INTRODUCTION



Saint Augustine famously wrote, in the exquisitely personal voice of The Confessions of Saint Augustine, “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.” My own life makes the most sense to me when I view it through the lens of this same restless search. Here are the things that have pushed me away from God. Here are the things that have led me back to God. The things that push me away from God? They always seem easy and comfortable at first, but they leave me dissatisfied and restless. The things that pull me toward God? They are often difficult and demand more of me than I would like to give, but they bring peace with them, too. My whole life is an effort to remain keenly aware of the push and pull so as to find the resting place. It is an old struggle: Augustine wrote those words at the turn of the fifth century. It is a common struggle, too: the parable of the prodigal son is enduringly popular because so many of us feel compelled to live it for ourselves. But as Augustine says, we are made for God, and we can find rest.

I grew up in a Christian home. We were churchgoing but not settled about it, and I spent my young childhood hopping in and out of different Protestant denominations: Presbyterian, Methodist, Southern Baptist. I saw spiritual restlessness firsthand. When I was thirteen, our family converted to Catholicism. In that steady tradition, my parents’ restlessness ceased abruptly, and I picked up on their contentment. I spent my teenage years as a devout Catholic: regularly going to daily mass, spending time at adoration, reading theology for fun, acquiring a taste for God. It was a beautiful fledgling faith, but it’s easy to be virtuous in the absence of temptation, and it’s easy to have faith when nothing ever tests it. I became an adult and I left home and, embarrassingly, doubts pushed in almost immediately. Also embarrassingly, the doubts weren’t even of an interesting variety. They were the same well-worn questions of faith that people have wrestled with for thousands of years. I didn’t know how to be Catholic and also have doubts, and I didn’t know how to be a Christian without being Catholic, and so I left everything behind.

I stopped reading Aquinas and Anselm and Augustine. I stopped going to church. I stopped praying. I simply disengaged from the questions I could not answer, distancing myself from anything having to do with religion and instead calling myself a “hopeful agnostic.” The freedom was thrilling at first. It always is. I told myself that I could do what I wanted to do and believe what I wanted to believe and go where I wanted to go. But Christianity had been the thing around which my whole life was ordered, and I felt the absence of its gravity. I felt it particularly in my early twenties as I moved through the big life changes of marriage and children. By the age of twenty-five, I was living in Austin, Texas, with my husband (busy with law school) and our two sons under two (busy with keeping us awake at night). I was a stay-at-home mom, and I was struggling with the intensity of motherhood and the particular invisibility that often accompanies that kind of caretaking. I wanted something to anchor me, to order my days, to provide a rhythm to my life, to bring me back to myself. Where does one then turn when, before, one has always turned to prayer?

Austin has a reputation for being a “witchy” kind of place, and I found that reputation to be true. Most everyone I met was trying to cultivate some sort of personal spiritual meaning. I had friends who collected crystals, friends who practiced astrology, friends who went on Sunday morning hikes and called it church. I also had friends who played around with tarot cards. Captivated by the images, I bought a Waite-Smith deck for myself. I bought it because I was bored and restless. I bought it because I missed the intentionality of prayer. I bought it because I, too, was trying to cultivate meaning. Tarot scratched my itch for the ritual of religion, and I quickly fell in love with how it made me feel seen. I never used it for divination, because I’ve never believed in divination, but I loved creating a quiet space to shuffle cards and pull cards and sit with them. I loved getting to know characters like the Fool and the Empress, the Knights and the Queens. I loved registering my ever-changing reactions to these images and seeing myself, good and bad, reflected in them. Tarot helped me to know myself again. It was also a fine substitute for prayer, until it slowly became no longer the substitute but the substance.

The sneaky thing about tarot is that it is full of surprisingly Christian imagery. Tarot originated in fifteenth-century Italy, and the cards reflect the deeply Christian culture of that particular time and place. During a time in my life when I wanted nothing to do with Christianity—I simply refused to read Scripture or attempt prayer or darken the door of a church—I was pulling cards almost every day and using them mostly as journaling prompts. My Catholic upbringing wouldn’t allow me to look past the Christian ideas that permeate the tarot. I would pull Temperance and write about the presence of that virtue in my life. I would pull the Hierophant and meditate on the joys and sorrows of the institutional Church. I would pull the Devil and find myself reflecting on the nature of my own particular vices. Confronted with these images over and over again, I felt unable to escape my own sense of spiritual restlessness. Over the course of these years, my tarot practice began to feel less like a writing exercise and more like a prayer. The thing that had always helped me to see myself more clearly started to show me the God-shaped hole in my life.

