The Marseilles deep dive after 29 Years of Procrastination

I am a master-class procrastinator. I have not posted here in 10.5 years [update: it's been 3 years since I wrote the first three paragraphs of this post, it has now been 13 years], and there is a series of posts I have been meaning to write since long before I started this blog. Of course, at the time, I had never heard of a blog, and I was thinking more of a book with a spine, covers, and paper leaves. Just imagine.

So here's the thing: twenty-nine years ago, I found something hidden in plain sight--plain to be seen in the images of the Tarot of Marseilles. No one had ever mentioned this to me before, and I had never read about it. I still have not come across any accounting of it anywhere. That is why I feel like I ought to lay it out for someone else to see as well, before I die.

It was the Fall of 1994, Eugene. I had been working in a bakery between stints in graduate school. A friend of mine, also named David, would occasionally meet over coffee to talk about Tarot. Sometimes we might do readings for each other. More often, we would share our Tarot journals and discuss the meaning and symbolism of the cards.

Up until then, my knowledge of the Tarot had been limited to the books I could find and afford from the local New Age bookstore, Paralandra (long closed now). I can still smell the patchouli. I would pore over the decks on display and the section of related books. They had open display versions of each deck I looked through covetously. I thumbed through the books, but inevitably, I was too poor to buy them.

What I could glean from thumbing through books I would never buy was that the Tarot was brought to Europe by "Gypsies" and had originated in ancient Egypt. The symbolism of the Major Arcana was all grounded in the secrets of Kabbalah, astrology, and numerology.

Then, around this time, 29 years ago, when I was frequenting coffee shops with the other David, with a pack of Tarot in one hand and a composition book in the other, I discovered two important things (but not my big singular discovery yet; I will tell you about that further on): (1) A Wicked Pack of Cards: The Origins of the Occult Tarot by Michael Dummett, et al., and (2) The Tarot of Marseilles. The takeaway from discovery number one was that all those things I had learned about the history and origin of the Tarot were dead wrong. And that led to discovery number two: the existence of the Tarot before occult symbolism was added, still readily available to us today in the form of the Tarot of Marseilles.

Following upon these discoveries, we feverishly discussed what the "real" symbolism of the Tarot must be when you've removed all the occult systems that had been forced onto it over the years, like washing away a painting on top of a painting to discover the treasure underneath.  What discovery were we going to make as we carefully cleaned away the layers of occultist kitsch to find what lay beneath?  One thing I remember the elder David had said to me, "Don't impose anything from the outside, just look at the images as they are presented--what was the artist showing us?"

There was a point in time, where I found myself in my tiny campus quad, by myself, with my pack of Marseille Tarot.  I had surely drank too much coffee that day and I had probably passed through environmental cannabinoid vapors at some point that day, ubiquitous in the Eugenian atmosphere.  So there I was on my carpeted floor--a moss green if I recall--I had the 22 trump cards (because "Major Arcana" was something made up by the occultists) all spread out before me in an ordered circle.  Then I saw it.  The pattern.  There was a pattern after all, not dependent on numerology, or Kabalah, or ancient Egyptian cosmology.  It was a pattern self evident in the images themselves.

What had I seen?  Well, I'll get to that, but I'll need to go over context first.  Insofar as I was engaging in some sort of archaeology of pure symbols and representation, we need to understand the context--the strata in which the symbols were found.  An artifact is never removed from a site without first analyzing the context.  So too with our symbols.  More on this.  I will try not to wait 13 years before my next post.  We'll see . . .