Knowing the history of the emergence of the Tarot system, and this is precisely the system, is worth it only because this knowledge will help many to get rid of unnecessary fears and not fall for many ducks that are written in many books by fairly "respectable authors." So, the history of the emergence of Tarot cards is very vague, contains a lot of speculation that is not supported by historical facts. There are many conjectures, since there is no specific source of their occurrence, the person to whom their creation would be attributed.
We can try to build some logical chains, but not on conjectures and enthusiastic visions of exalted gentlemen, but on historical facts. Some of the tarologists attribute the creation of cards to the time of Ancient Egypt, talking about the unfound temple, the book of wisdom and their use in the mysteries. Others are sent even further to India, as if from there they were brought by a tribe of gypsies. There are even those who suggest as much as a Chinese trace in the origin of Tarot cards. As much as possible?
Let's take a more critical approach to this point and look at the available historical facts. The first mention of the Tarot in written sources dates back to 1367 in the canon of Bern about the ban on the card game. Let's make a note for ourselves - this is the middle of the 14th century, the cards already existed, and the Catholic Church imposes a ban on them.
The first Tarot deck found, more or less identical to those we now have, dates back to 1392, fragments of these decks have been preserved. It is believed that they were created by Jacquemin Gringonner, the jester of the French king for his amusement. But this deck lacks the Major Arcana. In 1450, a deck was created for Count Visconti and the maiden Sforza, as a wedding gift. Fragments of this deck made up the oldest surviving to this day, consisting of 78 Tarot cards. At the same time, such a direction as "Christian Kabbalah" appeared in esotericism, but about it a little later.
In 1540, the book "Marcolino" Divination "is published in Italy, which indicates the reprehensible properties of Tarot cards. The beginning of the 17th century - the treatise" Glory and Confession of the Rosicrucians "appears, which became the manifesto of the Rosicrucian secret society, which notes the esoteric essence of the Tarot and their predictive capabilities XVIII-XIX centuries - the heyday of interest in the Tarot. Here we meet already well-known names: Ettailla with the book "Predictive Tarot", Elefas Levi, Papus, MacGregor Mathers from the Order of the Golden Dawn, Aleister Crowley, who came out from there. Russian esotericists who seriously analyze Tarot: Vladimir Shmakov, Rosicrucian G.O.M. (Grigory Ottovich Mebes)
Why, in fact, everyone discounts Europe, which has always had many of its own secret orders and religious movements, whose spiritual views did not coincide with the dogmas of the Catholic Church. Attempts by the Inquisition to clear the field of dissent only made it necessary to improve the art of encryption and conspiracy. The south of France and the north of Spain and Italy have historically been the concentration of heretical mystical knowledge. Want more value? But any teaching is always built on previous knowledge, hence the connection with ancient teachings. But let's try to figure it out anyway.

The emergence of the concept of maps in the world
Let's start by defining where the cards appeared in general, as a concept. Playing cards and their predictive variants are found in different countries of the world. In China, playing cards are mentioned already in the 8th century, where they were simply banknotes with images of emperors. In the 13th century, a deck of playing cards arose, where there were four suits associated with the seasons and 52 weeks of the year, there was an analogue of the Joker, but there were no court cards of the Major Arcana in Chinese decks.
India had its own version of playing cards, or Ganjifa cards, which have been known since the 16th century, were called. There is a saying that they migrated to India from Persia. As we remember, Tarot has already been created in Europe. The number of suits in the cards of Ganjif varied from 8 to 12, the number of cards in each suit corresponded to ten. The Raja (Shah, King) and the Vizier (Minister) were present there. The suits were cardinal directions, planets, twelve signs of the zodiac, incarnations of the god Vishnu (avatars).
Middle Eastern playing cards are also known. One of the decks, kept in the museum of Turkey, is believed to originate from Egypt of the Mamluk era (XV century). There are four suits in the deck, and this is more like a Marseille Tarot deck. The Middle Eastern deck contains: coins, bowls, swords and polo clubs. Each suit has three face cards: Malik (King), Nabib Malik (First Minister) and Thani Mabib (Second Minister). There are 52 cards in total.

