Man seeks to form for himself in whatever manner is suitable for him, a simplified and lucid image of the world, and so to overcome the world of experience by striving to replace it to some extent by this image. This is what the painter does, and the poet,
the speculative philosopher, the natural scientist, each in his own way. 1
Albert Einstein
Much time has passed since Tarot Plain and Simple saw the light of day in 1996. I am deeply gratified by the reception that book received from the tarot community. It was a labor of love that chronicled my journey in learning the cards. The content was largely dictated by the cards themselves as they appeared in countless readings and gradually revealed their shades of meaning. Since then, I have continued to use the tarot along with my other great interest, astrology, for meditation, reflection, understanding, and enjoyment. My experience of the cards has been similar to that of Rachel Pollack, who wrote: “When we really need to know something, the Tarot speaks to us with absolute clarity.” 2
In 2010, perhaps in resonance with the transiting planets and my natal Virgo Sun, I felt an urge to delve more deeply into the Western occultist symbolism that underlies both tarot and astrology. I wanted to understand what goes on in the mind of a tarot reader during the process of divining with the cards. At that time, the planet Neptune was transiting my fifth house of creativity where it was stimulating Mars in the ninth house of higher learning, publishing, and divination. Neptune, the modern ruler of Pisces, is a mystical planet closely linked to the tarot, intuition, and to trump XII, the Hanged Man, who contemplates existence from a unique perspective as he dangles by one foot from a tau cross.
These two disciplines, tarot and astrology, serve to stimulate our intuition and provide fresh perspectives as we journey through life. In Jungian terms, the symbols of tarot and astrology connect us with archetypal images of the collective unconscious, the same images that pervade myths, literature, and spiritual traditions. The tarot per se is a product of the Renaissance. As Juliet Sharman-Burke and Liz Greene of The Mythic Tarot emphasize, Greek myth “seized the mind of the Renaissance and … peeps from behind the often mystifying imagery of the Tarot … ” 3
The more I study tarot and astrology, the more aware I become of how much they have in common. Whether or not tarot readers realize it, they use astrology in their practice every day. The divinatory meanings of the Waite-Smith and Crowley-Harris tarot decks derive in large measure from the Golden Dawn astrological associations. The commonalities between astrology and tarot, their historical origins and symbolic significances, are the focus of this book. A deeper understanding of their shared symbolism will take the skills of the intermediate tarot reader to a higher level. 4
My first contact with tarot was in the 1970s. I became intrigued when an astrologer friend showed me her cards. Shortly thereafter, while browsing in a Manhattan bookstore, I came across a paperback entitled A Complete Guide to the Tarot by Eden Gray. This book was clear, well written, and to the point. I later learned that Rachel Pollack, a grande dame of tarot, also came to tarot through Eden Gray, whom she calls “the mother of modern Tarot.” 5 I could not agree more. Many of the card meanings we use today come from Gray’s writings and are not found in the tarot literature prior to the 1960s when Gray began publishing.
The tarot has a long and fascinating history. Unfortunately, many authors repeat tall tales and historical inaccuracies about the tarot’s origins. To set the record straight, I will present a brief but reasonably accurate history based on current historical findings. Playing cards could not exist until paper was invented in China some two thousand years ago. Initially the Chinese used rolls of paper for writing purposes but eventually they progressed to using sheets of paper, which fostered the development of cards. Around the ninth century CE, the Chinese created card decks with four suits for playing games. Chinese playing cards subsequently spread throughout Asia and to countries along the trade routes connecting China with the Middle East.
In 1939, Leo Arie Mayer, professor of Islamic Art and Archeology at Hebrew University, discovered a twelfth-century deck of Egyptian Mamluk cards in a museum in Istanbul. The Mamluks were a diverse group of slave soldiers who won political control over several Muslim countries during the Middle Ages, and they especially enjoyed playing cards. Almost identical to modern playing cards, the Mamluk deck is made up of fifty-two cards, which include forty numbered or pip cards and twelve court cards. The court cards are called na’ibs and consist of a king (malik), his deputy (na’ib malik) and an under-deputy (thani na’ib) in each suit. The four suits are cups, dinari (coins), scimitars (swords), and polo sticks (wands). The Mamluks used their cards to play the game of deputies (na’ibs), which gave rise to the Spanish word naipe for playing card.
