Still working on a concept for the Creative Tarot: I’m looking at the Tarot de Marseille and the Visconti-Sforza Tarot, musing about the meanings and possible personifications of the Major Arcana – and arrive at a simple and rather groundbreking idea.
The Spirits I Summoned
»Oh yes, from yesterday, right?«, said the DHL man when I opened the reception door for him, full of anticipation. All was forgiven until I unpacked at home and wished this package had never arrived. My head is bursting.
The Bateleur is not the Fool, but the Magician. Who is sometimes a juggler, a trickster, an entertainer himself. That’s how I had noted it somewhere before. He is led by the Fool (in the Tarot de Marseille (Hadar, n.d.), Le Fol; in the Bateleur book (Godde, 2022), Le Mat; in the other book in English (Morsucci, 2018), simply as usual The Fool) to the individual stations and talks to the figures, who then also explain the corresponding Minor Arcana to him. In French. I flipped through and read a bit – and honestly don’t think it’s worth the effort. It’s not a real story. The Bateleur is simply dragged from one station to the next (or goes through a door, climbs up or down), and the Arcana explain themselves at great length, a dialogue with questionable punctuation over several pages, then they move on. So, ultimately, it’s just an explanatory book. But I do like that the Minor Arcana are logically placed with the Majors here. (Godde, 2022)
The Tarot de Marseille itself is tough stuff. I like the illustrations, which are so much simpler, more basic than the later ones. But the colours are killing me. It’s like the local carnival here in Mainz; the Bateleur strongly resembles a Swiss Guard. The labelling is archaic(?) or at least alternative; instead of Bateleur, it says Basteleur; instead of L’Étoile (the Star), L’Estoille. And, even more irritatingly, the Roman numerals count up to four; the 4 is thus IIII – I learned that you only count up to three and the four is written as a five with a preceding (i.e., subtracted) one: IV. So the 19 is not the (familiar to me) XIX, but XVIIII. It’s not like learning a new language; it’s like learning four new languages at the same time.
……. that’s from Goethe’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice.
It’s interesting that the Fool in the Tarot de Marseille has no number at all. This corresponds to the interpretations I know, that the Fool can belong pretty much anywhere. It is his journey, after all. High Priestess and High Priest are called La Papesse and Le Pape, the female pope and the pope – more on that in a moment. The Lovers is L’Amoureux. The card doesn’t show a couple in love, but a man who has to choose between two women. Death has no name, the card bears the ominous number XIII and shows a walking skeleton and various human body parts. The Tower is called La Maison Dieu – the House of God? (Hadar, n.d.)
The second book (in English) that I had ordered on the Tarot de Marseille is more conventional, also writes a bit about numbers and Pythagoras, and on that basis also divides the Major Arcana into three times seven. And it’s full of spelling mistakes. (Morsucci & Aloi, 2018)
In the accompanying book to the Visconti-Sforza Tarot, the Italian translations are also mentioned, from Il Matto – I can now deduce that from the French – to Il Mondo. Here, too, we have a female pope and a pope, the Lovers are called L’Amore (love, as far as I know), the Chariot is the Triumphal Chariot (with a woman sitting on it), the Hermit is Il Tempo (Time – not the tissue) and holds an hourglass, the Hanged Man is Il Traditore, according to the accompanying book the Traitor, the Tower is La Casa del Diavolo, the House of the Devil, the Judgment is L’Angelo, the Angel. (Packard, 2022, pp. 48, 91, 52, 59, 60, 62, 63, 66, 67, 72, 80, 88) (Sources work now).
Excellent, even my extremely modest Italian skills are good for something; who would have thought?