The early European names for playing cards (naibi, naibbe, naipes, etc.) may come from the Mamluk Naib Ministers. But the Major Arcana is not here again.
So, from the Islamic world (Egypt or Turkey), maps get to Europe (first to Spain and Italy) somewhere in the 13th-14th centuries. Europeans gladly borrowed oriental games such as checkers and chess. And they also liked playing cards, remember the jester Charles VI, who personified all the cards of the court with specific historical figures. With maps of the yard, everything is more or less clear. The Europeans improved the cards and introduced European concepts: Kings, Jacks, Pages, well, what is a king without a Queen. But where did the major arcana come from?
There is another legend about the Tarot, which wanders from one author to another, as if they were carrying ancient encrypted secret knowledge. Where did she come from?
The Major Arcana of the Tarot fit perfectly into the Kabbalistic tree of the Sephiroth. Initially, Kabbalah was considered only a Jewish teaching and was an esoteric interpretation of the Torah. However, as a result of its further development, its closer connection with Christianity was manifested. The Torah is the Pentateuch of Moses, included in the Old Testament. The Major Arcana of the Tarot reflect the basic archetypal concepts of each of the Sephira.
Now let's return to Kabbalah and see what interesting things happened in this teaching during the appearance of the Tarot.
From the 8th to the 15th century, most of Spain belonged to the Arabs of the Maghreb, Islam dominated here, but large Jewish and Christian communities existed in this territory. The provinces of Andalusia and Granada were prosperous territories, the level of civilization in the caliphate far exceeded that of the Spanish and French of the Middle Ages. Caliphs of the Maghreb ruled wisely and fairly, they showed high tolerance towards Christians and Jews. In addition, Muslims patronized the arts, supported the development of science and created in Cordoba the best urban infrastructure in Europe at that time. During its heyday, the Caliphate was one of the most economically advanced European states.
The Kabbalistic teaching here received a new creative impetus and began to develop as a current of Jewish thought in a completely new, theurgical interpretation of the meaning of the fulfillment of the commandments of Moses. In the Maghreb, a school of ecstatic or prophetic Kabbalah arises. The school, founded by Yitzhak ben Shlomo Luria Ashkenazi in the 16th century, would influence the teaching throughout the subsequent history of Jewish mysticism.
The Kabbalists of this direction represented the Sephiroth as separate intellects, hierarchically located on the cosmological scale, the contemplation of which allows one to achieve a prophetic state, and also, at the same time, these are the internal psychological states of the soul of a mystic uniting with God. Here we will focus on the word contemplation, that is, on the drawing, as in the mandalas, which are meditated on in Hinduism.
At that time, the papal inquisition was raging in the rest of Europe, which arose as an instrument of combating apostasy, with the Cathars. The Caliphate of Cordoba collapsed in 1031. Weak states were no longer able to resist the European kings. And during the Reconquista, Cordoba in 1236 came under the rule of the Castilian king. At the end of the 1492 century, the remnants of the Caliphate completely fell under the onslaught of the Spanish and French troops, and the persecution of the Jews began, but especially of Christians who were fond of Kabbalah.
At this moment, it was necessary to somehow hide the knowledge and, most likely, it is the Christian Kabbalists who add 22 arcana to the usual playing cards, which they used in meditative practices. We recall that the first deck, identical to modern ones, was dated 1450. The Major Arcana clearly fall on the Sephiroth tree.
The Kabbalistic teaching, which began to take shape more clearly in the 12th century, was formed into a specific school in the 15th century. For the first time, the image of the "sephiroth tree" appeared on the title page of the Kabbalistic book "Portae Lucis" published in 1516, a translation of the Latin manuscript "Shaare Ora" (Gate of Light) by Joseph Gikatilla, written by him presumably in 1290. Previously, graphic images of the Tree were not encountered. We are starting to slowly piece together the puzzles of this riddle. So, we can summarize, a deck of Tarot cards, identical to modern decks, most likely developed somewhere in the 13th century. Yes, they wanted to hide secret knowledge in it, only not in Ancient Egypt, but in medieval Europe.
From the book "Not invented stories about Tarot cards"


From the book “Tarot: Theory and Practice.

A Complete Description of A. E. Waite’s System”

In the Hermetic tradition, it is believed that the ancient Jews received their esoteric knowledge from the Egyptians, so the twenty-two letters and ten Sephirot of Kabbalah - the basis of the Tarot system - are, in essence, of Egyptian origin.

According to legend, in ancient Egypt there was a temple in which the mysteries of occult initiation were performed. Each of the successive stages of initiation was carried out in a special room. There were 22 of them in total. On the walls of the rooms there were symbolic paintings, from which the Great Arcana of the Tarot later came. A detailed account of these mysteries and the ancient pictures of the Tarot can be found in the book "Egyptian Mysteries", attributed to Iamblichus and translated into Russian by the publishing house "Sophia".

Some researchers dispute the Egyptian origin of the Tarot. Indeed, except for the work attributed to Iamblichus and the traditions of the Hermetic orders, we have no evidence of the existence of the "Book of Thoth" (Great Arcana of the Tarot) in Ancient Egypt. The ancient Hebrew Kabbalistic roots are traced much more clearly in the Tarot, and skeptically oriented adherents of the Tarot suggest that the starting point in the history of this system is 300 AD - the approximate date of the creation of "Sefer Yetzirah", a fundamental work on Kabbalah, which details the astrological symbolism of the Hebrew alphabet, which at the heart of tarot.

Documented Tarot History in compressed form can be represented as follows:

1367 AD e.-- In the canon of Bern, a ban on the card game appears. This is the earliest written reference to the Tarot that has come down to us.

1392-- Jacquemin Gringonner creates three decks of Tarot for the entertainment of the French King Charles VI. Fragments of these decks make up the oldest Tarot document that has survived to this day.

1450- In the middle of the fifteenth century, Tarot decks were created in Milan for the Visconti and Sforza families. Fragments of these decks form the oldest complete Tarot deck of 78 cards that has come down to us.

1540-- In Italy, in Marcolino's "Divination" ("Le Sorti") appears the oldest printed treatise on the Tarot as a system of divination.

1612-- In the anonymous treatise "Glory and Confession of the Rosicrucians", the manifesto of the European Secret Society of the Rosicrucians, the first mention of the esoteric Tarot appears. It gets the name ROTA and is described as a kind of device or mechanism for receiving advice and information about the past, present and future.

1781-- In the Encyclopedia of Cours de Gebelin, entitled "The Primitive World ("Le Monde Primitif"), Tarot is first associated with Egypt. De Gebelin claimed that the original Tarot deck, created in ancient Egypt, was the hieroglyphic Book of Thoth.

1785-1791 years-- The French occultist Ettailla writes a number of books in which he creates the first mantic dictionary for Tarot cards. (When creating his own dictionary, Mathers did not use Ettailla's definitions as a source. Papus cites them, along with Ettailla's divinatory techniques, in his book "Divinatory Tarot" ("Le Tarot Divinatoire"), which was translated into Russian in 1912 and withstood several reprint editions in the late 80s - early 90s.)

1856-- Eliphas Levi in ​​his work "The Doctrine and Ritual of Higher Magic" ("Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie") for the first time connects the Kabbalah and the Tarot. This is the scheme that S. L. MacGregor Mathers developed when creating the Golden Dawn Tarot deck. (A Russian translation of Levy's book can be found in a book published by "REFL-book" in 1994. It is published as a "major" to the book by Dion Fortune, which in this edition was called "Secret Without Fiction".)

1887-- After the formation of the Order of the Golden Dawn, Mathers begins to describe the esoteric attributes of the Tarot in his manuscript "Book T" ("Book T").

1889-- Papus publishes "Gypsy Tarot" ("Le Tarot des Bphemiens"). In this book he develops the principles of the exoteric Kabbalistic Tarot of Eliphas Levi.

1909-- Aleister Crowley, in the private edition of "Book 777" ("Liber 777"), details the Tarot order established by Mathers. This information is also disclosed in the privately published Crowley in 1909-1914. occult almanac "Equinox" ("Equinox"). (especially in issue I:8).