* * *

I wish I had a dramatic story to tell about my return to Christianity, but the story holds no drama. I did not simply wake up one day and decide to believe in God again; my return to Christianity was as slow and meandering as my departure was sharp and abrupt. I admitted to myself that I missed religion, that I was restless and unsettled, that my own attempts at being “spiritual but not religious” were not enough. I quietly (almost furtively) started rereading some of my favorite spiritual writings from my teenage years: Augustine’s Confessions, Henri Nouwen’s Life of the Beloved, Teresa of Ávila’s The Interior Castle. Living in Manhattan at the time, I wandered the medieval galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and spent time with the religious art there. I popped into churches while out running errands and didn’t tell anyone. I made fumbling attempts at prayer. I cried a lot. I also started attending an Episcopal church in our neighborhood at the request of my husband, who was looking for community after our move to New York City. We found ourselves going back every week, warmly welcomed by the people there. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the restlessness went out like the tide.

This is the point in the story where the reader expects me to write about how I abandoned tarot in the peaceful wake of my return to Christianity. That would be a tidy ending, wouldn’t it? Tarot has a bad reputation, after all. I didn’t abandon it, though. To be honest, the idea never once crossed my mind. It seemed unthinkable to me, because tarot was one of the things that led me back to God. To my mind, tarot and Christianity are a natural pair, even though their marriage seems strange at first (and second and third) glance. I integrated tarot seamlessly into my prayer practice, pulling cards with morning prayer and finding connections between the images and Scripture. To most everyone’s surprise but my own, it fit perfectly. I was excited enough about this connection that I started to share my thoughts publicly, mostly on Instagram. A lot of people didn’t like it. Tarot readers were suspicious of organized religion. Christians were suspicious of a practice tinged with the occult. But some people did like it. Enough people, at least, for me to be able to write this book for you.

* * *

Writing this book has been the greatest pleasure. I have loved being given the challenge of explaining tarot as a coherent, theological whole, and I have loved being given the gift of time to dive deeply into theology, time that I haven’t had since I was a teenager. In looking for research and inspiration for this book, I drew from the theological sources that most move me: the early church fathers, the medieval mystics, the lives and writings of the saints, and many papal encyclicals. I spent the better part of a year reading Athanasius and Julian of Norwich, biographies on my favorite women saints, and slim volumes by popes on joy and suffering and mercy. (Reading this list of theological inspiration, you’ll be unsurprised to learn that, while tarot led me back to Christianity, writing a book about tarot led me specifically back to Catholicism.) My research had a Catholic bent, and so the book has a natural Catholic bent as well. That being said, I’ve also tried to keep it as ecumenical as possible. While I read through a lot of specifically Catholic theology in researching this book, I also read through the Bible again, and in writing the book, I tried to draw from biblical common ground whenever I needed a story or a line of poetry or a feeling to illustrate the meaning of a card. In addition, I’ve used the NRSV translation of the Bible as it’s the translation with which I am most familiar.

* * *

Writing The Contemplative Tarot has felt like a chance to write about the God whom I adore and the practice that taught me how to adore God again. For me, this book feels less like a how-to guide and more like a collection of seventy-eight little prayers. By that, I mean that these interpretations are my own and are deeply personal to me. I hope they will be helpful to you, but I also hope that you take them in the spirit in which they are given. They are not the rule of law. In most places I have tried not to stray too far from the original meanings of the cards, instead teasing out the theological implications of the traditional meanings, but what I tease out of the cards might be different from what you will tease out. Tarot’s beauty lies in its ability to be constantly reinterpreted. What I hope, more than anything, is that this book will inspire you to slow down, to remain open to God’s “still small voice,” and to let the cards help you form your own prayers.



1 A BRIEF HISTORY OF TAROT



There are many histories of tarot; few of them are true. If you want to learn about tarot, you can read about how tarot contains the lost Hermetic knowledge of ancient Egypt. You can find intricate theories on tarot’s esoteric connection to Kabbalah, that mystical Jewish school of thought. You can listen to arguments that tarot and the I Ching are intimately connected, being the major oracles of the West and East, respectively. You can learn about tarot’s origins in Indian tantra and tarot’s origins in Romani culture and tarot’s origins in Waldensian teaching. There are as many theories on the beginnings of tarot as there are tarot readers to champion them, but these myths are just that. Elegant myths, never verified by the people who first espouse them, are taken for truth and become part of the culture of tarot. And so the history can appear murky, making tarot seem more mysterious than it is. Appearances are deceiving, though. In truth—in actual, verifiable truth—tarot began its life as nothing more than a card game with no purpose beyond providing entertainment to Italian nobles. This may be a disappointment for those who wish tarot to be more magical than it is, but if we follow the thread of truth, we find that the real history is interesting in its own right.

