Esotericism - Introd

THE
TAROT

Guildhall Library Tarocchi Cards, 1470

ALTHOUGH chiefly associated today with fortune-telling, divination and esoteric “spirituality”, the Tarot cards have a very mundane origin and were not associated with prophecy, divination, or the occult until relatively modern times.

IT is only in relatively modern times that these playing cards, containing echoes of medieval morality, became “the focus of esoteric investigations” and “a sort of popular religion or diagnostic tool for mind, body and spirit.”


ANTOINE COURT [de GÉBELIN]	Monde Primitif	Jean-Baptist ALLIETTE	Cartomancy

Antoine Court, (1725–1784) who called himself Antoine Court de Gébelin, was a Huguenot/Protestant minister and Freemason, born in Nîmes, France who initiated the interpretation of the Tarot as an arcane (supposedly ancient Egyptian) repository of timeless esoteric wisdom in a chapter of his compendium, Le Monde primitif, analysé et comparé avec le monde moderne (The Primeval World, Analyzed and Compared to the Modern World), published in 1781. The practice of cartomancy (fortune-telling using the Tarot deck) was popularized by Jean-Baptiste Alliette (1738–1791) an otherwise-obscure French merchant.

HISTORY of the TAROT/TAROTCHI/TRIUMPH CARDS

PLAYING cards arrived in Europe around 1370 and were modified from their Eastern forms to include various suits representing political rivalries and ecclesiastical hierarchies.

Surviving examples include the German Hofämterspiel cards from around 1450, depicting different nations and members of a royal household. These would later be transformed into nobility engaging in a hunt (King, Queen, Knight)

IN the fifteenth century cards were produced that were probably not used for gambling, but rather for some kind of didactic instruction: these represented traditional medieval Christian interpretations of virtues, vices, and the ordering of the cosmos. The most famous of these are the Mantegna Tarochi series created by Andrea Mantegna (1431-1503). The depicted images are mentioned by Mantegna's biographer, Giorgio Vasari, who states that Mantegna also devised copper prints of trionfi, “triumphs” or “trump” cards.

PLAYERS of modern bridge, whist, and poker will recognize the notion of “trumps” (trionfi/triochi) or wild cards that “trump” other cards. Rather than designating a particular card or suit of cards as trumps or wild cards, a set of fixed trumps were printed together with existing suit-decks in the fifteenth century to give the so-called “Tarot deck” containing both four suits and a fifth set of 22 trump or triumph cards.

THE designation of these as triumph cards suggests a possible reason for the subjects depicted on these cards. In classical antiquity and less frequently in medieval Europe a successful general would be accorded a “Triumph” after a successful campaign. The triumphal parade included what are today called “floats”: that is, wagons or chariots containing persons and objects that symbolized the social order and commemorated the victory. In medieval Europe - and still in many places today - this triumphal parade took place during “Carnival” on Shrove Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent: it was an opportunity to visually portray the purpose of the upcoming Lenten season. Some historians believe that the Tarot trumps depict the familiar floats and costumed individuals who annually participated in this parade, serving as symbols that emphasized the need for cultivating virtue, avoiding vice, and conforming to the divine and terrestrial orders.

Guildhall Denis van Alsloot-Ommeganck Brussels 1615. Triumph Archduchess Isabella

IT is only in relatively modern times that these playing cards containing echoes of medieval morality became “the focus of esoteric investigations” and “a sort of popular religion or diagnostic tool for mind, body and spirit.” Antoine Court, (1725–1784) who called himself Antoine Court de Gébelin , was a Huguenot/Protestant minister, born in Nîmes, France who initiated the interpretation of the Tarot as an arcane (supposedly ancient Egyptian) repository of timeless esoteric wisdom in a chapter of his compendium, Le Monde primitif, analysé et comparé avec le monde moderne (The Primeval World, Analyzed and Compared to the Modern World), published in 1781. The practice of cartomancy (fortune-telling using the Tarot deck) was popularized by Jean-Baptiste Alliette (1738–1791) an otherwise-obscure French merchant.

MODERN occultist enthusiasts of the Tarot particularly remember A.E.Waite for his collaboration with the British artist Pamela Coleman-Smith in producing the so-called Waite deck of Tarot cards, as well as for his 1910 commentary, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot. Both the deck and the book remain popular in the Wiccan and New Age movements; however, Waite denied the remote origins of Tarot cards and he considered their use their use in fortune-telling and divination less significant than as pictorial-symbolic images for use in Christian meditation:

there is no particle of evidence for the Egyptian origin of Tarot cards. […] The Tarot embodies symbolical presentations of universal ideas, behind which lie all the implicits of the human mind, and it is in this sense that they contain secret doctrine, which is the realization by the few of truths imbedded in the consciousness of all, though they have not passed into express recognition by ordinary men.

[...] I do not suggest that the Tarot set the example of expressing Secret Doctrine in pictures and that it was followed by Hermetic writers; but it is noticeable that it is perhaps the earliest example of this art. It is also the most catholic, because it is not, by attribution or otherwise, a derivative of any one school or literature of occultism; it is not of Alchemy or Kabalism or Astrology or Ceremonial Magic; but, as I have said, it is the presentation of universal ideas by means of universal types, and it is in the combination of these types--if anywhere--that it presents Secret Doctrine.