Cards of Mystery Blowin' Confusion All Around

"And cruel Death surrenders with its pale ghost retreating/Between the King and Queen of Swords"-- Changing of the Guards, Bob Dylan, 1978

Rock music has a number of cottage industries and among the most long-lived of these is the art and science of deciphering Bob Dylan's lyrics...

Unfortunately for my bank account, I'm not able to adequately pigeonhole Dylan's songs other than to note many echo my own thoughts and feelings in the same way thousands of other people say his writing provokes similar responses inside them ...

Bob Dylan's song, "Changing of the Guards," which appears on
his Street Legal contains multiple references to the Tarot

Dylan's lyrics frequently offer tidbits to whet the appetites of those who would parse his words, sifting them as carefully as a Kabbalist gingerly traveling narrow paths between the Sefiroth in search of mystic enlightenment...

One song from his Street Legal album, "Changing of the Guards", makes several fairly clear references to archetypal images gracing the mysterious Tarot cards: the Moon, Wheel of Fortune, Tower, Sun, Death surrendering (or reversed, in Tarot terminology) between the King and Queen of Swords.  A previous Dylan album, Desire, featured the Empress on its back cover...

Tarot cards have been with us since the middle of the 15th Century.  The best evidence does not date them any earlier and this same evidence suggests the first people to use them simply played games with them in the same way we use modern cards to pass the time or to gamble that Lady Luck favors us...

Visconti-Sforza Tarot: The Star

Like Dylan songs, Tarot cards spawn any number of scholars intent on deciphering their true history and purpose.  (We might note these seekers of knowledge are every bit as earnest as those who would prove Christopher Marlowe or Sir Francis Bacon were the "real" Shakespeare and as dogged in their pursuits as those who know that mystery tale teller Rex Stout did not speak tongue-in-cheek in 1941 when he proposed Dr Watson, confidante to Sherlock Holmes, was a woman.  We must give some credit to Stout even though we might pity those who doubt Shakespeare's authorship of his plays. Would, Stout asks, any self-respecting man ask another man to play Mendelssohn on a violin for his listening pleasure?  A powerful argument indeed.)...

Many people simply do not believe the 15th Century theory holds water when it comes to tracing the origin of the Tarot.  A popular birthplace for them is Egypt, at a time eons ago when Isis herself spoke and stones rose from the Earth to form the Pyramids.  But others say the Land of Pharaohs was just a way station in a tale that began in Atlantis with prescient priests encapsulating their ancient wisdom into a symbol-filled deck while awaiting the destruction of their continent in a single day and single night...

 

Arthur Edward Waite, best known today for
his design of the Rider-Waite Tarot deck, was
also an early member of an influential late 19th
century occult society known as The Order of
The Golden Dawn

Drawbacks travel in the caravan bearing the Atlantean and Egyptian theories...

Scholars interested in the history of playing cards in Europe appear unable to find any written or inscribed references to them that go beyond a 1367 prohibition against their use in the city of Bern, Switzerland.  About nine years later, Florence, future cradle of the Italian Renaissance, also forbade their use.  More laws against them popped up in Marseilles and Lille in the early 1380s.  But attitudes change.  In 1392 or 1393, records kept by Charles Poupart, treasurer to the French king Charles VI, show that it was His Majesty's pleasure to compensate painter Jacquemin Gringonneur the sum of 56 sols for three packs of cards, "gilt and colored, and variously ornamented," that did amuse the king...

[Playing cards, as a form of recreational pursuit, date back to China during the Tang Dynasty, possibly before the 9th Century and were popular throughout Asia by the 11th Century.  Current opinion has it that cards with four suits similar to the ones we know today came to Europe in the late 1300s by way of contact with Egypt.]

Chinese playing card: Ming Dynasty, circa 1400

As for the Tarot cards specifically, the earliest surviving examples appear to be several hand painted decks created by an unknown artist (or artists) for the aristocratic Visconti and Visconti-Sforza families.  The most complete of these decks are 74 cards housed by the Pierpont Morgan Library.  Yale University has 67 cards in its Cary Collection.  Nine other institutions throughout Europe and the America have exhibits ranging from a single card to 48 of them.  All of these cards, with the possible exception of 23, can be reasonably dated to around 1450 or a few years later...

Rider-Waite Tarot: The Star
(Waite saw this trump as stmbolizing
spiritual truth irrigating both land and
sea with the Waters of Life)

What makes the Tarot cards so mysterious are the fact that a complete modern deck consists of two separate decks, the one a Major Arcana with 22 symbolic images and the other a Minor Arcana of 56 cards subdivided into four suits that correspond to the Spades, Diamonds, Clubs, and Hearts in modern day playing cards...

