Items related to The Nigel Jackson Tarot
Here's your chance to get one of the most beautiful Tarot decks ever, as you relive the magic of times gone by, with The Nigel Jackson Tarot from internationally acclaimed artist and Tarot scholar, Nigel Jackson.
When you get this deck, the first thing you'll notice is that it comes in a slipcase and is made of two sections. The first part is a boxed set of 78 exquisitely illustrated cards. They reflect Jackson's research into classical, medieval, and Renaissance occult symbolism.
Also in the slipcase is a 160-page minibook that includes everything you need to know to use this beautiful deck:
·The history of the Tarot
·The groundbreaking new theory connecting Pythagorean numerology and the Tarot
·The Tarot and astrological magic
·The meaning of the symbolism on the Major Arcana
·Gnostic Narrative in the Tarot
·Divinatory meanings of the Major and Minor Arcana
·The Key of Hermes Layout
·The Pythagorean Method of Tarot divination
·The Combing Out the Fortune divinatory technique
·The Method of the Seventh Card
·The Royal Road Tarot spread
·The Eastern Cross layout
·Card combinations in Tarot readings
·Magical meditation and the Tarot
Together, this book and deck in a slipcase make up one of the most beautiful and most powerful Tarot sets ever. You will spend many hours finding new depth of meaning in the symbolic art. The minibook will show you the secrets of meditation and exactly how to give readings.
When you get The Nigel Jackson Tarot, you have it all in one elegant slipcase. Get your set today.
When you get this deck, the first thing you'll notice is that it comes in a slipcase and is made of two sections. The first part is a boxed set of 78 exquisitely illustrated cards. They reflect Jackson's research into classical, medieval, and Renaissance occult symbolism.
Also in the slipcase is a 160-page minibook that includes everything you need to know to use this beautiful deck:
·The history of the Tarot
·The groundbreaking new theory connecting Pythagorean numerology and the Tarot
·The Tarot and astrological magic
·The meaning of the symbolism on the Major Arcana
·Gnostic Narrative in the Tarot
·Divinatory meanings of the Major and Minor Arcana
·The Key of Hermes Layout
·The Pythagorean Method of Tarot divination
·The Combing Out the Fortune divinatory technique
·The Method of the Seventh Card
·The Royal Road Tarot spread
·The Eastern Cross layout
·Card combinations in Tarot readings
·Magical meditation and the Tarot
Together, this book and deck in a slipcase make up one of the most beautiful and most powerful Tarot sets ever. You will spend many hours finding new depth of meaning in the symbolic art. The minibook will show you the secrets of meditation and exactly how to give readings.
When you get The Nigel Jackson Tarot, you have it all in one elegant slipcase. Get your set today.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Nigel Jackson, born in 1963, lives in Manchester, England and is a well-known artist and illustrator specializing in the symbolism of Western Esoteric Tradition: he is deeply immersed in the traditional Tarot of 15th century Italy, the magical teachings of medieval-renaissance astrological magicians such as Ficino, Agrippa and Bruno and in bringing to life the talismanic images inherited from ancient sources of arcane lore such as the Arabian grimoire The Picatrix. He has worked intensively in researching the magical system of the 28 Mansions of the Moon. Nigel has been involved for the last quarter of a century in pursuing the inner wisdom of the hermetic mysteries and in expressing the symbolic 'language of the gods' through his visual art which he views as a living 'alchemy of the imagination'.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
Chapter 1 -Historical Origin and Significance
It's said that the shuffling of the cards is the earth, and the pattering of the cards is the rain, and the beating of the cards is the wind, and the pointing of the cards is the fire. That's of the four suits. But the Greater Trumps, it's said, are the meaning of all process and the measure of the everlasting dance.
