Tarot! : Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions by Claire Gilman

Before Aleister Crowley, before Arthur Edward Waite and Pamela Colman Smith, before the Golden Dawn, before Papus, Éliphas Lévi, and Etteilla, the first author to describe an occult version of the Tarot was Louis-Raphaël-Lucrèce de Fayolle, comte de Mellet, writing in Antoine Court de Gébelin’s, 1781, eighth volume of his monumental encyclopedia, Monde primitif.

The comte de Mellet associated the Tarot’s trumps with the Classical Ages of Man: the Age of Gold, the Age of Silver, and the Age of Iron. He correlated the Trumps with the letters in the Hebrew alphabet, he described the minor suits in detail, and he provided the earliest discussion of a divination technique for the Tarot. 

In 1977, the Newlyn Gallery in Cornwall exhibited a series of 78 taro designs quite unlike any previous. Ithell Colquhoun’s bold project seeks to dispense with the figurative narratives of the traditional taro and re-imagines the forces behind each card as pure colour. Drawing from the pioneering work of Moina Mathers and Florence Farr in the 1890s, Colquhoun integrates the esoteric teachings of the Golden Dawn with surrealist semi-automatic techniques to produce a design for a taro deck that remains unique in Western esotericism.

Originally produced as a small limited edition of 100 copies by Adam McLean (Alchemy Web Bookshop, Glasgow), this rare deck has long been highly prized by collectors of taro. Our new edition is reproduced from high-quality digital photographic files of the individual designs that we commissioned in 2017. The cards are on a premium 400gsm stock with a matt lamination. For ease of use, the cards reproduce both the traditional and initiated Golden Dawn names. This deck is sold with an accompanying booklet which offers an essay by Richard Shillitoe that explores Colquhoun’s relationship with the taro, and Colquhoun’s own explicative text ‘Taro As Colour’.

Down Here is the first of a meticulously researched and lavishly illustrated three volume work, The Tarot of Marsilio by Christophe Poncet; a landmark inquiry into the origins of the Tarot de Marseille. Against the prevalent view in the academy – that the tarot was never used, before the 18th century, for anything other than card games – Poncet argues that the Tarot de Marseille is a work of esoteric philosophy hidden in plain sight.

Through a careful analysis of artworks, philosophical texts, and the imagery and symbolism of the cards, Poncet places and dates the deck to Florence in the 1470s. Marsilio Ficino, translator of the Corpus Hermeticum and the complete works of Plato, is identified as the likely mastermind behind this tarot. In this first volume, the imagery and meaning of the Chariot, the Devil, the Lovers, Strength, the Hermit, the House of God, Arcanum XIII and the Fool are explored.

As readers of Two Esoteric Tarots will know, Poncet’s investigation is comparable to that of Peter Mark Adams in The Game of Saturn, shedding new light on heterodox thought in the Renaissance.

Christophe Poncet has been on a decades long quest to discover the truth about the Tarot de Marseille and the esoteric ideas encoded in the cards. The Tarot of Marsilio takes us on an extraordinary journey of discovery, from a lost masterpiece of Botticelli in a ruined castle, through the stacks of the Vatican library, artist’s sketchbooks, and works in the collections of the Louvre, the British Museum, and the National Gallery. Poncet brings us into the hermetic thought-world of the circle around the brilliant polymath Marsilio Ficino.

For the tarot reader and occultist, this work opens up a profound understanding of the cards, their history and the context of their creation. With these keys we can read the visual language of the trumps as they were intended, and play the game of Western esotericism at a deeper level. Whether enhancing our divinations or stimulating the practice of talismanic and image magic, Poncet changes forever our understanding of the most archetypal and iconic tarot deck.