“The economist J.M. Keynes once remarked that those economists who disliked theory, or claimed to get along better without it, were simply in the grip of an older theory.... Hostility to theory usually means an opposition to other people’s theories and an oblivion of one’s own.”
Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction
Robert V. O’Neill wrote what is probably the most interesting of all the historically oriented Tarot books, Tarot Symbolism, (1986). It is 392 pages, (without an index), and expresses the author’s view that early Tarot was in fact virtually all the things claimed by the eighteenth and nineteenth-century occultists and twentieth-century neo-Jungian interpreters, more or less. (The occult interpretations are sometimes couched in psychological terms, permitting the simultaneous justification of both as the historical significance of the trumps.) The book claims that occultists have done much to “elucidate the meaning of the symbols”, and “many occultist interpretations are justified”, while taking care to reject none of the occult sciences as possible “influences” on Tarot. Because occultist views have held center stage in terms of Tarot interpretation for over two centuries, and because this book is the most notable apologetic for the historicity of their interpretations, O’Neill’s work is must reading for anyone interested in either occult or historical Tarot studies. Tarot Symbolism is highly respected in the contemporary Tarot community, and the more historically knowledgable Tarot authors consider it to be a reliable and objective work of scholarship.
Though this book can rarely be found, it contains perhaps the most carefully reasoned, wide-ranging, and well-supported treatment of Tarot imagery yet written. O’Neill, a research scientist, puts both his research skills and his scientific objectivity to good use, presenting a wealth of information on the historical relationships between Tarot and other esoteric traditions. What Kaplan and Dummett have done for the history of the exoteric Tarot, O’Neill does for the history of the esoteric Tarot.
Cynthia Giles, The Tarot: History, Mystery, and Lore, (1992), 218.
The view that Tarot Symbolism is a scholarly work on esoteric Tarot history and iconography is common among Tarot enthusiasts. In some ways Tarot Symbolism resembles an historical study, and in some ways it resembles an art-historical iconographic study. However, O’Neill has not approached Tarot history or iconography in the manner of an historian or art historian. In an iconographic project, attempting to discern the actual intended design of Tarot and its likely literary or artistic sources and influences, the primary data are the surviving decks (the work itself), while the secondary data include contemporary documentation and the historical milieu. Moakley took this approach, and it required no references to modern occult views of Tarot. In an historical project, attempting to identify the origin of Tarot, the actual historical use or interpretation of the decks, and so on, the primary data are contemporaneous documentary records. Dummett took this approach, both in studying the early history of Tarot and the later history of occult Tarot. O’Neill took a different approach: Most of the pages of Tarot Symbolism are filled with comparisons between the interests of Renaissance and modern occultists, detailed discussions of eighteenth-century and later occult-Tarot interpretations, speculation about what a fifteenth-century magus might have thought about a card image taken out of context, etc. These are not meaningful data with which to address either historical or art-historical questions concerning Tarot in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries. Such speculations and concern with modern occult Tarot are not appropriate unless one assumes that the modern occultists were essentially correct in their assessments, and is attempting only to correct their incidental errors and omissions so as to bolster their case. Such an assumption and focus makes Tarot Symbolism a work of occult apologetics. Iconography begins with the work itself, the cards and their sequence. History begins with the documents, extant records and artifacts. O’Neill begins and ends with modern occult views of Tarot.
The factual history of esoteric Tarot—history based on direct evidence—was well researched and presented by Michael Dummett in Chapter 6 of The Game of Tarot, (1980). Subsequently that documented history of esoteric Tarot was developed in great detail in two additional books: A Wicked Pack of Cards (1996), by Ronald Decker, Thierry Depaulis, and Michael Dummett, and A History of Occult Tarot (2002), by Ronald Decker and Michael Dummett. The history of esoteric Tarot begins in the late eighteenth century when Tarot cards (and a great many other things) were coopted by a few occultists in France. Eighteenth-century Freemasons (and their opponents) invented an elaborate fictional history for themselves, and Tarot cards were one small piece of that decades-long development. The cards were employed primarily for divination (also popular at the time, the first book on cartomancy having been published in 1770) and as a set of Cabalistic emblems. Tarot’s use for divination spread quickly and significantly, but the more philosophical aspects languished until a very different version was devised in the mid nineteenth century. Near the end of the nineteenth century, variations of this version of occult Tarot became more widespread and well-known, being spread by a number of the occult societies that were popular at the time. In the late twentieth century, esoteric Tarot was again reinvented, largely abandoning the rigid, complex, and less fashionable Cabalistic systems, (although nothing is ever really lost to occult Tarot), instead interpreting the cards primarily as Jungian archetypes of transformation. In addition, inescapably fashionable neo-Gnostic sensibilities have strongly colored occult Tarot at least since the mid nineteenth century, and are central to Tarot Symbolism and to other late twentieth-century versions of occult Tarot. These approaches gave more panache to Tarot’s divinatory use, permitted very broad and flexible associations of all kinds, and established an authority for the esoteric use of Tarot that was grounded in twentieth-century psychological theories rather than less esteemed and historically-suspect “superstitions” and arcane mumbo-jumbo.
The only esoteric or magical references historians have uncovered regarding playing cards before the eighteenth century were ad hoc uses, (including Satanic worship of the Devil card by Venetian witches in 1589, a 1612 reference to the use of cards as magic charms, and a 1622 Satanic pact written on a Two of Hearts). Nothing suggests any intended esoteric design or systematic occult interpretation or use prior to the eighteenth century, and Tarot’s absence from all magical, philosophical, and divinatory texts of the era strongly rebuts any theory of its esoteric importance. Regular playing cards were used for divination only as a randomizing device in connection with lot books, in the same manner as dice or spinners. (Eventually, special fortune-telling decks were invented which had the lot-book fortunes printed on the cards. This was a step in the direction of modern cartomancy, first seen in the eighteenth century.) No symbolic associations were apparent, and Tarot was not used in even this limited fashion.
That is the documented history of occult Tarot. Tarot Symbolism presents nothing of the sort, so anyone looking for occult Tarot’s factual history is strongly advised to look to the books listed above. O’Neill presents something far more intriguing: He offers theories about a hypothetical esoteric history built around “possibilities”, hidden meanings, and above all, speculation in lieu of direct evidence. In this hypothetical world, Tarot was not a mundane game adopted by eighteenth-century occultists and converted to esoteric use, but was invented as an esoteric “symbolic system” which the later occultists correctly recognized as such. Thus, O’Neill’s history of esoteric Tarot begins in early fifteenth-century Italy, with the invention of Tarot itself. This is quite a different project than the history of esoteric Tarot as approached by Dummett et al. Giles was aware of the factual esoteric history, or rather lack of same, as is shown by comments such as, “Since the cards were almost certainly known at the time of these Renaissance magicians [Ficino and Pico], it is very striking that the trump images are never mentioned in their magical treatises”, and by her discussion of Agrippa’s half-century later compendium, De occulta philosophia”, an encyclopedic summary of esoterica which showed no interest in Tarot at all, much less any occult content nor magical use the deck of cards might have. (See the sidebar, Tragedy of the Rosetta Stone for an explanation of the magi’s indifference toward Tarot.)
