In

the Cards

Frances A. Yates

New York Review of Books

FEBRUARY 19, 1981

The Game of Tarot from Ferrara to Salt Lake City
by Michael Dummett
Duckworth (Biblio Distribution Center, Totowa, New Jersey), 600 pp., $47.50

Twelve Tarot Games
by Michael Dummett
Duckworth, London, 242 pp., £5.95


This very large book is an elaborate history of the game of Tarot, a card game not
unrelated to our modern cards, with suits and trumps, but much more complex,
using packs of picture cards with strange images. From the fifteenth century this
game spread over Europe with variations in different countries. Professor
Dummett, a very well-known philosopher and interpreter of Frege, has taken
time off from his labors to write a detailed account of this game and its local
variations: a much shorter companion volume is a guide to the playing of twelve
games. In the larger volume he publishes many illustrations of Tarot cards; even
a reader uninterested in card games must surely be puzzled and fascinated by
the pictures. The same images, in varying forms, recur constantly: “the Female
Pope,” “the Hanged Man,” “the Emperor,” and so on, just as we constantly see
kings, queens, and knaves in our packs. It seems to be the basic aim behind
Professor Dummett’s fanatical pursuit of the Tarot game, in all its forms, to prove
that throughout its history it was only a game, and nothing else. His book will not
be welcome to contemporary occultists, who attach immense significance to “the
Tarot,” to the initiations into mysteries, or revelations of the future, supposed to
reside in these cards.

According to Professor Dummett, the first person to, “occultize” the Tarot cards
was Court de Gébelin, author of Le monde primitif, an immense work in nine
volumes published in Paris from 1725 to 1784. Gébelin believed in a primitive
world in which all men lived in harmony, in which all arts and sciences had their
origin, in short, in a golden age which it was the object of his vast researches to
uncover, principally through the investigation of mythologies and languages.
Following the euhemerist tradition he believed that all myths and allegories
secretly record the invention and progress of the arts and sciences. For his
linguistic studies he collected the alphabets, grammars, vocabularies and their
etymologies of many languages, seeking to establish their common origin in the
language of nature. These ideas have a familiar ring, reminding of both Rousseau
and Vico. Gébelin is one of the very few of his contemporaries to have heard of
Vico, whose Scienza nuova he mentions with approval. Similarities in the
treatment of the Hercules myth by Gébelin and Vico are discussed by Frank
Manuel in The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods.

Though Gébelin is aware of new thought movements stirring in the eighteenth
century, his outlook is firmly rooted in Renaissance occult traditions, in the
writings associated with the “Egyptian,” Hermes Trismegistus, and in the Cabala.
A word frequently used by Gébelin is “hieroglyph,” and by this he does not mean
what Egyptologists have meant since Jean François Champollion established the
modern science of Egyptology, including the principles for deciphering
hieroglyphics, early in the nineteenth century. He has in mind the Hieroglyphica
of Horapollo, a fourth-century collection of pseudo-Egyptian images, deeply
revered by Renaissance scholars and artists. The pseudo-Egyptian aspect of
Renaissance iconography is very familiar to art historians, and is discussed, for
example, by George Boas in the introduction to his translation of Horapollo, and
by Rudolf Wittkower in Allegory and the Migration of Symbols. It is in this
Renaissance sense that Gébelin speaks of “hieroglyphs.” The pseudo-Egyptian
hermetic picture-language is, in fact, the language of the primitive world, more
profound than any discursive description, which he wishes to restore. And it is
significant that Gébelin calls the Tarot cards “hieroglyphs.”

Dummett is at rather a disadvantage when discussing Gébelin on “Egyptian”
terminology because he is unaware of all this Renaissance Egyptian lore. He
looks in Wallis Budge for light on Gébelin’s Egyptian quotations, and naturally
finds no help there. Budge was a post-Champollion Egyptologist for whom
Horapollo and the Renaissance hieroglyphic tradition were an exploded pseudo
science.

