The Origins of the Tarot Tarot history has been turned upside down in the last two decades, as if the Magicians table had been kicked over and set up again. The cards are not, it seems, the encrypted truths of the pharaohs. They were not brought to Europe by the secretive Gypsies. Alchemy and tarot, or Kabballah and tarot, have no chicken-and-egg relationship after all, and even those parallels that can be drawn are more disputed today than ever. It turns out that all these threads of mystical wisdom have been spun by a tradition that dates only to the late eighteenth century, beginning with Antoine Court de Gebelins influential esoteric compendium, Le Monde Primitif. Se mon e vero, e ben trovato: If its not true, it ought to be. Enthusiasm for the mystical dimensions of the tarot continues to grow, and heads as level as those of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell have testified to the mythic power of tarot images. In fact, the humdrum origins of the tarot--as a game of playing cards--do not diminish one whit the spiritual beauty of these curious symbols. The mundane facts are as follows, thanks in good part to the brilliant scholarship of Michael Dummett: A 52-card game began to appear in European cities in the 1370s and was soon established almost everywhere. Playing cards were sometimes called newly arrived, never newly invented. They came--no one knows exactly how--from the Mamluk culture of Egypt. These cards were inscribed with script and abstract decoration, in keeping with Islamic distaste for graven images, but the deck was structured much like the cards we know today: four suits of ace through ten and three court cards. Europe quickly altered the cards to suit local taste by portraying people and objects, and by adding queens. Sometimes the original suits of cups, coins, swords, and staves were retained, though the polo sticks of the Levant were meaningless objects to Europeans, and so became knobby cudgels or lathe-turned batons. Fifteenth century card makers invented the cost-saving and user-friendly designs of hearts, diamonds, spades, and clubs, printed in simple red and black: the modern, international pack was born. After a generation or so of use, a fifth suit, a series of permanent trumps, was added to the other four. These trionfi were invented in northern Italy between about 1415 and 1440, in the elegant ducal courts of Milan or Ferrara. The oldest surviving pack, the Visconti-Sforza, shows the tarot already fully fledged. The most popular versions of the tarot for several centuries was a very different creature: the simple woodcut cards called the Tarot de Marseille. This French pattern probably derives from a Milanese pack of around 1500. Some images that have come to seem fundamental to tarot--the ambiguous trio of the Lovers, the canines and lobster of the Moon--began as Milanese/Marseille curiosities. It was the modest Tarot de Marseille that sparked the revelation of Court de Gebelin and his collaborator, the Comte de Mellet, that mystical truths were hidden in the cards. A younger contemporary, Etteilla (or Alliette), established cartomancy as practice and profession. By reading for the Empress Josephine, Mlle. Le Normand made herself and divination by cards famous. Several French visionaries followed, including the self-styled Eliphas Levi, who drew the tarot into the center of his vast esoteric studies. From a British secret society, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, come the two great twentieth century occult decks Rider-Waite and Thoth. The first, perhaps better called the Waite-Smith, was conceived by Edward Waite, leader of the Golden Dawn: scholar, Christian mystic and magus. The cards themselves were created by Pamela Colman Smith, a free-spirited young artist. The Thoth Tarot also emerged from the Golden Dawn, but by way of the notorious black sheep Aleister Crowley. His talented artist executant, also female, was Lady Frieda Harris. In our millenial age, the Thoth cards, in all their ecstatic chaos, have come more than ever into their own. by Brian Williams ~ Cedar ~
Posted on: Sun, 16 Mar 2014 06:34:45 +0000
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