Essay: JK Rowling's Own Private Tarot Game

JK Rowling never tells her readers about Harry Potter learning about Tarot, nor is it ever mentioned during his Divination lessons. Despite this, Professor Trelawney abruptly reappears in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, even though she is no longer Harry’s teacher by the time he’s in his sixth year. In just about every appearance she makes in the sixth book she is raving about the Tower, also called The Tower of Destruction, or La Maison Dieu (The House of God) in French, the sixteenth card in the Tarot Major Arcana. Trelawney ranting about this card is the first overt mention of Tarot in the seven books, and it is a virtual throwaway.

It is not, however, the first mention of the name of a Tarot card in the series. In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Rowling calls the Little Hangleton pub frequented by Frank Bryce, the caretaker at the Riddle House, The Hanged Man. This is the name of the twelfth card in the Tarot Major Arcana. JK Rowling has also invented her own “set” of cards: Famous Wizard Cards, which are included in Chocolate Frog packages. The first card of this type that we see in the series is the one bearing the image of Albus Dumbledore, which can be considered equivalent to card number one in the Tarot Major Arcana: The Magician.

Another non-obvious nod to Tarot in the Harry Potter books could be the character of Peeves, particularly the way that he seems to appear randomly in the books. In addition to this, many readers may have wondered, while they were reading the seventh book, “When did this turn into a road movie?” (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 8 and Episode 9. ) Examining the archetypes JK Rowling uses and looking at the role that games, toys, sweets and fairy tales play in the books (see Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 10: All’s Fair in War and Quidditch) can help to dispel some of these mysteries. Many elements of the story can also be seen more clearly when they are viewed through the lens of the Tarot.

Fortune-telling is not the only function for Tarot cards, or even their original function. The cards first appeared in early fifteenth century Italy for playing games. Another name for the Tarot Major Arcana are the “trumps”. This comes from the Italian word trionfi, which means “triumph”. These cards were originally a depiction, in two dimensions, of the popular “triumph” parades in medieval Italy that were a regular part of festival days (especially during Carnival or Mardi Gras) but also for weddings and other special occasions. In these processions, one character after another is presented, each “trumping” or triumphing over the preceding one. Robert M. Place writes:

In ancient Rome, when a conquering general would return to the city, a triumph would be arranged down Appian Way. The parade was organized from the lowest to the highest, starting with the captives and ending with the general himself.... Triumphs were also held as religious processions before games and at Roman funerals. [History, Symbolism and Divination (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2005), p. 113]

The most ancient traces of triumphal parades of this sort are on Etruscan funeral urns from the third and fourth centuries B.C.E., which may have been the inspiration for the spectacles staged during the time of the Roman Empire.

Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II (1194-1250) is credited with repopularizing the triumph after his victory over Milan in 1237, when he played the hero in a re-enactment of a typical Roman triumphal procession. By the fourteenth century, about a hundred years later, triumphs had become a regular event at festivals throughout Italy, and these public performances reached their peak in the fifteenth century, about another hundred years on, roughly the same time that the first Tarot decks were being developed.

A dividing line between “high art” and “popular art” wasn’t very well-drawn in Europe at that time, and some of the most exalted artists of the day “worked on the setting, the costumes, the displays, and the poetic symbolic content” of the triumphs. Those who were staging the parades were on a constant hunt for ways to increase the pageantry, and poets, most notably Petrarch, in his poem I Trionfi, used this “cultural vocabulary” in philosophical works to depict “the soul’s journey”, which is only fitting, since the triumph (which was originally depicted on Etruscan funeral urns) represented this type of symbolic journey from the very start.

The Triumphs of Petrarch (I Trionfi)

Only in the nineteenth century did Tarot begin to be used for cartomancy (fortune-telling with cards). Games that include “trumps” and “tricks”, similar to the game of Bridge, can be played with the full set of Tarot cards, though some Tarot games use fewer cards than the complete deck. 

Each suit of cards in the Tarot Minor Arcana is numbered from one to ten, and after that there are four “face” cards, rather than the three in modern decks of playing cards (King, Queen and Jack); the Minor Arcana also has a King and Queen, but the other face cards are the Knight and the Page. Some people think that the Knight morphed into the Jack on modern playing cards and the Page simply disappeared, while some think the Page became the Jack and it was the Knight that disappeared from the deck, and some people think that the Knight and the Page were combined to create the Jack; it’s not really clear what happened there, and it’s not necessary for us to solve that mystery to talk about the Major Arcana.

