Chapter 1 -Historical Origin and Significance
It's said that the shuffling of the cards is the earth, and the pattering of the cards is the rain, and the beating of the cards is the wind, and the pointing of the cards is the fire. That's of the four suits. But the Greater Trumps, it's said, are the meaning of all process and the measure of the everlasting dance. -Charles Williams, The Greater Trumps, 1932
For centuries the Tarot's mysterious emblems of power and prophecy have exercised an enduring fascination for many people, and their enigmatic appeal is just as strong today. In the course of the last 200 years, the curiously compelling images depicted on the cards have inspired intriguing and sometimes wild theories of origin, ranging from Court de Gebelin's eighteenth-century speculations concerning its status as a survival of the fabled "Book of Thoth," dating from ancient Egypt, to the conceits of Petrarchian love poetry and more recent opinions of Jesse Weston, positing the pre-Christian Celtic origin of the symbolism in the cycles of Grail literature. The truth about the development of the deck over the last 2,000 years, resulting in the formalized woodcut packs produced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries at Marseilles, Besancon, and elsewhere in Europe, reveals a much more complex, subtle, and intricate picture of diverse esoteric influences cross-fertilizing and cohering over many centuries around the now-familiar Greater and Lesser Trumps of Tarot. These symbols, once treasured in the courts of fifteenth-century Italian nobles and Florentine princes and carried through many lands in the painted caravans of Romany sorcerers and fortunetellers, have never lost their appeal to the imagination and speak as beguilingly today with their voice of enchantment as they ever did in times gone by. Once known they are quite unforgettable. This is because they resonate within us as a true "psychic language," epitomizing the original timeless archetypes within the Deep Mind. In order to gain understanding of the wisdom-traditions that converge so mysteriously in the patterns of Tarot symbolism, let us briefly examine the known historical and conceptual background of this "Mute Book."
Tarot Symbolism and Origins The earliest extant examples of Tarot decks were illuminated with precious pigments on vellum with consummate artistry for courtly patrons in Renaissance Europe during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, including the deck allegedly designed by Jacquemin Gringonneur for France's King Charles VI in the year 1392. However, as early as March of 1377, play with cards had been officially proscribed in the city of Florence. The inventory of the Dukes of Orleans for 1408 records the purchase of Quartes de Lombardie, the Lombardy Tarocchi deck. The noble Milanese dynasty of the Viscontis commissioned the artist Marziona de Tartona to design a Tarocchi deck. Many of the so-called Lombardy Tarocchi decks were created as presents for aristocratic weddings such as that of Filipo Visconti and Maria of Savoy in 1428, for which the artist Bonifacio Bembo of Cremona executed a princely Tarot. The Visconti-Sforza deck dates from 1441 and celebrates the marriage of Francesco Sforza and Bianca Maria Visconti. The cards feature many examples of their heraldic family crests. According to some accounts, Francesco Fibbia, the Prince of Pisa, was the first to combine the originally separate Greater and Lesser Arcana during his exile at Bologna. The court ledgers of the Este family at Ferrara for 1442 mention Carticelles da Trionfi, the Trumps or "Triumphs" of Tarot.
The Tarot we recognize today is based on the so-called Venetian-Piedmontese Tarocchi. The close trade links between Venice and Turkey under the Abuyyid and Mameluk rulers led to Saracenic adaptations of the Minor Arcana, leaving out both Major Trumps and pictorial court cards, both proscribed under Islamic law. The only such fifteenth-century Turkish deck to survive is brilliantly ornamented with Circassian-Egyptian style artistic motifs and is kept at the Topkapi Saray museum in Instanbul. The Tarocki decks of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia also preserve the ancient symbols in the context of gaming.
Looking further back into history, the most ancient essence of the Tarot can be seen to have passed down from the adepts of Gnostic mystery-cults and the doctrines of Hermetic-Neo-Pythagorean magicians, which flourished into the final centuries of the Roman world up to the reign of the last pagan Emperor, Julian the Apostate.
Each of the Greater Arcana of Tarot is termed a "Trump," deriving from Triumphus or Thriambos, meaning a Dionysiac hymn marking a stage or spiritual station in the drama of Initiation in the Orphic Mysteries. The core of the Trumps is the mystical scale of numbers unfolding from the One to the Twenty-One, which relate to the concept of numbers as the Eternal Types or Ideas in the Divine Mind (Nous). These concepts of Arithmancy or Mathesis as the supreme key were taught by Orphic, Pythagorean, and Hermetic-Neo-Platonic schools of magic operant in the late Roman Empire, when Middle Eastern Gnostic religions, including the Hermetic, Mithraic, and Isian faiths, seeped westward into the Mediterranean sphere. Among the principal sources drawn upon by these schools were the teachings of Pythagoras, Plato, Zoroaster, Hermes Trismegistus, Apollonius, and Plotinus, as well as Hellenized Egyptian, Chaldean, and Persian mystery-cults then spreading across the Empire. Numbers, as the purest and most abstract conceptions, belong to the most exalted realm of the Mind and ceaselessly project and condition the phenomenal world according to immutable laws. As the Alexandrian Hermetic text "Libellus IV, Discourse of Hermes to Tat: The Krater" says, God then, is like the unit of number. For the unit [One], being the source of all numbers, and the root of them all, contains every number within itself, and is contained by none of them: it generates every number, and is generated by no other number.
In fifteenth-century Italy, where the Tarot sequence crystallized, the great magus Pico Della Mirandola stated as one of his Conclusiones Magicae printed in 1486: "By Numbers, a way is had, to the searchyng out, and understandyng of every thyng, able to...(Continues)
