For centuries people have consulted Oracles to find out what the future has in store for them… Now your very own Oracle is just a phone call away!
TELEPHONE:
09061 740 084
1580 923895 (ROI)
CREDIT CARD LINE:
freephone:
0800 063 1072
(freephone ireland):
1800 812 680
Or text ORACLE
plus your question to
88006
Subscribe
Tracing the minor arcana at the National Playing Card Museum, Turnhout, Belgium
Tracing the minor arcana at the National Playing Card Museum, Turnhout, Belgium
If you love chocolate, waffles, and more than a glimpse of tarot history and mystery, a trip to Belgium’s National Playing card museum at Turnhout is a more-than-necessary indulgence. Less than a hours’ drive northeast of Antwerp, this small town buried near the Dutch border was once at the heart of the playing-card industry that thrived in the area from the early 1800s. Today, it’s also the home of printing giant Cartamundi, established in the town in 1970 as a merger of the three founding printing and publishing companies: Bredpols, Van Genehten and Biermans, who in their time have produced everything from religious texts to children’s comics, magazines, packaging and, of course, playing cards. Cartamundi today owns AG Muller, printers of the Thoth tarot and several Marseilles decks, amongst others.
When you enter the museum – a functional, modern building with (thankfully) English-speaking staff on hand, you’re offered a souvenir deck unique to the museum; and there are also lots of printed sheets of early cards to browse through and buy after you’ve meandered through two floors and over 200 years’ worth of printing history.
The museum has the ambience of a working print studio which, in a sense, it is. Featuring a fully operational coal-powered steam engine and more than twenty old card printing presses, the museum hosts regular demonstrations in card printing, bringing alive the old machines and the playing-card characters they once printed. In the musuem’s archive (sets of plates stacked on shelves you can browse) are many original printing plates that were used to print the earliest playing cards.
The museum and Mme Le Normand
Taking a moment to pour over the lithographic plates stacked against the back wall of the museum, I came across one depicting the Parisian ‘parlour sibyl’ Mme Le Normand, presumably part of one of the commemorative decks published in Europe after her death in 1843. (The 36-card Lenormand deck has its roots in fortune-telling with playing cards; and forms the basis of Titania’s Fortune Cards by Titania Hardie.) Excitedly I turned over the remaining plates hoping to find, perhaps, a full set for the Mme Lenormand deck. Twenty minutes later, my search had turned up some beautiful playing-card designs and three prints of The Star, Moon and Sun, but no more Le Normand nor any surviving printing plates for tarot.
Decoding the suits of the minor arcana
Fearing I was only to exhume a lithograph or two rather than a treasure trove of early tarots, my expectations shifted again when I walked through into the gallery rooms – and realised that the tarot was actually all around me. Framed on walls, looking up from sheets in the print rooms and displayed under glass in cabinets in darkened chambers are the wands, cups, coins and swords of the tarot’s minor arcana. Showcased as examples of the museum’s oldest printed playing cards, they also appear in a form we recognise most: the suits of hearts, diamonds, spades and clubs.
While in England we adopted the French suit symbols, in Spain and southern Italy evolved what we as tarot readers recognise as the minor arcana suit symbols – cups, swords, sticks and coins. Across Europe variations flourished, featuring acorns, flowers, shields and bell, which reminded me of an untitled deck I inherited years ago, shown below. It depicts dogs and elephants with a stylized leafy trees, plus suits of acorns and bells that look like balloons. Now those mystifying suit symbols were beginning to make sense!
Middle Europe
Shield, flower, bell, acorn
Germany
Heart, leaf, bell, acorn
France
Heart, spade, diamond, trefoil (club)
Southern Europe
Cup, wand, flower-coin, sword
Italy
Cup, club, coin, sword
Spain
Cup, club, coin, sword
Swords link with the spade or leaf; cups are hearts; coins are diamonds and bells; wands are acorns.
The shield and flower are unknown.
This surely gives us an indication of how the tarot’s minor arcana merged and emerged – it’s all about location, location, location…which got me thinking how, through the ages, just how different attitudes to tarot might have been had the minor arcana been as familiar to us as, well, a deck of ordinary playing cards. James Bond laying down the Four of Wands in Casino Royale? Eddy the card sharp in Lock, Stock playing a winning hand with the Ten of Cups? Lemmy from Motorhead venerating The Ace of Swords? Now there’s a thought.
National Museum van de Speelkaart (MSK), Druivenstraat, 18 2300 Turnhout, Belgium http://www.turnhout.be/speelkaartmuseum.
Tel 014 415621 Call for opening times and information on guided tours; the website is in Dutch and at present not available in translation.
Liz Dean is an author and editor. Her books include The Art of Tarot, The Love Tarot, How to Read Your Tarot Cards and most recently, The Golden Tarot, all published by CICO Books. www.thegoldentarot.com