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Welcome to Beyond the Beauty, a podcast from My Heart Radio, I'm your host, Bobby Brown. I've been in the beauty industry for a long time and I've learned a lot. I have watched makeup, skincare and beauty change more than I ever could have imagined. This season on Beyond the Beauty, I'm exploring the beauty industry past and present. I'm reflecting on my own experiences and I'm talking to some of the biggest and brightest names in beauty today. I'm back with brand new episodes beginning October 28th.

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Listen to Beyond the Beauty on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. In this uncertain and turbulent time, it's helpful to reflect on a historical past, to understand how it can inform our present in our election special two part series of personality, we're digging into the life and legacy of Joe McCarthy. Want to understand what really made Joe McCarthy tick and in turn would affect his psyche hard on Americans of the Day.

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Take a listen to this new two part personality election special and all of our other episodes on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Welcome to stuff you missed in History Class, A production of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast, I'm Holly Fry. And I'm Tracy Wilson. Tracy, you've seen plenty of tarot decks, I'm sure. I sure have. Most people probably have these. These are super uniform in terms of what they contain, although the designs of decks vary greatly. There are normally four suits which can vary, particularly regionally. But the ones that you commonly see in North America are cups, coins, swords and wands or staves.

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Each of those suits has 14 cards. So the PIP cards, that number one to ten, and then a king, Queen Knight and Jack, those suit cards make up what's called the minor arcana. And then there are another 22 cards that make up what's called the major Arkana. And these are the trump cards. So they include things like the lovers, the sun, the moon, the hanged man and death, plus the fool tarot card show up all over the place in entertainment, even if you've never seen a deck.

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Personally, we have all seen that very dramatic moment on TV or in a film when a person draws the death card and there's that scary music sting.

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But if that character knew the history of tarot cards, they probably would be too worried about it, even if they just know how that card is often interpreted today. All right. Yeah, we'll get to that. Yeah. So that's what we're talking about today is kind of a brief overview of tarot cards. And I do want to level set. You will not walk away from this episode going. I could do a reading that's not this at all.

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I mentioned that I was doing this to a friend and they were like, oh, are you going to explain? I was like, I would have to have way, way more knowledge of that one to do it anyway and to know no. But we're going to talk about how they came to be used as a divination tool and other things. But really, the start is pretty, pretty benign and humble. Yeah. Yeah. So as Holly just alluded to, if you say the word tarot today, people usually think of mysticism and the occult.

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But really this just started out as a card game. There was no divination or meditative aspect to these cards.

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Use and games played with cards are believed to have originated in China. There are references to games with suited cards going all the way back to the 9th century in Chinese texts. And we also know that card games were played in the Mamluks Sultanate of Egypt by the 13th century. Their theories about whether or not cards traveled from China or whether different cultures were developing these ideas. But there are examples of these Mamluks cards that feature suits that are very familiar. Cupps coins, swords and sticks from Egypt, card games traveled into Europe and we see mentions of them starting in Italy in thirteen seventy Venice, because of its status as a port city, was probably the point of entry.

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And then from there it seems like cards which were very easily transported because of their small size spread pretty quickly. And 13 Seventy-Seven, a game called Ludus Khartum was invented by a German monk, and almost as quickly as card games were introduced into Europe, there was some suspicion about them. There are sermon's that you can find historically and ordinances forbidding card playing and suggesting that it might lead to to bad behavior. In some cases, these are the things you would hear in even more modern things about the vices of cards and the dangers of being a card player.

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Those all developed right alongside the spread of the games. So none of that is new. One Paris decree issued on January 22nd. Thirteen ninety seven stated that working people could not play tennis ball, play dice, play cards or play nine pins on a workday. Had to wait for a holiday. But while the working man may have been discouraged from playing cards, the wealthy were not only playing cards, but they were also commissioning artists to make really beautiful hand painted decks.

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And 13 92 Charles Papa, who managed the Treasury for King Charles, the 6th of France, is said to have commissioned three gilt decks from Painter Zachman, engineer on behalf of the King.