Gébelin’s remarks on “Le Jeu des Tarots” occupy only a few pages in the eighth
volume of Le monde primitif. He informs the reader that there exists an Egyptian
book which has escaped destruction. It is concealed in a game, the Tarot game,
well known in Italy, Germany, and Provence, but unknown in Paris. He describes
the strange images on the cards of this game and states that they are
hieroglyphs, written by Thoth-Hermes, the Egyptian god of letters, containing all
the doctrines of the ancient Egyptians.

Considering the importance which Dummett attaches to Gébelin as the first to
“occultize” the Tarot cards, it is typical of his negative approach to iconography
that he does not reproduce the Court de Gébelin images. They are reproduced by
Stuart R. Kaplan (Encyclopaedia of Tarot, page 139), and are close to the cards of
the Tarot of Marseille except for a significant change in the image of “the Hanged
Man,” who is presented right-way-up.

The professional iconographers and art historians seem to have curiously
neglected the Tarot images, as Gertrude Moakley complains in her interesting
attempt to relate the trumps of the fifteenth-century Italian cards to the Trionfi
of Italian spectacle.* I cannot find that any serious iconographical attempt has
been made on the French Tarot tradition to which the Court de Gébelin images
belong. I am therefore plunging dangerously into an uncharted sea in the
following remarks.

The image called “Luna” shows two little doglike animals gazing at the moon:
below them, an object rather like a crayfish crawls out of the water. Gébelin
offers some explanation of this image which he says is reported by Clement of
Alexandria. The two dogs are, according to the Egyptians, guardians of the
tropics, placed there to prevent the stars from wandering; the crayfish is the sign
of the zodiac, Cancer, and refers to the inundations of the Nile, which occur when
the sun and the moon leave that sign. This is exactly the kind of abstruse
information provided by the pseudo-Egyptian hieroglyph, which always has a
further reference to Egyptian teachings on the divine. In the Horapollo type of
Egyptian hieroglyphic, dogs are prominent, with the general meaning of “sacred
letters,” though I have not found the Tarot image of Luna either in Horapollo, or
in Valeriano’s Hieroglyphica, the Renaissance encyclopedia on the subject, which
Gébelin mentions. However there can be no doubt that the “Luna” Tarot image is
what the Renaissance called a hieroglyph, a conveyor of Egyptian wisdom.

An anonymous essay is printed by Gébelin, with his own discussion of the Tarot.
This essay attempts some interpretation of the images, of a religious nature,
referring to the Eternal God and the moral law. The writer amplifies a statement
made by Gébelin that the images of the Tarot trumps correspond to the twenty-
two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. This introduces the possibility of a Cabalist
interpretation, and it is in this sense that I would approach the image of “la
Papesse,” or the female Pope, one of the most puzzling of the cards. Behind the
head of this hieroglyphic woman is an unrolled scroll; she holds a book half
concealed by her cloak. I suggest that this could be an image of the scroll of the
Torah, the Hebrew scriptures, now unrolled or unveiled in Cabalist
interpretation. This is something of a shot in the dark, like my attempt on “Luna,”
but I would venture to say that even these preliminary and hesitant efforts to
enter the iconographic areas opened up by Dummett’s book have aroused in my
mind a doubt about the validity of his main argument, that the fact that the Tarot
was an “actual game” gets rid of all “occult” associations.

Whether or not Gébelin was the first to “occultize” the Tarot cards, which I tend
rather strongly to doubt (his images of “Luna” and of “la Papesse” are already
present in the Tarot of Marseille), his announcement of the discovery of an
“Egyptian” book in a well-known card game would give rise to particularly
intense excitement in pre-Revolutionary France. Gébelin died before the
outbreak of the Revolution but he held an important position in the intellectual
world of liberals and philosophes which was moving toward it.

