Michael’s Tarot Notebook
Essays on a Late-Medieval Artifact

The Tarot pack is the subject of the most successful propaganda campaign ever launched: not by a long way the most important, but the most completely successful. An entire false history, and false interpretation, of the Tarot pack was concocted by the occultists; and it is all but universally believed.
A Wicked Pack of Cards

An Introduction to the Notebook What this site is all about...	“Know your place, practice the virtues, and trust in God.’ The message of Tarot
The Pictures on the Cards A Description of the Tarot Trumps
The Riddle of Tarot Early Tarot’s Didactic Design
A Visual Summa of Salvation The Triptych Structure of Tarot de Marseille
TdM’s Ladder of Virtues Tarot de Marseille’s Allegorical Design
Three Medieval Christian Sermons A Septenary Structure of Tarot de Marseille
Wedding Symbolism The Mystical Wedding in Tarot de Marseille
Trionfi da Milano Ur Tarot – Capturing the Unicorn
The Mendicant’s Tale An Earlier Presentation of the Quadriga Theory
Fragments of Tarot History Chronological Fact Sheet and Index
Tarot Miscellany Book Reviews and Miscellaneous Essays

Introduction

This site is primarily about the allegorical meaning of a 560-year old card game. The “false history” of Tarot, invented by the occultists, was replaced by real history in 1980, with the publication of Michael Dummett’s The Game of Tarot. The “false interpretation” of the occultists was never plausible, and in 1986 all the main variations of it were shown to be untenable, with the publication of Robert V. O’Neill’s Tarot Symbolism. This site presents an alternative to those false interpretations, consistent with the real history and based on the images and sequence of the cards themselves.(1)

Other aspects of the Notebook, including the more documentary Fragments pages and the modern topics in the Miscellany pages, came about as a result of that interest in the original subject matter of the fifteenth-century Tarot trumps. Because of that focus on Tarot’s historical design, most of the material in the Notebook will not be of interest to the majority of Tarot enthusiasts—my apologies. However, there may be a few Renaissance Faire folk or other medievalists interested in a remarkable work of fifteenth-century Christian art that was also a hugely popular game.(2) Someday an art historian or medievalist will do scholarly justice to the iconographic genius of early Tarot—until then this Notebook can be thought of as a preview.

Our immediate next concern is to speak of the cards in their history, so that the speculations and reveries which have been perpetuated and multiplied in the schools of occult research may be disposed of once and for all.
The Pictorial Key to the Tarot

Looking for a Good Story

Once upon a time in a far away land—with very strange customs and beliefs—a very strange game was played with cards. Actually, the game itself was not nearly so strange as the deck that was used. It was a deck with five suits.

More specifically, the time was in the first half of the fifteenth century, and the far away land was Northern Italy. The peculiar customs included local festivals and holy feasts; Carnival and Corpus Christi celebrations; pageants, plays, processions. A pervasively-allegorical popular culture was expressed in art, literature, and everything from personal emblems to public monuments, from miscellaneous church furnishings to the facades of great cathedrals. The strange beliefs included the many varieties of medieval Christianity which defined the customs and culture. The game and the deck were what we call Tarot.

The game itself was a trick-taking game, not too unlike many other, later trick-taking card games. Tarot involved a trump suit, played when a player cannot otherwise follow suit. Unlike most such games today, however, the trump suit in the game of Tarot was always the same suit, a special fifth suit of permanent trumps, which was added to a standard 56-card deck of the times. This trump suit was made up of twenty-two cards with allegorical images. The images were in a ranked sequence, each one triumphing over (trumping) the lower ranking cards, and being triumphed in turn by the higher ranking cards. The original name of the deck was not Tarot, but carte da trionfi, cards with triumphs, or trumps. That’s what Tarot was, for three and a half centuries.

Since the late eighteenth century, Tarot has become other things, well beyond being merely a card game with allegorical trumps, and many esoteric meanings and uses have become associated with the trumps. The primary concern here, however, is what the trumps might have meant to fifteenth-century Italians, and specifically, the intended meaning of the original designer. That makes the exercise an iconographic quest. The historical deck designs discussed here predate the occultists’ discovery of Tarot, (with the exception of the Waite-Smith deck, discussed along with other contemporary topics in the Miscellany section).(3)

Although any number of meanings can be attached to the series of images, only that hypothetical historical meaning, the “author’s message”, can explain the design and answer the question, why were these pictures put in this sequence?(4) From the endless possible interpretations, is there a selection which can make sense of the series as a whole, so as to reveal what meaning might have inspired the design of this amazing artifact of art history? That is the Grail of Tarot iconographic studies. The subsequent inventions of late eighteenth-century French fortune-tellers and Freemasons, or their intellectual heirs, appear to have no historical relevance or explanatory value. Because these naive symbolists failed to research the actual history of their subject, and sought to install a predetermined system of meaning into Tarot rather than look for what might already be there, their historical speculations are worthless. Whether their inventions are of value to modern magi, mystics, and sibyls is another question, to be put to each individual who studies them for such purposes.(5) But the occultists contributed nothing to the historical quest.

