JESSICA FRIEDMANN Twenty-two Impressions: Notes from the Major Arcana. Reviewed by Ann Skea

Part memoir, part guidebook, part history, Twenty-Two Impressions shows the strangeness and wonder of the tarot.

In 1442, an apprentice beats sheets of gold leaf out of a coin, 100 sheets to the florin, as dictated by the guild.

This gold, together with paints made from materials ranging from chalk and lead to expensive lapis lazuli and malachite, will be used to embellish a pack of cards commissioned by an eminent Milanese family. Similar cards, created to ‘burnish the reputation’ of the prominent Visconti-Sforza family, commemorate the 1441 marriage between Bianca Maria Visconti and Francesco Sforza, and they contain images of family members. A number of these rich ‘Visconti Sforza Tarot’ decks were made, but they were ‘an expensive novelty, in the form of a fashionable game’, a ‘new game’ referred to by Francesco Sforza’s secretary as ‘carte de triumphi’. The ‘triumphs’, or ‘trionfi’, is still a widely used term in writings about the tarot.

In the first part of Jessica Friedmann’s Twenty-two Impressions, she traces the history of the tarot cards from their origin as common playing cards, possibly entering Europe as the Islamic game of Mulūk wa-nuwwāb (‘Kings and Deputies’), in which the deck has ten numbered cards and four suits – Coins, Cups, Swords and Polo-sticks (‘which in Spain and Italy became Batons or Wands’).

By 1337, the popularity of these playing cards was so widespread in Europe that:

Monks at the Abbey of St Victor in Marseille were admonished ‘that no one should venture or undertake to play dice, “pages”, or chess’ – the ‘pages’ here referring to ‘paper for playing’ – because of the ‘frenetic craze of monks and nobles for the game of cards’.

Friedmann suggests that ‘historical context’ influenced the immense popularity of these cards. Petrarch, she notes, wrote a poem called ‘I Trionfi’ (‘Triumphs’) that ‘valorised’ popular Roman triumphal processions, and in which ‘you can begin to see the allegorical framework of much of the tarot emerging’.

By the fifteenth century the card game based on the imagery of ‘I Trionfi’ and ‘fusing Christian piety with ancient Roman spectacle’ was widely popular, not least because images on the playing cards could reflect and subtly (and safely) satirise social conditions and prominent people. Woodblock printing and printing presses allowed cards to be produced more cheaply and in greater numbers, and the historical merging of territories fostered the widespread popularity of games like ‘trionfi’ or, as the cards were called in a 1526 document, ‘tarocchi’. In France tarocchi became tareux, and in English, tarot.

The first tarot deck Jessica Friedmann bought was the Tarot de Marseille. These cards were produced in great numbers in the sixteenth century and ‘the figures of the Major Arcana became codified into the characters we know today’. That was a time when literacy was ‘still the privilege of scholars’ and symbolic images stood for words: ‘a picture of a fish’ identified a fishmonger, for example, and a church window told Biblical stories. So, ‘the tarot of this time can only be understood through complex interplay of words and images’.

The importance of this, for Friedmann, is that it bypasses the formulaic approach to reading the tarot cards that has become entrenched since the publication of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, with its accompanying instructions for laying out and interpreting the cards for meditation, divination and/or fortune-telling. AE Waite, the ‘poet and mystic’ whose ideas they express, drew on the teaching and practices of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (of which he was a member), which, in turn, drew on Jewish Qabala, the Hebrew alphabet, gematria, astrology, Rosicrucian teachings, and long traditions of magic and ritual, especially those associated with Mithraic and Orphic mythologies. The Golden Dawn created its own ‘sacred tarot’ for use in initiation rites, and each card, as Friedmann notes,

is designated as a ‘key’ upon which members meditate, reflecting their newly gained esoteric knowledge.

Friedmann clearly dislikes Aleister Crowley, who was an important figure in the Golden Dawn before he was thrown out. He was clearly a monster, and he delighted in writing obscure and sarcastic texts designed to lead those who only dabbled in magic astray. My own exploration of his work, however, has revealed the depth of his study of the occult and the vast extent of his knowledge, and I have found that his compendium of ‘Qabalistic texts’, 777, offers valuable information that can broaden any reflection on the tarot images.

‘Look, Hear, Think’, Friedmann instructs, and in the second part of her book she looks at each of the 22 major arcana cards in her Tarot de Marseille deck, listens to her instincts and feelings about each card, and thinks of episodes in her own life these images bring to mind. Her response to each card is based on close observation of the image, on her own intuited and visceral response to it, and on extensive and scholarly reading, which includes commentaries on tarot, magic, psychology, gender issues, religion, history, and a diverse range of other things (music, art, literature, philosophy, etc.) that have interested her.

