Transcript for:
History of the Tarot

hello my name is Colin Lowe and this talk is on the history of the Tarot now some quite remarkable stories of me told about the Tarot one of the most remarkable stories is based on the idea that two and a half thousand years ago there was a prophecy that ancient Egypt would be destroyed the temples would be broken the language would be forgotten there'd be nothing but sand and ruins and the sages of ancient Egypt wanted to preserve the deepest mysteries the deepest secrets and they encoded them in the form of a set of universal symbols and that that set of universal symbols was turned into a set of playing cards the Tarot I thought it would be interesting to do a talk on the history of Tarot and talk about what we actually know about the Tarot and it turns out we know quite a lot about the Tarot more than enough to fill in our talk and phiu probably fill a 5 or a later talk quite easily so I'm gonna have to scoot through it quite quickly and I'll just introduce what the tops going to cover so the first thing I'm going to do is talk about the introduction of playing cards into Europe and show you what they looked like then I'll talk about the very first tarot cards that we have the earliest tarot cards dating back to the Italian Renaissance and I'll show you lots of examples of those then I'm going to skip forward about 300 years - just before the French Revolution and I'm going to talk about what I call French Illuminism and by Illuminism I mean people who claim to have a tradition of secret knowledge passed down typically through secret societies and I'm thinking of Freemasonry and Rosicrucians in the 18th century particularly in France there was an amazing number of these orders and societies then I'm going to skip forward another hundred years and talk about British Illuminism which is essentially a continuation of the same thing except it's in Britain but it's really important for the history of the Tarot because it it marks the transition from this which is the Masai Tarot the classic French term to this which is the so called rider-waite column and Smith Tarot which probably the best-selling Tarot in the world now I want to start in the year thirteen seventy approximately it's what you might call late medieval now when people think of medieval we think of crusades and knights and armor and castles and the feudal system and lords and ladies and all that stuff that was a few generations earlier hadn't passed away but it was passing away the reason was the Black Death the Black Death had swept through europe in 1370 anyone older than about twenty years old would have been witnessed to complete social collapse between a third and a half of everyone in Europe died and not only died but died in the most gruesome and awful way by 1370 things were recovering but the feudal system the traditional knights in armor picture that was pretty broken in its place particularly in Italy was cities and cities began to be the new economic force not castles and land not knights in armor cities and cities were centers of commerce banking trade and innovation now to the north of the Mediterranean Christian was all Christian to the south it was virtually all Muslim the Muslims in Spain all the way around North Africa to Egypt Muslims in Saudi Arabia obviously and in Syria all the way through Turkey the only the last outpost of Christendom was Constantinople and the small remaining part of the Byzantine Empire the Muslim world stretched all the way across the China and it's from China that a fundamental innovation arrived in Europe anybody does anybody know what it was no nobody knows it was paper without paper it's difficult to do playing cards I'll leave you to work out how you can do playing cards without paper Europe didn't have people Europe had vellum and parchment which were based on animal skins they're obviously very time consuming and quite spensive to prepare and books were hand written on vellum and parchment with paper came printing mass production and playing cards the playing cards we know about come from Egypt are called mum look paint playing cards there was a set found in the Topkapi Museum in Istanbul and we know a fair bit about that was quite it caused some quite nice sets of Muslim or Mameluke playing cards and I'll just show those now what we have here are four examples of Mamluk plane cards they are very ornate and richly decorated on the Left we have coins second from the left we have polo sticks third from the left we have cups and on the right we have swords it's a curved scimitar type sword now experts have studied these cards very carefully and try to reconstruct what the original pax looked like and have concluded there were 52 cards in four suits of 13 there were 10 pip cards in each suit and three court cards the court cards represented a king and a couple of administrators they were not pictorial probably due to the Islamic prohibition on images I can't tell you much about the Mamluks other than the fact that they were a cast of slave warriors who originated in the Caspian Sea area and were transported into Egypt where they ruled there for many centuries the surprising thing about this is that what we are looking at is essentially the game of cards same number of cards for suits 13 cards in each suit 10 pip cards three courts cards it's pretty much identical to the modern poker pack apart from the fact that the suits symbols and the card decorations look different from about 30 70 we start to find references to a new game in Europe it's called variously Nighy poor naive a name that would seem to come directly from the Mamluk card game there are references to Moors and Saracens which is just a way of saying that it was believed again from came from North Africa the points of entry would seem to be Spain which was in very close contact with the Muslim and Italy through trade routes the game spread with incredible speed suddenly there's a rash of references all over Europe we know this because laws that previously prohibited various kinds of gambling including dice suddenly start to include playing cards there are no references before this suddenly playing cards just appear within a decade and they're all over Europe so what did a an early European pack of cards look like I think it looked something like this now this is not an ancient pack of cards in fact it's quite modern the company that makes