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FREEMASONRY AND THE TAROT
Kenneth W. Davis
Semiannual Meeting, The Masonic Society
Salt Lake City, Utah, July 16, 2011
Copyright 2011 by Kenneth W. Davis
Introduction
Hundreds, probably thousands, of books and articles have
been written
about supposed connections between Freemasonry and
the Tarot. A
Google search last week found more than a million pages
that include
both those terms. Libraries and archives surely include
many more.
Today I propose to briefly introduce the Tarot, to provide
an overview of
its supposed connections with Freemasonry, to dismiss
many of those
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connections, to discuss a set of real but relatively
unimportant
connections, and to discuss one very important one.
Histories of the Tarot
First, the Tarot. Like Freemasonry, the Tarot has both a
legendary
history and a documented one.
The most discussed legendary history of Tarot traces it
back to ancient
Egyptperhaps to the god Thoth himself, perhaps in his
incarnation as
Hermes Trismegistus. For example, the astrologer DorisChase Doane
contended that
. . . underneath the Great Pyramid is a temple of initiation
on whose
walls hang tablets depicting the same images as theseventy-eight
tarot cards, plus another thirty that are more esoteric still
(Clifton,
114).
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Some have suggested that the Tarot contains the secret
teachings of
ancient Egypt, coded to hide those teachings until theycould be
discovered by a more enlightened agepresumably ours.
Some of those who argue for an Egyptian origin claim that
the Tarot was
carried from Egypt in the Exodus. (Surprisingly, Ive found
no
speculation that it was contained in the Ark of the
Covenantalthough
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there is speculation, of course, that the Templars
discovered the Tarot in
Jerusalem and brought it to Europe.)
Still others have suggested that the Tarot was brought out
of Egypt by
the Romani people,the Gypsies, so called because they
were believed by
many to be Egyptians. (As you may know, they actually
emerged from
India.)
Others have argued for origins in the Kabbalah, even
assigning Tarot
cards to the pathways in the Tree of Life. Albert Pike, in
what I believe is
his one mention of the Tarot in Morals and Dogma, wrote
He who desires to attain to the understanding of the
Grand Word
and the possession of the Great Secret, ought carefully to
read the
Hermetic philosophers, and will undoubtedly attain
initiation, as
others have done; but he must take, for the key of their
allegories,
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the single dogma of Hermes, contained in his table of
Emerald, and
follow, to class his acquisitions of knowledge and direct
theoperation, the order indicated in the Kabalistic alphabet of
the Tarot
(777).
(Refreshingly, that was one of General Pikes shorter
sentences. And its
on page 777, which Im sure means something.)
Others trace the origin of the Tarot to early Islam,
especially in its Sufi
form.
And theres more. Chas Clifton, writes
In Tarot history, any connection is fair game. For instance,
because
there are fifty-six filled-in Aubrey Holes at Stonehenge andfifty-six
cards in the Minor Arcana [Ill define that term shortly], to
an occult
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commentator such as Stephen Franklin the two not only
might be
but must be connected (114).
But of course, none of this legendary history is
documented.
What is documented is that in the early 1400s, Tarot
decks were being
used in Italy for playing games. (In many places they still
are.) By the
early 1500s they may have used for divinationfortune
tellingbut more
informed researchers generally argue that this use
occurred much later.
What is certain is that by the middle 1700s they werebeing seen as
having occult or esoteric meanings.
By way of background, a standard Tarot deck has four
suits of fourteen
cards each (the cards of a modern fifty-two-card deck plus
four Pages,
ranked just below the Jacks or Knights). Esotericists refer
to these fifty
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six cards as the minor arcana. The suits are swords, cups,
coins (or
pentacles or disks), and wands (or rods or staves or
batons). As you canguess, esoteric users of the Tarot have established
correspondences
between these suits and the four traditional elements, four
classes of
medieval European society, the four seasons, the four
directions, the four
Gospels, the four levels of the cosmos, and so on. It
seems certain,
however, that the four Tarot suits led directly to the four
suits in our
familiar decks of playing cards.
To these minor arcana are added twenty-two trump
cards, called by
esotericists the major arcana. Each represents a category
of person (such
as the Magician or the Lovers); an object (such as the
Chariot or the
Moon); or an idea (such as Strength or Temperance).
Early esoteric users
of the Tarot established correspondences between these
cards and the
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twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabetas well, as Ive
said, as the
twenty-two paths in the Kaballistic Tree of Life. Some
have credited themajor arcana with reflecting, or even inspiring, the twenty-
two chapters
of the Book of Revelations.
