The Tarot and human fate
Published Feb 24, 2018 04:05 pm
By Sylvia L. Mayuga
FIRST TAROT CARD Saul Hofileña Jr. created the first playable tarot card in the Philippines. The Cartas Philippinensis is history disguised as tarot and the paintings are visual records of our country’s past.
Here’s new delight for artists, historians, symbologists, and students of the occult: Cartas Philippinensis, Philippine Tarot cards by the prolific lawyer-historian and wildly imaginative Saul Hofileña Jr. drawn by the artist Guy Custodio.
Taking on the Tarot with its five centuries of tradition in Europe with a whiff of its origins in ancient Egypt, and linking its symbols to central events and personalities in Philippine history makes Cartas a 21st-century global Filipino artifact easily a collectors’ item.
The most intriguing thing about the Tarot is the oral tradition of its origins in the Library of Alexandria, pride of the Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt in the 3rd century BC. This major center of learning on visible and invisible reality was run like a university with visiting scholars from all over the ancient world. It was also constantly threatened by Egypt’s rivals and the Pharaoh’s enemies.
In 48 BC the army of Julius Caesar set off a fire; in the 270s AD Aurelian launched an attack that destroyed the main library. Activities were transferred to a “daughter library,” the Serapeum, in a temple in another part of Alexandria, but the Coptic Pope Theophilus destroyed that, too, in 391AD.
The story goes that these threats compelled the keepers of this library to sum up as much of its knowledge as they could by encoding it in symbols on playing cards to spread throughout the outside world. Finally, the library of Alexandria, one of the Seven Wonders of the World was completely destroyed in the Muslim conquest of Egypt in 642 AD, says the Wikipedia.
Nearly eight centuries later, in 1430 to 1450, the first Tarot packs with allegorical illustrations turned up as playing cards in a game called “tarochi” in Milan, Bologna, and Ferrara, Italy. More cards were added as time passed, bearing philosophical, social, poetic, astronomical, and heraldic ideas and heroes of Rome, Greece, and Babylon. By the late 18th century, these centuries-old sacred symbols were also in use as divination, a throwback to their place in Egyptian mythology.
The Tarot Comes to the Philippines
European travelers in that 18th century introduced the Tarot to Hispanic Philippines, both as a card game and a form of divination. Interestingly, its use in divination is strongly associated with places where the esoteric Union Espirista Cristiana de Filipinas still thrives today.
The Union Espiritista, founded on February 1905 by spiritualists in Pangasinan and Manila, was affiliated to a global federation rooted in occult spiritual knowledge. Their key belief in direct revelations by the Holy Spirit through mediums’ public revelations in trance can moreover be traced back to Philippine babaylan culture as a spiritual practice long antedating Christianity.
Babaylanic consultation with the spirit world for healing and spiritual wellbeing is still very much alive in the Union Espiritista. With permission, you can still see these trance mediums in action in active centers today, starting in Espiritistas’ original home, Pangasinan, the province of gifted healers.
On the other end of this spectrum of Filipino spirituality, you can also see fortune-telling with Tarot cards in public markets all over Luzon, just as gambling with Tarot cards remains a familiar sight in gatherings of rural folk. The famous Tarot de Marseille omnipresent in the Philippine countryside was apparently the first deck to reach the country.
A new blossoming
Propelled by the powerful human urge to peer into the spirit world to gain a foothold in a troubled world, a new blossoming for the Tarot came from the movement for higher consciousness in California in the ‘70s. Its return to the Philippines in a staggering variety of decks, retaining traditional symbols but with designs emphasizing different facets of esoteric knowledge was welcomed by a new generation of spiritual seekers in an anti-war generation.
Among these decks were the Tarot of the Witches, the Aquarian Tarot, the Tree of Life Tarot, the Alchemical Tarot with alchemical symbols, the Robin Wood Tarot with pagan symbols, Morgan’s Tarot inspired by Tibetan Buddhism, and occultist Aleister Crowley’s dark and brooding Thoth Tarot with astrological, zodiacal, elemental, and Qabalistic symbols. All of it aimed to understand the depth reality of a world under the threat of nuclear extinction.
This long-time Tarot student has found the classic Arthur Edward Waite deck the most helpful in this quest. Drawn by the artist Pamela Colman Smith under the direction of the Christian mystic and scholar of the occult, Arthur Edward Waite, and published by his Rider Company in 1910, it’s the most widely known Tarot deck in the world today.
Cartas Philippinensis now belongs to this modern layer of ancient tradition. Unlike the usual 78 cards of the conventional Tarot, however, Cartas limits itself to 22 cards of the Major Arcana (Secrets), interpreting their archetypal meanings with key events and figures in Philippine colonial history.
