Abstract

The Arthurian Romances, like the Gnostic religions, were at heart concerned with man’s quest for wisdom, psychic growth, and the ultimate spiritual emancipation.

Alfred Douglas, The Tarot, 1972

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Saturday, 19 November 2005

The Known History of the Tarot

Tarot is the French name of playing cards called Tarocchi by Italians. The 22 Tarot trump cards were surely developed independently of the full set of 78 that incorporate the normal deck of 52 suit cards—indeed more than the normal deck, since each suit has an extra picture card called a knight, the knave being called the squire. The Tarot trumps were numbered from 1 to 21 with one card, the Fool—which became the Joker of modern packs—left unnumbered.

The history of playing cards generally is obscure, though they were probably an offshoot from the invention of paper money in China. The clue is that the four suits were based on coins, being designated, coins, strings of coins, myriads of strings and myriads of myriads. Chinese, being famous gamblers, used to play some sort of bragging game in which they gambled on the face value of the paper money they held in their hand. Cards let them play the game when they were skint. The new game came west just at the time that the idea of paper money did too. The obvious route would have been along the silk road and through the Moslem lands, but some think a sea route via India more likely. The basis of this conjecture is that the symbols of the suits became cups (hearts), rings (coins), sceptres and swords, objects held by some Indian gods such as Hanuman, the monkey god. The trouble with the idea is that Indians do not use these sorts of cards themselves.

What is interesting about the Tarot cards is that they emerged in Italy, France and Germany by the end of the fourteenth century. So it seems the cards were developed just at the time that the Cathar and Bogomil heresies came to the fore, and were extinguished by the Holy Catholic Church, through its Holy Inquisition. The occultist, A E Waite wrote:

It has not so far occurred to any one that the Tarot might perhaps have done duty and even originated as a secret symbolical language of the Albigensian sects.

The Pictorial Key To The Tarot, 1911

He added, “I do not look through such glasses”, so, the question remains whether the cards have any relationship with the heresy. Steven Runciman writing on Manichæism, thought the Tarot was Cathar. Regarding textual evidence, according to Feliciano Bussi (1740), an Italian, Nicolas de Corvelluzo, in 1480, wrote that cards came to the town of Viterbo in Italy from the land of the Saracens of north Africa in 1379, being known as cartes Saraceni. The Arabs called it “na’ib”, and it came to be called “naibi” by the Italians. In Spain, occupied by the Moors for 800 years, playing cards are called “naipes”. Yet, it is odd, if the Arabs played cards that they are never mentioned in the Arabian Nights as an amusement for bored sheiks and their concubines.

Moreover, the evidence is that cards were already being played in France Belgium and Switzerland by 1379. Cards could not have been properly developed without cheaply made paper, so their popularity in Europe was tied in with paper manufacture, and the Flemish word for paper was “knaep”, a word conceivably given to cards and passed into Spain via the Habsburg possessions, and the concomitant trade between them. The word “card” itself means paper from the Latin word for paper “carta”, whence such words as chart, a map made on paper, and a charter, an official document. Among Cathar skills was paper making, and nonconformist artisans dominated the paper trade for centuries. Some have associated the introduction of the cards with the coming of the Gypsies into Europe, but the Gypsies did not arrive until at least a century after the cards, unless they had been infiltrating into Europe for some time, and it was only in the fifteenth century they were noticed. What cannot be denied is that the designs on the cards reflect European traditions, so, even if the idea of the playing cards came from the east, this deck of Tarot trumps looks to be a European invention, or was quickly westernized. Chess reached Europe in about 1100, and the court cards of the original 56 card deck of suit cards look like the names of chess pieces. Curious that the knave of cards is the bishop of chess.

Documents are extant that describe games in the Middle Ages at Nuremburg and Augsburg in Germany in the last quarter of the thirteeth century, but playing cards do not feature in them. An ambiguous passage is to be noted around 1350, and, by 1379, cards were being bought by the Belgian Duke of Brabant. Indeed, already in 1378, they were being prohibited in Regensburg in Germany, implying that they were being made in sufficient quantites to be undermining the morals of its citizens. Manufacture will have been by stencil.

The earliest undisputed description of cards was by a German monastic, Brother Johannes of Brefeld in Switzerland, in 1377. He describes a deck with no Tarot trumps, and with only the three court cards of modern packs. The third court card was not a knave but a “marshal”. By 1415, the Tarot cards had been invented and were available to those wealthy enough to buy them, like the dukes of Milan, the main city of Lombardy, one of the heretical regione. Cards for nobility were expensive because hand painted, and odd cards that survived from old decks were preserved in the possessions of the rich, and so are the same. Other Italian nobles took up the fashion, and card decks were made with Tarot trumps and Italian suit names until around 1750, when the fashion changed to having French names—though Charles VI of France had had a Tarot pack made in 1392 to amuse himself in his madness. These hand painted packs curiously omitted cards XV and XVI, the Devil and the Tower, and some omitted card II, the Papess. By 1427, the guild registers in Brabant included playing card makers, and cards began to be printed on the new invention, the printing press, in 1440. A Franciscan friar preached against playing cards and dice around 1460, distinguishing between the suit cards and the Tarot trump cards, suggesting they were separate decks.

The Growth of Heresy

Either the designs began in northern Italy or they were popularized there. Of course, Italians were the great trading people of the Middle Ages, with the famous sea ports of Venice and and their arch-rivals Genoa, at either end of the plain of Lombardy, trading with the east. Several famous northern Italian cities had packs of cards associated with them, among them Bologna whose Bolognese pack had 62 cards (2, 3, 4, 5, all being omitted from the standard mixed pack, and the last two Tarot trumps were reversed so that the Judgement was the last card), Florence whose Florentian pack had 97 card pack and Venice itself whose Venetian pack had 78 cards, being the standard pack with the Knight court cards and the 22 Tarot trumps. If they were inspired by the importation of cards from the east or Africa, the Italians obviously set out to design their own varieties of them. The Tarot pack has survived, though it is called in Italy the Piedmontese pack, directly linking it with the regione of Piedmont noted for heresy. Moreover, a tributary of the great northern Italian river, the Po, is called the Taro river. It is not actually in Piedmont, but is in the next province, Emilia, only twenty miles away, flowing east close to Parma.

