, it is the nineteenth Arcanum of the Tarot which invites us to occupy ourselves quite especially with the "star" of Hermeticism in the heaven of intuition. What is this "star"? The Zohar says:

And God made the two great lights. . .originally, when the moon and sun were in intimate union, they shone with equal luminosity. The names JEHOVAH and ELOHIM were then associated as equals.. .and the two lights were dignified with the same name: MAZPAZ MAZPAZ. . .The two lights rose simultaneously and were of the same dignity. But. . . the moon humbled herself by diminishing her light, and renounced her place of higher rank. From that time she has had no light of her own, but derives her light from the sun. [...I]t was only after diminishing herself that she took the name ELOHIM. But her power is manifest in all directions. . .EL being "the dominion of the day", IM being "the dominion of the night" and HE in the middle being the remainder of the forces ("the stars"), participating in both dominions. (Zohar Bereshith 20a)

It is left to us only to cite another passage from an ancient source —from the eleventh book of Apuleius’ Metamorphosis —in order to have all the elements necessary to grapple, sufficiently equipped, with the problem of the "star" of Hermeticism and "The Sun" of the nineteenth Arcanum of the Tarot. Apuleius summarised his great vigil at the temple of Isis — the "arcana of the sacred night" (noctis sacratae arcana) —in the following way:

I approached the very gates of death and set one foot on Proserpine’s threshold, yet was permitted to return, rapt through all the elements. At midnight I saw the sun shining in its brilliant radiance; I entered the presence of the gods of the under-world and the gods of the upper-world, stood near and worshipped them. (Apuleius, Transformations: The Golden Ass)

Let us now seek for the reality, having in view the above-cited passage from the Zohar and the statement made by Apuleius. The Zohar tells us that the moon "renounced her place of higher rank"—that of equality with the sun —and that "from that time she has had no light of her own, but derives her light from the sun; nevertheless, her real light is greater than that which she radiates here below". Here below, therefore, the moon reflects the light of the sun, whilst above — where her name is ELOHIM —"her power is manifest in all directions… EL being ‘the dominion of the day’, IM being ‘the dominion of the night’ and HE in the middle being the remainder of the forces (‘the stars’), participating in both dominions."

Now, the moon, in so far as she is the nocturnal luminary here below, reflects the sun, but in so far as she is the nocturnal luminary above, she shines with her own light, and it is the sun which reflects her. In other words, the moon is "solar" above and "lunar" here below, whilst the sun is "solar" here below and "lunar" above. It is in this sense that EL, the radiant part of the moon’s name above, has "the dominion of the day",i.e. it is the visible sun — reflecting the invisible moon during the day. Similarly, the visible moon reflects the sun (become invisible) during the night. The spiritual moon is therefore the sun which shines at midnight. And it is the spiritual moon — or Isis-Sophia — that Apuleius "saw shining at midnight in its brilliant radiance". For the long vigil in the Isis temple resulted in a vision of the cosmic principle of Isis, i.e. the spiritual moon or the "sun at midnight".

All these things, although presented to us in mythological clothing, relate to the profound reality of the relationship of intelligence and wisdom, and their union —intuition. For intelligence corresponds to the moon, wisdom to the sun, and intuition to the restoration of the "intimate union" of the two luminaries. [...] "The Sun" of the nineteenth Arcanum is the "sun at midnight", i.e. the "sun" that Apuleius "saw shining at midnight in its brilliant radiance", and it is this "sun" which is the "star" of Hermeticism across the ages. It is the principle of intuition, or the intimate union of transcendental intelligence and wisdom.

The Arcanum of intuition is therefore that of knowing how to raise to creative intelligence the intelligence which reflects, and how to effect its union with wisdom, i.e. that of the work of re-establishing, firstly, the union of intelligence of diminished light here below with the intelligence of complete light above, and then the union of intelligence-thus-reunited with divine wisdom (see figure).[...]

Just as the impulse of scholasticism, on the historical ladder of western civilisation, did not lead to a perfect system of scholastic philosophy, but rather to mysticism, so does individual intelligence, on the ladder of individual development, lead to intuition and not to a state where it knows all and explains all. Intelligence is not the absolute aim; in developing, it is transformed into intuition. It is called to effect the passage from argumentative reasoning to comprehensive intuition. [...]

The Zohar and Apuleius speak of the moon and the sun joined —the sign which is the sign of Isis. We find this sign again in the apocalyptic vision of the woman enveloped by the sun and with the moon under her feet. But the apocalyptic vision adds here a third element: the twelve stars.

In other words, intelligence united to wisdom in intuition still does not signify the achievement of the work of the reintegration of consciousness, if it is not crowned by a third element, which corresponds to the "stars" just as intelligence corresponds to the "moon" and wisdom to the "sun". What, therefore, is this third element?

In order to understand its role and nature it is still necessary for us to look at — and this time more closely — the experience of spirits who turned from intellectualism to intuitionism. [...It is] the German philosopher [...] Schopenhauer [...] author of the celebrated book The World as Will and Representation, who made the decisive step from Kant’s thesis (that phenomena hide the essence of things, and that the essence remains inaccessible to intelligence as such) to the intuitive introspection of the essence of one thing —the Self—a thing that represents and contains the other things of the world.

This intuitive introspection allowed him to arrive at the conclusion that it is the will which is the essence of things, and that things are only representations of the will. Therefore the world is, according to Schopenhauer, a unique will which represents or "imagines" the multiplicity of things. And as Schopenhauer found that the same experience gave rise to almost the same conclusion in Indian mystical philosophy—above all in the Vedanta, based on the Upanishads of the Vedas — he said: "The Upanishads were my consolation in life, and they will also be so in death".

Thus, the mystical philosophy of India is the original and prototype of intuitionist philosophies of the West —such as that of Schopenhauer, Deussen and Eduard von Hartmann [...]. Let us therefore examine the fundamental experience and principal conclusion to be drawn from the mystical philosophy of India, as represented by the Vedanta of the Advaita ("non-dualist") school.

This philosophy is founded on intuitive-introspection -as method. This is based on the one hand on experience of the will as the element underlying all intellectual, psychological, biological and mechanical movement, and on the other hand on the experience of the "inner eye" or detached transcendental Self, which observes the movements produced by the will. The will creates the multiplicity of mental, psychic, biological and mechanical phenomena, in contrast to the unity of "the Seer in seeing" (the transcendental Self). The transcendental Self does not move, therefore it does not change, therefore it is immortal, therefore it is not an entity separated from the real essence of the world, and thus it is one with it. The true Self of man and the essence of the real world— or God— are identical. Aham Brahma asmi ("I am Brahma") —this is the formula which gives a summary of the experience and conclusions drawn by the Vedanta.

Now, it suffices on the one hand not to identify with the will and its movements and on the other hand to identify with the transcendental Self—"the Seer in seeing"— in order to attain to the real being and essence of the world in the intuitive experience of Vedanta adherents and German intuitionist philosophers. But one could ask: Is the intuitive experience of the transcendental Self truly final and complete, so that nothing follows it or surpasses it? Is the experience of the transcendental Self truly the nec plus ultra ("the ultimate") of knowledge?

Indeed, it lacks something important: the whole spiritual world, i.e. the Holy Trinity and the nine spiritual hierarchies. The "great portent" of which the Apocalypse speaks indicates beyond the sun and moon a crown of twelve stars on the head of the woman.

The intuitive experience of the transcendental Self—sublime and stimulating as it may be —does not suffice, alone, to let us perceive, and to render us conscious of, the spiritual world. The union of the "moon" and the "sun" alone, in the human spiritual microcosm, still does not signify the experience of the spiritual macrocosm. It is not sufficient to elevate oneself to the transcendental Self; it is necessary, still further, that this transcendental Self perceives and becomes conscious of other "transcendental Selves"—many of which are higher than it. The transcendental Self of man, as eternal and immutable as it is, is not the ultimate summit in world evolution.

[..] Judaeo-Christian Hermeticism, which ranges itself on the side of Sankya with respect to the negation of the identification of the "transcendental Self with God, is intensely occupied with the third "luminary"—the "stars"—in the three aspects of astrology, angelology and trinitarian theology, which aspects correspond to the body, soul and spirit of the third "luminary". Judaeo-Christian Hermeticism is thus the sustained effort across the centuries to know and understand the three luminaries in their unity, i.e. to know and understand the "great portent which appeared in heaven — a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars" (Revelation xii, 1). It is the woman in this apocalyptic vision who unites the three "luminaries"— the moon, the sun and the stars, i.e. the luminaries of night, day and eternity.

It is she —the "Virgin of light" of the Pistis Sophia, the Wisdom sung of by Solomon, the Shekinah of the Cabbala, the Mother, the Virgin, the pure celestial Mary—who is the soul of the light of the three luminaries, and who is both the source and aim of Hermeticism. For Hermeticism is, as a whole, the aspiration to participation in knowledge of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and the Mother, Daughter and Holy Soul. It is not a matter of seeing the Holy Trinity with human eyes, but rather of seeing with the eyes —and in the light —of Mary-Sophia.[...]

The Athenians, also, had an analogous feminine triad, which played the principal role in the mysteries of Eleusis: Demeter—the Mother, Persephone —the Daughter, and "Athena the bringer of salvation" (cf. Olympiodorus, In Platonis Phaedonem commentaria = "Commentary on the Phaedo of Plato"; ed. W. Norvin, Leipzig, 1913, p. Ill)—where Athena was at the same time the "community of Athens" or the "soul of Athens" as it were, analogous to the "Virgin of Israel".

Historical analogies and metaphysical parallels alone, however, do not suffice to attain the complete certainty of intuition: it is for the heart to say the last decisive word. Thus the following "argument of the heart" proved to be decisive, twenty-five years ago, to the one who writes these lines.

