Did medieval Jewish Kabbalists design the Tarot deck? Most occultists seem to think so
Until the 18th century, tarot cards were simply playing cards. It was then that occult researchers became convinced that these cards in fact held magical properties
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It was during one of the early waves of the COVID pandemic that I was drawn deep into the world of Tarot. I was apprehensive at first.
On the one hand, I consider myself to be a rational, logical, and sensible person and so I knew that there was nothing for me to fear. On the other hand, maybe this stuff actually worked?
As I delved deeper into the history and mythology of Tarot, a question began to form in my mind that even the tarot deck couldn’t provide me with an answer to: were tarot cards influenced by Jewish mysticism – the famous Kabbalah – with which I was already familiar from my work at the National Library of Israel? How else can one explain the fact that the Sefirot from the Kabbalistic Tree of Life keep showing up in the tarot cards?
Many books have dealt with the connection between Tarot and the Kabbalah, and particularly – Tarot’s reliance on the latter. The majority of these books seem to presuppose the connection between the popular card deck and Jewish mysticism, and don’t feel the need to explain the relationship or prove its existence. But We, rational, logical and sensible people that we are, need to do better. We will need to find the answer to this question within the complex and intricate history of the deck of cards that we refer to as Tarot. So, let’s dive in.
The first historical reference of the Tarot deck came about in medieval Italy when a new card game called Tarocchi became a hit among the Italian aristocracy. The structure of the new playing deck was different from other card decks of the era, which might have been the reason that an anonymous monk in 1377 decided that the Tarot cards were the most complete and accurate representation of the “current state of the world”. And indeed, the first 22 cards in the deck, later to be known as the Major Arcana (Greater secrets, in Latin), depict medieval personas, such as the Emperor, the Empress, the Magician and the Pope. Alongside these, appear cards with conceptual values and symbols: the World, Justice, Temperance, the Wheel of Fortune and Death.
The 56 Minor Arcana (Lesser secrets) cards are organized in a structure that would eventually inspire the playing cards we are familiar with today. The Minor Arcana cards are subdivided into four suits: Wands, Cups, Pentacles (also referred to as Coins), and Swords. Each suit begins with the number one card – which is the Ace – and runs up to the number ten card; following are the four Court cards: the Page, the Knight, the Queen and the King.
For centuries, the Tarot deck was used as a regular deck of playing cards. It was only some 400 years after its first appearance, in the late 18th century, that the deck was attributed hidden powers. In 1781, a Protestant pastor named Antoine Court de Gébelin published a book dedicated to the Tarot deck, and became the first to draw a connection between Tarot and ancient Egyptian lore. During one of his walks through the streets of Paris, Gébelin came across a group of women playing with a Tarot deck and determined then and there that these were not ordinary playing cards but an arcane repository of timeless esoteric wisdom. In his ensuing studies he concluded emphatically that the Tarot symbols were based on ancient Egyptian wisdom that had made its way to Europe through Jewish Kabbalah.
Although the ancient Egyptian language had not yet been deciphered at the time, the Frenchman asserted that the word “Tarot” derived from two ancient Egyptian words: “Tar” (which supposedly means road or path), and “Ro” (king or royalty). Therefore, according to Gébelin, the meaning of the word “Tarot” is, “the king’s path”. When Jean-François Champollion finally deciphered the Egyptian hieroglyphics in 1822, the etymology provided by Gébelin was revealed to be completely delusional.
Gébelin was not the first to view the ancient Egyptian religion as a significant and unique source of knowledge. Since the Renaissance, there was a widespread belief in Europe that western culture had its roots in the ancient Egyptian religion, and that its wisdom was handed-down to ancient Greece through conquest and expansion; and to Judaism (and from there on to Christianity) through Moses.
Gébelin’s innovative book contained a short article by the Comte de Mellet, who followed Gébelin’s esoteric thought, and asserted that the 22 Major Arcana cards are an illustrated representation of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. This idea would subsequently become an anchor for all those who claimed a direct connection between Tarot and Kabbalah: 22 cards correspond to the 22 letters of the alphabet.
Almost over night, Gébelin and de Mellet’s assertions changed the way the Tarot deck was perceived, to this day: from a popular pastime for European aristocrats, the Tarot decks quickly became associated with fortunetellers, magicians and occultists. In fact, two years after Gébelin’s book was published, Jean-Baptiste Alliette popularized the Tarot divination method.
Éliphas Lévi further developed Tarot as a key to the great mysteries. This 19th-century French author and poet, born Alphonse Louis Constant, wrote more than twenty esoteric books about Kabbalah, alchemy, and magic. He maintained in his book Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, that “without the Tarot, the magic of the ancients is a closed book”.
Lévi was captivated by the idea of the Tarot as a secret and undeciphered book. But whereas Alliette designed a new deck of Tarot cards, Lévi elevated the historical Tarot of Marseilles to the rank of sacred scripture.
“One who is confined, with no access to any books aside from the Tarot, can obtain universal wisdom within a few years and proficiently lecture on all subjects unmatched and with undoubtable astuteness”, asserted Lévi, who believed that Tarot’s wisdom preceded even the Law of Moses.
