In 2006 I published a short entry titled “Tarot” in the Encyclopedia of Religious and Spiritual Development that I want to reproduce here with minor changes:

A Tarot deck consists of 78 pictorial cards. The pictures on the cards resemble illustrations to a fairy tale, or an adventure story. This is the story of an individual journey through life, with its many events and experiences. Each card represents a moral lesson that a human soul must learn in order to be fruitful and creative in experiential endeavours. In order to go ahead, each one of us has to often leave behind some illusions and dependencies that are counterproductive to human growth and spiritual development. These situations are also symbolically represented in Tarot cards. Nearly every one of the cards has an image of a living being, a human figure situated in different contexts. This figure is not just a physical body but the mind, soul and spirit as well. And while a body goes through life and accomplishes different tasks, the human psyche too goes through transformations, as life itself calls for the constant renewal and enlargement of our consciousness. The journey through the cards’ imagery is therapeutic as each new life experience contributes to self-understanding and, ultimately, spiritual rebirth. In the Tarot deck, rebirth is signified by the Sun card, with its image of a small child warming in the sunshine, the psychic energy of a child enriched by the solar energy of the whole universe.

There is no proven origin of Tarot cards. Different sources mention different geographical and historical roots. The only factual information about Tarot genesis is a set of seventeen elaborately painted cards now located in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris and documented as dating back to 1392. The collection in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York contains thirty- five cards from a full deck whose origins go back to around the middle of the 15th century. Tarot has been traditionally used as a divinatory tool, although Michael Dummett presents Tarot as belonging to a family of card games, integral to specific cultures. Psychologically, each card in the deck carries a strong humanistic aspect in terms of the dominating personality drive being an instinct to grow, develop, differentiate, and nurture our spiritual feelings. Tarot readings, despite being traditionally considered irrational, nonetheless help to achieve a wider scope of awareness than rational thinking alone can provide. Tarot brings to awareness many initially unperceived meanings thereby contributing to human learning based on both actual and potential experiences that encompass past, present, and future aspects. The cards may be considered to project subconscious human desires, wishes, beliefs, and hopes, and the power of Tarot symbolism is such that the images may transcend existing blocks and defenses. The Tarot images cannot be reduced to merely arbitrary symbols; according to the Hermetic tradition they constitute, in a coded format, an ordered system of esoteric knowledge hiding in the Memoria. The Tarot symbols can be considered to represent the universal language that is structured in accord with a certain syntax and semantics. A Tarot reader translates the non-verbal, pictorial language of symbols and signs into spoken word. Many typical life experiences are represented in the patterns that appear when the cards are being spread in this or that layout. As themes emerge in the course of a reading, therapeutic material is being gathered. This material contributes to the healing of one’s psyche as it provides the necessary guidance toward solving a variety of problems or clarifying an ambiguous situation. The four suits in the Tarot are connected to four ancient elements: pentacles to earth, wands to fire, swords to air, and cups to water. One of the most popular spreads is called the Celtic Cross: it comprises ten positions combined together to provide information illuminating a particular question or query. Some positions in a spread signify the dimension of time; that’s why there can be a peculiar feeling of gazing into the future and revisiting the past during readings. Philosophically, a spread reflects a four-dimensional view on time, in which past, present and future events coexist. David Bohm, a physicist, has posited all events as enfolded in the timeless implicate order. In the physical world they unfold into explicate order thereby creating time in our customary three-dimensional reality. Perhaps Tarot readings enable us to access the implicate order in its past and future aspects. Moving along the levels of order human consciousness undergoes evolution: it grows and expands as it reaches the spiritual realm. The spiritual quest becomes quite literally associated with personal growth as an individual acquires greater knowledge and awareness along his/her developmental path.

This is only a very brief and general introduction to the Tarot story, but its focus is the important problematic of human development, that is, our intellectual and moral growth as a function of learning from the information “encoded” in the Tarot images. In my 2011 book Re-Symbolization of the Self: Human Development and Tarot Hermeneutic I have substantially expanded this theme, while staying faithful to the idea of experiential learning and informal education provided by Tarot readings and the interpretation of images.

I am less concerned with Tarot “history and mystery” (using Sir Michael Dummett’s words) than with the practical effects of Tarot having far-reaching implications at the level of individual and social consciousness. A talk show on 2 June 2011 with Erik Davis, host of Progressive Radio Network, on the topic “Tarot, bricolage, and the language of images: talking about reading and cards with Inna Semetsky” clarifies this point.

In Richard Roberts’ account of Tarot readings, including a reading for, and a dialogue with, Joseph Campbell, he suggested that it is rather pointless to construct hypotheses “about Tarot origins… because the ultimate importance of Tarot is that it is a symbolic system of cosmic, moral, and natural laws, each of which has the same underlying principle, operating in all areas relevant to human endeavor, and which ties together all three systems” (1987, p. 7). The very fact that Tarot is alive and well today confirms its resilience. For the purpose of my continuous research into, and practice with, Tarot it matters little who, where and when gave birth to Tarot because the “essence of their importance for us is that a very real and transforming human emotion must have brought them to birth. It seems apparent that these old cards were conceived deep in the guts of human experience, at the most profound level of the human psyche. It is to this level in ourselves that they will speak” (Nichols, 1980, p. 5).

Tarot “speaks” in the language of signs, symbols and images that becomes “decoded” by a genuine reader. This language differs from the verbal expressions of the conscious mind. The common language of expression used by the objective psyche or soul (Anima Mundi) should, if properly understood, allow us to see beyond the veil of individual and cultural differences and barriers. The world’s quintessential soul, Anima Mundi, holds together the four physical, material, elements, namely air, earth, fire and water; itself being a fifth, invisible, “element”. Through Tarot, the invisible becomes visible and we can access the deep meanings of our experiences. It is the hermeneutics of Tarot, described in detail in my book that provides us with the opportunity of understanding this common, even if hypothetical, symbolic language. The Bible refers to a time when the whole Earth was of one language and of one speech, and all people were one. Medieval symbolism considered the World as a book of God written in a codex vivus, which is to be deciphered. The philosopher Bacon contrasted the apparent unreliability of human communication with the language based on real character, the use of which would have helped people to understand each other by means of shared meanings. This understanding can expand the realm of our choices and possibilities, of which we may remain unaware if not for the Tarot guidance. Valentin Tomberg presented Tarot Arcana as authentic symbols that can render us capable of making discoveries and engendering new ideas.

As recently noted by philosopher and abbot Mark Patrick Hederman in his book Tarot: Talisman or Taboo? Reading the World as Symbol, Tarot provides us with the system to fill the gaps produced by the area “where education and trained sensibility are in short supply” (2003, p. 86). As an educator, I agree with Hederman that “each of us should be given at least the rudiments of one of the most elusive and important symbolic systems if we are even to begin to understand human relationships. This would require tapping into a wavelength and a communication system other than the cerebral, reaching what has been called the ‘sympathetic system’ as opposed to the cerebro-spinal one” (Hederman, 2003, p. 87). At times when for various reasons it is difficult to understand the whole of the personal situation or attain an overview of seemingly disparate bits and pieces that do not make sense, a Tarot layout that symbolically represents the complicated and mixed aspects of one’s life, further confused by the unique way the individual psyche perceives them, connects the dots and provides a chance to recognize how they all are interrelated.

Thoughts, emotions, hopes, fears, problematic interpersonal relationships, intra-psychic conflicts, the immediate environment, significant others, desires and wishes – in short, the whole phenomenology of a person’s life-world, of which however s/he might not yet be aware at a conscious level – is symbolically represented in Major and Minor Arcana. As a lesson to be learned, it is our stopovers along the experiential journey through life experiences that contribute to our learning and self-understanding. Tarot not only speaks in a different, silent, voice, but also enables a process of critical self-reflection analogous to the ancient Socratic “Know thyself” principle in the heart of an examined life. This examination is achieved via many lessons “embodied” in the images that together lay down an unorthodox “foundation” for the existing, both actual and potential, moral knowledge in the form of the collective memory gained by humankind over the course of its history. Such a foundation, when properly constructed, should help us in repairing what Karl Marx called the crooked timber of humanity.

In the Tarot deck, the potential of/for self-knowledge is signified by the image of The High Priestess, Major Arcanum number II.

She is as a symbol for Sophia, or Shekhinah, or Ennoia; all the feminine principles of Wisdom across religions and cultures, yet all representing the return of the Goddess for the purpose of unfolding the scroll she holds in order to reveal to humankind the secrets of hidden, Gnostic, knowledge. The High Priestess sits on the throne as on a seat of transformation, ready to reveal to humankind the words of wisdom “written” in the scroll she holds. Her knowledge is of the long-lost speech that describes the true nature of things in the symbolic language similar to the one, according to myth, used by Adam before the Fall (or before the confusion of tongues in Babel). The High Priestess is a symbol of spirituality and female intuition as a special sensitivity and sensibility. She signifies the invisible and secret knowledge versus the sensible and empirical; yet she can potentially express herself, thus making the invisible present. This lost or forgotten speech may manifest itself in the unconscious contents such as a slip of the tongue in Freudian psychoanalysis, in dreams, in Jungian active imagination, and in Tarot symbolism. The unconscious contents enfolded in the scroll that the Priestess holds are not arbitrary but accord with specific grammar or code that provides them with structure, making them potentially available to consciousness. The Priestess’ number in the deck is 2, which in Jewish mythology, for example, signifies “Beth”, the second letter in Hebrew alphabet meaning the house (home). The Priestess’ house of wisdom would have been opened with the two keys (and the keys are often portrayed on this card in some other decks). The gold key is Logos and reason; the silver key is intuition and imagination; thus The Priestess symbolizes the holistic wisdom in which the feminine mode of knowing is complementary to essentially male rationality. According to a Jewish myth Shekhinah dwells here – in this world – while desperately wanting to reconnect with her beloved: she is the bride, the feminine counterpart, of God. Contrary to God’s transcendence, Shekhinah represents divine immanence in this world. While in rabbinic literature the term Shekhinah is used primarily as a synonym for God’s presence in this world, some Kabbalistic sources suggest a kind of mythic separation from God: the divine as present in, but yet hidden from, the human.

Sophia is God’s (that is, celestial) self-reflection (in the terrestrial) because it is wisdom indeed which is necessary for self-reflection. Yet, being separated from her beloved (in exile, according to myth) Shekhinah/Sophia is often sad and depressed, and sometimes appears to us at this plane of manifestation in the guise of the Holy Ghost, as symbolically portrayed in the Minor Arcanum Nine of Swords representing the twilight zone between night and morning. She needs to be recognized and spoken to, but we cannot perceive her message and wake up. Her voice is silent (Semetsky, 2010) therefore we are forced to let her go. In Egyptian tradition her name is Isis, the goddess of the rainbow and bridge between heaven and earth, who was also depicted as a wisdom figure in mythology. The symbolic meaning of The High Priestess is the very essence of hidden wisdom, the search for which was the task undertaken by Socrates in his effort to prepare educators as philosophers, literally: lovers of wisdom.

Shekhinah’s presence, while only potential in the symbolism of The High Priestess is being actualized in The Star, the imagery of which conveys the brightness of divine sparks as symbolic of the forthcoming transformation towards new understanding, new society, new culture, New Age.

Robert Place (2005) reminds us of the 12th century monk Joachim of Flora (also known as Gioacchino da Fiore) who had an epiphany in which he saw all history ascending through several levels, each associated with one aspect of the Christian Trinity. In the Age of the Father, the world was created and the Old Testament written. In the Age of the Son, Christ was born and has died on the Cross, the New Testament was written and the Church began. The New Age, envisaged by Joachim, would be ruled by the Holy Spirit. This promised Golden age of reconciliation will be infused with love and, according to Joachim’s vision, humankind will be able to communicate with the divine directly, not via an official Church, which would thus be dissolved. The divine will be found within and not without. The passing of the Golden Age is characterized by modern over-rationalization following the mythical death of the god Pan, or rational Apollo taking over nature bound Dionysus. The resurrection of the harmonious, peaceful and prosperous Golden Age (that was presided over by the virgin goddess Astraea – The High Priestess) and the infusion of the symbolic language of images into culture will bring back Justice as its guiding archetype at the social level.

