The Tao in the Tarot

by Sarita Armstrong

  From India came the game of Snakes and Ladders reminding the illiterate of the way the world works through the law of karma, practically played out as winning and losing, gains and set-backs, unexpected losses and unlooked for winnings. For thousands of years the language of trade on the Silk Road was Akkadian but the mixed races of ordinary travellers could communicate more easily through plays, mimes, games and the playing of cards with pictures and symbols.

  The idea of philosophical ideas being communicated along what was ostensibly a trade route is not really so strange. Arthur Waley in the introduction to his translation of the Tao Tê Ching writes:

  “It has been said that merchants, who were undoubtedly the main carriers of information about the outside world, are not likely to have been interested in philosophy. This is a notion derived from a false analogy between East and West … Buddhist legend, for example, teams with merchants reputedly capable of discussing metaphysical questions; and in China Lü Pu-wei, compiler of the philosophical encyclopaedia Lü Shih Ch’un Ch’iu, was himself a merchant. Legend even makes a merchant of Kuan Chung; which at any rate shows that philosophy and trade were not currently supposed to be incompatible.”1

  Only serious travellers on a mission would pass the whole length of the Silk Road. Most traders would take their goods along one section then pass them on to others who travelled the next section, and so on. In the same way the Tarot would have been passed along the Silk Road to the west and east most likely by those canny traders, the Scythians, who not only controlled the central stages of the road between China and Rome but extended their trading routes north of the Black Sea and up the European rivers Volga, Danube and Rhine. When the followers of Mohammed were disrupting the peaceful trade along the route some descendents of the Scythians known as the Khazars, who still controlled the Darband Pass (modern Derbent) between the Caspian Sea and the Caucasus Mountains, welcomed into the safety of their mountain fastnesses people of all religions and cultures who were being persecuted. These included Jews, Buddhists, Zoroastrians and probably a lot of independent-minded riff-raff who had worked and travelled along the Silk Road (and who later may have become known as gypsies) who did not wish to be taken into the Islamic bond. So in this way too the wisdom of the Tarot would have survived and indeed passed further north into Europe. The Khazars are closely connected with Judaism and the preservation of the Jews from persecution, so it is very likely that the strong association of the Tarot with the Qabalah was remembered in this way. When the Mohammedans eventually reached the Khazar king in his mountain stronghold around the 8th century, they demanded he either give up his life and kingdom, or accept teaching on the Koran from two learned Imams. This broad-minded ruler gladly accepted the latter and his kingdom continued as a hub of learning for all peoples.

  An Oriental Destination

  Unlike the Tarot, the I Ching has been fairly well preserved throughout the centuries due to the honour in which the Chinese have always held it, though it has had its times of persecution. Its origins are said to go back to the legendary Fu Hsi who lived early in the third millennium BC contemporaneously with the First Egyptian Dynasty. Like other legendary civilizers - Thoth in Egypt, Quetzalcoatl in Peru, Viracocha in Mexico, or Oannes in Mesopotamia - Fu Hsi too is said to have taught the Chinese how to grow food and cook, how to behave towards each other, how to write with symbols and by no means least, how to make music. When he was an old man he worried that the people would not be able to manage without his continuing guidance, so he devised a system of explanation using double trigrams. Over the course of time the system was developed and written down with various commentaries and named the I Ching or Book of Changes.

  In the introduction to his classic translation of the I Ching, Richard Wilhelm writes:

  The fact that he [Fu Hsi] has been designated as the inventor of the linear signs of the Book of Changes means that they have been held to be of such antiquity that they antedate historical memory. Moreover, the eight trigrams have names that do not occur in any other connection in the Chinese language, and because of this they have even been thought to be of foreign origin.1

  This corroborates my own theory that the origins of the I Ching are not necessarily entirely Chinese in nature. Franck and Brownstone in their book The Silk Road support this idea with their comments on the origins of Chinese writing:

