Tarot is a game. It can be played by one player, two players, or a number of players, depending on the rules. If one person is playing we could call it “The Meditation Game.” If two people are playing we could call it “The Divination Game.” If a number of people are playing we call it Tarocchi, Tarock, Triumphs (Trumps) or Tarot. Tarocchi is Italian, Tarock is German, Trumps is English, Tarot is French. The earliest reference to the cards describes them as “cartes de trionfi,” or “cards with triumphs.”
It’s a game, entertainment, a diversion, a way of passing the time. We shouldn’t take it seriously. The very earliest reference to Tarot as a divination tool is Manière de se récréer avec le jeu de cartes nommées Tarots by Etteilla (1785) which translates as "How to Entertain Yourself With the Deck of Cards Called Tarot.” How to entertain yourself, note, not how to fix the future and live by it like a curse.
At the same time it remains mysterious. It has a provenance. The major cards, the Trumps or Major Arcana, in particular, hold a fascination. The word “Arcana” means a secret, something known only to a few. It’s from the Latin “arca” meaning chest. A chest is a strong box, a place you lock up your treasure so no one else can have it. That seems reasonable in the case of material treasure, you want to protect it. But intellectual treasure is another thing. You don’t diminish knowledge by sharing it, so why keep it secret? Why lock it up in a chest?
I prefer the word “Trumps,” as this is what they were originally used for. Trumps is short for Triumphs. Tarot is a trick-taking game. When you lay down a trump to take a trick there’s a sense of triumph. The Triumphs were also a pageant of allegorical characters who’d pass the spectator’s way in carriages or floats during the Carnival. There was a medieval poem called Il Trionfi (1351-1374) by Petrarch which described such a pageant. It’s a reference to the Classical Roman Triumphal procession, where victorious generals led their armies into the city displaying their spoils. Petrarch’s poem evokes a series of allegorical figures, including Love, Chastity, Death, Fame, Time and Eternity, each overcoming the next. So Chastity overcomes Love, Fame overcomes Death etc.
And what better image to describe the Tarot than a procession of allegorical characters at a Carnival? Isn’t that exactly what they look like?
There goes the Fool, with his Jester’s cap and his bells, ripped trousers showing his rear end, his comedy dog harrying him from behind. There’s the Magician at his roadside stall playing tricks for money. Are these the same sort of tricks you take in the game? There goes the Papess, that most blasphemous of cards, signifying the real meaning of Carnival, as the world turned upside down, by inverting the established order. There’s the Empress and the Emperor, who only have eyes for each other. But this is a Carnival, it’s not real life. They’re mock figures, like the mock Kings and Queens of All Fool’s Day. Maybe they’re not even married, but are conducting an affair, in plain sight, on this most public of days. Next comes the Pope, with his pious expression and his acolytes kneeling before him. What are they doing down there? Is it sacred or obscene? The point of Carnival is to satirize the powerful, to prick the pompous and to expose hypocrisy. Later the Pope turns into the Devil and we discover who he really is.
Next comes a scene of marital confusion: two women vying for one man’s attention, in the form of the Lovers. It’s a scene we might see in the Carnival crowd. Once Cupid’s arrow strikes we can expect a cat-fight, as one of the women is bound to feel betrayed. Then comes the Chariot, a figure of Triumph to represent the triumph of the cards, and the one figure who’s definitely carried on a float. Next we have the figure of Justice, one of the cardinal virtues, who always make their appearance at Carnival. She’s a reminder of the eternal values that always should underpin our existence, and that only Fools or Knaves ignore. Finally we have the Old Man, Old Father Time (also known as the Hermit) to remind us of our mortality.
I’ll bring our procession to a halt now as the nature of the Tarot changes at this point, and you should never overstretch a metaphor. This isn’t to claim that this is the origin of the cards, or that Medieval Carnival provides a source for the imagery, just that all human life is in the cards, as it was when they were first devised. The people who made them were just like us. They reflected their own lives, dramas, foibles and shortcomings in these cards. In doesn’t matter what the precise divinatory meaning of the individual cards might be. They weren’t created for divination anyway. They’re more like a folk-tale than a grimoire, more a dream-scape than a dictionary. The meanings shift and meld depending upon the circumstances. They melt into each other.
