"Shakespeare's Tarrochi" (2025)

Divination and fortune telling are the first things that most people assume, when they see or hear about Tarot cards. However, the Tarot cards have changed in form and function since their first appearance during the early Renaissance. 1 For at least five centuries, the Tarot has tenaciously survived the condemnation of church, the persecution of state and the ridicule of academia. 2 Whereas, most contemporary literature on Tarot, aims to interpret the occult significance of each card placing exclusive emphasis on the divinatory meanings, this research does not follow the standard pattern, for it is fundamentally ethnographic in its assumption. 3 This dissertation aims to research the form, symbolic artistic imagery (iconography), and related meanings (iconology), of the Rider-Waite-Smith 4 deck of Tarot cards, which have remained relatively similar to previous decks with some alterations throughout five-hundred years, until the late-twentieth century with the proliferation of New-Age decks. Art historians focus on the artistic significance of the cards within the context of the specific period and cultural milieu they were created in, scholars of western esotericism focus on occult significances and historians of games focus on the decks' multifaceted history. 5 The goal of this study, which is interdisciplinary in its essence, considering its association to Art History and Material Folk Culture, is to decipher the underlying meaning of the symbols, iconography and iconology according to Art History theories and the Jungian Psychological School of Thought utilized in Folklore. Therefore, the focus of this research is on the cards from the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot deck, considered one of the last classic Tarot decks, by deciphering its artistic and symbolic meanings, all the while relating to older classical Tarot decks, since they are founded on adaptations of and inspirations from, the decks that came before. 6 In the Confucian sense, Tarot provides the advantage of the thousand words each picture is worth, being easily adaptable because it is inherently neutral and doctrinally foundationless. It carries no particular allegiance to any system of belief, which postulates an exclusive claim on truth or reality. 7

AN IMPRESSIONISTIC ACCOUNT OF SOME OF THE CULTURAL BACKGROUND TO THE INVENTION OF TAROT CARDS

14 th to 16 th century Italy was richly imbued with art, literature, music, magic and philosophy. This chapter from a more substantial work on Oracular Devices relates how the representation of ideas accelerated during this period. And how some cosmological models were outlined. It suggests how the invention of printing led to a boom not only in literary and philosophical works but also in cultural products as diverse as music, playing cards and pornography. It is also concerned with a few of the ideas that later gained importance in occult uses and interpretation of Tarot.

The Phenomenology of Tarot, or: The Further Adventures of a Postmodern Fool

The early draft of this paper has been orally presented at the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy (ASCP) Annual Conference 2004 “Critique Today”, sponsored by the Department of Philosophy and the Centre for Research on Social Inclusion, Division of SCMP, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, 8-10 December, 2004, session 17 “Phenomenology, Semiotics, Ethics”. Thanks are due to Melissa McMahon for her insightful comments and suggestions at the session. This paper is a sequel to my earlier Roberta Kevelson Memorial Award-winning essay entitled "The adventures of a postmodern Fool, or the semiotics of learning" (in C. W. Spinks (ed.). Trickster and Ambivalence: The Dance of Differentiation, Atwood Publishing, MA, 2001, pp. 57-70) which analysed the phenomenon of Tarot readings in terms of Deleuze's method of transcendental empiricism and traced the Fool’s adventures as an experiential learning process. The present paper will not only address the implications of this philosophical method, that Deleuze has called both wild and powerful, but will also track continental thinking back to its phenomenological origins and Husserl's concepts of noemata and noesis. I will suggest that a singular reading creates a semiotic bridge that connects these two seemingly disparate “realms”. The tentative conclusion of the paper is that the interpretation of Tarot images provides a practical means for determining the meaning and content of mental representations thus addressing (albeit not solving) one of the problems of primary significance (namely: the theory of content determination) in contemporary cognitive science.

An Introduction to the Study of the Tarot

Arthur Edward Waite - The Pictorial Key to the Tarot

The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, 1910

In my preface to The Tarot of the Bohemians, which, rather by an accident of things, has recently come to be re-issued after a long period, I have said what was then possible or seemed most necessary. The present work is designed more especially--as I have intimated--to introduce a rectified set of the cards themselves and to tell the unadorned truth concerning them, so far as this is possible in the outer circles. As regards the sequence of greater symbols, their ultimate and highest meaning lies deeper than the common language of picture or hieroglyph. This will be understood by those who have received some part of the Secret Tradition. As regards the verbal meanings allocated here to the more important Trump Cards, they are designed to set aside the follies and impostures of past attributions, to put those who have the gift of insight on the right track, and to take care, within the limits of my possibilities, that they are the truth so far as they go.

Rev. of "The Cards: The Evolution and Power of Tarot by Patrick Maille. University Press of Mississippi, 2021." Mythlore 40.1 (Fall/Winter 2021): 274-80."

Mythlore, 2021

The Pictorial Key to the Tarot

I Cannot Find the Hanged Man: Tarot Cards in Fantastic Fiction

Folklore, 2021

Abstract In 1909, the occult publishing firm Rider and Son issued a pack of Tarot cards created by the artist Pamela Coleman Smith and the writer Arthur Edward Waite, both members of The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. This new Tarot linked a divination device that originated in the eighteenth century with current esoteric ideas. T. S. Eliot’s use of the cards in The Waste Land fixed the image of Tarot as the embodiment of a mystical quest, and, as the most available Tarot in the twentieth century, the Rider Pack provided an enduring set of images and meanings for Tarot mythology, which continues to influence speculative fiction and to create new interactive storytelling memes through Tarot readings.

Symbolism within the Tarot and Comparative Visual Analysis: A Proposed Methodology for the Study of the Tarot as Applied to the Rider Waite Smith Deck

conservancy.umn.edu

This paper introduces a structured methodology of studying the Tarot using a procedure focusing on a comprehensive comparative visual analysis of the cards. The process begins with several different kinds of analysis of the cards themselves, followed by the analysis of other subjects, texts and outside data related to them. The final step is the synthesis of all this information, and the formation of conclusions. The method will then be applied to a sample selection of cards from the classic Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot deck for the purpose of demonstrating it.

Rev. of "Tarot and Divination Cards: A Visual Archive by Laetitia Barbier with a foreword by Rachel Pollack. Abrams/Cernunnos, 2021." Coreopsis 10.2 (Autumn 2022).

Coreopsis, 2022