This writing by Andrea Vitali, divided into a preface and six paragraphs, followed six historical sections on exhibition Tarot: History, Art, Magic by the Association “Le Tarot”
HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION
During the Renaissance the “Images of the Ancient Gods” reminded the observer of the classical myths, which were considered symbols of great ethical and moral values. The game of tarots was born in this period: it is considered to be one of the most extraordinary achievements of Italian Humanism. It reunites the most august representatives of the Greek pantheon with the Christian virtues, allegorical pictures of the human condition and symbols of the most important heavenly bodies.
Tarots were a game of memory which included the marvels of the visible and invisible world and gave the players physical, moral and mystical instruction. In fact, the series of cardinal virtues - Strength, Prudence, Justice and Temperance - reflects ethical precepts; the series of human conditions such as the Emperor, the Empress, the Pope, the Fool and the Juggler recalls the hierarchy which enslaves human beings; and the series of planets (Stars, Moon, Sun) refers to the celestial forces which subjugate human beings - and above them the Universe ruled by God.
But tarots soon lost this didactic and moral aspect, which already at the beginning of the 16th century was little understood. They were then considered no more than a game. Consequently the iconography of the figures changed according to the popular tastes of the regions where Tarots were used.
Only at the end of the 18th century was the philosophical meaning of tarots rediscovered, but the new interpreters only took into account their magical and divinatory aspect because they started from wrong premises.
A famous article published in 1781 by the freemason and archaeologist A. Court de Gebelin states that “the book of Tooth exists, and its pages are the pictures of the tarots”. A few years later another freemason, Etteilla, began to restore some of these pictures claiming that he knew the game which had been played by the ancient Egyptians. According to Etteilla, the first tarots represented the mystery of the origin of the Universe, the formulas of various magic rites and the secret of the physical and spiritual evolution of man. Ever since then, the game of tarots has been linked to the world of magic.
In this way the new era of Occultist Tarots was introduced, since it was believed that these cards offer more than mere knowledge of the future. The beauty, mysticism and mystery of tarots have influenced several artistic and philosophical tarots. One aim of this exhibition is to illustrate all the “messages” that tarots have evoked in the past and in the contemporary world.
CELESTIAL HARMONY
The game of Tarot, which were created at the beginning of the 15th century in Italy, is composed by 56 numeral cards, said to be Italian but in fact Arabic in origin (cups, coins, staves, swords), which arrived in Italy around the 14th century, and by 22 allegorical cards known as Triumphs inserted during the 5th century.
This game derives from Petrarca’s Triumphi (hence “triumphs” from Italian “trionfi”), who in that work described the principal forces which govern men and assigned a hierarchical value to each of them. Romanesque numerology saw in number Six "the superhuman, the power" as it coincided with the days of the biblical creation. First comes Love (Instinct), that corresponds to a juvenile phase, won by Bashfulness (Chastity, Reason), a following phase of mature calmness, to which follows Death, that signifies the transitoriness of the terrestrial things. It is at its turn, won nevertheless from Fame, victorious on death in posterity’s memory, but upon it Time triumphs which is finally overhung by the Triumph of the Eternity, that makes men escape from the flow of the becoming and sets him in the kingdom of eternity.
The number of the Triumphal cards at the beginning maybe was composed by 8 allegories, later by 14 and 16, then was finally set on 22, number that in the Christian mystical meaning represents the introduction to the wisdom and the divine teachings engraved in humanity. Such path, that reports a progressive adaptation of these "playing cards" to religious numerological laws, was probably adopted to avoid the sentence of the Church which was continually cast against the card games considered of hazard.
