Introduction

Note: This blog is organized like a book, beginning at the top and going down. To read a chapter, click on it at right.

The major chapters are listed at right, one for each of the 22 trumps. For information on the suit cards, however, go to the corresponding trump number in the Marseille order, from 1 (Magician) to 14 (Temperance).

This post was most recently revised in June of 2011.

INTRODUCTION

I came to tarot by way of a 20+ year fascination with Renaissance imagery. It started with Shakespeare, then the works of art relevant to Shakespeare, and then tarot. Since Michael Dummett's The Game of Tarot, it has been generally accepted that the first evidence of tarot--the first cards, the first references--is in Northern Italy of the early Renaissance. It is my contention that the tarot served as illustrations for what was conceived as a universal philosophy. Accumulated wisdom of ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome could be seen in 22 cards, arranged in a way that paralleled not only Christian teachings but alchemical sequences and the ancient "mysteries" as well. In the hands of some, it also may have sought to include the Jewish wisdom tradition.

The Christian part was done by 1500; Greco-Roman and Greco-Egyptian references had begun to be included, and slowly accumulated over the next 270 years. The Jewish part had begun by the 1490's, based on the studies of Pico della Mirandola. Later developments are difficult to determine; I think that interesting parallels can be constructed between the tarot as understood in the 1600's and the Jewish Kabbalah as then published in Latin translation. Owing to the Inquisition's prosecution of "Judaising," this part of the tarot would have been safer kept quiet. Starting in 1781, there followed 150 years of more public association of the tarot with the Kabbalah, but based on rather different texts than were available previously.

All of this has been said before, and discredited by others just as often. What I want to do here is provide an abundance of primary references for the images and interpretations--not all that are currently available, but enough to make the point, with links to additional information. I will give specific references to ancient works widely available in the Renaissance, and not only to them but to the illustrated mythology handbooks of the 16th and 17th century that cited them: not only Plutarch's Isis and Osiris, for example, but numerous other writers on the same subject, and not only artworks of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, but ancient reliefs and sculptures that were copied in engravings and published with annotations in most European languages.

There need not have been any "secret stream" of hidden knowledge that passed through the ancient world to the Renaissance. The designers of the cards had all they needed from reading books, looking at pictures, and taking notes. The books and pictures are still accessible, for the most part. All we have to do is find the references.

My goal is to develop plausible accounts of esoteric symbolism in the cards for the period 1420-1781. I pick 1420 as the beginning date because I think that that is about when the first decks of cards resembling tarot began, in the sense of having a special trump suit with particular personalities and symbolism on them. I pick 1781 as the end date because that is when books describing tarot and theorizing about it in "esoteric" terms began, usually claiming that the cards derived from ancient Egypt. Slightly before that, in 1771, was Etteilla's book on fortune telling with a piquet deck, that is, a regular deck with the 2s through 5s removed. Then in 1781 came de Gebelin and de Mellet, in de Gebelin's Le Monde Primitif, after which Etteilla published about tarot along similar lines.

For the tarot cards themselves, I have another end-date: around 1672, the date on the "Chosson" 2 of Coins. That is the first known appearance of what later became standardized as the "Tarot of Marseille"-- "TdeMII," as it is called for short. There is also a practical consideration: I do not want to consider the new translations of Kabbalah in Rosenrath's Kabbalah Denudata, 1684 (http://www.billheidrick.com/Orpd/KRKD/index.htm There is more than enough material already.

The question then arises, what happened between 1420 and 1672? Was there an "underground stream" of esotericism developing in those years that was never put into print? And if so, was it continuous, each generation passing it on to the next, or did it spring up and die out, perhaps more than once? And if it died out, to what extent? Did, for example, the fortune-telling aspect continue, with no understanding of any connection to erudite sources? Such questions must remain unanswered. I am concerned with something else.

My methodology has already been articulated by Decker, Dummett, and Depaulis in their book A Wicked Deck of Cards. I have highlighted the most important part in red:

