|
Dan: To begin with, tell me about Robert
M. Place -- I'd like to know about the Robert M.
Place that exists behind the tarot. What kind of
things do you do? Who are you?
Robert: The first thing that I would like
to say about myself is that I am an artist. I have
known this since I could first draw. l kids draw,
but, as soon as I picked up a crayon, I knew that I
was an artist. I started drawing realistically by
the second grade and all through grammar school and
high school I was known as the school artist. By my
last year in high school, I had won ever art award
the school offered and several national scholastic
art awards.
I went to college in the second
half of the sixties. Although I wanted to go to art
school in New York, my parents and my guidance
councilor steered me toward a teacher's college.
This was a mistake.
After graduation, I taught art
in a grammar school in New Jersey for five years
and I hated it. The teaching job did not pay enough
for me to make it through the summer without other
work but this was a blessing in disguise. To earn
money in the summer, I started selling my paintings
at outdoor art shows. It was at these shows that I
realized that I could earn a living making jewelry
and selling it at art and craft shows. This was my
ticket out of teaching. I taught myself to make
jewelry and built up my business. When the business
was strong enough, I quit teaching and have been
working for myself ever since.
For years my wife, Rose Ann, and
I made jewelry and sold it both wholesale and
retail in some of the best craft shows in the
country. My jewelry and metal sculptures have won
awards and been exhibited in museums and even the
White House. After The Alchemical Tarot was
published, I began to move away from the jewelry
and now I am mostly doing illustration, writing,
and conducting lectures and workshops. Rose Ann and
I live in the Woodstock area in New York with two
rescued greyhounds, and two Siamese cats. Our cats
and dogs have been finding their way into my
illustrations lately.
Dan: So there you
were, creating jewelry, traveling a bit... what was
it that began your interest in Tarot? Did it begin
as art or practice?
Robert: It started
with a dream and a series of synchronistic events.
The magical quality of these events is startling
and it seems that there is nothing arbitrary about
my involvement in the Tarot. I did not actually
choose to become involved in a conscious way. It
was an unconscious decision.
Recently, I was telling the
story on the radio, on the Woodstock Roundtable,
and Doug, the host, asked me if Rod Serling showed
up while these events were unfolding. It is that
kind of story; it belongs in the Twilight Zone.
I have been interested in the
Tarot and other esoteric subjects since I was
studying art in College in the late 1960's. My
girlfriend at that time read the cards. She used
the Waite-Smith Deck. I even began to create my own
hand-drawn deck based on the Tarot of Marseilles,
the traditional French deck. I only finished four
cards before I lost interest in the project, and
although as an artist I have always been involved
in symbolism in my work, I was not directly
involved with the Tarot for many years after that.
My true involvement with the
Tarot started with a dream in the summer of 1982, a
dream that startled me with its clarity and
intensity. I was dreaming that I was following
someone through a red brick building.
Then, I dreamed that a phone
rang, interrupting the events of the first dream in
the same way that a phone call can interrupt ones
thoughts during the day. The sound of the phone
startled me into lucidity and intensified the
events in the dream in a way that made them
impossible to forget. I remember thinking, "how can
someone call you in a dream? I didn't know that
that could happen. Even in the dream, it was clear
that this was a message coming form a place distant
from my normal consciousness. The phone was the
perfect symbol for this. I picked up the dream
phone and an international dream operator, informed
me that she had a person-to-person call for me from
a law firm in England. I accepted the call, and a
secretary from the firm came on the line. She told
me that she was sending me my ancestral
inheritance. She could not tell me what it was, but
only that it would come from England, it is kept in
a box, and that it is sometimes called the key. She
added that I would know it when I saw it. Then, she
ended the conversation with some precautions. She
said that this was a gift that contained a hidden
power and, that with this power, came
responsibility. Before I could receive this gift, I
had to accept the responsibility that came with it.
I accepted without hesitation.
When I awoke that morning, I
naively expected to see the box at the foot of my
bed. As the week progressed, I eagerly anticipated
receiving my inheritance. In a few days, my friend
Scott came over with his new deck of Tarot cards.
It was the deck designed, in England in 1909 by
Pamela Colman Smith and it came with a book
authored by A. E. Waite entitled The Pictorial
Key to the Tarot. As he walked through the
door, I felt my head turn in his direction as if of
its own accord. My eyes also seemed to working on
their own. As they focused on what he was holding,
I knew that this was my inheritance. Although this
was not the first time that I had seen this deck, I
now saw it in a new light.
