A Game Of Thrones Tarot, Pt. 1

SPOILER ALERT: This article presupposes that you have read A Game Of Thrones/watched through the first season of A Game Of Thrones. I will make efforts not to spoil anything past that. (Though I will likely write a separate article that incorporates the entirety of the story thus far.)  

And now, a little mood music...

Words Are Wind - An Introduction That You Will Probably Skip

I’ve been meaning to write this article since around 2008 or 2009, whenever I finally caved to  my friends’ recommendations and dove into A Game of Thrones, the first novel in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice & Fire saga. As you may have noticed, I have a bit of a compulsion when it comes to rooting out the underlying archetypal patterns in...well, just about anything that I really like. I find this to be a really useful set of tools in gaining a deeper understanding with regard to the characters and the world - just like in real life.

So, what’s prevented me from tackling this subject long ago? One factor is this: ideally, the Tarot should loosely represent a story. Stories have endings, and this story has a few novels to go before it reaches its conclusion (and the more pessimistic of our lot have speculated that this day will never come.) But basically, a character that I believed to be a crystal clear representation of “The Magician” at the beginning of the story might be better allocated to “The Tower” after two subsequent books of strife and hardship. The main deterrent, though,  has been the sheer SCOPE of it. The world is so vast, the characters so numerous, and of course, it only grows further as the series progresses. By the time we get to A Dance With Dragons, there’s enough material to make five different Tarot decks.

All of this considered, I decided that the best way to proceed would be to confine this article to Season One, the real A Game Of Thrones. This works on a few levels - one, while a character’s allocation might change from book to book, this is fitting, as many of us transition between roles in our every day lives. So while you might feel like someone you know is “The Hermit” in your life, they may completely come out of their shell a year later and become “The Sun.”. It’s a matter of perspective. Works the same way in fiction, or at least in as sprawling a tale as this. There’s also the matter of deaths and replacements...we all know Martin has no qualms killing off a major character, and it may come to be that, looking at the story a few books down the line, an archetype left uninhabited by the death of a major character may find a perfect replacement later on. I will address this a bit further as I go through each on the major arcana in more detail.

GoT + Tarot = Metal.

A Game Of Trumps

A quick word about Tarot...a lot of people believe that the origin of Tarot cards are draped in secrecy, and that they may have roots that trace back to the Ancient Egyptians. But no one knows for sure, because they are SUPER mysterious!

Yeah...this is not actually the case. Tarot comes from a 15th Century Italian card game called Tarocchi. It’s still played regularly in some parts of Europe. The reason that people associate Tarot with Egypt is because Victorian English mystics had a serious fascination with all things Egyptian, and considered its culture to be the font of all mysticism, and went around retroactively assigning pre-existing traditions back to Egypt willy-nilly.

The deck is actually very similar to a normal Poker deck - there are four suits of cards, each numbering 2-10. Each has an Ace and a set of Face/Court Cards. (Slight difference here...whereas normal decks use King, Queen, Jack, the Tarot decks generally have some arrangement of four figures...most commonly known as Knight, Queen, King, and Page, the same archetypes are sometimes notated as Knight, Queen, Prince, and Princess.) 

The Viscoti-Sforza is one of the oldest surviving Tarot decks, dating back to the 15th century. The Tarot of Marseilles and the Rider-Waite (which was illustrated by Pamela Coleman-Smith, and thus should be known as the Colman-Waite deck, really,) set the standard for the appearance and format for Tarot decks to come.

Furthermore, the suits used today are analogous to what is used in the Tarot (Spades = Swords, Hearts = Cups, Clubs = Wands, and Diamonds = Pentacles or Coins.) This corresponds very easily to the traditional Western elements (Spades/Swords = Air, Hearts/Cups = Water, Clubs/Wands = Fire, Diamonds/Pentacles or Coins = Earth.) For more information on the traditional Hermetic elements, check out my Avatar: The Last Airbender article from a few years ago.

Long story short, you can read Tarot with a deck of playing cards. I have done so more than once after a night playing Asshole and Kings and Bullshit Pyramid. The major symbol set you’d be lacking are the Major Arcana, or Trump Cards. This is a fifth suit of cards, all bearing a title, which can defeat or “trump” any normal card. The only card in this this suit that is still included in a regular deck of playing cards is The Fool...except we call it “The Joker.” These Trump Cards come from a Neoplatonic Christian tradition called Triumph Parades, the point of which is that each one is considered closer to Godliness as they ascend. Traditionally, The Fool is the unnumbered Wild Card, because even the wisest of men has been made to look stupid by the ramblings of a fool, and not all “fools” are as stupid as they first appear. Since then, occultists have divided up these 22 cards into representations of the 4 elements, the 7 classical planets, and the 12 zodiacal signs. For more on Tarot history, refer to Robert M. Place’s text, The Tarot: History, Symbolism, & Divination.