There was a remarkable revival of occultism in that world. Revolutionary
Egyptianism, as propagated by Giordano Bruno, entered into the real Revolution.
The cult of a Supreme Being, using Egyptian symbols, was the religion of the
Revolution. Mesmerism, the science or medicine of the revolutionary period,
enthusiastically adopted by Gébelin, was hermetic in origin; Mesmer’s astral
fluid comes out of Ficino. Egypt became a symbol of freedom, an idea reflected in
the Egyptian symbols on American dollar bills (Gébelin was a friend of Franklin).
The role of Freemasonry, with its Hermetic-Egyptian rituals, is a force very much
to be reckoned with in all this movement (Gébelin was a Mason). In this general
climate of opinion, Gébelin’s promotion of the Tarot cards begins to look less
eccentric, if these cards contained Hermetic-Cabalist allusions.

Gébelin was a Protestant, the son of a man very closely associated with the
Protestant cause, author of a history of the war of the Camisards, the last stand of
the persecuted Huguenots in the Cévennes. Gébelin delayed bringing out his own
researches until he had published his father’s work, with which he was deeply
identified. For the Protestants, the arrival of the Revolution meant the end of
their persecution, for the Revolution stood for religious toleration. The fact
(corroborated by Dummett) that the Tarot was not known in Paris raises the
question of why Gébelin presented it with such force to the Parisian world. Might
this have been because it was associated in other parts of France with the
resistance to persecution?

Whatever the Tarot mystique may have meant to Gébelin himself, it forms only a
small section of his vast researches into the allegories of “le monde primitif,” yet
this small section was the part of his work which was seized on by
contemporaries and successors and became associated with the history of
occultism up to the present. It is the great merit and value of Professor
Dummett’s work that he has brought this out. He draws an important distinction
between Renaissance occultism, in touch with early science and with forward-
looking movements, and the post-Gébelin type of occultism in which the
mystique of the Tarot cards was added to the Hermetic and Cabalist sources used
in the Renaissance and assumed a dominant role in French occultism of the
eighteenth century.

The Tarot cards, almost immediately after Gébelin’s promotion of them, were
used for fortunetelling. In this tainted form, “the Tarot” was adopted by Eliphas
Lévi, who flourished in the mid-nineteenth century and propagated belief in the
images of the cards (in the form of the Tarot of Marseille) as containing the
whole of Hermetic, and particularly of Cabalist, magico-spiritual teaching.
Dummett expounds the role of Tarot in Lévi’s works, so influential in modern
occultism, and traces its presence in his spiritual descendants in France. He
draws attention to the fact that the Tarot game was not known in Britain during
the time when it flourished on the Continent, and that therefore the Tarot
mystique was not developed there. I can confirm his statement that the Tarot is
never mentioned in the Renaissance occult tradition either on the Continent or in
Britain.

A fact of importance to the historian which Dummett brings out is that the
modern occultists support their belief in the immense significance and
immemorial antiquity of Tarot by assuming that all earlier occultists knew of the
Tarot, though they do not mention it. Thus Guillaume Postel is drawn into the
Tarot camp by the assumption that this noted sixteenth-century French Cabalist
must undoubtedly have known the Tarot mystique, and similar annoying claims
are made for other well-known Renaissance figures such as Trithemius. This
trait of the occultists confuses history, like their other habit of the false
ascription, assigning to well-known authors statements which they never made.
In such minds no firm historical statement can be arrived at.

How can one sum up one’s impressions of Professor Dummett’s extremely odd
book? For specialists in card games he has dredged up an enormous amount of
out-of-the-way material. His main argument, that the fact that the Tarot cards
were used as “real card games” proves that their images did not have any occult
significances, is unconvincing. If Professor Dummett had expended one-tenth of
the time and industry that he has devoted to chasing obscure card games to
examining more carefully the volumes of Court de Gébelin, he would have had to
ask himself who “Orapollo” was and in what sense Gébelin used the word
“hieroglyph.” Such researches would have led him to ask other questions of his
material besides the one which he has chosen to explore.