-Charles Williams, The Greater Trumps, 1932
For centuries the Tarot's mysterious emblems of power and prophecy have exercised an enduring fascination for many people, and their enigmatic appeal is just as strong today. In the course of the last 200 years, the curiously compelling images depicted on the cards have inspired intriguing and sometimes wild theories of origin, ranging from Court de Gebelin's eighteenth-century speculations concerning its status as a survival of the fabled "Book of Thoth," dating from ancient Egypt, to the conceits of Petrarchian love poetry and more recent opinions of Jesse Weston, positing the pre-Christian Celtic origin of the symbolism in the cycles of Grail literature. The truth about the development of the deck over the last 2,000 years, resulting in the formalized woodcut packs produced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries at Marseilles, Besancon, and elsewhere in Europe, reveals a much more complex, subtle, and intricate picture of diverse esoteric influences cross-fertilizing and cohering over many centuries around the now-familiar Greater and Lesser Trumps of Tarot. These symbols, once treasured in the courts of fifteenth-century Italian nobles and Florentine princes and carried through many lands in the painted caravans of Romany sorcerers and fortunetellers, have never lost their appeal to the imagination and speak as beguilingly today with their voice of enchantment as they ever did in times gone by. Once known they are quite unforgettable. This is because they resonate within us as a true "psychic language," epitomizing the original timeless archetypes within the Deep Mind. In order to gain understanding of the wisdom-traditions that converge so mysteriously in the patterns of Tarot symbolism, let us briefly examine the known historical and conceptual background of this "Mute Book."
Tarot Symbolism and Origins
The earliest extant examples of Tarot decks were illuminated with precious pigments on vellum with consummate artistry for courtly patrons in Renaissance Europe during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, including the deck allegedly designed by Jacquemin Gringonneur for France's King Charles VI in the year 1392. However, as early as March of 1377, play with cards had been officially proscribed in the city of Florence. The inventory of the Dukes of Orleans for 1408 records the purchase of Quartes de Lombardie, the Lombardy Tarocchi deck. The noble Milanese dynasty of the Viscontis commissioned the artist Marziona de Tartona to design a Tarocchi deck. Many of the so-called Lombardy Tarocchi decks were created as presents for aristocratic weddings such as that of Filipo Visconti and Maria of Savoy in 1428, for which the artist Bonifacio Bembo of Cremona executed a princely Tarot. The Visconti-Sforza deck dates from 1441 and celebrates the marriage of Francesco Sforza and Bianca Maria Visconti. The cards feature many examples of their heraldic family crests. According to some accounts, Francesco Fibbia, the Prince of Pisa, was the first to combine the originally separate Greater and Lesser Arcana during his exile at Bologna. The court ledgers of the Este family at Ferrara for 1442 mention Carticelles da Trionfi, the Trumps or "Triumphs" of Tarot.
The Tarot we recognize today is based on the so-called Venetian-Piedmontese Tarocchi. The close trade links between Venice and Turkey under the Abuyyid and Mameluk rulers led to Saracenic adaptations of the Minor Arcana, leaving out both Major Trumps and pictorial court cards, both proscribed under Islamic law. The only such fifteenth-century Turkish deck to survive is brilliantly ornamented with Circassian-Egyptian style artistic motifs and is kept at the Topkapi Saray museum in Instanbul. The Tarocki decks of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia also preserve the ancient symbols in the context of gaming.
Looking further back into history, the most ancient essence of the Tarot can be seen to have passed down from the adepts of Gnostic mystery-cults and the doctrines of Hermetic-Neo-Pythagorean magicians, which flourished into the final centuries of the Roman world up to the reign of the last pagan Emperor, Julian the Apostate.
Each of the Greater Arcana of Tarot is termed a "Trump," deriving from Triumphus or Thriambos, meaning a Dionysiac hymn marking a stage or spiritual station in the drama of Initiation in the Orphic Mysteries. The core of the Trumps is the mystical scale of numbers unfolding from the One to the Twenty-One, which relate to the concept of numbers as the Eternal Types or Ideas in the Divine Mind (Nous). These concepts of Arithmancy or Mathesis as the supreme key were taught by Orphic, Pythagorean, and Hermetic-Neo-Platonic schools of magic operant in the late Roman Empire, when Middle Eastern Gnostic religions, including the Hermetic, Mithraic, and Isian faiths, seeped westward into the Mediterranean sphere. Among the principal sources drawn upon by these schools were the teachings of Pythagoras, Plato, Zoroaster, Hermes Trismegistus, Apollonius, and Plotinus, as well as Hellenized Egyptian, Chaldean, and Persian mystery-cults then spreading across the Empire. Numbers, as the purest and most abstract conceptions, belong to the most exalted realm of the Mind and ceaselessly project and condition the phenomenal world according to immutable laws. As the Alexandrian Hermetic text "Libellus IV, Discourse of Hermes to Tat: The Krater" says, God then, is like the unit of number. For the unit [One], being the source of all numbers, and the root of them all, contains every number within itself, and is contained by none of them: it generates every number, and is generated by no other number.
