Esoteric Coffeehouse

I have mentioned in my previous articles about the influence of Eliphas Levi on the Rider-Waite tarot, the most common tarot pack in the world today. Today, I want to look slightly more in depth at how Levi’s Kabbalistico-Egyptian theory of tarot origins blended together with A.E. Waite’s own interpretations to yield the well-known cards of modern tarot. To do so, I will look at the symbolism and meaning of the 10th Rider-Waite tarot card: the Wheel of Fortune.

The Wheel of Fortune is usually considered a good card, bringing about luck, change, and good fortune (1). Yet other people deem it is a bad card, because it signals major change, even if usually of a good sort (2). Obviously, the value that we bestow on this card is linked with the perception we have of change in general.

A.E. Waite, the spiritual author of the Rider-Waite tarot, openly attributed the conception of the Wheel of Fortune card to Eliphas Levi (3). Therefore, a good starting point to understanding this card would be to delve into Levi’s vision of the Wheel of Fortune.

Levi built an entire philosophy surrounding the word “Rota” which means “wheel” in Latin. He believed that Rota stood for the enigmatic Labarum, or the monogram of Christ, and that it hid the whole of magical science within it (4). He furthermore affirmed that Rota was transliterated into Taro by esoteric adepts. He also played with the letters in the tradition of the Kabbala to form the word “Tora” as well – the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. This word play is clearly visible on the card’s wheel spokes: you can read clockwise Taro, counterclockwise Tora and starting on the bottom Rota. This is of course, not all there is, because the four letters also point out to the cardinal signs. Thus one can also imagine the movement of the sun from east (Alpha) to west (Omega). Interspersed between this circulatory movement is the name of God (YHWH) inscribed on the wheel, to suggest that all this change is overseen by the divine will. Also on the spokes of the inner wheel (there are three enclosed wheels one into the other) are the alchemical symbols of sulphur, salt and mercury as well as water. This reflects Levi’s desire of combining all esoteric knowledge, including alchemy, into the “Taro”. Nevertheless, these particular symbols were introduced by Waite according to Golden Dawn imagery (5).

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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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