The origins of the Tarot are as mysterious as the Tarot itself. Esoteric teachings throughout the ages have been a strictly oral tradition, but with the advent of the printed word it became necessary to create a system that covertly preserved the ancient initiatory knowledge – the Tarot. Speculations about the precise origins of the cards tend to be more or less regurgitated in most books about the Tarot but is it really of any great concern? Perhaps for some people, setting the date as early as possible – the Atlantean Age or Ancient Egypt – gives special credence to its authenticity and luminosity. Let’s just say it was devised ‘once upon a time’.
It seems the first positively identified Tarot scholar of significance was Antoine Court de Gébelin, a French archaeologist, who in the late 18th century pronounced that the cards had originated in Egypt, but the source of his information is not clear. Whatever their origin, the popular opinion is that the cards came from somewhere other than Europe itself. Unfortunately, we Westerners tend to revere and favour the philosophies and religions of Asia and the Middle East rather than respect and treasure our own rich European esoteric traditions. Why do we find Taoism, Buddhism, the Chinese system of Feng Shui and the similar Indian system of Vastu Shastra (meaning House Science) more interesting than our own equivalent and equally profoundly erudite culture such as the Celtic tradition which has, or had, a far greater relevance to our Western way of life?
A popular conception is that the Gypsies, who originated not in Egypt but in India, introduced the cards into Europe and used them for fortune telling, but current evidence indicates that the Indians arrived in the West about a century or more after the first Tarot cards appeared in France and Italy. (‘Tarocchi’ is an old Italian gambling game of cards). Others suggest the cards were brought into Spain from the Middle East by the Saracens or the Crusaders. It could be just as likely that the Tarot originated from the Medieval Rosicrucians, although they may have adapted it from an earlier tradition.
Of course, it would certainly be interesting if, one day, an archaeologist/historian/researcher did discover the origins of the Tarot. However, although the knowledge of when and whence it came might satisfy the curiosity of those who enjoy such academic certainties, to my mind a more important question is whether a deck – either ancient or modern – expresses the sacred concepts, esoteric teachings and integrity of the symbolic language of the Tarot.
According to the Woman’s Encyclopaedia of Myths and Secrets by Barbara G Walker, the world’s oldest gambling game is called Faro or ‘the game of kings’. Spain’s national card game Ombre – ‘the game of Man’ – was as much a system of mystical divination as a modified version of an earlier game, Primero, which most resembled the ancient Tarot. The cards have also been called the ‘game of re-birth’ and ‘a compendium of gypsy philosophy and religion’.1
Undoubtedly, the history of religious dogma and persecution has caused the more so-called ‘Pagan’ esoteric teachings to go underground. In the case of the Tarot, the Christian priesthood attacked the use of the cards, and even today many people and church authorities are afraid of the Tarot’s occult connotations. The apparently benign reason why the Christian Church objected to the Tarot and to card playing generally was that such pastimes were thought to be frivolous and could lead to gambling. But it is more likely that the cards were banned because, through a combination of ignorance and religious intolerance, they were thought to express the various guises or aspects of evil and idolatry invented by the Devil.
The Tarot has been recognized as a powerful tool for the self-discovery of one’s inner, intuitive spiritual knowledge or gnosis. (‘Gnosis’ means ‘an intuitive experience and understanding of esoteric truths – an inner wisdom’.) Orthodox religions cannot tolerate an individual’s intuitive feelings or a personal search for mystical experiences, and so the early Christian Gnostics were hunted down and almost wiped out because they wanted to experience for themselves an ‘inner godliness’ rather than follow a blind belief in religious dogma. As the saying goes, ‘the religious man believes; the mystic knows’. The Greek philosopher Plato (429–347 BCE) held the view that everyone is gifted with complete wisdom and knowledge and the true teacher is one who simply helps us to remember that which intuitively and instinctively we already know! Indeed, the Tarot was intended to be, and in the right hands can be, a ‘true teacher’ that leads to self-knowledge and spiritual enlightenment.
