The ’Pataphysics of the Marseille Tarot...

[EnriqueEnriquez]

Reading the Marseilles Tarot: the Science of the Circumstantial
A ‘Pataphysical Musing on the ‘Pataphysics of the Marseilles Tarot

1.

Olde time meat the Ace de Batons

All the time meat in Lempereur’s hand

All the time eat is like Le Pendu’s pole

2.

Poet André Bretón, who always championed the Marseilles tarot, also championed the writings of Jean-Pierre Brisset. Brisset’s whole body of work was devoted to show how man descended from frogs. Beyond the memorable claim itself, what makes Brisset’s work fascinating is that all of his evidence was… linguistic! Take this sentence from Brissetʼs ‘The Science of God, or The Creation of Man’, published in 1900:

“Jʼai un lʼeau, je mans (I have the water, I ea(t)), which became jʼai un logement (I have a home), shows us that the first home was in water and that people ate there.”

In his writings, Brisset would see the formal connection between the -French- words used to name two seemingly unrelated domains -men and… Well, frogs- as objective proof of their scientific connection. It is no wonder that he is considered a ʻpataphysicsʼs saint! His linguistic escapades are of interest here because his wordplay is very close to what the French define as ʻla langue des oiseauxʼ, a game mainly based on homophonies, in which the duplicity in the sound -shape- of words would be used to recall duplicitous meanings, but also, unlikely connections which could be either amusing or inspiring. Moreover, Brisset’s connection with ‘pataphysics is significant here in that ‘pataphysics might allow us to place the Marseilles tarot within the broader context of a poetical tradition, both from a chronological, and an operative point of view.

ʻPataphysics is defined as “the science of exceptions” (although we may have reasons to believe this was an exception!). It is suggestive to think that the Marseille tradition has always used the tarot within a ʻpataphysical context, even if -or precisely because- it has done so unconsciously. Perhaps it would be more sobering to say that the Marseilles tarotʼs tradition unconsciously belongs to a whole school of French poetry that grew from Alfred Jarryʼs ʻpataphysics and informed -directly or indirectly- groups like Dada, Surrealism, Oulipo, and many others.

Card-maker Jean-Claude Flornoy suspects there was a visual stage of la langue des oiseaux (the language of the birds) that could have predated the verbal one. Contemporary authors working with la langue des oiseaux, like Luc Bige and Yves Monin, focus entirely in the written word. Even so, that kind of wordplay resembles that idea of finding connections between the details in tarot cards that is typical of the Marseilles tarot tradition (“card number Thirteen shows Le Fou’s skeleton”, “the wall behind the twins we see in Le Soleil card conceals the tomb we see in Le Judgement”). The circumstantial connections hinted by these visual homophonies are taken as positive proof of some actual knowledge being hidden in the images by his makers. A direct result from this is the deliciously masturbatory -and rather ‘pataphysical- maxim: “the proof that there must be a secret in there is that we don’t know it”. This thesis belongs to what we could call the Marseilles tarot’s ‘folklore’ -a parcel within its history- which has been fostered by some French authors active in the 20th Century – the ‘pataphysician’s century- like Tchalay Unger, or Philippe Camoin.

The Marseilles tarot’s folklore is made from little circumstantial connections, like “Justice carries around her neck the rope to hang Le Pendu”. (This is a rather exceptional claim, since no rope can be seen around Justice’s neck in any other tarot, and even in the Marseilles tarot it can be said we are looking at a robe’s lace). Since these coincidences don’t amount to a whole, cohesive, system or design, they fit very well into a “science of exceptions”. Even so, all these arbitrary visual connections are taken as tangible proof of the card-makerʼs intention. While the reading of these details as a -rather crippled- body of hidden knowledge offers no advantage to our objective understanding of the Marseilles tarot’s history or iconography (unless we understand folklore as a slice of history), it represents a whole quarry for ‘pataphysical poetry. It is said that “Actual works within the ‘pataphysical tradition tend to focus on the processes of their creation, and elements of chance or arbitrary choices are frequently key in those processes”. Just as the members of the Oulipo group were notorious for imposing capricious restrains to their work, whoever reads the tarot accepts to create a meaningful narrative while being subdued by randomness and mathematical probability. (In the benefit of the circumstantial, it should be noticed here that Italo Calvino, whose ‘Castle of Crossed Destinies’ was composed under very the specific constrains implicit in using all the cards of a tarot deck, spread on a table, in one single arrangement, was at some point considered an Oulipo member).

