Will the Real Tarot
Please Stand Up?
The Structure of the Tarot Deck
We saw in the last chapter that the modern tarot deck consists of seventy-eight playing cards in five suits: Wands (batons), Swords, Cups, Pentacles (coins, disks), and trumps (keys, major arcana). Tarot cards today are used to play card games but more commonly are used as tools for divination. The structure of the current tarot deck derives from the ordinary playing cards (na’ibs, naipes) the Arabs brought to Spain some seven hundred years ago. The practice of playing games with cards was well-established on the Iberian Peninsula by the year 1375 CE.
The Mamluk Deck
The Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt (1250–1517 CE) consisted of a ruling class of soldiers who loved to play card games in their free time. A beautiful example of the Mamluk playing cards can be seen at the Topkapu Museum in Istanbul, Turkey. The pack consists of four suits of thirteen cards each, just as can be found in modern playing card decks. Each suit consists of ten pip (numbered) cards and three court cards: a malik (king), a nā’ib malik (viceroy or deputy king), and a thānī nā’ib (second or under-deputy). The four suits of the Mamluk deck include:
- • Polo sticks, which became the active energetic Wands of the tarot.
- • Cups or chalices, which remained the convivial Cups of the modern tarot.
- • Scimitars, which became the incisive Swords of tarot. Scimitars are short swords with curved blades that broaden toward the point. They are most devastating when used to slash an enemy from atop a moving horse.
- • Dinars (gold coins), which became the pragmatic Pentacles, Disks, or Coins of today’s tarot.
The Standard Tarot Deck
The Mamluk deck entered Europe via Spain and gradually spread to other countries. It was not long before the Europeans, upon noticing that the Mamluk court cards consisted of three men and no women, decided to add one to the court. This feminine touch resulted in a deck with a king, queen, cavalier, and knave. The inclusion of a queen in the European playing card deck may have been motivated by the actual dynasties and rulership in a culture where queens held positions of authority.
The Italian artists who painted the first tarot decks added a fifth, or trump, suit to the four standard suits to create a deck for playing a game similar to modern bridge. The early tarot decks varied in the total number of cards contained. As the tarot deck continued to evolve, the total number of cards eventually settled at seventy-eight.
At the end of the fifteenth century, the French conquered Milan and the Piedmont region of Italy. One of the spoils of this war was the Italian tarot deck, which the French brought back to their homeland. The city of Marseille on France’s Mediterranean coast became a center for the production of tarot cards and the origin of the Tarot of Marseille, which set the standard pattern for all subsequent tarot decks. As a result, today’s tarot consists of:
- • A trump suit of twenty-two cards consisting of an unnumbered Fool and twenty-one numbered trump cards, often called the major arcana (“greater secrets”).
- • Four standard suits, usually called Wands, Cups, Swords, and Pentacles, each consisting of ten pip cards in each suit. Occultists call the tarot’s non-trump suits the minor arcana (“lesser secrets”).
- • Four court cards in each suit, modeled after the European royal court consisting of a King, Queen, Knight, and Page.
The Main Types of Tarot Decks
Three main types of decks currently dominate the tarot landscape:
- • The Tarot of Marseille, the oldest known of which is by Jean Noblet in Paris around 1650.
- • The Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot, published in 1909, undoubtedly the most popular deck of the last century. It has been cloned many, many times.
- • The Crowley-Harris Thoth Tarot, created between 1938 and 1943 but first published as a tarot deck in 1969.
The following section will review these three decks in some detail along with other significant tarot decks that are part of tarot history.
Visconti-Sforza Decks
The earliest Italian tarot decks varied in the number and arrangement of cards. The so-called Visconti-Sforza decks contained images of members of the wealthy Milanese Visconti and Sforza families dressed in their finest attire. The cards themselves are beautiful works of art; more than a dozen such decks can be found in various museums, libraries, and private collections around the world. These card decks may have been used to play the trick-taking game of trionfi (trumps).
Unfortunately, complete sets of these early tarot cards no longer exist. The Pierpont-Morgan Bergamo deck, produced in 1451, originally consisted of seventy-eight cards. The Cary-Yale deck, which may be the oldest extant set of tarot, probably contained eighty-six cards in all. At some point, card makers decided to limit the “standard” tarot deck to seventy-eight cards comprised of twenty-two trumps, forty numbered pip cards, and sixteen court cards, as we have today.
The Sola-Busca Deck
This exquisite deck was owned by the Venier family of Venice. Most likely produced around 1491 by artist Nicola di Maestro Antonio, the Sola-Busca deck consists of seventy-eight cards and is unique in that each card is illustrated with characters based on figures of classical antiquity. Some authors believe that the symbolism of this deck derives from alchemical theories about transforming base metals into gold. The practice of illustrating each of the seventy-eight tarot cards with a unique scene or character would not be repeated until Pamela Colman Smith painted the now famous Rider-Waite-Smith deck in 1909.