these the the del negra company in Italy is still in business making cards but it does preserve some of the most important features of the earliest decks so there are four suits there are ten pip cards in each suit there are three court cards in each suit and the suits are coins sticks not polo stakes but stakes cups and swords and curved swords in fact look very like a scimitar and Europeans didn't know anything about the game of polo and so they substituted something else that seemed reasonable so in the earliest packs you tend to see various kinds of stick either a baton or a scepter or a cudgel or a staff important features worth noting the very ornate treatment of the Aces in particular look at the ace of swords with the hand holding the sword and the sword going through the crown the court cards there is a standing page there's a Knights seated on a tiddly squashed up horse and there's a king sitting on a throne there is no Queen at this point Queens came later very few examples of early European playing cards survive the attrition rate is close to 100 and I suspect there were many useful things you could do with a worn-out deck of cards including lighting the fire and stuffing the soles of your shoes so out of all the tens of thousands of decks of cards printed we have very few examples but this is an example some people believe it's Venetian and if you look at the the two of scepters on the top row it has a no 62 or at least that's what people think and it's been dated to 1462 on the top row you'll see the ace of scepters the ace of cups the ace of swords and the ace of coins on the second row you'll see the pages standing holding their symbols and you'll see the Knights on tiddly squashed up horses and on the bottom row you'll see the four kings so I wasn't making it up this is the pattern of early packs of cards by now you're probably wondering when on earth I'm going to start talking about the Tarot I promised you a talk about the history of the Tarot so far I haven't said anything about the Tarot actually I am talking about the Tarot it just is not Vyas but it will become obvious in a few more minutes before I do that I have to talk about something called trick-taking games no bridge is a trick-taking game and so is whist trick-taking games have always been very popular and very quickly I'm going to explain how they work and it is importantly trust me it's important so imagine you're four people sitting around a table the first person plays the four of cups the next person should play a cop but they don't have a cup in their hand so they throw away the two of staves it's called the discard it isn't worth anything the next person does have a cup yes the ten of cups so he plays that so the Tanners know the high card the last person has the king of cups the king of cups is the highest value card and so it wins the trick that's what it means by trick-taking game you have around and the highest card wins the trick now in order to make trick-taking games more interesting it's possible to introduce what's called a trump suit now the Trump suit has a higher value than any of the other suits now in this example suppose first person plays the four of cups the next person plays the two of clubs but if the clubs is the troop suit it wins in fact it has a higher value than any other card it beats the king so that's the idea of having a trump suit it adds a lot of complexity and interest to the game whist and bridge are both trick-taking games where you can have a trump suit now very early in the history of european playing cards we find references to what in latin is known as ludus trium forum which means game of triumphs in Italian the word is Creon fee and it's the origin of our word Trump so it goes right back to the Renaissance this idea of trumps and the Tarot seems to have originated when somebody decided it would be fun to add a dedicated Trump suit instead of nominating say cups or staves as the Trump suit why not have a dedicated full-time Trump suit that would make summer for some interesting games now the last time I did this talk I realized that there were a significant number of people in in the audience and there was an audience I did this live who didn't know very much about the tower and I found myself at this point regretting that I hadn't actually done an introduction to the tower so I'm gonna do that now I'm gonna do it very quickly because a lot of people will know about the tower but I'm just going to twist through the structure of the Tarot pack very quickly right the Tarot pack I'm about to show you is what one might regard as the canonical Tarot pack it's the maasai Tarot from France it dates back to the middle part of the 17th century and the suit you're currently looking at is obviously the suit of coins note the page standing up the night on a squashed up Diddley horse the King on his throne and the Queen now the Queen is the new thing where instead of three court cards we now have four court cards we have a queen as well this is the suit of cups note the ACE the very ornate almost Palace like chalice the chalice with the palace not much else to say about that other than the fact I've got some upside down the suit of sort look at the ACE the hand holding sword and the crown the design of the pit cards the highly stylized curved swords in my mind is a direct connection with the Mamluk cards which also featured very highly stylized curved swords the last suit is the suit staves they don't seem to have been able to decide what the staff was supposed to be so the page is holding what looks like a bulk of timber the knight is holding a club the Greens holding a club and the Kings holding a scepter this is where it gets interesting we have 21 number trump cards with these strange designs on them and we have an unnumbered card The Fool now it's often said there are 22 trump cards but that's not the case there are 21 trump cards and there is The Fool we can say that because we know a fair bit about how people played games with the tarot cards and the fool wasn't a trump The Fool wasn't played as a trump the fool could be played instead of a trump but there were all sorts of special rules around the full card and it wasn't a trump so there are 21 Trump cards and there is a fool we're now going to take a look at the earliest tarot cards these are known as the Visconti sposa tarot cards there are 271 known cards in 15 separate groups