Daniel Medvedov

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Breves Comentarios Polimecnicos al Artculo
Tarot Mythology: The Surprising Origins of
the World's Most Misunderstood Cards
By Hunter Oatman-Stanford June 18th,
2014
http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/the-surprising-origins-of-tarot-most-misunderstood-
cards/


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Madrid 2014
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En la portada - The Empress. The Hanged Man. The Chariot. Judgment.
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With their centuries-old iconography
blending a mix of ancient symbols, religious
allegories, and historic events, tarot cards
can seem purposefully opaque. To outsiders
and skeptics, occult practices like card
reading have little relevance in our modern
world. But a closer look at these miniature
masterpieces reveals that the power of these
cards isnt endowed from some mystical
sourceit comes from the ability of
their small, static images to illuminate our
most complex dilemmas and desires.
Theres a lot of friction between tarot
historians and card readers about the origins
and purpose of tarot cards.
Contrary to what the uninitiated might think,
the meaning of divination cards changes
over time, shaped by each eras culture and
the needs of individual users.
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This is partly why these decks can be so
puzzling to outsiders, as most of them
reference allegories or events familiar to
people many centuries ago. Caitln
Matthews, who teaches courses on
cartomancy, or divination with cards, says
that before the 18th century, the imagery on
these cards was accessible to a much
broader population. But in contrast to these
historic decks, Matthews finds most modern
decks harder to engage with.
You either have these very shallow ones or
these rampantly esoteric ones with so many
signs and symbols on them you can barely
make them out, says Matthews. I bought
my first tarot pack, which was the Tarot de
Marseille published by Grimaud in 1969,
and I recently came right around back to it
after not using it for a while. Presumably
originating in the 17th century, the Tarot de
Marseille is one of the most common types
of tarot deck ever produced.
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Marseille decks were generally printed with
woodblocks and later colored by hand using
basic stencils.
!
!Comentario mo CM
Hay que comentar algunas cosas sobre
algunos nombres de los veintidos
arcanos mayores
The Hanged Man - por ejemplo debera
ser The Hanging Man o sea El Hombre
Colgando y no El Hombre Colgad!o

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El Tarot es un sistema de memorizacin y
almacenamiento tradicional de materias esotricas
relacionadas con el destino existencial del Ser
Humano, menos sutil que el sistema matemtico del
ciclo de los cambios reflejado en los hexagramas del
I Ching, o en los tetragramas tradicionales de la
geomancia rabe, africana negra y europea medieval.

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Comparando el TAROT con los 64
Hexagramas del I CHING o con los 16
Tetragramas Geomnticos es descubrir una
diferencia del cielo a la tierra entre la
sutileza y estilizacin grfica de los antiguos
signos grficos matemticos binarios chinos
y este grupo de imgenes que se ven casi
infantiles al lado de la complejidad del
sistema chino o rabe y africano y antiguo
europeo de la Geomancia.

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El TAROT pertenece a un sistema alfabtico
y figurativo de rden 22 y por ende, no
es matemtico, lo que indica un retroceso
del progreso de estilizacin mnemnica.

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Top: A selection of trump cards (top row)
and pip cards (bottom row) from the first
edition of the Rider-Waite deck, circa 1909.
Via the World of Playing Cards.


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Cards from a Tarot de Marseille deck made
by Franois Gassmann, circa 1870. Photo
courtesy Bill Wolf.
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However, using cards for playful divination
probably goes back even further, to the 14th
century, likely originating with Mameluk
game cards brought to Western Europe from
Turkey.
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By the 1500s, the Italian aristocracy was
enjoying a game known as tarocchi
appropriati, in which players were dealt
random cards and used thematic associations
with these cards to write poetic verses about
one anothersomewhat like the popular
childhood game MASH. These predictive
cards were referred to as sortes, meaning
destinies or lots.
Even the earliest known tarot decks werent
designed with mysticism in mind; they were
actually meant for playing a game similar to
modern-day bridge. Wealthy families in
Italy commissioned expensive, artist-made
decks known as carte da trionfi or cards
of triumph.
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These cards were marked with suits of cups,
swords, coins, and polo sticks (eventually
changed to staves or wands), and courts
consisting of a king and two male
underlings.Tarot cards later incorporated
queens, trumps (the wild cards unique to
tarot), and the Fool to this system, for a
complete deck that usually totaled 78 cards.
Today, the suit cards are commonly called
the Minor Arcana, while trump cards are
known as the Major Arcana.