There is nothing which is more necessary and more precious in the experience of human childhood than parental love; nothing more necessary, because the human child, alone, is not viable if it is not taken from the first moments of its life into the circle of care of parental love or, lacking parental love, its substitute-charity; nothing more precious, because the parental love experienced in childhood is moral capital for the whole of life. In childhood we receive two dowries for life, two assets from which we can draw during the whole of life: the vital biological asset which is the treasure of our health and vital energy, and the moral asset which is the treasure of health of soul and its vital energy—its capacity to love, to hope and to believe. The moral asset is the experience of parental love that we have had in childhood. It is so precious, this experience, that it renders us capable of elevating ourselves to more sublime things —even to divine things.[...] For it is the experience of parental love —and it is above all this —which renders us capable of loving the "Architect" or "First Cause" of the world as our Father who is in heaven. Parental love bears in itself true senses of the soul for the Divine —which are, by analogy, eyes and ears of the soul.

Now, the experience of parental love consists of two elements: the experience of maternal love and that of paternal love. The one and the other are equally necessary and equally precious. The one and the other render us capable of raising ourselves to the Divine. The one and the other signify to us the means of entering into a living relationship with God, which means to love God, who is the prototype of all paternity and all maternity. [...]

Similarly, it is so with the rosary prayer, where appeal to the two aspects of divine paternal love in the prayer addressed to the Father and the Mother is made during meditation on the mysteries of the Joy, Suffering and Glory of the Blessed Virgin. The rosary prayer is — in any case for the Hermeticist — again a masterpiece of simplicity, containing and revealing things of inexhaustible profundity. . a masterpiece of the Holy Spirit!

Dear Unknown Friend, the Arcanum "The Sun" with which we are occupied is an Arcanum of children bathing in the light of the sun. Here it is not a matter of finding occult things, but rather of seeing ordinary and simple things in the light of day of the sun —and with the look of a child.

The nineteenth Arcanum of the Tarot, the Arcanum of intuition, is that of revelatory naivety in the act of knowledge, which renders the spirit capable of an intensity of look not troubled by doubt and by the scruples engendered by doubt, i.e. it is the vision of things such as they are under the eternally new day of the sun. It teaches the art of undergoing the pure and simple impression which reveals through itself—without intellectual hypotheses and superstructures —what things are. To render impressions noumenous— this is what it is a matter of in the Arcanum "The Sun", the Arcanum of intuition.

You will understand therefore, dear Unknown Friend, that in speaking of parental love and of its two aspects, in speaking of the practice of the novena and the rosary prayer, etc., we are in no way estranging ourselves from the theme of the nineteenth Arcanum of the Tarot; rather, on the contrary, we are penetrating to its very heart. For we are endeavouring to advance from an understanding of what intuition is to its exercise, i.e. from meditation on the Arcanum of intuition to the use of this Arcanum.

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.

I am a tarot reader. (Yes, I know. When I tell people I am a tarot reader I get the same reaction I would get by claiming to be a stripper, minus the erections). The thing is, I approach the cards from my background as a visual communicator who understands that the job of an ‘image maker’ is to affect people through images. You probably know that the term ‘empathy’ was used by a psychologist, Theodor Lipps, to describe a certain relationship between a person and a work of art. For me, the tarot is at once a tool and a research field to understand that particular kind of empathy.

When you tell people you like tarot cards they tell you these images are associated with insanity and chicanery. You look around, you visit a few new age shops, read a few books, treat yourself to a few readings and end up confirming what you already thought: the tarot’s public image has been modeled by con-men and madmen. Trying to reconcile a love of the imagery of the cards with that harsh fact is difficult. It helps to know that the tarot’s official history is a fraud concocted in the 18th Century and that all the attitudes and superstitions around the cards evolved from that fraud. It also helps to know that in the last 20 years, a few serious researchers and historians have come forward with important and solid historical data that show how the tarot is a product of Christian medieval Europe and that it was initially conceived as a game of chance. Now, here is where things start to get interesting. First you learn that a long time before the tarot was used for divination it was used for poetic purposes. That is, the cards would be dealt out to a group of ladies and then the poet would improvise a few verses of poetry, comparing each lady with the image she was holding. The tarot was first, then, a game of analogies! When you dig a little deeper still on the use of analogies in the Middle Ages, you end up uncovering the notion of symmetry. In a work of art, each detail mirrors another detail either at a visual or at a conceptual level.  All these details together mirror the larger work, giving the viewers a visual thread that would map endless conceptual connections and suggest to the mind a certain learning pathway. Most medieval visual documents were crafted with this notion. At this point, the visual nature of the tarot starts coming forward, and with it, the beauty of its design.

The medieval notion of symmetry made use of images to facilitate analogical thinking. Cognitive scientists today see analogies as a suggestive way to foster creative problem-solving. Many of the experiments suggest that when we use a graphic, or an image, to illustrate an analogy people understand the analogy more easily because it is easier for us to map visual sameness than relational sameness. All these ideas make it possible for us to start thinking about the tarot in different terms. The depth of the tarot’s original didactic intention is hard to establish. It was, after all, a game of chance which is still practiced in many countries of Europe just as we would play bridge or poker. But thanks to people like Michael Dummet, Gertrude Moakley, Ronald Decker, Thierry Depaulis, Robert O’Neil, Ross Caldwell and Michael Hurst we can trace its whole narrative sequence back to a ’summa of salvation’, a morality tale that is a reflection of the time in which the tarot was created. That is the reason why you have never heard this story. The ideological agenda of the ‘new-age world’, which has claimed the tarot as a counter-cultural space for those who reject any official, male-modeled spirituality won’t have it. The market wants what the market wants.

Even so, if we want to understand the tarot as a visual document, we will do well to acknowledge the notion of symmetry – and its correlation with the tarot’s use in playing with analogies – as a viable starting point. The current understanding of the tarot, rooted in a fraudulent history, has it as a repository of symbolic knowledge. In practice this reduces the tarot to a set of mnemonic keys whose alleged meanings are parroted without taking into account the actual images. Very influential in this view has been the adherence by many tarot enthusiasts to the Jungian notion of archetypes and synchronicity as a way to explain the tarot. Disregarding the inherent value of such models, they constitute an a-historical view of the tarot that contributes nothing to our iconographic understanding of the trump series, and reduces the experience of the images to a mere intellectual exercise.

As an alternative, I propose a phenomenological approach to the tarot that doesn’t focus on symbolism as an intellectual construct but rather on the way we experience images. By contrasting the the medieval notion of symmetry with our current understanding of the brain through up-to-date cognitive and neurological research we will be able to apprehend the tarot’s language of shape. That way we will learn that in order for us to experience these images we must see them as actions, always keeping in mind that shape is a manifestation of movement. We must understand each card as a snapshot from a movement in a sequence. It is not that The Magician is ‘Snapshot One’ and La Papesse is ‘Snapshot Two’, but that The Magician includes the actual, visually verifiable act of standing up straight we see depicted in the card and it includes both the moment before and after that action. In other words, every image suggests a sense of flow. How do we experience that flow? We do so by mirroring the image. In its purest state, each image gives us a very clear directive: “Do as I do. Be as I Am.”

Mirroring is implicit in the idea of symmetry. Both are rooted on detecting sameness, a notion that is brought forward by analogical thinking.

Linguists suspect that we understand the world in terms of metaphors and that an important part of how we think about the world corresponds to our physical orientation in space. A very intriguing example of this is our understanding of time. Most of the metaphors we use to think about time are mapped from our relationship with space. In the tarot this becomes obvious as Left becomes ‘the past’ and Right becomes ‘the future’, so we can read the passage of time as a narrative and literally ‘travel’ through it. As we use our spatial orientation to orient ourselves though time each one of the the character’s postures on a card contains information about where we are, where we came from and where are we going. Here the idea of flow is again implicit. Using our body to orient ourselves both in chronological and experiential time implies mirroring with our body the flow we see in the cards. Current research on mirror neurons suggests that perception and action are linked and that the very act of contemplating an image engages the motor areas of the brain related with the performance of that action.  More important, even contemplating an action engages us emotionally because those areas of the brain connected to mirror neurons are linked to the areas of the brain concerned with emotions. The implication this may have for our understanding of body movement is profound. Researchers who study emotions have found that mimicking facial gestures elicits the same emotions we normally associate with these gestures. Pantomiming sadness, for example, would eventually erode our sense of being content. Just as mood can affect our body posture, our body posture seem to be able to affect our mood. Mirroring a tarot card means embodying the features it represents, so each one of us could access our own experience of that body posture.  In the tarot, “do as I do” becomes “feel as you have felt”. This mirroring serves as an opening for all the memories, beliefs, thoughts and sensations we have learned to associate with the specific action we see depicted in the card. Experiencing a body posture is a way of bringing forward our experience of the world. Given that this a subjective experience it opens the door for all our personal background and biases to fill-in the gaps, giving that body experience a unique and personal quality. In this way the tarot’s images can facilitate creative thinking by means of analogy. A card elicits our experience of our own body, and with it, our vast store of knowledge.

From a cognitive point of view, the tarot’s images are useful in narrowing down the field from which we can map the analogies between our current situation and our past experiences. From the perspective of the body, mirroring the tarot’s images imparts in us a sense of orientation, it gives us a key to access these past experiences and a way of grounding our circumstances in our physical sense of self.

