Sunday, November 6, 2016

Introduction

This blog is devoted to the 22 tarot trumps (i. e., major arcana) in the context of the various times in which these cards, in various versions, were made and used, by particular consumers and designers. My methodology thus assumes that the meaning of an allegorical image is a function of the times in which it is made, as understood by particular audiences and designers (I say "designer" rather than "maker" because we cannot assume that the two are the same).

Before the mid-18th century, the only clear evidence of their use is in a trick-taking card game. However the titles were used in poems and pageants with symbolic intent. Since there were also instructional card games, it is likely that the cards were illustrated with this serious purpose in mind. It has been suggested, for example, that the cards indicated a "stairway to heaven" following Christian doctrine. However, since much of the imagery is also occurs in secular contexts, including literature referencing pagan mythology, these contexts, too, are part of the meanings of the cards. There is no one context, in other words, by which to interpret these cards, since use in a card game by itself does not provide any. So the history of a particular card is one of shifting meanings according to historical context at that time.

My first foray into this area was a blog entitled  "22 Invocations of Dionysus," at http://22invocationsofdionysus.blogspot.com/, which began with Christian interpretations, then went to interpretations in terms of Greek and Roman writings about ancient Egypt that were known during the Renaissance, and then extended these to the context of writings and images from the Greco-Roman cult of Dionysus. I subsequently extended the range to include the contexts of Kabbalah, Pythagoreanism, and Alchemy, all from a 15th-17th century perspective. However the result is rather sketchy. So I have also written separate blogs on each of these perspectives, plus that of Plato as understood in the 15th-18th centuries:

These blogs merely look at how the cards would be interpreted given the interest in those other perspectives at the time and place of particular decks. There is much that does not quite fit any of these specific contexts; also, there is the issue of how these perspectives relate to the original Christian perspective, and how all of them relate to the tarot in its later development in the late 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. These will be my concerns here.

Most writers on Tarot history either refer to the period before de Gebelin's essay in 1781 or to the period after it. I am trying to compare the two. What I have noticed is that de Gebelin and the 19th century occultists even when advancing ideas that first appear in print with them, the conceptions they articulate are ones that were well known for centuries - some in medieval times, some after the texts were brought to western Europe after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and translated. It is hard to imagine that these texts had not already been applied to the tarot long before the occultists expressed them in their books. It seems to me likely that there was an "underground stream" of sorts about the tarot in the 16th-18th centuries that did not get expressed in books until the relaxation of censorship in France in the late 18th century, a stream of "esotericism" that saw the tarot in terms of points of view that had existed since the time of the Roman Empire, even if not applied to the tarot until it was invented in 15th century Italy and those texts were accessible there, starting soon after the time of invention, if not, to a limited extent, also part of the initial conception. 

Here I refer mainly to the conception of the cards as "hieroglyphs" in the medieval and early Renaissance conception of them, that is, as sacred or quasi-sacred images containing both obvious and non-obvious (and so in a sense "hidden") meanings, accessible by association with the Greco-Roman Neoplatonic tradition, itself originating in ancient Egypt. This conception of hieroglyphs is something that would have come to the foreground when Horapollo's 5th century Hieroglyphica was brought to Florence in 1419, but it was already in use from Latin sources. Moreover, it fit in easily with the so-called four levels of interpretation of scripture articulated by Augustine, which Dante and others had applied to secular literature as well.

The well-known Swiss psychiatrist C. G. Jung, was very familiar with this tradition, as well as the alchemical writers who projected it onto the material in their laboratories. For him, seeing its application there and in other cultural manifestations, it became the "archetypal" basis of his interpretations of dreams and fantasies, psychologized under the influence of Freud and Nietzsche. The same can readily be applied to the twenty-two images of the tarot sequence. 

When I refer to a "Jungian interpretation," I do not mean only what Jung actually wrote or delivered orally about the cards, which is not much. He did attempt a study of them, enlisting the help of a couple of his students, but it did not get further than a few preliminary notes taken by one participant and one lecture, of March 1, 1933, in which he discussed, briefly, the trumps and, more extensively, the Devil card. From the notes taken by a student of a private discussion with Jung, it is clear that his main source of information was Papus's Tarot des Bohémiens, which included, besides many historical inaccuracies, small black and white images of the Tarot of Marseille and Wirth trump cards. For more on this point see Mary Greer's blog at https://marykgreer.com/2008/04/18/carl-jung-on-the-major-arcana/. For extensive quotations from Jung and his students regarding the tarot, see an earlier blog of Greer's, https://marykgreer.com/2008/03/31/carl-jung-and-tarot/, as well as Gerardo Lonardoni at http://www.letarot.it/page.aspx?id=194&lng=ENG. But in his lecture Jung said more in relation to the Devil card than these writers notice, for which see my post on that card. Others have taken up where Jung left off, of whom the most useful to me has been Sallie Nichols in her Jung and Tarot, written in 1980.

