Josephine McCarthy - Tarot Skills for the 21st Century

1. Hirschvogel 1538 .

The development of cards as a mystical magical tool

But me the scrip and the staff had strengthend:
I carried the star: that star led me:
The paths Ive taken, of most forsaken,
Do surely lead to the open sea:
As a clamour of voices heard in sleep,
Come shouts through the dark on the shrouded deep.
A. E. Waite, Strange Houses of Sleep.

The tarot trumps in a regular, traditional tarot deck whose writing Waite discovered in the British museum reading room in 1881.

I have worked with the Rider-Waite deck, among many others, since the mid 1970s, but it was not until I came to write this book that I took the time to really and carefully look at the imagery and symbology within each tarot trump. What I found astonished me: things of great significance that my eyes had simply skipped past, such as ancient magical messages stripped of their usual dressing and clothed in ordinary.

This made me sit up and do a bit of background research on A. E. Waite and Pamela Colman Smith (also known as Pixie) and the influences that surrounded them. Where did they get the knowledge for such imagery? Some of it was not commonplace in magical circles of the nineteenth century. I was also careful not to assume that the imagery was all from Waite: I have learned only too well from personal experience that often women involved in such projects were sidelined as just the typist or just the artist when it many cases that was clearly not true.

The imagery hidden in the tarot trumps is pulled from a variety of sources. In addition to hints at Rosicrucian themes, it draws on the mythologies of Rome and Greece, the Kabbalah, Dynastic Egypt, and Mesopotamia. A recurring theme of magical mystical ascent flows through the trump cards, indicating that one or both of the creators of the Rider Waite deck had a solid knowledge of magic and mysticism as well as ancient history and Egyptology. Or at least they collaborated with someone who did.

I quickly found that Waite was a member of the Reading Room club at the British Museum in London, as was S. L. M. Mathers, one of the founders of the Golden Dawn, an esoteric order that Waite would eventually join. Other members of the reading club included his friend the poet William Butler Yeats (also a Golden Dawn member) and most importantly, E. A. Wallis Budge, curator of Egyptian and Assyrian antiquities at the British Museum from 1894 to 1924. Budge had a deep and abiding interest in all things magical, and his knowledge of magic informed his approach to some of his work on, and translations of, Egyptian mortuary texts. Our understanding of the ancient Egyptian language has vastly improved since Budges time, and his translations have not aged well. However, they can still make for interesting and informed magical reading alongside a modern academic translation.

Budge was also close friend of William Butler Yeats, and as a museum curator he was a frequent attendee of the meetings of the reading club at the museum.

Pamela Colman Smith was also a magician as well as an artist, and she was a member of the Golden Dawn. She mixed with the same crowd who frequented the British Museum reading room, and she did commission work for her friends William Butler Yeats and Bram Stoker, who were both reading room members.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the British Museum reading room club was a powerful focal point for the major writers, thinkers, esotericists, Egyptologists, artists, and occultists of the time. Debates, lectures, and discussions were a frequent feature of the reading room, and many of the major occultists and esoteric thinkers of the age spent huge amounts of time reading and researching in the vast collections of obscure texts that the museum library held.