She observes the orientation and gestures of the figures; the symbolic objects depicted with them (swords, shields, animals, etc.); and she refers to historical references that have been made in earlier decks. In the representation of ‘The Lovers’ in the Visconti di Modrone deck, for example, an umbrella decorated with heraldic devices of both families shields the figures from Cupid’s arrow, ‘as if they are protected from Cupid’s whims’.

Above all, Friedmann’s responses to the images are personal, sometimes reflecting her Jewish heritage, and always representing her identification with the figures or other aspects of the image. Looking at Cupid hovering over the lovers prompts a description of being swooped on by a magpie:

One of them lives in the tree very near my house. I’ve heard the woman whose tree it is refer to the bird as Jacko, though my friend Sarah’s kids call him Norman. He is a fixture in the street. A king among the birds.

His beady eyes assess me when I leave the gate and walk around the corner to the shops. I am tracing the perimeter of his territory, but he knows my route by now.

Someone in a passing car calls out ‘You’ve got a magpie above your head’, as if she didn’t know. Looking at the image on the card she thinks of ‘that eerie sense-knowledge of something in the air above, watching but yet waiting to strike’.

The image of the Pope makes her angry. He is not looking at the supplicants at his feet, so excludes ‘those who would come to him for guidance’; she mentions Reformation propaganda that portrayed the Pope as a demon or the incarnated Devil; she thinks of institutional sexual abuse that the Vatican has chosen to ignore; and of the practice of extending boundless love to the perpetrator and not the victim (about which she reads in the ‘cosy mystery stories’ she ‘compulsively’ reads); and she mentions ‘simony, nepotism, and the forced conversion of Muslims and Jews’. If you feel ‘triggered’ or ‘distressed’ by a card, she tells the reader, you can

put it in a sock, or flush it down the loo, or mulch it into the compost as worm food. Tarot, though challenging, should never feel psychically unsafe.

At times, in this very personal view of the cards, she seems to forget her earlier critical assessment of the influence of, for example, Jungian and Freudian theory. Comparing the images on cards for ‘The Sun’ and ‘The Moon’, she refers to the ‘id’ and the ‘ego’; and seeing a friend’s twin infants playing like the shadowless children depicted on ‘The Sun’, she thinks of Jung’s idea of the ‘shadow’ and the ‘shadow self’ and suggests that the card asks us to consider relationships, ‘reflection, mirrors’.

The title, Twenty-two Impressions, expresses exactly what is in this book, but Friedmann’s impressions are rooted in experience and knowledge and are far from the atmosphere of ‘purple crushed velvet and pentagon necklaces, magick shops, assorted crystals’ that she once found ‘faintly embarrassing’. She does describe her tarot reading rituals but she is adamant that ‘if you come to tarot seeking certain answers, intent on being told something you think you know, you are closing yourself to possibilities’. Instead, ‘you lay out the cards and all you need to do it look’: don’t ‘strain towards meaning’.

Back-and-white reproductions of images from the major arcana of the Tarot de Marseille are included in this book, along with other interesting illustrations. Readers may respond to each image in a completely different way to Friedmann, but that is how divination works, and Friedmann’s comments will just add another perspective, another memory, to be drawn on. She has found comfort and healing through close contemplation of the tarot cards. My own most important lessons in their value have come through following the use Ted Hughes made of the tarot, together with the meanings of Hebrew letters and Sephirothic energies, as he made his qabalistic journey around the 22 paths of the four linked Sephirothic Trees, and in this process created the 88 poems that he published as Birthday Letters. My journey can be found in my essays on ‘Poetry and Magic’.

Not everyone will find tarot as essential in their lives as Jessica Friedmann does, but one curiosity she has introduced me to in her wide-ranging explorations is the Tarot Garden of Niki Saint Phalle at Capalbio in Tuscany. This is a collection of monstrous, weird, dazzling sculptures based on the major arcana. Nikki lived inside one of them during the two decades she and her helpers took to construct this garden.

Tarot, for those who do not regard it as just a game, is strange and wonderful, as Twenty-two Impressions convincingly shows.

Jessica Friedmann Twenty-two Impressions: Notes from the Major Arcana Scribe 2024 HB 272pp $35.00

Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994, and currently available for free download here). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (ann.skea.com) are archived by the British Library.

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Tags: Aleister Crowley, history of the tarot, Jessica | Friedmann, qabala, tarot cards, Tarot de Marseille, Ted Hughes