Anonymous (2002). Meditations on the Tarot. Tarcher

Hederman, M. P. (2003). Tarot: Talisman or Taboo? Reading the World as symbol. Dublin: Currach Press.

Nichols, S. (1980). Jung and Tarot, an archetypal journey. York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, Inc.

Place, R. (2005). The Tarot: History, symbolism, and divination. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin.

Roberts. R. (1987). The original Tarot and you. San Anselino, CA: Vernon Equinox Press

Semetsky, I, (2010) . “Silent Discourse: the language of signs and “becoming-woman”’. SubStance #121, Vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 87-102.

During Mediæval times, the legend of the wandering Jew gained popular recognition. I have previously (around 2003 on Aeclectic’s TarotForum) written some comments that indicates possible connections between the Fool and the Wandering Jew – what we shall be briefly looking at here are not only some of those references, but also weaving thoughts surrounding this legend with aspects of relatively recent political developments in light of Rudolf Steiner’s Christology… some of which will undoubtedly seem a little stretched or far-fetched to some. Still, here goes…

The Wandering Jew

The legend ultimately derives from a passage in Matthew that was expanded in typical mediæval fashion in order to begin to make sense of the words given therein. Mediæval Christian thought provides us with numerous wonderful stories, from infancy ‘gospels’ through to quite sophisticated theological treatises forming a substantive foundation for much that is still current in contemporary Christian understanding (for example, numerous contemporary works that are ultimately derived or in part based on the works of Augustine or of St Thomas Aquinas).

Let’s turn to the biblical source first and then make brief diversions elsewhere. The following is found in Matthew 16:27-28

For the Son of Man shall come in the glory of his Father, with his angels, and then he shall reward each according to their deeds. Truly I say to you, there be some standing here which shall not taste of death until they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.

From this arose a legend that finger-pointed not only to an ‘identifiable’ individual Jew, but also, through a sequence of thoughts, to the Jewish people as a whole. For example, in the fourth century Prudentius writes:

From place to place the homeless Jew wanders in ever-shifting exile, since the time when he was torn from the abode of his fathers and has been suffering the penalty for murder, and having stained his hands with the blood of Christ whom he denied, paying the price of sin.

Of course, in the above description it is in light of the destruction of the second Temple in the year 70 when Judea was under Roman annexation, effectively describing the increasing diaspora of Jewish life and the appalling view of Jews as ‘Christ-killers’ (seemingly at the same time forgetting that all early Christians, as well as Jesus himself, were of course Jewish). The Jewish folk were, in so many ways, ‘homeless’ or, rather, without a home in their own right in the promised land of their forebearers. The quote from Matthew also lead, in addition, to the specific query as to whom it was that Christ spoke. And here the legend points to a local dweller in Jerusalem at the time of Christ’s crucifixion. According to what is probably to most common tale, as Christ was passing by bearing the cross on his way to Golgotha, a local leather-smith ‘taunted’ Jesus urging him not to dawdle, for which Christ replied that whereas He was indeed stepping to his death, the taunter would now have to ‘wait and continue living until I return’.

There is an interesting twist in the story as it develops through time, as by the 17th century the taunter is named Ahasver – ironically the Persian fool-king mentioned in the Book of Esther and the basis of which forms the Jewish festival of Pushim.

In any case, we have by this stage both an individual as well as a people who are destined to walk the Earth without homeland until the second coming of Christ. Truly, one could say, a possible depiction of an itinerant wanderer that walks and is chased as an unwanted beggar-fool.

Christ’s return: Rudolf Steiner’s approach

Notwithstanding the various Christian views as to when this is to take place, Rudolf Steiner has a specific Christology that incorporates two particular characteristics: the first is that the return is as described in the Gospels, with directly piercing through the veil and seen by those who ‘have eyes to see’; the second is that a time is specified and has already taken place (and continues to so do). Let’s briefly look at these two points.

Again the reference is principally from Matthew, in this case 24:27-30 (though I skip 28-29 in what follows):

For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. […]

And then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.

This is very much an image similar to that usually represented by trump XXI in the earlier Marseille type: Christ in the ‘clouds’ (or bursting through a mandorla) also used for representations of the transfiguration and for ‘Christ in Majesty’ (as a side-note for those interested, the first section of the quote references Steiner’s ‘Foundation Stone Meditation’).

As Steiner describes the appearance or return of Christ (in, for example, The Reappearance of Christ in the Etheric), he gives a date that effectively sees the ‘piercing through the clouds’ begin in the 1930s and continues from that time on. In light of this, for Anthroposophists (and others who similarly consider that the ‘Second Coming’ occurs in such a realm and began prior to WWII), the legend of the wandering Jew, if taken seriously, would see relief in his liberation through a well deserved and long overdue death. For the ‘wandering Jew’ collectively (in other words, as a people), it probably seems obvious that the establishment of Israel in the 1940s would provide some kind of ‘confirmation’ that Christ’s ‘return’ has taken place: the place of their home has been re-established and now provides rest in the promised land (albeit still all too tumultuous!).

No doubt simply due to that I recently had to summarise and review the first 460 pages of Meditations on the Tarot in completing the monthly studies that have taken us through the first sixteen trumps, I found myself reflecting on not only some fundamental principles taken for granted in the book, but also that here again what emerges is tarot’s deep Christian roots. It is undoubtedly in very large part this that makes the author of the work write in the foreword:

These Letters are written in French because in France – since the eighteenth century until the present time, i.e. the second half of the twentieth century there exists a literature on the Tarot, a phenomenon which is found nowhere else. On the other hand, there existed in France — and it still persists — a continuous tradition of Hermeticism, in which is united a spirit of free research with one of respect for the tradition. The purpose of these Letters therefore will be to “incarnate” into this tradition, i.e. to become an organic part of it, and in this way to contribute support to it.

Now I have to admit that at first sight it may appear that this contradicts what I have just written above. Yet it is this very ‘continuous tradition of Hermeticism’ that is the one that has fundamental Christian roots. This does not, of course, negate that ‘non-Christian’ elements also form part and parcel of the tradition: rather, what tends to occur is that, in a manner very much reminiscent as to what occurred with both Plato and Aristotle, they became neo-platonic and Christian and neo-aristotelean and Christian.

With tarot, in fact, it even forms an even more obvious and literal Christian connection: there appears no authors prior to the 20th century who are not themselves either Christian or propounding Christian esoteric understanding. It seems ironic that in France, in a country that since 1788 explicitly in many ways rejects Christianity, the latter’s values continue to play a central part in not only esoteric literature and occult work, but also underpins the various strivings of tarot authors from De Gebellin, through to Etteilla, Levi, Christian, Papus and a host of others.

Perhaps it should also be remembered that the so-called Magical tradition was itself well versed and well embedded in Judeo-Christian thought: ie, Christian philosophical concepts couched in what was often a poor basis of biblical Hebrew.

Perhaps it is in large part all this to which the author of Meditations on the Tarot was referring.

After all, he lived in London at the time of writing (in the mid-1960s), and had undoubtedly seen and judged as having a relative lack of depth and tradition the writings emerging from the various authors that were influenced or derived from the Golden Dawn. Certainly Mathers, Waite and Crowley had all contributed much in the way of concatenating various systems one over the other, yet in each case what seems to have been at play is something akin to very mechanical thinking. In contrast, the ‘tradition’ to which the author of that book referred was more akin to taking the essential characteristics of Christian hermeticism, seeing how this was reflected in earlier writings, and allowing for the same to similarly be (again) reflected in the images of the trumps.

There is also, of course, the depth of the images of the trumps themselves. Here what is called to mind is very much that aspect of Christian art, which, as Robin Jensen reminds us in Understanding Early Christian Art that

images depend particularly on memory and use a kind of of sign language to remind us of what we already know. They are not meant to be taken literally, but rather only serve as openings to a far more complex set of layered meanings and significations.

And without contradiction, is able to also point out that

what images mean is more analogous to translating than to decoding.

I am suggesting that what the author saw in the ‘continuous tradition’ that until more recently existed ‘nowhere else’ was in large part reflective of this.

Of tarot itself, of course, there is no doubt that many of its images formed part and parcel of the imagery found in popular Christian culture, including various Lumière cathedral carvings. That many also had precursors in pre-Christian times is also clear: to use a non-tarot example, there can be seen a transformation from Isis and Horus to Mary and Child (though even here, I am tempted to raise that this is further reflected in tarot as Empress and shield).

In returning to the author of Meditations on the Tarot, what he manages to continuously do is precisely what Robin Jensen mentions: he allows the images to be translated, rather than decoded, and lets these ‘serve as openings to a far more complex set of layered meanings and significations’, yet at each instance reminding us of the tradition of which he speaks: that of Christian Hermeticism.

Well known author and modern mystic and teacher Abbot Thomas Keating says that ‘this book, in my view, is the greatest contribution to date toward the rediscovery and renewal of the Christian contemplative tradition of the Fathers of the Church and the High Middle Ages’. Yet I would go further in the sense that the book, irrespective as to whether it contributes to such a rediscovery and renewal, also refocusses tarot towards its Christian imagery… not that I always agree with him, by the way: there are many instances in which some more recent historical discoveries were simply not at his disposal, and he thus uses the writings of earlier authors and exegetes the image in light of such – some examples of this includes claiming that a ‘dog’ is on the Wheel of Fortune; or too closely (to my mind) connecting the Tower with its Babel counterpart (and totally omitting its reference to pseudo-infancy gospels).

Still, what the book brings to mind is that sense of the vital importance of what I shall simply here refer to as the Western esoteric Christian tradition – that tradition out of which the depth of value of personal autonomy as understood in the west is rooted, and without which the arts, culture and wealth of the west seems diminished.

Perhaps I’ll here simply leave the last word to Antoine Faivre: ‘The most beautiful and instructive book of the twentieth century concerning Western esotericism’.

Over the last few years I have often reflected on, and being asked, as to how tarot may be included in the context of education. Perhaps it’s because I also teach in a Waldorf Steiner School, in which, to be sure, artistic and historical considerations are certainly given their place! With regards tarot, however, they have actively found but little place… though perhaps more than may be apparent.

Only a few months ago I saw in a classroom in the Australian State of Queensland a large panel in which were a set of Keith Courtenay’s Australian Dreamtime Tarot. Now in the context – a local and traditional native artist being given some pride of place – seems reasonable enough. Similarly, mention has previously been made within these Newsletters (Cf Working with Children) of a couple of artistic endeavours in France with regards tarot.

I also know of an ex-student who, having completed her schooling within a Steiner School, entered university and undertaking art completed a folio of photographic pieces based on the trumps of the tarot. But what of more formally having tarot in the context of schooling? are there avenues in which such remains a viable – and desirable – option?

Let me address this in various ways. Firstly, if any instrument (whether it be a book, slide rule, iPad or deck of cards) is placed as part and parcel of the educational setting, then, I would suggest, effective usage needs to be able to take place. On this alone I personally do not consider that a tarot deck, at least in its traditional imprint, is appropriate in the very young years: therein is not the ‘finished picture’ that is best presented, but rather implements that have multiple possible imaginative uses. For example, a block of wood can be used imaginatively as cell-phone or racing car or stove or cake or soap. By contrast, a deck of tarot is already too embedded with ‘completed’ meaning.

Going to the other extreme age range within school education, I can legitimately see a number of possible functions a deck of tarot may have. For example, in numerous schools and pedagogical methods, individually (or group) negotiated projects may be undertaken. I see a time when I will very likely face the prospect of not only having to approve such, but also be involved in its supervision: this is an undertaking that the 17 y.o. may certainly undertake with the full impetus of artistic, philosophical and historical might.

Between these extremes, there may be room for specific uses of not so much the deck as a whole, but rather imagery that itself reflects the deck’s appearance and inherent parts. A few examples may be apparent: when working through mediæval European history, one of its inevitable aspects is its political makeup. Therein the positions of Pope, Empress, Emperor, all in the context of imagery related to open-eyed Justice, religious beliefs of the Last Judgement and resurrection, and the place of the Devil and some of the Virtues are each and all wonderful avenues for images arising directly out of the tarot. This is certainly something that can be used in appropriate studies whether in Class 7 or 11.

