The Teacher of Tarot’s Origins

Professor Sara Ahbel-Rappe contemplates the Villa of the Mysteries replica in LSA’s Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, a fresco that depicts women of the ancient Roman world engaged in mysterious rituals. In the Department of Classical Studies, Ahbel-Rappe teaches the ancient world’s cryptic histories alongside its philosophical and cultural transformations. Photography by Leisa Thompson/Michigan Photography

Seated in her office before a table spread with Tarot cards, Sara Ahbel-Rappe, professor of Greek and Latin in the Department of Classical Studies, wants to make something very clear: She’s not a fortune teller. 

With an academic background in classical and Hellenistic philosophy, Neoplatonism, and the philosophy of language, Ahbel-Rappe has written books about the great minds of antiquity, like Plato, Socrates, Plotinus, and Damascius. She is also an expert on the Tarot—its history, iconography, and the classical philosophies mapped onto the cards. She teaches a class called “Tarot and Western Spirituality,” in which her students learn about the ancient world’s cryptic histories alongside its philosophical and cultural transformations and even create their own Tarot decks.

But Ahbel-Rappe doesn’t use Tarot—or teach it—to predict the future. Instead, it is for her an instrument for understanding the past. In particular, it sheds light on the art, culture, and philosophy of the Renaissance, where it was invented as an expression of that period’s fascination with Plato, Socrates, and the worlds of ancient Greece and Rome.

“That’s not Tarot’s purpose,” Ahbel-Rappe says. She views the Tarot as a window into the intellectual and artistic history of late antiquity, through the Renaissance, and into modernity.

When the Order of the Golden Dawn dropped the Rider-Waite Tarot Deck in 1909, they rode a cresting wave of renewed fascination with the occult, and London’s mystics—both casual and ordained—went wild for Tarot. Joining the society, however, required a process of initiation, Ahbel-Rappe says: “In the Order of the Golden Dawn, you were given a blank Tarot deck, and you were given a box of 100 different watercolors from this certain shop in London, and you had to color your entire deck, according to this secret method of coloring. And that was your initiation into the society.” Photography by Liz DeCamp

In Ahbel-Rappe’s work and teaching she tells the story of how a 15th century translation of Plato’s Dialogues into Latin and the creation of Tarot cards shortly thereafter brought this philosophy to ordinary people. Plato’s ideas—and the Tarot—circulated through late antiquity into the Renaissance, across cultures, spiritual practices, and geographic regions, and into our current day. 

According to an interesting Renaissance figure, the story of Tarot is also the story of the human journey, as imagined by Plato, Ahbel-Rappe says. She describes the story of the soul as a chariot from Plato’s Phaedrus dialogue: “flying around, communing on the truth, then falling to earth and becoming embodied. After the fall … looking to grow wings and go back up there. And the fastest way to grow wings is to fall in love.

“The Tarot deck tells the story of the Phaedrus, of our fall and our ascent. This is the philosophy of self-perfection through the lens of Plato.”

And this ancient philosophy of self-perfection has demonstrated considerable staying power. Most of Ahbel-Rappe’s students begin her class aware of what a Tarot deck is, even if they don’t yet know its history.

Marsilio Ficino, a Florentine magician, Catholic priest, and admirer of Plato, “kickstarted the Renaissance” with his 15th century translation of Plato’s Dialogues into Latin, Ahbel-Rappe says. And when he created his tarot deck, he sought artists of the royal court, like Sandro Botticelli, to illustrate  the themes of Plato’s psychology for ordinary people. Photography by Leisa Thompson/Michigan Photography

Walk into any New Age bookstore and the first Tarot deck you’ll see on the shelf is bound to be the Rider-Waite edition, a deck originally created in London by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and illustrated in vivid, primary colors in 1909 by the artist and mystic Pamela Colman Smith.

Even if you don’t frequent New Age bookstores, you’ve probably seen images of this Tarot deck on tote bags, coffee mugs, and internet memes. You might also be familiar with the newer Great Lakes Tarot Deck, Dungeons and Dragons Tarot Deck, Steampunk Faerie Tarot, Disney Villains Tarot Deck, or even The Pasta Tarot. Of these decks, Rider-Waite is the most recognizable—but it’s in no way the first extant Tarot deck.

