So It Is Written

Tarot Shelf Three

I was pleased this year that a big part of my holiday haul were several new Tarot and Oracle decks. I possibly have suggested that I might have a bit of a Tarot problem (not enough shelving to begin with) , but if a deck presents me with attractive artwork that resonates with my personal tastes, I will likely eventually add it to my collection.

On the other hand, if the artwork doesn’t speak to me, then I will leave it, regardless of how popular it is. For example, my only version of the Tarot of Marseilles is a digital one on my phone and tablet, because frankly I think these cards are butt ugly. I realize that they are the final form of many copies of copies made from woodcut blocks, to meet the demands of Tarot players from the Renaissance onward, and that there ancillary use for divination was not considered of prime importance to the printer.


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tarot-shelf-two
I may have mentioned before I have a Tarot problem. Chiefly, the problem is not nearly enough shelf space. In addition to the header image on the page, these represent my displayed Tarot and oracle card collection, though there are lot hidden in the back and some that I have lost the boxes long ago that reside in other less graphicly blandished containers in other parts of the library. And over the holiday I added at least 11 more. Well, there was a full moon and a year end discount at the used bookstore and I was more or less unsupervised.

Yet because this deck forms a very important link between the elaborate Italian decks like the Visconti-Sforza Tarot and the modern ones which were typified by the Rider-Waite-Smith, I reluctantly got the Android version from the Fool’s Dog. I cannot warm up to these cards so they will not serve me to read. A paper copy might be something I should have, but so far they are priced highly (to my mind) for something that was never in copyright, and should be available in discount versions. For now, the scanned images suffice for my research work.

For me personally reading the Tarot, or using it for meditation or inspiration or spellcraft, is unequivocally tied to my experience of the images. I am an artist. I experience the universe through the visual faculty foremost. This may mean that with a particular deck, my mental impression of the card does not match the usual and customary interpretation. As I looked through a number of the new decks, and looked for the familiar signposts that I admit to having learned in my early days, I got to pondering that whole proposition.

That is, here we have an image, more than likely only about a century old, that has been presented as a definite indicator of a particular idea.

Because Waite said it did. Because he read it from Levi. Levi read Etteilla who probably was extrapolating from Court de Gebelin. Each of these scholars added their own esoteric bent to the tradition, which has no exact reliable origin.


Levi-hierophant
Levi the Heirophant – The Keeper of the Keys to the Secrets. While his magnum opus Dogma et Rituel de la Huate Magie, gives us his interpretations of the Major Arcana. One has to delve into his History of Magic to find reference to the lesser cards, and it is buried among a broadly racist discussion of the use of Tarot by the Romani.

As I haven’t a French edition of the latter tome, I can’t say to what extent this coloring of the Bohemian Nomads, as they are called, comes from Waite as translator, but sadly misogyny, racism, and classism permeate the writings of the 19th and early 20th century occult authors.

This has made the grains of wisdom in such works hard to access, and put off many more modern readers entirely. It’s important to remember to cast such figures and their respective works in the context of their age, and not our own. In a hundred years, we may be seen as utter barbarians.

Many attribute it toward Egypt, but even this is massively miscast (aside from being plain wrong). Crowley’s “Book of Thoth” is more connected with Levi’s “Book of Hermes” and both thereby associate the “Divine Wisdom” with Hermes Trismegistus and the so-called “Emerald Tablet” of the alchemists.

The Emerald Tablet entered European thinking in the Middle Ages through Moorish Spain, and is more than likely a grimoire based upon Greek texts surviving in the Islamic world. So in such a way it does come from Egypt, but not in the way most suppose.

Nor does the confutation of the racial slur “gypsy” with both cartomancy and that ancient land have any basis in fact. The Romani people, we now know, descend from the Indus River valley rather than the Nile one.

But still such stories persist. I trace that to the invention of Curtis Siodmak and the iconic performance of Maria Ouspenskaya in 1941’s The Wolf Man. This one film gives us the archtype of the wizened kerchiefed Fortune Teller with her crystal ball, pronouncing doom to the hero. She was so powerful in the part that she returned for the sequel Frankenstein Meets The Wolfman in 1943.

Whether Ouspenksaya’s character derives from an actual tradition is hard to say. The Wolf Man series were at the tail end of Universal’s golden age of monster movies. Her purpose in the film is expository.

