The word itself gives many people pause. Students bring us two stories about the tarot, and they usually believe one of them strongly. The first says that the cards are the secret wisdom of ancient Egypt, hidden in a game so that it would survive the burning of the temples. The second says that the cards are inherently satanic. Neither story has history on its side, and the history is not hard to find. It is in museums and libraries, and it can be told in an afternoon.
A Game of the Italian Courts
The tarot deck is Italian. It appears in the courts of northern Italy in the 1430s and 1440s, at Milan and Ferrara and Bologna. The oldest cards that survive were painted for the ducal house of Milan, the Visconti and the Sforza, and they can be seen today in museums and libraries. What they are is a card game. The Italians called the extra cards trionfi, triumphs, and that is where the English word trump comes from. The triumphs were a fifth suit added to the ordinary four, so that one card could beat another in play.
The pictures on the triumphs were the standard allegorical parade of late medieval Christian Europe: the Pope and the Emperor, Death, the Wheel of Fortune, the Last Judgment with its angel and its trumpet, and the virtues, Justice, Temperance, and Fortitude. It is the same imagery a traveler would find carved into a cathedral porch or painted on a chapel wall, and a great Italian poet of the century before had written a cycle of poems called the Triumphs in the same spirit. It is the visual language of a Christian civilization thinking about the order of the world.
For roughly three hundred and fifty years that is all the tarot was. People played it the way people play bridge, and in parts of Europe they play it still. There is no clear evidence of anyone using the cards to tell fortunes until the eighteenth century, and none at all of anyone attaching occult meaning to them until 1781.
A Drawing Room in Paris
In that year a Protestant pastor of Paris, a learned man and a Freemason, published his account of a visit to a friend's house where he found a game of tarot being played. He announced, he says, almost at once, that these cards were the lost pages of the Book of Thoth, the secret wisdom of ancient Egypt, encoded in a game so that it would outlive the destruction of the temples.
He had no evidence. The stone that would unlock the hieroglyphs had not yet been dug up, and no one in Europe would be able to read Egyptian for another forty years. He put the claim in the eighth volume of an enormous work on the primeval world that few people read, and it might have died there. But a Paris fortune-teller, who signed his books with his own surname spelled backward, took it up, and before the decade was out had produced the first deck designed for telling fortunes and was selling readings. That is the birth of the occult tarot: not in a temple, but in a drawing room and then a shop.
Cards Against Letters
In 1856 a former seminarian of Paris, writing under a Hebrew pen name, did the thing that would shape everything after him. He laid the twenty-two triumphs against the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, one to one, in order. He did not take his order from the Book of Formation, which is the ancient text that actually says what the letters do, and which arranges them by a different logic altogether. He counted.
In 1888 the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in London took his system, moved the planets of seven letters to fit its own scheme, and declared that the ancient text had been deliberately veiled. The page The Secret Chiefs tells that story. In 1909 a member of the order designed, and an artist of the order painted, the deck that almost everyone in the world now recognizes as the tarot.
So when someone tells a student that the tarot is the occult wisdom of ancient Egypt, she should understand that this is a story made up in a Paris drawing room in 1781 by a man who could not read Egyptian. And when someone tells her that the tarot is inherently satanic, she should understand that for the first three and a half centuries of its life it was a Christian card game with the Pope in it.
Where the Voices Came From
Here is something even many readers of the cards do not know. The occultists of the nineteenth century, the seminarian, the London order, the designer of the deck, did not talk about channeling. They were doing something the fellowship would call mistaken in its own way, building a system of ceremonial magic on a set of symbols that nobody had commissioned. But if you had told the designer of the deck that the cards delivered messages from spirit to the collective, he would have stared at you. The London order read the cards by structure, or at least tried to.
So where did channeling come from? Where did the cards told me come from, and messages from your guides? For that we have to cross the ocean. The farmhouse knocks of 1848 in upstate New York gave the English-speaking world, within a decade, a whole vocabulary of mediums, spirit guides, and messages from the other side. The Theosophical Society, founded in New York in 1875, added the language of energy and of hidden masters transmitting wisdom through chosen vessels, and through the early twentieth century that language of vibration and transmission seeped into every corner of what would become the alternative spiritual world.