Despite that absence of historical evidence, O’Neill tells an elaborate story of Tarot’s esoteric origins, early history, and symbolic significance. He interprets the trumps largely in accord with nineteenth and twentieth-century writers on occult Tarot, but because the traditional theories of esoteric Tarot are untenable, O’Neill had to devise a novel approach to argue for their historicity. He argues against a systematic design in terms of a coherent sequence of the trumps. A rigid mapping or system of correspondences was at the heart of occult Tarot systems, from de Gébelin to the Golden Dawn and Crowley, and O’Neill rejects the validity of all such interpretations. He also argues against a systematic design in terms of congruent content of the trumps, the kind of thematic design wherein all the trumps are interpreted in terms of a unified subject matter or type of source material. Instead, he presents the subject matter as diverse, and the sequence as merely a loose progression. These two conclusions constitute a nearly-complete rejection of the earlier occult systems of meaning, all of which took a unified content (unified within each of several layers of correspondence) and precisely ordered sequence as key to understanding Tarot.
Although O’Neill rejects the earlier occultist interpretations of the Tarot trumps as a coherent, precisely ordered group, he adopts most of their various and conflicting interpretations of the individual cards. This mix-n-match group of subjects and their confused sequence is cobbled together by O’Neill in a freely improvised “Fool’s Journey”, an eclectic approach first popularized in the 1970s, emphasizing intuitive interpretation and having little concern for internal coherence or structure to the sequence. These three elements of his approach are closely interrelated, and shape the structure of the book. O’Neill begins and ends the book with a rambling description of this motley Fool’s Journey, (chapters One and Fifteen), and each chapter between presents a rejection of one or more previous, more systematic interpretations, combined with the implicit or explicit adoption of various—usually unspecified—particulars.
The theories presented by generations of occultists were primarily systems of Cabalistic and astrological correspondence. They associated each of the 22 allegorical cards with one of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and thereby with a host of other esoteric correspondences including astrological subjects and Paths of the Cabalistic Tree of Life. This essential core of occult Tarot is rejected by O’Neill, who notes in Chapter 10 that “there are correspondences, but nothing so simple as reducing the whole symbolism to the Tree of Life... There is sufficient evidence to postulate that Kabbalah had an influence on the designers. There is not sufficient evidence to indicate that it is the sole source of the symbolism.” He concludes that some Cabalistic “influence” is “increasingly plausible at this stage in our explorations.” (Page 253-4.)
Introducing an appendix to that chapter, O’Neill is a bit more clear.
We ended this study with some critical remarks about the simplistic application of Kabbalistic letter mysticism to the Tarot. But we certainly did not mean to imply that it is not interesting to explore the possibilities. However, any such exploration must be relegated to the sphere of pure speculation. Since we are not compelled by logic or by the symbols themselves to accept any of the traditional assignments, we should feel free to explore new possibilities. I propose, therefore, to attempt a new system of interpretation based on the iconography of the cards themselves.
Throughout these studies, I have restricted myself to reasonable conclusions which can be drawn from historical facts. But in the next few chapters on occult sciences, I will have to diverge from this approach. In many cases, understanding the relationship of the occult sciences to the Tarot requires that one make use of the imagination. Only in this way can I communicate to the reader the intuitional messages contained in the cards. It is at this level that the cards have their greatest appeal. However, to maintain at least a vestige of order, I will relegate these speculations to Appendices. This should serve to differentiate between the factual story being argued in these chapters and the underlying intuitive appeal of the symbols.
(Page 257, emphasis added.)
There is, in fact, no such differentiation. Every chapter, as well as the appendices, relies on intuitional messages (i.e., ill-defined and historically unsubstantiated analogies) and the abandonment of traditional images and sequence in favor of occult images and interpretations of those images outside of their sequential context. In Tarot, sequence conveys meaning. The cards’ rank or place in the sequence is in fact its most defining characteristic. The Pope triumphs over the Emperor, both Love and Death over the Pope, the Devil triumphs over all such worldly people and concerns, and the Angel of Judgment over all that. Sequence conveys meaning. Likewise, in Hebrew letter mysticism sequence is also essential to meaning. However, in that appendix O’Neill goes on to present the cards in a wholly-arbitrary sequence, ignoring whatever meaning might have been originally intended, to create a completely new “Tarot”. Then isolated analogies, utterly divorced from the sequential context of Tarot, are presented as an example of how occultists derive their “intuitional messages” from Tarot, and how they attribute “influences” to various esoteric sources: arbitrarily.
Implicitly or explicitly denying the significance of the original order, (to permit free association based on simplistic and often far-fetched analogies to the images taken out of context), is one of the techniques employed by contemporary Tarot enthusiasts. This is especially appropriate for fortune telling, where each card is interpreted either in isolation or in a new context of a randomly selected spread. O’Neill adopts this modern approach not only in this appendix but throughout. His rejection of any systematic sequential meaning or coherent overall design, combined with his adoption of diverse and even conflicting analogies as the intended meaning, effectively conceals the fact that esoteric interpretation cannot make sense of the clear meaning of the images (e.g., Justice as an allegory of justice) or their place in the Tarot sequence.
In other words, while O’Neill’s actual findings refute the various occult theories of Tarot, his stated conclusions are crafted to conceal that, and to imply the opposite. In the above quotations, O’Neill admits that the design and symbolism of the trumps do not support any of the proposed Cabalistic systems, and yet concludes that an unspecified set of intuitive correspondences does indicate Cabalistic influence. While he free-associates about such possible correspondences in the appendix, the results of his imaginative fancy are directly reflected in his overall Chapter conclusions. In other words, while O’Neill’s findings constitute a systematic rejection of previous occult theories of Tarot’s meaning, his conclusions create a new theory of occult Tarot meaning based on the intuitional messages he derives. He never clearly rejects the older theories, nor does he acknowledge at any point that he is creating a new theory of occult Tarot’s meaning. By failing to state clearly what the older theories claimed, the contradiction between his rejection of them (in his findings) and his espousal of them (in his conclusions) can be obscured.
In his final chapter, on Ars memorativa, the trumps are presented as a memory structure. This would seem to require some clear-cut design to the overall sequence, a defined structure for the memory structure. Memory structures were mental outlines by which one could organize and thereby access the encyclopedic knowledge which was the possession of every learned man in the Middle Ages. Various memory texts discussed methods for creating such mnemonic systems. O’Neill discusses individuals including Ramon Lull (1232-1316) and Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) as connecting the memory arts to magic, and as usual makes an interesting discussion out of the alleged influence on Tarot. However, also typically, he fails to even attempt to make sense of the Tarot images in this context.
Obviously a key element of a memory structure is structure, as is seen in the varied examples of actual memory structures collected by Frances Yates in The Art of Memory (1966). Rules for memory varied over the centuries, but the following, taken from an early fourteenth-century work by Bartolomeo da San Concordio (1262-1347), Ammaestramenti degli antichi, are fairly typical. (Yates, 87.) Bartolomeo’s rules were based on the memory writings of St. Thomas Aquinas. (Yates suggests that Petrarch’s famous albeit fragmentary Rerum memorandarum libri appears to have been based on this work.)
Additionally, as O’Neill admits, “all of the [memory] texts recommend against the production of any single series of images to serve the general public. They would be striking to the designer but would not be as effective as images the user designed for himself.” Thus, Tarot as a memory structure fails to pass even the most superficial critical examination. However, O’Neill shrugs off this crucial observation.