I don’t want to make exact comparisons and studies; that is not the goal of this thesis, and I already have a headache. I find the female pope particularly exciting, who in the Marseille is most likely and in the Visconti-Sforza definitely wearing a tiara. The accompanying book states that the depiction is possibly of Sister Manfreda, a woman from the Visconti clan who was appointed female pope by her sect. (Packard, 2022, pp. 52, 53) I’ve read elsewhere before that it is supposed to be Pope Joan, whom we know from the novel by Donna What’s-her-name and the later, mediocre film adaptation. Joan is said to have been born in Ingelheim, which is twenty minutes from here, about halfway to Mainz with its blue-red-yellow carnival madness.
Conclusion: I am hardly any wiser than before, and I can’t get rid of the spirits I have summoned. If I were to give all this material and the new questions that arise from it the attention they deserve, the project would balloon into a dissertation.
HOARDER!!!
Ransom Note Style
In the meantime, I’m continuing to work on my Fool’s Tale and brooding over the card names and number themes. I’m not finished yet and can now look into the new books for detailed questions. But I’m already quite satisfied.
What has always bothered me about the tarot is that some Major Arcana are people or personifications, and others are simply concepts, virtues, or natural phenomena – but still depict people or personifications. That doesn’t make any sense! Did they simply shy away from calling Justice Justitia (the Roman Goddess)? I don’t know. But I always found it inconsistent. Now more than ever. Until this morning, I thought I couldn’t do it any better, meaning I couldn’t assign a good personification to every card that doesn’t immediately conjure up the entire Greek pantheon or whatever other world of gods. But this morning, I read on Alexa Szeli’s website on Crowley’s Adjustment (that’s Justice with Rider-Waite-Smith) that Crowley himself called her the Harlequin, with Szeli referencing the Fool (Crowley 2019, according to Szeli, n.d. (a)).
Breakthrough. The Harlequin is also a fool, a clown, and for me, the strangest of them all. I immediately have a mysterious figure in mind, half in black, half in white. My best kindergarten friend had that as a carnival costume. Opposites that couldn’t be more extreme. And the foolish Harlequin unites them. Adjustment. Justice.
If I choose this path for my deck, I am definitely and without a doubt far enough away from the traditional decks (and their questionable meanings and interpretations). But I’m also not going down the track that a thousand others before me have chosen and simply redesigning the tarot with a new theme (let’s say the Odyssey tarot full of Greek gods). And I manage to personify all the cards. Except for the last one, the Completion (of the masterpiece). Because that would take a very spooky turn towards Pygmalion and Dorian Gray.
So now I have twenty characters. The Fool sets out and meets them all. In the current version, he himself appears as a character in each act, at his respective new stage of being. I don’t know yet if I will leave it like that, because it kind of blurs the story again. What is crucial at this point, however, is that the twenty-one characters in total (i.e., all cards except the World/Completion) come from different worlds and actually exist on completely different planes. We have a King and a Queen; real historical figures and also classic fairytale and theatre characters. We have the Nixie, the mythical Lorelei on her rock, not unlike the Sirens from the Odyssey. We have the Magician, the Angel, the Ferryman, the Faun …
Tatort vs. Lord of the Rings
It can be criticised that the whole thing is very European and very reminiscent of the classical antique. I already wanted to call the Hermit Buddha, and with the Angel, Aladdin and his magic lamp also came to mind. I was able to stop myself. My background is European, I grew up with the fairytales of the Brothers Grimm, and I studied archaeology for a while (in Mainz, Helau), and it’s okay if my tarot moves within my cultural sphere. Buddha, as much as I like him and consider myself a Buddhist, is in our cultural sphere mostly just a trend and decoration at a Thai massage place. And the genie from the lamp? Well, he’s also just the Arabian Nights equivalent of the good fairy. Or rather, the spirit that Goethe’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice summoned?