About the number 22 of the Triumphs here's how Origenes considers this number: “In the order of numbers, each single one a certain force and power over things. Of this power and force the Creator of universe made use, in some instances to give origin to universe itself, in others to express the nature of each thing as it appears to us. It follows then, that one must observe and draw out on the base of the Gospel these aspects, belonging to the numbers themselves. And in truth it ought to be not ignored that the books of the Bible itself, as the Jews reported them, are not without reason twenty-two and therefore equal to the number of Hebrew letters. Since in fact, twenty-two letters seem to be the introduction to wisdom and knowledge of the world” (Select in Ps I - PG 12, 1084). In other words, Origenes referring to the 22 books inspired by the Bible perceives in the twenty-two letters that compose the Hebrew alphabet an introduction to the wisdom and teachings of God imprinted in mankind (A. Quacquarelli, s.v. Numeri, in DPAC, pages 2447-2448).
The medieval theology assigns to the universe a precise order, formed by a symbolic staircase rising from the earth to the sky: From the top of the stairs God, the First Cause, governs the world, without getting directly involved, but operating “ex gradibus” i.e. through an uninterrupted series of negotiators. In this way his divine power is transmitted down to the lower creatures, and even to the humblest beggar. If we on the contrary read this symbology from the bottom to the top, we are taught that the man can gradually elevate in the spiritual order, climbing along the summits of the bonum, verum and nobile and that science and virtues make him approach nearest to God.
From the first known list of Triumphs of the beginning of the 16th century, it is evident that it was an ethical game. The Magician shows a common man who has been provided with both temporal guides (the Emperor and Empress) and spiritual guides (the Pope and Popess, i.e. Faith). Human instincts themselves must be mitigated by the virtues: Love by Temperance, and the desire for power (the Chariot of Triumph) by Fortitude. The Wheel of Fortune teaches us that success is ephemeral and that even great men are destined to become dust: thus the Hermit who follows the Wheel represents Time, to which all beings are subject and the necessity for each man to meditate on the real value of life, while the Hanged Man (The Traitor) depicts the danger of falling in temptation and sin before the arrival of the physical Death. Even the afterlife is represented according to the typical medieval idea: Hell, and thus the Devil, stands at the centre of the earth, while the celestial spheres are above earth. According to the Aristotelian vision of the cosmos, the terrestrial sphere is surrounded by celestial fires which in the tarots are represented as lightning striking a Tower. The planetary spheres are synthesized in three main planets: Venus (the pre-eminent Star), the Moon, and the Sun. The highest star is the Empyrean, the seat of the angels who will be summoned to awaken the dead from their tombs at the Last Judgement - when divine Justice will triumph in weighing the souls and dividing the good from the evil. Highest of all is the World, or the Holy Father, as an anonymous Dominican commentator on the tarots wrote at the end of the 15th century.
The same author places the Fool after the World, as if to illustrate his complete alienation from all rules and teachings, since, because of his lacking reason, he was not able to understand the revealed truths. The thought of the Scholasticism, that aimed to confirm the truths of faith through the use of reason, united in this category all those people who didn’t believe in God, even if able to reason. In tarots the presence of the Fool has therefore a further and deeper sense: the Fool, in its meaning of not believer in God but reasoning one, had to become, through the teachings expressed by the Mystical Staircase, Fool of God as the most popular saint became, that is Francis, who was called “The Saint Minstrel of God” or “the Saint Fool of God.
Only at the beginning of the 16th century the term Tarot appeared, probably attributed to these cards in the moment in which their ethical content was forgotten to keep only the playing aspect, even if some good jurist affirmed to perceive in them “something virtuous".
The origin of the new term is still controversial today: some hold that it derives from the Arabic Tariqa, meaning “The Way of Mystical Knowledge”, a variant of a mystic path of Indian origin, having as inspiring source Tara, goddess of Knowledge (The Green Tara represents the goddess of the Supreme Knowledge in the Tibetan Buddhism), both based upon 22 aspects.
