The Fool from the Sola Busca deck.

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“Tarot” is a strange word because everyone and no one knows what it means. Ask anyone over 20 what “Tarot” means, and the likelihood is that they will recognize it in the simplest, most popular way; A deck of cards which can tell the future. Like so many modern myths, that is misleading on both counts. Although there are decks of Tarot cards, and they predated its study, Tarot is also the school of thought behind the meaning of the cards, rather than just the cards themselves and any simple meanings which might become attached to them. And they certainly can’t tell the future. They can, however, help to make sense of the present. It was predictable that Carl Jung would have taken a passing interest in Tarot, and he strips it of its divinatory reputation:

[W]e can predict the future, when we know how the present moment evolved from the past.

Tarot is culturally important in different ways. Historically, it is a conundrum which has been all but academically abandoned. It is aesthetically very beautiful, and yet tied inexorably to the occult. Where did these strange cards come from?

The first point of interest in the history of the Tarot is that no one can agree what it is. Richard Cavendish, in his beautifully illustrated 1975 book, The Tarot, gives a picture of confusion when it comes to the provenance of the cards:

All sorts of theories and legends have gathered round the cards, because of their puzzling but enticing symbolism and the uncertainty of their origin. It has been said that they came from China or India or Persia, that they were brought to the West by the gypsies, or by returning Crusaders, or by the Arab invaders of Sicily or Spain, or alternatively that they had nothing to do with the East and were invented in Europe.

A suitably mysterious and shrouded beginning for a pack of cards which would later be used by every famous occultist from the 18th century onwards.

The appearance of Tarot cards in Europe can be roughly dated by noting which famous authors don’t mention the cards. Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Chaucer make no mention of them in the 14th century, and would surely have done so had they seen them. By the 16th century, however, the first verifiable progenitor of today’s deck appears, and the Venetian or Piedmontese Tarot would become the more familiar Marseille deck. The Catholic Church kept a watchful eye over this new fad, pressuring the producers of the decks to change certain cards—The Pope, Female Pope, Empress, and Emperor—into other figures. The same redaction would be practiced by French Tarot producers during the Revolution in 1789, who would be careful to remove the heads from the four kings. Perhaps it was the Church’s reliance on pictorial symbolism (as a religion of the largely illiterate) that made it so suspicious of what was, at the time, simply a game. The Catholic Church was not amused by the game of Trionfi—or “Trumps”—perhaps suspecting that the cards would one day be put to diabolical use. Referring to the Tarot deck as “the Devil’s picture-book,” the Church even placed Tarot cards on their list of forbidden books, the index prohibitorum. The Church’s suspicions echo centuries later, as T. S. Eliot, in The Waste Land, depicts “Madame Sosostris… With a wicked pack of cards.” Eliot goes on to describe a very strange three-card layout which has puzzled Tarot scholars ever since, and which he provides a footnote on. Eliot’s mystery woman was of course, using the cards for divination. At what point did Tarot go from being a game to being an occult sideshow?

Ronald Decker and Michael Dummett find the origin of the use of Tarot for divination in A History of the Occult Tarot:

Modern cartomancy arose only in the XVIIIth century: packs of cards were shuffled, dealt and spread in prescribed formats for telling the future. The earliest instance of Tarot cartomancy occurred in Bologna, but the familiar variety, surviving today, descends from French fortune-tellers.

The use of Tarot cards as a fortune-telling device, although present from the early 18th century, only came to prominence academically in the 19th century via the work of Éliphas Lévi and Antoine Court du Gébelin, and so the greater part of Tarot’s history was indeed as a game, Tarocchi in Italian, and Tarok in France. So, divination begins as a parlour-game which itself is descended from an intellectual game on a par with chess. It is in fact Michael Dummett who writes most convincingly on this in his book, The Game of Tarot. Carlo Penco, who met the philosopher at a conference in Sicily in 1991, was interested to hear that Dummett was interested in Tarot, and questioned him as to why. The young man received a terse reply:

I have no interest in the divinatory use of Tarot cards; it is completely spurious and has no connection with the origin of the game.

Dummett was more interested in Tarot as system, and we will have to have a brief look at the composition of the Tarot deck to understand what that system is.

There is a first and obvious correspondence between Tarot cards and any ordinary casino deck you would see today, and that is the equivalence of the suits:

Spades = Swords.
Hearts = Cups.
Clubs = Wands.
Diamonds = Coins (also Pentacles or Disks).

