The Tarot Code

by Carlo Bozzelli

  14 Il Messaggio di Pitagora (The Message of Pythagoras), Vincenzo Capparelli, vol. I Edizioni Mediterranee 2003.

  15 Ibid.

  16 The school of Alexandria.

  17 One of the models typical of Gnosticism was the Valentinian School, founded in Rome by Valentine, of Egyptian origin, in 140 AD. He had numerous disciples who brought into being two great schools of thought: the Western (in what are now Italian and French regions, including Provence) and Eastern. To Valentine, or to members of his School, are attributed some of the more important writing found near Nag Hammadi, for example, the Gospel of Truth, the Tripartite Treaty, the Gospel of Philip, the Epistle to Reginos on the Resurrection and, above all, the Pistis Sophia. The texts are written in Coptic, although most of them (perhaps all) were translated from the Greek. Thanks to this discovery, scholars have identified traces in the citations, of writings of the Fathers of the Church. The manuscripts have been dated to the III and IV centuries AD, while for the original Greek texts, however still controversial, a period between the I and II centuries Ad is generally accepted.

  18 The Corpus Hermeticum is a collection of philosophical-religious writings of the late Hellenistic Era, attributed to Hermes Trismegistus (the Latin Mercury, identified also as the Egyptian Thoth, the God who gave hieroglyphics and writing to man), which represented the source of inspiration for Renaissance Hermetic and Neoplatonic thought. The fundamental thought of these texts is summarized in the esoterical doctrine of a “divine revelation” given to men by Hermes, not through rational demonstration and logical deduction, but rather through some mysterious initiation. Marsilio Ficino, translator of the Corpus into Latin in 1471, indicated Pythagorus and Plato as the latest representatives of the ancient Wisdom contained in it.

  19 According to Christian tradition, Eastern monasticism originated with Saint Anthony (ca 251-356 AD), considered the “Father of Friars” but as we will demonstrate in chapter 8, it is actually far older.

  20 The Cenobia were communities of monks and Saint Pacomius the Great was considered their first true legislator. He, in fact, dictated a Rule for his brother monks according to which they should “put all of their earnings from all activities into a common fund, be it for food or for the hospitality of pilgrims.”

  21 John Cassian, Cenobitic Institutions 1, 36.

  22 John Cassian was never canonized by the Catholic Church (which in any case celebrates him on July 23) but by the Orthodox Church, which celebrates him on July 29. He was, however, considered a saint by several Popes, among whom Urban V (1362-1370) and Benedict XIV (1740-1758).

  23 Inside the monasteries, the place dedicated to the copying of texts and antique codes was called the scriptorium.

  24 Domini Du Cange, Glossarium mediae et infimae latinitatis, Charles du Fresne 1678; Henry René d’Allemagne (1863-1950) in the work Les cartes a jouer du XIV au XX siecle (Playing cards from the XIV to XX century).

  25 Storia dei Tarocchi (Story of the Tarot), Giordano Berti, Mondadori edition, 2007.

  26 Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1469-1533) in his De rerum praenotione counts the images in playing cards as one of many forms of sorcery: “Sortium multa sunt genera ut in talorum iactu in tesseribus proijciendis/in figuris Chartaceo ludo pictis” (Many are the types of sorcery, painted in the figures of card decks, as also in the throwing of the dice. or the game of shells). Strasbourg (Argentoraci) 1507, without page numbers, Bk VI chap. VI.

  27 Storia dei Tarocchi (Story of the Tarot), Giordano Berti, Mondadori edition, 2007.

  28 The I Arcanum, the Magician (the Bateleur), symbolizes the Will; the II, the High Priestess, Science; the III, the Empress, Action; the IIII, the Emperor, Realization; the V, the Hierophant, the Master of the Arcana; the VI, the Lover, the Two Roads, the Ordeal; the VII, the Chariot, Victory; the VIII, Justice, Equilibrium; the VIIII, the Hermit, the Veiled Lamp, Prudence; the X, the Wheel of Fortune, Fortune; the XI, Strength, the Tamed Lion, Strength; the XII, the Hanged Man, Sacrifice; the XIII, the XIII Arcanum, Transformation; the XIIII, Temperance, the Solar Genius; the XV, the Devil, Typhoon; the XVI, the House of God, the Tower; the XVII, the Star, Hope; the XVIII, the Moon, Twilight, Delusion; the XVIIII, the Sun, Well-being; the XX. Judgement, Renovation; the XXI, the World, Recompense; the Fool, Expiation.

