The Pictorial Key and the Fool's Location

ladybird

I tried looking and found no one discussing this topic. Perhaps I missed it?

Why is the Fool located before the World and not before the Magician in Waite's PKT? Was it a printing mistake? It seems like it was an error but I wonder if there is something more to it since I've seen other editions with this same sequence.

Thanks!

Maree
 

Belobog

It's Waite's idea of interpreting the Fool's journey, or some old dogmatic principal of the "path that is layed before you". Mr. Waite is quite eccentric on the topic, so I'm guessing it's some old dogma he wanted to change.
 

ladybird

Thanks for the link, kwaw!! This just makes me ask more questions though. (I'm sure I'm not the first to ask?! :p) Like, why have the cards drawn up with the Fool as "0" then? PKT was not the first book I read about Tarot but reading it just makes the question all the more confusing! It seems that there are many secrets that Waite didn't want to disclose which is probably why it is complicated to read. It just seems so random to me to have the fool be between XX and XXI. Does anyone theorize that it could have been a mistake? So when you say it's where the French exoteric tradition put it, was there a doctrine that shows this arrangement? Sorry for the questions, I'm just perplexed and keep wondering if it's an oops?! (Like the oops line on the Sun card!) But then again if it was an oops he probably would have fixed it in a later edition! I keep wondering if there's something in the Fool's journey that's important to note here between Judgement and The World. Can anyone share with me their wisdom here? Thank you, sweet ATers!!
 

Richard

It is not a mistake. In PKT Waite uses Eliphas Levi's ordering, in which The Fool is inserted between Judgement and The World. When the corresponding 22 Hebrew letters are correlated with this ordering, The Magician is Aleph, The High Priestess is Beth, and so on down to Fool (Shin) and The World (Tau). In Part 2 Section 3 of PKT, Waite calls this "the prevailing attribution of the cards to the Hebrew alphabet." In contrast, the Golden Dawn started with The Fool as Aleph, The Magician (Beth), and so on to The World (Tau). The only agreement of the GD ordering with Levi's is that The World is Tau in both systems. For this reason, Waite writes, "nearly every [prevailing] attribution is wrong." I.e., he is in agreement with the GD rather than the Levi attributions. Since at that time the GD information was secret, and Waite honored his vows to the Order, he retained Levi's "prevailing" ordering in PKT and did not reveal the GD's. Of course, the real significance of all this has to do with the correlation of the Tarot with the Qabalistic Tree of Life, but that's for another thread.
 

Barleywine

Most commentators writing from a Golden Dawn perspective have seen it as an intentional "blind" to conceal the "true" (that is, GD) order. Other than "vows of secrecy," it's not clear to me why this was felt to be necessary. Aleister Crowley certainly didn't feel such compunction when he published "Liber T" in the Equinox in 1912 (but then, he was in open revolt).
 

Richard

Most commentators writing from a Golden Dawn perspective have seen it as an intentional "blind" to conceal the "true" (that is, GD) order. Other than "vows of secrecy," it's not clear to me why this was felt to be necessary. Aleister Crowley certainly didn't feel such compunction when he published "Liber T" in the Equinox in 1912 (but then, he was in open revolt).
It was necessary only to the extent that it hid the attributions of the Majors to the connecting paths on the Tree. He had already interchanged Justice and Strength, but their positions on the Tree according to the GD were not revealed, since having The Magician on the Path from Kether to Chokmah would put Strength on Binah-Geburah and Justice on Chesed-Netzach, which is incorrect according to the GD. Anyone who has been a member of a "secret" society will understand how vows can be taken seriously. (Nowadays it is more a fun thing, not a snob thing. In Waite's day it was more in line with the Biblical injunction not to place pearls where they will only be disdained.) Crowley, of course, was not the type to respect vows and such.
 

ladybird

Thank you! Wow, there's more I want to read about this! I'll have to meditate on the Fool's Journey between Judgment and The World to get my own vibration of what this part of the path means. Can anyone please share their thoughts on this point in his journey? Thank you!
 

Abrac

The Fool was always unnumbered or numbered 0. When occultists thought they saw a relationship between the 22 trumps and the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, the big problem was always where the Fool belonged. Waite shows his own struggle by basically placing it as 0 and 21. Aleister Crowley struggled with it, and wrote that his arrangement was proof positive that his Book of the Law came from a superhuman source. But crtical examination shows that it too has problems.
 

Richard

......Waite shows his own struggle by basically placing it as 0 and 21......
Putting the PKT description of The Fool between Judgment and The World is according to Levi's ordering, which apparently was more or less standard among occultists until it was revised by the GD. In PKT, part II, section I, page 70, Waite makes it clear that he is not in agreement with this. "[In section II] the zero card of the Fool is allocated, as it always is, to the place which makes it equivalent to the number twenty-one. The arrangement is rdiculous on the surface, which does not much signify, but it is also wrong on the symbolism, nor does this fare better when it is made to replace the twenty-second point of the sequence." Thus it would appear that the Levi ordering serves the purpose of a blind.