TdM Divination, Approximately
Several years ago I was informed by someone with good credentials that there is no centuries-old tradition for performing divination with the Tarot de Marseille cards and their Italian Renaissance predecessors, all of which were originally used only for the playing of card games. The popular “French Cross” or tirage en croix spread has little historical cachet since it was apparently of late-19th-Century origin and has not received widespread recognition in the English-speaking tarot community. It was allegedly learned by Swiss occultist and tarot author Oswald Wirth from his mentor, Stanislas de Guiata, who supposedly obtained it from Joséphin Péladan, and it was first described in detail in Wirth’s 1927 book, Le Tarot des imagiers du Moyen Âge. It is typically four cards in length (the “cross” of the title), often with an optional fifth “synthesis” card at the center that is either drawn from the deck or calculated by summing the numerical values of the other four cards and reducing the digits in the sum by “Theosophical addition” to a number below 22, yielding a separate trump card to summarize the entire reading (usually called the “quintessence”).
Recently, on one of the Tarot de Marseille pages, we were discussing the use of symbolism in tarot reading, and the TdM purists mentioned that they only read with the 22 trump cards and draw interpretive inferences solely from the images themselves and the context of the question, with no resort to keyword lists and incidental correspondences such as those developed by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (the opinion being that there is no place for them in the TdM canon.) Because they make no use of the 40 non-scenic “pips,” they are able to ignore the fact that the minor cards are very sparse in narrative potential beyond the usual suit and number implications (which one might suppose were derived from their previous role in “trick-taking” scenarios). That seems to serve the traditionalists just fine.
The first use of the tarot for popular divination predated the French Cross by roughly 150 years, originating in the work of 18th-Century French fortune-teller Jean-Baptiste Alliette. He was the first to create symbolic meanings for the 78 cards of his personal deck, and is rightly considered the “father of the esoteric tarot” who has cast a long shadow over subsequent thinking on the subject, even if few modern diviners know his “Continental” deck or his literary pseudonym, “Etteilla.” I find it interesting that TdM enthusiasts dismiss the contribution of Alliette to cartomancy, essentially squeezing themselves into a narrow conceptual framework that throws them back onto the scholarly opinions of tarot historians regarding what the imagery in the trumps was intended to convey.
They are also unsympathetic toward “pure” TdM writers like Joseph Maxwell, Paul Marteau and Yoav Ben-Dov, whom they consider to be too “symbolic” and insufficiently literal (I didn’t dare ask them about that old surrealist, Alejandro Jodorowsky), but they seem to love Camelia Elias, whom I found uninspiring in my first exposure to her work, and Enrique Enriquez (whom I do admire) even though he is more than a little poetically impressionistic. There have been a few good books on the subject but, even after getting one’s head around the Medieval archetypes that populate the TdM trumps, it may be challenging to bring them to bear on present-day situations since they were a cultural phenomenon of their time that may or may not have universal applicability today, necessitating a good deal of approximation when interpreting them.
My point is that those who would work with the entire deck of 78 cards and don’t want to remain within the confines laid out by Wirth, but who also prefer to avoid inserting esoteric correspondences, must effectively create their own interpretive model for use in fortune-telling since there isn’t a robust existing one. I’ve done so in my own practice, and I don’t see any other convincing way to open up what is a rather austere paradigm. While I’m sure there are expert practitioners out there who can prove me wrong, my personal belief is that the TdM trump cards aren’t supple enough on their own to shoulder the entire burden of “real-world” prognostication, from the the most particular to the most inclusive, without a considerable amount of intuitive guesswork to anchor them to mundane circumstances. I’ve tried it but wasn’t satisfied with the outcome in most cases.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on June 21, 2023.
