Somewhere, I once read that Tarot is the I Ching of the West. I must admit that I found the idea very appealing, despite Tarot's relatively recent origins and the lack of reliable evidence for its existence before the fifteenth century. It most likely acquired its standard structure through the fusion of the Mamluk playing deck with Italian picture cards, whose origins can be traced to medieval didactic and mnemonic imagery rooted in classical, esoteric, and theological traditions.
While the I Ching is based on binary opposition (yin and yang) and the mathematical combinatorics of trigrams, Tarot is founded upon narrative progression. Tarot is a book that can be shuffled, suggesting that destiny, or the cosmos itself, is composed of archetypes that are continually rearranged. In this sense, Tarot represents a transition from the cyclical conception of time characteristic of the East to the scenic or dramatic conception of time characteristic of the West.
Prominent examples of these early pictorial decks include:
- Cary-Yale Visconti (Visconti A), c. 1441
- Pierpont Morgan Bergamo, commonly known as Visconti-Sforza (Visconti B), c. 1451
- Brera-Brambilla (Visconti C), c. 1450
- Ercole I d'Este, c. 1473
- Sola Busca, c. 1491
There is also evidence of a deck described by Marziano da Tortona, secretary to the Visconti rulers of Milan, dating from between 1414 and 1418. It is worth noting that this deck was based on Greek gods and heroes, which in some ways supports my view of Tarot as an instrument of didactic and mnemonic practice.
This was not Tarot in the sense of the Major Arcana as we know them today, but rather an attempt to integrate classical mythology into a card game. Its existence demonstrates that the structure of Tarot remained fluid before eventually crystallizing into the form that became established in later centuries.
In his 1978 Encyclopedia of Tarot, Stuart Kaplan mentions the so-called Mamluk deck dating from the late fourteenth century and originating in Egypt. Preserved today in the Topkapi Palace Museum in Istanbul, the deck consists of fifty-two cards divided into four suits: staves, swords, cups, and coins. Each suit contains ten numeral cards and three court cards: the king, the deputy king, and the second deputy king. Because the deck emerged from the Islamic world, its court cards are not illustrated but instead bear written titles. Fragments of even older examples have also survived, leading Kaplan to suggest that such cards may have circulated throughout the Islamic world as early as the eleventh century.
In Tarot: An Ancient System of Symbols, Julij Berkovski identifies three principal Tarot traditions that emerged during the fifteenth century: the Lombard-Venetian Tarot of seventy-eight cards, the Florentine Minchiate of ninety-seven cards containing the twelve zodiac signs, four elements, and four virtues (Faith, Hope, Charity, and Prudence), and the Bolognese Tarot of sixty-two cards. It was from the Lombard-Venetian tradition that the famous Tarot de Marseille later developed, a deck many regard as the prototype of Tarot as we know it today.
I am inclined to believe that learned church philosophers with interests in esotericism and alchemy, members of monastic orders and building guilds, initiates of the secret sciences, may have contributed significantly to the symbolic framework upon which Renaissance Italy constructed a pictorial system capable of conveying an initiatory narrative. This narrative brought together elements of alchemy, magic, astrology, Hermeticism, and Christian mysticism. It is difficult to know with certainty, yet it is entirely conceivable that some adept genius from the ranks of the master builders of the Gothic cathedrals conceived the sequence, principles, and essential details of the imagery through which the initiatory story of Hermetic Kabbalah was ultimately expressed. That story belonged to a wider system of initiation containing keys to the interpretation of a secret doctrine, one that largely disappeared from the European stage by the sixteenth century.
I am inclined to seek the origins of the Major Arcana not merely in card games but in the didactic and mnemonic methods of the Middle Ages, as well as in the subterranean currents of alchemy and Eastern star-lore. Such a perspective suggests that the architects of Tarot may be found among monks and theologians of the Western Church acting in concert with initiates of the operative Masonic guilds whose works still adorn the cities of Europe.
The master builders themselves could hardly have designed, decorated, and filled the magnificent cathedrals commissioned by the Church with gargoyles and symbolic figures of pagan and alchemical origin merely according to their own whims. Someone must have approved such imagery, or perhaps even demanded its inclusion. The collaboration between ecclesiastical thinkers and the architects of Gothic monuments suggests that the very individuals who conceived these symbolic programs and justified them before those incapable of understanding them may be precisely the people we are seeking.
From our present perspective, it is difficult to determine who fulfilled which role or how deeply each participant was initiated into these matters. One thing, however, seems certain: all of it existed and functioned within the framework of the Church, serving its purposes and operating under its protection. In this sense, the underground currents of occultism did not exist outside the Church, for educated men could circulate, study, and work only within its institutions. Beyond that sphere, there were relatively few initiates of significance.
At the moment when mnemonic images became incorporated into games of leisure, gambling, and divination, many clergymen denounced cards as the work of the Devil, although there were also those who believed that cards could serve a role in moral education. It is well known that experienced card players often possess remarkable memories when it comes to tracking the circulation of cards during play. In this sense, Tarot may be viewed as a portable locus within a memory palace.
