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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