3.11.2024

A short excursion into a long story . . .

Welcome everyone. For those new to EP, I’ll start off by explaining that I am especially interested in the Middle Ages, and the importance of medieval contexts in understanding Tarot. This theme has come up from time to time in EP posts—and I plan to create a dedicated page that focuses on this theme.

Which is just a quick note to explain why I spent a lovely hour today watching this presentation:

Things to know: (a) Yale’s Beinecke Library is one of a very few institutions holding the earliest extant Tarot cards, and (b) incunabula is the scholarly term for books printed between 1450 and 1501. That’s not very period—just fifty years—but it begins around the time our earliest known examples of the Tarot trumps were painted. And it ends on the cusp of a century in which printed Tarot decks began to proliferate.

Scholars working on incunabula (quite a few of them, and all over the world) are not interested in Tarot, as far as I know. Nevertheless, their research is fascinating when viewed from the perspective of Tarot history.

And by chance (?), a galley copy of one chapter from my book The Tarot: History, Mystery, and Lore turned up this morning in some papers I was sorting. Scanning it quickly, I came across this discussion:

As noted Jungian theorist Marie-Louise von Franz observes, archetypal representations are “genuinely graspable in the actual culture of a people, or in the work and experience of an individual.”

We see the archetypes most clearly as we discover them in the myths which give life and purpose to a community, or in the creative efforts of individuals who use art, music, and poetry to give form to their own psychic engagements. For this reason, it’s important to understand the cultural context—the “mythoform”—within which the Tarot images originally developed.

The magical background of the Tarot, already discussed at some length, is important not just for understanding the occult associations of the cards, but also—and perhaps even more importantly—for understanding the whole imaginal milieu from which the cards emerged.

Think of it this way: Even if the trump images were somehow proved to be much older than the Renaissance, or to have originated somewhere far from Italy, it would still be true that the form in which we know them now is saturated with the feudalism of the late Middle Ages and the mystical enthusiasm of the Renaissance.

Accordingly, Colin Wilson recommends in his classic book The Occult that the student of Tarot begin with an immersion in the medieval/Renaissance background of the cards:

• Simply stare at [the] cards as a child stares at coloured pictures in his favourite book. . . . The mind should be full of images of Gothic cathedrals, of medieval stained glass which may be the inspiration for the glowing colours of the Tarot—of small towns surrounded by fields, and artisans at their everyday work.

The "myths" of the culture that laid the foundation for the Tarot can certainly be found in the Middle Ages: the romances of the Grail cycle, Dante’s Divine Comedy, the structures of feudal society, the hierarchies of the Church, and the fantasy of the Ptolemaic universe.

But although the Tarot images were incubated by this static medieval world view, they were in fact born from the energy created when that world view began to collapse. Historically speaking, the emergence of the Tarot trumps was roughly contemporaneous with the rediscovery of Greek philosophy, the introduction of linear perspective in painting, and the recognition (by astronomers, at least) that the Ptolemaic description of the universe was irredeemably inadequate.

And as we have already seen in several examples, magical philosophy blossoms when old structures of cultural certainty start to crumble — much the way flowering vines will immediately insinuate themselves into the cracking walls of an abandoned building.

I’d forgotten that I wrote about this idea in “Tarot and the Imagination,” which is the second chapter in the Mystery section of HML. The previous chapter, “Tarot and the Occult Tradition,” had offered a fairly detailed account of magical philosophy, and the following chapter, “Tarot as a Way of Knowing,” brought the section to a close with a discussion of divination.

Because that manuscript never existed in digital form (all done on paper, with a typewriter!), and has never been published in an e-version, it’s not easy to create excerpts, or to revise/update the existing text. But I have produced a rewritten version of Part One, History, and will be making it available as an ebook soon.

In the meantime—now that I’ve started looking at the text in Mystery, I’m feeling eager to revisit the whole section . . .

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I have to be brief today, but will follow up this week with more lore, and some bits of news.

As always, thanks so much for reading. C