There is no questioning the symbolic character of the images on the Tarot trumps. If you represent the virtue of justice as a woman holding a sword and a pair of scales, you are making heavy use of symbolism. This is exoteric symbolism. It happens to be an instance in which the symbolism has remained familiar to us, but symbolism embodied in others of the Tarot trumps would have been equally familiar to Italians of the Renaissance. The only question open to dispute is whether there is esoteric symbolism as well: symbolism intelligible only to those instructed in astrology or other arcane subjects. It is intrinsically plausible that there should have been such symbolism in a special pack of cards invented at that time and in that milieu. People of the Renaissance reveled in hidden symbolism, and the occult sciences enjoyed greater prestige in the Christian world than at any other time before or since. Any theory to this effect must pass a severe test, however. It must depend, not on any direct evidence that can be cited, but on the intrinsic plausibility that of the particular interpretation proposed, which must draw on nothing that was not available at that time and place. But it ought not to be too plausible; it cannot be anything which, if present, would leap to the eye of a man of the Renaissance looking at the cards. The reason is that, if the trump sequence was designed in accordance with any esoteric symbolism, this fact was very quickly and generally overlooked. None of the XV and XVI-century sources so much as hints at such a thing, and the absence of such a hint from some of these sources would be very surprising if their authors had had any inkling that any such symbolism was there to be found. This applies to the sermon in which Tarot, together with other card and dice games, was denounced as an invention of the devil; the preacher would not have lost such an opportunity to reinforce his point. It applies equally to Lollio's Invettiva, in which both the game and the cards are ridiculed; the poet, likewise, would not have lost so good an opportunity to ridicule the cards still further, instead of saying somewhat lamely that their inventor must have been drunk.

But I think some qualifications are in order. I can think of other reasons, besides those mentioned by Decker et al, why someone writing about tarot might keep quiet about an esoteric interpretation. If he was hostile to the particular esoteric context, he might not want to draw attention to it, because people just might want to exploreit further. If friendly to the esoteric context, he might not want to cause trouble for the cardmakers and sellers. The later 16th and most of the 17th century were repressive times, in both Catholic and Protestant countries.

Also, there is the consideration that what would have been esoteric to some, in the sense of requiring specialized knowledge to which they were not privy, might have been exoteric to others, in the sense that the specialized knowledge required was not of a suspicious and secretive kind. Groups with specialized knowledge, but not "secret" knowledge--people who knew the untranslated but freely published Graeco-Roman literature about the gods, for example--might not have been considered devilish, and so not worth attacking on those grounds. Only if a critic saw the cards as themselves promoting pagan cults would he be concerned; and that indeed is not obvious.

In this regard I find it interesting that astrology, which was much more an accepted part of the culture than it is today, is by Decker et al considered "arcane" and esoteric. Perhaps they are projecting their own attitudes onto those times. Or perhaps they have in mind the very technical and specialized astrology that professional astrologers used, with its decanates, its exaltations, detriments, and so forth, and their claims to predict "favorable" and "unfavorable" days, etc. That is as opposed to ordinary people's rudimentary knowledge of signs of the zodiac, houses, and planets (including how planets relate to the zodiac and houses). At least that's the limit of my knowledge.

However the basic criteria that Decker et al suggest seem to me quite sound: intrinsic plausibility of the interpretation proposed, not too obviously pointing to specialized knowledge (of a strange, secret, and suspicious kind, I would add), and drawing on nothing not available at that time and place. Direct evidence" is not required. Theirs are quite the criteria that I will attempt to use myself. What they offer are the criteria I would want to be judged by. To some, Decker et al's criteria might seem like a reductio ad absurdum of any pre-de Gebelin "esoteric tarot." To me they constitute a challenge.

I start with a review of the history of tarot during the time I am focusing on,1420-1670, when the decks developed, along with some mention of the cultural context. For tarot, what I want to do is introduce the various decks that still survive, in whole or in part, when and where they developed, and for whom. I am not concerned about which was first, or of recovering some "original" meaning of the tarot. The tarot, I believe, has always been a work in progress. It is just that to understand the symbolism, we need to know the cultural context, in terms of its designers and audience.

In this cultural context, I will review in particular the historical development in those areas that might be termed "esoteric," at least in the sense of not being known by the average person. In particular:

(1) the revival of interest in Greek and Roman literature and art on its own terms, starting in the late 14th century;

(2) the interest in "hieroglyphs," starting in the early 15th century;

(3) new interest in ancient Egypt, stimulated by increased contact of Europeans with that country's antiquities, starting in early 15th century Italy and spreading to France by the next century;

(4) the interest in ancient mystery cults, including their use for "magical" purposes, starting with Ficino and spreading to France by the next century;

(5) the interest by Christian scholars in Kabbalah, starting in late 15th century Italy with Pico and possibly Boiardo.

(6) a renewed interest in Pythagoreanism, stimulated especially by new architectural projects and a new text out of Greece, the Theologumena Arithmeticae.

(7) a continued interest in alchemy, with many texts, many of them illustrated, available from late 14th and early 15th century, greatly expanding after the invention of printing, reaching a peak in the early 17th century.

(8) a popular interest in fortune-telling as well as the playing of card games.

I will hit all these areas in my first chapter.

