Yet Another Tarot Blog

After spending all of my free time yesterday thinking about this, and doodling different grids, I've come to the following conclusion:

1. I had a small misunderstanding of temperament versus function pair. Sorting by function pair and sorting by temperament yields two different results. I'm including both here for my own reference.

2. There is a specific and esoteric gender madness to the court via a bunch of stories from the Golden Dawn about Holy Guardian Angels and reproduction and impreganation and regenerative cycles. The Kings/Knights and Knights/Princes are very definitely masculine in nature, but also represent an active element. The same theology holds that some elements are active/masculine and some are passive/feminine. If we take the courts as manifestations of energy, what happens if you have an active manifestation of passive energy, and vice versa? Is it tension or completion?

Who knows, but on the basis of that tension I've decided to express a rank as introverted; when they're sympatico, the rank expresses as extroverted. I've always had the sense that the Queens and Pages of the Cups and Pentacles were a little more extroverted and outgoing than their male counterparts.

Another way to think about it, if you want to reintroduce a hierarchy model to everything, is that if Kings represent mastery of their particular element, then their energy should be in tune with the element wrt activity/passivity.

( Preliminary models then. )


A comparison of all three models looks something like this:

King of Wands ESFP or ENFP	King of Cups INFJ	King of Swords ENTJ	King of Pentacles ISTP, ISTJ, or ISFP
Queen of Wands ISFP or INFP	Queen of Cups ENFJ	Queen of Swords INTJ	Queen of Pentacles ESTP, ESFJ, ESFP
Knight of Wands ESFJ, ESTP, ENTP	Knight of Cups INFP or ISFJ	Knight of Swords ENTP, ESTJ	Knight of Pentacles ISTJ or ISTP
Page of Wands ISFJ, ISTP, INTP	Page of Cups ENFP or ESFJ	Page of Swords INTP or ISTJ	Page of Pentacles ESTJ or ESTP

I'm dumping this here so maybe I'll stop obsessing over it and give my brain a goddamn rest.

jenny_evergreen's first monthly card draw for me was in regards to prior thoughts on the nature of deity. So I put a question to the birds: "What do I need to know about my relationship to deity?" Since I brought up both her Patreon and Hekate here, I guess it's fitting I should follow up with a post that combines both of those topics.

The card that came up for me was blue jay:



Relevant bit of a slightly longer description: This bird is the cheerful, flexible opportunist...[and]...[h]e is a shameless thief (doesn't recognize the ownership concept, except for territory).

This is the part I keep coming back to. Maybe jenny_evergreen too, I can't know what her thought process is. She pointed out some options:

1. Trickery afoot (in which case either myself or Arwen or both are being hoodwinked)
2. A kind of deity being recommended (in this case, trickster)
3. I "should be emulating Bluejay, especially the 'cheerful, flexible opportunist' approach. So maybe this is not so much about making a lifelong bond with a deity, but letting them come and go..."

I list these in order of likelihood.

1. My instinct when it comes to both this particular deck and to jenny_evergreen's singular instincts is that a warning against trickery would be much stronger, and be much less oblique. And since I'm not paying anyone money, time, or energy for the privilege of having a relationship with a deity, I don't need someone to tell me not to get tricked. :P (Related to deception and manipulation, though, this dude is getting major side-eye in a Facebook group I'm in.)

2. More or less equally unlikely is a trickster deity. Sometimes we're repulsed by things because we secretly admire them, or wish we could be them; sometimes we don't click with something because that's just not our bag. And that's how I feel about trickster deities, by and large. A mode of being I can roll with out of necessity (think an actor putting on a "show" to help Jews escape an increasingly dangerous Germany, a la Mel Brooks' To Be Or Not To Be) but not for the lulz (think 4chan).

3. Now we're in the realm of the very likely, and jenny_evergreen admits as much herself, saying her instinct tilts towards this one as well. There are three aspects of this idea for me and they're all kind of related to this point. The first is the one that she speaks about directly: allow energies to come and go as they will. This is about not taking things super seriously—relationship with deity can and should fluctuate as necessary—but the second point is also being allowed to take something seriously if I want to.

