fancy and the ace of spades

Paul Christian was a 19th-century French journalist, historian, and occultist whose real name was Pitois. Cynthia Giles's "The Tarot: History, Mystery, and Lore," with its compact but comprehensive history section, includes a couple of pages on M. Christian and his work. Although Gile's discussion is intelligent and informed, she doesn't mention that it was this fellow Christian who originated the terms "major arcana" and "minor arcana."

Those names for the two divisions of the tarot deck, with their aura of mystery and mossy old age, go back to...1870? And they were just the point of departure for an elaborate, beautiful, over-the-top Oriental fantasy that culminated with initiation, underneath the pyramids, into an ancient Egyptian "mystery" religion, where neophytes were led into the circle composed of "78 gold leaves" which had once been housed in an extremely ancient temple in Memphis.

And so forth. "No factual basis was offered for the tale," Cynthia Giles notes, "but it swiftly became a part of the burgeoning background to the occult movment," along with the similar work of the American Ignatius Donnelly with his theory of the lost city of Atlantis. Even the golden plates found in a cave by another American, Joe Smith, who founded a new religion, were a similar sort of 19th-century fancy. Whether any of them actually believed what they wrote out of their exuberant imaginations is open to debate.

Christian was a scholar who got appointed to a position in the Ministry of Public Education at 28. His job was to sort through thousands of old books the revolutionary government had seized from monasteries in 1790, and a lot of them dealt with magic and alchemy. This was weird stuff for the modern age and, I imagine, pushed the young writer in occultic directions.

The thing about occultism is, it's the basis for an awful lot of contemporary approaches to tarot. If we don't have it, what have we got?

To start, we have a deck of cards, or rather two decks of cards, or to be very precise, a deck of 52 cards to which were added 4 court cards and 22 picture cards.

When I designed my own tarot, I decided to keep the 52-card deck and eliminate the 4th-ranked court card, and keep the queens and the usual 22 picture cards, making a deck of 74. Why there are usually four court cards in a tarot suit I don't know; it might have something to do with scoring the game, for the invention of the tarot pack as a gaming device which only later came to be used for divination, is beyond dispute.

There's a beauty and balance to the regular 52-card pack that I wanted to incorporate into my own. It mostly has to do with the 13-card suits, 13 being such a deliciously mysterious and immaculately prime number, compared to the clunky 14. Also, I grew up with the French suit signs, or the International deck as it's called nowadays, so adding the trumps to it seemed natural, just as adding them to a playing deck with suits of cups, sticks, coins, and swords would have seemed natural to a 15th-century Italian designer of games.

While they may seem plain as vanilla to aficionados of fanciful or occult tarots, some of the playing cards, even with their minimal imagery, resonate deeply in our culture: who doesn't understand the meaning of the queen of hearts, for example?

The Ace of spades is one of these. An ominous card, one of three associated with death (the others are the nine spades and, of course, trump XIII), the ace of spades conceals a secret. It was the center card in our reading this past weekend, and it sat there huge in the middle of the read, mute and secretive.

It was so big and so secretive I find it very disturbing.