One last thing on Tarot, specifically in the way that I came to these allocations: in some cases, there is a character who really just IS the card title...it is their actual title. An example: those familiar with A Clash Of Kings will know of the court jester known as Patchface, who should be “The Fool” for all intents and purposes. In cases like that, I will give them an honorable mention, or try to include them in some way. But overall, I feel the Trumps should highlight the most important characters in the tale. In some cases also, it seemed necessary to collect a few different characters serving the same function on one card. I’ll explain further as I go.

Anyway. On with it! For Winterfell!    

0 The Fool - Tyrion Lannister and Company - Prime Air

If anyone’s occupying the Wild Card slot, it’s our impish friend, Tyrion. The Fool card has been allocated to the element of “Air,” which deals with the intellect, freedom of thought, communication, and identity. The card classically portrays a motley character with his dog at his heels, representative of his instinct, trying to warn him of danger. It’s often read as a beginning to a new journey, the entrance into a new world - a fool knows nothing, and seeks to soak up all the knowledge and experience available. However, because of either their childish mind or appearance, the character is seldom taken seriously. However, as alluded to earlier, this is a powerful card that draws strength from being underestimated, and from the benefit of being generally unfettered by societal expectation and knowledge of the world.

As Tyrion is either regarded as a joke or a monster by most of his family, let alone by the rest of the world, he’s free of certain societal expectations. No one really cares that he goes to whorehouses, that he speaks and behaves in a vulgar fashion...he’s already viewed as an embarrassment and an outcast, so what’s the difference? You almost expect the guy to come home with a sellsword, a whore, and a few tribes of mountain raiders at his back.  

However, he is a Lannister - being of high birth and education, he’s well aware of civilized conventions, and feels free to invoke them or cast them aside at will. For example, he’ll think nothing of ridiculing a court with a heartfelt “confession” of past wrong-doings, but he knows enough about the law of Westeros to save his skin by demanding a trial by combat.

Admittedly, The Fool can often conjur an image of innocence and ignorance...Tyrion reveals this archetype more fully realized by trauma and experience. He recounts a tale of his youth to Bronn, his sellsword, and Shea, his prostitute consort, wherein we get a glimpse of that innocence. For those who don’t remember, this was the story of his romance with a country girl named Tysha, who he fell in love with and married in his youth, and who turned out to be a whore in his father’s employ who was paid to love Tyrion. He was made by his father to watch as a gang of men ravaged her and paid for her services, and then was made to do so himself. Lord Tywin Lannister did this to ensure that Tyrion kept to his station and did not think of doing “normal” things like getting married. The Fool often finds that it is an abomination of nature, and ends up shaking its fist at the sky, raging against its creator for being born. Tyrion’s relationship with his father brings this image to mind.

Tyrion may seem powerless at first glance, but he’ll surprise you - as the series progresses, he’ll continue to out-wit, out-fight, or otherwise maneuver himself around many of the other major characters in the series, and many no-win situations.  


I The Magician - Lord Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish

The Magician is also know as “The Juggler.” Or, “Le Bateleur” or “Il Bagatto” in the French and Italian decks...these terms mean something akin to “Mountebank” or “Huckster,” and are meant to invoke the image of a sleight-of-hand artist. This is very different from the more recent occult representations of this figure, which are more noble and accomplished, portraying a man who has mastered the tools of ceremonial magic.

Littlefinger’s something in between these two ideas. He’s certainly a society type, and therefore conveys an air of nobility. However, his house is very low on the totem pole, a minor banner-man to House Tully, the lords of the Riverlands, and the wussiest of the major houses. Littlefinger himself grew up as a close friend of the Tully family’s two daughters, and found himself in love with the elder, Catelyn. However, since she’s way above his station, he had no hope of marrying her - she was eventually engaged to Brandon Stark, Ned’s older brother, who Littlefinger foolishly challenged to a duel and who dished out a savage ass-kicking in response. (Brandon, of course, perished at the hands of the Mad King, Aerys, and so Catelyn was instead married to Ned.)