  29 Papus, Le Tarot divinatoire (The Divinatory Tarot), Librairie Hermétique, Paris 1909, p 15.

  30 Joseph Maxwell, Le Tarot, le symbole, les arcanes, la divination, page 13, ed. Libraire Félix Alcan.

  31 Basically, these Besançon Tarot, edited by Grimaud in 1898 were copied from the more ancient Tarot of the cardmaker Lequart (which the editor Grimaud had acquired), of which an example may be seen today at the French Museum of Playing Cards in Issy-les-Moulineaux, in France.

  32 William W. Westcott, 1848-1925, was another member of the SRIA. Around 1888, Westcott presented Mathers with a recent English edition of the Steganografia, a work on magic cryptography written in the 1400’s by Abbot Tritemius (1462-1516). The white pages of the book, which according to Westcott had belonged to Eliphas Levi, described the twenty-two steps of a self-initiation into High Magic: these steps corresponded to the Triumphs of the Tarot. Westcott’s volume was published in London in 1896 with the title The Magical Ritual of Sanctum regnum and reprinted in Paris towards 1920. Historians of the Golden Dawn maintain that this work should not be attributed to Levi. Today it is certain that the fraud was Westcott’s idea, not the only one of his career.

  33 The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, Rides & Co., London 1910, page 59.

  34 From The Great Symbols of the Tarot by A.E.Waite, extracted from Shadows of Life and Thought, Selwin & Blount, London, 1938, p 186.

  35 Nicolas Conver founded his Maison Conver, in 1760.

  36 Among the tints, black and white are not numbered, being considered “non-colours.”

  Chapter 3

  “And when the seven thunders spake, I was about to write; but I heard a voice from heaven say, “Seal up what the seven thunders have said and do not write it.”

  (Apocalypse of John)

  3.1 The general structure of the Tarot

  The Tarot is a group of figures, in two subgroups of 22 and 56 cards, called respectively Major Arcana and Minor Arcana. It may seem superfluous to stress this fact, but this subdivision has at times been debated. This, because the history of these images has been so rich in a multiplicity of options, with respect to the actual number of cards and their general configuration. Therefore, not only a unanimous agreement is lacking on this point37, but many have also contested the simultaneous origin of the two groups. The most popular theories state that the Major were created after the Minor,38 the oriental derivation of which seems to be demonstrated by the presence of the curved sword, typically Asian. According to experts, in fact, the Minor Arcana prove from the playing cards themselves that, invented in China around the VIII century, after having migrated towards the West, to India and Persia, taken to Europe by the Saracens, Muslims of the African coast and of Spain, they precede the birth of the Tarot.

  The oldest citation supporting this hypothesis is the word naips (similar to the modern Hispanic naipes) in the Diccionari de Rims of 1371 of the Catalan poet Jaume March. This term seems to have been used for playing cards and also for Tarot cards in spite of the fact that, in the aforementioned tome, its meaning is never precisely clarified.

  However that may be, scholars believe that the Minor Arcana possess the four suits so well-known to the gaming public (Pentacles, Cups, Clubs and Swords) precisely because of this lineage and that they are the precursors, followed only later by the Major Arcana. The truth is another.

  The origin of the Tarot has nothing to do with playing cards, being traceable to the first century of the Christian epoch. It is the playing cards which may derive from a form of degenerated Tarot. The Tarot, born complete and perfect from its dawn, owing to the ebb and flow of events, as the p
receding story has described, underwent dispersion and disgregation of its symbols into a series of decks which, in almost all cases, retain only sporadic fragments of the original deck.39 From this process of degradation, therefore, were born as well the playing cards who owe their four suits to the Tarot (exactly the opposite of what is commonly believed today).