A full Tarot deck is a combination of the twenty-two cards of the Tarot Major Arcana plus the fifty-six cards of the Minor Arcana, the suits of which are wands, swords, cups and pentacles (which are sometimes call coins or disks). These suits have become clubs, spades, hearts and diamonds in modern decks of cards. The symbols for the Tarot Minor Arcana suits are also seen on some of the Tarot Major Arcana cards, and the Major Arcana itself is also considered to be a fifth suit of the Tarot Deck when games are played with the full deck.

Even as people in fifteenth century Italy witnessed trionfi and used Tarot cards, the two-dimensional version of trionfi, to play games, they knew that both the parades and the decks of cards told a story. Karl Jung recognized that the Tarot “had its origin and anticipation in profound patterns of the collective unconscious”. As the Jungian scholar Joseph Campbell observed, one of the most common myths or folktales found in all cultures is the spiritual quest for enlightenment, a quest that he labeled the hero’s journey. The Tarot embodies this archetypal quest.

Leaving out the Fool card for now, which is unnumbered when it’s used as a playing card (just as Jokers are unnumbered in modern decks of playing cards) but labeled zero or twenty-two when it’s used in Divination, the other twenty-one cards in the Tarot Major Arcana can describe a journey from an unformed personality to wholeness and integration, symbolized by the twenty-first card in the Major Arcana, The World, which may have been very appealing to people when the cards first began to be used for Divination. Rowling depicts Harry on just such a journey and presents wholeness as an ideal throughout the seven-book series, which is another way that her story dovetails neatly with the Tarot Major Arcana as a set of symbols.

 The cards other than the Fool can be arranged in three rows of seven cards each, a grid of twenty-one cards that can shed light on why some plot elements appear in the books when they do, or why they appear at all. However, even though he doesn’t fit into this grid of cards, we can’t ignore the Fool entirely.

In some Tarot games, the Fool is called the Excuse, and this card may be played on any “trick”, which means a player is expected to “follow suit” or play a card of the same suit as the other players, but the Fool gives him an “excuse”, you can play this card instead (which is handy if you don’t have the required suit of cards in your hand). The modern equivalent is games in which some cards are called “wild” and stand in for other cards; the Fool is always wild.

In her book on Jung and Tarot archetypes, Sallie Nichols writes:

THE FOOL, whose designation is zero...can also burst unexpectedly into our personal life with the result that...we end up playing the fool ourselves. [Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey (Boston, MA/York Beach, ME: Weisner Books, 1980), p. 267.]

In terms of Harry’s story, for instance, Peeves appears when Harry least wants him to, singing songs, throwing things, and making Harry feel like the fool. As with the Fool in Tarot games, Rowling can “play” Peeves at any time. She may be referencing card games or links to the Fool card for Divination, or for storytelling, or a combination of these things; all of them actually fit Peeves very well.

It is not surprising that the filmmakers decided that they could not find a way to fit Peeves into the Harry Potter films. In the book Order of the Phoenix, Peeves teases Harry on the way to a detention with Umbridge, asking Harry if he’s hearing voices, seeing visions, or speaking in tongues, which are all related to ecstatic religious experience, and Harry is caught up in a religious war in Order of the Phoenix. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 20, Episode 21, and Episode 22.) By doing things like this, Peeves gives the reader hints about what’s really going on in the story, and his actions sometimes have an impact even several books later, such as when he smashes the vanishing cabinet in the second book, to serve as a distraction for Harry to escape Filch’s clutches, and then this cabinet has to be repaired by Draco in the sixth book for Death Eaters to enter the castle. Peeves is definitely more than he appears to be, but the filmmakers never quite “got” the purpose of a character who’s basically the equivalent of the Fool card in the Major Arcana, so when it came to the film scripts, he didn’t make the cut.

Often, when Tarot cards are used for storytelling, the Fool is cast as the protagonist or the central character. Though Harry is sometimes in the role of the Fool, this isn’t the Tarot archetype that best describes his character. The Lover of the sixth Major Arcana card, which is equivalent to the archetypal Youth (see Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 7: Fountain of Youth), may also fill the role of the protagonist in the Tarot story. But while Harry does fit the Youth archetype’s gender and age designations, and he also fits the Tarot Lover archetype, Rowling doesn’t seem to be doing this either. 