Given that the poetics of the tarot are the poetics of Chance, and given that Calvino’s process (like any non-moralizing reading of the tarot) can be seen as more memorable than its final result, we would like to submit ‘The Castle of Crossed Destinies’ to the hall of fame of ‘pataphysical literature. Then, we would like to challenge Alejandro Jodorowsky’s definition of the Marseille tarot as a “metaphysical machine” by re-defining it, instead, as a “’pataphysical machine”; for the tarot cannot be used to understand what is real, but to understand how what isn’t real can become realizable. In his book ”Pataphysics, the Poetics of an imaginary science’, poet Christian Bök, writes: “For ʻpataphysics, any science sufficiently retarded in progress must seem magical”. By turning whomever uses it into a ‘pataphysician, the Marseilles tarot becomes a tool of unmatched obsolescence to face the future. If Alfred Jarry, the father of ʻpataphysics, defined it as “the science of imaginary solutions”, we can confidently use the his definition to account for the process of choosing a life’s course based on a random selection of tarot cards!


Enrique Enriquez, New York July 2010

 

[Melanchollic]

2 of Cups! All the time sweet?

 

[EnriqueEnriquez]

I have my reservations.

If you look at the Ace of Cups you see frozen water, but, what if the water isn’t water but grounded glass?


EE

 

[EnriqueEnriquez]

A continuation on post # 1...

3.

Ace de Deniers: filigreed = I feel greed





4.

Up until now we* have struggled to conciliate the verifiable findings of tarot history with the poetics of the Marseilles tarot. Iconography tell us that the tarot trump cycle presents a quite specific message: "Only Virtue trumps over the vicissitudes of Life". Although this powerful message brings forward the brilliance of the trump cycle's design and allows for a sober homiletic usage of the tarot, it also limits the possibilities of reading anything else in the cards. The message allows for no exceptions! At odds with this message we have the French optical tradition, which suggests that the Marseilles tarot responds to a holographic scheme in which a 'secret' has been hidden in the interrelationship of the smallest details we see in the cards. We celebrate this thesis as an unconscious poetic gesture. (The 'pataphysic nature of this claim is also unconscious. These authors don't see anything subversive in proposing the absence of unicorn food in a pet shop as positive proof of unicorns being elusive creatures).



Still, the problem remained. An adherence to the tarot's iconographic message reduces the analogical games that are possible to play with the cards. The solution to this conundrum is given to us by the concept of anagram. If we take the trump cycle in it's original order as our 'source' sentence, we understand that by anagramming that sentence, or sections of it, we obtain several new anagrams of that source sentence, and each one of these new sentences reveals new messages and meanings. We believe this to be a very important notion.



Along with homophony and etymology, anagramming and reversing words are viable ways to discover what they conceal. The same devices can be applied to the Marseilles tarot. After all, those are the fundamental gestures in la langue des oiseaux. We submit that the importance of these word games for the Marseilles tarot tradition has been unjustly overlooked. The French play with the details in the cards in the same way they play with the sounds of words! The Marseilles tarot tradition is a by-product of the unique relationship the French have with their own language. This is an extraordinary finding. As outsiders, we can only marvel at the unfathomable fact that most french tarot authors prefer to take this connection for granted, while favoring more arcane pursuits. Not only does the French language lend itself beautifully for homophonies, but the French love to play with them.



While analyzing Brisset's oeuvre (Sept propos sur le septième ange, Paris, 1970), Michel Foucault offered a fabulous metaphor:"the chances of a die falling on the same side seven times in a row are unlikely". But Brisset has shown us that the same word could mean seven different things! The implications of conceiving each one of the Marseilles tarot's images as a dice who won't necessarily fall on the same number every single time we lay it on the table are extraordinary. This allows us to turn every reading of an image into its own exception. (It also allows us to say “Foucault made me do it!”)