The Italian ports blossomed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries with the decline of the eastern Roman empire of Byzantium, and the institution of the crusades, Venice, Pisa and Genoa being among the beneficiaries of the wars. The cities of northern Italy also had access to the Alpine passes and trade to the north. Piedmont is in the immediate mountainous hinterland of Genoa, the Taro being to the east on the way to Venice. It is along these trade routes that the heresies, and the free artisans and tradesmen who carried them, spread north.

Italian merchants were resourceful and generally tolerant men, used to meeting people whose religion was not Catholic Christianity, and might not even be Christianity at all, in the Byzantines and the Moslems. They could not afford to be bigots, and the parts of Europe where heresy grew were just those where these free artisans and traders plied their business. The axis from Toulouse in southern France to Venice was the heartland of the heresy with fingers extending orthogonally to the north up the Rhone (to northern France and the low countries), and into Switzerland and Bavaria, thence along the Danube towards Bulgaria. Moreover, the south of Italy had been ruled by the Greeks of Byzantium until the Normans drove them out, and nearby Sicily was ruled by the Saracens, so here were other routes for non-Catholic ideas to enter the Italian peninsula.

Primitive Christianity in Europe

An original primitive Christianity, that had survived at the grass roots in the east, spread westwards through Anatolia into Thrace and Bulgaria before travelling further west by sea and up the Danube. This organized form of primitive Christianity, winning over believers at the grass roots, made the Church worry about ordinary people whom it had generally neglected, and suddenly it obliged all Christians to attend mass at least once a year.

The Church had been the religion of the upper class of feudal society, the nobles. The peasants had been largely ignored as long as they remained resigned and paid their tithes. Plainly enough, many had given up attending mass at all. Priests had been taking their benefices, their rents and tithes, and had been neglecting their duties, including regularly offering mass. Catholic priests often could not understand their own mass, nor could they recite it properly in Latin—which they had little knowledge of—even by rote learning, whence the expression Mumbo-Jumbo[†]Mumbo-Jumbo. Mumbo-jumbo is often said to be from an African word for a grotesque idol, and therefore any object of blind unreasoning worship, but it is never used in that sense today, if it ever had it. It is used for meaningless verbiage. The modern Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable gives the African account of the expression, adding that it is “from a lost native word”. The OED also claims it is “of unknown origin”, but says that Canon Robinson could find no word in the lexicons of the Niger natives to which the references in the works of F Moore and Mungo Park relate. Moore and Park in the accounts of their African travels of 1738 and 1799 respectively are the earliest mentions of Mumbo-Jumbo. But Emerson in 1847 includes “Romanism” and “Mesmerism” as examples of mumbo-jumbo, and the word “mumble-jumble” was being used as a verb, to mean mix up and confuse things, in 1833. The clue is that the expression “mumble-matins” was a slang term for a priest in the decades following 1560, and it seems that mumbo-jumbo was a different articulation of the same sentiment. The priests were known for mumbling because they did not know their Latin properly. That is the point. from their incoherent mumblings of the mass. The churches were often empty, and the growth of heresy should not have been surprising. Peasants who for 800 years had occasionally attended an incomprehensible mumbled Latin mass, generally had adopted a Christianity that combined basic elements of the Christian myth with ancient classical religious elements and northern solar worship. So in the grass roots mix around the turn of the millennium were these elements:

• Primitive Christianity—the idea of a Saoshyant, from Zoroastrian, perhaps through Mithraism, or a Messiah, from Zoroastrianism through Judaism. The saviour was pictured as the sun, and was the solar face of God in these religions. This was confused with what of the Catholic faith percolated to the root of society.
• Zoroastrianism—dualism, the world as being the kingdom of a lesser god, the Demiurgos, identified with the Hebrew God by the Gnostics, because the Jews had rejected the Devil as an independent God, in what seemed an act of the Devil pretending to be the true God when he had been seen through.
• Classical religions—in contrast with Catholic Christianity, the Cathars seem to have accepted a range of classical gods and goddesses as aspects of the Saoshyant—akin to the Avatars of Hinduism—appearing as guides, as Cathar Christs do, to guide or show the way.
• Northern solar religions—since the Christ, sent to find lost souls, was seen as the sun, the face of God, the primitive form of Christianity was ready to accept Celtic and Norse solar gods as manifestations of Christ
• Since material existence was already Hell, no one had to worry that they would be punished further, as Catholic Christianity taught, by believing these solar gods were aspects of Christ. There was only one way to go, and that was up. And the monstrous reaction of the Catholic clergy, agents of the Devil, to Cathars, proved they had been right. The Devil fought back by murdering them, but they did not care. Every completed life took them closer to salvation. The Church had to resort to genocide to win the argument.

Bernard Sylvester, about 1150, wrote a neo-Platonist book, called On the Universality of the World, which proved to be immensely popular, and a source of the Renaissance, it being taught widely in the medieval universities shortly to be founded. Yet it recalled the Great Mother as the goddess Nature, and Eros as the god of fertility, as well as the classical gods associated with the planets. Added to this had been the disappointment of the millennial expectations of the eleventh century. These were the seeds of the growth of non-Catholic ideas, and the apparent spread of eastern Gnostic Christianity from Bulgaria into Lombardy, Piedmont, Provence and Languedoc, along that axis. Certainly Bogomil belief was influential, but it was simply crystallizing what had been there all along but forced into a supersaturated state by the Catholic clergy. Catholicism was official, but beneath it primitive Christianity and its sibling, solar Paganism, simply awaited the crystal that allowed it to grow visibly.

As a product of the late middle ages, the Tarot incorporates all of the influences that made up the Cathar heretical tradition. Jessie L Weston thought the Tarot had to do with a Pagan Celtic cult that survived Christianity and continued as an underground faith. Margaret Murray thought witchcraft was another underground Pagan religion. Both were misled by failing to realise that primitive Christianity was not as different from Paganism as later Christians have made out. The primitive Christianity adopted by the Pagan peasants of Europe, under pressure from their ruling classes, was little different from a novel Paganism. Christianity at the level of the feudal nobility was the form of it that evolved most, and sought to distinquish itself from classical Paganism, and pre-Christian barbarian religions.