In 1910 in the May issue of the English magazine Occult Review, an anonymous author, then writing under the initials V. N., publicly reveals the correct attributes of the Tarot in the Golden Dawn system, citing tables from Crowley's Book 777.

1910-- Arthur Edward Waite publishes The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, which hints at the existence of a secret Kabbalistic Tarot within the Golden Dawn system.

1916-- in Moscow, Vladimir Shmakov publishes the encyclopedic work "The Holy Book of Thoth. The Great Arcana of the Tarot" (reprint: "Sofia", 1993), in which he links the French Kabbalism of the Tarot with Indian Vedanta, Gnosticism and other religious and philosophical teachings.

1920-- In a series of articles for the AZOTH magazine, Paul Foster Case presents his interpretations of the Tarot in the light of the tradition of the Golden Dawn philosophical school. Around 1920 Case claims to have found the correct order of the Tarot by deciphering veiled directions in the writings of Eliphas Levi.

1937-- Israel Regardie publishes the secret instructions of the Golden Dawn along with Book T in his four-volume The Golden Dawn.

1944-- The "Book of Thoth" by Aleister Crowley describes in detail a new version of the Tarot, reconstructed from Mathers' "Book T" but in the light of Thelemic magic (Crowley was the founder of the religion of Thelema (from the Greek thelema - "will "), the main tenets of which are: "Every person is a star", "Do your Will - let the whole law be in this" and "Love is the Law - Love subordinated to Will").

1947-- In The Tarot, A Key to the Wisdom of the Ages, Paul Foster Case develops the Golden Dawn symbolism for the Tarot Major Arcana. This edition is the definitive version of Case's "Introduction to the Tarot", first published in 1920.

Since 1969 to the present -- The resurgence of interest in the Tarot has led to a wide spread of traditional decks (versions of Waite, Crowley and Case) and to the creation of completely new ones (pagan, Wiccan, New Age, Osho-Tapo, etc.). In 1969, "T: The New Tarot" appears, developed on the basis of contacts with spirits using an alphabet board. After that, more and more new versions of the Tarot began to appear, most of which no longer have practically nothing to do with the Kabbalistic, Hermetic Tarot of the Golden Dawn.

Source of Tapo

So, although the first book on the metaphysics of the Tarot was published by the Frenchman Eliphas Levi in ​​1856, the primary source of the English esoteric version of this system should be considered "Book T". According to legend, this is the same parchment manuscript that was found in the hands of the founder of the Rosicrucian brotherhood, Christian Rosicrucian, when his grave was opened one hundred and twenty years after his burial. According to a more skeptical version, "Book T" was written by Mathers, the culmination of his own years of Kabbalistic research.

At present, one can easily get acquainted with the contents of this secret document of the "Golden Dawn", since "Book T" is completely published in Regardie's encyclopedic work "The Golden Dawn". In the small volume of this document, Mathers succeeded in reworking all his intuitive Kabbalistic conjectures about the Tarot into a working mantic lexicon, which remains relevant to this day.

  • "Illustrated Key to the Tarot"(1910) by Arthur Edward Waite (almost entirely reproduced in this edition)
  • "Book of Thoth(1944) Aleister Crowley
  • "Tarot: The Key to the Wisdom of the Ages(1947) Paul Foster Case

Each of these interpretations comes directly from Mathers' Book T, since all of these authors were members of the Golden Dawn for some time. Each of the books contains a lot of divinatory meanings for tarot cards, but upon critical examination, it turns out that all these meanings directly go back to Mathers' unique divinatory dictionary for tarot.

French and English tarot schools

The main difference between the French (Levi) and English (Mathers) occult schools is where they place the Fool card among the Major Arcana. Levi considered the Fool to be a card without a number and placed him between Symbol XX (Judgment), and Symbol XXI (Peace). In this case, the first card of the deck was the Magician (or, as he is called in the French system, the Magician). Mathers, on the other hand, considered the Fool the first card that opens the entire sequence of the Major Arcana. After all, zero is the beginning of all other numbers.

What is the correct system? This issue can be resolved only in the course of practical work with both systems over a long period of time. Divinators who work with Waite's Tarot believe that the English system integrates Kabbalah and Tarot on a deeper level than Levi's system. But they also acknowledge that there is an additional set of meanings in the French exoteric kabbalistic system that can sometimes light up the cards in a new way or give them new meaning. The "English" advise not to neglect the French system, but to use it as an auxiliary to obtain additional symbolism.

Aiwass, the angel with whom Crowley spoke, may have answered our question in 1904 by dictating the following passage for The Book of the Law:

My prophet is a fool with his one, one, one; are not they the Ox, and none by the Book?

My prophet is a fool, and with him one, one, one; are they not the Bull and nothing according to the Book?

(Liber AL, I:48)

Here Fool is equated with:

Unit, unit, unit Ox Nothing (according to the Book)

These correspondences reveal Mathers' secret order in which the Fool's symbol opens the Tarot deck and corresponds to the Hebrew letter aleph. Each of the three symbolic correspondences for the Fool is related to the Hebrew alphabet in the following way.

111 is the numerical value of the name of the letter Aleph, written in Hebrew (ALP = 1 + 30 + 80 = 111). The bull is a hieroglyph corresponding to the name of the letter aleph. Nothing (according to the Book) - zero, the number of the Fool in the Tapo (a symbolic book in pictures).

How did Mathers discover this all-important tarot secret? Did he find it in some secret manuscript? Was he initiated into some secret society of magicians who kept this secret? Or did he find this key on his own, by the power of his own intellect?

The official version of the origin of the Golden Dawn magical system is based on the existence of some mysterious manuscript. Freemason occultist Wynn Westcott found an ancient text in the ruins of books, consisting of many articles. This text went down in history as a "ciphered manuscript". The text contained information about the system of Masonic rituals based on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. All data were recorded in schematic form, with an unknown numeric code being used from time to time. According to another version of the story, Westcott found the encrypted manuscript among the books and papers of his recently deceased friend. One way or another, Westcott, unable to decipher this script, turned to fellow Freemason Samuel Liddell Mathers for help.

