The Tyranny of the Familiar

I presently own just over 70 tarot, Lenormand and and oracle decks and, although I’ve made great strides in my battle with “Deck Acquisition Syndrome,” I despair of ever completely conquering it. But I just had an epiphany regarding the nature of my addiction. I’ve come to realize that, at least in the realm of tarot, most of the decks I’ve pursued lately have shown a conspicuous departure from the standard (i.e. “RWS”) iconography. I’m constantly looking for something “just a little different” that still hews to the well-worn trail blazed by the pictorially-abstract Tarot de Marseille “pips”and eventually rerouted with consummate skill in the inspired “semi-scenic” Minor Arcana of the Thoth Tarot created by Aleister Crowley and Frieda Harris. Although they didn’t fully meet his original goal of producing a pack of cards after the manner of the “Medieval Editors” who gave us the forerunners of the post-Renaissance TdM decks, Crowley and Harris came close enough that the Thoth’s minor-card antecedents are obvious in all but the suit of Swords and a few other cards where Crowley insinuated his Qabalistic symbolism into the design. In marked contrast, Pamela Colman Smith’s images for the “small” cards of the RWS, apparently with marching orders from Waite to steer clear of the historical precedents he was bound by oath to conceal, shows little empathy for the TdM (although their debt to the earlier Italian Sola Busca Tarot is obvious, allegedly because that deck was on display in a London museum while Smith was at work on her paintings).

Although I’ve only been using the Waite-Smith deck for twelve years now (after working exclusively with the Thoth for forty years) I’ve come to feel more than a little stifled or “straitjacketed” by the tediously prosaic scenes in the Minor Arcana. They lack fluidity of expression in both subject matter and execution, making poor fare for the kind of impressionistic extemporizing that the Thoth’s evocative moods, themes and colors excite in the imagination. I’ve often mentioned that they “hijack the narrative” with their “canned vignettes,” suggesting scenarios that may have little or nothing to do with the actual circumstances of the question or topic of the reading. We as readers are tempted to stuff the bulk of our storytelling into the cramped confines of the folklore that has grown up around the cards, and only with generous applications of ingenuity can we escape being buried in its inanities. If I read one more lyrical description of “childhood memories” for the 6 of Cups or “charity and generosity” for the 6 of Pentacles, I’m going to completely lose my cool and start ranting again, something I’ve managed to avoid for some time now. The Golden Dawn source material that underlies both the Thoth and the RWS decks is more metaphysical in nature and largely devoid of any such commonplace assumptions regarding those cards.

Granted that the RWS is a much-loved deck precisely because it hands neophyte readers a ready-made script for their observations, as far as I can tell from my online perch it has created generations of dependent dilettantes, most of whom never stray far outside its narrow box. They enlist “intuition” (usually stimulated by free-association from the pictures) in their approach to interpretation because they can’t draw any conclusive parallels between the visible testimony in the cards and the querent’s situation. I would argue that Waite and Smith did nobody any favors with this anecdotal approach to discernment, but then Waite was entirely dismissive of common fortune-telling with the tarot in the first place, finding it beneath the dignity of an occult master; so it’s unlikely he cared too much what Smith was up to. Interestingly, he did have a preoccupation with less high-minded types of prognostication; check out A Manual of Cartomancy: Fortune-Telling and Occult Divination, in which he was “slumming” under the pseudonym of “Grand Orient,” apparently so his esoteric reputation wouldn’t be sullied by pedestrian associations.

Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on September 7, 2022.