PART 1

As someone who teaches tarot, reads professionally, and reads for myself and my friends too, I've long observed people's desire to delve into life's mysteries through the cards. As a strong believer in divining by our own lights, here and now, I still love to look back to the past. Why? It helps to demystify the tool and opens new lines of thought in our present as we carry on the interpretive pictorial thread that runs through continents, era, and cultures.

There can be a lot to demystify. I remember always hearing that the cards originated in ancient Egypt. This idea was popularized by French occultist Antoine Court in the late 1800s in a publication on "Egyptian Mysticism," as if the cards reflected specific secrets from the ancient Egyptian priesthood. Of course as an adult, looking more deeply, I see that there was no evidence to support this vague link. Yet for a time it became the dominant narrative around tarot.

There is, though, a clear early influence from Egypt: the Mamluk playing cards that made their way from the Mamluk Sultanate into Italy during the 14th century. These cards were used for gaming and gambling and are beautifully ornate. The decks are made from four suits: coins, swords, cups, and polo sticks, and many of cards feature (mostly) encouraging inscriptions. For example:

“I am as a garden, the like of which will never exist” “With the sword of happiness, I shall redeem a beloved who will afterwards take my life.” "Like a chandelier which brings joy, and evermore delights hearts" "Rejoice for your good fortune which is renewed (all the time) for as long as the birds sing."

On another level there is the game of polo itself, reflected in the "polo stick" suit (that has become in our modern decks wands, or clubs). Polo, a game of aristocrats, was seen by many as metaphor for our relationship with the Divine: we mortals are the ball, and can be hit in any direction at any time, unless elevated to the status of a player who controls moves on the field. This concept of fate, and the overcoming of fate through self awareness, continues to be a theme in modern tarot.

Different tarot packs draw influence from the time and place in which they've evolved while simultaneously reflecting the common human themes of death, fate, fortune, and the skillful (or not) negotiation of life's challenges. Learning about these evolutions has helped me to let go of the prescriptive meanings that once helped and also limited my reading practice. Once I saw the cards themselves change, I felt free to shed the totalizing constraint of pre-standing correspondences. (For example: what does it mean that the Star card's figure has one foot on the ground and one in the water? What if you form your own interpretation?)

I can now now develop a more personal relationship with the archetypes that illustrated in each deck. While such images are indeed steeped in meaningful and arguably timeless tradition, real magic, or divination and the wisdom gained from, require a personal journey, and every reader will have their own.

PART 2

Mamluk cards were already making their way into Europe as a game when the Sultanate adventured into northern Africa, Italy and the Iberian Peninsula. During this period we see the emergence of the Visconti-Sforza Tarot in Italy around 1460, and the mysterious Sola Busca Tarocci in 1491. Both are 78 card decks that include Major Arcana (the Magician, the High Priestess...), pip cards (the suited numbers) and court cards (of course the familiar monarchs, with their knights and pages). However, an interesting branch occurs: The Visconti-Sforza, following the Mamluk packs, becomes a model for the perhaps familiar un-illustrated pips in the French Tarot de Marseille:

== those decks

While the Sola Busca's illustrated pips wind up pretty clearly inspiring some of the images from later occult decks, notably Pamela Coleman Smith’s illustrations for the Rider Waite Smith deck:

== those decks

The Sola Busca, in fact, were on display at the British Museum during the time that Waite and Coleman Smith were designing the deck.

One big shift in these early decks was the introduction of Major Arcana, drawing as they did on several sources of mysticism and cultural dogma. At that time, the Bubonic Plague of the mid 1300s was still fresh on people's minds, and had inspired numerous cultural effects: for example the well known medieval drama, "The Dance of Death" that described a battle between heaven and Hell for our largely hapless souls. Imagery of towers and chariots were common during this time, as players battled, fell from grace, and perhaps found redemption.

Hans Holbein, 1549

PART 3

For French occultists during the mid 1700s tarot cards had become a source of divination more than a symbolic game used for diversion and gambling. Jean-Baptiste Alliette (known as “Etteilla” -- his name backwards) operated as a professional reader, astrologer and occultist. He invented large systems of correspondence between his own deck and a range of mystical teachings. Adding onto that system, Éliphas Lévi, who abandoned his early career as a Catholic priest, drew parallels between his personal study of the Kabbalah and the cards; for example he aligned the ten sephiroth with the tarot suits, and Hebrew letters themselves with the Major Arcana. Beyond that, secret societies like the Theosophical Society and the Kabbalistic order of the Rose-Cross began to incorporate similar correspondences and practices as they relied on cards to formulate various mystical and divinatory practices.

some cards from the Etteilla Deck

These ideas made their way to England where, in 1887, a trio of Freemasons founded the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. I will spare you the bulk of the drama surrounding the Golden Dawn. However! This order is pivotal in the development of tarot as well as the esoteric branches that spring from it. For example: its members created their own tarot decks for personal use as part of their path of initiation. The Golden Dawn itself had a deck, which comes down to us as The Hermetic Tarot, authored by Godfrey Dowson. Initiates of The Golden Dawn also included all kinds of artists and mystics, including Arther Waite and Pamela Coleman Smith-- who later split from the order to maintain a more typically Judeo-Christian form of mysticism before partnering with Waite to create the famous Rider Waite Smith deck. Alleister Crowly was also among the initiates, until he split from the order due to his own frustrations with their internal politics. He later partnered with Lady Frieda Harris to create the Thoth deck, also still in wide use today.

the 'PAM-A' version of the Rider Waite Smith

Of course, running throughout tarot's journey to us in the present are the individualized forms of thought and art practiced by gamblers, dreamers, mystics, artists, occultists, and hobbyist pass-timers throughout history. Gnostic doctrines have played a role, as have more intimate personal alchemical concepts or feelings of rebellion against more traditional religious pasts. Surrealist painters have explored the archetypes in their own fashion, using a past deck pattern as a framework: the most famous of those probably being Salvadore Dali’s Universal Tarot , although it's worth nothing noting that Dali felt little connection to the cards and merely took making the deck on for a commission. For the vast majority of discernable trends, though, we find a common thread, however serious or playful: to seek meaning and purpose in life.

And of course this history continues to inform contemporary deck-making and attitudes towards the cards. In tarot we find a rich, non-verbal language that interacts directly with the viewer-- in a way, much like any art. The meanings of cards are not, and have neevr been static; instead they're always evolving, alive as we are,as they reflect us and our lived experience. These cards are a tool for deeper understanding and wisdom when we trust that we have access to that same within ourselves.

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NOTES!

• For further discusson of the "Mamluk cards", check out M. Dummett, & K. Abu-Deeb, "Some Remarks on Mamluk Playing Cards," in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 36, 106 1973. At the end of that work, you will find a list of all inscriptions that we have from those decks.

• For a glance at some of the ways that the Plague effected European popular culture check out: https://www.montana.edu/historybug/yersiniaessays/medrano.html.

• For a classic introduction to actual Kabalah, check out The Essential Kabbalah by D. Matt, Harper Collins, 1983. Or, if you want to go straight to the source, you could seek out some volumes from The Pritzker edition of The Zohar, translanted and edited by that same D. Matt, Stanford University Press, 2004.

• There is much popular thought about the Freemason, who in the very least began in France as a rationalist, anti-royalist society during the years leading up to the French Revolution. Check out The Oxford History of the French Revolution by W. Doyle, Oxford Press, 1989 for context + more on that era.