August 10, 2022
Flashback . . .
One of last week’s Notes started off with a mention of Peter Bebergel’s Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll. I didn’t get to mention then that the book contains another interesting Tarot-related story—this one about John Starr Cooke and the iconic T: New Tarot deck.
Bebergel offers a fascinating look back at Tarot’s role in one of the 20th century’s pivotal events, so I’m going to quote most of it here:
The idea for the Human Be-In was born in a conversation between two counterculture occult artists, John Starr Cooke and Michael Bowen, the art editor and one of the founders—along with the poet Allen Cohen—of the San Francisco Oracle. Bowen was deeply schooled in theosophy and other esoteric philosophies and his artwork might now be described as belonging to the Visionary tradition. He was an outsider artist who routed his attunement to mystical frequencies onto canvas.
Cooke, born to a wealthy family in Hawaii, had started using tarot cards as a child when he inadvertently purchased a deck, thinking it an ordinary pack of cards. As an adult, Cooke became involved in Scientology, Sufism, and eventually Subud, an esoteric spiritual practice. . . .
Cooke and Bowen were both convinced a new age was dawning. Guided by answers received on a Ouija board from an entity known as “One,” Cooke “channeled" the images for what he understood to be an important new interpretation of the tarot, one that Cooke believed had been prophesied by Madame Blavatsky. The deck, T: New Tarot (often referred to as New Tarot for the Aquarian Age), was first presented as a series of posters, published by the psychedelic- poster company East Totem West and showcased in the August 1967 issue of the Oracle.
The Human Be-In turned into a gathering of over thirty thousand hippies and counterculture elites on January 14, 1967, at Golden Gate Park. It was here that LSD prophet Timothy Leary made his famous pronouncement: “Turn on, tune in, drop out," a message that would become Walt Whitman's “barbaric yawp" of the hippies. Leary later remarked that this was his version of Aleister Crowley s own call to spiritual liberation: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."
I’ll let that passage stand for itself—and flip to another (quite funny) story about Cooke and his Tarot. This came up in an old EP post about Ken Kesey:
Poet Maureen Hurley, who was sort of accidentally involved with the Tarot/counterculture connection, shared this recollection on her blog:
“Ken Kesey once sent me rather unusually inscribed checks to purchase some new age tarot cards I was selling. My job at Western Star Press, located in the basement of Alice Kent’s big Victorian house in Kentfield, was sorting tarot decks.”
It seems some malfunction at the printing plant had jumbled hundreds of decks into one huge pile, and Maureen had to find a proper sequence of 78 cards from the pile to fill each order. (I love imagining this!)
That was in 1971, and the deck in question seems to have been John Cooke and Rosalind Sharpe’s T: The New Tarot, which was marketed as “a Tarot for the Aquarian Age.” (The design of the cards is very hard to characterize, so have a look here.)
See you tomorrow. C