CHAPTER 3

MYTHS AND REALITY

Tarot myths abound: the Greek god of communication, the messenger Hermes, has been identified with the Egyptian mystical god Thoth who is said to have “given” his name to a Tarot deck known as The Book of Thoth. Yet, there does not exist a single certain and proven origin of Tarot cards. Different sources mention variety of geographical and historical roots: in Europe in the south of France, or Italy, or Spain; in the Far East, or in Egypt. Tarot richness derives from the fact of it encompassing the elements in common with so many different cultures and ethnic groups. There does not seem to be a straight or direct line of its descent from any particular area. When exactly Tarot first appeared in its functioning form remains unknown too, even if it is understandable that it is unlikely for Tarot in its current format to manifest its presence before the invention of the printing press. The imaginary point of the birth of Tarot does not seem to have a fixed position in the space-time system of coordinates. The migration of nations throughout history could have easily caused a migration of ideas, but these ideas happened to survive amidst their movement along the globe. It seems that on several occasions during the history of humankind one or another civilization gave birth to Tarot; hence such discrepancy in opinions of where and when Tarot originated. This chapter will go through some of the cultural memory traces left in history by the ancient Hermetic tradition and revived during the Renaissance (Yates, 1964, Faivre 1994; 1995). The messages encoded in the format of pictures were made more accessible to the public in an age when writing was a restricted act. Even if a singular linear descent is problematic, there remains some factual evidence regarding the origins of Tarot, as a produced deck in the form of the seventeen exquisitely painted cards, which are now located in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris and dating back to 1392, as has been documented in the French Court ledger. A current collection in Pierpont Morgan Library in New York comprises thirty five pictures from the full deck of the seventy eight, whose origin is believed to go back to around middle of fifteenth century. As a system of universal Gnostic knowledge, Tarot may be as old as the world or as young as the world; different civilizations, through generations, may have used various means, pictorial or otherwise, for encoding the same ancient, universal knowledge. Quite likely Tarot went through its own rebirth several times during its existence. The ideas inscribed in Tarot Arcana might have been circulating through- out the world since earlier times and may have only surfaced and attracted attention at the time of the Renaissance and the revival of Gnosticism. The Egyptian-born Plotinus reconstructed ancient Greek metaphysics by in- corporating elements of the Hermetic tradition, thereby founding the system that

23 CHAPTER 3 was in modern times called Neoplatonism as a synthesis of Plato’s ideas with other philosophical systems including pagan beliefs as well as the mystical teachings of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Plato himself was viewed by Neoplatonists as a transmitter of the earlier ideas of Pythagoras who, while remembered mainly as mathematician, was considered in ancient Greece to be a human incarnation of the god Apollo and sharing his divine powers. Plato’s Republic tells a story of prisoners living in illusion among the shadows on the walls of the infamous cave while remaining unaware of the bright light produced by the sun as the metaphor for true, real, knowledge. The soul’s quest to unite with what is missing parallels a hero’s journey away from the cave towards the sun, to which he is drawn by his love for light, for wisdom. This knowledge of the real is to be shared with those who are still chained to the walls; and this is the most challenging part of Plato’s story. We will see in chapter 4 that many images of the Major Arcana in the deck relate to celestial images, culminating in the Arcanum called The Sun indeed. In Plato’s Symposium, he elaborated on the erotic desire for the good and the beautiful as the highest aspiration of the soul’s quest. For Plotinus, the soul’s memories could be either in words or in images, and the feminine principle of the World Soul or Psyche is accompanied by a masculine one, Nous, as the World Intelligence. Still, they are but aspects of the ultimate unity, the One. Frances Yates notices that the “great forward movements of the Renaissance… derive their vigour…from looking backwards” (Yates, 1964, p. 1) to the Hermetic tradition and the harmonious, peaceful and prosperous Golden Age presided over by the virgin goddess Astraea and filled with Justice as the guiding archetype. The passing of the Golden Age is characterized by modern over-rationalization following the mystical death of the god Pan, or rational Apollo taking over nature- bound Dionysus. As a form of thought, which transforms beliefs into inner knowledge, or Gnosis, the Hermetic tradition survived many centuries into the Christian era. Revived by Marsilo Ficino, Pico della Mirandelo and Giordano Bruno, it informed the Renaissance, since then being manifested in a plurality of forms, including the pictorial representation of this knowledge in the symbols of Tarot. Ficino, who believed in the Egyptian roots of Hermes, has translated the Corpus Hermeticus into Latin. Giordano Bruno took the Egyptian revival even further: for him, the mind works solely through archetypal images that are reflecting the universe in the human mind. In the middle of fifteenth century the Jewish Kabbalah “penetrated Christian milieus and celebrated surprising nuptials with …Hermeticism” (Faivre, 1994, p. 7). The Kabbalistic Tree of Life is a metaphor for consciousness when the supreme unity, the One, not unlike in Plotinus’ scheme of things, incorporates both masculine and feminine principles as intelligence and wisdom. Russian philosopher and professor of law Valentin Tomberg, the author of the “magisterial work” (Faivre, 1994, p. 98) devoted to the meditations on the twenty-two Major Arcana of Tarot in the light of Christian Mysticism (published as Anonymous, 2002), cites sources as diverse as Plato and St. John of the Cross, Jewish Zohar and Christian St. Paul, Bergson and Ouspensky, Dionysus and Leibniz, St. Augustine

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