In Seventy Eight Degrees of Wisdom, Rachel Pollack posits the Hanged Man as a notably odd card. The figure is not hanged by the neck as we'd expect, but by the ankle among leaves, and looks completely unbothered. She draws connections to St Peter of the Christian tradition being crucified upside down, and to Norse mythology where Odin is hung upside down from the World Tree, and to shamanistic initiation practices in Siberia and North America, as well as to European alchemists, who all hang upside down in the same way not in punishment but for enlightenment. In A Wicked Pack of Cards by Ronald Decker, Thierry Depaulis, and Michael Dummett, the authors, when faced with the peculiarity of the Hanged Man, simply claim that it would have been self-evident to its 15th century players as the corpse of a traitor of the state hung by the ankle, "as were those of Mussolini and his mistress in Milan after the fall of the Fascist regime." According to Wikipedia, "This mode of hanging had been used in northern Italy since medieval times to stress the "infamy" of the hanged."
Which is more likely to be true? And when I'm handling the card, which informs my interpretation? I aim to play games with tarot cards, build scaffolds of meaning with them, really mine their imagery, symbolism, and potency for everything they're worth at the table--so I ought to know what I'm working with. Where did tarot originate? How old is it actually? Why is the Rider-Waite tarot so dominant among oracle decks? And, most importantly, how inextricable is tarot's connection to the occult? When I pick up a card, am I toying with forces beyond my reckoning? This is Playing the Popess, part three of a series on tarot in roleplaying games.
I'm interested in the literal history of tarot, of course, but as a game designer I'll also be picking out any game history, rules, or similar structures for reference and posterity. [Full disclosure, I took two semesters of French in high school, and I’m approaching these names and titles with that degree of confidence in my pronunciation. So. Apologies in advance.]
Origins
Tarot descends from the Italian game Tarocchi, which was once called trionfi, or game of triumphs. According to trionfi.com, “The name "Trionfi" was born out of a ritual call used at festivities "io triumpe" at the epiphany of a god.“ In ancient Rome, a trionfi was a parade through the city after a victory in which at least 5000 men were killed. Boccaccio’s Amorosa Visione is a poem that describes a procession of triumphs, each conquering the one before, in the sequence of Wisdom, Earthly Glory, Wealth, Love, and all-destroying Fortune (and her servant Death). Another poet called Petrarch expanded on this idea with his I trionfi, inspired by his unrequited love for the possibly fictitious Laura. Love conquers Man, Chastity conquers Love, Death conquers Chastity, Fame conquers Death, Time conquers Fame, Eternity conquers Time. Many scholars agree that this is the inspiration for what would become the order of the trump cards in tarocchi many years later after playing cards reached Europe in 1365. This is not uncontested, however, and the exact crystallization of the tarot deck we recognize today is hard to pinpoint. In a blogpost for the Met Museum, Tim Husband estimates that "Because of the complicated nature of the game… it is likely that [tarocchi] had begun evolving earlier in the [15th] century." Helen Farley, Lecturer in Studies in Religion and Esotericism at the University of Queensland, writes in a tarot chapter for The Occult World that “No invention first appears in a form that is final and complete. Instead, there are a number of false starts, incremental changes, revisions and redesigns and so it was with the invention of tarot.” Farley describes a 1449 letter that mentions a tarot-like deck designed by Duke Filippo Maria Visconti of Milan and illustrated by Michelino da Besozzo. The deck was meant as a gift for Queen Isabella of Anjou, but does not survive today. However, the letter and an instructive treatise about the deck written by the Duke’s secretary still exist. Duke Visconti’s biographer, Decembrio, describes the deck:
“[Decembrio described the deck] as comprising ‘sixteen celestial princes and barons’ with four kings. Though the sixteen cards were sequential, as with the tarot deck, they were also distributed into four orders or suits, namely Virtues, Riches, Virginities and Pleasures (Pratesi 1989, 34). …This deck was very different to the deck that later became characterised as tarot, but it does seem to have represented an intermediate stage between regular playing cards and tarot. Though the sixteen deities were not present as trumps in later tarot decks… [Franco] Pratesi suggested that the denari (coins) corresponded with the order of Riches; spade (swords) evolved into Virtues; coppes (cups) inspired Pleasures; and bastoni (batons) became known as Virginities (1989, 143–44).”
A tarot deck that DOES still survive--keep in mind these cards were paper or pasteboard and most saw regular use and abuse--was painted by an artist named Bonifacio Bembo for the Visconti family a year later in 1450. This deck resembles its modern descendant pretty closely: four suits of 14 cards each, and 22 trump cards, though all cards are at this point missing inscribed numbers and titles. The trump cards depict subjects that would have been in popular knowledge where Tarocchi was played, including such figures as the Hanged Man, yes, but also the Pope and Popess, Fortitude, and Mountebank (which is either a medicine seller or a charlatan or probably both). The suits were cups, swords, batons, and coins, which comes as no surprise to Husband, "as that's what the suit symbols of Italian playing cards remain to this day."
Between these and the Visconti-Sforza deck, Farley claims that Duke Filippo Maria Visconti did in fact invent the tarot deck, asserting that the symbolism of the trumps connected to his own life:
“For example, the cards of the Emperor, Empress, Pope and Popess represented spiritual and temporal power in northern Italy in late Medieval and Early Modern times (Dummett 1986, 104). Milan was caught in a power struggle between the Pope, exerting influence from Rome, and the Holy Roman Empire to the north. These four cards are indicative of that struggle (Farley 2009, 52–58). Interestingly, the Popess has been linked to the figure of Sister Maifreda da Pirovano who was a relative of the Viscontis. She was a member of the heretical sect of the Guglielmites (Newman 2005, 28). Significantly, none of the extant decks possessed either the Devil trump or the Tower trump, standard in modern tarot decks. …The Tower or ‘Torre’ in Italian… was also the name of the main political rivals of the Visconti in Milan. It is not inconceivable that the Tower card, with its destructive and violent imagery, was present in the original decks, symbolising the eventual triumph of the Viscontis over the Della Torres (Farley 2009, 84–88).”
I guess if you’ve done enough research you can get away with citing your older work? I’m not an academic.
Farley’s theory is interesting, but improbable. On his blog Pre-Gebelin Tarot History, Michael J Hurst recounts when Franco Pratesi posted on the Tarot History Forum and sparked some drama over a diary entry in 1440 by notary Giusto Giusti which reads: “Friday 16 September, I gave to the magnificent lord sir Gismondo, a pack of triumph cards, that I had made expressly in Florence, with his arms, and beautifully done, which cost me four and a half ducats.” Pratesi had anticipated that this update to the historical record would spark some interest, but Hurst, and apparently many others, were not impressed. According to them, Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta (1417-1468) was the first known Tarot enthusiast, so gifting him a tarot deck is a no-brainer.
The search for tarot’s true inventor is a fascinating rabbit hole, and I’ll leave links to my sources in the description so you can take a peek if you like. But the point is: we know that the tarot deck was invented in Italy, and can place its invention alongside tarocchi roughly around 1410-1445. Decker, Depaulis and Dummett write: "in the early 16th century [tarocchi] spread to France and Switzerland, almost certainly in consequence of the wars, in which the Swiss were involved, of the French to capture Milan. ...Tarot was known to French writers before the late 18th century solely as a game-- a game more widely played in France than chess…” French card manufacturers picked up the game and ran with it, creating the Tarot de Marseilles, which differs slightly from the Italian tarot deck. Nevertheless, the game at hand was still Tarocchi.
