by Marcus Katz
At the time I felt it was a pretty thankless task; little if anything was known about Pippet. As an artist and designer he had been very talented but had fallen into obscurity, becoming long-since forgotten. It was through this search for Pippet that I chanced across the obscure cataloguing of Waite and Trinick’s Great Symbol of the Paths in the British Museum. I also miraculously found a photo of Pippet, thanks to a retired nun still living at a convent associated with his life and family. The researcher’s life is an alchemy of tedium and lifetime discoveries, and one hopes for a few of the latter to offset the mind-dulling boredom of the former.
The rediscovery of these images after they had languished for over three decades in the vaults of the British Museum came about through a combination of two things: a dogged determination—even obsession—to keep looking for hours and days on end for a single photograph, and a feeling that I was forging a link to the past and to the very spirit of these people. I also believe there is always a greater purpose towards which all our acts and obsessions are driven.
It is with this same spirit I feel a link to the history of Pamela Colman Smith and Arthur Edward Waite. There is a story that seeks to be told here and now, echoed from the past.
For the last three years I have lived completely in the summer of 1909, learning to live without any future expectation or knowledge. This almost impossible task, living in innocence of two World Wars ahead—and specifically the knowledge of the growth of the tarot some sixty years later—is the work that led to the material in this book.
What has struck me most is that a century of speculation has overlaid Pamela’s life and images. The conspiracy theories of hidden Masonic stories and other esoterica have long obscured a simple secret: Pamela was a child of the theatre, a storyteller, and a Catholic convert. Waite was also Catholic—albeit of a peculiar kind—as his second tarot images make clear.
This is the true secret of the Waite-Smith Tarot—it was a rectification of the power of symbolism to provide universal access to a hidden sanctuary of mystical experience created by a bohemian Catholic artist and a Catholic mystic, presented through the theatrical tradition.
2. Shakespeare’s Heroines Calendar, Pamela Colman Smith, 1899. Courtesy of Mark Samuels Lasner Collection.
As a result I have followed my research into Pamela’s friends and colleagues of the time; the art, poetry, and theatre that were her daily life. As a researcher I started with simple questions: How did Pamela afford her rent whilst painting for five months? Where did she physically stand to paint the paintings? How far away was Waite living to her during that time, and how would they have communicated? With so few extant records to go on, we’ve had to recreate the entire situation and walk into it as a living scenario.
Actually, Pamela left lots of evidence—the images themselves and her other artwork. It is one little sketch that proved the “Pippet hunt” component of this book—a sketch that we were able to discover was a real place, and the place that unlocked the whole deck.
There is a little part of England that still retains the old-world charm of yesteryear, the Romney Marsh area of East Sussex. There, I walked in Pamela’s footsteps, standing exactly where she must have stood to have drawn the sketch I held in my hand. I breathed in old air from the very cottage in which she had spent many weeks drawing, relaxing, laughing, and telling stories in her inimitable way. This cottage, Smallhythe Place, was owned by Pamela’s good friend and renowned stage actress Ellen Terry, whose story we touch upon in this book.
Smallhythe Place is maintained by the National Trust and is kept in a loving time capsule. It is preserved so delicately and with such love and respect that you can visit and imagine Ellen and Pamela have popped out for a picnic with their friends and children and are just about to return.
It is thanks to the National Trust and their dedicated and accommodating staff at Smallhythe—especially the delightful Susannah Mayor—that we were able to view, commission, and license previously unpublished photographs of Pamela and her friends. We can now look back into the life and spirit of Pamela Colman Smith and those she loved as well as recognising the theatrical components of the deck she created.
As I looked through album after album of personal photographs and saw for the first time the intimate photograph of Pamela and Edy Craig peering into the very window by which I sat, I felt as if I was tumbling back through history and meeting Pamela in her own life. I was in her world. Death and the dust of time were suddenly no barrier to the legacy she had bequeathed. The Pamela who shone out through that photograph radiated such love and joy—the very essence of the 10 of Cups—a rainbow light and the delight of good home and company. She was abiding in her perfect garden, the same garden she gave to us in her tarot.
It is not just the cottage at Smallhythe and its surrounds that bewitches and bewilders. It is the whole luscious Pixie-esque landscape surrounding it. The old medieval town of Winchelsea and the open land that surrounds it (most of which is under the guardianship of the National Trust) are preserved so well that Pamela would still feel at home. It is where you can see Tower Cottage, where Ellen Terry lived until purchasing Smallhythe Place as her long-term home. If you look, you will see the landscape of Pamela’s heart’s desire through her eyes.