In previous movies the actor Edward Von Sloan would have given us the dire warnings in the guise of Dr. Van Helsing (Dracula) , Dr. Waldman (Frankenstein) , or Dr. Muller (The Mummy). But in 1941 and 1943 the character of “Herr Doktor” was not a type American audiences found comfortable anymore, so the pseudo-Slavic Madame Maleva took up the reins of the person “in the know”.

By the way, the Wolf Man is where we first hear popularly about the Pentagram being a “mark of the devil”. But fundamental Christianity firmly latched onto it as such. Especially since Anton LeVey uses an “inverted” pentagram as the symbol on the Satanic bible. The evil Satanic he-goat fits right into it.

Except it’s not the Satanic he-goat. It’s something called Baphomet, which was imagined by Eliphas Levi. The same Levi who gave us the roots of our modern Tarot meanings. Baphomet is a composite creature, similar to many in alchemical artwork, that incorporates symbols to express certain esoteric teachings. It has been confused with Kernnunos, and Pan, and of course the “Black Goat” in medieval witch-hunting texts. If it has a real progenitor it’s the old Egyptian generative god Khnum.

But the name Baphomet is murky too. It comes from the trials (under torture) of the Knights Templar, to describe a “head” they supposedly worshipped in secret conclaves when they had denounced Christ and trampled upon the cross. The actuality of this Head of Baphomet is by no means an established fact either. Some researchers have put forth that the head is either the folded up Shroud of Turin or a similar sacred cloth called the Mandilion or the Veronica. There is as much proof for that as for the theory that the Templars were secret converts to Islam, and that Baphomet was a mis-recording of Mohamet. Ultimately, like many “confessions” brought about by the insidious methods of the Inquisition, we don’t even really know if Baphomet was simply made up by ecclesiastical authorities who needed a convenient heresy.

In any case, it’s not the Devil, nor does it have any real connection to any devil, demon, or malefic spirit the Christian establishment has seen as persecutorial throughout it’s multiple millennia. But the impression persists. Because somewhere at some time some one wrote it down, and then it became “truth”.

Just like the meanings of the Tarot cards.

Prior to our Good Lady Pixie’s renditions, the 40 pip cards of the Minor Arcana were simply counters, much as any modern deck of “playing cards”.


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A Tale of Two Tarots. On the left is my 50 year old Hoi Poloi variation of the RWS deck, and on the right, the delightfully dark Deviant Moon Tarot. I’ve picked a few cards from each deck as an example of why the images are -to me at least- as important, if not more important, than the text of accepted meanings.

In the first instance our Four of Cups seems to share a common theme – that of satiation, sufficiency, and the need to reject excess. Yet in the Deviant Moon, there’s a touch of deviltry, or at least pique, as the figure casually flicks away the fourth chalice. Or does she drop it in a daydream. Her face (so like a Venetian carnival mask) seems to stare far away, unconcerned, or even unaware, that she has lost one of the cups.

Below is the well known Two of Swords, which often indicates an approaching danger to which the figure is blind to. It speaks of ill preparedness, isolation, and disengagement. Yet the Deviant Moon variant shows us an ettin-like creature, two heads, opposite each other, able to see, but locking in a perpetual struggle for dominance. The design plays off of the Gemini nature of the Deuce. Here the twins are merged. It speaks more to us of inner conflict, indecision, and stagnation. In a way it is not entirely different than the other card’s usual meaning, but yet the journey we take is a fresh one.

Joseph Campbell argues that the suits were symbols of the four estates of the Medieval world. The Wands were the Peasantry, the people working the land. The Swords, were the Nobility, deriving from their historical roles as professional soldiers. The Cups were the Clergy, symbolized by the Holy Cup of the Eucharist, and finally the Merchants were associated with the Coin of the realm.

It’s a pretty picture that would seem to fit, and as Campbell is such a revered source on so many ideas about our human mythology it can be difficult to question. But the connection of the suits with the Elements is equally as strong, and the origin of these cards in Islam, which was not arranged in exactly the same social order, calls it into suspicion. Many sources see the playing card as coming from China, where paper and printing were more extant than in Europe, and traveling with spice, cloth, and secret wisdom, along the Silk Road.