Two hand-painted Mameluk cards from Turkey (left) and two cards from the
Visconti family deck (right), both circa 15th century.
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Graphic designer and artist Bill Wolf, whose
interest in tarot illustration dates to his art-
school days at Cooper Union in New York,
has his own theories about the tarots
beginning. Wolf, who doesnt use cards for
divination, believes that originally, the
meaning of the imagery was parallel to the
mechanics of the play of the game. The
random draw of the cards created a new,
unique narrative each and every time the
game was played, and the decisions players
made influenced the unfolding of that
narrative. Imagine a choose-your-own-
adventure style card game.
The imagery was designed to reflect
important aspects of the real world that the
players lived in, and the prominent Christian
symbolism in the cards is an obvious
reflection of the Christian world in which
they lived, he adds. As divinatory usage
became more popular, illustrations evolved
to reflect a specific designers intention.
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The subjects took on more and more
esoteric meaning, says Wolf, but they
generally maintained the traditional tarot
structure of four suits of pip cards [similar to
the numbered cards in a normal playing-card
deck], corresponding court cards, and the
additional trump cards, with a Fool.

This woodblock version of the classic Tarot de Marseille was
published around 1751 by Claude Burdel. Photo courtesy Bill
Wolf.
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Even if you arent familiar with tarot-card
reading, youve likely seen one of the
common decks, like the famous Rider-
Waite, which has been continually printed
since 1909. Named for publisher William
Rider and popular mystic A.E. Waite, who
commissioned Pamela Colman Smith to
illustrate the deck, the Rider-Waite helped
bring about the rise of 20th-century occult
tarot used by mystical readers.
The Rider-Waite deck was designed for
divination and included a book written by
Waite in which he explained much of the
esoteric meaning behind the imagery, says
Wolf. People say its revolutionary point of
genius is that the pip cards are illustrated,
meaning that Colman Smith incorporated
the number of suit signs into little scenes,
and when taken together, they tell a story in
pictures.

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This strong narrative element gives readers
something to latch onto, in that it is
relatively intuitive to look at a combination
of cards and derive your own story from
them.
The deck really took off in popularity when
Stuart Kaplan obtained the publishing rights
and developed an audience for it in the early
70s, says Wolf. Kaplan helped renew
interest in card reading with his 1977
book, Tarot Cards for Fun and Fortune
Telling, and has since written several
volumes on tarot.
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A version of the popular Rider-Waite deck from 1920.
Photo courtesy Bill Wolf.
Though historians like Kaplan and
Matthews publish new information on
divination decks every year, there are still
many holes in the larger story of fortune-
telling cards. Wolf points out that those who
use cards for divination are often at odds
with academics researching their past.

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Theres a lot of friction between tarot
historians and card readers about the origins
and purpose of tarot cards, Wolf says. The
evidence suggests they were invented for
gaming and evolved for use in divination at
a much later date. Personally, I believe they
were designed for game play, but that the
design is a bit more sophisticated than many
tarot historians seem to believe.
The earliest known tarot decks werent
designed with mysticism in mind; they were
actually meant for playing a game similar to
modern-day bridge.
By the mid-18th century, the mystical
applications for cards had spread from Italy
to other parts of Europe. In France, writer
Antoine Court de Gbelin asserted that the
tarot was based on a holy book written by
Egyptian priests and brought to Europe by
Gypsies from Africa.

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In reality, tarot cards predated the presence
of Gypsies in Europe, who actually came
from Asia rather than Africa. Regardless of
its inaccuracies, Court de Gbelins nine-
volume history of the world was highly
influential.
Teacher and publisher Jean-Baptiste Alliette
wrote his first book on the tarot in 1791,
called Etteilla, ou Lart de lire dans les
cartes, meaning Etteilla, or the Art of
Reading Cards. (Alliette created this
mystical pseudonym Etteilla simply by
reversing his surname.) According to
Etteillas writings, he first learned divination
with a deck of 32 cards designed for a game
called Piquet, along with the addition of his
special Etteilla card. This type of card is
known as the significator and typically
stands in for the individual having their
fortune read.

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A hand-colored set of tarot cards produced by F. Gumppenberg, circa 1810.
Photo courtesy Bill Wolf.
While the tarot is the most widely known,
its just one type of deck used for divination;
others include common playing cards and
so-called oracle decks, a term encompassing
all the other fortune-telling decks distinct
from the traditional tarot.

