Hunting the Unicorn V
Theories from the Internet
Part VIII in The Meaning of Tarot Series
PREVIOUSLY
Unveiling the Renaissance Metaphor
Occultation
Hunting the Unicorn
Gertrude Moakley & The Triumphs of Petrarch
Hunting the Unicorn II
Hunting the Unicorn III
Hunting the Unicorn IV
Part V - Theories from the Internet
At last, we have arrived at the final leg of our journey. With the internet now connecting scholars from all over the world, they came together to attempt to solve the mystery of tarot—did they succeed? Read on and decide!
Michael J. Hurst - The Riddle of Tarot (2004), Pre-Gebelin.blogspot (2007-2016)
The first theory we are going to examine comes from Michael J. Hurst who wrote about tarot iconography as a hobby for nearly 20 years both as a blogger and as an avid contributor across various tarot forums. I never knew Hurst as I was not studying tarot during the years that he was active but from what I can tell from his writing he was a bit of a character. A self professed ‘tarot geek’, he was openly hostile to occult interpretations of tarot and would sometimes go off on tangents filled with sarcastic wit and an oddly specific humor. While he humbly claimed to not be an art historian the depth of scholarship expressed in his posts spoke much to the contrary.
Over the course of his research, he compiled an extensive gallery of tarot cognates and even made a few original discoveries. It was Hurst who did the journalistic legwork to uncover much of the biographical information on Gertrude Moakley that now graces her Wikipedia page. Additionally, Theodore Low De Vinne’s description of tarot in The Invention of Printing had gone unnoticed by tarot scholars until Hurst rediscovered it. As tarot itself has been largely passed over by academics we find ourselves in a situation where a guy with a strong passion and a blog really was one of the top scholars in the field, and with his passing what will become of his work in the decades to come? There is a profound question here about the preservation of knowledge in the internet age - someone really ought to be writing all of this down.
I choose the name Hunting the Unicorn for this chapter as homage to one of Hurst’s old posts: Unicorn Hunters My Top 10. He had named that post after a phrase Dummett had used a few times to describes attempts to decode tarot’s underlying metaphor. As Hurst’s post was a power ranking that really only made sense if you had read these obscure books, I wanted to do more of a comprehensive guide to the theories these books proposed. Now here we are, back at the beginning.
While I had read most of the posts on the pre-Gebelin blog before I had begun writing this series, it wasn’t until I was doing research for Hunting III that I found a working link to Hurst’s full theory hidden away in posts on TarotL, an archaic message board from the primitive internet. The Riddle of Tarot was pretty much what I had expected though it did contain a few surprises. It is worth noting that Hurst continued to write for over a decade after this essay, while his views didn’t change too much he certainly did amend some things later.
He begins the essay by addressing the question of whether or not there is in fact an underlying metaphor, or ‘riddle’, behind the sequence of the tarot trumps. He uses various source quotes to summarize the academic view of Dummett - that the tarot images were simply memorable images perhaps derived from the triumphal procession, a position which he often refers to as the triumphal sampler.1 He then moves to reject this position by arguing that tarot’s cyclic design and polysemic layers are evidence that it is a kind of visual riddle.
A key criteria in Hurst’s Unicorn Hunters power ranking had been whether or not the author had been cognizant of the three different subject matters presented in the trump sequence. As such the different subjects, what Hurst had called ‘the three worlds’2 were a key component to his own theory. However he didn’t follow the simple 3 x 7 structure and instead differentiated the ‘worlds’ based on the subject matter that they presented.
Like Tarot Symbolism and Ronald Decker, Hurst was also a proponent of Tarot de Marseille primacy. That is to say the belief that the TDM is faithful to the game’s original design. Hurst, like Decker, argues for TDM primacy based on the complexity of the pattern’s ordering. Furthermore his theories are mostly dependent on the TDM for their meaning. Card order matters especially for an attempt at a gameplay interpretation.