In my Lecture Notes I alluded to the medieval quadriga exegesis as a feasible coordinates that may facilitate our lecture of tarot. This schema proposes four levels of lecture for a document: literal, allegorical, moral and anagogical. A phenomenological approach to the tarot would link the first and fourth layers of meaning and focus on them, leaving purposefully aside both allegorical and moral levels. It is my contention that the allegorical and moral level of the tarot are intrinsically linked, since we need to understand an allegory in order to read its moral implication. I do believe these levels to be useful in a reading, but understanding them supposes a familiarity with the history and iconography of the images that I don’t feel entitled to impart here. There is still much debate on the actual iconographic origin of the cards. Even so, I urge the serious student of the tarot to seek the work of those authors I have already cited. Besides, my practical experience suggest that a a non-symbolic approach to the tarot is more likely to generate practical information for the client. To underline the way in which our anagogical reading of the tarot is based on the literal one, in my Lecture Notes I proposed the formula: objective observation prompts intuitive insight. This essay could be seen as an expansion of that idea. ‘Objective observation’ will be inspired here by the theory of embodied semantics as way to help us understand the notion of shape-as-meaning, an idea that gives root to the tarot’s visual language and suggests that there is enough information in the posture of the characters featured in the cards for us to detect meaning without having to refer to any symbolism. In my work with the tarot I understand embodiment at two different levels. First there is the automatic physical response a person may experience by looking at an image. That response can be strengthened by describing the image in the card as an action instead of seeing it as a symbol. This is a sort of automatic mirroring in which the person’s experiences of that action – plus all the abstract concepts they have learned to relate to it – are elicited. At a second level we have the conscious action of mirroring the image, expressed when we suggest to a person that acting like the character in a card could be a positive course of action. In the conversations in this book I will suggest that we can build up the second kind of mirroring on top of the first one, in a pacing and leading schema. For now let’s just say that the physical description of an image serves both to activate a memory search in the person (sometimes this will be defined as a transderivational search or ‘TDS’) that occurs as an automatic response, and to point out a specific attitude the person may purposefully enact.

It is for this reason that the description of the image must focus on the human character we see in there. That human character, which very often is the main figure in the card, is the easiest element to map to the person who looks at the cards. It may be possible that at some point someone would feel they identified with one of the horses in The Chariot or with the black bird in The Star, but it is more likely that the person will mirror the charioteer or the blonde woman pouring water. In order to help us focus on these human characters I have devised a ‘grammar’ that will help us articulate the different parts of a character’s body and detect a coherent meaning. The basic elements of this grammar can be found in “An Ecological Approach to Perceptual Learning and Development”, experimental psychologists Eleanor Gibson and Anne Pick state that the successful development of a baby depends on three key elements: Communication, Object Perception and Manipulation, and Bodily Motion. In order to thrive an infant must be able to engage in meaningful communication with others. At a very early stage this communication is of a non-verbal nature, consisting of gaze, gesture, and vocalizations. After this initial stage the child starts interacting with objects and understanding their meaning by experiencing their effect. Eventually the child’s legs and spine will be strong enough for him to become an ‘object among objects’, interacting with others from a more movable perspective. I confess that I read these findings with great curiosity and excitement, because they closely match my interpretation of the observable features of a character in a tarot card. When I was trying to synthesize a methodology to observing the images, I noticed that, with the exception of The Moon card, every single one of the trumps had a main character, and therefore, each single card could be mirrored from the perspective of our body experiences. (Even The Moon has a physical component, as it may be argued that an absence of human figures in the card suggests the possibility of our physical absence. Advise doesn’t get much more direct than that!). I also noticed that there were three constants in all the cards: all the characters have a head, a body, and two hands. I noticed that the character’s head could be categorized in three ways: facing left, facing right or facing straight forward. There were also three postures for most of the bodies: sitting, standing, or walking. Finally, while the hands of all the characters can be seen in several activities, they were always engaged in some action. Such action gives meaning to the objects these characters are holding, and by extension, they define the meaning of the four elements illustrated in the four suits, since they are all elements we handle with our hands, and therefore their meaning is the use we make of them. It was clear to me that by describing each one of these features in one card we could get a sense of what each specific posture means to us at an experiential level. More importantly, by looking at a few cards in a row we can see a movement sequence that can be described as a story. I want to make very clear that I am not claiming any historical validity of such meanings. I have devised a way to look at the cards that is founded in the tarot’s medieval origin. That is, I propose we read the tarot using the same coordinates that we would use to read any other medieval document: by acknowledging the four-layered reading proposed by quadriga exegesis and by following visual symmetries to prompt analogical thinking.  But I am not using these coordinates to explain the tarot, only to activate it as a visual language. I have condensed all these keys into a poem:

Presence is meaning.
To the left, remembrance, to the right, l’Avenir.
Those who look straight at you are seeing the present.
Fill your head with attention.
Do what the images do, not what they say.
Sit passively, stand receptively and walk actively.
Embody your destination.
Duel with the sword, build with the wand,
offer a cup, plant a coin.
Let the hands show your intention.
Forget what red is and notice what is red,
stand on a number as you would on a hill,
strip down to your armor;
for what turns gold into lead also turns salt into sugar,
what one step fulfills another could encumber
and what you wear wears you down.
Know an image by its friends:
the deepest truths hide in the obvious.

 
Let’s look at it section by section:

Presence is meaning

stands for the very idea of embodiment. Each one of the tarot’s images features a main character and that main character has a body we can mirror with our own body. The very act of a character being there, illustrated in the card, is a message, a piece of direct advice: “Be like me! Stand up straight on your own two feet, remember where you came from, practice your craft and honor your talent”. Such words spoken by the reader will elicit a metaphorical mapping from ‘doing’ to ‘being’ in the client’s brain. Remember, one of the main findings of current cognitive science is that thought is mostly unconscious. We go through memories, connections, inferences, and sensorimotor responses without being consciously aware of it. We simply cannot help doing it. That is why the reader only has to describe the action depicted in the cards to get the process going in the client’s brain. The main assumption here is that, given the context in which these images are being described in a reading about that person, the client’s brain will naturally map anything the character is doing into an orientation about how to behave. More precisely, the literal attitude described from a card will be mapped by the client’s brain into a metaphorical way of being. There is no ‘technique’ and no magic words. And there is no right or wrong description of an image. What we really want is for our words, our ‘interpretations’ to get out of the way so the client can experience the image at a pre-verbal level, with our words simply building on top of that experience. But of course, our brain won’t simply process that information at a literal level. Metaphorical thinking emerges from our literal experience of the world. At a basic level our literal language accounts for our direct, embodied experience of objects and events, upon which we then we build more abstract models of communication by giving all those literal experiences a metaphorical value. In this way we use our direct experience to describe events that aren’t directly linked to our ‘here and now’. Since all metaphors imply a transfer of properties from the source domain to the target domain, we can use what we physically know in order to understand or describe what cannot be experienced physically. I have already described the way in which we use space to map our understanding of time. By looking at a few cards in a sequence we can see the passage of time in the way we have experienced it. But it’s not only a spatial orientation which defines our understanding of time. Each one of the tarot’s images depicts a motion that carries implicit a sense of timing. Compare for example the steady pace of The Fool with the abrupt momentum of The Tower. There is a speed in Judgement that we don’t see in The Hermit, and a steadiness of pace in Justice what we may intuit in The Emperor but feels very slow compared with The Magician. This sense of timing comes again from our personal and direct experience of the actions depicted and suggest narrative elements that can be used in a reading.

Here I would like to point out something so obvious that it may even be perceived as absurd: the identity of each one of the tarot’s characters is defined by its posture. The Fool is walking with a bag over his shoulder and a walking stick in the other hand, while being chased by a dog. If we decide to represent The Fool sitting on a throne and holding a scepter, he won’t be a fool anymore. Those are the attributes that give visual identity to The Emperor. Shape is meaning and, therefore, each character’s posture is meaningful because it can be mirrored by us and it can be experienced from a multi-sensory perspective. We can remember how it feels to walk in a landscape – here, again, we see time being illustrated – and we can remember the smell of the countryside, recall the warm feeling of the sun on our back or recall the scary thought of being chased by a dog. More importantly, mirroring the image it would suggest to us that we should ignore that dog and walk at a steady pace. At either a literal or metaphorical level that is all we need to be told by the image because that is all of what that action can afford us.

To the left, remembrance, to the right, l’Avenir
Those who look straight at you are seeing the present

is alluding at our space-time coordinates: we learn to understand time by moving through space. In their book ‘Philosophy in the Flesh’ George Lakoff and Mark Johnson provide us with a very clear model for this metaphor:

The Moving Observer Metaphor

These simple coordinates: Left (Space Behind The Observer), Center (Location of the Observer), Right (Space in Front of The Observer) are giving us something to see, something to mirror, and therefore, something to understand: a sense of flow, a storyline, a narrative continuum that we can define as ‘what is happening’ or ‘where we are going’.

