Makers of Modern Tarot: New Horizons

Grail myth and Fourth-Way mysticism--with a glimpse of physics and poetry . . .

So far in “Makers of Modern Tarot” . . .

The Golden Dawn arose as the most influential secret society of the late 19th century, then fragmented in the early 20th century--undone to a great extent by the opposing personalities and theories of two men. (Catch up in Complicated Beginnings and Seeds and Splinters.)

The men were, of course, Arthur Edward Waite and Aleister Crowley.  So we pick up first with a closer look at their respective Tarot decks.  Then—beyond the aftermath of the Golden Dawn to an almost equally influential idea from another source.

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However different they may have been temperamentally and philosophically, Waite and Crowley had some things in common. Both were concerned with the Tarot as a symbolical tool, and they studied it in a practical rather than a theoretical way, believing that the use of the Tarot images could be a path to knowledge and transformation.

But their two decks—which arrived more than three decades apart—were as different as they could possibly be, both aesthetically and intellectually. From a design perspective, the Waite-Smith deck is rendered in primary colors, with a cheerful, open, almost naïve style, while the Crowley-Harris “Thoth” deck is haunting, swirling, colored in beautifully eerie shades, filled with barely veiled sexuality.

Waite’s pictures are crowded from border to border with traditional symbols, and everything from the pattern on a dress to the color of a flower is intended to be highly meaningful; Crowley's pictures, on the other hand, depend not on conventional symbolism but on an atmosphere of strangeness, which makes it seem as if each card is a peephole into another world.

Crowley’s reputation for extremities of thought and behavior is so fully developed that it is something of a surprise to read his Book of Thoth. There he gives a semi-restrained account of the Golden Dawn and its misadventures, in addition to a literate, informative, and very readable exploration of all the Tarot cards.

The theories he presents are far from being bizarre (at least from our contemporary point of view), and if they had been attributed to someone other than the notorious character described in British tabloids as "the wickedest man in the world," they would probably have been viewed quite differently.

The originality of Crowley's approach is especially visible in his use of the “new science" to elaborate his ideas. By the time of Crowley’s later writings, the theories of Einstein, Planck, and Heisenberg were already well-known, and The Book of Thoth was the first work in which the Tarot was approached in a post-Newtonian framework.

The following passage demonstrates that Crowley had quickly understood what was to dawn only slowly upon others:

The essence of Science today is far more mysterious than the cloudiest speculations of Leibnitz, Spinoza or Hegel; the modem definition of Matter reminds one irresistibly of the definition of Spirit given by such mystics as Ruysbroeck, Boehme and Molinos The idea of the Universe in the mind of a modem mathematicians is singularly reminiscent of the ravings of William Blake.

Traces of Crowley’s distinctive scientific interest are to be found throughout The Book of Thoth and in the designs of the Thoth deck. The twenty-first trump, for example, which Crowley calls The Universe," includes among its symbols “the skeleton plan of the building of the house of Matter. It shows the ninety-two known chemical elements, arranged according to their rank in the hierarchy."

Crowley adds that “the design is due to the genius of the late J.W.N. Sullivan,” who was among the first science journalists. Sullivan was also part of a social group that included such notable figures as painter Wyndham Lewis, critic John Middleton Murray, poet T. S. Eliot, and writer Aldous Huxley—all of whom were interested in the interplay of philosophical thought and the new physics.

It would be fascinating to know where Crowley might have taken his speculations on science and Tarot. However, The Book of Thoth was published only a year before his death in 1945.  And at the time, it seemed little more than a belated finale to occultism's golden age.

The creative spirit of occult inquiry that flourished early in the century had, like so much else, been dimmed by the social and political tensions of the world between the two great wars. As A. E. Waite expressed it years later:

The War of 1914 engulfed all the Schools and all their brave imaginings; and when it was in fine suspended by the figurative peace of Versailles, the Schools emerged but slowly from the weltering chaos and were shorn of their chief personalities, their adornments and appeal.

Waite made this observation in 1930, in the introduction to a new work by French occultist A. E. Thierens, titled The General Book of the Tarot . Its publication marked a return of the French influence in Tarot studies, already evidenced by the appearance in 1927 of a new deck and book--Le tarot des imagiers du moyen-âge--by none other than Oswald Wirth, one-time associate of Stanislaus De Guaita.

But although these works were “new" in the sense of being published for the first time, there was little innovative about them. Both Wirth and Thierens were squarely in the French tradition, as descended from Eliphas Levi—reworking familiar ideas, as the momentum of the occult revival steadily diminished.

Nonetheless, Thieren’s book—which was reissued in a 1975 American edition under the title Astrology and the Tarot—is still interesting today in that it juxtaposes the interpretations of Papus, Mathers, and Waite.

The Golden Dawn methodology and lineage certainly dominated Tarot thought in the early 20th century, just as Levi’s approach had dominated the late 19th century. But there were other developments taking place as well. In 1910— the same year that Waite’s Pictorial Key was published—a young Russian produced an unusual pamphlet titled The Symbolism of the Tarot: Philosophy of Occultism in Pictures and Numbers.