what this means is it looks like there were 15 packs of cards some sets are almost complete others are fragmentary others some just have one or two cards the reason these cars survived is probably because they are hand-painted and must have been incredibly expensive to make they were used by the nobility the first set I want to look at is the carry Yale Visconti cars it's an odd Tarot because each suit has six court cards it's like female equality there was a king and a queen there was a knight and a female Knight who also writes a horse and there's a page and the female page the this set only has 16 Trump's and we don't if it originally had 16 Trump's or whether some of the Trump's have been lost the second set I want to look at is called the Pierpont Morgan said this set is almost complete I think there are two Trump's that are missing this is the female Knight from the Carrie L set riding sidesaddle no less take a look at the card it's embossed and it's gilded and then it's been hand painted over the top I particularly like the decorative harness on the horse this is the Empress note the Black Eagle on the shield the Black Eagle was a recurring motif in the Empress card this is the love card note the heraldic symbols on the umbrella strength death the ace of cups were the palatial chalice the male page of cups had beautifully decorated the Last Judgement and the world and now some cards from the Pierpont Morgan set this one obviously is death but a different death from the previous death possibly death by plague rather than war or something again the Empress with the black eagle strength a different interpretation of the strength card and I do feel sorry for that poor line last judgment the fool and the four of scepters the motto are Bhandara I believe is a Visconti motto so what does the town Visconti Sforza mean well in order to explain it's useful to understand the political situation in Italy in the middle part of the 15th century the country was in a state of perpetual war Italy as we understand it today didn't exist much of Italy was divided into city states now a city was obviously the coal city and some surrounding land and they were an almost continuous warfare with one another so in Lombardy which is the northern plain you know Milan Genoa you have Venice you have other cities like Ferrara and Pisa a little to the south you of Florence in Tuscany and then you have Rome with the papal States below that you have Naples and the kingdom of Naples to the north north of Lombardi of Switzerland and the Holy Roman Empire to the west you have France and Spain hovering like vultures the reason they're hovering like vultures actually that's not very good value the reason they're hovering there is because Lombardi is immensely rich it's rich because of trade many of the city-states are divided in loyalty someone loyal to the Holy Roman Empire and some are loyal to the Pope even within individual cities families are loyal to the Holy Roman Empire loyal to the folk Pope there are factions within cities if you're in the wrong faction you can get expelled families are at war with one another just like in Romeo and Juliet where you have the Montagues and the Capulets and they won't talk to one another and they fight in the street the whole of Italy's like this now because the city-states don't have a sufficient population to fight these a terrible grinding Wars what they do is they hire mercenary mercenary companies to fight for them and the captains of these mercenary companies are like Premier League footballers you'll move from team to team one day they're fighting for Milan next day the fighting for Venice then of waiting for Ferrara then the fighting for peace I know obviously if there if it was a good mastery captain you want them on your side you want to offer them something so you'll say oh I'll give you so many buckets to fight for me and you'll say no got a better offer from Venice so I'll give you a castle see this castle thinking of this castle okay I'll fight for you so this was the situation one of the most successful master captains was Francisco slaughter his father was a commoner he'd risen up through the ranks and although Francisco Sforza was a very important man politically he was still a common are the Visconti's were the hereditary Dukes of Milan the konschak Filippo Maria Visconti does not have an heir he only has an illegitimate daughter so that's a real problem for him how on earth does he continue the line Francisco's father says I will marry your daughter now we don't even know exactly what Francisco Maria Visconti said to that but we do know he wasn't very keen on the idea this this jumped-up play of a mercenary captain wanting to marry the daughter even if she's a legitimate of the hereditary Duke of Milan he hated the guy however it did happen he needed Francisco's falls on his side or at least he wanted him not to be attacking him and so the marriage took place Duke Filippo Maria Visconti died and franceska Sforza was able to finesse the marriage and become duke of milan owned for another century the sponsors were the the Jukes of Milan so amazing story really so Visconti sposa what that means as the cards appear to have been created around the time of that position if you look at the cards there are Visconti mottos and there Visconti there are examples of ask aunty Hungary also sponsor stuff and it's difficult to tell just exactly when any pact was produced but it's quite clear that they were produced around that time tarot historians believe that the love card either in the carry Elvis County Park or in the Pierpoint morgan pack represents the marriage now it could have been the marriage of Field Poll Maria Visconti but almost certainly one of them represents the marriage of Bianca Maria Visconti to Francisco Sforza so I hope that clarifies the whole business it helps to understand that so that you can understand how the Tarot of that period is dated there is another way to approximately date the Visconti Suazo Tarot take a look at this fresco from the Casa Borromeo in Milan it shows a group of fashionably dressed young people playing cards I'd like to note three things about the women's clothing the first is that the dresses are high waisted and they have a thick band underneath the breasts second is the very voluminous slit sleeves and the third thing very characteristic is the strange bulbus head we're now compare the