Tarocchi is a trick taking game, and is played more or less like this: The Fool, the World, and all Kings are worth 5 points. Queens are 4, Knights are 3, Pages are 2, and every other card is worth one point. Some of the numbered, or pip, cards are removed from the deck. Each player gets around 15 cards to their hand. The goal of a round, or a trick, is to have the highest ranking card. If you have that, you get to collect all of the cards played in the trick. Each player plays one card: the first player decides the suit, and the others either follow suit or play a trump card. Higher pips beat lower, trumps beat pips, higher trumps beat lower trumps. The fool never wins a trick. At the end of the game, whoever collected the most points wins. How To Play Tarocchi
The trump cards were not numbered for a long time; players would need to memorize their order, which would have varied whether you were playing with the Tarot de Marseille or the original Italian deck. Trick taking games, and playing cards themselves, originated in China and wandered over to Europe through India, Persia, and Egypt during the Mamluk Sultanate, and probably was also introduced in Spain through its occupation by the Moors. But trump cards are a European invention, first appearing in the German Karnöffel in 1426 among the peasantry. This was probably independent of tarot, since the trump wasn't called a trump in Karnöffel but instead the 'chosen' suit. Having unique picture cards for the trumps is a quirk of tarocchi.
We know that cards traveled west across the continent. Could they have come with romani travelers, like the stereotypical image of a scarfed fortune teller? After all, we know that the Roma originated in India. Well, no, the dates don't match up. The Roma first appeared in Western Europe in 1417, reaching Italy in 1422 and France in 1427. That dates them early enough to beat Tarot cards in 1440, but not playing cards, which appeared in Catalonia by 1370. Also, there is no evidence that Tarot was present in India before the 19th century. There's plenty of evidence of playing cards in India though, such as Ganjifa cards in 1527. Notably, ganjifa decks vary widely in how many suits they contain; Mamluk kanjifa consists of 52 cards divided into the four suits of coins, polo-sticks, cups, and swords, from which the Italian suits naturally descend; but Dashavatara Ganjifa is 120 cards with 10 suits, which correspond to the ten avatars of Vishnu. The Ramayan ganjifa is comprised of 8 or 10 suits, with the numeral cards depicting episodes from the epic Ramayana, each suit providing a different story. However, again, no evidence points to the existence of trump cards in ganjifa decks, nor to the use of them as divination tools in India. Even when Romani travelers carried decks with them, it was for playing card games; their preferred method of divination up until the 17th century was palmistry. This is reinforced by a wide variety of sources, from sympathetic to outright hostile:
All of this isn't to say that there was no other usage of tarot decks in Renaissance Europe. One early recorded use of the deck (I would now qualify as a game) was a minor verse form known as tarocchi appropriati. The poet selected 22 people of some group-- the ladies at a court, for instance -- and assigned one of the trumps, including the Fool, to each of them, "describing them each in turn in a verse where the name of the trump card assigned to her figured prominently." But according to Decker Depaulis and Dummett, no esoteric symbolism was applied, just the surface meanings of the trump cards. Similar tag-yourself style society games were played without cards or poets, just groups of 22 assigning each other as trumps. There is even a description of a "non-standard tarot game--one played with a nonstandard pack having a verse tercet on each card... each player had to read out the verses on his cards, from which much amusement was supposed to derive." (A verse tercet on a non-standard tarot card? What a funny idea.) The authors do not claim that these games were designed to survive the test of time, though imagining any of these games as so fun as to write them down for posterity feels like a stretch. But hey, I'm not a scholar of 15th century society games, maybe the joke was funnier back then. It does remind me of the verses written down on Lotería cards, which similarly carry images meant to speak to popular archetypes of the time they were designed. Though Lotería cards aren't played on their own, they're called out to a group of players in conjunction with Loteria boards, which are a lot like Bingo boards. Interestingly, Lotería was also invented in 15th century Italy and then was popularized in 19th century Mexico; but that’s its own video.
The deck with the most influence over the modern understanding of tarot is likely the Sola Busca Tarot. According to wikipedia, “Arthur Mayger Hind…supposed that the deck was engraved around 1490 and then hand-painted in 1491…. created for a Venetian client by Mattia Serrati da Cosandola, a miniaturist operating in Ferrara (the center of Tarot card production at the time)... In 1907, the Busca-Serbelloni family donated black-and-white photographs of all 78 cards to the British Museum.” The Sola Busca tarot is notable in that every card, including the pip (or minor arcana) cards, have images on them; it’s very likely that A.E. Waite and Pamela Colman Smith had both the opportunity and motive to take inspiration from them for the Rider-Waite tarot pack produced in 1909. (More on that later.)
But the imagery of these tarot decks is very intentional, and very specific. Could it be that their artists drew some inspiration from the occult? Pollack implies this, but admits that there is no historical basis for it. A Wicked Pack of Cards concedes that the cards are heavily symbolic, since "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." Whether that symbolism is esoteric--that is, intelligible only to those few trained in the occult--the three authors regard with skepticism. One of their arguments against it is an anonymous sermon recorded in the 1480s which denounces tarot with other dice and card games as an invention of the devil, but doesn't judge the sin as any deeper than gambling. "The preacher would not have lost such an opportunity to reinforce his point." Farley offers the additional argument that during the Renaissance, “it was widely believed that God embedded clues in nature that could be deciphered by anyone with sufficient knowledge. In this way, humans were able to discern the mind and will of God (Kieckhefer 1989, 90)...Any form of divination or fortune-telling which made use of invocations, written petitions or the use of sigils or signs was considered to be devilish [and] could draw the unwelcome attentions of the Inquisition (Russell 1972, 143).” If the symbolism was esoteric at the time, it must have been genuinely esoteric in the form of dogwhistles that the public--including the Catholic Church at one of the heights of its power-- either didn't recognize or didn't find offensive. Not to say that the Church never ran afoul of tarot’s patrons; both Duke Visconti and Gismondo dealt with long, agonizing antagonism from its leadership; Gismondo in particular was canonized into hell while still alive –the first person ever to be canonized in this way– then tried to kill the Pope with his own hands, and died a few months later. But the disputes, as far as I can tell, were over military actions and rampant infidelity and possibly incest? Not playing cards. It is possible for tarot’s meanings to be well and truly hidden, or for there to be double entendres lost on the general public. But this was a very popular game that was played by soldiers and landed gentry alike, on whom that esoteric meaning, and whatever magical potency it carried, was lost in the pursuit of play.
Why it settled at 22 trump cards is unknown to me, though much is made of this fact in occult studies since there are 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet. The removal of the Fool leaves 21 cards neatly divisible into three sets of seven, both of which are fun magicky numbers. In his essay on cartomancy, the comte de Mellet tracks the development of mankind by dividing the Major Arcana into the Golden Age (characterized by youth, creation, and innocence):
…the Silver Age (marked by civilization, heroes, and strife):
…and the Iron Age (the modern age, suffering is rampant, nobody listens to their elders, everyone’s on their phones, etc.):
But that's an interpretation that was made hundreds of years after the trumps had solidified in imagery, order, and quantity. (The word cartomancy, by the way, originates as "cartonomancy" by Etteilla in his 1770 publication Etteilla, or a way to entertain oneself with a pack of cards, though the casual pastime of card reading in Europe certainly predates him. More on Etteilla and de Mellet later.)
Speaking of cartomancy, the earliest recording we have of reading fortunes in cards is in Bologna, with the Tarocco bolognese tarot deck. It differs from the Tarot de Marseilles and Italian tarot decks in some notable ways, having only 63 cards, and replacing the Pope, Popess, Emperor, and Empress with Moors in 1725. Numbers were added to some of the trump cards, and the suit cards became double-headed (which most cartomancers object to, since it rids the card of an upright and an inverse). Pratesi discovered a single loose manuscript sheet in the Library of the University of Bologna that gives cartomantic interpretations of 35 Tarocco bolognese cards. A Wicked Pack of Cards provides the following description of their meanings:
The authors clarify that these interpretations do not derive from Etteilla's, though they don't date this manuscript, annoyingly, so I don't know whether it was contemporary with him or not.