Others perceive a possible link to the technique used in northern Italian courts known as Taroccato, used for decorating illuminated manuscripts with a punch; still others assume that the word Tarocco comes from the dialect word tarocar, which means saying or doing foolish or senseless things while gambling. It seems likely that this term too could come from the Arab root TRH (cf. the Italian verb “tarare”, from the noun “tara”, with the meaning: to take away, to subtract (in this case the opponent’s points). In Castilian we find the noun “tarea”, from the same Arabic root and the same meaning , extended to draw, drop, assign (deal out cards?).
ALLEGORICAL ICONOGRAPHY
The allegories which appear on the trump cards belong to the iconographical tradition common to most of Europe from the 13th century. They may be found in the decorations of the Gothic cathedrals, in the frescoes of public buildings, and in encyclopaedic and astrological manuscripts. In practice, the figures represented on the cards of the Triumphs are a real Biblia Pauperum, that means a “The Poor men's Bible”. Playing the cards, people directly drew from these a knowledge of the Christian mysticism and its contents, concepts that were continually recalled in their minds, according to the method of the Ars Memoriae of the time.
They may be readily interpreted by reference to the cultural context of the courts of northern Italy, and their taste for moralizing images derived both from religious tradition and classical mythology. For the ancient gods continued to play a role in medieval Christian culture, even though their characters were different from those of the original divinities.
On the one hand, they were held to be civilizing heroes who taught men many arts, like Minerva, the first weaver, or Apollo, the medical god. On the other hand, they were interpreted as allegories of virtue and vice, and it is in this sense that they appear on some of the Tarot cards.
Obvious examples include Strength, represented by the mythical Hercules as he destroys the Nemean Lion - the symbol of animal instinct; Love, represented as Cupid ready to launch his darts against incautious lovers; Prudence, represented by Saturn; and the Modesty of Diana, the Immodesty of Venus, the Truth of Apollo illuminating Earth with the disc of the sun.
Many tarot figures clearly employ Christian iconography. For example, the World is sometimes represented by the Celestial Jerusalem placed inside a sphere supported by angels or dominated by Celestial Glory. The card bearing the Popess, identical to that in Giotto's frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, derives from the image of Faith. Amongst many other possible examples, representations of virtues such as Temperance, Justice and Fortitude echo the classical iconography to be found in the sculpture of Gothic cathedrals or the miniatures of the sacred books.
Other sources of inspiration include ancient astrological treatises. The figure of the Bagatto, or Juggler, appears among the Children of the Moon - that is to say, the trades which are influenced by the moon. The Misero, or Fool, is found among the Children of Saturn, the Lovers among the Children of Venus, the Pope among the Children of Jupiter, and the Emperor among the Children of the Sun. Moreover, astrologers appear in several packs of triumphs as representations of the Moon or the Stars.
Lastly, there are images drawn from everyday life. An extremely interesting example is the figure of the Hanged Man, which refers to the punishment inflicted upon traitors. In the Bolognini Chapel of the church of Saint Petronius in Bologna an identical figure is represented in a fresco by Giovanni da Modena as the retaliation punishment for idolaters, since idolatry was considered the most awful kind of betrayal because addressed to the disownment of the Creator. Although the punishment of hanging by a leg has been represented in other works, the Saint Petronius fresco is the only known example which coincides perfectly with the Tarot card.
THE DIVINE HERMES
Hermes, who was associated with the Egyptian god Thoth, was considered in the ancient world to be the inventor of writing and the author of several magical and religious treatises. At the time of the Roman Empire, these Hermetic texts were re-interpreted in the School of Alexandria in the light of Greek philosophy, especially Pythagoras and Plato. The Fathers of the Church also viewed Hermes with great respect as a result of analogies between some of the texts attributed to him and and passages in the gospels.
In 1460, a manuscript found in Macedonia and wrongly attributed to Hermes Trismegistus was brought to Cosimo de Medici in Florence. The translation of this work in 1463, by the priest and philosopher Marsilio Ficino, was followed by the translation of Platonic works which revealed a fascinating conception of the Cosmos. This philosophy held that the Universe converged on the Divine Unity, ordered according to various degrees of perfection and represented by the concentric circles of the planetary and celestial spheres, while man himself possessed a divine part - the soul - that during his earthly existence could lead him to contemplation of the Supreme Good through the practice of virtue and through the mediation of the various angelical beings.