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Etteilla eventually switched to using a
traditional tarot deck, which he claimed held
secret wisdom passed down from ancient
Egypt. Etteillas premise echoed the writings
of Court de Gbelin, who allegedly
recognized Egyptian symbols in tarot-card
illustrations. Though hieroglyphics had not
yet been deciphered (the Rosetta Stone was
rediscovered in 1799), many European
intellectuals in the late 18th century believed
the religion and writings of ancient Egypt
held major insights into human existence.
By linking tarot imagery to Egyptian
mysticism, they gave the cards greater
credibility.
Building on Court de Gbelins Egyptian
connection, Etteilla claimed that tarot cards
originated with the legendary Book of
Thoth, which supposedly belonged to the
Egyptian god of wisdom.

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According to Etteilla, the book was
engraved by Thoths priests into gold plates,
providing the imagery for the first tarot
deck. Drawing on these theories, Etteilla
published his own deck in 1789one of the
first designed explicitly as a divination tool
and eventually referred to as the Egyptian
tarot.
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A few of the cards from Etteillas esoteric deck, reproduced
by Grimaud in 1890.

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Etteilla was one of the people who actually
made divination so esoteric, says
Matthews. He created a deck that
incorporated all the things from Court de
Gbelin and his book Le Monde Primitif
['The Primitive World'], which suggested an
Egyptian origin for the tarot and all sorts of
arcane things. Matthews makes a
distinction between the tarots abstract
interpretations and the straightforward
cartomantic reading style that thrived
during the 16th and 17th centuries, prior to
Etteilla.
When we used to send telegrams, each
word costs money, Matthews explains, so
youd have to send very few words like,
Big baby. Mother well. Come to hospital.
And youd get the gist of it. I read cards in a
very similar waystarting from a few
general keywords and making sense of them
by filling in the words that are missing.

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This isnt the tarot style of reading where
you project things, like, I can see that
youve recently had a great disappointment.
Mercury is in retrograde and da da da. A
cartomantic reading is much more
straightforward and pragmatic, for example,
Your wife will eat tomatoes and fall off the
roof and die horribly. Its a direct way of
reading, a pre-New Age way of reading.
*
!Mi comentario:
Es de un dubitativo gusto este anterior
puto comentario del autor. Es obvio que
es el tpico modo norteamericano de
hacer chistes cnicos que se quieren de
rancio humor ingls, cuando no viene al
caso ni tiene que ver con Conan Doyle o
Sherlock Holmes

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One of Matthews favorite decks is the Lenormand published by Bernd A.
Mertz in 2004 based on a design circa 1840. Photo courtesy Caitln
Matthews.
Matthews has authored several books on
divinatory cards, and her latest, The
Complete Lenormand Oracle Cards
Handbook, will be published in October of
this year.

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This 36-card deck was named after the
celebrity card-reader Mademoiselle Marie
Anne Lenormand, who was popular around
the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries,
though the decks bearing her name werent
actually produced until after her death. The
oldest packs in Matthews collection are two
Lenormand-style decks, the French Daveluy
of the 1860s and the Viennese Zauberkarten
deck from 1864, which were some of the
first decks to be illustrated using the
technique of chromolithography.
! Mi Comentario:
De nuevo aparece el chiste cnico, esta
vez publicado como el quid de la cuestin
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Your wife will eat tomatoes and fall off the
roof and die horribly.

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Oracle decks like the Lenormand tend to
rely on more direct visual language than
traditional tarot cards. The tarot can often
speak in broad, timeless, universal
statements about our place in the world,
says Wolf. The imagery of fortune-telling
decks is more illustrational and less
archetypal. The images are generally more
specific, simpler, and less universal, keeping
the conversation more straightforward.
In contrast to most oracle decks, which dont
include suited pip cards, Lenormand cards
feature a unique combination of numbered
playing-card imagery on top of illustrated
scenes used for fortune-telling. One of the
earliest versions, called the Game of
Hope, was made by a German named J.K.
Hechtel and was prepared like a board
game, says Matthews. You laid out cards
1 to 36, and the object of the game was to
throw the dice and move your tokens along
it.
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If you got to card 35, which was the anchor
card, then youre home, safe and dry. But if
you went beyond that, it was the cross,
which was not so good. It was like the game
Snakes and Ladders. In this way, the Game
of Hope fell into the Victorian-era tradition
of board games that determined a players
life story based on luck.

This Lenormand-style oracle deck shows a mixture of playing card and
fortune-telling illustrations, circa 1870. Photo courtesy Bill Wolf.