  “The innovation of writing in China is linked to the reign of the legendary Huang Ti, the Yellow Emperor, traditionally dated at 2697 – 2597 B.C. … Some Western scholars … suggest that Huang Ti himself was not only a historical person but also a conqueror from the jade country of the Pamirs … whose empire stretched not only eastwards to China but also westward to Mesopotamia, and who passed on to China great chunks of Near Eastern culture … Many modern scholars have gone to the other extreme and look at China as if it had developed in total isolation from the rest of the world. They largely ignore the probable existence of transcontinental connections from very early historical times.”2

  At the Chinese end of the Silk Road lay Chang’an where the road terminated – or began – depending on your direction of travel. Chang’an, now modern Xi’an, was founded as early as 1130 BC by King Wên as his capital city of Haojing after he had settled his nomadic people along the Wei river valley. King Wên was a deeply knowledgeable man renowned as an exemplary ruler, but the Shang dynasty who ruled the land to the east of Chang’an imprisoned him for seven years. King Wên must have studied Fu Hsi's trigrams and possibly other divinatory arrangements, for he spent his time in prison forming the I Ching for the first time into the work as it is generally studied today, as well as writing numerous commentaries (of which fragments only remain). He returned eventually to his own kingdom, which he ruled for a further 49 years and his son - the Duke of Chou - continued his father’s work to produce a further section of commentaries.

  On a modern map Chang’an would lie well within central China, for the country now extends as far west as Kashgar and includes the whole of the Tibetan plateau. But the influence of the Tibetan, Uyghur and Turkic people around the central area of the Silk Road for hundreds of years should not be overlooked, for these kingdoms themselves extended well into what is now modern China. As late as the 8th century AD the Tibetan empire extended from Sogdiana in the west to Chang’an in the east. They controlled a lot of the Silk Road for centuries and their culture must have been very influential.

  King Wên and his nomadic people did not come from central China but from the west of Chang’an, so they must have been from the lowland steppes of northern Tibet and the borders of the Taklimakan desert, both of which may have been less inhospitable in those days. In fact, a deterioration of climate and pasture may well have been a reason for their displacement. It seems only to be expected that the hexagrams King Wên studied most probably originated from that area rather than from the China of his captors, which complies with Wilhelm's comment (quoted earlier) that the early writing does not relate exactly to early Chinese writing. It was more than a thousand years later, in the 5th century BC, that Confucius and his disciples added their own commentaries.

  During the first millennium King Wên’s capital city became a cosmopolitan hub where all were welcomed and accepted and an interest taken in their views and philosophies. Buddhists, Taoists, Greeks, Nestorian Christians, Zoroastrians, Manicheans and later, Muslims, all mingled in the streets of Chang-an, and it was quite possible to worship at any one of over 100 temples that abounded in the vicinity of this vibrant trading city.

  There is a well-loved legend of the greatest exponent of Taoism heading westward from China along the Silk Road in the 6th century BC. The story goes that a watchman in a tower on a pass of the Western Mountains through which Lao Tzŭ would have to travel as he headed west to the start of the Silk Road, espied the famous Taoist riding on his ox, and invited him to stay the night in the hope of persuading him not to quit China. Realising the wisdom of his guest, the watchman encouraged Lao Tzŭ to write do
wn his philosophy. This he did, reputedly creating the most famous book on Taoism, the Tao Tê Ching. But in the morning he remounted his ox and continued on his westward way along the Silk Road!

  In the same 6th century BC the Phoenician philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras is said to have travelled as a young man to India, and this he would have done by journeying east from the Mediterranean coast along the western branches of the Silk Road to Bactria and on down into India.

