EnriqueEnriquez
Hooked on TdM said:
The main issue here is intention. I have problems with the idea of each image in the tarot being made with a secret intention. I find the idea of the tarot being made by enlightened masters too romantic. We don’t know who conceived the trumps, but we do know that the tarot was made by artisans. Having a background in art myself, I am interested in the fact that these artisans were masters of their craft, and although this may be problematic for some, is my suggestion that craft is what moves the human soul. What makes us feel god’s immensity as soon as we enter a cathedral is the architecture, architecture being -as my friend Scion has pointed out- a form of manipulation. All arts are a form of manipulation whose aim is to compose emotional states. The artisan doesn’t accomplishes that by means of occult knowledge, but with the very understanding of how to work with shape that defines his craft. The ideas I am sharing with you here are tied to Unger and Camoin’s ideas, but more precisely, to Matteo María Boiardo’s poem “I Truinfi”, and with Teófilo Folengo’s “Merlini Cocai’s Sonnets”. In the work of these two poets we have what could be the earliest historical account mentioning the use of Tarot for a purpose other than card playing, described an analogical game. In this game, a group of people will contrast their personalities and situations with the character depicted in the card they got. A more contemporary link to this can be found in Italo calvino’s “The Castle of the Crosses Destinies”, a book that I suggest everybody following this thread should read. (In his book, Calvino accomplished something I am aiming for you to accomplish in here. Something that Boiardo, Folengo, Unger and Camoin left conveniently aside, this is, and understanding of the pips as equally visual as the Trumps). As poets, Boiardo, Folengo and Calvino were able to understand the evocative quality of the trumps. As poet Robert Creeley wrote: “For a poet these details are profound masteries in themselves and speak as emphatically as will the evident content one otherwise calls ‘the meaning’.” In my opinion, the drama of the tarot is that we went from Boiardo, who was a poet, to Etteila, who was a hairdresser. Please understand here that I am totally biased about this. I feel that the idea of ‘occult’ knowledge always functions as a pyramid scam, with those who seek the occult knowledge at the base, the initiated in the middle, and the ‘master’ at the top. The problem being that on top of the master there seems to always be a forgery. I am totally biased against bad myth-making because bad myth-making is the opposite of art. For me, bad myth-making is the one who needs to be taken as truth to function. Art doesn’t need its metaphors to be taken as fact to have power. “A myth that only works if is taken as fact” can also be the definition of a lie. I prefer not to compromise myself pleading alliance to any secret school proposing any set of defined meanings. I don’t look for meaning in the cards. I look for meaning in life, and in the tarot I detect messages. In the following weeks we will see how a message is what speaks to us first. Instead of chasing the occult, I prefer to go back to Robert Creeley, who wrote: “one knows all too well that’s what to be said has only its own occasion”, because in my view, the experience of tarot is never about the tarot, but about the person who is looking at it. In fact, it is possible to say that by reading the tarot the tarot read us.
Now, I would like to recapitulate. So far, we have seen how there are two things we do in order to detect a message in the cards:
- Follow the poetic patterns
- Recall the image's semantic field
In my work, I focus on the first of these two aspect because it is there where I feel that I can make a worthwhile contribution. It is in the realm of tarot as a poetic event that I have something to share. The second aspect is equally important, but I feel there are other people already focusing on that with success. Understanding the Marseilles tarot's semantic field implies going back to that point in time before the 'occultists' discovered the tarot, (a point in time before the Golden Dawn legend reshaped our understanding of the tarot to the point of making us wrongly believe they were the main source of knowledge about the cards). But this is also a point in time when the Court de Gébelin, Papus and Etteila weren't relevant. We need to go further back. To understand the Marseilles tarot's semantic field we must become familiar with the art and culture of late Medieval Europe, and other writers have already commented on this extensively.
Jean-Michel David comes to mind. His online course aims at providing a comprehensive understanding of the card's iconography and the cultural influences that may have helped to shape them. Then there is Michael Hurst, whose sober essays I deeply enjoy, and there is of course the always-controversial Michael Dummet. The fact that Dummett's objective point of view has ruffled so many feathers is very telling. As another poet who prefers to remain unnamed once told me: "Everybody wants to make the tarot his bitch!"
In any case, what I need to point out before going further is that I do not believe in the idea of "not reading any books on the tarot". I do think, however, that the dogmatism of the 'occult' authors is useless, and at worst, bad myth-making. But is not possible to have a truthful comprehension of the Marseilles tarot without considering it as an artistic document, tied to the real-world of the post-medieval/renaissance era, and not to the occultist's micro-cosmos.
That said, I would like to advance an idea some of you might find problematic: a throughout understanding of the Marseilles tarot iconography won't necessarily make us good readers. To say that a reading is not a class on the tarot would be too obvious. The key is to understand that the purpose of a reading is to help a person reach a kind of knowledge they won't have access to by logical means, a knowledge that goes beyond the literal understanding of the cards and beyond their allegorical religious agenda. Such knowledge is reached by tapping into the card's anagogical level, and this occurs when both our semantic field and the cards semantic field overlap, generating a kind of meaning that is bigger than the combination of these two things: in other words, a revelation. Such a revelation occurs when we find what wasn't there before, and it can't be traced back to our personal semantic field, that is, to the context of what we know because we have experienced it. Nor can this revelation be traced back to the tarot's semantic field, that is, to the way the images on the cards can be found functioning in the art and literature of its time, or in the way the individual elements conforming each image can be found functioning within that culture.
For example, to point out Le Soleil and state that the two people in there are Cosmas and Damian, although very interesting, may be useless. At a literal level we can only speculate if they are Cosmas and Damian, a depiction of Gemini, or Laverne & Shirley. Besides, the tale of the two mischievous saints who traveled around, switching the rotten limbs of European patients for the healthy ones of moors cadavers may be too big to fit in our client's pocket, and too heavy to carry around just for the sake of it. The tarot makes us better people because by studying it we get to learn about all kind of things, including the curious life of Cosmas and Damian. But knowing these things won't make us better readers if we insist on believing that finding meaning in the cards consists of repeating on cue the tales we have learned. Using a tale for therapeutic purposes and doing divination aren't the same thing.
We must be responsible for our own metaphors. We must make divination the moment in which we help a person find new meaning. This is an act of poiesis in which a revelation appears in front of us expanding our understanding of reality, the tarot and life. That's what we do when we look at the cards: we let them reveal their original intention at an imaginal level. We must learn all we can about Le Soleil. We must learn about Gemini, Cosmas and Damian, the masculine and feminine principles, the House of Children and Pleasure, or the Hebrew letter Kaph so we can do an act of amnesia. Then we will look at Le Soleil and feel that nothing is obscure, everything is clear, radiant, nothing stands between these two characters and they are embracing, finding their voices in each other's ears. This is an alchemical process in which we take all our rationality and all our words and then decant them into a feeling, into a simple certainty, so we can look at few cards and say "look, this person is experiencing this." Many of us could write the biography of our father, delving into his personality, preferences, particularities and more relevant anecdotes. But that is not what experiencing 'father' is. Experiencing father means to feel in that presence, or in an embrace, the certainty of being safe. That is the difference between the poet and the historians. For a historian, a father is certain man of certain age who lived in certain address and knew certain people. For a poet, a father is the feeling of being safe. Historians hunts the facts about things, while poets trace back the essence of a thing to that very moment before it became a symbol.
All the best,
EE