Point is, Littlefinger realized then that he would never be a man of arms and brawn, but that his intellect could be just as sharp as any sword, and ten times as effective at gaining power. And so, like a trickster at a carnival, Littlefinger keeps getting people to step up and play the game, claiming their power, their resources, and their lives. He juggles plots and information, gauging each person by their role and their usefulness.

The Magician has been allocated to the planet Mercury, which is associated with the functions of communication and cognition. In mythology, Mercury (or Hermes) was the messenger god, fleet of foot, quick-witted, and always ready to cook up mischief. He was also the only one who was welcome anywhere - being a messenger meant that he could even go to Hades, a realm where none of the other Olympians were welcome. Due to his low-noble status, Littlefinger seems to enjoy a similar privilege, rubbing elbows with royals in one moment and managing a brothel in the next.

The Norse recognized the Mercurial current in the trickster god, Loki, who schemed and plotted until he brought the world down around him. As the series goes on, and the scope of Littlefinger’s influence becomes clearer, it causes one to wonder if he could be responsible for a similar set of events...

In the Rider-Waite deck, and as is pictured here, The Magician has full use of the four elements (vision, intuition, intellectual analysis, and a grounded sense of priorities,) and is pointing to the sky and the ground, fulfilling the maxim, "As Above, So Below," that prevails in ceremonial magic. This refers to to the concept that proposes that changes made to the symbolic world are reflected back onto the earth, changing the material world. And in a way, that's what Littlefinger does. Nearly all of his work is done by word and symbol, by deception and analysis, and he effects true and significant change in the world of Westeros by doing so.  

Varys, The Spider could also be a possible allocation for this position, though I like him better in another. More on him later...


II The High Priestess - Catelyn Stark

Well, I don’t know where the hell else to stick you, Catelyn.

Catelyn’s a character that really seems to divide fans. I don’t mind her so much, but a lot of people seem to absolutely loathe her. I think this is because a) people LOVE Jon Snow, who she can’t seem to stop riding for being another woman’s son, and b) she’s the ultimate over-bearing mommy, ready to do anything her children need, including run their lives for them.

In other decks, this card is called “The Papesse,” or female Pope. Either title reflects a high level of religious and spiritual understanding. Obviously, Cat isn’t that person. However, this card has been allocated to The Moon, the celestial body associated with emotional identity, family, nurturing, and with wisdom that cannot be understood without experience. In other words, you can read a how-to book about how to rear a child, but it’ll be very different and MUCH less information-dense than the actual experience of raising a child.

Catelyn exemplifies the willingness to sacrifice everything for the family, from fighting off a murderer who was trying to kill Bran, to venturing to King’s Landing to warn her husband of the plot against their house, to capturing Tyrion by raising the strength of her father’s bannermen (an extension of family, a base of power)...whatever complaints one may have about Catelyn, she’s certainly not a shrinking violet.

Kind of a bitch move at the end of the day, but still kind of badass. 

Regarding the “power of experience” factor, this doesn’t come into play in an overt way, but you do see signs of it now and then. For one thing, in the book, she’s the first one to realize that something is terribly wrong when Bronn is fighting Ser Vardis Egan in the duel for Tyrion’s life at the Eyrie. She’s done the circuit, seen a lot of tournaments, and knows what it looks like when someone’s losing a fight - while the rest of the court is laughing at Bronn’s tactic of “running away,” Catelyn recognizes that his movements are deliberate and calculated, and that he’s not worried in the least. This skill-set makes her a valuable adviser to her son Robb in future.

Lunar hurt leaves deep emotional scaring, and it usually takes a wound of that level to drive a person to revenge. Catelyn gives voice to these Lunar needs for retribution when she lays out their priorities to Robb. “First we get the girls back. Then, we kill them all.”

Meanwhile, Catelyn’s sister, Lysa, embodies all of the negative, horrible, Medea-esque qualities of The Moon. Without spoiling too much...you can already see that something’s terribly wrong when a lady’s still breastfeeding her eight year old son...but basically, the dark flip-side of the Moon is a pasture that’s willing to consume its own crops in order to strengthen the soil. Lysa prioritizes her own happiness over any member of her family, and the bond they share means very little at the end of the day.

There is one character - less prominent, but equally pivotal - who might be more fitting in this allocation. That is the witch, Mirri Maz Duur, who was actually a High Priestess for the Lhazareen people. The Moon has always been associated with witches and magic, and here, we have someone who had the emotional and familial core ripped away from her, and who plotted revenge because of it. Khal Drogo destroyed her country, her people, her family, even her god, and she responded by doing whatever was necessary to destroy the Khal and his unborn son. However, being that she is not one of our major players, I felt Catelyn to be a more appropriate choice. 

