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A week of lore . . . .
The August experiment continues with excerpts from Part Three of History, Mystery and Lore. I’ll be revisiting some of the lesser-known Tarot books that were reviewed in the Lore section. Each entry contains my own impression, followed by a quote from the book.
I’m not revising the original texts, but will add a note of update/expansion after each one. However—I doubt whether any of the other “notes” will equal this one in surprise value! Serendipity at work (as usual).
Hasbrouck, Muriel. Tarot and Astrology. Inner Traditions, 1987.
This book, originally published as The Pursuit of Destiny, is a complete departure from typical Tarot books, but it is surprisingly interesting nonetheless. Hasbrouck discovered, in Israel Regardie’s published version of the Golden Dawn papers, a document which inspired her to identify the Tarot pip cards as the key to a system of ten-day cycles, based on the solar year, which she feels offers a more refined approach to defining personalities and their interactions than that of conventional astrology. I was at first suspicious of the whole idea--but every single birthdate I looked up here proved to be remarkably accurate in its description of the person in question. Hasbrouck supplies positive and negative tendencies, along with suggestions tor methods of balancing the two. The style of the book is intelligent and appealing, for the most part, and offers an unusual way of using the Tarot.
The ten-day cycle formula serves to throw new light on the question of why the pack of cards is constituted as it is, who constructed it, and the possible object of its invention. This question, too, requires a chapter to itself, which will be found later in the book. In passing, let us merely recall the rather pertinent statement made by Alice—just as she was growing to her full size, and leaving Wonderland for reality—that the human race is nothing but a pack of cards. Lewis Carroll, who created Alice, was a mathematician in his leisure moments, and many people have suspected that behind the Carroll fantasies lurk hidden truths.
It seems there are plenty of copies available at Amazon, and you can use the “Look Inside” feature to get a good idea of Hasbrouck’s approach.
The author was born Muriel Elizabeth Bruce in 1890, in Canada. She attended college, trained as a classical pianist, and worked as a reporter for a Toronto newspaper. Sometime in the 1920s, she became interested in Theosophy, and began long friendships with Paul Foster Case and other noted esotericists.
I love this note from her correspondence with Israel Regardie:
In 1931, Muriel married Louis Hasbrouck, a Yale graduate who served in both World Wars, ending as a captain in the Air Force. In the years between, he worked on Wall Street.
The Pursuit of Destiny was published in 1941 by E.P. Dutton and Co., and was sold with a deck of 48 cards. By 1978, at least six editions had been published, as well as translations into Spanish and (for some reason) Croatian.
In 1953, Muriel Hasbrouck Inc. produced a line of scents (Amyris, Crusade, Silver Dawn, Passing Hours, Golden Petals) marketed with the tagline “Your Personality in Perfume.”
All the while, however, Muriel was formulating a complex theory of “Space-Time Dynamics,” which she first applied to the prediction of earthquakes and space weather, then to economic trends.
Muriel and Louis provided economic forecast reports to private clients for more than two decades before both passed away at the age of ninety.
The story of what happened to the Hasbroucks’ work after that is almost as complicated as the work itself—and that’s saying a lot! But you can read all about both, here and here.
See you tomorrow. C