What’s in the Notebook

Most of the pages in the Notebook are (or will be, when the Notebook is a bit more complete—future pages are shown below in red, while existing pages have links) devoted to exploring that intended meaning, looking for a “good story” to explain the images and their sequence. In addition, two sections have tangentially related pages. The Fragments of Tarot History pages comprise a timeline of over 350 Tarot factoids, with quotes and references to the sources from which they were taken. The pages in the Tarot Miscellany section are concerned with more contemporary topics, several of them relating to the early-twentieth-century Christian mystic, scholar of the occult, and inventor of modern Tarot, Arthur Edward Waite, and the Tarot trumps he designed. Pages in this section also review a handful of out-of-print books on Tarot history and meaning, and a few Tarot decks.

The Pictures on the Cards, describing and illustrating the twenty-two trump cards, is the first page in the Notebook. It mentions some of the most obvious aspects of the images, their subjects, and their relationships. Also included is some discussion of the ways in which the images were varied in early decks, and the extremely common practice of conflation, the invention of novel iconography to blend different motifs in a single image, giving multiple layers of meaning. In one particular pattern of Tarot deck such conflation is employed to produce a systematic, neatly structured design on each of the conventional layers of exegesis used by Christians throughout the Middle Ages. The interpretation offered here is therefore presented in five pieces, including a generic interpretation appropriate to all early decks, and four others, corresponding to the four layers of meaning originally included. (These five pages are emphasized with a shaded background on the menu above.)

The generic story is presented in The Riddle of Tarot, which lays out the didactic design of Tarot’s trump cycle. It is an interpretation applicable to all the varieties of early Tarot. Although the Tarot trumps were redesigned (the pictures changed a bit, the sequence altered some) more than a dozen times in their first century of existence, the basic outline of the most literal layer of meaning remained visible in most of these. (There were also a few complete redesigns, including the Sola Busca and Boiardo decks, which are outside the scope of this project.) The much more complex original story is broken into four sections, corresponding to the four layers of meaning. The literal meaning is presented in A Visual Summa of Salvation, for that is what the literal design of Tarot was. The allegorical layer of meaning illustrates the seven Cardinal Virtues, equally spaced in a “ladder of virtues” design and in an order of precedence from St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologia, (Political Prudence, Regnative Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, Temperance, Faith, Hope, and Charity), and is presented in TdM’s Ladder of Virtues. The moral (tropological or homeletic) layer of meaning takes the appropriate form of Three Medieval Christian Sermons. These are based upon three key messages of the New Testament that were dear to the medieval Christian mentality: the corruption of this world; the example set by Jesus; and the imminent Second Coming. A fragmentary anagogic, or mystical layer of meaning also appears to be present, reflected in mystical wedding (hieros gamos) symbolism suggesting personal union with God. This is discussed in the page, Wedding Symbolism.

Because that project is going to take a while to get written up, (so far, only the generic interpretation is online), an earlier version of the story is included, at least for the time being. The Mendicant’s Tale was written for a different Web project which never came to be, based on some of my posts to an online Tarot mailing list. While focusing on the moral layer of meaning, it discusses all four.

Although the primary focus of the Notebook is an exegesis of the Tarot trumps’ intended meaning, there are some historical ideas presented. One in particular is noteworthy, and is the subject of its own page. The original form of Tarot is not known with certainly from the existing documentary evidence. Milan and Ferrara are the most commonly suggested places of origin. No “standard pattern” decks from Milan have survived. The French brought Tarot from Milan in the late fifteenth century, but the oldest extant standard pattern decks from France, known as Tarot de Marseille or TdM, are from the late seventeenth century. Based primarily on iconographic evidence and inference, it appears that two of the earliest surviving French decks (those by Chosson and Noblet) accurately reflect the iconography of fifteenth-century Milanese decks, and moreover that the original design of Tarot is reflected in one of them, and an intentional variation in the other. This is not an assumption presupposed or required by the iconographic study, but a conclusion drawn from it. This conclusion has a number of implications for understanding the iconography of other decks, and the early history of Tarot in general. I have referred to this hypothetical Ur Tarot as Trionfi da Milano, making the common abbreviation “TdM” intentionally ambiguous. An argument supporting this conclusion is presented in Trionfi da Milano.

