The Hermit's Tarot Major Arcana

Most deck designers unleash all their creativity on the major arcana. I have taken a very conservative approach, basing all these designs on the Tarot of Marseilles. I have redrawn them all, of course, rendering and coloring them according to my own esthetic preferences, but I have kept the basic figures and poses as presented by this centuries-old tradition. My goal is to understand these ancient symbols better, not to replace them with new variations.

I have also retained the Tarot of Marseilles ordering in preference to that of Waite. Thus, Justice is VIII and Fortitude (Strength) is XI. For the card titles, I have also mostly followed the Tarot of Marseilles, which in a few cases goes against the grain of modern custom in the English-speaking world. Thus High Priestess and Hierophant are Papess and Pope. In two cases, I have reverted to pre-Marseilles titles. The Tower or House of God is named Lightning in the Hermit's Tarot. "House of God" was one of the last Tarot of Marseilles titles to become established, and all the earlier titles of the card (Arrow, Fire, Lightning) draw attention to the agency of the tower's destruction, not the building itself. This suits my own understanding of the card much better. I have decided to leave the Italian name of the Magician or Juggler untranslated: Bagatto. The word doesn't seem to have any clear meaning, and the character depicted on the card is not easily pigeonholed as to his profession.

It is with some trepidation that I went so far as to put Hebrew letters on the cards. I do not see this as primarily an occult deck. However, I have given a great deal of thought to the meaning of the major arcana in sequence, and for me they do represent a spiritual journey from mundane consciousness to cosmic consciousness. The journey can be mapped on to the qabalistic Tree of Life, although I think the published path attributions of the Golden Dawn (Crowley, Waite, Fortune) are not worth much. For me, the major arcana represent an ascending sequence from the material to the divine, not a descending sequence as the mainstream occultist tradition maintained. I therefore thought it would be both instructive and delightfully malicious to label the major arcana with Hebrew letters in reverse, so that The Fool is tav and The World is aleph. The reversed system is actually quite felicitous in several cases.

In mapping the major arcana to the paths on the Tree, I have been guided more by the kinds of transitions the images on the cards suggest, not by the need to follow a strict numerical sequence. I have produced a mapping that I think is highly instructive. It is described in The Major Arcana and the Tree of Life.

I group the major arcana into triads, each representing two divergent approaches to spiritual development, followed by a synthesis that balances the two and leads on to the next challenge. Notice that the final card in each triad is a figure with very strong religious connotations.

The Physical Triad	0 - The Fool	I - Bagatto	II - The Papess
The Social Triad	III - The Empress	IV - The Emperor	V - The Pope
The Moral Triad	VI - The Lovers	VII - The Chariot	VIII - Justice
The Triad of Self-Mastery	IX - The Hermit	X - The Wheel of Fortune	XI - Fortitude
The Triad of Transcendence	XII - The Hanged Man	XIII - Death	XIV - Temperance
The Triad of Liberation	XV - The Devil	XVI - Lightning	XVII - The Star
The Triad of Gnosis	XVIII - The Moon	XIX - The Sun	XX - Judgement
The Final Monad			XXI - The World

I have also become fascinated with the Minchiate tarot, which includes 20 additional trump cards. I decided to create versions of the additional Minchiate trumps for the Hermit's tarot, as a kind of optional "add-on module". This doesn't quite make it a proper Minchiate deck, because the Minchiate cards differ from the Tarot of Marseilles in other ways as well, but I do think it will give the deck some interesting possibilities. The trump cards each bear two numbers: the Marseilles-ordering number in black at the top, and the Minchiate-ordering number in red at the bottom left. The additional trumps are listed here.

The Additional Virtues	XVI - Hope	XVII - Prudence	XVIII - Faith	XIX - Charity
The Elements	XX - Fire	XXI - Water	XXII - Earth	XXIII - Air
The Signs of the Zodiac	XXIV - Libra	XXV - Virgo	XXVI - Scorpio	XXVII - Aries
	XXVIII - Capricorn	XXIX - Sagittarius	XXX - Cancer	XXXI - Pisces
	XXXII - Auqarius	XXXIII - Leo	XXXIV - Taurus	XXXV - Gemini

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Copyright © 1998, 1999 Tom Tadfor Little