Tarot card reading
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Tarot card reading is a form of cartomancy whereby practitioners use tarot cards purportedly to gain insight into the past, present or future. They formulate a question, then draw cards interpret them for this end. A regular tarot deck consists of 78 cards, which can be split into two groups, the Major Arcana and Minor Arcana. French-suited playing cards can also be used; as can any card system with suits assigned to identifiable elements (e.g., air, earth, fire, water).
History[]
One of the earliest reference to tarot triumphs, and probably the first reference to tarot as the devil's picture book, is given c. 1450–1470 by a Dominican preacher in a fiery sermon against the evils of the devil's instrument.[1] References to the tarot as a social plague continue throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, but there are no indications that the cards were used for anything but games anywhere other than in Bologna.[2] As philosopher and tarot historian Michael Dummett noted, "it was only in the 1780s, when the practice of fortune-telling with regular playing cards had been well established for at least two decades, that anyone began to use the tarot pack for cartomancy."[3]
The belief in the divinatory meaning of the cards is closely associated with a belief in their occult properties: a commonly held belief in the 18th century propagated by prominent Protestant clerics and freemasons.[3] One of them was Court de Gébelin (see below).
From its uptake as an instrument of prophecy in France, the tarot went on to be used in hermeneutic, magical, mystical,[4] semiotic,[5] and psychological practices. It was used by Romani people when telling fortunes,[6] as a Jungian psychological apparatus capable of tapping into "absolute knowledge in the unconscious",[7] a tool for archetypal analysis,[8] and even a tool for facilitating the Jungian process of individuation.[9][10]
Court de Gébelin[]
Many involved in occult and divinatory practices attempt to trace the tarot to ancient Egypt, divine hermetic wisdom,[11] and the mysteries of Isis.
Possibly the first of those was Antoine Court de Gébelin, a French clergyman, who wrote that after seeing a group of women playing cards he had the idea that tarot was not merely a game of cards but was in fact of ancient Egyptian origin, of mystical Qabalistic import, and of deep divine significance. Court de Gébelin published a dissertation on the origins of the symbolism in the tarot in volume VIII of work Le Monde primitif in 1781. He thought the tarot represented ancient Egyptian Theology, including Isis, Osiris and Typhon. For example, he thought the card he knew as the Papesse and known today as the High Priestess represented Isis.[12] He also related four tarot cards to the four Christian Cardinal virtues: Temperance, Justice, Strength and Prudence.[13] He relates The Tower to a Greek fable about avarice.[14]
Although the ancient Egyptian language had not yet been deciphered, Court de Gébelin asserted the name "Tarot" came from the Egyptian words Tar, "path" or "road", and the word Ro, Ros or Rog, meaning "King" or "royal", and that the tarot literally translated to the Royal Road of Life.[15] Later Egyptologists found nothing in the Egyptian language to support Court de Gébelin's etymologies.[citation needed] Despite this lack of any evidence, the belief that the tarot cards are linked to the Egyptian Book of Thoth continues to the present day.
The actual source of the occult tarot can be traced to two articles in volume eight, one written by himself, and one written by M. le C. de M.***.[a] The second has been noted to have been even more influential than Court de Gébelin's.[2] The author takes Court de Gébelin's speculations even further, agreeing with him about the mystical origins of the tarot in ancient Egypt, but making several additional, and influential, statements that continue to influence mass understanding of the occult tarot even to this day.[16] He made the first statements proposing that the tarot was "The Book of Thoth" and made the first association of tarot with cartomancy. Court de Gébelin was also the first to imply the existence of a connection between the tarot and the Romani people, although this connection did not become well established in the public consciousness until other French authors such as Boiteau d'Ambly and Jean-Alexandre Vaillant began in the 1850s to promote the theory that tarot cards had been brought to Europe by the Romani.[17][18]
Etteilla[]
The first to assign divinatory meanings to the tarot cards was cartomancer Jean-Baptiste Alliette (also known as Etteilla) in 1783.[19][20]
According to Dummett, Etteilla:[2]
- devised a method of tarot divination in 1783,
- wrote a cartomantic treatise of tarot as the Book of Thoth,
- created the first society for tarot cartomancy, the Société littéraire des associés libres des interprètes du livre de Thot.