The third, if I can build on this card and bring my own past to bear, is that it's okay to pick and choose. Not universally, necessarily. Definitely not, actually. But for me personally—I err on the side of the very careful and very fastidious (when it comes to the spiritual, anyway) and feeling like everything always needs to be the roots, the original, the purest form of whatever... so it's okay to relax, and it's okay to mix and remix and take what works for me and disregard the rest.

I've come across a couple of Tarot apps that I think are worth having. They're both the work of Tina Gong, in terms of code as well as art. Multifaceted!

I had been looking for a Tarot deck app for a while before I stumbled across her apps. I just wanted something quick and clean that could generate cards on the fly, which turned out to be a more challenging task than you might think. I had another one before, but it was gummed up with ads and was just a mess. (I don't remember which one it was, but even if I did, I don't think it's generous to badmouth a free app that was only mediocre.) For a while, I was using a random number generator. Golden Thread and Luminous Spirit Tarot are both what I wanted, plus more. (In a good way, not in an OPTIONS OVERLOAD way.)

Golden Thread is targeted at beginners. You can draw a daily card, and there are also spreads: one-card, three-card, and Celtic Cross. The single-card reading was perfect for my "I just need to draw a random card on the go" needs, and I'll be using it for that for the foreseeable future. It also helps you track a lot of neat Tarot data about yourself: how positive/negative your readings have been over time, the most common card keyword that's come up, etc.

The Luminous Spirit app is more intermediate focused and assumes you already have a solid working knowledge of the Tarot (though keywords are always available for each card, plus its reversal). Instead, it connects your readings to lunar cycles. You set an intention for each cycle, and then at each new phase of the moon, there's a different reading.

Each app uses a Tarot deck that has a physical, printed equivalent (hence my use of the "deck lust" tag here). The apps are free, and are free of ads. It's the sale of the physical items that helps support the apps. (And Gong's enthusiasm, natch.) I don't know how much I like the aesthetic of the Golden Thread deck, but I might very well pick up the physical Luminous Spirit deck:



This is a really well designed app, and I appreciate that they use original decks instead of just using the Waite–Smith deck. I admit that it wasn't until I did some research into Pamela Colman-Smith that I really appreciated the Waite–Smith deck, but now I'm totally onboard with it. My beef with Tarot apps using the Waite–Smith deck is more how it usually indicates a sort of lack of effort—just grab a public domain Tarot deck with easy-to-read images and go! No original decks, no recent decks that would mean paying licensing fees to artists or estates. (Of course, not every app or software with a more unique, modern deck is necessarily paying its artists. I recall a sketchy app ripping off a deck from the Magical Realist press.) But it's that extra attention to detail that makes an app really stand out, and that's why I think I'll continue to use it for a long time to come.

I love projects that combine the arts and the sciences (you should check out the #sciart hashtag on Twitter if you haven't already). This Science Tarot deck is so wonderful, I might make it my Christmas present to myself.

Each card, from the Majors to the Minors to the court, has been associated with a scientist (courts), a scientific concept (Minors), or a "science story" (Majors). Care has obviously been taken to align the energy and meaning of the card as best as possible with the concept. Each suit has its own theme that in turns tells the larger story of creation: Wands as creation, the nuclear fusion burning in each star; then Pentacles as exchange, elements forged in the star now coalescing into matter; Swords as scientific observation, the higher thinking of conscious life and the beginning of abstract, scientific fields like mathematics, chaos theory, and physics; and finally Cups as the integration of the scientific consciousness into a more holistic picture of life and the return of the scientific observer to a participant in the system. The deck creators also employed Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey to tell the "story" of the Minor Arcana suits, for that extra layer of meaning. For example, the 2 of Swords:

Sitting under the apple tree, we contemplate a choice to be made. The tree branch lifts an apple high in the air, and gravity continuously pulls it toward the ground. These equal and opposite forces hold the apple in place. But soon the balance may shift and the apple may fall, releasing the branch from its burden and shaking the leaves as they swing upwards.

