Dai Léon’s Origins of the Tarot is a massive tome, the subtitle of which is ‘Cosmic Ordering and Principles of Immortality’. It is an academic book, and the reader may occasionally find the text confusing. Léon seems to wind round and round looking at the same issues from a different perspective each time. It is an engrossing read, as the Sufi/Neoplatonic influences behind the Tarot have not been so explicitly detailed previously and, as other reviewers have pointed out, it’s well overdue. In fact, once you’ve finished the book you may find you want to return to page 1 and begin again – and ‘know the place for the first time’.
My biggest gripe with this book is the lack of paginated references. There is an index but none of it is related to a specific page, allowing Léon to make statements such as ‘Once rendered as Image-Exemplars and called Triumphant, those Attributes heralded a spiritual renaissance passed from Eastern Christian and Sufi societies to European spiritual orders. With that, a fourth-wave trans-rational, vision-logic age emerged. It advanced through its youth in centuries following and continues to mature in the twenty-first century.’ My mind immediately teemed with questions: Are we talking about the 15th century or before? Where can we find more about this trans-rational renaissance which passed from the Eastern Church to the West? How did it keep alive between the 15th Century and the 21st? etc. I’d prefer some specific sources – for example when he mentions the Caucasian mummies in the far west of China, which is one of my particular interests.
Having said that, it is a refreshing book, not least because Leon does not follow any of our previous accepted truths. In this way he forces us to step into the position of the Hanged Man, to question everything we’ve been told about the origins of the cards so many of us use day-in, day-out – without actually knowing much about them at all.
ISBN 978-1-58394-261-1
