Translator’s Introduction
Previously, we have alluded to the work of André Virel, without examining his writings on the subject. In effect, Virel’s seminal work, Histoire de notre image (Mont-Blanc, 1965), contains considerations on the Tarot, considerations which must be among the most insightful and thought-provoking to be found in the vast corpus of books on the Tarot. Virel would later revisit the Tarot in a number of articles, reworking, adapting and supplementing his earlier thoughts.
André Virel (1920-2000) was a 20th-century French polymath: artist, poet, anthropologist, psychologist and philosopher. A member of the Resistance during WWII, Virel later became one of the leading proponents of what he termed oneirotherapy, the study and use of dreams and guided imagery as a psychotherapeutic practice.

A prolific writer, Virel’s works include a novel, books of poetry, scientific papers, and learned studies of symbolism, mythology and psychology. In English, his work Decorated Man/ Ritual and Seduction was published in 1980 by Abrams. Recently, his Mental Imagination: Introduction to Oneirotherapy, cowritten with Roger Frétigny, was published by Inner Garden Press.
This sub-chapter, “Deux images du Tarot de Marseille,” forms the fourth section of the article entitled “Laboratoire et oratoire du rêve,” published in volume III of the Cahiers Jean Scot Erigène, 1992, and later compiled in Les Univers de l’Imaginaire, Éditions de l’Arbre Vert, 2000. The later version includes the concluding paragraph from the following sub-chapter, which we have not added here. The present excerpt is a much-developed version of the corresponding section of chapter 3 of Virel’s Histoire de notre image, “Le tarot de Marseille”.
The influence of the “Carteresian” (to coin a word) dialectics will be obvious to seasoned readers of these pages, and Virel’s (uncredited) influence on later generations of French tarologists ought to be equally clear by now with respect to to the issue dealt with in this text.
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Two Images of the Tarot of Marseilles
André Virel
The Tarot is a game whose known origins are not very ancient. The Charles VI Tarot is so-called because it is considered to date from the end of the 14th (or early 15th) century. It is painted by hand. Later, decks were engraved onto woodblocks. There are also Tarot decks from Venice or Lombardy, from the early 15th century.
Nowadays, the best-known deck is the Tarot published by B.P. Grimaud in Paris. It is the so-called “Tarot of Marseilles” since it reproduces a model published in 1761 by Nicolas Conver, master cardmaker in Marseilles. It is a deck of 78 cards, also called arcana, of which 56 point cards are called minor arcana, and 22 figurative cards called major arcana. The 56 point cards are divided into four series of 14 cards (staffs, cups, swords, coins) and form a set analogous to our current decks of playing cards. It is probable that the 56 point cards preceded the complete Tarot of 78 cards and that, in a later step, these 56 cards followed another evolution, becoming the decks of 56 cards in which staffs, cups, swords and coins became, respectively, diamonds, hearts, spades and clubs, at the end of the 18th century. 56 cards are reduced to 52 with the disappearance of the knight, at least in France, for in certain Spanish decks, the knight is still present, but the queen has disappeared.
As to the 22 major arcana, 20 of them bear a name at their base, and a number in their upper cartouche. But two major arcana form the exception to this double labelling. One is numbered, XIII, but it is not named. The other is not numbered, but it is named, LE MAT. The one is therefore essentially number, and the other speech, which already evokes the dialectic of the particle and of the wave, of discontinuity and of continuity.
Let us also note, concerning the horizontal lines of the frame, that figure XIII has no rectangular base in which a name might be inscribed. Therefore, the character is not only the unnamed but also the unnameable. His name is nobody. His lower jaw is blocked by a sort of frontal bandage which prevents it from moving and thereby does not allow the emission of the word. XIII has sealed lips. Let us recall here the symbolic importance of the teeth. Elsewhere, we wrote:
“If the skeleton, solid structure of the flesh, symbolises death, its sole visible part during life are the teeth. The teeth are therefore the place in which life and death are fused together. The teeth are time. To lose one’s teeth is to lose time, it is to die, and it is sometimes to be reborn… Among numerous primitives peoples, the initiation ceremony is accompanied by shattering the teeth, and this symbolism recalls those pierced teeth of the Palaeolithic which accompanied the body to its abode.”
In our ontogenesis, the acquisition of our temporality involves the acquisition of the notion of death. We then understand, for instance, the importance of the symbolic impact of losing “milk teeth” for the child towards the age of seven years. This loss is very emotional in the proto-conscious genesis of the notion of time seeking to orient itself and the Me seeking to affirm itself. This shock may be positive in the acquisition of our temporality, which involves the acquisition of the notion of our possible death. To lose this solid corporal fragment which enables us to chew, to kill, symbolically prepares the child to a later awareness he will have of death, towards the tenth year, of life and of non-life, of Me and the not-Me. Similarly, for a child, the fact of seeing an adult taking out their dentures is charged with such a symbolic efficiency.
Let us take another look at XIII. He is the man with the mouth of shadows and his gesture is the voice of night. His left foot, being stuck in the back soil, condemns him to not being able to advance along a sagittal pathway, but turn on himself like the hands on a clock face. And, like the pendulum of a clock, his scythe goes from right to left, and from left to right, in an incessant lateral movement of destruction. It is as though past and future were experienced in an eternal present of repetition. He is an echo of the permanent destruction by Saturn-king, of disintegration. Segments of bodies and decapitated heads emerge from the black earth. There, the tufts of grass are not green yet each of them has but two colours, yellow or blue, whose union gives vegetal green.