Isaac Newton observed that every action caused an equal and opposite reaction and so reasoned that every reaction could be predicted from the action that triggered it. Like a game of billiards, Newton's world is a predictable knocking around of objects: the force of the impact equals the mass of the moving object times its acceleration. To send an apple flying in a specific direction, we only need to know where to hit it and how hard. To move a gigantic apple, we'll need to hit it with a great deal of mass, or we will need a running start.

A decision is hanging over your head. You can choose to leave the apple suspended in the tree, or you can apply enough force to bring it down. Either decision may bring good results, but if you wait too long, the apple may fall on your head.

Hero's Journey, Step 2: Refusal of the call. The hero is reluctant to use this new power.

The court cards are all illustrated with famous scientists; Page, Knight, Queen, and King are all associated with Helen Fisher's work in personality and attraction. Pages are the Explorers of their suit, Knights are the Innovators, Queens are the Storytellers, and Kings are the Visionaries.

There is obviously just so much thought and attention to detail in this deck—but then, would you expect anything less from a science-themed Tarot deck?—and I am just in love.

A friend of mine alerted me to the existence of The Ghetto Tarot, and I wanted to share it here.



I love the idea of photographic Tarot decks, especially updated or just new interpretations of the iconic images. I love the idea, but the execution so far has been lacking. Things got one step closer with Alice Smeets's The Ghetto Tarot, a collaborative fundraising art project. I encourage you to read more about the project at the above IndieGoGo link.

The Afro-Caribbean milieu of this project is certainly appropriate, given Pamela Colman-Smith's own heritage; I haven't seen all of the images yet but I can say already that I particularly love Death and The Sun, as they are less literal recreations of Colman-Smith's plateaus and more a portrait of Haiti, Haitians, and Port-au-Prince themselves.



Death




The Sun

I admit to liking the simple recreations less than these images, but I still love Smeets's collaboration with Haitian artists on this, and the fact that the profits from the deck will go to them. Tarot and art as a force for good in the world. Plus, sometimes the literal recreations actually work out well, like in The Moon and the 3 of Swords.



The Moon




The 3 of Swords

Others work because the Colman-Smith's original artwork was striking and made for a well-composed photo. Yet somehow, the impression is starker when it's a photograph. Take the 9 of Swords, one of my favorite cards (in terms of aesthetic, not in terms of divinatory meaning. Obviously!)



9 of Swords

I don't know if I'm going to buy a copy of this deck yet, or if I'm going to opt for a poster print. I know already that I probably wouldn't use this deck much to read, but some of these photographs are just too beautiful to pass up. Besides, it's for a good cause.

The woman to whom all modern Tarot readers owe their hobby received a pittance for her artwork and died in debt, unknown outside her circle of bohemian friends.

Just so you know.

I mean there's more I could say, but someone else has already done an excellent job writing a comprehensive biography of her, so I will link to that and use this space to share some brief, notable facts. If you don't follow that link or remember anything else I mention here, remember that thanks to prevailing Victorian attitudes (read as: patriarachy, white supremacy), Smith never received the credit, money, or prestige she should have for her work on the groundbreaking Rider-Waite-Smith deck.

Unfortunately she has no direct descendents that could possibly benefit from her work (US Games estimates that, were she given her proper royalties, her estate would be worth millions today), so I guess the best we can do is remember to call the deck the RWS deck instead of just the Rider-Waite. Or maybe just Waite-Smith, as they did the work; Rider was just the publisher.

Anyway, here are some brief facts about Pamela Colman-Smith!

First of all, she was a cutie patootie and seems like she would have been a vibrant and interesting person just to know:

What a smile! She went by the nickname "Pixie" which I imagine suited her quite well.

Colman-Smith was born in 1878 to a British father and a Jamaican mother, their only child. She spent her early years in Manchester, then in Jamaica, until finally studying art in Brooklyn. While we remember her today for the RWS Tarot deck, Colman-Smith was engaged primarily in set design for the theater. She also became involved in the women's suffrage movement and illustrated pamphlets on the topic.
Colman-Smith was a member of the Golden Dawn in her own right. (I was always under the impression that she was just a random artist Waite had simply contracted out to. I don't know why. But in case anyone else was under that misconception, I thought I'd clear it up.) Outside this occult group, many of her friends were the movers and shakers of the early 20th century.