In the context of creative writing, Classes 8, 9 or 10 may be introduced to the brilliance of the human capacity for meaning-making by weaving stories from the concatenation of two or more images. Whether these be taken from magazines or the tarot is, in a sense, immaterial to the creative act. What results from the sources, however, will in part depend on the possibilities of inherent depth of the visual stimulus provided, and in that sense imagery that reflects tarot seems quite an apt option.

In the context of the visual arts, of course, there is even wider scope! From photography to electronic image manipulation, from painting to sculpture, from miniatures to installation works, the scope is rather fantastic. If Niki de Saint Phalle can create her fantastic garden, if mosaics can adorn the walls of a modern Chateau-turned 4-star hotel in France, and Jean-Claude Flornoy was able to provide large tarot shop-signage in his township, then surely other creative and publically available tarot ideas are to be created!

As a matter of interest, images of Niki de Saint Phalle’s tarot garden have been used in Class 10 art classes (amongst many other non-tarot ones) prior to students undertaking individual 3-D mosaic projects. Similarly, cards have also been used in Class 11 literature in reference to what it was that various poets were referring. And tarot mentioned on various occasions in various classes when appropriate.

Even in Mathematics, I recall a particular Class 9 group with whom discussions centred on various shaped numbers, realising that the base-4 line, triangle, square and pentagons (ie, the numbers, respectively, 4, 10, 16, and 22) were all in some way related to tarot – admittedly, this was from a young man whose family used tarot regularly and for whom many of its intricacies was already quite familiar… and also realised that I was interested in the subject.

But – I hear some say – imagine if this was all to take place in classes in most schools… the uproar!

I am neither advocating that tarot be introduced as part and parcel of a syllabus nor even that it be necessarily used in the ways I have mentioned above. Rather, what seems to me to be of greater import is that the very possibility of its various uses, in contexts where it may indeed be more acceptable, that the offerings tarot has be not prevented from making its gifts.

By Joep van Loon

Filippo Maria Visconti Bianca Maria Visconti Francesco Sforza Gian Galeazzo Sforza

As all human made concepts, Tarot has not been created immediately in its final form. In the beginning of its existence, in 15th century Northern Italy, there were a lot of different stages before the Tarot crystallized in the form we know it today, with 4 suits containing 10 numeral and 4 court cards and completed by 21 numbered trumps and 1 unnumbered picture card, the Fool. The four suits were derived from early Arabic card games, the trumps were an invention during the Renaissance period in Italy. No references are given in this article, most of the information given here can be verified on the excellent website trionfi.com, some other information comes from Andy’s Pages (a_pollett.tripod.com). The first card game with separate trumps was probably ordered in the early 15th century by Filippo Maria Visconti who became Duke of Milan in 1412 at the age of 20 years. The painter was Michelino da Besozzo. The images of the trumps were based on the classical Roman mythology with 12 Gods and 4 Heroes or Half gods. We don’t know the number of cards of each suit, we only know that the highest suit card was the King and that the four suits, containing 10 numerals each, were distinguished by eagles, phoenixes, doves and turtle-doves. None of the Michelino cards have resisted to time, the information comes to us through the writings of Martiano da Tortona, the scribe of Visconti, who died in 1426. The probably oldest Tarot game that survived time (partially) is the game actually known as the Cary Yale Visconti or also as the Visconti di Mordrone. It was probably created by Bonefacio Bembo in 1441 at the occasion of the wedding at the age of 16 years of Bianca Maria Visconti, daughter of Filippo Maria. She married with Francesco Sforza, who was at that time 40 years old. The suit signs were Cups, Swords, Coins and Arrows. Every suit had 16 cards, 10 numeral cards and 6 court cards. Probably there were, like in the Besozzo game, 16 trumps, of which 11 have survived. At least four trumps had a symbolism different from later Tarot games, Faith, Hope, Charity and Fame. From the second oldest surviving Tarot game, called the Brere Brambilla Visconti, only 2 trumps survive, the Emperor and the Wheel of Fortune, too little to conclude anything about its structure. It had the same suit signs as the Visconti di Mordrone, but with only 14 cards in each suit. The third game painted by Bonefacio Bembo, known to us as the Visconti Sforza, was ordered in 1450 by Francesco Sforza, probably at the occasion that he became the Duke of Milan, 3 years after Filippo Maria Visconti died without leaving a son as legitimate heir. The suits signs were now Cups, Swords, Coins and Sceptres. There were 14 cards in each suit and probably only 14 trumps, who have all survived. It was only in the last quarter of the 15th century that another painter, maybe Antonio Cicognara, completed the Visconti Sforza game with another 8 Trionfi, of which only 6 have resisted to time. At that time the Duke of Milan was Gian Galeazzo Sforza, grandson of Francesco, who became Duke of Milan in 1476 at the age of only 7 years. During its development, there were a lot of influences on the imagery of the Tarot. We mentioned already the classical influences with the Besozzo trumps showing images based on Roman mythology. Another influence was the 14th century writer Petrarca who wrote a poem called ‘I Trionfi’, In this poem he describes a procession of 6 chariots, in which the driver of each chariot is triumphed by the driver of the next one (Love → Chastity → Death → Fame → Time → Eternity). It is this poem, ‘I Trionfi’, that gave its name and its internal structure to the trumps, with each trionfi triumphing over all lower trumps and triumphed by all higher trumps. Next, as in most Renaissance Art, a very important influence on the Tarot imagery was the Bible. Its tripartite view of the nature of man, distinguishing body, soul and spirit, might have been of influence on the structure of the Tarot. Also the writings of Plato influenced the structure of Tarot. In book 4 of his work ‘The Republic’ he describes the nature of Justice in human beings. Long before the Bible, he had a tripartite view of the human soul. He divides the soul in three levels, an appetitive, a spirited and a rational one. The appetitive soul deals with sex, hunger, pleasure or in general with physical satisfaction and must be controlled by practising the virtue Temperance. In the human body it corresponds with your belly or your genitals. The spirited soul deals with self preservation, anger, honour and victory and must be controlled by using the virtue Courage. Its correspondence in the human body is your heart. The rational soul deals with truth and wisdom. Its corresponding virtue is Prudence and in the human body it is symbolized by your head and mind. Only someone who has these three virtues united can practise the virtue Justice. Prudence and Justice are often combined in one, because someone who practises the virtue Prudence is able to practise the virtue Justice.

The structure of the Visconti Sforza in 1450

As stated before, the trumps section in the original Visconti Sforza consisted of 13 Trionfi plus the Fool. The final version of this Tarot game consists of three distinct levels, a first level describing the structure of society, a second level describing the journey of the human Soul through life and a last level, describing the ascension of the human Soul to Paradise, after its separation with the human body. This third level is completely missing in the early Visconti Sforza. It is highly unlikely that all the cards of one distinctive level were lost after a couple of years and that they have been replaced. It is much more probably that the creation of the last level took place in a later development stage of the Tarot. So my theory is that these cards are the original cards and not some sort of replacement. In fact, the third level is not missing in the original Visconti Sforza, it is represented by one single pair of cards depicting Justice.

So the Visconti Sforza in 1450 had only 14 Trionfi that described the organisation of human society and the development of the human soul through life. Both levels consisted of 3 pairs of 2 closely related cards. A seventh pair described the nature of Justice, the world’s justice associated to the human society and God’s justice associated to the human soul. The order in which I will describe the cards is governed by this division in pairs and supported by the images themselves.

Level 1 : Human Society

The society level in the Visconti Sforza is divided in three sub levels. The first one shows us some ordinary people. The second one represents the authorities and the third level portraits our moral leaders.

Pair 1 : Ordinary People

Village Fool & Street Performer

The first pair in the Society level is formed by two cards depicting ordinary people. On the lowest card, we see a man in ragged cloths. He has an empty mind, represented by the seven feathers in his hair. Behind him some mountains, representing obstacles in our live. Green mountains represent obstacles in the real world and blue mountains obstacles in our mind. The big wooden club on his shoulder represents his force, but it is a force without intelligence. The man is clearly a Village Fool, and his mind is closer to heaven than to Earth. The Village Fool has such a low level that this card was not even able to triumph over the suit cards.

The second card shows a Street Performer. His red coat and shoes symbolises his activity. In front of him there is a table with several useful objects to trick the public. The two dices remember us that life is not written in advance, chance has a role to play. The Street Performer is seated on a cubic box symbolising that he’s a stable person. In his left hand a tiny wand, reminding in this context a magical wand. The Journey into the Tarot begins here, there are no obstacles in sight, the future is open, as indicated by the dices, everything is possible. The Street Performer is the first and lowest Trump, but it has a high value. It represents Birth and Creation.

Village Fool & Street Performer

To illustrate the close link between these two cards we make a small side step to the town of Ferrara, ruled by the Este family. Like the Visconti and the Sforza families, the Este family admired card games. They even bought in 1437 a card printing press. The famous Dick sheet, dated tot the end of the 15^th century, might have been printed on this press. According the account books of the Este family, Jacopo da Soncino, also called il Sagramoro, got on the first of January 1441 some money for producing 14 figures for Bianca Visconti, 14 figures that might well have been the 14 trumps of a card game. The first mention of the name Trionfi for the trumps appears one year later in the same account book. One of the oldest card game for the Este family that survived partially time is the Tarot of Ercole 1 d’Este. It was made probably in 1473 at the occasion of the marriage between the Duke of Ferrare with Leonora d’Aragon, princess of Naples. The heraldic symbols of both families figure on some of the court cards. The Village Fool and the Street Performer on this game are particularly interesting. Both cards are showing a scene in the same environment, probably a village party. On the Village Fool’s card we see some small children with absolutely no respect at all for this foolish man who appears almost naked. The children tear his few cloths further down letting appear his genitals, a detail that has been blackened out in later times. The two children appearing at the right on the Village Fool’s card are also shown on the Street Performer’s card. But on this card there is a big difference, they have a lot of respect for the clever man who captures fully their attention. The same children appearing on both cards emphasize the strong link between these two cards, it is clearly a closely related pair of cards. The children on this pair of cards symbolize our childhood and the beginning of our live cycle.

Pair 2 : The Authorities

The Empress and the Emperor

The second pair in the society level represents the authorities of the world, the highest card representing the Emperor and the lowest card his wife, the Empress. They are clothed in blue and gold symbolizing, when used in this combination during the Renaissance, royal persons. Their cloths are richly ornamented with symbols related to the Sforza family. The Empress carries several symbols relating to power like the sceptre in her right hand, the imperial eagle on the shield that she is carrying in her left hand, the crown on her head and her royal posture on the throne. The Emperor also has a sceptre in his right hand. In his left hand a globe surmounted by a cross (the globe represents the Empire over which the Emperor is ruling and the cross the Christian religion of its habitants). He is wearing the imperial eagle on his head. The Emperor is much older than the Empress maybe referring to the situation of Francesco Sforza who surpasses his wife Bianca Maria Visconti with 25 years. The Emperor does not have the same royal posture as his wife, in fact, the relation of Francesco Sforza as Duke of Milan to the Holy Roman Emperor is not at all as close as in the time of Filippo Maria Visconti. Francesco Sforza kept the Emperor’s symbol in the cards, but in changing his posture and presenting the Emperor as an old man, he emphasizes the diminishing power of the Emperor in advantage of his own power.

In the same way as you could compare the first level with your childhood, you can compare the second level with the productive part of your life. The Emperor and the Empress represent symbolically not only the authorities of a country, but also the authorities in a family in the person of a father and a mother.

Pair 3 : Moral Leaders

The highest level in society is formed by our moral leaders, servants of God devoted to Religion. Even the highest ruler is subordinate to God, so the moral leaders trump over the authorities. In the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, it was still a habit that the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire was crowned by the Pope in Rome. On the Visconti di Mordrone, this level is symbolized by moral values, the lowest card representing the virtue Faith and the highest card the virtue Hope. Faith and Hope are the lowest Theological Virtues, that will disappear in Paradise once the human Soul has been reunited with God.

