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Explaining the Tarot: Two Italian Renaissance Essays on the Meaning of the Tarot Pack
The symbolism of Tarot cards has intrigued people for five centuries. In this volume, two Italian authors of the 16th century, one known, the other anonymous, interpret the meaning of the Tarot trumps and the suit cards from a variety of interesting perspectives. Drawing from philosophy, religion, poetry, contemporary science, and the rules of the game itself, while at the same time offering examples from history and current events, the authors describe a series of images that for them is more than a game. They find that the symbolism of the cards, and their order, offer moral lessons and a wholesome guide to the ultimate purpose of life, which is to seek God. Their two discourses on the symbolism of the Tarot cards, here edited and translated into English for the first time, are the earliest ever written, and offer a rare glimpse into the other side of the game of Tarot in its first centuries – the meanings people saw in the pictures on the cards.Two Italian authors of the 16th century interpret the symbolism of the tarot deck. These texts are translated here for the first time.Deux auteurs italiens du 16e siècle interprètent le symbolisme du jeu de tarot. Ces textes sont ici traduits en anglais pour la première fois.
- GenresTarot
72 pages, Paperback
First published March 31, 2010
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September 8, 2020
If you've heard that the original meanings of tarot cards have been lost to history, it's time to update that notion. These two essays from around 1560 don't agree on all points but give a strong sense that 1) there was agreement before history forgot, 2) the symbolism was familiar enough to be taken for granted (eg, chariot = luxury), 3) people cared about these images and continued debating rankings and nuances a century after inception (aside from references to debates, one of the authors ends his essay with a full page of hedging against the flame war he's anticipating), and 4) a lot of great detective work can still be done.
The second (anonymous) essay was completely unknown until the 1980s, when one hand-written copy was discovered. So immediately I ask myself if it's a forgery, which gets less and less likely as other copies surface in the archives of various libraries around Italy, France, and Germany. There are now 5 known copies, plus an old reference to a copy that was shipped to the American colonies. For a manuscript never published by a printer (all are written out by hand, by 5 different scribes), this essay seems to have made the rounds quite a bit. The other essay was published in a small run, but for centuries it was confused with the same guy's PhD thesis in law.
(I get a little kick out of the way these two obscure works are now printed, bound, and shipped on demand by Lulu.com, the only source for most people. Maybe this isn't so different from those hand-written copies.)
The similarly-themed book "Visconti Tarots: Extraordinary Examples of Renaissance Art" gives a fuller overview of early tarot history, tracing particular symbols often to Greece and Rome (eg, the lion in Strength was first the mythical Nemean lion fighting Heracles, then in later cards the Biblical lion in the tale of Samson and Delilah). But it's less scholarly. Fact shades into opinion and then outright whim, and there's a narrow band in the middle where you really aren't sure which is which. To rephrase slightly, each card analysis starts on one end, the definite, and finishes on the other, the superstitious, and in the middle you don't know how much is factual. And that's fine for the purpose—it's a book that accompanied a renovated historical facsimile deck—speculation and even mysticism are fair game for the audience. But reading some of the earliest writings on the subject with excellent footnotes, as in this book, is a different and more wonderful experience. It feels like being thrown into the middle of a conversation spanning the ages.
Example card: The Hermit. If you go way back, he seems to have embodied Time (as either Saturn of Bacchus), unambiguously. He even held an hourglass. Later he's this lonely figure with a walking stick, unexplained and mysterious beyond the card's title, the hourglass now a lit lantern hanging from his outstretched arm and hand. Then he takes on modern interpretations as a seeker of truth, or even an early stage of adulthood that's about independence and finding yourself. But in the middle of that drift, to both of these writers, he was quite clearly and specifically the epitome of Old Man, a combination of wisdom and decrepitude. Despite a number of differences between these two Italians who appear never to have communicated, in the local cultures of both, Old Man beats Fortune (today the Wheel of Fortune) and is beaten by the Traitor (today the Hanged Man), and right after him, by Death. Yet this is not in keeping with the standard deck today, in which The Hermit is a slightly lower card beaten by Wheel of Fortune. Interpretation: as the card's meaning drifted from Time/Saturn to Old Man to The Hermit (and modern spins like Wanderer), its rank in the game fell.
Another example: Both authors call the Magician the Innkeeper, though oddly they do also refer to street performers and deception. One relates the card to a folktale about two rival innkeepers, and says the (immediately preceding) Fool is the other innkeeper. That's curious. It isn't the only rule or interpretation in these two essays that appears nowhere else.
It's a unique feature of the game that it can show you how players valued concepts against each other. Every time, say, Temperance beats Death is an opportunity for a player to complain and say, that doesn't make sense, why would Temperance beat Death? Sure it's a wholesome Christian virtue (with self-control, you live better and maybe longer and go to Heaven), but not everyone will agree that Death is vanquished by virtue. Not only that, but the difference translates into who wins and who loses the game, and money can ride on the outcome. We're talking about hundreds of years of incentives to find the most agreeable answer. So if a dissenter can convince the other players, their group sets up new house rules. Early on, this was especially true, as most decks from the 1400s didn't include numbers. Players created their own rankings of the majors, or else used or adapted the ones they learned by observation and word of mouth, creating a variety of traditions. The hierarchy we have today is what survived best. It's similar but not identical to these circa-1560 variants. The book includes a handy diagram of two decks side by side, comparing how the two authors saw it in their respective cities.
If you read Italian, the original text is included. Though my Italian is very basic, the language hasn't changed all that much, and with a bit of effort I can figure out what every word means, using the facing translation to match things up. Reading through all the old Italian is not something I've done, but it was one goal I had in mind when I got the book, and I'm still excited about it. These essays are only about 10 pages each if you take away the introductions, translations, and notes, so it's very achievable.
Ultimately, tarot is a game of ideas and their interrelations, and the fact it's sparked so many discussions does not seem to be an accident. There's almost a Glass Bead Game aura, a feeling that everything in human experience could be put in a snow globe, abstracted down to a game with a finite vocabulary of, essentially, hieroglyphics. It's widely supposed, for a number of compelling reasons, that the game was invented by Marziano da Tortona sometime around 1420, in an essay that still exists (arguably the earliest recorded game design document, albeit for a game that is not yet tarot), and which is also well worth the read. (A translation by two of the three people who put together this little book is also available order-print-bind-ship from Lulu, and seeing the high quality of the text, I know what's next on my tarot list, even though I've read the document online. See a review at: https://tarot-heritage.com/2019/08/26....) Marziano was a tutor to the Duke of Milan and later his advisor, and he was preoccupied with ethics and representation in the game he created, a trend that has never entirely left the deck.
After this pair of essays, both the mystically-oriented tarot decks and actual games of tarot tell a more coherent story (or really set of stories), and the two (sets) even connect better with each other.
The second (anonymous) essay was completely unknown until the 1980s, when one hand-written copy was discovered. So immediately I ask myself if it's a forgery, which gets less and less likely as other copies surface in the archives of various libraries around Italy, France, and Germany. There are now 5 known copies, plus an old reference to a copy that was shipped to the American colonies. For a manuscript never published by a printer (all are written out by hand, by 5 different scribes), this essay seems to have made the rounds quite a bit. The other essay was published in a small run, but for centuries it was confused with the same guy's PhD thesis in law.
(I get a little kick out of the way these two obscure works are now printed, bound, and shipped on demand by Lulu.com, the only source for most people. Maybe this isn't so different from those hand-written copies.)
The similarly-themed book "Visconti Tarots: Extraordinary Examples of Renaissance Art" gives a fuller overview of early tarot history, tracing particular symbols often to Greece and Rome (eg, the lion in Strength was first the mythical Nemean lion fighting Heracles, then in later cards the Biblical lion in the tale of Samson and Delilah). But it's less scholarly. Fact shades into opinion and then outright whim, and there's a narrow band in the middle where you really aren't sure which is which. To rephrase slightly, each card analysis starts on one end, the definite, and finishes on the other, the superstitious, and in the middle you don't know how much is factual. And that's fine for the purpose—it's a book that accompanied a renovated historical facsimile deck—speculation and even mysticism are fair game for the audience. But reading some of the earliest writings on the subject with excellent footnotes, as in this book, is a different and more wonderful experience. It feels like being thrown into the middle of a conversation spanning the ages.