1700’s
Okay. That accounts for tarot’s first 250 years of written history, more or less. Why does that change in the 18th century with the occultists? What about the Golden Dawn, and Waite himself, and Pamela Colman Smith? Why does tarot have such a stranglehold on divination and cartomancy when Lenormand is right there?
The first published essay that describes Tarot as an artifact of the occult was in the massive manuscript Le Monde Primitif by a French Swiss Protestant pastor and Freemason by the name of Antoine Court de Gebelin. Gebelin first describes Tarot in 1778 in an 'Etymological Dictionary of the French Language' under the form Tarraux. The entry reads:
Game of cards well known in Germany, Italy and Switzerland. It is an Egyptian game, as we shall demonstrate one day; its name is composed of two Oriental words, TAR and Rha, [or] Rho, which mean 'royal road'.
(It doesn't, by the way. “Oriental” isn’t a language, and the Rosetta Stone hadn't been deciphered yet, Gebelin had no idea what meant what in ancient Egyptian.)
In his essay, Gebelin explains how he came to understand that the cards were ancient Egyptian wisdom:
A few years ago, [we were] invited to visit one of the ladies of our acquaintance... we found her occupied in playing this game with some other people.
-We play a game which you surely do not know.
-That may be; what is it?
-The game of Tarots.
... in quarter of an hour the pack has been run through, explained, declared Egyptian; and since this is in no way the product of our imagination, but the effect of the deliberate and perceptible connections of this pack with everything that is known of Egyptian ideas, we promised ourselves one day to make it known to the public.
So, he saw a deck of cards and decided they were ancient Egyptian wisdom on the basis of...he decided it.
A Wicked Pack of Cards concedes that it is true that Italian and Spanish playing cards were derived from Egypt, but of the 11th century, post-Christianity and not remotely into Egypt's long, long, long, *long* ancient history. Just a reminder in case there was any question whether Gebelin was speaking out of his ass. However, he was far from the only Frenchman possessed by Egyptomania.
The comte de Mellet was an otherwise unremarkable court noble and military commander, not even a Freemason, but he wrote an apparently unrelated essay that utilized even more Orientalism with even less evidence. The essay agrees that the deck is a book, but calls it le livre de Thot, or "the book of Thoth" and claims that the word Tarot is from the ancient egyptian "TA-ROSH:" (again: Rosetta stone won't be discovered for another 26 years. completely making it up.) His essay also contains the first allusion to a Cabalan connection and makes the 22-card 22-letter association with Hebrew. de Mellet also includes the banger sentence "There is, finally, a twenty-second card without number and without power, which, however, increases the value of that which precedes it; it is the zero of magic computations: it is called MADNESS." de Mellet's essay has a lot in common with Gebelin's, and though it differs in some ways, most notably it does not address Gebelin's essay at all. A Wicked Pack of Cards presents three theories: 1. de Mellet was boldly and brazenly plagiarizing Gebelin, 2. de Mellet somehow came up with these ideas completely independently of Gebelin, or 3. de Mellet and Gebelin drew from the same uncredited sources.
Regardless, the three authors declare de Mellet’s essay as the first publication to describe a method of divination with tarot cards. And what they describe is, honestly, bizarre. First, the trump cards and the suit cards are separated. Then, two people run through the decks simultaneously, card by card. The one with the suit cards turns them over while naming each card from Ace, 2, 3, and so on, all the way up to King, and then back around to Ace again. If a card they're holding is the card they're saying, that card gets added to the reading. The one with the trump cards is doing the same, but silently, paying attention to the suit cards, and puts a trump card aside whenever a suit card is chosen. They have fewer cards, so when they run out they just pick up the stack and start again without shuffling. This seems like it would take a while. And no guidance is given for how to read the cards, once they've been collected. But. There you have it: the first documented randomization mechanic for tarot.
Despite both the similarities and differences between his essay and de Mellet's, Gebelin published it in the eighth volume of Le Monde Primitif. And within two years, it began to have an effect on France.
Etteilla was the pseudonym of Jean-Baptiste Alliette, a French seed merchant turned print seller who took Gebelin and de Mellet's theories and put them to work commercially, selling books, cards, and oracle readings to the general public to some success. His own manuscript, Etteilla, or a way to entertain oneself with a pack of cards, which preceded Gebelin's publication by seven years, offers 'cartonomancy' for idle pleasure, but Gebelin's proposal that tarot might be for deeper more arcane purposes encouraged Etteilla to elevate his pitch with his next work. Etteilla can be credited with the first publication of card spreads--that is, arranging cards on a table with meanings given to each placement--as well as the first definitions for specific upright and reversed meanings, and the first specialized deck of divination cards specifically designed for occult purposes.
Etteilla wrote several manuscripts on tarot reading and formed two groups to continue discussing tarot interpretation: Société des Interprètes du Livre de Thot in 1788, and Nouvelle Ecole de Magie, or New School of Magic, in 1790. He would die a year later, in 1791.
For reference, the storming of the Bastille happened in 1789; and in 1793, Louis XVI would be executed in the French Revolution. Just to give some context and a backdrop to the early days of tarot as an occult tradition.
So much of what we know and understand to be tarot, and the mythos surrounding it, begins with Etteilla and his correspondents. However, though Etteilla may be the first famed professional fortune teller, he's by no means the most famous. No, that title belongs to Madame Marie Anne Le Normand.
Le Normand
Self-proclaimed confidante of Empress Josephine, rubber of famous elbows and writer of many star-studded memoirs, Le Normand did not care to elevate the practice of cartomancy so much as to advertise her own clairvoyance. By 1804 there was no shortage of fortune tellers in France despite a law that punished "people whose trade is to guess and prognosticate or explain dreams." Le Normand's many biographies are interwoven with exaggeration, plagiarism, and outright fabrication; but there is a police document that reports 'crowds at Le Normand's, the famous card reader...' in 1808. This is not the only police record of her; she even spent a few stints in jail. Her 602-page book Les souvenirs prophetiques d'une sibylle discusses in exhaustive detail her few days behind bars in 1809. Cartomancy is mentioned a couple of times in passing in this book, but never tarot itself. However, in 1817 she published a book called Les oracles sibyllins which, thrillingly, includes her card reading method. A Wicked Pack of Cards describes:
She clearly always uses a piquet pack, i.e. a 32-card pack. She cuts three times and deals the cards in eight piles. She then draws them and proceeds to read. Although she enumerates the cards she draws in her story, she does not trouble to give the meanings!
Les oracles sibyllins describes a wide variety of fortune telling after this; cartomancy is very low in Le Normand’s bag of tricks. She says little about tarot in her many, many books about famous events and how she prophesied them. Her publication of Empress Josephine's memoir is judged, then as now, as 'entirely apocryphal.' Le Normand is a massive figure whose history is a dizzying mix of elevated truth and barely concealed fiction told by her admirers, her critics, and herself. But despite her towering shadow in life, she never took a pupil, and her prognostications of the far-flung future were only revealed post-mortem, in an appropriately mysterious letter sent anonymously to one A. Gallus, with the pseudonymous Hortensius Flamel invited along to provide commentary. The prophecies hit about as often as they miss, and Flamel's input mostly props up one Madame Clement as Le Normand's successor. Following that commentary is a biography of Le Normand, which seems to be based on a letter sent to another publication earlier in the month. What's notable about this, why I bring it up at all, is that it includes some detail as to how she conducted her consultations:
She began each consultation by asking the consultant for personal details, including his date of birth, the initial letters of his given name and birthplace, his favourite colour, animal and flower, and the animal he most disliked.