Mathers, thanks to many years of dedicated occult research in the British Museum, immediately "split" the cipher used in this manuscript. He recognized it as a digital code used by the fifteenth-century occultist Trithemius in his Polygraphy. Alchemists worked with this digital code, trying to hide their secrets. When the manuscript was deciphered, it turned out that it contained all the information necessary to create what we now call the Golden Dawn magical system. It also reported the German address of a certain Anna Sprengel, a representative of the continental Rosicrucian lodge. Westcott obtained permission from the Rosicrucians to establish a branch in England, and with the help of Mathers and Dr. W. R. Woodman, in 1887 founded the first English lodge of the Golden Dawn.

This version is recognized by most adherents of the "Golden Dawn" and defended in the writings of Israel Regardie. However, in 1972, a study appeared that refuted it. Ellick Howe's book The Magicians of the Golden Dawn exposed the mystical origins of the order and proved that the documents that have come down to our time, which supposedly originate from the Rosicrucian lodge that previously existed on the continent, were in fact fabricated by Westcott and Mathers.

David Allen Hulse, one of the leading contemporary scholars of tarot, kabbalah and numerology, has studied Howe's documents and statements in the light of other historical studies on the origin of the Golden Dawn (such as the writings of Francis King, George Harper, James Webb, and Ethel Cohoun). Here are the conclusions he came to:

The Golden Dawn documentation was indeed fabricated by Mathers under Westcott. They were motivated to create a "noise factor" for the new synthetic system of Western magic. By doing this, they could convince more people to accept the Golden Dawn system as correct.

This mythical cipher manuscript was inspired by Bulwer-Lytton's Zanoni, which begins with a description of a cryptic manuscript written in a strange letter code; a careful translation of this manuscript allegedly formed the basis of the text of "Zanoni".

Be that as it may, this whole cunning plan turned against its creator, because one of the members of the lodge, the poet W. B. Yeats, questioned the authenticity of the original sources. The committee formed to investigate the true nature of these documents eventually split, leading to, among other things, Mathers' expulsion from the magical order he had created. However, neither Yeats nor his committee of inquiry have ever been able to unravel the mystery of the origins of the Golden Dawn's magical system.

Hals put forward his own version of the origin of the Golden Dawn documents. Mathers, independently of Westcott, worked for many years in the British Museum's book depository, collecting all the necessary information to create the foundations of the Golden Dawn magical system. Thanks to his knowledge of Masonic rituals, he came up with a new set of rituals that played the theme of each Sephira and each Path on the Tree of Life, rather than the traditional Masonic themes of King Solomon's Temple.

Knowing the Enochian system of John Dee, Mathers created his revised version of this system in the light of the Jewish Kabbalah and Tarot. But the greatest value of his system, compared with any other, is that Mathers built the most convenient Tarot correspondence scheme for work, being able to restore the secret order of the Great Tarot Arcana (the first twenty-two cards) on the basis of the Jewish Kabbalistic text "Sefer Yetzira". It is this model of the main attributes of the Tarot, and not at all Enochian, as many authors suggest, that underlies all other symbolic systems of the Golden Dawn. Indeed, in order for the Enochian system to fit into the Golden Dawn system, it must match between the Tarot and the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Without the Tarot, the Enochian system does not fit into the main series of magical correspondences.

Hulse believes that Mathers discovered the true Kabbalistic model for the Tarot, and first developed correspondences for the Tarot, and only then created all other systems to be consistent with these basic correspondences, which led to the equation of the Fool with the Hebrew letter aleph and the element of Air (0 = 1). This assumption seems to be confirmed by Mathers himself in his introduction to the symbolism of the Book of T, stating:

In doing so, I not only deciphered the symbolism, but also subjected it to verification, study, comparison and scientific research, both by means of clairvoyance and in other ways. As a result, I became convinced of the absolute correctness of the symbolism of "Book T" and the accuracy with which it represents the Occult Forces of the Universe.

In creating Book T, Mathers was faced with three major mysteries regarding the true order of the Tarot. These were:

  • The mystery of the card leading the deck of tarot cards,
  • The mystery of the order of seven planets in the group of the Great Arcana,
  • The secret of the location of Leo and Libra in the Great Arcana.

How he unraveled these mysteries is detailed below.

It should be noted that the following three major publications first revealed to the world the main correspondences of Mathers:

  • "Book 777"Aleister Crowley (1909) -- Table XIV of this text shows Mathers' secret attributes (without citing the source)
  • "Illustrated Key to the Tarot" Arthur Edward Waite (1910) - Waite does not explicitly reveal Mathers' correspondences, but uses them in his book as the primary source for all symbols and divinatory vocabulary. He hides in the symbols all the keys necessary to decipher the secret symbolism. For example, on the Symbol card III, The Empresses, shows the correct astrological attributes of Venus (All these clues are explained in detail in our book in the section "Tarot Waite's Arcana").
  • "Introduction to Tarot"Paul Case (1920) -- In this first work, Case shows the esoteric order of the Tarot. Case claims that these correspondences were the result of his own independent study, carried out around 1906. However, a note on page 14 of this text says that "planetary the attributes (for the Major Arcana) are taken from "Book 777", London, 1909." This means that until 1909, when he read "777", he did not have full confidence in the correctness of the esoteric sequence of the seven planets in the Tarot. The source is The planetary correspondences used by Crowley himself were Mathers.

Every serious tarot reader, especially A. E. Waite, A. E. Crowley, and P. F. Case, has used Mathers' Book T to define and illustrate his own tarot system.

If the divinatory characteristics compiled by Waite, Crowley, and Case are compared with Mathers' original, then it becomes possible to reconstruct the divinatory canon necessary to give a clear definition of each of the seventy-eight cards.

Therefore, traditionally Tarot is associated with "secret knowledge" and is considered mysterious.