Hurst categorized the first world as the Social Hierarchy. In his view it presents a didactic expression of the Three Estates—laboratores, bellatores, and oratores (those who work, those who fight, and those who pray)—noting that, despite social changes such as the rise of the merchant class, this tripartite division persisted as a literary and allegorical motif for centuries. Within the first 6 trumps each of the estates have 2 representatives: the Fool and Baggato for the rabble, Emperor and Empress for the nobility and lastly the Pope and Popess for the clergy. It is worth noting that this sequence also serves as a microcosm for the tarot metaphor as a whole. He refers to this ‘world’ as The Realm of Man and sums up its lesson with the phrase Know your place!
For next world, the subjects presented represent the Allegories of Life motif. Hurst explains this subject matter as having been derived from The Fall of Princes tradition, drawing this name from the title of Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium (On the lives of famous men, also known as The Fall of Princes). Hurst noted that the de Casibus connection had originally been proposed by W. M. Seabury. He called this world The Realm of the Soul and summed it up with the following:
“This may seem as boring and anachronistic today as the moral of the first section, (“know your place”), but it was one of the most characteristic themes of the era: “Practice the virtues”. The second noteworthy point is that the sequence of virtues itself reflects an order of precedence established by St. Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa Theologia.”
While Hurst doesn’t seem to mention that the tarot virtues are backwards that of the Stoic/Christian ordering, his explanation for this sequence is one of the best that I have found. By his formulation, the ordering is based off of triumphs, tribulations and mortality. Justice prevails over Love and the Triumphal Car, Fortitude weathers the tribulations of Time and the tumult of Fortune, Temperance outlasts Betrayal and even Death itself.
Hurst calls the final world, that of the Biblical End Times, the Realm of Eternity with the lesson here being to “Trust in God”. What is inventive in this section is that he views the Star, Angel and World cards as representative of Christ. He bases this interpretation off of a selection of bible verses. In this view, the Star is derived from Revelation 22:16 I am the bright Morning Star, John 11:25 I am the resurrection and the life for the Angel and Revelation 21:23 I am the Light of the World" for the World card.
He takes this idea a bit further in the next section where he ties the Pope and Popess to the two faces of prudence:
“the Popess and Pope need to be accounted for. One virtue, two figures—an insurmountable problem? Hardly: Prudence was traditionally portrayed with two faces, a young woman and a bearded man. As these two cards are part of a social hierarchy, it is significant that there are two forms of Political Prudence: Regnative Prudence, appropriate to rulers, and Political Prudence per se, appropriate to the governed. (St. Thomas Aquinas, ST II:ii:50, following Aristotle: “The Philosopher says (Ethic. vi, 8) that ‘of the prudence which is concerned with the state one kind is a master-prudence and is called legislative; another kind bears the common name political, and deals with individuals’.”) This reading is confirmed by noting that one of the two Prudence cards triumphs over a pair of commoners while the other triumphs over a pair of monarchs.”
In the essay’s conclusion Hurst sums up his tarot theory “A triumph of Death cycle with sub-motifs from the most popular works of the time, (including Vado Mori, Dance of Death, Boethius, Boccaccio, Aquinas, and the Bible), based largely on conventional images”. He also stated that “The Dance of Death [was] the closest cognate to the trump cycle as a whole with Holbein’s version encompassing all 3 of tarot’s subjects in a similar pattern. As for the moral lesson behind the metaphor, he closes the essay out by referring to tarot as a ‘ladder of virtues’, a schematic for Christian salvation.
We have seen tarot described a few times as a cosmic ladder of the soul’s ascension, these two concepts aren’t themselves that different. Reading Tarot Symbolism gave me some insight into Hurst’s thinking as he referred to that book quite often. In his view, Tarot Symbolism was the best evidence against the occult interpretation of tarot as it brought together an authoritative collection of theories and failed to prove any of them - he even referred to it in this essay as ‘compendium of negative results’. He also made the same observation that I did about TS’s theory on the Judgment and World cards stating:
“it has been seriously maintained by one influential Tarot author that the resurrection had to be the last card in the sequence, as in the Southern tradition, else the design was somehow heretical. However, the Eastern sequence of resurrection to judgment, followed by the final reward in New Jerusalem is as orthodox as any imaginable, being taken directly from the Bible. See Da 12:2, Jn 5:28-9, Rev 20 & 21, etc.”
