There are three unanswered questions on the tarot:
In the tarot community there is an implicit understanding that in some way the tarot has always been about divination. We want it to be so. I have my doubts. I believe there was a simple political agenda at work – to use the tarot as a vehicle to create a mystical quasi-Christian system based upon Judaic and Islamic sources, but without disclosing those sources. Europe has a long and ignoble history of ethnically cleansing the continent from influences from the Middle East. Our Christian faith has been cleansed as far as possible from its roots. Jesus is depicted with blonde hair and blue eyes; his birth is symbolised by a Christmas Tree and giving gifts, while Easter is a commercial enterprise to sell chocolate eggs. The influence of Islam and Judaism has been tolerated, barely, at the extremities of Continental Europe. In the West, Spain had a very successful Islamic civilisation that also tolerated Judaism, but this was forcibly removed and Spain became ultra Catholic. In the East, Prague became a centre of kabbalistic thought. Today, Moslems are seen at best with suspicion, and at worse as the end of civilisation.
At the heart of the Judaic and Islamic religions is the belief that no graven images are permissible of the Prophets. Tarot, on the other hand, is image rich. Tarot thrives on art, pictures and images. Tarot is unthinkable without its beautiful pictures. The western culture has no problem with plagiarism when it comes to appropriating eastern knowledge. Scientists such as Isaac Newton stole many Islamic ideas and used them as their own without ever feeling the need to acknowledge the sources.
While there is evidence of propaganda in using texts such as the Sepher Yetsirah and the Bahir to convert Jews to Christianity by suggesting that these texts predict the Coming of the Messiah, Islamic influences were simply deleted. For example, we only have references to tarot being banned in the 1370s, while the first examples of decks appear around 1450 to 1480. Michael Dummett proposed the Islamic origins of tarot in 1980, forty years after the discovery of the Mamluk cards in Istanbul.
In the 14th century the prototype tarot deck had 52 cards, and it originated in the Mamluk playing cards. These cards had four suits, and the court cards were the King and a Minister, which evolved into the Kings, Knights, Knaves and Queens.
By the 15th century, the symbols for the suits had become Coins, Cups, Swords and Batons. The 22 Trump cards were added. The cynic in me believes that 22 is significant as the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet for anti-Semitic purposes, particularly as the Jewish religions forbids the use of imagery. The number of the Major Arcana has always been 22, although the introduction of zero meant that there have sometimes been 21 with an un-numbered card. The history of the Major Arcana should be seen as portraying a continuous snapshot of the ebb and flow of religious and political trends in society.
The best way for a fad to take root is for the opinion formers to take up new ideas, so tarot decks were painted to portray the nobility who had money and influence. This flattery worked particularly well in Italy with the Viscontis of Milan and the D’Estes of Ferrara.
The next century saw printing technology spread the tarot decks for playing around Europe. The Trumps cards were numbered and had titles added.
Religious war broke out on the iconography of some of the cards in the 17th century, particularly in Catholic countries over the Pope and female Pope cards.
The 18th century saw the rise of the Tarot of Marseilles which used Egyptian symbolism to explain its origin. The cards began to be commonly used for divination. Note that Kabbalism was not the first choice.
The 19th and 20th centuries saw kabbalism and astrology incorporated into the tarot, and the cards were increasingly used for divination rather than playing games.
The origins of the tarot clearly go back to the Mamluk Tarot, and the Near East, with influences from Sufism, Persia and Zoroastrianism. There are also intriguing links to polo. These influences are particularly strong for the creation of the suits.
The muddled creation and development of the Triumphs shows the search for an identity for these cards, which seems to have originated in Petrarch’s I Trionfi, began in 1356 and continued until his death fourteen years later. There may well be a connection to the Mystery Plays and Morality Plays that were very popular in medieval Europe. However much the depiction and order of the Triumphs has changed down the centuries, the constant has been the number 22, so could we be witnessing an attempt to Christianise the Hebrew alphabet? The next stage shows that the problem was embraced as a virtue when the esoteric tarot developed. The Tarot of Marseilles included Egyptian iconography, but the problem was of course that hieroglyphics had so far eluded translation. This did not stop the notion of the Egyptian God Thoth take root as the God of the Tarot. With Egyptian hieroglyphics such an impenetrable barrier, an alternative route had to be found, and where better than kabbalism? After all, the Sepher Yetsirah, Bahir and Zohar were readily available in Latin. Now of course, Jewish mysticism could not be taken on as it was – it had to be Christianised, and used as propaganda to convert Jews to Christianity. Incidentally, the 12th century books from Southern France and Spain, the Sepher Yetsirah, Bahir and Zohar were originally propaganda tools against Judaism.