Lévi continued Gébelin’s line of thought. He accepted the correlation between the 22 Major Arcana cards and the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. In addition, he directly associated the first ten cards of each suit with the ten Kabbalistic Sefirot, and contended that each of the four tarot suits corresponds with a letter of God’s name (Y-H-W-H). Within a few decades, Lévi’s tenets reached England, and were circulated and enhanced by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. a New Age for the Tarot and for spirituality had begun to take shape.
The Rider-Waite Tarot and the Thoth Tarot Deck
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was a secret society that concerned itself with mystical doctrines. The Order was established in 1887, in London. For over a decade, the Order acted in its original configuration until it disbanded and split into various, and at times contentious, groups. One cannot overestimate the Order’s great influence on modern Tarot and Western spiritual movements.
Two members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn would subsequently design the two most influential and popular tarot decks of the New Age declared by the Order. They both deliberately embedded Kabbalistic symbols into their decks—along with emblematic drawings from astrology, Christian mysticism, alchemy, and ancient Egyptian lore. The members were, Arthur Edward Waite, who published his deck in 1909, and Aleister Crowley, whose Thoth deck was published posthumously in 1969.
The Rider-Waite pack is named after the publisher (William Rider) and its mastermind (Arthur Edward Waite). The name given to this deck disregards the essential contribution of the artist who actually designed the deck, Pamela Colman Smith. The major innovations of this deck are the illustrated scenes that Waite and Smith crafted into the Minor Arcana cards – which in the older decks resembled simple playing cards. The Kabbalistic influence is most apparent in the 10th card of the Pentacles suit. In this card, ten Pentacles are arranged in the pattern of the Sefirot in the Tree of Life, superimposed on a scene depicting urban life. The images of the Sefirot and the Tree of Life are central symbols in Kabbalah, visual representations of the divine Sefirot – the ten omnipotent powers of God, that are emanating from Ein-Sof (“the Infinite”) into the material world.
In the accompanying book written by Waite, which details his Tarot deck, he made no reference to the Sefirot and the Tree of Life displayed on the card.
The other clues disseminated by Rider are found in the Major Arcana: The Magician (card no. 1) lifts his right arm to the sky while his left points to the ground – a Kabbalistic emblem that signifies the connection between heaven and earth. The infinity symbol hovers over his head.
In card no. 2, the High Priestess is seen reading the Torah, with Boaz and Jachin, the two pillars of Solomon’s Temple, on either side of her. Waite wrote of the High Priestess, who in the Tarot of Marseilles is called La Papesse (“The Popess”):
In a manner, she is […] the Supernal Mother herself – that is to say, she is the bright reflection. It is in this sense of reflection that her truest and highest name is Shekinah – the co-habiting glory. According to Kabalism, there is a Shekinah both above and below.
This is one of the few instances in Waite’s commentary in which he interprets one of his Tarot cards using an overt Kabbalistic symbol – the Shekinah or Shechinah, which is the last of the Kabbalistic Sefirot, and the female essence of the divine.
And these are just the most obvious clues.
Even though Waite published his Tarot deck, he did not elaborate on his interpretation of the cards. In this sense, Waite was a faithful follower of Golden Dawn, an order whose members were not expected to impart its substance and secrets outside of its private circle.
With Aleister Crowley, the opposite was true. One of the reasons he was expelled from the Order was his reckless distribution of manuscripts and artwork compiled and composed by members of the Order. Of the two, Crowley was the one who put a particular emphasis on Kabbalah.
As early as the introduction in his book, after detailing the Tarot structure (Major and Minor Arcana), Crowley asserts that this structure might appear “arbitrary, but it is not. It is necessitated, as will appear later, by the structure of the universe, and in particular of the Solar System, as symbolized by the Holy Qabalah. This will be explained in due course”.
Thus, in a single paragraph, Crowley explains how he understands the Kabbalah: the Sefirot symbolize the universe, and not the ten omnipotent powers or qualities of God, as they do in traditional Kabbalah. Crowley combines astrology and Kabbalah in his interpretation of the Tarot deck. And it seems that most of the cards refer to at least some aspect of Kabbalah – particularly one of the ten Sefirot. Many examples can be offered, but I’ll settle for the one that stood out most to me.
Crowley expounded on the deck he crafted in the book that accompanied the Thoth cards. His own interpretation of this card begins with:
The number Ten, Malkuth [kingship/kingdom], as always, represents the culmination of the unmitigated energy of the idea. It shows reason run mad, ramshackle riot of soulless mechanism; it represents the logic of lunatics and (for the most part) of philosophers. This is reason divorced from reality.
The hilts of the Swords occupy the positions of the Sephiroth, but the points One to Five and Seven to Nine touch and shatter the central Sword (six), which represents the Sun, the Heart, the child of Chokmah [the wisdom Sefirah] and Binah [understanding].
