Tarot card meanings are disputed by different occult authorities. One of the biggest disputes stems from divergences between the two most influential Tarot interpreters over how to interpret the wild card in the deck, the card known as the Fool. Here we will review the historic differences over this issue between the French writer who introduced the Tarot to the public, Eliphas Lévi, and the man whose interpretation of the Tarot became the most influential in the English-speaking world, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers.

Levi’s Tarot

Alphonse Louis Constant, who wrote under the name Eliphas Lévi in mid 19th-century France, was the man responsible for introducing the occult interpretation of the Tarot to the general public. Before Lévi’s time, Tarot cards were primarily used for playing card games, and only a handful of obscure writers had ventured esoteric interpretations of the cards. Lévi revived the work of these writers and gave it a new spin with a more popular appeal.

Kindle, Wi-Fi, 6″ Ink Display Includes Special Offers & Sponsored Screensavers

In Lévi’s first writings on the Tarot, published in 1855, he referenced two late 18th-century French writers who had preceded him in introducing the occult interpretation of the Tarot to the general public: Antoine Court, who gave himself the title Antoine Court de Gébelin and Jean-Baptiste Alliette, who inverted his last name and wrote as Etteilla. Gébelin, a former Protestant pastor who had become a Freemason, published the first major occult interpretation of the Tarot in 1781 under the title Le Monde Primitif (The Primitive World). Over the next decade Alliette, a card designer, followed this up with a new Tarot deck which he promoted through books and a correspondence society. Between them Gébelin and Alliette introduced the novel notions that the Tarot had historic roots in ancient Egypt, and that it contained a secret code relating the cards to symbols from Greek astrology and alchemy and the Jewish occult tradition known as Kabbalism.

These ideas lay largely dormant in French occultism until Lévi took them and ran with them in his 1855 book Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, translated into English in 1896 by Arthur Edward Waite as Dogma and Ritual of High Magic, and also sometimes published under the title Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine & Ritual. After spending most of the book presenting what he claimed was a body of universal wisdom handed down from ancient sources, Lévi suddenly announced in the last chapter, “The Book of Hermes,” that he was about to reveal the key to his entire teaching. He then proceeded to expound his ideas on the Tarot.

Commenting on the prior contributions of Gébelin and Etteilla, Lévi asserted that the true key to the Tarot was not known to them. He claimed the key had been kept secret by two other French secret societies of the late 18th century, the Rosicrucians and the Martinists. Lévi announced that he had unlocked the mysteries protected by these groups and was now revealing them to his readers.

Lévi proclaimed that the “universal key” to “all ancient religious dogmas,” previously “permitted to none but the high priests” and even within those circles “confided only to the flower of initiates,” boiled down to three things. I will take the liberty of summarizing these three things in language which is hopefully somewhat simpler than what he used. They consisted of:

1. An alphabetic code representing universal philosophical ideals
2. A number code associated with the astrological signs of the Zodiac
3. A geometric code corresponding to the four points of the compass and the four elements

After outlining this esoteric code system, Lévi linked it to the Tarot. He correlated the 22 cards known as the Major Arcana with the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. He ascribed Kabbalistic and astrological correspondences to the non-face cards of the suits known as the Minor Arcana. And he related the face cards of the Minor Arcana to geometric patterns associated with Hebrew divine names, while tying the four suits of the Minor Arcana to the four points of the compass and the four elements. Everything in existence seemingly tied up in a neat little rational bundle.

But there was one wild card threatening to throw a monkey wrench into this entire system: namely, the Fool. Where did it go in the Major Arcana sequence? Did it go at the beginning, like a low Ace, or at the end, like a high Ace? The interpretation of all the other cards depended on the answer to this question. Gébelin had placed it first. But Lévi said the Fool went between cards 20 and 21. Or at least that’s what he told his readers.

MacGregor Mathers wasn’t convinced.

Mathers’ Tarot

Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, cofounder of the British quasi-Masonic magical society called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, started with Lévi’s interpretation of the Tarot, but ended with a different conclusion. An avid library researcher, Mathers went back before Lévi to Gébelin and Etteilla, and back before them to the medieval Kabbalists.

He became intrigued with an early Kabbalistic document called the Sepher Yetzirah (“Book of Creation“), which was translated into English by his Golden Dawn associate William Wynn Westcott. Mathers discovered that if he put the Fool first in the deck, as Gébelin had done, the astrological symbolism in the Sepher Yetzirah lined up more neatly with the Tarot. He then proceeded to make other changes to Lévi’s Tarot system. The resulting new system was set forth in a Golden Dawn internal document, later reproduced by Israel Regardie as a chapter called “Book ‘T’” in his book The Golden Dawn.

Mathers’ interpretation of the Tarot won the day over Lévi’s, at least in the English-speaking world. His interpretation was taken up by Lévi’s English translator Arthur Edward Waite, who became the namesake of the most popular Tarot deck of the 20th century, and by Aleister Crowley, who ultimately became the most influential interpreter of the Tarot.

So Who Was Right?

So who was right between Lévi and Mathers? Waite summed up his conclusion in his autobiography, Shadows and Light:

We have to recognise, in a word, that there is no public canon of authority in the interpretation of Tarot symbolism.

Given Waite’s own authority, it would be difficult for me to claim a weightier opinion on this matter; so leaving the last word to him, I trust the conclusion to your considered authority, o gentle reader.

Worthy References

Link to PDF text of Waite’s translation of Lévi’s Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (earlier edition without Waite’s critical comments)
Wescott’s translation of the Sepher Yetzirah
Link to PDF text of Mathers’ Book “T”
David Allen Hulse, The Western Mysteries: An Encyclopedic Guide to the Sacred Languages & Magickal Systems of the World: The Key of It All, Book II, St. Paul: Llewellyn Publications, 2000.

Related Posts

1. Tarot Cards: Where Did They Come From?