Just to make sure my position is clear to anyone who reads this: I agree with much of Mary's thesis. There is no doubt in my mind that Arthurian and Masonic stories and symbols were important to Waite and that he included references to them in the RWS deck. The only thing I disagree with is the very specific claim that Mary is making, that Waite intended for the pip cards to illustrate some of those stories by showing sequential scenes in numerical order, like a comic strip.
I realize that to some people it may seem an unimportant point. For me, while I'm frankly not extremely interested in Waite's metaphysical theories, I am very interested in whether the RWS pip cards were designed as sequential story illustrations. It goes to the very heart of why that feature of the RWS has proved so popular and why many of us are drawn to it. Do we somehow sense underlying stories in the suits? Or is it the very lack of an intended story that makes the RWS pip designs so successful?
As I've been pondering this over the last few days, here's how it settles out in my mind. For me, the strongest arguments against what I'll call the story theory are two:
1) Smith's artwork clearly does not attempt to show a regular cast of characters throughout each suit; and
2) Waite makes no explicit statement that he meant the pips to show stories. He makes no explicit statement that he makes a connection in his mind between tarot pips and stories. Certain stories were clearly important to him throughout his life, and he clearly included some Arthurian/Masonic symbolism in the court and pip cards, but that doesn't mean that we can assume that he designed the pips to illustrate the stories.
Mary has listed several examples of what she refers to as circumstantial evidence. I've done some Googling about circumstantial evidence and have learned some interesting things. "Circumstantial evidence" means evidence that requires some inference. An eyewitness testifying to the committing of a crime is direct evidence. A forensic expert's testimony that the victim's DNA was found on a suspect is circumstantial evidence: it requires inference by the judge or jury as to how it got there.
The fact that evidence is circumstantial doesn't necessarily make it inferior to direct evidence. In fact, circumstantial evidence can be stronger than direct evidence; for example, a forensic expert's testimony can be more convincing than an eyewitness's testimony, because that eyewitness testimony might be mistaken.
The important point about circumstantial evidence is that several pieces of it when taken together can be decisive, if the pieces of evidence corroborate each other and fill in missing information.
An example (which I read in the Wikipedia article on circumstantial evidence) would be in a murder case, where you might have a man testifying he saw the suspect enter a house, heard a scream, then saw the suspect emerge with a bloody knife. A forensic expert testifies that the blood on the knife is the victim's. Those two pieces of circumstantial evidence corroborate each other, and each supplies what the other is missing. Together, they complete the jigsaw puzzle.
In the case of RWS pips, it seems to me that although Mary has listed several pieces of indirect or circumstantial evidence, it's not determinative, because it's not different kinds of indirect evidence which support each other or fill in missing info. Instead, all of her evidence is basically Waite repeating the same ideas (i.e. his emphasis on Grail symbols and Arthurian/Masonic stories).
In this case, direct evidence would be Waite writing that he had designed the RWS pips to sequentially illustrate specific stories. We clearly don't have that direct evidence. Circumstantial evidence would be Waite writing, contemporaneously to the creation of the deck, of links in his mind between tarot pips and stories (for example, inclusion in PKT of text to the effect of, "lay out the pip cards in sequence and see what stories they make"). If we had that, then we could combine that circumstantial evidence with Mary's cited evidence of the importance to Waite of Arthurian/Masonic stories, and that combination of circumstantial evidence would have weight: we could infer that Waite's interest in those stories + Waite's mention of the pips telling stories = a reasonable supposition that he wanted the pips to tell the stories.
But we don't even have that indirect evidence. Nowhere does Waite mention the concept of the pips sequentially illustrating stories. And I think it's important to point out that illustrated pips for a divinatory tarot deck was a new thing in 1910. It had no precedent. Waite invented it. (The Sola-Busca and Vacchetta decks clearly weren't designed with divination in mind.) So he didn't have the benefit that many of us have had of decades of study and use of illustrated-pip decks. Starting in the '70s and '80s tarot decks began to be used in a much more creative and freer way, but in 1910 their use was very constrained. They were used for fortune-telling and game-playing. The Golden Dawn and other esotericists were using them for meditation, and the GD engaged in pathworking. The GD did indeed see the pip cards as metaphysical stages of a journey, but that's not the same thing as seeing them as illustrating sequential scenes of a story.
Another interesting point about circumstantial evidence is that (to quote the Wikipedia article): "An explanation involving circumstantial evidence becomes more valid as proof of a fact when the alternative explanations have been ruled out."
What's the alternative to Mary's theory? The alternative is the theory which is now commonly accepted, I think, by most people: That Waite provided Smith with cartomantic meanings and GD influences for the pip cards, and that either he also suggested specific scenes or she created the scenes herself based on her earlier work (like the Four of Swords), based on well-known artwork from the time (Seven of Pentacles), her stage experience, and her own imagination, or perhaps he suggested some scenes and she suggested others.
Mary has failed to show why this generally-accepted theory is inadequate. In fact, under the principle of Occam's Razor, which favors simpler explanations over complex ones, the commonly-accepted creation theory for the pips seems far simpler and more plausible than believing that Waite alone or Waite and Smith together encoded stories into the pips and then engaged in a conspiracy to erase every trace of it.
