T:
Sorry - I didn't say that Florence invented a gypsy personality. She claimed to have gypsy blood (whether it was true or not, I don't know). We know that she taught the technique to John Brodie-Innes and we know that Gardner worked under her in the London Temple where she taught Tarot.
CD:
The claim to Gypsy blood has been greeted with extreme scepticism .In the course of your research did you encounter it anywhere except in the Brodie-Innes article.Roger never found it anywhere else but Florence's only book length biographer to date was extremely superficial and a large amount of Yeats-Florence material was stolen after the death of George Yeats.So something could still turn up but the Farrs are an odd family to have been intermarrying with the Gypsies. Perhaps a legend of a marriage to a 17th century Gypsy? On the other hand,Florence was show business after all.
T:
Valliant died two years before the GD was formed, so he wouldn't have passed his information directly on to a GD that didn't yet exist. I wouldn't be surprised if Eastern European gypsies used playing cards for fortune-telling. They may have even used Tarock cards. I don't read French so I don't know how much he actually wrote about the Tarot. Maybe someone else can tell us. But that is no guarantee that the technique came from him unless it is in his book.
CD:
But Stanislaus de Guaita and his secretaries Charles Barlet and Oswald Wirth had been using Vaillant material for years before Papus incorporated it into his materials.Yeats specifically refers to S de G as the only scholar and gentleman he met among the French occultists.
Brodie-Innes does not give a date for his readings with Florence Farr. It was unknown to GD in mid-October,1897. Yeats writes in a Celtic order book dating from late fall,1897,that he is going to have Florence make Celtic order court cards. If he hasn't yet shown her his Celtic Cross method he would have shown it to her when he got to London.
Roger saw the Gardner entries many years many years before his recent critic.He did not bother to take any further notes as he does not recollect that there was -could not have been anything earlier IN THE GD than when the Yeats-Pollexfen correspondence started them off.By 1909 Waite, and those behind Waite, had equated it with the Kabbalistic cross technique.Waite printed it in 1929.Did he include it in "Doctrine and Literature of the Kabbalah"
On the other hand Yeats had Gypsy Tarot material much earlier from the French.Material which was later incorporated in both Waite and Thierens.The latter of whom incorporated some very nasty references to Florence's and William' s dealings with the Bohemians,actually the DeGuaita group.Roger has nothing on the machine that Florence had direct contact with them.
By the way Barlet was one of the good guys in all of this.When Barlet belatedly discovered some very important- and genuine- black magicians were mixed up in the Leo Taxil fraud,he resigned his office and gave the evidence which probably included Tatrot material to the still very young Guenon. These people had direct connections to the Reuss group as did Crowley,Waite (and Paul Barlowe who,judging by his eccentric and perverse style, is now writing on this thread.)
T.
It was Boiteau d'Ambly in his Les Cartes à jouer et la cartomancie, Paris, 1854, who first spread the gypsy-Tarot connection, which was first made by the Abbé Rive, I believe (pre-Court de Gébelin).
CD.
Check the dates in MD.The two books by the Gypsy (from whom Vaillant says he got his first Tarot information shortly preceded Boiteau who would naturally have seen them.The Gypsy announced that he was going to publish over a dozen more books which contents he listed.But he never did.His books are filled with alleged drawing. ) Vaillant named this Gypsy as the source of his materials however he also named,as we said before, certain Turks who were housing the Romanian Gypsey and who held an identical doctrine.
No Gypsy pack containing these designs is known at present to have existed. The Vaillant manuscripts were last reported seen in Prague at some unknown time before 1928.Since then the Nazis and the Communists have been there for long periods.The manuscripts could be any where or no where by now.
Mary,we know nothing about magic working except what we learned from Roger playing original "Rune Quest" and cleaned up versions of " Empire of the Petal Throne".(That last one's got a lot of Donmeh stuff.) Roger isn't in to either magic in general or GD in particular,but he did do a lot of role playing in his time.
He had to investigate the ORIGINS of the GD because both Yeats and Charles Williams made intensive searches to find out its origins and they often incorporated what they found in their works.Much of this stuff was never GD at all.
For instance,we gave you the reference to Regardie.The Hanged Man never was GD .
His ritual directly from Sothis.One version of this ritual has been in print for twenty years.
People just keep repeating the same old mistaken identifications over and over again.
The use of the Sothis Hanged Man material is obscene in Thierens(He stuck in a dirty achroamatica that has been obliterated in the web version but is obvious in the original text.) We therefore will not certainly not reprint the names of God in a discussion of his work or with a Crowleyite blogger who is obsessing about his barber's backside.
Look,I(yes me,Shane,the typist and editor ) am at University now and I have lots of work to do.The others rely on me and I have to call Roger who pays the bills for the calls when he can be reached It is impossible to continue,particularly when we're talking to a guy who ripped us off for large amounts of Shakespeare material over at Wikie and then claimed we kids were insulting him.We are not the ones printing stuff about eying up people's backsides.We have been in touch with young people at his university and they don't like getting this kind of stuff thrown at them any better than we do.Never again.
P.S. Crowley,Waite and Wescott all had their highly placed political Turks.They are historically identifiable people.Ataturk was educated at a top Donmeh school in Salonika.His folks sent him there all the way from Albania.He was moved into power by a coalition that included four prominent and identifiable Donmeh.He was treated as a Donmeh throughout the circles in which the GD people moved.If you look like a duck,quack like a duck,and are treated like a duck,you are a duck.Same goes for Ataturk.
And,by the way, Paul ,this is not early twentieth century Turkey nor decadent early 21st century England.The current Turkish government has some of the toughest pro-heterosexual laws in Europe.(Amnesty has a petition out protesting them.) Meantime you're lucky that your barber isn't having you up on charges.