For the Phoenicians, the letter X marked a spot. Water holes are a vital fixture in maps, and the letter X shows a fox’s head drinking water on a pond, her face reflected on the surface of the water. A fox will only come for a drink if it is safe. For the Phoenicians, the letter O represented an eye and the letter K represented the lines on the palm of a hand. 'O.K.' shows an eye looking at an empty hand, confirming that there is nothing concealed in it -no weapon to kill foxes- and therefore all these foxes -whose names have the letter X right on the middle- know that it is O.K. to come where the X marks the spot, and drink. Since it is safe, all kinds of animals will come too from the four corners of the earth to quench their thirst, just as the letter X suggests. (X is the Roman numeral for 10. Now we know why, in the tarot, the numbered cards show the higher amount of elements). Our insistence on using the alphabet to illustrate our understanding of the Marseilles tarot hopes to underline both the fact that the Marseille tarot functions exactly like a language does, and that the way we use language mirrors the way we think. Words are naked thoughts. When images take the place of words, they become naked thoughts too. The French's proclivity for pattern recognition accounts both for la langue des oiseaux and for The Marseilles tarot optical language. They are both the visual and phonetic halves of the same poetic coin. In 'The Castle of Crossed Destinies' Calvino tell us that the Ace of Deniers is a coin that someone flipped but ended up standing entangled in some bushes: neither tails nor head! That is a 'pataphysical coin toss.



There is one word in French that contains all five vowels: oiseaux (bird). For the English language that word is eunoia (beautiful thinking). There is more than one of such words in Spanish, most notably eufonía (beautiful sound) and eulogía (beautiful speech). Interestingly, if we take vowels to be the soul of a word, we will see how eunoia, eufonía and eulogía all share the same soul! We cannot help but find magic in the way all these five-vowel words allude to elevated things.



The French language allows for an exceptional playfulness that has turned the Marseilles tarot tradition into a unique house of mirrors.



The Marseilles tarot tradition has transformed the exceptions of it's own language into a system. To taste the ’pataphysic nature of this kind of poetry, two delicious examples should suffice. The first one comes from Philippe Camoin. (Camoin’s method to interpret the Marseilles tarot take us immediately to a ’pataphysic world, starting by the fact that, although he acknowledges that the Marseilles tarot brings within itself the keys to it's own decoding, he claims to own these keys). Camoin give us the Law of Two, which states that “Two cards often share a relationship”; except when the Law of Three is at play, in which case “Icons may come in Threes, the third version may show a variance”; except of course when the Law of Four is at play, in which case “Icons may come in Fours, the fourth version may show a variance”. Camoin even has a Law of Exception! This one basically reverts his Law of Resemblance, in which “Numerous examples abound wherein cards have iconographic resemblance to each other”. This is, the cards always resemble each other, except when they don’t.



Our second example comes from Tchalai Unger. As if the title of her book: ‘The Tarot, an Answer From The Future’ (Paris, 1985), weren’t ’pataphysical enough, here we have a little pearl that would have made Brisset very proud: “To call ‘the fool’ the card that bears the name ‘Le Mat’ is to deprive ourselves from a very rich source of information, (count the more common letters in all the tarot’s names, which words do they create?). Besides, it would be like freezing the card’s meaning while suppressing all the weight the unconscious gives to homophonic games. Indeed, the name doesn’t just operate at the level of mere spelling, but also in a phonetic sense. The Mat, from the Arabic mat -death- is only used in chess in reference to the king, who cannot leave its place without being captured. Besides, the mat -who has no number nor place- is outside of the tangible order, and even so, he is leaving. This apparent paradox gets enriched by other additional meanings. Matte is a mixture of copper and sulphur; an object lacking luster, from the Latin mattus, the mast from a ship, which is perpendicular to the bridge and allows the sails to propel the boat forward.”



In both Camoin's and Unger's cases, reality is just a departure point from where we are soon removed through successive jumps. While each leap’s length seems reasonably short, the overall effect is consistent with what writer Pablo López has defined as ‘pataphor’, this is, “an extended metaphor that creates its own context” or even better: “that which occurs when a lizard’s tail has grown so long that it breaks off and grows a new lizard.”



Therefore, we can describe the Marseilles tarot tradition as a true 'science of the circumstances', were iconographically irrelevant details acquire a fundamental importance and everything we see is taken to be part of a bigger, albeit non verifiable, scheme. Here we are, once again, before Brisset's gesture of making a universal theory out of untranslatable connections among words. Such consistent inconsistencies leave us with a wealth of 'pataphysical poetry to delve into. It may be difficult to accept that the Marseilles tarot didn't need the conscious gesture of its makers for the French to find in it's images the same rejoice they found in language. But lets not go there. Perhaps it would be better to believe that Noblet, Dodal, Conver et all were also 'pataphysicians.





5.

la maison dieu



l'âme et son dieu



6.