The beauty of this absurd compilation is that it is absurd. The Fool’s journey, the Major Arcana, are a completely different world. I believe it is often easier for us to learn lessons and to understand and question things the further they are from our actual reality. Fantasy worlds give us permission to dream, to believe in dragons, to briefly remove ourselves from our own everyday lives. Let’s take two examples. A random Tatort episode (that’s a down-to-earth german crime series), whose locations really exist and whom we may even have visited, and whose story could in principle happen exactly like that here in the present. And something more fantastical, let’s say Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. In the Shire, we see (and feel?) a harmony that even the most charming Tatort cannot radiate. Frodo is more naive and innocent than any child in this country. He has to muster a courage for his mission that can hardly be represented in the »real world« without causing depression or reopening ugly wounds. What would be the equivalent of his departure from the Shire, to the Elves and into the land of Mordor? What would the Ring be?
Frodo leaves the nice new housing development in the suburbs, crosses the darkest streets of the city at night, where he is robbed and mugged, saves himself in a brightly lit shopping mall where high society strolls, and finally moves into some crisis area to sink the crown jewels? It doesn’t make sense. This Ring does not exist. Neither does the wisdom and purity of the Elves. They are symbols, and such symbols help us to understand, to grasp. Otherwise, all the fairytales, whether in the collections of the Brothers Grimm or from Arabian Nights, would not exist. And neither would Odysseus and the Monomyth and Batman. We need our heroes and villains and dragon slayers!
We need our heroes and villains and dragon slayers!
Maybe I’ll do some more research here to organise my thoughts and formulate all this a little more well-founded. But my decision has been made anyway. The whole process up to this point has shown me what has stuck in my memory from the last 38 years, and the conclusion is: The more absurd, the better. And I should perhaps mention at this point that, compared to the average person, I watch little television, movies, and series. I have a few DVDs and the media libraries of ARD and ZDF (the boring public german broadcasting networks). No Prime, no Netflix, no regular television. And fantasy is actually not my thing at all. Except for Game of Thrones. At least that’s what I thought until now. On the other hand, I am a bookworm and mainly read crime novels and thrillers, creepy stuff that takes place in reality. Every now and then I like something historical, occasionally a schmaltzy novel about family secrets. All very real, completely free of wizards.
However, when I muse about the Emperor, (luckily) no presidents or the like come to mind, but a king on his throne, complete with an ermine cloak and golden crown. With the Hermit, I only think of the rock hermitage near my home in the third step. First, a wise man on a mountaintop comes to mind, whom you have to seek out to share in his wisdom and become his apprentice. The old man from whom Uma Thurman gets trained in Kill Bill, maybe. Or Saint Patrick meditating on his mountain. And with the word Hero, I don’t think of all the everyday heroes who save lives and prevent catastrophes. I think of someone with a considerable biceps who bathes in dragon’s blood. Hot!
Images. Stories. That’s probably how the subconscious works.
And the librarian in my head has, in the last few days, half-consciously and half-unconsciously, rummaged through all these images and stories and clumsily cut out sections, letters, symbols, and little pictures and glued them together. It looks like a ransom note, but it’s the journey of my Fool.
BORING.
Elementary School Math
I had planned to write less. The other day, someone wrote in the thesis WhatsApp group* that they were almost at the end of their bachelor’s thesis and now wanted to start the documentation but didn’t know what to write. Someone else agreed. My documentation is already over 100,000 characters long – and I haven’t even started on the development, the »real« creative work. Something here is going terribly wrong …
But … I can’t document my research, my approaches, and how I came up with them without going into great detail here. And the research itself, flipping through books and browsing the internet, ultimately makes up only a small part of my current work. The leaps happen in my head. And if I don’t capture them, no one (not even myself) can understand later where it all came from. It could also have been stolen from somewhere. Attempted plagiarism, failed. So I’m taking notes. I can always shorten it later.