In any case they hit Venice in the 1200s and evolved into the more elaborate trick-taking game of Tarrochi. At this point the simple pips were joined by face cards, and a variable group of special point cards that we now call the Major Arcana.

It is the Major Arcana that Levi gives us values for, connecting it with the Mystic Qabbalah through the ability to give each card a corresponding Hebrew letter. This may be entirely arbitrary. It may be just another attempt to find “ancient wisdom” in something that was never meant to contain it. So there’s something of a good argument that the divinatory cards are only the Major Arcana, and the rest were just along for the ride.


tarot-books
The actual number of Tarot books I own is small and recent in comparison to the card decks (excluding the books that came with the decks).

The Connolly and Crowley are among the first. The Connolly was a gift with my RWS deck that didn’t have a book. Though well regarded it is a bit Judeo-Christian oriented for my tastes. Such were the times. The Crowley is a recent replacement of a stolen copy, though it is the same late 70s edition.

Wedged between in the dark there is a copy of Waite’s Pictorial Key to the Tarot, now available cheaply as a public domain reprint.

The rest are some recommended by other writers on the occult, and with the Encyclopedia of Ancient and Forbidden Knowledge, and the Tarot Volume of the Taschen Library of Esoterica, make up the total texts I have on the subject.

I may add one or two more in future,; Dion Fortune, most likely. But a vast majority of texts out there are parroting each other, or one of these, or worse are making bad renditions of Levi’s problematic texts.

On the other hand, there’s a good tradition for using general pip and face playing cards for divinatory purpose, completely separate from the Tarot. Folklorist and podcaster Corey Hutcheson in his book 54 Devils gives us a glimpse into these practices, as well as touching briefly on the Lenormand Oracle, a strange hybrid of playing card and image reading supposedly developed by Marie Adelaide Lenormand, a cartomancer during the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

But because the images in the RWS deck give us mnemonic clues to the meanings associated with the Minor Arcana – meanings which may have been a general oral tradition prior to Waite – they’ve become one of the more successful versions of Tarot, and probably the most used for inspiration and elaboration by 20th and 21st century artists and cartomancers.

Which begs the question, if the images and the interpretations are exact from Levi and Waite – why on earth are there so many Tarot decks out there. I have a collection topping 50 and it’s only a fraction of what is available in the mass market. With the RWS falling into public domain a few years ago, Pamela Smith’s icons are showing up everywhere, and clones of her deck can be found on discount store shelves for under $10.

And I strongly feel it is her deck. Like many people today, I fully recognize that the expansion of Tarot as an art form and divinatory practice is largely due to the artwork she created, rather than the interpreted writings of Levi and Waite.

Those writings may not fully hold up to close scrutiny. Through the artwork – which though more than a century old still fascinates and inspires, we can find new vistas, insights, and interlinking interpretations that makes the cartomancer’s art and skill paramount to any dusty old tome.

Because, to borrow from Doc Brown, your future isn’t written yet. No one’s is.

And on that thought I will ask you to come back next week and be a part of my future. As always, thank you for reading to the end.

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You Stole My Holiday

Pilgrims

Having had the month of November to rest ourselves from the travails of crossing the veil on Samhain, and the equally mortifying stress of upcoming Black Friday sales, the occult community frequently comes together at this time of year to inform every Christian within earshot that they are about to celebrate an old pagan fire festival that they stole from our ancestors.

And of course this inevitably brings up all the other old pagan fire festivals that they also stole from our ancestors, and the rituals they “borrowed” and the symbols they are misusing etc., etc. It’s a wonder we ever get the Black Friday Eve Feast dishes done in time to line up at the mall for the Coming of the Big Screens.


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And here, in one single painting, is all the trappings and trimmings of the autumn/winter holidays in America.

The image, created by illustrator Norman Rockwell during the early days of American involvement in World War II, is certainly a propaganda piece.

It depicts an harmonious multigenerational feasting orgy that occurs on the third Thursday in November, right before the mad capitalist cash grab retailers hope will keep their doors open, remove excess inventory before tax time, and get them through the post holiday slump while everyone struggles to pay for the “gifts” that count more than the thoughts.

I love this painting for what it aspires to be, but I hate that it has become a fantasy that many of us are searching for every year at this time.

It’s a myth, and should be regarded as such. Place it next to the Birth of Venus and Saturn Devouring His Sons, as allegorical at most, and let’s all stop trying to live up to it. It’s not healthy on a number of levels. 

