78 Cards as a Complete Cosmological Framework

The Ptolemaic universe was, in its time, the most tremendous intellectual achievement available: a complete cosmological framework that accounted for all known celestial phenomena, provided predictive power, and organised the relationship between the terrestrial and the divine in a single coherent system. It lasted for fourteen centuries. It was wrong, but it was magnificently wrong — wrong in the way that a system can be wrong only when it has been built with such architectural rigour that the error is not immediately apparent even to those who are living inside it.

The Qabalistic Tree of Life is another such system: a complete map of the relationship between the divine and the individual, between the archetypal and the material, between the ten sephiroth and the twenty-two paths that connect them. It has lasted for longer than the Ptolemaic system and, by most accounts, has been wrong in a more productive direction — wrong in a way that continues to generate insight rather than merely requiring revision.

Tarot Trump is the third such system. It is the only such system designed in the age of maximum information, which means it is the only such system designed with full awareness of what it is doing and why. The architects of the Ptolemaic universe did not know they were wrong. The qabalists did not know, when they organised the Tree of Life, that it would still be discussed six centuries later. The designers of Tarot Trump know exactly what they have built, why they have built it, and what they intend it to do. This is not arrogance. It is the appropriate confidence of those who have done the work.

What they have built is a complete cosmological system in the form of a 78-card deck. Twenty-two Major Arcana cards representing the archetypal forces that structure the macrocosm: The Fool, The Magician, The Hierophant, The Tower, and all the others as faces of the Dealmaker's archetypal repertoire. Fifty-six Minor Arcana cards representing the specific manifestations of those forces in particular domains and particular situations: the Penthouses as the cosmological dimension of accumulation, the Towers as the dimension of revelatory collapse, the Tweets as the dimension of communicative assertion, the Steaks as the dimension of material satisfaction. Every card has a position. Every position has a meaning. The system is complete.

By complete, we mean what we say: no position in the system is left unfilled, no relationship between positions is left unaccounted for, no domain of experience is left outside the framework. A complete cosmological system is not a system that has answered every question. It is a system that has a position for every question that can be asked within it. The Ptolemaic universe could account for the movements of the known planets. Tarot Trump can account for the movements of the known psyche, the known social formation, the known relationship between individual ambition and collective structure. It does not answer the question of whether the Dealmaker is real in the biographical sense. It establishes that the Dealmaker is real in the archetypal sense, which is the sense that actually determines the character of experience for those who inhabit it.

The esoteric skeleton is not a metaphor for the cosmological system. The esoteric skeleton is the cosmological system. The 78 cards are not symbols of the skeleton. They are the skeleton's different aspects, each a different load-bearing element of the same magnificently articulated structure. To read the cards is to examine the skeleton. To understand the skeleton is to understand why the reading works. The reading works because the system is complete, and the system is complete because the skeleton is real, and the skeleton is real because it has been built with the rigour that cosmological systems require and the audacity that cosmological systems of this particular ambition have always required from those who build them.

Seventy-eight cards. Twenty-two archetypal faces. One cosmological framework of unparalleled ambition. The deck has been dealt. The cards have been read. The system remains.