In fifteenth-century Italy, where the Tarot sequence crystallized, the great magus Pico Della Mirandola stated as one of his Conclusiones Magicae printed in 1486: "By Numbers, a way is had, to the searchyng out, and understandyng of every thyng, able to be known." To the Hermetic magus, the key of number opened up the ultimate secrets of the universal laws, the mysteries of creation, and of the immortal soul, in accordance with the dictum of Pythagoras that "Number is the Root of All Things."
The Greater Arcana are, in essence, founded upon ancient numerological teachings. This gives a clue as to the actual historical origin of the Tarot Trumps for around 530 b.c.e. Pythagoras left his native isle of Samos due to his distaste for the regime of its ruler, the tyrant Polycrates, and settled in the town of Crotona in "Magna Graecia" (southern Italy), where his esoteric Orphic-Pythagorean brotherhood was established throughout the Greek colonies there. As Cicero notes ". . . many centuries later so flourishing was the fame of the Pythagoreans that no others seemed to be learned men." The Pythagorean mystery-teachings concerning mystic numerology, reincarnation, and the immortality of the soul had a tremendous impact on the Stoic and Platonic circles in Rome for many centuries thereafter, being taught by such initiates as Posidonius in the first century b.c.e. This great revival of the mysticism of Pythagoras combined with the Stoic and Platonic doctrines was called Neo-Pythagoreanism and, according to W. K. C. Guthrie, it especially emphasized the "astral theology and number-mysticism," the magical side of earlier Orphic-Pythagoreanism. Its exponents over the next three centuries included Cronius, Numenius of Apamaea, Nigidius Figulus, and the great magus Apollonius of Tyana. It contributed greatly to the emerging Neo-Platonic philosophy of Plotinus, influenced the Jewish Cabala through the works of Philo of Alexandria, and early Christian philosophy via the writings of Clement of Alexandria. The mediaeval philosopher-mystics such as Nikolaus of Cusa kept the Pythagorean-Platonic tradition alive in Christian Europe.
Having surmised that the originals of the Venetian Tarocchi designs emerged from the number-mysticism of Neo-Pythagorean revival during the period 100 b.c.-a.d. 200, it is fascinating to speculate whether or not some prototype of the Greater Arcana may have been employed by the theurgists and magi of ancient Rome, perhaps painted on vellum or parchment for the use of initiates. The transmission of this Neo-Pythagorean Gnosis underlying the Tarot may have been effected within the ubiquitous mediaeval Guild system which regulated all crafts, arts, and industries in the world of the Middle Ages, including stonemasonry, stained-glass work, ironwork, weaving, and textile work among others. These Craft Guilds, from which speculative Freemasonry would later crystallize, preserved many secret symbols, concepts, and initiatory practices from the pre-Christian past and among stonemasons and others the figure of Pythagoras was especially revered. The Masonic Cooke Manuscript from 1430 relates how Pythagoras and Hermes discovered after the Flood three pillars on which the Elder Wisdom of Angels was inscribed. A. E. Waite remarks that Hermes and Pythagoras were regarded in the mediaeval Masonic mythos as "the saviours of the Ancient Wisdom," and says that "Pythagoras himself appears, but under the name of Peter Gower, as a prototypical Master of the Craft." More importantly to our theory, the manufacture of cards and the continuity and quality of their designs was the province of Master Card-Makers registered in the Guild system. For example, two Master Card-Makers are recorded in the Brabant Guild-Book of 1427 and others, including female card-painters at Nuremburg and other regions. It was doubtless that these Guild Card-Makers in the regions of Lombardy, Piedmont, and Venice preserved the Secret Tradition behind the Tarot and acted as the living link between Graeco-Roman esoteric lore and the mediaeval Tarot symbolism between a.d. 500-1300. It seems very plausible that mediaeval Master Card-Makers within the Craft Guilds preserved the ancient Orphic and Neo-Pythagorean Gnosis of the late Roman culture in the form of the early Italian Tarocchi deck. This would also explain why the earliest Tarot decks almost exclusively originate from the Italic-Roman regions, spreading throughout France, Germany, and Eastern Europe in later centuries. (It may be no accident either that the traditional Marseilles deck of France originates from the region of the early Greek colony of Marsilia in southern Gaul, where the Pythagorean Brotherhood was said to have had a significant presence). If we accept this Neo-Pythagorean origin in Italy around the first century before Christ, the Tarot trumps are seen to represent an astonishing survival of classical Graeco-Roman esotericism into the Middle Ages and an unbroken transmission of ancient pagan Wisdom into the world of today.