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Earliest examples of cards that look like what we might recognize as Terho are from Italy in the early half of the 15th century, and these were primarily in Venice, Florence, Milan and Urbino. So these seem to have been gaming decks that were used in the Italian court and the houses of nobility. And the reasons that these cards would have been a pastime for nobles, more so than anyone else, was that they were really expensive. The cards were all being hand painted initially.

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Yeah. Those ones in France that were forbidden for common workingmen to play with were like the the more mass produced ones. But the ones that start to look like Taro really were all very beautiful.

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And it sounds very much too like a pack of modern playing cards. So again, there were four suits each with. Numerical cards ace to 10, so cups, coins, batons and swords, batons you'll sometimes see again as wands or staves, and then it had the face cards, Jack Knight, Queen and King. And in addition to this list, which is really close to what you're probably very familiar with, there was also a set of trump card, sometimes called Taraki, depicting various figures as well as a full card, although Italian decks are the oldest examples that we have of these cards.

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There were other and maybe older kinds of trump cards that were being developed in Europe, as well as early as the 14 20s, a German card game called Novel feature these sorts of trump cards. And while there are some similarities in Carnival and Terho in the game form, including Carnival also being a trick taking game, these are believed to have developed independently.

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So going back to the cards in Italy, in the fourteen hundreds, the decks included 40 numerical suit cards, 16 face cards. So those are the the court cards, 21 trump cards and the fool, as I said, a total of seventy eight, which is the number you would have in a deck today. The Trumps were numbered with Roman numerals and they included a hierarchy of figures, not the same figures you would see today. So like the pope, the emperor, the son and death were in there, but not all of the same lineups that we would normally see in a modern deck.

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The inclusion of the fool. And this set of trump cards is what sets these decks apart from regular playing cards, sets of the time, and establishes the game of the time that we would call Terho.

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Both the decks and the games that they were used for grew in number and they diversified pretty rapidly. There are examples of decks that involved different numbers of cards, different breakdowns between the numbered cards and the trump cards, and then different orderings of the cards. The figures represented on the Trump cards were not consistent from deck to deck, and there were different artistic styles and themes that the artists were using. These were, as Tracy alluded to a moment ago, primarily games known as trick taking games.

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So that meant that in each round of play or trick, the result was that one of the players would win or take that trick. We still have card games that are trick taking games today.

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Obviously, some of the games that originated with these 15th century TERO decks are in fact, still played today with a deck that is basically a tarot deck, although not again, in the way that we would think of it in associations with the occult or fortunetelling.

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There are a number of decks that were made in the fourteen hundreds in Italy that are sometimes referred to collectively as the scantest force. The decks, these decks are said to be the work of court painter Bonifacio Bambo. The first of these decks is a deck made for Filippo Maria Visconti. That was the Duke of Milan. Sixty nine of the decks cards remain and they are in the Vinicky Rare Book and manuscript library at Yale.

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A deck made for Francesco's Forsa, who was a mercenary who married Filipov, is not his only daughter is dated to sometime shortly after fourteen fifteen. This is probably to mark the marriage. The deck is known as the Visconti or the deck. There are one surviving cards, although they are not all part of one collection. Thirty five of them are in the collection of New York's Morgan Library and Museum, and the other twenty three are in Bergamo, Italy at the Accademia Karara and 13 of them are privately held by the Coyote family.

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Another deck, known as the Brambilla Deck, is part of a collection in Milan, Italy, at the pinnacle. Take a deep breath. This deck is also believed to have originally been made for Duke Filippo Maria Visconti. That name Brambilla is that of an owner of the deck. Later, these decks changed hands a number of times and were recognized pretty early as collector's items. There are only two surviving trump cards from this deck, but the rest of them that still exists are the numbered suit cards.

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So these effects are kind of talked about collectively, but they're not identical. And the Visconti Terho, the court cards are more numerous than in later iterations. There are also masculine and feminine versions of all the court card ranks. And this also incorporates faith, hope and charity in the Trumps. But the Visconti of the deck is different, although we don't know if this was an evolution of the game or a refinement of the game, or just a change made for some other reason, like maybe, oh, this person likes these things.

