Customer Reviews

Tarot and the Millennium: The Story of Who's on the Cards and Why

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Beginning with Gertrude Moakley's _The Tarot Cards_ (1966), fanciful theories that the tarot embodies ancient Egyptian mysteries and occult secrets have given way to theories more anchored in historical fact. Unfortunately, there are several such "historically plausible" theories competing for our attention: tarot depicts a Renaissance carnival parade, tarot is a Renaissance neoplatonic cosmograph, tarot is a simple card game with no reference to anything deeper, etc.

This book throws one more possibility into the hat: tarot depicts an apocalyptic prophecy from the 13th century.

The evidence is a medieval manuscript, more than a century earlier than the first tarot decks. The author argues that there is a parallel for each tarot card in the illustrations of this manuscript. The Hermit, for example, is correlated with a picture of St. John eating a book, representing prophecy.

The pictures in the manuscript, though, often seem only vaguely similar to the tarot cards Betts matches them with; this is explained by the passage of time and "symbol substitution", through which (for example) St. John's book becomes the Hermit's lantern or hourglass, with people nevertheless remembering what the original meaning of the figure is. And although we know from early documents that the Hermit card was variously referred to as "Time", "The Hunchback", or "The Old Man", Betts maintains that the people using these titles would still understand the card to be a depiction of St. John.

This disconnect in both symbolism and card titles happens for almost every card in Betts's hypothesis, leading the reader to question whether the correspondences are real or imagined.

There is nothing wrong with speculation, of course. The problem with this book is that no recognition is made at all of the more plausible connections that other writers have made between the tarot and Renaissance culture (Moakley, O'Neill, Williams). In recent decades, there has evolved a fairly solid body of conventional wisdom recognizing that most of the tarot symbols were standard allegories of the 15th century. The fact that much better matches (both in symbolism and in card titles) can be made "closer to home" severely undermines Betts's hypothesis. Rather than acknowledging this, the book instead completely ignores the competing viewpoints and in fact presents itself as "the truth revealed", a disconcerting self-indulgence more suited to the old occultists than to modern scholarship.

The book does contain some nice summaries of cultural trends in the late Middle Ages, such as the Franciscan movement and the apocalyptic genre. And the case in favor of Betts' hypothesis is interesting and readable, if not convincing.

Alas, the book presents a "long shot" hypothesis so one-sidedly that it comes across as undeniable truth. For this reason, I simply cannot recommend it to any student of tarot history who is not already familiar with the standard references, such as Dummett's _The Game of Tarot_, Moakley, O'Neill's _Tarot Symbolism_, or Williams's _A Renaissance Tarot_.

This is an excellent book that does away with the usual garbage about the tarot. The author presents a good case for the cards representing a story of the apocalypse. The history of the period when the cards appeared is discussed in detail especially concerns about the antichrist and the end of the world. I recommend this book.