Christianity at the grass roots level remained much closer to the solar beliefs of Zoroastrianism under the culture of Hellenism. As such it was closer to what the peasants knew and could understand, their own chief Pagan gods being solar and seasonal ones. Grass roots Christianity was much less refined than the religion of the aristocracy, which began to evolve when the Roman aristocracy adopted it under Constantine, who merged it with the other solar religions of the empire such as Mithraism, then continued evolving when it was sold to the aristocracy of the emerging nation states in Europe after the fall of Rome. The primitive form of it retained much that we have been taught to consider Pagan, such as seasonal and fertility festivals. This is the mysterious way that the Cathar heresy encompases Pagan themes while being considered by the Church as a heretical Christianity. Thus the symbolism of the Tarot cards is a mixture of Christian and Pagan.

The form of Zoroastrianism that had dominated in Rome before Christianity absorbed it was Mithraism, known to the Romans as the worship of the Unconquered Sun. Constantine’s father and Constantine himself were worshippers of the Unconquered Sun, and Constantine did not become a Christian until he was dying. As far as he was concerned, to cut down possibilities of dissension in the empire, all solar religions ought to be merged, and that is the process he initiated by putting the Christians in charge, their reward for supporting his bid for power. To Constantine, Christianity was an unmistakeably solar religion. Mithraism had seven accepted levels of initiation, though there seem to have been further degrees up to twelve, the last being called Shahanshah, or King of Kings, the title of the Persian kings, in some offshoots. A living relic of it, traditionally hated by Catholics, is Freemasonry which has allegedly over thirty levels of initiation.

The Cathar Meaning of the Tarot

The only “sin” of the earthly soul in the Cathar belief is not knowing, and that is corrected through experience. All souls will get to heaven, and it is no sin that a soul is still here on earth. It has not yet got gnosis, but it will come, and cannot be forced. It is easy to see why the Catholic hierarchy did not like this religion. The plethora of Catholic sins are meant to keep the population guilt ridden and to keep them supporting the Church by their faith in the useless magic of the sacraments, instead of personal effort. The Catholic sacraments, wealth, power, sexual indulgence, the easy life, ambition, were all temptations of the Devil to lure the soul from the path to gnosis, and obstruct its escape from the material to the spiritual. The soul is part of God, so God Himself is incomplete while the Devil still has power over some souls. It is this incompleteness of God that stops Him destroying the Devil. He needs all souls to be back with Him, then the world will be destroyed like the Tower, card XVI in the Tarot pack. With the salvation of each soul, their own personal world, their personal Tower, is destroyed, and with all personal prisons gone, the totality and its master, Satan, goes too. Faith is inadequate. The soul has to make the journey to knowledge personally, through experience, through actual rejection of the Devil and his world. Salvation is by gnosis not pistis. The supposed sufficiency of belief is one of the Devil’s tricks.

The Tarot cards originally were a picture book or comic strip version, for illiterate peasants, of the journey of the human soul to heaven—a sort of Pilgrim’s Progress. The Cathars had control of the paper business, as Harold Bayley has shown in his study of early water marks, so they could make the first picture books. The idea of pictures to help the belief of the illiterate was one that the late medieval Catholic Church embraced in its own churches which were filled with scenes of the life and passion of Christ to act as visual reminders of what it was all about. Most medieval art had the function conjectured here for the Tarot, and before long Protestants, like Bunyan, were writing up their own versions of it. The main trouble is that the original designs are no longer extant, and might not be completely in the right order. What we have are much later copies and copying errors have been introduced, some accidentally through misunderstanding the picture copied, and other deliberately to avoid offending Catholics, or by Catholic design to change the message.

The soul is at present trapped in the material world which is Hell—and this is no metaphor or bad mouthing of reality—the world really is Hell, and there is nothing lower. The Tarot cards show the voyage the soul has to take, with its dangers, to get back to heaven, the universal world of the spirit. Here we try to guess what each card meant. Even though the overall voyage of the soul seems clear enough, particular cards are puzzling.

The Fool, the unnumbered card, is the human soul seeking gnosis, knowledge of its true nature and duty. It is a lost angel not knowing its predicament or how to return to its home with God in heaven. The journey can only begin when the Fool meets a wise man, the Magician (I), who is, in Italy, the Bagatto (Bagattel), a word with the same root in it as Bogomil, the Indo-European word for god, “baga”. Magician also has the Iranian word in it “magi”, the caste of Zoroastrian priests whose religion was the dualist origin of Gnosticism, and even Christianity itself. So the man is not a stage magician or a medieval mountebank, but a magus, a priest of sorts, a lesser god, an angel in waiting, a Cathar Perfect! At the very least, he is a fellow Cathar who acts as an adviser and guide to the novice, the Fool. In a sense he is also the maturer form of the Fool because he too will take on the same role for others.

Cards II to VIII are earthly temptations, barriers to progress—earthly power, false religion, sex, ambition and false justice. All of these have to be rejected and cast off in the ascetic life of the hermit (VIIII). Progress depends on fate (X) and fortitude (XI), but with them the aspiring soul can approach death (XIII) as a Cathar Christ, a hanged man (XII), one who has achieved material perfection, and so with spiritual baptism (XIV) in the consolamentum, can escape from the captivity of the material world which is then seen to be dominated by the Devil (XV) holding its people captive. Once that is realized, the earthly prison that was Hell is shattered, releasing the purely spiritual soul which can then rise upwards through the levels of heaven, the stars (XVII), the moon (XVIII) and the sun (XIX). The Judgement (XX) is either misplaced or, more probably, it is not a judgement at all but simply a fanfare by the herald welcoming the soul back home into the spiritual universe (XXI) of God’s presence—every soul spiritually gambolling as a part of God.

The Fool

Everyone begins their life in ignorance. They are fools. So, the Fool is Everyman setting out on his journey of discovery. He carries all his goods in a small bag on a stick. He is poorly dressed with the seat hanging out of his trousers, through the attack by a dog, and, in some packs, quite unaware, is about to step over a cliff. The cliff stands for all the dangers of life in the physical world—dangers for the salvation of the soul.

