True Origins of Tarot - Part 2: Stepping Into Cartomancy
This is the second part in our True Origins of Tarot series, click here for Part 1.
Evolution of the Tarot
The present-day association of tarot & other cards with fortune-telling and the occult gained popularity due to the French Mystics in the 18th & 19th centuries and has very little to do with the medieval tarot cards. Etellia, Levi, and Papus were the ones to blame for all of this. One early record of cartomancy came from the famous adventurer and womanizer Giovanni Casanova who writes in his memoir about chastising a young, Russian peasant girl named Zaïre who practiced divination with a regular deck of cards and apparently used them to predict his infidelities (a feat which probably did not require any sort of magical ability).
"Etteilla", the pseudonym of Jean-Baptiste Alliette, was a French occultist and tarot-researcher. He was credited with being first to develop an interpretation concept for the tarot cards and made a significant contribution to the esoteric development of the tarot cards and to a wide audience. Etteilla published "Way to recreate yourself with the deck of cards called tarots" in 1783. He wrote that he had learned his system from an Italian; it remains unclear to what extent his assigned symbology was his own contribution. It was the first book of methods of divination by Tarot. He was the first professional tarot occultist known in history who made his living by card divination.
The Tarot of the Bohemians was written by another French occultist, Gerard Encausse, under his occult alias, Papus. It was published a little over 100 years later, in 1896. Gerard Encausse was a French hypnotist, physician, and occultist. He gave his “history” of tarot claiming that the practice contains knowledge from ancient Egypt, India, and Atlantis, which is not supported by evidence, as we’ve just discussed. This book was groundbreaking for tarot as we know it due to its exploration of Jewish Kabbalah mysticism & he was the first to draw the connection between the Hebrew alphabet & Major Arcana.
Eliphas Levi was also French, also an esotericist active in the 1860s-1890s before he died. He was a poet, and writer. He created Baphomet. Initially pursuing an ecclesiastical career in the Catholic Church, he abandoned the priesthood in his mid-twenties and became a ceremonial magician. He incorporated the Tarot cards into his personal magical system, as a result the Tarot has been an important part of the paraphernalia of Western magicians. He didn’t have one specific publication on the topic, but you can get compiled volumes of his writings. He had a deep impact on the magic of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, whose membership counted Arthur Edward Waite, Pamela Coleman Smith, Aelister Crowley, William Butler Yeats, Dion Fortune, and Constance Wilde, Oscar Wilde’s wife. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, for those unfamiliar, was a Secret Society of Ceremonial Magicians based in England. To join, all these folks knelt before the high priest and swore never to reveal the Order’s secrets, on peril of expulsion, and on pain of being “paralysed without visible weapon”.
Oscar Wilde was inspired by the stories his wife told him to write his spine-chilling thriller about dark magic, The Picture of Dorian Gray. I bet neither really considered that by breaking her oath she might have actually destroyed both their lives. Within a decade of her spilling the beans, Oscar Wilde had become the most notorious and reviled man in the country. In 1895, when Oscar, at the very height of his career and public popularity, attempted to sue the Marquess of Queensberry for libeling him as a homosexual, he was exposed as just that and condemned. Paying a heavy price for her husband’s downfall, Constance became a social outcast, exiled with her children to a life lived out in rented rooms under assumed names. Do you remember the vow she took on the threat of being “paralysed without visible weapon?” Once she fled she found herself disabled with a creeping paralysis in her arms and legs that would eventually kill her at the age of 40.
Arthur Edward Waite and Pamela Coleman Smith created the most popular deck of all time, first published by The Rider Company in 1909. Some imagery remains similar to that found in earlier decks, but overall the Waite–Smith card designs are substantially different from their predecessors. Christian imagery was removed from some cards, and added to others. For example, the "Papess" became the "High Priestess" and no longer features a Papal tiara, which many associated with the story of Pope Joan. The "Lovers" card, previously depicting a medieval scene of a clothed man and woman receiving a blessing from a noble or cleric was changed to a depiction of the naked Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and the ace of cups featuring a dove carrying Sacramental bread. The Minor Arcana are illustrated with allegorical scenes by Smith, where earlier classic/Marseilles style decks (with a few rare exceptions) had simple designs for the Minor Arcana.
The symbols and imagery used in the deck were influenced directly by Eliphas Levi and the teachings of the Golden Dawn. In order to accommodate the astrological correspondences taught by the Golden Dawn, Waite made several changes to the deck. He switched the order of the Strength and Justice cards so that Strength corresponded with Leo and Justice corresponded with Libra. He also based the Lovers card on Italian tarot decks, which have two persons and an angel, to reinforce its correspondence with Gemini.
Click here to go to Part 3 in this series, The True Origins of Tarot Cards