I am not a Christian, and I don’t think I ever actually was. I attended Sunday School and Vacation Bible School as a child, and I have a very good understanding of the Bible, but I was not baptized or christened into the community of the church. In fact the church that provided these services was not part of a structured hierarchy or established sect. I think what was being preached was probably what the evangelical churches teach now, but as I tend to avoid them, the comparison is with their public persona only.

At any rate, I never saw Christmas as a religious rite of the Christian faith, or a part of the Miracle of the Resurrection, though I find researching the ideas around this festival quite fascinating.

Yet I still celebrate Christmas because I have friends and family less weird than myself that enjoy that holiday. I don’t personally need to spoil it for them by telling them how it originates as Saturnalia in Rome, or is really the Viking Yule that calls the Sun back to us from the Outer Dark. It is a time for family and food and fellowship, and a celebration of life continuing to move forward another year.

My wife’s mother had her last Christmas in 2021. She sat beneath a plaque of the Wheel of the Year (which I am sure she purchased with a wink-wink as a “Celtic calendar”) and watched us all open our gifts. She had always set great store by having the family together for Christmas day. Which was December 27 this time, because that was when we could all be off work, and make the several hour journey to where they lived. A bit over a month later she was gone. Our Christmas will never be quite the same again.

That Wheel of the Year is the exact one we call the Witches Calendar and most likely derives from Wiccan Sabbats plotted by Gerald Gardner and others who created the Wiccan faith in the first half of the 20th Century. At its corners you will find the Solstices and the Equinoxes under suitably archaic Gallo-Nordic names, and betwixt and between those you will find the cross quarter days, which are the big festivals for Wiccan and witch alike.

These ancient and noble traditions are a matter of speculation. Some bits come from tradition, oral history, and folklore. Some come from things like Robert Graves’s White Goddess and other interpretive works that in analysis can’t be considered a valid historical source.

So hurling the gravy boat at Cousin Cecil, the “Christian weirdo” at Black Friday Eve dinner over it seems, to my way of thinking, a bit of an overreaction. It cries out for a need to “defend our turf” by vilifying the other guy. And that’s precisely what many have accused the Christian community of doing to the occult community for centuries (and not without good and sufficient reason).

Do we really want to be the ones to carry that onward?

Now if Cecil lobbed a roll at me first, that’s a different matter. I love a good debate. I delight in finding historical precedent that many of Cecil’s most cherished and revered truths have their origin in something or someplace other than what he thinks they do.

Ah, for those glorious days in the early Church when you could argue for months about how many angels could fit on the head of a pin. I think sometimes the reason the Church today has so many defectors to other beliefs, or no belief at all, is because they’ve taken away that wonderment with the spiritual world.

Let’s be fair. Spirit is a big thing. Way bigger than we are. Regardless of how you come at it, the idea that we are ghosts pushing around a meat suit on a tiny fragile rock spinning around a big ball of fire in an infinite and possibly timeless emptiness without any other ghosts out there is somewhat terrifying. Only moderately more terrifying is that there are other much bigger ghosts out there who are making it all go, to which we appear as meager as bacteria. But what I think is most terrifying is that those really big ghosts are out there wondering if there are even bigger ghosts that they can’t see.

And all of them can dance on the head of a pin.

So when you establish a narrowly defined “sure and true” procedure for how all that comes together and operates for your club, you’ve taken some of the magic out of it. I mean, if I told you about how the TVs actually arrive at the Coming of the Big Screens, it just wouldn’t feel as special, now would it?

And perhaps that’s why people are drawn to non-traditional observances of traditional holidays. Or traditional observances of non-traditional holidays, depending on how you see it. Yule for Christmas. Ostara for Easter. Just leave me my Halloween, please. I’m always nervous that I’ll mispronounce Samhain in front of the family.

We don’t live in Ancient Rome or Medieval England or First Century Judea. So our choice of how we celebrate important dates, in fact our choice of important dates, is completely arbitrary. The Romans were a fairly tolerant and eclectic bunch. They loved a good party, so you can probably find a Roman festival to match up with about any day in the calendar 1The Romans even added days to the calendar to match up. , and if you can’t, you’ll find one they celebrated that was “stolen” from the Greeks, or the Celts, or the Phoenicians, or the Egyptians.