With the Tarot deck, the pip cards are the same, ace to ten, but it is when we arrive at court that things change. Whereas today’s club deck has Jack-Queen-King, the Tarot suit has Page-Knight-Queen-King. We have added some cavalry to the deck. So much for the Minor Arcana. It is the Major Arcana that is the real mystery of the Tarot.

The 22 Major Arcana cards in a standard Tarot deck are as follows:

0. The Fool.
1. The Magician.
2. The High Priestess (also, The Female Pope).
3. The Empress.
4. The Emperor.
5. The Pope.
6. The Lovers.
7. The Chariot.
8. Strength.
9. The Hermit.
10. The Wheel of Fortune.
11. Justice.
12. The Hanged Man.
13. Death.
14. Temperance.
15. The Devil.
16. The Falling Tower.
17. The Star.
18. The Moon.
19. The Sun.
20. Judgment.
21. The World.

Some packs have minor differences. Aleister Crowley’s reverses the positions of Strength and Justice, for example. Also, the use of Zero for The Fool has caused disputes about order. But these are the type of tiny academic fire-fights you will get in any field of study. It is part of the enjoyment of Tarot to compare systems and observations.

The Minor Arcana, then, are almost exactly the same as our familiar pack of cards, with the simple addition of the Knight. The Major Arcana, although more famous, are far more unfamiliar, and it is the mystery of their addition to the basic deck that interests Dummett, although from the point of view of Tarot as a game and not as a tool of divination, fortune-telling or cartomancy. Dummett views the cards as “clear and unclouded by the smoke of the sorcerer’s incantations.”

You can buy James J. O’Meara’s Mysticism After Modernism here.

The Major Arcana were originally known as Triumphs, Trionfi in Italian, and Dummett’s question is; what are these cards doing in their additional role to a pack of cards clearly used for gaming, if that explanation does not have an occult or magical answer, as he believes they do not? His answer is a philosophical one, and will take us into the idea—an important one in Tarot—of correspondences, that is, the cards viewed not merely in isolation with simple meanings that can be read off, but elements in a game that have different meanings or implications depending on their relation to one another. And so Dummett had no interest in Tarot cards as some sort of Mystic Meg, the famous 1980s British TV fortune-teller. He saw divinatory use of the cards as useless in and of itself. But he didn’t see what it signified philosophically as useless.

The “fallen” nature of the Tarot, from a complex game of strategy to a slightly scary parlor-game for bored ladies, like an Ouija board, is often a subject for remorse. Jessie Weston’s book on the Grail legend, From Ritual to Romance, is one of those books that stars briefly in the movies, turning up as it does on the bedside table of Brando’s Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. Ms. Weston also regrets the cheapening of a game with intellectual depth rather than a parlor-trick:

Today the Tarot has fallen somewhat into disrepute, being principally used for purposes of divination, but its origin, and precise relation to our current playing-cards, are questions of considerable antiquarian interest. Were these cards the direct parents of our modern pack, or are they entirely distinct therefrom.

There is a feeling among many who have studied Tarot that its transformation from being a game played with beautiful cards into some occult mystery was simply an operetta composed and performed by men who thought they were magicians, and not just the bored and idle rich with a book of spells. Tarot certainly feels more dignified as both game and subject of interest, and the idea that its use in the occult is somehow intellectually superior to its role in gaming is absurd. Penco writes, in Dummett and the Game of Tarot:

Certainly playing the original Tarot game in its variants is more difficult than playing with Major Arcana for the purpose of divination…

Games have a social history and an educational role. Children learn from games, both to develop social relations with other children, and also to learn that there are rules, in life as much as in playground games, which must be adhered to and with which all players must be in agreement. Watch children at play, see how seriously they take their games. Egyptian rulers used to do just that, watching the little ones at play and taking note of what they said and how they acted, seeing this apparently innocent gamboling as suggestions affecting the affairs of state. Why should Tarot not be a game children play? Could it be less instructive than whatever they waste their time with online? Jung suggests a role for the cards in just this way:

[The cards] combine in certain ways, and the different combinations correspond to the playful development of mankind.

