Musical notes in the Parrott deck

Thread originally posted on the Aeclectic Tarot Forum on 19 May 2005, and now archived in the Forum Library.

Adam McLean	19 May 2005
Today I received a copy of the Parrott tarot. The major arcana have on the lower right, a music note and a bird. Is this merely a musical scale as one commentator on these forums suggests, or do they play some tune in sequence? If it was merely a scale why are some notes of different lengths, from crotchet to semibreve. Also some notes on different cards seem to be the same. The sharp or flat trails the note, rather than preceeding it as is the usual convention. Has anyone tried to work out if there is music behind this? Is it supposed to notate the call of the different parrots? My apologies if this has already been adequately answered elsewhere.

Annabelle	19 May 2005
Ooohh....wonderful questions. And I wish I had answers, but unfortunately I don't. I've had the Parrott deck for a couple of months, but haven't yet spent much time studying it. I, too, have wondered about those musical notes, and even thought about putting the deck in order, sitting down at my electric keyboard, and playing the notes card by card to see if it came out to be anything recognizable, but so far I haven't done any experimenting or investigating. I hope that someone else out there has some insight to share, though, because now I'm really curious!

WolfSpirit	19 May 2005
I know very little about music but I know we had this question before. It is not an invention of the creator of the Parrott deck to assign musical notes to the majors. Here is an old thread about majors and musical notes: http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?t=16038&page=1&pp=10&highlight=musical+notes I dont know if you are aware of this, but there is also an online "handbook" for the Parrott tarot: http://www.geocities.com/parrott-tarot/mdk-text.html Hope this will be of interest to you :)

fyreflye	20 May 2005
The Golden Dawn system assigned specific musical notes to each of the 32 Paths of the Tree of Life. There's a table of Hebrew letter/Path/Musical note correspondences in Robert Wang's The Qabalistic Tarot. Wang says he got the correspondences from the private notes of GD member Alan Bennett. Tom Parrott's conceit of perching his "bird" on the musical staff containing the notes may confuse some as to the correspondences. Look across the card to the lower left where the selected path for the card is highlighted. The "bird" itself can sometimes be helpful in understanding the meaning of the cards. I particularly like his 8 of Cups ;)

The Musical notes in the Parrott deck thread was originally posted on 19 May 2005 in the Tarot Decks board, and is now archived in the Forum Library. Read the active threads in Tarot Decks, or read more archived threads.