Tarot: A Fresh Look at an Arcane Art

Many of us in the modern world have never actually seen a tarot card. If we have heard of the tarot, it has likely been through the filter of sophisticated literary allusion, such as T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, which draws much of its poetic imagery from the mystical cards. In times past, however, the tarot was considered by king and commoner alike to be a mirror of life: vivid, valid, vital; worthy of respect, of trust and of fear.

The tarot is rich in mysteries, and the greatest of these is its source, which is unknown. Throughout the centuries, men have striven zealously to trace it to its beginnings, but the secret has always eluded mortal quest, remaining hidden in the thick shadows of impenetrable antiquity. The very word tarot defies etymological analysis and is, to this day, inexplicable.

Ancient Egypt, some have said, was the tarot's birthplace; and in evidence they have offered the Egyptian words tar(road) and ro. (king), claiming that the tarot is a kind of royal road of life. The chief exponent of the Egyptian school was the 18th Century French philologist Court de Gébelin, who thought the tarot cards were remnants of the ancient Book of Thoth.

According to other allegations, the 22 major cards of the tarot correspond to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, thus linking the tarot with the arcane writings of the cabala.

These theories--and many others that have been advanced through the years, attributing the tarot to Hindu, Arab, Gypsy and other origins--are as flawed as they are fascinating. Emile Grillot de Givry, author of Anthologie de l'Occultisme and other mystical works, has said, "The truth is much more beautiful.... The tarot has no origin whatever. It remains a mystery, an enigma, a problem."

The great English tarot authority and Mason, Arthur Edward Waite, once wrote: "The tarot embodies symbolical presentations of universal ideas, behind which lie all the implicits of the human mind, and it is in this sense that they contain secret doctrine, which is the realization by the few of truths imbedded in the consciousness of all."

These recondite meanings of the tarot were responsible for historical prohibitions of all forms of cards by both church and state. In 1423, Saint Bernardino of Siena preached sternly against them and four decades after that, in the time of King Edward IV, cards were forbidden to be imported into England.

The tarot is a pack of 78 cards, 22 of which represent the Greater Arcana, the remaining 56 being the Lesser Arcana. These lesser cards (which sometimes number 52) are the ancestors of the common playing cards we use today: our king, queen and jack (or knave or page) may be found there, in addition to a knight, which has disappeared from modern playing cards. The coins or pentacles of the tarot have been glamorized into our diamonds; the wands or cudgels have become clubs; the swords have been demoted to lowly spades (reminiscent of the Biblical injunction to beat our swords into plowshares); while the suit known (text continued on page 239)Tarot(continued from page 102) as cups has become--in a puzzling switch typical of the tarot's mysteries--hearts.

But the cards that have truly captured the imagination of men are those of the Greater Arcana. For untold generations, these two-and-twenty evocative, disturbing cryptic little pictures have tempted us with the seductive suspicion that they contain--in symbolic, coded, allegorical form--the inmost secrets of life, love, destiny and death.

"Man has suffered a great loss," writes mysticist Gertrude Moakley, "and his heart is plagued with a longing to recover the lost treasure. Somewhere, deeply buried, this treasure still exists. The problem is to find the way to it." And that way, she suggests, may be revealed by the tarot, which De Givry has described as "a mysterious door opening on a gaping and unfathomable future of illusions and hopes."

The cards of the Greater Arcana picture all of life. They show us an assortment of human characters: the Pope, the High Priestess (sometimes called Pope Joan), the Emperor, the Empress, the Magician (or Juggler), the Hermit. They show us, also, grim allegorical personages, the Devil and Death. The cardinal virtues of Justice, Strength and Temperance are depicted, and the astronomical elements of the Sun, the Moon, the Star. Two of the cards relate to fatality in human life: the Lovers and the Wheel of Fortune. Four more depict elements of cosmic fatality: the Chariot, Judgment, the World, the House of God (sometimes known as the Lightning-Struck Tower, which many assume to be the Tower of Babel). The 22nd and last card of the Greater Arcana is unnumbered and is called the Fool, precursor of our common joker.