Tarot cards are also things of great beauty. Some of the lush Minchiate packs (with more cards than the regular 78) of the 18th century are miniaturist works of art, like Renaissance lockets. Visually, the three most famous Tarot decks are the Marseille, the Rider-Waite-Smith, and the Crowley-Harris. While the Marseille deck dates back as far as the 15th century, and was probably originally produced using wood-blocks, the latter pair are from the 20th century, and both artists were women.

Pamela Colman Smith created the Rider-Waite-Smith deck in 1909. It had previously been simply the Rider-Waite deck, after its non-artistic creator, Arthur Rider-Waite. Waite was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, as were Aleister Crowley and W. B. Yeats. This somewhat dubious organization was responsible in large part for nurturing the association between Tarot cards and the occult. At the Golden Dawn headquarters, Rider-Waite met Smith, who agreed to work on a new Tarot deck. Smith was a charming, slightly feral, elfin woman who enjoyed performing with a puppet theater she had had since childhood. Her early art had been influenced by the great French painter and lithographer, Odilon Redon, and the Rider-Waite-Smith deck has something of the cartoon about it, or at least the graphic novel. Perhaps the reason that the deck became so popular after World War 2 is explained by Dawn G. Robinson, the author of Pamela Colman Smith’s biography:

Tarot for the masses rather than simply occultists was a paradigm shift occurring in the late 1950s.

The artist who produced the paintings reduced to decorate Aleister Crowley’s deck couldn’t have been more different. Never an aristocrat by birth, Lady Frieda Harris insisted on her title, and was responsible for far more than the brushwork commissioned by the “Great Beast 666.” Crowley wanted her to design a traditional pack, but she persuaded him to incorporate his intellectual and cult pursuits into the cards. The Crowley-Harris deck is always seen as the most spectacular, the Rider-Waite-Smith the most “friendly.”

There are, of course, thousands of decks available today. There’s quite a Tarot industry out there, although the literature is a bit hippy-dippy for my tastes. What I would be interested in reading though, is the following. I Googled “Tarot therapy” and got dozens of hits, including an “extensive guide to Tarot use for psychotherapists in counselling.” Why not? I bet Big Pharma seethes at this sort of thing, which produces revenue for no one (except maybe Agmüller, the famous Swiss printers of Tarot decks).

Then there are the cards themselves seen not just as objets d’art, but as signs in a sign system which must be read off, must be interpreted if there is to be a system to study at all. And, if there is, then to study is to read.

It is said that Tarot cards are “read.” There is a reader, and a querent. And this act of reading symbols which tell of greater things is firmly within a tradition of the universe as a book. Galileo uses a famous image:

Philosophy is written in that great book which ever lies before our eyes – I mean the universe – but we do not understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols, in which it was written.

There are several antiquarian but charming theories that Tarot is a “speculum mundi,” a mirror of the world, and that the cards and their combinations lead to higher things and more rarified realms of thought. In this way, the cards instruct the initiate not as to his future, but to the world in which he finds himself. The idea of a deck of cards providing an education was present as early as the 15th century in Europe, when a set of 50 instructional playing-cards were made and attributed to the great court artist, Andrea Mantegna.

To read is to be able to interpret signs. That is what is deficient in people who can’t read; they can see the signs, but they don’t know how to interpret them. They can’t process the meaningless letters they see on the page. And so the understanding of signs is vital at the base level of simple literacy. It is no small wonder that when given a mysterious deck of cards rather than another Victorian tract on metaphysics and the infinite, occultists headed for the card-table to begin the work of interpretation.

Aleister Crowley was a complex man, to put it very mildly. A drug addict and serial abuser of women, a mountaineer whose mistake on an expedition may have cost lives, and dubbed by the Daily Mail as the “wickedest man in the world,” Crowley’s writing on Tarot is among the finest in the field. Crowley centers his theory of Tarot on correspondences. This system has a long history, and is based around the working belief that things in the simple sense “correspond” with one another by virtue of differing orders of similarity. This can lead the student into as large a labyrinth as he cares to build. So we see Crowley, having forged a connection between The Fool card, zero, and the Egyptian vulture-goddess Maut (“The Fool” in many of the non-English Tarot decks is named “Le Mat” or “Il Mato”) whose legends are taken up by Crowley. The vulture has a spiral neck in myth, analogous to the form of the energy which comprises the universe. In a short paragraph, Crowley mentions Zoroaster and Einstein. Also, the vulture of legend procreates using the wind, and Crowley directs us to the Greek belief that life was inherent in the movement of air (Crowley is quite right to say this), and to the pre-Socratic school of the philosopher Anaximenes.

