Mostly it began with storytelling. I am a geek, really. Table-top roleplaying has been a thing my husband and I have done together for a long time. It's pretty much how we met, but after D&D went to 4E back in '07 we diverged our interests and went to different systems. He likes the dice heavy structure of pathfinder and I wound up in the more story centric tables of the White Wolf games. I leapt in wallet first for VTM 5E when it came out in 2018. 

 

So, what does that have to do with Tarot?

 

Tarokka.

 

D&D put out a whole set of cards for Curse of Strahd 5E that are pretty much Tarot but for Barovia. And now me already very deep into Tarot IRL, I was trying to make a really neat set for my VTM game. It is already a well used suggestion for the system, White Wolf games are like a dark alternative, monster filled magic positive version of the world we know. But I was kind of struggling with simplicity and elegance. Nobody wants to pause a game for a little Tarot interpretation in the middle. SO if it was going to be a character prop or a Storyteller aid, it was going to need simplification.

 

Which is where my author training came in. John Truby's Anatomy of Story is one of my favorite books for setting up stories and narratives and something I am referencing when I make chronicles and characters all the time. If I was going to make a tarot prop for a chronicle, it had to be simple, concise, and understandable between my character and the Storyteller. John Truby Talked about the Elevator Pitch for a story. You probably have heard it from a few authors and scriptwriters. One day, you climb on the elevator and a movie producer climbs in with you. Now tell the producer your story in the 20 seconds it takes to go down the elevator at your office in a way that he will want to call you back to hear more.

 

Be Simple, Concise, Organized, Impactful.

 

The pitch for this deck: Create a five suit expansion to the tarot that cleanly shows the elements as natural elements while showcasing the supernatural as a fifth suit. Create a major arcana that interacts with the traditional Tarot while still covering the same storytelling themes

 

Ok. interested? now the long-winded insight. Just bear with me. I am nothing if not an overthinker.

 

At the time, I was struggling with the minor arcana, because we all tend to do that due to confusing, conflicting interpretations and the sheer bulk of pip cards that are in the deck. It's easy to grasp the major arcana because it's already a story. The idea of trumps go all the way back to the Triumph parades of Ancient Rome, parades that told the story of the Emperor's conquests. That's literally how the names of the cards got their names long before they had cartomantic significance and it was just a trick taking game borrowed from North Africa and popularized in Milan and across the European side of the Mediterranean and then appropriated by the French when they acquired Milan and then taken to the French colonies in the New World just as cartomancy was taking off as a niche use for the cards.

 

Even through all that history, The minor arcana does not have that kind of a story attached. Heck the minor arcana didn't even have full illustrations until about two hundred years ago and still doesn't in official gaming decks. And originally I was going to design a pip deck as well. It's cheaper, easier and faster to only have to worry about card illustration for the trumps.

 

That notion didn't last long. As it turns out, just like in most things, simplifying meant taking apart the whole thing and putting it back together. SO I did that. ANd then I went down the rabbit hole with the history of card games, stumbling through the 19th century innovations in the anglo-french deck and into games like castle and the idea of a fifth suit. And then looked into whether Tarot as a game ever experimented like that. ANd really it hadn't. There have been a few attempts. Now mind you, Tarot does have an incredible number of variations, The 78 card French Tarot is only the most popular kind of Tarot, but it's always been just four suits. 

 

But again, at the time I was designing a game for a fantasy game that is set in an alternative Earth. So maybe there, Tarot had a five element version. In White Wolf's Mage the Ascension, after all, there are elemental mages and they do deal with Quintessence whereas in the real world, Quintessence was kinda off again on again in philosophy and alchemy and abandoned late into the 18th century, with the last alchemists and first scientists seriously debating it as valid being people like Torbern Bergman (1735-1784). Science abandoned it because it is not part of the study of physical matter. It's just not quantifiable in the structure of matter or in the humors. And it stayed that way, at least until recently where it's getting picked up again in Quantum Physics and the search for the fifth fundamental force. 

 

SO, I was reading into that. It's really true what they say, we did know quite a lot more in the ancient world than we gave ourselves credit for. Pythagoreans believed that the monad begat the dyad, which begat the numbers, which begat the points, which begat the lines, which begat the shapes, and so on.  And what that really is is an understanding of dimensions and forces. That understanding, all the way back to 6th c. BCE. So I thought, well, what if we looked at this from a theoretical perspective, and put forces first. We get four classical elements, we also have four fundamental forces. Thats electromagnetism, Strong Force, Weak force, and gravitation. and if Quintessence is a fifth force as people like Dr. Cristof Wetterich (1952- ) are studying

What would be a fifth element to go with a fifth force?