In this blog I am focusing on just a few of the most important decks and writings, and as much as possible keeping to sources that can be accessed on the Internet. The first surviving tarot is the deck known as the Cary-Yale or Visconti di Modrone, 1440s, probably commissioned by Filippo Visconti, Duke of Milan, and available in high-resolution scans on the website of the Beinecke Library. The second is the deck known as the Visconti-Sforza or Colleoni-Bagliati, or Pierpont-Morgan-Bergamo. Some of its cards are on the website of the Morgan Library; the other triumph cards can be seen on various sites. Third is the so-called Charles VI, named for a 14th century king of France but actually northern Italian of about the 1460s-1470s. It is on Gallica, the website of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France for images. These are all hand-painted decks, none of them complete. There is also one that was first engraved and then painted, the so-called Sola-Busca Tarot (named for families that owned the cards), of Ferrara or more probably Venice, probably around 1491; it is the first deck of which all 78 cards have survived. 

Then come the printed decks, available from unused proof sheets that were stuffed in the bindings of books of the time: the Rosenwald, perhaps from Perugia, around 1505; two sheets from Bologna, the Beaux-Arts and Rothschild sheets, both now in Paris, c. 1500; two sheets now in Budapest, originally from Ferrara or Venice, early 16th century; the so-called Cary Sheet, online at the Beinecke library site. and a few cards found in the Sforza Castle of Milan, varying in age from 1499 to c. 1600, some of which have been put online. I have had recourse also to various decks of the so-called "Marseille" family, 17th and 18th century, most of which are online in Gallica, as is a late 17th century Bolognese deck. 

Then comes the first "esoteric" deck, that designed by Etteilla in 1788. Then there are a few designs by Eliphas Levi, 1856, realized by Wirth in 1889, and a deck by Wegener and Falconnier of 1856, and Wirth's reissue with abstract designs in the background, from 1927. These are all Parisian. From the English-speaking world I have chosen that designed by A.E. Waite and Pamela Coleman-Smith in 1909 London and Paul Foster Case in 1920's U.S.

There are also written texts, not many but of at least as much importance as the decks. Besides various 16th-17th century references in literary works and accounts of the rules of play, there are two Discorsi on the Tarot, both Italian of around 1565; the first half or so of the first, by Francesco Piscina, is online in Lulu.com. After that is Court de Gebelin's essay on the Tarot in his Monde Primitif, vol. 8, 1781, with a companion essay by the Comte de Mellet in the same volume. The original is online in Gallica; there are several translations on the Web. The best is that by Steve Mangan on Tarot History Forum, but I have used that of J. Karlin in Rhapsodies of the Bizarre, because it gives the page numbers of the original for ease of reference. After that comes the Cahiers (notebooks) and other works of Etteilla, starting in 1785, whose originals are now online in archive.org and the digital resources of Gallica and the Wellcome Institute.

For Eliphas Levi's 1856 Dogme e Rituel de la Haute Magie, I have used A. E. Waite's English translation of the 1861 edition, online in archive.org under the title Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual. While a recent translation by John Greer is sometimes better, sometimes it is not, in my view, and Waite's has the virtue of being online. It is to me important that readers be able to access the original contexts of my quotations and summaries. Archive.org also has Papus's Tarot des Bohemiens, 1889, translated as Tarot of the Bohemians, 1889, and Wirth's Tarot des Imagiers du Moyen-Age, 1927, translated as Tarot of the Magicians in 1985, as well as the originals of these works. Also in English at archive.org are Paul Foster Case's works Tarot Fundamentals and The Tarot: A Key to the Wisdom of the Ages, the works of C. G. Jung, and Jung and Tarot by Sallie Nichols, 1980. 

These are not the only decks and decks I have cited, but they are the ones I return to repeatedly throughout this series of posts.

The current blog is being filled out and occasionally revised card by card, post by post, over time. The date at the top of each entry is not when I first entered that post, but when I set up the blog. Given Google's computer program for blogs, the order of posts reflects to some degree when they were last worked on. So the order may not correspond to their customary order in the standard Tarot of Marseille (which Golden Dawn-inspired occultists have largely kept, except for interchanging Justice and Strength). I put the date I inserted the content, and the date I last modified it, in the body of the post. In general, so far I have come back to it twice since setting up the blog in 2016, in one period of 2018 and another of late 2022 - early 2023.

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