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We'll add a card for this. We do not know because this deck is so similar to a product that you might see today versus the Visconti deck that preceded it. The Visconti Forsa deck is sometimes called the oldest known tarot deck.

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The hierarchy of trump cards in the scanty four is a deck is as follows. This goes from the highest to the lowest rank world. Angel's Sun Moon star. Temperance, death, traitor, old man, wheel of Fortune, Fortitude, Chariot, justice, love, pope, emperor, pope, yes, empress, mountebank.

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And finally, the full yes popes would eventually evolve into the high priestess, like you could see were these weren't all as uniform and they slowly become the things we're familiar with.

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Now that other d'arc, the Brambilla deck is closer to this one, I believe. And then there's another deck which was likely designed in Italy and then made its way to France and became known as a French deck. And that's the Teradyne Marseilles. This deck was based on woodblock prints of the 15th century and its design actually continues to be used today. This deck, as the Italian ones we've been discussing, was also a true gaming deck with none of the association with mysticism that would come later on.

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Before we get into that mysticism, which is coming, we'll take a break for a quick word for some sponsors. Her with the of Brown is a weekly podcast brought to you by Cynical Women Podcast Network and I Heart Radio. I'm your host, Amena Brown.

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And each week I'm bringing you hilarious storytelling and soulful conversation, centering the stories of black, indigenous, Latino and Asian women. Each week we are going to laugh, consider and reflect upon the times. Join me as we remind each other to access joy, affect change and be inspired. Listen to her with Amina Brown on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast.

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Welcome to Beyond the Beauty, a podcast from My Heart Radio, I'm your host, Bobby Brown. I've been in the beauty industry for a long time and I've learned a lot. I have watched makeup, skincare and beauty change more than I ever could have imagined. This season on Beyond the Beauty, I'm exploring the beauty industry past and present. I'm reflecting on my own experiences and I'm talking to some of the biggest and brightest names in beauty today. From celebrity makeup artists to brand founders, we have the household names and the up and comers who are changing the game today.

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I'm back with brand new episodes beginning October 28th. Listen to Beyond the Beauty on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Join me as we all learn about the real meaning of beauty. In the 18th century, a Frenchman named Antoine killed Isabella, provided the pivotal moment in taros historical identity could.

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Isabella was born on January 25th, 1725 in Neame, France, and he became a French Reformed Church pastor. He was a Protestant propagandist, a scholar and a supporter of the North American colonies in their quest for independence from Great Britain. But in terms of today's subject, the germane part of his story is that caught Isabella wrote a multivolume book project and the years from 1773 to 1784. This project was called The Primeval World Analyzed and compared to the Modern World.

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He died in May of 1784 with this work unfinished, but he had already published a lot. His writing, as this title suggests, had a pretty wide focus. He wrote about Callendar history, grammar, the possibility of a universal language, and he also examined mythology. And in the volume of the work that was published in 1781, he wrote about tarot cards Cordish of Linked Tero to the Lost Book of Thoth.

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So 34th is an ancient Egyptian godling to writing wisdom and magic. And there have been multiple texts that have been referred to with the name Book of Thoughts in each case suggesting that the information contained in them came in some way from the God. In the theory that was put forth by Kurdish ablana was that this book, which contained information about ancient magic and wisdom, had been entrusted to travelers rather than risk its destruction by enemies. But Corde Zabulon believed that this book that had made its way to Europe had been transformed into a deck of tarot cards as a way to disguise it.

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This is all totally supposition on his part. He had no actual evidence to back it up. He also linked the 22 trump cards of a terror attack to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. He was suggesting there was this linkage among multiple cultures through this lost book and that the true meaning of the cards was a secret that had been shared only with a trusted few.