Another important aspect of this philosophy was the idea that the Universe was reflected in all things. Man was conceived as a little world, a Microcosmos which in structure and content was identical to the Macrocosmos. Beginning with Ficino, Renaissance philosophers devised elaborate systems of correspondence between the stars of the firmament and the various parts of the human body. One consequence of this was the revaluation of magic, astrology and alchemy - the prime example of a Hermetic art. These sciences were thought capable of enabling man to understand the secret links which held the universe together and influenced human behaviour.
Thus the ancient planetary divinities - Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury, the Sun and the Moon - reassumed their role as powerful and feared spirits who could be invoked and questioned for knowledge of man’s fortune. Indeed man, through the creation of amulets, the performance of special rites, and the carrying out of specific operations, would be able to defend himself from the power of the stars - which was even hidden in stone and metals - and by capturing that power employ it for his own spiritual elevation.
This philosophy inspired such authors as the poet Ludovico Lazzarelli (1450-1500), whose De Gentilium imaginibus deorum was illustrated with figures from the so-called Mantegna Tarots, and the anonymous author of the Sola-Busca Tarots (approx. 1490) with their references to alchemy.
During the same period several of the tarot images were modified in order to conform with the Hermetic iconography. Following the Platonic conception, in fact, the starry origin of the soul is represented in the map of the Stars, and the Anima Mundi which Ficino believed to represent the mediating influence between man and God appears in the map of the World.
THE GAME OF TAROTS
In the first decade of the 15th century, probably in Bologna, this card game was conceived and, from the 16th century, it quickly spread in Europe. The Tarots were originally used in games with rules near to those of the chess and for this ingenious character, the "Ludus Triomphorum" was expressly omitted in the ordinances against the games of hazard emanated during the 15th century.
Besides, thanks to numerous Renaissance documents, it is known that in aristocratic courts the game of tarots was at the centre of sophisticated entertainments, for example the invention of courtly sonnets and answering questions of various kinds concerning cards taken from the pack. Another common practice that lasted until 19th century, was that of associating the tarot figures to famous people, composing sonnets or simple mottoes on them which might be praising, comic, or decidedly satirical in tone.
In the 18th century there was a rich production of tarots developed with fantastic scenes, inspired to the animal world, to the history, to the mythology, to the customs of the various people.
But since it was an hazard game, with all the consequences that this involved, starting from the 16th century the Church intervened to repress it. Just after a hundred years from their creation, the Christian meaning of the Mystical Staircase on which their order was structured, had been already forgotten.
These playful and literary practices soon however lost their importance. As early as the end of the 15th century an anonymous friar preacher denounced the Tarots as the work of devils, and supported his claim by arguing that in order to draw men into vice the inventor of the game had deliberately employed solemn figures such as the Pope, the Emperor, the Christian virtues, and even God.
The good monk writes besides that “If the player thought about the meaning of the papers, he would run away. In fact in the cards there is a fourfold difference. There is money running away form players’ hands. And this means the instability of the money of the player, because you must think that when you enter in the game you will loose your money. They are also there the cups to show what a poverty will come, because the poor player with no more glasses will drink in a cup. They are also there the batons. The wood is dry to suggest the aridity of the divine grace in the player. There are even the swords that mean the brevity of the life of the player since he will be killed, etc. Really, no kind of sinners is so desperate as that of the card players. When a player loses and cannot have the desired point, the card or the triumph, it strikes the cross in the money, cursing God or the saints, and he throws away the dice with anger telling himself That I had my hand cut off’ etc. Very easily he becomes angry with the companion that derides him and continually rise some offenses and they beat each other etc”. The anonymous preacher then ends with the canonical sentence “Player, open your eyes or you’ll get a bad end”.
