Esoteric Coffeehouse

I have written, about two articles ago, about French occultist Eliphas Levi’s contribution to tarot mythology. I have decided to go farther and show how the tarot was taken up by the Golden Dawn circle at the end of the 19th century and turned into a major spiritual guidance tool.

The Golden Dawn movement per se surely deserves another article, but for now I will just summarize it as a nineteenth century magical movement that drew heavily on the ‘occultist’ strand as defined by Eliphas Levi, Bulwer-Lytton and the Rosicrucian movements. It was founded by William Westcott and Samuel MacGregor Mathers. Mathers was a brilliant thinker with a particular talent at consolidating occult knowledge floating in esoteric circles at the time. As an example, he drew up the first Golden Dawn tarot deck (now lost), whose Arcana corresponded not only to Kabbalistic paths (as in Levi) but also to the initiatory levels of the Golden Dawn system (1). In Golden Dawn terms, the gradual mastery of the Tarot became similar to the novice’s journey of spiritual awakening. It was probably part of this concept of adept progress that novices were encouraged to reproduce their own sets of cards from Mathers’ templates for quite a long time (2).

The importance of the Golden Dawn tarot is also emphasized by the fact that the scroll containing Mathers’ writings on the Tarot was sometimes presented during the Golden Dawn ceremony. The four suits (wands, coins, cups and swords) were also sometimes used as ceremonial props (3).

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I have written sometime ago an article on the Egyptian myth of the Tarot (you can find it here if you missed it). I mentioned there that the ‘creators’ of the Tarot as we know it were basically 18th century esoteric writers Antoine Court de Gebelin and his friend the Count of Mallet. Yet Tarot would not be the esoteric phenomenon it is today (a search on the internet on ‘tarot’ would pull a staggering amount of 28 million entries) if it weren’t for another Frenchman, Alphonse Louis Constant, known as Eliphas Levi (1810 -1875).

Levi was a shoemaker’s son, just like another famous esotericist, Jacob Boehme. He was due to become a priest, but he gave up and got involved in the whirlwind of the 1848 revolution (1). When his political ambitions became frustrated, Levi turned to a serious study of Western esoteric traditions. In the process, he became acquainted with two key traditions: the Jewish Kabbalah and the Tarot.

The Kabbalah is a set of esoteric teachings developed by medieval Jews, and based upon a hidden understanding of the Hebrew Bible. At the core of the Kabbalah stays the Tree of Life, a complex system representing the 10 emanations of God into His Creation and the relationships amongst them. Kabbalah had been enthusiastically taken up by the Hermetic thinkers of Renaissance Europe, particularly Pico della Mirandola, Johann Reuchlin, Cornelius Agrippa and others. Christian Cabala, or Qabalah, as it became known, may have altered the original Jewish thought, but it had a tremendous influence on modern esoteric traditions. Levi enthusiastically subscribed to the Kabbalah and included it in his works.

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