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2. What does the name Tarot mean, and where did it originate?
By a name I know not how to tell thee who I am.
Tarots: a kind of great cards, whereon many several things are figured,
which make them much more intricate than ordinarie ones.
—Cotgrave's Dictionarie, 1611
What’s in a name? Is a rose still a rose and does it really smell as sweet if it’s called skunk? A name carries with it potentially many codes, some secret and special, some commonly known. A rose isn’t a skunk, but what we mean by that is not so obvious as it might first appear. In a sense, the words rose and skunk are meaningless unless we fix them to ideas (or mental images), or in semiotic views even to sound-images, enabling or evoking concepts. And we know what a rose is, and what a skunk is, because we’ve learned a conventional (that is, a commonly accepted) association between these particular words and the particular concepts1 they refer to.
Sometimes, to be playful or practical,2 we even transfer the original association to some third party, and so a person we don’t like can also be a skunk, but in that event also, he wouldn’t simultaneously be a rose unless perhaps we meant it sarcastically. But, what if a word meant something intrinsically, and not arbitrarily? What if the arrangement of the characters of the word were not purely functional, to represent a nominal sound (or sound image), but was masking a secret code,3 each letter bursting with symbolic pods of significance? Then we would have a cipher (from the Arabic cifr—empty, zero). And that is what occultists have claimed is the true nature of the word Tarot.
The basis of this claim is purely fanciful, rooted in the highly influential conjectures of two 18th-century Frenchmen, Antoine Court de Gébelin and Louis-Raphaël-Lucrèce, Comte de Mellet. While the philosophe and the cavalry officer, respectively, revealed competing codes for the name Tarot, they assured readers that the word, whatever its precise etymology, was ancient Egyptian, this decades before Egyptian hieroglyphics began to be deciphered.4
The name had been declared Egyptian, a full-blown mythology (complete with variant versions) had been supplied by a serious scholar—Court de Gébelin—and in short order con-artists such as Etteilla co-opted the esoteric dogma of his predecessors and started marketing Masonic-like initiations into Tarot mysteria. Soon, the name was claimed to be an (A)rchetypal key, perhaps a cosmic code invented by Atlanteans, or Templars, or Albigensians, maybe a sign for the Great Wheel of Dharma, or the Mercurial Logos—or really, if you thought about it, but not too much, a question (beloved of pomos and the people who sell to them) might occur to you: who could say with any absolute authority where the secret code that revealed everything to everyone had originated? And if you could say, why would you want to spoil everyone else’s fun?
Those questions beg many others in the manner of those who worship (and again—sell) around the altar of the secret and relatively recently manufactured Tarotic myth of the name.
Where in fact did the name Tarot come from and what does it mean and how did it get transmuted into a sign of great occult significance?
One of the disturbing things (if you’re a Tarot true believer) that history teaches us is that the first name for the pack of cards we call Tarot wasn’t Tarot at all but Trionfi—specifically carte da trionfi (cards with triumphs)5—this being the name of the Italian card game and the special cards (the twenty-two trionfi or trumps) needed to play it. So, by this fact alone, all speculation about the meaning of the cards which is based on the name Tarot involves interpretations of a secondary development and can’t pertain to the invention of the cards,6 and so the etymology of Tarot can’t be shown to support an ancient Egyptian origin of the deck.
Around the turn of the 16th century, two important things happened to carte da trionfi, and to the names it was called. For some reason the Italians began calling the deck Tarocchi, the name by which the cards (for games and fortune-telling) are still called in Italy today. Secondly, the Tarocchi deck was introduced into France, where its name was changed to, or was initially adopted as, Tarot.
Why the name of the cards was changed from Trionfi to Tarocchi we don’t yet know with certainty. Tarot experts such as Michael Dummett have suggested it was likely a convenient evolution since at least one other French card game, perhaps derived from the Italian original,7 was called Triumphs and some new name needed to be provided to distinguish between these. However Dummett says this French game, at least by this name (of Triumphe), could only have come into existence AFTER the Italian name "ceased to be used exclusively for Tarot cards." However this may have been, the name Tarocchi stuck to the old Italian Trionfi cards, and from this new name came all the versions of the name by which the cards (and games) became known as they spread throughout the rest of Europe. In Germany, for example, the name became Tarock (Tarocchi is pronounced hard—Tar-OK-Kee), in Hungary Tarokk and in France it became Tarot—although a number of variations on the spelling were used for some time before the final orthography was accepted. Clearly, or seemingly so, the first four letters in the German, Hungarian, and French names of the game come from the Italian word TAROcchi.
While it is generally believed that there is no convincing evidence concerning any etymology of Tarocchi and thus Tarot, there is an interesting possibility, going back to Arabic roots, and even, oddly, from these to ancient Egyptian ones. This etymology concerns the Arabic word taraha (pronounced tarakha), meaning to throw away something. This word is the ultimate root 8 for tare (in French and English) and tara (in Italian), both of which refer to deductions or removals of excess articles, such as wrapping or boxes for example, from a load of cargo—one wouldn’t have to pay shipping on the tare (the discarded portion). Now, as perhaps becomes clear to some, my use of the word discarded is not disconnected to the track of this etymology, since the idea proposed here is that the word Tarocco (pronounced tarok-ko), the singular form of Tarocchi, described a common feature of Tarot or Trionfi games—the removal or discard of an excess portion of the cards (usually from the dealer’s hand) to a reserve pile.9 Depending on the rules of the version of the game,10 the cards in this pile wouldn’t count in some calculations (just as in the shipping rules) but would in others, particularly in the calculations of points at the end of the hand. It appears the Italians adopted the word only slightly altered (to an Italian form) from the Arabic, while the French supposedly dropped the hard k sound and went with taro, thus demonstrating they probably inherited the word from the Italians, but also suggesting they may have adopted the word as a variant of tare.