Breaking the Tarot Code:
The Tetraktys Key
The long-sought key that unlocks the secrets behind the sequence of Tarot Trumps is the ancient Pythagorean symbol called the Tetraktys. It is composed of ten points arranged in a triangular formation in a descending series (1 + 2 + 3 + 4). (See Figure 1.1.) Theon of Smyrna remarked that the Tetraktys was revered in the Pythagorean cult as a psycho-cosmic glyph embodying the "entire nature of the universe." Initiates called it the Perpetual Fountain of Nature, as it was held to contain the ratios of mathematical harmonies underlying the whole of creation and revealed the emanation of all things from the One and the involution back into that Unity through the Dekad. In the Pythagorean-Orphic Mysteries, initiates swore their oaths upon this sacred symbol that encapsulated their most secret doctrines concerning the soul's immortality, cyclical reincarnation, and the concepts of number underlying the laws of the cosmos. The mystic names and attributes given to the Dekad in ancient Graeco-Roman esotericism are as follows.
The Pythagorean Dekad:
The Tetraktys and the "Gods of Number"
1. Monad: Also termed Apollo, Sol, Zeus, Proteus, Chaos, and Eros as the original Unity and Primal Essence, the One; Taxia ("Order").
2. Dyad: Called Juno-Lucina, Luna, Rhea, and Diana, it is the principle of Duality, the first reflection of the Divine Mind; Analogia ("Equal Proportion").
3. Triad: Called Vesta, Latonia, Thetis, Tritogenia, it represents Harmony, Perfection, the threefold Goddess.
4. Tetrad: Known as Hercules, Bacchus, Bassarius, Pan, Cyllenius, who holds the key to the Four Elements of Nature.
5. Pentad: Called Pronoia ("Providence"), Athanaton ("the Immortal"), corresponding to the Heavenly World and Mercury as the Quintessence of Aether, the Fifth Element.
6. Hexad: Called Venus, Persaea, Amphitrite, Hygeia ("Health"), it is known as the Number of Wedlock, Marriage, and Generation, "the Reconciler."
7. Heptad: Sacred to Apollo, Minerva, and to Mars, titled Telesphoros "Far-Bearing," it represents the ethereal vehicle of the soul; Akropolis ("the Citadel").
8. Ogdoad: Called Dike ("Cosmic Justice"), Law, the Steadfast, and All-Harmonious; also holy to Saturn, the Fates, and Vulcan, it symbolizes perfect equilibrium and balanced equality.
9. Ennead: Called Prometheus, Proserpina, Oceanus, and Horos ("Horizon"), it is the holy number of the Spheres of the Nine Muses.
10. Dekad: Anangke ("Necessity"), Ouranos, and Mnemosyne ("Memory"); a number sacred to Janus, it symbolizes the Cosmic Cycle, the Wheel of Time, Fate, and Eternal Cyclicity (Anakuklosis) originating from and returning to the original source; the Number of Kosmos.
This number scale corresponds to the cards I-X of the Greater Arcana. Cards XI-XX represent the "doubling" of the Dekad, the cosmic cycles of outgoing evolution and ingoing return symbolized by the ancient Cosmic Lemniscate sign of Infinity. Plutarch actually remarks that "the Pythagorean World consisted of a double Quaternion [Tetraktys]," equating to the spiritual and phenomenal realms. In this way the cards are perhaps to be seen in pairs or "dyads," illustrating key concepts of the mystery-teachings.