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And at the time, these ideas completely fascinated people. It was an utterly captivating concept. It's worth noting to set the scene of why this was the case, that this was the same time when Franz Mesmer, covered in an episode of the podcast by previous Hosea and Delina was living in Paris, and the idea of his so-called animal magnetism had enthralled Parisian high society. Spiritualism was having its first big wave of popularity as people grappled with the new developments in the scientific world and how those developments sometimes challenged, long held religious and spiritual beliefs.

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So Cordish balance assertions about a deeper meaning to ADEC that people had been using to simply play games with were completely enthralling. There was this certain romanticism about the idea that they had been holding in their hands images that were linked with ancient magic without ever having realized it.

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I feel like someone making similar assertions today would get a similarly captivated response.

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Yes, fortunetellers were in some cases using decks of cards already as tools of their work. This was already being used at this time in Europe, but this seems to have been similar to the way tea leaves might have been interpreted. Nobody really thought the tea itself was mystical. Similarly, it wasn't so much about the cards themselves. Prior to Cortazar, balance writing was more about the person doing the interpreting. Yeah, they did not think that there was a hidden or magical meaning in the cards.

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They were just kind of part of a fortunetellers tools of how they could help you perceive bigger ideas than you were accustomed to. But the first person to gain widespread recognition for his work with tarot cards was Jean-Baptiste Aliette, who went by Attia, which is just his name, backwards. More than a decade before Cordish Abdullah's writing about tarot cards, Aliant had published ETA or a way to entertain yourself with a deck of cards in 1770. But after Isabella Abilene's writing about the tarot deck was released, Aliette got to work on a new and updated piece of writing of his own ETSI or a way to entertain yourself with a deck of cards called Tarot was released in 1785.

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And in this writing, Elliott Bilstein, the ideas that Cordage Ablana had already introduced the new writing claimed that the Tarot was a book written by the God thought himself that it was the oldest book in the world.

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Aliette also shifted the order of the trump card so that they differed from Cordish. Analysis and to be clear, this was all just like Cordish balance, work, conjecture, but this book that Aliette wrote is where a lot of ideas about tarot cards and their meaning, which persists today, got their start. One of these was the idea that a card that appears inverted has a shift in its meaning. This is like a whole ball of wax. I dare not open.

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I know if you talk to people that actually like to use tarot cards, some will read inversions and some you can get a whole debate going. But this is where the whole idea of that came up. Another idea that he introduced was that the numbered cards also called the PIP cards we've been calling them that also had meaning not just the Trump cards of the major arcana.

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And this was not the only instance of the Trump cards shifting position. Different writers and interpreters ever since have debated the order of the cards and particularly where the fool fits into the hierarchy. Remember, too, that the representations in every deck were not necessarily the same, and that further opened up other interpretations.

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Yeah, I was I can't remember exactly which deck it was, but there was one that mentioned that there was a representation of Nebuchadnezzar in it and like how that changed the whole thing. And basically if an artist was doing their thematic, it could significantly shift the way somebody who was used to a different deck would look at that deck. It's also established first a society for discussion of Terho interpretation, and then he opened a new school of magic. He also developed a new deck of tarot cards that was created not at all for gameplay, but expressly for use in divination.

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The next figure, he was significantly influenced. The development of tarot cards is another Frenchman, LFR Lévy. Levy was born in 1810. So almost 30 years after Cordish, I balanced tarot analysis was published. And almost 20 years after Elliott died, Mavie was born Alphonse Blooey Constant. Livy's early vocation had actually been theology. Although the week before he was supposed to become a priest, he abandoned that path. But that background did inform his study and exploration of spirituality and mysticism, though he didn't deeply embrace his work in the occult until he was almost forty, which was when he changed his name.

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Lévy took Kurdish Abilene's connection of the terro Trump's to the Hebrew alphabet and then further refined that sorting the letters and their associated cards into three groups of association. They were the elements, the planets and the Zodiac.