I was actually quite impressed with Hurst’s biblical scholarship. The verses he quotes are pulled from the Latin Vulgate as that was the bible that was in use at the time. His view is certainly not literalist as he talks about stories in the bible being parallel to each other. He was also knowledgeable about biblical numerology, equating Job’s 7 daughters with the 12 Apostles with the common factor being the numbers 3 and 4 either added or multiplied.
To reflect on Hurst’s theory as a whole we end up with something similar to Decker’s theory about Apuleius’s virtues3. Also Hurst’s three worlds Realm of Man, Realm of the Soul and Realm of Eternity aren’t too far from Place’s Platonic Soul of Appetite, Soul of Will and Soul of Reason. Unfortunately Hurst never commented on either Place or Decker’s books as far as I know. I do think it’s possible that tarot with it’s multiplicity of meanings had both Platonic and Biblical philosophy in mind, the two don’t have to be mutually exclusive. In Hurst’s view, the Temperance angel represents the Eucharist, different - but not that different - from Neoplatonic transmigration. Perhaps Hurst would have agreed with that as seemed to equate the World card with both the Anima Mundi and the Bridegroom of Christ.
While I have hit the highlights, there is much more to this essay including a rather complicated art historical discussion. As he only relies upon period sources and the bible, Hurst’s theory is the least assumptive of any that we have examined thus far. Even less assumptive than the triumphal sampler as that theory assumes they would choose moralizing images and then not have a moral. It’s even a bit less assumptive than the Place Platonic Hypothesis, though the two have numerous similarities. While Platonic knowledge was common among the educated if the same concepts can be explained via Christian thought that is the simpler answer. However there are still many elements from Place’s hypothesis that I favor over Hurst’s such as his explanation of the Chariot. We’ll dive deeper into conclusions on all of this in the next installment.
Ross G. R. Caldwell - Explaining the Tarot (2010) Amazon,
A Treatise of the Deification of Sixteen Heroes (2019) Amazon
It would have been impossible to write an article about tarot theories from the internet and not have included a few by Ross Caldwell. He is recognized as one of the top tarot scholars and the two books listed above that he co-authored are foundational works essential to tarot history. The Deification of the Sixteen Heroes is the definitive look at the instructions for Marziano’s game and Explaining the Tarot is about the two Italian Renaissance Tarot essays from Francesco Piscina and another author. Elements from both were examined way back in Unveiling the Renaissance Metaphor.4
As we have already discussed the subjects for both of these book, what I wanted to highlight in this article were a pair of essays that Ross authored and posted on tarot forums some years ago. In both of these essays he was following up on leads from Gertrude Moakley and expanding upon her hypothesis. The first of these essays that we will look at explored tarot’s connection to medieval dice games, its full text can be found at Tarotforum.net.
The essay begins by citing an academic paper that was trying to dismiss Moakley’s dice analogy on the grounds that two dice having 21 unique rolls was insufficient to explain the presence of the 22 tarot trumps. Ross overcomes this obstacle by establishing that the Fool is an analog to a null roll in the dice games that would have been contemporary to the invention of tarot. In this theory the null roll in Italian games was derived from Soçobra, a game of Aragonese import:
“By 1283, when Alfonso X of Aragon had his Book of Games composed, the scoring of the dice game "Zara" (Hazard) was based on the principle of "soçobra", which is the difference between the result of the throw and 21. "Soçobra" means literally "below-above", "under-over" or "topsy-turvy", and has come into modern Portuguese in the form "soçobra", and into Spanish as "zozobra" meaning "shipwreck" (capsizing) and figuratively as "anxiety". In its original sense in Alfonso's book, it refers to the relation between the die-point on the top and its opposite on the face below (e.g. 1 and 6, 2 and 5, 3 and 4).
In their study of Alfonso's game of Zara, Basulto, Camuñez, and Ortega explain -
"In the text of the game of Azar, the “soçobra” of a point is another one that is the complement of value 21. This means that, if on having thrown three dice the sum is 15 points, then the soçobra of 15 will be equal to 21 - 15 = 6 points. Where the value 21 = 3 (6 + 1) is, in this game of three dice, equal to 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6, that is the sum of the points of the six faces of the die. Besides this, a point and its soçobra have the same probability (...). In case of throwing two dice, the point 4 is the “soçobra” of point 10, because 4 + 10 = 14 which at the same time is equal to 2 (6 + 1), that are, two dices, each one with six faces."“Deriving from the Arabic term for "the dice" (az-zahr), the word "zara" became a generic term for dice games, as well as keeping its original signification as the name of a particular game.”
