Tarot card reading
Tarot card reading is a form of cartomancy whereby practitioners use tarot cards to purportedly gain insight into the past, present or future. The process typically begins with formulation of a question, followed by drawing and interpreting cards to uncover meaning. A traditional tarot deck consists of 78 cards, which can be split into two groups, the Major Arcana and Minor Arcana. French-suited playing cards can also be used; as can any card system with suits assigned to identifiable elements.
History
The first written references to tarot packs occurred between 1440 and 1450 in northern Italy, for example in Milan and Ferrara, when additional cards with allegorical illustrations were added to the common four-suit pack. These new packs were called carte da trionfi, triumph packs, and the additional cards were simply known as trionfi, which became "trumps" in English.One of the earliest references to tarot triumphs appears around c. 1450–1470 mentioned by a Dominican preacher in a sermon condemning dice, playing cards and 'triumphs'. References to the tarot as a social plague or as exempt from the bans that affected other games continued throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, but there are no indications that the cards were used for anything but games. As philosopher and tarot historian Michael Dummett noted, "it was only in the 1780s, when the practice of fortune-telling with regular playing cards had been well established for at least two decades, that anyone began to use the tarot pack for cartomancy."
Claims by the early French occultists that tarot cards had esoteric links to ancient Egypt, the Kabbalah, Indic Tantra, or the I Ching have been frequently repeated by authors on card divination. However, scholarly research reveals that there is no evidence of any significant use of tarot cards for divination until the late 18th century as it was believed to be invented in Italy in the early 15th century. In fact, historians have described western views of the Tarot pack as "the subject of the most successful propaganda campaign ever launched... An entire false history and false interpretation of the Tarot pack was concocted by the occultists; and it is all but universally believed".
The belief in the divinatory meaning of the cards is closely associated to the notion of their occult properties, a view commonly held in early modern Europe propagated by prominent Protestant Christian clerics and Freemasons.
From its uptake as an instrument of divination in 18th-century France, the tarot went on to be used in hermeneutic, magical, mystical, semiotic, and psychological practices. It was used by Romani people while telling fortunes, as a Jungian psychological apparatus for tapping into "absolute knowledge in the unconscious", a tool for archetypal analysis, and even for facilitating the Jungian process of individuation.
Court de Gébelin
Many involved in occult and divinatory practices attempt to trace the tarot to ancient Egypt, divine hermetic wisdom, and the mysteries of Isis.The first was Antoine Court de Gébelin, a French clergyman, who wrote that after seeing a group of women playing cards he had the idea that tarot was not merely a game of cards but was in fact of ancient Egyptian origin, of mystical Qabalistic import, and of deep divine significance. Court de Gébelin published a dissertation on the origins of the symbolism in the tarot in volume VIII of the work Le Monde primitif in 1781. He believed that the tarot represented ancient Egyptian Theology, including Isis, Osiris, and Typhon. For example, he thought the card he knew as the Papesse and known in occult circles today as the High Priestess represented Isis. He also related four tarot cards to the four Christian Cardinal virtues: Temperance, Justice, Strength and Prudence. He related The Tower to a Greek fable about avarice.
Although the ancient Egyptian language had not yet been deciphered, Court de Gébelin asserted the name "Tarot" came from the Egyptian words Tar, or, and the word Ro, Ros, or Rog, meaning or, and that the word literally translated to. Subsequent research by Egyptologists found nothing in the Egyptian language to support Court de Gébelin's etymologies. Despite this lack of any evidence, the belief that the tarot cards are linked to the Egyptian Book of Thoth continues to the present day.
The actual source of the occult tarot can be traced to two articles in volume eight, one written by Court de Gébelin and one written by M. le C. de M.***, who has been identified as Major General Louis-Raphaël-Lucrèce de Fayolle, Comte de Mellet. This second essay is "considerably more impressive" than de Gébelin's, albeit "as full of assertions with no basis in truth", and has been even more influential than Court de Gébelin's. The author makes no acknowledgement of de Gébelin and, although he agrees with all his main conclusions, he also contradicts de Gébelin over such details as the meaning of the word "Tarot" and in how the cards spread across Europe. Moreover, he takes de Gébelin's speculations even further, agreeing with him about the mystical origins of the tarot in ancient Egypt, but making several additional, and influential, statements that continue to influence mass understanding of the occult tarot even to this day. He made the first statements proposing that the tarot was "The Book of Thoth" and made the first association of tarot with cartomancy. Meanwhile Court de Gébelin was the first to imply the existence of a connection between the Tarot and Romani people, although this connection did not become well established in the public consciousness until other French authors such as Boiteau d'Ambly and Jean-Alexandre Vaillant began in the 1850s to promote the theory that tarot cards had been brought to Europe by the Romani. In fact, there is virtually no evidence that Romani people used any form of playing cards for telling fortunes until the 20th century.