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Living is interesting because he acknowledged that the tarot cards were useful as a divination tool, but he was not especially fond of their use in that regard. He thought that the far more important role of tarot cards was as a tool of spiritual philosophy, being a way for students of esotericism and the occult to gain insight and wisdom through meditation and psychological self-analysis. Livi also believed that the TERU had been part of a greater knowledge, which had been universal to all of the ancient world's cultures, swith occultist Joseph Paul Oswald.

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Wirth built on Livy's work when he wrote the book, Literally Does Magic Do Moyar? That's the Terho of The Magicians. That was in 1889. Wirth introduced ADEC to a company it called Arcand Do Kabbalistic, which was Akana of the Kabbalistic Terho. It was not a complete deck. It was just the 22 major Arkana cards. And this is the first instance where the game card designs are really reimagined with clear occult symbolism included. Yeah, prior to that they were still very much in the old style where it it looked a lot like the game.

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Joha and it led Vincent Unkles, known by the name Pappas in esoteric circles, was a physician and a cultist who founded the modern Martinus Order of Christian Mysticism. He studied the Kabbalah alchemy, magic and the Occult Terho in addition to medicine. And he also connects to our recent episode on Madame Blavatsky. He was a member of the French Theosophical Society, but he didn't really find that his interests and beliefs completely aligned with the society's interest in approaching the occult through an eastern lens.

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Pappas, who was born in 1865, worked to further the ideas that LFR slavey had developed in his lifetime. Like lavae, he sought to integrate a range of ideas from many cultures into a unified spirituality. Around the tarot deck, he developed a system that gave each trump card three different meanings that you could use to interpret them a physical meaning, a magical astral meaning and a divine meaning. And he also expanded the number of ways the cards could be laid out for divination.

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So a lot of the layouts that you will see people using even today are ones. He came up with so coming up, we're going to get into a couple of names that might sound pretty familiar to folks as well as the order that they belong to. But first, we're going to take a quick sponsor break.

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So if a lot of what we have talked about in those first two segments so far sounds like it overlaps a lot, for example, with Rosicrucian ism, that is because it does this so-called brotherhood, which is what it's usually called, named for the rose and cross design of its symbol, is organized around the belief that esoteric wisdom possessed by people in ancient times has been passed down through their order. This, like the work of several of the people mentioned in this episode, incorporates a number of occult ideas from different religions and cultures into one sort of unified theory.

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In the late 1980s, the Rosicrucian Society called the hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, was founded in England. This group based its organizational structure and rituals on a group of documents known as the cipher manuscripts. That's a set of five dozen folios containing writings that were related to Kabbalah, Christian Gnosticism, Egyptian magic and other belief systems. These folios were dated 1899, and we should mention that these are controversial documents. Their legitimacy has been argued about for decades in terms of how they're relevant to Tero.

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They were deciphered by a man named William when Westcott, and that was a key development that led to the formation of the Golden Dawn and the practice of an ideology of Terho evolved significantly within the Golden Dawn. The deck was linked, for example, to the Judaic Kabbalah Tree of Life. It was also seen not just as a way to peer into the future, possibly, but also as a means to manipulate and control it. The TERO also became linked to Celtic concepts and symbols through the work of one of Golden Dawn's most famous members, William Butler Yates.

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There were changes to the deck itself as well to reflect changing ideas about its symbolism, spearheaded largely by a member of the Golden Dawn named Samuel Liddell. MacGregor Mather's Mathers was British and that McGregor in his name was something that he added. He claimed that he had ancestors from the Scottish Highlands, but there are no actual records to back that up.

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Mather's linked suits, WANs cups, swords and pentacles to conceptual meanings. He related them to the ideas of father, mother, the masculine and the feminine, with WANs and Cupps representing respectively kings and queens and the Swords and pentacles sort of a tier below them as princes and princesses. He also associated them with fire, water, air and earth, arguably the biggest contribution that Mather's made to a cultism.

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And Terho was through his translation work. He spoke several languages and translated a number of occult texts into English. He was a practitioner of ceremonial magic and also a teacher of Aleister Crowley, although the two men would eventually become enemies. Yeah, we'll tell you why in a minute. But that brings us to the work of Crowley as well as another man, Arthur. Edward, wait in. These two names are fairly commonly known as part of modern occult history.