P. D. Ouspensky, the best- known follower of the mystic Gurdjieff, departed significantly from the usual emphasis on Kabbalah, replacing the Tree of Life with this more Christian metaphysical schema:

Now, if we imagine twenty-two cards disposed in the shape of a triangle, seven cards on each side, a point in the center of the triangle represented by the zero card, and a square round the triangle (the square consisting of fifty-six cards, fourteen on each side), we shall have a representation of the relation between God, Man and the Universe, or the relation between the world of ideas, the consciousness of man and the physical world.

The triangle is God (the Trinity) or the world of ideas, or the noumenal world. The point is man’s soul. The square is the visible, physical or phenomenal world. Potentially, the point is equal to the square, which means that all the visible world is contained in man’s consciousness, is created in man’s soul. And the soul itself is a point having no dimension in the world of the spirit, symbolized by the triangle.

Ouspensky went on to offer a cycle of meditations based on the trumps. His ideas on the Tarot, which show considerable influence from Oswald Wirth, were expanded in his book A New Model of the Universe, published in England in 1930.

Meanwhile, a quite different line of Tarot inquiry had been given new impetus in England by Jesse L. Weston’s influential study of the Grail legends, From Ritual to Romance, published in 1920. Weston’s work is best known for being referenced in notes written by T. S. Eliot to accompany his epic poem, “The Waste Land”—even though Eliot later downplayed his use of the text.

But for students of the Tarot, Weston’s book is of interest because it takes up and expands A. E. Waite’s notion that the four suits of the Tarot minor arcana are analogues of the four Grail Hallows.

Waite had published a large volume entitled The Hidden Church of the Holy Graal: Its Legends and Symbolism in 1909.  It contained a chapter describing “The Hallows of the Graal Mystery Rediscovered in the Talismans of the Tarot.”

Weston used this Tarot connection in support of her argument that the symbolic objects—cup (or dish), lance, sword, and stone—represented in the Medieval Grail romances are similar to the four treasures of Celtic lore— cauldron, spear, sword, and stone—because both are fragmentary records of the secret rituals of an ancient fertility cult.

Weston contends:

We have . . . evidence that these four objects do, in fact, form a special group entirely independent of any appearance in Folk-lore or Romance. They exist today as the four suits of the Tarot.

To reinforce this idea, Weston quotes from a private correspondence with William Butler Yeats, in which he wrote:

(1) Cup, Lance, Dish, Sword, in slightly varying forms, have never lost their mystic significance, and are to-day a part of magical operations. (2) The memory kept by the four suits of the Tarot, Cup, Lance, Sword, Pentangle (Dish), is an esoterical notation for fortune-telling purposes.

The details of Weston's theory about the origins of the Grail lore have not proven too durable in the light of later scholarship, but her general approach was very provocative. By combining anthropological scholarship with literary criticism, Weston opened up new territory which has been richly developed by scholars in recent years. Moreover, by treating the Tarot as a symbol system, rather than as an occult instrument, Weston widened the context of Tarot inquiry.

The connection of the Tarot with the Grail material has suggested some interesting ideas—such as Tarot scholar George Wald’s explanation of the mysterious Tower card, which was originally called “The House of God”:

The card portrays one of the most striking incidents in the legends surrounding King Arthur and his knights and the Holy Grail... the “dolorous” stroke struck in the Grail Castle—the House of God—by one of Arthur’s knights, the luckless Sir Balin.

According to Sir Thomas Malory’s account of the incident in Le Morte d Arthur, when Sir Balin smote King Pellam with the Grail spear, which he had discovered in the Castle Tower, “therewith the castle roof and walls broke and fell to the earth." The wound received by King Pellam would not heal, and he became the Fisher King, whose illness and impotence brought disaster to his people and turned his realm into the Waste Land.

The Emperor and The Hanged Man have been associated by some with the Fisher King, before and after his wound. “Although the Arthurian cycle of legends concerned Britain," Wald points out, “it was read by Italians and French as well, and, indeed, was known throughout Europe as a subject of art."

(George Wald was a Nobel Prize-winning biologist who took an interest in the history and symbolism of Tarot. These remarks, from Wald's unpublished manuscript, are quoted in Stuart Kaplan's Encyclopedia of Tarot, Volume Two.)

There seems good reason to see some influence of the Grail legends at work in the Tarot, and nothing contradicts the idea. But the influence may go back even further, to connections with the Celtic treasures, as Weston proposed, and to other pagan motifs as well. In recent years, the pagan background of the Tarot has been developed by a whole group of theorists who will be discussed in the next chapter.

Though Weston’s speculations added a valuable new dimension to theories about Tarot symbolism, most of the Tarot books published in England and France between the two World Wars added very little to Tarot theory. For the most part, they were elaborations of ideas that had been formulated during the fertile Golden Dawn period--and though the authors sometimes gave new twists to these old ideas, the creativity of the European approach to Tarot was fading.

In its place came new energy, from an unexpected source. For the first half of this century, much of the innovation and animation of the occult movement was no longer to be found in London or Paris.  Where then? Los Angeles, California!

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So the course of Tarot history turns now to different shores, and “The Transformation of Tarot.”