We have singled out one card for special attention. It is the 12th card, the strangest of all, the Hanged Man. Its meaning is obscure, buffeted by controversy. In most versions of the tarot, he hangs by one foot from a cross or gibbet, head down, not dead but alive, his face usually expressionless, sometimes suffering, but in some tarots almost blissful. In at least one version, his head is surrounded by a glowing nimbus, much like a halo. In another version, his hands are holding two cloth sacks (do they contain money?). One daring tarot scholar insisted that the Hanged Man only appears to be hanging, because the card has traditionally but erroneously been held upside down: In reality, he is standing on one foot and the other foot is shown in mid-air while the man care-fully considers whether or not he should take the next step. According to this interpretation (almost universally rejected), the card represents prudence.

Arthur Waite said of the Hanged Man: "It is a card of profound significance, but all the significance is veiled.... It has been called falsely a card of martyrdom, a card of prudence, a card of the Great Work, a card of duty.... I will say very simply on my own part that it expresses the relation, in one of its aspects, between the Divine and the Universe. He who can understand that the story of his higher nature is imbedded in this symbolism will receive intimations concerning a great awakening that is possible, and will know that after the sacred Mystery of Death there is a glorious Mystery of Resurrection."

With an appropriately enigmatic air, Miss Moakley simply says, "Show the Hanged Man card to some friend who has never seen the tarot before, and let him take the card into his own hand. Notice what he does with it. Another way is to give your friend the whole pack of cards to look through, and again notice what happens when he comes to the Hanged Man."

Although tarot cards can be used like any other cards to play mundane games of chance, their true worth is seen in the dark art of cartomancy, whereby gifted persons, attuned to the mysteries, are said to divine the course of future happenings. A famous cartomancer was Mlle. Le Normand, twice imprisoned by Bonaparte, who used the tarot to foretell the Empress Josephine's divorce. Josephine said of that divination, "It told me that from the moment Napoleon left me he would cease to be happy."

Unlike tea leaves, the crystal ball, common playing cards or other aids to prophecy, the tarot is steeped in, among other things, a certain fleshliness, a subtle, understated sexuality. Without being overtly erotic, naked male and female figures, their genitals unhidden, are pictured in many versions of the cards called the Lovers, the Devil, the Star, Judgment, the World. The Ace of Wands is sometimes transparently phallic in its symbolism and among the meanings attributed to it are virility, creation, birth.

As has been shown, all tarot packs, though fundamentally similar, are not identical. There are many slight and a few large differences among them. In one Italian tarot, for example, the Pope and the High Priestess are replaced by the pagan deities Jove and Juno. The card called the Moon often depicts two astronomers studiously observing the lunar sphere--but at one point in the history of the tarot, they became a pair of dogs baying at the moon. Was this emendation intended as a satirical comment on learned men? No one knows.

The oldest extant pack of tarot cards (unhappily, incomplete) resides today in the Bibliothéque Nationale in Paris. It is believed to date back to the year 1392 and to be the work of a well-known Italian artist, who did it anonymously for fear that it might reflect adversely on his reputation. The suggestion that this was the original tarot deck has been proved to be groundless; for although no older pack of cards exists in the world, the tarot is spoken of in writings set down long before his epoch.

We will never know when or where the tarot was born, but its devotees are generally agreed that it will never die. The rebirth it is currently enjoying among us all as part of a vast revival of interest in the occult must not be dismissed as a fad, for the tarot has survived the shifts of fashion, the scorn of skeptics, the persecution of church and state. Often content to remain in the background while the simooms of controversy or cynicism rage, it keeps its secrets safe, emerging again whenever men have most need of it. De Givry has rightly said, "[It] has beaten a subterranean path through the centuries, avoiding both religion and science, and yet establishing itself in their domains, sitting in their tribunes and teaching principles the fixity and invariability of which are well contrived for baffling all historical and philosophical research."