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Description of the tarot deck

Composition

The cards of a typical tarot deck are divided into two large groups:

  • Major arcana - "trump cards", usually 22 cards. Each of these cards has its own original drawing and a unique name. The order of the cards and the names in different variants of the Tarot deck may differ slightly.
  • Minor Arcana - four suits, usually 56 cards, 14 cards of each suit. The minor arcana consists of four series or suits - Wands, swords, cups and denariev. Each suit contains Ace, Two, Three, and so on up to Ten, followed by "court" or "curly cards" ("pictures") - Page (Jack), Knight (Horseman), Queen, King. The position of the Ace in the series of minor arcana is determined only by the accepted agreement, it can stand both at the beginning of the sequence (that is, it can be considered, in fact, the Unit of the corresponding suit), and after the King (that is, it can be considered the highest of the curly cards). In modern fortune-telling practices using the Tarot deck, the first option is more often used.

Design

Depending on the style used, various famous decks have received names:

  • Egyptian Tarot - Egyptian motifs.
  • Marseilles Tarot - in the style of France of the 17th century.
  • The Visconti-Sforza Tarot is the oldest known full deck, created in the 15th century, named after the customers. Images of the major arcana are made in the style of the Italian Renaissance.
  • Tarot Ryder - Waite - drawn at the beginning of the twentieth century, the most popular iconography, which left many clones and descendants. Named after original publisher William Ryder and design author Arthur Waite. The artist is Pamela Colman-Smith. For the first time, the minor arcana received not only the designations of suits and denominations, but also meaningful plot drawings.
  • The Thoth Tarot is a deck created by Aleister Crowley and Egyptologist Frieda Harris. Characterized by a more modern style of execution and extremely rich esoteric symbolism.

In the 20th century, especially in the second half of it, many “new” designs of the Tarot deck appeared, so now it is difficult not only to list all the options, but even to name their exact number. A significant part of them are variations on the theme of one of the classic decks, mainly the Rider-Waite Tarot, but there are also quite original "themed" designs. Examples include the erotic Tarot Manara (Tarot arcana are illustrated with thematic sketches with an acutely erotic bias, the author is the Italian artist Milo Manara, the deck was created at the very end of the 20th century and first released in 2000) or the Tarot of the Elves by Mark McElroy and David Corsi ( unlike a number of other variations on the elven theme, here the compositions of the drawings are not borrowed from Waite, but are completely independent, moreover, in the deck, while maintaining all the general features of the Tarot, five stories are symbolically depicted: the major arcana sequentially tell how the main the hero investigates the loss of four relics, and the suit cards describe the history of each of these relics). There are decks created based on various cult works of art, and simply on popular topics (Tarot of Flowers, Tarot of Vampires, Samurai Tarot, and so on). A number of followers of philosophical, religious and psychological schools have designed their belief systems in the form of Tarot decks and use such decks for various practices (“Osho Zen Tarot” and others).

Tarot and playing cards

Parallels arise between the Tarot deck and common European playing card decks. The four suits of the Tarot can be put in line with the four traditional card suits: wands - clubs, swords - spades, cups - hearts, denarii - tambourines, a number of virtues of minor arcana, from ace to king (or from two to ace) differs from most playing decks only the presence of not three, but four "curly" cards, and in most European playing decks there is no Knight, but there is a Jack (Page), but there are also those in which there is no Jack, but there is a Knight (Rider). True, there is nothing to connect with the major arcana in playing decks, only the Joker, which is available in a 54-leaf deck, can be likened to a Jester with some stretch.

All these parallels have been repeatedly noted by various researchers of the history of the Tarot. According to one popular hypothesis, the Tarot deck was the common predecessor for all European playing decks. There are other options, some of which are listed below in the Origins of Tarot section.

Origin of Tarot

The origin of tarot cards is overgrown with numerous legends. But, according to most modern studies, Tarot cards appeared in Italy at the beginning of the 15th century (1420-1440). In 1450, the Visconti-Sforza Tarot deck appears in Milan. The surviving fragments of the decks invented by the Visconti and Sforza families served as the prototype of the modern deck of 78 sheets. The decks of those times that have come down to us are luxurious handmade cards made for the aristocracy. In 1465 a deck appears Tarocchi Mantegni, whose structure is based on the Kabbalistic division of the Universe known as the 50 Gates of Binah. The deck consists of 50 cards, 5 series or suits (Vault of Heaven, Foundations and Virtues, Science, Muses, Public Status) with 10 cards each. Some images on modern Tarot cards (major and minor arcana) were borrowed from the Tarocchi deck (Encyclopedia of Modern Magic, vol. 2. 1996). The Tarocchi Mantegna deck served as a symbol template for artists of the 2nd half of the 15th century (in particular, for Robinet Testar in the manuscript “Instructive book about chess love”).

To date, there is no reliable information that the cards appeared earlier. Sometimes they try to start the history of the Tarot from 1392, since there is a record dated to him, according to which a deck of cards was ordered from Jacquemin Gringonnier for the French king Charles  VI, and some of these cards are still kept in Paris. However, the deck "Tarot Karl VI", stored in the National Library, is a handmade deck of the end of the 15th century. northern Italian type. Therefore, it is possible that the deck ordered for the king was an ordinary deck for card games.

legends

Egyptian

There is a legend that in ancient Egypt there was a temple in which there were 22 rooms, and symbolic paintings were depicted on the walls of the rooms, from which the Great Arcana of the Tarot later originated. This legend confirms the version that the Tarot cards originated from the vignettes of the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, the drawings of which were actually applied to the walls of sacred structures - tombs.

For the first time, Cour de Gebelin mentioned the possibility of the origin of the Tarot from Egypt. He wrote in the fifth volume of The Primitive World (1778): "Tarot. A card game common in Germany, Italy and Switzerland. It is an Egyptian game, as we will show one more time; its name consists of two oriental words, Tar and Rha (Rho), and means "royal way." This claim was made before the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799 and even more so before the Egyptian symbols were deciphered. All these facts call into question the theory of Egyptian origin, since the words indicated by Zhebelin did not appear in the Egyptian language.

Kabbalistic

Others believe that the Tarot came from Kabbalah (twenty-two letters and 10 Sefirot in Kabbalah - the basis of the Tarot system) and consider the starting point in the history of the Tarot to be 300 AD - the approximate date of the creation of Sefer   Yetzira, the fundamental work on Kabbalah.