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If you have brushed up against any of this subject matter, you have seen those names and both of them were members of Golden Dawn.

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Waite was 34 when he joined the Brotherhood in 1891, although initially he did not stay with the group for very long. He quit, but joined once again five years later. Waite's name is well-known today because of the tarot deck that he designed, known as the writer Wait Terho, the most popular deck of all time and is still being produced today.

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The writer in the name is for the Writer Publishing Company, and one of the big changes in this deck is the PIP cards being illustrated with their own imagery that was intended for divination in this kind of takes them completely away from game play decks. And indeed, by the early 20th century, there was very little, if any, association between games and tarot cards in most popular culture, with two big exceptions as being England and a lot in France, where the game version persisted, you can still play tarot in France, the game.

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It is like one of the most popular card games. The writer weight deck featured illustrations by a woman named Pamela Coleman Smith, who was also a member of Golden Dawn. She is also fascinating and I would love to do an episode on her at some point. Wait characterized the deck as a, quote, spiritual history of man following along the idea that the tarot connected to the esoteric knowledge of many cultures.

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This was not the first time the suit cards were illustrated. There's a version of the game tarot called the Solar Busca Tarot. The features illustrated PIP cards. These do appear to have been a source of direct inspiration for the writer wait deck. But the 15th century solar Musika deck, while it was visually really rich, was still intended for gameplay. Although modern recreations have been used for divination and interpretation, and then we get to Alister Crowley, who was born Edward Alexander Crawlin, he changed his name at the age of twenty three years later, in 1898, he joined the Golden Dawn.

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And Crowley is a fascinating figure. He could easily be the topic of an episode all his own. And he's kind of close to the top of the list we'll see at Halloween time next year. Maybe his good fortune in being born very wealthy meant that he was afforded really a life of indulgence even after he just kind of dropped out of university without a degree and decided he would travel and write poetry. In the Golden Dawn. Crowley found a rivalry with Yates, but that's really a trifle compared to the conflicts that he would be part of throughout his life.

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Eventually, he had burned through his inheritance and he started traveling less. He became a captivating figure after his death, but during his lifetime, most views of him were pretty unfavorable because of his association with black magic, including the death of one of his followers in Sicily that led to him being kicked out of Italy permanently. And the rift between Crowley and Mather's, which also led to his really bad reputation, began with the publication of Crowleys book Leber's 777 in 1999.

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And in this book, he shared details of the connection between the Hebrew alphabet and the major arcana of tarot cards. That was information that was considered a secret among the members of the Golden Dawn, and divulging that secret was just the beginning. Crowley also started publishing articles in which he described the various rites, rituals and other secret knowledge of the order.

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He wrote the Book of Thoth a short essay of the terho of the Egyptians near the end of his life. That was in 1944. It linked back to court Isabella in 1781, writing. Crowley had designed a tarot to accompany the text. He had collaborated with artist Freeda Harris, but that wasn't actually published along with the book Crowleys Tharthar Tarot wasn't published until 1969, at which point Crawley had been dead for more than 20 years. So in the last 50 years, since that Crowley terror was published, tarot cards have become really mainstream.

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There are now two books available in abundance. You can literally walk into a big box store and buy them. Decks are now made that are themed with everything from famous works of art to TV and film characters. Maybe in our Friday casual chat, I'll talk about some of the decks I have because I just like them.

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And the ways that people have used them have also continued to diversify. So people still use them for divination. People use them to meditate. People just I collect them because I think they usually have cool art. And within any of those there are widely varied approaches to how people will use them.

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And as we look at the long arc of Terho from its beginnings as a game to becoming imbued with this meaning over the centuries, how he wanted to close with a quote from a book written in 1970 by Ian Gray, Ontario, it's one of those mass market paperbacks that has been a popular entry point for people who want to learn about tarot since its first publication. Yeah, I kind of love this because it is a book that teaches people how to use tarot cards.

