Paul Huson - Dame Fortunes Wheel Tarot: A Pictorial Key

First Published 2017

Published in 2016 by The Witches' Almanac LTD.
P.O. Box 1292
Newport, RI 02840-9998

Text and Tarot card art 2017 Paul Huson

Illustrations, Layout and Design 2017 The Witches' Almanac, LTD.

Address all inquiries and information to
The Witches' Almanac, ltd.
P.O. Box 1292
Newport, RI 02840-9998

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. Printed in South Korea.

13-ISBN: 9781-88-109842-3

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W hen you pick up a deck of traditional Tarot Cards you enter history. Although historians now know that the Tarot was invented purely as a card game, the cards have over the centuries acquired an aura of legendry and magic, and indeed over the course of time become a popular tool for divination and personal introspection. For some very odd reason, when approached with serious intent they seem to have the ability to provide answers to questions put to them with an eerie intelligence. What then is the history of these mysterious cards? We still know very little, but what we do know is worth recounting.

By the end of the Middle Ages, inspired by imported exotic decks of Middle Eastern cards known as nabi from Mamlk-ruled Egypt, playing cards had made their appearance in Europe. In 1376 we have the first documented notification of their use in trick-taking gambling games. Writing a year later, a Swiss Dominican monk named Johannes of Rheinfelden notes that even humble, household things can be used as sources of wisdom and moral instruction, and among such things he includes the newly invented decks of cards. These, Brother Johannes claimed, could be used as an instrument for understanding anything in the world.

By the mid-1400s Italian versions of these decks more often than not contained 56 cards, each deck composed of four different sets or suits of fourteen cards. Each suit consisted of ten cards displaying from one to ten suit signs, and four further court cards displaying a picture of a Knave or Page, a Knight, a Queen and a King. The pictorial signs used to distinguish these four suits were Batons, Swords, Cups and Coins. In France, to make for easier reproduction by stencil, these signs were later replaced by the emblems we know today as Diamonds, Spades, Hearts and Clubs.

About the same time they changed the signs, French card makers also began bestowing names drawn from popular medieval legends on their court cards. Many of these names were taken from the Bible and the Aeneid of Virgil, books from which passages were often drawn as random oracles, a practice known as sortilege or bibliomancy. Arthurian knights from the Matter of Britain appeared in the cards too, as did characters from the Charlemagne legends comprising the Matter of France.

Italian card makers meanwhile had not been idle and had now begun adding a fifth suit of 22 allegorical picture cards known as triumphs or trumps to their standard 56 card decks. These trumps were cards that could take or triumph over any suit card in the deck, thereby taking the trick. The new, large, 78 card decks became known in Italy as Tarocchi, in France as Tarots.

The order and names of the 22 trumps have varied over the ages, but relatively insignificantly. Whoever entitled them, like the French namer or namers of the court cards, appears to have turned to the imagery of popular medieval romance and drama for inspiration, a common stock of allegories, in effect the pop entertainment of the time. Characters from the morality play known as The Dance of Death appear side by side with episodes from liturgical dramas typical of the late middle ages, as well as characters from tales told by Petrarch, Boccaccio and the influential Roman Neoplatonic philosopher Anicius Boethius.

The most important clue to the original meanings ascribed to the trumps however, may lie in the fact that the earliest examples we possess are not numbered. As trionfi, triumphs, an unnumbered hierarchical order would therefore presumably have to have been embodied in their imagery alone. Arguably, for purposes of the trick-taking game, each successive trump in the sequence would have to be recognizably dominant over its predecessor. If this were the case, whoever designed the sequence did it in such a way that the regular gambling card player of the early 15th century would have no difficulty in perceiving this order of precedence. Giovanni Francesco Piscina, a Piedmontese judge writing in 1565, informs us that the lower cards are subject to the higher, indicating that everything below the card representing Fortune, for instance, is subject to her insolence, and that the trump sequence itself represents a gradual ascent from terrestrial matters to celestial, including the world of religion, with the last trump card representing the Celestial Paradise, the highest estate to which humanity can aspire.

Nevertheless, by the 1500s Tarot trumps began to carry numbers from zero to twenty-one, possibly for the convenience of players new to the game or simply because the allegorical order of precedence of the trump images was becoming hazy. By the 1600s, they were also being printed with the following names: 0The Fool; IThe Juggler; IIThe Female Pope; IIIThe Empress; IVThe Emperor; VThe Pope; VILove or The Lovers; VIIThe Chariot or Fame; VIIIJustice; IXThe Hermit; XThe Wheel of Fortune; XIFortitude; XIIThe Hanged Man; XIIIDeath; XIVTemperance, XVThe Devil, XVIThe Tower, XVIIThe Star, XVIIIThe Moon, XIXThe Sun; XXJudgment; XXIThe World. During the 1800s, when Tarot cards began to receive close study by occultists, the 22 trumps were dubbed the Major Arcana and the 56 suit cards the Minor Arcana, meaning Greater and Lesser Secrets respectively.

A lthough playing cards originally appear to have been created in Europe for gambling purposes, there is plenty of evidence, as may be seen in records of the Spanish Inquisition and in De Rerum Praenotione, a text written by Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola who lived between 1469 and 1533, that from at least the the late 15th century onward they were also being used for folk magic and fortune-telling. Sophisticated methods of Tarot reading, however, only appear in print in the late 1700s, in the writings of a Parisian fortune teller, Jean-Baptiste Alliette or Etteilla as he preferred to be known professionally. Etteilla claimed he had originally been taught to read Tarot cards in 1757 by three itinerant fortune-tellers including an Italian from Piedmont, but had elaborated on his tutors' methods, which he considered primitive and akin to bibliomantic sortilegea perceptive observation as it happens and probably closer to the truth than he realized.

Etteilla's contribution to the art of Tarot card reading cannot be overstated. The traditional divinatory interpretations that he and his pupils recorded for each of the suit cards provided the basis of much of the card reading lore that was later incorporated into the Order of the Golden Dawn and other occult organizations.

Following the custom set by 19th century fortune-telling decks, every card of Dame Fortune's Wheel Tarot, including all the cards of the Minor Arcana, has been illustrated to aid the card-reader. The interpretations of the suit cards follow for the most part Etteilla's traditional interpretations, which may strike some as quaint today, but they are the genuine article. The cards are illustrated with imagery drawn from medieval and early Renaissance sources, and the court cards follow the French tradition and appear as characters drawn from medieval romance. The designs of the Major Arcana cards, however, follow fairly closely those of a variety of historically important Tarot decks ranging in origin from 15th century Italy to 17th century France.