The Female Pope and the Pope

Francesco Sforza disagreed with Filippo Visconti in the way how to symbolize Religion in the Trionfi game. He decided to use symbols that were much closer to our society in depicting a female Pope and the Pope himself. On the female’s Pope card we see a woman in the simple clothes of a nun. Here face radiates peace and the closed book in her left hand was used in the Renaissance to symbolise Faith in God. This woman beliefs profoundly in God and she has an absolute Faith in Him. This card is a clear symbol for Faith in God. In this way it is also a symbol for the Roman Catholic Religion. The triple Tiara symbolises the divine trinity and provides a close link to the second card in this pair that portraits the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, the Pope.

The Pope is the leader of the Church, so the Pope card symbolizes the Institute of the Roman Catholic Church rather than the Roman Catholic Religion. The Pope is successor of Peter, first disciple of Jesus and first Pope of Rome. So the Pope is in fact the successor of Jesus. Jesus, who gave by his Death and his Resurrection, hope into Eternal Life back to humanity. Finally Faith and Hope are present in a disguised way The message is the same as on the Visconti di Mordrone, but it is given to us in a much more subtle and still easily recognisable way. Continuing the comparison of the society cards with the stages in a human life, this third pair represents the mature part of your life. One has retired from work and people profit from your wisdom. In the same way we compared the first pair with our childhood and the second pair with the productive part of our life, the Pope and the Female Pope represents our grand-father and your grand-mother.

Level 2 : The Soul’s Journey though human life

I skip for the moment the Justice card, who had his place here in the first Visconti Sforza deck but belongs to a different level, to go directly to the second level, representing the Journey of the Soul through human life. In this level we have 3 pairs representing the appetitive Soul, the spirited Soul and the rational Soul. The appetitive Soul is represented by mastering yourself. The spirited Soul is represented by the passage of time, and the rational Soul is represented by the transition of the Soul to after-life.

Pair 4 : Mastering yourself

Marriage and Victory

The first level of the Soul according Plato is the Soul of appetite, that has to be purified in practising the virtue Temperance. This level concerns physical satisfaction like sex, thirst, hunger and in a wider sense also the lust of power. More positively, it concerns also the appetite of a child to learn. So the journey of the human Soul is starting here in childhood.

When becoming an adult, you need to master your physical needs. On the Visconti Sforza this level is symbolized by two cards expressing this need to master yourself. On the card at the left, we see two people giving a promise of marriage to each other. For the Italian Nobility, marriage was an affair of State and had nothing to do with love. So the promise of marriage between two noble people symbolizes the victory over our sexual desire. Cupid, who is holding his arrows in his hand instead of shooting down, is just a powerless spectator. The eyes of Cupid are banded to symbolise that Love is blind, but I this case Love can do nothing, the pact between the man and the woman is stronger than love.

On the second card we see the same woman, this time portrayed as the Empress. She is seated on a Victory Chariot that is led by two winged white horses, symbolising the persons mind that is ready to overcome all eventualities of life. It is a positive card indicating that this person will use her power in the benefit of her people instead of for her own benefit. So the victory described by this card is the victory over your lust to power.

Pair 5 : The struggle against time

The Wheel of Fortune and Time

The second level of the Soul is the Soul of Will, and according Plato you have to practise Fortitude to master this level. This second part of the journey of the Soul through human life describes the working phase of a human life, the part of life when we have responsibility over our family and over our work. So this pair deals with the hardship of life and the mental force you need to pass through this period. In the Visconti Sforza this period is symbolized by the struggle against time. No one can win from Time, you need a lot of force and courage to withstand to the effects of Time.

In the first card we see Lady Fortune. Lady Fortune has her eyes banded to indicate that good luck and bad luck act in the same way for the rich as for the poor. On the top of the wheel a boy in royal blue and gold who is saying ‘I reign’. He has the ears of a donkey to indicate his ignorance, he’s stupid enough to think that he will reign forever. On the left side a boy that climbs and shouts ‘I will reign’. And at the right a boy with the tail of a donkey who says ‘I have reigned’. Below the wheel an old man who says ‘I don’t reign’, he never had the good luck. The Wheel is representing the time that is turning, on everything comes an end and the old man carrying the Wheel of Time is carrying in a symbolic way the burden of time.

The same old man is portrayed in the next card. He holds an hour-glass in his hand, symbol of Time itself. This old man is father Time himself. Time is acting on everybody and is stronger than the strongest army.

Pair 6 : The transition to after-life

The Hanged Man and Death

The highest level of the Soul is Reason, a level that has to be purified by the Virtue Prudence. In the Tarot this is symbolised by the journey of the Soul passing through the final phase of human life. The Soul is becoming wise by now and is waiting the next step, the transition to After Life.

On the first card we see a hanged man. His legs are crossed, remembering the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. The hanged man symbolizes that your life has been irreversibly reversed. You have retired from work and something bad happens. Maybe you got a bad accident, maybe your wife died, maybe you got a heart attack or another very serious illness, in any case, your life will never be the same and you have to prepare for the inevitable, the transition to your After Life. Note that the mountains in the background reappear to reinforce these difficulties and that there is one blue mountain symbolizing the difficulties in your mind that you have at this moment to accept this new situation. The hanged man has a very serene expression. He knows that death is close and he accepts the inevitable.

The last card of this level is Death, symbolizing this transition to After Life. Death is standing passively. He has a bow and arrow in his hand, but he isn’t chasing. He is waiting for you, he knows you will come, your time has gone out. That this period will not be easy to accept is symbolised by the blue mountains in the background. Maybe you are not afraid for Death, but everybody has some fear for the process of dying that is extremely difficult to accept.

Level 3

Pair 7 : Justice

Justice and The Last Judgement

In the original Visconti Sforza, the third level is formed by one single pair of cards describing the nature of Justice. Justice, that is according Plato the highest virtue, here combining all other virtues in one single card.

On the first card we see the Virtue Justice with her usual attributes. In her right hand she has a balance to show that justice is impartial. The balance has to measure between good and bad. In her left hand she has a sword that symbolises that justice has to decide. Even with insufficient data, Justice will decide between good and bad. Behind the Virtue Justice we see a knight who is carrying out the decisions of the worlds Justice. In the 1450 Visconti Sforza Tarot, this card has to be placed before the first pair of the second level, just behind the Pope.

On the second card we see two angels resurrecting the Dead from their grave. The resurrected people are naked, the human soul has nothing that it can hide in front of the last judgement. Behind the Angels we see God, represented as an old man with a sword in his hand. He will decide on every Soul, and be aware, his justice is just, God does not need a balance to decide, he has all the knowledge necessary to decide if a Soul is ready to go to Heaven.

The structure of the Visconti Sforza in the last quarter of the 15^th century

Even with such a logical and coherent structure, the Italian Nobility wasn’t very satisfied yet. The tripartite view on human nature was there, but it wasn’t optimal. The two groups of six cards in this structure could be compared with the first two levels of human nature, body and soul, but the last pair failed to take into account the third level. There was a need for a supplementary more spiritual level. So a new level of seven cards was designed and every level incorporated now its corresponding Virtue. This new level described the journey of the Soul after Death, from the horror of Hell unto the peace of Paradise in Heaven.

The first card games that were showing the new cards were probably the Tarot game of Ercole 1 d’Este and the Charles VI game. Both decks are dated between 1470 and 1480.

Pair 7 : The lower cardinal virtues

At some time, the Sforza family asked another painter, probably Antonio Cicognare, to complete the Visconti Sforza Tarot. Several dates have been mentioned between 1470 and 1484. The most probable date seems to be near 1484 when the ruling Duke of Milano, Gian Galeazzo Sforza, grandson of Francesco was at the age of fifteen. The two Virtues Temperance and Fortitude were added and replaced the Justice virtues as moral values guiding the first two levels. In the Visconti Sforza, these two Virtues were portrayed in a blue upper cloth with reddish shirt and shoes. The dark mountains behind both virtues remind us the difficulty for human beings to really master these moral values. Temperance replaced Justice on top of the first level depicting Society and representing the appetitive part of the Soul. Fortitude replaced the Final Judgement on top of the second level representing the journey of the Soul through human life. Then Justice was shifted on top of the newly created last level describing the journey of the Soul between Death and Resurrection and the Final Judgement was placed on top of the three cardinal virtues

Temperance and Fortitude

Temperance is portrayed in almost the same way as we see her in today’s Tarot, as a woman with long blond hair, diluting one liquid with another to temperate the force of the second one. Traditionally it is interpreted as wine being diluted by water to annihilate the effects of alcohol.

David slaying a lion

Fortitude is portrayed as a man slaying an animal resembling a Lion. This scene is quite unusual, normally the virtues are portrayed as women. On the Visconti di Mordrone we see a woman opening the mouth of a lion, an image that will survive unto our time. The image on the Visconti Sforza has been related to both the story of Samson and and the Lion of Timna (Judges 15:5-6) and to the story of Hercules and the Nemean lion, the first of his twelve labours. The weak point in these comparisons is that in these stories both Hercules and Samson killed the lion with their bare hands. Personally I prefer to compare the scene on the Visconti Sforza Tarot to the story of David slaying a lion (Samuel 17:34-37). This story is traditionally illustrated in exactly the same way as we see on the Fortitude card, illustrated here by a silver plate dating from the 7^th century Constantinople and conserved in the Metropolitan Museum. The story of the young boy killing a lion to save a lamb is much more in agreement with the significance of the Fortitude card who indicates that ordinary people needs a lot of courage to withstand the hardship and life in our battle against time.

Level 3 : The journey of the Soul in After-Life

The new third level of the Tarot, called the level of Light, describes in three pairs of two closely related cards the ascension of the Soul from the depth of Hell to Paradise in Heaven.

Pair 8 : Battle against Evil

The Devil and God's Anger

The first level in the level of Light, consists of two very negative cards, portraying on the first card the Devil and on the second a burning building, called the Tower, Fire or Lightning and sometimes even the Devil’s House. These two cards did not survive in one single collection of cards from the Italian nobility, only the second card survived in the Charles VI Tarot. So as an exception I cannot show the Visconti Sforza cards for the simple reason that they did not survive. Did they ever exist? I believe so, they are present in all the uncut sheets of the end of the 15^th century. We show here an example that is preserved in the Rothschild collection in the Louvre Museum in Paris. Their origin is not Milan but probably Bologna.

The Devil is consistently portrayed in the Renaissance as a hairy monster with horns, bat wings, the claws of a bird as feet and often a second face on the genital area. The second scene is generally portrayed as a building being destroyed by fire, sometimes struck by lightning and often with one or two people falling down. This scene reminds us to the disasters striking the Earth at the opening of the Seventh Seal in the Apocalypse. Personally, I prefer to call this scene God’s Anger.

In the ascension of the Soul during After-Life, these scenes represents the bad acts we have committed in life. All our bad acts, symbolised by the Devil will be remembered and punished, symbolised by the Anger of God. This process of self knowledge and self cleaning is necessary before a human soul can raise to heaven.

Pair 9 : Growing light

The Star and The Moon

After the passage of the Soul through the darkest places in After Life, lights begin to appear. First there is the twinkling of the stars, then the brighter light of the Moon is appearing in the darkness. The Star and the Moon are symbolized by the Roman goddesses Venus and Diana. They are both dressed in the same colours as the Virtues Temperance and Fortitude and behind them there are the same dark mountains remembering us our difficulties to respect the moral values.

The Star represented on the Visconti Sforza is thus Venus, goddess of Love and the brightest star in the night. In fact, the Morning Star is a traditional personification of God’s Love representing here that he’s forgiving our bad acts. The Moon is the Goddess Diana. This card emphasises that you have to know darkness in order to recognise light. You have to know the darker parts of your inner self, and correct these bad parts, before you can be a light for other people.

