The Origins of the Tarot Cards back
The origins of the Tarot cards - who first designed them, where, when and for what purpose - remain vague and elusive despite a considerable number of books and articles which over the years have attempted to illuminate the darkness in which the cards are shrouded. The perennial enchantment of the cards is evidenced not only by these sometimes sound and scholarly and sometimes wildly mystical writings, but also by the fascination which the Tarot cards continue to hold for the layman despite endless attempts on the part of the skeptic to make fun of them and relegate them to the general dustbin of tea-leaf readings, crystal ball and other oddities. Whatever it is about the Tarot cards, they have held the human imagination for at least five hundred years and possibly for much longer; and they certainly show no sign of disappearing.
What is it about these strange picture-cards which continues to exercise such a mysterious spell, even over those individuals who consider themselves sensible and not ordinarily prone to believing in occult mysteries? In part, the answer to this may be that the Tarot cards are not "occult" - that is, they are not supernatural or magical in the sense that those words are generally used, and they are not the especial property of the esoteric initiate, although many Tarot students would like to think so. There is evidence to suggest that in the mid-fifteenth century - the time scholars believe the cards were first in evidence in Europe - they were freely available to anyone who could afford a deck and who cared to make the effort to understand and use them. It is our intention to restore the Tarot cards to their original accessibility, so that they need no longer remain the domain of the scholar or occultist who deliberately obfuscates their symbolism.
Writers on the subject of the Tarot have at one time or another assigned the invention of the cards to a wide range of sources. Same claim their origins lie in the religious rituals and symbols of the ancient Egyptians; others suggest that they are the spring from the mystery cults of Mithras in the first century after Christ. Still others find concurrences with pagan Celtic beliefs, or with the romantic poetry cycles of the Holy Grail which emerged during the Middle Ages in Western Europe. More sober scholars, relying on what may be seen and touched in museums, focus on the earliest cards we now possess, and believe they were painted during the Renaissance. Certainly if we wish to base our exploration of the Tarot's origins exclusively on factual evidence, the first documented deck of Tarot cards - those which include not only the ordinary four suits of playing cards, but also the strange images of what are now known as the Major Arcana or Tarot Trumps - spring from the second half of the fifteenth century and were painted in Italy.
There are two of these decks, one known as the Charles VI pack and the other known as the Visconti-Sforza pack. But the existence of these two beautifully designed decks of Tarot cards does not really tell us anything with any certainty. They are simply all that we can hold in our hands. And if these are indeed the first invention of the Tarot, this historical documentation cannot reveal why we in the modern era, who have long ago left behind the peculiar beliefs and world-view of the Renaissance, should still find that the symbols and images of the cards hold such an inexplicable air of profound significance. These picture cards seem to invoke elusive memories and half-known associations with myth, legend and folklore, and imply despite rational objection some kind of story or secret which cannot be totally formulated and which slips away the moment we attempt to define it too rigidly.
The Italian Renaissance encompassed a revival of classical Greek thought with its dynamic spirit of experiment, adventure and enterprise. From the gray, rigid, melancholy world-view of the Middle Ages, the bright animistic soul of ancient Greece burst open upon the Western world with enormous energy and incalculable consequences. Greek manuscripts - particularly the writings of Plato and the Neoplatonists and Hermetic philosophers of Alexandria and the Middle East - found their way into the West after the sacking of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453. These manuscripts, which had been unavailable in Western Europe since the Goths overran Rome, arrived in Florence at a time when that city's rulers were sympathetic to such heretical writings, and the new spirit was rapidly spread by the recently invented printing press.
This Neoplatonic-Hermetic movement boldly challenged beliefs which had for many centuries been considered sacrosanct, for it flew directly in the face of the Church's authority, decrying blind obedience to dogma, and encouraging the psychological development of the individual. The vision was as pagan as it was Christian, and images of the ancient gods and goddesses began to appear in Renaissance art where before there had been only conventional religious themes. And it first flooded Western Europe at precisely the time that the earliest known Tarot cards were in use.
