The tarot : history, symbolism, and divination

281 Pages·2014·7.45 MB·English

by  Place

Table of Contents

Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Introduction

Chapter 1 - THE HISTORY OF THE TAROT
Chapter 2 - THE MYTHICAL HISTORY OF THE TAROT
Chapter 3 - THE SEARCH FOR MEANING
Chapter 4 - INTERPRETING THE MAJOR AND MINOR ARCANA
Chapter 5 - THE WAITE-SMITH TAROT
Chapter 6 - HIEROGLYPHS FROM THE SOUL

NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JEREMY P. TARCHER/PENGUIN
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Place, Robert Michael.
The tarot : history, symbolism, and divination / Robert M. Place.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN : 978-1-440-64975-2
1. Tarot. I. Title.
BF1879.T2P
133.3’2424—dc22

http://us.penguingroup.com
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO CORMAC AND TADHG.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank my editor, Mitch Horowitz, for his enthusiasm and
encouragement on this project. I want to thank historian Ronald Decker for his
assistance and for answering my inquiries, and historians Michael Dummett,
Robert O’Neill, and Tom Tadfor Little for also answering my inquiries and
providing leads. I want to thank William M. Voelkle for making a copy of de
Gébelin’s text for me. I wish to thank Grazia Mirti for providing me with a copy
of Fanti’s Triompho di Fortuna. I also want to thank my wife, Rose Ann, for her
encouragement and assistance. And thank you to Arthur Edward Waite for
sending me the Tarot in a dream.
INTRODUCTION
It will be thought that I am acting strangely
in concerning myself at this day with what appears at first sight
and simply a well-known method of fortune-telling.
—A. E. WAITE, FROM HIS PREFACE TO THE PICTORIAL KEY
TO THE TAROT, 1910

I have been interested in the Tarot and other esoteric subjects since I was
studying art in the late 1960s. My girlfriend at that time read the cards. She used
the deck that was then called the Rider Waite deck but is now commonly
referred to by Tarot scholars as the Waite-Smith deck. With its colorful
archetypal images, this early twentieth-century deck is what will come to mind
for most people when they think of Tarot.
At that time, I even began to create my own hand-drawn deck based on the
Tarot of Marseilles, the traditional French deck that developed in the seventeenth
century, but I finished only four cards before I lost interest in the project.
Although as an artist I have always been involved in symbolism in my work, I
was not directly engaged with the Tarot for many years after that.
When I did become reacquainted with the Tarot, I did not actually choose so
in a conscious way. It started with a dream in the summer of 1982, a dream that
startled me with its clarity and intensity. I was dreaming that I was following
someone through a red brick building. Then I dreamed that a phone rang,
interrupting the events of the first dream in the same way that a phone call can
interrupt one’s thoughts during the day. The sound of the phone startled me into
lucidity and intensified the events in the dream in a way that made them
impossible to forget. I remember thinking, How can someone call you in a
dream? I didn’t know that could happen. Even in the dream it was clear that this
message came from a place distant from my normal consciousness. The phone
was the perfect symbol for this. I picked up the dream phone and on the other
end I found an international operator, who informed me that she had a person-to-