 

and what does the model look like rather than the traditional circle of elements? And it would make sense too, five elements, five senses, five forces, five internal wits.

 

A long while and a lot of going back and forth between old Agrippa, looking into the sources he used courtesy of the references provided in Donald Tyson's annotated version and digging into what modern physicists are saying about the fundamental forces. ANd then somewhere in all this digging, halting myself and saying, wait. what the heck am I going this deep for just to get a simple prop for a game. If I'm going this deep, I want a real world usable, legit set incorporating quintessence as a whole force at play, What's the element already, for the purposes of a useable set of concepts?

 

It's life. 

 

Its as simple as that. And just as elements have their properties too, you know, like hot, dry, wet, cold I began to see the elements as the points of an inner pentagon of a pentagon of forces with quintessence as the top point. Life found its properties too. it has the properties of Observation and countermotion. And that matters (pun intended) for quintessence as a force, because quintessence was probably a force in making the big bang happen. But forces can't be perceived, only the consequences of forces can be perceived. Matter exists because forces interacted. and if you set the pentagon model with forces on the outside, upright, elements inverted, and make Air the Arche, because in terms of how things began in the big bang, fire did not come first, heat came first (fire is not heat, heat is actually the precursor to fire), and hydrogen among all the elements out there, finally, when enough subatomic particles got together, basically. Hydrogen is air. and only after you have forces acting on hydrogen can you at last have actual fire, as in kaboom, the universe has stars.  

 

So, back to the ancients again. Pre-socratic, because the arche was a hot topic back then. Plato settled for fire as arche, but yes indeed, there is a case in ancient philosophy for air as the Arche through Anaximander of Miletus. It's important to go back like this. For the sake of provenance. If I want to change the Tarot, and the tarot works with the elements, the concepts had to have been there in the ancient world to study it that way, to take it from a different perspective that then better aligns with a more modern understanding.

 

Life: counter motion and Observation. Just hanging out there opposite Quintessence, something that can't be directly observed. Affecting all other elements because of Countermotion. Life moves. it seeks out or avoids interaction. The rest of the elements are at the mercy of fate. But we can't see life as an element because we are part of it. That's where Aether comes in.

 

Aether. It was described as the air of the gods, but it's actually an immanence point, at the perfect admixture between fire and water, the consequences of the force of Quintessence can be observed by life. We are always describing it in these kind of terms: the fire of the spirit, the water of life. WE see it in our dreams and in mysteries, the stuff of fire and water, all the time. Even if you don't have a concept for sentient supernatural beings that may inhabit that point, gods and such, immanence is a concept that means the indwelling of spirit (source) in everything observable. For the sake of the model, the place where life observes and reacts to the interaction of quintessence with the physical elements.

 

Tarot is inherently monist. Alchemy, magic, religion. These study the change of things or the perseverance of things rather than the matter of things. Let's make a gnostic leap and call in the concept of an undefinable, but possibly sentient source. Irrational, by the mathematic terminology, power and perhaps will. and how do we describe life and by extension Aether? spirals. DnA, for example. Sugars. Alcohols. All with chirality, and left hand chirality at that. That's Countermotion. How do we describe the procession of four elements? circles and squares (and triangles).

 

Now we have the basis for the fifth suit. Let's call it Shields, reasons saved for another post because this one is getting long. Shields describes the open system, the creative and expansive spiral to the closed, transactional and attritional system of the four elements. It's irrational by nature, because it means that it does not have to conserve energy so it acts different than the other elements. Powered by source (extra-creational force). Is it sentient or not is more theology than necessary. It just is what it is.       

 

So what would the fifth suit be and what would it look like in the cartomantic set? Ascension and expansion. Those human concepts that would break cycles and draw us closer to an understanding of source work. Whatever you want to call becoming a living thing that is capable of seeing and understanding forces at work rather than just dealing with the consequences of forces. True supernatural understanding. and then to take those concepts out of the elemental suits because they are redundant there. That helps simplify the traditional suits. Bonus, the concepts of Shields are all concepts we all understand already to some degree or other. no initiatory mysteries necessary. That means accessible and universal. Which means it fits in the minor arcana. AS for the Majors, it fits both ways because twenty is divisible by four and by five, which covers the numbered cards, if we take the older approach and remove the numbers from the oudlers, the World and The Fool, now we have a comparative elemental story there, the five suit playing off of the traditional four suit in every card. Which actually worked out really well, clarifying the cards' meanings. Again, story for another post.

 

As I said. Too big for a game prop, but now it has real world application. And modding the Tarot is ambitious but if you hang with this blog maybe I can make better sense of this rambling first blog post with later more specific ones, but it's been three years bouncing around in my head and in my documents with pretty much nobody else to look at it. Hope I didn't confuse people too much.