  For those experts who protest the presence of the curved sword in the suit of swords, according to them having, exclusively oriental roots, not ascribable to any Western period, suffice it to remember the finding of friezes and coins of the Hellenistic and Imperial Roman epochs.40 Artifacts showing swords of those times render plausible the use of a similar symbol in the first centuries of the West.

  Briefly then, the Tarot was not born from the union of two groups, as most specialists maintain, but has always been a whole in which all the Arcana were created together. In any case, the most sure and efficient way to dissipate every doubt in this regard is by comprehension of the Coded Structure, thanks to which the 78 cards emerge as a unique and finite entirety in which numerous Codes and correlations connect the Major with the Minor, leading to a close and evident interdependance of the two series. We have already affirmed that the deck of Nicolas Conver, in its many versions and more or less faithful imitations, copied from the 1799’s, is the ancient depository of an initiatic message, more ancient still.41

  Over the centuries the message, thanks to confraternities of monks and corporations of master cardmakers, has been perpetuated so as to arrive to us unaltered. Thus, studying this deck, we will endeavor to understand the nature of this unique entity called Tarot, constituted by two elements in an intense relationship one with the other, the Major and Minor Arcana, analyzing its configuration and the particular functions to which it is destined. We will begin with the evaluation of its general structure; but in order to do this, we must have on hand all 78 cards (for those who do not have a deck, it would be well to obtain one). We invite even the most expert to observe them as if it were the first time, seeking simple relationships and trying to comprehend the manner in which the Tarot is composed. The cards should be observed searching first of all for the logic of their disposition and, only afterwards, the possible relationships among them.

  The Minor Arcana

  It is evident that ceratin cards are characterized by clubs, pentacles, cups and swords, which form four series of ten “object” cards and four “figure” cards, for a total of fourteen cards in each series. We do not need any preliminary knowledge in order to see that there are indeed four series: we need only observe. Here are their names in French:

  -Deniers (Pentacles)

  -Coupes (Cups)

  -Bâtons (Wands)

  -Epées (Swords).

  The first ten Arcana are numbered from 1 to 10; the last 4, called the Court cards, are placed at the end of the sequence and are called:

  -Valet (Page)

  -Reyne (Queen)

  -Roy (King)

  -Cavalier (Knight).

  Fig. 1

  The Minor Arcana

  On the previous image we preesent the 56 cards in order. If we analyze this structure in detail from a numerological point of view, we find a whole made up of 14x4, that is, 56 elements.This subdivsion is easy, because the Tarot itself suggests it. In fact, our choice is not arbitrary but dictated by the nature of the global composition of the cards, composed in a simple and evident manner by 4 series of 14 elements each. Another important detail, is that the number 4 appears various times: 4 suits, 4 Courts, and 14 cards per suit (10+4 units).

  This number in traditional symbolism is tied to the square, which has in fact 4 sides, and is associated with the Earth, as opposed to the Heavens, the spiritual world, represented by the circle. Thus, such an abundant presence of the number 4 would seem to suggest a tie between the Minor Arcana and the terrestrial world. Why? We must ascertain the correctness of this hypothesis and its meaning. In fact, from the first steps in the study of the Tarot, in order to not risk personal and subjective interpretations, it is necessary to entrust ourselves contantly to proveable and objective elements.

  Firstly, it is worthwhile to know that in order to understand the symbolism it is not necessary to know complex problems or have particularly qualified and specialized notions, quite the contrary. In the case cited here, for example, we could certainly say that the philosopher Plato considered the square and the circle absolutely beautiful in themselves. According to this vision, the first would refer to the materialization of ideas, thus expressing phenomena and tangible reality; the second, vice versa, would represent the spirit, the world of superior ideations, of the Archetypes, All this, while potentially shareable, does not help us to understand why these two geometric figures were chosen to represent Heaven and Earth. In fact, in order to understand the symbolism made of images, codified by the Ancients, it would be well to appeal, first of all, to simplicity.