* * *

Renaissance Italy was nothing if not Catholic. How could it be anything else? At the time, the Catholic Church was undoubtedly the central institution of Western Christianity, and it was seated in Rome (apart from that brief and embarrassing detour to Avignon in the fourteenth century). The capital-C Church was in the Italians’ backyard. In many ways, this was a point of pride, and of course Catholicism was a distinguishing mark of Italian culture. Much of the most famous art of the Italian Renaissance—Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, Raphael’s Sistine Madonna—is religious art. That being said, while this closeness to the Church was an inspiring gift, at times it was an equally inspiring point of revulsion. Sometimes closeness breeds contempt, and anyone who was that close to the institution of Catholicism had a front-row seat to the unsavory sides of the papacy not always apparent from a distance. While Petrarch was a devout Catholic, he had no problem lambasting the Curia, the administrative institution of the Church. Boccaccio’s The Decameron contains stories that gleefully satirize the clergy. Dante’s The Divine Comedy famously puts some popes in hell. The point is this: however one felt about religion, it could not be ignored. Good or bad, Christianity was a thing that had to be reckoned with.

Renaissance means “rebirth” and refers to the revival of classical antiquity that occurred first in Italy and then across the rest of Europe in the fifteenth century. What was being rebirthed during this time was interest in the ancient world. Works by Plato and Aristotle and Homer were brought back via the Italian trade routes that covered the Mediterranean. Scholars searched monastic libraries and found ancient manuscripts. There was a new blooming of interest in the Greek and Roman cultures of antiquity, and the thinkers of the Renaissance sought to revive the ideals of these cultures, to measure themselves by the standards of the ancient world, and to carry on its legacy. One of the intellectual challenges of the Italian Renaissance was figuring out how, exactly, to do those things. Obviously, much of what was being unearthed about the ancient world had its origins in pagan antiquity, and the people of fifteenth-century Italy self-identified as Christian to a degree that can be difficult for us to fathom today. Everything needed to fit, somehow, into a Christian worldview. This challenge was one of the sparks of the Renaissance. How could the pagan classics of antiquity and the Christian belief of the day be held together?

One of the men who wrestled with this challenge was Marsilio Ficino, a Catholic priest and dedicated scholar of Greek philosophy. The first to translate Plato’s extant works into Latin, Ficino was deeply immersed in Platonic ideas, like the immortality of the soul, rewards and punishment after death, and a superior immaterial world that superintends the earthly world. If that sounds a lot like Christianity to you, you’re not alone. Ficino was convinced that there were hidden depths in traditions not considered Christian—Platonism among them—that still aligned with Christian thought, and he worked to make that alignment clear.

While Ficino was trying to align pagan and Christian thought in his own philosophical way, the writers of the Renaissance were teasing out their own interpretations. This new acquaintance with classical antiquity familiarized the authors of the Italian Renaissance with allegory, a literary device that writers such as Petrarch and Dante used extensively to advance Christian thought. Dante’s Comedy is a clear allegory for man’s journey to salvation. Petrarch’s I Trionfi (Triumphs) evokes the Roman ceremony of the triumphal procession, honoring allegorical figures such as Love, Chastity, Death, and Time while showing us the ideal course of a man moving from sin to redemption.

Rooted in Christianity and enamored of pagan antiquity, ever trying to marry the two—this was the cultural environment that birthed tarot. The first tarot deck was created sometime in the early fifteenth century. We do not know exactly who it was created for, but the most likely candidate is Duke Filippo Maria Visconti of Milan. This new tarot deck would have been, in many ways, familiar to an Italian noble like the duke. Created not for divinatory purposes but for playing a game similar to bridge, it contained the four suits of the regular playing-card deck with which the Italian nobility would have been familiar: Cups, Batons, Coins, and Swords. These were pip cards, somewhat prosaic cards marked only with the small and standard symbols that denoted each card’s suit and value. What made the new tarot decks special was the novel addition of a fifth suit consisting of twenty-one trumps and a Fool. These trump cards were originally illustrated but unlabeled, and while their symbolism and order varied among individual decks, their Renaissance influence was always clear. The trumps contained allegorical figures that expressed ideas from both Christian thought and classical antiquity. These are the same figures that are familiar to tarot readers today: Death, the Fool, the Empress, Temperance, Justice, etc. This is what tarot was from the start: nothing more than a card game with which Italian nobles could while away idle hours, and nothing less than an allegory for a journey through life.