Current research on embodied meaning tells us that we build our more abstract thoughts on top of our bodily experience of the world, from the very basic directions, like up, down, straight, curved, diagonal, horizontal and vertical, backwards and forward, to the most complex mental operations we are capable of, like mathematical or philosophical inquiry. That is why, when we refer to a man in terms of him being ‘straight’, we don’t assume he has an iron rod instead of spine, when we refer of a certain person as ‘twisted’ nobody suspects scoliosis, or when we talk about a woman being ’cold‘ no one would consider using her to storage fish. We are able to automatically transfer these attributes from our original experience to the new context that is presented to us. Back to the tarot, even if from an iconographic point of view The Hermit could be seen as representing either the reversals of fortune in the form of old age, Time or ascetic renunciation, we must first and foremost see it as man walking with the help of a cane and a lantern. A person may not know anything about asceticism, but we have all used a lantern at some time or another along our lives. Knowing what the card means from an iconographic -moral/allegorical- point of view is important to us, but that is not what would be more pervasive when talking to a client. That is all theoretical information that the client cannot necessarily link to her personal experience. But we all have used a lantern to see, and therefore, we could use that experience to understand other events, different from using an actual lantern. So, we can be confident that when we are describing to a person how The Hermit is “using his light to gain clarity” this person won’t be just hearing us talk about changing the front porsche’s light bulbs, but potentially about an issue that needs to be understood. Joseph Grady speak of primary metaphors as those first level abstractions we map from our bodily experience of the world. Among these primary metaphors we have “UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING”:

Understanding is Seeing Metaphor

Notice how all of these mappings apply to The Hermit, and how the literal description of The Hermit’s attitude or posture can be understood metaphorically in virtue of the ‘Understanding is Seeing’ metaphor. The crucial point here is that we naturally map these sources to these targets in our daily lives without paying too much attention to it. That seems to be how abstract thought arises. So, when I talk about reading a card literally as the most direct way of eliciting experiential meaning in a person I am not inviting you to cross your fingers, trust your ‘gift’ and guess, or try to get it right by any cunning device, but to understand and utilize the way our brains make meaning. Below I have copied a list of primary metaphors compiled by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. I have paired some tarot images with them. Try to think of sentences in which the literal description of the images can elicit these primary metaphors:

You may notice how the same images have been paired with several different primary metaphors. If we talk about The Hermit in terms of “using his lantern to see” the ‘Understanding Is Seeing’ metaphor seems pretty apt, but if we were to add “The Hermit is using his lantern to see where he came from” then we will need the ‘Time Is Motion’ metaphor to map the left of the card to ‘the past’, the right of the card to the future and the whole left-right motion to the coordinates of The Hermit’s lifetime. While at a literal level The Hermit may be visually tracing back his steps, the sentence invite our brain to take its metaphorical meaning as in “looking at the past”. If we extended our reading further by saying “The Hermit is using his lantern to see where he came from and get a sense of where he is going” we will need the ‘Purposes Are Destinations’ metaphor to reframe The Hermit’s actions as mental activity conductive to orientation as a goal. Just as a simple concept can be mapped into a single body experience, we also put all we know about several body experiences -seeing, walking, sorting physical obstacles- at the service of one more complex notion. Combining the ‘Understanding Is Seeing’ metaphor with the ‘Time Is Motion’ metaphor and the ‘Purposes Are Destinations’ metaphor is what will allow us to see a man who walks with a cane and points a lantern to the left as letting our experience inform our actions.

Fill your head with attention.

This key corresponds to the head of the characters, or more precisely with their glances. By looking the character’s head we will know if the figure is suggesting us to pay attention to the past (Left), the present (Straight Forward) or the future (Right). depending on the direction of the main character’s head one single card will be saying to us “look back”, “Look ahead”, “focus on here and now”; but when we see more than one card in a sequence we can observe a ‘head movement’ that describes a change of focus, a redirection or even a persistence of attention.

Do what the images do, not what they say

is a direct allusion to observe the character’s action without getting derailed by its alleged symbolic meaning. In The Moon card, for example, I have suggested that an absence of human figures suggests our physical absence. This will be a lot more useful than seeing The Moon as ‘the mother archetype’. From a phenomenological perspective, night-time is dark and we have a set of experiential learnings that associate darkness with danger. But we also have an experience of the moon that gives us a sense of timing: we know that the darkness will only last a fortnight, and this is reinforced by the fact that after The Moon card we have The Sun card: daylight trumps night-time. Still, within itself, we can see the moon as full and regard all of our experiences about how this event occurs once a month. Here, a phenomenological observation of the image in itself is suggesting a different sense of time that we can, by transferring our literal experience into a metaphor, map into a feminine cycle if this is analogically sound. The moon is not a disembodied, abstract symbol, but an event we all have experienced. We don’t need to read Clarissa Pinkola-Este’s books to understand what The Moon means, we only need a window.

Sit passively, stand receptively and walk actively.
Embody your destination.

In his extraordinary book ‘From Molecule to Metaphor’, Jerome Feldman points: “… the process of understanding through embodied simulation inherently involves a choice of perspective. The three basic alternatives are: agent (pushing), experiencer (being pushed) and observer (seeing third party)”. A big part of what ‘mirroring the tarot’ means has to do with finding ourselves in the cards. We find three main body postures in the tarot: sitting, standing and walking. We possess experiential information for these three states. Sitting is our most passive state after lying down (which is not depicted in the tarot). Just as the child that learns to stand, in our upright position we become ‘an object among objects’. We are engaged with our surroundings but we aren’t yet active. That is why I describe that state as ‘receptive’. We gather information, we emit signals, but there is no definite sense of movement. Such movement will be the next step, defined as the actual action of walking. (There are other body postures defined in the tarot, like falling down in The Tower and kneeling down in The Star. Both of them imply one step beyond being standing still, and therefore they will be considered as active). Any of these three actions defines the ‘destination’ of our mind, our attitude expressed by our body. Mirroring the card would then imply mirroring that physical attitude, either at a literal or at a metaphorical level. For example, we have seen how The Fool walks forward, with his eyes fixed on the future. At a literal level this body posture could be mirrored by taking a walk, while at a metaphorical level we could talk about ‘moving on’ as a way to suggest we are forgetting an ex-lover. The important thing to reinforce here, that every single action in a character’s posture can be seen as direct advice, with application that could be literal or metaphorical. Comparing the different body postures of the characters we see in a row of cards gives us a sense of sequential motion describing an evolution or change of action: going from a card that shows a character sitting down to a card that shows a character walking gives a clear indication of taking action, while the opposite would suggest we wait. At each level: head, body and hands, the characters are giving us direct pointers as to be, or how to act.

Duel with the sword, build with the wand, offer a cup, plant a coin.

Four elements conform the tarot’s suits: swords, wands, cups and coins. We manipulate all of these elements with our hands. Both the use we have for them and the context in which we use them defines what they mean. Think for a moment about what would happen if a knight challenges another knight to a duel, and at the very last minute each warrior draws a cup instead of a sword. The whole event would get re-contextualized and the ‘crossing’ of cups will evoke in us a different set of multi-sensory references than those evoked by the crossing of swords. The sound of two cups clinking together, and all the memories it brings in all different sensory levels would be the meaning of the suit of Cups, just as the sound of two swords clashing, and all the scenes that sound brings up would be the meaning of the suit of swords. From this we can infer what is behind the phrase Let the hands show your intention. Someone who offers us a cup intends something very different from someone who points a sword at us or who gives us a coin. The hands of a character in a card show us what the character is doing, and since our experience of any object has an emotional component implicit in our reading of the goal such an object will suggest we accomplish whatever a character is doing with his hands and tells us what it is the character is hoping to achieve.

Let the hands show your intention

Looking at a single card, the hands of a character give us specific ideas about the kind of action that it makes sense to imitate. Looking at several cards in a row, each action of the hands can be seen as steps in a movement sequence, revealing a more complex and complete intention. The transformation of an object held by a character into a different object would suggest a corresponding evolution or reinterpretation in our goals. A passive scepter that becomes a cane suggests action, just as a cup being poured, symmetrically transfixed into a person tied up, suggest stagnation.

Forget what red is and notice what is red,

is another reference to privileging experience over disembodied symbolism. It is our experience of red, as in blood rushing through our veins, what gives red its meaning. Since this verse, and the following five, are symmetrical, this line will mirror this other line in the poem: For what turns gold into lead also turns salt into sugar. Meaning, defined by our relationship with the world, is what differences a nugget if one metal god only to cast little soldiers from a nugget of another metal we treasure. We experience a certain kind of white dust as salty and another one as sweet. We know what ‘salt’ means because our taste buds remember that particular experience and can distinguish it from the experience associated with the word ‘sugar’.

Stand on a number as you would on a hill

has symmetry with what one step fulfills another could encumber and both refer to using numbers sequentially and not symbolically. We learn to experience numbers through our fingers and we use that embodied knowledge to count. Counting can be both a quantitative act and a qualitative act. Two is more than one, which could imply that two defines a higher quantity than one, but also, that two is better than one if we are planning to venture into an unexplored cave, or one can be better than two if we got a last piece of cake and we are alone at home. Numbers define progressions that expand or contract. ‘Standing’ on a sequence of numbers suggest that, by orienting ourselves in space, numbers will point to us if we are advancing or retreating, moving ‘up’ or ‘down’.

Strip down to your armor

has symmetry with what you wear wears you down. Both sentences invite us to read the progressive nakedness of the tarot characters as empowerment through transcendence of the material world. In the trump’s sequence the characters start heavily dressed and start loosing clothing as soon as the heavenly realm becomes more present. The message seems to be simple: the more we need to wear, the less powerful we are. We are limited by our status, social perceptions, roles and insecurities. A naked character becomes pure movement.  At a secular level I would reframe that by saying that transcendence lies beyond our menial needs for status symbols, and flow is only achieved if we drop our vertical defenses. The flesh that cannot be pierced cannot be loved. A raised bridge cannot be crossed.

Know an image by its friends:

is an allusion to the very notion of symmetry. Any image has a ‘friend’ on anther image that shares some of its visual or conceptual attributes. Some of these visual pairings are quite obvious, like The Lover and Judgement, or Temperance and The Star, some of them are conceptual in nature, like The Pope and The Devil, and therefore harder to grasp. Beyond that, the above set of keys suggest that all heads have symmetry with the other heads, all bodies have symmetry with other bodies, and all of the hands, and the object they hold, have symmetry with other hands and objects. Comparing and contrasting these symmetries is what gives us a narrative. But there are of course many other things that are symmetrical, like La Papesse’s body and the building in The Tower. (By comparing the evolution of the crown from one image to the other, we get a message). The pillars in the Chariot’s canopy are symmetrical to the trees in The Hanged Man, and the celestial body in The Sun has symmetry with The Hermit’s lantern. In fact, if you fan the cards so you can see at once only half of all of them, you will discover countless symmetries. They aren’t for me to point out but for you to discover.