  Every truly traditional symbol contains, apart from the generally known exterior meaning, a superimposed esoterical aspect, accessible only to those who have arrived at a certain degreee of knowledge. Their great keys of access are naturalness, clarity and semplicity, which oppose complexity. We do not intend to say that this is all easy, but only to mainain that the roots of symbolic knowledge must be grounded in the terrain of evidence in order to then bring nourishment to the highest, most fragile fronds of a vaster comprehension.

  In the case of the square and the circle, therefore, it is enough to reflect upon their form. We have said that the first is composed of 4 sides, which represent the 4 elements of the material world: earth, water, fire and air, in which we live and by which we are surrounded and which, as we are about to see, are in close rapport with the symbols of the Minor Arcana; it is a stable, solid and “rooted” figure, and for this reason leads to the terrestrial. The second leads instead to the Heavens, to that celestial vault which appears to us, as it did to our ancestors thoousands of years ago, as they lay in the fields, observing the stars. These are the reasons why, for example, a church, which is a place of conciliatioon between matter and spirit, is built in a square and surmounted by a cupola, a circular element.

  The 4 suits: Pentacles, Cups, Wands and Swords

  The Minor Arcana, which, as already noted, in their basic organization possess a preponderance of the number 4, seem to have a close rapport with the terrestrial world, itself formed of 4 principles. We aim to verify if there does exist a connection between the 4 elements of nature and the suits of the cards. The notion of the 4 elements has been used since antiquity, for example by the presocratic philosophers (Thales, Anaximenes, Anaximander, Pythagoras, Parmenides, Diogenes, etc, to name only the most famous) or in a later age, Aristotle himself. Even the Alchimists of the middle ages formulated the hypotheses according to which the elements earth, water, fire and air were the basic principles of our world.

  Actually, it was not an exclusively Western teaching but had a more general valence, being known also to oriental traditions, such as the Hinduist or the Buddhist, to mention the better known. Briefly, this doctrine avers an esoteric decomposition of the world into these four factors, which would be the bricks of the foundation of our physical universe. Instead of accepting this version simply because we are told that it is true, let us see if this is all confermed by the Tarot. First of all, we repeat, the Minor Arcana are divided into four series as are the four elements. As there is a first clear relation with the terrestrial, material and physical world, let us verify the possibility of greater consistency of this analogy. We know that the Minors are divided into Pentacles, Cups, Wands and Swords. What does this signify at a symbolical level? Observe the clarity and the logic of the following Codes, of these puzzles which permit our first step into the Coded Structure with which we will concern ourselves in the next chapter.

  Cups

  What do we use Cups for, in our daily lives? If we think of the modern equivalent, the an
swer is immediately evident. As glasses are used for drinking, Cups contain liquid: water, the quintessential liquid. As we look at the first card of the series, the Ace of Cups (as is correct when studying the Tarot), something emerges which facilitates the evaluation. Let us observe for a few moments the following illustration: the water gushing from under the great chalice is a delicate wink of the Tarot to confirm our suppositions. Always remember, these images are to be examined, first of all, with our eyes!

  Fig. 2

  Ace of Cups

  Pentacles

  As they are coins (and in fact are sometimes called Coins), made of gold. we may determine an evident connection with the earth, gold being a mineral present in the soil. If we desire a confirmation in this case also, suffice it to observe the Ace of Pentacles which, as the preceding Ace of Cups, shows another clue: from the great golden disk roots and flowers grow, creating an obvious connection with...the earth! All this is coherent and clear; and all considered, we could say that the first two symbols have been decodified and understood with great ease.

  Fig. 3

  Ace of Pentacles

  Wands

  Regarding the Wands, instead, we must search with more attention. For the Ancients, what was a possible and practical use for wood? This element burns, producing fire. In this case as well, if we observe the following card, the Ace of Wands, we will discover how the Tarot, by the presence of sparks around the the large central wand, fully confirms our supposition.