Tarot is a trick-taking game. It can also play tricks on us. To trick is to deceive, from the Old French “trichier,” possibly from the Latin “tricor”: to behave in an evasive manner, to evade, to search for detours, to trifle with, to delay. There are at least three tricksters in the Tarot: The Fool, the Magician and the Devil, possibly more. A good trick can bamboozle us or amaze, or it can cheat us of what’s rightfully ours. It can sow the seeds of doubt in our perceptions, or even our sense of reality.
It could be said that reality itself is a trick, played upon us by our senses. Light is a wave that might also be a particle… or it is a particle that might also be a wave. It’s a wave when viewed in a certain way, and then a particle when viewed in another. If we set up an experiment to prove it’s a particle, it looks like a particle. If we set up the experiment to prove it’s a wave, it looks like a wave.
The light enters the eye through the cornea. Your iris dilates to control the amount of light. Your lens sends the light to the back of your eye. It’s like an image on a screen, but upside down. Then your retina sends the image as an electrical signal to the brain, where it’s flipped right side up again. In the same way words are sounds carried by vibrations in the air which agitate the ear drum and are then sent as an electrical signal to your brain, which must then be translated by the socially-sanctioned dictionary you’ve stored in memory.
What you perceive as reality, as sounds and images, smells, tastes and feelings, is really just a construct in your head. And if this is the case, if reality is a construct inside your head, where’s your head? Your perceived head must also be a construct, and your real head must be outside it, beyond the confines of the known Universe, at the boundary of reality itself. (My thanks to Bertrand Russell for that, via Robert Anton Wilson: from Quantum Psychology.)
So Tarot is just like life. It’s a trick we play on ourselves. We say this card means this thing, although it is no more than a picture on a piece of card. We act as if the card has meaning, when it has no meaning in and of itself. We bring the meaning with us, when we draw the card from the deck and interpret it.
Its meaning has changed over time. It was different to the aristocrats of the Italian Renaissance who invented it, than it was to French peasants who played it in the dust after work in later centuries, using wood block prints on cheap paper rather than the gilded masterpieces of their predecessors. It meant something else to the French occultists who saw it being played and who imagined the secret lineaments of an Ancient Egyptian magical text in its mysterious forms. It meant something else again to the Spiritualists, something else to the initiates of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, something else to A. E. Waite and Pamela Colman Smith—who between them designed the famous Rider-Waite deck—something else to Aleister Crowley, something else to the Surrealists, something else to the Psychoanalysts. No doubt it means something else to you than it does to me.
The world’s mutable and changing and so are we. We imagine that reality is a big unchanging block of something “out there” on which we carve our initials. It’s more like water. It’s not outside of us. It flows through us. It’s the same with meaning. Meaning is a constantly moving stream, a complex skein of contradictory currents shifting over time. In order to get at the meaning we need to construct a sort of conceptual implement in which to hold it. That construct is language.
Tarot’s like a visual language. This is perhaps why the French Occultist Antoine Court de Gébelin associated it with Egypt and the Book of Thoth when he first saw it. He thought he was looking at hieroglyphs. The Tarot isn’t precisely hieroglyphic, but it can serve a similar function. We can use the images to hold meaning.
I’m a student of the I-Ching. I’ve been reading the book for nearly 50 years. The I-Ching is written in Chinese, itself a visual language. Chinese ideograms are little pictures that contain an idea. They’re not generally guides to pronunciation. They carry their meaning symbolically, as metaphor. For example, the word for Hexagram 49 is usually translated as Revolution. It shows a picture of an animal hide stretched out to dry in the sun. You can see the head with its horns, the stretched out limbs, the skin taut as if on a rack. It means to skin, and also leather. It acquired its meaning as transformation early on. The I-Ching is of Neolithic origin, and was used in this way when the book was first written down. A skin can be transformed to make shoes or a coat or a saddle. Also a skin can transform the wearer. Perhaps the ancient Chinese shamans would don the skin of a wild animal to perform ritual dances to invoke the Spirit Being of that animal; maybe to gain power of the animal in the hunt, maybe to serve as an oracle. They’d be transformed by the skin.
Certain animals lose their skin and acquire new skin. The ancient people took note of this. The ideogram became associated with the idea of change, of transformation, of metamorphosis, as in the transformation of a caterpillar to a butterfly, or of a snake shedding its skin. Eventually it acquired its meaning of revolution and social transformation. A single word in Chinese has multiple meanings. It can mean shoes, a bridle, or other leather products. It can refer to the transformations of alchemy and the transformations of the soul. It can mean social transformation, revolution, the renewal of social relations to make a new society. It shows that the idea of revolution is sanctioned in Chinese thought which, whether Westerners like it or not, legitimates the rule of the Chinese Communist Party, itself part of a Chinese tradition going back many years.