We need to know a little of what this new Neoplatonic-Hermetic world-view espoused, because we can then understand the meaning of the Tarot cards better. Also, we can begin to glimpse just why the cards fell into such disrepute, and were associated with the work of the Devil. Essentially, the new world-view challenged the old medieval idea that man was a poor, sinful creature who could only know God through His intermediary, the Church. "What a great miracle is man!" became the rallying cry of the Renaissance, for in the new vision man was a proud co-creator in God's cosmos. The Neoplatonic-Hermetic movement believed that the human being was in essence a microcosm of the greater universe, and that therefore self-knowledge - knowledge of the soul - was the only true religious path through which one might reconnect with one's divine origins. Self-knowledge was of course the first dictum of the Greeks; "Know thyself" was carved above the doorway of Apollo's temple at Delphi. And knowledge of self meant knowledge of the many diverse drives and impulses of the inner man or woman, some of them dark as well as light, as well as knowledge of the cycles of development at work in human life. The multiplicity of Greek gods seemed, to the newly awakened mind of the Renaissance, a better and more truthful analogy of the complex patterns of the universe than the rather static world of the Trinity with its exclusively male and benevolent deity. Moreover, if man was a great miracle and a co-creator in the cosmos, then he had the right to tamper with himself and his world, even improving upon God's not-so-perfect creation, rather than obediently accepting his lot according to religious dogma. It is no wonder that the Church retaliated with such great ferocity, eventually forcing this new vision underground in the ensuing two centuries.
Along with the sparkling and mutli-faceted Greek gods, the Renaissance also adopted a Greek method of approaching the gods: the art of memory-systems which were initially developed as a kind of pictorial key to meditation. Whether the individual simply wished to remember the text of a speech or poem, or wished to experience a feeling of the connectedness of the soul with the larger universe, these systems involved study or meditation upon a series of magical images, each of which was a symbol and therefore had several levels of meaning. An example of memory systems still in use today is the Stations of the Cross found in Catholic churches, intended to recreate in the mind and heart of the observer the whole unfolding story of Christ's life, death and resurrection. During the Renaissance, the memory-systems became associated with magical talismans or emblems, pictures or amulets meant to invoke in the observer a sense of a certain power at work in life on many levels. The object of such meditation was to form a kind of ladder to reach higher levels of consciousness and gain insights into the divine world. The image was meant to restore "memory" of the divine world of the soul, raising individual consciousness from its entrapment in the mundane trivia of the material world and reconnecting the person with his or her real source.
The Church naturally considered such traffic with pagan images to be the work of the Devil, and energetically suppressed every study which touched upon such heretical themes. By the time the so-called Age of Enlightenment had dawned, ushering the "scientific" world-view that apparently put paid to the mystical nonsense of earlier centuries, the Tarot cards had been relegated to life in the shadow-world of the occultists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. No longer accessible to the public and no longer relevant to any philosophical or spiritual world-view acceptable in society, the cards were progressively doctored and changed in accordance with the particular spiritual beliefs of the group or order which had got hold of them. Thus the Tarot cards as we now usually see them are interesting hybrids, influenced by everything from Cabalistic thought through to Arthurian legends, from latter-day magical practices to Rosicrucian symbolism. Interesting though these hybrids are, they have lost their original universality, and the average reader, desiring to learn more about the cards, is often put off by the obscure symbolism and sometimes rigid moral and spiritual doctrine which has been injected by a particular esoteric school of thought.
Taken from The Mythic Tarot, by Juliet Sharman-Burke and Liz Greene.
In my personal experience, the Tarot has primarily served as a mirror to my subconscious. Each card touches on a different aspect of life, spiritual development and knowledge of self - in different dimensions and on various levels.
What is required to use them as a successful tool, is a commitment to know self, a passion for understanding the Laws of the Universe, and most of all, a burning desire to touch the heart of God.
Start by taking one card a day (preferably the Major Arcana first), live it, understand it, own it and then apply it to your own walk into Light. Once you understand the message and energy of each card, the combination of multiple cards and the Voice behind the message, you will be able to assist others in their own walk. You will have lived through each card and gained enough understanding to guide others into their own truth.
The most important factor in owning and using a Tarot deck is the intent to discover self first. I wish you well on your discovery of Self!
Allen