this picture with these cards first this one no this one this one and this one the peculiar headgear is called a balls oh and it was very characteristic of a particular time in place this lady is Isabella d'Este II she was an important patron of very well-known artists this particular painting was painted by Titian here is Elizabeth Taylor wearing a bozo the balls are so characteristic are used it in my own little illustrations of the tarot cards returning to the fresco comparing the tarot cards to the fresco I think it's reasonable to say that whoever painted the tarot cards lived at the same time as whoever painted the fresco and they probably lived in the same city and maybe even in the same street in fact when you compare the fresco with this tarot card the sufficient likeness in the way the face is painted you might say that there was painted by the same artist artists torian's have looked very carefully at all this evidence and decided that the Visconti spas Sottero was probably painted by an artist a Milanese artist known as Bonifacio Bembo who was painting around about the 1450s and that was probably the date at which the tarot cards were painted of course the Tarot did not only exist as highly expensive hand-painted luxury items for the lords and ladies of Lombardi there were also mass-market versions for the most part very crudely printed using woodblock prints and if they were covered at all then just very badly applied dogs of color because they weren't luxury items very few examples of these have survived there are survivals but they are very limited and we don't have as good an ideas we would like as to how the iconography of the tower developed we can see that over time most of the trumps did change some more than others in particular some changed a lot so the moon for example changed a lot and the star changed a lot I don't have time to talk about that just now what I'd like to do now is to take you on a quick trip through 300 years of tarot card development from the 15th century through to the 18th century what we have here is an uncut printer sheet it's probably Italian you can see that the designs are very crude by comparison with the hand-painted terrors they are so crude you will have difficulty picking out the detail at the scale of this video so I'll try to describe it for you the top two rows are court cards the second row from the bottom has some Trump's and there is the tower it's upside down the wheel death and the devil the bottom row has the Emperor the Pope the Empress the female Pope and the fool note the characteristic double-headed eagle of the Holy Roman Empire on the shields of both the Emperor and the Empress this is a second very similar printer sheet the printing is a little clearer and it's easier to make out the detail another difference is that the Trump on this sheet are numbered so on the top row work one can make out strength number nine and the magician numbered one on the second row you can see the Hermit at number 11 and the hangman at number 12 on the third row you can see the Sun at 18 judgment at 19 justice at 20 and the world at 21 also the moon at 17 the bottom row has love at number 8 temperance at number 6 and the star at 16 this is quite different from the numbering on modern terrors the numbering of early terrors was not set in stone one common change was that justice was placed between judgment and the world now if that seems curious it's consistent with the book of Revelation first does the angel say during the last Trump on the day of judgement then there's divine justice where sinners go to hell and agudo reward it and go to heaven and finally there's the descent of the heavenly City in a new world and again this is described in the Book of Revelations we will now jump forward some 200 years to around the Year 1650 this pack is French and has named the John Noblet Aero after the printer stamp on the two of coins it would seem that jean noble' was resident in paris if we jump forward another hundred years we see that printing is becoming more sophisticated and the designs are converging on what we now know as the Messiah Tarot this deck is dated to around 1760 and is attributed to Nicola convair will now step forward some 300 years from the first tarot cards in all that time there's no suggestion that the Tarot is anything other than a game there's no record of it being used for divination or fortune-telling we're going to step forward to the Year 1782 when in France King Louie the 16th is on the throne his wife is Marie Antoinette was some seven years from the French Revolution in Paris there's a Protestant pastor this is unusual because there had been a considerable persecution of Protestants so the fact that he's a Protestant pastor in Paris tells you something about his status he's a very high grade freemason he has a mania for joining societies and running societies for several years he's been engaged in a somewhat mad publishing venture a multi-volume thesis known as the malt preemie teef and he was trying to establish that back in the day there was a golden age of universal religion moral righteousness and tolerance etc etc a golden age and this was based on his somewhat maverick analysis of ancient legends and myths and fanciful etymology he was known as something as saddled which is I think as a polite way of saying he was a bit of a know-it-all but he was genuinely informed the king had subscribed to many volumes of his work and that shows that he was fashionable and accepted in 1782 in volume eight of this prodigious undertaking for no good reason he inserted an essay on the turul so cruel to Jamila's thesis was that the Tarot is profoundly Egyptian he claimed it was the ancient book of fourth Thoth was the Egyptian god of wisdom and he believed that the priests wishing to preserve this ancient wisdom transliterated the book of Thoth into symbols which were encoded onto cards those carts were taken across Rome in the days of the Caesars they were known to the Pope's the Pope's carried them with them to Avignon when the papacy was resident there and they disseminated throughout the southern part of France throughout Italy in Switzerland and Germany what he didn't know is that the dissemination all over France as well but the game had become unfashionable and had died out in the north of France because he believed the carts were profoundly Egyptian he had to reinterpret almost all