On

the Cards

The Game of Tarot and Twelve Tarot Games, by Michael Dummett

T. S. Eliot, in his Notes to The Waste Land, airily admitted to an ignorance of ‘the
exact constitution of the Tarot pack’. Such ignorance was common in the 1920s
but is far from common now, chiefly because Eliot’s poem set people to searching
for the exact constitution. While we deplore the presence in that poem of a man
with three staves and a one-eyed merchant (neither of whom are to be found in
the Tarot), we accept, because of the authority of the poet, the quasi-mystical
status of the pack and its divinatory power. In 1949 I managed to get hold of a
copy of Papus’s The Tarot of the Bohemians, which exalts the cards as the
‘absolute key to occult science’, and, with its aid, turned myself into a fairly
efficient Madame Sosostris of the charity bazaars. Michael Dummett now comes
along to tell us that the Tarot is primarily for games, not cartomancy, and that
there is nothing either venerable or mystical about it.

Let us consider first the thing that Eliot did not know, namely ‘the exact
constitution’. The Tarot is composed of seventy-eight cards, divided into a ‘minor
arcana’ of fifty-six and a ‘major arcana’ of twenty-two. The fifty-six correspond to
our own Anglo-American pack, with the additional court card of a knight. There
are four suits – wands or sceptres (our clubs: this is where Eliot got the notion of
the ‘staves’); cups or goblets (our hearts); swords (spades, spada being Italian for
sword); money or pentacles (ennobled with us to diamonds). In Italy, in the card-
playing drinking shops, one still sees those old Tarot suits. The Anglo-American
versions are to be found in the bridge-playing upper-class circoli. Tarot,
incidentally, derives from the Italian tarocco, but nobody knows whence tarocco
derives.

The major arcana is all picture cards, and some of the pictures seem to be of
remote and terrible meaning. A dog and a wolf howl at a moon that drips blood,
while a crayfish tries to crawl out of a pool. An angel trumpets the Last
Judgement. A tower is struck by lightning and starts to crumble. A man is hanged
upside down from a tree. The Waste Land has invested these last two cards with
a poetic weight which they were not originally intended to carry. Mr Dummett
does not use the term ‘major arcana’, finds in its cards nothing extraordinary,
and asserts that the pictures have an arbitrary derivation. The figures ‘are, in
fact, just what someone of the time would be likely to pick up if he were asked to
select a series of subjects for a set of twenty-one picture cards.’ The time in
question is the fifteenth century. What is important on these picture cards is not
the picture but the number attached to the picture. The cards are no more than
permanent ‘triumphs’ or trumps, and each has a fixed numerical value.

Mr Dummett mentions twenty-one picture cards, though the total is actually
twenty-two. The twenty-second is the Fool. Its value is zero. ‘The player who
holds it can play it at any time, irrespective of the obligation to follow suit or to
play a trump; it cannot take the trick, but it excuses the player from the normal
constraints on playing to a trick, which is why it is often called the Excuse.’ It is
not the ancestor of the Joker, which is an American invention of the late
nineteenth century.

Things are now becoming clear. The Tarot pack is for playing games. If we wish
to use it for divination, that is entirely up to us, but we would be foolish to think,
like Papus, that we have here an ancient mystical codex which, over the
centuries, has been debased and reduced to the greasy pack once known as the
Soldier’s Prayerbook. The Tarot is an ordinary fifty-six-card pack of fifteenth-
century Italy (we have dropped the knight), to which twenty-two extra cards
have been added. The important thing, the one which gives a Tarot game its
special fascination, is the existence of permanent trump cards with marked
values. On the cover of Mr Dummett’s paperback guide to twelve representative
games card players are warned that, if they try some of them, they may lose their
appetite for games played with the regular pack. It is a fair warning. After
Grosstarock, Ottocento, Konigsrufen or Cego, bridge and whist seem very insipid.

Let us now consider Mr Dummett himself, whose big and expensive book on the
history of the Tarot is as exhaustive a study as one will find, scholarly, sceptical,
worthy of the philosopher whose books on Frege have met with large acclaim
(‘Superb exegesis’ – The Times –, ‘Monumental’ – The Listener). Mr Dummett was
more or less driven to this study by political events. An inveterate opponent of
racism, he became sickened in 1968 (‘the most terrible year that I hope I ever
have to live through’) by such horrors as the assassination of Martin Luther King
and the Labour Party’s promotion of racial discrimination in Britain. Emotional
anxiety precluded rigorous work on philosophy or logic, so he fell back on a new
hobby, of which this brilliant book is the scholarly fruit. I agree with Mr Dummett
about the importance of the ludic in our lives and the hypocrisy of scholars who
will not see games as an integral part of a culture. Of the world’s great games,
chess is approved because there is no chance and hence no gambling in it. Card
playing, because of the aleatory element, is looked down upon. Dr Johnson,
honest as always, wished he had learned to play cards, seeing in the ombre table
a means of heightening human sodality. One might add that a card game brings
us into contact with the unexpected, the unknown, the mysterious.

And so we come back to Papus and the division of the syllables of the Sacred
Name among the suits, the Tarot as the sidereal book of Henoch, the astral wheel
of Athor. Even though Mr Dummett puts our cartological emphases right, I still
swear by the Tarot as an efficient engine of divination. Eliot, as a good Anglican,
scorned Doris and Dusty, who drew the coffin, as well as the cartomancer with
the bad cold. But it is evident that he was fascinated by those who ‘report the
behaviour of the sea monster, describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry …
riddle the inevitable with playing cards.’ So are we all. These two books are
intended to cool our fascination, interest us in the history of cards, and promote
new pastimes. They succeed in the last two, but I am not persuaded to throw
away my Papus.

– Anthony Burgess. But Do Blondes Prefer Gentlemen?