A Thursday Note (8.19)
Jessie Weston/Sylvia Plath + the mysterious George Wald
I planned this Thursday email because the Tuesday edition was rather hasty. But as fate would have it, I found several things I’m keen to share.
First some EP news:
Now available—The Makers of Modern Tarot: Dead Ends and New Horizons. This is the last part of Chapter 3 from The Tarot: History, Mystery, and Lore—and I had the opportunity to correct some things in the original text that were not exactly wrong . . . but not quite right!
I’ve also updated About the History of Tarot: 1400-1925, adding links to all the Chapter 3 parts. If you’d like to revisit the stories in order, find one in particular, or share the series with others—start here!
Now some things I did not know:
One problem with the text of History, Mystery, and Lore is that fairly often I could not include the kind of details which would add value on various points. “History” was just one of three parts, and it had to include all the highlights from before 1400 to the end of the 20th century. So—not a lot of room to spare for bringing things to life, or making extended connections.
Fast forward, and as far as space goes, I have plenty of luxury in creating these online versions. But not a lot of bandwidth in terms of time. So whenever something in the original text looks thin, or not quite clear, I can nip out to the net, find more or better information, and splice it into the old version—but I can’t weave in everything I come across that might be of interest.
Even when I’m fascinated by something I didn’t know.
I can, however, share some notes and links, so anyone else who’s interested can have a look at what I found. Today I wanted to know more about the background and impact of Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, and I also wanted to vet the passage about the Tower/House of God, attributed by Stuart Kaplan to one “George Wald.” Both the new searches yielded information-treasures.
First: If you want to know more about Jessie Laidlay Weston, the best source I found is Angela Jane Weisl’s “By Her Works Shall Ye Know Her: The Quest for Jessie L. Weston (1850-1928).” It’s included in Jane Chance’s collection Women Medievalists and the Academy—which is generously previewed on Google Books. Though there’s nothing substantive about Tarot in Weisl’s essay, Weston’s personal/professional story is very interesting on its own.
But my prize find in this category was the 2017 blog post “From Ritual to Romance: Plath’s Pagan Primer (w/Tarot too!)” by Julia Gordon-Bramer. I had a general notion that poet Sylvia Plath was interested in esoteric topics, but have never studied her work closely—so I had no idea about the extent of her engagement. Gordon-Bramer offers an inviting introduction here, and apparently has written much more in this vein, so I look forward to further explorations.
Second: Way back in 2009, the inimitable Michael J. Hurst kindly solved the mystery of “George Wald”—who is quoted by Stuart Kaplan, but not cited. I quoted the quote in History, Mystery, but couldn’t track down it’s origins. (In “those days” doing research was just a lot harder!) Obviously I’m late in finding this out, but very pleased to know that George Wald was a Nobel Prize-winning biologist, who wrote an unpublished manuscript on Tarot that he apparently shared with Kaplan.
I would so love to read the whole thing, but MJH (who has since passed away) did not say where it might be found. He did, however, quote at length concerning Wald’s Tarot “discovery story”—which as so often happens, occurred in an unexpected way. Wald explains:
I was introduced to the tarot through a strange experience coming from a quite different direction. Some years ago I found in the Dutch city of Delft a series of eighteenth-century Biblical tiles showing Jesus as a beardless androgyne. . . .
From time to time over the years I have tried to determine what might have impelled the simple, probably illiterate workmen who made those tiles, or the customers who purchased them, to think of Jesus in that way, so breaking with the icon of the bearded Christ that had been traditional for over a millennium. Christ with a beard appeared in the role of teacher and sufferer, as contrasted with the beardless (although very rare) Christ Triumphant, in which he is portrayed as the Son of God, transfigured from the Son of Man (Didron, 1851 ). Michelangelo's Christ in Judgment portrayed a youthful, unbearded and athletic type of Jesus.
One day I came upon that pathetic androgyne again, this time in a reproduction of tarot card XXI The World, in the deck by Payen, dated 1713. It was beyond question the figure of Jesus, as demonstrated by its similarity to the Christ of the Vievil deck, the presence of the four creatures, and the traditional mandorla (Italian for "almond"), the two-pointed oval that frames the figure.
This quoted passage is included in a much longer discussion on the Tarot History Forum (of course), so have a look if you are curious about—well, hard to narrow that down very much. And fair warning, there are 78 long posts in this thread. But if your personal interests ever cross the History path, you will really enjoy the level of detail and cheerful debate.
Finally: I have two more things to share in the history space, but one is from 1300 and one is from 1954. Notes about both in the next newsletter—meanwhile, though, I have a tease from the Beinecke Library’s richly illustrated devotional, known as the Rothschild Canticle:
This is one of several images in the book that made me think of Tarot—I’ll share more next week. Briefly, though, I’m fascinated because this book is securely dated at about 1300, which is certainly more than a century before the earliest Tarots. And in any case, the painted Tarots used a completely different image for the Star than printed Tarots of the Marseilles type.
Many Marseilles-type decks—like the 1650ish Noblet (shown below)—feature a figure pouring water from two jars, along with several trees arranged in the background. I’m wondering whether there might be a hidden connection . . .
And there you have it for the Thursday “bonus” newsletter! C