0-The Fool/XXI-The World: Encompassing all is this primal dyad, symbolizing pure Spirit, "Perfect Mind" embracing "Perfect Wisdom," the Initiate-Fool, and the Mystery-Goddess.
I-The Juggler/XI-Fortitude: Mind as Sovereign over lower Nature; the Source of Magical Mastery.
II-The Popess/XII-The Hanged Man: Holy Wisdom attained by introversion and sacrifice.
III-The Empress/XIII-Death: The Womb and the Tomb; Incarnation/Discarnation; Birth/Death.
IV-The Emperor/XIV-Temperance: The elemental World receiving the numinous Influence.
V-The Pope/XV-The Devil: The Hierophantic Masters of the Heavenly and Chthonic Mysteries.
VI-The Lovers/XVI-The Tower: Synthesis/Breakdown; Love/Wrath; Generation and Destruction.
VII-The Chariot/XVII-The Star: Winged Chariot of the Soul; Aetheric Vehicle; the Sidereal Body.
VIII-Justice/XVIII-The Moon: Cosmic Justice ruling the sub-lunar realm; Permanence amidst Change.
IX-The Hermit/XIX-The Sun: Pilgrimage to the Midnight Sun; transmutation of Lead into Gold.
X-The Wheel of Fortune/XX-Judgement: The causal Cycles of History transfigured in Eternity, Time, and the End of Time.
This primal dyad is perhaps hinted at in the traditional ordering of the Trumps Major in which card 0 comes between XX-Judgement and XXI-The World, signifying that the last two cards are somehow different or to be considered "apart" from the first twenty Trumps, ...
It's said that the shuffling of the cards is the earth, and the pattering of the cards is the rain, and the beating of the cards is the wind, and the pointing of the cards is the fire. That's of the four suits. But the Greater Trumps, it's said, are the meaning of all process and the measure of the everlasting dance.
-Charles Williams, The Greater Trumps, 1932
For centuries the Tarot's mysterious emblems of power and prophecy have exercised an enduring fascination for many people, and their enigmatic appeal is just as strong today. In the course of the last 200 years, the curiously compelling images depicted on the cards have inspired intriguing and sometimes wild theories of origin, ranging from Court de Gebelin's eighteenth-century speculations concerning its status as a survival of the fabled "Book of Thoth," dating from ancient Egypt, to the conceits of Petrarchian love poetry and more recent opinions of Jesse Weston, positing the pre-Christian Celtic origin of the symbolism in the cycles of Grail literature. The truth about the development of the deck over the last 2,000 years, resulting in the formalized woodcut packs produced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries at Marseilles, Besancon, and elsewhere in Europe, reveals a much more complex, subtle, and intricate picture of diverse esoteric influences cross-fertilizing and cohering over many centuries around the now-familiar Greater and Lesser Trumps of Tarot. These symbols, once treasured in the courts of fifteenth-century Italian nobles and Florentine princes and carried through many lands in the painted caravans of Romany sorcerers and fortunetellers, have never lost their appeal to the imagination and speak as beguilingly today with their voice of enchantment as they ever did in times gone by. Once known they are quite unforgettable. This is because they resonate within us as a true "psychic language," epitomizing the original timeless archetypes within the Deep Mind. In order to gain understanding of the wisdom-traditions that converge so mysteriously in the patterns of Tarot symbolism, let us briefly examine the known historical and conceptual background of this "Mute Book."
Tarot Symbolism and Origins
The earliest extant examples of Tarot decks were illuminated with precious pigments on vellum with consummate artistry for courtly patrons in Renaissance Europe during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, including the deck allegedly designed by Jacquemin Gringonneur for France's King Charles VI in the year 1392. However, as early as March of 1377, play with cards had been officially proscribed in the city of Florence. The inventory of the Dukes of Orleans for 1408 records the purchase of Quartes de Lombardie, the Lombardy Tarocchi deck. The noble Milanese dynasty of the Viscontis commissioned the artist Marziona de Tartona to design a Tarocchi deck. Many of the so-called Lombardy Tarocchi decks were created as presents for aristocratic weddings such as that of Filipo Visconti and Maria of Savoy in 1428, for which the artist Bonifacio Bembo of Cremona executed a princely Tarot. The Visconti-Sforza deck dates from 1441 and celebrates the marriage of Francesco Sforza and Bianca Maria Visconti. The cards feature many examples of their heraldic family crests. According to some accounts, Francesco Fibbia, the Prince of Pisa, was the first to combine the originally separate Greater and Lesser Arcana during his exile at Bologna. The court ledgers of the Este family at Ferrara for 1442 mention Carticelles da Trionfi, the Trumps or "Triumphs" of Tarot.