The cards of a Tarot deck have no established designs, so
hundredsif
not thousandsof artists and esotericists over the
centuries have
designed their own. For example, today you can find Tarot
decks themed
around baseball, cats, Christian saints, faeries,
Shakespeare, andwitches. One of the most-used decks today is the Tarot of
Marseilles,
which you have been seeing and which probably dates
from the sixteenth
century. P.C. Browne, an adherent of the Templar school
of Masonic
origins, makes much of Naomi Ozaniecs argument that
the Marseilles
Tarot was first published in 1718just one year after the
founding of the
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Grand Lodge of England. Browne writes, It is interesting
that two
ancient forms of esoteric study and practice should
emerge to public viewthe same time (Browne).
For divination the cards are shuffled, then dealt into a
pattern, or
spread. The Tarot readerusing one or more of the many
systems of the
meanings of the cardsinterprets the spread, both as
individual cards
and as a whole. Sometimes the meaning of a card is
affected by whether
it is dealt with its picture right side up (to a viewer) or
upside down.
As Ive said, hundreds or thousands of articles and books
posit direct
reciprocal influences between the Tarot and Freemasonry.
But after
examining such arguments, Jean-Michel Davidconcludesas I dothat
Freemasonry and the Tarot remain on opposite faces of a
chasm, no
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matter how much some may have worked at their union
(David).
My thesis today is that although the Tarot and Masonicritual have no
shared documented historical origin and no significant
historical
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influence on each other, they do have several interesting
points of
historical contact.
Points of contact
The first documented point of contact between masonry
and the Tarot is
a relatively minor one, concerning the work of operative
masons. David
has pointed out that some of the images in buildings
designed and
constructed by medieval stonemasons have strong
similarities to the
images of the Tarot of Marseilles and other early decks.
For example, a
relief sculpture of the Flight to Egypt at Amiens Cathedral
bears a
striking resemblance to the design of Trump 16the
House of God,
usually called the Towerin the Marseilles Tarot (David).
However,
discovering the reasons for such pictorial similarities
belongs to the field
of art history.
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The first significant documented point of contact between
the Tarot and
speculative Freemasonry occurred in the person of
Antoine Court deGebelin, born in France in 1719. He became a Freemason
in 1771 at the
Lodge of Les Amis Reunis, but transferred to the Lodge of
Les Neuf
Soeurs, where he became a lodge brother of Benjamin
Franklin. Court de
Gebelin had been a supporter of American independence,
and to my
knowledge, its possible that he sat in Lodge the evening
of April 7, 1778,
when Most Worshipful Brother Ben escorted Francois-
Marie Voltairea
giant of the Enlightenmentto Voltaires initiation.
In Volume 8 of his book Le Monde Primitif, published in
1781, Court de
Gebelin positedwith no historical evidencethe theory
that the Tarot is
a repository for the secret wisdom of Egypt, in fact the
secrets of the
legendary Book of Thoth. An essay in Le Monde Primitif
written by a
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possible Mason, le Comte de Mellet, proposed the
correspondences
between the twenty-two trumps and the Hebrew alphabet,
and yetanother essay in the book laid out a method of using the
cards for
divination.
Mary K. Breer, seemingly one of the most through
historians of the Tarot,
writes
Court de Gebelin and probably le Comte de Mellet were
members of
Masonic, Rosicrucian, and other secret societies that were
then
rampant in France. Thus, there is a good chance that they
were
revealing information that had already been circulating
among these
secret societies (280).
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However, Breer offers no evidence for this speculation.
And an
anonymous entry in Tarotpedia (a Tarot wiki) puts it this
way:
Freemasons have been involved since at least the 18th
century in
writing about, or in the design of, tarot. Court De Gebelin
and
Etteilla were two such Freemasons. . . .
Of course, this says no more about an intrinsic connection
between
freemasonry and tarot than a connection between tarot
and horse-
racing (which they likewise may have had an active
interest in)
(Tarotpedia).
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A second important point of contact between Freemasonry
and the Tarot
occurred in the person of Arthur Edward Waite,
Freemason andesotericist. The 1909 Tarot deck he created along with
artist and fellow
Golden Dawn member Pamela Colman Smith joins the
Marseilles Tarot
as one of the three best-known decks today. Incidentally,
it is frequently
sold and referred to as the Rider-Waite Tarot, giving its
publisher top
billing and omitting any mention of Smith.
Burkle examines the twenty-two trumps of what I wish to
call the Waite-Smith Tarot, and despite Waites immersion in
Freemasonry, finds overt
Masonic association in only one card, the High Priestess,
seated
between the two familiar pillars of Solomons Temple.
The third Tarot in that trinity is the Thoth Tarot, devised by
Freemason
and esotericist Aleister Crowley and illustrated by fellow
occultist Lady
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Frieda Harris. The Thoth desk was created between 1938
and 1943, but
not published in its entirety until 1969. Like the Waite-
Smith deck, theThoth Tarot has no significant Masonic symbolism.
Freemasonry and the Tarot as archetypal
I suggest that the most significant relationship between
Freemasonry
and the Tarot is, as I have said, that both are works of folk
art that give
expression to some of the same fundamental human
archetypes.