- created the first corrected tarot (supposedly fixing errors that resulted from misinterpretation and corruption through the mists of antiquity), The deck
- created the first Egyptian tarot to be used exclusively for tarot cartomancy, and
- published, under the imprint of his society, the Dictionnaire synonimique du Livre de Thot, a book that "systematically tabulated all the possible meanings which each card could bear, when upright and reversed."[21]
Etteilla also:[22]
- suggested that tarot was repository of the wisdom of Hermes Trismegistus
- was a book of eternal medicine
- was an account of the creation of the world, and
- argued that the first copy of the tarot was imprinted on leaves of gold
In his 1980 book, The Game of Tarot, Michael Dummett suggested that Etteilla was attempting to supplant Court de Gébelin as the author of the occult tarot.[citation needed] Etteilla in fact claimed to have been involved with tarot longer than Court de Gébelin.[2]
Marie Anne Lenormand[]
Mlle Marie-Anne Adelaide Lenormand outshone even Etteilla and was the first cartomancer to people in high places, through her claims to be the personal confidant of Empress Josephine, Napoleon and other notables.[2] Lenormand used both regular playing cards, in particular the Piquet pack, as well as tarot cards likely derived from the Tarot de Marseille.[23] Following her death in 1843, several different cartomantic decks were published in her name, including the Grand Jeu de Mlle Lenormand, based on the standard 52-card deck, first published in 1845, and the Petit Lenormand, a 36-card deck derived from the German game Das Spiel der Hofnung, first published around 1850.[24]
Éliphas Lévi[]
The concept of the cards as a mystical key was extended by Éliphas Lévi. Lévi (whose actual name was Alphonse-Louis Constant) was educated in the seminary of Saint-Sulpice, was ordained as a deacon, but never became a priest. Michael Dummett noted that it is from Lévi's book Dogme et rituel that the "whole of the modern occultist movement stems."[25] Lévi's magical theory was based on a concept he called the Astral Light[26] and according to Dummett, he claimed to be the first to:[27]
- "have discovered intact and still unknown this key of all doctrines and all philosophies of the old world... without the tarot", he tells us, "the Magic of the ancients is a closed book...."
Lévi accepted Court de Gébelin's claims that the deck had an Egyptian origin, but rejected Etteilla's interpretation and rectification of the cards in favor of a reinterpretation of the Tarot de Marseille.[28] He called it The Book of Hermes and claimed that the tarot was antique, existed before Moses, and was in fact a universal key of erudition, philosophy, and magic that could unlock Hermetic and Qabalistic concepts.[citation needed] According to Lévi, "An imprisoned person with no other book than the Tarot, if he knew how to use it, could in a few years acquire universal knowledge, and would be able to speak on all subjects with unequaled learning and inexhaustible eloquence."[29]
According to Dummett, Lévi's notable contributions included the following:[30]
- Lévi was the first to suggest that the Magus (Bagatto) was to be depicted in conjunction with the symbols of the four suits.
- Inspired by de Gébelin, Lévi associated the Hebrew alphabet with the Major Arcana (tarot trumps) and attributed an "onomantic astrology" system to the "ancient Hebrew Qabalists."[31]
- Lévi linked the ten numbered cards in each suit to the ten sefiroth.
- He claimed the court cards represented stages of human life.
- He also claimed the four suits represented the Tetragrammaton.