The oddest thing of all about this book is that, in spite of his antipathies,
Dummett has actually contributed a great deal to a critical elucidation of the
history of occultism. He has shown that the Tarot mystique entered French
occultism in the eighteenth century, and that it was imported into England,
where it had previously been unknown, in the occultist movements of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

I am greatly in sympathy with Professor Dummett’s aim of applying critical
historical methods to the history of occultism. This is what I try to do myself. His
book helps in this direction by its critical history of Tarot elements in French
occultism, but his rational approach through “real” card games is not
satisfactory. I would suggest that other approaches should be applied, through
iconography, or through the history of Cabala, of which the Tarot mystique is no
doubt a debased form.

The most interesting feature of the problem is, to my mind, Court de Gébelin
himself, who appears to be moving within those “universal language”
explorations, those searches for “real characters,” as by Leibniz in his
Characteristica, through which Renaissance hermetic, Cabalist, and mnemonic
studies had been evolving into new approaches to what is now called linguistics
(see my Art of Memory, chapter seventeen). Yet this same man reverts to the
Renaissance attitude toward “Egyptianism” and the hieroglyph in his treatment
of the Tarot cards as written in remote antiquity by Thoth-Hermes. It is striking
evidence of the persistence of these ideas, which even the advent of
Champollion—only a few years after the publication of Le monde primitif—failed
to kill, as the history of French occultism shows.

The real clue to Court de Gébelin and the Tarot of Marseille may be in some form
of post-Revocation (of the Edict of Nantes) Freemasonry.

* Tarot Cards Painted by Bonifacio Bembo for the Visconti-Sforza Family (New
York Public Library, 1966)

Origins of Tarot

Michael Dummett

MAY 14, 1981

In response to:

In the Cards from the February 19, 1981 issue

To the Editors:

Dame Frances Yates, in her notice of my book, The Game of Tarot, reviews only
four pages out of 600 [NYR, February 19]. In view of her interests, this may not
be surprising; but she gives a false impression of the book’s purpose. If the many
chapters tracing in detail the history of the different forms of the game had been
included, as she says, simply “to prove that throughout its history [Tarot] was
only a game,” I should have been indulging in an extravagant degree of over-kill.
On the contrary, the chapter on the origin and development of Tarot occultism
was a digression from the main concern of the book, namely to give a detailed
history of the game in all its forms, as H. J. R. Murray did for chess. A further
purpose was to reconstruct the history of the cards and of the different types of
design used for them, something not previously attempted. Such a history forms
an essential basis for any theory about their iconography; because Dame Frances
ignores, not merely my answer to the question when and where the Tarot de
Marseille designs originated, but the question itself, her observations on the
subject lack the credibility they might otherwise have had. The Tarot de
Marseille is descended from a particular type of design for popular Tarot cards
used in Milan from the late fifteenth century, but acquired some of its features in
France. The crayfish on the Moon card is found in the Milanese prototype, but the
dogs are not; to my mind, the idea of dogs baying the moon is so commonplace
that no resort to arcane pseudo-Egyptian symbolism, such as Dame Frances
suggests, is needed to explain their presence.

Dame Frances evidently thinks that the occultists were on to something genuine
in their interpretations of the Tarot pack; but more substantial reasons than she
offers are required for such a conclusion. She does not challenge, though she
does not mention, the evidence I brought forward, based on a multitude of
documentary references, that no occult significance was attached to the cards,
nor any use made of them save for playing games, until the intervention of Court
de Gébelin in 1781. It could still be that the original iconography of the cards
involved hermetic or other magical symbolism, though it is far less likely that
this should be true of details, like the dogs mentioned above, introduced at a
later stage. It was not a thesis of mine that no such symbolism was involved; in
fact, however, it appears to me that the iconography of the cards is explicable in
terms of standard Renaissance imagery, without invoking anything more
esoteric. In particular, I cannot see a shred of reason to suppose, with Dame
Frances, that any allusion to the Cabala was intended, as the occultists believe;
the fact that they have been unable to agree which card to associate with which
Hebrew letter is proof that there is no very evident correspondence between
them. Dame Frances gives no ground for the supposition: to make it out, she will
have first to state which association of cards with letters she considers correct.
In the meantime, given the widespread confusion about this subject, it seems to
me unhelpful of her to advance a conjecture of this kind without solid reason.