Clement, who sets up shop in Le Normand's apartment though never reaches a fraction of her predecessor's esteem, writes a booklet titled The Bleeding Raven, or the Future Unveiled in 1844, and describes the following cartomantic layout:
First thirteen cards are exposed and read, then nineteen, and finally twenty-one, the cards that have been read being each time returned to the pack, which is reshuffled before drawing the next set.
The Lenormand deck itself has just about as much to do with Le Normand herself as Clement did: capitalizing on her notoriety (to much greater success) but resembling little else about her life or card reading practice. Le Normand herself used 32 card decks, but the Lenormand is based on a 52-card pack, with two cards for male or female consultants. The Lenormand decks were first published by the French card manufacturer Grimaud, who started selling them two years after Le Normand's death; followed in 1850 by the German publishing house of J.F. Aug. Reiff whose cards are slightly differently arranged. At around the same time came 'petit lenormand' decks, which were 36 very simple pictographic cards that actually originate from a German racing game called The Game of Hope, published around 1800 by G.P.J. Bieling of Nuremberg. The rules of which are:
The cards must be arranged to form a square of [6 x 6] in numerical order. Two dice are used and each player moves his man according to the throw of the dice up to the thirty-sixth card. As in many race games, there are lucky and unlucky cells. However, the last lines of the text state that 'with the same cards one can also undertake an entertaining fortune-telling game'. It is a very simple question-and-answer system, using only 32 cards arranged in eight rows of four.
Speaking of spreads, L'oracle parfait, or the complete oracle, by Albert d'Alby, may present the first documentation of at least a partial celtic cross spread in 1802, describing a layout of 5 cards in the form of a cross; though according to Farley, the popularization of the celtic cross spread as we understand it today by A.E. Waite wouldn’t happen for roughly another century(although what exactly about it is celtic, Waite does not explain).
Grimaud’s Lenormand pack preceded a bloom of oracle decks in France throughout the 19th century. Some decks had cards representing things like 'Hope', 'Journey,' 'Illness,' which had clear meanings to them; and some of these decks, though not all, included a small image of the playing card it corresponded to. But most of them were at the very least inspired by Etteilla's tarot, like Madame Finet's 1800 'le Petit Oracle des Dames', or the 'nouvel Etteilla' or 'petit Necromancien' produced by Parisian publisher Robert in 1810.
Grimaud published two cartomantic decks under the names Oracle Belline and Grand Tarot Belline. The Oracle is a 52-card deck of numbered cards without rank or suit-sign named after Marcel Belline, who lived on the same street as a cartomancer of mild celebrity named Edmond Billaudot. Belline “discovered” his hand-drawn and inked decks and passed them along to Grimaud to put on the market. Why these aren’t called Oracle Edmond… well.
Edmond himself advertised his services by first name alone and was described by Éliphas Lévi as a tall stout man dressed in black. In his book The Urn of Destiny, or the Future Unveiled, published in 1854, he describes his methods:
...Edmond makes use of the twelve houses of the Zodiac... Having shuffled the cards and had the consultant cut them, he distributes them into twelve piles of six or seven cards each. Each pile represents a house, and each house a range of subjects: thus the third governs brothers, sisters, cousins, judges and prelates. The reading consists in examining each pile in turn and interpreting the cards in relation to the subjects governed by that house: the meanings of all seventy-eight cards, upright or reversed, are then expounded.
“Proper” tarot decks took three forms at this point: German tarot, which had the French suit signs, featured non-traditional animals for the trumps, and were used overwhelmingly for playing tarocchi in Germany and Central Europe; Italian tarot, which didn't necessarily mean decks produced in Italy but that followed the traditional forms like the Tarot de Marseille, the Tarot de Besancon, and the Belgian tarot; and, lastly, the "Egyptian" tarot, comprised of variations on Etteilla's deck, and others like it, including the Princess Tarot which was determined to look more the part. Production of the Princess Tarot was taken over by Charles Watilliaux, "whose firm, active from 1874 to 1908, specialized in board games and playing cards for children." I would love to know more about Watilliaux as this is the earliest I've ever seen a games publisher who did games and only games, as opposed to toymaking or selling games alongside books or prints. It's wild to me that someone sat at a work desk trying to pull game mechanics out of a deck of cards in 1874, the same year Camille Saint-Saens dropped Danse Macabre and the Impressionists had their first exhibition. I would be delighted to see what else besides the Princess Tarot Watilliaux had in his catalog.
What follows in Etteilla’s wake is, honestly, a lot of French cartomancers of various degrees of earnestness, skill, and coherence, publishing many books repeating many of the same things down to the same passages from Etteilla's original works. The art of fortune telling with cards petered out from the potent magical form that Etteilla formed societies to discuss, to “an agreeable pastime for the ladies;” of which, to be clear, I would love documentation, because those are gamers playing games, but I have not had much luck finding any beyond Etteilla and his self-serious clade of nerds–I mean, educated men.
For all the societies Etteilla formed, tarot reading would have remained a popular women’s game, had Éliphas Lévi not taken up the mantle.
Éliphas Lévi and Paul Christian
Born Alphonse-Louis Constant, Éliphas Lévi spent the first chapters of his life publishing 'poetry, radical socialist pamphlets, and religious effusions.' Like Gebelin before him, he began a man of the cloth, studying to become a priest until 1836, and joining the Benedictine monastery of Solesmes in 1839. In 1852 he took the name Éliphas Lévi, an anagram of "Alphonse Louis" into Hebrew, and plunged into the world of the occult. Lévi was intensely focused on "high magic," described by Richard Cavendish as 'an attempt to gain so consummate an understanding and mastery of oneself and the environment as to transcend all human limitations and become superhuman or divine.' As such, he regarded low magic such as professional fortune tellers with great contempt and distanced himself as much as possible.
Etteilla's work, as foundational as it is to tarot's existence as a divination tool and as essential as it is to tarot's popularity, was always, at its root, about making a living as a fortune teller. Lévi discarded this base origin; for him, the tarot was a source of magical symbolism, whose historical value was paramount, and whose use as a divinatory tool was tertiary at best.
For Etteilla personally Lévi expressed contempt. Calling him 'the father of modern cartomancers', he mistakenly described him as a 'hairdresser' or a 'barber', and judged his books, which, with some justice, he characterised as 'obscure, wearisome and barbarous in style', to 'have degraded the ancient work discovered by Court de Gebelin into the domain of vulgar Magic and fortune-telling by cards'; 'his endowments', Lévi tells us, 'were insufficient for a Magus and more than were needed for a skilful and accredited diviner of the vulgar order'. ... Though 'on the threshold of discovering everything that is concealed' in the Tarot, Lévi tells us, Etteilla was 'destined to die at the gate of the sanctuary without ever penetrating behind the veil'; no wonder, then, that he succeeded in producing only a 'misconstrued and mutilated Tarot'.
So out with the Egyptian tarot, and all its descendants; back to the Tarot de Marseille, the standard in France for the past 200 years. To replace the fount of mysticism left empty from the removal of Egyptomania, Lévi returns to the idea Gebelin glanced over: that the 22 trumps had a connection to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Lévi decided with the same academic rigor as Gebelin of thinking about it really hard that Tarot must have been linked with the introduction of the Cabala to the Christian public in 1486. Although why a deck that was Jewish in origin would have featured the Pope and Popess, who was a kind of Catholic in-joke, is beyond me. Regardless, Lévi was convinced that the Cabala and the tarot were two halves of a whole, neither intelligible without the other, though his reverence doesn't extend to the suit cards. It's worth noting, also, that there's no record of Lévi studying with Jewish Kabbalists, instead electing to learn everything from books and their ensuing commentary. You could regard him as a kind of Hebrew weaboo. A hebweaboo. a hebrewboo. hmm.