After this explosion of work in the turn of century, records of Colman-Smith dwindle until her death in Cornwall in 1951. She was in debt and her belongings were auctioned off. Hopefully among them is a well-preserved journal or diary that will one day be found and help clue us in on those missing thirty years of her life!

I've been a fan of the-toast.net for a while now, mostly because of their recurring series of commentary on Western art, courtesy Mallory Ortberg. Ortberg has another series on the art of Tarot Cards: Highly Literal Tarot Readings. So far she's looked at Wands and Swords. They're killing me.



The Stick War Has Begun





Now Let Us Attend a Good Charlotte Concert Together




Don't Look At Me




Okay You Can Look Now

A common method for teaching the Major Arcana is to frame it in the context of The Fool's journey, from The Magician all the way through The World, each card (theoretically) a logical consequence from the previous. But how long has this particular narrative been ascribed to the Major Arcana?

Many of the websites I visited and books I read when I first started to teach myself Tarot used this paradigm in elucidating the meanings of the Major Arcana. While I learned the card meanings easily enough, the nature of the relationship between the cards and the logical nature of the procession from the one to the next eluded me. No one really explained why the Major Arcana were ordered as they were, or why, for example, The Chariot necessarily follows The Lovers. Maybe my lack of understanding there means I don't truly comprehend the cards' true meaning; that's possible. Either way, the Fool's journey and the progression of the Majors has been a sticking point of mine, so I decided to do a little scratching.

As Robert O'Neill points out, mystical journeys are perhaps the most universal of tropes and they predate the Tarot by nearly immeasurable years. In Middle Ages Europe, those visions and journeys with pious Christian messages tended to be the ones saved and copied by churches and monasteries, and were also often referenced in sermons or artwork in the church. Given the ubiquity of these images, it's hardly surprising that some of them became the Trump cards of tarocchi decks of the time. Other images were derived from common secular visual tropes of the day, such as The Hanged Man. Art is always a reflection, and a product, of its era.

Prior to the advent of the printing press in Europe (1450), decks were individually created and inspired hand-painted works of art commissioned by wealthy patrons, bound together only by the rules of tarocchi. It's unlikely that they (or at least, that all of them) were used to teach any sort of lesson about piety or Godliness. While nearly all of the personages in the Major Arcana can be traced to popular literature (most notably Italian), there is no one definitive work with all of the Trumps in a particular order to tell a particular story; no one religious or occult order got together and dictated that the Trumps should be ordered just so for whatever purpose. Franco Patesi has suggested a few works in particular that may have served as inspiration and, while not rejecting the idea that a definitive source exists and hasn't been found (or existed but was destroyed), admits as more probable the "multiple streams of influence" hypothesis.

In other words, while the images in the Major Arcana probably came from a multitude of tales and illustrations of spiritual progression, the final version we have today is not (so far as we can tell) based on any extant occult source's recommendation. The Waite-Smith deck, perhaps the most popular and recognizable Tarot deck in the world, was likely based in large part on the Sola-Busca Tarot, which A. E. Waite and Pamela Coleman Smith both probably saw in display in the British Museum. The Sola-Busca is the only extant and complete full-color tarocchi deck with full-color illustrations of the Trumps and the pips, though that is not to suggest the Waite-Smith deck is a mere clone. Smith and Waite adjusted some of the card meanings and images so that there are major differences between the two, even though there also many similarities. Here are some more sample images of the Sola-Busca deck so you can check for yourself. Giordani Berti suggests that the Sola-Busca deck, which has been attributed to Nicola di maestro Antonio, is an occult deck (not only a mere gaming deck) with ties to alchemy, but it's my unlearned opinion that those similarities were not meant to be any kind of lesson or secret code, but are just more contemporary images and ideas Nicola di maestro Antonio used for the sake of art. In any case, those ties are through the use of images in cards throughout the deck, more or less at random; Berti is not referring to any secret "recipe" (literal or metaphorical) contained with the ordered numbers of the Trumps.

