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Claude Debussy & The Musical Tarot Connect
By Roger Cantrell
There is a popular misconception that the card deck of Tarot was something usually found in a carnival sideshow tent where you would find an old gypsy with a crystal ball. More recently, the Tarot has become the latest quick fix of late night TV addicts engaged in a credit card bending exercise in search of their own spiritual El Dorado. While the ancient race of the gypsies did come from the Slavic countries and settled into the European continent, their history actually began in India. According to Barbara Walker, in her book The Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, the gypsies brought these Tarot cards from their ancient home in Hindustan. The Tarot cards were a way by which the wise men in the ancient world communicated with each other through symbolic pictures. Barbara Walker writes: The Tarot has been linked with several non-Christian mystical systems: the Cabala, Hermetic magic, classical paganism, witchcraft. Dr.Gerard Encausse wrote," The game of cards called the Tarot, which the gypsies possess, is the Bible of Bibles. It is the book of Thoth Hermes Trismegistus, the book of Adam, the book of the primitive Revelation of ancient civilizations." A more recent student of the cards says, The Tarot speaks in the language of symbols, the language of the unconscious, and when approached in the right manner it may open doors into the hidden reaches of the soul.
Another element of the Tarot involves music or more precisely the 12 musical tones of the western diatonic scale. Dr. Paul Foster Case wrote a classic book about the Tarot entitled, The Tarot, a Key to the Wisdom of the Ages. Dr. Case's work has been recognized for what the preface to the first revised edition of his book calls the Tarot's intimate connection with Qabalah(also spelled Cabala), Astrology, Alchemy, and the other Hermetic Sciences. In his lessons on the Tarot, Dr.Case associates a musical tone to each of the cards known as the Major Arcana. The major arcana are the 22 trump cards of the tarot deck. Each trump card is known by a title, which gives a clue to its symbolic meaning. As I began my study of Debussy's operatic masterpiece, Pelléas et Mélisande, I began to notice certain serendipitous connections between the drama, the music and the musical tones and the symbolic pictures of the major trump cards of the Tarot.
The Tarot Trumps and their Musical Tones
#0 The Fool, E Natural
#1 The Magician, E Natural
#2 The High Priestess, G Sharp
#3 The Empress, F Sharp
#4 The Emperor, C Natural
#5 The Hierophant, C Sharp
#6 The Lovers, D Natural
#7 The Chariot, E Flat
#8 Justice, G Flat
#9 The Hermit, F Natural
#10 Wheel of Fortune, B Flat
#11 Strength, E Natural
#12 The Hanged Man, G Sharp
#13 Death, G Natural
#14 Temperance, G Sharp
#15 The Devil, A Natural
#16 The Tower, C Natural
#17 The Star, B Flat
#18 The Moon, B Natural
#19 The Sun, D Natural
#20 Judgment, C Natural
#21 The World, A Natural
As we look at the pictures of the Tarot trumps in numerical order, their progression suggest the stages of a life we experience in our own. Once again Barbara Walker illuminates:
The word "trump" came from trionfi or "triumph," the old Latin word for a religious procession, in which the very sequence, costumes, and masks of the marchers stood for doctrinal teachings the initiates could understand. Images of the deities, sacred masks borne by temple dancers, charioteers, priests, and priestesses displays the exuviae, "attributes" of divinities. The leader of the procession was the triumphator, a magistrate in charge of Rome's sacred games. At the end of the drama or the parade, celebrants raised the cry of Triumpe, announcing the immanence of divine spirit in the things and persons shown. Trump, then, originally meant,” that which is divine," and like everything divine it was credited with power of divination.
In the book, Music, Power, Harmony, author R.J. Stewart writes: Tarot images mirror specific forces within the human entity, the interaction of spirit and soul, psyche and body. ...If we link sets of images, such as pantheons, Elemental cycles, tarot, religious emblems, and so forth to musical patterns, we can generate a very powerful interaction within ourselves, either individually or in group work...The images in tarot are of mythic entities, god and goddesses, or, in a Jungian sense, of archetypes, potent representations of forces that are generally unconscious.
Regarding Pelléas et Mélisande, the question that begs to be answered is: Did Debussy write his music with the Tarot in mind as part of some intricate musical-dramatic design? As far as I have been able to determine, there is no direct evidence that he did indeed do so or even that he was even acquainted with the symbolism of the Tarot. And since Dr.Case was only 4 years old when Debussy finished writing Pelléas, it seems very unlikely that he and old Claude were pen pals at the time.
Yet, it has been said that art may come from two different sources. The artist may write out of his own conscious intention or, the artist may create through inspiration and thus become a vessel or conduit of the transcendent. This is what Carl Jung meant by the concept that man does not possess creative powers; rather the creative powers possess man. If this is so, then the art of Claude Debussy could unconsciously reflect the wisdom and mystery of the many facets of that transcendent jewel. In the symbolic nature of music, which may be a reflection of the sound of transcendence, the Tarot is a pictorial reflection of the images of that same divine source.
Like the procession of the Roman trumps, the pictures of the Tarot trumps proceed through the stages of the lives of every human being. Therefore by taking and interpreting the twenty-two trumps, beginning with number "0", called The Fool, and ending with number 21, The World in terms of its musical symbolism I, like the knights of the Round Table in search of the Holy Grail, proposes to enter the forest where there is no path in search of "musical-Tarot" occurrences in the mythic world of Pelléas et Mélisande.
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