Greater Arcana Study Group—The Fool

Abrac

Here are Waite's comments in his 1909 article "The Tarot: A Wheel of Fortune" in the Occult Review:

Last or first, as you please, in its own series, is the card which represents Zero and is entitled The Fool. It is in no sense, though it has been called, a type of humanity as the blind slave of matter, though in the common traffic of fortune-telling it may, and does, stand for extravagance or even for enthusiasm and the folly which its name implies. It is said by Eliphas Levi to signify eternal life; it is a card of the joy of life before it has been embittered by experience on the material plane. On the spiritual plane it is the soul, also at the beginning of its experience, aspiring towards the higher things before it has attained thereto.​

This part of Waite's commentary in the PKT caught my attention,

"The sun, which shines behind him, knows whence he came, whither he is going, and how he will return by another path after many days."

These three are heads of the "legends of the soul" to which Waite refers elsewhere. The legends are doctrine concerning the soul, passed down from generation to generation as opposed to quantifiable history. "Return" refers to the mystic quest.

This also caught my attention,

"He is a prince of the other world on his travels through this one . . ."

From The Way of Divine Union (1915), “The worlds merge one into another; the two are indeed one. The other world is the inwardness of this.”
 

Teheuti

The text by Soror Q.L. is usually published along with "Book T." I thought it was written by Mrs. Felkin. The link you gave, Abrac, is illustrated by the Trumps from the Felkin's Whare Ra [Golden Dawn] Temple in New Zealand. It is not known whether these cards are an exact copy of a deck designed by Moina and MacGregor Mathers or modified by the Felkins. Members of the Whare Ra Temple were given a B&W copy on something similar to index card stock. I assume they could color it themselves although the card stock would not be ideal for that purpose (I have an original Whare Ra deck).

For those who are not aware of it - the Felkins were members of the Golden Dawn in England who immigrated to New Zealand and started a very successful GD Temple there that kept going until around the time of the 2nd WW or a little later. Pat and Chris Zalewski 'rescued' and have published quite a bit of the material from that Temple.

I recommend keeping this paper and the Whare Ra cards in mind as a comparison point while going through Waite's text.
 

Teheuti

I believe Mary found a parallel between the Fool and one of the characters in Tobit (one of the Biblical books in the Apocrypha), a story of which Waite was fond.

From the Book of Tobit (or Tobias), “And Tobias went forward, and the dog followed him, and he lodged the first night by the river of Tigris.” (Tobit 6:1)

Here's from a typical painting illustrating this scene:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Filippino_Lippi_016.jpg

It was from the Book of Tobit that Waite got his magical motto: Sacramentum Regis: “For it is good to hide the secrets of a king, but honorable to reveal and confess the works of God.” Etenim sacramentum regis abscondere bonum est opera autem Dei revelare et confiteri honorificum est. (Tobias 12:7)
 

Teheuti

This also caught my attention,

"He is a prince of the other world on his travels through this one . . ."

From The Way of Divine Union (1915), “The worlds merge one into another; the two are indeed one. The other world is the inwardness of this.”

Waite: Lamps of Western Mysticism:
“He would bear . . . within him at least unformulated vestiges of his antecedent state, of the immemorial past in God which was once his mode of being, and our mystic consciousness of a Divine Presence within us, attained in certain manners or degrees and by the following of certain paths in life, is at once a witness thereto and an earnest of a restoration to come, because it proclaims our surviving kinship with our source.”​

Waite's "Secret Doctrine" is essential to understanding many of the oddities in Waite's text on the cards.

With PCS we'll probably never have any idea what she intended (so we get to make it up!). With Waite, his other works and a careful reading of PKT reveal exactly why many of the symbols and images of the Greater Trumps are the way they are. Waite's intent is crystal clear to those who choose to read his body of work.
 

Michael Sternbach

The Hermetic shows a man with a wolf and flowers.

Right, but the Hermetic doesn't claim to be faithful to Mather's prototype. It is obviously strongly influenced by both RWS and Thoth.


Wow, great! Thanks.

The text by Soror Q.L. is usually published along with "Book T." I thought it was written by Mrs. Felkin. The link you gave, Abrac, is illustrated by the Trumps from the Felkin's Whare Ra [Golden Dawn] Temple in New Zealand. It is not known whether these cards are an exact copy of a deck designed by Moina and MacGregor Mathers or modified by the Felkins. Members of the Whare Ra Temple were given a B&W copy on something similar to index card stock. I assume they could color it themselves although the card stock would not be ideal for that purpose (I have an original Whare Ra deck).

I doubt that there is an exact copy of Mather's deck extant. In their interesting book The Magical Tarot of the Golden Dawn, the Zalewskis freely admit extending the original GD materials, and I guess that's in the tradition of the Whare Ra.

Anyways, the text by Soror Q.L. seems to confirm that the later GD based decks must be pretty close to the original conception. (Just like I had assumed for The Fool.)
 

Abrac

In the index of Regardie's Golden Dawn book, for Q.L. it says, "Q.L.=Quaero Lucem (Harriet Miller Davidson, aka Mrs. R. W. Felkin)." Could Davidson be her maiden name? Apparently it's the same person in any case.
 

Teheuti

Alright, I'm confused now. As I said, according to Giordano Berti, Soror Quaero Lucem is Harriet Miller Davidson who authored the text in 1904.

I will send him an email. Let's see what he says...
I found it! Harriet Felkin was Robert Felkin's second wife. She was originally initiated into the GD as Harriet [Harriot] Miller Davidson, Soror Quaero Lucem, which seems to have been changed to Quaestor Lucis (there seems to be some confusion about this). She was a co-founder of the Stella Matutina and Whare Ra.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Robert_William_Felkin