It would be interesting to know when the first appearance in print was of the concept of seeing the pip suits as stories. I don't know the answer -- the earliest I can think of is the Mythic Tarot in 1986. I'm sure there are earlier books that mention it, but I'd be willing to bet none of them is earlier than the late '60s. I just don't think someone in 1910 would have thought of it.
Mary has posted a quote from Waite:
The Holy Grail
p. 466
"In so far as there is mystic purpose or Hidden Doctrine in Grail literature it is often like an echo from afar—a rumor, a legend which had fallen in the hands of romancers. It is as if Sir Walter Montbéliard, the patron of Robert de Borron, being by the hypothesis a Templar, had told a strange story to the poet of things which he also had heard from afar. . . .
I put forward as so many material of assitance, so many traces of the same implicits perpetuated through several centuries—(1) the Sacramental Mystery of Alchemy as corresponding to the Eucharistic Mystery of the Holy Grail; (2) **the mystical pageant of Kabbalism as analogical to the Grail pageant**; (3) certain quests in *Masonry* as synonymous—outside all derivation—with the Grail Quest."
[What, may I ask, is the mystical pageant of Kabbalism - but the journey on the Tree through the ten sephiroth - the number cards of the Minor Arcana? [...]
In this quote Waite seems to equate Arthurian and Masonic stories with pip cards (at least in Mary's interpretation). So is this the smoking gun? I don't think so. First of all, it references Kabbalism, not tarot. By "Kabbalism" did Waite mean "tarot"? Maybe, but it seems like an awfully big inference to hang the entire argument on.
Secondly, Mary has conveniently omitted (perhaps disingenuously?) the publication date. The Hidden Church of the Holy Graal was published in 1909, but The Holy Grail, from which this quote comes, is a later edition from 1933, 24 years after the creation of the deck. So, this particular piece of evidence doesn't fulfill the promise of Mary's earlier reference to it:
In his appendix on the Minors in the Grail book he says he can devise pageants out of the Minors. He was working on both the Tarot and the Grail book at the same time.
Quite the contrary: he does not say that he can devise pageants out of the Minors, and he didn't write that at the same time that he worked on the deck.
One question I have is, if the connection between Arthurian/Masonic stories and tarot pips was so important for Waite, then why did his second tarot deck not include pip cards? I've read on Mary's site that there apparently exist 10 additional designs for the sephiroth. It would be interesting to know whether they're illustrated with storytelling scenes or not -- I would suspect not.
A second question I've been starting to wonder about is, if Waite had intended the RWS pips to illustrate specific stories, and then engaged in a conspiracy with Smith to completely hide or erase any evidence of that fact by directing her to not show identifiable continuing characters, and then refused to allude to the fact at all in his writings, then does it even really have any meaning to say that he intended it? If he put it in there and then erased it and never mentioned it, can it really be said to exist? Perhaps it's there in some ineffable, metaphysical way, an indefinable trace that can't be pinned down -- but if so, it seems like perhaps a waste of time to even talk about it, since it can't be proved and apparently had no great significance for Waite, since he didn't mention it or hint at it (except for Mary's 24-years-later quote, which I think is too hazy to qualify).
I don't buy the explanation that it's not there because Waite hid it. Waite apparently liked to hint at some things and hide other things in plain sight, but despite that tendency, I still think that if it ain't there at all, then it ain't there at all.
Mary's continued demand that I provide alternate stories for the pip cards becomes more ridiculous to me each time she repeats it. It might make more sense if I were making the argument that there are stories in the pips, just not the stories she cites. But my argument is that Waite didn't design the pips to illustrate stories at all. Mary seems to be taking great exception to my statement that the result of her story attributions is as one would expect when correlating tarot with other symbol/story systems.
I'll admit that that statement of mine is subjective -- just as subjective as her own story attributions. And if I did come up with different attributions, her judgement of their success would be just as subjective. Once again, I'm not obligated to perform work to disprove her thesis. I'm beginning to suspect that the reason for her challenge is to present me with a Sisyphean task so that I'll go away, and then she'll have a good excuse to ignore my criticisms.
Besides, do I really need to prove the idea that the tarot (or any symbol system) is infinitely flexible and capable of multiple interpretations? As Abrac has said, and I agree:
Waite was always careful to not say "this or that is what lies behind the symbolism." Even in his comment on the Ace of Cups he says "It is an intimation of that which may lie behind the Lesser Arcana. In his autobiography he says great pains were taken so that no external influences came into play upon Pamela as she created the images, but in the next breath he says she had to be "spoon-fed" on some of the majors. So I think Waite's intention was to not infuse the cards with any concrete meanings, but it was probably inevitable that his beliefs a philosophy would spill into it.
So, given the deliberately ambiguous nature of the images, I think it wise to display caution and not uncritically accept a theory which calls for very precise attributions to the cards and for which (and I'm talking about the story aspect specifically) there is no corroborative evidence.