of the cards to fit his thesis now some of them wasn't too difficult the star card for example he said was the goddess Isis watering the Nile it's a good idea quite like it others were a little less intuitive so for example the Pope now clearly the Pope couldn't be the Pope not needed so the Pope had to become an Egyptian priest the Hierophant the female Pope clearly no female perps in ancient Egypt clearly not a female Pope must be the high priestess almost every idea came up with her legs it just ran so for example the fool card he didn't know that the fool card wasn't a trump and as it didn't have a number he decided it must have numbers zero that made 22 Trump's which is very convenient because there are 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet he didn't actually say that the tarot cards correspondent to the Hebrew alphabet but he did say that the correspondent to a universal alphabet and it didn't take much intelligence to connect the dots another idea he had is that although the chops are conventionally numbered from one the juggler up to 21 the world that that was the wrong order clearly was the other way around that the world represented creation and and so he decided that the ordering was wrong and he ordered the carts from the world downed the juggler that idea grew legs now it must be said that cord Isabella knew very little about the Tarot he knew nothing about the history of Tarot he knew nothing about the history of playing cards in Europe he also do remarkably little about Egypt he'd read Greek and Roman authors but he never been to Egypt and he couldn't possibly have read any authentic Egyptian literature because the rosetta stone had not yet been discovered or deciphered nobody knew how to read ancient Egyptian however he was pushing on an open door many of the subscribers to his multi-volume ethic would have been high grade freemasons he would have known lots of people who were freemasons because he was a high grade freemason himself and one of the founding ideas of Freemasonry is that it goes all the way back to the ancient temple of Solomon a thousand BC so Freemasons are quite accustomed to this idea of immense antiquity and secret traditions and secret knowledge and secret rituals going all the way back so as I say he was pushing on an open door with this idea at the same time as he was writing the aqua test Cagliostro was traveling around the capitals of Europe marketing what he called Egyptian Freemasonry it was a fad it was immensely popular so that's how the myth of Tarot began at the same time as could a Gemini was writing another person jean-baptiste Alouette he was a merchant he published under the name a Thiele he produced a series of little books describing how to use playing cards and subsequently tarot cards for fortune-telling and divination and this was the the key moment at tarot cards suddenly stop being a game and started being something else of course they carried on being a game in today in certain parts of Europe but in France and particularly in the north of France suddenly this they took on this whole new aspect of being instead of just being playing cards they suddenly became secret mysteries and Oracle's I'm not going to jump forward about 50 years and talk about one of the absolutely key figures in the history of the development of the Tarot and now a small digression almost exactly 50 years ago when I was a student I was walking around the University Library looking through the stacks and I found a book called the history of magic written by someone called Ella fast Levi it had been translated out of the French by someone called Arthur and would wait and will come across him because he in fact it's the same Arthur Edward wait who commissioned this pack the world's best-selling Tarot pack this book had a big influence on me I think I think it's fair to say the elephants in the fast lane by the author attended a big influence and almost everyone who read him he had a genius for exposition he wasn't born an elf a slave I that was a pen name he was born Alphonse Louie constant in Paris he was born around the time that Napoleon was coming into power he was educated for the priesthood he was almost ordained but he had an eye for the ladies and in the end he was not and ordained as a priest he spent most of his life being very very poor and he was something in a social justice warrior he fired of pamphlets right left and center about this issue last issue some other issue it has to be remembered that at this time Paris was still post-revolution in a state of ferment and there were a lot of social tensions then for no obvious reason and it wasn't like he stopped being a fervent Catholic or anything like that for knew of his reasons sometime in his mid life he suddenly reinvented himself as this character Alif a slave I the Magus and he wrote a series of what in retrospect were very influential books on on magic the history of magic and a book called the dogma and ritual of high magic and other ones the clear key of the mysteries etc elf a slave I was a very competent draftsman his illustrations have been endlessly recycled through many many popular compendiums of the occult if you go through a book on us aquifers are more magic there's a very good chance you'll find one of his elf illustrations there one illustration in particular the goat of Mendes has become almost the canonical representation of Satan although it was never intended as that but that's what has become it's also become pretty much that the image of the devil in the Tara Tara was absolutely key to everything he did Levi was convinced that the Tarot was ancient Egyptian but it had become corrupted printers had not understood the diagram the pictures they were looking at the pictures have all been corrupted he needed to be restored back to its original form it's like an old painting though become tarnished it needed to be restored and although he never designed a Tyrell pack he could have he was a very talented draftsman but he could have designed to tear apart but he didn't it's a pity but he laughed notes describing what he regarded as his rectified tarawa and these were very influential so for example the chariot drawn by horses obviously you know wrong the ancient Egyptians didn't use horses to draw the chariots the Sphinx's another example the Empress card see the crown of stars around her head that sailor first lay by the