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The games original instructions said it
could be used for divining because the
illustration on each card included both a
symbolic image, like the anchor, and a
specific playing card, like the nine of
spades. Hechtel must have seen that there
were overlaps between divining with
playing cards, which, of course, everyone
did, and his game, says Matthews. Many
other oracle decks appeared around the same
time at the end of the 18th century and into
the early 19th century. They became really
popular after the Napoleonic Wars when
everyone settled down and became terribly
bourgeois.
Quite recently, it was discovered by Mary
Greer that there was a prior source to the
Lenormand cards, she continues. Theres
a deck in the British Museum called Les
Amusements des Allemands (The German
Entertainment).

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Basically, a British firm put together a pack
of cards that has images and little epigrams
on the bottom, which say things like, Be
aware, dont spend your money unwisely,
and that sort of thing. Its quite trite. But it
came with a book of text thats almost
identical to the instructions for later packs of
Lenormand cards.
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Les Amusements des Allemands, circa 1796, has many overlaps with
Lenormand decks. Via the British Museum.
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By comparing various decks from different
time periods, tarot-card enthusiasts can
identify the evolution of certain illustrations.
For example, says Matthews, the modern
version of the hermit with the lantern, youll
find that that was an hourglass and he was
Saturn or Chronos, the keeper of time. You
can see how that translates with the Tarot
Bolognese meaning of delay or blockage. It
was about time moving slowly, though
thats not used as a modern meaning much
now.
Most card readers recognize that the
associations and preconceptions of the
person being read for are just as important as
the actual drawings on the cards: Divination
cards offer a way to project certain ideas,
whether subconscious or not, and to toy with
potential outcomes for important decisions.


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Thus, like scenes from a picture book, the
best illustrations typically offer clear visions
of their subjects with an open-ended quality,
as though the action is unfolding before you.
Matthews favorite decks are those with
straightforward illustrations, like the
Tarocchino Bolognese by Giuseppe Maria
Mitelli, an Italian deck created sometime
around the 1660s. Matthews owns a
facsimile of the Mitelli deck, rather than an
original, which means she can use them
without fear of damaging a priceless
antique. The deck that I enjoy most is the
Mertz Lenormand deck because of its
clarity, she says. The background on each
card is a creamy, vellum color, so when you
lay them out in tableau, you can see the
illustrations very clearly. I frankly get so
tired of all the new Photoshopped tarots and
the slick art, with their complete lack of any
framework or substance.

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Trump cards from the Tarrocchini Bolognese designed by
Giuseppe Maria Mitelli, circa 1664.



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I also enjoy reading with the Lenormand
deck made by Daveluy, which has been
beautifully reworked by Lauren Forestell,
who specializes in restoring facsimile
deckscleaning up 200 years worth of card
shuffling and human grief. The coloring on
the Daveluy is very beautiful.
Chromolithography gave an incredibly clear
color to everything, and I think it was
probably as revolutionary as Technicolor
was in the days of the movies.
The illustration on some decks did double
duty, providing divinatory tools and
scientific knowledge, like the Geografia
Tarocchi deck from around 1725. The
Geografia are extraordinary cards, almost
like a little encyclopedia of the world with
the oracle imagery peeking out at the top,
Matthews says. The actual bit that you read
from is just a cigarette-card length.

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So for example, the hanged man just shows
his legs at the top of the card, while the rest
of the card has information about Africa or
Asia or other places on it.

On the Geografia deck, the symbolic imagery is reduced to a small colored
segment at the top of each card; the rest is related to global geography. Via
eBay.



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In contrast, the meanings in other decks are
particularly difficult to decipher, like the
infamous Thoth tarot developed by Aleister
Crowley, notorious for his involvement with
various cults and experimentation with
recreational drugs and so-called sex
magick. Completed in 1943, the Thoth
deck was illustrated by Lady Frieda Harris
and incorporated a range of occult and
scientific symbols, inspiring many modern
decks. As Wolf explains, with the rise of
the divination market in the 20th century,
more liberties were taken, and the imagery
evolved into increasingly personal artistic
statements, both in content and style of
execution.
But to balance such arcane decks, there are
divinatory cards that offer little room for
interpretation, like Le Scarabe dOr or
The Golden Beetle Oracle, one of Wolfs
most prized decks. Its just fantastically
bizarre.
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Theres a little window in the lid of the card
box, and when you shake it, the beetle
appears, and points to a number, he
explains. Then you find the corresponding
number on a set of round cards, with
beautiful script text on them, and read your
fortune. Can you not imagine standing in a
Victorian parlor in France, consulting the
Golden Beetle? It was like performance art.

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El artculo es crtico e informativo y
posee un gran valor periodstistico, pues
la manera coloquial de ofrecer un total
disregard a Crowley, por ejemplo, es
espectacular. Bravo!
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