The Star and The Moon

The Tarot of the Este family threats the subject on a different way without changing the signification of the cards. On the card representing the Star, we see a very bright Star and two astronomers calculating its trajectory. In Fact, the star on this card is probably the Star of Bethlehem that announces the birth of Jesus, the son of God, who has been send to Earth by love for human mankind and to save the human race for eternity. Here the Star represents thus also God’s Love. Love is, after Faith and Hope, the third and most important Virtue directly related to God. Note that Love is often replaced as a Virtue by Charity in order to differentiate Love for your neighbour from physical love.

On the next card we see an eclipse of the Moon and again an astronomer performing some calculations. The eclipse of the Moon is the perfect symbol for the passage through the darkness before you can see the light. The astronomers on both cards reinforce the close relationship between these cards.

Pair 10 : The lights of Heaven

The Sun and The World

The last pair of the Visconti Sforza is the most beautiful, representing all positive aspects of light. In the first card we see a naked and winged boy reaching for the Sun, source of live on Earth. In the second card, the same boy, assisted by a second one, holds an image of the New Jerusalem, symbol for Paradise in Heaven. The dark mountains on the card are now far away, indicating that the previous difficulties are now only a far memory. In fact, these two cards, representing the ascension of the human Soul into Paradise, are by far the most positive cards of the whole Tarot deck.

The naked boys symbolise absolute innocence. The Soul has returned to the state of innocence that it had at the birth of a child, with an absolute purity of mind. The Soul has accomplished the cycle of life and is ready for Rebirth

Pair 11 : Justice

The original pair 7 became finally pair 11, with Justice as the Virtue governing the third level and the Last Judgement on top the three Virtues. While both Justice cards were already existing, there was no place for the Virtue Prudence. In any case, this was not of great importance. In the Renaissance both virtues where often exchanged, and someone who practises one of these two virtues, automatically practises the other.

The Tarot Wheel

So the final structure of the Visconti Sforza tarot is the following. We have three levels with in each level three sub levels consisting of a pair of two cards. The three levels together are describing the cycle of human life. The easiest way to emphasise this cycle is to arrange these eighteen cards in the form of a circle.

Each of these three levels is governed by a moral value, the level of Society, representing the Soul of Appetite is dominated by the Virtue Temperance. The three sub levels in Society are represented by three pairs of two cards, respectively ordinary people, symbolized by the Village Fool and the Street Performer, then the Authorities, symbolized by the Empress and the Emperor and finally the moral leaders, represented by the Female Pope and the Pope. The place of Temperance is above the first level of three pairs of cards, so we place her there as the first spoke of the Tarot Wheel.

The next level describes the Journey of the Soul through human life, representing the Soul of Will. According Plato, its corresponding Virtue is Fortitude. Again we find three pairs of two cards, first the Victory over your sexual desire, symbolised by a promise of marriage and secondly the chariot of victory, that stands for mastering your lust of power. The second pair is related to Time, with the Wheel of Fortune, just as the Tarot Wheel, a symbol for the human life cycle followed by the Old Man or Father Time himself. The third pair is standing for Transition with as first card the hanged man, representing a major irreversible incident in human life and next Death, representing the transition of the Soul from human life to After Life. The Virtue Fortitude is placed above this group of three pairs of cards as the second spoke of the Tarot Wheel

The highest level of the Soul is the Soul of Reason. It is represented in the Visconti Sforza Tarot by the journey of the Soul through After Live, from the deepest darkness of Hell to the brilliant light of God in Heaven.

The first pair represents terrors of Hell, with the first card showing the Devil representing our bad acts and a second card showing the Anger of God destroying the Evil of the Devil representing the punishment for these deeds The philosophy behind is that we have to be aware of our acts and that we have to regret and repair the damage we have done before we can rise to Heaven.

In the second pair light is appearing in the darkness with as a first card the Star, representing God’s Love saving us from evil and secondly the Moon, representing knowledge of your inner self. You need to know your inner self before You can see the Light and appear in front of God’s Justice.

The highest pair represents this Eternal Light with the Sun and the World, the World representing Paradise in Heaven. At this level we know our inner self and the Soul found back its state of purity that it had at our Birth. This purity is symbolized by the innocence of naked children. The Soul is ready for the Judgement of God for Rebirth or Eternity.

According to Plato, in order to purify the Soul of Reason we need to practice Prudence. Those who are practising Temperance, Fortitude and Prudence, are also practising Justice. Because the Justice card existed long before the other two virtues, it replaces here Prudence, and we find above this level the Virtue Justice as a third spoke of the Tarot Wheel.

Finally in the axis of the Tarot Wheel we find the image of God himself resurrecting the Death and judging the Soul, deciding between Rebirth and Eternity. Rebirth for those whose life wasn’t perfect and Eternity for those who lived as a Saint.

And this brings us to the last image of the Visconti Sforza Tarot, presenting the Tarot Wheel. Nine pairs of two cards form the Tyre of the Wheel. Remark the place of the Village Fool, both before the Street Performer as the first card of the human life cycle and next to and after the World representing reincarnation. At the next level, the three spokes of the Wheel are formed by three cardinal Virtues, Temperance, Fortitude and Justice. And finally on the highest level, in the axis of the Wheel, the Last Judgement with an image of God judging the human Soul.

The Tarot Wheel

Remark the importance of the number three in this arrangement. As a tyre we have 3 groups of 3 pairs each. The whole structure consists also of three levels, the 18 cards representing the human life cycle from birth to rebirth forming the first level, the 3 virtues representing the moral values as a second level and last but not least, the last judgement, representing God’s Justice, forming the third level. Tarot in the Renaissance was certainly a game, but is was also a educational tool to explain the structure of Life.

And here ends my theory about the internal structure of the Visconti Sforza Tarot. This structure is based on the analysis of the images themselves. Can this structure be used for other Tarot games? It surely can, but because each author had its own view on the Tarot, the resulting Tarot Wheel differs from game to game. In the context of this article, the space is not available, but this fascinating story about the original structure of the Tarot will be further extended to the Tarot of Marseille during the Tarot Convention in Sainte Suzanne in September this year [2011].

The original edition of the Xultun Tarot and its companion book The Maya Book of Life: Understanding the Xultun Tarot by Michael Owen are available from Kahurangi Press at www.xultun.com

The Xultun Tarot was created by New Zealander Peter Balin in 1976. It is also known as the Maya Tarot or the Maya Book of Life. It consists of twenty-two cards of the major arcana plus two cards representing the masculine and the feminine principles and fifty-six cards of the minor arcana (Cups, Jades, Staffs and Swords). The Maya “x” is pronounced “sh” so Xultun is pronounced “shool-tun.”

Where did the tarot come from?

The Maya Book of Life: Understanding the Xultun Tarot challenges the Western-centric notion that archetype of the tarot belongs solely to one geographical place and one historical period.

Tarot cards first appeared in Renaissance Italy in the 14th century. With the late 19th century esotericism of the Order of the Golden Dawn, for example, the cards and their interpretations tended to become more and more arcane as with the Rider-Waite or Crowley decks. Early European decks, such as the Marseilles Tarot, give us a clearer view. Unlike many later tarot they are not burdened with self-conscious symbolism nor do they attempt to make the cards conform to a particular metaphysical or psychological theory. In the last twenty or thirty years there has been an explosion of New Age tarot decks. Unfortunately, most of these have little or no connection to the underlying archetypal structure of the tarot and are often a collection of pictures that solely reflect the author’s conscious intent.

Western culture emerged from the last physical Ice Age over 10,000 years ago but in the last 2,000 years it has succumbed to a spiritual Ice Age. The tarot first appeared in Europe when it was being ground under the glacier of Christianity and had been almost completely severed from its indigenous and instinctual roots by 5,000 years of “progress” and “civilisation.” We shall see the significance of this historical time period and the year 2012 in the Planet Earth card. When spirit and nature become estranged in a rational culture, as had occurred in medieval Europe, the result is that divination and other non-rational pursuits have to live in the shadows. At the same time they become increasingly needed, not to foretell the future but to bring about balance between spirit and nature, this world and the other world, head and heart.

Carl Jung said, “The ideal of spirituality striving for the heights was doomed to clash with the materialistic earth-bound passion to conquer matter and master the world. This change became visible at the time of the Renaissance.” It was a time when scholars had returned to the only roots they could find that they thought were “civilised” enough and were in the neighbourhood—classical Greek and Roman culture. Their desire was to be reborn into an age of light out of the ignorance and superstition of what they called the “Dark Ages.”

The brilliant but highly specialised consciousness of the Renaissance later became the “Age of Enlightenment” of the 17th and 18th centuries. This philosophical and cultural movement, seen in the writings of John Locke, Rene Descartes and Thomas Hobbes, for example, had an abiding faith in the power of reason to engender progress and enlightenment. However, this enlightenment came at a price. What was of the earth, the feminine and nature fell into the collective shadow. Just as a dream compensates for the one-sidedness of personal consciousness so archetypes compensate for the one-sidedness of cultural consciousness. The tarot emerged from the collective unconscious during the Renaissance as a compensation for the excesses of what was to become “Western” culture.

The tarot is a gift, created not by any individual consciousness or particular culture, but by spirit or, in psychological terms, the collective unconscious. It was not invented but emerged in response to a need for balance and beauty. Not balance between humans but for humans to be able to hold the balance between nature and spirit within themselves. The tarot allows spirit and nature to come into balance through the intercession of humans, a theme we shall return to throughout the book.

When an archetype emerges from the collective unconscious it arises in different places and cultures and historical times. The form of the archetype may be different but the essence is the same. We see the same archetype that underlies the tarot in the Cabala with its 22 Sephiroth, alchemical manuscripts like the Rosarium Philosophorum with 20 woodcuts and Splendor Solis with 22 paintings, the biological structure of DNA and the 20 or 22 amino acids, the Maya vigesimal system based on the number 20, the teachings of the Twenty Count, and the 20 + 2 cards of the Xultun Tarot major arcana.

What is the tarot?

The tarot is an aide-mémoire for the soul. It is an archetype in itself as well as a series of archetypal images that tell the story of the stages of spiritual and psychological development that are possible over a lifetime. It is the story of the flowering of the soul and how it participates in the great cycles of creation. It is a symbolic depiction of the soul’s journey from spirit to substance and back to spirit, from heaven to earth and earth to heaven, and finding heaven on earth and earth in heaven. If we look at the major arcana we see the Great Light at the top of the deck above the Fool and the Sorcerer. At the bottom of the deck we see the zigzag design symbolising the earth. All the human action happens in between and in the process both spirit and substance are changed.

The tarot embodies two principal archetypes. First, the archetype of the Self and how it manifests over a lifetime. Jung defined the Self as the organising centre of the psyche or the “God-image within.” Second, the archetype of number which Jung said was the archetype of order become conscious.

Differences

The Xultun Tarot is similar to other tarot decks in that there are twenty-two major arcana and fifty-six minor arcana. However, it differs in several important ways.

The names and numbering of the Xultun cards differ from the European tarot. Rather than Roman numerals, the Xultun cards are numbered at the bottom of each card using the Maya notation where a “dot” is one and a “bar” is five.

The Xultun is the only tarot where the major arcana, when laid out, form a picture. This is not an artistic convenience or an aesthetic gloss but a reflection of the fact that the tarot is an interconnected whole with multiple cross-connections between the cards. Although the illustrations in this book show a two-dimensional picture, the Xultun Tarot is actually a spherical, 3D hologram. Each card resonates with all the other cards in specific patterns that we shall explore further in the Loom of Time chapter.

As well as a richly cross-connected web, the cards also form a linear sequence that tells the story of the transformation of the soul. Many interpretations of the tarot lean towards considering the cards individually in isolation from each other rather than as part of a coherent and connected developmental sequence. Because the European tarot do not emphasise the developmental sequence of the cards they have blurred the difference between the first and second halves of the deck. The cards in the first half of the Xultun Tarot, from the Priestess (2) to the Balance (11), have more to do with personal and collective processes whereas the cards in the second half of the deck, from the Hanged Man (12) to Planet Earth (21), are more concerned with impersonal and archetypal processes.

The Xultun Tarot was the first tarot not based on traditional images derived from the medieval European tarot or the Western occult tradition. The imagery and teachings of the Xultun Tarot are indigenous to the Americas so the cards are less encrusted with the layers of European tarot interpretation that have accrued over the centuries.