The last of the historically-oriented pages, Collected Fragments of Tarot History, is a chronological listing of over 350 historical items that tend to shed some light on the context and history of Tarot, as well as the interpretation of the trump sequence. All of the items include references to the secondary sources from which they were taken, including many from Michael Dummett’s The Game of Tarot, Stuart Kaplan’s The Encyclopedia of Tarot, and an article by Gherardo Ortalli from the periodical Ludica. Most of the entries also include brief quotes, but they are intended primarily as a rough chronology and as an index to the sources cited, rather than a detailed presentation of the historical material itself. It’s a timeline, not a history, and even at that it is broken into five files because of its length.

The first of the Tarot Miscellany pages, The Tarot Death Card, was written in October, 2002, as a rejoinder to the assorted Tarot experts, fortune-tellers and others, who insisted that the Tarot Death card doesn’t mean death, in the context of the Black Muslim terrorists who went on a murder spree in the D.C. area. The second essay, The Sephirotic Cycle of Waite-Smith, describes a Qabalistic interpretation of the most popular modern Tarot deck which may be more in keeping with the author’s design than the various applications of Golden Dawn correspondences that have been asserted as his intent. (It is very closely related to an earlier Sephirotic interpretation put forth by Karen Witter, although based primarily on the iconography of the deck rather than Waite’s many writings.) The third essay, The Mythic Cycle of Waite-Smith, looks at the same modern deck in terms of Aldous Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy and Joseph Campbell’s concept of a “Universal Monomyth”. Like the previous essay, it is iconographically based, and intended to represent the originally intended design more accurately than other discussions of the Waite-Smith deck have managed to do. There are also some of Waite’s writings presented, Essays of Arthur Edward Waite.

The book reviews are closely related to the allegorical meaning of early Tarot. Michael Dummett’s The Game of Tarot is documentary history per se, and as such the author does not speculate on any possible meaning to the allegorical sequence. Despite that however, his analysis of the historical variations in sequence (Chapter 20 of The Game of Tarot) is so revealing that it forms the basis around which my own interpretation of the allegory is presented in The Riddle of Tarot. The other five books reviewed each present varying amounts of history versus exegesis and speculation, but all contain substantial amounts of interpretation regarding the meaning of the trump sequence. They constitute the most well-developed and well-known alternatives to the interpretations presented in the main section of the Notebook. Finally, an example of the most common sort of contemporary interpretation is examined in detail, as an illustrative case study of Postmodern Tarot. (Two deck reviews are also included. Like The Mendicant’s Tale, they were written at the request of others, for other purposes. They have been edited slightly and a few scanned images added.)

The last group of Tarot Miscellany pages deals with iconography, that branch of art history which examines the subject matter of didactic works. The interpretations on this site are all rooted in iconographic exegesis, looking at the pictures and their sequential relationships. Many of the images in Tarot are unconventional, even unique. And in all of the interpretations offered here, simple, (often obvious), face value meanings are taken as primary, just as they were in medieval exegesis. Secondary meanings may be complex, subtle, obscure, sophisticated, difficult to discern and comprehend. However, in both the Jewish (PaRDeS) and Christian (Quadriga) exegetical traditions, literal meanings are primary and explicitly privileged. Modern exegetes (art historians), including Erwin Panofsky, also recognized this controlling significance of the more superficial layers of meaning, observing that the correct iconographic identification of factual and conventional content is prerequisite for the more subjective interpretation which he termed “iconological”. Such methodological considerations are discussed in The Iconography of Unusual Images. In addition to focusing initially on the most superficial and conventional meanings, this methodology also emphasizes the use of internal contextual information (ranking and relationships between iconographically related cards) and literary sources (most importantly for Tarot, the Bible) in assessing unconventional symbolism.

