FNL_INSPIRED Vol 2_Spring

16 INSPIRED VOL 2 hen Cilla Conway and I announced that we were working on a Byzantine Tarot, a number of friends asked us if this was possible, since the period in which Tarot received its formulation was much later, toward the end of the Middle Ages and into the early days of the Renaissance. In fact, our stud- ies had already indicated that a number of recognizable Tarot archetypes existed within the iconography of the Byzantine world, and as we continued to research the vast and wonderful resources on the subject, we found more and more links. One of the most significant of these was the eighth-cen- tury Byzantine empress Irene (752–803 CE), who was responsible for the restoration of the adoration of the Christian God and the saints through icons, after a long period in which the use of imagery in worship was con- sidered heretical—known as iconoclasm. This was im- portant since one of the oldest methods for using Tar- ot was via images, and while such imagery was never banned in Europe, it may not be going too far to sug- gest that Irene’s actions in restoring iconography can be linked directly to the origins of Tarot. Curiously, one of the most significant discoveries in Tar- ot history of recent years was the finding of an incom- plete fifteenth-century card deck widely known as the Mamluk Tarot. It was discovered in the Topkapi museum in Istanbul (formerly Byzantium) in 1927 by L. A. Mayer, who proposed that it was the earliest Tarot deck. In fact, it is almost certainly a set of playing cards, and in line with the prohibition against images within the Muslim religion, it consists only of abstract images. However, there do appear to be four distinct suites: cups, coins, swords, and staffs (or polo sticks), and four court cards. The overall design of the cards is similar to those of the earliest Tarots we still have, which date from the same century and were found in Italy, even to the point of the swords being represented, in both Eastern andWest- ern decks, as scimitars—not normally part of Western weaponry! It’s possible that the Mamluk Cards influ- enced the design of the Western Tarot decks, and it is an amazing point of continuity that these are from almost exactly the time when the Byzantine Empire fell. by John Matthews, The Byzantine Tarot: Wisdom from an Ancient Empire (illustrated by Cilla Conway) and also The Grail Tarot: A Templar Vision (illustrated by Giovanni Caselli) A CITY WITHIN A DECK INSIDE THE BYZANTINE TAROT W