Fifty-Six Mirrors: Overlooked Looking Glasses

WELCOME to the great adventure! Together we are about to embark on an exploration of a time-honored facilitator of psychic growth—the Tarot cards. Before our scrupulous, respectful investigation of individual Tarot images, however, I would like to introduce you to the Tarot as I understand it and offer a perspective that will prove essential in the work to follow. Both a clear grasp of what a Tarot deck is and how, from this writer's view, it can be used to greatest profit are necessary orientation for what follows.

Many facets of the Tarot's origins, history, and evolution remain enmeshed in controversy and mystery. However, the briefest of introductions will do for our purposes: a concise context within which we can focus on the interpretations of the cards for inner growth.

Tarot refers to a deck of seventy-eight pictured cards which most people associate with Gypsy fortune tellers. Others, for various reasons, have traced their origins back to the Egyptians. A more scholarly approach would say that Tarot first appeared in thirteenth-century France, in the still-available Marseilles deck. At that time, they were produced on leather and metal, predating both the invention of paper and the arrival from India of the Gypsies.

The seventy-eight cards are of two basically different kinds: the Major Arcana (Arcana, as in our word arcane meaning "secret," "esoteric," or "hidden away"), of which there are twenty-two; and the Minor Arcana, of which there are fifty-six. So we have the "great secrets," the Major Arcana, and the "small secrets," the Minor Arcana.

The Major Arcana relate to the soul's journey. For those of us who believe in reincarnation, they refer to that part of us that outlives the body and returns to the earth plane. For those who do not, they relate to that part of us that continues after the body is gone, the God energy that has become manifest in a vessel that it outlives. Clearly then, to associate them primarily with fortune telling is as erroneous as associating them primarily with Gypsies!

Tarot cards may have been the original deck of playing cards. In fact the Italian word for Tarot is Tarrochi, and there are those who believe that the first Tarot deck was designed for the Visconti family by Bonifaccio Bembo for the purpose of gambling. Here we see the emergence of good from evil, or at least trivial, interests.

In fact, the Tarot eventually became associated with the Holy Kabbalah, and in particular, the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. There is the predictable controversy about when and how these two giants of metaphysical thought came together, with theories ranging from biblical times to the nineteenth century. However, it is clear that by the nineteenth century, the two modalities were used in concert, to the great enhancement of the Tarot cards. We will explore Kabbalah in the next chapter; what follows is a brief history of its association with the Tarot.

In 1856, Alphonse Louis Constant, known as Eliphas Levi, published the first book to associate the twenty-two cards of the Major Arcana with the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the four suits of the Minor Arcana with the Tetragrammaton—the four-letter name of God. In 1889, Gerard Encausse, a student of Levi known as Papus, published The Tarot of the Bohemians, which asserts that the Tarot was generated by the Tetragrammaton and is to be understood in terms of it. Another student of Levi, Paul Christian, created a system combining Tarot with Kabbalistic astrology. Also in 1889, Oswald Wirth published a deck of Major Arcana whose twenty-two designs incorporated the twenty-two Hebrew letters. Both his teacher, Stanislos De Guaito, and Papus were members of the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose Cross, which has come into modern times as the Rosicrucians.

The connection between Kabbalah and Tarot continued to be recognized in the execution of decks by such proponents as Aleister Crowley, Paul Foster Case, and Manley Palmer Hall. The Rider Waite deck, to which the discussions in this book specifically refer, furthers this tradition. Although the Hebrew letters do not appear in his deck, Arthur Edward Waite, a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, assigned Hebrew letters to the cards in his writings. The Golden Dawn deck, executed by Robert Wang, associates the ten sefirot, or vessels, with the ten numbered cards, and the four olams, or realms, with the suits of the Minor Arcana. Aleister Crowley, in the Book of Thoth, went so far as to assert that "the Tarot was designed as a practical instrument for Qabalistic alculations."

The point is simple: regardless of the actual origins of Tarot and Kabbalah, by 1890 Kabbalistic teaching was integral to Tarot design. It is my contention that the expanded understanding and use of Tarot has Kabbalah—properly understood—at its root.

The foregoing is presented only to suggest the rich history of the Tarot in relation to Kabbalah, fertile ground for exploration should readers' interests so incline them. The history of the Tarot, however, is incidental to the study of the cards themselves, so let us now return to them and to the Minor Arcana in particular.

The Minor Arcana fall into four suits: Pentacles, Cups, Swords and Wands. Pentacles became Diamonds (the word pentacle refers to a coin within which is a five-pointed star, or pentagram), Cups became Hearts, Swords became Spades, and Wands became Clubs. Often, if someone says, "I can read your fortune from regular cards," it's because they have learned to read the Tarot and are familiar with the correspondences. They are simply translating.

Of course, our deck of playing cards has fifty-two cards, and the Minor Arcana of the Tarot, as I have mentioned, number fifty-six. The disparity can be explained in that we have three royalty cards in our modern deck—the jack, queen, and king. But the Tarot equivalent is composed of four court cards—the page, knight, queen and king. The page and the knight collapsed into one another to make the jack, thereby eliminating one card from each suit and four cards from the deck.

The deck with which we will be working is, as I have mentioned, the Waite deck, designed by Arthur Edward Waite and executed by Pamela Colman Smith. Its designs are wonderful and have been published by a number of companies. The differences among them (with one exception that occurs in the Major Arcana) are in the rendering of color. The designs are identical. What the various versions share is Waite's innovation of depicting the cards of the Minor Arcana as people in action or process, involving the symbols of their suits. Thus, the Four of Wands, the Two of Pentacles, the Seven of Swords, and the...