A wicked deck of cards does not mince words when it dissects the associations Lévi makes between these two collections of meaning. It points out the incompatibilities and inexact edges that don't quite meet in Lévi's smorgasbord. The particulars are a little too dense for this overview, but the broad stroke is that Lévi's proposal relied on syncretism, that is, the assimilation of discrete traditions into one universal amalgam, in search of a unified archetypal humanity to return to: a garden of Eden, or a shared language before the tower of babel, to cite stories a Catholic like Lévi would be familiar with. Decker, Depaulis, and Dummett seem sympathetic to Lévi's goals, even as they find his methods pitiful:
He wanted to draw on the best of the past to build a unified civilisation for the future. Given his stance as a Catholic reformer and syncretist, he probably felt no obligation to enquire into any primitive Cabala, but was more than happy to accept the easy and attractive versions that came to him already filtered through centuries of Christian appropriation. Lévi adopted this 'Cabalism' because he believed that it could be the means of reconciling Christianity and Judaism. Thinking that it had once been a widespread faith, his vision of a future of political, social and religious accord led him to hope that it could be revived and made universal.
In spite of the fundamental mismatch of iconography, and the deep wrongness of the graven image to the Jewish faith, tarot is thus bonded with Lévi's Cabalistic vision of magic, and it's from this definition that almost all modern Western occultism pulls the tarot as essential symbolism.
Is there a word for someone who's *too* into Judaism and Cabala? It kind of is antisemetic but in the way that egyptomania is racist. It's like having a parasocial relationship with a religion. semetimania? Anyway.
If Éliphas Lévi sets the guidelines for occultism going forward, Paul Christian, his pupil and friend, means to fill in the blanks. Decker, Depaulis, and Dummett introduce Christian as a shameless liar, and perhaps one whose steadfast Catholicism, in contrast to Lévi's continuous struggles with his faith, frames Christian's contributions to the occult sciences as less than genuine. Christian does give us the word 'arcana' to refer to the tarot cards, and proposes the following basic meanings for the trumps:
He also expands the net of meaning from Cabala to astrology, numerology, and Hermeticism in his books L'homme rouge des Tuileries and Histoire de la magie. The Grand Tarot Belline, originally penned and used by Edmond, uses numbering from L'homme rouge, indicating that Edmond must have made the deck after 1863.
Christian devises and repeats often a completely bespoke astrological system in his work, which "...demanded great ingenuity for its construction, and is tedious to read about unless the reader appreciates ingenious constructions." He also invents onomatomancy, which is performed by taking a sentence of three or four lines and making an anagram using all but a handful of letters, predicting the destiny of the subject and reinforcing that destiny with a latin verse starting each word with the unused or 'mute' letters from the original sentence. "The anagrammatic method of divination, ludicrous as a technique, likewise required dexterity of the crossword-puzzle type for devising the many examples occurring in the book, which must have cost Christian a great deal of labour." And finally he contributes fatidic circles to the occult sciences, which Decker, Depaulis, and Dummett judge at this point is a system as complex as it is broken.
The authors’ note in parentheses that “he refers us to yet another table” charms me. Imagine if he'd been taken under the wing of a half decent GM today, what a heartbreaker he'd design.
The French Occultists
Éliphas Lévi and Paul Christian’s work would not bear fruit until a full decade after Lévi’s death. Then, in 1880, there was an explosion of secret societies in Europe, many of which drew their arcane understanding of tarot from Lévi and Christian directly. In 1889, Stanislas de Guaita, founder of the Cabalistic Order and dubbed by journalists "the sombre marquis," sponsored hypnotism healer and amateur artist Oswald Wirth in creating a tarot deck consisting only of the 22 major arcana under the title Les 22[vignt-deux] Arcanes du Tarot Kabbalistique. Only 350 copies were made, and the tarot’s iconography was gently modified to include more recently solidified occultist ideas. Wirth took another stab at designing these cards with de Guaita's approval, but these were not published until thirty years after de Guaita's death under the title 'The Tarot of the Mediaeval Artists.'
Later in 1889, Wirth contributed an 'essay on the astronomical tarot' to the book Le Tarot des Bohemiens, elaborating on Christian's tarot-astrology connection, claiming 'the Tarot, considered as a whole, is pre-eminently the Sacred Book of occult initiation,' and concluding by associating each of the major arcana with constellations in and outside of the zodiac.
Wirth also wrote Introduction to the Study of the Tarot in 1931. His disciple, Paul Marteau, who was until 1963 head of the cardmaking firm Grimaud, (how’s that for networking?) had a tarot de marseille pack reissued by the firm in 1930 with full intention that it be used for cartomantic purposes. It was Marteau who ended up giving the deck the name Tarot de Marseille, and expounded on the symbolism of each card in his book by the same name in 1949.
Let’s jump back to 1889 for a second, because we can't talk about comprehensive books on tarot without mentioning Papus's Le Tarot des Bohemiens, in which Wirth's essay was published. In it, Papus, originator and leader of several secret societies in France and known outside of the occult as the physician Gerard Encausse, makes an effort to document everyone who had written about the tarot up until this point, including those named in this video, among others. He also... look, numbers and I are not friends, I went to art school for a reason, so I find numerology to be perplexing at best. But Papus thought it was definitively important to combine a numerological system with the tarot deck. Decker, Depaulis, and Dummett describe it in more depth than I’m going to, and then say:
“This summary has passed over many further details; and it is evident that this whole tortuous system of correspondences is completely arbitrary. It is not derived from the Tarot, but imposed on it: no one wishing to devise a pack of cards exhibiting a double correspondence with the letters of the Divine Name, or with the numbers 1, 2, 3 and 4, would hit on one with the structure of the Tarot pack.”
In 1896, the Egyptian tarot got another makeover from an actor named R. Falconnier in Les [vignt-deux]XXII lames[lamms] hermetiques du Tarot divinatoire. He renamed many of the major arcana and switched them up a bit to fit the orientalist theme better:
13 years after Falconnier, Papus published yet another book on tarot called Le Tarot divinatoire in 1909. It contains barely a hint of the arcane knowledge in le tarot des bohemiens, focusing instead on cartomancy which Papus still believed was a 'feminine predilection.' It proclaims that the minor arcana is necessary to use the tarot as a divination tool correctly. As such, it doesn't use Wirth's illustrations, since those are limited to the 22 major arcana; instead, Gabriel Goulinat, an artist from the Ecole-des Beaux-Arts, illustrates the 78 lames of the Egyptian tarot, printed in the back of the book. Goulinat's cards are dense with information, and cite their descendancy from Etteilla's design.
The book itself Decker, Depaulis, and Dummett regard with open disdain, saying "It is obvious that Le Tarot divinatoire was thrown together by Papus in the greatest haste and with the least possible trouble." They cite copy-pasted text from Le Tarot Bohemiens, huge chunks of raw quotation from other writers including Etteilla, and an elaborate mislabeling of what he calls 'tarot indien' which are, in fact, 5 of 10 illustrations of the incarnations of Vishnu, apparently found in Lévi's private collection and included on the basis that Papus thought it appropriate.
Neither Falconnier nor Papus's books accompany decks themselves, as we've now come to expect. Instead, the readers were instructed to cut illustrations out and paste them onto cardboard in order to make the decks themselves. This strikes me as really odd. Why not mass produce them? Does that subtract from the secret, occult nature they were trying to imbue the cards with? If so, why publish these books to the public at all?
I don't have much fondness for tarot as a smorgasbord of different esoteric meanings from cabala, hermeticism, astrology, numerology, and egyptology. I think the bundling of imagery and meaning can be really deeply fruitful if you are well-versed in what each element represents; you get kind of a cross-section of a bunch of different ideas, narrowed by association with each other into a single shape peculiar to that intersection. So I can kind of see the "deeper" insight an occultist might have to a tarot card, given their training in those fields. But I find much of the early association of those specific elements with tarot to be arbitrary and coincidental at best, and shoehorned, appropriative, and orientalist at worst. I mean, to some extent most doctrine and myth is just some stuff someone said once that resonated with people to some degree--but this is just taking a handful of Frenchmen at their word when the depth of their associations is just that "they decided it was true."
