THE MANTIC ARTS | TAROT
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TAROT

Dogen wrote extensively on the importance of not aiming at enlightenment. So there are no languid oceanic feelings in our case! On the contrary, the emphasis is put in daily life, in daily practice. This practice can benefit our tarot reading practice...

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"We should not fool ourselves and should accept the mission given to us by our wonderful and magical game of cards, a game that in my opinion does not predict our future but that opens many doors and invites us to enter them. How does it work? Only God knows, unless it be our angel that uses the sacred and magic deck as a language between our client and himself by means of us.
Will we know one day? Should we know?
Or should we simply accept?
Who will possibly have the answer to that?"

Alain BOCHER

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That the objects in the Universe be symbols not produced by any human intervention... is perhaps a source of continuous wonderment. To go beyond this fact can lead us to the most neurotic byzantinism... Planets can ressonate what happens in the life of a cat or dog, you see? These animals are not in any hermeneutical relationship with the planets... They are not even conscious of the planets, so they are incapable of projecting meaning onto them...

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Divine Action: after a salutary practice of zazen meditation I began to read as usual one or two pages of a book of Buddhist sermons transcribed from the talks of a Japanese monk that lived in the Unites States, Dainin Katagiri. It said something like this:

It is impossible to do all the things we propose to do only through our power. In fact we do not touch Reality by our own efforts only. If you try to touch what is Real you will immediately fall into delusion. Such is our human situation.

Can we really understand how divination works? That is perhaps a vain enterprise that is beyond our forces... As to myself I feel it is better to earnestly study the Tarot cards, to study what they tell us... What the monk said (to me, of course) was that perhaps Reality is shown to us when we are calmer, in peace, when we are not looking for it... It is a bit like the idea of Grace in Christianism.

The widespread use of the Rider-Waite deck is a typical cultural and historical trend of Anglo-Saxon countries, for elsewhere folk variations of the Marseille deck were far more common for a long time. There are some problems in superposing posterior attributions to the cards, attributions that come from other symbolic systems such as (christianized) Qabalah or 19th and 20th century magical (or even magickal) initiatory systems/paths.

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The Tarot works independently of the operator: even if you acquaint yourself with it through some magazine, if you follow the rules it will answer your questions. The difference is that a qualified Tarot reader will know the details, the subtleties, the silences of the deck...

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Reading the Tarot for yourself is not such a good idea for many reasons. Besides the suggestibility factor or involuntary distortion, there is also a curious fact: the cards tend to give fuzzy answers if we are reading it for ourselves. Don't ask me why, it's a mystery...

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Cript-Kabbale, in his beautiful and intelligent site ABC du Tarot de Marseille, shows how the language of the birds, initially rediscovered by Grasset d'Orcet and popularized through the works of Fulcanelli, was widely used in the Marseille cards (lame, card, in phonetic cabala yields l’âme, soul). This cabala consists in using the similar sound of different words to encrypt esoteric messages. This phonetic cabala was a widespread phenomenon both in Western esotericism and in Middle-Eastern Islamic esotericism.

Cript-Kabbale accomplished a brilliant cabalistic analysis of the traditional French song Mon ami Pierrot. In this case, Pierrot yields Pie erre haut or 'The Magpie wanders in the High'... I wonder about the relation between this folk song with the Sufi text of Ferid ud-Din Attar, The Language (or Conference) of the birds, written in Persian... The date of its composition is near the date of the presumed appearance of the Tarot cards and also of the composition of this French song; geographically these events are not so distant, and the Persian text is also about the Magpie (in French, Pie) who is the central character of the story and who is also very important in the language of the birds system (or phonetic cabala). The relation or even the profound filiation between Medieval European Hermeticism and Muslim esotericism (and of course Muslim alchemy) is flagrant.

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As to the antiquity of the Tarot as the closed and structured system that we know, in my opinion it is probably immediately post-Medieval and of initiatic, hermetic, alchemical and astrological content. However, the link was lost, the transmission and above all the intention of the Major Arcana was lost, and to whom they were destined. This intention might perhaps be restored through an individual, particular gnosis, for the Tarot deck seems to be a mnemotechnical device, an Ars Memoria in the sense used by Frances Yates. The Minor Arcana seems to be an addition of Arab origin and have a different symbolic system, apart from the fact of being more obviously ludical. But it seems we shall never know these facts for sure, and perhaps this was made on purpose... The Tarot is archetypal not in the Junguian sense but in the sense of Plato and Plotinus, it translates the content of the Anima Mundi. An anamnesis is necessary in order to rediscover the lost intentions behind the Arcana, behind their names, their order, their numeration, their anagrams...