Finally, because of its imagery the Xultun Tarot reveals more clearly the archetypal pattern that underlies all tarot decks.

Beginnings

Peter Balin was born near New Plymouth, New Zealand. A self-taught artist, he travelled widely and by the mid-1970s was living in Los Angeles. In a talk he gave in 1977 he relates how, on the evening of December 21, 1975, some friends came to his house and one of them had a tarot deck. It was the first tarot deck he had ever seen and Balin thought it was sort of medieval and uninteresting. Later in the evening one of his friends suggested that he should draw a tarot deck but Balin thought it was a silly idea and said so. Right in the middle of his protestation:

“Something occurred which had never happened to me before in my life, and which is extremely difficult for me to explain. The only way that I can do so is to say that it approximated a colour slide going on in my brain. That is all of a sudden, I was telling her how crazy I thought she was, and the next minute… Voom! I should say about like that, it’s very difficult to describe because it was not quite like that either. But this large thing appeared in my head it seemed, or somewhere inside of me, I just really don’t quite know where.”

The image was of the twenty-two cards of the major arcana assembled to make one picture and all the figures were in Maya dress. The next morning Balin had a tremendous urge to paint. He took a sleeping bag to the art gallery where he worked and slept on the floor. He painted almost day and night for three months. Balin said, “Apparently I had a lot of the qualifications necessary to be able to make this deck. One of [which] was that I knew nothing about the Tarot. Because if I did, obviously I would be tripped up by what I knew. There would be a great battle in my head.… Within a year of the time that the original cards were painted, they were printed and out on the market. Obviously something somewhere felt that it was very important to get these cards out.”

For the 2010 edition Kahurangi Press have reproduced the cards in their original size and vivid colours. And, in cooperation with Peter Balin, they have redesigned the back of the cards in cinnabar red with a new feathered serpent design and the box in green with a blue feathered serpent encircling it.

Historically, almost all tarot decks were named after their creator but Balin didn’t want the deck named after him. So he made a list of Maya place names and selected Xultun, the name of a Maya site near Tikal in north-eastern Guatemala. Sometime after painting the cards, Balin discovered that the word xultun also means “a storage place” where the Maya stored water or maize. The limestone of the Yucatan peninsula is so porous that no water collects on the surface. The only sources of water are a few cenotes—deep, steep-walled sinkholes with water at the bottom. So the Maya had to dig bottle-shaped cisterns or xultun beneath the ground. These had broad, sloping surrounds, plastered with limestone, to funnel rainwater into the cistern. The bodies of human sacrifices were thrown into abandoned xultun and in shamanic healing ceremonies the conjured evil spirit was cast into a xultun. So the Xultun Tarot is a storage place, a container for the light and the dark, and a repository for seeds of knowledge.

Another other use for the xultun was as a star-tube. The Maya created a sophisticated astronomical calendar for marking the progression of time. For them, time was alive and events were conducted on dates that were most charged with ch’ulel or life force. To make their calendrical calculations they observed the movement of the stars during the day as well as at night. The Maya priest sat at the bottom of a xultun looking up at the sky through its narrow neck. [xultun] Here, even at midday, he could see the stars quite clearly overhead. In the early 1600s the Italian astronomer Galileo used a similar method for observing stars during daylight by sitting at the bottom of a deep well. So when we open the Xultun Tarot we are looking through the star-tube of the tarot, in the daylight of consciousness, at our stars—the patterns of our soul’s movement in time.

Balin had lived for some months in a small Maya village with many ruins close by. He spent the summer of 1972 sketching images at Tikal. The first six figures in the cards (Fool, Sorcerer, Priestess, Consort, Ruler and Priest) are all drawn from wooden lintels in Temple III at Tikal as are the glyphs running across the base of the platform that the last three figures stand on. The glyphs between the second and third rows come from Stela 26 at Tikal. Additional designs are taken from Stelae 1 and 31. A stela (Latin for standing stone) was an upright stone slab or pillar often carved with glyphs. Maya called them tetun, or “tree-stones.”

Balin said he did find a way of signing the cards. He was born on a farm on the slopes of Mount Taranaki in the North Island of New Zealand. At the bottom left hand side of the Sorcerer card we see the same mountain.

Twisted Hairs

Beginning in the early 1970s, with the publication of Carlos Castaneda’s books, a loosely-connected body and lineage of teachings which had previously been an oral tradition became accessible to the public. Since the mid-1970s they have been taught by Harley SwiftDeer Reagan and written about by various authors such as Teisha Abelar, Lynn Andrews, David Carson, Florinda Donner, Jamie Sams and Hyemeyohsts Storm.

The source of knowledge was a teacher or teachers to whom the author apprenticed or a tradition or lineage from which the teachings came. For Andrews it was Agnes Whistling Elk and Ruby Morning Star from Saskatchewan, for Castaneda it was Don Juan and Don Genaro, for Storm it was Estchimah and the Zero Chiefs, and for Reagan, who studied with Storm, it was Navajo medicine man Tom Two Bears Wilson and the Twisted Hairs Medicine Council of Elders.

Traditionally, Twisted Hairs were medicine people, shamans and storytellers who travelled throughout the Americas (Turtle Island). What differentiates a Twisted Hair from a traditional medicine person is their ability and desire to seek knowledge from outside their tradition. These men and women gather knowledge from every direction of the wheel of life in order to find their own centre and come into alignment with the Creator. Hair symbolises knowledge and a Twisted Hair is one who braids knowledge from all traditions and ways into his or her Path with Heart and makes it their own knowledge. Their purpose, their dream, is to preserve the beauty and integrity of the web of life that has been dreamed by the consciousness of this planet. They hold the breath and blood of this first dream, so that we can feed it, remember it and dream their dream onwards.

The name Xultun has Twisted Hairs associations. At its height Tikal was the largest Maya city with a population of 90,000 people but was abandoned around 900 CE. Tikal was the name used by the local Itzá Maya people and means “Place of Voices” or “City of Echoes.” But this is not the original name of the city. The name glyph of Tikal was recently deciphered by epigrapher David Stuart as Mutul. The glyph appears in the Sorcerer card. A name glyph was like a national flag or coat of arms for a Maya city-state. The central part of Tikal was called Yax Mutul which means “Great Green Bundle.” The surrounding area over which Tikal ruled, which likely included Xultun, was referred to as Mutul which means “knot of hair,” “hair bundle,” or “hair twisted or coiled and tied into a bun.” The Temperate Man, the number 14 card, is one of the most important cards in the Xultun Tarot and he is a Twisted Hair.

Some Twisted Hairs carried a medicine item similar to the Xultun Tarot in their medicine bundles. These “cards” were made of sandpaintings on thin wood and covered with animal glue and contained something from each of the Mineral, Plant, Animal and Human Worlds. It was known as the Book of Life or the Children’s Fire. The Xultun Tarot is the Holder, Keeper and Teacher of many of the Twisted Hairs teachings (or Shields of Knowledge) in symbolic form.

[Michael Owen is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Tauranga, New Zealand]

Cover image: The White Bird by Michail Grobman, 1987
Painting and gouache on paper

Human Development and Tarot Hermeneutic

by Inna Semetsky

This book originated as an action-research project conducted between 1992 and 1994 under the auspices of the Californian Behavioral Board Science Examiners when I was a postgraduate student enrolled in the Masters of Arts degree program in the area of Marriage, Family and Child Counseling and Human Development at Pacific Oaks College in Pasadena. Unbeknown to me at the time, my study was to be a type of research analogous to what Jungian scholar Robert Romanyshyn will have called more than a decade later “research with soul in mind” (Romanyshyn, 2007). Yet back then in 1992 I was not only ten years away from the subject matter of my future doctorate in the area of philosophy of education and cultural studies, but also quite undecided on the topic of my Masters thesis that was eventually to be called “Introduction of Tarot readings into clinical psychotherapy: a naturalistic inquiry”.

Interestingly enough, and once again in accordance with Romanyshyn’s imaginal approach, my topic was about to choose me rather than the other way around! Referring to the imaginal, Romanyshyn emphasizes the role of this “third” dimension between the senses and the intellect as enabling an embodied way of being in the world within the context of complex mind reaching into the whole of nature. It was Henry Corbin who coined the imaginal world – Mundus Imaginalis or mundus archetypus, the archetypal world – as a distinct order of reality corresponding to a distinct mode of perception in contrast to purely imaginary as the unreal or just utopian. Yet, it is our cognitive function enriched with imagination that provides access to the imaginal world with a rigor of knowledge specified as knowing by analogy.

The method of analogy that mystics around the world have practiced for centuries defies the privileged role allotted to the conscious subject that observes the surrounding world of objects – from which he is forever detached – with the cool “scientific” gaze of an independent spectator so as to obtain a certain and indubitable knowledge, or episteme.

Mystics and poets (from whom Plato used to withhold academic status) historically played a participatory, embodied role in the relational network that forms an interdependent holistic fabric with the world thus overcoming the separation between subject and object. This dualistic split has been haunting us since the time of Descartes, confining us to what Corbin calls the “banal dualism” of matter versus spirit. As for the “socialization” of consciousness, it pretends to resolve the dilemma by making, according to Corbin, a fatal choice: either myth or historical reality. Either facts or fiction! This book avoids the binary fatality of either/or choice: we will see in Chapter 3 that Tarot renders itself to explication in both mythical and real historic, cultural, terms.

The sociological dimension is significant: Philip Wexler (1996, 2000, 2008), pointing out the current importance of religion and spirituality for socio-cultural life, ascribed the status of symbolic movement to sociology of education that aims to bring spirituality to secular, long-disenchanted and alienated, contexts so as to satisfy their hunger for meaning.

Wexler emphasizes an approach from within long-standing religious tradition and focuses specifically on Jewish mysticism. He calls for the “broad-scale revitalization…of the culture of modernity, a re-articulation of ancient religious traditions, and…the anti-institutional, but religiously-oriented movements of everyday life that we often referred to as instances and heralds of a ‘new age’” (Wexler, 2008, p. 9).

I share with Wexler his conviction that our present postmodern age calls for revision of the pre-modern traditions of theory, interpretation and understanding and especially in terms of following “the new age…tendency [by means of] opening the reservoir of the cultural resources of traditional, religious understanding… [in] mystical, experiential and spiritual aspects: from Hinduism, Tantra; from Islam, Sufism; from Christianity, mysticism; from Judaism, Kabbalah and Hasidism” (Wexler, 2008, p. 10).

This book will not only have added Tarot as a spiritual, both metaphysical and practical, system to Wexler’s list of multicultural traditions but will focus specifically on Tarot hermeneutic or on the art of, using the term from popular culture, Tarot readings. Etymologically, the Greek words hermeneuein and hermeneia for interpreting and interpretation are related to the mythic god Hermes, a messenger and mediator between gods and mortals, who crosses the thresholds and traverses the boundaries because he can “speak” and understand both “languages”, the divine and the human, even if they appear totally alien to each other.

As a practical method, Tarot hermeneutic allows us to relate to something essentially other but nevertheless understandable, knowable and, ultimately, known. The relation thus established between the generic “Self ” and “Other” in our real practical life is significant and has both epistemological and ontological implications. The dimension of the foremost importance is however ethical, considering that we live in a time of the multiculturalism and globalization when different values appear incommensurable and continuously compete, conflict, and clash!

In our current global climate permeated by diverse beliefs, disparate values, and cultural conflicts, understanding ourselves and others and learning to share each other’s values is paramount for the survival of our species. This requires an expansion of our consciousness using all available means, including the knowledge of the symbolic language of Tarot pictures that are worth more, as the saying goes, than many thousands of words. Classical Russian author Ivan Turgenev pointed out that a picture shows at a glance what it can take dozens of pages of a book to expound. Without making grand metaphysical claims concerning Tarot, this book will focus on its practical side as comprising my empirical research data. Yet, important theoretical stepping stones will be laid down through chapter 1 to chapter 7 to ground the empirical data that will be presented in minute detail in chapter 8. Chapter 8 will comprise the fifteen actual Tarot readings that have been documented as constituting the core of my research and published with the written consent of all participants.

