Tarot Time Traveller
Page 18
—Eliphas Lévi, Transcendental Magic 129
We must now take a couple of mid-chapter time travel-hops, so hold on tight and bear with us. The history of tarot is very busy during this time, so we will often get caught in time-vortices.
10:00 am, 3 December, 1861: Paris, France
We arrive in time to locate a young English man walking down the Avenue du Maine, just as he turns into block number 19, a well-appointed brick building of three stories, with a small garden area, porters lodge and a pillared front tower almost symbolic in its nature. We follow the young man as he asks the porter for directions—it seems as if he speaks French as well as his native English—and makes his way to the first floor. He walks along a narrow corridor and turns to the fourth door on the right; at which is a small card sign declaring in Hebrew characters the name of the occupant and the sacred word INRI. The man smiles as he sees that the letters are all drawn in the three elemental colours of red (fire), yellow (air) and blue (water).
He knocks on the door and we wait silently behind him. Shortly, the door is opened by a short and stocky man with what his visitor will later describe as a “rubicund complexion.” He has a thick black beard and moustache as well as a felt hat upturned at the front. The man takes it off in greeting and we see that at some point he has had a tonsure on his scalp, over which new hair is now grown.
After entering and making pleasantries, the two men sit down and talk business; the young man tells his host that he has been collecting much information of the occult game of tarot, and asks if the older man intends indeed to issue a complete set of tarot cards, as he had read in one of the man’s previous books. His host gets up from his chair and takes out from a pile of manuscripts a small volume which contains “twenty years’ of work”; sketches of all twenty-one cards and the Fool amongst other occult symbols and text. He offers it to the younger man with his assistance should his visitor decide to publish a set of tarot cards in England.
The man is Eliphas Lévi. His visitor is the Freemason Kenneth Mackenzie, member of the S.R.I.A., and the most likely author of the manuscript that will be the basis of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn some twenty-seven years after this meeting. 130
As Lévi proves to be such an important nexus in our time-stream, we will also hop to 1896, where we find his work is being appreciated by a later founder member of the Golden Dawn.
6:00 pm, 7 February, 1896: London, England
We find ourselves stood again in a small apartment, this time in London rather than Paris, watching a man complete a manuscript ready for publication. We are beginning to realise that the history of tarot is being written at many such desks as much as across the tables of actual tarot card readers, who are now in a parallel stream to such esoteric writing.
The manuscript is an edition of Eliphas Lévi’s Magical Ritual of the Sanctum Regnum (Holy Kingdom), and it has been translated and prepared for publication by W. W. Westcott, one of the three founder members of the Golden Dawn, who is sat at his desk even now, completing the preface.
He completes his writing by hoping that his “little volume” will have a “cordial reception” by a “large [a] circulation” in readership. Unfortunately, we know from the future that such a readership will not be found for this work, other than a few members of the Golden Dawn, including a certain A. E. Waite, who will write that Westcott deserves praise for his rendering of Levi’s work, which Waite sees might provide a “kind of syllabus” for Lévi’s later books.
The volume also contains eight coloured plates, several of which illustrate images that Waite would draw upon soon for his own “delightful experiment” in the tarot. One of these is a hand holding a sword out of a cloud, illustrating “the magical sword.” Another direct influence is the illustration of the “Wheel of Ezekiel” which bears the letters TARO, the alchemical symbols, and other design features Waite will copy in his own designs given to Pamela Colman Smith.
However, there is a deeper influence; in one illustration, “Le Cherub de Jekeskiel,” found in his Magical Ritual of the Sanctum Regnum, Lévi hand-wrote upon the illustration the names of the sephiroth of the Tree of Life. These indicate that the image corresponded to (or was drawn deliberately with) the locations of the Tree of Life matching sections of the image. This is a central idea picked up across the Golden Dawn materials and by Waite himself, a fact more clearly evident in his second tarot, the Waite-Trinick. In that deck, the illustration designs are overlaid onto a secret template of the Tree of Life. 131
Tarot materials were in short supply at the time for the members of the Golden Dawn, and Westcott’s list of references shows us how the time-stream of tarot is connected at this point and passed onto the English esotericists: Court de Gébelin, Etteilla, Eliphas Lévi, Paul Christian, Papus, and Oswald Wirth.