We suggest that the Marseilles tarot divinatory tradition belongs to a broader, French literary tradition, represented by a lineage of writers who, inspired by the puns and wordplay that were part of French popular culture, used la langue des oiseaux as part of their creative methods. (Interestingly, Richard Khaitzine's book ‘La Langue des Oiseaux, Quand ésotérisme et littérature se rencontrent’, proposes la langue des oiseaux as the underlying link between the work of Raymond Roussel, Alfred Jarry, Maurice Leblanc and Gaston Leroux).



Who belongs to that lineage? It would be impossible to define where does it began, but we can signal a few signposts, starting with François Rabelais, who left us an intriguing invitation in the prologue to his Gargantua and Pantagruel: “In the perusal of this treatise you shall find another kind of taste, and a doctrine of a more profound and abstruse consideration, which will disclose unto you the most glorious sacraments and dreadful mysteries, as well in what concerns your religion, as matters of the public state, and life economical”. Many authors have been puzzled, and inspired, with these lines, most notably Claude-Sosthène Grasset d'Orcet (1828-1900), who outlined a whole methodology to find the hidden “taste” of Rabelais’s work, using what in his own words was “la langue des oiseaux”. It is important to notice how Grasset d'Orcet thought that not only literary works, but also images, should be decoded by using la langue des oiseaux.



Grasset d’Orcet’s method consisted mainly on scanning the text and choosing words with homophonic potential, so their sound can suggest a different arrangement, a new sentence, that will have him discovering a new meaning within the text. (He allegedly used a grid, and took care of rearranging these words to form eight-syllabe sentences, preferibable ending in L, or in a L-sound). For example, from the sentence: “Et fut trouvée par Iean Audeau, en un pré qu’il avoit près l’arceau gualeau...”, Grasset d’Orcet would choose the words “iean Audeau-pré-arceau gualeau” whose sound, together, would be taken to mean: “Janus, dieu pairé arche Gaule”. Notice how poor Jean Audeu ended up becoming God Janus (Janus, dieu)! This may be hard to see in print. (This seems to be one of the reasons why this is called la langue des oiseaux (language of the birds): it only exists while the sound of a word is ‘flying’, where it remains ambiguous, jumping from one semantic field into another one. This all stops when the sound is ‘caged’ in print).



The key for Grasset d’Orcet’s operation lies in the notion of homophony. In a rather simplified example, if we were to read aloud the name 'Loraine' in French we will notice how it sounds like ‘L’or reine’. We could then say that, in la langue des oiseaux, Loraine means "gold reigns". If we are in a roll, we could even say that we have found the Reyne de Deniers's first name.



In the tarot, the folklore has it that when we pronounce La maison dieu (The house -of- God) in French it sounds like l'âme et son dieu (The Soul and its God). When we pronounce Le bateleur, it sounds like le bas te leurré (That what is low lures you). As soon as we recognize the way these homophonies expand the original meaning of these cards, we experience the operativity of la langue des oiseaux. (Consistently with a “science of exceptions”, there are only a handful of card names that lend themselves for this game).



If the eight-syllabe scheme was used, and the L rhymes were respected, Grasset d'Orcet called this device grimoire blanc. When the procedure included referencing words from foreign languages, like Latin or Hebrew, he called the device grimoire noire. If both the eight-syllabe and the L-rhyme schemes weren’t followed, Grasset d'Orcet called this device Lanternois. (We must keep in mind that Lanternois is one of the language spoken by some characters in Gargantua and Pantagruel).



In his book 'Petit dictionnaire en langue des oiseaux' Luc Bigé describes Lanternois as "reading a text without the vowels". This seems as an useful simplification within the same methodology of letting the sound of words dictate the combination of new sentences. By extracting the 'soul' of words we are left with their bodies, and these bodies can be 're-animated' by giving them a new 'soul'. That 'soul transplant' is precisely what Grasset d'Orcet achieved: same carcass, new meaning. All these methods seem to bring forward both the 'physicality' of words and the immateriality of speech. A conjunct of letters becomes like a flute which, when we blow air through it, achieves a certain sound. Different pronunciations are different ways of 'playing' these word-instruments to elicit different associations, or emotional responses. If, for example, we take out the vowels in the word SOUL, we are left with S L. Giving that 'body' a new 'soul' (by exchanging the original vowels by two different ones which will occupy their exact same place) will leave us with words like SEAL or SAIL or SOIL. Now, it is just a matter of finding how the words 'seal', 'sail' and 'soil' expand our understanding of the word 'soul' to have a 'pataphysic ball.