As can be seen from the above rules, the elements of memory structures were not only systematically arranged, but also linked, “and the rhetorical concept of ductus emphasizes the way-finding by organizing the structure of any composition as a journey through a linked series of stages…” (Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought, 1998.) Because O’Neill fails to understand the actual design of the trump series, he cannot present the series systematically, the way it would be useful for a memory structure. Instead, he discusses in detail the “Tarocchi of Mantegna”, which he also fails to correctly understand (see Shephard, 1985, for an explanation of the Mantegna design) but which is sufficiently well labeled and divided into groups that O’Neill can make a case that they “are a perfect example of the evolution of memory images into concrete form for the purpose of instruction and classification of the sciences”. From that vague and speculative association with the art of memory, he ventures to make equally speculative comparisons and contrasts with the trumps to thereby link Tarot with Ars memorativia indirectly, via the Mantegna cosmological series of images. “The resemblances between the Tarot and the Mantegna prints clearly establish the Tarot within this same tradition.” (Page 352.) In other words, no coherent structure for Tarot as a mnemonic system is presented by O’Neill. Yet he concludes:
We have seen the art of memory transformed from memorization to instruction, to images of the Neoplatonic hierarchies, to magical operations, to mystical technique. The circumstantial evidence is simply too overwhelming to dismiss. The Tarot belongs to this development. It is a Neoplatonic concept of the hierarchical structure of reality and simultaneously an Hermetic approach to mystical union with God. We have argued this case through hundreds of pages of text, and seen most of the divergent lines of evidence converge on the art of memory.
This is a 1970s invention of Tarot authors seeking historical gravitas for their favorite subject. In rebuttal to this should be sufficient to note that scholars such as Frances A. Yates and Mary Carruthers have written more than a few volumes about the art of memory and related subjects without ever discovering Tarot, or the Mantegna cosmograph, as examples. Yates specifically sought to survey the complexity and diversity of the memory tradition, yet failed to mention Tarot. The fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries were flooded with treatises on the art of memory, and apparently none of them shared the modern view that Tarot was somehow related.
This does not mean that the trump sequence failed to display systematic meaning. As with every didactic work, it had content to convey, and composition to organize that content for understanding and recollection. Likewise, this does not mean that someone could not adopt and use a cyclical work, narrative or schematic, as a memory structure. For example, a complex arrangement of images on the facade of a cathedral might make a useful memory structure. Much more valuable, however, and in keeping with the recommendations of the memory texts, would be an imaginary cathedral facade, with sculptures selected, envisioned, and organized as the individual sees fit for their particular needs. It would be designed as a memory structure and explicable as such. However, if someone used a real facade for such a purpose, that adventitious use would not explain the cathedral’s design, which had merely been hijacked. Apparently no one even hijacked the Tarot trumps as a memory structure until the 1970s, (although now that concept is being popularized by Margaret Starbird, among others). Tarot was not recognized as a memory structure by anyone during the centuries when such things were commonplace, nor by scholars who study the subject today. Aside from the lack of historical substantiation, O’Neill fails to even present a plausible rationale or systematic design to the trumps which could explain their alleged utility as a memory structure. In short, the trump images display no sequential or other structure which O’Neill can find.
O’Neill assumes that Tarot was the product of Renaissance sensibilities, and specifically an eclectic synthesis of Neoplatonic magic and mysticism, drawing from various esoteric and exoteric traditions. Chapter 3, discussing the Italian Renaissance, concludes with the following.
The major elements which I hope the reader takes away from this study can be briefly summarized. Renaissance man was preoccupied with the magic, mysticism and enigmatic imagery he found in the late Hellenistic and Roman literature. He synthesized these components with the Christian and Italian elements already a part of his culture. The synthesis was then projected in his art, poetry and, we hypothesize, in the Tarot. He was concerned to synthesize all sources of wisdom into a single, integrated system. Thus, it is unlikely that the explanation of the Tarot symbols will be found in any single source. We must examine a great number of separate sources and look for the way that these disparate sources were integrated in the cards. The remaining studies [chapters of his book], therefore, will focus on individual elements or sources, developing the historical background to the point that we can understand how and why each element might have formed a part of the syncretism.
(Page 96, emphasis added.)
Such an anything-goes, kitchen-sink syncretism was a goal of the nineteenth-century occultists who developed occult Tarot, and a less extravagant blend of philosophy, mysticism, and magic was pursued in the Renaissance by an intellectual elite including the likes of Ficino and Pico. This was during the Italian High Renaissance—the era of Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael—beginning several decades after Tarot’s invention. However, with the anachronistic myopia so common among occultists, O’Neill assumes that modern occult sensibilities were always in place, and fails to note the evolution of occult views which took place over a period of centuries. It is certainly true that the many subjects which O’Neill reads into Tarot were in existence at the time Tarot was invented. However, no one attempted to “synthesize all sources of wisdom into a single, integrated system” until centuries later. Ficino was only the beginning of the syncretism which is assumed by Tarot Symbolism, not the culmination.
The first phase of the process did involve figures like Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), whose translation of the Corpus Hermeticum (Poimandres) was published in 1471, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494), Johannes Reuchlin (1455-1522), Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1485-1535), who wrote Occulta Philosophia in 1531, Guillaume Postel (1510-1581), and the influential Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680). The central synthesis of these figures was to reconcile Neoplatonic and Hermetic Christianity with mystical Cabala, starting with Pico. “The synthesis was not perfect. Thus although Pico della Mirandola introduced the Cabala to a Christian audience, he was a fervent opponent of astrology, [Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem, 1495], as involving a denial of human free will. Even Cornelius Agrippa’s compendium of magic in 1531 omitted alchemy, which for the most part remained isolated from the other occult sciences.” (Decker et al., 167-8.) Of course, the Jesuit priest Kircher, and others who professed orthodoxy, strongly rejected Gnosticism, and so on. O’Neill’s version of Tarot, (i.e., Tarot as conceived by Lévi and his intellectual heirs), would have had no home nor friends in the Italian Renaissance of the late fifteenth century.
The late fifteenth and sixteenth-century Hermetic Cabala phase in the evolution of a modern occult synthesis both developed and integrated Hermetic doctrines of magic and Christian mysticism with Christianized Cabala, but it was the late sixteenth and seventeenth-century Rosicrucian phase which integrated alchemy into the mix. As noted by Frances Yates in The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (1972), “the Rosicrucian was one fully in the stream of the Renaissance Hermetic-Cabalistic tradition, but distinguished from the earlier phases of the movement by his addition of alchemy to his interests.” A Renaissance alchemist like Paracelsus (1493-1541) was outside the mainstream of Neoplatonic humanism. However, later figures like John Dee (1527-1608) who wrote Monas Hieroglyphica in 1564, Robert Fludd (1574-1637), and Christian Knorr von Rosenroth (1636-1689) brought alchemy into the fold. This was the beginning of a more encompassing synthesis of the type suggested by O’Neill. The Rosicrucian manifestos emphasized both Cabala and alchemy, and the magi extended their practices to outright sorcery.
