Reading 'The Pictorial Key to the Tarot' by AE Waite - Confused?

[MagsStardustBlack]

This book came with the Pamela Colman Smith deck so i'm reading it now.... He makes many ref' to the people Eliphas Levi and Court de Gebelin - among others??? So i googled them.... It's like opening a can of worms. Is there a nice little summery book for each of these people anyone can recommend so i can get a grip on what they are about....

Google brought up -The History of Magic by Levi - any good?

Its hard to understand Waite when i don't know who and what he is refering to.

Many thanks,

Mags.

[tarotbear]

Dear Mags -

The only way is to Google these people.

'The Pictorial Key to the Tarot' needs a good modern editor to rewrite it. It is written in that stifled, condescending Victorian style that implies the author has more knowledge of the subject that the reader, and if the reader doesn't understand it is because the reader is an ignoramus. IMHO the language needs a serious updating, or at least a dictionary to explain what all these archaic words translate into.

Don't feel badly - the book is meant to confuse the reader so that the truly uninterested will give up.

[LRichard]

I really think that Pictorial Key is mainly a reference book. (It needs a good index, however.) If it is too frustrating to read straight through, just put it aside, or skip around to the parts which you find interesting.

[Barleywine]

Originally Posted by MagsStardustBlack

This book came with the Pamela Colman Smith deck so i'm reading it now.... He makes many ref' to the people Eliphas Levi and Court de Gebelin - among others??? So i googled them.... It's like opening a can of worms. Is there a nice little summery book for each of these people anyone can recommend so i can get a grip on what they are about....

Google brought up -The History of Magic by Levi - any good?

I might suggest that you would be better served by reading "about" these people at first rather than trying to read them outright. Levi's core work was translated into English by Arthur Edward Waite, so it was probably into that Victorian English Tarotbear mentioned. Court de Gebelin's "Le Monde Primatif" is several volumes, although I think tarot is discussed in only one of them. Here are a couple of tidbits from Wikipedia. The more modern histories of the tarot (Place, Huson, et al) will probably fill you in further. I can't speak from direct knowledge since I don't own any of the above, and my historical references are all older.

Eliphas Levi (Alphonse Louis Constant)

His magical teachings were free from obvious fanaticisms, even if they remained rather murky; he had nothing to sell, and did not pretend to be the inititate of some ancient or fictitious secret society. He incorporated the Tarot cards into his magical system, and as a result the Tarot has been an important part of the paraphernalia of Western magicians. He had a deep impact on the magic of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and later on the ex-Golden Dawn member Aleister Crowley. He was also the first to declare that a pentagram or five-pointed star with one point down and two points up represents evil, while a pentagram with one point up and two points down represents good. It was largely through the occultists inspired by him that Lévi is remembered as one of the key founders of the 20th century revival of magic.

Antoine Court de Gebelin

It was his immediate perception, the first time he saw the Tarot deck, that it held the secrets of the Egyptians. Writing without the benefit of Champollion's deciphering of the Egyptian language, Court de Gébellin developed a reconstruction of Tarot history, without producing any historical evidence, which was that Egyptian priests had distilled the ancient Book of Thoth into these images. These they brought to Rome, where they were secretly known to the popes, who brought them to Avignon in the 14th century, whence they were introduced into France. An essay by The Comte de Mellet included in Court de Gebelin's Monde primitif is responsible for the mystical connection of the Tarot's 21 trumps and the fool with the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. An essay appended to this gave suggestions for cartomancy; within two years the fortune-teller known as "Etteilla" published a technique for reading the tarot, and the practice of tarot reading was born.

[LRichard]

A lot of the Wikipedia material on esoterica is substantially accurate.

Waite boldly and effectively destroys Court de Gebelin's popular theory of an Egyptian origin for Tarot.

Waite gives credit to Levi for some of his interpretations of the Major Trumps. Levi may have been one of the first magicians to notice a correlation between the Tarot Trumps and the 22 Paths on the Qabalistic Tree of Life. The Golden Dawn picked up on this but greatly improved the correlations by shifting The Fool to Path 11. Waite indicates that he goes along with the GD rather than Levi, although he follows the "traditional" Levi ordering in the section on the Majors.

If one wants to explore the occult origins of the Rider-Waite (and other GD-inspired decks), there is a lot of material that needs to be covered. Unfortunately, this can be daunting, and most RWS users bypass this difficulty by reading the cards intuitively or going by the LWB instructions. A lot depends on what one wants to get out of the deck.

[direwolf336]

Originally Posted by MagsStardustBlack

Its hard to understand Waite when i don't know who and what he is refering to.

Many thanks,

Mags.

Ha, I feel like I have a pretty good understanding of the fundamentals of each card and I still don't know what the heck he is talking about in that book. And i'v read it 3 times hoping to get more out of it each time

[tarotbear]

Originally Posted by direwolf336

Ha, I feel like I have a pretty good understanding of the fundamentals of each card and I still don't know what the heck he is talking about in that book. And i'v read it 3 times hoping to get more out of it each time

You have the patience of Job!

I believe, IMHO- that those tomes were deliberately written that way so that if you were an initiate - who was confused - their answer was - "You are a plebe - you need to study harder!" Once the initiate did some work and realized that something was entirely erroneous and mentioned it to (whomever), they would say "AHA! You figured it out! Good! Now you can go to the next level and we will tell you more of the crap we threw in to confuse the plebes - and reveal the truth!"

[direwolf336]

Originally Posted by tarotbear

You have the patience of Job!

I believe, IMHO- that those tomes were deliberately written that way so that if you were an initiate - who was confused - their answer was - "You are a plebe - you need to study harder!" Once the initiate did some work and realized that something was entirely erroneous and mentioned it to (whomever), they would say "AHA! You figured it out! Good! Now you can go to the next level and we will tell you more of the crap we threw in to confuse the plebes - and reveal the truth!"

I think you might be right!!!

[LRichard]

Originally Posted by tarotbear

You have the patience of Job!

I believe, IMHO- that those tomes were deliberately written that way so that if you were an initiate - who was confused - their answer was - "You are a plebe - you need to study harder!" Once the initiate did some work and realized that something was entirely erroneous and mentioned it to (whomever), they would say "AHA! You figured it out! Good! Now you can go to the next level and we will tell you more of the crap we threw in to confuse the plebes - and reveal the truth!"

It is human nature to want to blame others for our own lack of understanding. Yours is one of the cleverest that I have seen.

It is thought that the Illuminati was as you have described. When the initiate finally reached the top rung, he was told that everything he had been taught was BS, and he was now ready to join the plot to take over the world. To this end, he was told that it is okay to lie, cheat, steal, and even kill, because there is no God.

However, now that the entire Golden Dawn corpus is available to all (thanks to Crowley, Regardie, and others), it is clear that their degree system did not work that way. Nice try, though.

[tarotbear]

Originally Posted by LRichard

Nice try, though.

I have no idea what you are talking about, or why you need to be so rude.

My comment was a JOKE . If you can't take a joke, you need to ask yourself why you feel this joke is some personal crusade to persecute your beliefs, which it is not.