As you open this book (and we close it for now, moving on for a while from Pamela and Arthur’s “delightful experiment” of the tarot), I am left feeling blessed. The garden in which she lived, still lives. It exists for real, and it exists in every tarot deck. The story she told is still being told in every theatre, in every life, and in every tarot reading. The garden is divine, infinite, and ever-present, and the story is endless, eternal, and constantly being retold. In the true journey being revealed by our lives, we are all able to navigate our return to Eden through the tarot. All reasearch in this book is considered ongoing; as a further resource, visit www.waitesmithtarot.com to receive updates and additional insights into this deck.
We invite you now to walk behind the stage curtain with us and enter the eternal garden Pamela painted for us all to see.
[contents]
One
How to Read the Tarot
His [Oswald Wirth’s] 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.
–A. E. Waite, “Introduction” in A. Thierens,
The General Book of Tarot (1930), 11
In this book, we reveal many of the sources that inspired the art of the Waite-Smith tarot deck, and all the subsequent versions of decks that have drawn from this design. However, we will begin by ensuring that even as a beginner you are able to read the tarot cards either with the Waite-Smith deck or any version of tarot—even those without fully illustrated scenes on the minor arcana such as in the Marseilles deck.
We will do this by revealing the secret of the structure of tarot through correspondence to the Kabbalah.4 This is a complex subject we’ll cover in more detail in a later chapter; however, it can be simplified into just fourteen words to get us reading tarot in about ten minutes. You can then spend the rest of your life practising and building on these basics.
A. E. Waite wrote much on the Kabbalah, the Jewish system of mysticism, and used it as a map of both his magical life and his personal form of Christian mysticism. In doing so, he developed the initiatory system of spiritual development from the Golden Dawn, the Hermetic Order of which he had originally been a member before resigning in 1914. He went on to found his own mystical order, the Brothers of the Rosy Cross—in which he developed his second tarot images with stained glass artist J. B. Trinick.5
The tarot can be mapped onto the Tree of Life, t
he fundamental diagram of Kabbalah, through a system of correspondences where one element in one system corresponds to a similar element in another system. In layering many systems through correspondence, a magician aims to bring their entire universe into an interconnected totality, ultimately seeing the fundamental patterns and processes underpinning the whole of everyday life.
By using correspondences in the manner of Waite and other magicians, we can learn tarot very quickly from just fourteen keywords. These keywords relate to the forty minor arcana and twelve court cards as they correspond to their equivalent in the map of the Tree of Life.
The ten numbers of the four suits (1 through 10) are equivalent to the ten Sephiroth on the Tree of Life. We give a keyword that embodies the nature of each Sephira below. Although there are many more potential keywords, we find these most useful in readings.
Seed
Energy
Structure
Growing
Sorting
Balancing
Results
Changing
Ending
Fixing
So these numbers represent ten stages in any creative process, from the seed of an idea to its final fixing in the world of action. Every question we are ever asked as a tarot reader will be somewhere placed along this spectrum, from “How will my new relationship develop?” (Seed and Energy) to “Is my job secure and what should I do?” (Changing and Ending).
However, splitting the universe into only ten stages is not quite enough to make a comprehensive and flexible divinatory map. We need to know which aspect of life is within any of these stages. So we then take the four suits as the four worlds:
Pentacles: Resources (Earth)
Swords: Thoughts (Air)
Cups: Emotions (Water)
Wands: Ambitions (Fire)
Those are again, rough approximations; if we have to force anything in the universe into just one of four categories, it will always be a tight squeeze! As an example, a pencil would correspond to swords, as it is connected to writing down thoughts. An artist would be connected with cups, for creating art that appeals to our emotions. A career would be pentacles, as it corresponds to the world of resources. These also correspond to the four elements of earth, air, water, and fire and the four directions.
However, we only need those fourteen keywords to now mix and match any of the forty combinations of ten cards in four suits.
If we take it as a formula, step by step, let’s try:
Ace (1) of Swords
This would be the Seed of Thought according to our keywords.
If we think about what that might mean in the everyday world, a “seed of thought” would be the beginnings of an idea, planting an idea; even the film Inception comes to mind.
We can also use this method to work out reversed cards. In this case, a seed of thought reversed would be the opposite—a niggling doubt.
Let’s try another:
7 of Wands
This would be the Success of Ambition. When we look at Pamela’s drawing of this card, we can see clearly how she visualised the success of ambition—you’ve made it, but you have to fight everyone else off to keep your place! If we were to reverse the “success of ambition,” it would be failure and lack of ambition; and when we turn to Waite in PKT, we read this card reversed as “perplexity, embarrassments, anxiety. It is a caution against indecision” (184), which to us sounds close enough to what happens when failing through a lack of ambition.