Grasset d'Orcet also used a device that would be of special interest to us. He called it Patelinage, this is, expressing the text with gestures instead of words, as in a game of charades. ‘Patelinage’ seems to mean "playing the fool", and it comes from ‘Patelin’who seemed to have been a popular character -of cunning manners- in some theatrical farces. (In separate articles we have already hinted at the role of embodied semantics and physical gestures in our understanding of the Marseilles tarot’s images). In a game of charades, we hope that the literal description of a gesture would make representational -metaphorical- sense. Something similar happens here. A proposed reading of an image through patelinage would consist on describing the figure’s posture, gestures, or details, and then detect potential homophonies for the words we used to describe these attributes.



If we were to look at L'Ermite, for example, we could take the fact that he is holding a lantern as a wink to Grasset d'Orcet, as if L'Ermite were saying with his gesture "Look! I can show you lanternois!" If we were to look at the blaze on top of La maison dieu, while remembering that the French term 'blaise' (From the Latin Blaesius), means "to lisp" or "to stutter", and that Saint Blaise was famous for healing obstructed throats, we could be inclined to think that La maison dieu is saying "Clear the throat! Stop stuttering!". (The 'pataphysical nature of these gestures should be evident, as they all suppose using an initial degree of separation from reality as trampoline to achieve further degrees of separation).



One author seemed to have taken Grasset d'Orcet’s advice to the letter: Fulcanelli. In his book ‘Le mystere des cathedrales’(1926), we find this enchanting assertion: “For me, Gothic art (art gothique) is simply a corruption of the word argotique (chant, slang), which sounds exactly the same. This is in conformity with the phonetic law, which governs the traditional cabala in every language and does not pay any attention to spelling. The cathedral is a work of art goth (Gothic art) or of argot, cant or slang. Moreover, dictionaries define argot as 'a language peculiar to all individuals who wish to communicate their thoughts without being understood by outsiders'. Thus it is certainly a spoken cabala. The argotiers, those who use this language, are the hermetic descendants of the argonauts, who manned the ship Argo.” (We have to point out, tough, that the argonauts preferred to plug their ears with beeswax rather than listening to mermaid’s chants).



There was another French wordsmith, Gerard de Nerval (1808-1855), who is thought to have said: "Heraldic is the key to understanding the history of France”. Perhaps Nerval was answering to Victor Hugo, who said that coats of arms were: "the symbolic hieroglyphs of feudalism". We take these comments as demonstrative of a sensibility towards symbols that may have been the basis for French occultism, and manifests beautifully in French literature. Following the ’pataphysic example of our predecesors, we have found a link between Nerval and the tarot: Gerard de Nerval was known for keeping a lobster as a pet, under the argument that lobsters were peaceful and would never bark nor sniff one’s manhood. (We were almost sold to that last argument until we noticed how the French word for lobster is ‘homard’ whose anagram, "Ah, Mord!" literally means "Ah, Bites!") The lobster's name was Thibault, and Nerval liked to walk it on a leash around the Palais Royal in Paris. Now we know why there are two dogs and a lobster in La Lune. It is obvious that the image-makers who conceived that card committed an act of plagiarism by anticipation, at least three centuries before Nerval was born!



Besides Fulcanelli, it was Raymond Roussel (1877-1933) the author who provided self-professed proof of this connection betweenla langue des oiseaux and French literature. Roussel explained his method (‘Comment j'ai écrit certains de mes livres’, 1935), which he called his procédé, like this: "I chose two similar words. For example billiards and pilliards. Then I added to it words similar but taken in two different directions, and I obtained two almost identical sentences. Having found the two sentences, it was a question of writing a tale which can start with the first and finish by the second". Again, homophony turns certain words into doors between separate semantic fields. In Roussel's hands, les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux billard (the white letters on the cushions of the old billiard table) became les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux pillard (The white man’s letters on the hordes of the old plunderer). Due to the procédé, words become living organisms, whose cells split and propagate by a series of homophonies, associations, and puns. Sounds familiar?



Roussel was a poet's poet, revered by his peers but never fully appreciated by the public at large. Michel Foucault has devoted many pages to Roussel (‘Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel’, 1986). He is not alone, of course. From André Bretón to John Ashbery, many poets have acknowledged the tremendous impact Roussel had in their work.