In a few more days my friend Ed
gave me the Tarot of Marseilles. He said that he
just had a feeling that I needed a Tarot deck and
he had an old copy of the Marseilles deck hanging
around. That was my first deck, but soon I made a
trip from the New Jersey suburbs, where I lived,
into Manhattan to buy the Waite-Smith cards. Now
that Tarot decks can be purchased in any general
book store, one's local new-age shop, or on-line,
it may seem odd that I had to make a trip to a
major U.S. City just to buy a Tarot, but at that
time, although Tarot decks were available, they
were not as prevalent as they are now.
Over the next month I began
experimenting with the cards. At first I resolved
not to read any books on the Tarot. Most books that
were available then on the Tarot passed on spurious
histories and misinformation that stemmed from the
occult fantasies of the 19th century. I
wanted to communicate directly with the images
unhindered by these preconceptions. My girlfriend
had shown me the Celtic cross spread in college. So
I decided to begin with that combined with Jungian
techniques of dream interpretation.
 Dan:
Discuss with me your own evolution in the art
styles you have worked within tarot. What was it
that had you begin, with the Alchemical
Tarot, then the Angels Tarot, and
Tarot of the Saints; I want to see inside
your head...the evolution that has brought about
The Buddha Tarot.
Robert: The Buddha Tarot was
released this past March (2004). I am currently
creating The Tarot of the Sevenfold Mystery.
I have also started a Vampire Tarot and a Celtic
Tarot but there is very little work done on either
of those. I have also written a book on the Tarot,
called The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and
Divination. It is being published by Tarcher, a
division of Penguin Putnam, and it will be out in
October.
At the beginning of each
project, each deck was heralded by a dream, but the
events that lead to the creation of The
Alchemical Tarot were as startling and
synchronistic as was my first introduction to this
mystical inheritance. I have written about these
events in my introduction for The Alchemical
Tarot.
It started in the late 1980's,
when I began to develop a voracious appetite for
knowledge. I read everything that I could find on
the Tarot, mysticism, Hermeticism, Gnosticism,
alchemy, and related subjects. Every table in my
studio was soon covered with stacks of books
reaching toward the ceiling, and I filled a large
hardbound note book with charts, lists, and notes -
at that time, this seemed odd because I was not a
writer, and had no plan to become a writer.
By 1987, my reading had become
noticeably excessive to my wife and friends. I
intuitively knew that I was onto something, but I
was unable to explain what it was. It was only when
I heard a commentator on the radio talking about
the Harmonic Convergence that I began to understand
what was happening to me. I had been hearing about
the Convergence for a few weeks, but thought of it
as just another New-Age curiosity. However, this
commentator mentioned that during this period of
spiritual transformation sensitive individuals all
over the Earth would be experiencing a flood of
information on spiritual subjects. I intuitively
realized that this is what was happening to me, and
being able to explain this to Rose Ann, gave her
some peace of mind also.
One day in August of that year,
I was reading the Picture Museum of Sorcery,
Magic, & Alchemy, by Emile Grillot de
Givry, when I became fascinated by a 17th century
symbolic alchemical engraving representing the
philosopher's stone.
 The
design depicted a heart in the center of a cross
with images of the four elements assigned to each
corner, an arrangement called a quincunx. The
heart, which was surrounded by a wreath of thorns,
of course, was related to the Sacred Heart of
Jesus. It was unusual to find the sacred heart
depicted in the center of a cross and, in Christian
art, the quincunx arrangement is usually reserved
for the icon called "Christ in majesty," which
depicts Christ seated on a throne in the center of
the symbols of the Four Evangelists, the lion, the
bull, the eagle, and the man.
But, this was not an orthodox
Christian symbol. It was created by an alchemist to
represent what he considered the most sacred thing
in the world, the Philosopher's Stone. The creation
of the Stone is the goal of the alchemical Great
Work and it is a substance made of pure spirit,
"the Soul of the World," as the alchemists called
it. Once created, it was said to be able to heal
any illness, to prolong life indefinitely, to turn
lead into gold, and to turn an ordinary man or
woman into an enlightened sage.
Images like this are more than
symbolic works of art; they capture archetypal
realities that have power over one's psyche and, on
this occasion I accidentally unleashed that power.