He is a Poor Man, an Ebionite, one who will follow the apostolic tradition of poverty and preaching for no reward. A flower, he sometimes has, even then, stood for peace, for the Cathars were lovers of peace. Not so their Christian tormentors. The dog represents the Church’s response to them, its Dominican inquisitors, the “Domini Canes” or “Hounds of the Lord”. In some decks the attacking animal absurdly is a cat, an apparent Christianization, indeed, reversal, since the Cathars were denigrated as cats by Catholics.

The medieval fool or court Jester was expected to mock and satirize his master and his court, though the explicit court jester garb, is probably a later “clarification”. The Cathar aspirant to salvation disdained the material world, secular and religious, as the court of its own master, the Demiurge, the Christian Satan. Heretics were accused by the Catholic Church of worshipping Satan. They did not. They mocked the ruler of this world as a fake pretending to be God, and they did it by parodying the false and worthless sacraments of the traditional Christian Church, his tool for keeping people ignorant and captive.

The Magician (I)

The Magician stands before a table on which there are various objects. Except for his clothes, he could be a priest preparing for a mass, but generally is made to look like a travelling conjurer or a stage magician. Some packs, though, make him a cobbler, so he is a travelling artisan. Such men were free, an unusual state to be in then unless you were an aristocrat. People were tied to the land. They were not formally slaves, owned by someone, but they were slaves indirectly. They were tied to the land, and the land was owned by a landlord. So tradesmen, travelling artisans were free spirits who were their own masters. They extended their freedom to the spiritual level in fact, calling themselves “Free Spirits” because they were no longer tied to any church either. Many artisans were heretics.

This magician as card I is represented as the first step the Fool must take to begin his journey to salvation. He is a guide to the ignorant seeker after knowledge. He is the first contact with heretical belief, a travelling Poor Man, a teacher modelled after the apostles, preaching while earning a living through his craft skills. The wide brimmed hat was perhaps a disguised halo.

The Papess (II)

The Papess stands for the Church. Sometimes, her girdle forms the Chi-Rho cross, the proper symbol of Catholic Christianity, and she is holding a book which is the Catholic bible, the Vulgate. She sits before a curtain which obstructs the truth from sight. She wears a tiered crown or tiara, and is dressed in finery. A tiara is a Persian crown, and it was taken from Mithraism as a symbol of the Church when it took it over, so it is not what it was, and stands for falseness. Sometimes she is sitting between two pillars like the Pope (V), but they support nothing, signifying that the huge edifice of the Christian church is nothing—a mirage—though it might be that they stand for the two pillars of the Temple of Solomon and therefore the Jewish scriptures that the heretics regarded as worthless, being the accounts of the Demiurge, the Hebrew God.

Modern interpretations of the Tarot—influenced by an irrational desire to make everything feminine all right—try to give the Papess a favourable interpretation, but it is certain that, if these cards had their origins in heresy, then nothing reminiscent of the Pope or the Catholic Church could have been favourable. She stands for the lies of the material world—the false spirituality of Catholicism.

The Empress (III)

The empress is a finely dressed woman on a throne, looking smug and properous. She is crowned and carries a sceptre and a shield with an emblazoned eagle. She stands for the material world as represented by the secular authority of the Holy Roman Empire. The message is that the seeker must not be awed by secular estates any more than they are awed by supposedly spiritual estates. Cathars did not particularly condemn women as more wicked or inferior to men, unlike Catholic Christianity, but they also had no special regard for women. The human bodies of both males and females were material and therefore in the realm of the Devil. Perfects, whether male or female, rejected sexuality as an earthly pleasure to be disdained as distractions by mature souls, aspiring to the spiritual level. The warning applies equally to souls that are in a body of either sex, which is why there are cards symbolising spiritual and secular temptations of both sexes—a male and female emperor and a male and female pope.

Now there is a curiosity about the Empress and that is that she is often shown as if she was an angel, with a large pair of wings folded behind her. Possibly a drape meant to be like the one behind the Papess hiding the truth has been misconceived as wings, but, given that they are wings, this whole interpretaion of the Empress as the secular world must be wrong—diametrically wrong. For then, the Empress most likely stands for the Cathar church, and is deliberately contrasted with the Christian one. It is even possible that the Empress is not female at all. Angels are sexless. It might be the good son of God, who is the archangel Michael, who appears to humanity as Christ. The wicked son of God is Satanael, who is pictured on card XV.

The Emperor (IIII)

The emperor is also finely dressed with a crown and a sceptre, sitting or, really, arrogantly lounging on a throne bearing the device of an eagle. He is the Holy Roman Emperor and represents secular authority on earth. There is a curious code in Mithraic symbolism whereby the image of the god representing the equinoxes stands with a raised or lowered torch signifying spring and autumn respectively. These figures also have their legs crossed, the spring figure with his right leg bent over his left leg, and the autumnal figure with his left leg bent over his right leg. Sometimes the legs are not crossed but the same leg is bent, right for spring, and left for autumn. Here, curiously, the emperor lounges against the throne in the spring stance, right leg over left. What looks to be a significant symbol seems merely the convention of the artist and means nothing, because some early decks do not have this curious leg crossing.

The Pope (V)

The pope is shown blessing some supplicants while holding a staff topped with the papal triple cross. Behind him are the two pillars, sometimes seen with the Papess, supporting nothing, representing an edifice of falshood, the teachings of the Catholic Church, the false sanctity of the sacraments, meaningless symbols of the material world falsely held to be sacred. He is crowned with the papal diadem or triple tiara, the Persian head dress adopted by the Church from the Mithraists. He wears gloves, shown by the emblem on them of a Maltese cross, while below him, among the suppliants—each wearing broad round hats that resemble halos—is an apparently disembodied hand and the hand and arm of someone off the shot.

Cathars believed Christian blessing required the laying on of hands, and that was their practice in their main, perhaps only, ritual, the consolamentum. Catholic blessings were meaningless—no sanctity is passed on by them, and the gloved hand of the pope demonstrates it. The hypocrisy is denoted by the fact that those being blessed have symbolic halos but not the blesser—they have more reason to be deemed holy. The Pope was an agent of the Devil, but ordinary believers were captive spirits. Perhaps the hands which appear mysteriously were meant to signify the proper apostolic practice incorporated in the consolamentum of the Cathars.