André Bretón intuited a connection between Roussel’s antics and alchemy. Foucault downplayed the connection. Ashbery reasonably argues that we may never know. So far, nothing suggests that such link is fundamental to fully appreciate and apply la langue des oiseaux. As a matter of fact, what writers have done with la langue des oiseaux for pure literary purposes seems to exceed what the occultists have achieved with it. The reason soon becomes aparent: the methodology outlined by both Grasset d'Orcet and Roussel suggests that la langue des oiseaux is a game that doesn't reveal, but creates meaning. This language doesn't have us finding metaphysical truths, but founding 'pataphysical realities. Perhaps that is the "taste" Rabelais wanted us to palate: the taste of language itself, inviting us "to extract wealth from it's own poverty" as Foucault would put it. Nothing in the methodology itself suggests someone left a message hidden in those texts in the first place. When we take a text and recombine it's parts until a new text emerges, we aren't uncovering an occult message, but creating new meanings that weren't necessarily implicit in the original text. As with any exercise in pattern recognition, we are very likely to find whatever we are looking for, unless we aren't looking for anything, in which case we may just enjoy the surprises that words conceal. If what we find uncovers new aspects of the original texts -if we find out that the bite is implicit in the lobster- we are primed by our brains to adjudicate such coincidences to the will of an 'agency'. We would submit that ‘agency' is the distance that separates the occultist from the poet. Where the poet sees the beauty of words brought forward by his own talent, the occultist sees a divine plan.





Enrique Enriquez, New York, July 2010

 

[Melanchollic]

Ace de Deniers: filigreed = I feel greed

LOL

Brilliant!! Rather profound too, considering the big gold coin dominating everything in the picture space. Money is everything!!



.

 

[EnriqueEnriquez]

Final installment...

7.

if a snake’s egg grows roots

it’s tail will sprout an apple

8.

In the Phoenician alphabet N stands -or slithers- for a snake. Perhaps that is why we find it in both ‘GARDEN’ and ‘EDEN’. The snake brought the end of Paradise by making Adam and Eve face themselves in the mirror of their nakedness. The letter N is symmetrical to itself, if we rotate it 180 degrees clockwise or counter-clockwise. The letter N is the letter I looking at itself in a reversed mirror, so the reflection of its head is where its feet should be, the reflection of its feet is where its head should be, and both reality and reflection are always ready to switch places.

Le Pendu is a man standing on his head while looking at us as if we were a former, upright, reflection of himself. Looking at Le Pendu, we become the letter N.

As a game, the main peril la langue de oiseaux could bring us is madness.

In his ‘Homo Ludens’ (1938), Johan Huizinga defined play as “a voluntary activity which takes place within certain fixed limits of time and space, according to rules freely accepted but absolutely binding, having it’s aim in itself and accompanied by a feeling of tension, joy and the consciousness that it is “different” from “ordinary life”". Madness has our compulsions turning us into machines. It’s rules are binding but not freely chosen. It has been said that madness is the creative response of an individual to cope with a frustrating environment. ‘Pataphysics, the science of the imaginary solutions, can be seen as a form of self-prescribed madness. While a madman is sequestered from ordinary life, a ’pataphysician is self-sequestered from reality. We can see how, as a ‘pataphysical machine, the Marseilles tarot can help us reach those two degrees of separation with reality that ‘pataphysics prescribe, but a warning is in order: we may end up eating the bread crumbs trail we left behind to orient ourselves, never finding our way back home.

9.

Amusing: Le Tarot contient de 22 lames ses leçons

I’m using: Le Tarot qu’on tient, devin de lames, c’est le son

10.

Imagine you are standing in front of a brick wall. Initially, all of these bricks look exactly the same. When you think about them, you envision them all serving the same purpose: to build a wall. But after passing your hand over the wall you discover that, here and there, some bricks are loose. If you move the loose bricks a little bit, you take a peek into another world beyond that wall. You cannot quite see that whole world, but these different glimpses allow you to form a picture of it. It doesn’t matter if the picture is accurate or not. What is important is that these loose bricks have taken you beyond the wall.

With their methods, both Grasset d‘Orcet and Roussel evidenced language’s loose bricks. While Grasset d’Orcet’s gesture resembles the passing of the hand over the wall to sense the loose bricks left by the builders, Roussel built a whole city whose walls had loose bricks in them. As Roussel points out in his ‘Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres’, the procedure was akin to rhyming: one has to go around tapping on each brick to find the hollow ones.