The Tarot we recognize today is based on the so-called Venetian-Piedmontese Tarocchi. The close trade links between Venice and Turkey under the Abuyyid and Mameluk rulers led to Saracenic adaptations of the Minor Arcana, leaving out both Major Trumps and pictorial court cards, both proscribed under Islamic law. The only such fifteenth-century Turkish deck to survive is brilliantly ornamented with Circassian-Egyptian style artistic motifs and is kept at the Topkapi Saray museum in Instanbul. The Tarocki decks of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia also preserve the ancient symbols in the context of gaming.
Looking further back into history, the most ancient essence of the Tarot can be seen to have passed down from the adepts of Gnostic mystery-cults and the doctrines of Hermetic-Neo-Pythagorean magicians, which flourished into the final centuries of the Roman world up to the reign of the last pagan Emperor, Julian the Apostate.
Each of the Greater Arcana of Tarot is termed a "Trump," deriving from Triumphus or Thriambos, meaning a Dionysiac hymn marking a stage or spiritual station in the drama of Initiation in the Orphic Mysteries. The core of the Trumps is the mystical scale of numbers unfolding from the One to the Twenty-One, which relate to the concept of numbers as the Eternal Types or Ideas in the Divine Mind (Nous). These concepts of Arithmancy or Mathesis as the supreme key were taught by Orphic, Pythagorean, and Hermetic-Neo-Platonic schools of magic operant in the late Roman Empire, when Middle Eastern Gnostic religions, including the Hermetic, Mithraic, and Isian faiths, seeped westward into the Mediterranean sphere. Among the principal sources drawn upon by these schools were the teachings of Pythagoras, Plato, Zoroaster, Hermes Trismegistus, Apollonius, and Plotinus, as well as Hellenized Egyptian, Chaldean, and Persian mystery-cults then spreading across the Empire. Numbers, as the purest and most abstract conceptions, belong to the most exalted realm of the Mind and ceaselessly project and condition the phenomenal world according to immutable laws. As the Alexandrian Hermetic text "Libellus IV, Discourse of Hermes to Tat: The Krater" says, God then, is like the unit of number. For the unit [One], being the source of all numbers, and the root of them all, contains every number within itself, and is contained by none of them: it generates every number, and is generated by no other number.
In fifteenth-century Italy, where the Tarot sequence crystallized, the great magus Pico Della Mirandola stated as one of his Conclusiones Magicae printed in 1486: "By Numbers, a way is had, to the searchyng out, and understandyng of every thyng, able to be known." To the Hermetic magus, the key of number opened up the ultimate secrets of the universal laws, the mysteries of creation, and of the immortal soul, in accordance with the dictum of Pythagoras that "Number is the Root of All Things."
The Greater Arcana are, in essence, founded upon ancient numerological teachings. This gives a clue as to the actual historical origin of the Tarot Trumps for around 530 b.c.e. Pythagoras left his native isle of Samos due to his distaste for the regime of its ruler, the tyrant Polycrates, and settled in the town of Crotona in "Magna Graecia" (southern Italy), where his esoteric Orphic-Pythagorean brotherhood was established throughout the Greek colonies there. As Cicero notes ". . . many centuries later so flourishing was the fame of the Pythagoreans that no others seemed to be learned men." The Pythagorean mystery-teachings concerning mystic numerology, reincarnation, and the immortality of the soul had a tremendous impact on the Stoic and Platonic circles in Rome for many centuries thereafter, being taught by such initiates as Posidonius in the first century b.c.e. This great revival of the mysticism of Pythagoras combined with the Stoic and Platonic doctrines was called Neo-Pythagoreanism and, according to W. K. C. Guthrie, it especially emphasized the "astral theology and number-mysticism," the magical side of earlier Orphic-Pythagoreanism. Its exponents over the next three centuries included Cronius, Numenius of Apamaea, Nigidius Figulus, and the great magus Apollonius of Tyana. It contributed greatly to the emerging Neo-Platonic philosophy of Plotinus, influenced the Jewish Cabala through the works of Philo of Alexandria, and early Christian philosophy via the writings of Clement of Alexandria. The mediaeval philosopher-mystics such as Nikolaus of Cusa kept the Pythagorean-Platonic tradition alive in Christian Europe.
