Airing Out the Tradition: When “Organic” Trumps “Scientific”

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Although he was addressing Medieval poetry and poets in The Discarded Image, C.S. Lewis made several observations that can be directly applied to the diviner’s approach to cartomantic tradition.* He mentioned that many literary works of that era were an amalgam and synthesis (or at worst a pastiche) of contributions by a host of authors like Chaucer and Mallory, each of whom adapted the work of their predecessors in much the same way that Shakespeare co-opted the “bones” of the Italian novel. In many cases they were “borrowers” and “burnishers” whose original work did no always measure up to their enrichment of the historical canon.

Lewis notes that in any conflation of creative input from different eras, each “new patch” influences what came before and is in turn influenced by it, not through mere addition of content but rather more “chemically” (he could just as well have said “organically”) than “arithmetically,” meaning that counting up the”jots” won’t produce the same totality as contemplating the whole since it is “ greater than the sum of its parts.” Confronted with bad poetry that has been “plastered up” with ornament and affectation, the astute reader can still detect “the rubble through the stucco.”

We are in much the same position with the tarot “knowledge base.” All of the tweaking and tugging on the baseline that has occurred since Etteilla published the first book dedicated to divination in the late 1700s has not strayed all that far from the source, and more recent attempts to “reinvent the wheel” in the form of so-called “New Tarot” have been largely shrugged off by more seasoned and knowledgeable practitioners. There have been interpretative extrapolations and amplifications galore, but not much radical revisionism in anything that can be legitimately identified as “tarot” in both structure and spirit. Those entrepreneurial card-pushers who gleefully stick the name “tarot” on what amount to personalized oracle decks aren’t fooling anyone.

The worthiness of the material is its own justification for existence; it has stood the test of time even if it is only a starting point on the road to mastery of the card-reader’s art. We may play around with the source material to our heart’s content but in the final analysis we are standing on the shoulders of giants who were more metaphysical “alchemists” than “organic chemists,” and we would do well to remember that. Although modern tarot artists and writers may denigrate the richness of the classical wisdom, they are — as Lewis said about the willfully derivative poets of the Middle Ages — “never more indebted to their (predecessors) then when they are adding to (them).” To risk another cliche, “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” but, where they leave off imitating and start improvising on their own shaky authority, they may be veering off-course into self-parody.

For those of us who pursue the old ways, we should be aware of the caveat tendered by Lewis toward those authors who purveyed their own brand of “alt-history” by tagging it onto their alterations: when latching onto the established lore, we must avoid being “anxious to convince others, perhaps to half-convince (ourselves), that (we) are not merely ‘making things up.’” In our efforts to rewrite the script closer to our personal understanding of its intent, we are merely the “last builder” (in a long line of tinkerers) “doing a few demolitions here and adding a few features there.” We have no claim to originality beyond our own narrow demesne, we are simply “gilding the lily.”

We may have unassailable confidence in our methods, but when trying to invent something unprecedented we can feel like we’re “jumping into the deep end.” The best advice would be to blithely go where the narrative takes us but simultaneously validate it against the the foundation of core knowledge, then “check-and-adjust” as necessary. There is no shame in “touching up” what has been received from our ancestral mentors rather than tossing it out as unoriginal; it was common practice in the Middle Ages.

*Many of the academic phrases and terms I’ve quoted were derived from this source.

Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on January 4, 2025.