When I encounter so many of these systems of meaning I find myself asking: "who says?" Who defines the number 3 as representing growth? That question turns out to be incredibly difficult to answer, since authors in the occult have a tendency to mash things together, repeat things word for word, and make things up whole cloth when constructing their manuscripts. A single, definitive source for any given concept is hard to find.
But with the Rider-Waite tarot, we know who says: A.E. Waite and Pamela Colman Smith, both members of the Golden Dawn. Well, why did they say the things they said? Because of what they were inundated with in the Golden Dawn. Why was the Golden Dawn fixated on the things it was studying? What was at the heart of its hypothesis, what was it trying to prove? How is A.E. Waite and Pamela Colman Smith's work an extension of that hypothesis?
1909
Which brings us, at last, to 1909: the year that the Rider-Waite deck was published by William Rider & Son of London, with The Key to the Tarot written by A. E. Waite: the first iteration of the guide book included with the deck in the package U.S. Games Systems sells today.
Arthur Edward Waite was born in New York in 1857 and raised in England by his mother after his father died at sea. His Catholic faith was shaken when his sister died in 1874, and he began investigating the esoteric at 21. Dummett and Decker write of Waite that “[he] cannot be described as a magician; but he was an occultist. His aim was, by the use of occult symbolism and ceremonial, to create a substitute for religion; perhaps for that religion which he had practised so enthusiastically in his boyhood.” According to wikipedia, Waite joined the Outer Order of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1891 after being introduced by E.W. Berridge, a medical doctor in London.
Waite’s passages in and out and back in and back out again of the Golden Dawn and Rosy Cross and all of its various splinter societies over the course of the next 24 years is the tiniest peek into the clash of personalities that came to characterize the Order. For we petty creatures who love hot mess, the Golden Dawn is a treasure. But for the purposes of this essay, we must focus on what Waite learned from the Order, and what inspired him to take what he learned into refitting and publishing the tarot that we know today.
We have some of his own language on the subject in the Key to the Tarot itself, published alongside the tarot deck:
“...There is a secret tradition concerning the Tarot, as well as a secret doctrine contained therein; I have followed some part of it without exceeding the limits which are drawn about matters of this kind and belong to the laws of honour. This tradition has two parts, and as one of them has passed into writing it seems to follow that it may be betrayed at any moment, which will not signify, because the second...has not so passed at present and is held by very few indeed. I ask, therefore, to be distinguished from a few writers in recent times who have thought fit to hint that they could say a good deal more if they liked, for we do not speak the same language; but also from any one who... may say that she or he will tell all, because they have only the accidents and not the essentials necessary for such disclosure... I have said as much as I can; it is the truth after its own manner, and as much as can be expected or required in those outer circles where the qualifications of special research cannot be expected.....”
This seems to be how he can indulge the holdings his ego has about mastery of the esoteric and oaths of secrecy taken about said esoterica, while also correcting errors he saw in the iterations of tarot present in the Golden Dawn and in circulation by other occultists.
But let’s back up a tad. Before he published the deck with Rider, Waite translated Lévi's work from French to English and drew a great deal from Lévi's tarot when designing his own deck. But he was not beholden to it, moving around several cards and dropping some meanings while emphasizing others; according to Robert M. Place, "Waite has consistently said that the trumps in the Tarot do not relate to the Hebrew letters and he included details in the layout of his deck that would contradict both Lévi’s and the Golden Dawn’s associations. But he does appear to have approved with the Golden Dawn’s celestial and elemental associations, which can clearly be seen on at least two-thirds of the trumps." Waite was aware of Kabbalah enough to attempt scholarship on it himself, though it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny; on the blogpost “The Jewish History of Tarot,” jewitches.com quotes Gershom Scholem, an influential Jewish scholar and author, as criticizing A.E. Waite’s books on Kabbalah:
"even though Waite’s sense of historical criticism may have been superior to that of other contemporary esoteric writers on Kabbalah, it still remained extremely inadequate. …Waite appeared to be ignorant of almost all the modern literature on Kabbalah, so that what he wrote about its origins, development, and decline was ‘for 80% wholly without foundation’....although Waite claimed to have searched hard for manuscripts, he was blissfully unaware of the relevant holdings even in the British Museum, not to mention manuscripts in Oxford, Munich, and so on. … it is only with sincere regret about the fatal disproportion between [Waite’s] great labors and the depth of understanding that was possible for him, on the one hand, and [his] so sadly deficient knowledge of original sources and a useful historical-critical foundation, on the other hand, that one will have to put this book aside."
This raises the question: is the Rider-Waite deck valuable at all to actual practitioners of Kabbalah? According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “Judaism does recognize astrology – ancient wisdom through which you can predict the future and/ or determine certain things about people. However, consulting the future is forbidden. While astrology may give you insight on your weaknesses, strengths, character traits, and so on, it does not tell you anything specific about your future.” Lots of secular resources I’ve found like to talk about how the Major Arcana has been tweaked to suit the Tree of Life, but given Waite’s refusal to use actual sources (which Tree of Life?), I imagine he could only luck into accuracy speaking with a vocabulary and grammar he did not understand. Meanwhile, Rosicrucian iconography and Christian mysticism saturate the deck. It cannot be stressed enough how much Jewish mysticism was filtered through an overwhelmingly Catholic lens; Gebelin, de Mellet, Levi, Christian, Waite, all of them began–and some continued–their spiritual journey with Catholicism, and pulled those biases forward with them into the occult, whether they meant to or not.
Okay, then what esoterica was the Golden Dawn supplying for Waite? Joseph Gurney describes in The Tarot of the Golden Dawn:
One of the most important inner order documents is the so-called “Book T.” This contains a full description of the divinatory meanings of the Tarot trumps and the Minor Arcana. It also gives a method of attributing the Minor Arcana to the various decans of the Zodiac… of which is said: “… [N]ext unto the Bible [it] is our greatest treasure, which ought to be delivered to the censure of the world.”
Gurney goes on to describe how the Golden Dawn squirmed astrology around to suit the Major Arcana as they understood it:
![Les 22[vignt-deux] Arcanes du Tarot Kabbalistique](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Les_22_Arcanes_du_Tarot_Kabbalistique.jpg){kind=link}
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You can pause and read this if you’ve got a head for astrological terms and whatnot. I think even if I were well-versed in astrology it would give me a headache to describe the differences of their methodologies from Levi and Papus and, fuckin, commonly accepted astrology–the gist of it is, book T moved some of the Major Arcana cards around to match Cabala because they happened to share numbers, wedged astrology in there, and then filled out the gaps with the Minor Arcana. Dummett and Decker write:
“Mathers [co-founder of the Golden Dawn] thought he had been shown ‘how absolutely correct the symbolism of the Book T is, and how exactly it represents the occult Forces of the Universe’. The truth is, with his theory as with other detailed interpretations of the Tarot in terms of a mixture of the Cabala with astrology, that it has been made to fit only by force majeure. The natural way to represent the decans, like the signs of the zodiac, is pictorially, like the personifications on the frescoes in the Palazzo di Schifanoia in Ferrara; no one wishing to depict them would reasonably think of doing so by means of collocations of four suit-symbols, repeated from two to ten times, even without adding Aces and court cards using the same suit-symbols but with a different significance. The primal mistake was to attempt an occult interpretation of the suit cards at all: in so far as they represent anything, it is not the occult Forces of the Universe, but the heraldic emblems of the court of Mamluk Egypt (1250-1517), the source of the oldest known examples of the suit-symbols.”