The Lovers (VI)

The Lovers shows a man torn between two women, one the older, seemingly the mother, and a younger one seeming to want to be his wife. The symbolism seems to be that of choosing independence from the mother by marrying, but that makes the soul dependent again and so still trapped in the material world. In older decks, the difference in age of the two is far from obvious, but some choice seems implicit—perhaps the choice between Catholic and heretical Christianity. A cupid or angel hiding in the sun fires an arrow.

Conventional interpretations emphasize the role of love in the maturing of the young man, but it cannot be so mundane because the Cathars hated the material world as the work of the Evil Spirit. Again the card is a warning, a warning that even love whether of mother or of lover is an earthly temptation, a trick of the Devil, to keep the soul enslaved. The angel is represented like the fravashi of the Persian religion, the soul in heaven. It is a reminder of the soul’s true destiny. An arrow is actually a deadly weapon, and the traveller is choosing death—a longer period of confinement in the earthly prison—or life in the Cathar view, which like the traditional Christian one, perversely takes it that the only real life happens when this life is gone.

The Charioteer (VII)

Here is another temptation of life represented by a charioteer—really Ambition—the charioteer rides over everything to get to his goal. In life everything that stands in his way will be swept out of his way, and the potential success of it is shown by the chariot being finely furnished with drapes, while the charioteer wears fine armour, no doubt needed to save him from the blows of his inevitable enemies, and brandishes a club or sceptre. It might stand for the military life, but mainly for the indifferent trampling of the interests of others in any walk of life.

The Cathar is concerned about life in the material world because it constantly tempts and tricks, and their aim was to avoid pitfalls. The charioteer is not actually in control of his vehicle, he holds no reins and is simply going where his horses take him. He thinks he is going somewhere but it is an illusion. His destination is arbitrary, subject to the whims of fate and not his own brilliance as he thinks. His wealth and prestige, achieved through his ambition is the pure trickery of the master of this world, the Devil.

Justice (VIII)

Justice is shown as a serene woman holding the scales and the sword that themselves symbolize justice. Justice is one of the four virtues with Temperance, Fortitude and Prudence. All appear here except Prudence, but prudence is care in practical matters and so is a virtue of the real world. But so too is justice! Here Justice is represented not as a personal virtue but as a warning that Justice in the Devil’s world is an illusion and not to be relied on. Justice can neither be had nor ordained where the Devil is king, so any idea that a career in the judicial system is meritorious, or that justice can be had on earth is false. The physical world is intrinsically unjust because the Devil is contrary.

Here too is a clue that wings in some pictures were not there originally. Here the image of Justice sits before two posts that have a curtain hanging between them, again hiding the truth as it was in the case of the Papess. But some decks show the figure with a large pair of wings like the Empress!

The Hermit (VIIII)

If the seeker of knowledge has understood the lessons so far, he realises that there is nothing for the world but to reject it, to become deliberately ascetic and to put no faith in anything in it. The seeker must be a hermit in spirit. In the terms of the Essenes and Jesus at the Sermon on the Mount, he must be “poor in spirit”, disdaining everything that material existence offers, as poor temptations from the real spiritual reward. He is dressed as a Franciscan monk, a Capuchin with his humble robe and cowl. The Capuchins tried to revert to the original practices of S Francis in the early 1500s. The Franciscans were a Catholic order set up to rival the “Free Spirits” in their apostolic poverty and pureness of life, so it is likely that the Franciscans were actually dressing like the Cathar Perfects, and this is what the Hermit here stands for, and in early cards his robe is black or very dark, as the Perfects’ robes were. Indeed, some Franciscans became heretical, as far as the Church was concerned.

This hermit holds up a lamp and carries a stick as if he is trying to find his way through a dark passage as if he were virtually blind. To achieve perfection—and Christians were to be perfect as their Father in heaven was perfect—the aspirant soul has to tread carefully in the real world because it is so full of traps and pitfalls. The whole philosophy of the Cathar was different from Christianity, especially as it now is, faith now being sufficient—the ultimate deception of Satan. The actual salvation of a soul, Cathars believed, was immensely difficult—but would certainly happen, eventually, through experience.

Sometimes, the stick is entwined with a serpent, making it into the ancient symbol of Æsculapius, the God of healing. All reference to healing in the gospels has nothing to do with curing physical ailments, but is a metaphor for curing spiritual ones, and the same is probably true here, though, it seems that one of the practicalities that the Cathars allowed themselves was to alleviate suffering through medical skills, such as the use of earths and herbs. Since the world is Hell, and Hell is a place of suffering, the only good was to try to alleviate it in defiance of the will of Satan. The Perfect was the fully experienced man, already an angel in all but substance, and so the perfect teacher. They ended their lives acting as a living Christ, intent on showing others how to achieve the same condition, the condition of being ready to move on. Those who had no compunction about causing suffering were the demons of Satan, false humans with nothing of the angelic in them, but it was God who punished them, not the Cathar.

When the cards are laid out in a traditional figure of eight, the Hermit is at the end of a loop that stands for material existence. The seeker starts out in life as a poor, carefree Fool and ends up, if he is following the right path, as a poor wise man, full of cares. The Fool can become Perfect, and then is almost ready to move on into the journey in the spiritual sphere. In the material loop, the Hermit stands adjacent to the Fool setting out, as was the Bagattel, so he has become a Bagattel himself, a guide for ignorant new seekers. That, then, becomes the purpose of the remaining earthly experience he has, if he is to move on.

The traps and pitfalls remain. He must show others the way, while avoiding any remaining temptations himself. The Hermit is wise, but has yet to find the final pieces of the puzzle of gnosis. He has to escape the material plane and move up to the spiritual one. He has the admiration of his fellow believers and is worshipped as a Christ, everyone expecting him to continue on his journey upwards, but he is never sure, and needs his lamp and probe until the end lest he fall at the last second. He must continue to explore the darkness to be sure of the way. He cannot ever be complacent. That is the ultimate devilish trap.