  In the same historical period we have evidence of similar ideas emerging at both ends of the Silk Road, which is hardly surprising when we consider that each terminus was a cosmopolitan hub of learning. As Richard Wilhelm’s son, Hellmut, tells us:

  “If we turn now to the concept of change which has given the I Ching its name and which determines its system of thought, we are immediately reminded of the aphorism panta rhei, “everything flows,” used by Heraclitus of Ephesus around the year 500 B.C. as the foundation of his own philosophical system. This was about the time when the I Ching also took shape, and we have here one of those remarkable instances of parallelism when phases of development of East and West simultaneously find expression in similar ways.”3

  When Alexander the Great went east on his world-conquering campaign in the 4th century BC he to a large extent also followed the route of the Silk Road, the natural geographical way for getting from Europe to the East. When he reached Bactria and the high Pamirs he found a land rich in agriculture and beauty and healthy living. It was here he took a wife, Roxanne, who is usually portrayed as a wild uncultivated woman. In reality, Alexander – who was no great lover when it came to women – found here a beautiful and civilised country and a people with whom he wished to make an alliance, culturally as well as politically, cementing it with a convened marriage to the king’s daughter.

  Bactria stood at the cross-roads where the trade route from India joined the east-west route between Chang-an and the western ports of the Phoenicians. When Alexander wanted to press on through the mountains and down this branch of the route to conquer India, a large number of Greek troops who had faithfully followed him from Macedonia to what they already considered to be the ends of the earth, refused to go any further with the result that many of them settled in this productive land and, like their leader, married the beautiful women of Bactria. Alexander’s troops consisted not only of fighting men but also of many necessary artisans – blacksmiths, leatherworkers, weavers, farmers, cooks and so on - as well as artists and writers to keep the records. The culture so specifically combining of western art and eastern ideas known as Ghandaran developed in this area from these people. Their descendents were the first to portray the Buddha in human form, something the Buddha himself is said to have forbidden for fear of being idolised. These paintings and monuments are still considered some of the most beautiful Buddhist works of art. The images of the Buddha of such vast proportions at Bamiyan deliberately destroyed by the Taliban, were a prime example of these great artefacts. It is from the folk music of this area that we can discover the actual sounds of ancient Greek music.

  The kingdom lasted for over a thousand years – from the 1st century AD to its collapse under the onslaught of the Muslims in the 11th century AD. With the enlightened rule of the Mauyrian king Ashoka new ideas and ancient lore flowed from India through Ghandara to China, and similarly via Persia to the west. We find many echoes of the Tarot in the gods and goddesses of the ancient Greeks but even these are only vestiges of earlier traditions.

  The Apostle Thomas reached India and China via these routes from the Mediterranean coast. In the year 399 AD Fa Hsien left China in the opposite direction on a pilgrimage to India that lasted twelve years. The purpose was to collect Buddhist texts in an effort to revive the standard of Buddhist practice in his home country. In the 7th century AD the Chinese emissary Hsuan-tsang undertook a journey that lasted sixteen years in all from China to the kingdom of Gandhara.

  From the 4th century we have Nestorian Christians fleeing eastwards after being ostracised by the Roman Church at the Council of Ephesus, heading in the direction of Chang-an along the Silk Road. A formal Christian delegation led by a monk or possibly a bishop called Aluoben (who preached in Syriac so was very possibly from the area of the Khazars) was amicably received at the court of the Tang Dynasty in Chang-an. Within a few years a Christian monastery had been established close to Chang-an, though we should realise that the Christianity propounded was of an early mystical type and the learning was a two-way understanding between the proponents of Taoism and Christianity, a synthesis rather than a contradiction. This is evidenced by what has become known as The Jesus Sutras after the translation of many scrolls discovered at the caves of Dunhuang, and from the wonderful cave frescoes there.

  In the 14th century Marco Polo followed the same route from Italy to China, and a hundred years later his compatriot Bonifacio Bembo was creating his version of the Tarot cards. One can see from this that both the Tarot and the I Ching would have been part of this melting pot of cultures and that the ideas behind each would have mixed and mingled along the way.

  The Tao - Tarot Connection

  Most people know of the Tarot cards as a method of telling one’s fortune or of discovering what the future may bring. However, this is only the remnant of a long lost ancient wisdom that we can glimpse in the practical use of divination. The pack of Tarot cards - as we know it - is considered to have been originally created by the Italian artist Bonifacio Bembo in the mid-fifteenth century, but the cards themselves belie this and I believe there was nothing original about it at all. Bembo was a neo-Platonist and most likely knew he was perpetuating an arcane tradition. Within the cards of the Major Arcana, many of which are archetypes in themselves, he included symbolism to hint at forgotten beliefs, but in his day it was unwise to say too much about anything that might contradict the view of the church.