Functions

A game

The French game of tarot (jeu de tarot) is a card game with tricks for four players. This is the only widely used card game that has survived to this day, using a full 78-leaf Tarot deck. The game is ubiquitous in France and is also known in French-speaking Canada. French tarot has been known since ancient times and has been popular for at least several centuries.

divination cards

In the writings of some occultists, one can find statements that the Tarot has been used for predictions almost since the time of the Flood, if not earlier. However, the first documentary evidence of the practice of correlating cards (in particular, Tarot cards) and human destinies dates back only to the 16th century. Some poets of that time, describing celebrities in laudatory verses, compared people with the trump cards of the Tarot. Such verses were called "tarocchi appropriati", and in one case (1527) they refer to the fate of a person. In 1540, the book Divination (ital. "Le Sorti") is published in Italy, in which the author, a certain Francesco Marcolino da Forli, indicates a simple way to predict the future using cards of the suit of coins of an ordinary playing deck. This is the earliest treatise on divination known to us. Although the Tarot deck contains similar cards, it is impossible to unequivocally state that the Tarot was a developed divination tool in those days. It is possible to speak with confidence about the Tarot as a system of predictions that has taken shape only since the end of the 17th century, since records dated 1700 have been preserved in Bologna, in which the divinatory meanings of the Tarot cards are unambiguously described.

Meditative practice

Recently, meditation practices with the help of images of Tarot cards have become very popular. Most often, the Major Arcana are used for this. The goals of such practice may be different: a deeper understanding of the cards for use in divination, spiritual development, occult practice.

Tarot as a source of secret knowledge

According to esoteric notions, there is a hermetic, gnostic, or kabbalistic symbolism in the tarot cards, since the early Italian Renaissance, which gave rise to the Tarot, was a time of great intellectual activity. Therefore, Hermeticism, astrology, Neoplatonism, Pythagorean philosophy, and the unorthodox Christian thought that flourished then could leave their mark on the symbolism of the Tarot.

Similar symbolic "traces" in the Tarot prompted later researchers to the idea that the Tarot comes from ancient cultures (Egyptian or Babylonian), that this system is a secret body of wisdom of the past. The first explorers known to us in this area were Cours de Geblen. In 1781, his book The Primitive World was published, in the last chapter of which it is stated that the Tarot goes back to the Egyptian tradition. He suggested that the name "taro" is translated from ancient Egyptian as "The Way of the King." It is possible that the studied maps were created by the author himself. Even more suspicious is the involvement in the creation of one of the decks, or rather the next deck, by the Comte de Saint-Germain or he is Edgar de Valcour-Vermont, he is ... etc. Whoever he just wasn’t, appearing in different guises over the years, the main thing that he was also in the same Masonic lodge with Cour de Gebelin. According to one version, Saint Germain intentionally changed the original version of Antoine Court de Gebelin's trump cards in order to hide deeper some of their sacred meaning, "easily" compared with "Revelation" by John the Theologian. Later, the freemason Paul Christian, aka Pitois, Jean-Baptiste, showed in his drawings one of the concealments of Saint Germain - a map. This map deciphers and indicates the time of change in the coming century.
And from that time on, the deck was looked at as a mysterious occult system, and the studied Marseille Tarot became a model for creating decks, on the basis of which occult research was conducted. We also note that in the early versions of the Tarot there were not only astrological symbols, Hebrew letters, but even numbers. Such was, for example, the Visconti Sforza deck, dating from 1428, made by the artist Bonifacio Bembo for the wedding of Bianchi Maria Visconti with Francesco Sforza. Only in 1470 will a deck of cards appear Montegna depicting classical gods and astrological symbols.

Standing apart among the researchers of the symbolism of the Tarot is the mathematics teacher and hairdresser Alyette, on whom the ideas of de Geblen's book made a great impression. Allett, devoting himself to the occult, developed his own system of divination by cards. In history, he is known as Etteila, this pseudonym was an anagram of the explorer's own name.

Major scholars of Tarot symbolism belong to one of two schools: French or English. The main difference between the schools is where they place the "Jester" in the Major Arcana series. The founder of the French school is Eliphas Levi. In the year in his work “The Doctrine and Ritual of Higher Magic”, Eliphas Levi for the first time connects Kabbalah and Tarot, associating. The founder of the English school, Mathers, places the Jester, the zero lasso, before the Magician, since zero is the beginning of all other numbers, as Nothing is the progenitor of all things. In this system of correspondence, the aleph corresponds already with the "Jester".

Further, the question of the symbolism of the cards was dealt with by Arthur Edward Waite (White), who in 1910 published the book "The Illustrated Key to the Tarot". Under his direction, Miss Pamela Colman-Smith, a young American who was a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn, drew a new Tarot deck, the so-called Ryder deck. Waite for the first time placed on the drawings of the "numerical" minor arcana, which previously depicted only suit symbols in the amount corresponding to the face value of the card, drawings with a certain plot, unique for each card. This made it possible to expand the interpretation of the minor arcana in divination: if earlier these cards were interpreted exclusively by a combination of suit and face value, now it is possible to use the symbolism of images. Another significant reform was the change in the positions of the Arcana "Justice" and "Strength" (in the early decks - VIII and XI, in Waite - XI and VIII, respectively). Published simultaneously with the deck, Waite's book "The Illustrated Key to the Tarot" gives a complete description of the deck, the symbolism of the cards and its interpretations from Waite's point of view.

