The 11th and 22nd trumps of a typical Rider Waite style of Tarot. The cards are numbered 10 and 21 due to the first trump being numbered, '0'. The Hare hypothesis can be studied in the light of Tarot symbolism. We're talking here of the major arcana and ignoring the minor. The major arcana is composed of 22 trumps while the minor has 56.
Tarot speaks to our subconscious mind via the dialogue of archetypes rather than words. The Tarot system as a whole emerged out of the Italian renaissance of the 1400s. The earliest packs are known as 'Tarocchi' and evolved around 1420 to 1430. Some historians have suggested the first packs were a kind of present given to the nobility at the time by budding artists, or perhaps the artists were commissioned to paint them.
Eventually the cards evolved to the set number of 22. Many people think of Tarot as belonging solely in the domain of Madame Garaboldi at their local fete along with crystal balls and 'tall dark strangers'. It's fascinating to think what the Italians got up to with the earliest cards. Perhaps they started as an art form and then travelling gypsies recognised their potential for fortune telling. Or perhaps they developed out of the entertaining side of the travelling scene in southern Europe, finally popping up in Italy among the rich nobility.
The four life script archetypes entered the cards in the 1700s - the earliest example being the Jean Payen deck of 1743. Before this, someone had put four baby cherubs into the 22nd World trump; one for each corner. Later these cherubs evolved (grew!?) into the Angel, Bull, Lion and Eagle that we see in the packs of today. In the nineteenth century a trend emerged which placed a man or woman standing in the middle of the four bestial archetypes surrounded by the symbol of the ouroborus serpent. Later in the early 1900s the Wheel of Fortune trump gained the four archetypes at its four corners, taking early Christian artwork from medieval times as a guide.
The earliest (surving) examples of such art in the British Isles appears in the Book of Lindisfarne and the Book of Kells. Legend has it that the Book of Kells was originally drawn in Iona Abbey, which as well as being the birth place of Christianity in Scotland, also had strong links to the main ecclesiastical community in Ireland.
The woman who rides the Wheel of Fortune in early examples of the card is probably based on a combination of Saint Catherine of the Wheel, whose cult began at Mount Sinai in the ninth century and the Goddess Fortuna (blind fortune). Early examples of the card have a destructive aura, as the wheel is shown to run over people by its blind rider.One thing which becomes clear when studying Tarot is the symmetry which exists between the first 11 cards (love, sex and order) and the second 11 cards which have an aura based mainly on loss, death and disintegration. The first 11 trumps start off with the psychopomp of the Fool (simple childhood) followed by the Magician and High Priestess (two young celibates), followed by the mature Empress and Emperor (married couple), followed by another marriage conducted by the Hierophant, followed by the Lovers, who then transform themselves into two horses or sphinxes which pull a Chariot trump (the driving force of positive love) and so on until we come to the second wave of cards....
This kicks off with the Wheel of Fortune which contains Anubis, the Egyptian God of death and the underworld, followed by a whole range of nasty and devilish trumps: Death, the Hanged Man of self sacrifice, the greedy root power of the Devil, the Tower of Destruction.... all eventually leading around to the 22nd World trump of completion and balance.
It would take a whole book to explore all of these archetypes in a more serious manner, but the above ideas should help to illustrate the symmetry which exists between the two. It's even possible to find pairs of complementing cards if both groups are arranged in two lines, one above the other. For example the Fool complements Strength in the sense that we turn to the vulnerable Fool (which pops up in modern times as the cherub of St. Valentine's day) when falling in love for guidance and we turn to Strength in desperation when faced with grief. Likewise, love can help us gain Strength just as grieving encourages us to gain the qualities of the simplistic Fool. A complementary dance exists between the two. Space doesn't allow for a study of the symmetry of the other cards in more detail but the contemplation of this symmetry seems like a nice way to spend an evening by the fire.The conflation of creation and destruction explored in Tarot has similarities with youth currents swinging between celebrations of togetherness, order and love and then separation, disorder and revulsion. Both systems spin off atavistic archetypes which can be understood with transactional analysis. The beauty of the youth currents is that people themselves are now becoming the symbols of an ongoing, self-referring pattern. To put it romantically, society is becoming the Rota of self-knowledge. It's happening on the streets.
Soon our children may look back on these atavistic patterns as a guide to urban, tribal self-knowledge just as some of us today enjoy exploring our personal subconscious mind through the play of the Tarot. When William Gibson stated in Wired magazine that Punks are like, "Industrial society dreaming", perhaps he was only seeing one part of a larger, ongoing picture.
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