Having surmised that the originals of the Venetian Tarocchi designs emerged from the number-mysticism of Neo-Pythagorean revival during the period 100 b.c.-a.d. 200, it is fascinating to speculate whether or not some prototype of the Greater Arcana may have been employed by the theurgists and magi of ancient Rome, perhaps painted on vellum or parchment for the use of initiates. The transmission of this Neo-Pythagorean Gnosis underlying the Tarot may have been effected within the ubiquitous mediaeval Guild system which regulated all crafts, arts, and industries in the world of the Middle Ages, including stonemasonry, stained-glass work, ironwork, weaving, and textile work among others. These Craft Guilds, from which speculative Freemasonry would later crystallize, preserved many secret symbols, concepts, and initiatory practices from the pre-Christian past and among stonemasons and others the figure of Pythagoras was especially revered. The Masonic Cooke Manuscript from 1430 relates how Pythagoras and Hermes discovered after the Flood three pillars on which the Elder Wisdom of Angels was inscribed. A. E. Waite remarks that Hermes and Pythagoras were regarded in the mediaeval Masonic mythos as "the saviours of the Ancient Wisdom," and says that "Pythagoras himself appears, but under the name of Peter Gower, as a prototypical Master of the Craft." More importantly to our theory, the manufacture of cards and the continuity and quality of their designs was the province of Master Card-Makers registered in the Guild system. For example, two Master Card-Makers are recorded in the Brabant Guild-Book of 1427 and others, including female card-painters at Nuremburg and other regions. It was doubtless that these Guild Card-Makers in the regions of Lombardy, Piedmont, and Venice preserved the Secret Tradition behind the Tarot and acted as the living link between Graeco-Roman esoteric lore and the mediaeval Tarot symbolism between a.d. 500-1300. It seems very plausible that mediaeval Master Card-Makers within the Craft Guilds preserved the ancient Orphic and Neo-Pythagorean Gnosis of the late Roman culture in the form of the early Italian Tarocchi deck. This would also explain why the earliest Tarot decks almost exclusively originate from the Italic-Roman regions, spreading throughout France, Germany, and Eastern Europe in later centuries. (It may be no accident either that the traditional Marseilles deck of France originates from the region of the early Greek colony of Marsilia in southern Gaul, where the Pythagorean Brotherhood was said to have had a significant presence). If we accept this Neo-Pythagorean origin in Italy around the first century before Christ, the Tarot trumps are seen to represent an astonishing survival of classical Graeco-Roman esotericism into the Middle Ages and an unbroken transmission of ancient pagan Wisdom into the world of today.
Breaking the Tarot Code:
The Tetraktys Key
The long-sought key that unlocks the secrets behind the sequence of Tarot Trumps is the ancient Pythagorean symbol called the Tetraktys. It is composed of ten points arranged in a triangular formation in a descending series (1 + 2 + 3 + 4). (See Figure 1.1.) Theon of Smyrna remarked that the Tetraktys was revered in the Pythagorean cult as a psycho-cosmic glyph embodying the "entire nature of the universe." Initiates called it the Perpetual Fountain of Nature, as it was held to contain the ratios of mathematical harmonies underlying the whole of creation and revealed the emanation of all things from the One and the involution back into that Unity through the Dekad. In the Pythagorean-Orphic Mysteries, initiates swore their oaths upon this sacred symbol that encapsulated their most secret doctrines concerning the soul's immortality, cyclical reincarnation, and the concepts of number underlying the laws of the cosmos. The mystic names and attributes given to the Dekad in ancient Graeco-Roman esotericism are as follows.
