Did you know that there was a card that simply vanished out of the Tarot deck? Poof! Like it never existed, and its existence isn’t even known, except to a few historians and Tarot scholars.
THE PRUDENCE CARD
The card was known as, “Prudence,” and – as you can see – it depicted a woman looking into a mirror while a snake keeps her company. A very strange image, indeed.
It appeared in one of the first known Tarot decks, known as the Visconti-Sforza deck. This was about the year 1450 and, although the images were crude by today’s standards, for the most part they represent the same themes we see in our modern Tarot decks. Except for Prudence. What in the hell is SHE doing in there?
WHY PRUDENCE WAS INCLUDED
To understand why Prudence made her way into the Tarot, we really have to look at what was happening in Europe in the 1400s.
Can you say, “Inquisition?” Sure you can.
This was a time when the Catholic Inquisition was in full swing and even the hint of fortune telling could get you burned at the stake as a witch. The Tarot is – quite obviously – a tool for divination and so they needed to disguise what it really was.
The first ploy was to say that it was just a simple card game. You know . . . it’s just poker, only with archetypes. Nothing to see here.
The second trick was to include so much Christian imagery that the priests and torturers would be thrown off of the scent. In order to do that, they included the ‘four cardinal virtues’ of the Catholic Church. They are:
JUSTICE
TEMPERANCE
FORTITUDE (AKA Strength)
PRUDENCE
Put quite simply, these cards are nothing but camouflage for the real, original Tarot deck.
SO WHAT HAPPENED TO HER?
The obvious question here is, “Why did Prudence disappear?” Why did the other, “virtue cards,” remain while she went away to wherever ex-Tarot-cards live?
Most scholars suggest that the messages she was meant to convey – reflection, wisdom, self-knowledge – were simply absorbed by other cards. They feel that The Hermit card in particular had all of those qualities, so perhaps Prudence simply wasn’t necessary.
In modern terms, we could say that her job description was eliminated. Which sounds like bullshit, doesn’t it?
My personal theory is that Prudence may have been just a little too Pagan for their purposes. It’s a very strange card. The image of a woman, a snake and a mirror conjure up memories of mythological creatures like Medusa or Hathor. Perhaps the artist who created the Visconti-Sforza deck was tipping his hand a little too much with this depiction and they needed to hide her.
Whatever the reason, Prudence faded into obscurity, leaving the Tarot a little leaner, but much more mysterious.
PROBLEMS FOR THE OCCULTISTS
The presence of Prudence would have created a major problem for the Victorian occultists – who really brought the Tarot back to life – had they known about her.
They were bound and determined that there was some secret, ancient path hidden away in the Tarot cards and – by god – they were going to find it. In the 19th century, Eliphas Levi had correlated the 22 cards of the Major Arcana with the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. He went on to create an elaborate system where he divided the 22 cards into three groups of 7, which echoed the Kabbalistic Tree of Life.
Arthur Edward Waite, who published the Waite deck that we’re all so familiar with, was so determined to make the deck fit into a numerology scheme that he actually changed the order of the cards. He flipped the numbers so that Strength took the place of Justice and Justice became Strength. Who cares about history, right?
And, after all of the many years they put into organizing the 22 cards of the Major Arcanum into tidy systems, it turns out there were actually 23 cards.
Well, hell.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
The disappearance of Prudence is more than just a historical footnote. It reminds us that our knowledge of the Tarot is constantly evolving and it leaves some tantalizing questions.
Why did this ONE card disappear, and not the other virtue cards?
Was the Tarot truly designed as a mystical system disguised as a game?
Does it carry Egyptian or even Atlantean symbols that were concealed from the religious authorities?
The mystery endures and the Tarot invites us to keep looking.
Just the Tarot 