Everything, for Crowley, leads to everything else. This could lead to ontological confusion, to a lack of fixed study, but Crowley encourages the cross-pollination of legend as essential to the awakening of an image. In his great book on Tarot, The Book of Thoth, Crowley writes:

It has seemed convenient to deal separately with these main forms of the idea of The Fool, but no attempt has been made, or should be made, to prevent the legends overlapping and coalescing.

Crowley allows myth and legend, the zodiac and the Hebrew alphabet, the planets and the metals, to weave one another’s narratives around the others. For Crowley, the Tarot begins as a deck of cards and leads inwards, to the self, and outward, to the world.

The cards should never be taken at naïve face value, as the best Tarot scholars show. Here, Crowley is discussing the famous card number 6, The Lovers;

The subject of this card is analysis, followed by synthesis. The first question asked by science is: “Of what are things composed?” This having been answered, the next question is: “How shall we recombine them to our greater advantage?”

Compare this with an explanation of The Lovers from a contemporary online Tarot service:

The Lovers card symbolizes love, harmony, and relationships, and values alignment.

This is not to disparage the Tarot industry. It is far better to spend your time with Tarot cards than with much of the toxic pastimes the modern world has to offer. It’s not necessary to have a deep, esoteric understanding of Tarot, it can be relaxing and meditative in its own right.

P.D. Ouspensky, the Russian mystic philosopher and disciple of Gurdjeff, also writes superbly on Tarot. He sees that “this work could not have been invented by illiterate gypsies of the 14th century.” He also explains the simple appeal of the Tarot for purposes of divination:

The Tarot makes it possible to ‘seek gold’, ‘to evoke spirits’, and ‘to draw horoscopes’, simply by means of this pack of cards without the complicated paraphernalia and ceremonies of an alchemist, astrologer or magician.

Ouspensky has a point. Aside from the willow-stalk runes or coins of the I Ching, Tarot readers are able to travel light. Ouspensky’s explanations of the cards are more symbolic and traditionalist, different from Crowley’s pseudo-science. Here, his text does not describe the card, The Sun, as you might expect. Instead, it occurs during the meaning of the famous Death card:

The sun sinks at one point and rises at another. Each moment of its motion is a descent at one point and an ascent at another. It understood that it rises while sinking and sinks while rising, and that in life, in coming to birth, dies, and in dying, comes to birth.

To us, that may sound like hippie drivel. But it is a reminder that, at one time, the idea of death was inextricably linked in the pre-modern mind with the idea of rebirth. The Tarot card shows Death as the reaper, working in the field among scattered limbs, but also green shoots. For simpler souls than ours, the cards were moral homilies, not some crystal ball gimmick.

Unsurprisingly, Tarot has become the victim of the modern in that it is offered as a lifestyle choice, an appurtenance to make you seem special and somehow apart. The flimsy nature of much “new age” thought is responsible for this. Anything with a whiff of the occult, Kabbalah, the Ouija board, I Ching, runes, crystals and a whole inventory of mysterious “portal studies,” will always attract the woolly-minded and imprecise, those who find the modern world too intellectually demanding, or perhaps too insistent on them having gainful employment, and would prefer to retreat into a safe haven where nothing can be disproved.

But Tarot is really something far more than that. There is no need to stalk around like a pantomime villain, as members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn tended to, to study Tarot. I have studied it for 30 years, not intensely but as a sort of odd side-road off the main street of philosophy. I can read the cards but I rarely do, although I did once read for un brujo, a Nicaraguan witch, at a bar in San Carlos. Fairly scary, but a good snapshot for the memory. And the memory is something else the study of Tarot will assist.

I recommend anyone buy a Tarot deck. They are beautiful things to handle and look at. Who knows, you may find yourself arranging the Major Arcana cards into different orders to tell different stories, as an inquisitive scholar in 17th-century Europe would have done. A Tarot deck is a fascinating thing if you are a scholar, an aesthete, or just want that whiff of brimstone the occult brings with it. Unfortunately, the Tarot cards will never tell you your fortune, not even if you cross the gypsy’s palm with silver, but they can give you a new perspective on thinking which Ouspensky recognized in A New Model of the Universe:

Who knows, for instance, that an ordinary pack of playing-cards contains a profound and harmonious philosophical system?