Congrats Helen, I didn't realise you'd turned your research into a book.
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Subject: [JFRR] A Cultural History of Tarot: From Entertainment to
Esotericism (Farley, Helen)
A Cultural History of Tarot: From Entertainment to Esotericism. By
Helen Farley. 2009. London: I. B. Tauris. 304 pages. ISBN:
1-84885-053-0 (hard cover).
Reviewed by William Hansen, Indiana University ([log in to unmask]).
[Word count: 1090 words]
Playing cards were introduced into Italy in the fourteenth century by
the Arabs. The decks had the basic structure that ordinary decks of
cards have today: four suits, each featuring ten numbered cards and
three court cards, making a pack of fifty-two cards altogether. In
Italy these suits were called cups, batons (replacing the Arab suit
of polo-sticks), coins, and swords. In France they metamorphosed
respectively into the hearts, clubs, diamonds, and spades that for
Americans and many Europeans characterize a standard pack of playing
cards.
Tarot cards appear to have arisen in Italy as a modification of
playing cards. A tarot deck typically has four suits consisting of
ten numbered cards and four (rather than three) court cards, plus
twenty-one trump cards and one wild card, for a total of
seventy-eight cards. The basic novelty of the tarot deck was the
addition of the twenty-one trump cards, each displaying a distinctive
image. The term "trump cards" derives from "triumph cards" (Italian
carte da trionfi), so called because the cards are ordered
hierarchically so that in play a higher card triumphs over a
lower-ranked card. Tarot cards were used to play the game of tarocco
(the Italian word is of uncertain etymology); the French at the time
called it taraux, and from the French we have our English word
"tarot" with its silent final letter. By the seventeenth century the
game of tarok, or tarot, was being played in most of Europe.
Although tarot continues to be played in some regions of Europe, most
persons today think of tarot cards not as playing cards at all but as
fortune-telling cards or as a device for the acquisition of
self-knowledge. The fascinating story of this transformation is the
subject of Helen Farley's A Cultural History of Tarot, wherein the
author traces the history of tarot decks, the uses to which they have
been put, and the ideas that have arisen about them. The novelty of
her approach, she declares, lies in her pulling together the work of
researchers who do not usually converse with one another: scholars of
Western esotericism, historians of games, and art historians. She
rightly points out that a major challenge faced by historians of
tarot is that much of the literature on the subject is popular
scholarship in which conjectures about tarot are transmitted
uncritically as facts.
Farley parses the cultural history of tarot into four major periods,
beginning with fifteenth-century Italy, when the evidence suggests
that the tarot deck was devised as a modification of the familiar
playing-card deck. The earliest surviving packs consist of
hand-painted cards crafted for members of prominent Italian families,
the most nearly complete set being the so-called "Visconti-Sforza"
deck, which has served as the basic model for most subsequent tarot
decks. In my view Farley makes a persuasive argument that the imagery
and symbolism of the trump cards in this deck were devised
specifically to reflect the world and worldview of the powerful
Visconti and Sforza families of Renaissance Milan. Thus the four
trumps known as Emperor, Empress, Pope, and Popess can be seen as
representing temporal and spiritual power in northern Italy in late
medieval and early modern times, and the Popess card may have been
inspired specifically by a particular nun connected with the Visconti
family who was called La Papessa by her admirers. Other cards
represented virtues (e.g., Fortitude, Justice), luminaries (e.g.,
Sun, Moon), metaphysical ideas (e.g., Old Man = time, Wheel of
Fortune = chance), and so on. The deck was, Farley argues, a sort of
allegory of life, with its mix of chance and skill, the trumps
loosely reflecting the history and worldview of particular
aristocratic families in a fifteenth-century Milanese context.
The second period is late-eighteenth and nineteenth century France.
The symbolism of the trump cards was no longer readily understood,
and tarot was drawn into the occult movements and the Egyptomania of
the day. Influential French occultists interpreted the tarot cards as
remnants of a lost Egyptian book, The Book of Thoth; Egyptian priests
had encoded their ancient wisdom in the cards and entrusted them to
gypsies, who brought them to Europe. Tarot cards were also associated
with the kabbala. Other occultists developed the idea that the cards
were divinatory; accordingly, the game of tarot was merely a disguise
that one could dispense with. In short, French occultists transformed
tarot from a game into an instrument of esotericism.
The next significant period was nineteenth-century England, when the
secret fraternal society called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn
focused upon the tarot as an important device of divination, ritual
magic, and meditation. Most modern methods of tarot divination derive
in fact from the system of esoteric correspondences devised by
members of the Golden Dawn, whose approach to the tarot was a complex
syncretism of Egyptian, Hebrew/Jewish, and Celtic lore and fantasy.
The British occultists, like the French occultists before them,
modified and published tarot decks that reflected their own view of
the true nature of tarot. For example, after tarot cards ceased to be
playing cards, occultists added The Fool, which originally was a wild
card, to the trump cards, raising the number of trumps to twenty-two.
Of the occult decks the most popular and influential has been that
designed by Arthur Edward Waite.
In Farley's fourth period the tarot has been redefined by twentieth-
and twenty-first-century New Agers as a device for self-knowledge and
self-healing. No longer do tarotists seek to reconstitute the
original tarot deck and grasp its ancient, hidden meanings, and no
longer is tarot an esoteric device for the few. Instead, the deck has
become unabashedly fluid and popular. New-Age designers feel free to
re-imagine its structure and symbols, drawing their imagery
eclectically from astrological, Jungian, feminist, classical, Old
Scandinavian, Celtic, alchemical, pagan, Taoist, Amerindian, African,
and other sources.
The shortcomings of the book are few. Although the author stumbles
occasionally in her handling of foreign languages, the only error
that may mislead the reader has to do with the secret fraternal name
that Arthur Edward Waite bore as a member of the Hermetic Order of
the Golden Dawn: Frater Sacramentum Regis Abscondere Bonum est. She
renders the motto as "It is good to keep the sacrament of the king"
(144), but "abscondere" means "to conceal, keep secret," not merely
"to keep." For the uneven copy-editing and the rather low quality of
the illustrations the publisher is presumably responsible.
Overall, Helen Farley has given us a sound, clearly written, and
richly documented book that makes an informative and enjoyable read.
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