“For instance, whereas in Alfonso's rules of Azar, throwing the points 3-6 or their soçobras 15-18 on the first roll was called an "azar", and was an instant win, in the rules of the game as it was played in Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries, rolling an "azar" was considered a null roll and the dice had to be rolled again.
This rule is explained in Francesco da Buti's circa 1390 commentary on Dante's Purgatory, Canto 6.1-12:
"Note that this game is called ‘zara’ from the occurrence of the points rolled with three dice below 7 and above 14; and when they get these points, the players say 'Zara', as indicating 'Null', like the zero in the Abacus; and these are not allowed, because they don't have three parities like 7 and 14 and the points in between; thus seven has three parities: that is, threes and ace, five and two aces of one and threes (3-3-1, 5-1-1, 3-3-1); and thus 14, sixes and 2, fours and 6, fives and 4; and so for the other throws in the middle: and this is not found in 3, 4, 5, or 6, nor in 15, 16, 17 or 18, which would be in one or two ways at the most as can be seen by looking at them."
Essentially his argument is that the Fool represents the Null roll and therefore having 22 trump cards makes tarot a faithful analog to the medieval dice game.
“Francesco da Buti's explanation (above) of "zara" as a homonym of "zero", and referring the reader to the practice of leaving an empty column on the abacus for the place-holder zero when doing calculations, reflects the role of the Fool in the tarot - his most common and probably original purpose is a "null roll" which allows the player holding him to skip having to play a more valuable card. Moreover, the image chosen for the card would derive from this name - "nulla" is a synonym for fool or idiot, "matto" in Italian. This connection was apparent to the author of the Steele Sermon, who described the Fool as a "nulla" - "El Matto sie nulla" means "The Fool, thus he is null". For him, being a Fool was a sufficient explanation for why he was null. My theory would be that the designer chose the image of a Fool for a null because of this, a rule he had already determined would exist.”
Also of note from this same post is a lengthy discussion on monks and dice games. He quotes from a sermon by San Bernardino which relates the 21 letters of the Classical Latin Alphabet to the 21 points on a die:
“The missals are the dice which, as there are 21 letters in the alphabet, so there are 21 points on a die. The books that are on the altar - missal, gospel, and letters - are the three dice which are used to play."
The monks even had this nifty mnemonic game where they related each of the dice throws to a sin:
“The earliest preacher to associate each of the rolls of dice and points on a die to sins seems to be Meister Ingold, a Dominican preacher in Germany who had spent time in Italy. In 1432 he wrote a morality of 7 games called "The Golden Game", and in his chapter on dice he listed 21 sins corresponding to the unique throws of two dice, and also noted the comparison with the 21 letters of the alphabet, although in the text we have he doesn't elaborate.
Around 1445, the Dominican Archbishop of Florence, Antonino, explicitly systematized this correspondence, actually giving the list of sins in alphabetical order (Thiers quotes it in French, my Latin equivalents are based on Antonino's disciple Gabriel Bareletta's):
"As many points as there are on a die, so many are the evils that proceed from them" (Quot in taxillis sunt puncta, tot scelera ex eo procedunt)".
His list was (reconstructed):
1. Amissio temporis (Wasting time)
2. Blasphemia (Blasphemy)
3. Convitium (Clamour, noisy and idle chatter)
4. Dissipatio (Squandering of money, goods)
5. Ecclesiastici contemptus (Contempt for the Church)
6. Furtum (theft)
7. Gula (gluttony)
8. Homicidium (murder)
9. Invidia (envy)
10. (K? - Thiers describes it as "The trouble they cause in their families which they leave to lack, of even necessary things, in order to have what they need for their game - I can't extract what the Latin keyword would be)
11. Laudatio falsa (false praise)
12. Mendax (lying)
13. Negligio (neglect of their duties to God and the Church)
14. Odium (hatred)
15. Participatio peccatis (participation in sins)
16. Querelae (quarrels)
17. Rapina or Roberia (robbery, plundering)
18. Scandalum (scandal)
19. Tormentum, Torpor (misery and torment (at losing money), despair)
20. Usura (usury)
21. Violatio (violation, profanation)”
When I first read this I wanted to theorycraft that perhaps the tarot card were concealing sins: the Baggato represented Avarice, the Popess could be Blasphemia - the design train pretty much wrecked there.
