Westcott's Tarot essay 1922

"Playing Cards and the Tarots in Divination" by Dr William Wynn Westcott. From The Transactions of Metropolitan College, S.R.I.A. (1922).

http://grimoire.blog.ocn.ne.jp/doll/files/westcott1922tarot.pdf

I found this really interesting so I made it into PDF for sharing. There are sublte sarcastic references to RWS and MacGregor Mathers (so I suppose). I believe this was the last thing Dr Westcott wrote about Tarot.

Thank you for posting. I printed it for reading later!

It's kind of you to put this up for sharing but it doesn't really say a whole lot. It basically spends a long time talking about possible history of the tarot, then goes on to meaning of the cards and divination, which is extremely limited, giving LWB size meanings for the major arcana, then outlining the OOTK method of divination but steadfastly refusing to tell us the Hebrew letter attributions of the cards, astrological attributions of the cards, and how many times to count in the counting of the cards in OOTK (because of vows of secrecy) .

Basically it's an article for people who wondered what tarot was, rather than people seeking a method of working with the cards.

edit: I'm sorry. I just re-read this post and although I put in a disclaimer, I was pretty negative about the content of the file. I'm sorry. I should have kept my cakehole shut on this occasion.

Thank you for your generosity Roppo, it is much appreciated.

graspee said:

but steadfastly refusing to tell us the Hebrew letter attributions of the cards, astrological attributions of the cards,

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Of course thats a BIIIIIIIIIIG secret! (Well used to be ... )

Admittedly the content of the article is rather poor judging from the esoteric viewpoint, but I'm really interested in it because of its being poor. Westcott wrote the article for the members of Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, not for the general readership. Nevertheless what he did was the elementary introduction to the cartomancy and the Tarot. Once I read a post from a reader in the correspondence pages of The Occult Review (1919) in which the poster deplored that the Tarot was not well-known, even in Theosophical cirles. It seems Tarot had not been a big topic among the general occult fans till late 1960s.

By the way friends, we read the following in the article.

And now in regard to the Tarot packs of to-day; almost always those procurable in England come from North Italy, the English have not printed any Tarot Cards with the ordinary English Suits, but I hear that a lady has drawn some of her own designs for Tarot Trumps but for these there is no general sale.

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"a lady" -- is it Pamela Colman Smith? If so, then the RWS pack was "no general sale" status around 1920. Or someone else? Mrs Felkin, perhaps? What do you think?