A Caveat

Iconographic interpretation and the comparison of alternatives (such as those presented in the book reviews) brings up a final point: Assembling tattered puzzle pieces within the context of an historical appreciation of the time and place of Tarot’s creation is a substantial challenge, one that can never be completely met. Jon Whitman, in his book, Allegory: The Dynamics of an Ancient and Medieval Technique, offered the following caveat:

It might please the allegorists in retrospect that an understanding of their technique implies an understanding of a whole world, but by the same token, that kind of knowledge must await the life to come. At the same time, perhaps it is only right that a study of allegory should begin by acknowledging its own imperfections. By its very nature, allegory is the most elusive of techniques, constantly seeming to be other than what it is. It exhibits something of the perpetually fluctuating, uncertain status of the world it depicts. Such a fugitive world, as Plato argued, is not susceptible to definitive treatment, but only to provisional description—to an eikos mythos, a likely story.... At the same time, such an account may at least suggest something of the value of its subject. For allegory, which is always pointing toward a goal that lies beyond it, is forever having to come to terms with its own provisionality. In the process, it encourages its readers not only to aspire toward some world of perfect fulfillment, but to direct attention to the limited world of which they are a part.

For the most part, the essays and interpretation presented in this notebook are not Tarot history per se, but rather a hypothetical interpretation of the pictures on the cards, based on iconographic exegesis—story telling. I’m telling a tale, which is why I began with, “Once upon a time...” Unlike the “speculations and reveries which have been perpetuated and multiplied in the schools of occult research”, my speculations and reveries are intended to be consistent with what is known about Tarot history, and about the larger historical context in which Tarot was created. Unlike the learned apologists for occult “influences”, vague and general analogies intended to justify eighteenth and nineteenth-century fabrications, I have sought specific sources, themes, and motifs that would explain the pictures on the cards and their sequence. Unlike the endless speculative “possibilities” put forth by contemporary Tarot enthusiasts (“Tarotists”) committed to keeping Tarot forever unexplained, I have chosen to critically evaluate and compare those possibilities in the context of the Tarot images and sequence, and to suggest my own interpretation, one more closely tied to that primary data, the evidence of the cards.

Starting with the images rather than a preconceived theory, paying attention to the face-value meaning of those images, and interpreting them and their sequence in the larger mainstream context of the era instead of focusing narrowly on magic, mysticism, and divination, yields a very different view of early Tarot. But it is important to remember that this is an amateur’s reconstruction—just because I say something with conviction don’t make it so. While the generic interpretation as well as the literal and allegorical layers of the TdM interpretation are more descriptive than interpretive, and therefore probably correct (at least in general terms), the moral and anagogic layers are highly speculative, despite being consistent with the overall design. I am not an authority on any of the subjects discussed here, nor a scholar of any kind—just a hobbyist with a home page. Some future art historian or medievalist may create a much better version of the story of Tarot than the one I have sketched out, but so far that hasn’t been done.

Department of Redundancy Department :
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again... and again. Some of that is intentional. Because this is a Web site rather than a book, I have no idea where someone might begin and end their visit, so various points are intentionally repeated for context. The “Tarot-History Reading List” will be repeated at the bottom of this and several other pages primarily as a keyword compendium. (Google™ or another search engine might thereby introduce some Web-surfing medievalist or art historian to the subject of Tarot iconography.) Some key points are reworded and repeated for clarification or emphasis. However, more than a little of the redundancy comes from the way these pages have been cobbled together from previous essays and emails, and some is just the inevitable result of sloppy writing and lazy editing...
or did I already mention that?

Notes

1. In addition to many occult interpretations of the Tarot trumps, there have been various psychological interpretations, and several notable historical interpretations. In 1951, William Marston Seabury published a small booklet which proposed that the symbolism of Tarot and Dante’s Commedia derived from the same source. (Different vaguely conceived theories of a connection between Tarot and various works of Dante have subsequently been suggested by Joseph Campbell and others.) In 1956, Gertrude Moakley published an article (expanded into a book in 1966) presenting the Tarot trumps as a triumphal procession based largely on Petrarch’s I Trionfi. In 1986, John Shephard published an astrological interpretation of the trumps as a unique and exceedingly complex cosmograph. In 1998, Timothy Betts published an interpretation of the trumps as a kind of block book, illustrating a fourteenth-century apocalyptic legend of the Last Emperor conflated with passages from Revelation. My interpretation of the trumps as a schematic encyclopedia of Christian salvation is another such attempt at an historical explanation of the pictures and their sequence.

2. Joan Cole's page on SCA Period Appropriate Tarot Decks has, in addition to comments on and illustrations from such decks, an excellent collection of related links that might be of interest to “Scadians”, including pages on how to play period Tarot games, (or at least, knowledgable reconstructions of period rules).