The earliest origins of the visual symbolism of the Tarot are murky. Some scholars speculate that the cards’ imagery derives from a mysterious priesthood in ancient Egypt, while others cite an androgynous Indian god as possible inspiration for Tarot symbolism or the paper technologies of ancient China as evidence of the cards’ origins.

But most scholars—Ahbel-Rappe included—agree that these symbols and ideas first took the shape of a Tarot deck in 15th century Italy. And by Tarot deck, she means paper cards, ordered into suits, featuring 22 human images making up the Major Arcana—that is, somewhat akin to a deck we might recognize now. These first Tarot decks were painted by manuscript artists in the Florentine courts, and used not particularly for divination but as playing cards. And they were likely created by an intriguing figure by the name of Marsilio Ficino.

“The connection between Plato and the Tarot is the work of a magician,” Ahbel-Rappe says. Ficino—who, in addition to being a practicing magician, was also a Catholic priest and the founder of a Plato-revering classical philosophy society called the Florentine Academy—was hired by Cosimo de’ Medici—a fabulously wealthy banker, patron of the arts, and de facto ruler of Florence—to translate Plato’s Dialogues into Latin.

The cultural and social effects of the translation of Plato’s philosophies into the lingua franca were immense. Ficino’s translations of Plato “kickstarted the Renaissance,” she says.

Ficino thought that Plato’s philosophies were more than good writing. He believed they could help people and transform the way that they saw the world.

And so, in order to bring Plato’s teachings to a wider popular audience, Ficino made another translation. With the help of the artists of the royal court, Ficino created a Tarot deck based on the psychology of Plato’s philosophy, and on Plato’s concept of life as a journey toward perfection.

At the table in her office, Ahbel-Rappe moves through the cards before her, picking them up one by one, and explains their iconography. She shapes the stories behind each card into the arc of Plato’s journey.

Holding up the Magician card, which features a plucky figure surrounded by roses, one hand aloft, Ahbel-Rappe describes the magician Ficino’s practice of the art. Ficino used the books of Agrippa that were coming into popularity in the Renaissance to launch his own alchemical theory in complement to Plato’s philosophic journey of the human soul.

“Our soul—our lead—has to marry with God—gold—and create this kind of alchemical marriage.

“The Magician card is, on the one hand, a master of arcane techniques, and I call him a theurgist,” Ahbel-Rappe continues, “because the entire Tarot arises based on the philosophy of theurgy, which is the idea that the gods reveal themselves in human imagination.

“The Magician card is also, though, a charlatan, a huckster,” Ahbel-Rappe says. “He represents our ego. He’s where we start in our journey, and he teaches us how to be humble. That’s what the Tarot journey is about.”

Moving right along, Ahbel-Rappe jumps from humility to suffering, plucking the Devil card from the table. She frames her introduction to the card with a tale from Plato: the “Story of the Cave” from Book 7 of the Republic.

Plato says, “Imagine a prison. Imagine prisoners facing a wall, chained by their necks.”
And the interlocutor says, “Strange prisoners.”
And Socrates says, “Like us.”

“Everyone here on this card,” Ahbel-Rappe continues, tapping on the Devil in her hand, “is in the prison of their lower desires, and our job is to get out of that prison and be illuminated. So the image of the devil represents that kind of bind, that chain of the lower self.”

Greed, addiction, indulgence—these are all man-made corollaries to the suffering depicted on the card, she explains, and these lower desires, Ahbel-Rappe says, return us to Plato’s story, which is “about getting off of the wheel of birth and death, and back to our true nature of perfection, to our true home.”

“Remember,” Ahbel-Rappe says, “in the Fool’s Journey, we started off not knowing who we are, and we started with the charlatan, the false self, the person that was immersed in the desires of this world.

“Now we’re coming to our liberation,” Ahbel-Rappe says, sweeping her hand from Magician to Lovers to Chariot to Devil to Sun and to World, “and we see that, first of all, we had to break our chains, break those ties with the lower soul, the soul of will, the soul of appetite, the soul of power, to look to truth.”

