The Equinox (Volume I, Number X)

THE KEY OF THE MYSTERIES they did not know how to employ it properly, and used it solely for fortune-telling. The game of chess, attributed to Palamedes, has no other origin than the Tarot, and one finds there the same combina- tions and the same symbols: the king, the queen, the knight, the soldier, the fool, the tower, and houses representing numbers. In old times, chess-players sought upon their chess-board the solution of philosophical and religious problems, and argued silently with each other in manceuvring the hieroglyphic characters across the numbers. Our vulgar game of goose, revived from the old Grecian game, and also attributed to Palamedes, is nothing but a chess-board with motionless figures and numbers movable by means of dice. It is a Tarot disposed in the form of a wheel, for the use of aspirants to initiation. Now, the word Tarot, in which one finds “rota” and ‘‘tora,” itself expresses, as William Postel has demonstrated, this primitive disposition in the form of a wheel. The hieroglyphs of the game of goose are simpler than those of the Tarot, but one finds the same symbols in it: the juggler, the king, the queen, the tower, the devil or Typhon, death, and so on. The dice-indicated chances of the game represent those of life, and conceal a highly philosophical sense sufficiently profound to make sages meditate, and simple enough to be understood by children. The allegorical personage Palamedes is, however, identical with Enoch, Hermes, and Cadmus, to whom various mytho- logies have attributed the invention of letters. But, in the conception of Homer, Palamedes, the man who exposed the fraud of Ulysses and fell a victim to his revenge, represents 02 195