The Wheel of Fortune (X)

The Wheel of Fortune is really the Cycle of Being. At this stage the destiny of the soul is no longer pure chance but depends upon its stage of perfection. If it is imperfect still, then it cannot move on, and returns on the wheel into being. It is reincarnated. The wheel shows what seem to be three creatures on it, one being an imperious lion at the top, a monkey like creature is descending, and a dog like creature is ascending. The meaning of Buddhism is also knowledge, and the soul in Buddhism is also reincarnated if the soul is still imperfect, and it is reincarnated not necessarily as a human being even, if it has been very imperfect.

The lion is at the top and is crowned and winged and has a book and a sword. Having reached the top, it has achieved perfection and is rewarded by moving on. The wings suggest its spiritual nature now, and the book is the book of its life in which its deeds are accounted—the record of its progress to Perfection. Possibly the lion represents the judge of each soul as it completes a cycle. In older representations the lion crouches on its haunches, face on and upright looking rather female except for its tail.

The wheel is a simple image of how the soul is reincarnated at different levels according to the progress it has or has not made. The wheel is shown with six spokes, standing for the six incarnations it has before it succeeds on the seventh. Sometimes seven spokes are explicit. Seven incarnations is the maximum number required. If the soul is not ready it continues its trip on the wheel descending again on another circuit of the cycle of being.

The two animals on the wheel seem dressed in tutus suggesting they are performing animals, jumping at the Devil’s command. However, these “tutus” seem to be a mistaken impression of an older drawing which shows the wheel oriented at a different angle, where the “tutus” are simply the indistinctly represented bosses of the axle of the wheel confused with the adjacent creatures. It shows how copying earlier designs has led to nonexistent “symbolism”.

The laying out of the cards in the eternity pattern shows the Wheel of Fortune at the intersection, sharing it with the ultimate goal, heaven, the Nirvana of the Buddhists, the kingdom of God of the Persians and then of the the Christians. At the intersection the initial judgement is made and the soul progresses or is returned for another lesson.

Fortitude (XI)

Fortitude is the second virtue met and shows a a woman holding the jaws of a lion so that it cannot bite. The fortitude needed is that mentioned already in connexion with the Hermit, facing the last years of your life in apostolic poverty while waiting for death to move on. It is all too easy to relax a little, to sit back thinking a job is well done, but such smugness is the work of the Devil, and the fortitude is required by the soul still, having other spiritual difficulties to face on the journey. Fortitude is, of course, spiritual strength. Death itself has no fears when it means leaving Hell. So fortitude is developing the strength that will allow the soul now to complete its journey, leave the cycle of being and continue. Such fortitude allowed the Cathar Perfect to endure being slowly burnt alive.

The Hanged Man (XII)

The Hanged Man hangs from a “pi” cross by a cord from his left ankle with his right leg bent behind his left, in a mockery of the Crucifixion, the supposed salvific act of the Catholic Christ. This is the metaphorical fate of the Cathar Christ, the Perfect, at the hands of the Devil’s agents on earth. He usually has his hands behind his back out of sight, perhaps bound. Considering his predicament, he looks quite serene.

The “pi” cross is made of two young trees each with six lopped branches. Trees in ancient tradition stand for life and knowledge, and here are the two trees of the Garden of Eden supporting the soul as it crosses over from life to knowledge. Often, the man has dark hose on his left leg, and light hose on his right. Coloured cards often use this halving motif, in which one object is light coloured and another dark coloured, another example being the two horses of the Charioteer. It is an obvious symbol of dualism, good and evil.

The two trees stand for each half of a year and the connecting branch is the equinox. The bent leg symbolism is uncertain. The right leg is bent suggesting spring, but it is bent behind the left, whereas normally it bends in front of it. Maybe the symbolism is simply that of the crossing, the crossing over from the dark material existence to the bright spiritual one. Sometimes the hanged youth has a silver halo about his head, again symbolising his transference into spirituality. The vernal equinox in the northern hemisphere stands for coming life and the autumn equinox for coming death, but the symbolism is reversed in the east where the autumn precedes the life-giving winter rains, and the summer sun kills all life. The death of the natural man stands for the beginning of spiritual life, once Perfection has been achieved. Cathars abhored the Christian cross, and so used the symbolism of the pi cross, but pi is also a symbolic gateway from the material to the spiritual. The soul must enter the spiritual world with humility, whence this soul’s humiliating predicament.

Death (XIII)

Death is what might be expected, a skeleton with a scythe reaping a crop of human beings. Two disembodied heads lie among the bones and limbs by the scythe, one wearing a crown. Death is no respecter of earthly status, another reminder that the trappings of worldliness are valueless, ultimately. The world is a charnel house for the material parts of us, but the Gnostic soul, the Cathar Perfect, has crossed over. Often the sun is visible on the horizon, presumably meant to show it is setting on life, and the sun is life, or the provider of it. It sets between two pillars supporting nothing! The whole worthless display of the edifice of the Church supports nothing, and offers nothing, as the sun sets on physical life.

Temperance (XIIII)

Temperance seems to be a female angel though probably is meant to be androgynous, as immortal beings ought to be, not needing any organs of reproduction. She usually has a sun sign on her forehead. Temperance is moderation, and a sensible virtue in life, but what sense is meant for it now? Temperance ought to be pouring the contents of the larger jug, at least, on the earth, assuming the jugs contain wine. She or it pours water from one jug to another finer one, so the metaphor of crossing is again suggested, the soul continuing its crossing from the temporal to the spiritual.

Temperance really has no etymological link with temporality—it has no connexion with time—but perhaps one is mistakenly assumed here. Then the Angel of Time pours the life of the soul from the meagre jug of materiality to the plush jug of spirituality, or often just from one jug to another equivalent one, each standing for a type of life. In the perfect state, as heaven is presumed to be, there can be no time and perhaps the angel is showing time as running out, or being prepared to be poured out, as soon another card (XVII) shows.

It might also stand for the Cathar rite of consolamentum. Cathars rejected any baptism by water in the traditional Christian fashion, as a material sacrament, and believed in the spiritual baptism of the apostles. The metaphor of baptism using water, but heavenly water perhaps sufficed to hide the true meaning from those who did not have ears to hear, so to speak.