This explanation of the origin of the name Tarot, unlike so many others, is both reasonable and doesn’t require anything other than a seemingly clearcut linguistic evolution based on the game practice of Tarot—no battles on the Taro River or political intrigues or hidden Kabbalistic meanings are required.
Also, and this seems to be something that has escaped the attention of Tarot historians (up till now) but this is in fact the etymology given for Tarot in a number of comprehensive French dictionaries.11 However, beyond that fact of its attractiveness, and its acceptance by certain lexicographers, is there any other reason to think someone might have named (or renamed) a card game after the game feature of discarding? The answer to this takes us back to the discussion above concerning the transfer to a French game of the old Italian name of Trionfi, or in French Triomphe. The French game of Triomphe eventually became the celebrated Écarté—Discard12—after the prominent game feature it shares with its cousin, or parent, Tarot.
In conclusion, we see that at some point around the turn of the 16th century, the Italian card game of Trionfi underwent a name change to Tarocchi. The etymology suggested here, and which is mirrored by a nearly identical name change of a related game, indicates that the name Tarot is the French form of an Italian name, derived from an Arabic root, meaning the game of Discards.
The following table shows the suggested etymology of Tarot, and related words:
|
WORD
|
Meaning
|
Root
|
Meaning
|
| Tarocco-Tarocchi |
Discard-Discards |
taraha |
to throw away |
| tare-tara |
tare deduction; to calculate a tare, or discard |
tarhah,
derived from taraha |
that which is thrown away |
| Tarot(s) |
Discard(s) |
Tarocco, or tare-tara |
as noted above |
NOTES
1—Or the particular collectives of concepts—i.e. correspondences—that match these keys.
2—Practical in the sense of making the words do extra duty. Why invent a new signifier when you can put chains on the tires of the old one and drive it on new surfaces for which it hadn’t originally been intended? Of course, then you’ve invented a new signifier. Never mind.
3—As Saussure complained:
This use of the word symbol is awkward, for reasons connected to our first principle. For it is characteristic of symbols that they are never entirely arbitrary. They are not empty configurations. They show at least a vestige of natural connection between the signal and its signification.
As I explain in my essay, Tarot—a Semiotic View, What Saussure is referring to as our first principle is that of semiology (his label for semiotics), which states that the relationship between the signifier and signified is always arbitrary. Saussure thus is validating the notion that there could be signifiers with natural (and possibly very mysterious and secret) connections to what they signified. As noted in my essay, it is a debatable point whether or not that feeling of Saussure’s represented anything more than a sidestepping of a recognition that long traditions of sign linkages can make the links seem natural.
4—Even that clear fact, and its obvious implications—that these writers were at best inventing myth and certainly not doing archaeology, as had to have become clear in the 19th century, after the decipherment of the Rosetta Stone—has been ignored by occultists and later by pomos and Tarot marketers, such as Stuart Kaplan. Indeed, Kaplan, in 1600 pages of comments about Tarot in his three "encyclopedias", devotes four and half lines to the fact that, as he puts it, "…the French scholar François Champollion solved the problem in 1822 of how to read hieroglyphic writing." This comment follows a summary of Court de Gébelin’s theories, but Kaplan doesn’t provide any critique concerning the contradiction between the claims of the philosophe and the fact that Egyptian hieoglyphics couldn’t be read when Court de Gébelin published his theory of Tarot, a theory based on the supposed meanings of Egyptian hieroglyphics. Kaplan’s opportunity to plainly refute this myth is ignored by him because he’s mainly interested in marketing the mystery of Tarot.
5—In other words—the standard pack of playing cards with the twenty-two trumps added to it.
6—Well, OK, it might pertain to the invention of the cards IF one could show that the name Tarot was more than superficially related to the name Trionfi. But one can’t show this. The two names have entirely different etymologies, although of course they did end up being applied to the same deck of cards and the games played with them.
7—Dummett discusses at length the likely origins of the names of the cards, in The Game of Tarot, pages 80-87.
8—The immediate root for tare and tara is one derived from taraha—tarhah—"what one throws away". In fact, it may be that the immediate root for Tarot is tara/tare, and tara is even suggested as the real root for Tarocchi, but that seems unlikely, given the close similarity between Tarocchi and taraha.
9—It also describes a technique or tactic in Tarot games of discarding or throwing away worthless or lower counting cards in order to save those of higher value till they can be played to a winning trick.
10—As is explained in horribly meticulous detail in Michael Dummett’s The Game of Tarot, there were as many versions of Tarot game rules as there were villages in which the cards were distributed. Recall that most people seldom if ever left their villages (remember, no cars, planes, or trains), and there wasn’t any television or even telephones with which to spead the word about one’s latest Tarot game rules innovation. Much like the American approach to Monopoly, where each family learns its own rules, and almost nobody reads the ones supplied with the game, people liked to create their own versions of the game of Tarot, while still maintaining the basic structure of play.
11—For example, Le Robert Dictionnaire historique de la langue française and the Tresor de la Langue Française.
12—Literally:discarded.
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