The Tarot and the Tree of Life

Few objects in the Western tradition have been more studied, more decorated or more misunderstood than a pack of tarot cards. It was invented for a game. It became, over four centuries, a summary in pictures of the whole Hermetic system, in which every card stands for a place on the Tree of Life and every suit for an element. Our page on divination gives a short account of the cards. This page sets out their history and their structure in full, and suggests how they can be studied.

A short history

1. About 1440

   The triumphs

   At the courts of northern Italy, ordinary playing cards were enlarged with a fifth suit of allegorical pictures called triumphs: the Emperor, Love, Death, the Wheel of Fortune, the World and others. The oldest surviving packs were painted by hand for noble families of Milan. The game played with them, which the Italians came to call tarocchi, spread across Europe and is still played.

2. 1781

   The book of Thoth

   In the eighth volume of his work The Primeval World, the French scholar Antoine Court de Gebelin announced that the trumps were the remains of an ancient Egyptian book of wisdom, the book of Thoth, disguised as a game to preserve it. An essay in the same volume first suggested a link between the twenty two trumps and the twenty two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. There was no evidence for either claim.

3. 1789

   The first fortune telling pack

   A Parisian card reader who wrote as Etteilla, already the author of the first books on reading the tarot, published the first pack designed for divination, with meanings printed on the cards.

4. 1856

   The letters and the Tree

   Eliphas Levi, in his Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic, set out a systematic attribution of the trumps to the Hebrew letters, which opened the way to placing the cards on the paths of the Tree of Life. French writers after him began to call the trumps the major arcana, the great secrets.

5. The 1880s and after

   The modern scheme

   A London order of the 1880s revised Levi's attributions, moving the Fool to the head of the sequence and exchanging the places of Strength and Justice. A pack published in London in 1909, designed by Arthur Edward Waite and drawn by Pamela Colman Smith, gave a picture to every card, and most esoteric packs made since are built on it.

None of this diminishes the cards. A set of images refined by four centuries of use and two centuries of careful symbolic thought is a remarkable instrument, whatever its origin. It is worth knowing the history so that one is not misled by the claim, still widely repeated, that the tarot comes from ancient Egypt.

The structure of the pack

A tarot pack has seventy eight cards. Twenty two are the trumps, or major arcana, each with a number and a title. The remaining fifty six, the minor arcana, form four suits of fourteen cards: an ace and nine numbered cards, followed by four court cards. Each of the three groups, trumps, numbered cards and court cards, has its own place in the Hermetic scheme.

The trumps and the paths

The twenty two paths of the Tree of Life are numbered from eleven to thirty two, following the ten spheres, and each carries a letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The Sefer Yetzirah divides the letters into three groups: three mother letters, given to the elements of air, water and fire; seven double letters, given to the seven planets; and twelve simple letters, given to the signs of the zodiac. When the trumps are laid on the paths in order, each card inherits a letter and its attribution. The table gives the scheme in widest use today.

Two refinements are commonly added. Since there are only three mother letters for four elements, the last two trumps take a second attribution: Judgment stands also for spirit and the World also for earth. And in older packs, as in Levi, Justice is the eighth trump and Strength the eleventh. The exchange was made so that the lion of Strength would fall on the path of Leo and the scales of Justice on the path of Libra. Both orders are in use, and a student should know which one a book is following.

The suits and the four worlds

The four suits are attributed to the four elements, and through them to the four worlds of the Qabalah and the four letters of the divine name. The scheme gives each suit a level of being as well as a temperament.

The numbered cards and the spheres

The ace and the nine numbered cards of each suit correspond to the ten spheres, the ace to Kether and the ten to Malkuth. Each card is read as the quality of its sphere expressed in the element of its suit. The aces are the roots of the four elements, pure and undivided. The fives fall on Geburah, the sphere of severity, and are the most troubled cards in the pack. The sixes fall on Tiphareth, the center, and are the most harmonious. The tens fall on Malkuth and show each element at its most concrete, whether as fulfillment or as a burden.

Once this is grasped, the fifty six small cards no longer have to be memorized one by one. A student who knows the ten spheres and the four elements can work out the general sense of any numbered card, and the pictures become illustrations of a meaning already understood.

The court cards

Each suit has four court cards, read as the four elements within the element of the suit. In the commonest scheme the queen is water, the page or princess is earth, and the king and the knight share fire and air between them. Schools disagree about which of the two male figures is which, and some packs rename them. The principle is simpler than the disputes. The queen of cups is water of water, feeling turned toward feeling; the page of pentacles is earth of earth, the beginner's careful hand. In practice the court cards are read as kinds of people or ways of acting.

How to study the tarot

The quickest way to learn the cards is also the slowest. Choose one pack built on the scheme above and keep to it. Learn the structure before the individual meanings. Then take the trumps one at a time, a card a week for twenty two weeks, setting the card up where you will see it, contemplating it for a few minutes each morning and noting in the diary anything it seems to illuminate. Learned this way, the meanings become your own rather than a list to be looked up.

The trumps are also used as doors for the trained imagination. A student may picture the card as a scene, enter it, and observe what follows, under the cautions given on our page on imagination. This is the ancestor of the practice known as pathworking, in which the paths of the Tree are explored through their cards.

For divination, the guidance on practicing well applies with full force. The cards describe a pattern. They do not decide anything for you.