In the earlier Renaissance, the magi had been careful to use only the forms of magic operating in the elemental or celestial spheres, using talismans and various rituals to draw down favourable influences from the stars. The magic of a bold operator like Dee, aims beyond the stars, aims at doing the supercelestial magic, the angel-conjuring magic.
(Yates, 282.)
Seventeenth-century Rosicrucianism was a cornerstone of Freemasonry, which developed and spread wildly in the eighteenth century. In the process, Masons and their opponents crafted a fabulous fictional history which included much of the modern myth of Tarot. The fictionalizing of Masonic history began with the Chevalier Ramsay in 1736, who established their association with the Knights Templar, their inheritance of ancient rites and secret wisdom, and asserted that there had been many Masonic lodges in the Middle Ages, founded by Kings and princes when they returned from the Crusades. (Peter Partner, The Knights Templar and their Myth, 1981.) Stories invented circa 1760 included many other familiar elements from the modern Holy Blood, Holy Grail genre of neo-Masonic historical fiction. Two decades later, such Masonic mythmakers discovered Tarot, which became one more ingredient in the Freemason’s farrago.
Modern occult writers tend to imply if not actually believe that Tarot was always part of the recipe, but Tarot was a late eighteenth-century afterthought. Contrary to O’Neill’s claims, the Renaissance synthesis of Ficino & Co. came decades after Tarot’s invention, and developed in the subsequent century. When Pico and later figures wrote about Hermetic and Cabalistic subjects, they never mentioned Tarot. When the Rosicrucians wrote their books and tracts in the seventeenth century, they too never mentioned Tarot. The heyday of the alchemists was also in the seventeenth century, and they too failed to mention Tarot, and they also failed to adopt its “symbolic system”. When the Masons were initially forming their myths, likewise, no Tarot. NONE of the Renaissance and Rosicrucian figures cited above mentioned Tarot—not even in their most encyclopedic works, not even in passing. However, from the moment when Tarot was adopted by the Masons, it automatically acquired a host of rich associations that had been built up over the previous three centuries of development. Even that, however, was not the end of the developmental process. O’Neill describes the Tarot trumps as an esoteric sampler created by a Renaissance magus like Ficino, in keeping with an eclectic “Renaissance mindset”. However, the synthesis which O’Neill seems to take as a given during the vaguely defined period he refers to as the Renaissance did not fully materialize from the esoteric aether until the middle of the nineteenth century. It was Éliphas Lévi (1810-1875) who actually synthesized all the pieces, including crucial later accretions such as Mesmerism (“animal magnetism” and the “galvanic stream” which conveys the will of the magus) and Tarot, into a unified esoteric world view.
Lévi completed the task, begun in the Renaissance, of synthesising the various ingredients of the Western tradition of magic; it was he who finally made it a single tradition. …he expounded it all. He never wrote a treatise on the Hermetic Books, on the Cabala or on the Tarot. He did not even expound seriatim the branches of the high magic of which he wrote, with separate chapters or sections on the diverse occult sciences and doctrines: he made a synthesis. In his writings, the Cabala, alchemy, Hermeticism, astrology, magnetism and even a little black magic from the grimoires are inextricably intertwined. You could learn about all of magic from reading Lévi; however selectively you tried to read him, you could not learn about anything less than all of it.
(Decker et al., 169-170.)
According to Lévi, understanding Cabala required Tarot, just as much as understanding Tarot required Cabala. This kind of interpenetration of diverse subjects is required by Tarot Symbolism’s all-in-one hodge-podge of subject matter, in which none of the subjects posited can be identified, even by O’Neill, as being present throughout the sequence. This is in fact the view of Tarot which he takes for granted, and he sees a synthesis like this, including Tarot, in the early fifteenth century when Tarot was invented. None of the subjects imposed on the trumps by O’Neill would have seemed foreign to Lévi, nor would they have seemed an incongruous hodge-podge. Thus Lévi, not Ficino, is the actual exemplar of a Renaissance magus as conceived by O’Neill.
In the Renaissance, allegedly, all these “sources of wisdom”, these divergent subjects, were assembled into a single integrated system, and thus, “it is unlikely that the explanation of the Tarot symbols will be found in any single source. We must examine a great number of separate sources and look for the way that these disparate sources were integrated in the cards.” A hypothetical Renaissance magus is assumed to have held this world view, four centuries before Lévi, and to have created Tarot to cryptically embody it. Because of those anachronistic assumptions, it is trivially easy for O’Neill to find or create analogies between the (nineteenth-century) inventions of occult Tarot and the (fifteenth-century) Renaissance magi whom O’Neill identifies as the designers of Tarot.
These analogies are then assumed to reveal occult intent in the trump cycle. In each of the central chapters, O’Neill examines one or more of these asserted “influences” that might be related in some fashion to the traditional occultist interpretation of Tarot. In each chapter, he concludes that there was certainly some (usually unspecified) “influence” on the design of the trumps, or that there might have been some influence, but that the subjects of that chapter cannot explain the images and their sequence. In other words, in no case does a particular subject matter examined present a coherent interpretation of the trump cycle. The nature of that assumed influence, and the methods by which one might verify or refute the speculation, is never explored, and thus no explanation for the selection of images and their sequence is ever offered. O’Neill summarizes this in Chapter 7, where he writes:
The first point we must establish is that the Tarot is not simply reducible to any one symbolic system, Christian mysticism included. Although we will find the concepts of mysticism clearly symbolized in the cards, fully one third of the Trumps do not seem to fit at all (i.e., cards one-four, seven-eight, fourteen.) Thus, although we will argue that some of the basic themes of the Tarot can be found in the mystical tradition of Christianity, it certainly does not explain everything. We will need all of the symbolic systems presented in our series of studies to approach anything like a complete understanding of the symbols.
(Page 175, emphasis added.)
Perhaps the designer was dyslexic and had A.D.D., or was otherwise unable to form a coherent thought. In any case, this a priori insistence that there can be no coherent explanation for the images and their sequence is not defended, except by the repeated observation that the esoteric interpretations, as presented by their occultist originators, don’t work very well. O’Neill is admitting any, even all, esoteric subject matter that has credentials dating back to Renaissance Europe, (and some exoteric ones as well), but he is adopting none of them systematically. None of them appears to be present in the manner that the occultists claimed, and none of them work in any other systematic manner, either. All of the “symbolic systems” are needed, and assorted elements from those systems must be combined in an arbitrary manner to account for Tarot’s images and sequence.
| Levels of Allegorical Interpretation | |||
| LEVEL | MEANING | CASSIAN’S EXAMPLE | DANTE’S EXAMPLE |
| Literal | Historical | Jerusalem (actual city) | Exodus from Egypt |
| Allegorical | Doctrinal | The Church | Redemption via Christ |
| Tropological | Moral/Homiletic | The Soul of Man | Conversion to Grace |
| Anagogic | Eschatological | Jerusalem (heavenly city) | Ascent to Glory |
| Some of O’Neill’s Layers of Interpretation | |
| Fool’s Journey Layer (pseudo-literal) | Astrological Layer |
| Cosmological Layer | Mystical (Neoplatonic Pagan) Layer |
| Mystical (heretical Gnostic) Layer | Holy Grail Myth Layer |
| [_________] Layer (fill in your own) | Petrarchian Layer |
| Doctrinal (heretical Gnostic) Layer | Alchemical Layer |
| Kabbalistic Layer | Magical Emblems Layer |
| Mystical (orthodox Christian) Layer | Gnostic Myth Layer |
| Classical Myth Layer | Numerological Layer |
| Jungian (archetypal myth) Layer | [_________] Layer (fill in your own) |
As discussed in the first section, none of these alleged layers of meaning yields a systematic interpretation, one which can make sense of the sequence. Each card may—or may not!—have a preferred interpretation on a given level. Reiterating what was pointed out above, such a promiscuous mix-n-match approach yields an eclectic and ad hoc interpretation with zero explanatory value. O’Neill does not even attempt to assemble a coherent explanation, instead claiming that he is only presenting historical evidence.