Despite the sentence of the Church the tarots kept on spreading, so much that beginning from the 18th century, tarots were imported in Italy from France and in particular from Marseilles - whose design was imitated by producers in Lombardy and Piedmont to renovate their own production.
Then, under the pressure of more modern games, the tarots gradually disappeared, so that today they are used in a few places in Sicilia, Emilia, Lombardy, Piedmont and south-eastern France. But in the meantime the tarot images had been subject to esoteric manipulations and interpretations which led them to be considered as “magical icons”.
THE BOOK OF THOT
The birth of the tarots as a magical tool came at the height of the Enlightenment, towards the end of the 18th century, with the then famous French archaeologist and freemason Antoine Court de Gebelin: “If we were to announce that, in our days, there survives a Work which contains the purest doctrines of the Egyptians, and which has escaped the flames of their libraries... who would not be impatient to consult such a precious and extraordinary Book... This Book exists and its pages are the figures of the Tarots”.
In order to justify his assertions, Court de Gebelin explains that the word tarot derives from the Egyptian Ta-Rosh, meaning the “Science of Mercury” (in Greek Hermes; in Egyptian Thoth). Then, aided by an unknown collaborator, he listed the numerous magical properties of the Book which he had just discovered.
These theories were taken up by another freemason, Etteilla, whose real name was Jean-François Alliette: “The Tarot is an ancient Egyptian book, whose pages contain the secret of a universal medicine, the creation of the world, and the future of the human race. It was conceived in the year 2170 BC, during a conference of 17 magicians presided over by Hermes Trismegistus. It was then engraved on gold sheets which were placed around the central fire of the Temple of Memphis. Then, after various vicissitudes, it was reproduced by common medieval engravers in such imprecise fashion that the meaning was completely distorted”.
Thus Etteilla restored to the tarots what he believed to have been their original form: he refashioned the iconography and called it the Book of Thoth. The legacy of Neoplatonism and Renaissance Hermeticism is evident in Etteilla’s re-elaborations. Indeed, he reproduced the stages of Creation in the first eight triumphs, emphasized the role of Virtue leading men's souls towards God in the next four, and in the last ten triumphs represented the negative conditioning to which human beings are subjected. The fifty-six numeral cards were intepreted as the divinatory sentences written for man.
The fashion for cartomancy took off as a result of these revelations. It was only many years later that the mystical element of the tarots received a similar revaluation at the hands of Eliphas Levi, who denounced Etteilla's mistakes and asserted that the 22 triumphs corresponded to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet.
He also explained the relationship to magic, Masonic symbolism and above all to the 22 paths of the “Cabbalistic Tree of Life” - which in turn reflected the identical structure of man and the universe. By following the “22 Channels of Supreme Knowledge”, man's soul could achieve contemplation of the Divine Light.
Eliphas Levi’s theories were taken up by numerous occult brotherhoods, and each one devised a new tarot pack which followed its own philosophical concepts. For some, initiates were to work towards the creation of a vast Humanitarian Temple whose aim was the creation of the Kingdom of the Holy Spirit which would be based on an esoteric form common to all cults; for others, the Tarots represented the stages in an individual path towards the mystical elevation or psychic exaltation which derived from magical powers.
TAROTS AND CARTOMANCY
Ross Caldwell writes «Writing from the Spanish court around the year 1450, Fernando de la Torre described how, with a special form of the common naïpes that he had designed, players could “tell fortunes with them to know who each one loves most and who is most desired and by many other and diverse ways” (puédense echar suertes en ellos á quién más ama cada uno, e á quién quiere más et por otras muchas et diversas maneras). Echar suertes means “to cast lots”, and is the common Spanish term for “telling fortunes”; this is the earliest time in history the term is used in connection with playing cards».