As I looked at the design, I realized that the
heart in the center was symbolically
interchangeable with the woman dancing in the
center of the World card in the Tarot and that the
symbols of the Four Evangelists in the Four corners
of her card are interchangeable with the four
elements that were depicted on this design. I
reasoned that if the image on the World card, which
is the culminating image in the series of trumps in
the Tarot, symbolizes the same spiritual substance
that the alchemists sought as the end and goal of
their Great Work, than it is likely that the Tarot
trumps are telling the same story.
This thought was like a key that
unlocked a secret door in my brain. I sat
mesmerized as a flood of alchemical images flowed
out of this door and aligned themselves with the
Tarot trumps. In an instant, I saw that all of the
Tarot cards were interchangeable with alchemical
symbols and, that when this interchange was
complete, the trumps told of the same journey or
process, the alchemical Great Work.
Although this insight happened
in seconds, it took me seven years of research,
writing, and drawing to illustrate that vision and
the result was the Alchemical Tarot.
Once I had decided to create the
Alchemical Tarot, it triggered a series of
synchronistic events. Because of these events I had
an article on my deck published in Gnosis magazine,
I met the well-known writer, Rosemary Ellen Guiley,
and I teamed up with her on the project. Because of
Rosemary, we got HarperCollins to give us a
contract and an advance. I illustrated the deck and
Rosemary and I wrote the book. I actually did most
of the writing but it was good to have an
experienced writer to help me out and without
Rosemary we would not have attracted such a big
publishing company. The Alchemical Tarot,
book and deck, came out in 1995.
Many occultists had also found
alchemical symbolism in the Tarot but what I had
discovered was more complete. Also, occultists tend
to look for some secret code in the Tarot.
In the 1800's, Levi almost
single-handedly revived the occult tradition. Levi
was enamored with the Kabbalah and tried to
synthesize all occult teachings into one Kabalistic
system. He considered the Tarot an important part
of occult tradition and it was imperative for him
to demonstrate that it was also Kabalistic. He
picked up on an idea that was mentioned before him
by Court de Gebelin, namely, that the 22 trump
cards are related to the 22 letters in the Hebrew
alphabet. The Hebrew letters in the Kabalistic
system are also each related to a sign of the
zodiac, a planet, or an element. So, once the cards
are assigned to the letters, they also are
connected to the astrological system. Many people
still find this a satisfying way to think about the
Tarot. But I find it a symbolic dead end.
This system of correspondences
leads one away from symbolism that is actually
presented in the pictures on the cards. It denies
the story that is there. Kabalah really has nothing
to do with this system and the amalgam of the two
is artificial. At it worst, this type of thinking
reduces the symbols in the Tarot to mere signs.
The Tarot was created in
Renaissance Italy in the early 1400's. It was a
popular deck used to play a card game and the
images in the cards come out of that culture. They
are related to the iconography of the period and
depict a type of parade.
Renaissance culture was
essentially Christian but it had synthesized this
with aspects of pre-Christian or pagan Classical
religion as well. Some of these aspects were kept
alive through the Middle Ages and some were being
rediscovered in an attempt to reclaim the ancient
artistic heritage.
Renaissance culture was also
mystical. Their view of reality was strongly
influenced by the Neoplatonism of the late Middle
Ages and in the mid 1400's they rediscovered much
of the ancient Neoplatonic literature.
Neoplatonism is just a term made
up by scholars in the 1800's to label something
that I think is very exciting and pertinent.
Namely, that in the ancient world many people
looked at Plato and his philosophy as a mystical
religion. In many ways, this Western mysticism
parallels Buddhism in its philosophy and practice.
In the 1960s, I, like a lot of
people at that time, starting looking to Asian
religions to find the type of personal religious
experience that I felt was missing in Western
culture.
When I discovered Neoplatonism,
I found that what I had been searching for in
Hinduism and Buddhism was in our culture also. It
is just that we had forgotten about it. In the
Renaissance, they had not forgotten and that
message is what they captured in the pictures in
the Tarot.
The story told by the
alchemists, when they describe the process of
making or discovering the Philosopher's Stone, is
the same mystical journey that we find in all myths
and religions. It is what Joseph Campbell called
the "Hero's Journey."
Dan: So how did this
realization influence your work on the
Alchemical Tarot and subsequent decks?
