Bringing Home the Bacon!
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I just discovered a quote by an unnamed “Bacon” (it’s unclear whether the writer meant Roger or Francis, but my money would be on the latter, who was a consummate linguist) that speaks loudly to my long-held opinion that the scenic (and often “folkloric”) minor cards of the Waite-Smith tarot do no justice to a more philosophical appreciation of Waite’s esoteric roots in the Golden Dawn system of knowledge. While this deeper understanding with its wealth of correspondences is not crucial to the practice of popular fortune-telling, it adds considerable nuance to the more literal expression of ideas inherent in the visual presentation and introduces a metaphysical dimension that Waite deliberately chose to exclude from his writing.
“If an untruth in nature be once on foot . .. by reason of the use of the opinion in similitudes and ornaments of speech, it is never called down.” (In other words, if errors go uncorrected they will be perpetuated through blind repetition.)
Tarot historians have left little doubt that Waite, who disdained prognostication with the tarot cards as “vulgar” (even if he did publish an entire book on cartomancy as “Grand Orient”) kept “hands off” the artistic development of the Minor Arcana, leaving Smith to her own devices. The upshot of his disinterest was that Smith (with her theatrical narrative vignettes) substantially hijacked the descriptive meaning of the cards from under the sway of Waite’s text, leaving a gap in continuity that has been filled over the last hundred years with imaginative folklore that has little relevance to Waite’s (and to a lesser extent, Smith’s) Golden Dawn pedigree. With a nod to Bacon, I submit that this hallowed version of the “truth” has never been “called down” or seriously challenged except by Tarot de Marseile and Thoth practitioners; uncritical neophytes tend to swallow it whole.
There has been no end to intuitive revisionism based on free-association from the suggestive imagery, often with little or no connection to its interpretive antecedents. A flourishing culture of Bacon’s “similitudes and ornaments of speech” (enshrined in keywords) has overrun a calmer, more rational analysis of the symbolism, a fanciful digression that — abetted by Jungian sympathies — seems to leap right over the occult playbook, one that harks back to the 18th-Century innovations of Etteilla but without a firm grounding in his methods. In other words, overly enthusiastic “cheer-leaders” for psychic divination are making it up as they go, which will eventually (and almost entirely) divorce tarot reading from its historical foundation. This will leave us wholly within “oracle” territory without a shred of conventional “tarot” to be seen.
This trend is nowhere more evident than in the explosion of new tarot decks, most of of which I dub “TINOs” (tarot in name only). Not only are many of them artistically anemic, they are equally devoid of symbolic heft, perhaps not even alluding to the classical graphics of the older cards and thereby severing a vital link between past and future. I commented on this a couple of years ago, and it has now accelerated far beyond its inception with the advent of self-publishing, promoted by clueless entrepreneurs hoping to make a buck. Tarot collectors can be excused to some degree for adding these decks to their inventory, but those who intend to read with them may not even be aware that what they’re getting for their money is a tepid misrepresentation of the “real deal.” They are so enamored of the “new, improved” tarot and so averse to the “old standby” that they fail to comprehend the impact of this insidious departure from the norm. Even those who choose to stay with the Waite-Smith tarot often turn a blind eye to its more profound implications and just fabricate their own anecdotal rhetoric for the purpose of storytelling.
My long-suffering readers will no doubt groan at this reiteration of a shopworn topic that is a “hot button” and a favorite “whipping boy” of mine, but as a lifelong proponent of the Thoth deck only recently come to the RWS in 2011, I can’t help but notice a precipitous decline in the symbolic vigor of the modern tarot from that robust exuberance I experienced back in the early ’70s at the height of “New Age” experimentation. It’s like a tapped-out field that has been doused with toxic fertilizer for so long that it will never return to its former productivity, while its bemused adherents continue to delude themselves about its potency. It’s sad that the numerous beginners who are clamoring for insight are being handed the ersatz version of tarot guidance that is based on personal opinion and not on recognized principles of excellence. I’ve put down, half-read, numerous tarot books that stray into such renegade advocacy, and in my own work with other decks I’m prone to import reliable Thoth definitions and ignore what the earnest but misguided deck creators are trying to put over on their customers.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on December 19, 2024.