In Jungian psychology, an archetype is a mental image inherited from our earliest ancestors. That great scholar of the human consciousness, Carl Gustav Jung, defined it as “universal, archaic patterns and images deriving from the collective unconscious, the psychic counterpart of instinct.” Archetypes are revealed “in behavior, images, art, myths, religions, or dreams,” he explained, “inherited potentials actualized when they enter consciousness as images or manifested through interaction with the outside world.”
History Told in Archetypes
Closing up on Philippine formative experiences with interpretations of archetypes makes Cartas Philippinensis a kind of therapy for the trauma of colonization. Hofileña’s images and historical passages plumbing three centuries of subjugation is therefore less divination and more a decolonizing narrative prodding a wounded Filipino psyche to heal with greater self-knowledge.
Cartas’s first three cards configure Spain’s power triangle over las islas filipinas. The first card is the Spanish sovereign as El Loco, the Fool, who barely knew the people and lands he conquered and proceeded to exploit. The second card is the friar advising the King in his church-sanctioned conquest. The friar is El Mago, the Magician reducing prayer to hypnotic spells in Latin to wield power for prestige and personal profit in Spain’s distant colony.
The third card is Governor General Narciso Claveria as El Emperador, the Emperor, who renamed the majority of indios as a tax collection measure in the 19th century. Such was his power that he erased their past while determining the fate of families for generations to come.
The next cards portray native inner resources resisting complete subjugation. The first is the Virgin Mary as La Emperatriz, the Empress. Like a beloved babaylan goddess, this peerless queen has ruled the Filipino heart in the many trials of his history. Another is the beata as La Sacerdotisa, the High Priestess, generously serving her people in unchartered religious communities but never knowing the worldly power of the male priest.
A third is Bishop Cesar Ma. Guerrero as El Papa, the Pope, a counter-force to the entrenched power and moral decay in the Catholic Church in his time in the Philippine transition from Spanish to American rule, the Japanese occupation, and early independence. Known as a gifted exorcist, Guerrero earned the encomium “santo y sabio”—holy and wise.
Hofileña’s vein of historical irony continues in the card La Justicia, Justice with Spain’s laws turned into a web ruling subject indios in a language the majority could not understand. It matches El Colgado, the Hanged Man, with indio priests treated like criminals for refusing to take part in their friar parish priest’s excessive charges for baptisms, marriages, and burials.
Given the power of the friars, La Luna, the Moon, an archetype of visions, dreams and illusions, describes the clamor for reforms as “howling at the moon.” Wanting to keep indios docile in ignorant fear, the friars even refused to obey a royal decree to teach indios Spanish, the better to keep them obedient.
Opposite the Moon is El Sol, the Sun, the archetype of enlightenment. Hofileña points out that the sun also happens to be symbol of the Dominican Order. This returns us to the first two centuries of Philippine Christianization, when Dominicans inspired by the Catholic Reformation in Spain “risked life and limb to cross uncharted seas to bring Catholic doctrines to the New World.”
The first scholarly band founded the University of Sto. Tomas, now one of the oldest in the world, which published the first books printed in the Philippines. But such is human nature. By the 19th century, the Dominican Order was charging mounting rentals in their vast landholdings granted by the Crown, causing much suffering in Calamba and the adjacent countryside, Sta. Cruz de Malabon, and Orion, Bataan. When came the Philippine Revolution, a supposedly mendicant order’s heartless administration of these friar lands led to the arrest and vilification of Dominicans.
An abusive government and friars sowing seeds of their own destruction is highlighted again in La Torre, the Tower, a classic archetype of sweeping violent change. The execution, advised by the friars, of the native priests Gomez, Burgos, and Zamora for leading a movement to Filipinize the clergy in 1872 so shocked the nation that it became the seed of revolution in 1896.
And so Philippine history went according to Cartas Philippinensis. There are more arresting historical insights in the rest of its cards, but one is an especially fitting end to this introduction—La Estrella, the Star. In the Tarot’s spirit of divination, Hofileña suggests that the linked destinies of Spain and the Philippines were “written in the firmament, predicted in the stars.”
Time stands still in La Estrella, with a brown woman pouring water into a flowing river from two equally brown jars. Above her to her right is the constellation of Pisces, the stars of March, the month when the navigator Ferdinand Magellan made landfall in accidental discovery of the Philippine islands in 1521. To her left the stars of Sagittarius in December recall the fate of the Spaniards three centuries later in their defeat by American battleships in Manila Bay, ending Spanish rule in the Philippines in the Treaty of Paris in December, 1898.
The original Tarot Star signifies renewal and hope. La Estrella in Cartas takes us to a major turning point with a new colonizer in a history of continuing struggle for sovereignty.