During the Middle Ages, images such as the Pope, the Emperor, or the Wheel of Fortune helped preachers and orators remember complex moral sermons. The famous Memory Theatre of Giulio Camillo in the sixteenth century represented an attempt to organize the entirety of human knowledge through images and symbols arranged within a wooden amphitheater. Tarot is, in essence, a pocket-sized version of such a theatre.
The introduction of playing cards into Western culture can be traced no earlier than 1375 in Florence, when Nicola della Tuccia, in his Chronicle of Viterbo (1379), described them as being of Eastern origin under the name naibe.* The addition of this linguistic connection contributes further historical depth to the story.
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Many representatives of speculative Freemasonry, as well as various irregular Masonic and para-Masonic organizations, adopted a similar approach toward the symbolism they inherited and developed. It should also be remembered that many figures associated with occult schools simultaneously belonged to Masonic, para-Masonic, or fringe Masonic bodies. Such overlap allowed the symbolic, initiatory, and mythological narratives of these organizations to reinforce one another and contribute to the emergence of a shared esoteric worldview.
Whether deservedly or not, Tarot gradually became heavily mystified over time because of what Ronald Decker, in The Esoteric Tarot, described as the peculiar combination of its images and their confusing hierarchy.
The motifs associated with each individual Major Arcana were already familiar and, in one form or another, embedded within the collective imagination of medieval Europe. They existed independently and served various purposes, although their esoteric character cannot be dismissed. Decker correctly observes that these images were standard allegories and symbols that Tarot's creators employed either to conceal esoteric systems or, I would add, to emphasize them. He concludes that during the Renaissance conventional symbols were rearranged to generate new allegories. From our present perspective, even these seemingly familiar symbolic and pictorial representations constitute a considerable interpretive challenge. We must first examine and decipher them before arriving at any usable understanding of their role within the Tarot system.
As a consequence, the modern world has witnessed an inflation of Tarots of every imaginable kind. The occult schools of the West took Jewish Kabbalah, Hermeticism, mythology, astrology, alchemy, ancient grimoires, Greek magical texts, and Tarot itself, and transformed them into something they may never originally have been, combining them into a complex symbolic apparatus whose ultimate meaning has become obscured. In doing so, they effectively turned Tarot into the Book of Thoth. We should remember that Antoine Court de Gébelin was the first, in 1781, to popularize the Egyptian hypothesis, claiming that Tarot represented the sole surviving fragment of the lost Library of Alexandria.
The codification of Tarot into twenty-two Major Arcana of Gothic-Renaissance origin, sixteen court cards, and forty Minor Arcana of Arabic, Egyptian, or Persian origin conveniently served the purposes of eighteenth-century, and especially nineteenth-century, European occultism by providing a structure through which Hermetic and Kabbalistic doctrines could be expressed. Sometime in the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century, someone determined that the Major Arcana should be framed within a sequence of twenty-two pictorial images, thereby creating, intentionally or otherwise, a remarkable correspondence with the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet.
Beginning in the eighteenth century, occultists inspired by the Tarot de Marseille associated its Arcana with Egyptian mythology and magic, as well as with the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. During the nineteenth century, they went even further, integrating Tarot into astrology and the Kabbalistic diagram of the Tree of Life, a symbolic map of the cosmos composed of ten Sephiroth connected by twenty-two paths and distributed across four Kabbalistic worlds. Eventually, at least two major occult schools of Tarot emerged, each proposing a different correspondence between the Hebrew letters and the Major Arcana.
In this sense, the Tarot de Marseille became the starting point for dressing Tarot in the garments of the emerging pseudo-Egyptian, syncretic, and Kabbalistic occultism of Enlightenment Europe. Having undergone its Rosicrucian incubation during the seventeenth century, this current reached its full expression in the Illuminist and Masonic eighteenth century, flourished further within nineteenth-century Freemasonry and Neo-Rosicrucianism, and ultimately extended into the contemporary New Age movement.
In The Game of Tarot, Michael Dummett observed that if we seek the symbolic intentions of those who designed the earliest Tarot decks, the Tarot de Marseille is a questionable guide, since we cannot be certain that its pattern predates the seventeenth century. The oldest surviving example of the Marseille type is generally attributed to Philippe Vachier of Marseille and dates from 1639. Dummett therefore concludes that if we wish to uncover the hidden meaning of Tarot, we must begin with its original and authentic form. Yet this immediately raises another question: which version, precisely, should be regarded as the authentic one, and do we have sufficient grounds for such an assumption? Dummett himself approaches the problem through the order of the cards, noting that the sequence found in the Tarot de Marseille is not the only one that existed.
It should also be remembered that the Tarot de Marseille was a product of woodcut printing. Its crude lines and primary colours were not merely aesthetic choices but technological limitations. Yet it is precisely this simplicity that transformed it into a kind of Rorschach test of esotericism. The images are sufficiently indeterminate for occultists to perceive within them Hebrew letters, Egyptian gods, or alchemical stages.