This is not to say that it is impossible or inappropriate to read other traditions—like alchemy, astrology, or the Kabbalah—on to the cards. If you happen to know a lot about them, that certainly enriches your understanding of the cards and adds new layers of meaning to draw on. I'm not questioning the legitimacy of such a practice; this reading-on is the exact reason Tarot as a divination tool exists today. I only mean that my goal in this investigation was the strictly-defined Fool's journey in the Majors: was this a narrative that artists had in mind when creating the early decks? Is there a long-standing historical tradition of the Major Arcana as a story or some kind ? If so, where did it come from? If not, when did people start applying that idea?

Since I think it's safe to say that the Fool's journey was not the intended framework of the Majors in the earliest decks, when did it start getting read on to the Major Arcana?

Such a narrative is not really the focus either in Waite's Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911) or in Tarot of the Bohemians (1896). Nor was I able to detect one in Eliphas Levi's Transcendental Magic: Its Dogma and Its Rituals (1854–1856). S. L. MacGregor Mathers, in his summation of the meanings of the Major Arcana in The Tarot in 1888, provides a little fable almost as a mnemonic aside:

The Human Will (1) enlightened by Science (2) and manifested by Action (3) should find its Realisation (4) in deeds of Mercy and Beneficence (5). The Wise Disposition (6) of this will give him Victory (7) through Equilibrium (8)* and Prudence (9), over the fluctuations of Fortune (10). Fortitude (11), sanctified by Sacrifice of Self (12), will triumph over Death itself (13), and thus a Wise Combination (14) will enable him to defy Fate (15). In each Misfortune (16) he will see the Star of Hope (17) shine through the twilight of Deception (18); and ultimate Happiness (19) will be the Result (20). Folly (0), on the other hand, will bring about an evil Reward (21).

*Here Mathers is using the Major Arcana model with 8 as Justice (or Adjustment) and 11 as Strength, instead of the reverse we see in Waite's model. Note that both of them do not number the Fool before 1, but in between Judgment and The World, though it retains its value of 0.


P. D. Ouspensky, famed proponent of the Fourth Dimension, also took some time out to write on the Tarot: a tract titled The Symbolism of the Tarot (1913). He talks only about the Major Arcana, and the bulk of the writing is a first-person narrative through every card in the Majors. While each stage of the journey (each card) is connected to each other, the order Ouspensky chooses for his story isn't to simply follow the traditional numbering. Starting with the Magician at one end of the Majors and The Fool at the other, Ouspensky works from either side in to the middle. He starts with the Magician, then to the Fool, then to the High Priestess, then to the World, and so on, ending with The Hanged Man as the ultimate end of the tale. According to Ouspensky, in each pair of opposite cards, "one card complet[es] the sense of another and two mak[e] one." That is the the only thing approaching The Fool's journey I could find, though as you can see there are strong differences between Ouspensky's narrative and the story suggested by the numerical order of the Major Arcana.

Finally, Crowley opens The Book of Thoth with:

Be this thy task, to see how each card springs necessarily from each other card, even in due order from The Fool unto The Ten of Coins.

which implies that there is a logical sequence behind not just the Major Arcana but the entire deck. The imposition of the Qabalah on the Tarot does create something of a natural progression, though there are multiple paths on the Tree of Life and there is nothing to suggest that the Tarot was originally designed with the Qabalah in mind. Moreover, this logical progression is not limited to the trumps and is not described by Crowley as "the Fool's journey."

On and on my research could go, and hopefully it will, but it requires more time and more than just cursory readings and searching for terms. There are numerous 19th and 18th century texts in French I haven't been able to find online and in English (my French skills are not up to the task of 200-year-old treatises on occult topics); they may shed some more light on the topic, or at least contribute to a clear and unequivocal "no." I largely suspect that the popularity of Joseph Campbell's work in comparative mythology and the 1949 publication of The Hero With a Thousand Faces is the leading contributor to the idea of The Fool's journey.

A 10-card spread from rwcarter on Aeclectic, best applied to situations where one isn't directly involved but still invested in. The original thread and discussion is here. Here is the spread: