Table of Contents Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter 1 - THE HISTORY OF THE TAROT Chapter 2 - THE MYTHICAL HISTORY OF THE TAROT Chapter 3 - THE SEARCH FOR MEANING Chapter 4 - INTERPRETING THE MAJOR AND MINOR ARCANA Chapter 5 - THE WAITE-SMITH TAROT Chapter 6 - HIEROGLYPHS FROM THE SOUL NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX ABOUT THE AUTHOR JEREMY P. TARCHER/PENGUIN Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), Cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Copyright © 2005 by Robert M. Place All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada Most Tarcher/Penguin books are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchase for sales promotions, premiums, fund-raising, and educational needs. Special books or book excerpts also can be created to fit specific needs. For details, write Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Special Markets, 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Place, Robert Michael. The tarot : history, symbolism, and divination / Robert M. Place. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. eISBN : 978-1-440-64975-2 1. Tarot. I. Title. BF1879.T2P 133.3’2424—dc22 http://us.penguingroup.com THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO CORMAC AND TADHG. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank my editor, Mitch Horowitz, for his enthusiasm and encouragement on this project. I want to thank historian Ronald Decker for his assistance and for answering my inquiries, and historians Michael Dummett, Robert O’Neill, and Tom Tadfor Little for also answering my inquiries and providing leads. I want to thank William M. Voelkle for making a copy of de Gébelin’s text for me. I wish to thank Grazia Mirti for providing me with a copy of Fanti’s Triompho di Fortuna. I also want to thank my wife, Rose Ann, for her encouragement and assistance. And thank you to Arthur Edward Waite for sending me the Tarot in a dream. INTRODUCTION It will be thought that I am acting strangely in concerning myself at this day with what appears at first sight and simply a well-known method of fortune-telling. —A. E. WAITE, FROM HIS PREFACE TO THE PICTORIAL KEY TO THE TAROT, 1910 I have been interested in the Tarot and other esoteric subjects since I was studying art in the late 1960s. My girlfriend at that time read the cards. She used the deck that was then called the Rider Waite deck but is now commonly referred to by Tarot scholars as the Waite-Smith deck. With its colorful archetypal images, this early twentieth-century deck is what will come to mind for most people when they think of Tarot. At that time, I even began to create my own hand-drawn deck based on the Tarot of Marseilles, the traditional French deck that developed in the seventeenth century, but I finished only four cards before I lost interest in the project. Although as an artist I have always been involved in symbolism in my work, I was not directly engaged with the Tarot for many years after that. When I did become reacquainted with the Tarot, I did not actually choose so in a conscious way. It started with a dream in the summer of 1982, a dream that startled me with its clarity and intensity. I was dreaming that I was following someone through a red brick building. Then I dreamed that a phone rang, interrupting the events of the first dream in the same way that a phone call can interrupt one’s thoughts during the day. The sound of the phone startled me into lucidity and intensified the events in the dream in a way that made them impossible to forget. I remember thinking, How can someone call you in a dream? I didn’t know that could happen. Even in the dream it was clear that this message came from a place distant from my normal consciousness. The phone was the perfect symbol for this. I picked up the dream phone and on the other end I found an international operator, who informed me that she had a person-to-