Then came the years between 1970 and 1990. The New Age took all of these streams, spiritualism, Theosophy, the human potential movement, and the practices of the East stripped of their traditions, and blended them into a single marketplace. A woman in trance spoke for a being who dictated books. A long course in spiritual psychology was taken down from an inner voice. A film actress told a television audience of millions about her past lives. The word channeling, in its modern sense, dates from these years.
Into that marketplace came the tarot, not because it belonged there but because it was available: the one visually rich, already mysterious, already occult tool sitting on the shelf. The deck of 1909 had been reissued in 1971 and was selling by the million, and the New Age needed props. New decks appeared, then oracle decks, angel cards, messages from your guides. The cards stopped being read by anything at all and started being felt. What energy is coming through? What is spirit telling you? Pick a card for whoever is watching. That is not the London order. For once it has nothing to do with the seminarian's mistake. It is spiritualism with a deck of cards in front of it, and it is the practice that scripture already had a name for, as the page The Lot and the Diviner explains.
The Fool's Journey
The same years gave readers the framework most of them learn first. The phrase the Fool's Journey is usually traced to an American teacher's guide to the tarot published in 1970: the Fool, numbered zero, sets out and meets each of the other triumphs in turn as a station of growth. Ten years later a gifted writer made the idea foundational in a commentary that is still among the most widely read in English, presenting the twenty-two cards as a step-by-step journey through the stages of life toward unity, with the Fool's lost innocence as the thing to be regained.
The fellowship does not mock this. Those writers were not careless. They worked with the best scholarship they had, and the framework they built is coherent, meaningful, and has served a great many people. But it rests on the seminarian's numbering, and it makes of the cards a single road walked by everyone in the same order. The page Paths, Not Steps describes the older picture it replaced.
No Hard Cards
One more change belongs to these years, and it has done more harm than the rest. In 1984 a much-loved teacher's book on reading the cards for oneself encouraged readers to ask of each card whether it represented a power of their own. Psychologically that sounds generous. But notice what happens. Suddenly every card is about you. There is no providence any more, no messenger, no condition outside the self. And the reader has introduced a preference about the cards before a single card has been interpreted. The old symbols do not all describe abilities. Some of them name a condition, a state a person is in, whether she likes it or not.
The teacher offered a technique. In the last twenty years the age of the screen has turned the technique into a rule, and the rule has a slogan: there are no bad cards. It no longer means, try to find something constructive. It means that no card may ever say the hard thing. And that is the trouble. A card that can only ever be positive cannot help you. It can only flatter you. Flattery is not medicine. It only delays the moment when you find out the truth, and usually you find it out the hard way.
Look at the Empress, whom the modern books read as abundance, fertility, nurture, and creativity, and nothing else. The wheat, the flowing gown, the sign of Venus on her shield are all there, but Venus never meant only one thing. Attraction can nourish, and attraction can consume. In the Book of Formation each of the seven double letters carries a pair of opposites: life and death, peace and war, wisdom and folly, wealth and poverty, grace and ugliness, seed and desolation, dominion and servitude. That is not a deck divided into good cards and bad cards. It is the same force moving in two directions. Read that way, the Empress was never simply abundance. She asks a far more useful question: is this desire creating something, or consuming it? Asking it is the difference between affirmation and discernment.
What the Fellowship Takes from This
We take three things. First, that history is a medicine against both fear and fantasy, and that a student who knows where the cards came from is free of the story that they are ancient and of the story that they are demonic. Second, that the cards have no authority of their own, and that the only question worth asking about them is the one the page on the lot asks: who do you believe is answering? Third, that a teaching which can only comfort is not a teaching. The scrolls of the desert curse their enemies and examine their members every year. The gospels say hard things on nearly every page. A way that never names a hard condition cannot lead anyone out of one.
And one small thing more. The fellowship has always labeled its own writings, the Lections, as its own and not as ancient. If the tarot had been labeled honestly from the beginning, a fine Italian card game later used by some as a picture book of the Kabbalah, a great deal of confusion and a great deal of fear would have been spared.