«There are no clear accounts of how fortune-telling with cards was done until about a century and a half later, but in the meantime cards were sometimes listed with dice and other methods as kinds of “sortilege”, a term sometimes meaning “witchcraft” in general, but specifically meaning “divination”. In 1506, an Italian, Giovanni Francesco Pico della Mirandola, in a chapter against divination, included “images depicted in a card game” as being among the different kinds of sortilege. Later, in 1554, the Spanish priest Martin de Azpilcueta listed cards (cartas) as one of the means of divination, all of them sinful. In his 1632 encyclopedic miscellany Para todos exemplos morales, humanos, y divinos, Juan Perez de Montalvàn (sometimes spelled Montalbàn), like Mirandola and Azpilicueta, lists naipes as one of the methods of sortilege, or fortune-telling: “Sortilege, which is done with dice, playing cards, and lots ”» .
The use of cards for magic was a practical diffused in the 16th and 17th centuries so much to that the inquisitional courts intervened more times to condemn it. In Venice in 1586 the inquisition took provisions after the use of cards of tarots in a ritual developed on an altar and so in Toledo in 1615.
An indirect relationship between cards and divination is found in some books of fortune in which playing cards exclusively served as an instrument to get scores and combination of numbers and figures, remaining completely extraneous to cards any value of cartomancy and symbol. The work Le Ingegnose Sorti by Marcolino da Forlì appeared in Venice in 1540 is an example.
From different testimonies written at that time, we know that cartomancy was diffused. Merlin Cocai (pseudonym of Teofilo Folengo) in his work, the Chaos del Tri per uno of 1527, writes in literary form a sort of divinatory reading with tarots similar to the one currently used, while from Spain of 1538 (as the historian of tarots Ross. G.Caldwell has underlined) comes to us a document compiled by a certain Pedro Ciruelo in which he, close to dice and to the written sheets, inserts the reading of cards (in this case done with the naipes, which is to say numerals and of court cards) as an instrument to divine (A divina por las suertes).
We know that in 17th century Spain the use of the cartomancy was very diffused, but it is in Bologna in the first years of the 18th century there is the first document known in which we find the list of cards with the relative divinatory meanings. However it is only in the 19th century that the number of fortune-tellers increased so dramatically - thanks to the astonishing revelations of Court de Gebelin, Etteilla and the occultist brotherhoods. It is generally accepted that between the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century the times were propitious for prophets and fortune-tellers, both in France and elsewhere, as the result of political uncertainty and economic crisis.
One of the most celebrated fortune-tellers of the time was Mademoiselle Le Normand, who built up a considerable fortune by paying careful attention to her public image. M.lle Le Normand became the confidant of the Empress Josephine and read the cards to Napoleon. The “Sibylle des Salons”, as she was known, was imitated by scores of fortune-tellers who sought to make a living from their art by declaring themselves to be disciples or even heirs to M.lle Le Normand. Others created new packs of tarots based on the Egyptian Tarots of Etteilla or the ordinary French playing-cards.
About the year 1850, fortune-telling with tarots and other kinds of playing-card had become a popular technique throughout Europe, and in the same period an increased interest in esoteric philosophies provided fresh impetus for the magical arts in general and cartomancy in particular. The spread of this practice through all social classes was accompanied by a vast industrial production of cards to meet the many needs of customers. At least a hundred new designs of fortune-telling cards appeared during the 19th century, especially in France, Italy and Germany. Most of them however had little to do with the Tarots, but derived from books on the interpretation of dreams and the so-called “Cabala del Lotto” (System for foretelling lottery numbers).
It might be argued that this fashion has never declined, except in times of war. Today, sociologists investigate the causes of what they perceive as a return to the irrationality of the past, while it would be more pertinent to read this apparent “irrationality” as an expression of the constant desire in Western history for "higher" certainties.
Moreover, there is an important artistic element to be taken into consideration. Highly-skilled painters and graphic artists have devoted their attention to designing fortune-telling cards: their work is not only witness to their personal creativity, but also to the collective sensibility and taste of the period in which they lived.