All these keys suggest that we can draw a lot of information by approaching individual cards as actions and also by comparing how these actions evolve in a sequence of cards. In his book ‘The Meaning of The Body’ Mark Johnson tells us that “life and movement are intrinsically linked”. Cognitive scientists talk about ‘schemas’ as conceptual structures we have for understanding experiences. All of the movement schemas we have learned through our life-experience and have been encoded in our brains are activated in response to our environment. Since our brain is, in a way, an self-regulating best-match seeker mechanism, this often happens below our conscious awareness. But the power these schemas have to bring forward memories, feelings, and physiological sensations is the very act of meaning-making. We don’t need to be told what things mean because we know, we have experienced them, not as abstract constructs but in real life. Mark Johnson also points out how, curiously, our interface gets erased in the act of perception: we don’t feel our own body but these things our body is in contact with. That makes it very easy for us to overlook our own physicality as the foundation of meaning-making. That is why we can say: the deepest truths hide in the obvious.

The theory of embodied semantics proposes that “concepts are represented in the brain within the same sensory-motor circuitry in which the enactment of that concept relies”. My contention is that, since the objective of perception is to inform our actions, and since the human brain seems to respond to still images implying motion as if these images were actually moving, describing images as actions is a shorter path to suggest an idea to the brain. This all sounds very complex when in truth it is very simple: while looking at the tarot we must work with what is there, in the image, because that is a symmetrical – or analogical – way of tapping into what is ‘there’ within the other person’s experience. Describing a card automatically becomes a description of the person who is looking at the card. As I have already hinted when I mentioned mirror neurons, this model of thought argues that mental connections are in fact active neural connections. Of uttermost importance for my model is the idea, promoted by many cognitive experts, that the brain doesn’t separate shape from meaning, and therefore, we must look at each card knowing that the action depicted in it shows in itself its own conceptual intention.

On the other hand ‘intuitive insight’ can be further understood to be analogical thinking, and as such, stripped of any vagueness or mysticism. Considered by many as our brain’s best talent, analogical thinking is currently used by any student trying to solve new problems based on old lessons he read in a book, by lawyers who look for the right precedent for their cases, by researchers on artificial intelligence building computer models of neural connections, by scientists open to a ‘Eureka! moment’ or designers who seek inspiration in nature, by poets trying to say the same old things in new ways, and by anybody who uses their previous experience to face new challenges. Analogical thinking can also be seen as the root of magical thinking, as the sorcerer who aims to control nature by handling little bits of it. In that regard I would like to clarify that I am not proposing a causal relationship between a few random cards and a person’s life as a magician would. Seeing something happening in the cards won’t automatically make anything happen in real life. What I propose is that whatever can be pointed out in the card and taken as analogous to the person’s life can inspire an action if we build up on the empathy that is established between the image and the person, so that the image becomes a suggestion. This concept lies at the heart of the model I am proposing.

Analogical thinking can be very useful in fostering creativity and proposing unexpected insights, but is not magic. Although our ability to map an analogy doesn’t guarantee that the analogy is right, analogical thinking is our most effective tool when it comes to breaking away from ‘here and now’ to help us find alternative solutions to our problems. In working with the tarot, analogies have proved to be exceptionally useful at suggesting ideas. As Milton Erickson put it beautifully when speaking/writing about analogies in hypnosis:

“Because they can’t reject the analogy; they can recognize the parallel. If you just talk about the problem they can refuse to recognize that. The analogy they have to recognize; they have to recognize the parallel. In doing so, they partially recognize the problem.”

By understanding shape as meaning we can elicit an analogical response in a person. This form of advice taps into the person’s experience without imposing an external frame of reference. We are using that person’s experiential knowledge to define her coordinates and any possible course of action. Using the tarot’s images to help a person remember those learnings – either explicit or implicit – that they already have, can help them cope with reality in their own terms. The main idea I want to propose here is that in a tarot reading we use images to talk to the brain in a suggestive way. To clarify our objective, we must strive to do this by the most direct means, and along the way getting rid of any superstitious procedure whose effect within the reading cannot be causally established.

In conclusion, a descriptive approach to the tarot, both historically sound and in tune with today’s cognitive research should accomplish two things: first, by using medieval keys -quadriga exgesis and symmetry- to read the tarot as a medieval document we could reframe all the current notions about ‘secret codes’ and ‘hidden mysteries’ people associates to the tarot into a more sober understanding of what these images actually are. (As far as I know, acknowledging the quadriga exegesis as an useful reading schema for the tarot is something most serious historians do, but I have never seen the notion of medieval symmetry applied to the tarot before). Second, this approach should produce a more elegant model to think about the tarot, better suited to our contemporary understanding of how images affect us and what use we may have for that kind of aesthetic experience. This should help us dispense with the “How do you know the client’s question?”, “Do you look at their fingernails?” and all that nonsense which sadly defines the way in which most wannabe readers approach, or think about, tarot readings.

We now know enough about the brain to keep from using the psychic/paranormal understanding of the tarot. The supernatural is increasingly becoming an out-dated notion. If from a historical point of view the tarot was an amusing game, we can update that view to see tarot readings as cognitive play based on our brain’s ability to engage in analogical thinking to recall its own embodied knowledge. That’s how images work us.

Enrique Enriquez
New York, 2009

It is blasphemy! Imagine someone having the gall to suggest that the Tarot, which was referred to as the ‘Devil’s Book’ in the Middle Ages, is presenting the same gospel as Jesus’ New Testament. For this to happen there would have to be two significant paradigm shifts. One shift would require a new understanding of Jesus’ New Testament, and the other, a new understanding of the Tarot. And this is the seat of the problem. Christianity, the religion that emerged in the century following Jesus’ death, monopolised his teachings and declared that its interpretation of Jesus’ teachings, was in fact, the only valid interpretation. A similar fate unfolded with the Tarot. A set of images that were created during the 14th century as a sacred map, where trivialised a hundred years later into a card game and system of divination.

What if the original gospel taught by Jesus had been radically distorted by a religion that declared itself to represent his doctrine? What if the Tarot was not a divining tool but a sacred map? What if the Major Arcana of the Tarot was the primitive, pre-Christian teachings of Jesus recorded in picture form to preserve the integrity of his teachings, during a time when his gospel of love had been distorted by power and greed? If these questions were plausible, then one could assume that the symbolism of the Major Arcana would reveal a dimension to Jesus’ teachings that have been forgotten or ignored for hundreds of years.

If this is in anyway conceivable, then its ramifications will be enormous. This would challenge the validity of Christianity, especially if the doctrine revealed by the Tarot is significantly different to the teachings currently represented by Christianity. This would put into question the position that Christianity represents Jesus’ authentic teachings. Would this make Christianity obsolete? It’s hard to imagine a world without Christianity. But there would have been many people anciently who thought that religions like Mithraism (second century B.C. to fourth century A.D.), and the Eleusinian rites of Demeter (13th century B.C. to fourth century A.D.), would never disappear. No wonder the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages declared the Tarot heretical and went to great lengths to exterminate the ‘heretics’ responsible for their creation.

This radical proposal rests solely on the idea that the Major Arcana of the Tarot reveals a more primitive and original understanding to Jesus’ New Testament than what is contemporarily accepted by Christianity as the New Testament. The Major Arcana (the word arcana meaning ‘secret or mystery’) is made up of 22 picture cards, which originally appear to have been a stand-alone set of images. The earliest references to these images arose in Northern Italy, in the region of Milan, around the middle of the 14th century. This was during the time when Milan was under the control of the Visconti family. Taking control of Milan at the end of the 13th century, Otto Visconti was appointed as the archbishop, however, he became a self-declared heretic, which saw Milan, along with several other Northern Italian cities, being ‘excommunicated’ by the church. The void of religious instruction that came as a consequence of the Catholic Church’s actions was filled by the Cathari and Patarini heretics, who the church attempted to exterminate thorough the Albigensian Crusade and the Inquisition. It appears that Milan became a refuge for the fleeing heretics and their form of spirituality appealed to the Italian nobles, just as it had to the nobles of Southern France from where they were fleeing.

It is thought that the inspiration for these sacred images, which later became known as the Major Arcana of the Tarot, may have come from these religious heretics. A set of images arose that later became known as the Marseille Tarot. It is widely accepted that the style of these images predate all other sets of Tarot cards, which are currently known to exist. These days, Tarot cards come in all forms and in most cases hold no resemblance to the primitive images of the Marseille Tarot. This rejection of the Marseille symbology was indicative of the shift which occurred in the 15th century, which saw the images that were originally designed to be a sacred map, become a tool for divination. It is worth noting that the declaration by the Church that the cards were the “Devil’s Books” appears to predate their use for divination. This would suggest that the Church’s banning of the images was a consequence of some other form of heresy.

All of these images lend support to the idea that the Major Arcana of the Marseille Tarot were created during the 14th century. It also would suggest that the creation of these images took place in the region of Northern Italy. However, what of its doctrinal relationship?