Three decades later, A. Crowley created his own deck in collaboration with artist Frida Harris. Although Crowley's deck is generally made in the "English" style, he also made noticeable changes to it: he returned "Justice" and "Strength" to their original "French" positions (VIII and XI), renamed some of the major arcana, changing their interpretation, and also assigned to all the "numerical" cards of the minor arcana their own names, reflecting their meaning. The figure cards of the minor arcana have been renamed: instead of the four of "Page", "Knight", "Queen" and "King", the four "Princess", "Prince", "Queen" and "Knight" are used. Work on the deck, called "Tarot Thoth" in honor of the Egyptian deity of the same name, was completed in 1944. Then Crowley released under the pseudonym "Master Therion" "The Book of Thoth", which describes the deck and deciphers its symbolism according to Crowley's views. Crowley's interpretation of the cards differs in many ways from the classical tradition, it includes interpretations from European astrology, the cabal, the mythology of many peoples, from India to Scandinavia. The symbolism of Tarot Thoth is extremely rich, many tarologists call this deck the most symbolic variant of the Tarot; it is also the least unambiguous in interpretation. There is an opinion that Crowley kept secret some aspects of the symbolism of his deck, as a result of which his interpretations are often supplemented and modified by interpreters. Despite the author's desire to spread his approach to the Tarot as widely as possible, Crowley's deck was published during his lifetime only in an extremely limited edition (200 copies) and in an inferior form (poor print quality, card drawings were taken from reproductions of the "Book of Thoth", only two colors). Its widespread distribution occurred after the death of the authors, when several publishing houses released the deck in large numbers and in normal quality, using the original drawings made by Frieda Harris under the direction of Crowley .. - M .: Williams Publishing House, 2005. - 672 p. -

Drawn pictures have long been used for divination for the future - they have become the most ancient and very powerful tool for predictions.

The history of Tarot cards goes back to ancient times, and it is still not known for certain who first introduced this method of divination to the world.

There are several varieties of decks, each of which has its own characteristics.

Gypsies or not?

The most popular hypothesis about the appearance of Tarot cards today is the legend according to which these magic cards were first seen in wandering gypsy soothsayers.

However, historians strongly disagree with this. Their research suggests that the first mention of these cards appeared in Germany in 1329, which happened a century before the arrival of the gypsies in Europe.

At the present time, there is no way to verify whether that ancient scripture really referred to predictive cards, since documentary evidence of how they looked did not survive to our times.

The first images of the Major Arcana were published in 1392 in France. King Charles IV wanted to somehow brighten up his leisure time and asked the court painter to draw him a deck of cards. These cards, numbering 22, looked very solid: calf leather, gold trim and shirts inlaid with real silver!

Tarot Visconti - the beginning of the history of tarot cards

The first full-fledged deck containing not only the Major Arcana, but all 78 cards, was the Visconti-Sforza Tarot. Historians disagree on the exact date of his birth: according to some sources, this happened in 1428, according to others - a little later, in 1441, while others generally call 1450.

The “customers” of the magic deck were the Milanese condottiere Francesco Sforza and his wife Bianca Maria Visconti, and the artist Bonifacio Bembo painted it.

The exit of the magic deck into the big world

Until the 18th century, Tarot cards were not very popular, and their publication occurred only in the 1770-1780s, when Count Antoine Cour de Jeleben began to study secret knowledge and mythology, after which he structured the knowledge gained in his works " About the game of Tarot" and "Tarot Research". It was there that for the first time we talked about the possibility of predicting the future with the help of maps.

The Count's apprentice, the hairdresser dell'Aliette, went even further. This man joined the Masonic Lodge, took the pseudonym Eteyla, and then released not only a book about predictive cards, but also his own deck, which was called the "Tarot Eteyla."

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, three more variations of the Ettail deck were released.

Eliphas Levi and his followers

A great contribution to the development of the use of Tarot cards was made by the French occultist Alphonse-Louis Constant, known to the world under the pseudonym Eliphas Levi. The great mystic was not at all interested in the possibility of divination on this deck, and the purpose of his research was the connection of the mysterious Jewish teaching about Kabbalah with the interpretation of the Major Arcana.

Levi's writings were appreciated: several famous mystics and occultists of the 19th century revised his teachings, releasing their own works on the subject of the magical Tarot deck.

History of the Golden Dawn Tarot Cards

In the 19th century in England, a secret occult society, the Order of the Golden Dawn, gained particular influence among mystics. It consisted of people whose names are still well known - this is the great Aleister Crowley and Arthur Waite. It is their decks that are considered the most popular today.

But even before each of these masters developed their own deck, they all studied the Golden Dawn Tarot, a deck created by Samuel Mathers and his artist wife Moina Bergson.

Map studies in France and other countries

Separately, it is worth mentioning the French direction in the history of these fortune-telling cards. The most popular person here was Gerard Encausse, who became famous under the pseudonym Papus. He introduced the world to two of his decks - "Gypsy Tarot" and "Predictive Tarot", which were released in 1889 and 1909, respectively.

Other big names associated with the magic deck include the Swiss occultist Oswald Wirth, who compiled his own version of divination cards, as well as Paul Christian and Elbert Benjamin, authors of detailed books on the art of understanding and working with the deck. Thanks to the work of these researchers, the popularity of Tarot cards in the world has increased dramatically.

Arthur Waite and his tarot cards

Today, one of the most famous decks used by most tarologists on the planet is Arthur Waite's Tarot.

This man devoted his whole life to magical research and the occult. He was a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn, which helped him penetrate deeply into the symbolism and meaning of the Tarot.

Many years of study led the master to release his own deck, drawings for which were made by his longtime girlfriend, also a member of the Order - Pamela Coleman Smith. This event took place in 1909 and became a real revolution in the history of Tarot cards.

Legendary Tarot of Thoth

Along with the Waite deck, Tarot Thoth is also very popular today - the result of many years of work by the famous mystic Aleister Crowley and artist Frida Harris.

Crowley's deck has no analogues in the world, and is considered a truly unique and incredibly detailed magical tool. Crowley's teachings, which he expressed in the cards, cover many areas, including the magical traditions of different countries, mythology, the science of Kabbalah, astrology, numerology and practical magic.

Modernity

Today in the world there are a huge number of different Tarot decks. Some of them are reworked versions of the maps of classical schools, while others are completely author's exclusive works.

However, none of them has yet succeeded in outdoing the popularity of the Waite and Crowley decks. But who knows, maybe the history of Tarot cards is not over yet, and after a century or two the world will see another revolution of the ancient predictive system.

The title "Thrice Greatest" was adopted for Hermes because he is the Great Knower and was considered the greatest among philosophers, the greatest of all priests and the greatest of all kings and, according to ancient texts, contained "the three constituent wisdoms of the whole world ". Thoth-Hermes Trismegistus was revered as a prophet of the one true god, and Cyril of Alexandria (4th century AD) said that he was the first to confess the Holy Trinity.