 Robert:
Once I discovered that the Tarot contained the
alchemical Great Work I could see that the Tarot
trumps could be related to any heroic myth in any
culture. However, there were lots of decks coming
out that were relating the tarot to various
cultures. It seemed that people wanted to connect
the Tarot to almost anything except the northern
Italian culture of the 1400s that actually created
the deck.
Alchemical symbolism was part of
that culture and the symbolism was directly related
to the original cards but it was not the primary
influence. The images on the cards were part of the
popular iconography connected with a Renaissance
parade called a triumph and with symbolic mystical
art that made use of the parade as a metaphor for
the mystical journey.
The symbolism that artists made
use of for the popular poems, the works of visual
art, and for the symbolic carts actually created to
be displayed in the parades came out of a cultural
synthesis that combined Christian iconography with
alchemy, romanticism, and Classical deities.
Angels and saints were an
important part of this synthesis and it is not
surprising that in the earliest decks, from the
first Tarots created in the 1400's to the
Marseilles deck created in the 1700's, we find
depictions of angels, such as on the Judgment card,
and references to saints, such as the Hermit card.
In fact, the earliest printers
who carved woodblocks and printed the first playing
the cards were the same printers who created the
first saint cards, which they sold to pilgrims at
cathedrals and shrines. These printers were experts
in Christian iconography and they would draw on
this tradition when designing playing cards.
For my next two decks, The
Angels Tarot and The Tarot of the
Saints, I explored both of these paths.
HarperCollins commissioned
Rosemary and me to create The Angels Tarot. It
actually came out in the same year that the
Alchemical Tarot did, 1995. This is because angels
were extremely popular at that time and the
publisher knew that the deck would have a ready
audience of angel collectors. But, because of the
rush to get the product out while the craze was
hot, they gave us very little time to complete the
project.
Rosemary had already written
books on angels and we had her research to draw on.
She recommended Gustav Davidson's Dictionary of
Angels to me and I read it cover to cover,
making notes in the margins as to which angel fit
to which Tarot card. I felt that I made good
choices connecting the trumps with historically
accurate angels that personified the same
archetype.
 I
did not neglect the bizarre or demonic angels that
were being ignored by most of the works on angels
that came out at that time. According to the
Christian mythology, a third of the host of angels
rebelled and became fallen angels or demons. This
fits in well with the Devil card and with the
Hanged Man, which traditionally depicted a traitor
hung by his foot. Although I felt that I made the
right choices when collating angels to cards, the
end result was a collection of images that made
sense but did not have one consistent story that
illustrated the mystical message in the trumps the
same way that the alchemical images did.
For my next deck, I chose the
theme of saints. Again, the publisher, this time
Llewellyn, was looking for a deck on saints. I had
been toying with the idea three years before and
when I met a representative from Llewellyn at the
World Tarot Congress in Chicago and they asked me
if I could put together a proposal for a saints
deck. I replied that I already had a proposal to
show them.
The Tarot of the Saints
came out in 2001 and I had a year to work on it
before I handed it in. This was four times the
amount of time that I had for the Angels. I
basically applied the same approach. I read books
on the lives of saints and made notes about which
saints embodied the same ideals or theme found on
each trump and on each royal card in the minor
suits.
The correlations lead to some
surprising insights about the Tarot images.
For example, the tower being
struck by lightning that we find on the Tower card
in the Tarot would have been easily recognized in
the Renaissance as the symbol of St. Barbara, whose
legend involves both a tower and a bolt of
lightning. In the icons of St. Barbara she is
depicted holding a tower with three windows, on it,
representing the Trinity.
 Although
the original Tower cards were more likely to be
illustrating a scene from Revelation, as the deck
evolved into the Tarot of Marseilles, the Tower
came to be called the House of God. In these French
decks, St. Barbara's three windows find their way
into the tower.
Another saint who gives us new
insight into the Tarot is St. Mary Magdalen, whom I
put on the Papesse card. To many Gnostic sects she
is the principal transmitter of Christ's teaching
and therefore a perfect counterpart to the more
orthodox Pope, for which I chose St. Peter, the
first Pope.
The stories of the saints follow
the same mystical journey that is illustrated in
the Tarot. Each is an example of someone who has
embraced virtue to overcome life's difficulties and
progressed toward the mystical vision illustrated
on the World card. But, by using different saints
for each trump, I didn't get the satisfaction of
one continual story that coincides with the Tarot
story the way that I did with The Alchemical
Tarot.
Dan: So if given another
opportunity, would you have done things
differently?
