The Castle

Across the iconographic vocabulary of the Western mystery stream the castle is the figure of the home not yet reached. Medieval Europe used the word for at least four overlapping things: the seat of a sovereign whose authority radiates from a single tower; the defensive enceinte that decides who is inside the wall and who is not; the spiritual home, the shape onto which the soul's longing for return projects itself; and, most of all, the unattained goal — the painted point in the distance toward which the chivalric romance is structured. To read the castle is to admit that the painted scene has somewhere it is meant to end, and that the figure in the foreground is in some specific posture toward that ending.

The structural inheritance the painter is drawing from is the medieval Arthurian quest. Chrétien's Grail castle in the 1180s is the originating image: the Fisher King's hall, encountered once and lost, is the unreached home that the rest of the hero's life is organised around. By the time of Malory's 1485 Le Morte d'Arthur the convention is settled — Camelot at the centre, the surrounding castles of trial and refuge, Galahad and Perceval and Lancelot each defined less by what they wear than by what they are riding toward. By the time Wagner writes Parsifal in 1882, Montsalvat — the high castle where the Grail is kept — is read as a figure of the inner home that asks an entire life of wandering before its gates will be recognised. The painter who places a small towered shape on the far hill of a 1909 tarot is invoking eight hundred years of that convention: the soul has a home, and the home is at altitude, and the road is the body of the picture.

The castle is one of the few symbols that distributes itself almost as a typology. Four cards in the Rider-Waite-Smith deck place a castle in their painted scene, and the remarkable thing about that quartet is that it constitutes a complete spectrum of the relationships a figure can hold to her unreached home. On the Five of Cups the castle stands across the river, with a bridge already built — the figure has turned away from a home that is still there and still reachable, and the iconographic claim is that grief is sometimes the inability to look up. On the King of Pentacles the castle stands at the edge of the garden, behind and slightly to the right of the seated king — a home already attained, a stability so settled that he need not look at it to know it is there. On the Eight of Swords the castle stands on the far hill, behind the bound and blindfolded figure on the marshy plain — a home she has left, the system whose rules she once helped make, now visible only as something she is still obeying though she has walked beyond its wall. On the Ace of Wands the castle stands at the far end of the landscape, ahead of the freshly leafing staff — a home not yet reached, painted small enough that the foreground gift does not have to compete with it, but always present so that the gift is understood as having a destination.

Read across these four cards together and the symbol resolves into one statement of unusual clarity. The deck does not paint a castle to fill the corner; it paints a castle to assign each figure a specific posture toward home. Five of Cups: home left, still reachable — the grief of not turning around. King of Pentacles: home attained, no longer questioned — the stability of arrived life. Eight of Swords: home left, no longer wanted, but still legislating — the bondage of a system one has technically walked out of. Ace of Wands: home not yet reached, freshly oriented — the staff sprouts knowing where its road ends. There are exactly four relationships a person can hold to her unreached home, and the deck has painted all four. This is not a coincidence; it is a small piece of design.

The castle's iconographic depth predates tarot by several centuries and is layered from at least three streams. From the practical military architecture of medieval Europe comes the literal castle — keep, curtain wall, gatehouse, towered enceinte — the home of a sovereign whose authority is built into stone. From the courtly literature of the high Middle Ages comes the romance castle — the Fisher King's hall in Chrétien de Troyes' Perceval (1180s), the trial-and-refuge castles of Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur (1485), the towered habitations of allegory in The Romance of the Rose. From the late nineteenth century, just before Smith painted the deck, comes Wagner's Parsifal (1882) and its Montsalvat — the high castle where the Grail is kept and to which the wandering hero must finally return. By 1909 these three streams had been fused for centuries: the painted castle on a tarot card is at once a real keep, a romance destination, and an inner home, and the painter is not required to disambiguate.

Pamela Colman Smith's particular contribution is the reduction. She paints the castle small — a few towers on the far hill, a bridge across the middle distance, an outline against the horizon — and lets that smallness do the work. A castle painted close would be the figure's present circumstance; a castle painted far is the figure's relationship to her unreached home. The decision to paint it always far is what allows the four castle cards to read as the typology they form.