Our modern interpretations of the Tarot can be identified precisely to the 1750s when Etteilla began to explore the tarot as a divination system. Etteilla declared that the tarot contained all the secret wisdom of the ancients. This notion was taken up by Court de Gebelin who saw not the kabbalism of Judaism, but ancient Egyptian symbols, and the Book of Thoth. Etteilla developed his system of divination with a mish-mash of sources that had no internal logic, so it was up to later occultists to provide a coherent structure.
Eliphas Levi connected the Egyptian symbolism with the Hebrew Alphabet inspired by Le Mond Primitif by Court de Gebelin and the Oedipus Aegypticus by Athanasius Kircher. These two books provided a structure of attributions to the Hebrew alphabet incorporating astrology and angelology. Add in the heady mix of the renaissance magic of Henry Cornelius Agrippa, and we have the esoteric tarot.
The next development of the esoteric tarot was inspired by Eliphas Levi, when various members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in England revised some of Levi’s ideas. Historians disagree on who was responsible, but it is clear that Wyn Westcott, Macgregor Mathers, and AE Waite all had some input. I would suggest that that the Irish playwright WB Yeats, who was head of the Order for a time; unfortunately, of all the prominent members of the Golden Dawn, Yeats was the only one to keep his vows and not leak the secrets of the Order.
The basis of all the interpretations of the Major Arcana can be found in a handful of authorities concentrated in a period of barely 200 years. These are:
Minor Arcana Interpretations
Almost all the interpretations for the Minor Arcana come from a single source, the Picatrix, (1256) which is a Latin translation of an earlier Arabic manuscript on the magical attributions of the 36 decanates. The decanate system is truly ancient, going back around 5,000 years to Ancient Egypt.
The Golden Dawn was the primary force for using the Picatrix, although it naturally did not acknowledge this. The interpreting authorities can be slimmed down to:
What happened to the Sephiroth? Everything written about the Minor Arcana concerning the Sephiroth is clearly an extrapolation based upon an interpretation of what the Sephiroth mean. The Sephiroth on the Tree of Life can be seen only as a secondary system, and one that is not particularly coherent. This does not of course stop books on Tarot continuing to print diagrams of the Minor Arcana on the Tree of Life.
Since there are 36 decans, four Minor cards do not fit into the system, which is why the Aces are referred to the ‘Roots of the Powers of the Elements’, interestingly not to Kether, which would be an obvious choice if one wanted to reinforce the kabbalistic notion of the Tarot. The reason why Kether is not the first choice is that the Minor Arcana are divided into four elements, and Kether is not supposed to be subdivided in any way.
If there have been many reinterpretations and arguments over the order, naming and attributions of the Major Arcana, it is as nothing to the Court Cards. Originally there seemed to be only two court cards; a King and a Minister. This was later expanded to include a Knight, Knave and Queen. The order and nomenclature was changed by the Golden Dawn to fit in with Kabbalistic ideas found in the Sepher Yetsirah and Bahir, and to confuse the issue further, Aleister Crowley made further adjustments.
The primary attribution of the Court cards is of course to the four elements. Later, these elements were sub-divided using the elements, so that we have fire of water, earth of air, etc. The Golden Dawn added an extra level of complexity by associating the King, Queen and Prince with astrology using the decanate system, but by overlapping the signs so that for example the Queen of Wands rules from 20 degrees Pisces to 20 degrees Aries. Since the Princesses or Knaves were the earthy part of each element, they could not rule a decanate, so they each ruled a “Quadrant of the Heavens about Kether” (Book of Thoth, Crowley).
However, the main authorities of interpretation can be slimmed down to:
The latter three names can be considered part of the same school, the Golden Dawn.
What is interesting about the development of the Tarot is the way that its Arabic antecedents have been consistently ignored or covered up. The Kabbalistic association appears when occultists were unable to convincingly incorporate their preferred source, from Ancient Egypt. Where Kabbalism does appear, the agenda and propaganda of converting Jews to Christianity is never far below the surface. The use of astrology, particularly with Picatrix, shows the only coherent and consistent interpretations for the Minor Arcana. Interpretations of the cards only appeared around 1750, and if we aggregate members of the Golden Dawn, the number of modern authorities on the tarot comes to:
What has happened to all the other authorities? Well, while they have not contributed greatly to the divinatory meanings of the Tarot, they have extended the influence and attribution of the Tarot into other esoteric, occult and philosophical realms and schools.
Despite the machinations and convoluted history, Tarot is still a brilliant system of divination and magic. The inclusion of 22 cards to the 56 suit cards is very significant, as it showed an agenda for including Christian religious imagery. Trying to understand the order of those cards as they evolved is a red herring. There seems to be little understanding down the centuries for why there are 22 cards, until Christian kabbalists saw the significance. However, even then they preferred to use Ancient Egypt over the Bible. My preferred tarot deck is the Thoth Tarot by Aleister Crowley. On the back of the Thoth Tarot book is a drawing of the God Thoth.
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