That's why you aren't supposed to suffer a witch to live.

There is another actual priestess introduced in Season Two, however, that would probably be an even better choice. Melisandre of Asshai is a sorceress and advisor of Stannis Baratheon, and will become a major player in the war for Westeros.

To conclude, the temple depicted in this Rider-Waite version of the High Priestess is the fabled Temple of Solomon. The Priestess herself is privy to all of the initiated mysteries. The black and white pillars in the background labeled "B" and "J" (yeah yeah, get the laugh outta yer system) stand for "Boaz" and "Jachim," the pillars of "Severity" and "Mercy," respectively. A fully realized version of this archetype, able to confidently perch between those two ideals, is really the most appropriate choice for this archetype, which is another reason Catelyn fits. 

III The Empress - Daenerys Targaryen

This was pretty easy. The Empress is the card of earthly pleasures, joys, of compassion and fertility. Its association is with Venus, planet of love and connections. It’s also typically code for “hot, young girl.” Dany is all of those things and more. Better yet, as Khaleesi, she is basically an Empress in title.

Dany’s journey iinitial journey is one of coming to know happiness. Her life up until the events of the first episode saw her dependent on her creepy, maladjusted brother, ferrying them from place to place and begging for their kingdom. The only things that really kept her going were small joys, memories she associated with a moment of peace and happiness here and there - a house by the sea, the feeling of a sea breeze. And so on.

She’s horribly depressed when she’s sold off to Khal Drogo, because he and his world are not things she associated with joyful experience in the least. They’re strange and different, and basically gross her out and frighten her. But gradually, she comes to find great happiness in her marriage and in her new lifestyle...so much so that she recognizes how joyless her previous existence was and treats her brother accordingly for putting her through it. Don't take my word for it...ask the lovely and talented Ms. Clarke...

Compassion is also a big part of the Empress card, and Dany is always the first and last one to fly that flag, no matter how much trouble it has gotten her into. Compassion, both for those weaker and less powerful, and for her enemies, is always factored into Dany’s plan for getting what she wants. We’ll see this more in Season Two, but her treatment of Mirri Maz Durr and her insistence that Khal Drogo stop the camp rapes is the first major indicator of this. She also gives a TON of chances for redemption to her brother, Viserys, only letting up when the situation had spiraled too far out of her control.

Daenerys, Venus, and The Empress all operate under the principle that life is not worth living, and stuff is not worth having (even kingdoms) unless you can enjoy it.

IV The Emperor - Khal Drogo

Pretty sure I'd get the tongue ripped out of my head for making this...

Another easy one. The Emperor’s consort is The Empress. Drogo’s consort is Daenerys. “Khal” is the closest title the Dothraki have to “Emperor.”

The Emperor is associated with the first sign of the zodiac, Aries. Aries is the most overtly martial and combative of the signs, is one of the natural positions of the war-planet, Mars, and is designated as “Cardinal Fire.” “Cardinal” refers to a sudden burst of force, “Fire” in this case meaning ambition, vision, and will. The typical Aries ideal is the action hero, the John McClanes of the world, who show their character in deed rather than in word. This can empower them with the drive to carve their name into the world in big, fiery letters. It can also make them pushy, combative, emotionally-unavailable dicks.

Khal Drogo was a Dothraki who just happened to be the best at killing people and leading armies. As such, he carved out a massive rep, amassed an unstoppable fighting force, and collected a shitload of bells in his braid. He was easily one of the most dynamic and beloved characters in the first book/season, and half the time we had no idea of what he was saying. You didn’t need to - once again, this is a man who ACTS. We see him drop his weapons and kill an armed man with his bare hands. We see him execute Viserys Targaryen in the most brutal and metal way possible (although that’s a bad example, as he had a pretty great line for that.) In the book, not as much in the series, we also see him be very tender and loving with Daenerys, which also speaks a great deal towards his character.

                                                                                                                           

The Emperor is about surveying your weapons, your resources, your options, and then mobilizing them and leading them into battle. Very different from The Empress’ compassion, this archetype is about blazing trails and personal glory. Though it can be done for the accomplishment of some greater work, some higher purpose, it can just be the “I climbed the mountain because it was there” route. That certainly seems to be the case for the great Khal, a goddamn honey badger of a man who retired undefeated in personal combat.             

TO BE CONTINUED...