The division into two decks isn't actually what makes the cards so intriguing...

It is those 22 symbols that have engaged the minds of men and women since Court de Gebelin proposed in his 1781 work, Monde Primitif, the cards of the Major Arcana were actually a synthesis of all human knowledge collected by the ancient Egyptians and distilled into The Book of Thoth, somehow saved from the ruins of burned and pillaged temples...

Antoine Court de Gebelin, a former Protestant
minister turned archaeologist, was the first to
propose an ancient Egyptian origin for the Tarot

Unfortunately, de Gebelin had little more than his enthusiasm for the notion to back up his theory...

Others following de Gebelin in seeking an esoteric or occult origin for the Major Arcana have proposed several more plausible, if yet unproven, ideas.  One hypothesis of some interest is the notion the cards were a pictorial summary of alternative religious beliefs considered heretical by the medieval Church.  One of the first to ponder this possibility was occultist and Masonic historian Arthur Edward Waite...

Waite, in his 1910 The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, dismissed suggestions of truly ancient origins for the Tarot in Egypt or India or China as "deceptions and self-deceptions" due to a lack of evidence for the cards prior to the 14th Century.  He considered it a "missed opportunity" that previous researchers had not analyzed the Major Arcana as a possible symbolic encapsulation of doctrines taught by long outlawed Albigensian sects...

Necronomicon Tarot: The Star

[Outside of specialists in medieval European history, Albigensian sects (often referred to as Cathar sects in contemporary writing) are little known today except among those folk interested in returning Christianity to what they perceive as its original roots.  What we can say definitively about the movement is that it seems to have appeared in the south of France in the 11th Century, flourished for a while, and then found itself attacked and brutally suppressed in the mid-13th Century.  Pockets of Albigensian belief lingered on in the French Languedoc, the Pyrenees Mountains, and Northern Italy until at least the early 1330s.

It is, however, a more tricky task from a historian's standpoint to outline actual Cathar beliefs.  The Church ordered the writings of its members destroyed as heretical so we are generally left with only the testimony of the sect's opponents as to its doctrines. A majority of scholars agree the Albigensian faith probably had its roots in a much earlier attempt to reform Christianity (the so-called Paulician heresy) and that its beliefs likely contained Gnostic and Dualistic elements.  Beyond this, we descend into the realm of academic squabbling.
 

Pamela Colman Smith, "Pixie" to her friends, following written
comments by Arthur E Waite, created the beautiful images of the
Rider-Waite Tarot deck

From the standpoint of Rome, the Cathar movement was particularly dangerous.  True enough, it had many adherents amongst the peasantry.  But, unlike most heresies, the Albigensians found allies and even some believers amongst an already independent-minded nobility in the South of France.]

Since Waite made his comments over a century ago, other researchers with a mystical turn of mind have taken up his suggestion that the Albigensian heresy may have some connection with the images of the Major Arcana...

Pamela "Pixie" Smith was also a commercial illustrator
whose work adorned children's books, war relief
posters, and calendars such as this 1899 celebration of
Shakespearean plays.

And, since it is difficult to know exactly what constituted Cathar belief, some like Alfred Douglas conclude no conclusive correlations can be made.  Douglas does believe the numerical arrangement of the Major Arcana suggests Gnostic themes well:  Man is born a Fool, ignorant of the Divine Spirit residing within him, becomes aware that the world is surely more than he sees around himself as he ages, contends with orthodoxy imposed by the political and religious hierarchy, and then begins a long, introspective journey that leads to the liberation of his soul from the many illusions of the world of matter and reunion with the Divine...

While aspects of Gnostic doctrine are quite attractive and not necessarily at odds with the teachings of the Church, it has traditionally been considered dangerous or heretical for several reasons.  Among them is the fact that a number of Gnostic sects have rejected Tanakh (the Hebrew Scriptures) as inspired by a cruel and malevolent force, the Demiurge, who created the material world in which we live and breathe, whom they often identified with Satan.  A few sects have gone so far as to reject all forms of sexual expression, even in the confines of marriage, as evil...

Others, scholars and artists alike, have sought meaning in the Tarot as we shall see in future essays.  Some have pondered the archetypal images of the Major Arcana in the light of Carl Jung's theories...               

Tarot Josnell: The Star

 

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CREDITS

Note: Information on the early history of Tarot Cards is taken from The Encyclopedia of Tarot, by Stuart Kaplan (Stamford, Connecticut, 1978), The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, by Arthur Edward Waite (London, 1910), The Tarot: The Origins, Meanings, and Uses of the Cards, by Alfred Douglas (London, 1973). All photographs for this essay were located through Google Images or Wikipedia, without authoritative source or ownership information except as noted: Bob Dylan Street Legal album cover from bobdylan.com