I read somewhere that tarot is the I
Ching of the West, regardless of its relatively recent origin and the lack of
reliable evidence of its existence before the 15th century. It took its
standard form by merging the Mamluk playing deck with Italian picture cards,
whose origins date back to medieval religious didactic and mnemonic
representations, with influences from ancient, esoteric, and theological
sources. Three main types of tarot emerged in the
15th century: the Lombard-Venetian with seventy-eight cards, the Florentine
"Minchiate" with ninety-seven cards, which includes cards with twelve
zodiac signs, four elements, and virtues (Faith, Hope, Charity, and Prudence),
and finally the Bolognese with sixty-two cards. It is from the Lombard-Venetian
tarot that the widely recognized Marseille deck later originated, which many
consider the prototype of the tarot as we know it today. I believe that the
medieval European initiates of Hermeticism, among whom were learned members of
the Catholic Church, could have been significant contributors to the symbolism
upon which representatives of the Italian Renaissance established the pictorial
system of the tarot. Through this symbolic system, the initiatory story of the
secret science encompassing various fields such as alchemy, magic, astrology,
Hermeticism, and Christian mysticism was told. It is difficult to know
precisely, but certainly, among others, some adept genius from the ranks of the
Masonic builders of Gothic cathedrals could have been the one who devised the
sequence, principles, and important details of the imagery that shaped the
pictorial initiatory story of Hermetic Kabbalah. This story is part of an
initiatory system that contains the keys to interpreting the secret doctrine,
which completely left the European stage already in the 16th century.
Deservedly or not, the tarot has
become quite mystified over time due to, as Ronald Decker emphasized in his
book The Esoteric Tarot, the strange combination of images and their confusing
hierarchy. The motifs of each individual major arcana were known and somewhat
entrenched in the general ideas of the European Middle Ages. They existed
independently and served various purposes, although their esoteric nature
cannot be overlooked. Decker rightly says that these images are standard
allegories and symbols used by the creators of the tarot to conceal esoteric
systems or, I would add, to emphasize them. Decker concludes that during the
Renaissance, conventional symbols were rearranged to produce new allegories.
From today's perspective, even those general symbolic and pictorial ideas
incorporated into the tarot present quite a complex challenge, so we must first
delve into and decipher them in order to gain any usable view of their meaning
within the tarot system.
The codification of the tarot into
twenty-two major arcana (of Renaissance origin), sixteen court cards, and forty
minor arcana (of Arab-Egyptian or Persian origin) conveniently served the
purposes of European occultism in the 18th and especially the 19th century, to
better express its Hermetic and Kabbalistic doctrines. As early as the late
14th or early 15th century, someone decided to frame the major arcana with
twenty-two pictorial representations, thus creating, intentionally or not, an
interesting correlation with the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet.
Starting from the 18th century, occultists, taking the well-known Marseille
deck as a model, connected its arcana with Egyptian mythology and magic, as
well as with the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. In the 19th
century, they linked the structure of the tarot with astrology and the
Kabbalistic diagram of the Tree of Life (a symbolic map of the cosmos),
composed of ten sephirot, connected by twenty-two paths, which span the four
Kabbalistic planes. Subsequently, at least two occult schools of tarot emerged,
each interpreting the connection between each Hebrew letter and the major
arcana differently. In this sense, the Marseille deck serves as the starting
model for the adornment of the tarot in the garb of the impending tide of
enlightened pseudo-Egyptian syncretistic-Kabbalistic speculative occultism in
Europe. This occultism, incubated during the Rosicrucian period in the 17th
century, shone brightly during the Illuminati-Masonic 18th century, and
especially in the Masonic and neo-Rosicrucian 19th century, continuing up to
the New Age of today.
The significant question remains why the Marseille deck,
impoverished in style and expression, became the starting point for the
occultization of the tarot. In his book The Game of Tarot, Michael Dummett
observed that if we seek the symbolic intentions of those who devised the first
tarot deck, the Marseille deck is a dubious guide, as we cannot be sure its
pattern predates the 17th century. Dummett concludes that if we are searching
for the hidden meaning of the tarot, we must consider the original, correct
version of the tarot. Yet, we cannot help but wonder which version that might
be and if there is any basis for such a notion. Dummett proposes that the
solution to this problem lies in the sequence of the cards, noting that the
order used in the Marseille deck is not the only one. Throughout the process of
Marseille-ization and later occultization of the tarot, other variants of these
cards were sidelined, such as the Mantegna Tarocchi from 1465, which embodies a
coherent and essentially Hermetic worldview with didactic and contemplative
purposes. The pictorial expressions of this tarocchi, actually engravings, are
divided into five thematic groups of ten representatives each: celestial
spheres, cardinal virtues, liberal arts, Apollo with the nine muses, and
typical social classes of the time. This is very interesting, but since this
tarot is difficult to fit into the mentioned Kabbalistic system, as well as
into card games or divinatory schemes, it is clear why it fell out of favor.
