Jake Baddeley

The Baddeley Tarot

As an artist interested in symbolism and mythology for years, I was eventually led to the images in the tarot deck and the symbols you find there, which I found intriguing and beautiful. There are some fantastic decks that go back to the renaissance that are works of art in themselves.
What caught my attention the most was that the imagery in the cards was entirely opaque to me.
They clearly represented something very specific but I had no idea what they meant. So after lots of research, asking around and reading, I quickly realised that nobody knows. There is no answer to this question; you can not go online and ask for an authoritative interpretation of these images, because no authoritative explanation has come down to us.
We have the decks, we have the images but we have no explanation of what they meant.
So in modern times this seems to have become “make your own meaning up” and people do, they interpret them as best as they can based upon the knowledge that they understand, which is pretty much what I have done.

Only I seem to have stumbled across the original intended meaning of the cards in the process and I believe that I can prove it.

The imagery of the cards becomes clear once you realise that each card illustrates a myth. By looking at all the different cards in the deck, arranging them in the correct order and comparing them, a pattern emerges. Then, and only then, a story emerges from the whole row of myths together, which creates or illustrates a new myth. This is the original story of the trumps, which tells of a journey of the soul through Life, Death, through the Underworld and back again to Life in a cycle, because the tarot is cyclic.

From this it has become clear to me that the message in the Tarot is that of reincarnation and the immortality of the soul. This is the big myth of the trumps, the group story it tells and this story matches almost perfectly with an ancient initiation rite known as the Eleusinian mysteries, which goes back almost 3000 years to ancient Greece. This rite appears to be the pattern upon which the trumps are based. I show how I reached this conclusion in my introduction and lay out the main parts of the argument.

The Eleusinian mysteries was an initiation that aimed to change the understanding of the initiated and it acted as a catalyst to bring a change in its way of perceiving things. It was also an oracle, as the Goddess would pronounce oracles within this initiation journey. So oracular pronouncements where a core part of the Eleusinian mysteries, and that is of course what the modern Tarot has become; a way of accessing oracular pronunciations.

This deck is not an attempt at creating something new but to recreate something old. What I wanted to know was, what was the intention of the original designers and what was the original message behind this deck. I did not want to force upon it my own point of view, but to simply just restore it to its original meaning.

In doing so I have reemphasised the oracular nature of the Tarot and its core message, which is the immortality and the divinity of the soul. It describes the path of the Soul and its journey through Life, as it is based upon the vices and virtues that the soul must contend with in order to reach perfection. This is Neo-Platonic philosophy in a nut shell.

As far as I know, no one else has reached these conclusions and seen the whole picture. Some people have had glimpses, and found parts of the puzzle. I have added all these bits together and created the big picture, which is that the Tarot is a portable initiation rite and obviously related to an ancient oracle. And not simply, as many have suspected, just a set of playing cards or a game.
There are very few tarot decks out there that can claim that they are directly related to an ancient initiation rite which makes this deck somewhat special.

The Baddeley Tarot is a deck that brings a level of power and authenticity with it, that most modern decks have lost. A lot of the Tarot’s original impetus has become watered down, exactly because the true meaning and true message has been corrupted. So to restate that message, is to ground the Tarot back into its original essence and to reconnect to it a oracular power that had been lost.