Perennial Story Lines

There are perennial story lines that repeat throughout the various theories on the her/history of the Tarot. One popular Tarot legend describes the Egyptians creating the original Tarot in its book of Thoth. The story describes an oppressed group of Egyptians referred to as “Gypsies”, racing away from persecution in Egypt, and creating a set of picture cards to describe and spread the ancient word of their esoteric teachings. There is supposedly no historical evidence to support this theory, yet it remains embedded in the Tarot epic.

The Celts were another group so believed to have originated the Tarot. R. J. Stewart (author of the Merlin Tarot and the TV show Xena) suggests that the Tarot had its origins in the story-telling traditions and images preserved by traveling entertainers, called “bards”. He points out that the images of the Tarot have clear connections with images described in Vita Merlini, a text that pre-dates the earliest known Tarot deck by three centuries. According to Stewart it clearly describes the Empress, the Hanged Man, the Wheel of Fortune and the Fool.

The Jewish mystical tradition is also believed to have recorded the secrets of the Kabbalah in the Tarot. The alchemists were believed to have hid their secret teachings in the Tarot. (Appendix Ozaniec, Naomi, The Illustrated Guide to Tarot, A Godsfield Book: New York, NY, 1999, pp. 28-29)

A resonant plot that pervades these believed her/historical roots of the Tarot, would look like the following,

• a spiritual/philosophical/political elite, of a society, or tribe, interpret and proliferate a set of cards that depict the secrets of the universe, humanity and the divine,
• it is through the study, and publication of this set of picture cards of this elite stratum of a society, that the esoteric wisdom of the Tarot thrives until it reaches the notice and consequent disparagement of opposing, established, and powerful religious institutions, which then order its destruction,
• the persecuted, oppressed clan/tribe/mystical, secret society/nationality escape with this picture book (Tarot has for most of its known history been referred to as a “book”) and upon reaching their new homeland, use this set of cards to proliferate their esoteric teachings,
• the wise and mystical secrets of this displaced, oppressed and persecuted people are depicted in a picture book (a set of cards) and “played with” or used for entertainment purposes to deflect it’s spiritual significance.
Societies comprised of members sworn to secrecy, and wide scale persecution of everyone caught with the Tarot in their possession, accompanied by mass scale burning of decks and books, have had an devastating impact on the Tarot’s recorded history.

To present day, the Tarot remains marginalized from established, traditional religious institutions. But never before in its history has the Tarot blossomed to the global propagation and respect it presently holds. Her/historians continue to search for indisputable evidence of Tarot’s roots.

I believe it is in the recognition of these repeating historical theories that the Tarot’s true history can be re-membered.

Tarot from the East

Tarotists have even theorized that the Tarot originated in India. The four-armed Hindu diety, Ardhanarishvara is an androgynous figure combining the right half of the god Shiva, with the left half of his consort, Parvati, holding a cup, scepter, sword and ring. The monkey god Hanuman is also shown at times shown holding these same emblems. These items bear a close resemblance to the four suit signs of the Tarot; Cups, Wands, Swords and Disks, which the Magician learns to use in the Major Arcana.

Further, the four Tarot suits refer to the four castes of Hinduism; Cups being priests/Brahmin; Swords, warrior overlords of Kshatriyas; Disks (Coins) representing the merchant class and Wands the surfs or Sudras.

Paul Foster Case believed it was a Chinese adept who brought the Tarot from the East. The Chinese have a proverb, “One picture is worth ten thousand words.” Chinese writing is made up of conventionalized pictures and these pictures express ideas instead of words. Case writes that the esoteric doctrine of the Tarot was a development of ideas fundamentally identical with the wisdom taught in the secret schools of China, Tibet and India.

Tarot in the West

The Christian churches condemned the Tarot as a wastrel parlour game of the rich around the middle of the 15th century.

Tarocchi, the Tarot Card game, was popular in the 1400’s among influential families. The game was similar to Bridge with trumps, and The Major Arcana is still referred to as the Trump cards – see the Crowley deck.

By the mid-15th century a popular demand for Tarot cards superseded religious opposition and card-making workshops thrived in many cities in Italy, France, Germany and Belgium. Wealthy and influential families, such as the Visconti family in Italy, commissioned artists to paint a deck using family members as models in the Major Arcana. One of their ancestor’s portrait was featured as the Papess card (The High Priestess) linking them to the famed story about a woman (referred to as “Pope Joan”) who became a Pope.

Throughout this period, Tarot Cards were burned on sight.

The Tarot Re-surfaces

In 1781 – eight years before the French revolution – Antoine Court de Gebelin, a French occultist and archeologist, theorized that the gypsy Tarot was the remnants of an ancient Egyptian book of magical wisdom. This Egyptian sacred text (according to de Gebelin) was still treasured by many Romany peoples since their exodus from Egypt. He published a nine-volume book: The Primitive World Analyzed and Compared to the Modern World. The publication of this treatise made the Tarot a central tool of the Rosicrucian sages. Overnight it was feted as the ‘bible’ of all true occultists.

One famous Tarot story describes a high-ranking general in Napoleon’s army visiting a famous Tarot Reader in Paris. During his reading, he was told that there would be trouble with the next Emperor and one day he would be a King.

He left the reading nervous about what he perceived as a coming conflict with Napoleon. Napoleon did become the Emperor as history tells us, and soon lost favour. Bernadotte was crowned the first King of Sweden shortly after Napoleon’s fall from power just as the reader had predicted!

Josephine, Napoleon’s wife, studied and read the Tarot cards regularly for herself. There is no recorded history of Josephine reading the Tarot for anyone else.

This Smith/Waite deck was titled the Rider-Waite deck. This deck is still the most widely sold deck in the world, now named appropriately the Waite/Smith. Pamela died alone, in poverty, in New York in the thirties. It wasn’t until the women’s movement was in full swing in the ‘70’s, that the first women’s Tarot deck went into production, and attention was finally turned to the remarkable accomplishments and steadfast, selfless dedication of Pamela to the present day proliferation of the Tarot.

Crowley and Lady Frieda Harris in the design of their deck, stayed with the tradition of depicting the pips in a strict symbolic format, which is how you can tell the origins of modern decks. If the deck has characters depicted performing some function or activity, it’s taken from the Coleman/Smith/Waite tradition, and if the pips depict only the symbols of the suit, it has followed the Harris/Crowley tradition.

Many are confident that the Tarot originated as a card game in 14th Century Italy and was re-interpreted by Antoine Court de Gebelin to be really an ancient magical object capable of determining the future. I have used it as a tool of divination for more than thirty years and have had enough experience with them to say they work effectively as a psychological tool for expanding consciousness, synchronicity and meditation.

Divination takes much more than a stack of cardboard cards with random images printed on them.