The arcana of the Mantegna Tarocchi tell a broader and more comprehensive story
than the twenty-two arcana of the tarot, and this story is harder to interpret
using speculative Kabbalistic and astrological schemes of occultism. Later
versions of the tarot, created by well-known names in occultism, although based
on the same foundation as the Marseille deck and its predecessors, diverge from
these solutions in various details. Many authors evidently aimed to embed their
own ideas and principles into the tarot, emphasizing aspects of the doctrines
they taught and followed. This simultaneously provides insight into the
teachings of the occult schools to which these authors belonged and the
philosophy they advocated.
I am inclined to believe that the authors of occultist versions of
the tarot were not familiar with the original keys to the doctrine upon which
the tarot was based. If they were familiar, which is less likely, they ignored
them for certain reasons. I think that modern-day occultists have attributed
meanings to the tarot that it originally did not have. They compensated for
their lack of knowledge about the phenomenon that fascinated them so much with
lucid and intuitive speculations about the apparent symbolism of the tarot
images. They combined this with what they knew about the meanings and
metaphysics of the Hebrew alphabet and Kabbalah, as well as their own
understanding of Hermeticism, magic, alchemy, and astrology, along with the
facts and myths mainly of Egyptian and Greek mythology. Thus, the ideology of
the tarot, or rather the ideology expressed through the tarot, was born.
Sallie Nichols, in her book Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey,
highlighted how it is difficult for modern people, surrounded by a culture
where speech holds the most important place, to understand the non-verbal,
pictorial language of the tarot. In her book on the tarot, Nichols chose the
Marseille deck as a reference. According to her interpretation, the Marseille
tarot managed to preserve the general tone and style of some of the earliest
decks. She emphasizes that there is no evidence that the Marseille tarot was
created by one person, unlike most modern tarot decks. Additionally, unlike
most modern decks, the Marseille tarot does not have accompanying text but
offers a story in images. Nichols observes that modern decks were designed by a
known individual or group of people, and many of them are accompanied by books
in which the authors express in words the ideas that are pictorially
represented on the cards. Thus, modern tarot has been turned into illustrations
for books of the occult worldview. Nichols says it seems as if the tarot cards
were designed as illustrations for some ideas expressed in words, rather than
the cards being created first and the text inspired by them. Nichols notes that
modern tarot images seem to illustrate verbalized concepts more than pointing
to feelings and visions that are completely beyond the reach of words.
I am inclined to believe that the source of the meaning of the major arcana of the tarot should be sought in the didactic and mnemonic methods of medieval Europe, as well as in the underground currents of alchemy and Eastern star sciences. This would lead us to the realization that the architects of the tarot could be found among the monks and theologians of the Western Church, in a mixed role with the initiates of the operative Masonic guilds whose works still adorn the cities of Europe. The stonemasons themselves could not have independently designed, shaped, and adorned the grand and expensive buildings commissioned by the Church with gargoyles and other symbolic figures of pagan and alchemical origin. Someone must have approved or explicitly required that all this be done in such a manner. This mixed role of church thinkers and authorities with the architects of Gothic buildings adorned with pagan and alchemical symbols indicates that the key figures who conceptualized and justified these ideas to those who did not understand them are precisely the people we seek in connection with the origin of the tarot. It is difficult from this perspective to discern what role each person played and who was privy to what, but one thing is certain: all of this existed and functioned within the framework of the Catholic Church and its affairs and goals. In this sense, the mentioned underground currents of occultism did not exist outside the Church, because it was only within its framework and under its aegis that educated people circulated and operated. Outside of this, there were few relevant initiates.
When mnemonic images became part of a leisurely gambling game and divination, some church pastors decried the cards as the devil's work (although there were those who believed that the cards could play a role in moral education). It is well known that experienced card players have excellent memory when it comes to the circulation of cards in the game. The introduction of card games into Western culture can be traced back no further than 1375 in Florence, when Nicola della Tuccia (Chronicles of Viterbo, 1379) attributed an oriental origin to them under the name naibe. This "devil's work," in the form of a system of seventy-eight cards, was later embraced by occultists as one of the pillars of their gnosis, shrouding it in the veils of mystery whose trail supposedly leads back to ancient Egypt! By doing so, the occult schools of the modern age built their legitimacy, presenting themselves as the keepers of the secrets of the Egyptian priests with whom they allegedly had an unbroken initiatory continuity through the mystical Rosicrucian Brotherhood. Similarly, many representatives of speculative Freemasonry, as well as various irregular Masonic and paramasonic groups, adopted similar symbolism. It should also be noted that many members of occult schools simultaneously belonged to various Masonic and paramasonic organizations (fringe masonry). Consequently, today we have an inflation of various tarot decks. The Western occult schools have, by blending elements from Jewish Kabbalah, Hermeticism, mythology, astrology, alchemy, ancient grimoires, Greek magical texts, and tarot, created something that these elements perhaps never were, mixing them into a complex instrument whose ultimate meaning is essentially obscured. Thus, they turned the tarot into the "Book of Thoth."