In his book Researches into the History of Playing Cards, published in London in 1816, Samuel Weller Singer suggests that the Tarot cards were part of the magical and philosophical lore secured by the Knights Templar from the Saracens or one of the mystical sects in Syria. To avoid persecution when they returned to Europe, the Knights Templar concealed the symbolic meanings by pretending the cards were for gambling. Although the Templars, who had been founded in Jerusalem in 1119, were condemned as heretics and cruelly suppressed in 1312 by the Papacy who feared their power, the Tarot survived. In his book The Secret Teachings of All Ages, Manly P Hall tells us that in 1370, a monk called John Brefeld said that in the symbolism of the cards ‘“the state of the world as it is now is most excellently described and figured.”’ Hall goes on to say, ‘… this too was considered to be heretical and from the 14th century onwards the Tarot cards were denounced as The Devil’s Books.’2
By the 14th and 15th centuries, the Church had become extremely intolerant of other traditions and sects such as the Jews and the Cathars, who were the last vestiges of the early Christian Gnostics. The Tarot was forbidden throughout Italy and France, and in Germany packs were burned. Nuremberg and Tournai (Belgium) – where the card painters were mainly women – witnessed scenes of some of the worst witch hunts in Europe.
Surprisingly, during the same period of extreme intolerance the nomadic Gypsies used the Tarot to express their own occult, spiritual beliefs centred around the Great Mother Matriarchal principle personified by the Pagan Mother Earth Goddess Tara, who ruled the fate of men. The name has other similar derivations in the Greek, Roman, Indian and Celtic traditions which Barbara Walker suggests is the origin of the name Tarot.3
The earliest known record of the Tarot cards being produced in the West dates from 1392. The cards – 15 Major Arcana and 2 Minor Arcana – are preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. No one can tell how many there may have been in the full deck but they can be accurately dated because the French King Charles VI’s treasurer recorded a cash payment to an artist Jacquemin Gringonneur for painting three decks. About 30 years later, there is another record of an Italian painter Bonifacio Bembo who painted a deck for the Duke of Milan, but again it appears that not all the cards survived. The earliest complete set of Tarot cards, published in 1769 and known as the Ancien Tarot de Marseille, illustrates costumes and decorations which could be dated back to the early 14th century, before the Gringonneur cards were painted.
Unless Gringonneur was not only an artist but also a mystic who received the divine wisdom of the 78 cards by means of channelled inspiration from the ether – which of course is possible – someone must have produced an extant deck of cards for him to copy or adapt. If this is the case, it would suggest that the Tarot cards were in existence in Europe much earlier than the 14th century.
The costumes of the Major Arcana and the Minor Arcana Court cards of the Ancien Tarot de Marseille authentically illustrate the clothing and armour of the period of Medieval Europe between about 1300 and 1450.4 (See plates 1, 2 and 8–11.) Shorter beards and long-pointed shoes were also in fashion in the mid-14th century. In fact, the extraordinary length of shoes became the subject of an Act of Parliament in 1388 which ‘prohibited the making of shoes with toes exceeding two inches beyond the necessary convenience of walking.’ Nor were the multi-coloured parbaloons, or close-fitting leggings, as we now call them, any less absurd. The costumes also closely resemble the pageant dresses of the early mystery plays.5
In his book The Mystical Tower of the Tarot, JD Blakely says that, according to Paul Marteau, ‘the ancient Marseille pack is a reproduction of the arrangement which was edited in 1761 by Nicolas Conver, maître cartier of Marseilles who had conserved the wood (blocks) and colours of his distant predecessors, but no date is given for their origin.’6
Over the centuries, costumes, styles and fashions have changed the designs of the cards, but it would seem the basic format and integrity of the Tarot remained intact until the 19th century when Alphonse Louis Constant (1810–75), a Roman Catholic Abbé and herbalist, wrote Transcendental Magic under the pseudonym Eliphas Lévi Zahed (or simply, Eliphas Lévi). The book expounded on the correspondences between the 22 letters and numbers of the Hebraic alphabet and the 22 Major Arcana cards of the Tarot. Although there are 22 cards, The Fool is numbered ‘zero’, which immediately creates a discrepancy between the numbering of the Hebraic letters and the numbering of the cards. Such spurious discrepancies have to be fudged over, which only serves to obscure the full impact and meaning of the Tarot’s unique symbolism. However, Eliphas Lévi did profoundly say, ‘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 unequalled learning and inexhaustible eloquence.’
Since Lévi, other 19th and 20th century occultists – notably Aleister Crowley and AE Waite of the Order of the Golden Dawn – and many more French, American and British authors have produced elaborate tables which deceptively claim to show how numerology, Kabbalah, the I Ching, the astrological signs, the Runes, musical notes, colours, gems, animals, plants, magical weapons and perfume have a direct metaphysical correspondence with the Tarot. Some packs have even expanded the number of the Major Arcana to as many as 40 cards!