The discontinuous Saturn-king, or Vulcan, schize or focality.
Is that to say that XIII is only frozen time, always equal to itself, beyond all evolutive duration? No, for its skull is furnished with a nasal appendage. No, for this flesh-coloured skeleton is a skeleton with a covering of skin. And its vertebrae have the shape of ears of corn. This is the arcanum in which life and death fuse together. Its two aspects are the inexorable void but the possible resurrection. Its significance is then that of the rites of passage and of the great Osirian myth. It is the great meaning of the expression transmitted by Tradition: the Lost Word. Arcanum XIII is an offer of initiation.
Let us now observe LE MAT, by placing him next to XIII. The staff of the MAT and the handle of the scythe of XIII are parallel. In XIII, the handle of the scythe signs a disintegrative action by a lateral symmetric movement devoid of all advance. In LE MAT, the staff takes part in the sagittal advance of the character.
The headdress of LE MAT extends outside the frame of the image, there where the white cartouche bears no number. XIII is unnamed, LE MAT is unnumbered. LE MAT transcends all quantification, suggesting all possible numbers, which is to say, none at all. The empty cartouche is zero and infinity. In the set of twenty-two major arcana, LE MAT may thus be located everywhere and nowhere, between any other pair of the twenty-one other numbered arcana. Exegetes have often placed him between arcana XX and XXI, between LE JUGEMENT and LE MONDE. It is no doubt there where he appears to us to be ideally situated, as bearer of the infinite and the atemporal, the meaning of which is necessary for an understanding of the universe. […]

The continuous Uranus-king, or Mercury, indifferentiation or syntony.
LE MAT marks the quest of our spatial integrations. The orientations of his body are bizarre. The feet of LE MAT are properly aligned on the rectilinear base of the image but his head and his body appear relatively twisted, the torso seeming to present itself frontally, which recalls the folded perspective of Egyptian figures. He holds a staff with a knapsack in his left hand, but it rests on his right shoulder.
Whereas XIII is sedentary, LE MAT is a nomad, a wandering voyager, of no fixed abode, in an atemporal space. For his part, XIII evokes a time deprived of spatial freedom. LE MAT suggests a duration without history, an undertaking whose footsteps leave no trace. And yet a sort of dog reveals the most fleshy volume of his body: his hindquarters bear the scars of his past ordeals. Above, that staff with the knapsack across his throat, is it not a sign of the anguish caused by that baggage?
May his image blur to the benefit of his message, arcanum of the word, escapee of the number, and we dream your space like a fog in which all contours are erased, in which all the noises of nature become fused into murmurs. Deprived of all landmarks, your language becomes the sound of an alarm and a call for help. It is the foghorn, the hope of which is to hear an echo. The tinkling of your necklace of bells restitute to you the envelope of your body, closest to yourself.
In certain versions of the Tarot, this arcanum was called LE FOU [the madman]. But it expresses both folly and freedom. This word MAT would come from the Persian word meaning “death.” And here this word refers us back to arcanum XIII, which bears none. It is as though each of these two arcana were of a dual nature, as though these two arcana constituted a set of a dual nature. Is it not the same, in contemporary physics, for the set of the wave and the particle, in the dialectic of continuity and discontinuity?
Your symbolic dialogue, XIII and MAT, is indeed the inner dialogue of each of us. XIII is only an offer of initiation through the contribution of the MAT. And LE MAT is only an offer of freedom thanks to the contribution of XIII. Their set is that hope which the symbolic consciousness of dream brings to us, the consciousness of that Imaginary which dissolves and reintegrates the vectors of the fundamental dimensional coordinates of our understanding, the vectors of the three spatial dimensions and of the temporal dimension. It is these vectors which structure the intuition which is given us of our body, which enables us to know the world and to act upon it, and to know ourselves.
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In his earlier book, Virel wrote a succinct overview of the reciprocal relations between these two arcana, which presents some slightly different formulations which are worth considering.
Of these two arcana, one is numbered, but not named: arcanum XIII. The other is not numbered, but is named: LE MAT. One is number, the other speech. One symbolises discontinuity, the other continuity. Note the symbolism of death and of dissociation of arcanum XIII; and the symbolism of mobility, of movement, of arcanum LE MAT, the wandering voyager. He is the man of no fixed abode, chased by a dog, the guardian of the home. Disengaged from the law, he is the free man, or the madman. In certain decks, in effect, he is named LE FOU (the Fool). The comical twin of certain kings (the profane, twin of the sacred), the fool was emancipated from the social rule; he could say anything with impunity. We also know that LE MAT is, in the game of chess, the position of the king who cannot avoid defeat. The lost king, that too is madness, if we consider that the king, as central power, is, on the social plane, what consciousness is on the individual plane.
Let us note that death (arcanum XIII) and madness (LE MAT) constitute, with wisdom, possible manners of escaping the constraints of the Over-self. Whence the fact that these two arcana have the privilege of translating a bipolarity of the metaphysical adventure of Man.
One will note that arcanum XIII presents dissociated limbs. Death is often associated with a theme of dissolution: it is, on the one hand, because it is in fact a dissolution; above all, it is because the disintegration of the body may take on an initiatory significance related to the idea that the individual must die in order to be reborn – that is to say, to symbolically change body, to decompose in order to recompose oneself on a higher plane. […]
André Virel, Histoire de notre image, Mont-Blanc, 1965, pp. 64-65.
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Image source: Paul Marteau, B.P. Grimaud, Ancien Tarot de Marseille, 1930, courtesy of the BNF.

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