There are also two interesting historical compendiums listed by Westcott: A Descriptive Catalogue of Playing and other Cards in the British Museum, by W. H. Wiltshire in 1876, and Facts and Speculations on the Origin and History of Playing Cards, by W. A. Chatto, far earlier in 1848.
Before we look at Lévi’s work and its influence on Waite—and on Crowley—we note that Westcott states clearly (for his likely intended audience in the Golden Dawn) that “the twenty-two Tarot Trumps bear a relation to numbers and to letters” whilst suggesting that the attributions given by Lévi, Christian, and Papus are incorrect when compared to what he certainly alluded to the Golden Dawn teachings in the Cypher manuscript.
A Doctrine of Tarot
It is not often mentioned that Lévi also made his living for a while as a poet and originally as an illustrator. He could deftly summarise the correspondences of kabbalah and tarot, and in doing so, created a template for the Golden Dawn teachings and inspired Crowley’s later mystical poetry where it was often based on a tarot or Kabbalistic correspondence.
We will here list Levi’s correspondences for the twenty-two letters and tarot cards.
[Aleph] A conscious, active cause in all we see.
[Beth] And number proves the living unity.
[Gimel] No bound hath He who doth the whole contain.
[Daleth] But, all preceding, fills life’s vast domain.
[Heh] Sole worthy worship, He, the only Lord,
[Vau] Doth his true doctrine to clean hearts accord.
[Zayin] But since faith’s works a single pontiff need,
[Cheth] One law have we, and at one altar plead;
[Teth] Eternal God for aye their base upholds.
[Yod] Heaven and man’s days alike his rule enfolds.
[Kaph] In mercy rich, in retribution strong,
[Lamed] His people’s King he will upraise ere long.
[Mem] The tomb gives entrance to the promised land,Death only ends; life’s vistas still expand.
These doctrines sacred, pure, and steadfast shine;
And thus we close our number’s scale divine.
[Nun] Good angels all things temper and assuage,
[Samekh] While evil spirits burst with wrath and rage.
[Ayin] God doth the lightning rule, the flame subdue.
[Peh] His word controls both Vesper and her dew.
[Tzaddi] He makes the moon our watchman through the night.
[Qoph] And by his sun renews the world in light.
[Resh] When dust to dust returns, his breath can call
20 or 21. [Shin] Life from the tomb which is the fate of all.
21 or 22. [Tau] His crown illuminates the mercy seat,
And glorifies the cherubs at his feet. 132
We will see how these correspondences can be used following a brief overview of the minor arcana.
The Kabbalah of the Minor Arcana
Levi also provides a further analysis of the minor arcana of the tarot with the kabbalah. He creates a correspondence between the four suit
s and the letters Yod + Heh + Vau + Heh which make the divine name YHVH as follows:
Clubs (Wands) = Masculine Yod [Creation, Man]
Cups = Feminine Heh [Mercy, Love, Woman]
Swords = Vau, the conjunction of Yod and Heh [Force, Child]
Coins/Pentacles = Heh (final), circle [Completion, World]
We have added a selection of contemporary keywords in square brackets above to provide a straightforward way of blending the suits with the card numbers as we will describe below.
Having created these correspondences, he is then able to extend them into the ten sephiroth of the Tree of Life through the ten cards in each suit. In the list below we have amended the names of the sephiroth to keep them consistent in this present book, as Lévi had a few alternative spellings. In square brackets, we have added keywords which will prove useful in the following exercises.
1. Kether [Crowning, Point, Unity, Source]
The four aces.