Such attempts to attribute astrological signs to the Tarot have also created a wide diversity of opinion resulting in a confused interpretation of the cards. This is particularly so in the case of Major Arcana card numbers VIII and XI. If the Marseille deck is generally accepted as being the most authentic and certainly the oldest known complete set, it places Judgement at Number VIII and Force at Number XI. (Force is illustrated by a person staring into the open jaws of a lion.) Most modern decks, particularly the Ryder Waite pack, place Force or Strength at Number VIII because the sign of Leo (represented by a lion) is in the eighth house of the Zodiac and this led to the interchange of numbers VIII and XI. As we shall see later, placing the cards according to the Marseille deck where Judgement is Number VIII creates a logical sequence of steps on the Path to Fulfilment. Another ‘fudging’ of the Tarot symbolism occurs when cards are attributed with the personality characteristics of certain signs of the Zodiac, such as suggesting that Major Arcana card Number VI The Lover expresses the traits of a Gemini or that card Number IV The Emperor personifies an Aries Sun sign.
Imposing changes to the numbered sequence of the cards to coincide with personal ideas about astrological or Kabbalistic correspondences or the inclusion of additional symbolism in the design of a card simply corrupts the fundamental wisdom of the Tarot. Each divinatory or oracular system uses its own unique method for charting the steps to self-awareness and enlightenment, but the pathways leading to the goal of one’s quest pass through different territories in much the same manner that the spiritual teachings of every religion follow a well-defined and yet seemingly separate road to reach the same mountain of enlightenment and personal destiny. The Vedas tell us, ‘Truth is one, the sages speak of it by many names.’ As we shall see later, however, the esoteric symbolism of numbers – in particular the numbers one to ten – certainly has correlations and a common bond with other occult systems in which the number, geometry and rhythm of the Cosmos resonates with the cycles and happenings in the life of a person.
Apart from their common bond of number symbolism (as opposed to Numerology), the quest of the 20th-century occultists to produce a Grand Unifying Theory that binds all these occult traditions into one homogenous, conglomerate and interchangeable system may be as fruitless as the long-sought-after unified theory of physics. Stephen Hawking, one of the world’s foremost cosmologists and theoretical physicists, questions whether there can ever be a unified theory or is this simply a mirage? In his book A Brief History of Time, Hawking says that ‘some would argue … that if there were a complete set of laws, that would infringe God’s freedom to change his mind and intervene in the world.’7
Of course, the Tarot is a living language but it is hoped that in the 21st century we have now gone beyond the phase of trying to unify it with the symbolism of other esoteric traditions. Of course, it would be unreasonable to suggest that the Marseille pack was the one and only authentic, uncorrupted replica of the original symbolism of earlier decks: no doubt through the ages, variations have been and will continue to be introduced by those who feel the need to make changes to suit their own interpretations and insights. But if the designers of such cards have misinterpreted or misunderstood the arcane meanings of the Tarot, the wisdom will be distorted and obscured. As Richard Feynman (1918–88), the American physicist and Nobel Prize winner, wisely said, ‘You can recognize Truth by its beauty and simplicity.’
To understand the Tarot we must decipher the symbolism, but first we must ensure that the Tarot deck we are using has a logical and comprehensive set of symbols that are compatible throughout the whole pack of cards otherwise the full import is lost or, at worst, the ‘language’ is confusing and unreadable. In other words, the symbolic grammar, vocabulary and syntax must be consistent and follow a logical pattern. The Ancien Tarot de Marseille deck by BP Grimaud satisfies such ‘rules’ and has a rationality which ensures that the symbols combine with each other in a relationship that is both coherent and meaningful. The introduction of signs or sigils imported from other esoteric traditions and systems is akin to, say, reading a European language such as German or French and suddenly finding a Japanese ideogram or an Arabic script interspersed in the text. Such foreign language words would be incomprehensible and meaningless.
Unless the integrity of the system remains intact, the quality, profundity and clarity of the interpretation will be compromised and may lead the reader to miss the mark. When the unique symbolism underpinning the Tarot is read as a stand-alone oracle of sacred wisdom, without any extraneous embellishments associated with other systems or traditions, our psyche will be able to receive a clear, unambiguous message.