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Magic Monday
It's nearly midnight, so we can proceed with a new Magic Monday. Ask me anything about occultism and I'll do my best to answer it. With certain exceptions, any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. Please note: Any question or comment received after then will not get an answer, and in fact will just be deleted. (I've been getting an increasing number of people trying to post after these are closed, so will have to draw a harder line than before.) If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 143,916th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.0 of The Magic Monday FAQ here. Also: I will not be putting through or answering any more questions about practicing magic around children. I've answered those in simple declarative sentences in the FAQ. If you read the FAQ and don't think your question has been answered, read it again. If that doesn't help, consider remedial reading classes; yes, it really is as simple and straightforward as the FAQ says. The picture? I've been tracing my lineages back as far as I can, and last week took my Martinist lineage back as far as they can be documented. The next step -- and it's the last step in the entire process -- involves a fair bit of speculation, but it's speculation backed up by some evidence. It's been suggested by some historians, Marsha Keith Schuchard foremost among them, that the mysterious Knight of the Red Feather who conferred the Templar lineage on Baron von Hund, last week's honoree, was none other than Charles Stuart, the Bonnie Prince Charlie of Scottish song and story. The claim is that in the years immediately before 1745, when the House of Stuart made its last (and disastrously unsuccessful) attempt to reclaim the British throne, Charles and his inner circle of supporters used various forms of clandestine Freemasonry to raise funds, engage in espionage, and gather arms and supporters for the planned rising. Baron von Hund's initiation was an incident in that process. Martinez de Pasqually, who was honored a couple of weeks back, also claimed to have a charter signed by Charles Stuart as the basis for his occult Masonic order. So it's possible that what lies behind one of the great traditions of Western occultism is a failed political intrigue that got picked up and repurposed by a couple of canny occultists. Stranger things have happened in the history of occultism.
...And with this, the rambling tale of the odd lineages that I've inherited comes to an end. Now I'll have to think of something else to use as illustrations to Magic Mondays!
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***This Magic Monday is now closed. See you next week!***
***Please note -- when Magic Monday is closed, IT'S CLOSED. I just had to delete a flurry of attempted comments posted up to eleven hours after I shut things down. I do need some time to write and do other online chores, you know, so please don't keep trying to post after 12:00 am Monday night/Tuesday morning -- there'll be a new Magic Monday in a week, you know. ***
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2) Waite was up to his eyeballs in the bitter quarrels that tore the British occult scene apart at the beginning of the 20th century; he was a Christian mystic and was dead set against the practice of magic; and his ragging on other occultists was motivated by both of those. If you have trouble understanding Waite, don't fret about it -- he was one of the worst writers of his time, and never could say anything in a single short word where a sesquipedalian sequence of periphrastically obfuscatory syntactical assemblages would do. ;-)
3) The tarot deck was invented in Italy around 1415 by Marziano da Tortona, secretary to the Duke of Milan. That's been known by European art historians for more than a century, and it's frankly embarrassing that so many occultists in the English-speaking world never got the memo. That doesn't mean it was originally just an ordinary game. It came out of Renaissance Italian intellectual culture, which was saturated with occultism, and was devised as a game that the children of the aristocracy could play, and in the process absorb the effects of magical images. Waite was fluent enough in European languages that he knew about the real origin of the tarot, which is why he didn't buy into the usual stuff about Egypt or Atlantis or what have you.
4) Not at all. The Rider-Waite deck is Cabalistic from top to bottom; it was created for Waite's own magical order, the Rectified Order of the Golden Dawn. Remember that Renaissance Italy was where the Cabala was first adopted by magicians outside the Jewish community. Later on, after Waite's first order blew up, he launched another order, the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, and had another artist, John Trinick, make a different set of images for the tarot trumps. You can find some images of the Trinick deck here:
https://mythcrafts.com/2019/05/21/a-e-waites-second-tarot-the-waite-trinick-deck/
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1) Is there any literature Waite could have drawn upon for his Minor Arcana card meanings you could point me to?
2) That's a good one! I feel when I read Waite I am following a deep plot, excited for the great reveal and then after the plot unfolds, I am not sure what the reveal was. It's funny how he will give a compliment but then be like, "yeah but this guy had no clue what he was talking about". He was "was dead set against the practice of magic"? WOW!