Dame Frances is selective in citing de Gébelin’s ideas on the Tarot, omitting, for
example, his suggestion that the trump cards are to be read in descending order
(because, he says, the Egyptians always counted backwards), so that trump XX,
as being the second card, should be seen as depicting, not the last Judgment, but
the first Creation. I think that no enlightenment is to be looked for from such
speculations as these. I did not, as she thinks, suggest that his ideas were
eccentric in the prevailing intellectual climate, but stressed many of the points
she also mentions, such as his Freemasonry, his defense of French Protestants,
his affinity with Rousseau, and his belief in Mesmerism; what I complained of
concerning his ideas was that they were hopelessly wrong. I allowed that his
general project was not intrinsically absurd, but judged its execution worthless,
because of his radically unscientific methods of investigation. The dates 1725
and 1784, given by Dame Frances for the first and last volumes of his Le Monde
primitif must be misprints; they should be 1773 and 1782 (1725 being the date
usually cited, in mistake for 1719, for his birth, and 1784 being that of his death).

After devoting a paragraph to the erroneous Renaissance lore of hieroglyphs,
Dame Frances remarks that “it is significant that Gébelin calls the Tarot cards
‘hieroglyphs,”‘ and goes on to describe me as being at a disadvantage in
discussing de Gébelin through ignorance of that lore and to instance my citation
of Wallis Budge as a manifestation of such ignorance. This entire line of criticism
appears to be misconceived from start to finish. De Gébelin does not once refer
to Tarot cards as “hieroglyphs” (the author of the other essay that follows his
does do so). Both writers offer derivations of the word Tarot from what purport
to be transliterated phrases of ancient Egyptian, without citing any hieroglyphic
forms. Since the Renaissance literature on hieroglyphs was unconcerned with
phonetic renderings, hieroglyphs, whether genuine or pretended, are completely
beside the point; I cited Wallis Budge’s dictionary to confirm what, as I
remarked, one would expect from pre-Champollion fragments of ancient
Egyptian, that they are completely spurious. Dame Frances proceeds to expatiate
further on the relation of de Gébelin’s ideas about Tarot cards to the Renaissance
theories of hieroglyphs, without establishing the slightest direct or indirect
connection between them: she fails to identify any point of correspondence of
the pseudo-hieroglyphs either with the Tarot imagery or with de Gébelin’s
interpretation of it. By so failing, she only reinforces my conclusion that his
speculations about Tarot cards rested, not on a mistaken basis, but on none at all.

The thirty-six plates in my book were carefully selected to give a comprehensive
pictorial history of Tarot cards. Dame Frances cites their not including de
Gébelin’s illustrations as “typical of [my] negative approach to iconography.”
Since these were merely indifferent drawings after what was, with a single
exception which I mentioned, a quite ordinary pack of the Tarot de Marseille
type, which I did illustrate, it would have been superfluous to reproduce them; I
am curious to know which of the existing plates seems to Dame Frances even
more dispensable. The book is not about Court de Gébelin—though Dame
Frances has not shown what it says about him to be in any way defective—but
about a game with many variations. I said only a little about iconography, since
that was not my theme: but I said enough to establish that the ideas on the
subject of all the occultists, from de Gébelin onwards, were wholly misconceived,
and, further, that the iconography of the cards had no bearing upon the purpose
for which they were originally invented or used. Moreover, by working out the
early history of Tarot designs, I supplied a basis for any serious theory of their
iconography; without such a basis, speculations on the subject must go quite
astray, exactly as do those which Dame Frances herself chooses to air in her
review.

Michael Dummett

New College, Oxford, England