The Devil (XV)

In the perfect state of heaven the Devil has no power. The dualist eastern religions seemed to recognize the Devil as being time itself, or responsible for creating time, and time is the great corrupter. Thus in Zoroastrianism, the original Perfect creation of Ahuramazda was static, but the Evil Spirit corrupted it by introducing time into it. Modern science would identify the Devil with entropy, and some medieval pictures showed him as responsible for decay, the characteristic of the physical world.

The soul has crossed over to the spiritual level and can look back to the material world it has left, the realm of the Devil. He sees the Devil standing dominant over the world, shown as a plinth, a castle or prison, with the inhabitants chained in captivity, and shown as devils themselves. Of course, the Devil is also an immortal spirit and so is shown as an androgyne. Rather than horns, the Church’s successful attempt to identify the Devil with the classical god of fertility, Pan, the Evil Spirit is shown wearing a horned helmet. The horns on the helmet look like antlers, and some think the witches worshipped a horned god, like Cernunnos. If they did, it was mockery not serious worship, the heretics being fully aware that this world is thoroughly wicked, and their destination was purity. The Devil worked his trickery through earthly institutions that had to be obeyed, like the Church and the secular authorities, meant to keep people in bondage and ignorant of how to escape it. Having escaped, it all becomes clear.

The Tower (XVI)

The Tower is the material world, now destroyed by a flame or lightning from the heavens shown, in old packs, issuing from the mouth of the sun—the true spiritual god, or His face, at any rate—the Unconquered Sun. The world was the Devil’s kingdom, and with its destruction, the Devil loses his crown. The soul has been freed from bondage, and the castle or prison of the material world, shown with the Devil standing on it in the previous card, is destroyed. The soul cannot be trapped again. The French name of this card is “The House of God”, and so it is, but not the house of the supreme God, merely that of the Demiurgos, the Devil, who is god of this world.

Two figures fall, from the building. These are the demons made by Satan as part of his creation to act as jailers for the captive angels of heaven—in the cards, the Pope and the Emperor. All apparent human beings do not have the spark of God within them. Some of them are genuinely wicked servants of the Devil, but it is not the task of the Cathar to judge and destroy them. That is God’s work, and He does it when each Cathar reaches Perfection and moves on to spirituality and home. Then that soul’s material world is destroyed and its jailers are destroyed with it, by God! Christians and Moslems, it seems, think it is the duty of human beings to rid the world of God’s enemies, but that is a trick of the Devil to add to human misery on earth.

The Zoroastrian idea was that each of us had a personal choice to make, that of good or evil, truth or lie, and by choosing correctly we help in the cosmic battle between the two opposed forces. Here is the result of our choice—a small victory for good, and a contribution towards the ultimate victory of the good spirit, God. The soul’s personal reality is destroyed, and the effect of it is to help liberate the captive spirits, the sparks of God within us shown as little circles.

The Star (XVII)

The Star shows a naked woman pouring water simultaneously from two jugs. Behind her in the sky are eight stars, one bright and seven weaker. The stars are the lives the Perfect has had, the bright one being the final immortal spiritual life. In the background is a bird nestling in a tree, the soul finally settling in its rightful place. If it is the tree of life, it again represents immortality. The discarded water is mortal life, now ended, or it signifies the end of time, water and time both flowing, and this showing that time flows out for good. Thus heaven is timeless, as it should be, as a perfect world.

The Zoroastrians had the idea that the soul reaching heaven was met by a woman who stood for the soul itself, and so was perfect, if the soul was, but was increasingly blemished according to the state of the soul. It seems to have given the Moslems the idea of the heaven of black-eyed houris promised to martyrs, though one wonders what the promise for women suicide bombers is. The point about the Zoroastrian belief was that the soul met its own reflexion in the shape of a woman, not that it met a beauty to enjoy an eternal weekend with. Here then is the beauty, and she symbolically indicates that time has ended. Heavenly beings had no use for clothing.

The Moon (XVIII)

The Moon is a card of more mysterious symbolism than the rest of them, mysterious as they are. The soul has to ascend through the planetary spheres to reach the Godhead, and the moon is one of the planetary levels. Theophilus of Antioch, a second century Christian, saw the moon as standing for humanity—being a reflexion of God or his own symbol, the sun. The moon obviously symbolizes rebirth or resurrection, going through its monthly cycle of growth and decline. There are two castles on either side, as if they were forming a gateway, and two dogs howling at the moon in the middle ground, often a dark and light one. The foreground is occupied by a rocky pool containing what looks like a crayfish, but, as a short tailed crustacean, is likely to be a crab. It is in the pool just where the reflexion of the moon would be expected. In the air are inverted droplets, like raindrops, but heading towards the moon, not downwards. The focus of everything is the moon, and the droplets stand for the ascending souls of the Perfects—holy ghosts, tiny because they are distant, but attracted, like moths, to the divine light.

The picture seems to be a summary of the Cathar belief that the soul ascends leaving the world behind, and imperfect souls are left behind too, perhaps as dogs, and represented as dogs howling in longing for the spiritual object of their desire—to rise heavenwards to their proper home. Zoroastrian belief was that the moon was a purifier, and that it had preserved the semen of the Primæval Bull when it had been killed, and then returned it to earth as the seed of all life. The moon is a step on the soul’s journey back. Perhaps there is an implication that the soul continues to be tested for purity at each level, whence the continuing need for fortitude, and could be sent back to the Wheel of Fortune at any point in this spiritual journey should it prove unworthy.

The moon is also the Goddess Diana, the Heroic One or Herodias, whom the Church in the middle ages thought was revered by the witches. Diana was also identified with Hecate, death and rebirth. Hecate’s symbol was the dog. So, the pool seems to be the lowest parts of the physical world, and perhaps the crab the lowest form of life that could conceivably be a container for a soul, and the picture is a vista of the journey from the lowest level to the level of the moon. Crustaceans were known to shed their shells just as snakes slough off their skin, and so are also symbols of resurrection, called “the casting off of the old Adam” by Christians. The zodiacal sign of Cancer is said to be in the House of the Moon, so the two symbols have an astrological link. The astrological reading of Cancer is to do with imprisonment, pregnancy, rebirth, baptism and awakening.