Tarot de la Réa, by Alain Bocher

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A critical outlook is essential... We have some difficulties is assembling two separate parts of us: our use of an ordinary language and our spiritual experience; we end up doing what Kant defined as an amphibology in his Critique of Pure Reason, that is, the erroneous transposition of problems pertaining to a particular domain to a different area.

Our spiritual experience (which is also a daily experience) and our Tarot practice are both completely different from our cerebral analysis of them. For example, we practice Zen-Buddhism, and our real lived experience of it is in this sense to think, not to think, to go beyond thinking and non-thinking, to just sit (zazen). Our divinatory practice, in its turn, naturally derives from this lived experience of the flux, of the Tao... Our study of the Tarot should ideally follow these lines, a hermeneutical contemplation of each card, of each spread, of the traditional motifs of the cards, of the employed letters, of card numeration, of the obscure, diffuse, present and absent order implied, of what is numinous in the Arcana, of what is evoked by them... This should be done at the same time as we radically avoid any associations with other symbolic systems such as Kabbalah and Astrology.

When we try to translate this profound, meditative (and serene, and originary) lived experience into an ordinary language that uses Western Occult jargon our alarms ring, we clearly perceive in disgust the metaphysical baroqueness of occultism, its excessive complication, the mental onanism that constitutes in a general way pseudo-esotericism. Trying to translate our lived experience and perceptions through analytical discourse is not a good idea, we should avoid such a trap. Perhaps the only appropriate form of communication for these matters is the gesture, and the poetical, evocative form of language... A language that only points to direct experience, and nothing more.

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Tarot is silence, night, wind, the smell of grass, crickets, the flux, the constant change and impermanence of the world, the profound lack of Being, the absence of Being, instead the purest Becoming. There is no God, perhaps only equally ephemeral gods, becoming, becoming, samsara, nirvana, the one being also the other... We must polish the mirror, polish, polish, every day, for every day is holy.

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Of course there exists a strong connection between the Divinatory Tarot and the Initiatic Tarot, it consists in the more or less profound sharing of each card's meanings. But perhaps that is all, for the Initiatic Tarot begins where the Divinatory Tarot ends, the former being incommensurably richer than the latter.

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Alchemical bas-reliefs are aproximately a century older than the first registered Tarot decks. These bas-reliefs are conspicuously an Ars Memoria in the best tradition of Cicero and Quintilianus, destined to a small group of initiates (and
candidates). Some profane historians affirm that the first decks were a kind of pedagogical system made for the vast mass of illiterates of Medieval Europe, a system that aimed the socialization of these social strata by means of cards that represented society's varied social layers. This line of reasoning might be successfully applied to cards (first called naïbes and later triumphs/trumps) II, III, IV, but it does not in any way apply to the majority of the deck. The images on the cards are typically strong, dramatic, with rather complex details, and not at all obvious as one would expect if their intention was a mere socialization process.

It is far more probable that the Tarot was in its origin another hermetic Mutus Liber, as were a century before it the bas-reliefs. To discard the written word in those times was not some pedagogical condescendence, but a valid way Tradition had of successfully encrypting esoteric messages.

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Erroneous and obstructive classifications. It is a great mistake to separate the mantic use of the Tarot from its "initiatical" or esoteric use. The Tarot is a pictorial language and here lies its function and essence. As we learn this language we communicate more efficaciously with our daimon, the latter being also known as the Unconscious or our Higher Self. Through the Tarot our daimon will gradually and topically teach us true "esoteric" wisdom, namely our innate deep wisdom. Initiation to this wisdom thus happens through the divinatory practice of the Tarot and not through the study of works that do nothing more than project or attribute their own "esoteric" notions to our poor deck of cards.

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Q : Doesn't Tarot reading imply a fatalist worldview ?
A : No. Tarot is the (relatively) passive side whose pro-active complement is Magic. Both are the two sides of the same coin, of the same phenomenon, of the same activity or technology, of the same métier.

Through the Tarot we explore possible futures and the most probable of them through the law of inertia or law of least effort : "if events follow the present direction without opposition or contrary effort, the most probable possible future is the one we see here".

However, the usefulness of the Mantic Arts enters at this precise moment. As with the discoveries of Modern Physics, the simple act of spying possible futures already alters the probabilistic configuration of the same : the observer actively affects the observed.

Besides, what good would it do to know our future if the latter was inexorable ? In many cases that would certainly be a masochistic endeavour. If we explore the future we do so in order to decide if it is the case or not to magically and practically intervene, in order to alter the most probable inertial scenarios. And it is at this moment that Magic enters the scene. As Crowley said, all intentional actions are magical, from the prosaic act of writing a letter and taking it to the Post Office to the elaborate ritual of Ceremonial Magic...

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