There is of course much more to this essay, I recommend reading the full thread which can be found at Tarotforum.net.
The other essay I wanted to discussion was this interpretation of the Bolognese sequence that plays on the Triumphs motif. The full text of this essay can be found in an ancient thread over on the Tarot History Forum.
The oldest tarot decks that we have all come from this Florentine pattern that Bologna also seemed to share. Likewise if we accept the suggestions of Moakley, Seabury, Hurst et. al. that the tarot iconography was derived in part from the works of Petrarch and Boccaccio then we have another factor in favor of Florence. Could the Bolognese deck with its long tradition and strange rules be preserving secrets passed down from the oldest tarots? Micheal Dummett said this about the game in his book:
“This Bolognese type of game is in several respects the most remarkable of all the many forms of Tarot. It is extremely complicated, but its complexity is of the sort that confers an extraordinary subtlety upon the play, it is certainly among the very best and most fascinating of all the games played with the Tarot pack. It can be shown to have remained very nearly unchanged since the beginning of the eighteenth century; in all probability, it has remained much the same since its invention” - Michael Dummett, The Game of Tarot [Pg. 233]
The Bolognese game (Tarocchino or Tarocchi Bolognesi) is played with a shortened pack with 62 cards with cards 2-5 omitted from each of the suits. In the trump sequence only cards 5-16 are numbered with the 5 lowest and 4 highest cards left unnumbered. Trumps 2-5 known as the 4 Papi or the Mori are often depicted as all men, a pair of Emperors and a pair of Popes in different poses - sometimes remixed with turbans and recolored to be Moors. As these cards lack a number they are scored situationally with the last Papi played winning the trick.
Getting back to the theory at hand, the trumps are divided into the familiar 3 worlds schema each relating to a triumph.
The first world consists of Trumps 1-5:
“Triumph of Love - the Current State of the World
Love (concupiscible appetite, desire) triumphs over the whole world below - Popes, Emperors, the players of the game (Bagattino), Kings, and everyone below (the whole pack). Note that the Popes and Emperors are not ordered in listing the sequence - their "order" is determined in each round of play, thus illustrating the game of power in the current state of the world.”
The Second World is Trumps 6-13:
“Triumph of Death - a Moral Example (in de casibus form)
Death triumphs over everyone too, even those with the greatest virtue - the example of Caesar is shown. Although possessing all virtue and highly favored by Fortune, he imprudently ignored the oracles and signs and at an appointed Time he was Betrayed.”
This sequence represents the past as a moral lesson, the figure on the Chariot card is interpreted as Caesar. He had all of the virtues (hence why they are all bunched together) but that couldn’t save him from fate with Fortune > Hanged Man > Death being the story of his betrayal and downfall on the Ides of March.
The Third World is the final 7 Trumps:
“Triumph of Eternity - the World to Come
Eternity triumphs over death and hell (Apocalypse 20:14). An apocalyptic scenario is shown in the final cards (each specific to the three families - in the Bolognese it is the Last Emperor).”
By ‘three families’ he means the 3 categories of tarot pattern from the XV century as identified by Dummett. We talked about the Last Emperor Prophecy in Hunting III when discussing Tarot and the Millennium, though that book favored the Type-C Arrangement (Eastern/Ferrara). It is a uniquely medieval prophecy about the final earthly emperor that will stave off the antichrist and bring in the Millennium, it’s a bit different than modern eschatology.
In the final ‘world’, Satan will eat the sinners but then will be judged himself (The Tower). There are signs (Star, Moon, Sun) in the heavens that foretell the coming of the last emperor. In this theory the woman on the sun card is ‘the spinner of fate’. Lastly, we have the familiar ending of Judgment followed by the establishment of the millennial kingdom.
