The Celtic tarot and the secret traditions: a study in modern legend making

Folklore, Annual, 1998 by Juliette Wood

It is all too easy to compile a list of favourite historical solecisms from the current outbreak of tarot-mania. Writers such as Michael Dummett and James Webb articulate the very important position that much occult writing hovers uneasily between a commitment to a set of beliefs about the tarot and an attempt at academic coherence, which depends very heavily on a synthetic antiquity and a tendency to blur the distinction between fact and speculation (Webb 1971, viii and 1-5; Dummett 1980). Certainly, there is a fundamental difficulty with occult arguments. They assign meanings to aspects of tarot cards and their history, though these are exactly the aspects of the argument that require independent proof. As a result resemblances are taken to validate the original assumption, and any differences are dismissed as corrupt transmission or deliberate suppression.

However, interest in the tarot continues and people find a metaphysical, spiritual or psychological reality there despite the obvious constructedness of its source. Victor Turner's influential work on the importance of ritual in maintaining social structures argues that the rhetorical and behavioural strategies which underpin performances create social meaning (Turner 1987, 74-92). One of the features noted in the present study is the interrelationship between occult ideas, theories of culture and imaginative literature in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. In this context, models of ritual may be more useful in understanding the tarot phenomenon than models of history. Turner's adaptation of definitions of play in Huizinga's Homo Ludens (1933) and in Man, Play and Games by Roger Caillois (1965) offer a useful perspective on the tarot phenomenon.

Turner draws on Huisinga's ideas to link rituals and games as arenas in which sets of actors control, or fail to control, the rules. Huisinga's link between play and secrecy suggests another angle from which to assess the esoteric tarot, one which reveals a greater tension between ritual and play. The complexity of the rules in regards to the tarot suggests the secrecy element so central to Huisinga's idea of play. The order in which the cards are read is important, the layout is often quite elaborate, and each position has a special meaning. All the cards are assigned meanings in both their upright and reversed positions; in addition, the meanings can be affected by other cards in the vicinity. Learning all the meanings of the cards with enough facility to "read" them fluently is a quite considerable mental feat. In the more esoteric interpretations, learning the meaning is itself a process by which the initiate progresses towards his goal and the sense of secrecy and mystery is reinforced by the difficulty of the endeavour. In tarot divination, the cards are read by the diviner, who knows their meaning, on behalf of a presumably ignorant enquirer. In this sense, tarot does seem to have a ritualised element. Viewing it as a form of ritual helps us to understand how the esoteric tarot functions within what Turner has called the "space/time of the subjunctive mood of cultural action" (Turner 1987, 78). This has been described elsewhere as the "time out of time" dimension of ritual activity in which the interstitial period occupied by the ritual is defined by clear activating and de-activating phases (Falassi 1987, 3-5). Thus, different rituals can be seen as clearly activated and de-activated in terms of other social activity and relatively fixed or open in regard to internal rules. The tarot certainly operates by fixed rules with clear outcomes, and when it is used in divination has clear opening and closing phases. If complexity of the rules is viewed in terms of Huisinga's concept of "playful" secrecy, then these rules allow participants to control the outcome whether in terms of reader/enquirer in fortunetelling or the initiate's own esoteric progress.