The Pythagorean Dekad:
The Tetraktys and the "Gods of Number"
1. Monad: Also termed Apollo, Sol, Zeus, Proteus, Chaos, and Eros as the original Unity and Primal Essence, the One; Taxia ("Order").
2. Dyad: Called Juno-Lucina, Luna, Rhea, and Diana, it is the principle of Duality, the first reflection of the Divine Mind; Analogia ("Equal Proportion").
3. Triad: Called Vesta, Latonia, Thetis, Tritogenia, it represents Harmony, Perfection, the threefold Goddess.
4. Tetrad: Known as Hercules, Bacchus, Bassarius, Pan, Cyllenius, who holds the key to the Four Elements of Nature.
5. Pentad: Called Pronoia ("Providence"), Athanaton ("the Immortal"), corresponding to the Heavenly World and Mercury as the Quintessence of Aether, the Fifth Element.
6. Hexad: Called Venus, Persaea, Amphitrite, Hygeia ("Health"), it is known as the Number of Wedlock, Marriage, and Generation, "the Reconciler."
7. Heptad: Sacred to Apollo, Minerva, and to Mars, titled Telesphoros "Far-Bearing," it represents the ethereal vehicle of the soul; Akropolis ("the Citadel").
8. Ogdoad: Called Dike ("Cosmic Justice"), Law, the Steadfast, and All-Harmonious; also holy to Saturn, the Fates, and Vulcan, it symbolizes perfect equilibrium and balanced equality.
9. Ennead: Called Prometheus, Proserpina, Oceanus, and Horos ("Horizon"), it is the holy number of the Spheres of the Nine Muses.
10. Dekad: Anangke ("Necessity"), Ouranos, and Mnemosyne ("Memory"); a number sacred to Janus, it symbolizes the Cosmic Cycle, the Wheel of Time, Fate, and Eternal Cyclicity (Anakuklosis) originating from and returning to the original source; the Number of Kosmos.
This number scale corresponds to the cards I-X of the Greater Arcana. Cards XI-XX represent the "doubling" of the Dekad, the cosmic cycles of outgoing evolution and ingoing return symbolized by the ancient Cosmic Lemniscate sign of Infinity. Plutarch actually remarks that "the Pythagorean World consisted of a double Quaternion [Tetraktys]," equating to the spiritual and phenomenal realms. In this way the cards are perhaps to be seen in pairs or "dyads," illustrating key concepts of the mystery-teachings.
0-The Fool/XXI-The World: Encompassing all is this primal dyad, symbolizing pure Spirit, "Perfect Mind" embracing "Perfect Wisdom," the Initiate-Fool, and the Mystery-Goddess.
I-The Juggler/XI-Fortitude: Mind as Sovereign over lower Nature; the Source of Magical Mastery.
II-The Popess/XII-The Hanged Man: Holy Wisdom attained by introversion and sacrifice.
III-The Empress/XIII-Death: The Womb and the Tomb; Incarnation/Discarnation; Birth/Death.
IV-The Emperor/XIV-Temperance: The elemental World receiving the numinous Influence.
V-The Pope/XV-The Devil: The Hierophantic Masters of the Heavenly and Chthonic Mysteries.
VI-The Lovers/XVI-The Tower: Synthesis/Breakdown; Love/Wrath; Generation and Destruction.
VII-The Chariot/XVII-The Star: Winged Chariot of the Soul; Aetheric Vehicle; the Sidereal Body.
VIII-Justice/XVIII-The Moon: Cosmic Justice ruling the sub-lunar realm; Permanence amidst Change.
IX-The Hermit/XIX-The Sun: Pilgrimage to the Midnight Sun; transmutation of Lead into Gold.
X-The Wheel of Fortune/XX-Judgement: The causal Cycles of History transfigured in Eternity, Time, and the End of Time.
This primal dyad is perhaps hinted at in the traditional ordering of the Trumps Major in which card 0 comes between XX-Judgement and XXI-The World, signifying that the last two cards are somehow different or to be considered "apart" from the first twenty Trumps, ...
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- PublisherLlewellyn Publications
- Publication date2000
- ISBN 10 1567183654
- ISBN 13 9781567183658
- BindingCards
- Number of pages160
- Rating
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