So, coming back to 1992, I remember the day when I took the November- December issue of The California Therapist out of my mailbox and my eyes fell on the letter to the editor. The author of the letter was interested in learning of other professionals who were encountering in their practice people who were more interested in learning about their past lives and going to psychics, as the author put it, rather than discussing their parents and more recent childhood. The author felt that she and other therapists working with quite a number of “new age” clients needed more publicity.

When I read the letter written by a qualified mental health professional and published in a respected professional periodical, my first feeling was that of belonging. Wow! I am not alone in my pursuits! At that stage, being a postgraduate student, I did not widely publicize the fact that I was a Tarot reader. Yet the very fact of being a reader is what originally motivated me to want to become a professional counselor and to invest my time, money, mind and soul into the intensive research culminating in the book you are now reading.

Many years ago, eager to listen to anyone who would have provided any guidance to me in my seemingly vicious circle of then current life-tasks, problems and issues, I turned to readers. Nothing seemed to help, and I found myself going from crisis to crisis and losing the thread of connection with not only the external world but myself as well. Moving from one counseling room to another, I did not feel understood, and more and more doubts about my own integrity started to occupy my mind, further contributing to the loss of that connection, that fragile link, which enables one to know oneself.

It was the ancient “Know Thyself ” maxim that was inscribed on the temple of Apollo at Delphi and, as philosopher of education Nel Noddings (2006) reminds us, still remains the necessary, even if often disregarded, goal of education. It was the quest for meanings and evaluation of life-experience – an examined versus unexamined life – that Socrates was calling for.

Noddings is adamant about the importance of self-knowledge as the very core of education: “when we claim to educate, we must take Socrates seriously. Unexamined lives may well be valuable and worth living, but an education that does not invite such examination may not be worthy of the label education” (Noddings, 2006, p. 10, italics in original). Still more often than not education is equated with formal schooling (for children) or perpetual training (for adults) thus a priori marginalizing the realm of lifelong human development and experiential learning situated amidst real-life situations.

For me, such an informal – or, rather, post-formal (Steinberg, Kincheloe, and Hinchey, 1999) – education grounded in an existing cultural practice began when, on the verge of despair, I found myself sitting opposite a man who was a genuine Tarot reader. It was his reading that precipitated a catharsis: something that subconsciously I did not want to know or accept, that was repressed and stored away in my unconscious mind and thus not dealt with, was brought to my awareness, then explored and discussed by my reader and me, becoming in this process a meaningful reality.

I left that reading session fully aware that I had to deal with the emergent information as this new knowledge was me, my selfhood that so far has been denied, displaced, or sublimated. This process of informal guidance by means of a Tarot reading, that transgressed the boundaries between education and therapy, facilitated a process of development and personal transformation. This developmental, at once healing and learning, process is still going on, and in this quest I was and still am accompanied by the wonderful world of Tarot: I became a reader, in the parlance of popular culture. Or, in terms of academic discourse, a “bilingual interpreter” who can translate the “language” of the unconscious, projected in the array of Tarot pictures (chapter 7), into verbal expressions; and I consider this one of the richest and most liberating experiences a person can have in life.

The word education derives from Latin educare that means to lead out as well as to bring out something that is within. The word therapy derives from the Greek therapeia in terms of human service to those who need it. Education and counseling alike involve either implicit or explicit inquiry into the nature of the self and selfother relations. Carol Witherell notices that, ideally, each professional activity “furthers another’s capacity to find meaning and integrity” (1991, p. 84) in lived experience. Importantly both practices are “designed to change or guide human lives” (Witherell, 1991, p. 84).

In the area of human development, which is the focus of this book, the rigid boundaries between those apparently separate, in the contemporary context, disciplines of education and therapy become blurred: both are oriented to creating meanings for our experience that includes the realm of the yet unknown and unconscious. The role of unconscious learning has been systematically addressed by the Australian higher educator Marian de Sousa (2008, 2009) especially as a means for focusing on emotional and spiritual intelligence grounded in “the processes of feeling and intuiting” (de Souza, 2009, p. 681) in the combined context of education and mental health.

Tarot hermeneutic provides an unorthodox epistemic access to the realm of the unconscious analogous to Carl Gustav Jung’s analytical or depth psychology, to be addressed in chapter 2, when the effects of the archetypal dynamics comprising the field of the collective unconscious – a theoretical construct posited by Jung – is analyzed in practice. Jung’s biographer Laurens van der Post, in his introduction to Sallie Nichols’ book Jung and Tarot: An archetypal journey notices her contribution to analytical psychology by virtue of the “profound investigation of Tarot, and her illuminated exegesis of its pattern as an authentic attempt at enlargement of possibilities of human perceptions” (in Nichols, 1980, p. xv).

Contemporary post-Jungian scholar Andrew Samuels mentions “systems such as that of the I Ching, Tarot and astrology” (Samuels, 1985, p. 123) as possible even if questionable resources in analytical psychology, and quotes Jung who wrote in 1945: “I found the I Ching very interesting…I have not used it for more than two years now, feeling that one must learn to walk in the dark, or try to discover (as when one is learning to swim) whether the water will carry one” (p. 123). Irene Gad connected Tarot pictures with the stages of human development in the context of Kabbalistic teachings and alongside the Jungian process of individuation towards becoming authentic selves. She considered their archetypal images “to be…trigger symbols, appearing and disappearing throughout history in times of transition and need” (1994, p. xxxiv). Such historical and socio-cultural value of Tarot hermeneutic in the context of collective – not solely individual, but social – consciousness will be addressed in Chapter 9.

This book will demonstrate that Tarot, as an existing, albeit marginal, cultural practice traditionally located at the “low” end of popular culture, plays a significant role in the process of self-formation or construction of human subjectivity, thus becoming a means for the re-symbolization of the Self. Philip Wexler introduced the concept “resymbolization” as focused on the “collective symbolic or cultural work” (1996, p. 115; italics in original) constituting a process of cultural, societal change due to the reinterpretation of human subjectivity as grounded in “the interactive dynamics of relationality” (Wexler, 1996, p. 115) especially as it pertains to Jewish mystical teachings, Kabbalah, which is literally translated as Tradition. It is a relation as ontologically basic (versus an isolated and self-centered moral agent) that is also central to Nel Noddings’ ethics of care in education.

Hasidic philosopher Martin Buber, whose concepts were instrumental for Noddings, referred to the “wordless depths [when we] experience an undivided unity” (1971, p. 24; brackets mine) between the two people at the soul-level in the form of the famous I-Thou relation. These depths are filled not with words but with images, and the task of this book is to elucidate the images, to articulate them, to appreciate their role in the re-symbolization of the relational Self at both individual and collective levels.

For Buber, it is the lived world that engenders the personality of a particular individual. It is the world comprising the whole environment, both natural and social, that “‘educates’ the human being: it draws out his powers and makes him grasp and penetrate its objections” (Buber, 1971, p. 89). Buber deliberately puts the word educate in quotation marks to distinguish his new mode of the relational, shared, erotic educational experience from the old one-sided model based on the will to power and authority that neglects “experiencing the other side” (p. 96). It is the integrative dynamics between self and other, between consciousness and the unconscious, between I and Thou that constitutes an element of inclusion comprising education in which educator “is set in the midst of the service” (p. 103).

A relational, integrative approach is also a formidable Zeitgest in the area of another human service profession, that of psychological counseling and therapy (Corey, 1991). In the early ‘90s, Corey has been already advocating an integrative perspective taking into consideration therapists’ willingness to look into the expansion of their own outlook and into possibility of widening the range of techniques to accommodate a diverse population. Including rapprochement, convergence, and integration in the psychotherapeutic Zeitgeist, Corey envisaged that the current “Zeitgeist…will continue with this trend toward convergence and integration and that there will also be an increased emphasis on a spiritual perspective” (p. 429).

Michael Murphy (1993) also called for the integral practices that encompass a wide variety of domains in human nature in a comprehensive way; including somatic, affective, cognitive, volitional and, importantly, transpersonal dimensions. Edward Whitmont (1985), in the context of post-Jungian practices of psychotherapy, pointed out that solely verbal or reflective methods may not be sufficient. Acknowledging the limitations of just “talking therapy”, he emphasized that the development of psychic awareness achieved a new quality in terms of a novel relation to spiritual meaning. Whitmont pointed out a new developmental phase in the evolution of consciousness that demands a broader scope of awareness encompassing but not reducible to intellect alone.

Understanding that human consciousness undergoes evolution, growth, and expansion is an important premise in the present approaches to education for spirituality, care and wellbeing (De Souza, M., Francis, L., O’Higgins-Norman, J., and D. Scott, 2009; Gidley, 2009). Jean Gebser, a French polymath, referred to the evolution of human consciousness in terms of its intensification by means of progressively going though the archaic, mythic, magic, and mental structures to be finally superseded by the integral consciousness, which will have incorporated a spiritual dimension. Gebser pointed out that mythical bards like Homer are represented as being blind because their task was not to observe the visible world with the organ of sight, the eye, but to use insight, “a sight turned inward to contemplate the inner images of the soul” (Gebser, 1991, p. 271). It is an insight into the meanings of Tarot images, as this book will demonstrate, that leads to intensification, expansion, and re-symbolization of consciousness.

Another memory comes to mind. It is summer of 1993. I am busy working in my clinical internship in West Hollywood. The client population in the area, and accordingly in the agency I am working for, consists of mostly gay men. I am having a counseling session with “John”, in his thirties, and HIV positive. We are discussing his outbursts of sudden anger in the relationship with his live-in boyfriend, when abruptly John switches the issue: “I saw my spiritual guru yesterday,” he says. “She said she didn’t see a speck of death in me.”

The impact of that phrase on me, and the timing of it, was like a turning point. It brought a paradigm shift in my professional relationship with John. The session became illuminated by what was of paramount importance, significance and value in John’s painful and uncertain internal world. It redistributed the weights of issues he was overwhelmed with. It indicated that John was reaching out to whoever could understand his hopes and fears, acknowledge them, reflect back and help him in working through his problems. It happened to be his spiritual guru who cared about him and was able to provide him with the necessary reassurance.

This emotional desire as “the longing to be cared for…is manifested as a need for love, physical care, respect or mere recognition – [and] is the fundamental starting point for the ethics of care” (Noddings, 1998, p. 188). Such was John’s internal subjective reality – and this reality was addressed and mirrored in his spiritual quest. I began to wonder about the ambiguity of my professional role in this situation: what response or intervention could I, in my capacity as a counselor, provide in agreement with the framework of the behavioral-cognitive approach advocated by the agency I was working for?

What could one do within the limitations of a solely cognitive orientation aiming to behavior modification for this particular person whose initial assessment, according to his intake form, indicated an early stage of dementia? Desperate and overwhelmed by the turn of events in his personal experience, he turned to somebody outside this formal counseling room, to somebody he perceived as a spiritual guru. My immediate feeling was: if only I could introduce into our counseling sessions a spiritual dimension – and specifically by means of Tarot readings – John may very well benefit! At the very least his world view, which obviously included spiritual aspects, would be validated; at the very best, the meanings of the events in his life and the value of his personal experience, however tragic, would become open to his awareness.

Slowly the idea emerged. Nothing should prevent an existing phenomenon from becoming the subject of inquiry. The phenomenon of Tarot readings does exist; the shelves in the bookstores are crowded with popular publications; there are more than two hundred and fifty various decks available. There is a variety of advertising in popular media. TV channels have their own “psychic networks”; yet all of this exists mainly at the level of popular culture.

As noticed by Emily Auger (2004) in her research on Tarot and other meditation decks in the context of aesthetics, Tarot decks represent a popular, or “low”, rather than “high” art forms such as painting, architecture, or sculpture. Yet, it is Tarot that was to become the subject matter of my postgraduate research in the area of behavioral sciences, thus transgressing the borders between popular and academic cultures. Similar to Robert Romanyshyn’s “wounded researcher” (Romanyshyn, 2007) I was ready to step into the untapped unconscious field and to explore the many “wounds” underlying our perceptions and judgments.