In subsequent chapters I look at each trump individually in sequence, discussing after each one what I take to be the corresponding cards in the four suits. For each Trump I first articulate the Christian iconology that serves as a foundation anchoring the card--for if nothing else, the cards have to be acceptable to the higher echelons of the Catholic Church. I also include here Graeco-Roman imagery that has been taken over within Christianity, e.g. the lady holding scales for Justice. Then I consider Egyptian references in the cards, accessible to those who knew the classical writings on Egypt, accurate or not, and the archeological findings available at the time. These mainly have to do with the Osiris myth. Osiris was considered by the Greeeks and Romsns and hence by the Renaissance as well, as one form of Dionysus, which is my principal focus. I am not concerned with pre-Ptolemaic Egypt, or even the " real" Egypt. What is relevant for the Renaissance is what might be termed "Greco-Egyptian Egypt," defined through the eyes of the mainly Greek autors who wrote about it. T

After the Greco-Egyptian, I examine Dionysian and Orphic references that might have been put in the cards, and even more likely seen there, whether intended or not. There is Dionysian imagery even in 15th century Ferrara, but it expands greatly in the later decks. The Renaissance had many texts available to them about the so-called Mysteries, and also the imagery that appeared on Roman-era sarcophagi.

Then I go through alchemical, Neopythagorean, and Kabbalist interpretations, again in terms of the literature and pictorial imagery what was readily available then. The alchemical imagery seems to me influential throughout the tarot's early history, even in the 1420s, as we shall see by a comparison with the illuminations in alchemical manuscripts of that time. Finally, for one card, the Pope, I have a section giving references to the ancient cult of Mithras, as understood during the 15th-17th centuries. And finally, after each numbered trump, I look at the corresponding numbers in the suits, taking the Pages through Kings as numbers 11 through 14.

For the Dionysian interpretations, I have something additional. I take advantage of the many Greek epithets for Dionysus in the classical Greek literature; I have made up invocations for all the tarot trumps, using epithets of Dionysus starting with different letters of the alphabet, going in order starting with Alpha for the Fool and ending with Omega for the World. There are no epithets in Greek starting with 2 of the 24 letters of the Greek alphabet.

After I gone through all the cards, I summarize the result, relating it to the game of tarot, by which I mean the trick-taking game that was played with this deck. I use the account of the rules as provided by de Gebelin in his 1781 essay.

One area I am not exploring is a possible relationship between the cards and astrology, in the sense of systematic correspondences between the cards and the planets, signs of the zodiac, and decans. I do find relationships of the cards to individual constellations of the zodiac and individual planetary gods, but not in a systematic way. For example, I correlate Venus with several of the cards (Popess, Empress, Lover, Star). I correlate the Bateleur with both Mercury and a ram, i.e. Aries. I correlate the Moon with Luna and Cancer. Etc.

It is possible that the Jewish non-Kabbalist Sefer Yetzirah provided a systematic esoteric correlation between astrological entities and the 22 cards. That work was indeed available in the Renaissance and after. However I have not seen any correlation of letters to astrological entities based on the pre-18th century Sefer Yetsirah that makes symbolic sense when mapped onto any actual pre-18th century order of the tarot trumps. And I have not found anything else to suggest that this system of correspondences was used, other than both systems' use of exactly 22 entities. That number in the case of the Sefer Yetsirah is explained by the fact that the Hebrew alphabet has 22 letters. No one knows how the number of trumps became fixed at 22. The same explanation may apply there, or a combination of factors including some still unknown.

And despite the use of the Arab-derived grimoire called the Picatrix in Ferrara at precisely the time in which the tarot was developing (in the "Room of the Months" there), I have not been able to find any meaningful correlation between the decanate images of the Picatrix and the images or meanings of the pre-1781 tarot cards. I agree with Paul Huson in The Mystical Tarot that any correspondence is so slight it can be attributed to chance.

That said, there are two historical sequences of planetary correspondences (excluding signs of the zodiac and elements) to the ten sefiroth that seem to me almost to fit the tarot trump sequence. These are Pico's, in his 900 Theses of Dec. 1486, and Kircher's of 1667, in the planetary signs attached to the sefiroth in his often-reproduced diagram of the Tree of Life. To me these matters are highly speculative. I discuss them in Appendix B. These assignments also fit, more or less, the tarot poem written by Mateo Boiardo, Pico's cousin, in the late 1400s, most probably for a d'Este wedding in Jan. 1487 Ferrara. I discuss this matter in Appendix C. To get to the Appendices, go to the bottom of the "Conclusion" page and click on "Older Post." (Appendix A, in case you were wondering, is a theory of mine on the changing structure of the Milanese tarot, 1420-1470.)