The Tarot isn’t as sophisticated as the Chinese language, which has about 7000 characters which can be combined to make 106,230 words. Chinese goes back to Neolithic times and serves more than a billion people in several different language groups. It’s why China holds together as a nation, despite its differences, and accounts for the extraordinary durability of certain Chinese texts, such as the I-Ching and the Tao Te Ching. How many Middle English texts such as The Canterbury Tales, can be read by ordinary English-speaking people today, let alone Old English texts such as Beowulf? Chaucer’s masterpiece dates from the 14th century. The Tao Te Ching dates to the fourth Century BC, and the I-Ching was probably first compiled before even the discovery of Iron.
Tarot wasn’t designed as a language. It’s a game. But it’s a game which can aid communication, and, over the years, like the ideograms in Chinese, it has acquired layers of meaning. In Chinese you can talk about “Fields of Meaning.” The fields are associative. You can think of the Tarot in the same way. Each picture tells a story which can be understood associatively, or metaphorically. Take one example: the Emperor. He’s an older man. He’s a married man, closely associated with his partner card, the Empress. He’s a man of authority. He’s the personification of the idea of authority. He might be an authoritative text, like an encyclopedia or a dictionary, or an authoritative structure, such as a university. He could be the source of authority in a social system, like the government. He could be oppressive authority or protective authority. He could be a figure of authority in your life, such as your father, or an aspect of yourself.
The whole deck is like that, layers of meaning interacting with layers of meaning, and just as in Chinese, where one word can serve to represent revolution or a pair of shoes, how you read it depends upon the grammar, the structure, how it appears in the sentence. It depends on the other cards in your reading. It depends on the position of the card in relation to the other cards.
This is why I prefer the Marseilles deck to all contemporary decks. The Marseilles doesn’t have pictures on the pip cards. Its meanings are more wide open than modern decks, though it takes longer to learn. The problem with putting pictures on the pips is that it limits the meaning. It imposes a particular meaning on the card, a meaning imparted to it by the designer of the card. If you’re looking at the popular Rider-Waite deck, then it is A. E. Waite’s meaning you are observing. That’s not necessarily your meaning. Same with Crowley’s deck, or all the other decks that have come down to us. There’s nothing wrong with them. Use them if you feel comfortable with them, but never forget that this is someone else’s interpretation you are dealing with and that you have nowhere near exhausted its potential for finding meaning.
The Marseilles deck, on the other hand, is pristine. It comes to us from a time before any specific meanings were ascribed to the cards, before it was used for divination. It’s not itself the original deck—that honor belongs to the Visconti-Sforza deck of Renaissance Italy—but it preserves many of the characteristics of the earliest decks, and was one of the first mass-produced sets of cards, familiar to people all over Europe for decades, even centuries. It remains the definitive pack. It inspired the divinatory practices of the 18th-century French Occultists who first began using it, and who made all the wild speculations about its origins that have come down to us ever since. That’s a testament to its mystery. It’s from the Marseilles deck that all subsequent Tarot decks are fashioned.
The meaning of each card is derived from a combination of number, suit and position, from its relation to the other cards, and from you. You’re liberated from A. E. Waite, the Golden Dawn, the Kabbalah, the Book of Thoth and all that other malarkey.
Take the Ten of Swords. The Rider-Waite deck shows a person lying dead on the ground with 10 swords buried in his back. What a dismal image. What can it mean? It looks like nothing less than ritual murder, like the person reading it was stabbed in the back multiple times, a horrific mass betrayal leading to an agonizing end. The Marseilles deck, on the other hand, shows 10 stylized swords in a lattice. They don’t even look like swords. What can you make of that? You can say there’s a surfeit of swords in your life at this point; and then it depends on what you mean by swords and what you mean by the number 10, what cards come before and after, how you’re feeling today, what question you have asked, and who’s sitting with you at the time. You’re not confronted by such an apocalyptic scene of total destruction, which would be bound to upset your sense of well-being. It’s enough to give you nightmares. The Marseilles deck allows you to envisage the Ten of Swords in any way you like. Are there too many swords? Maybe. Is this burden to you? Possibly. But does it mean that you’ve been stabbed in the back 10 times over and that you’re now lying face down, dead in the dust? It’s up to you to decide.