The Sun (XVIIII)

The sun is bright in the sky directly above a pair of infants, standing before a low wall. The left one possibly gropes as if he is blind, and the other seems to be guiding him. The droplets of the souls continue their ascent to the next level, the Sun. Traditional solar religion has the sun having two sons, the summer sun and the winter sun. They become the origin of the two spirits, the good one and the bad one. In northern European solar mythology, one of the brothers, Hoder, is blind, the other, Balder is beautiful.

The two infants are sons of God. All humans with a soul, creatures of the good creation—are sons of God, so here are innocent pure spirits reunited with their Father, or about to be, represented as the sun and protected by Him. The blindness might be meant to signify that only in the intense spiritual light of the Father does the ascending spirit really begin to see. Maybe the implication is that even the wicked spirit who is the twin of the good one, becomes good when all evil has been destroyed, or, maybe, the testing of the ascending spirit has not yet ended. If he cannot see the light of the father, then he is still not pure enough, and might yet have to return to the Wheel of Fortune.

They are safe in his walled garden, a type of Garden of Eden, the Christian “paradise”, in Persia, a walled park suitable for a prince. But they are still separated from God, simply bathing in His spiritual light, but are now close to him. Perhaps the wall symbolises the final separation from God, soon to be crossed. G T Elmore, a scholarly but typically fanciful sufist, saw a Fatimid source, albeit derived from a Gnostic original, for the Tarot—Cathari being tolerant of Moslems—and reckons Quranic symbolism suggests walls hide treasure. Jesus spoke of “treasure in heaven”. The soul is about to find it. The ascending souls above them show that the journey is not yet over, but the souls are now secure.

The testing for purity, perfection and worth are over. Now the soul is acknowledged as Perfect. The original good creation in Zoroastrianism was a static world in which the sun rested permanently directly overhead at noon, and this signifies that the original perfectly good creation of God has been restored.

The Judgement (XX)

An angel blows a trumpet from the center of the sun, while below, the soul is emerging as if from a grave or tomb to be welcomed by souls already present. The Cathar belief was not the traditional Christian one of the afterlife being resurrection of the dead into this world. The world was the imperfect creation of the Evil Spirit, and so to be resurrected into it was simply to be reincarnated in the wicked world, and that meant the soul was as yet too imperfect to begin its journey. Reincarnation showed unworthiness. Resurrection is stepping through the gate into the homeland, the proper home of the spirit—heaven, God’s perfect world. The whole of the journey beyond the physical is an ascent, and so the gate is a horizontal one, apparently a tomb and the soul enters as if rising—being resurrected from—the dead. Of course, to the perfect spirits of heaven, these souls were dead, having been cast into Hell, the physical world we occupy.

Resurrection to the Cathar was a metaphor for stepping through the final gateway of heaven to rejoin God. The traditional Christian view that people in the physical world can rise from the dead into physical bodies is an error. Souls can be reborn into physical bodies when they have to undergo metempsychosis to learn a little more gnosis but they cannot reanimate a dead body. The soul died to the spiritual world as soon as it left heaven by the trickery of the Devil, and thereafter its objective was to return. Catholic Christians and those half Catholic, half Cathar Puritans that followed them, have all misunderstood the final ascent into the presence of God, indeed into the very being of God, explained with the metaphor of the soul rising from the dead. It is the corollary of the physical world being Hell or Hades, the abode of the dead. Life in the material world is spiritual death!

The angelic trumpet does not announce the Judgement—that has been continual—and this card must be misnamed. Indeed, in Italy, it is simply called The Angel (Angelo). The trumpet announces the arrival of the soul into the highest heaven. The angel is a herald. God, as the totality of the spiritual and so symbolised as the other souls already there, gives thanks for another soul—another prodigal son—returned. The cross on the trumpet banner is contrary to Cathar belief and must be a Christianization, unless it is merely a hieratic for the four tetramorphs that symbolize everything, and therefore the universe, as they appear in the final card 21. The soul is about to reunite with the true cosmos, and some old packs show the souls still ascending towards the sun even in this penultimate card.

The World (XXI)

The spiritual cosmos is shown in the final picture of the deck. The four quarters represented by the tetramorphs always stood for everything, though usually it was interpreted as meaning everything on earth. Here it means everything spiritual—the spiritual cosmos or heaven. Traditional Christians used the four symbols to stand for the four evangelists, but they are really zodiacal symbols for the four quarters of the year, the four seasons, suggesting that God is seen as Time, perhaps as eternity itself. The wreathe tied at each end is a type of euroboros, the year depicted as a circle, and therefore again Time, a ring having no beginning and no end is traversed forever, and stands for eternity.

Within it walks the androgyne Soul, united temporally and spatially with everything in the world, using the word “world” itself to mean everything, not just the material world, but a world is free of any Demiurgos, for it is the united world, when all the souls have come again to their spiritual home, all the petty prisons of the soul have been destroyed, and the Demiurgos Himself is no more. The picture is the world spirit, the anima mundi, in the form of the Free Spirit enclosed by the wreathe of glory, the symbol of final victory.

What the wand-like objects are held by the spirit is unknown, perhaps fennel stalks each holding the sparks, the souls of those in heaven. The last card, placed in the eternity symbol, coincides with the Wheel of Fortune, and is the card which precedes the Fool beginning the journey in such a layout. So what has happened is that the world was originally the material world of the Fool, but has become the spiritual world of the perfected souls through their journey upwards. The journey is not an endless circle per se because the soul has spiralled up to the spiritual level.

It seems that the Tarot stimulated production of various imitation sets, but, even more elaborate, such as the one called the Baldini set. The Florentine deck, mentioned already, was also most likely a deliberate imitation and over-elaboration of the original Tarot, and is plainly Christianized. They were probably deliberate attempts by the Church to confuse the audience the Tarot were aimed at, poor and simple peasants and labourers. The Church did the same with the Arthurian legends, and still, to this day, Christian publishing houses issue vast numbers of worthless books about Christianity to make it hard for simple people to distinguish the good from the bad. The Devil never ceases his tricks, the Cathars would point out!

Further Reading

• More on the Millennium, when Christ failed to return, and notions of heresy began to take hold in the West
• More on heretical beliefs, and the persecution of heretics
• More on the Inquisition
• More on witches

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