History, unfortunately, has not preserved indisputable evidence regarding the material incarnation of the Egyptian god Thoth. Some researchers argue that Thoth, or as he was also called Tutti, came to the land of Egypt after the death of the island of Atlantis. If we take into account the time of the flood that destroyed the civilization of the Atlanteans, quite definitely indicated by Plato, it turns out that Thoth appeared in Egypt around 9600 BC. But this does not quite coincide with the affairs of Thoth, who is considered the inventor of writing (or brought it from Atlantis ), since the oldest chronicle known to us, not counting the symbolic writing on the columns of temples, dates back to 4400 BC. Of course, more ancient sources of writing could simply not reach our days, or Plato in his Critias simply made a mistake by 5000 years old.

Since Thoth-Hermes could have come from Atlantis, which means that he was a representative of some mysterious and high civilization, perhaps his image is a collective of the so-called "Fallen Angels". According to the Book of Enoch, they were a race of divine beings called in Hebrew irin, "those who look" or "those who are awake." This term was translated into Greek as egregori or grigori, which means "guards". These Watchers are also found in the pages of the Hebrew Book of Jubilees. Their descendants were called the term Nephilim - in Hebrew this word means "those who fell" or "fallen." In the Greek translation, these are gigantes, or "giants" - a race of giants, described by the Greek poet Hesiod (about 907 BC) in the poem "Theogony". As in the Bible, the book of the ancient Greek poet tells about the creation of the world, about the onset and sunset of the "golden age", about the arrival of the race of giants and about the Flood.

Verses 1 and 2 at the beginning of chapter 6 of Genesis read: “When people began to multiply on the earth and daughters were born to them, then the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were beautiful, and they took [them] for themselves as a wife, which one they chose.” And stanza 4 of chapter 6 of Genesis continues: “At that time there were giants on earth, especially since the time when the sons of God began to enter into the daughters of men and they began to give birth to them: these are strong, glorious people from ancient times.”

Historian S. H. Hook, in his book The Mythology of the Near East, writes: “Behind the brief and, apparently, deliberately vague mention in stanzas 1-4 of chapter 6 of the Book of Genesis lies a more common myth about semi-divine beings who rebelled against the gods and were cast down to the underworld ... The fragment set out by the authors of the Bible was originally an etiological myth explaining the belief in the existence of a vanished race of giants…”.

It is possible that Hook is right, and if stanzas 1 - 4 of chapter 6 of Genesis are the product of more ancient Near Eastern myths, then long ago, at the dawn of human history, on our planet, perhaps on the island of Atlantis or on biblical lands, there lived a higher and a more perfect race of semi-divine beings. Some of its representatives began to marry women from less civilized races, as a result of which giants were born. However, then a series of global cataclysms hit the planet, which brought with them fire, flood and darkness, putting an end to the dominance of the race of semi-divine beings and their giant children.

Let's get back to the Book of Enoch. In the first chapters, the author retells the story told in the 6th chapter of the Book of Genesis about how the Sons of God took wives from among mortal women. It goes on to say that "in the days of Jared" (Enoch's father) two hundred Watchers "descended" to Mount Hermon, a mythical place identified with the triple peak of Jabal el-Sheikh (9200 feet above sea level) in the northern part of ancient Palestine. In Old Testament times, its snow-capped peaks were considered sacred by all the tribes that inhabited the Holy Land. It is quite possible that it was on this mountain that the "transfiguration" of Christ took place, when his disciples witnessed how the Lord "transformed before them."

On this mountain, the Guardians swore an oath and "obligated themselves with mutual curses", probably well aware of the consequences of their actions both for themselves and for all of humanity. It was this conspiracy that gave the name to the place of the “fall” (or “descent from heaven to earth”) of angels, since in Hebrew “Hermon” or herem means “curse”.

Further in the "Book of Enoch" the name of the leader of the Guardians is mentioned - Salmaaz and nineteen of his subordinates, these are "chiefs over dozens of them." Then we learn that the rebellious Guardians, who communicated with people, revealed to them the forbidden secrets of the sky. One of the leaders named Azazel "taught people how to make swords, and knives, and shields, and breastplates, introduced them to earthly metals and the art of their processing." He also taught people how to make bracelets and jewelry and showed them how to use antimony, a white, lustrous metal found in fine arts and medicine. He taught women the art of “putting paint on the eyes”, introduced “all kinds of precious stones and all shades of flowers” ​​- that is, before that, women did not use cosmetics and did not adorn themselves with jewelry.

Other Guardians revealed scientific knowledge to people - they taught meteorology (“recognition of clouds”), geography (“signs of the earth”), as well as astronomy and astrology (“constellations”, “signs of the sun”, “movement of the moon”). A watchman named Kasdeia "showed to the children of men the unholy movements of spirits and demons, and the beating of the fetus in the womb, so that it might come out." In other words, he taught women how to have abortions. One of the Guardians named Penem "taught the sons of men bitter and sweet," that is, to add salt, seasonings and spices to food. In addition, "he instructed mankind how to write with ink on paper." And the leader of the Guardians, Salmaaz, taught the people "witchcraft and how to graft trees." Perhaps one of the gifts of the Guardians or Fallen Angels was also a deck of Tarot cards, in the Major Arcana of which echoes of their history are hidden. According to the Book of Enoch, the rebellious Guardians revealed secret knowledge to mankind, however, they were eventually imprisoned by the heavenly Archangels until the Day of Judgment.

The plots of the illustrations of some of the Major Arcana evoke associations with the story of the Fallen Angels. For example, the Hanged Man Arkan depicts the bound Salmaaz, forever suspended upside down between earth and sky in the constellation of Orion. He received this severe punishment for revealing the forbidden name of God to a beautiful girl named Ishtahar in exchange for carnal pleasures. And the Last Judgment Arcana may not depict the rebirth of the dead to the sound of the trumpet of the Archangel Gabriel, but the descent of two hundred angels (200 is the numerical value of this Arcana) to earth, which brought a qualitatively new round of development for the human race and rebirth from the darkness of ignorance.