Here’s an interesting bit of context-sensitive design from Gurney, though:
A point of divergence between the Golden Dawn tarot and other tarot decks is that rather than having “upright” and “reversed” meanings, the cards are either said to be “well-dignified” or “ill-dignified.” The Golden Dawn makes use of tarot-spreads in which the meanings of individual cards are judged according to the influence of other cards which are in close proximity. Hence, a card which is surrounded by other cards of generally harmonious nature is said to be “well-dignified,” whilst one that is surrounded by inharmonious cards is “ill-dignified.” The precise meaning of a card may also be more specifically attenuated by the surrounding cards.
So for example, the Five of Pentacles may mean either financial loss or marital problems. Were this card surrounded by cards of the suit of Pentacles, this would emphasise the financial or material loss aspects of the card. If on the other hand, it were surrounded by… Cups, this might indicate that an interpretation concerning marital or relationship problems might be better emphasised. If surrounded by Wands, this might indicate problems with an enterprise in which one is engaged, such as one’s career: Swords on the other hand might point to the fact that problems are caused by strife or conflict with another person. In the last mentioned example, the precise meaning might differ tremendously depending on which particular card it actually was. If the Five of Pentacles were next to the Two of Swords, for example, this might indicate the possibility that the problems could be resolved: if however it were the Ten of Swords, this would indicate the opposite, that these problems would lead to disaster.
This knowledge was kept secret on pain of oath for years until Aleister Crowley published Liber 777 in his periodical The Equinox in 1909. Liber 777 contained everything Crowley had been able to get his hands on of the Golden Dawn’s secret rituals, rites, and esoterica. I don’t know what month Liber 777 was published but the Rider-Waite came out at the end of 1909. Did Waite suspect this was coming? Was it in direct reaction to Liber 777 spilling the beans? Was Waite trying to control some portion of the narrative around the occult sciences now that Crowley had claimed a public spotlight? Or was the tarot pack as a public commodity a longer game that Waite was finally capitalizing on?
At this point, Waite had a fairly full catalogue of published esoteric writing under his belt, and a relationship with Rider as a publisher. He also wrote a number of books and articles under the psuedonym…[sigh.] ‘Grand Orient,’ and most of his texts had at least footnotes telling readers to petition Rider for the tarot deck and guide they coincidentally had for sale. Decker and Dummett write:
In December 1909 Waite published a short essay, ‘The Tarot: a Wheel of Fortune’ in the Occult Review, to publicise the imminent publication of the pack designed by Pamela Colman Smith. Misspelling her name, he announces that he has ‘interested a very skilful and original artist ... Miss Pamela Coleman Smith’ in the proposal to design a set and thereby ‘to rectify the symbolism’. In this, he says, ‘we have had other help from one who is deeply versed in the subject’. He twice refers to the Manual of Cartomancy [written by Grand Orient], and declares that the secret doctrine embodied in the Tarot ‘is of all ages and peoples’.
So we know that the Rider-Waite publication was cushioned on either side by Waite’s actual bibliography, and propped up by the work under his pseudonym. Decker and Dummett give us this picture of A. E. Waite as an author and as an occultist:
His writing often creates the illusion of the work of a fastidious scholar repelled by the grandiose and irrational pretensions of occultism. It is an illusion, however: Waite, a member of the Golden Dawn and the leader of one of the fragments into which it broke, was as committed to occultism as any of those whom he so scornfully rebuked. …The outcome of reading him is thus a double vision. He explains clearly why, in purely factual respects, the beliefs of the occultists are unfounded; but one is left to gather that to reject the inner core of those beliefs is to be guilty of superficiality and disrespect for a profound tradition.
For A.E. Waite, the Rider-Waite tarot was a culmination of his occult knowledge; but, as K. Frank Jensen writes for The Playing Card:
However much we dislike the idea, we probably have to acknowledge, that to Pamela [Colman Smith] the 78 tarot cards… were a commissioned work, which she worked on during a relatively short period only in 1909, at the same time when she was occupied with several other projects, including an exhibition in New York and involvement with the suffrage movement.
In Queen of Wands, Cat Willett portrays Pamela Colman Smith as vivacious and hard working, but ultimately overlooked. Smith was born in England in 1878 to American and Jamaican parents, and grew up in England and New York. She trained under Arthur Wesley Dow at the Pratt Institute when she was 15, though ultimately dropped out of school to take care of her dying mother in Jamaica; then, shortly after Smith moved to England, her father died, leaving her an orphan at 21. Pixie to her friends, Smith was inundated with the arts, friends with Dracula’s author Bram Stoker, then-famous actor Henry Irving, and poet W.B. Yeats, among others. Yeats was the one who invited her to join the Golden Dawn, which was one of the few secret societies to accept women in their ranks. Smith was also involved in the suffragette movement, and we understand that she was "good friends" with known lesbian Edy Craig for a number of years. (we don’t know anything for sure, but she also was roommates with lifelong friend Nora Lake for 40 years until the end of her life, so. Who can say!) Smith had some success with gallery showings, including one that showcased her synesthesia by painting pieces by Debussy, who said "You have not only captured the idea which was in my mind, but you have carried it further." But, when she tried her hand publishing her own periodicals under the title the Green Sheaf featuring predominantly women artists and writers, she found little success.
Waite approached Smith about the deck in 1909. I don't suspect that their working relationship was the closest, given Waite said of Smith "I had to spoon-feed her my orders" and Smith wrote to a friend at the end of the project only that "I’ve just finished a big job for very little cash!" This small pittance would be the only money she would ever see from the project. She finished the 78 illustrations in 6 months, which is an impressive turnaround considering how iconic and densely designed the cards are, and I mean iconic in both senses of "singular and genre defining" and "full of iconography." Afterwards, she went on to publish many books, magazines, and paintings, living on the meager wages of a work-for-hire illustrator in England; to her, this deck was one of many projects thrown out into the void. We don't even have her originals anymore. Yet millions of copies of the Rider-Waite tarot have been sold all over the world. That financial support would have made a real difference, had she been able to keep the rights to her art; without that, she struggled to make ends meet for the rest of her life.
In an effort to better honor her enormous contribution, some folks have taken to calling it the Smith or Smith-Waite deck, which I'll do for the remainder of the video.
Smith and Waite had the benefit of access to a comprehensive understanding of functioning systems of meaning like astrology within the Golden Dawn and its ensuing splinters. I'm not saying astrology is true, I'm saying it's coherent and self-supporting and was refined over a very, very, very long time. Why do the Lovers and the Devil mirror each other? [Astrologically, the Lovers is linked to Gemini and the Devil is linked to Capricorn, which are opposites.] Is the change from cupid firing at a man making a choice between two women, to two figures overlooked by an angel, a design choice in order to support this mirroring? I'd argue, yeah, it's very intentional. The visual vocabulary of the Smith-Waite deck is limited, repeated across the deck, iterated and subverted and rephrased as needed. It's part of what holds the whole thing together. Sometimes this is based on iconography that predates Smith and Waite; often it's invented or tweaked for this deck in particular. The antiquated trappings of the deck can be attributed in part to the Sola Busca tarot and in part to A.E. Waite’s interest in Arthurian legend and Celtic myth. Farley notes, “As with W. B. Yeats, [Waite] came to see the correspondences between the tarot suits and the Grail Hallows or Talismans of Celtic myth which he named as the Lance, the Dish, the Grail and the Sword…he erroneously traced the legends of King Arthur and the Holy Grail back to earlier Celtic mythology.”