  Perhaps our strongest association with the Tarot is with gypsy fortune telling, and no doubt there is a strong connection there. Gypsies have always been a people neither swayed by the common norm, nor obligated to any church, and often persecuted for their attachment to ancient ways. Their origins are none too certain but they thought of themselves as a unique people. This itinerant band was always on the move yet maintained strong bonds within their own kind. There is a tradition that when the Serapeum in Alexandria was destroyed for the third time, the priests left in a homeless, wandering group, carrying with them their most precious volumes of wisdom and that this group of itinerant priests were the forerunners of the wandering gypsies from Egypt. The temple of Serapis was used as an annex to the Library of Alexandria and would have contained much important knowledge and wisdom from the earliest of days. The niches that contained the books are one of the few things that remain in the temple today. A further opinion would have the gypsies arriving in Europe from the area around the Caspian Sea, a melting pot in itself of cultures east and west, to which a branch of the Silk Road known as the Royal Road – the Tar Ro - would have taken the itinerant priests from the Serapeum if they followed the natural route from Alexandria through Petra and Damascus.

  During my use of the I Ching I had noticed a number of hexagrams that seemed special in some way, just as the Major Arcana cards of the Tarot are special to the pack as a whole. So I looked through the I Ching from start to end and noted down those hexagrams that had always stood out in my mind for one reason or another. When I counted them up I was surprised to find that out of the 64 hexagrams, I had chosen exactly 21 – the same number as the cards of the Major Arcana (excluding the Fool) and I found it was these cards in the main that were surprisingly comparable to the Major Arcana. In assigning the hexagrams to the cards I noticed that the central ones, the combined Yin/Yang cards, were in almost all cases made up of double trigrams, where the upper trigram is identical with the lower trigram, strongly emphasising the basic characteristic.

  I was not just looking for headings that made sense, for to twin the Tarot card of Lovers with
Hexagram 13 entitled Lovers… in John Blofeld’s translation would have been simplistic, for another translation entitles this same hexagram Fellowship, which does not have quite the same connotation. I wanted to look beyond the superficialities and search for an underlying core system in the way the hexagrams develop from one to another as we move around the circle with the order of the Tarot cards. Details can be found in Appendix 1 but a simple explanation of how the I Ching works may be necessary at this point.

  When one asks a question of the I Ching three coins are thrown six times. Each resulting combination of the three coins indicates either a static Yin line, a static Yang line, a moving Yin line, or a moving Yang line, from which a pair of trigrams (a hexagram) is formed. The answer to most questions in the I Ching involves a hexagram with a moving line. This would be a Yang line that is moving towards becoming a Yin line, or a Yin line that is moving towards becoming a Yang line. Now we need to look more closely at the idea of moving lines that change one trigram to another, and therefore one hexagram to another.

  It is easier to understand exactly what is happening with the moving lines if we consider the original method of divination with yarrow sticks rather than with the more modern usage of coins. Yarrow sticks are simply short lengths of the stalk of the yarrow plant (similar to our cow-parsley) chosen for their straightness. We have to imagine how long, straight Yang stalks (or lines) are always pushing outward because that is of their nature, being Yang, creative and active. The more a stalk, a line - or indeed anything - extends itself (imagine pulling out chewing-gum or a length of dough) the more it becomes weak and thin in the middle until eventually it has to break and become two smaller parts: a Yin line made up of two short lengths. In contrast, a Yin line made up of the two shorter lengths or yarrow stalks, being reflective and inward-looking, is always pushing its two parts towards each other – inwards – until eventually they join together forming one long Yang line or stalk. This idea of potential change and inter-relationship between the lines that transform the hexagrams is fundamental to the way the I Ching works and is the essence of Taoism: the continual interaction between the opposites in life.