The Cathars believed that this world was an illusion, in fact, they believed that a lesser deity was the God of this world. Their goal was to awaken from this world in order to enter the kingdom of Heaven, and believed that the Sermon on the Mount, in particular the Beatitudes, explained how that was possible. The images of the Major Arcana were designed to explain the whole process of transformation, but the part of the process which related to Jesus’ Beatitudes was depicted in cards 12 to 20. In his teaching of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus explained to his audience (which was primarily Jewish) that what he was teaching them was not intended to do away with the old testament (the law or the prophets which included the temple rituals), but that he was there to make them more meaningful. He was challenging his audience to adopt rituals for a temple ‘not made with hands’. His new testament was a form of spiritual psychology, which he goes onto explain in detail in his sermon. This was such a new concept to his Jewish audience that the last verse in the scriptures relating to the Sermon on the Mount explains that the people were ‘astonished at his doctrine’.

The core structure of his psychology was explained in the eight Beatitudes. These statements summarised the transformative process required to overcome the world of illusion in order to find the kingdom of Heaven. Cleverly, the Cathars created images that explained that process.

The Christian church was unable to align itself with this version of Jesus’ gospel because it required detachment from power (control) and wealth, the important things of this world. It necessitated righteousness, forgiveness, charity and peace as the only priorities. This version of Jesus’ gospel taught that in Christ consciousness there was “neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female”. This form of Jesus’ gospel has not been practiced in two thousand years, with the exception of the few who truly understood his primitive teachings. The Cathars were one group who honoured his primitive teachings. In an attempt to salvage these teachings, Jesus’ New Testament was transposed into a set of 22 images that would later be referred to as the Tarot. It is very possible that the Tarot was in fact Jesus’ New Testament.

Russell Sturgess is the author of the book Metanoia: Renovating the House of Your Spirit from which this article is derived. Russell is also the director of education for beAttitude, which presents a system of education based on the primitive teachings of Jesus, in particular the eight Beatitudes.

When I first obtained volume 1 in 1985, it had already been in print since 1978, the internet did not yet exist, and the variety of tarot decks available in any location was a reflection of the views of those in that region: in France, basically only the playing cards, the Grimaud Marseille and some Etteilla were available; in contrast, in the USA it was basically the Waite-Smith or the 1jj, both marketed by US Games, the owner of which, Stuart Kaplan, is simultaneously the author of this Encyclopedia.

Matters of tarot were also rapidly changing. Numerous new decks were coming out, and the ‘crystal craze’ appeared to be replaced by an emerging ‘tarot craze’. Neo-paganism in its various forms was already the rage in many parts of ‘Western’ countries in which English was spoken, and, to also provide a totally contrasting perspective on the way in which tarot was looked upon by the populace, Michael Dummett (not yet ‘Sir’) had also already published his massively influential (though still seldom read) The Game of Tarot (1980).

It wasn’t until nearly ten years had lapsed since the first volume had appeared that volume II of the Encyclopedia was published in 1986. By then, the tarot ‘furore’ was in full swing, and it took merely another four years for volume III to appear in 1990.

These ‘volumes’ are also perhaps not to be thought as pre-organised, planned and structured as one may expect an encylopædia to be: establishing clear guidelines and structure across a number of volumes that would see later editions amend errors or omissions occuring in its antecedent edition. Rather, and, I would suggest, out of necessity at the time, the first volume sought to encapsulate as a resource all decks and writings about tarot that was known at the time, simultaneously aware that much was in the process of being published which would, of necessity, form the basis of a later volume in which could also be included decks and writings from earlier times that had since been uncovered… and likewise for volume III.

By that stage, the style of each volume was well established. It took another fifteen years before volume IV emerged in 2005. By then, US Games had become one (though its largest) amongst various tarot publishers, and a large number of new decks had also emerged from an unexpected source: in Japan in various Manga and related styles. In Europe, K. Frank Jensen had already established what is likely to be the most complete collection of 20th century tarot decks (in addition to completing ten years of his Manteia); the Musée des Cartes a Jouer was opened in Paris; Lo Scarabeo was emerging as a major player in card production and variety of design; quite a number of early decks had been re-published (often in limited runs) by the likes of Flornoy, Grimaud, Il Meneghello and Héron; and, importantly, the advent of the Internet had made not only deck variety well known and often partially readily available, but also enabled those interested to communicate with one another across the globe and, at times, purchase decks that may have simply otherwise been locally unavailable.

I personally think that it is in that context that the volumes have to first be considered and assessed for not only their worth, but also their influence and future development. On the subject of their future development, a brief mention should here be made that volume V is apparently in preparation. Personally, I strongly suspect that such will be the last of the series – at least in that form.

Structure of books

I have been using the volumes in what may be considered semi-frequent but regular ways since obtaining that first volume now (…how time flies) nearly 25 years ago. By far the volume that has seen the most wear (simply because of my usage) is volume II. I must admit that I still find their structure somewhat confusing.

One way to describe their structure in a nutshell is to consider that each volume has a three-fold division, the central one being its most visual and likely its main selling point: firstly, there is (or are) some tarot essay(s) of note, each volume focussed on different essays; secondly, there are listings of numerous tarot decks with representative imagery from each; and thirdly, and not to be dismissed, what is perhaps collectively the most complete tarot bibliography, usually briefly annotated.

The Essays

The essays make their appearance usually at the beginning of each volume, though volume IV is a little distinct in this regard. Also, volumes I and II have essays towards the end. Still, in essence, the essays provide some view on the development, the interpretation, or some other consideration on tarot. In general, they each provide good synopsis of the main views they advocate in the context of research of the times in which they were published.

Volume I, which, it must be recalled, was originally published in 1978, provides a good synopsis of the views of a large variety of authors, though in some cases makes statements that assumes the veracity of the views promulgated by the Golden Dawn.

The chapters that follow on early references to playing cards and to tarot, as well as the references to the Visconti Sforza emblems, still provide (together with volume II) one of the most accessible reference work as a foundation to that area of investigation – despite the work that has taken place over the past thirty years, including at least one PhD.

The essays at the end of the book, on card interpretation and on spreads, reflects the times in which they were written and the scarcity of readily available equivalent material at the time. From my point of view, the ‘interpretations’ provided, as well as the card-position meaning of the various spreads, appear a little fixed. To be fair, on the other hand, especially the second essay can be taken as reporting on the spreads found in other works.

In volume II, the essays on various things historical are a real mine for research regarding early considerations pertinent to tarot. There’s not much out there that is comparable and that easily accessible. If for no other reason, it makes this volume – for myself at any rate – indispensible.

Volume III’s essay on Pamela Colman Smith appears (to me at lesat) to lack due acknowledgement to Melinda Parsons’s 1975 MA dissertation. The essay is nonetheless well worth reading, but it has to be taken in light of the incredible amount of work that has emerged over the last few years. As such, it forms one amongst a number of such materials, including, of course, Frank Jensen’s 2006 Story of the Waite-Smith Tarot (though this admittedly hit the press subsequent to volume III which, it must be recalled, was published some sixteen years earlier in 1990).

With volume IV, there are no essays of comparable breadth or depth as in the other volumes. Still, worthy of mention is a one-page description near the end of the volume which includes the number of permutations possible for a given ten-card spread (basically, 78!/68!).

Overall, it seems to me that though some of the essays (such as especially the ones in volumes II and III) have their proper place in the series, others would be better presented in different media – such as a journal or Newsletter.

The strength of the volumes lies not, in any case, in the essays, and doubt that anyone would purchase the Encyclopedia (with the possible exception of volume II) for that content.

Annotated Bibliography

I next jump to the last section of the Encyclopedia simply to make brief mention and then return to the central content. Yet, though brief, it should not be underestimated!

This still remains a location which not only lists publications as near comprehensive as can reasonably be expected but, more importantly, still remains uniquely so!

The annotations are also, though brief, of merit. This is one area I hope to either see somehow reflected online (whether on Tarotpedia or elsewhere) or as on ongoing updated and separate volume of its own.

Tarot Decks

What makes the Encyclopedia wonderful for many remains, of course, the ease of access to representative cards from hundreds of decks. Yet this is also its own downfall: until volume IV, there was effectively no other means these were able to be accessed in one place with relative ease. These days, not only are most of the images from those same decks online in a variety of places, but also in colour.

Again, and through this aspect alone, the Encyclopedia, in its current form, shows its age and its past merit.

If it has not as yet been surpassed online, it is more that comparable work has to be systematically undertaken by not only someone who has the passion required, but also the resources. At the moment, this is spread across a number of individuals working in different locations across the world in non-coordinated ways and, as such, the Encyclopedia, despite the awkward manner in which the decks are arranged, remains in a unique position.

I say the decks are arranged in an awkward manner and yet, to be sure, I cannot say what other way they could have been better presented. The way they are grouped together suggests, for each volume, a logic that makes sense, even if across volumes new finds, new decks, or new styles cuts across groupings from earlier volumes.

It should be recalled that volume IV, as an example, does not arise out of a plan before volume I was completed, but rather is itself a consequence of the inevitable omissions of the previous three volumes.

If the whole four volumes were to have been written today, then I certainly would expect their overall arrangement to differ greatly with greater focus on earlier decks in the earlier volumes and greater sub-groupings with decks that have emerged since 1980.

Overview

So, in a nutshell, what do I think of them? Firstly, I sincerely hope that the set gets a fifth volume as many amongst us expect. Irrespective of their limitations, it is a set that will remain for years to come a testament to the diversity and richness of not only tarot in general, but also of this period in its history – and it seems to me that its closing volume has yet to appear.

For tarot enthusiasts and researchers, the set, irrespective as to whether most images also become available online and whether Tarotpedia or something similar develops to the extent of the volumes of the Encyclopedia of Tarot, remains a fount of reference material that is both relatively affordable and (still) readily accessible.

There are, of course, other books on tarot that any bookshelf ought to include. These, however, remain amongst that select group.