Why folk art? Folk artthink of the traditional folk song,
for example
is art that emerges from a folk, a community. Even if a
work was created
by a single artist, that artist may be long forgotten, as the
work spreads
and changes. This process can be called a kind of
Darwinism, in which
fit elements or changes survive and less fit elements or
changes
become extinct.
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Just as we do not know who created the first Masonic
ritual, we do not
know who created the first Tarot deck. Both have
developed withinrelatively defined communities, and have changed by
addition and
subtraction. Anyone who has experienced Masonic ritual
in different
Grand Lodge jurisdictions will instantly note the
differencesdifferences
typical in folk art. (For example, the relatively minor
differences between
Indiana and New Mexico ritual continue to make my head
hurt; I now
speak a kind of creole and often find myself wrong in both
jurisdictions.)
And anyone who browses Tarot decks and books in a
bookstore will find
even more dissimilarities, even in fairly traditional decks.
But paradoxically, fundamental similarities remain, even
across cultures
and genres. It was these similarities that led Carl Jung to
develop his
theory of archetypes. Jung wrote, The archetype concept
derives from
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the often repeated observation that myths and universal
literature stories
contain well defined themes which appear every time and
everywhere(Jung).
For Jung, archetypes are fundamental themes or motifs
that reside in
our collective unconscious and which are expressed in
myths, folktales,
visual arts, and personal dreams. If you believe in a reality
beyond the
material (a belief all of us confirmed as Entered
Apprentice candidates)
you can think of the collective unconscious as a great
underground poolof knowledge and wisdom that all men and women can
tap into. But even
if you are a strict materialist, you must agree that all
animals are born
with instincts shared with other members of their species,
and that for
humans, at least, archetypes may simply be instincts of
consciousness
instincts seen from inside instead of outside.
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In the case of the Darwinism of folk art, the surviving forms
may be the
most fit in part because they are the most archetypal.
Jung was a student of the Tarot and even listed the
archetypes or other
concepts that he believed were expressed or embodied in
the twenty-two
major arcana. Jung saw the Empress, for example, as an
image of
fruitfulness; and the Hanged Man, an image of sacrifice.
Subsequent students of both Jung and the Tarot have
expanded on
Jungs work. Gerald Schueler is just one Jungian therapist
who uses the
Tarot in his work (Schueler). Any many people use the
Tarot for
meditation.
In fact, Jung had a huge influence on one of the most
profound works on
Tarot cards, a Russian mystics anonymously published
1984 book
Meditations on the Tarot. In that book, each of the major
arcana in the
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Tarot of Marseilles becomes a focus for deep Christian
contemplation.
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(Im honoring the authors desire for anonymity, although
his name is
widely available.)
Not surprisingly, these same archetypes and concepts are
expressed or
embodied in Masonic Ritual. Fruitfulness, for example, is
embodied both
in the Cornucopia and in the Wages of a Fellowcraft, and
sacrifice to a
higher principle is the chief quality of Hiram Abiff.
Surely the most interesting card in the Tarot is the Fool,
numbered zero.
In tarot games, this card generally has no value on its
own, but increases
the value of other cards played along with it.
In esoteric and psychological interpretations of the Tarot,
the Fool is
often seen as an initiate, who moves through the other
major arcana on
his path to enlightenment. Many students of Tarot have
pointed out that
the major arcana can represent stages in the life journey,
perhaps even
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the steps outlined by Joseph Campbell in the heros
journey, his Junginspired
description of common elements of the worlds myths,
stories,and initiation rites (Campbell).
As a series of initiation rites, the rituals of Freemasonry
dramatically
embody the Fools journey. Like the Fool, the Masonic
candidate has no
value alonehe is symbolically divested of all metals, for
examplebut
both gains and gives value as he is inducted into the Craft.
As a side note on the Fool, the Marseille deck depicts him
in a way very
similar to Hieronymus Boschs 1510 depiction of the
Wayfarer. John J.
Robinson pointed out a number of similarities between
Boschs wayfarer
and a Masonic initiate: footwear, pants legs, cable tow,
and others (11718).
He uses these similarities to argue that Bosch must have
known
recognizable Masonic ritual much earlier than it is
otherwise known to
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have existed. But I dont have the time or knowledge to
support or
oppose that argument.
One more slight digression, particularly meaningful to
those of us from
the Southwest. Six of the cards in the major arcana are
also cards in the
Loteria, the Mexican game of chance similar to Bingo.
One of those cards, of course, is La Muerte, Death. Clifton
suggests that
this way of portraying Death, echoed in the Tarot, is the
ancestor of the
semicomic skeleton creations that Mexicans buy for
November 1, El dia
de los muertos (117).