The major onus of this book is to present the symbolic systems of Renaissance Italy and to suggest how these systems might have entered into the design of Tarot. The book does not offer a definitive interpretation but presents the available data from which such an interpretation might eventually be constructed.
(Page 5.)
Moreover, there is another contemporaneous mindset to be considered—the medieval encyclopedic tradition. Tarot was created perhaps a half-century before the celebrated Neoplatonic humanists took center stage, and even after their entrance, most medieval sensibilities remained intact. If Tarot were a reflection of those significantly different, centuries older and more pervasive traditions, then one might expect a highly systematic didactic design to the Tarot cycle, a schematic encyclopedia of some identifiable subject matter. (For an example of such an interpretation, see The Riddle of Tarot.) That possibility is not considered by O’Neill, much less explored. His discussion of Renaissance art, sandwiched between heretical sects and Kabbalah, finds no coherent didactic program in any such cycles, and dismisses the actual allegorical meaning of such works: “We have said enough about allegory in previous chapters to establish that the obvious meaning of a symbol is unlikely to reflect the true intent of the designers.” (Page 210.) Thus, the triumph of the Pope is twisted to represent heresy, the conventional Moral Virtues are assumed to refer to alchemy, and so on, in O’Neill’s counterintuitive and eclectic world.
The apparent absence of systematic design, justified in part by Gnostic misreading of the more straightforward interpretations and combined with occultist and neo-Jungian free-association (the “intuitional messages”) on any number of interpretational levels, provides complete freedom for any interpretation whatsoever, and a novel justification for the many and conflicting occultist theories. However, although O’Neill rejects any grand synthesis or systematic integration of the assorted elements, he does present a framework for considering this eclectic hodge-podge as something more than a mere grab bag of esoteric images. It could be compared to a preacher’s sketchy notes for a long and rambling sermon, using examples taken from diverse areas. It might be better compared to snapshots from a long journey, pictures that are selected and assembled to remind one of the most moving experiences encountered in a wide ranging adventure. This esoteric sampler “is a guide to the mystic, not a system of theology. The purpose is to inform the mystic that the states he experiences at various stages of his journey are well-known. The cards are guideposts showing the mystic that he is not lost and his current state, no matter how strange it may seem, is normal and to be expected.” (Page 175.) This mystical Baedeker is the essence of the so-called “Fool’s Journey” interpretation.
The matrix for O’Neill’s esoteric sampler interpretation is the late twentieth-century concept of a Fool’s Journey of mystical enlightenment, ascent toward God in this life. Each individual must reinvent Tarot for themselves, (like the Gnostics described by Irenaeus), weaving together their favorite esoteric elements into an allegorical, experiential, mystical journey of self discovery and divine enlightenment. The mystical Fool’s haphazard journey is the accommodating framework used by O’Neill to assemble the dissimilar pieces of his sundry essays into a single theory. Tarot Symbolism’s first chapter and last both present a rambling, free-associative miscellany of occult speculations, within the context of this portmanteau premise. O’Neill’s vision of early Tarot is a Postmodern “open-text” reading, (which is scarcely different in result from an ancient Gnostic misreading), permitting the incorporation of any and all historical details that one might decide on as the “intuitional messages” of a given image, taken out of context. The appeal of this approach is obvious: after giving oneself license to ignore the obvious and substitute whatever preconceptions one chooses, what remains is an endlessly elastic design. Being filled with projections, such a matrix is particularly hospitable to neo-Jungian interpretations. Being based on one’s own preconceptions, conscious and subconscious, such an interpretation will inevitably feel comfortable, it will seem convincing. Introducing his concluding ramble through the trumps, his final presentation of the Fool’s Journey, O’Neill writes:
Throughout this presentation, we will be analyzing the images on a very intellectual plane, on the level of the philosophical systems of the Renaissance. However, it must be remembered that the Tarot has meaning at a more fundamental level. They are archetypal symbols as well as expressions of a philosophy. Therefore, the cards may convey special meanings to the individual reader. We will not deal with this level of interpretation here, but the reader can be assured that such meaning was very much within the intent of the designers. The personal meaning of the symbols can never be analyzed completely, and that too was very much the intent of the designers. The reader should feel free to find his own meaning in the cards and realize that the designers fully desired him to find those meanings.
(Page 364, emphasis added.)
Mystical interpretations of mythical journeys are certainly nothing new. In a 2003 online essay which constitutes an added chapter to Tarot Symbolism, O’Neill cites the entire history of otherworld journeys as historical analogs for the Fool’s Journey interpretation of the Tarot trump cycle. A 2004 essay on Dante’s Commedia provides a more detailed example of this sort of analogy, albeit still without any clear structure or explanation of the images and their sequence. Not surprisingly, none of the examples cited bear any resemblance to the trump cycle; at least they do not resemble it prior to the prejudiced rejection of the trump images’ obvious meaning and the substitution of a surrogate, a freely intuited “archetype” of whatever might be required to match the writer’s preconceptions. Thus, for example, the incomparably gifted Dante (whose self-esteem and reputation matched his poetic greatness) must be interpreted as Tarot’s Fool, with ragged and gaudy garb, and a belled cap. (As silly as that seems, see the Inferno, Canto II:35 where Dante admits he is unworthy and his undertaking may be an act of folly, and Canto VIII:91 where Dante’s path is described as la folle strada. Oddly, O’Neill mentions neither of these passages, noting that “the character of the Fool does not appear in the Commedia”, while missing the fact that Dante’s travels are twice compared to a fool’s journey.) From anthropological, psychological, and comparative religious studies of the late nineteenth and particularly the early twentieth century we have many works which discuss mythical adventures and their mystical interpretation. These include well-known books by James G. Frazer, Jessie Weston, C.G. Jung, Aldous Huxley, Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade, and also less famous works by both scholars and popular writers. (Arthur E. Waite’s Pictorial Key to the Tarot is part of that tradition.) The interpretation of the Tarot trump cycle as a Fool’s Journey was developed in the 1970s as precisely such a generic or “universal” mystical mythos. Eden Gray’s books popularized it, and Sallie Nichols presented the first detailed version of it in her 1980 book, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey. (Some of the other books from the 1970s which established the historical and interpretive theories developed in detail by O’Neill include Paul Huson’s 1971 The Devil’s Picturebook, Alfred Douglas’ 1972 The Tarot, and Stephan A. Hoeller’s 1975 The Royal Road. Just as Tarot was a child of its times, so was Tarot Symbolism.)