Perhaps, a typical reading of the Marseilles tarot based on la langue des oiseaux seems closer to Grasset d’Orcet’s than to Roussel’s approach. The tableaux conformed by a sequence of cards seems to us like the brick wall which, being already there, is inviting us to find its ‘loose bricks’. For example, in a sequence conformed by Le Toille, Le Monde and l’Empereur, we will immediately notice how each one of these cards shows a bird. We could say that the bird is a ‘loose brick’ that connects all these three images. Once we have detected it, the pattern created by these three birds moves to the foreground. The rest of the figures become ‘solid bricks’, useful only to give context to the loose ones. Reading the birds as a pattern: when the little black bird (in Le Toille) raises (as on Le Monde) it becomes a symbol (as in l’Empereur), will be our message. Perhaps the Marseilles tarot’s folklore is right, and these birds we see on both l’Empereur and l’Impératrice’s shields are direct allusion to the canting arms of medieval heraldry. We could then see these three symbols saying: “the tarot’s symbols speak bird”.

This methodology is fairly consistent with the mechanics of a classical tarot reading: given a random selection of cards we would impose the grid of our personal concerns to it, until some symbols start clicking and we perceive a message. That is Grasset d’Orcet’s gesture, a gesture of decoding.

Roussel’s gesture, that of the poet, would imply building a sequence of cards based on the ‘loose bricks’ we find in them. Let’s say we start with l’Empereur. Now we go through the whole deck, looking for a card containing a piece of l’Empereur. (Such gesture isn’t short on insights. After all, we are defined by the choices we make). Choosing l’Impératrice to accompany l’Empereur based on the symmetry among birds would present us with a whole different range of narrative possibilities than if we would choose Le Pandu to accompany l’Empereur based on the fact that both have their legs crossed. More important, this initial gesture would define two completely different sequences of cards.

We have now a beginning in l’Empereur and an ending in Le Pandu. If we -loosely- follow Roussel’s procedure, what remains is a matter of going through the whole deck again until we find one card that could link the previous two. If after l’Empereur we have chosen Le Pandu, we could notice how both l’Empereur and Le Pandu have a bent knee. The French word for ‘knee’ is ‘genou’, whose anagram is ‘Ego nu’, this is, ‘naked Ego’. This would make either Le Toille or Le Monde our most likely choices. (In Le Monde we see both l’Empereur’s bird and Le Pandu’s crossed leg). Let say we chose l’Impératrice to accompany l’Empereur. Which card can bridge them? The French word for ‘bird’ is ‘oiseaux’, which is anagram for ‘eaux soi’, this is, ‘water oneself’ and for ‘aux soie’ which means ‘with silk’. ‘Eaux soi’ could take us to Le Toille, who is bathing in a river; and ‘aux soie’ take us back to Le Monde, whose main character’s naked body is only crossed by a cape. (Quite poetically, anagramming the word ‘oiseaux’ will take us to the only two cards beside l’Impératrice and l’Empereur that also show a bird). Pressed to decide between Le Monde and Le Toille, we could remember that l’Empereur is anagram for ‘merle pure’ (pure blackbird), which would take us to the blackbird in Le Toille. ‘Imperatris’ (as the card is named in Jean Dodal’s tarot) is anagram for ‘Marie strip’. Isn’t that woman in Le Toille the very same empress who got rid of her clothes? Our choice seems obvious then.

If we start a sequence with Le Pandu, we notice that his hair is -naturally- upside down. The French word for ‘hair’ is ‘cheveux’, which is an anagram for ‘chu vexé’. ‘Vexé’ is the past participle of the verb ‘vexer’, which means ‘to torment’ and it is usually applied to someone who is subject of an abuse of power. ‘Chu’ is the past participle of the verb ‘choir’, which translates as ‘falling’, as in loosing balance, usually by an object’s own weight. We know that the iconography of Le Pandu takes us to the Italian ‘pitture infamanti’ or ‘shame paintings’. Being hanged upside-down is a punishment for treason. Like an object taken down by its own weight, the man hanging upside-down brought his downfall to himself. So, here we have, hidden in Le Pandu’s hair, a whole description of his circumstances!

If Le Pandu’s hair is our ‘loose brick’, where in the tarot do we find him again? Look at the sun on the upper right corner of La Maison Dieu. The sun’s rays looks like Le Pandu’s hair. The sun is literally (ab)using all his power to make the tower fall, and with it, the two characters whose posture remind us of Le Pandu. Are those two people also being punished? In that case, Le Pandu is anagram for ‘pal nude’ or ‘pal nu’, a naked branch, like the one we see in the Ace de Batons: a club used to ‘come down’ on someone (like a ton of -loose- bricks), just like the powers of Heaven are coming down on that tower. In our little ’pataphysical game, the Ace de Batons would be the card that unites Le Pandu with La Maison Dieu.