It’s fair to say that most ancient civilizations amalgamated the ideas and beliefs of their neighbors as they grew outward. Egypt presents a very easy way to observe this. The Egyptians have more gods than most other Mediterranean cultures. Every city and village had a god. There were gods for rivers and rocks and trees. There were gods for the hours, the stars, the winds, the directions, and several more abstract concepts. As the culture expanded, the local gods were allowed to climb aboard the Boat of Ra as it sailed through the Celestial Nile. They helped to row, they fought off demons, and they ensured a friendly greeting for the sky-bound counterpart of the village they protected on the earth.

Ra the Sun god is an old god of the Delta, or lower Egypt. Further up the Nile, the fertility god Osiris (Ausur in Khemit) was more important. His worship may have begun in ancient times when a fetish made of wheat or corn was ritually buried. When the corn man sprouted, life had returned. The metaphor for the dead being reborn ensured Osiris his place as the Lord of the Blessed Dead. When Narmer unified Upper and Lower Egypt, Amen, his personal god, was merged with Ra, and celebrated with the great Temple of Karnak, one of the world’s oldest perpetually used sacred sites. The Temple remains more or less active through to the Romans, when a portion was rededicated as Christian church for the new Christian Empire. There is now a mosque in it’s place, while the ancient giant temple complex bears mute testimony to the survival of the old gods.

So “stole” may be a harsh word. Borrowed is less harsh, but not perhaps as accurate.

If you go to a village and they have always worshipped Odin, getting them to forsake Odin and embrace your new Shepherd god is going to be a tough sell. Maybe that first year you get two or three converts. But they still want to hang out with their friends and family and drink mead at Yuletide. And well, so long as they aren’t actively praying to Odin, then Jesus isn’t offended. The missionary work of conversion was, at least in the early church, a little more flexible than it would become.

And we have to remember that joining the church in the Roman times meant hobnobbing with all the other people who had embraced the new faith, and being able to sell them used chariots. We have all known someone whose practice of Christianity was as much political and mercenary as spiritual, if not moreso. So it should not surprise us that this was an ancient practice too. If the Emperor converts, so do the subjects. If the Romans convert, then maybe there’s a trade agreement to be made if the Picts convert also. Meanwhile, no one said anything about not drinking mead at Yuletide.

And gradually over the next couple of millennia, what had been purely pagan and what had been purely Christian became a bit confused. People had their mead and they went to mass. They burned a Yule log and put up a creche. And nobody stole anything, they just decided that they were going to do the things that everyone enjoyed doing together and not make such a big deal about where it came from. If your family put up a tree for six generations, it didn’t matter if it was an ancient pagan winter symbol or a Christmas tree.

This desire to tease out an authenticity that is probably not there I think stems from being born as orphan children into a predominantly monotheistic Western world. Because so much of the history of witchcraft is tied to it’s Christian persecution, those on the path desire validation that somehow they are rejecting every taint of the faith that burned their figurative ancestors.

It’s an odd quirk of the human psyche that we feel the need to identify with persecutions that we have never ourselves experienced. The Burning Times were a horrible blot on human history. So is the Holocaust, Slavery, the Trail of Tears, the Holy Inquisition, the Crusades and many other persecutions (including those against the Christians) carried out by one group of people who have singled out another to blame for all the evils of the world.

The scenario of the oppressed becoming an oppressor is the cultural equivalent of the abused child growing up to become an abuser.

It needs to stop. Here. Now.

Before there are no more TVs left at Best Buy.

Now give Cousin Cecil back his dessert spoon and have another slab of that pie that is a completely inauthentic holiday tradition before I come over there and make you.

I will see you next week, and to all a good night.


Featured image: A painting by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris depicting the first Thanksgiving.Credit…Bettmann Archive/Getty Images.

This depicts the other great myth of Thanksgiving, that the Puritan pilgrims shared a feast with the local Indigenous Peoples, in the spirit of harmony and fellowship.

Which, of course, is why the Indigenous Peoples are shown in the subordinate position gladly receiving food from the oh so much better Puritans.

These same Puritans would not much later be responsible for the Salem Witch Trials, which sadly was not the worst of their atrocities. But hey, have some more mashed potatoes and corn (gifts from those primitive Indigenous Peoples).

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