A Cultural History of Tarot ii A CULTURAL HISTORY OF TAROT Helen Farley is Lecturer in Studies in Religion and Esotericism at the University of Queensland. She is editor of the international journal Khthónios: A Journal for the Study of Religion and has written widely on a variety of topics and subjects, including ritual, divination, esotericism and magic. CONTENTS iii A Cultural History of Tarot From Entertainment to Esotericism HELEN FARLEY Published in 2009 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com Distributed in the United States and Canada Exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 Copyright © Helen Farley, 2009 The right of Helen Farley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. ISBN 978 1 84885 053 8 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress catalog card: available Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham from camera-ready copy edited and supplied by the author CONTENTS v Contents List of Illustrations vii List of Tables ix Acknowledgements xi Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Origins and Antecedents 6 The Emergence of the Playing Card Deck 8 Some Theories of Tarot Origin 18 Chapter 2: Renaissance Italy and the Emergence of Tarot 33 The First Tarot Deck 35 The Viscontis and the Italian Renaissance 39 The Purpose of the Deck 43 Tarot Imagery 45 Chapter 3: An Alternative Explanation of Tarot Symbolism 50 The Magician/Il Bagatella 51 Temporal and Spiritual Power: The Emperor and Empress, the Pope and the Popess 52 Love 58 The Chariot Misidentified 60 The Virtues: Fortitude, Justice and Temperance 62 The Old Man as Time 68 The Wheel of Fortune 69 The Hanged Man 70 Death 73 The Star, Moon and Sun: Astrology in Renaissance Italy 76 Angel 79 The World 80 Not a Tarot Trump but still the Fool 82 The Tower: Absent or Lost? 84 The Devil in the Deck 88 Chapter 4: The Transformation of Tarot into an Esoteric Device 93 France in the Eighteenth Century 95 Occult Philosophies 98 Antoine Court de Gébelin 101 Etteilla 106 vi A CULTURAL HISTORY OF TAROT Éliphas Lévi 111 Papus 117 Chapter 5: Across the Channel to England 121 The Nature of British Occultism 122 William Wynn Westcott 126 S. L. Mathers 128 The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn 129 Aleister Crowley 137 William Butler Yeats 142 Arthur Edward Waite 144 Chapter 6: Tarot and the New Age 151 Predominant Themes of New Age Thought 152 Combining Traditions and Methods 157 The Influence of Feminism 159 Neopaganism 161 A Fascination with other Religions and Cultures: Great and Small 165 History Repeating 169 Conclusion 173 Notes 177 Bibliography 235 Index 265 CONTENTS vii Illustrations 1. Mamlnjk playing cards now housed in the Topkapi Sarayi Museum, Istanbul. 14 2. The Tarocchi Players, Casa Borromeo, Milan. 35 3. The Bishop by Hans Holbein, first half of the sixteenth century. 48 4. The Popess from the Visconti-Sforza deck housed in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. 56 5. Fortitude from the Visconti-Sforza deck housed in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. 65 6. The Hanged Man from the Visconti-Sforza deck housed in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. 71 7. Death from the Visconti Sforza deck housed in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. 74 8. The Fool from the Visconti Sforza deck housed in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. 83 9. The Moon from a contemporary version of the Tarot of Marseille. 94 10. The Devil from a contemporary version of the Tarot of Marseille. 95 11. The World from a contemporary version of the Tarot of Marseille. 96 12. The Hanged Man recast as Prudence by Antoine Court de Gébelin in Le Monde Primitif. 102 13. Isis figures in Court de Gébelin’s version of The Star in Le Monde Primitif. 103 14. Lévi’s Baphomet as the Devil in Dogme et rituel de la haute magie. 116 15. Lévi’s Chariot as portrayed in Dogme et rituel de la haute magie. 118 16. The Moon card as represented in the Cipher Manuscript. 135 17. The Hierophant from Crowley’s Thoth Tarot. 137 18. Lust replaces Strength in Crowley’s trump sequence. 138 19. The Magus from Crowley’s Thoth Tarot. 140 20. The Fool from the Rider Waite deck. 145 21. The High Priestess from the Rider Waite deck. 146 22. Death from the Rider Waite deck. 147 23. The Kaiser replaces the Emperor in the Anti-Nuclear Wendländisches Tarot (1980). 154 24. Black Tortoises replace wands in the Feng Shui Tarot of Eileen and Peter Paul Connolly. 