3) Do we know for certain that there weren't Tarot decks before that deck in 1415, or maybe in some other part of the world that is lost to time? I thought the oldest deck we have access to was the Sola Busca one?
4) In the Pictorial Key to the Tarot, Waite pretty much debunks it had ancient origins, "it has no history prior to the fourteenth century, when the first rumours, were heard concerning cards." He says his deck is a "rectified" deck. He sure likes that word, "rectified", huh? So is it accurate to say that he did not believe any Qabalah link with Tarot, so he made his deck to be a Cabalistic deck? That would make more sense. I am guessing here he is basically saying Levi and Court de Gebelin didn't really know their stuff well enough to make any kind of Cabalistic claim with the Tarot, "The Tarot and the de Gebelin hypothesis he took into his heart of hearts, and all occult France and all esoteric Britain, Martinists, half-instructed Kabalists, schools of soi disant theosophy--there, here and everywhere--have accepted his judgment about it with the same confidence as his interpretations of those great classics of Kabalism which he had skimmed rather than read."
Cool pencil drawn images on those crds in the link you gave me.
Thank you a lot for your time and great responses here!
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2) Reading Waite is like getting one scene out of one of those really complicated novels where there are dozens of conflicts among the characters, and you don't have any way of knowing what they are!
3) There's zero evidence for any earlier tarot, and documents from the period indicate that Marziano da Tortona invented it. Sometimes it really is that simple. The Sola Busca deck was created around 1490 -- there are quite a few tarot decks older than it is.
4) What Waite is saying is that the tarot didn't start out Cabalistic. (I think he was wrong, because the Cabala was well known in early 15th century Italy.) It became Cabalistic when people like Lévi, Oswald Wirth, and Waite himself reworked the deck so that the symbolism fit the Cabala. Waite was bitterly jealous of Lévi, by the way, thus the smack he laid down in that quote -- Lévi had access to Frankist Cabalistic teachings from Poland by way of his teacher Hoene Wronski, which Waite didn't have access to, and that's what's behind Waite's insistence that Lévi didn't know Cabala.
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1) If Waite's Minor Arcana meanings were influenced by Golden Dawn and Golden Dawn's Minor Arcana Meanings were influenced by Book T who I believe was written by McKenzie, I am still curious whomever wrote the Book T, where he got his Minor Arcana card meanings from.
2) Classic! You said Waite was against magic, so Divination with the Tarot Waite would not consider Magic I take it.
3) Great info, thanks! I take it you do not subscribe to the theory put forth by Wilfred Houdouin that the Tarot of Marseille was designed under the geometry of the Metatron Cube. I guess humans see what they want to see.
http://tarot-de-marseille-millennium.com/english/#:~:text=The%20Tarot%20of%20Marseille%20is,world%2C%20translating%20a%20universal%20cosmology
4) So interesting! Waite had all this wisdom but still had such strong negative emotions. Maybe there is some old British humor in the beat downs he has in that book that comes with the Tarot decks. It is amusing.
Thanks a million!
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2) Magic is just one of the many branches of occultism. Divination is another.
3) Er, no, because the "Metatron cube" was invented by an American pop-occult writer in the late 20th century, and the Marseilles tarot dates from just a little while before then. ;-)
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Yeah metatron cube being the foundation for Tarot of Marsielles is so over the top but this one author/card creator is convinced! Maybe he's just really high.
I am interested in finding out how Waite took the Minor Arcana of the French and Italian Tarot decks and turned them into full stories for his deck that the other decks did not display. Papus' numerology approach seems simple enough to fit the Tarot of Marseilles Minor Arcana graphics, but not sure how Waite came up with his detailed stories. I'm gonna dig around and see what I can find!
Thanks!
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(Anonymous) 2023-08-28 02:34 pm (UTC)(link)JLfromNH/Crimson Obtuse Ouroboros
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(Anonymous) 2023-08-28 12:35 pm (UTC)(link)—Princess Cutekitten
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(Anonymous) 2023-08-28 05:32 pm (UTC)(link)—Princess Cutekitten
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