An encore?

‘Le Diable’ is anagram for ‘la bide’, ‘the belly’. (We must remember that, in the Marseilles tarot, Le Diable has a face on his belly). In French, “avoir un gros bide” would mean “to have a large belly”, which could send us to Le Toille, whose belly certainly shows, or to La Papesse, who in the Jean Dodal tarot is named ‘La Pances’. These choices would lead us into a completely different path that if we remember how, in French, “avoir mal au bide” would mean “to have an upset stomach”. Le Diable’certainly has a sick belly! Which other character in the tarot could be said to have an upset stomach? We must remember that L’Ermite carries a lantern. Have you ever wondered where is he going so late at night? In Latin, the bearer of the lantern was the ‘Lanternarius’, a word that conceals in it the word ‘latrines’. L’Ermite could be a man who goes into the night carrying a lantern, not so much to find God but to squat like a dog. We can actually see in his face that he is in a hurry!

Being this a science of the circumstantial, we can now notice how some French dictionaries propose ‘bagatelle’ (trifle, and object of little importance) as a synonym for ‘lanterne’. Just as, in Italian, Le Fou is called Il Matto, Le Bateleur is know as Il Bagatto. Le Bateleur (le Bas -une bagatelle- the leurre) would be the link between Le Diable and L’Ermite.

(Interestingly, the final sequence reminds us of Urs Graf’s ‘Mendicant Friar Lead by The Devil’, from 1512; which illustrates how, sometimes, appearances can be deceiving, and those who preach against a sin most vehemently, are often the ones committing it). Perhaps L’Ermite’s mystical airs (L’Ermite = air myth) are simply due to constipation.

Self-imposed rules and constrains are alternatives forms of randomness. (We were inspired to create anagrams for literal words describing details in the cards by Grasset d’Orcet’s methodology to read images (‘Œuvres décryptées’). Grasset d’Orcet takes the gesture in a different direction, since he would always derive his decoding from the homophonies hinted by the words when they are pronounced. We chose a more ‘graphic’ method to allude -with letters- at the dynamics of anagramming the trump cycle into new sequences of cards). Choosing one detail in a card and anagramming the -French- word for that detail, so the resulting anagram would take us to a detail on another card, is just another way of using chance to craft cartomantic narratives. Similar results can also be reached by following the visual symmetries in the cards. Le Pandu’s bounded hands would take us to Le Diable, his bent knee would take us to l’Empereur, his yellow hair would take us to the sun’s yellow rays on La Maison Dieu, the green poles would take us to the Ace de Batons, and his shirt would take us to Le Bateleur. From a visual point of view, the Marseilles tarot functions as an hypertext: each image is full of ‘loose bricks’, and each one of them gives us a glimpse of another image. Given the visual nature of the tarot, we must expand Roussel’s aim of arriving at one “unforeseen creation due to phonetic combinations”, to include visual symmetries and patterns. Our goal is to arrive at an “unforessen” sequence of cards due to verbal play, visual symmetry and the synonymy of gestures (making ‘pataphysics a patois physique). If the above choices seem arbitrary, then they will be in accordance with our “science of the circumstantial”. No one can accuse us from claiming we have found the tarot’s hidden message. If anything, we could be blamed for finding many secrets that weren’t there in the first place!

Our aim is not to arrive at an ultimate truth, but to stop -albeit briefly- at an exception made true. Those who consult the Marseille tarot must regard any narrative generated while following this methodology as an answer to a question not yet asked. Moreover, the perfect answer for what hasn’t yet been asked is in fact an anagram for its own question, and definitive proof of its accuracy. Such answer shouldn’t leave us other choice but to match its features with the correspondent inquiry, even if that means changing altogether our original source of consternation. We can only know our reasons for consulting the tarot after the fact, so the ultimate objective of our inquire would be to establish the grounds for inquiring in the first place. Instead of using a sequence of cards to arrive at some form of meaning, meaning-making will be the means through which we arrive at a sequence of cards, in a process that would have the Marseilles tarot shuffling itself. As a result, we could have what is imaginary in our reality mirroring the imaginary solutions posed by this ‘pataphysical machine (Proposing an imaginary solution is a way of hinting at the imaginary nature of a problem). With our beliefs redefined as aesthetic choices, all of our life decisions will become poetic licenses, to such an extent as the Marseille tarot is already our only verifiable reality.

Enrique Enriquez, July 2010