F ever a book should be written on the Romance of
Symbolism, its hypothesis of interpretation, its traditional and
imputed histories, a considerable space would be allotted assuredly
to Tarot-cards; while seeing that at this day there is more concern
in the subject than was felt even in the past, there would be a
call not only to survey that which lies behind us, a strange field
of speculation and reverie, but the prospect extending in front,
since every year brings forth some new proposition and provides
material for future imaginative flights. It is very curious to
contrast those comparatively sober terms in which Court de Gebelin
introduced his discovery of the cards,
1 though he sought to prove that their origin was
in Ancient Egypt, with the fantastic declamations of Éliphas Lévi,
who affirmed not only that they were the Alphabet of Enoch, Hermes
Trismegistus and Cadmus but the Gospel of all Gospels, a synthesis
of science and the universal key of the Kabbalah.
De Gebelin was a man of learning at his own period and remained
within the circle of facts, actual or supposed, as he saw and read
them. His successor was a man of extravagant mind, who contemplated
past and future alike through a glass of vision, and so beheld all
faërie unfold its images. The occult happenings of the past became
in the process as much a matter of invention as his own notions.
The inventions were decorative and were even characterised at times
by a magian quality of intuition; but in most cases his record of
past events was like his reading of things to come. His tale of the
Knights Templar, his intimations on the Rosy Cross, his survey of
alchemical literature are in much the same category as his
prognostications about a parliament of nations under an universal
monarchy ruled by a King of France. He discovered the religion
behind all religions, a fountain-source from which they issued in
their day and into which all return. This was the Secret Tradition
of Israel; but it proves to be a Tradition of his own making, which
falsifies all the literature, and he had not read the texts from
which he claimed to draw. He had glanced there and here at a few
records of the subject and distorted them in the magic crystal of
his seership. He took up the Tarot, and just as a cartomancist
shuffles and deals and lays out its picture-symbols for the reading
of things to come, so did he divine their past. He adopted the
speculations of De Gebelin, and they dilated in his own mind. He
dressed up the Trumps Major in Egyptian vestures and affirmed that
he had restored the Tarot in its primitive hieroglyphical form. By
a fortunate chance there had preceded him in 1857 another
fantasiast, J. F. Vaillant, with a gift in etymologies, more
stupefying than anything produced before him.
2 Between them there deployed all Babylon and all
its idols. But Egypt loomed behind Babylon and the Kabbalah behind
Egypt. It is post-Talmudic in unadorned fact, but for them it was
older than Moses and older even than Abraham. In fine, behind the
Kabbalah there was, and remains among us, the Book of Thoth, and
this was the Tarot, within which was the light unlimited of its
endless range of meanings that had never passed into writing but
dwelt implicitly in both, above all in Lévi's mind. And a day came
when he made his great discovery which had never entered previously
into the heart of scholiast or commentator. The Tree of Life in
Kabbalism has 22 Paths by which the Sephiroth or Numerations are
connected one with another and late Kabbalism had married these
Paths to the 22 Letters of the Hebrew Alphabet. But the Tarot
Trumps Major are also 22, and Éliphas Lévi proclaimed another
marriage, constituting a Trinity in unity of Cards and Paths and
Letters. It has been the joy of all Occult hierophants and their
believing disciples through the decades that followed. On all these
Lévi has exercised a great influence in French circles, and seeing
that Tarot expository literature is French almost exclusively, he
calls for consideration at length when estimating expository
values.
It was not in the least needful but was pleasant, if opportunity
offered, to find that there were others before him who knew and had
used to some purpose the Tarot keys. As a fact, there was St. John
on Patmos, the proof being that he wrote his Book of Revelations in
22 chapters. The Apocalypse henceforward, for true initiates,
became an exposition of Tarot Trumps. It had not occurred to Lévi
or to those who followed him that the arrangement of scripture
texts in divisions called chapters is unhappily a late device.
