As the train hurtles along, the art critic sniffs scornfully at the idea that tarot cards can tell your future. But he lets Dr Terror lay out his pack anyway, as does everyone else in the compartment. And, one by one, they are all dealt the same final card. It is Death.
This chilling scene, from the 1965 film Dr Terror’s House of Horrors, is fairly standard tarot fare. Many people use the cards to tell the future, or to meditate and find mindfulness. In any occult shop, you’ll find a huge selection of decks. Just in time for Christmas, traditionally a great time for card games, a famous pack – created in 1910 by Arthur Waite and Pamela Colman Smith – is being reissued by Taschen, complete with Waite’s booklet explaining the supposed mystic roots of tarot and what the symbols all mean: “Death: End, mortality, destruction, corruption. Reversed: Inertia, sleep, lethargy.”
Theirs, says the wording on the front of the box, is “the world’s most popular tarot”. Artist Colman Smith translated Waite’s occult ideas into lucid images. Her deck, the first set of tarot cards explicitly designed for esoteric use, had a huge influence on today’s occult conceptions.
Yet this belief in tarot as a revealer of hidden truths is not the survival of some ancient tradition. It’s a modern idea grafted on to something that was originally intended as a bit of fun. Tarot was a card game played in a fairly recognisable way, with the players laying down a card to compete for the highest value in a series of tricks – but with 20 or so ornate picture cards, depending on the set, to complicate the scoring. These were so beautifully crafted, so visually splendid, that their designs now obsess and befuddle people centuries after it was first played by Renaissance courtiers. But tarot is no more mysterious in its origins than Happy Families. There is one crucial difference, though: it is the most artistically ambitious card game ever created – and that has given it this strange esoteric afterlife.
The world’s oldest surviving tarot decks come from 15th-century Italy. They were commissioned by wealthy rulers who stipulated what they wanted, often adding in different picture cards, which they called “triumphs”. Today, these are known to occultists as the Major Arcana. One lost set, known only from a descriptive booklet, featured the pagan gods. The oldest pack that still (partially) exists – the Cary-Yale deck, created for Filippo Maria Visconti, duke of Milan – mixes images that are still in today’s tarot, such as Death and The Lovers, with unique cards representing Faith, Hope and Charity.
There’s no doubting the appeal of these sumptuous hand-painted artworks. Italo Calvino used one of the Milanese sets in his novel The Castle of Crossed Destinies: a group of strangers find themselves in a castle where they are robbed of the power of speech. To tell their stories, they must use the Renaissance cards. It’s a tribute to these almost 600-year-old artworks that Calvino can use them to sum up the essence of world literature. A youth, for example, discovers by his choice of cards that he is Hamlet (it’s a complicated novel).
Another striking aspect of the Cary-Yale Visconti pack is the powerful representation of women. Its painted characters include a female Knight of Swords, mounted on horseback in a gold-flecked dress, holding her weapon aloft, accompanied by her female page. In fact, all four suits represent strong women. This is typical of the chivalric culture of Italian Renaissance courts that also inspired court poet Ariosto to include a female knight, Bradamante, in his epic poem Orlando Furioso, centuries ahead of Game of Thrones.
This chivalric imagery takes us to the roots of tarot – as a game played by courtiers in between jousts and pageants. At court, men and women interacted in all kinds of entertainments. Women playing with these cards would probably have wanted to see themselves represented. In another picture card from the same pack, representing Strength, a woman effortlessly subdues a lion, holding its jaws open with her bare hands.
Symbolism was valued at the court of Milan for its own sake, as a kind of game, and this can be seen in the heraldic devices and mysterious emblems with which Leonardo da Vinci filled his notebooks when he was employed there. Tarot too was a game not a mystical practice. Magic was hugely popular in the Renaissance yet it used talismans, cabbala and necromancy – not cards. Curiously, all the Devil cards, assuming they existed, from early tarot packs appear to have been stolen and destroyed.
Card games, which probably originated in China, first reached Europe in the 1300s. Tarot was one of the first European examples, a trick-taking game with a high number of trumps. Renaissance tarot decks are experiments in play, and in expense, as they aim for the most lavish elaboration and tantalising imagery. Yet beneath their mystique, there are four suits of numbered cards – cups, coins, staves and swords. The suits we’re more familiar with – diamonds, clubs, spades and hearts – were invented in Renaissance France and took off all over Europe because they were easier to reproduce. They reached Italy by the 1590s, to judge from Caravaggio’s painting The Cardsharps in which a cheat appears to have the four of clubs and seven of hearts hidden behind his back.
The game of tarot, with all its weird trumps, didn’t disappear. Instead it was democratised. The Marseilles Tarot, which originates in 17th-century southern France, replaces the exquisiteness of early Renaissance decks with cruder, bolder images designed to be printed. Yet these stark picture cards, with strong black lines often filled in with primary colours, have their own artistic power: it’s the Marseilles Death card that Dr Terror keeps turning over.
As this card game became more antiquated and obscure, however, it started to be understood in a new way. With the rise of the Gothic novel at the end of the 18th century, and a new relishing of the supernatural, the primitive old images of the Marseilles Tarot were endowed with unearthly force. Occultists have dabbled in tarot ever since – and lost sight of its history.
The controversial magician Aleister Crowley believed tarot originated in the ancient Egyptian Book of Thoth. Waite, co-creator of this reissued deck, was himself a renowned occultist in the Crowley league, but he saw the tarot as pan-mythological, or at least as far as I can glean. These cards, in a style reminiscent of Edwardian book illustrations, reinvent the tarot pack to stress the occult, and include a new suit of Pentacles, a common symbol in magic. A pentacle has also been added to the grimacing Devil, right between his curved horns, as he looms over two naked satanists. Although sweetly coloured, the Waite-Colman Smith cards evoke a slightly sinister world of early 1900s magic, all candles and incantations in country houses.
The story of tarot is an inversion of how we imagine history. We assume we are more rational than our benighted ancestors, but in this case a card game once played purely for fun has been reinvented in modern times as a tool of fortune-telling and spiritual self-discovery.
And all that hocus-pocus has inspired modern artists. Salvador Dalí did a tarot, naturally. His entertaining mixture of art nouveau lushness and pop art wit includes a portrait of himself as The Magician. The surrealist movement celebrated the unconscious and irrational and – although Dali was seen as a traitor to it – his tarot is the most authentically surrealist of his late works. The French artist Niki de Saint Phalle set out to do it bigger and better: her Tarot Garden in Tuscany renders the tarots as giant multicoloured sculptures, inviting you to wander in their labyrinth of signs and read your fortune as you go.
There may be no connection between the modern mysticism of tarot and its origins as an artistically beautiful game – except one. Death has always been there. In the oldest Visconti pack, it is painted as a skeletal, wasted corpse who triumphs over a heap of victims including bishops: a classic late medieval depiction of death’s victory over all social classes and varieties of people. At the core of tarot, under its modern accretions of fantasy, here’s a real connection with the weirdness of old Europe when death was everywhere.
The Death card makes playing tarot perfect Christmas fun, with its frisson of midwinter ghost story. Just don’t play it on a train with a dealer called Dr Terror, whose entire pack seems to be comprised of Death cards.
The Tarot of AE Waite and P Colman Smith is published by Taschen on 22 December. Dalí: Tarot is also published by Taschen.