Robert: Before I began to
work on the deck I began to fantasize about
illustrating the trumps with images from the life
of just one saint. St. Francis would be the best
fit but even he would not fit perfectly.
When I woke up on Christmas
morning in 1996 I was surprised by the realization
that the perfect fit was not a one of the saints
that I had been contemplating, but the Buddha.
Rose Ann and I were staying at
her parent's house in New Jersey. On Christmas Eve,
I had been reading The Illustrated World's
Religions by Huston Smith and went to bed after
reading the section on Buddhism.
 When
I woke on Christmas morning, a correlation between
the life of Buddha and the Tarot was all worked out
in my mind. I could clearly see how the details of
the story of Buddha's life fit together flawlessly
with the Tarot trumps, illustrating that they are
essentially the same stories. I had worked on it in
my sleep but I could not remember the process --
only the result.
I started explaining my
revelation to Rose Ann, and amazed myself with how
the elements of Buddha's life fit the images in the
Tarot.
There were the four sights that
convinced Siddhartha to leave his life of pleasure
and his lover and embrace asceticism (or Strength):
an old man (the original Hermit card which depicted
a hunched old man with an hour glass), a suffering
man (The Hanged Man), a corpse (Death), and a
hermit (again The Hermit card). There was even the
chariot that he used to ride to town to see the
sights. Before this, his father had ruled his life
like a Pope and had been guiding him toward the
role of Emperor. This effort culminated with his
marriage to the beautiful Yasodhara, the future
Empress.
Once he realized that the
ascetic life was also a dead end, he embraced the
virtue temperance and had to deal with the
temptations of Mara, the Devil. Buddha remained
undefeated after Mara's fiery attack (The Tower)
and rose through various levels of enlightenment
just as the Tarot depicted a hierarchy of celestial
images leading to the mystical vision on the
highest trump.
The story even fit the
three-part pattern that I have found in the Tarot:
the first dealing with hope, the second with fear,
and the third the middle path, beyond hope and fear
that leads to mastery or enlightenment. This was
the start of The Buddha Tarot.
Dan: It sounds to me as though the
Buddha Tarot is the next logical progression
-- that in essence, it contains everything that has
gone before: the Alchemical, Angels,
and Saints -- and then continues from there?
Robert: Yes. The
Buddha Tarot is probably the most important
deck that I have completed since I finished the
Alchemical Tarot. I started with the
similarity between the Tarot trumps and the story
of Siddhartha -- the quest that led him to become
the Buddha. But as I began to do research for the
deck, I found that the connections between Buddha
and the Tarot were more profound than I had
realized at first.
 The
illustration that we find on the Tarot's World card
(in the Tarot of Marseilles and the occult decks
based on that model) is a quincunx, as I said
before. It is a sacred pattern that depicts the
symbols of the four evangelists, each assigned to
one corner, and in the center we find a nude
representing the spirit, the Soul of the World or
"Anima Mundi," as the alchemists would call her. In
the original Christian version of the icon, the
evangelists, represented by their angelic symbols,
are spreading the message of Christ to each corner
of the fourfold physical world. Through their
association with the fixed signs of the zodiac they
are also equated to the four seasons, the four
elements, and every aspect of the physical world.
In the Tarot, the figure in the
center is a goddess, the feminine spirit. She is
what the alchemists would call the "Quinta
Essentia" -- the origin of the word quintessence.
The Quinta Essentia is the essential fifth element,
the spirit, or life force that permeates all matter
and makes the world of form and time possible. The
design is essentially a Western mandala.
Mandalas are maps of sacred or
psychic reality that make use of a fourfold pattern
to depict the world and thereby illustrate the
center of the world -- the sacred space where one
connects with the spirit, the gods, or Buddha
consciousness. In the hero's journey, the
destination of the hero is always the sacred
center. This is where the hero will find the magic
healing elixir that is needed to complete his quest
and cure what ails the world. The World card is a
mandala but the entire Tarot deck also follows the
same sacred structure. It has four minor suits
representing the four directions, elements,
seasons, social classes, and other fourfold
divisions. The trumps stand in the central
position. They illustrate the hero's journey and
they culminate with the World representing the
sacred center and the goddess representing the
elixir.
When Siddhartha became the
Buddha, he ceased to be a man in the normal sense.
