The Tarot Cosmology of Papus
AUTHOR’S NOTE: A couple of weeks ago I posted an essay in which I took issue with the Golden Dawn’s arrangement of the Kings, Queens and Knights on the Chaldean wheel of the zodiac. Rather than the Queens being Cardinal (a dynamic and enterprising mode), I’ve always felt that they should be Fixed due to their innate sensibility and patience (Fixity is stable, cautious and security-oriented); the Knights (Golden Dawn and Thoth Princes) should be Mutable and not Fixed because they are mobile and restless; and the Golden Dawn Kings (Thoth Knights) should be Cardinal instead of Mutable since they motivate and inspire. The original assignments never made sense to me when attempting to reconcile the nature of the cards with my astrological background. I’ll get to the Princesses (Knaves) in a moment.
Imagine my surprise, while tracing the cosmological roots of The Tarot of the Bohemians, to find that Papus had already covered this ground by summarizing the earlier work of Paul Christian and Oswald Wirth, beginning with an astronomical overview and then moving into astrology. I had never read the book before and thought my opinions on the subject were strictly personal. To all appearances, I’ve found the basic blueprint for the Golden Dawn’s Chaldean methodology; although the formation of his Hermetic Order preceded publication of the book by eight years, MacGregor Mathers would have had access to the same sources as Papus.
Papus used his assumptions about the quaternary design of the tarot’s “creating, preserving, equalizing and transforming” qualities to rank the court cards as “Kings = Cardinal (active); Queens = Fixed (passive); and Knights = Mutable (neutral).” Then it gets really interesting, because he proposed a way of dealing with the four extra court cards (16 cards but only 12 signs) and the four extra pip cards (40 cards but only 36 decanates) that is every bit as imaginative as the Golden Dawn’s allotment of the Princesses and Aces to the polar region around the Earth’s axis. (Note that he doesn’t get into the dual-sign complexion of the court cards straddling the sign cusps as in the Golden Dawn system, nor does he need to.)
His model is seasonal, with three 30-degree signs per season and three ten-degree decans per sign. After placing the court cards in the signs representing the modalities as noted above, he assigned the Aces, Twos and Threes of the applicable suit to the decans of the first sign of each season (Wands in Aries; Cups in Cancer; Swords in Libra; Coins in Capricorn), the Fours, Fives and Sixes to the decans of the second sign (Coins in Taurus; Wands in Leo; Cups in Scorpio; Swords in Aquarius), and the Sevens, Eights and Nines to the decans of the third sign (Swords in Gemini; Coins in Virgo, Wands in Sagittarius; and Cups in Pisces). Because the Ten is numerologically equivalent to the Ace (10=1+0=1), Papus wasted little time and effort trying to shoehorn it into the pattern, and instead took it in a different direction.
Next he decided that the four unattached Knaves and the four free-floating Tens at the end of each quadrant should be transitional: they appear at the threshold of the next season, on what I’m calling the “seasonal bridge” (anyone who lives in the temperate zones of the Northern Hemisphere knows that late March is a tease, giving us a taste of Spring and then snatching it away). They have no decanate associations of their own, so they are more “nomadic” than “residential.”
This is an intriguing innovation that is in some ways more satisfying than the Golden Dawn’s approach since it is mystical rather than pseudo-scientific. I’ve always fancied the Knaves to be “standing on the doorstep of their next big adventure,” so this notion echoes my own train of thought. In this “betwixt-and-between” state the Knaves may actually partake of some of the “dual complexion” I dismissed so cavalierly above. (For example, the Knave negotiating the “seasonal bridge” between Pisces and Aries is coming from Water and moving into Fire; whether it is the Knave of Cups or the Knave of Wands is debatable, but I would be inclined to treat it as the conclusion of the previous quadrant, making it “Cups.”)
At the center of the system Papus placed the World card, which makes perfect sense since in his scheme the mandorla around the nude woman stands for the wheel of the zodiac and the four archetypal figures at the corners represent the Fixed signs that anchor the four seasons, while the woman herself embodies the seven classical planets. He mentions that each of the twelve signs is symbolized by a planet but doesn’t name them or go as far as the Golden Dawn in relating each decan to a specific planet. Below is my rendering of his ideas in the form of a chart that is far more legible and decipherable than the one in the book, which I found to be impenetrable.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on January 28, 2024.
