Visconti-Sforza Tarot: The Judgment Card
Backstory:
I encountered the Visconti-Sforza tarot deck in a small tarot shop in Milan called Il Meneghello. The shop was long and narrow. The front part displayed various tarot decks. The back was the shop owner’s tarot-drawing workstation. He remains one of the last few tarot artists in the world, and one of the most well-known ones, who still paints tarot cards by hand.
Not far from the shop is Sforzesco Castle, where the Visconti-Sforza tarot was invented as playing cards in the 15th century. Only three original decks have survived until today and one of them is housed at the Morgan Library in New York.
At the shop, I first noticed a different deck, something a bit more whimsical and less daunting, so to speak, than the Visconti-Sforza deck. But the shop owner kept pointing me to it. His daughter came to translate for him. I forgot our conversation, but I did remember hesitating about buying the Visconti-Sforza deck, even though the tarot artist seemed to think it was a good deck for me.
The Visconti-Sforza tarot was one of the earliest complete tarot decks, if not the earliest, and inspired later decks that were created for divination. That and the fact that the tarot shop was right next to where the deck was invented (Sforzesco Castle is widely considered the birthplace of tarot) made the encounter feel very romantic in hindsight. At the time, I had no problem deciding on the purchase of the whimsical deck that delighted me. But I wasn’t ready for the Visconti-Sforza deck right away. I left the shop, took a short walk, found a place to sit and did a bit of meditation. I pulled a card from the deck that I had just bought. All of this propelled me to go back and get the limited-edition Visconti-Sforza deck handmade by the tarot shop owner. After I bought the deck, I took it on a stroll through Sforzesco Castle.
The Card:
A while ago (this is a few years after I bought the deck), the idea of writing about the Major Arcana in this deck came to me. It is a daunting task, so I will just start with one card and see where the writing leads me. What I drew was The Judgment.
The Judgment card says to me:
“What translates through you is not personal. There are personal and impersonal aspects of operating in this world.”
My take on this message:
Intuition is personal and impersonal. The personal part is the specificity of an ask: “what would work best for me in this situation?” The impersonal part is sometimes the ingenuity of an answer that can feel out of left field but make sense somehow. The impersonal part is also a teaching from the the Diamond Sutra: “应无所住而生其心.” (“[Ones] should use their minds spontaneously and naturally, without being constrained by preconceived notions arising from the senses.”).
Trust connects the impersonal to the personal. And when they become fluid parts of an operation, weight dissipates, as in: one no longer lives with the heaviness that’s coming from incessant thinking. One may also call this trust faith. With faith, one lives with less doubt, and life becomes lighter also.