He woke up from the state of delusion that is
normal consciousness and realized that he was one
with all of reality. He realized that he was
actually the entire world. To demonstrate this,
Buddhists say that when Siddhartha became the
Buddha he became not just one Buddha but, to
represent the divisions of the world into the four
directions and the center, at least five Buddhas.
These Buddhas are called the five Jinas. There is
one for the center, Vairocana, who is colored
white, and one for each of the four cardinal
directions, Amoghasiddhi, the green Jina to the
north; Aksobhya, the blue Jina to the east;
Ratnasambhava, the yellow Jina to the south; and
Amitabha, the red Jina to the west.
 Each
Jina has a female counterpart called a Sakti.
Together they are like the King and Queen of their
division of the world. They rule over a direction,
an element, certain qualities, and each cures one
of the five poisons. In the Buddha Tarot,
each couple rules one of the suits. Each Jina has
an animal protector, which is like the Knight, and
a servant called a Dakini, which is like the Page.
Each also has a particular magical tool, which is
their symbol, like a jewel or a red lotus. In the
Buddha Tarot, these become the suit symbols.
In traditional Tibetan culture,
artists create hand painted cards called tsakli.
Unlike a mandala with its multiple imagery
organized in a unified geometric pattern, each
tsakli depicts just one sacred object, or deity.
The tsakli are used in ritual and meditation to
focus on the single element, but the same
archetypal unity runs through the set of cards.
They are a mandala broken into its separate parts,
a mandala of cards. This is how I see the Tarot.
The Tarot is a set of individual images that are
derived from the synthesis that is Renaissance
culture, but in the entire deck there is an
archetypal pattern that is sacred and enlightening.
When Siddhartha became the Buddha, his spiritual
body took the form of the entire mandala. Buddha
and the mandala are one and, in a sense, because
the Tarot shares that sacred pattern, Buddha became
the Tarot. The Buddha Tarot simply sheds
light on what was always there.
Dan: So, what's next? Having discovered
such an entirely satisfactory match for Tarot's
symbolism in the Buddha Tarot, have you
finished exploring the archetypes for now?
Robert: It would seem
that the Buddha Tarot is the culmination of
everything that I wanted to express through the
Tarot. It is the perfect tool for divination, which
literally means to communicate with the divine.
Yet, there is still more that I
wanted to express. Although I have turned away from
some of the systems that the occultists tried to
graft onto the Tarot, there is much of the occult
tradition that is valuable. And, it is vital for
the continued life of the Tarot that each
generation communicates with its symbols on a
personal level and uncovers new shades of meaning.
By fantasizing about the Tarot's icons, the
occultists at times added to the symbolism in a way
that harmonized with the historical image and gave
it greater depth.
When studying the Waite-Smith
cards, people often look into the traditions and
teachings of the Golden Dawn, the famous English
occult society to which both Arthur Edward Waite
and Pamela Colman Smith belonged. But, Smith was
also influenced by the art of the Pre-Raphaelites,
the mystical brotherhood of artists who dominated
the art world in England in the last half of the
19th century, and by the Symbolists, the
international art movement that was in part a child
of the Pre-Raphaelites.
 One
of the most prominent artists in the Pre-Raphaelite
movement was Edward Burne-Jones. He was the one
with the biggest international reputation and who
had the biggest influence on the Symbolists in
France and Germany. Although Burne-Jones' name may
not be familiar to many readers, they are likely to
recognize his art when they see it. His fairytale
like paintings, peopled by tall, pale stunningly
beautiful women and equally memorable heroic men,
have a melancholy, otherworldly quality that was
rediscovered and admired in the latter part of the
20th century.
The Pre-Raphaelites chose their
name because they wanted to create art that had a
mystic sincerity like the works of the late Middle
Ages and early Renaissance before the time of
Raphael. They believed that art could be a mystical
religious expression, a type of magic, and, for
their model, they looked to the artists of the
1400s, the century that gave us a revival of
Neoplatonism and that gave us the Tarot. The
Pre-Raphaelites created a cultural environment in
which magic and mysticism were once again prevalent
and this is the environment in which the Golden
Dawn took root.
Burne-Jones, in particular,
based his tall "stunners" on the paintings of
Botticelli and Michelangelo, the two artists whose
works are considered primary examples of
Renaissance Neoplatonism. His work expresses the
Renaissance ideal that physical beauty and
spiritual beauty are linked in one continuum that
can lead to the mystical experience of beauty
itself, as a timeless, underlying reality. It is
this ideal that allowed the creators of the Tarot
to place a nude on the World card as a symbol of
the primary beauty.