The overriding historical thesis of O’Neill’s book is that the Tarot trump cycle is not only interpretable in this manner, but was in fact created as such an archetypal myth of mystical passages. According to this view, the design incorporated elements from many different mystical paths (including sundry occult sciences) in an inchoate hodge-podge to emphasize the fact that all paths which lead to God are in fact the same path. That all paths are part of the same path is itself an essentially modern, ecumenical view, (albeit with notable precursors), and one which would have resulted in ostracism—or even incineration—in most of the cultures which created the various particular “paths” that many writers blur together. The creators of Tarot were presumably spared this fate because the trump cycle shows no such thing, at least not in any rationally intelligible form. It requires the intentionally perverse reading advocated by O’Neill to “discover” the Fool’s Journey in early Tarot. This amounts to a kind of counter-intuitive intuition (i.e., a cultivated bias) in which the conventional meaning of a symbol in its native culture and context is deemed unlikely to reflect the true intent of the designers, while the far-fetched inventions of nineteenth-century occultists and the “personal meaning” of a random twentieth-century reader are inherently credible as “very much the intent of the designers.”
The Tragedy of the Rosetta Stone
How is that possible? How could fifteenth-century Italian mystics have intended the meanings that twentyfirst-century New Age Californians find in their images? The answer lies in occultist and Jungian beliefs about the universality of “symbols”, and their corollary insistence on the ability of a spiritual elite (themselves) to correctly identify and interpret that universal mystical language. O’Neill notes that “there is no single interpretation of the symbols. This is intrinsic to the concept of a symbol, as opposed to a sign.… It has no precise singular meaning.” So what does it signify?
The symbol seems to arise spontaneously in the consciousness of man. There is no simple meaning. Rather the symbol seems to elicit a response, a response that arises from unconscious depths. It is this response, brought forth in the individual viewer, that constitutes the real value of the Tarot symbols. This will continue to be true even after we have searched extensively for what might reasonably have been in the minds of the designers. We will not succeed in explaining the symbols. (Page 35.)
Symbols are thus psychological universals which cannot be defined, and the Tarot images are symbols in this occult/Jungian sense. For example, the conventional image of Justice can not represent the Moral Virtue justice, (a “simple meaning”), but is many other things, depending on how you feel about it this morning (an “elicited response”). Again, we have an arbitrary denial of the obvious, and throughout Tarot Symbolism we have a failure to attempt any sort of direct interpretation of Tarot symbolism. O’Neill rejects the literal interpretation of the images (see the sidebar Gnostic Misreading), generally ignores contextual information provided by the sequence, and denies the possibility that the images could have a particular and conventional meaning. Every interpretation is mediated by arcane preconceptions, ad hoc chains of association, and left open for further “elicited responses”. It is not surprising given this approach that the result should be a self-indulgent, vaguely-defined, eclectic hodge-podge based on earlier occultist theories. But what is the appeal of such arbitrary and historically fraudulent mystification? Why pretend that the Wheel of Fortune, for example, was something other than the conventional emblem which it was in fact? O’Neill touches on the appeal of such an approach in explaining the earlier occultists’ fondness for Egyptian theories of Tarot symbolism.
Underlying this Egyptian theory is the concept that the images of the Tarot are pictograms, like the hieroglyphics. Occult tradition has always maintained that the hieroglyphics were mystical symbols that encoded the structure of reality. To disguise the doctrine, the symbols were transformed into an alphabet that could be read on another, lower level by the masses. Similarly, the Tarot was reproduced as playing cards. This approach would insure the continuance of the symbols without endangering the secret which underlay them. (Page 39.)
Details aside, O’Neill is correct in that Renaissance occultists made up fatuous meanings for hieroglyphics in the exactly same manner that later occultists would invent arbitrary meanings for Tarot. 
In both cases, these naive symbolists knew nothing of the real meaning of the images and imposed their own while claiming mystical insight. The technical term for this approach is “bullshitting”, and many are the adepts who practice its mysteries. In both cases, hieroglyphics and Tarot, the occultists had the satisfaction of considering themselves spiritually gifted individuals initiated into secret meanings, able to see what others could not, and so on. However, as delightful as Horapollo’s Hieroglyphica was in the late Renaissance and beyond, today there are not many popular books written about the occult symbolism of Egyptian hieroglyphics. The fashion for such things waned rather dramatically after the Rosetta Stone was translated, and the real meaning of the hieroglyphs was understood.
The magic was only taken out of the hieroglyphics with the discovery of the Rosetta stone in 1799 and its decipherment about 1822. Before that time, occult tradition maintained that the only way to understand the alphabet was on a mystical and intuitive level. Unfortunately for the occultists, the hieroglyphics turned out to be a rather ordinary alphabet. (Page 57.)
Ignorance is opportunity, a void which a creative person can fill in any way they wish. As Manly P. Hall put it, “The less information available upon a subject, the more certain men are to dogmatize, evidently upon the presumption that if nothing is known, anything may be true, and none will dare to contradict.” Magical and mystical interpretations of hieroglyphics were asserted as fact for centuries. Were it not for the Rosetta Stone, even today bookstore shelves might be filled with dozens of volumes interpreting hieroglyphs for meditative use, spiritual enlightenment, personal growth and self-help psychology, divination or whatever… right next to the Tarot section. But after the translation of the Rosetta Stone, “the magic was taken out” of that fanciful little game, which today seems too pathetically affected a fiction even for occultists to indulge. Ignorance is a practical prerequisite for savoring such “mystical symbols”.
When Holmes drew Watson’s attention to “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time”, the good doctor objected that the dog had done nothing in the night-time. Sherlock explained: “That was the curious incident.” One of the longstanding “mysteries” of Tarot is why Renaissance and Rosicrucian occultists were completely silent about “The Absolute Key to Occult Science”, aka, Tarot. Renaissance esotericists showed zero interest in Tarot or Tarot symbolism, despite the popular emblematic and hieroglyphic traditions, and despite their writing about every other occult interest, even including such dangerous topics as sorcery. For over three centuries, generation after generation of occultists failed to find Tarot useful for their purposes. They had no interest in the “arcane symbolic system” of Tarot for the simple (and obvious) reason that they were not sufficiently ignorant of Tarot symbolism to indulge such nonsense. Tarot’s images were not obscure and mysterious relics from a long-forgotten past. They were for the most part well-known iconographic conventions of the day, recycled into various works including a deck of playing cards. At the time Tarot was invented, there was no one on earth who could “intuit” or otherwise arrive at the correct meaning of the above cartouche (or any other hieroglyphs), despite the arrogant posing of the occultists of the era. Conversely, virtually everyone could correctly identify the meaning of the image to the right. (And notwithstanding O’Neill’s convoluted speculations, it wasn’t an alchemist’s retort, the wheels of Ezechial’s vision, nor did it derive from Ramon Lull!) Fifteenth and sixteenth-century Italians understood most of the symbolism in Tarot far too well to think it mysterious or occult. In fact, it was 350 years after Tarot’s invention before someone came along who was sufficiently ignorant of Tarot symbolism, (and sufficiently shameless about making up fantastic stories), to invent occult Tarot. Present-day occultists like O’Neill, following the lead of Antoine Court de Gébelin and Éliphas Lévi, make precisely the same claims about Tarot that earlier generations of occultists made regarding Egyptian hieroglyphics. Tarot cards are full of secret, magical, “mystical symbols” to be understood via “intuited messages”, rather than conventional “signs” to be recognized and understood by genuine historical iconography. A mundane explanation for the trumps makes the occultist claims to secret knowledge transmitted via initiation into elite societies dating back to the Renaissance or spiritual insight into the “true” meaning of the symbols seem like self-aggrandizing delusions.
