Annie Dieu-Le-Veut

I’m almost halfway through putting music to each of the 22 cards of the Major Arcana of the Tarot, and you’ll find links to some of them further down. But my idea is to brush off the cobwebs of 18th century occult thinking, to reveal the older spiritual teachings underneath each of these complex archetypes… at least as far as I understand them.

The Tarot has been badly treated over the centuries, largely by the Roman Catholic church that dismissed it as mere game of chance with no deeper esoteric roots. Even today, we are barely out of the Dark Ages, when the official consensus is that there is no trace of the Tarot before the 15th century.

It is thought that the House of Este in Ferrara produced the first deck of painted Tarot cards in 1498. However, this wealthy and magnificent Venetian court acted, in the shadows, as a diplomatic bridge between the different cultures of Byzantium and Rome. It welcomed Greek Orthodox scholars from Alexandria, then a veritable alchemical cauldron of Eastern and Western philosophies. So that would account for why the Tarot’s roots bypassed the dogmatism of the Roman Catholic church …. by drawing their sustenance from Eastern Christian and Sufi metaphysics, which, in itself, stood on the stout shoulders of the fathers of Neoplatonism: Plotinus, Porphyry and Proclus.

Added to which, the sensibilities of those who’ve studied Vedic scriptures and followed Eastern yogic paths, like Buddhism and Taoism, also resonate with these symbolic otherworldy icons of spiritual enlightenment.

It is probably the case that we will never be able to date the Tarot deck as such, because picture languages well-preceded the bird’s track squiggles of writing, and divination systems go back at least as far as ancient Babylon.

But it works, even today, as a universal template that is changeless. Every card is like a doorway to the portal of another world, each of which serves to remind us of the inner psychic and spiritual forces at play in our daily lives. We then follow those patterns and cycles to form an idea of a likely outcome.

By adding music into the mix, the messaging is no longer coming through just words and images, but sounds too. To me, this is more than a mere added novelty interest, given that sound is the primordial language that creates the universe.

Here are the tracks that I’ve published so far on Soundcloud. I’m very grateful to Andreas Pirner for his beautiful and elegant design framework for each of the covers.