devil card that's the Masai devil this is a devil as elif us they've I describes it and I could give countless examples is his influence on subsequent designs of tarot cards was huge and this was his rectified Tarot again Levi was pushing on an open door he was the right person at the right time the mid 19th century saw a renaissance of interest in all forms of autism it began with Fox sisters in America the the the sudden credible interest in spiritualism and it was a time of table turning of levitations of extraordinary aparts things appearing out of nowhere of ectoplasm people really believed in in the spiritual dimension it was something quite tangible Madame Blavatsky was at that point touring the world supposedly in Tibet perhaps she was in Tibet but she would come back and people would report the most amazing physical phenomena surrounding Madame Blavatsky she didn't found a Theosophical society until the year that Alif us live i died but it shows that he was very much a person of his time he was writing books about the Western esoteric just exactly the right time but he didn't actually become famous in his own life that was to come later what I'm going to do now is move forward a few years to the Year 1887 and I'm going to move across the channel from France into Britain the reason for that is that's where the story takes me I appreciate that there are several quite important French authors from the 19th century who wrote about Tarot that I've neglected to mention if you're interested in what I haven't said you might be interested in the wicked pack of cards the origins of the occult Tarot by ronald decker thierry de Poulos and Michael Dermott now an interesting thing happened in 1887 a group of high grade English Rosicrucians and Freemasons came across an unusual document there are various stories about how it was found it's all very vague and evasive one of the stories is that it was found in a you know somebody was shopping at a booksellers and it was found slit between the pages of book it was written in cypher when it was deciphered it was found to contain a description of an esoteric order and by a description I mean it had the rituals the initiation rituals and had knowledge lectures and it included a substantial amount material on the Tarot now it had obviously taken some ideas from the Tarot of Iliff a slave I but had gone a lot further and it had corrected Levi and again this obsession worth rectifying the tower getting it back to its original form now these high grade freemasons decided to contact someone in Germany the the cipher document actually an address on it so they wrote to this person Fross Pringle and purportedly received a reply back authorizing them to create an esoteric a secret esoteric order that would be open to men and women and they called it the hermetic Brotherhood of the Golden Dawn now just in case you're curious this has nothing whatsoever to do with the Greek ultra-nationalist state right-wing organization of the same name so this organization started and it's interesting for two reasons the first is that it attracted a curiously eccentric bunch of people some of whom were quite important so there were a number of what you might call a list B list and sealers celebrities they were attracted to the Golden Dawn probably the most important a list celebrity was the the poet William Butler Yeats there were a number of writers such as Arthur Edward wait if you commissioned the the weight pack and there was also the poet and Mountaineer Aleister Crowley who was responsible for working on the the fourth pack so and both of these men had both read and translated books by elephants Lavoie anyway that's the first reason for why the golden dollars important they had some interesting people and the second reason is that it purported to teach and practice real magic now you're probably gonna look at me a bit funny about is what does he made by real magic and this the complete golden Dawn's system of magic very big very heavy I don't have to answer the question I can just point you at this and actually I'm being a bit frivolous because it does the term is actually well-defined in the Renaissance there was the stuff that the church told you about the stuff you were supposed to believe there was another parallel system of belief that intersected with the Church's teaching but was somewhat different and its best represented by this book it's quite famous it's Cornelius Heinrich grippers three books of occult philosophy published in the early sixteenth century it's still a very important book for anyone interested in occult philosophy and I think it's fair to say that what you find in here the Golden Dawn system is basically a gripper plus a bit more Kabbalah he Jewish Kabbalah and the Tarot the Tarot is fully integrated into the system it doesn't exist here Turner was just a game at this time then here it's a complete system of occult philosophy so to give you an example of what's involved the 22 Trump's of the Tarot that's the 21 trumps plus the fool now correspond to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet that was true way back in the time of khadija belong but it's even more true now the 22 Tarot Trump's correspond to the 22 paths on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life and they correspond to astrology the astrological signs the astrological planets the elements going a bit further getting a bit esoteric now before court cards the page the night between the king they correspond to the four letters of the most sacred divine name the Tetragrammaton what we pronounce as Jehovah the Tarot aces correspond to the roots of the elements so coins has no Pentacles with a pentagram on and corresponds to the powers of Earth the powers of water the powers of air the powers of fire so the new languages cants that the Thoth the totems though the signifiers the pointers at things the PIP cards the 36 pip cards are taken to correspond to the 36 deck hands of an Egyptian astrology the Tarot has now become a set of Universal archetypes in here there are new descriptions of the cars the fairly abstract destroyed descriptions the cards have gone from being quite concrete symbols to becoming universal symbols bigger than humanity they stand outside of humanity it's as if the world is circumscribed by a barrier and outside that barrier there are these mighty powers the 22 tarot Trump's it's a bit difficult to