Bibliographic details

Encyclopedia of Tarot vol. I (isbn 0913866113 ), 1978
Stuart R. Kaplan
387 pages + 8 colour pages
images from 250 decks
30 page annotated bibliography

Encyclopedia of Tarot vol. II (isbn 0913866369 ), 1986
Stuart R. Kaplan
552 pages + 16 colour pages
images from 300 decks
28 page annotated bibliography

Encyclopedia of Tarot vol. III (isbn 0880791225 ), 1990
Stuart R. Kaplan
694 pages + 16 colour pages
images from over 550 decks
6 page annotated bibliography

Encyclopedia of Tarot vol. IV (isbn 157281506X ), 2005
Stuart R. Kaplan & Jean Huets
802 pages + 16 colour pages
images from over 800 decks
32 page annotated bibliography

> www.usgamesinc.com

Unless living in continental Europe and knowing what to look for and where, it is only since the nineteen-eighties that images from older decks became easily accessible with Kaplan’s first volume of his now four volume (and I hear soon-ish to be five) Encyclopedia of Tarot. Even with the first two volumes available by 1990, historically oriented decks were themselves scarce. It’s only with the advent of the internet that the last ten years has made a reasonably large number of early images readily available for those of us in search – yet without the proper research means – of early models and what these may possibly have meant or intended. This does not of course mean that many books were not also earlier available: to be sure, they were, and provided much to whet the mind’s imaginative faculty.

Grimaud (c. 1930)		Conver (c. 1760)

’simplified’ though typical tympanum showing Christ and four evangelists

It’s in this context that what has always been apparent (at least to me) is twofold: on the one hand the obviousness of the Christian basis and Christian content of the imagery of the trumps; and on the other that decks to which I had access to simply seemed to be ‘missing’ the one image that it seems ‘ought’ to be there in this context, namely that of Christ. It seemed of course obvious that the Grimaud Marseille, and the 1760 Conver on which it is based, bore direct iconographic similarities to the ubiquitous cathedral tympanum carvings showing Christ amongst the four evangelists. The obvious and ‘problematic’ connection being, of course, Christ’s and the World card’s contrasting depicted gender: whereas Christ is obviously masculine, the World, in those cards, is unquestionably depicted with feminine attributes.

This does not negate in any manner the way in which tarot has also, especially since the development of the neo-Pagan revivalism of the 1980s, been appropriated and modified to reflect numerous world-views: from those that suggest more jungian concepts to others that incorporate Buddhist, Australian Dreamtime, Native American, Aztec, Wiccan, or indeed harken to ancient and modern myths and sagas from those of Ancient Egypt or Greece to the Kalevala and modern literary giants such as Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. All these, of course, irrespective as to what I personally consider the merit or otherwise of any specific examplar, and omitting another huge range of decks that are essentially artistic templates or ‘frames’ (from Dali to the hundreds of perhaps lesser known, but in some cases incredibly talented artists).

Having before us a deck such as the Grimaud that reflected in so many ways the central trunk of tarot’s diversity, and finding that this deck was essentially unmodified since the 1760s, the type of deck was very fast, for myself at any rate, the core upon which an understanding of tarot as a whole needed to be mapped to or, perhaps by better analogy, anchored. Even more so when it is realised that most twentieth century tarot themselves derive in large part via the works of either Wirth, Waite, Crowley, Falconnier, or Etteilla, and that each and all of those are based, at least for their trumps, on first and foremost the Marseille-style.

It is also apparent, however, that as we look back into history, the earliest of known decks differ from the Marseille-type. Of most obvious differing form are the Visconti-type decks, individually hand-painted and gilded in the 15th century. Also, differences arise in what appears to be a number of possible orderings (not only were the earliest decks un-titled and un-numbered, but when numbering did start to make an appearance, variations occurs, with, for example, the Hermit numbered XI). In terms of imagery, the Visconti-Sforza, Cary-Yale, anonymous Parisian (due to the publishing house’s name having been carved out of the woodblock prior to the imprint that has survived), and Vieville, each pre-1700 decks yet the second pair dating two centuries later than the first, display significant enough differences:

Visconti-Sforza (c. 1450)		Cary-Yale Visconti (c. 1450)
anomynous Parisian (c. 1650)		Vieville (c. 1650)

Each of those decks include elements that have important symbolic references, many of which slowly being re-discovered by the tarot community. In the decks above, for example, the Visconti-Sforza may display, as suggested by both Moakley and more recently by Berti and Gonard, the Heavenly Jerusalem; in contrast the Cary-Yale and the Parisian seem to suggest Fate or Fortune over the fate of lands and the Earth. In the Vieville, we find the closest overall iconographic image to the Marseille-type earlier shown. Yet this quite late depiction is not the sole of the period or earlier as both the card found in one of the Sforza castlelets and the Noblet bear important resemblances:

Sforza Castle well card (c. 1500)		Noblet (c. 1650)

The Heavenly Jerusalem of the Visconti-Sforza is, to be sure, conceptually very closely related to the Vieville in that this city is deemed as the heavenly abode of the eternal Christ as presented in especially mediæval and renaissance Christianity. That he appears more ambiguously feminine in the Noblet does not diminish the intent as Christ. Apart from any other considerations, numerous mystical works exist that speak of Christ in feminine terms and, specifically, with reference to his bosom suckling his children – ie, us.

Amongst a couple of other examples I also include in my Reading the Marseille Tarot is a quote from Lia Moran and Jacob Gilad’s ‘From Folklore to Scientific Evidence’ [International Journal of Biomedical Science Dec. 2007], who remind us that:

Contrary to modern days, Jesus Christ has been often portrayed as having feminine qualities in medieval times. This includes both having physical feminine attributes such as lactating breasts as well as religious ones, such as Christ lactating his believers, reversing the role of Mary and Christ-child to Mother Jesus and the child-like soul. Others have connected the wound in Jesus’ side and breasts full of soul-sustaining milk or used breast milk symbolism to illustrate ideas of the motherhood of Christ versus the fatherhood of God.

That there is a ‘natural’ transformation of a figure that earlier clearly represented Christ surrounded by the four evangelists to that same figure as (initially) ambiguously feminine and over time ever less so makes sense in this context – as long as the concept of Christ with feminine attributes remains something that is alive to the mystical life of the community. Once this aspect is lost, so too does the figure’s original reference become somewhat forgotten and eventually transformed to something else that can be meaningfully re-considered. In our case, a figure that increasingly becomes simultaneously removed and present as tentative steps are taken to gain anew what a ‘Spiritu Mundi’ may mean.

In a sequence of cards that clearly bears a Renaissance Christian worldview – albeit one infused with neo-platonic and neo-aristotelean elements – it ‘makes sense’ to have its highest figure alive in the realm of the spirit yet at once both reachable and ineffable. The perfected Man, the second Adam, into which not only as breath been breathed (the ‘A’–air into the blood formed out of earth–DaM), but also, for the Christian, the Fires of Life (Shin) descended within humanity, and at once also showing a metamorphosis of Yahweh to Jeheshuah.

Allow me a little to explain the above.

Let’s first take a couple of steps back.

If the Hebrew alphabet has had any organising influence of the ordering of the trumps (and also have a small impact on minor details), then it is unlikely to have been in the order that was imposed on the cards by late 19th century views – though these in turn have of course had an impact on how decks that adopt views from the derivative orders of the three main ‘traditions’ will include details to match the preference.

In my personal view, I still consider it highly likely that some simple influence assisted in getting the trump sequence and its iconography stabilised between its creation around the first half of the 15th century and the time it became ‘canonised’ by what we now call the Marseille-type in the mid-17th century. Something like an ordered alphabetic sequence, due to its simplicity, certainly has appeal. This in itself does not make it correct, of course. What is interesting is that the letters’ ordinal values reflect well the Marseille-type’s numbered trumps, with the un-numbered Fool placed where only he can be: last, yet wherever he pleases.

If this sequence has any meaning, then each and every card, without much effort, would need to in some extent or other reflect an alphabetic consideration. Some more ‘obvious’ visual ones are Alef and the Bateleur, Lamed and the Pendu, Ayin and the Tower, Tzaddhi and the Moon, Kof and the Sun; some become ‘as obvious’ with a little reflection on the similarity of meanings of the letter-as-word or its import, such as Beit and the Papess, Samek and the Devil, and Resh and Judgement.

With Shin (or Sin – excuse the pun that only works in English and could not resist in the title of this piece), what we have is the twenty-first letter, so some aspect to its relation to Christ needs to be found if the methodology is to yield feasible or plausible results. Fortunately, this is one of the easiest upon which to reflect as long as some of the common practices of the times is known.

Yahweh, or the unpronounced name of God in the Torah, is written with four letters: YHVH, and these are themselves found commonly enough in especially high places enclosed within a triangle in numerous Cathedrals – though at times it is obvious that the carver knew no Hebrew but was instead merely copying script he or she was not able to ‘read’:

YHVH rendered in typically poor Hebrewl

One of the views that gained some prominence (and a means used in attempts to convert Jews – when more brutal means were not at play), was to claim that God the Father becomes God the Son in the ‘insertion’ of the Holy Spirit (who has tongues of flame, as does Shin) within the tetragrammaton (tetra means four in Greek, hence ‘4-lettered name’). In other words, YHVH→YHShVH Yahweh is Yeheshuah (Jesus).

YHShVH (as read from right to left)

In the context of the card image, this can be brought to reflection as the central figure is seen to be embedded within the four living creatures said to be at the Throne of God.

Within the religious context and mysticism of the times, the image, its placement, and even its possible Hebrew letter become understandable, and a redemption of the World in its eternal call towards Holy Jerusalem something that, for the person wishing to reflect on the imagery as religious art, a feasible reflection.