He continues:
This card has also been claimed as an ancestor of thefigure of
Death drawing a bow that is carved in wood and carried in
a cart by
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the Penitentes, a Hispanic religious brotherhood of
northern New
Mexico and sourthern Colorado. Marta Weigle, author of a
comprehensive work on the Penitentes, argued that theTarot trump
of Death not only inspired the carven figure but was itself
taken
from Petrarchs I Trionfi, because in the poem and on the
cart Death
is a female figure (the New Mexicans sometimes referredto her as
Dona Sebastiana). I think this is an unlikely connection,
given the
cultural isolation of the area during the early nineteenth
century
when the Penitente brotherhoods had their major growth;it is more
likely that Petrarch, the Tarots designers, and the
founders of
Hispanic Catholic lay brotherhoods drew on a common
cultural
tradition (117).
Masonic Tarot decks
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Before I conclude, Id like to briefly introduce you to
threepotentially
fourmodern Tarot decks labeled as Masonic.
The Tarot Maconnique, 1987, by Jean Beauchard, while
including a
number of general esoteric themes, has little that is
specifically Masonic,
at least in English-speaking Masonry.
Collin Browne, a South African Mason, created and
published The
Square and Compasses Tarot (2003). It does contain
extensive Masonic
symbolism.
And 2007 saw the publication of the Tarocchi Massonici,
by Morena
Poltroneiri and Ernesto Fazioli. Because I have not found
a copy of the
Fool card, I am instead showing you card number 1, the
Magician, which
fortuitously holds special meaning for me as the emblem
of my Mother
Lodge. The images I have seen from this pack are
incredibly beautiful. In
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fact, this Tarot was created as fine art, not as a working
deck: it
comprises only the major arcana, and is printed in large
format and onlyon one side of the paper. Im saving my money to buy a
copy for framing.
I also want to be so presumptuous as to show you a work
in progress,
the Freemasonry Tarot, now being shopped around topublishers by
David Naughton-Shires and me. David, as some of you
know, is an Irish
artist and designer who is also a Mason and a former
member of the
board of The Masonic Society.
Our deck is designed to be used in all the ways other
Tarot decks are
usedbut also educationally, as an introduction to
Freemasonry. Our
major arcana are the chief degrees and symbols ofMasonry, numbered
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to correspond with the major arcana of the traditional
Tarot and their
underlying archetypes.
Our minor arcana are prominent Masons, grouped into
suitsLodges
by the areas of their achievement: wands for artists and
entertainers,
cups for writers and philosophers, swords for warriors and
statesmen,
and coins for businessmen, scientists, explorers, and
athletes. We see
these Celestial Lodges as the Masonic equivalent of
fantasy baseball
and football teams.
Conclusion
In conclusion, what I suggest is that Freemasonry and the
Tarot emerged
from the same sourcesbut those sources were, of
course, not Ancient
Egypt or the Templars. Both the Tarot and Freemasonry
were born out of
the ferment of the European Renaissance, when mundane
objects and
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practices began to be seen as symbolsnot as mere
signs with specific
defined meanings dictated by the Churchbut as true
symbols, withrich, multiple meanings. In the Renaissance, a great age
of symbolism,
both the workings of ordinary stonemasons and the
figures on ordinary
playing cards were invested with roughly the same sets of
universal
archetypal meanings. If the Tarot can help us see and
think archetypally,
perhaps we can become better at seeing our Craft in the
same way
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Works cited
Browne, P.C. The Masonic Tarot (A History), presented
to the Lyceum
Lodge of Research No. 8682 E.C.
http://www.phoenixmasonry.org/masonicmuseum/Tarot_C
ards_Masoni
c.htm. April 11, 2011.
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces,
Commemorative
Edition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004.
Clifton, Chas S. The Unexamined Tarot, in The InnerWest, Jay Kinney,
ed. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2004, pp. 111-
23.
David, Jean-Michel. Tarot and Freemasonry: An Amorous
Chasm.
Association for Tarot Studies,
http://newsletter.tarotstudies.org/2008/11/tarot-and-
freemasonry/.
April 11, 2011.
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Freemasonry and Tarot. Tarotpedia.
http://www.tarotpedia.com/wiki/Freemasonry_and_Tarot.
July 7, 2011.
Greer, Mary K. Tarot for Your Self. Pompton Plains, NJ:
Career Press,
2002.
Jung, Carl. Quoted at Carl Jung Resources,
http://www.carljung.
net/archetypes.html. July 11, 2011.
Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian
Hermeticism. Robert
Powell, translator. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin,
1985.
Pike, Albert. Morals and Dogma. Washington, D.C., 1960.
Robinson, John J. A Pilgrims Path. New York: M. Evans
and Company,
1993.
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Schueler, Gerald. Chaos and the Psychological
Symbolism of the Tarot.
http://www.schuelers.com/chaos/chaos7.htm. July 6,
2011.
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