The Modern Tarot: Golden Dawn, New Age and Complexity
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).
Despite the use of this ‘official’ Golden Dawn tarot, it appears that Mathers did not discourage creativity and a type of improvisational approach on the Tarot themes. This may explain why the offshoots of the Golden Dawn tarot are quite vastly different in concept and design: the A.E. Waite’s Rider-Waite tarot and Alistair Crowley’s Thoth tarot. Certainly, the two tarots reveal their creators, being scholarly and organized in Waite and creative and mysterious in Crowley (4). From the two, Mathers was much more favourable to that of Waite, which was eventually included into the teachings of the Golden Dawn.
We don’t know how much Mathers’ Golden Dawn tarot traced back to Eliphas Levi’s analysis, but the Rider-Waite version is definitely indebted to Levi’s vision. In it, A.E. Waite attempts to preserve the mostly Egyptian-Kabbalistic roots of the tarot imagery, as he inherited them from Gebelin, Eteilla, Levi, Papus and a few others. In a future article I would like to take a look at an example of the Levi / Waite crossover that can reveal the meanings of some of the tarot cards.
However, it must be underlined that Waite was a much more scientifically-minded occultist than his tarot predecessors. His Pictorial Key to the Tarot denies any wondrous mythology of the Tarot i.e. that it dates back to Egyptian times or even earlier (5). Instead, he affirms clearly that the tarot was born in Renaissance Italy and that its esoteric meaning was not given until Gebelin bestowed one. Nevertheless, he believed in the power of the Tarot as a symbolic tool and made his best attempts to incorporate rich Golden Dawn imagery within it.
For now, it would be fair to say that the Rider-Waite tarot had an enormous impact on esotericists and artists in the 20th century (and beyond). The Rider-Waite is now the ‘standard’ tarot deck used by most esoteric-minded people and esoteric groups, and all the variations on tarot can eventually be traced back to Waite’s vision.
In the late 1900s, the Tarot was wholeheartedly supported and adopted by the New Age movement. Creative variants were constructed, including a witch-tarot, a Celtic tarot or karmic tarot, thus proving the flexibility and richness of the tarot tradition. If the idea of Elvis tarot or famous people’s tarot makes the deck become similar to a game (thus perhaps drawing it back to its true roots?), the tarot remains an important tool of self-expression, divination and meditation today.
Apart from esoteric groups, there is increasing evidence that the tarot had an influence on W.B. Yeats’ writings (as he himself was a prominent member of the Golden Dawn), on T.S. Elliott and on F.Kafka as well (6). The Waite tarot has also been used extensively by Jungian psychologists (7, 8). Indeed, the interest of many psychologists and educational specialists has been picked by the Waite tarot, being proposed as a projective technique (9). In 1975, systems theorist E. Jantsch also praised the Tarot for providing an inner way to knowledge (10). Recently, Semetsky considered that the Tarot is a type of complex self-organising system (11). Reviewing these new works, it appears that we may be entering a period when Tarot may become more mainstream and more recognized as a tool for self-awareness and spiritual growth.
References
(1), (2), (3), (4) Timmermann, A. (2006). “Pictures passing before the mind’s eye”: the Tarot, the Order of the Golden Dawn, and William Butler Yeats’s Poetry. Societas Magica Newsletter, 15.
(5) Waite, E.A. (1911). Pictorial Key to the Tarot. Online. Available at : http://www.sacred-texts.com/tarot/pkt/index.htm. Accessed on 04 December 2008
(6) Leavitt, J. (2007). Esoteric Symbols: The Tarot in Yeats, Eliot, and Kafka. New York: University Press of America.
(7) Hamaker-Zondag, K. (1997). Tarot As a Way of Life: A Jungian Approach to the Tarot. Weiser Books.
(8) Nichols, S. (1980). Jung and Tarot: an archetypal journey. Weiser Books.
(9) Semetsky, I. (2006). Tarot as a Projective Technique. Spirituality and Health International, 7(4), pp. 187-197.
(10) Jantsch, E. (1975). Design for evolution: Self organization and planning in the life of human systems. New York: George Braziller.
(11). Semetsky, I. (2008). Simplifying Complexity: Know Thyself…and Others. Complicity: An International Journal of Complexity and Education, 5(1), pp. 63-79.
Tags: bulwer-lytton, crowley, deck, eliphas levi, esoteric, golden dawn, Jung, macgregor mathers, rider-waite, Tarot, thoth, westcott