There was also Louis Claude de Saint-Martin, who was one of
les
vrais initiés, and he had written a certain
Tableau,
setting forth the relations between God, Man and the Universe. He
broke it up into numbered parts which reached the same total, so
the
Tableau Naturel arises out of the Tarot and returns
therein. After what manner the cards and the sections belong to one
another in either case, it was not to be expected perhaps that a
French Magus should unfold, though he held the key of all things,
so the allocation remains a mystery even to this day, while the
Lévi successors in France reproduce their master's dogmas from
generation to generation.
Hereof is the Tarot in its literary history, from the pre-French
Revolution
Monde Primitif of Court de Gebelin to the year
1870, when it occurred to P. Christian (Paul Pitois),
ancien
bibliothecaire that the History of Magic might be extended
further, with profit, by the gentle art of invention. The
Franco-Prussian war stood on the threshold of events, Éliphas Lévi
had been silent for five years and was forgotten for the time
being, though still in print. It was safe to borrow something of
his motives and manner, as also from the spectacular findings in
his glass of vision; so Christian borrowed accordingly, and his
tale of
La Fatalité à travers les temps et les peuples is
the
Histoire de la Magie of Lévi, retold after another
manner and with more liberal and frequent appeal to the repertory
of the Father of Lies. Christian had none of those literary gifts
which adorn the pages of Lévi, but his inventions are highly
sensational and often microscopical in detail. It seems probable
even that, like his predecessor, he began by convincing himself (
a) that things should have happened in that or in this way
and therefore did, (b) that his divinatory devices foretold the
future, at least now and then. It is precisely this kind of
mischief which begets itself in others, and altogether I am not
surprised that Christian's
L’Homme Rouge des Tuileries,
which followed--I think--his
Histoire de la Magie, has
become of authority among Grimoires and is sought eagerly, or that
he is still quoted off and on for his Tarot views.
A space of fifteen years elapsed, and
circa 1885 a group
of neo-Martinists began to be formed in Paris, with Papus--Dr.
Gérard Encausse--at their head. As it happened that notwithstanding
the two-and-twenty sections of his
Tableau Naturel,
Saint-Martin contributed nothing to Tarot lore, had in all
probability never glanced at the mysterious card-symbols, and
abandoned early and definitely all occult workings, the Martinism
of the late XIXth century signified, as a name only, that its
followers had their eyes turned to the esoteric tradition of the
West, rather than that of the East, and in their preoccupation were
thinly Christian rather than theosophical in the sense of Modern
Theosophy, through which some of them had passed and had come forth
unsatisfied. The Master in Chief of Papus was always Éliphas Lévi,
to whom his occult notions are referable in the last resource,
whose Kabbalism is his Kabbalism and whose Tarot is his Tarot.
Papus worked indefatigably at these subjects and extended them on
every side, producing great inventions, with a certain laborious
sincerity, as I shall be disposed always to think. But, like those
who preceded and those who have come after him, Papus was an
occultist, not a mystic, and from my point of view the pictorial
symbols of
les imagiers du moyen âge, as Oswald Wirth
terms them, unfold their meanings in this other and higher
light.
The Martinist School, its connections and derivatives, produced
their Tarots,
sub nomine Falconnier,
sub nomine
Alta,
sub nomine Oswald Wirth, and there were yet other
artists and diviners, some borrowing lights from one another and
some kindling an occasional torch or a casual flash on their own
part. The Monographs multiplied, and the Marquis Stanislas de
Guiata produced a sequence of treatises wherein all occultism
unfolded from the Trumps Major. There was no end to the activities,
with the Lévi pageants always in the background and in the
forefront often.
When twenty-five years had elasped in this manner and the Tarot
Bibliography had attained considerable dimensions, 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. The
names of some of them are with us at this day, centered in a little
group at Lyons.
But French occultism, apart from specific schools and incorporated
pretensions, seems very much alive, and Oswald Wirth produced
recently the most decorative Tarot study, so far as form is
concerned, which has appeared since we first heard of the subject.