The Tarot de Marseille was a popular product of vernacular craftsmanship, created for gaming and amusement in the workshops of Champagne and Provence rather than as an elite esoteric manual. It was precisely this popular ambiguity and simplicity that attracted eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French occultists such as Antoine Court de Gébelin, Etteilla, and Eliphas Lévi. In these simple woodcuts they believed they had discovered an ancient popular cipher whose meaning, allegedly, had been overlooked by intellectuals.
Throughout the process of what might be called the “Marseillization” and subsequent occultization of Tarot, alternative traditions were gradually pushed aside. One such example is the Tarocchi di Mantegna of 1465, which presents a remarkably coherent and fundamentally Hermetic vision of the world intended for didactic and contemplative purposes.
The imagery of this deck, which is actually a series of engravings rather than playing cards, is organized into five thematic groups of ten figures each: the celestial spheres, the cardinal virtues, the liberal arts, Apollo and the nine Muses, and the social estates of the age. Although fascinating, this system proved difficult to integrate into either the Kabbalistic framework later imposed upon Tarot or the card-playing and divinatory traditions that surrounded it. For that reason, it gradually disappeared from view.
The arcana of the Tarocchi di Mantegna tell a broader and more comprehensive story than the twenty-two Major Arcana of Tarot, yet that story resists interpretation through the speculative Kabbalistic and astrological schemes favoured by occultism.
Later Tarot decks created by well-known occultists preserved the general foundation of the Tarot de Marseille and its predecessors while departing from them in numerous details. Many authors were clearly eager to insert their own principles, ideas, and doctrinal emphases into the cards. Their decks therefore provide valuable insight not only into Tarot itself but also into the teachings of the occult schools to which these authors belonged and the philosophies they sought to promote.
Taking all this into consideration, I am inclined to believe that the authors of the occult versions of Tarot were simply unfamiliar with the original doctrinal keys upon which Tarot was structured. If they did possess such knowledge, which seems less likely, they chose to disregard it for one reason or another. In my view, modern occultists attributed meanings to Tarot that it did not originally possess.
The gaps in their understanding of the phenomenon that so fascinated them were compensated for through lucid and intuitive speculation about the obvious symbolism of the Tarot images. They combined this with what they knew of the metaphysics of the Hebrew alphabet and Kabbalah, as well as with their own interpretations of Hermeticism, magic, alchemy, astrology, and the facts and myths of Greek and Egyptian mythology. In this way, there emerged what may properly be called the occult ideology of Tarot, or more precisely, an ideology expressed through Tarot.
Sallie Nichols, writing from a Jungian perspective, observed that modern people, immersed in a culture that privileges language above all else, often find it difficult to understand the nonverbal and imaginal language of Tarot. In her view, the Tarot de Marseille succeeded in preserving the general tone and character of some of the earliest Tarot decks. She also emphasized that there is no evidence that it was the work of a single creator, as is the case with most modern decks. Equally important, the Tarot de Marseille is not accompanied by an explanatory text; it is a story told entirely through images.
Modern occult Tarots, Nichols argues, appear to have been designed primarily as illustrations of ideas already expressed in words, rather than as images that inspired the subsequent development of texts. As a result, the figures and objects depicted in such decks tend to be allegorical rather than symbolic in character. Their images illustrate verbalized concepts rather than evoking experiences, intuitions, and perceptions that lie beyond the reach of language itself.
According to the principles of Renaissance humanism, the early Trionfi were not instruments of divination but rather a Christian-Neoplatonic ladder of virtues and human destiny, tracing a path from the Fool to God, or to the Heavenly City. Once this original didactic and Christian context faded from memory, occultists filled the vacuum with synthetic Kabbalism, pseudo-Egyptian speculation, and astrology.
In doing so, they transformed Tarot into the Book of Thoth. What had once been a popular game and a visual mnemonic system became a text-based allegorical manifesto for their own secret societies and esoteric doctrines.
The culmination of the development of occult Tarot, through the teachings of the French and British occult schools, found its embodiment in the Thoth Tarot created by Aleister Crowley and Lady Frieda Harris. This deck represents a fully developed occult doctrine founded upon revelation, specifically the message of the messenger of the Aeon of Horus, thereby acquiring an additional mystical dimension.
That mystical dimension arises from the fact that the entire deck serves as a visual expression of magically inspired verses and declarations that Crowley himself recorded without fully understanding their meaning at the time, only gradually deciphering them over the years that followed.
At the heart of his almost entirely new magical religion, Thelema, lies the doctrine of the succession of aeons and, consequently, the succession of magical and religious paradigms. The Aeon of Horus is the epoch of the Divine Child, replacing the age of the Dying and Resurrected God. This doctrine is symbolized in card XX, which in Crowley's Tarot bears the title The Aeon rather than Judgement.
The god Horus has replaced Osiris upon the throne of the spirit of the age, and accordingly a new era requires a new set of rules embodied in The Book of the Law, whose imagery is, in many respects, expressed through the Arcana of the Thoth Tarot. It is a remarkable development, one that transformed artistically illustrated pieces of paper, or even simple woodcuts, into symbols believed to possess genuine magical potency.
NOTE:
Originally published in Serbian. This English version is an AI-assisted translation of the original text.