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But her discussion of it is so frank in terms of like what we do and don't know of of its actual history and and how it has become this thing that it was not initially that I really love the way she wrote about it. She wrote, quote, The origins of tarot are so veiled in the mists of time that it is only natural for myths and legends to have grown up, particularly around the major arcana superstition. Flights of fancy and speculation have added their own patterns to the rich and colorful tapestry of terror lore and, curiously enough, have only deepened its aura of magic and mystery.

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Cults have grown up around one or another historical theory, and sometimes their adherents have become fanatical in proclaiming the one and only truth. But the better informed investigators retain a certain amount of flexibility, even skepticism, and make no ironclad assertions. Oh, I love the way she put that it was perfect. Yeah, it's like you can study this and it is neat, but like we don't know a lot about it, really. Right. We're adding our own ideas to this, and that's part of what gives it meaning.

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But you can't assume that this was handed down from some ancient gods. So that is a little bit of Terho history. A brief overview. Do you have some listener mail to take us out of it? I have two pieces.

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One is from our listener, AOM, and it's something that we have heard before, but not in a while. So I thought I would just float it up for fun, she wrote. Hopefully this will make you laugh on a random day when you need it. I always need it. I have listened to the podcast for a long time through all various hosts and on various phones and pods over time. And while I have seen the podcast page showing your pictures and listen to you both say your names probably thousands of times, I only just happened to be looking at the page at the point of your podcast where you say your names and I've had your voices attached to the wrong faces for years just from voices.

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I would have sworn that it was Tracy that had purple hair and Holly who wore glasses. I was thoroughly astonished to realize exactly who was who. I don't know why I hadn't paid attention before. Maybe because I'm usually listening while walking or driving. But it made me giggle to realize just how long I've had the opposite names and faces connected. Thanks for all you do in providing such a continuous source of knowledge and entertainment. Longtime listener and. And you are not the only one that happens all the time.

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Hmm. It always it always makes me chuckle because of course Tracy and I know who we are, but we. Sure. But I mean I've done the same thing with audio only entertainment. Yeah. And it's super common. I always love it. Back in the before times when we would do live shows periodically during meet and greet, someone would say, I'm freaking out because I had you opposite the whole time. I had your names backwards. And I'm like, well, sometimes Tracy and I are very tired when we record and we will say the wrong names ourselves.

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But that's a different issue. We don't actually think we're the other person. But just in case. Anyone out there. Yep, I have purple hair. Tracy has glasses. I sometimes wear glasses, but not all the time. Well, and at this point in the pandemic, my, my hair is closer to a bluish black than my regular brown. Yeah. It's not nearly as dramatic as the purple in your hair. This is my natural color.

[00:36:11]

And then I have another email from listener Halley because I realized they didn't make a direct connection in an hour Bram Stoker episode. To me it seemed obvious. But again, that's because I was in the middle of that material all the time. He writes. At the beginning of the Bram Stoker episode, you said there was a fact you thought was crazy. And we're texting your friends about all week. What was it? Nothing seemed particularly crazy about his life.

[00:36:35]

Thanks for all you do. OK, that obsession with Walt Whitman seemed crazy. And I just. I know I yeah, that seemed bananas to me. Just the idea that he spent years of his life kind of obsessed with Walt Whitman and writing him these really strange fan letters, that was that was what it was. I'd never would have thought. You know, I bet the guy who wrote Dracula wrote Walt Whitman, these really, really emotionally raw.

[00:37:07]

Yeah. Yeah. Letters about his life. So I'm sorry that I didn't draw a more direct line there, but that's what it was. Sorry to have left you hanging. If you would like to write to us, you can absolutely do that. You can do that at History podcast it I heart radio dot com. You can also find us on social media. We're everywhere is missed in history. And if you would like to subscribe to the podcast, that is easy to do.

[00:37:31]

You can do that on the I Heart radio app and Apple podcast or wherever it is you listen. Stuff you missed in history class is the production of I Heart Radio for more podcasts from My Heart radio visit by her radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.