FIRST TAROT CARD Saul Hofileña Jr. created the first playable tarot card in the Philippines. The Cartas Philippinensis is history disguised as tarot and the paintings are visual records of our country’s past.
Here’s new delight for artists, historians, symbologists, and students of the occult: Cartas Philippinensis, Philippine Tarot cards by the prolific lawyer-historian and wildly imaginative Saul Hofileña Jr. drawn by the artist Guy Custodio.
Taking on the Tarot with its five centuries of tradition in Europe with a whiff of its origins in ancient Egypt, and linking its symbols to central events and personalities in Philippine history makes Cartas a 21st-century global Filipino artifact easily a collectors’ item.
The most intriguing thing about the Tarot is the oral tradition of its origins in the Library of Alexandria, pride of the Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt in the 3rd century BC. This major center of learning on visible and invisible reality was run like a university with visiting scholars from all over the ancient world. It was also constantly threatened by Egypt’s rivals and the Pharaoh’s enemies.
In 48 BC the army of Julius Caesar set off a fire; in the 270s AD Aurelian launched an attack that destroyed the main library. Activities were transferred to a “daughter library,” the Serapeum, in a temple in another part of Alexandria, but the Coptic Pope Theophilus destroyed that, too, in 391AD.
The story goes that these threats compelled the keepers of this library to sum up as much of its knowledge as they could by encoding it in symbols on playing cards to spread throughout the outside world. Finally, the library of Alexandria, one of the Seven Wonders of the World was completely destroyed in the Muslim conquest of Egypt in 642 AD, says the Wikipedia.
Nearly eight centuries later, in 1430 to 1450, the first Tarot packs with allegorical illustrations turned up as playing cards in a game called “tarochi” in Milan, Bologna, and Ferrara, Italy. More cards were added as time passed, bearing philosophical, social, poetic, astronomical, and heraldic ideas and heroes of Rome, Greece, and Babylon. By the late 18th century, these centuries-old sacred symbols were also in use as divination, a throwback to their place in Egyptian mythology.
The Tarot Comes to the Philippines
European travelers in that 18th century introduced the Tarot to Hispanic Philippines, both as a card game and a form of divination. Interestingly, its use in divination is strongly associated with places where the esoteric Union Espirista Cristiana de Filipinas still thrives today.
The Union Espiritista, founded on February 1905 by spiritualists in Pangasinan and Manila, was affiliated to a global federation rooted in occult spiritual knowledge. Their key belief in direct revelations by the Holy Spirit through mediums’ public revelations in trance can moreover be traced back to Philippine babaylan culture as a spiritual practice long antedating Christianity.
Babaylanic consultation with the spirit world for healing and spiritual wellbeing is still very much alive in the Union Espiritista. With permission, you can still see these trance mediums in action in active centers today, starting in Espiritistas’ original home, Pangasinan, the province of gifted healers.
On the other end of this spectrum of Filipino spirituality, you can also see fortune-telling with Tarot cards in public markets all over Luzon, just as gambling with Tarot cards remains a familiar sight in gatherings of rural folk. The famous Tarot de Marseille omnipresent in the Philippine countryside was apparently the first deck to reach the country.
A new blossoming
Propelled by the powerful human urge to peer into the spirit world to gain a foothold in a troubled world, a new blossoming for the Tarot came from the movement for higher consciousness in California in the ‘70s. Its return to the Philippines in a staggering variety of decks, retaining traditional symbols but with designs emphasizing different facets of esoteric knowledge was welcomed by a new generation of spiritual seekers in an anti-war generation.
Among these decks were the Tarot of the Witches, the Aquarian Tarot, the Tree of Life Tarot, the Alchemical Tarot with alchemical symbols, the Robin Wood Tarot with pagan symbols, Morgan’s Tarot inspired by Tibetan Buddhism, and occultist Aleister Crowley’s dark and brooding Thoth Tarot with astrological, zodiacal, elemental, and Qabalistic symbols. All of it aimed to understand the depth reality of a world under the threat of nuclear extinction.
This long-time Tarot student has found the classic Arthur Edward Waite deck the most helpful in this quest. Drawn by the artist Pamela Colman Smith under the direction of the Christian mystic and scholar of the occult, Arthur Edward Waite, and published by his Rider Company in 1910, it’s the most widely known Tarot deck in the world today.
Cartas Philippinensis now belongs to this modern layer of ancient tradition. Unlike the usual 78 cards of the conventional Tarot, however, Cartas limits itself to 22 cards of the Major Arcana (Secrets), interpreting their archetypal meanings with key events and figures in Philippine colonial history.