get your head round this it's it's it's strange and it's also very interesting it's a long way from the card game anyway the Golden Dawn did not last for very long apart from the internal tensions the personalities people like Aleister Crowley who was who came in late in the day but at a significant role in in its collapse apart from the personalities there was also the growing suspicion that cypher document was not what it seemed nobody could get the story straight it looked like it was a fabrication so anyway it started to fall apart there was actually the teaching system collapsed and then Aleister Crowley decided for reasons best known to himself to publish much of the internal documentation details of the rituals and so on there was a court case the whole thing came out public members of the golden dawn became something of a laughingstock by 1909 so that's nearly 20 years later after Edward wait one of the members thought it would be a good time to take what he had inwardly digested about the tower system in the Golden Dawn and produce a new toner pack and that's why I'm going to talk about now I bought this Terra back in 1971 the packaging is looking a bit pathetic the cards are good fun the first thing one notices about this deck is how colorful it is blindingly colorful vivid blues and vivid yellows and vivid Reds same thing one notices well what notices if one is familiar with the Tarot is that the suit of coins is no longer a suit of coins there are round symbols with a with a pentagram on and the name for those as Pentacles or panty calls that comes from elf a slave I thought they one notices is that the Pitt cards are now fully Illustrated so this is the the nine of Pentacles would have been the nine of coins this is a big change and it marks the emergence of the Tarot from being essentially a game of cards to being something in its own right one could quite easily play a game of cards within our sight area because that's what it was useful it difficult to imagine playing a game of cards with this these you need you need a pair of sunglasses to play cards with these it's it's not the first deck of tarot cards to have fully Illustrated pip cards the honor goes to this the so la busca desk this is a renaissance deck but it's very idiosyncratic and tends not to come up in discussions of the tower it is now well understood that Pamela Coleman Smith the artist of this tarot deck date consult the sol la busca deck and did use some of the designs so the story behind this is that Golden Dawn member Arthur and rod weight was a prolific author he published many books mostly on esoteric subjects but also on Freemasonry he understood the publishing business by 1900 and backtrack a little he had published a small book on definition and one of the forms of divination he discusses is how to do divination with odd MacLean cards and by 1909 he must have thought that there was a gap in the market for a new Terrell and this was probably inspired by his experience of being in the golden Don and having such a rich background in the Tarot so he approached an artist and the artist was Pamela Coleman Smith now Pamela Coughlin Smith was on the fringes of the Golden Dawn Circle she was a very good friend of the Yates family that's the family of the poet William Butler Yeats she was also very heavily involved in theatre production she was a good friend of a well-known actress Ellen Terry she'd done many sketches of theatrical costumes and I think that's quite apparent when you look at some of our illustrations she's very comfortable with historical costumes she did the entire 78 card deck in nine months and she received a flat fee from wait she said at the time it was a bit of a stretch trying to do it so quickly she then more or less disappears from view she's around for another nine years in the London circle eventually retired to common law where she lived the rest of her life in more or less complete obscurity we know remarkably little about her life in Carmel she died in 1951 the same year as I was born when I look at the Trump cars what strikes me is how little influence there is from the golden Dom I one would have expected more influence a most striking and strong influence from the golden Dom what I do see is a very strong influence from alpha slavery so this card the magician very different from the Maasai in the Maasai Terra the figure of the magician is actually a fairground well this is my interpretation a fairground magician he has a table is Varys conjuring tricks on it possibly he's doing games like the shell game it's staged magic it's conjuring magic it's sleight of hand it's that kind of magician so what we have here is a full-blown hermetic magician yong-man wand of power in the air pointing down to the earth as above so below on the table are the symbols of the four suits the the pentacle of the cup the staff and the salt above his head is a funny squiggly figure the lamina skate this is pure Elif a slave boy as she goes through the pack it's not always a pound but his influence runs right through the the Trump cars the big cards are a different story I have wondered for many years where the designs for the pit cards came from I had thought that perhaps they came from the Golden Dawn the Golden Dawn had a system based on the Egyptian deckhands and planets and signs astrological signs and if you go through that and look at the designs on the cards there are a few hits and many misses I also thought that perhaps weights book on divination how to tell the future with ugly playing cards may have been an influence that would have been the obvious influence but again there are hits and misses I have no idea where these designs came from I have to credit Pamela Coleman Smith for putting us all together she she came up with a complete set of designs for the PIP cards God knows where she got them from but the important thing is that her influence was profound hundreds of ratar-o plaques have been produced since this deck and they've tended to follow Pamela Coleman Smith's designs for the PIP cards over and over and over again you'll see the same designs so in some senses she is the mother of the terrible in some respects the the pakis is remarkably conventional so if you look at the Aces Ace of Wands thisis solves ace of cups they serve Pentacles I think these would have been instantly recognizable in the Renaissance likewise the court cards the Kings