caridwen
Pamela Colman Smith post 1910
This conversation with Stuart Kaplan was posted in the talking tarot section.
http://www.lightworks.com/MonthlyAspectarian/1999/June/699-02.htm
I was wondering how a member of the Golden Dawn could die in an unmarked paupers' grave when she was part of a fraternity who surely looked after each other. I thought the Golden Dawn was like the Free Masons and they networked and helped each other out yet she dies destitute, her body thrown on top of someone else's and no one knows exactly where she is now. Does anyone know if she fell out with the Golden Dawn a la Crowley or did they just conveniently forget about her?
Does anyone have any more information on her life apart from this:
eta does anyone have a decent biography?
This conversation with Stuart Kaplan was posted in the talking tarot section.
http://www.lightworks.com/MonthlyAspectarian/1999/June/699-02.htm
I was wondering how a member of the Golden Dawn could die in an unmarked paupers' grave when she was part of a fraternity who surely looked after each other. I thought the Golden Dawn was like the Free Masons and they networked and helped each other out yet she dies destitute, her body thrown on top of someone else's and no one knows exactly where she is now. Does anyone know if she fell out with the Golden Dawn a la Crowley or did they just conveniently forget about her?
Does anyone have any more information on her life apart from this:
She was born in Middlesex, England in 1878 and lived in London, New York and also in Kingston, Jamaica. She is the one that actually did the Rider-Waite illustrations; she did them for Rider and Company in 1909. It became very interesting that her deck was the first that ever had full images on the pip cards, being the one to ten, the four suits, Swords, Wands, Cups and Coins. She had joined the Golden Dawn [an English occult fraternity], she had worked with Arthur Edward Waite [a writer of the occult]. Alfred Stieglitz selected her art as the first non-photographic work to be shown at the gallery called 291 on Madison Avenue. In 1907 he showed her work. She became friendly with him and before Georgia O'Keefe died, I wrote to her and got permission to reproduce the letter that Pamela Colman Smith sent Alfred Stieglitz in 1909 or 1910 telling him that she had just done a big job of 78 illustrations for very little money. That was the Rider-Waite Tarot deck...
Originally, people thought that Arthur Edward Waite had influenced her greatly to do the deck -- but a woman by the name of Gertrude Moakley, who died last year, was a New York librarian in 1938 who researched and found out that the Sola Busca Tarot cards which were done in the fifteenth century, had some of the pip cards as full illustrations. There are nine or ten of the cards from the Sola Busca deck that Pamela Colman Smith actually redid in her deck. So obviously, she had gone to either the British Museum or the British Library, researched and found that deck, and when she did her own illustrations, she drew heavily on those. It wasn't so much Arthur Edward Waite or the Golden Dawn; I think it was more Pamela Colman Smith and her own intuition that did the deck.
Unfortunately, she died dead broke in 1951 without any assets. No one could pay for her burial so she was put into a pauper's grave in Cornwall, England. When I went there ten years ago to try to find her gravesite -- we were going to erect a tombstone -- we were told that if you were destitute, your grave was actually put on top of another person's grave and after twenty-five years there was no way to find out where she was actually buried....
She worked with Ellen Terry doing theatrical costume design and theatrical stage design, but she was really very alone in life, never married -- she suffered from a lot of emotional and physical problems.
eta does anyone have a decent biography?