What's interesting is, though the deck is designed to be in fruitful conversation with itself, Smith's designs do not always align with Waite's proposed vision. Place notes: "although Smith dropped the symbol of Mercury and kept the goat head linking her figure to Capricorn, Waite wrote in his description of the picture in The Pictorial Key that, “At the pit of the Stomach there is a sign of Mercury." " Which is true--of Éliphas Lévi's Devil, not of Smith’s. Waite supplied very specific instructions for the Major Arcana but left the Minor Arcana well enough alone, providing only a simple list of meanings; so the scenes that are present there are of Smith's making. It's hard to say how much of the discrepancies between Smith and Waite are to do with disagreements Smith may have had with Waite's vision, or simple errors in the rush to design and illustrate seventy-eight cards in six months. A big job for very little cash. I wish that attitude towards artists had died before Smith's time, but alas.
Is the secret to the Smith-Waite's popularity just capitalism? Wirth's 22-card deck at least had Grimaud’s publication prowess behind it, but Papus’ and Falconnier's decks required a physical butchering of their books and concentrated effort to paste them onto cardboard backing. People will do that, as print-and-play decks will attest, but it's a lot of work, so only folks who are already completely bought into the idea will have those decks. Whereas the Smith-Waite is the full package: deck and explanations, bundled into one; it's just better product design. But Etteilla had also sold decks and instructions in walking distance from each other; as had Grimaud in publishing the Petit Lenormand decks. Was it better marketing? A more receptive public? What makes Smith-Waite stand the test of time?
Imagine, for a moment, that I’ve picked you up by the scruff, wheeled you around, and dropped you in London circa 1910. Do you know where you would go to get a tarot deck? My guess would be, okay, maybe start with a toystore for the tarot de Marseilles, that’s probably popular enough to be in England; would Lenormand or a Princesse deck make it across the channel or would you have to import that special from France? For that matter, would Lenormand or Princesse be too self-serious for a toy shop? The Kabbalistique and tarot divinatoire sure as hell would be. We’re looking for something divinatory, something to rival the Smith-Waite; remember the Sola Busca is only available as photographs at the British Museum. We want something to take home. Right. Other than secret societies, where do you get spiritualist and occult paraphernalia? Where are Waite and Wirth and Papus publishing their manuscripts? There are magazines at this point, Waite published a teaser in the Occult Review, so let’s try a bookstore or a newsstand, maybe they can put us in the right direction. Wirth only published 350 decks of the Kabbalistique, so I dunno if we’ll get lucky… Does Rider & Son have a storefront? Worst comes to worst, Waite encouraged us to write in for a copy.
Well, if we jump the pond and wait six years, it’ll be pirated in America in 1916 and Smith’s illustrations will be reproduced in countless books on tarot forevermore. Crowley’s own Book of Thoth was published in the 1960’s and enjoyed some success; but even today it’s the Smith-Waite deck that you recognise. The truth is, at least in those early days, the Smith-Waite didn’t have much in the way of competition. A lot of the divinatory decks contemporary with the Smith-Waite are either hand-made, extremely limited run, or just playing card decks like tarot is originally. By the time Marteau repackaged the Marseilles deck as a fortune telling pack, Smith-Waite had been the standard for a good, I don't know, 20 years? Tarot’s market has never been that big to begin with, so it’s easy for one deck to dominate. Before he founded U.S. Game Systems, Inc, Stuart Kaplan surprised the vendors at an AG Müller & Cie stall by ordering 5,000 of their tarot decks for export to the US–more than Müller generally expected to sell in a year. He went on to acquire the rights to the Smith-Waite deck from Rider directly, and history has proved him right to. Smith’s illustrations, as arcane as their meanings might be, are as accessible as the deck has ever been for divination, and in full color. The name of the game–in design, marketing, and even pirated propagation–is accessibility.
Conclusion
All of this is not to say that the Smith-Waite deck is a perfectly self-referential iconographic system. I don't know the deck well enough to proclaim that as a fact. And it seems unlikely, since it's still kitbashing several different traditions of meaning systems together; there's bound to be some friction. But the Smith-Waite deck has the benefit of its predecessors’ successes and failures, and the Golden Dawn, as much as it was a messy social club with lots of clashing personalities, was a repository of exactly the symbolism that Waite and Smith are drawing from: the tarot itself, its iconographic origins still a mystery; astrology; alchemy; Hermeticism; and, yes, Cabala, as much as Waite might protest its presence, he himself references it often in Keys to the Tarot.
But if all of that is true, and I'm not trained in the occult sciences, then by definition when I pick up a tarot deck I'm playing with something I don't understand. Isn't that ignorant at best and at worst the same as appropriation? Well... I don't know. I don't think so. The Golden Dawn was a secret society, yes, but Smith and Waite were two of many members who published their works often and were hoping for commercial success. Systems like astrology have swaths of information that is freely available, that its experts want you to have. Whether or not Cabala counts as one of these open systems is...unclear, since it arises from but is not the same as Judaism, which is a closed religion, and has been looted, syncretized, and appropriated so much over time that clear consent is hard for me to recognize. I err on the side of caution and I don’t engage with that system. I’m capable of leaving it be because Cabala's association with tarot is, as Gersham Sholem notes with dismay, woefully uninformed and inaccurate, and based solely on the strength of Éliphas Lévi’s word. And people were reading tarot cards before he came around; there is a lot to the deck in its base iconography. While there are modern decks that embrace jewish mysticism with more accuracy and grace, the Smith-Waite is as close to kabbalah as the Princess deck is to ancient Egypt. The Smith-Waite, like the divinatory decks that preceded it, is a symbolic object. The point of a symbol is that it evokes association in the viewer’s eyes; and a universal symbol is made specific by its viewer. You get as much out of a system of meaning as you put in.
Not every association is valid in my opinion. The kind of parallels that Pollack drew with the Hanged Man veer dangerously close to simply drawing parallels between cultural archetypes that greatly simplify, ignore, or outright erase the context in which those archetypes exist in their respective home cultures for the sake of supporting the theory of a single, syncretic “monomyth”. The venn diagram of St Peter and Odin contains a single point of overlap: “religious figure upside down.” Their purpose, cultural position, goals, and outcome are all vastly different. Forcing the circles to overlap further robs each mythology of a wealth of understanding, complexity, and nuance that syncretism supposedly supports.
However, I think having access to that network of meaning is valuable. Tarot is a tool that encourages the reader to project order, reason, logic, and insight onto random juxtaposition. In that pursuit, having a wide variety of perspectives from which to view a given symbol is really useful. That's not to say I think a card should be able to mean everything; you still need limitation and focus to foster creativity and clarity. However, if you know why a given symbol means something different to another person, you might come to understand their worldview a little better, and challenge your own comprehension along the way. And you can use that same symbol in a different way in your storytelling. For example, if you're drawing the Hanged Man for an alchemist, who would see hanging upside down as a way to get wisdom out of their semen and into their brainjuice, you might set the traitorous interpretation aside in favor of a well-meaning but misguided act of desperation. In this way, you’re using a breadth of information to develop a narrow interpretation specific to this particular context.
New Age sensibilities brought a shift in the occult from the universal to the personal, from the psychic to the psychological. By the time tabletop games found their footing in the 20th century, tarot’s purpose and cultural footprint had shifted once again. But that’s for another video. Today, I’ll leave you with Pamela Colman Smith’s art and A.E. Waite’s guidance:
It should be noted (1) that the tree of sacrifice is living wood, with leaves thereon; (2) that the face expresses deep entrancement, not suffering; (3) that the figure, as a whole, suggests life in suspension, but life and not death. It is a card of profound significance, but all the significance is veiled. One of his editors suggests that Éliphas Lévi did not know the meaning, which is unquestionable nor did the editor himself. It has been called falsely a card of martyrdom, a card of prudence, a card of the Great Work, a card of duty; but we may exhaust all published interpretations and find only vanity. 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 embedded 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.
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