It is not surprising that when
we look at the works of Burne-Jones we find that he
painted many of the same themes that we find in the
Tarot. He has paintings of Temperance, the Wheel of
Fortune, lovers, allegorical chariots, kings, and
queens. It is like he was creating a Tarot but he
never finished it. The Tarot of the Sevenfold
Mystery started with my desire to finish
Burne-Jones' Tarot for him. I wanted to see what a
deck would look like if it was done in his style
and with his sense of symbolism.
I started by interpreting his
painting of Temperance as a colored ink drawing.
Then I used his pencil sketch of Folly as the
inspiration for the Fool, drawn in the same black
line ink drawing style. Once I felt that I had
absorbed the style, I began to create new
characters that were not based on any of his pieces
but that were consistent in their esthetic sense.
The proportions of Burne-Jones'
figures are directly influenced by Botticelli.
Their height is nine times the height of their
heads. This is what gives them an otherworldly
grace. I was careful to maintain these proportions
while creating new figures.
As I was working, a theme began
to emerge. I saw that in these cards I was creating
a bridge between the original Tarot decks of the
15th century and the 19th and
20th century occultists. The cards have
elements of both, the initial mystical allegory and
some of the depth that was added later.
One of the underlying constants
of the Western mystical tradition, from its origins
at the beginning of the historical period to the
present, is the importance of the number seven as a
symbol for the mystical journey and how this
symbolism is incorporated into the Tarot. The
prominence of the number seven in the structure of
the Tarot is one of the things that convinced the
18th century occultist Court de Gebelin
that the Tarot was occult and this is what started
the occult interest in the Tarot.
 In
our culture, we are surrounded by groups of seven
that have deep symbolic significance. There are
seven days to the week, seven notes in our music
scale, seven virtues and seven vices, seven
sacraments, seven archangels, seven wonders, seven
seas and seven continents, seven colors in the
spectrum, and seven Chakras. In the Bible, it took
seven days to create the world including the day of
rest, there are seven pillars to Wisdom's temple,
seven seals in Revelation, and Jesus removed seven
devils from Mary Magdalen. All together, the Bible
mentions the number 424 times. In popular culture,
we find fairytales with seven dwarves, seven wives,
or seven brothers. Even in modern popular culture,
we have heroes like Double-O Seven or the
Magnificent Seven. Our culture has ancient mystical
roots and all of these sevens remind us of that
past.
Did you ever look at a die and
notice that the numbers are arranged so that the
numbers on opposite sides always add up to seven?
The number seven is important in the game of dice
as well as the structure and there is evidence that
the ancient practice of divination with dice
influenced the structure and use of the Tarot. For
example, there are 21 possible combinations that
can be thrown with two dice. This is three times
seven. In the practice of divination with dice,
each of these throws has a separate character and
meaning. When we realize that the Fool is an
unnumbered wild card and not considered one of the
trumps in the game of Tarot we find that there are
21 trumps, just as they are numbered.
Each of the minor cards in the
Tarot has fourteen cards, which is two times seven.
Together they number fifty-six, which is the number
of possible throws that can come up when we use
three dice. The entire Tarot deck had eleven times
seven cards plus the unnumbered observer, the Fool.
It was this type of thinking
that drew the attention of the first occultists to
the Tarot. But, the deeper significance of
sevenfold symbolism in the Tarot has to do with the
seven steps of the mystical assent to the heavens
where the mystic receives enlightenment. In the
ancient Mithraic Mysteries, in the alchemical great
work, and in the seven sacraments we can see this
same symbolism. And, the Tarot is another mystical
tool that incorporated this seven-stepped process.
I intend the Tarot of the
Sevenfold Mystery to be the most beautiful deck
that I have created. But, I also intend it to be
the most open and creatively mystical by making use
of this archetypal sevenfold pattern that is at the
core of Western mysticism and at the core of the
Tarot’s symbolism, from its
creation to its occult revival.
Dan: It has been
wonderful that you could take this time with us. I
have enjoyed learning from you, and look forward to
enjoying your future decks.
The Tarot Garden is proud to
offer Robert Place's Buddha Tarot and
Tarot of the Saints in our online catalog.
Click
here for more information.
© Robert M. Place and Dan
Pelletier
19 April 2004
|