158 25. Odin plays the role of Emperor in the Haindl Tarot. 161 26. Marie Laveau replaces the Priestess in the New Orleans Voodoo Tarot. 167 viii A CULTURAL HISTORY OF TAROT 27. Simbi d’l’eau adorns the equivalent of the 8 of Cups in the New Orleans Voodoo Tarot. 168 28. The Wild Card is a novel addition to the New Orleans Voodoo Tarot. 169 CONTENTS ix Tables 1. Region-specific suit signs of tarot and ordinary playing cards. 7 2. The alignment of the ‘celestial princes and barons’ with the four orders. 36 3. Structure of the Etteilla tarot deck. 108 4. A comparison of Etteilla’s tarot cards with the Tarot de Marseille tarot trumps. 110 5. A table of correspondences to Hebrew letters formulated by Athanasius Kircher. Planetary spheres were arranged according to their supposed distance above the earth, from Saturn to the Moon as the closest. 115 6. Correspondences associated with tarot suit signs according to Éliphas Lévi. 117 7. Table of correspondences between the tarot trumps and the Hebrew letters according to Éliphas Lévi and the Cipher Manuscript. 133 8. Correspondences as given in the Sefer Yesirah̛ , by Papus and in the Cipher Manuscript. 134 9. Court card correspondences as described by Mathers in Book T. 136 10. The table of correspondences drawn up by Yeats while he was still a member of the Theosophical Society. 143 11. A table of correspondences between the four tarot suits and other systems including Jung’s four functions of personality used in the New Tarot. 156 x A CULTURAL HISTORY OF TAROT ILLUSTRATIONS xi Acknowledgements A book is a substantial undertaking and it cannot be completed without considerable support from colleagues, friends and family. I am fortunate in that I am well-endowed with all those people such that I hardly know how to whittle down my list. I would like first to thank Professor Emeritus Philip Almond who has uncomplainingly read drafts and made many helpful suggestions. Research travel is very expensive and I could not have undertaken it without the generous financial support of the University of Queensland Graduate School through the Graduate School Research Travel Award scheme. I would also like to acknowledge the generous support of the School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics and also to the Australian Association for the Study of Religion (AASR) for providing me with the funds to attend conferences and spread the seeds of my academic exploration. My research in Milan and London was greatly facilitated by many people who had not previously met me yet bent over backwards to meet my needs. I would particularly like to mention Patrizia Foglia at la Raccolta Bertarelli at the Castello Sforzesco in Milan. In London, I would like to extend my gratitude to John Fisher of the Guildhall Library; Jo Norman of the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum; Frances Rankine of the Prints and the Book, Word & Image Department of the Victoria and Albert Museum and the staff of the National Art Library. From I.B.Tauris I would like to express my gratitude to Alex Wright who believes that a book about tarot is viable! Thanks must also go to Jayne Hill who has tirelessly pored over my copy; every comma and fullstop. I reserve my thanks til last to my partner, James Boland, for his encouragement, support and good humour; for listening to the complicated exposition of my arguments when he would rather have been playing his guitar and for celebrating every word, every chapter and every milestone along the way. Introduction When we think of tarot, images of fortune-tellers, crystals and incense flash past our mind’s eye. Those with more romantic dispositions may imagine dark-eyed gypsies in colourful caravans, wending their way through the countryside, telling fortunes with cards for the curious few brazen enough to peek at their destiny before its blossoming. Outsized cards are shuffled, laid out and ‘read’; the order in which they are drawn, their symbolism and their position relative to each other are all significant for folk with eyes to see. Those who wish to possess a pack for themselves are confronted by a bewildering variety of decks: pagan tarots, astrological tarots, gypsy tarots, any number of Egyptian tarots, even a Metrosexual Tarot.1 In contemporary society where empirical scientific enquiry and strict rationalism are paramount, tarot has been associated with shoddy soothsayers and confidence tricksters, and it is in part for this reason that academics have deemed the area unsuitable for detailed examination.