In the meantime, I have checked the Minor Arcana. The logic is something like this: something happens in the Fool’s Tale that, in a figurative sense, can also happen in real life. Let’s take the VIII, the Harlequin, with whom I always struggle. I have defined what happens there as »Harmony emerges from chaos.« Now, all four elements are asked the same question (which varies with the numbers). In the case of the 8, it is »How do you achieve this?«. The Wands answer: »It just happened. Magic?«
The theme of the card (the card themes were already pretty much set and are being reviewed in this process) is, accordingly, Serendipity. Destiny or chance would also have worked, but for the fiery Wands, it’s Serendipity. Being in the right place at the right time – or something. The Cups answer: »I let go, I let it flow.« and the card is called Letting Go. Harmony from chaos does not arise from frantic effort but rather from letting things take their course. They just fall into place. Like water. The river finds its bed and flows to the sea. Always. The Swords exclaim: »Now everything makes sense!« – a eureka moment, the card is called Clarity. Thinking, researching, gaining distance, and at some point, usually in the shower, you have a bright moment, a light bulb goes on, and suddenly everything fits. The Pentacles answer: »I’m working on it. Perfecting it.« and the card is called Project. You also have to do something for harmony to emerge from chaos. The proof of this is every dirty sock that has ever landed on the floor.
Any of these can be a solution. Nothing fits all the time. And none of the answers, if we look at them strictly, are really a solution. Sticking with something without a mind and/or heart leads to misfortune and is far from perfection. The Sword-insight itself is useless if it is not further processed, shared, or transferred into reality. Letting go, without reason and action, does not lead to the goal. And neither does serendipity; because without initiative or prior thought, you wouldn’t have been in the right place at the right time in the first place.
In this way, all the themes and concepts collected so far have been tried and tested and partially adjusted. Always with the meanings of the corresponding tarot cards in mind – and I think this deck is already more coherent than anything else I have ever held in my hand. I have tried to stick to the elements and the numbers. With the latter, Reading and Understanding the Marseille Tarot unexpectedly helped me. It contains illustrations that strongly remind me of the module Principles of Design: Seeing and Understanding from my studies. 1: a dot. Unity, perfection. 2: a line, two-dimensional, direction. 3: a triangle, the first surface, shape. 4: a solid body, something tangible … or something like that. (Morsucci & Aloi, 2018, pp. 28, 29; 33-41)
This could also be an exciting idea for the graphical implementation. At least it’s better than writing everything in ransom note style.**
What if we take the Woo-woo out of tarot?
It is understandable that people have attributed all sorts of meanings to the tarot and have compared it with all sorts of other systems. I am doing just the same when I’m rummaging in the Odyssey. We humans need systems to understand, to grasp, to organize and to classify. But if we take away all the mystical, supernatural, questionable, occult, magical, and untenable things from the tarot (what a simple and yet groundbreaking thought …), then, firstly, the elements remain, whose existence no one would want to doubt, and secondly, the numbers, which also work without numerology. One plus one is two. Three dots make a triangle. A table and a horse with four legs are stable. Seven is a prime number. That’s not numerology; that’s elementary school math. So simple – and yet so captivatingly beautiful.
If you cross an element with a mathematical (not esoterically charged) number, You’ll already get something that you can reflect on: 4, stability, meets water. Doesn’t work. Water is in motion. Tides. Still water becomes pretty disgusting pretty quickly. But water itself is also so unstable that you can give it a shape. Vases, cups, snow globes …
I have tried this and am now in the process of finally assigning a message to each card. After reducing everything to one word, it is now time to put some meat on the bones. And in the process, individual terms are already changing again, and I have to reconsider in which direction the card’s meaning is going. At the moment, I’m at the point that the cards are neither positive nor negative, which they strongly are with Crowley and Rider-Waite-Smith. But I think that’s wrong. It depends on the person, the situation, and the point of view. Clarity can be a great insight, but it can also massively disappoint and derail me. I think it is important to be aware of the two sides of every coin.
* I left. Immediately.
** I’m not so sure about that …
Yeah, I know. That was long and quite boring. And there’s still no clear concept in sight. Well, at least the next episode will be much shorter.