During the fourteenth century, the North African Arabs brought the Mamluk cards to Spain, where they became popular and eventually made their way to the rest of Europe. The Spanish converted the Mamluk court cards into Kings, Horsemen, and Pages; the Italians later added Queens. Eventually the church and secular authorities objected to the use of cards (naipes) for gambling. References to the game of deputies (na’ibs) appear in the Spanish literature as far back as 1379. One does not have to be a rocket scientist to perceive the origins of modern playing cards and the tarot in the fifty-two-card Mamluk deck of twelfth-century Egypt. Fanciful claims about the mystical origins of the tarot in ancient Egypt, however, go far beyond what the facts justify.
In the early 1400s, at the height of the Renaissance, the northern Italians became fascinated with the Mamluk-based cards from Spain. Around 1420, an Italian artist had the bright idea of adding queens (mamma mia!) and “trump” cards to the deck to play a game called trionfi (triumphs), similar to the modern game of Bridge. Eventually the game became known as Tarocchi in Italy and Tarot in France. 6 The original name, trionfi, was a reference to the triumphal marches of ancient Rome. The images for the trump cards, which were added to the Mamluk-based deck, derive from the Bible and from Pagan texts, mystical Platonism and the mythology of ancient Greece and Rome, which were in vogue at the time. The pictures on the trump cards of the trionfi deck bore no resemblance to the gods of ancient Egypt, nor did they have any connection with the Jewish Kabbalah, which was unknown in northern Italy until some sixty years after the first tarot deck was created.
Over the next few centuries (1400–1700), the trionfi deck was used primarily to play games and gamble. Occasionally the deck was used to select randomly amongst pre-written oracle texts, similar to fortune cookies, for the purpose of divination. By 1750, northern Italian cartomancers (card readers) had attributed divinatory meanings to the cards themselves. In the mid-1700s, the art of reading one’s destiny in the cards became popular in France and then took the rest of Europe by storm. In his autobiography, German poet Goethe (1749–1832) mentions witnessing such a reading by a French cartomancer when he was a young man.
During the late 1700s, a series of hoaxes and absurd claims replaced the genuine history of tarot with fantastical nonsense. In Paris in 1781 (the same year that Uranus was discovered), the clergyman Antoine Court de Gébelin and the French occultist Comte de Mellet published without evidence their speculations that the tarot of Marseille contained not only the Egyptian mysteries of Isis and Thoth but also the secret mystical teachings of the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. This conjecture was pure speculation (aka bull dung), but the gullible public and later generations of tarot readers swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. The essays by de Gébelin and de Mellet initiated a tradition of woo-woo occultism and unsubstantiated fabrication divorced from reality.
Around 1870, another Frenchman, Jean Baptiste Pitois (aka Paul Christian, 1811–1877), continued this woo-woo trend in occultism. He coined the terms “major arcana” and “minor arcana” to refer to differing levels of presumed arcane spiritual knowledge concealed by ancient adepts in the mysterious images of the tarot—utter mumbo-jumbo! During the same period, the so-called “cipher manuscripts,” yet another clever hoax in the occult literature, were “discovered” and passed on to Freemason William Lynn Wescott, who was miraculously able to decipher them in 1887. Decoding the dubious documents led directly to the dawning of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, replete with its “secret chiefs” who spoke to lesser mortals via spirit communication. By this time, European occultism had become so popular that many otherwise intelligent individuals were completely duped by the Golden Dawn ruse. This same period in history also gave rise to the saying “there’s a sucker born every minute.”
Out of the Golden Dawn movement grew the two most influential tarot decks of modern times: the Waite-Smith and the Crowley-Harris Thoth decks, the masterworks of artists Pamela Colman Smith (1878–1851) and Lady Frieda Harris (1877−1962), respectively. These decks are light years distant from the original tarots of northern Italy with their images from the Bible and pagan mythology. Instead, decks in the Golden Dawn tradition focus on illuminating the significance of the mystical Kabbalah in explaining the universe. Despite the fact that many profound thinkers find the Kabbalah worthy of careful contemplation, the use of this mystical tradition is by no means fundamental to tarot divination.
My goal in this book is to investigate the symbolism shared by tarot and astrology prior to the nonsense introduced by de Gébelin and de Mellet in 1781. This process will involve an examination of the symbolic roots of tarot and astrology, dating back millennia to the time of ancient Greece and Rome. The tarot has a rich iconography based on biblical teachings, pagan myths, Greek philosophy, and Neo-Platonism, which fascinated the tarot’s originators in fifteenth-century Italy.