Four brilliant beams adorn his crown of flame.
2. Chokmah [Wisdom, Duality, Pair, Energy, Father, Force]
The four twos.
Four rivers ever from his wisdom flow.
3. Binah [Intelligence, Understanding, Structure, Mother, Form]
The four threes.
Four proofs of his intelligence we know.
4. Chesed [Mercy, Love, Expansion, Boundless]
The four fours.
Four benefactions from his mercy come.
5. Geburah [Justice, Severity, Organization, Power]
The four fives.
Four times four sins avenged his justice sum.
6. Tiphereth [Beauty, Harmony, Balance, Self, Centre]
The four sixes.
Four rays unclouded make his beauty known.
7. Netzach [Conquest, Victory, Nature, Cycles]
The four sevens.
Four times his conquest shall in song be shewn.
8. Hod [Triumph, Reverberation, Echo, Thought]
The four eights.
Four times he triumphs on the timeless plane.
9. Yesod [Foundation, Dream, Image, Vision]
The four nines.
Foundations four his great white throne maintain.
10. Malkuth [Kingdom, Matter, Material, Action, Manifestation]
The four tens.
One fourfold kingdom owns his endless sway,
As from his crown there streams a fourfold ray. 133
Having laid out these two systems of correspondence between the Suits and the ten cards in each suit, Lévi is then able to provide a “Kabbalistic meaning” for each card, and thus set the template for the Golden Dawn, Waite, Crowley, Zain, Case, and all similar systems down the time-stream.
He gives the example of the 5 of Clubs, which by correspondence is the “Geburah of Yod,” or the “justice (Geburah) of the Creator (Yod)” and on a lesser plane, the “wrath of man.” He suggests this system allows us to “understand how the ancient pontiffs proceeded to make the oracle speak.” 134 We can see how the Golden Dawn later arrived at the title “Lord of Strife” for this card and it passed on to Crowley in the Thoth tarot as “strife,” and to Pamela Colman Smith as an image of her friends trying to erect a trellis-work together in mock theatrical and good-natured argument.
Similarly, then, the 7 of Cups will be “the victory (Netzach) of Mercy (Heh)” or “the triumph of woman”; which becomes more negatively in the Golden Dawn, “illusionary success.” The Golden Dawn Book T description of the card includes “violence against women” although Crowley turns this around again in his own card, “Debauch,” a self-imposed weakness arising from a lack of balance, even “prostitution” in its widest sense.
Exercises
You can now use the keywords we have given to create your own prompts for journaling, creating new writing, or the actual reading of the cards.
1. Journaling
Select a card such as the 6 of Pentacles and contemplate the combination of keywords. This would be Beauty (6) and Completion (Pentacles). What is the “beauty of completion”? What comes to mind when you hear that phrase? What feelings does it invoke; positive or negative? What is the best thing about it? What is the worst thing?
2. Create New Writing
To prompt creative writing, we suggest arranging the keywords in different ways to suggest a title for writing, such as with the 6 of Pentacles, “a Complete Beauty” or perhaps “the Completion of Beauty.”
You might also take a pair of cards, and contrast them, such as the 8 of Wands and the 4 of Cups which would be “Triumph of Creation (or Man)” and “Mercy (4) of Mercy (Cups).” If we mash those up a bit, we might write something called “Mercy Squared” or a story about a triumphant man who must show mercy to someone who once did the same for him.
Another prompt is to create poetry or stanzas, epigrams or other pithy statements based on a card or pair of cards. If we took the 9 of Swords and the 3 of Wands, we would have “Foundation of Force” and the “Intelligence of Creation.” We can turn this into a couplet:
Before any force is applied to a foundation,
We must know the process of its creation.
This suggests that before we disrupt, undo, or break something down, even in a positive way, we should take a moment to understand how it was created and built in the first place. This will make it far more efficient when we apply ourselves to the task.