Example card: The Hermit. If you go way back, he seems to have embodied Time (as either Saturn of Bacchus), unambiguously. He even held an hourglass. Later he's this lonely figure with a walking stick, unexplained and mysterious beyond the card's title, the hourglass now a lit lantern hanging from his outstretched arm and hand. Then he takes on modern interpretations as a seeker of truth, or even an early stage of adulthood that's about independence and finding yourself. But in the middle of that drift, to both of these writers, he was quite clearly and specifically the epitome of Old Man, a combination of wisdom and decrepitude. Despite a number of differences between these two Italians who appear never to have communicated, in the local cultures of both, Old Man beats Fortune (today the Wheel of Fortune) and is beaten by the Traitor (today the Hanged Man), and right after him, by Death. Yet this is not in keeping with the standard deck today, in which The Hermit is a slightly lower card beaten by Wheel of Fortune. Interpretation: as the card's meaning drifted from Time/Saturn to Old Man to The Hermit (and modern spins like Wanderer), its rank in the game fell.
Another example: Both authors call the Magician the Innkeeper, though oddly they do also refer to street performers and deception. One relates the card to a folktale about two rival innkeepers, and says the (immediately preceding) Fool is the other innkeeper. That's curious. It isn't the only rule or interpretation in these two essays that appears nowhere else.
It's a unique feature of the game that it can show you how players valued concepts against each other. Every time, say, Temperance beats Death is an opportunity for a player to complain and say, that doesn't make sense, why would Temperance beat Death? Sure it's a wholesome Christian virtue (with self-control, you live better and maybe longer and go to Heaven), but not everyone will agree that Death is vanquished by virtue. Not only that, but the difference translates into who wins and who loses the game, and money can ride on the outcome. We're talking about hundreds of years of incentives to find the most agreeable answer. So if a dissenter can convince the other players, their group sets up new house rules. Early on, this was especially true, as most decks from the 1400s didn't include numbers. Players created their own rankings of the majors, or else used or adapted the ones they learned by observation and word of mouth, creating a variety of traditions. The hierarchy we have today is what survived best. It's similar but not identical to these circa-1560 variants. The book includes a handy diagram of two decks side by side, comparing how the two authors saw it in their respective cities.
If you read Italian, the original text is included. Though my Italian is very basic, the language hasn't changed all that much, and with a bit of effort I can figure out what every word means, using the facing translation to match things up. Reading through all the old Italian is not something I've done, but it was one goal I had in mind when I got the book, and I'm still excited about it. These essays are only about 10 pages each if you take away the introductions, translations, and notes, so it's very achievable.
Ultimately, tarot is a game of ideas and their interrelations, and the fact it's sparked so many discussions does not seem to be an accident. There's almost a Glass Bead Game aura, a feeling that everything in human experience could be put in a snow globe, abstracted down to a game with a finite vocabulary of, essentially, hieroglyphics. It's widely supposed, for a number of compelling reasons, that the game was invented by Marziano da Tortona sometime around 1420, in an essay that still exists (arguably the earliest recorded game design document, albeit for a game that is not yet tarot), and which is also well worth the read. (A translation by two of the three people who put together this little book is also available order-print-bind-ship from Lulu, and seeing the high quality of the text, I know what's next on my tarot list, even though I've read the document online. See a review at: https://tarot-heritage.com/2019/08/26....) Marziano was a tutor to the Duke of Milan and later his advisor, and he was preoccupied with ethics and representation in the game he created, a trend that has never entirely left the deck.
After this pair of essays, both the mystically-oriented tarot decks and actual games of tarot tell a more coherent story (or really set of stories), and the two (sets) even connect better with each other.
July 5, 2010
An invaluable resource; two extremely early (16th century) treatises on the symbolic values of the Tarot, completely independent of one another. The first, by Francesco Piscina, is especially strong on the trumps, while the second, by an anonymous author, really shines in the discussion of the suits.
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