There was no aim to prove or disprove anything, to qualify or disqualify, to compare or contrast. This study grew out of a desire to bring light to the often misunderstood realm of Tarot which is so much richer and valuable than its reductive popular role as a fortune-telling device, yet which is more often than not considered as such. The main “objective” of my study was, is, and will remain, the wellbeing of those who are seeking Tarot counsel.

A Tarot deck consists of seventy-eight pictorial cards, or Arcana. The meaning of Arcana (or Arcanum, singular) is that creative, but often missing, element in our lives, which is necessary to know, to discover in experience so as to be fruitful and creative in our approach to multiple life-tasks situated in the midst of experiential situations, events and our complex relationships with others. If and when discovered – that is, made available to consciousness – it becomes a powerful motivational force to facilitate a change for the better at our emotional, cognitive or behavioral levels and thus to accomplish an important ethical objective.

What is called a Tarot layout or spread is a particular pattern of the picturesque cards with a variety of images that are full of rich symbolism. Each position in the sequence of pictures constituting a particular layout has some specific connotations that will be addressed in detail in chapters 7 and 8. Tarot pictorial symbolism embodies intellectual, moral, and spiritual “lessons” derived from collective human experiences across times, places and cultures.

As such, Tarot “speaks” in a mythic format of symbols, the metaphorical universal language full of deep, even if initially opaque, meanings. The interpretation of Tarot images and pictures indicates a specific “hermeneutic, composed from the juxtaposition of disparate elements, [or] what Freud called pictographic” (Grumet, 1991, p. 75). As a symbolic system of reading and interpretation, Tarot is oriented toward the discovery of meanings for the multiplicity of experiences that would have otherwise appeared to lack meaning and significance. Thus the readings necessarily “honor the spontaneity, complexity and ambiguity of human experience” (p. 67).

The educational function derives from the holistic dimension embedded in experience that transcends the dualistic mind-body split and the scope of which expands to also incorporate the spiritual, transpersonal, domain. We thus acquire a better ability for self-reflection, self-knowledge, and a sense of value, purpose and meaningfulness of our experiences. Importantly we achieve a better understanding of what may appear to be the otherwise irresolvable moral dilemmas and which subsequently leads to the choice of right action and developing a better-informed, intelligent, decision-making ability.

In their monumental study, Crawford and Rossiter (2006) equate young people’s search for meaning, identity and spirituality with their very reasons for living and point out that meaning and identity are the same psychological reality looked at from different perspectives. From the viewpoint of meaning, it is an explanation of individual intentionality. From the viewpoint of identity, it is the individual’s distinctive self-understanding and self-expression (p. 33).

Noticing the link between the search for meaning, personal identity and spirituality, Crawford and Rossiter suggest that teachers should help their students “to look on their experience of education with a greater sense of its value” (2006, p. 321). It is a noble task, indeed, but it should be performed by teachers equipped with at least an equal if not greater sense of value and meaning of their own professional practice and their own personal development in terms of what Jung called selfeducation (chapter 2). Nel Noddings (2002) keeps reminding us that the aim of moral, holistic, education is to contribute to the continuous education of both students and teachers, in the dynamics between selves and others embedded in the caring relation.

“The attitude of care” (Noddings, 1991, p. 161) is characterized by the presence of attention or engrossment and is especially significant in the context of Tarot. Noddings refers to the story of the Holy Grail as told by Simone Weil (1951): In the first legend of the Grail, it is said that the Grail…belongs to the first comer who asks the guardian of the vessel, a king three quarters paralyzed by the most painful wound, “What are you going through?”… It is a recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a collection, or a specimen from the social category labeled “unfortunate,” but as a man, exactly like us. … This way of looking is first of all attentive. The soul empties itself of its own contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as he is, in all his truth. Only he who is capable of attention can do this. (p. 115).

Yet, John was not asked the question, “What are you going through?” within the agency’s behavior-modification approach. Nor that he would have been able to – consciously – answer this straightforward question anyway or wanted to engage in an explicit dialogue so as to intentionally share his pain and suffering with me. The counseling sessions under the adage of behavioral modification of the agency were supposed to “instruct” John to not get into arguments with his boyfriend. John’s referring to a conversation with his spiritual guru was an indication that he was looking for an alternative way to be cared for, to get attention especially because the probability of his early passing was his very reality.

To connect with the Other at the soul level means to connect via corpus subtile – the subtle, spiritual, “body” of emotions and feelings that are so often difficult to articulate precisely because they are buried deep in the unconscious, in the psyche. Their expressive language exceeds and spills over the limitations of our conscious discourse. It is the Tarot hermeneutic as the metaphorical, symbolic, quest for the Holy Grail that helps us in articulating what otherwise betrays words. This takes place because of the symbols’ functioning to bring the unconscious wounds and pains to the level of cognitive awareness, therefore engaging with the psyche and making it whole, healing it.

The psyche becomes filled with the new meanings of experiences and the acquired sense of not only interpersonal connection but, ultimately, spiritual communion. The plurality of evolving meanings express themselves indirectly, in symbolic form, and symbols act as transformers capable of raising the unconscious contents to the level of consciousness, therefore ultimately performing what Jung called the transcendent function when the implicit meanings become explicit by virtue of “becoming conscious and by being perceived” (Jung in Pauli, 1994, p. 159). The readings described in chapter 8 of this book were conducted in the spirit of what Jean Watson (1985) called, in the area of nurse education, the occasions of caring. Noddings explains that the occasions of caring constitute the moments when nurse and patient, or teacher and student, meet and must decide what to do with the moment, what to share, which needs to express, or whether to remain silent. This encounter “needs to be a guiding spirit of what we do in education” (Noddings, 1991, p. 168); such a guiding, relational and caring, spirit ontologically preeminent in Tarot hermeneutic.

Referring to “a hermeneutic lag [as] a poor reading of cultural tendencies” (Wexler, 1996, p. 5) that has become frozen in the dominant structures of the over-rationalization of knowledge, Wexler calls for the cultural, theoretical, and educational renaissance. His intent is to gather the holy sparks of the Kabbalistic creation myth told in the mystical Judaism as “the vital residue of an uncontainable supernal light [that] remain glowing in the dross of fragments of worldly vessels unable to contain them. So it is with…reinterpret[ing] ancient traditions in contemporary fields of thought. We have some glimmering, but only within the prevailing cover of opaque and limiting fragments. What I hope for…is an opening toward those premodern traditions, and their inspirational ‘sparks.’” (Wexler, 1996, p. 113) To reclaim the divine sparks at the level of human cultural practices is a challenge that this book intends to meet. The restored light as the central metaphor will have contributed not to the over-rational Enlightenment of modernity but to a postmodern spiritual Illumination that would defy pessimism and the frequent fatalistic resignation currently permeating individual and collective consciousness, locally and globally.

In the remarkable book Educating for Intelligent Belief or Unbelief, Nel Noddings (1993a) comments that some of the new age criticism appears superficial and “lacks the intelligence” (p. 39) which she encourages in her work. Noddings points out that this type of education will put “great emphasis on self-knowledge… that… must come to grips with the emotional and spiritual as well as the intellectual and psychological” (p. xiv). Analogously I encourage an intelligent and open attitude in the book you are going to read.

Furthermore, you will discover that Tarot hermeneutic paves a road toward such expanded self-knowledge and that using Tarot symbolic system as an educational and counseling “aid” enables us to learn from life-experiences hence becoming able to acquire intelligence and wisdom, indeed urged by Noddings. Philip Wexler suggested that many of the assumptions underlying the new age culture should be deeply deconstructed into the ancient core religious traditions from which they perform their bricolage. The next chapter 2 will focus on the notion of bricolage per se as constituting a theory-practice nexus in which the Tarot hermeneutic is embedded.

[> purchase copies of Re-Symbolization of the Self]

Review by Bonnie Cehovet
www.bonniecehovet.com

Author: Robert Swiryn
Pau Hana Publishing
2010
ISBN 978-061530438-0

The history of the Tarot is quite an interesting one, and one that is often traced by the imagery in the cards. In The Secret of the Tarot, Swiryn attempts to show that somewhere along the line the Marseilles Tarot (a specific style of Tarot that has its roots in early Italian decks) may have come to carry the story of the Cathars, a thirteenth century sect of religious heretics.

In his preface, Swiryn notes that in his opinion, the Marseilles Tarot carries what he terms a classical look, as opposed to more modern decks, which he feels have drifted away from historical authenticity. In his personal studies on medieval history, Swiryn began to recognize connections between historical characters and events of this time period and the images in the Tarot cards. He goes on to say that he feels that both the story of the Cathars, and their spiritual message, seemed to have found a place in the cards. The thesis he formed was that a person, or group of people, found a way to use the Tarot of Marseilles as an instructional vehicle to preserve the story of the Cathar persecution by the Roman Catholic Church and the King of France.

What Swiryn presents here is the story of the Cathars (a look at the Albigensian Crusade, the subsequent Inquisition and the fate of the Cathars), and the supposition that this story is concealed within the Marseilles Tarot imagery.

The book is in two parts: the first part covers the history of the Cathars through the lens of the Roman Catholic church, the medieval Languedoc and the Counts of Toulouse, the Cathars themselves, the Albigensian Crusade and the development of the Tarot. The second part covers the twenty-two Major Arcana of the Tarot, and attempts to look at what the creators of the Marseilles Tarot had in mind when they designed their cards. Through the lens of historical context, Swiryn attempts to show the connection between the spiritual beliefs of the Cathars and the imagery in the deck.

A great deal of research has gone into this book. People familiar with the Tarot world will recognize names like Robert O’Neill, Stuart Kaplan, Michael Dummett, Paul Huson, and Alfred Douglas. The specific Marseilles Tarot that is used throughout this book is the Nicholas Conver deck. Other illustrations are used to show the symbols and imagery used during this time period, such as a stained glass of the Virgin Mary in Majesty from Notre Dame de Chartres, the bell tower at St. Sernin, and the martyrdom of St. Sernin. These are all reflective of the times that the Cathars lived in.

Would it have been possible for the story of the Cathars to be imbedded in the Marseilles Tarot? On the surface, yes. Cathars could have worked amongst the artisans that cut the wood blocks for the Tarot cards. Probable – no. And if the story of the Cathars was embedded in the cards, it may have been done after their time, by someone else, to simply keep their story alive.

In Part 2, where the cards are presented, the connections that Swiryn makes between the Cathars and the Marseilles Tarot images are, in my opinion, tenuous at best. Tenuous, but worth considering. In the Lovers he attempts to make the case that the imagery was significantly altered from older decks to give it new meaning.

For example, Swiryn surmises that just as the two figures Lovers card in the Visconti-Sforza Tarot are generally accepted to represent the two families, the three figures in the Lovers card of the Marseilles Tarot may point to historical figures within the Albigensian story. He posits that the third figure may represent the French Regent (Blanche of Castille), intervening between Raymond VII (the middle figure) and Beatrice (the younger woman on the right). Another theory presented here is that the Marseilles version of the Lovers was sometimes referred to as the Two Paths, with the figure on the left representing the institutional church, and the figure on the right representing Love.

There are many other instances of information that is offered from a slightly different viewpoint than is generally considered. At the least it is interesting, including the thought that if Cathar history has been encoded in the Marseilles Tarot, that it was done hundreds of years after the demise of the Cathars, perhaps by Cathar sympathizers that were involved in the printing of the decks.

The Secret of the Tarot is written on a level that makes it readily understood by all levels of Tarot student. Between the footnotes and the bibliography, it is easy to see where Swiryn is referencing his material, so that anyone interested in following up with studies of their own may do so. There is one minor glitch, in that Robert O’Neil’s e-book Catharism and the Tarot was inadvertently left out of the bibliography, but it is acknowledged in Swiryn’s footnotes.

For anyone interested in the history of the Cathars, in the Marseilles Tarot, or in Tarot history, this is a book that I would recommend. The ideas presented here may not be universally accepted, but they do offer food for thought.

© December 2010 Bonnie Cehovet