While taking Ahbel-Rappe’s course in 2022, LSA anthropology alum Azul Rivera (B.S. ’23 ) was inspired by the musical Hadestown, a retelling of the Greek myth of Eurydice and Orpheus, and used songs, symbolism, and characters from the musical as inspiration for another retelling of the myth in this deck. Tarot card illustrations by Azul Rivera. Photography by Leisa Thompson/Michigan Photography 

Speaking of the Devil, Ficino’s relationship with the Renaissance art world might also be glimpsed in the card’s iconography, Ahbel-Rappe says. She opens a book of Sandro Botticelli paintings and finds the artist’s drawings of Lucifer, which were made for his illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy. 

“If you look closely at the card, you can see that the squint of the Devil kind of resembles Lucifer’s squint here. In fact, it’s very possible that Botticelli illustrated the first deck of Ficino’s Tarot.” 

Ahbel-Rappe points out more similarities between the Tarot card in her hand and Botticelli’s Lucifer in the book: his visual representation of the fallen angel’s batwings described by Dante, the tiny figures crawling off of the left and right sides of the Devil’s body—in Botticelli’s drawing, these figures are Dante and Virgil, and on the card, they resemble a pair of wicked little gremlins.

Ahbel-Rappe says that Ficino believed that images were magically powerful, an idea affirmed in various understandings of religious iconography: Looking at certain images could influence the soul and trigger a recollection of people’s deep spiritual knowledge. 

And so, she says, “Ficino sought out the artists of his day to create images that would draw people into this Platonic lore, not just through the storytelling, but through the images themselves. 

“In other words, he used Renaissance artists to create a dialogue with ordinary people to illustrate the themes of Plato’s psychology.” 

The magician was at work toward what he imagined to be a soul-edifying social good. 

Propped against a window in Ahbel-Rappe’s office is a Socrates stuffie. Though Socrates the man was known for his bulging eyes, large, misshapen nose, and the stench that filled his Agora prison cell before he downed the hemlock that killed him, this stuffie is pretty cute. Ahbel-Rappe, who has written three books on Socrates, says she likes to have him near her desk while she works. 

“He’s the philosopher I love the most.” 

Even more than Plato?

“Yeah,” she says. “Because he was Plato’s teacher.” 

The wisdom of Socrates’s teachings, she says, “is like that empty space, that not-knowing, that we can all have permission to access. It’s that space of not having the answer and having to think things through—that kind of inquiry. 

“Socrates used to have dialogues with generals and with people in charge of the city,” Ahbel-Rappe says. And these dialogues, given through the bars of a prison cell, made substantial ripples in the daily lives of people.

“His inquiries would make them kind of look behind the scenes and then start to turn around their perspectives.

“And I think that’s what Tarot is about: self-knowledge, not direct answers. All the cards are really about aspects of ourselves, and none of them is about something that’s going to happen to us from the outside. Plato distilled that story of ourselves.”

Ahbel-Rappe’s description of Socrates’s “empty space,” shaped by Plato into a philosophy of self-inquiry, translated by Ficino into Latin and then into a magical game of cards, brings to mind the position of the querent—the person who sits for a Tarot reading, in pursuit of a spectacular mystery’s answers. Or that of a student, poised to embark upon a journey of wonder and discovery. 

Ahbel-Rappe, scholar of Socrates and of his student Plato, has also distilled that inquiry-based pedagogy for her own students by giving them, in addition to the history and philosophy of the cards, the space to create Tarot decks that are meaningful to them.

“And besides all of that [history and philosophy] I’m really interested in modern esotericism,” of the kind found in the cards her students make and in the contemporary orders of magic they might research in her class, Ahbel-Rappe says. 

“I feel like students are often introduced to a disenchanted world. And modern esoteric material can tap into everyone’s need to be enchanted by the world, to kind of believe that there’s something beyond, even just in the realm of imagination. That’s a liberational space for them.

“I love that so much,” Ahbel-Rappe smiles. “That’s the humanities, right?”