Astrology and the associated disciplines of geomancy and alchemy were part and parcel of this Renaissance worldview. Robert Place has noted the similarities between alchemical transformation and the Fool’s journey through the tarot trumps. Aleister Crowley referred repeatedly to alchemical symbolism in the tarot. 7 In the nineteenth century, the Golden Dawn relied on astrological attributions and the Kabbalah to delineate the tarot suits. Ancient Egyptian gods and the Kabbalah, however, played no significant role in the creation of the original tarot.
Tarot divination is a uniquely personal endeavor, and there are as many tarots as there are tarot readers. The cards themselves are simply pieces of cardboard decorated with evocative images, that stimulate the imagination. The “real” tarot exists in the mind of each reader and is interlaced with his or her life history and repository of experiences, or better said, with the view of reality the reader has created from those experiences. In the pages that follow, I hope to share my own perspective on tarot and astrology, and especially on the common thread that originated in ancient Greece and continues to run through the cards.
I also wish to share my view about how I believe the tarot functions. Because of my upbringing and life experiences, I don’t place much stock in spirit guides, ascended masters, secret chiefs, ancient Egyptian gods, magical Hebrew letters, leprechauns, fairies, vampires, elemental spirits, body parts of saints, and the host of otherworldly characters and imaginary realms that purportedly play a role in tarot divination. For me the tarot is a tool that helps us tap into a natural human faculty: our intuition.
Tarot is indeed a form of divination, but the divine we commune with lies within. When doing a reading, I keep in mind the wisdom of occultist Dion Fortune, who compared divination to a weather vane that does not determine the course a ship should take but merely shows which way the wind is blowing and “how best to trim the sails.” 8 When a tarot reading is spot-on, it has a magical effect. This feeling of magic reminds me of a childhood story that had a lasting impact on me. Having originally read this tale some five decades ago, I have probably misremembered the exact details, but the plot presented here is essentially correct.
Once upon a time in old Mexico, there was a farmer named Miguel who began to suffer many misfortunes. He became frantic because his crops were failing, and it was increasingly difficult for him to support his family. Though Miguel did not believe in magic, he decided to seek advice from an old woman reputed to possess magical powers. Some even said she was a witch. After listening to Miguel’s woes, the old crone presented him with a wooden box of “magical” sand. She instructed him: “Each morning at sunrise, take a few grains of sand from a small opening on top of the box and place one grain in each corner of your fields.” The old lady cautioned Miguel never to open the box until he was on his deathbed, or else the magic would disappear.
Miguel followed her instructions to the letter, and his farm began to prosper. As he walked to each corner of his farm each morning to place a grain of magical sand, he noticed tasks that had to be done to ensure a good crop. Working with his family, Miguel brought his fields back to life and obtained a good harvest year after year. Finally, with his end approaching, Miguel asked his family to bring him the box of magic sand so he could look inside. With some effort Miguel pried open the box. Within, he discovered an inscription in the handwriting of the old woman, herself now long deceased: “Querido Miguel, the sand in this box is just ordinary sand that can be found anywhere in Mexico. The real magic always lay within you.”
1 . Albert Einstein, “The Quotable Einstein,” Turn the Tide, http://www.turnthetide.info/id54.htm (accessed 7 Jan. 2012).
2 . Rachel Pollack, Tarot Wisdom: Spiritual Teachings and Deeper Meanings (Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 2008), p. 139.
3 . Juliet Sharman-Burke and Liz Greene, The New Mythic Tarot (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008), p. 13.
4 . The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was a magical order active in the UK during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its members included such notables as the poet W. B. Yeats, occultist A. E. Waite, artist Pamela Colman Smith, and occultist Aleister Crowley. Throughout this text I have referred to it simply as the Golden Dawn.
5 . Rachel Pollack, The New Tarot Handbook (Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 2011), p. 2.
6 . Ronald Decker, Art and Arcana, Commentary on the Medieval Scapini Tarot (Stamford, CT: U.S. Games Systems, 2004), p. 8.
7 . The focus of this book is the connection between astrology and tarot. Alchemical symbolism is an extensive study in itself and will not be covered. Readers interested in alchemy are referred to the writings of Aleister Crowley and Robert Place for a more thorough discussion of alchemy and the tarot.
8 . Dion Fortune, Practical Occultism in Daily Life (Northamptonshire, UK: The Aquarian Press, 1976), p. 39.