Frieda Harris, who designed Crowley’s deck of cards, claimed that the Tarot cards that originated in Egypt were lost. And so, the illustrator of the most peculiar and mysterious deck of Tarot provided the most peculiar and mysterious claim about their origin: she claimed that Jewish Kabbalists were responsible for redesigning the Tarot deck in the Middle Ages. The majority of advocates of the secret connection between Kabbalah and Tarot make a claim that is much more subtle: that medieval Tarot illustrators were influenced by the Kabbalah, which was itself based on ancient Egyptian wisdom, and that these influences were hidden among medieval images and personas such as the Emperor and the Pope.
Arthur Waite made another intriguing claim. He flat out rejected the idea that Tarot originated in ancient Egypt. By analyzing the two Arcana he understood that these were two disassociated decks that had been deliberately united in Europe. The inception of the Tarot cards, therefore, is an unsolvable enigma. Historical research into the origin of the Tarot seems to support this conclusion.
The Kabbalah in Support of Tarot
In this essay, I referred to the term Kabbalah, without expounding on its essence. It is important to emphasize that the two deck creators – Waite and Crowley – were influenced by the Christian interpretation of Kabbalah, rather than the Jewish Kabbalah. Christian Kabbalah, as this interpretation was termed, flourished in Europe as early as the 15th century, and its main objective was to promote Christian dogma while utilizing Jewish Kabbalistic symbols.
Despite their differences in approach, it was not the intention of the creators of the two most prominent modern decks of Tarot to endorse Christian dogma. Waite and Crowley both believed that applying Kabbalistic aspects would allow them to restore the original, natural religion that preceded Christianity, and thus bring forth a New Age in which man would knock the gods off of their divine perch, and fashion a new life for himself, in his own way, according to his own wishes.
Crowley, radical in everything he did, had asserted that he aimed to replace Christianity with a new-ancient religion revolving around the Egyptian deity Horus, and thus he felt he was permitted to alter the original pack as he saw fit. Arthur Waite negated the concept of Tarot’s Egyptian origins, and the deck he and Pamela Colman Smith illustrated remains the closest to the older Tarot decks. It is also currently the most prominent and accepted pack, and the one which the majority of new Tarot artists base their illustrations on.
The New Age concepts that the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn members promoted, later became the New Age that we are quite familiar with today. The New Age reverted its gaze from Egypt, and beginning in the 1860s, turned to the true Far East: India and China.
And what does academia have to say about the matter? Gershom Scholem, the founder of the modern academic study of Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism, utterly dismissed the Golden Dawn’s modern analysis of Kabbalah (this was a typical attitude of Scholem’s). Although he had some respect for Éliphas Lévi and his “erroneous but brilliant” analyses, he referred to Crowley as a “gaudy imposter” and determined that “it is pointless to waste words on Crowley’s ‘Kabbalistic’ writings and what he called “magic” in his books and his periodical ‘The Equinox’.” The scandalous notions and interpretations of Crowley and similar figures led Scholem to advocate for “a redemption of this forsaken field [the study of Kabbalah] by applying rigid rules of historical research. I am committed to this mission”.
But who was right? Does the tarot deck really have secret and possibly prophetic powers? Are these forces obtained from the Kabbalah? And is it possible for us to come to any conclusion? A fabulous way to circumvent the need for an unequivocal and clear conclusion was offered by the psychologist Carl Jung. Jung proposed to view Tarot as a direct path to our subconscious. A way to penetrate our deepest thoughts, to self-explore our place in the world and make sense of our own lives. I prefer this approach to the common mystical analysis. Because even if the cards do offer an answer to my question, isn't my conviction that the answer is true actually stemming from my inner self and subconscious?
Yep Carl Jung's and your take. He noted essentially the same regarding the I Ching, with which I'm much more familiar than the Tarot.
There is, for want of a better word, much magic, that which defies rational explanation, in the world. Observation and personal experience of such leaves me quite convinced.
None the less it's a mundane world, Reason and rationality gets us through day to day. We can depend on it. Usually.
Magic on the other hand, hhit sappens but my take is don't bet your life on such or try to take it to the bank. No harm in wearing a St. Christoper's medal but still look both ways when you cross the street.
Hum. I just tossed the coins & asked I Ching what it thought of this Tarot essay: Got hexagram 18 wherein the judgement notes; "What has been spoiled through Man's fault can be made good again through man's work." So! Keep on truckin' Chen!
Great research on a useful tool. Agree with Jung’s, and your, summary. I’m not a consistent user of tools. My challenge involves clearing my headspace so heart can breathe and spirit can explore.
But my sister is a reader, and she’s shown me how a perceptive, adept “reader” may present the cards in such a way that one is drawn deeply into a self-reflective state, and how this shows up in - and indeed, reflects- the world.
In that state both the cards and the seeker represent far more than mere imagery suggests… if that makes sense.
Cards and tools of this nature can mean nothing, or a great deal.
I’m glad to see you cut bravely through the advice of some respectable elders to stay away from “the occult,”to tamp your curiosity as if it were offensive to G-d or Divinity. After many decades of life I believe open-hearted curiosity and seeking is itself the path to, not everything there is to know in the inscrutable world - but exactly what we need to know to live this life abundantly and well (despite inevitable tragedy and sorrow).