The occultist is a seeker of wisdom who feels that he must reject the ordinary, the codified and the established. He will only be satisfied by the strange, by a wisdom that contradicts the world he has rejected, and which has rejected him. It would be most unpalatable to find that the roots of occultism were all very ordinary and accessible. (Page 59.)
Most unpalatable—indeed, a bitter taste of reality after centuries of sweet fantasy. First, a tale of Tarot authored by ancient Egyptianians was created by eighteenth and nineteenth-century occultists who identified strongly with that supposed source of all wisdom. These fictions were ludicrous on their face, since there was nothing remotely Egyptian about the subjects depicted on the cards or their iconography, but the desire to attribute the cards to a legendary source was overwhelming. Now a new and improved story has been crafted. In this tale, where Hermetic magic and heretical mysticism were encoded into a deck of cards by elite, sophisticated Renaissance humanists, a new generation of occultists attributes Tarot to a more period-appropriate group with whom they strongly identify. The alleged authors’ values, attitudes, beliefs, and practices are very appealing to contemporary occultists, and no one wants to admit that this cherished artifact might not have always been what they want it to be, what it is today. Many interpretations have been “found” in the Tarot trumps, but it is most revealing that occultists like O’Neill never “discover” the meaning of Tarot to be something they disapprove of or find archaic and useless to modern esotericists. They always “discover” a meaning they find personally valuable. That is why the literal meaning of the Tarot trumps must be ignored, denied, or marginalized; that is why endless alternatives—“possibilities” and assumed “influences”—must be posited; that is why attending to the sequential context of the trumps, which constrains the acceptable interpretations, must be avoided; and so on. If the Tarot trump cycle is ever explained as a typical work of early fifteenth-century art, if the riddle of Tarot is solved, some part of its magic and mystery will be lost. Maintaining that mystery is therefore a task of importance to occultists, and Tarot Symbolism, more than any other contemporary book, has shouldered the burden by creating a new and improved fictional origin: the Renaissance magi.‡
Once one rejects the face value meaning of an image, one can make up any meaning he finds personally appealing. In fact, the only real constraint to this unbridled license and universal eclecticism is the requirement that the “intuited messages” reflect something current in Renaissance Italy. The historical problem with 1) rejecting the obvious meaning of the images, 2) presupposing an eclectic mix of subjects, 3) presupposing that none of the diverse subjects can yield a systematic interpretation, and 4) accepting virtually all “intuited messages” from previous generations of occultists, is the complete lack of explanatory power (and the systematic occult bias) of the resulting interpretation. By permitting any and in fact all esoteric interpretations, nothing is explained—any image could be substituted for any of the trump images, at any point in the sequence, and no contradiction would arise. The question posed for historical interpretation is, why were these subjects illustrated in this manner and in this sequence? In that regard, it is valuable to consider O’Neill’s criticism of the theory presented Gertrude Moakley, twenty years earlier.
The explanation is that the Tarot is not only a simplification of Petrarch’s scheme, but also a spoof, a ribald take-off on the solemnity of the original story in the spirit of the Carnival parade. This explanation is not acceptable simply because it allows too much freedom. Any lack of correspondence can be passed off as part of the joke. Therefore, if the cards match it is taken as positive evidence for the theory, while any discrepancy is dismissed offhand. This is too simplistic.
(Pages 79-80, emphasis added.)
This is a sound argument, and such explanatory weakness is a valid criticism of Moakley’s theory. She imposes relatively few constraints and therefore her interpretation explains little about the specific choice of images or their exact sequence. However, O’Neill’s argument against her interpretation is devastating to his own esoteric sampler view of Tarot, which is immeasurably more “free” than Moakley’s in terms of both subject matter and sequence. Since his view of early Tarot’s meaning imposes neither sequential nor subject matter constraints, but permits (even insists on!) the arbitrary mixing and matching of subjects taken out of context, it is by O’Neill’s own standard, “not acceptable”. In that sense, as an historical analysis or theory of interpretation, Tarot Symbolism has nothing to offer.
Moreover, unlike other historical interpreters of Tarot’s meaning, (e.g., Gertrude Moakley, John Shephard, and Timothy Betts), O’Neill focuses not on connecting historical Tarot to historical themes and motifs, but on connecting the speculations of occult Tarot to Renaissance occultism. Rather than starting with Tarot, he begins with the speculations of the occultists, and not surprisingly, he ends there as well. O’Neill prefaces his “Final Interpretation of the Cards” by saying that “the intention is to view the cards the way the original designers might have. To do this, we will place ourselves into the mindset of the Renaissance and suggest what the Renaissance Magus might have seen in the cards.” (Page 364, emphasis added.)
The Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA, the largest organization of Renaissance Faire folk) has an unofficial motto: “The Middle Ages as they should have been.” Their historical world is far more grounded in fact than, for example, that of Xena, Warrior Princess or The Da Vinci Code, but far more playful, ironic, and less constrained by fact than is the history written by scholars. It is a fun world of pseudo history, blending many historical elements with contemporary sensibilities. O’Neill has created for Tarot an esoteric history and interpretation that lies somewhere between the knowing but playful SCA approach to the past and the wanton license of mythmakers like Margaret Starbird, who pose as historians. Although he largely ignores the documented history of esoteric Tarot developed by Michael Dummett, and although his Fool’s Journey interpretation is not viable as an historical explanation, as an example of Tarot’s modern revisioning in terms of sundry esoteric systems, Tarot Symbolism is perhaps the best book written. Tarot Symbolism is a wonderful and motley “Fool’s Journey” through the Western mystery traditions, interpreting Tarot as a crudely-drafted and idiosyncratic travel guide for spiritual tourists, pilgrims of the soul. This is both good and bad, depending on whether it is taken as a modern approach to spirituality—which it is—or as history, which it is not. A great many knowledgable authors have reinvented Tarot in terms of their favorite subject matter, usually creating a new deck to go along with their vision. These efforts range from simple theme decks on any subject imaginable to elaborate metaphysical systems attached to historical decks. As Cynthia Giles noted,
…it’s all too easy to create seemingly rich and significant explanations of occult systems by building up layers of reference and allusion—without actually having sorted the worthwhile information from the worthless, and without ever showing whether the bits and pieces really do fit together in a meaningful way. … Tarot is particularly afflicted by such “synthesism” because it can be related, by even the moderately resourceful, to practically everything under the sun.