Let’s try another card:
4 of Cups
This is the Growing of Emotion, so it would be a generally positive card to receive in a relationship reading or a new employment. Are you content enough or do you want to add some more? It shows there is still space to develop the emotion—all the way from the 4 stage to the 10, Growing to Fixing.
To add to our ability to map any situation, we need to know what level of energy is active at the stage (1 through 10) and in the world (suit) of the event. We do this with the court cards, of which we have already learnt half of what we need to remember—the four suits—and now we simply represent four levels of energy as they correspond to four different stages of life: child, adolescent, and mature female/mature male. These are the four courts, and the keywords for those levels are:
Page: Unformed …
Knight: Directed …
Queen: Experienced …
King: Established …
So the Page of Pentacles is “Unformed … Resources.” He is the youngest energy in the element of earth. So he wants to get on and be practical and rewarded, but is only just starting. This is a good card to receive in a new business reading, for example, although it means you will have to work onwards for success; it will not be immediate.
The Queen of Wands would be “Experienced … Ambitions.” So as a person, she is someone who knows what she wants—and how to get it. She has got to where she is by knowing herself and her abilities. If this card came up as an advice card, it would advise the querent to be like the Queen, or to get the advice of someone who is successful in the same field.
With Fourteen Words,
We Can Now Perform a Tarot Reading
We can now perform a simple reading with only our fourteen words. As we deepen our knowledge of the Waite-Smith deck, we can add on many layers to these core meanings. We have left out the major arcana cards at the moment because as beginners, we read these simply as they are; Strength means “strength” and the Hermit means “being by yourself.”
So here is a three-card reading (without any of the majors turning up) to answer “What should I do to get the most out of the changes in my workplace?”
6 of Cups + 3 of Pentacles + 9 of Swords
We recall our fourteen keywords or look them up and get:
Balancing of Emotions + Structure of Resources + End of Thought
If we now expand those core meanings, we can see how they run together. The advice is to calm down and move on (balance your emotions), get your act together and show them what you can do (structure your resources), and stop worrying because what’s decided has already been decided (End of Thought). When we look at the images of the cards, this should correspond to that reading. In fact, it may even add more layers as you see how Pamela painted these concepts.
We will see later how we think Pamela painted the cards based on a similar set of keywords and concepts, from the Golden Dawn’s Book T, the Order’s teachings on the tarot. In fact, we would suggest any beginner to the Waite-Smith deck and symbolism in other decks use our book here with Book T and not use Waite’s descriptions of the minors at all.
In this example reading, we could pull a court card to see how we should get our act together, and if we got the Queen of Swords, that would be “Experienced Thought.” So, we would want to show our bosses how we had already thought about any of the issues the company faced; perhaps produce a “solution sheet” and pin it over our desk.
To add the majors into our reading, for now, we take them as they appear. The majors are images of big concepts and can be read just as they look—the Star is dreamy and hopeful (“when you wish upon a star”); the Tower is sudden disruption (just look at what’s actually pictured).6
By using the basic keyword method, you can read any deck based on the tarot structure, even non-scenic decks that have pip cards (like the 9 of Diamonds from playing cards, for example) for the minors rather than fully illustrated scenes. With just fourteen words, you can now read the Marseilles deck or use a regular playing card deck if you learn the following four correspondences:
Hearts = Cups
Spades = Pentacles
Clubs = Swords
Diamonds = Wands
As ever, there are variations of these correspondences, and we advise learning whatever s
eems most sensible to you in the beginning, become reasonably proficient using it, and then try out variations. It may take longer but it will not be confusing; we have seen many students stuck for years because they cannot decide the “right method” so they do not choose anything and endlessly await the correct solution. There is no “correct” solution; just the one that works for you now.
If we were to list twenty-two keywords for the major arcana, it would be close to Waite’s conception of them when he was producing his more considered work with J. B. Trinick some ten years later. They would be:
Fool: Redemption
Magician: Intelligence
High Priestess: Devotion
Empress: Soul of Nature
Emperor: Singularity
Hierophant: Religion
Lovers: Marriage
Chariot: Revelation
Strength: Existence
Hermit: Tradition
Wheel of Fortune: Consummation
Justice: Law
Hanged Man: Secret Tradition
Death: Sacrifice
Temperance: Communion
Devil: Temptation
Blasted Tower: Change
Star: Aspiration
Moon: Reflection
Sun: Transfiguration
Last Judgement: Calling
World: Outer Nature
Whilst these keywords seem very abstract, they are profound statements on each of the major arcana as seen by Waite beyond his secrecy, as we will examine later in this book. They may not be the words the majority of readers today would associate with these cards, but they are the words Waite would have recognised as communicating the nature of each card as he saw it.