3 His attention is directed to the Trumps Major
solely and he has little to say on the divinatory side of the
subject, that so-called practical side which engrosses most persons
who would call themselves Tarot students. It is none of my own
business, but it is clear from my knowledge of the literature that
under this aspect there is room for new treatment. Dr. Thierens has
approached it from an astrological standpoint in the work which
these preliminary pages are designed to introduce. I have been led
to do so because very little has been printed previously on the
zodiacal attributions of the cards and because it happens that I am
acquainted with unpublished divinatory methods making use of these
attributions for many years past in one of the occult circles.
4 There is a literature of the Tarot which has not
emerged so far into the light of day and some of it is excessively
curious. It was said of old in a very different connexion:
Quod
tenet nunc teneat donec de medio fiat; and I do not know
whether certain subsisting difficulties will be taken ultimately
out of the way, so that the theoretical and practical speculations
of such circles may be compared with those brought forward in
public ways during recent and earlier years. In this manner we
should have at least the subject general of the Tarot expanded
fully.
Meanwhile Dr. Thierens has approximated more than anyone else
towards a valid interpretation of Tarot Trump Major No. XII, being
the Hanged Man. From Court de Gebelin to Papus and Stanislas de
Guaita, not excluding Oswald Wirth himself, all published exoteric
meanings are utterly remote from the true significance of this most
pregnant symbol. In my
Pictorial Key to the Tarot and in
the Little Key which accompanies Miss Pamela Colman Smith's
complete set of the cards, produced long ago under my own auspices,
there was said concerning it that which was possible at the time. I
will give now one further indication. The human figure of the
symbol is suspended head downward and as such it is comparable to
the Microprosopus or God of Reflections in the so-called Great
Symbol or Double Triangle of Solomon, prefixed by Lévi to this
Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, being the frontispiece
of the first volume.
5 It follows that the true symbol belonging to
Trump Major No. XII, though it is by no means that of Lévi, is not
a Hanged Man at all; but it will continue to be depicted in this
manner unless and until the Greater Arcana are issued by the
authority of another Secret Circle, which so far has never
testified officially concerning itself in the outer channels of
research.
I have said that every year brings forth some new consideration,
and Dr. Thierens promises another work, while the speculation which
has just been adventured speaks of things unattempted and yet
conceived in the mind. There is no intention signified; but I know
what emblems would adorn it. How things will stand with the Tarot
in days to come may loom therefore vaguely; but obviously there are
activities to come. There is, however, one side of the subject on
which no horizon opens. As to where the Trumps Major originated,
how and with whom, there is no conclave of adepts to tell us and no
isolated student, holding evidential warrants. At the moment we can
look only for more speculations and more dreams to come.
ARTHUR EDWARD WAITE.
Footnotes;
1 Monde Primitif, analysé et comparé avec le Monde Moderne, par M.
Court de Gebelin, g vols. The account and examination of the Tarot
will be found in Vol. VIII, published in 1781.
2 Les Romes appeared at the date in question and maintained that
the history of the Tarot is lost in the night of time, but
everything justifies the hypothesis that it is of Indo-Tartarian
origin and that it has been transmitted to modern times by the
Romany tribes of his title.
3 Le Tarot des Imagiers du Moyen Age, 1927, accompanied by a
separative portfolio of coloured plates and with many illustrations
in the text.
4 Oswald Wirth has a short excursus on Astrology at the end of his
work, in which he enumerates the zodiacal implicities allocated to
the four elements, but no Tarot connection is suggested. It is
rather curious that a study of the Sepher Zetzirah in conjunction
with the Tree of Life and the triple marriage effected by Éliphas
Lévi has not produced speculations long since on the astronomical
and astrological correspondences of the Tarot Trumps.
5 See my annotated translation, entitled Transcendental Magic: Its
Doctrine and Ritual, new and revised edition, 1923.