Rowling’s hero is the Liminal Being, specifically the Metaphorically Queer Liminal Being, which is equivalent to the Stranger in George RR Martin’s Game of Thrones series, the aspect of the seven-faced god that has no gender or age associated with it. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 8 and Episode 9.) This archetype is also equivalent to the seventh card in the Tarot Major Arcana, the Chariot, which is fitting, due to this archetype’s ability to straddle worlds, which is what the Liminal Being always does. It is the very nature of liminality.

When the twenty-one cards in the Tarot Major Arcana other than the Fool are arranged in three rows of seven cards each, or three “realms” and seven columns, each column can be aligned with one of the Harry Potter books. The first seven cards go across the top row, cards one through seven, which have equivalents in the seven archetypes ruling each book in the series. (See Quantum Harry, Part I: The Archetype Episodes.) These cards are, in order, the Magician, the High Priestess, the Empress, the Emperor, the High Priest or Pope or Hierophant (which means High Priest), the Lovers, and the Chariot.

The second row, below that, has cards eight through fourteen: Justice, the Hermit, the Wheel of Fortune, Strength or Force, the Hanged Man, Death, and Temperance.

And finally, the bottom row has cards fifteen through twenty-one: the Devil, the Tower, also called the Tower of Destruction, the Star, the Moon, the Sun, Judgment, and the World.

When using these cards to tell a story, certain cards can be considered “seed cards” because they herald a new stage of growth in the story and they are equal to the sum of all of the cards that came before them, plus the number of the seed card in question can also always be reduced to the number one.

For instance, the first few seed cards are the Magician (card number one); the fourth card, the Emperor (because one through four add up to ten, and the digits of ten, one and zero, add up to one); the seventh card, the Chariot, is also a seed card (since one through seven adds up to 28, and 2 + 8 = 10, and 1 + 0 = 1).

Thus, in addition to the vertical columns, there are seven other divisions of the cards, seven sequential sets that also represent the seven stages in Harry’s story. Stage one is the Magician, the High Priestess and the Empress; stage two is the Emperor, the High Priest and the Lovers; stage three is the Chariot, Justice and the Hermit; stage four is the Wheel of Fortune, Strength and the Hanged Man; stage five is Death, Temperance and the Devil; stage six is the Tower of Destruction, the Star and the Moon; and stage seven is the Sun, Judgment and the World.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows juxtaposes Hallows vs. Horcruxes, with three Hallows at issue and seven Horcruxes including Harry. Examining the story through the lens of Tarot makes it impossible not to notice that three times seven is twenty-one, the number of cards in this Tarot grid that can be used to describe Harry’s journey to wholeness.

Each card in the Tarot Major Arcana is also related, numerically, to at least one other card, and some are related to two cards. The digits in the number of each card can be added to get the number of another card to which it is related or, going backward in this process, the number of the card can be broken down into two digits that refer to another card.

For instance the Magician is card number one; this links it to card number ten, the Wheel of Fortune and it’s also linked to card nineteen, the Sun.

 The High Priestess, card number two, is linked to card eleven, Strength, and to card twenty, Judgment.

The Empress, the Hanged Man and the World all add up to three; and the Emperor, Death and the Fool (card twenty-two when it is not unnumbered or called zero) each add up to four.

The five sets of two cards that link to each other are the High Priest and Temperance; next are the Lovers and the Devil; then the Chariot and the Tower; followed by Justice and the Star, and finally the Hermit is linked to the Moon.

If a card is only numerically linked to a column or to a sequence card its symbolism in the story may not be as significant as those cards, but often the linked cards help to illuminate the symbolism of the more prominent cards.

Examining the Tarot symbolism in the Harry Potter books just shows us again how clever JK Rowling was about constructing her massive sprawling series—but in some cases, it also reveals again, as the examination of games in the books did—that she can be so dedicated to her patterns and symbolism that it does not always make a great deal of sense in terms of the story, and in her eagerness to include this symbolism, it is possible to occasionally and inadvertently include a plot hole instead.

Adapted from the script for Quantum Harry,the Podcast, Episode 30: Harry and Tarot. Copyright 2017-2019 by Quantum Harry Productions and B.L. Purdom. See other posts on this blog for direct links to all episodes of Quantum Harry.

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