About this item
- Also known as Flemish Tarot
Specifications
Name
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Tarot Flamand de 1780
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Alternate Names
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Flemish Tarot
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Creators
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Vandenborre
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Publisher
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Carta Mundi 1983
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Deck Type
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Tarot Deck
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Cards
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78
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Major Arcana
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22
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Minor Arcana
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56
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Deck Tradition
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Marseilles
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Minor Arcana Style
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Marseilles-Style Pips
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Batons, Coupe, Epees, Deniers
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Court Cards
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Valet, Chevalier, Reine, Roi
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Major Titles
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The Fool
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is 22
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Strength
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is 11
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Justice
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is 8
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Card Size
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2.72 x 4.65 in. = 6.90cm x 11.80cm
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Card Language
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English
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Card Back
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Reversible
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Back Design
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Crudely-drawn Sun faces in hexagonal boxes, alternating rows of right way and upside down. Back is obviously printed as one large sheet, so edges are irregular.
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Companion Material
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Little white booklet in English.
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Reviews
and Magic in Boscastle, Cornwall, UK, then you will have
seen the exhibit called Joan's Cottage, a tableau
depicting a reconstruction of a nineteenth century witchs
home. The figure of Old Joan, named after the historical
Joan Wytte, sits at her table surrounded by the
paraphernalia of her Craft: dolls, bottles of potions, her
crystal ball and, laid out for a reading, the deck of
cards I'm about to describe. Of course, Joan Wytte
herself died in 1813 and would almost certainly never even
have heard of this or any other tarot deck, but why
spoil a good story?
I'm aware that several editions of
this tarot exist, but the one I own bears the title of
the Vandenborre Bacchus Tarot, and was originally
published in 1983 by Carta Mundi. It is very much a
historical reproduction deck. It's printed on unusually thick
card stock of an aged parchment shade, uncoated on the
fronts of the cards (which are fairly large) and only
lightly coated on the backs, with unrounded corners. These
physical properties make the deck rather hard to shuffle,
which suggests to me that it was primarily aimed at
collectors rather than people who might want to read it or
play games with it. The card designs are dated to 1780,
and differ only in details from those of the Jean
Galler Tarot of ten years before, even down to the
frequent misspellings among the card titles; the Juggler,
for instance, is named Le Bateleux rather than Le
Bateleur, which suggests that the craftsman who carved the
woodblocks was either illiterate or spoke Flemish rather than
French! (His misspelling Temperence is an improvement on
the Atrempance of the Jean Galler deck, though; I'll
grant him that.)
Many of the designs of the Majors were
obviously drawn from the Jacques Viéville Tarot of around
1650. As examples, the picture of the Hanged Man is
drawn inverted, leaving him in a balletic, pointy-toed
hovering pose; the Devil, with eyes and faces all over his
multi-coloured body, is shown in profile and walking to the left,
and without the usual two imps accompanying him; the
Tower is renamed the Lightning, and shows a man cowering
under a tree during a thunderstorm rather than a tower;
and the Sun shows a boy on horseback, carrying a
banner the image, of course, later revived by Pamela
Coleman Smith for the A. E. Waite deck. Unlike in the
Jacques Viéville Tarot, however, which had a slightly
different sequence, the Major cards appear in the
traditional (i.e. Marseilles) order. The Minors are of the
style familiar from the Marseilles and Italian tarots,
with straight, crossed Batons, curved, interlaced
Swords, chunky yellow Cups and rosette patterns on the
Deniers, which are the size of plates in the four court
cards.
Of course the most distinctive feature of the Belgian
deck, which tends either to fascinate people or to put
them off, is that neither the Papess nor the Pope
feature among the Majors. Instead we have Fracasse, the
Spanish Captain as the second Major (actually misspelled
Eracasse on the card) and Bacchus (Bacus) as the fifth.
Captain Fracasse is a cowardly braggart character from the
Commedia dell Arte, shown wearing the traditional doublet,
hose and ruff and also incorporated into his picture
is a very rude visual pun which I'll leave you to
discover for yourself! Bacchus, meanwhile, sits astride a
cask of wine, swigging from a bottle, naked except for
a kilt and crown of vines. The inclusion of these
two cards, I feel, changes the whole emphasis of the
deck, moving it away from spirituality and religion and
more towards reflecting the life of the common man of
the time, with these two images suggesting rowdy
taverns and lowbrow entertainment.
As I noted above, the
efforts of the publishers to reproduce faithfully the
appearance of the historical deck have resulted in the
creation of one which isn't as easy to shuffle as most
people are used to now, which is a shame, given that the
system of interpretation offered in the Little White Book
is unlike any other I've seen and deserves close
study. Trust me; this is not a deck to pick up and
blithely read using your usual card meanings, and that's
not just because of the presence of Bacchus and the
Captain. The writer (who is unnamed, at least in my edition
of the deck) has taken inspiration from the earliest
known listing of the Majors the anti-gambling sermon
Sermones de Ludo cum Aliis of 1500. In this document, a
rather different sequence is given for the Majors, which
the unnamed writer now treats as an original order
with esoteric significance. Following from this, the
sequence runs:
The Juggler signifying the King of the
Masquerade, the Carnival King of the Roman Saturnalia
The
Triumphs of Love from the second card (the Empress) to
the ninth (Strength)
The Triumphs of Death from the
tenth card (Wheel of Fortune) to the fifteenth (the
Lightning)
The Triumphs of Eternity from the sixteenth card
(the Star) to the twenty-first (the World)
The Fool
signifying the spirit of renewal and the Spring
The meanings
given for the cards are frequently unexpected. For
instance, the Juggler refers to an abrupt, unexpected
change, possibly a disaster; Love (not the Lovers) means
Love is present to protect you; and the Star means
that nothing achieved so far is final, or as the last
card of the reading, the result of this consultation
is unclear or undecided. The meanings of the Minors
follow; the suits relate, more or less, to the categories
of topics that we're all used to, but the meanings
tend toward the concrete fortune telling kind, rather
than the more philosophical and abstract meanings that
are current now. As an example, the Two of Swords:
Two swords represent a duel, but this card does not
presage bad luck. You will be protected against your
enemies, known and unknown. Hostility will not persist;
danger disappears.
The Little White Book finishes by
suggesting three ways of reading the cards: the Majors-only
five-card cross layout recommended by Oswald Wirth, and two
methods in which you use only the Majors and the fourteen
cards of the suit most relevant to your question. This
idea, which as far as I know originated in Le Tarot des
Bohémiens by Papus, seems to have fallen from favour these
days, but never mind engage with the spirit of these
cards and give it a try. This is a deck that wants to be
read on its own terms, speaking its own language. I
find it fascinating.
This is a rare deck, long out of
print, and I was very lucky to find it when I did. If
youre a fan of historical tarots and you enjoy the
challenge of trying something new and unusual, however, then
certainly, grab it when you see it. I can recommend it
heartily, and perhaps Old Joan would too.
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