I really dig this theory, if you may recall Petrarch’s I Trionfi was 3 pairs of Triumphs. With this theory we have the beginning, middle and ending triumph - not perfect but perhaps the best that could be done while leaving room for a multiplicity of meanings. Then there is the strange ordering with it’s unnumbered cards which could itself be a subtle allusion that no one has figured out yet.
There are numerous other theories that Ross has shared over the years; if one were to collect them all in a book, it would probably be the best tarot book.
Alain Bougearel - Le Tarot Arithmologique - Google Docs
Monsieur Bougearel’s theory is based around the fact that 22 is a pentagonal number: 1+4+7+10 = 22. 1 is the Magician in this analogy with the Fool added to the end. Following this layout we end up with a division of ‘worlds’ similar to the other schemes we have looked at in this series.
“The four enclosures of the Pentagonal Number structure the 22 allegorical subjects of the Tarot into 4 successive groups:
1 + 4 + 7 + 10 = 22.
The ordinal progression is then: 1, 5, 12, 22
First enclosure: 1
Second enclosure: 2, 3, 4, 5
Third Enclosure: 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12
Fourth Enclosure: 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22”
Basically the Magician is 1 from which emanates the 4, the Fortune sequence is cut off at the Hanged Man and we have Death included along with the eschatological triumphs. This entire theory is about 3 pages long with the bulk of its text explaining the 3 familiar ‘worlds’ + Magician Monad. While the divisions between the worlds are solid enough, I don’t know how one would go about trying to prove this theory - though the right analogy may still be out there.
Mark Filipas - A Lexicon Theory Of Tarot Origin (2002) SpiritOne
This theory argues that the Tarot de Marseille is a visual lexicon for the Hebrew alphabet.
On the face of it, liberties were definitely taken - calling the Emperor, a Duke for instance as well as some fumbling around in the Astrology cards. However this theory doesn’t claim to be anything more than a post hoc TDM interpretation. Perhaps there is some connection between this proposed lexicon and the mnemonic dice games like we discussed of above?
Helen Farley - A Cultural History of Tarot (2009)
This last one is technically a book and it was one of the first tarot books I read. It proposes a novel theory that the trump card images were meant to portray events in Duke FM Visconti’s life partly based on the assumption that Marziano’s game was indeed the prototype for tarot. In this book’s second chapter, the author rejects many of the theories we’ve been discussing in this series—such as Moakley’s hypothesis and even the Dance of Death. This book also makes a few arguments against its own case such as pointing that the Duke had been a reclusive man that avoided public gatherings and would have therefore been unlikely to have chosen the triumph as his personal allegory. The author thought that the Visconti-Modrone deck was the oldest extant deck and traced a lineage from it back to Marziano’s game via its hypothesized 16 card suits. A few years after this book was written it became widely accepted that many of the Florentine packs pre-date the Milanese ones. While it is certainly possible that tarot was invented in the princely court of Milan, the images on the hand painted cards are far more likely a play on an existing design and not themselves the prototypal tarot. This book also failed to recognize the 3 types of subject matter but I suppose that would have been difficult to discern if only considering the Visconti-Sforza packs.
My biggest takeaway from this book had nothing to do with Tarot at all. After repeatedly coming across a PDF of it while searching for other books, I realized that having an extensive bibliography could be a great asset for SEO.
There you have it, The Last Unicorn! In the next installment we will go through this whole series and talk conclusions - I already have a snappy title for it: The Harvest of Cherries. You won’t want to miss it!
Are there any theories that you know of that I missed that really should have been included in this article OR do you have a tarot theory that you would like to see presented? If so drop a comment and if I get enough of them I’ll make Hunting the Unicorn VI - Theories People Sent Me.
I love this phrase because it sounds delicious, imagine going into Olive Garden and ordering a triumphal sampler.
He credits John Shephard for coining this term in Cosmos in Miniature, but A.E. Waite had used this phrase in The Pictorial Key in a context implying a wider usage.
To recap: 2 Prudence (Popess), 5 Beatitude (Pope), 8 Justice, 11 Fortitude, 14 Temperance, 17 Providence (Star), 20 Sagacity (Angel)
I had a long internal debate before I began writing this series about whether to discuss the Renaissance essays when they were written or to save them for the 2010’s when they were finally being studied.