French Tarot after Lévi[]
Occultists, magicians, and magi all the way down to the 21st century have cited Lévi as a defining influence.[32][b] Among the first to seemingly adopt Lévi's ideas was Jean-Baptiste Pitois. Pitois wrote two books under the name Paul Christian that referenced the tarot, L'Homme rouge des Tuileries (1863), and later Histoire de la magie, du monde surnaturel et de la fatalité à travers les temps et les peuples (1870). In them, Pitois repeated and extended the mythology of the tarot and changed the names for the trumps and the suits (see table below for a list of Pitois's modifications to the trumps).[33] Batons (wands) become Scepters, Swords become Blades, and Coins become Shekels.[c]
However, it wasn't until the late 1880s that Lévi's vision of the occult tarot truly began to bear fruit, as his ideas on the occult began to be propounded by various French and English occultists. In France, secret societies such as the French Theosophical Society (1884) and the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross (1888) served as the seeds for further developments in the occult tarot in France.[34]
The French occultist Papus was one of the most prominent members of these societies, joining the Isis lodge of the French Theosophical Society in 1887 and becoming a founding member of the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross the next year.[34] Among his 260 publications are two treatises on the use of tarot cards, Le Tarot des Bohémiens (1889), which attempted to formalize the method of using tarot cards in ceremonial magic first proposed by Lévi in his Clef des grands mysteries (1861),[35] and Le Tarot divinatoire (1909), which focused on simpler divinatory uses of the cards.[36]
Another founding member of the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross, the Marquis Stanislas de Guaita, met the amateur artist Oswald Wirth in 1887 and subsequently sponsored a production of Lévi's intended deck. Guided entirely by de Guaita, Wirth designed the first neo-occultist cartomantic deck (and first cartomantic deck not derived from Etteilla's Egyptian deck).[37] Released in 1889 as Les 22 Arcanes du Tarot kabbalistique, it consisted of only the twenty-two major arcana and was revised under the title of Le Tarot des imagers du moyen âge in 1926. [38] Wirth also released a book about his revised cards which contained his own theories of the occult tarot under the same title the year following.[39]
Outside of the Kabbalistic Order, in 1888, French magus published Les mystères de l'horoscope which mostly repeats Christian's modifications.[40] Its primary contribution was the introduction of the terms 'Major Arcana' and 'Minor Arcana', and the numbering of the Crocodile (the Fool) XXII instead of 0.[41]
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and its heirs[]
The late 1880s not only saw the spread of the occult tarot in France, but also its initial adoption in the English-speaking world. In 1886, Arthur Edward Waite published The Mysteries of Magic, a selection of Lévi's writings translated by Waite and the first significant treatment of the occult tarot to be published in England.[42] However, it was only through the establishment of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1888 that the occult tarot was to become established as a tool in the English-speaking world.
Of the three founding members of the Golden Dawn, two, Samuel Liddell Mathers and William Wynn Westcott, published texts relating to the occult tarot prior to the founding of the order. Westcott is known to have made ink sketches of tarot trumps in or around 1886[43] and discussed the tarot in his treatise Tabula Bembina, sive Mensa Isiaca, published in 1887,[44] while Mathers had published the first British work primarily focused on the tarot in his 1888 booklet entitled The Tarot: Its Occult Signification, Use in Fortune-Telling and Method of Play.[45]
The tarot was also mentioned explicitly in the Cipher Manuscripts that served as the founding document of the Hermetic Order, both implicitly and in the form of a separate essay accompanying the manuscript.[46] This essay was to serve as the basis for most of tarot interpretations by the Golden Dawn and its immediate successors, including such features as:[47]
- placing The Fool before the other 21 trumps when determining the Qabalistic correspondence of the Major Arcana to the Hebrew alphabet
- attributing the Hebrew alphabet correspondences to pathways in the Tree of Life
- swapping the positions of the eighth and eleventh arcana (Justice and Strength), and
- reassigning Qabalistic planetary associations to accord with the re-ordered trumps
The Golden Dawn also:[48]
- renamed the suits of Batons and Coins to Wands and Pentacles
- swapped the order of the King and the Knight among the court cards
- renaming them the Prince and the King, respectively
- changed the Page to become the Princess
- assigned each of the court cards, too, to the letters of the Tetragrammaton, thus associating both the court cards and suits to the four classical elements,[48] and
- associated each of the 36 cards ranked from 2 to 10, inclusive, with one of the 36 astrological decans
The Hermetic Order never released its own tarot deck for public use, preferring instead for members to create their own copies of a deck designed by Mathers with art by his wife, Moina Mathers.[49][d] However, many of these innovations would make their first public appearance in two influential tarot decks designed by members of the order: the Rider–Waite–Smith deck and the Thoth deck. In addition, occultist Israel Regardie involved himself in two separate recreations of the original Golden Dawn deck, the Golden Dawn Tarot of 1978 with art by Robert Wang, and the New Golden Dawn Ritual Tarot[e] by Chic and Sandra Cicero, released, after Regardie's death, in 1991.[53] The central document containing the Golden Dawn's Tarot interpretations, "Book T", was first published openly, if not under that title, by Aleister Crowley in his occult periodical The Equinox in 1912.[54][55] The volume was later republished independently in 1967.[56]
| Tarot card | Hebrew letter | Element/planet/sign |
|---|---|---|
| 0 The Fool | א Aleph |
|