Etteilla
Cartomancer Etteilla, the pseudonym of Jean-Baptiste Alliette, was the first to assign divinatory meanings to tarot cards. Etteilla devised a method of tarot divination in 1783, and published his cartomantic treatise comparing the cards to the Book of Thoth in 1785. Etteilla established the Société des Interprètes du Livre de Thot, the first society for tarot cartomancy, in 1788.He promoted the Grand Etteilla deck as the first corrected tarot ; he created the first Egyptian tarot to be used exclusively for cartomancy, and published Dictionnaire synonimique du Livre de Thot, which "systematically tabulated all the possible meanings which each card could bear, when upright and reversed." Etteilla expanded tarot lore by describing the deck as a repository of the wisdom of Hermes Trismegistus, a book of eternal medicine, an account of the creation of the world, and claimed the first copy of the tarot was imprinted on leaves of gold.
In his 1980 book, The Game of Tarot, Michael Dummett argued that Etteilla was attempting to supplant Court de Gébelin as the author of the occult tarot. Etteilla in fact claimed to have been involved with tarot longer than Court de Gébelin.
Marie Anne Lenormand
outshone even Etteilla and was the first cartomancer to people in high places, through her claims to be the personal confidant of Empress Josephine, Napoleon and other notables. Lenormand used both regular playing cards, in particular the Piquet pack, as well as tarot cards likely derived from the Tarot de Marseille. Following her death in 1843, several different cartomantic decks were published in her name, including the Grand Jeu de Mlle Lenormand, based on the standard 52-card deck, first published in 1845, and the Petit Lenormand, a 36-card deck derived from the German game Das Spiel der Hoffnung, first published around 1850.Éliphas Lévi
The concept of the cards as a mystical key was extended by Éliphas Lévi. Lévi was educated in the seminary of Saint-Sulpice, and was ordained as a deacon, but never became a priest. Michael Dummett noted that it is from Lévi's book Dogme et rituel that the "whole of the modern occultist movement stems." Lévi's magical theory was based on a concept he called the Astral Light and according to Dummett, he claimed to be the first to:Lévi accepted Court de Gébelin's claims that the deck had an Egyptian origin, but rejected Etteilla's interpretation and rectification of the cards in favor of a reinterpretation of the Tarot de Marseille. He called it The Book of Hermes and claimed that the tarot was antique, existed before Moses, and was in fact a universal key of erudition, philosophy, and magic that could unlock Hermetic and Qabalistic concepts. According to Lévi, "An imprisoned person with no other book than the Tarot, if he knew how to use it, could in a few years acquire universal knowledge, and would be able to speak on all subjects with unequaled learning and inexhaustible eloquence."
According to Dummett, Lévi's notable contributions included the following:
- Lévi was the first to suggest that the Magus was to be depicted in conjunction with the symbols of the four suits.
- Inspired by de Gébelin, Lévi associated the Hebrew alphabet with the Major Arcana and attributed an "onomantic astrology" system to the "ancient Hebrew Qabalists."
- Lévi linked the ten numbered cards in each suit to the ten sefiroth.
- He claimed the court cards represented stages of human life.
- He also claimed the four suits represented the Tetragrammaton.
French Tarot divination after Lévi
However, it was not until the late 1880s that Lévi's vision of the occult tarot truly began to bear fruit, as his ideas on the occult began to be propounded by various French and English occultists. In France, secret societies such as the French Theosophical Society and the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross served as the seeds for further developments in the occult tarot in France.
The French occultist Papus was one of the most prominent members of these societies, joining the Isis lodge of the French Theosophical Society in 1887 and becoming a founding member of the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross the next year. Among his 260 publications are two treatises on the use of tarot cards, Le Tarot des Bohémiens, which attempted to formalize the method of using tarot cards in ceremonial magic first proposed by Lévi in his Clef des grands mysteries, and Le Tarot divinatoire, which focused on simpler divinatory uses of the cards.
Another founding member of the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross, the Marquis Stanislas de Guaita, met the amateur artist Oswald Wirth in 1887 and subsequently sponsored a production of Lévi's intended deck. Guided entirely by de Guaita, Wirth designed the first neo-occultist cartomantic deck. Released in 1889 as Les 22 Arcanes du Tarot kabbalistique, it consisted of only the twenty-two major arcana and was revised under the title of Le Tarot des imagers du moyen âge in 1926. Wirth also released a book about his revised cards, which contained his own theories of the occult tarot under the same title in the year following.
Outside of the Kabbalistic Order, in 1888, French magus Ély Star published Les mystères de l'horoscope which mostly repeats Christian's modifications. Its primary contribution was the introduction of the terms 'Major Arcana' and 'Minor Arcana', and the numbering of the Crocodile XXII instead of 0.