The Tarot of Marseille
When the French conquered Milan and the Piedmont of northern Italy in 1499, they brought the Italian game of trionfi back with them to southern France. The tarot became popular in the city of Marseille, which grew into a major center of playing card manufacture in Europe. The tarot decks produced there, for obvious reasons, became known as the Tarot of Marseille. The pattern and arrangement of the Marseille’s seventy-eight cards became the standard against which later decks would be measured. The Tarot of Marseille became the most widely used deck in non-English-speaking countries.
The Marseille deck consists of twenty-two trumps, forty pip cards, and sixteen court cards. The trumps are in the same arrangement as most modern decks with the exception of Justice (La Justice) falling in position VIII whereas Strength (La Force) falls in position XI. The Fool (Le Mat) is unnumbered. Today’s Magician, trump I, was called Le Bateleur (the Juggler, Mountebank, Showman, Buffoon). Trump II was La Papesse, the Female Pope, whereas trump V was Le Pape, the Pope of the Catholic Church. In addition, today’s Tower, trump XVI, was labeled Le Maison Dieu, the House of God. Finally, Trump XIII, the modern Death card, was without name and was referred to as L’Arcane sans nom (the unnamed trump).
The pip cards of the Marseille deck do not contain scenes like the Rider-Waite-Smith deck. Instead the symbols of each suit are simply repeated on the pip cards the requisite number of times. For example, the Five of Cups displays five cups, the Six of Swords shows six swords, and so on. The court cards consist of a king, queen, knight, and page (roy, reine, chevalier, valet).
In recent years, the Tarot of Marseille has enjoyed increasing popularity, spurred on by the writings of authors like Alejandro Jodorowsy and Yoav Ben-Dov, who offer beautiful modern reproductions of antique tarot decks in the Marseille tradition. The influential tarot teacher Caitlín Matthews has endorsed the use of the Marseille deck, as can be seen in this article about tarot mythology (italics mine):
“ … the meaning of divination cards changes over time, shaped by each era’s culture and the needs of individual users. This is partly why these decks can be so puzzling to outsiders, as most of them reference allegories or events familiar to people many centuries ago. Caitlín Matthews, who teaches courses on cartomancy, or divination with cards, says that before the eighteenth century, the imagery on these cards was accessible to a much broader population. But in contrast to these historic decks, Matthews finds most modern decks harder to engage with.” 10
Esoteric Decks
Divination has always been part of human history, and it is not surprising that tarot cards would be enlisted for this purpose. In the sixteenth century, people used the cards to select random passages from an oracular textbook, much as dinner guests at Chinese restaurants do when they select fortune cookies to read oracular statements about their future. Early in the eighteenth century, European manuscripts began appearing that detailed basic divinatory meanings and systems for laying out the cards.
In the latter half of the eighteenth century, amidst the burgeoning interest in ancient Egypt, French occultists began to publish wild speculations about the influence of Egyptian mythology on the tarot’s development. In 1773, the French pastor Antoine Court de Gébelin claimed (without a shred of evidence except his vivid imagination) that Egyptian priests coded the Book of Thoth into the images of the tarot. Occultists took this fanciful theory and ran with it as if this unsubstantiated conjecture were established fact.
While de Gébelin was fabricating his Egyptian fantasies, another French occultist, Jean-Baptiste Alliette, known as Etteilla (his surname spelled backwards), began to write about divining with playing cards. His book, entitled Enjoying the Playing Cards Called Tarot (1783), became an immense success and served to popularize tarot divination throughout France and much of Europe. Unfortunately, Etteilla swallowed de Gébelin’s fanciful theories hook, line, and sinker, and his popular text did much to promulgate the false idea that ancient Egypt was the origin of the tarot. 11 Nonetheless, tarot divination established a firm foothold in Europe that would last to the present century.
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn
Late in the nineteenth century arose in England an occult society devoted to ritual magic and esotericism: the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Among the many members of the Golden Dawn were notables such as poet William Butler Yeats, author Bram Stoker of Dracula fame, and occultists Dion Fortune, Israel Regardie, Aleister Crowley, A. E. Waite, and Pamela Colman Smith.
The study of the tarot became a core element in the Golden Dawn teachings as an attempt to synthesize many occult traditions into a coherent philosophy, much like the unified field theory scientists aspired to develop in modern physics. Central to the Golden Dawn system was the idea that the Kabbalah, a school of Jewish mysticism, contains the secret to understanding the meaning and purpose of the universe. The Golden Dawn assigned meanings to tarot cards based on associations with the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, the Kabbalah, the decans (ten-degree divisions of zodiac signs) of astrology, and other esoteric disciplines.
The Golden Dawn’s influence on the development of tarot in the twentieth century cannot be underestimated. Several modern authors have produced tarot decks rooted in the notebooks and records of the Golden Dawn. Among these are Robert Wang’s Golden Dawn Tarot and Godfrey Dowson’s Hermetic Tarot. The two most influential decks of the twentieth century, those of Waite-Smith and Crowley-Harris, were brainchildren of former Golden Dawn members.
Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot
Without a doubt, the Waite-Smith deck, published originally by the Rider Company in 1909, has been the most popular modern deck in the English-speaking world. After leaving the Order of the Golden Dawn, A. E. Waite set out to publish a deck of his own. Working with artist Pamela Colman Smith (known as “Pixie”), Waite produced a unique deck that, unlike the Marseille pattern decks, illustrated each of the forty pip cards with a scene evocative of the card’s divinatory meaning. It was the first deck since the Sola-Busca of 1491 to be illustrated in this fashion. The presence of scenes and characters on each card rendered this deck one of the easiest to learn and made tarot reading accessible to the masses. Many modern decks, including the Llewellyn Classic Tarot used to illustrate this text, are clones of the Waite-Smith images.
Crowley-Harris Thoth Tarot
The eccentric and brilliant occultist Aleister Crowley (whom the press called “the worst man in the world”) also broke with the Golden Dawn. 12 Toward the end of his life, Crowley decided to produce a tarot deck that reflected his years of study and practice of esotericism. Enlisting the aid of the artist Lady Freida Harris, Crowley collaborated with her from 1938 to 1943 to transform his ideas into reality. He wrote a companion book for the deck called The Book of Thoth to explain the intricate symbolism of the cards. Crowley’s encyclopedic knowledge of occult disciplines is reflected in Lady Harris’s paintings; the Thoth deck has become a favorite among scholarly occultists who enjoy the philosophy, mythology, occultism, and metaphysics underlying this magnum opus.
Theme-Based Tarot Decks
A tarot enthusiast I know has collected more than a thousand different decks, and there are countless others on the market. Many tarot decks focus on a particular theme and appeal to a specific audience. For example, there is an Herbal Tarot for those interested in the healing properties of herbs, a Tarot of the Cat People that combines science fiction and fantasy, a Ghosts & Spirits Tarot for those interested in the supernatural, a Halloween Tarot that follows the adventures of a black cat on Halloween, not to mention a Jungian Tarot, a Housewives Tarot, a Kama Sutra Tarot (rated X), a Steampunk Tarot, a Zombie Tarot, and even a Quantum Tarot for people interested in modern physics. Whatever tickles your fancy, there is probably a tarot deck designed with you in mind.
Nonstandard “Tarot” Decks
Sometimes the term “tarot” is applied loosely to any deck used for divination. Technically speaking, most dictionaries define tarot as a set of seventy-eight cards consisting of twenty-two trump cards, forty pip cards, and sixteen court cards. Nonetheless, several decks have appeared under the rubric of “tarot” without the classical structure of the standard Marseille deck. Such decks can be considered nonstandard tarots.
For example, the Deva Tarot, published in Austria in 1986, consists of ninety-three cards instead of the standard seventy-eight. The cards of the Deva deck are square, and their illustrations and symbolism are patterned after the Crowley-Harris Thoth images. The major arcana of this deck include an additional card called “the Separator,” and the minor arcana include an extra suit called “triax” to symbolize the Aether or the Spirit.
Fortune-telling and Oracle Decks
In addition to nonstandard tarots, there are many sets of cards devoted to fortune-telling and divination that do not claim to be variations of tarot. These include “oracle decks” such as angel cards, goddess guidance decks, rune cards, I Ching cards, and so on. Oracle decks, sometimes called wisdom decks, vary in the number of cards they contain. Typically, oracle decks center on a theme from religion, mythology, or an esoteric tradition, with each card representing a spiritual principle for reflection and meditation. Hay House, a major publisher of oracle decks, says the following on its website (italics mine): “Oracle cards are useful for anyone looking for answers and meaning. They differ from tarot cards in that they do not necessarily follow the traditional suits of tarot cards. Wisdom cards provide powerful messages to encourage positive thinking.” 13
Fortune-telling cards differ from oracle cards in that they are designed specifically to reveal the future. Reading fortune-telling cards requires a different mindset than reading the tarot. Fortune-telling card interpretations are suggestive of the stereotypical Hollywood scenes in which a mysterious reader looks at the cards and utters in a knowing tone of voice: “You will meet a tall dark stranger on a cruise this summer but he will be mainly interested in your money, so be careful.” Currently the most popular fortune-telling deck is the thirty-six-card Petit Lenormand.
10. Hunter Oatman-Stanford, “Tarot Mythology: The Surprising Origins of the World’s Most Misunderstood Cards,” 18 June 2014, www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/the-surprising-origins-of-tarot-most-misunderstood-cards/, accessed 10 April 2015.
11. This idea has a shred of truth in it because the Mamluk cards from which the tarot evolved were products of medieval Egypt.
12. “The Worst Man in the World,” The Sunday Dispatch (2 July 1933).
13. Hay House, “What are Oracle Cards?” oracle-cards-hayhouse.tumblr.com/about-oracle-cards, accessed 17 March 2015.