seated on a throne the Queen seated on the throne the Knight riding a horse and the Paige standing again that would have been instantly recognizable in the Renaissance but it's the fully Illustrated pet carts that really sets this tarapacá sight the final tarot deck that I wanted to talk about is this one is the fourth pack and it was produced by Aleister Crowley and Lady Freda Harris you can see them together in these photos Aleister Crowley's the rather stout gentleman and lady three Freda Harris's the one getting into the car she was the the wife of a Liberal MP now Aleister Crowley has had a bad press but in my opinion he was the most diligent student of the Golden Dawn he was born in 1875 and he came to the Golden Dawn in its last throes as a young man but he sucked up the entire system like a like a sponge he had fully internalized the system and it formed the framework for much of his later esoteric work lady Freda Harris was an artist they came together in I think it was about 1938 just before the outbreak of World War two and Crowley's idea was that they should produce a Terra pact to make a bit of money he wanted to do it quickly maybe six months and probably was always looking to ways to make money because he was he saw himself as a gentleman he wouldn't do a job it didn't work and it was always short of money in the event they spent years on on the this tarot deck lady for you Harris persuaded Cromley that as he'd spent a lifetime thinking about the tyro the the pterodax she'll be personal and and reflect the thought that had gone into it so they began about 1938 and were working on this design throughout the war as the bombs were falling on London the letters still survived and you'll find them on the internet if you look up Aleister Crowley and Lady Freda Harris letters you can find the correspondence as they work together designing this Tarapaca now the reason that I think it's important well the two reasons the first reason is that it fully realizes that the idea expressed by untoned kurdish Abela just before the French Revolution that the Tarot was Egyptian profoundly Egyptian and embodied the secret knowledge of the Egyptians probably wrote a book about this Tyra Park he calls it the book of Thoth Egyptian Tarot now brother cruelly actually believed that or not I don't know but that is the art idea that that runs through this that the Tarot isn't a deck of playing cards it is a system it's an entire system of occult knowledge encoded in the form of cars the Tarot I think the trumps in this design fully embody the idea of the Tarot trumps as vast Universal powers they're pip carts are elemental the the staves are all fiery the swords are all Airy the cups of watery the Pentacles are all earthly it's a it's it's a very very aqil deck the second reason I think it's important as I love lady Freda Harris's artwork it's very characteristic of the period it's coming out of the Art Deco period and you can see the influences and it's a very dynamic art it's everything's moving there are lines there are curves it's a beautiful style that she has I don't think it's very well reproduced I have two decks I have this one the big one but it's very poorly saturated and the colors are very wishy-washy this one's better but it's a bit too small I can't afford to keep buying ones just to see if the well be produced the the originals have disappeared into the bowels of the Warburg Institute where formerly the being restored I would love to see them on exhibition but I haven't seen them it would be nice to anyway that's all I have to say about this deck I think it's a very worthwhile deck it very much embodies the Golden Dawn system it is a little bit idiosyncratic I think you need to know a little bit about Aleister Crowley and a lot about the Golden Dawn to really navigate it but it is in my mind the the culmination of an idea the idea of the Tarot pack as embodied knowledge it finally achieves it in this deck that's all I got to say are now I'm going to go through some of the books I used as sources so that if you want to follow up these ideas you can I've only been able to cover a very small part of the history of the Tarot if you're wondering what I used for source material then the very first and most important source is Stewart Kaplan's encyclopedia of the Tarot there are four volumes I have three of them I'd say the first two are indispensable they're very comprehensive the next two books I'd say are indispensable are the wicked pack of cards and a history of the occult Tarot they have some authors in common the the principal author I think is Michael Dermott who was both he's actually Sir Michael Dermott he was an important philosopher and his hobby was the history of playing cards in the tournament Michael Thomas also produced 12 Tarot games so if you're interested in knowing how to play games with a tarot pack you have the Maasai Tarot and you want to play a game with it you can get that to you you also find on the internet a book that I like very much because it it probably has as much information as you can find on Pamela Coleman Smith is this one secrets of the weight Smith tarot by Marcus Katz and Telugu I really like this book I enjoyed it Arthur Edward wait did write a book about his own terror it's the swamp pictorial key to the tower it's not very expensive it's not terribly good but it's worth having secondary material if you really want to get into the occult Tarot you really have to dive knee deep into the golden Dawn's stuff and the complete golden Dawn's system and magic is a good place to go it's mostly original stuff rather than the secondary commentary material and if you're interested in the Thoth tarot this is hard going seriously it's hard going I understand it quite well and I still find it hard going but it exists and I think if you prepare to put up with the fact that it's an almost OCD presentation of aster Crowley's thoughts on the tower then it's a good book to read so thank you very much if you made it this far thank you for listening I do have my own book on Terra it's a very idiosyncratic you can find it in the the text below a reference to it it's on Amazon anyway thank you very much and I hope to produce some more videos on the Tarot you might want to subscribe I can't tell you in advance how long it's going to take me to produce them it took me a long time to produce this one but anyway thank you and goodbye