Did Waite know of Jungs' work?

[wandking]

Or was it Waite who influenced Jung? Although I can't quote exactly, on several occasions Waite uses psychological terminology and other references that makes one wonder if he was familiar with the theories of his contemporary. Likely both are influenced by Plato, which may account for the commonality but still I wonder.

[Alta]

Jung knew of Waite. According to the Index of the Collected Works, he referenced him in essays on: The Hermetics Museum Restored and Enlarged; The Holy Kabbalah; Lives of Alchemical Philosophers; The Real History of the Rosicrucians; The Secret Traditions in Alchemy; The Works of Thomas Vaughan.

Sorry, too lazy to pull out the rest of the books and look up the essays, but Jung did know about Waite. Hardly surprising I suppose.

[isthmus nekoi]

I don't know about Jung -> Waite influence, but Jung just never got into tarot. But a lot of Jungian writers have...

As for influence on Waite, Jung never experienced the same popularity as Freud. So any psychological background is much more likely to have come from Freud. I know Crowley's writings only ever mention old Siggy.

[wizzle]

Jung was born in 1875 and published his first major work in 1912. I believe the WR tarot was published in 1911 or thereabouts. If that isn't the exact date, I think it was substantially complete by 1911 (I looked it up yesterday, which is a looooong time ago).

Jung next published in 1917 and the larger body of his work didn't appear until 1933. His more "occult" books are even later.

So, if these dates are even remotely correct, Jung couldn't have been an influence on Waite.

My version of the I Ching has an introduction by Jung.

Here's a quick overview of Jung for anyone interested

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Jung

[tmgrl2]

I have been reading The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination by
Robert M. Place....

I love his organization and discussions of the historical elements...I am only up to page 50....but there is a discussion of archetypes and of Plato's beliefs (as mentioned by wandking in opening thread)....
that

abstract patterns and qualities perceived by human intelligence were a glimpse of the timeless reality that lies behind the impermanent physical world. He called this the world of archetypes, and believed that the archetypes were the ideal patterns that allowed physical reality to continually recreate itself.

The above is from Place's book...so...the concept of archetypes goes way back...and probably for historians, they would know even earlier references using different semantics to describe.

terri

[Teheuti]

It has long been believed that Jung knew little about Tarot although he acknowledged, after hearing a lecture on the subject, that it was a potent source of archetypal imagery. Recently I discovered the following quote from a lecture series he presented on the visionary paintings of Christiana Morgan. I believe we can forgive him his misconceptions concerning Tarot history.
1 March, 1933: “Another strange field of occult experience in which the hermaphrodite appears is the Tarot. That is a set of playing cards, such as were originally used by the gypsies. There are Spanish speciments, if I remember rightly, as old as the fifteenth century. These cards are really the origin of our pack of cards, in which the red and the black symbolize the opposites, and the division of four—clubs, spades, diamonds, and hearts—also belongs to the individuation symbolism. They are psychological images, symbols with which one plays, as the unconscious seems to play with its contents. They combine in certain ways, and the different combinations correspond to the playful development of events in the history of mankind. The original cards of the Tarot consist of the ordinary cards, the king , the queen, the knight, the ace, etc.,—only the figures are somewhat different—and besides, there are twenty-one cards upon which are symbols, or pictures of symbolical situations. For example, the symbol of the sun, or the symbol of the man hung up by the feet, or the tower struck by lightning, or the wheel of fortune, and so on. Those are sort of archetypal ideas, of a differentiated nature, which mingle with the ordinary constituents of the flow of the unconscious, and therefore it is applicable for an intuitive method that has the purpose of understanding the flow of life, possibly even predicting future events, at all events lending itself to the reading of the conditions of the present moment. It is in that way analogous to the I Ching, the Chinese divination method that allows at least a reading of the present condition. You see, man always felt the need of finding an access through the unconscious to the meaning of an actual condition, because there is a sort of correspondence or a likeness between the prevailing condition and the condition of the collective unconscious.
“Now in the Tarot there is a hermaphroditic figure called the diable. That would be in alchemy the gold. In other words, such an attempt as the union of opposites appears to the Christian mentality as devilish, something evil which is not allowed, something belonging to black magic.”
from Visions: Notes of the Seminar given in 1930-1934 by C. G. Jung, edited by Claire Douglas. Vol. 2. (Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, Bollingen Series XCIX, 1997), p. 923.

[jmd]

There is also mention of Tarot by Jung in his collected letters, that I mentioned and quoted from in a thread a number of years ago (Jan 2002) titled: Carl Jung's deck?.

I should mention that, since then, I have copies of the Hanni Binder notes, which simply describe in quite mundane terms aspects of the Marseille, no more.

[wandking]

In closing his description of The Sun card Waite writes, ". When the self-knowing spirit has dawned in the consciousness above the natural mind, that mind in its renewal leads forth the animal nature in a state of perfect conformity."

[wandking]

thanks for that link to the earlier aeclectic discussion JMD, it's like a gold-mine to me!

[wandking]

Earlier posts are correct in stating that Waite writings predate stored "collective unconcious" theories by Jung. In a section removed from specific card discriptions Waite, appears quite Jungian in his approach when he writes The Fool "signifies the journey outward, the state of the first emanation, the graces and passivity of the spirit. His wallet is inscribed with dim signs, to shew that many sub-conscious memories are stored in the soul.”

Perhaps a better question would have been did Waite influence Jung. The psychologist was fascinated with the occult and certainly would have been interested in a short overview of Tarot, like Waite wrote.