3. The inclusion of seventeenth-century Tarot de Marseille decks along with fifteenth and sixteenth-century Italian decks is based on historical necessity. Milan was one of the important early centers of the game, but unfortunately no standard pattern decks from Milan have survived. The French adopted Tarot from Milan in the late fifteenth century, and we have no evidence that they changed the Milanese trumps substantially, beyond adding names to the cards. Thus the earliest surviving French decks are the closest extant examples of what the Milanese decks might have looked like, and the sequence in which the trumps were ordered. In the Trionfi da Milano page, an argument is presented to the effect that Tarot de Marseille is in fact a very good example of those earlier Milanese decks, a living fossil.

4. Each image needs to be explained, including its place in sequence. Some are easy, others constitute what might be called traditional problems of Tarot interpretation. For example, why is there a female pope: what does the image represent and what is her function in the sequence? Where is the “missing virtue” of Prudence, and why are the three Moral Virtues placed as they are in any particular Tarot sequence? Why does Love triumph over the Pope, or even more curiously, why does the Devil triumph over the Emperor, Pope, and most of the other allegorical subjects? No explanation of the trump cycle is even marginally adequate unless it identifies not only the subject matter of each image, but also the significance of that subject in a coherent overall sequence, thereby making sense of the images both individually and collectively. A priori, of course, we can’t know that an adequate explanation is possible—the images may not have formed a coherent cycle—but that is still the minimum acceptable standard for an explanation.

5. Some contemporary Tarotists have attempted to go back and retrofit historical interpretations to the occultist’s fanciful inventions. While dismissing earlier claims of ancient Egyptian origins and symbolism, and a few other howling blunders and flagrant lies of the earlier occultists, they have attempted to maintain as much of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century Masonic fictions as possible. These modern apologists for the “false history, and false interpretation” of the earlier occultists have simply placed the proximate origin of occult Tarot in the hands of fifteenth-century Italian “Renaissance magi” as the conduit of ancient wisdom, instead of correctly locating the invention of occult Tarot in eighteenth-century France. (Admittedly, that’s a 2,000-year improvement on some of the earlier stories.) Just as earlier occultists felt that ancient origins were required to validate their practices and beliefs, these contemporary occultists appear to feel that occult origins of some kind (rather than centuries-later occult adoption) are required to legitimize their modern view of Tarot.

Revisionist Tarot authorities insist that there was “no false history and false interpretation” to begin with. According to this view, earlier occultist claims of Tarot’s ancient origins, secret traditions, and arcane content were intended figuratively. Such writings were essentially parables, the point of which was to link discrete historical movements and their expressions into a pseudo-tradition. Recurrent mystical or psychological truths and insights are taken as expressions of spiritual or subconscious universals, and the occult interpretation of Tarot is just one such expression of this irrepressible Perennial Philosophy. Of course, such a view ignores the two centuries during which these legends were presented as actual history of origin and transmission, and the Cabalistic and astrological interpretations were presented as the original significance of the images, the intended meaning of Tarot’s creator.

Because of their preconceptions regarding the meaning of the cards, these Tarotists have scarcely improved on the interpretations of their French predecessors, at least in terms of uncovering the intended meaning of the trump cycle. Taking the nineteenth-century occult interpretations as a given, and in fact as the primary subject of their investigations, they attempt to explain the origin of occult Tarot by reference to Renaissance esotericism, which is also interpreted in light of the nineteenth-century writers. Having interpreted both Tarot and Renaissance esotericism according to the vision of nineteenth-century occultists, it is a trivial exercise to then match Tarot so conceived to the ideas of Renaissance magi like Marsilio Ficino. Interpretations such as a woman with sword and scales representing an allegorical personification of Justice are commonly ignored or dismissed as inconsequential by such authors. That is not, however, an iconographic study in the conventional sense, i.e., taking the historical evidence of early Tarot itself as the primary subject matter and seeking to explain the pictures on the cards and their sequence.

In what may become the new standard for occult Tarot “history”, the traditional occult Tarot history and interpretations inspired by eighteenth-century fringe Freemasonry are being blended with contemporary neo-Masonic myths of the Holy Blood, Holy Grail genre. A number of popular books of that genre have mentioned Tarot, some providing considerable detail, while acknowledged fiction like The Da Vinci Code is bringing this fantasy to a much larger, mainstream audience. At least one Tarot author, a Gnostic bishop, is committed to promoting the merged mythologies as actual history, and several HBHG authors have incorporated various aspects of this modern Tarot lore. Even if the hope expressed above is fulfilled and some scholarly medievalists take up the subject of Tarot and its iconography, such mundane history and interpretation will never compete effectively in the popular marketplace with the delightful fantasies of the HBHG mythos.