Of course, these reflections do not mean that the trumps necessarily developed in quite the way here mentioned…

Similarly, that the central image has come to be first and foremost feminised beyond its likely earlier pointing to Christ reflects the mores of the times that change with the spiritual strivings within cultural shifts. Nonetheless and in my personal view, the grounding of the image needs to also be recognised.

Most Tarot readers would agree that Tarot speaks a symbolic language. Language is tricky, though. Meanings can be subtle and hidden, or they can turn around as circumstances change. The word "blue" can represent the sky on a sunny day, or it can indicate depression. A sunny day is cheerful in most contexts, while in a severe drought it’s not. In the same way that words change meaning with context, a Tarot card does as well.

It can take years to build one’s Tarot vocabulary. But just as toddlers begin to chatter as soon as they learn a few words, and manage to say quite a lot, it’s possible to start reading Tarot as soon as one begins to apply meaning to the cards. One way is by looking for how the cards in a spread interrelate.

According to Gail Fairfield, in Everyday Tarot: A Choice Centered Book, a good way to understand first the three numbers of the Minor Arcana is to view them geometrically. One is a point, Two is two connected points forming a line, and Three is three connected points forming a triangular plane (Figure 1). When we move from the one-dimensional, or linear, Two to the two-dimensional plane of the Three, something recognizable begins to take shape. Ideas, feelings, urges, or seeds of effort begin to develop into definite plans that seek a multi-dimensional form. In much the same way, when we work with more than one card in a spread, the interrelationships form a shape for interpretation.

Suit and element are important to consider. Sometimes Cups are empty, or dry. Earth requires moisture to be fertile, but a flood is a problem. Sometimes Swords are watery, as the air can be humid at times; and most people know about the triad that makes fire: oxygen (air), heat, and fuel (Figure 2). Fire produces smoke (air) and ash (earth). Water can put out a fire, but in doing so produces steam, releasing potent energy. When hydrogen is burned, the resulting byproduct is water. Seldom in nature do we see the elements in their pure forms, but it’s sometimes useful to try to separate them in order to understand a situation, especially in a Tarot reading.

Tarot numbers may be even more interdependent and overlapping in meaning, if that’s possible. Taking Threes as an example, we need to first look back at the Twos. Two can be seen as balanced polarities. That balance is frequently wrought with tension, conflict, struggles for dominance, or a stalemate between unresolved concerns. When we come to Three, that prior tension is released. The energies that built up in the Twos move forward in a more stable or cohesive way at Three, or they may fall apart, to merge or dissolve back into One.

The Threes in Tarot are mostly perceived as positive, and perhaps that has to do with their relationship to the Empress of the Major Arcana, which bears the number III and is usually seen as benevolent, loving, prosperous, creative, nurturing. But even she can have her bad days, and the negative side of the Great Mother archetype can be very bad indeed. It’s important to keep a balanced frame of reference when considering the minor Threes as well. No card is entirely positive or negative. Each represents a spectrum of meanings that come into play depending on the situation and point of view.

Threes relate to The Empress, which in turn relates to all four Queens, as well as numerologically to The Hanged Man and The World. One can think of The Hermit, as well as each of the four Nines of the Minor Arcana, as equivalent to 3 x 3. The Empress represents gestation and birth. In turn the Death card, with its digit ending in Three, completes a cycle. Six, which numbers the Lovers card as well as all four Sixes of the Minor Arcana, is the sum of 3 + 3. This can be considered when reading all the Three, Six, and Nine cards, and considering how they might represent a situation as it develops.

The same card can have multi-layered meanings within the same reading. Some of the best Tarot spreads show us the development of a situation from one stage to another. One example is the Dynamic Hexagramme offered at FourHares.com. When using that spread, a card read as a clarification of the opening card can carry one meaning, while the same card can take on another meaning altogether when viewed as part of another trigram (Figure 3).

A significator in another spread can work in a similar way, since every other card in the spread relates back to it, but each in its own way. Reversals, when used, provide yet another dynamic.

This means we need to be adaptable when assigning meanings to cards in a reading, and we need to keep in mind that their meanings can shift and flex, sometimes dramatically, from one reading to the next, or even one part of a spread to the next.

Does all this make Tarot overly complex? Yes and no. It is at times a good reason to limit a reading to a spread of just enough cards to answer the question or concern at hand.

I had a problem with reviewing the Magic Manga Tarot.

It kept reviving the ‘What is Tarot’ topic, a topic commonly bandied about on the electronic forums.

Then there was an evening here a while back when I sat with Robert Place discussing, “What is Tarot”. With his knowledge of symbolism, it was a great in depth discussion. I had a difficult time keeping up.

My inability to ‘keep up’ was further enhanced by my dabbling in Manga and Anime based Tarot, an appreciation for the Asian Tarot market. There’s that question I like to ask people, “If River Tam used a deck, what would it look like?” I like to move Tarot out into the future, when man lives amongst the stars. Add five hundred years to the calendar. What does Tarot look like?

We have expectations; we have ideas and concepts about what Tarot is. It has certain symbols, placed in certain orders, many predating A.E. Waite’s sweeping influences.

Back in 1970, David Palladini produced the Aquarian Tarot. Some images lacked the expected symbology, instead depending on character pose and expression to convey the elementary emotions that the symbols that we count on would project if they were present. It was the dawn of the Character Driven Tarot.

Then a few years back, something even more unexpected occurred.

Tarot began to sweep like a grass-fire across Asia.

There are myths that Europeans have created for and about Tarot. Although we’ve tried to correct them during the last thirty years, they have begun to sprout as facts, in the Asian markets. Some Asian Tarot books include (with new experts and photographs) the revelation that Tarot comes from Ancient Egypt….

Western symbols don’t carry the same meanings or weight in Asia. Asian numerology and astrology developed with differences. And some things don’t translate well, variances occur, changes occur in both directions of translations.

When I first began to explore Asian Tarots a few years back, I was at once captivated and shocked by the imagery. The Clamp X featured pictures slapped onto seventy-eight cards willy-nilly, with complete disregard for traditional ‘card meanings’ regarding suit, numbers, placement in a sequence.

But let’s not get too excited yet. Not all Asian Tarots are character driven. Some pay very close attention to accepted Western symbology and meanings. Some (the Derakkusu ban Hihou Tarot is an excellent examle) pay such a dedicated homage to western numerology, that westerners often fail to understand the subtlety, which may be closer to Ikibana than standard pip arrangement.

Evan Yi Feng’s Lunatic Tarot mirrors WCS in a specific manga art style.

Some folks go on about the Tarot Archetypes and ‘bringing them (the Archetypes) into our lives.

An ‘archetype’, and more accurately an archetypal image, by definition is an image that ‘means’ the same thing regardless of cultural interpretation.

Eastern Archetypal Imagery makes us rethink such statements.

They (the images) do not stand-alone and plainly convey the intended emotive reaction. Either images are not archetypal, or they do not fit the meanings, or our definition of Tarot is too narrow and restrictive.

One could make the mistake of assuming that Asian deck designers are careless by looking only at decks such as the Full Metal Alchemist and Clamp X.

The Magic Manga is a deck that will convince the astute user that our current definition of Tarot is far too narrow.

The Trumps are somewhat reminiscent of traditional western trumps, Strength is a stern looking woman either wrapped in a lion-skin or embraced by a lion (numbered in the continental fashion as XI), the Hierophant bows behind a Japanese cenotaph, the Fool is in Motley….

Some make us stretch our minds; Temperance holds a pendulum – and has both a black and white wing, the Hanged Man is enveloped in spider webs, the Devil shows only the victim sporting wrist restraints, and the Empress trims a rose standard.

The minors contain some vast variances.

The Two of Wands displays for us a stern teacher mid-sentence, the Two of Swords has a nurse displaying two scalpels, the Five of Wands shows a tightrope walker, the Four of Cups an indifferent ship captain, the Eight of Cups a woman in mourning, the Five of Cups a scientist mid-experiment who has just had a florence flask shatter.

Now each of these images actually illustrates the accepted standardized modern meanings. But each does so in a method that makes sense to the western mind with study and some pretty free-form thought association.

The Five of Cups makes sense when one considers there are levels of ‘disappointment’, or spilled milk. There are different types of leaving for the woman in the Eight of Cups, but what about that Four of Cups?

Take a look at the Four of Cups in the WCS. Three cups sit in the same configuration as the man’s contact with the ground. Three points of contact, a tripod. A fourth cup is introduced. But above. Like the man’s head that rests above the three points of contact. This is actually an illustration of the Z-axis, or three-dimensional geometry. This is something that man would have noticed once he began sailing. It is the first instance of human evolution where the Z-axis becomes crucial (awareness keeps one from capsizing).

The two scalpels for the Two of Swords? The aspect usually overlooked in the WCS Two of Swords is that of mastery. To sit with two swords at the ready while blindfolded implies a certain mastery with swords.

The Magic Manga is created in a warm and soothing palette. The deck and LWB are in Deutsch, Français, English, and Español.

“The cards should look like vintage prints. Thus the color parts are even (no soft gradients, structures or painted-like surfaces) and partially decorated with patterns. In order to avoid too bright, colorful and mawkish cards, I decided to use only four slightly discreet colors (winered, bottle-green, pale yellow and dark grey-blue) and mixed them and added some pattern” says Viviane, who drew the Tarot art in the style of Kaori Yuki (of Angel Sanctuary fame).

I really really like it. It could be a new benchmark for Asian Tarot art. It could have a few cards that five hundred years from now – would appear on a Tarot deck out in the black, where constellations no longer exist, and Earth is far behind, only legends of the old exist.

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