Excerpt THE ESOTERIC Ancient Sources Rediscovered in Hermeticism and Cabala

By Ronald Decker

Taken from the Introduction

Games

Some Tarotists, especially in the English-speaking world, may be unaware that Europeans use the Tarot deck for playing a game. It is a trick-taking game with wide variations. The rules have been thoroughly researched, notably by . 1 Prior to his publications, many Tarotists avoided discussing the Tarot in the context of game playing. It seemed too mundane and incompatible with their idea of the Tarot as a divinatory implement and a venerable relic. In antique Tarot decks and in most modern editions, two sets of cards are discernible. One set is comparable to common playing cards and has 56 cards aligned as 4 suits. The suits are identified by emblems: , , , . In standard , each suit has numeral cards, through Ten, with their values displayed in configurations of suit-signs. Each suit has court cards (Page, , , ). The common cards have been augmented by a set of allegories, usually 22 of them. They are arranged in a hierarchy of 21, plus a special card, , which can be unnumbered or marked 22 or 0. In the earliest examples, the cards have no numbers to specify the hierarchy. It had to be memorized. For the game of Tarot, the allegories serve as trumps, more powerful than any suit card. The Fool is special: it can be played in lieu of a suit card or a but cannot win a trick. Modern research proves conclusively that the aforementioned suits evolved prior to the trumps. The 4-suit deck (ca. 1345) was imported from the Muslim Middle East to Christian Europe. That deck was the general model for the suits, except that the imports had only three court figures, all male. Europeans sometimes added the rank of Queen. In north Italy (ca. 1440), courtiers also added the trump cards to create the Tarot. The first version seems to have had

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only 14 trumps. The full complement and the Fool were added before 1470. In the antique examples, the trumps are always found in tandem with the suits. As the Tarot diffused across Italy, different locales adopted somewhat different game rules, trump hierarchies, and trump imagery. Which rendering is the likely original? I can only affirm that my theory is best fulfilled by the so-called Tarot de (figure 0.1).

Oracles Tarot , as we know it today, did not emerge until the 1700s. It was first mentioned by a Parisian fortuneteller, , whom we will meet in my concluding chapters. For the numeral cards in his Tarot, he adapted his previous use of a local deck having the French suit-signs (, , , ). But how had those cards acquired their key meanings? I eventually will discuss the exiguous evidence for a lost system extracted from the Jewish cabala. Etteilla sought cabalistic influence in the trump cards, too. He knew variations of the Tarot de Marseille , but he completely altered some of the trump subjects and forced their hierarchy into a new order. He insinuated Egyptian motifs. For instance, his World trump includes two pyramids flanking Isis, the Egyptian personification of Nature. Etteilla referred to the trumps as “major hieroglyphs,” the suit-cards as “minor hieroglyphs.”

Allegories We know of two of Etteilla's contemporaries, Court de Gébelin and the Comte de Mellet, who also studied the Tarot de Marseille and theorized that it combined Egyptian mythology and Jewish cabalism. Those syncretic theories doubtless emerged from some underground trend, but not an authentic heritage descending directly from ancient Egypt. De Mellet divided the trump sequence into allegories concerning three stages of societal decline: the Ages of Gold, Silver, and Iron. (That formula did not originate in Egypt but, I suppose, could have become known there through contact with the Hindus, Persians, Greeks, or Romans.) De Mellet was the first author to dub the Tarot as a “Book of Thoth,” referring to the Egyptian god of and mysticism. Etteilla used the same title for his divinatory decks, both his common French deck and his uncommon Tarot. De Gébelin pretended to explain the trumps as illustrating some Egyptian story of Creation. Critics have assumed that the emphasis on Egypt was calculated to accommodate an eighteenth-century fad. The tendency to revive Egyptian ideas, images, and artifacts has occurred frequently enough for historians to give it a special term: “Egyptomania.” By the 1770s, the privileged classes in Europe were seeing Egyptomania in furnishings for homes, gardens, and tombs, as well as paintings by Hubert Robert, prints by Piranesi, sculptures by Clodion, plus various ballets, operas, plays, and initiation rites in secret societies. (De Gébelin had joined several groups devoted to the “ sciences” and enamored of Egyptian style.)

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De Gébelin, de Mellet, and Etteilla were creative but incompetent in their scholarship. We now know that cards did not exist in dynastic Egypt or in medieval Europe when the cabala commenced. Yet the Tarot's Egypto-cabalistic interpretation gained ardent adherents, enough to generate more books and a succession of Tarots in Egyptian style, often garnished with hieroglyphs. Some modern Tarotists variously bolster the Egyptomania and the pseudo- cabalism. The Egyptian magicians and Jewish mystics are currently asked to share credit with Sufi masters, Samaritans, Rosicrucians, Hindus, early Freemasons, Eleusinian hierophants, worshipers of the Earth Mother, Dionysian revelers, Chaldeans, Celtic sages, Babylonian priests. None of those groups, including Egyptian priests and Jewish rabbis, ever claimed to have invented the Tarot. Tarotists are undeterred and fabricate Tarot theories that defy the historical record. They exceed the interests and expertise of intellectuals in the Renaissance. The inflated constructions of most Tarotists are easy targets for sharp criticism from academia. 2 However, the critics of Tarotism go too far. They rightly discount the exotic trappings that the Tarot accumulated in the 1800s and 1900s. But we should not reject the original nucleus of the Egyptomane theory. I say this despite my own complaints about those eighteenth- century authors. We simply need to apply scholarship that was not available to them. In my research, I never followed any particular agenda or became the spokesman for any particular doctrine. I independently discovered clues and followed them wherever they led. In the end—after forty years of study—my theory actually uses ingredients that are popular in Tarotism, but I reorganize them with a respect for iconography.

Theory The Tarot was not invented by Egyptians; but I am certain that its inventor was a great admirer of Egypt. Court de Gébelin and his colleagues, although participating in a phase of Egyptomania, did not consider that the Tarot could have arisen in some earlier phase(s) of Egyptomania, rather than the Egyptian empire itself. Egyptomania occurred in Renaissance Italy, and, still earlier, at medieval Harran, in Asia Minor. The city was a center for esoteric studies, including Egyptian mysticism, magic, and . In my historical approach to deciphering the Tarot, I involve three main periods. 1. Astrologers in Harran, before AD 1000, invented the 4-suit deck of cards and used esoteric symbols as suit-signs. 2. Italian humanists, before 1440, supplemented the suits with Egyptianizing trumps, albeit blended with classical and Christian motifs. 3. French savants, by the 1750s, began interpreting the trumps along Egyptian lines but failed to consult the proper documents.

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