3. Apply in a Reading
When you next do a reading, try applying these Kabbalistic keywords to your cards. So, if the outcome card was the 6 of Pentacles again, it would be the “beauty of completion.” Take the three-minute tarot template to this phrase and interpret it in terms of a challenge, resource, and lesson. The challenge of the beauty of completion might be that you give in too soon or keep going too long if you are a perfectionist. The resource is that you have a concept in mind of what something will look like when it is complete, so you can concentrate on that as a guide. The lesson is that “whatever is finished is beautiful in its own way” even if there is always work that can be done to make it different or better.
Applying these Kabbalistic keywords or your own associations to the cards through the three components of the three-minute method is the heart of teaching tarot in Tarosophy, as we will see later down the timeline in the concluding chapter of this present book. We owe it to the French poet-kabbalist Eliphas Lévi, as do all the esoteric tarot readers.
The Court Cards
Ever the poet, Lévi gives us a final couplet for the court cards, having already dealt with the majors through the Hebrew letters and the minors through the divine name YHVH on the ten sephiroth of the Tree of Life. He says:
King, Queen, Knight, Esquire [page]
The married pair, the youth, the child, the race;
Thy path by these to Unity retrace. 135
They are the representatives of the divine forces YHVH, corresponding to the human condition.
Conclusion
Papus and Lévi, along with the earlier Etteilla and the occultist Oswald Wirth, are important nexus points in the evolution of tarot away from cartomancy and into esotericism. The work of creating connections between these systems led to decades of research, albeit often misguided by later standards, translations, and development of tarot culminating in the Order of the Golden Dawn. Whilst it may appear at first glance that such obscure teachings have little relevance to modern-day readings, the structure which was introduced into the tarot through the Golden Dawn was picked up by Pamela Colman Smith and designed into her deck with A. E. Waite. As that deck then becomes the most utilised template for a myriad of decks following in time, the structure of the esotericists is carried unbidden within the tarot through those designs.
The rotund man sitting smugly in front of the nine cups is Falstaff, whom Pamela chose to represent th
e Golden Dawn Book T text of “a good and generous, but sometimes foolish nature” and “self-praise, vanity, conceit, much talking of self.” In turn, that text is derived from the nine corresponding to Yesod on the Tree of Life, and the Cups corresponding to the world of Briah. Yesod represents the self-image and Briah the world of creation, hence the “self-praise” where we create our own image of ourselves; the very nature of Falstaff who is told “that thou hast forgotten to demand that truly which thou wouldst truly know.” 136
So, every card bearing the design of that man on that bench in front of those cups is working only to depict the Kabbalistic correspondence of that card and for no other reason. It is time for us to travel into the magical era that proved so influential to our tarot; let us jump into our time-pod and enter a new golden dawn for the cards.
[contents]
120 Proof that “hating on” other tarot decks or works is nothing new. See also Crowley’s acerbic review of A. E. Waite & Pamela Colman Smith’s deck, quoted in Marcus Katz & Tali Goodwin, Secrets of the Waite-Smith Tarot (Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn, 2015).
121 You can visit 20 Rue de La Banque in Paris, just down from the Bourse or historical stock exchange and see the archway through which the doors to the apartments are reached. It is rather fittingly designed with ten Rose emblems.
122 See Marcus Katz and Tali Goodwin, Secrets of the Waite-Smith Tarot (Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn, 2015).
123 This method is developed from Papus, Tarot of the Bohemians (Hollywood, CA: Wilshire Book Company, 1973), 62, where Papus lists “affinities.”
124 See Marcus Katz and Tali Goodwin, Tarot Flip (Keswick, UK: Forge Press, 2010).
125 See also Naomi Ozaniec, Watkins Tarot Handbook (London, UK: Watkins, 2005).
126 Papus, 255–256.
127 Ibid., 261.
128 See www.westernesotericism.com (Last accessed 6 July, 2016).