So, what happened? How did tarot evolve from an unassuming card game to an esoteric divinatory device? It took a long time for that shift to happen. The game of tarot moved through Europe over the course of several hundred years, but during this time it remained nothing more than a card game, and not even a particularly widespread one at that. Tarot died out in Italy. It remained fairly popular in France and Switzerland, but not really anywhere else. Eventually, tarot decks became standardized in the form of the Tarot de Marseille, a deck that is still in use today. At this point, however, it was still only a game. Tarot’s shift from a simple card game to an occult tool shrouded in mystery happened not gradually but rather abruptly, and it happened in nineteenth-century France.

* * *

Napoleon Bonaparte was obsessed with Egypt. In his youth, he had been fascinated by the East and so, as an adult, he conducted a capricious military campaign in Egypt. The campaign had no real military purpose, but it got him close enough to the East for which he longed. In the true spirit of the Enlightenment of his time, he took a team of scientists and archaeologists with him on this campaign, ensuring that a steady stream of Egyptian artifacts found their way back to France. Because Napoleon was fascinated by Egypt, everyone in France was fascinated by Egypt. This curiosity snowballed into a fanatic infatuation with anything deemed “exotic” by the French. By the nineteenth century, many scholars began to seek out similarities between Christianity and other religions, such as Hinduism and Kabbalism. A renewed interest in the occult developed, and spiritual philosophies like spiritism, Theosophy, Freemasonry, and Martinism thrived. This was the beginning of the French occult revival, and it was in this atmosphere that tarot was transformed from a card game to a divinatory device. Removed from its Renaissance context, tarot became instead a mysterious object that appeared to contain promises of forgotten esoteric lore, rediscovered by people primed to find esoteric knowledge in everything.

* * *

The Protestant pastor and Freemason Antoine Court de Gébelin could be said to be the originator of tarot’s connection to the occult. He lived in France in the eighteenth century, and while his interest in the occult predated France’s occult revival, he set the stage for what tarot would become. The way Court de Gébelin told the story, he was once at a party in Paris where he came across some ladies playing the game of tarot. These cards were unusual in Paris, and he was struck by their imagery. Since he had what was, at the time, a precocious interest in the mysteries of ancient Egypt, his immediate thought upon seeing tarot cards was that the symbolism contained the remnants of the lost Book of Thoth, an ancient text supposed to have been written by the Egyptian god of writing and knowledge. With no reliance on either the historical reality of tarot or accurate knowledge of Egyptian hieroglyphics, Court de Gébelin took a mighty contextual leap and reconstructed tarot history. He made public his theories on tarot in an essay included in his work Monde primitif, analysé et comparé avec le monde moderne. In his hands, tarot lost its significance as a game and became something mysterious and wholly new. Court de Gébelin’s new ideas on tarot later gained currency in Egypt-crazed France, with the help of one man.

While Antoine Court de Gébelin set the stage for the new tarot, it was Éliphas Lévi who brought tarot its full occult potential. Born Alphonse Louis Constant, Lévi originally pursued the Catholic priesthood and, after being ordained a deacon, abandoned the path to the priesthood at the age of twenty-six. At the age of forty he began to publicly profess a knowledge of the occult and became an esotericist of great renown. He had a reputation as an original thinker, and his extensive writings on ceremonial magic attracted attention in nineteenth-century France. Lévi was also interested in the tarot, and he carefully incorporated the cards into his theories on magic. He believed, as Court de Gébelin did, that tarot contained within its symbols the secrets of ancient Egypt, and he used the images of the Tarot de Marseille to further his esoteric belief that The Book of Thoth was the origin of all religions. He did not, however, hold in high regard the idea of using tarot as a divinatory device. The use of tarot for divination had been familiar in France since the occultist Jean-Baptiste Alliette published, under the pseudonym Etteilla, a few small books about divinatory tarot in the late eighteenth century. Lévi knew of these books and believed that it was possible to use tarot for divination, but he also believed that tarot’s most valuable purpose lay in its ability to convey ancient and universal wisdom.

As the nineteenth century drew to a close, there was a trend in France away from the use of tarot as a receptacle for universal wisdom and toward the use of tarot for divination. In response to this divinatory interest, the occultist Papus published Le Tarot divinatoire: Clef du tirage des Cartes et des Sorts, a tome dedicated entirely to cartomancy. While Papus himself did not have much respect for cartomancy, believing it to be primarily of interest to women, he had a thorough knowledge of tarot through his analyses of Lévi’s work and was happy to capitalize on its interest. With Papus’s work, tarot’s transformation from a simple game to a complicated esoteric device was complete. Oblivious to the Italian origins of tarot, French occultists cemented tarot’s place in the halls of the occult, successfully convincing the world that tarot was a mysterious Egyptian source of magical knowledge and a tool for divining the future.


Copyright © 2022 by Brittany Muller