In Jungian psychology, an archetype is a mental image inherited from our earliest ancestors. That great scholar of the human consciousness, Carl Gustav Jung, defined it as “universal, archaic patterns and images deriving from the collective unconscious, the psychic counterpart of instinct.” Archetypes are revealed “in behavior, images, art, myths, religions, or dreams,” he explained, “inherited potentials actualized when they enter consciousness as images or manifested through interaction with the outside world.”
History Told in Archetypes
Closing up on Philippine formative experiences with interpretations of archetypes makes Cartas Philippinensis a kind of therapy for the trauma of colonization. Hofileña’s images and historical passages plumbing three centuries of subjugation is therefore less divination and more a decolonizing narrative prodding a wounded Filipino psyche to heal with greater self-knowledge.
Cartas’s first three cards configure Spain’s power triangle over las islas filipinas. The first card is the Spanish sovereign as El Loco, the Fool, who barely knew the people and lands he conquered and proceeded to exploit. The second card is the friar advising the King in his church-sanctioned conquest. The friar is El Mago, the Magician reducing prayer to hypnotic spells in Latin to wield power for prestige and personal profit in Spain’s distant colony.
The third card is Governor General Narciso Claveria as El Emperador, the Emperor, who renamed the majority of indios as a tax collection measure in the 19th century. Such was his power that he erased their past while determining the fate of families for generations to come.
The next cards portray native inner resources resisting complete subjugation. The first is the Virgin Mary as La Emperatriz, the Empress. Like a beloved babaylan goddess, this peerless queen has ruled the Filipino heart in the many trials of his history. Another is the beata as La Sacerdotisa, the High Priestess, generously serving her people in unchartered religious communities but never knowing the worldly power of the male priest.
A third is Bishop Cesar Ma. Guerrero as El Papa, the Pope, a counter-force to the entrenched power and moral decay in the Catholic Church in his time in the Philippine transition from Spanish to American rule, the Japanese occupation, and early independence. Known as a gifted exorcist, Guerrero earned the encomium “santo y sabio”—holy and wise.
Hofileña’s vein of historical irony continues in the card La Justicia, Justice with Spain’s laws turned into a web ruling subject indios in a language the majority could not understand. It matches El Colgado, the Hanged Man, with indio priests treated like criminals for refusing to take part in their friar parish priest’s excessive charges for baptisms, marriages, and burials.
Given the power of the friars, La Luna, the Moon, an archetype of visions, dreams and illusions, describes the clamor for reforms as “howling at the moon.” Wanting to keep indios docile in ignorant fear, the friars even refused to obey a royal decree to teach indios Spanish, the better to keep them obedient.
Opposite the Moon is El Sol, the Sun, the archetype of enlightenment. Hofileña points out that the sun also happens to be symbol of the Dominican Order. This returns us to the first two centuries of Philippine Christianization, when Dominicans inspired by the Catholic Reformation in Spain “risked life and limb to cross uncharted seas to bring Catholic doctrines to the New World.”
The first scholarly band founded the University of Sto. Tomas, now one of the oldest in the world, which published the first books printed in the Philippines. But such is human nature. By the 19th century, the Dominican Order was charging mounting rentals in their vast landholdings granted by the Crown, causing much suffering in Calamba and the adjacent countryside, Sta. Cruz de Malabon, and Orion, Bataan. When came the Philippine Revolution, a supposedly mendicant order’s heartless administration of these friar lands led to the arrest and vilification of Dominicans.
An abusive government and friars sowing seeds of their own destruction is highlighted again in La Torre, the Tower, a classic archetype of sweeping violent change. The execution, advised by the friars, of the native priests Gomez, Burgos, and Zamora for leading a movement to Filipinize the clergy in 1872 so shocked the nation that it became the seed of revolution in 1896.
And so Philippine history went according to Cartas Philippinensis. There are more arresting historical insights in the rest of its cards, but one is an especially fitting end to this introduction—La Estrella, the Star. In the Tarot’s spirit of divination, Hofileña suggests that the linked destinies of Spain and the Philippines were “written in the firmament, predicted in the stars.”
Time stands still in La Estrella, with a brown woman pouring water into a flowing river from two equally brown jars. Above her to her right is the constellation of Pisces, the stars of March, the month when the navigator Ferdinand Magellan made landfall in accidental discovery of the Philippine islands in 1521. To her left the stars of Sagittarius in December recall the fate of the Spaniards three centuries later in their defeat by American battleships in Manila Bay, ending Spanish rule in the Philippines in the Treaty of Paris in December, 1898.
The original Tarot Star signifies renewal and hope. La Estrella in Cartas takes us to a major turning point with a new colonizer in a history of continuing struggle for sovereignty.