In addition to the uncritical accumulation of assorted vague analogies and the invention of ad hoc narratives which she laments, there is the problem that these interpretations are sometimes presented as historical explanations: anachronistic sensibilities are assumed, historically inappropriate meanings are imposed, and fictional individuals or secret societies are invented. Most of the many interpretations of Tarot in the last thirty years make no pretense of explaining Tarot’s original design. However, some of the more sophisticated, pseudo-historical examples have revisioned Tarot in terms of Pagan gods, Pythagorean philosophy, alchemical symbolism, and so on: subjects that might have appealed to the small cadre of Renaissance esotericists whom O’Neill identifies as Tarot’s designers. These Tarot authors have thus followed the example set by Tarot Symbolism, essentially developing in further detail some of the individual themes from O’Neill’s many-faceted theory. Likewise, Gnostic heresy—always near the center of O’Neill’s speculations—is at the heart of another popular interpretation, one which appears in books derived from Holy Blood, Holy Grail. In this genre of pseudo history, the Tarot trumps form a “flash-card catechism” illustrating the Albigensian teachings of the Knights Templar, and so on. This view of Tarot history is presented to a mass audience in books such as the mega-bestseller, The Da Vinci Code and Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and detailed in books such as The Underground Stream, The Second Messiah, and several titles by Margaret Starbird. Thus, by providing an endlessly elastic, esoteric open-text overlay for Tarot with a novel historical rationale, O’Neill has lit the path for a new generation of occult Tarot. Largely gone (or severely reduced in importance) are the Cabalistic correspondences that dominated occult Tarot’s first two centuries. In their place are archetypal symbols and Gnostic heresy.
Presenting this esoteric sampler view of Tarot, an eclectic “Fool’s Journey” interpretation, as the intended historical significance of the Tarot trumps is a deeply appealing theory to those steeped in occult and Jungian views of Tarot, however anachronistic and inherently implausible it may be. It claims that Tarot was intended to be exactly what we want it to be, that the fifteenth-century Roman Catholics who invented Tarot to play cards in northern Italy had the same values, attitudes, and beliefs as twenty-first century Postmodern Pagans telling fortunes with it in central California. What conceit could be more satisfying than to believe that our own cherished ideas have always been shared by the most sophisticated and enlightened members of every culture? What could be more seductive than believing that the artifact we find so fascinating was designed to express our own philosophies? In addition to that self-indulgent charm, O’Neill’s many historical discussions are interesting in their own right, and add historical flavor to the otherwise thoroughly modern interpretation. This is history as it should have been, as we might wish it had been—delightfully and creatively anachronistic, and wonderful in that sense.
The other substantial contribution of Tarot Symbolism lies in its detailed critical review of earlier occult interpretations. One by one, O’Neill rejects the traditional occult explanations, creating a comprehensive compendium of negative results. Despite his predilection for finding esoteric content in early Tarot, he is unable to support any of the traditional occult interpretations. Tarot Symbolism presents a painstaking examination of the many proposed occult systems, by a competent, knowledgeable, and diligent researcher sympathetic to such subject matter. Although O’Neill creates a new theory of occult meaning in early Tarot, he is able to support none of the occult speculations of the previous two centuries in anything resembling their original form. His rejection of them as inadequate, combined with his argument against explanations as limitlessly accommodating as his own, (“this explanation is not acceptable simply because it allows too much freedom”), constitute the most comprehensive and detailed case ever assembled against occult content in pre-Gébelin Tarot.
Unfortunately, O’Neill seems oblivious to both his effective criticism of the earlier occultists and to his new theory which presents fifteenth-century Tarot as having been exactly the same as twentieth-century occult Tarot. Nowhere does he summarize his systematic rejection of earlier occult theories of interpretation, thus ignoring the most significant historical conclusion to be drawn from his studies. Instead, as exemplified by the above comments and quotes from the numerology chapter, he leaves the reader with the impression that the occultists got it right. He does not even recognize that he has created a new historical interpretation and theory of origination, flatly denying it in the above-quoted passage about presenting only data. That contribution also deserves a clear summary, since it is complex and the pieces of it are scattered throughout the book, but O’Neill never provides one, thinking that he has presented only data.
That is a remarkably elaborate and comprehensive theory of Tarot history and interpretation from an author claiming to present only data. O’Neill repeatedly states that Tarot is a “child of its times”. However, his esoteric sampler view of Tarot is a child of nineteenth and twentieth century interpretations of the cards, and especially of the 1970s. Historically, it could only be conceived as a bastard child of the most extreme fringe elements one can imagine from the period a half-century after the invention of Tarot. The hypothetical Gnostic Pagan alchemist who fathered this mutant hybrid was apparently so far outside the mainstream of his times that no one had a clue what he had sired until the late eighteenth-century, when a French Freemason discovered Tarot’s twisted family tree.
From an iconographic point of view the theory explains absolutely nothing, since the theory is one of endless ad hoc accommodation, specifying neither content nor sequence of the images, and since the face-value meaning of the images is considered an obstacle to overcome. (God forbid that Death be thought of as death, or that Fortitude be mistaken for an allegory of fortitude!) This lack of constraint is not considered by O’Neill to be due to our ignorance of the original design, an absence of theory which may be corrected by later and better analysis. It is a feature of the theory which he repeatedly emphasizes. Eclecticism and interpretational freedom are essential to his conception of Tarot. Also disappointingly, from an historical point of view, O’Neill focuses throughout on the interpretations of occult Tarot authors, comparisons between their writings and those of Renaissance esotericists. His self-appointed task is admitted in the Introduction, where he justifies the use of Tarot de Marseille as his primary reference deck because it “simplifies the task of relating the occultist’s interpretations to our study of Renaissance culture.” This overwhelming bias toward traditional occult (and contemporary neo-Jungian) mysticism colors every page, and tends to obscure the historical content and the rare iconographic insight. However, considered as a work of the 1980s, Tarot Symbolism included a much-needed critical survey of previous interpretations, if the reader is careful to focus on the book’s findings and not be misled by its conclusions. O’Neill’s presentation of the Fool’s Journey as the intended significance of the trump cycle remains by far the most appealing historical interpretation devised, not only justifying the large majority of occult associations with the cards, but doing so in the context of the psychological and neo-Gnostic interpretations popularized in the 1970s and early 1980s.
Another reviewer wrote in 1997 that if one is not particularly interested in Tarot's history, and looks to Tarot Symbolism merely as a sourcebook for creating their own interpretation of the trumps, O'Neill's book is magnificent: it presents endless alternative avenues for the modern user to explore. Tarot Symbolism presents Tarot as it should have been, occult Tarot as we see it today.
† “The Joy of No Rules” is an anagram for “The Fool’s Journey”.
‡ Because esoteric Tarot has such a vital and established tradition and such an openness to reinvention, O’Neill’s efforts to maintain historical fictions regarding the origin and intended meaning are probably not necessary. It seems unlikely that modern Tarot would suffer at all, even if every Tarot author in the world agreed that the deck was adopted by the later occultists, not fathered by Renaissance magi. Esoteric Tarot has survived the realization that ancient Egyptians did not create the sequence of images to line the walls of an initiatory chamber, so it should be able to withstand the truths revealed by Dummett in 1980 without resorting to new fantasies.
Tarot Symbolism
Robert V. O’Neill
Fairway Press, Lima Ohio
ISBN 0-89536-936-2
© 1986 Fairway Press
Tarot Symbolism is being reprinted by the Association for Tarot Studies, (organizers of the 2005 Melbourne International Tarot Conference). According to the July edition of their newsletter, it is expected to be available by early December, 2004. Information on obtaining a copy can be found in their current Tarot Conference e-Newsletter.