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Wang - Qabalistic Tarot PDF

296 Pages·2007·24.91 MB·English
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The QABALISTIC TAROT A TEXTBOOK OF MYSTICAL PHILOSOPHY Robert Wang SAMUEL WEISER, INC. York Beach, Maine The Tarot Symbols on the Tree of Life. CONTENTS PREFACE, xv INTRODUCTION, Modem Tarot Studies: A Nineteenth Century Legacy 1 The Search For "Truth" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 5 The Golden Dawn 10 The Golden Dawn Tarot 12 The Rider-Waite Deck 13 Aleister Crowley's Thoth Tarot 14 Book "T" ..... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 15 THE QABALAH Origins of the Qabalah 20 The Sepher Yetzirah (Book of Formation) 21 Medieval Qabalism 21 The Renaissance: Hermeticism and Christian Qabalah 23 Magus to the Queen 25 Rosicrucianism .. ~ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 25 Later "Rosicrucians" 26 Hermetic-Qabalistic Deceptions 27 Hermetic-Qabalah and The Golden Dawn 28 The Tree of Life 29 Concepts 32 "Secret" Paths 37 Negative Limitless Light 39 The Four Worlds 39 Qabalistic Symbolism 43 The Sephiroth and Their Symbols - 44 The Minor Cards 47 The Court Cards 50 PATTERNS OF THE SEPHIROTH Kether, The Crown 53 The Aces 56 Chokmah, Wisdom 60 The Twos 63 The Kings 66 Binah, Understanding 69 The Threes 71 The Queens 74 Daath, Knowledge 77 Chesed, Mercy 78 The Fours 80 Geburah, Strength 83 The Fives 85 Tiphareth, Beauty 88 The Sixes 92 The Princes 94 Netzach, Victory 98 The Sevens 101 Hod, Splendor 103 The Eights 106 Yesod, Foundation 108 The Nines 111 Malkuth, Kingdom 114 The Tens 117 The Princesses 120 THE MAJOR ARCANA ON THE TREE OF LIFE Applications of the Sepher Yetzirah 125 The Matemals: Air, Water, Fire 125 The Double Letters: Planets, Localities, Days, Gateways, Contrasts 128 The Simple Letters: Signs of the Zodiac 131 The Cube of Space 131 Numerology 135 Sets of Paths . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 137 The Initiatory Scheme of the Tarot 140 THE UNIVERSE, Tau 145 JUDGMENT, Shin 149 THE SUN, Resh 154 THE MOON, Qoph 158 THE STAR, Tzaddi 162 THE TOWER, Peh 166 THE DEVIL, Ayin 172 TEMPERANCE, Samekh 176 DEATH, Nun 181 THE HANGED MAN, Mem 186 JUSTICE, Lamed 190 WHEEL OF FORTUNE, Caph 195 THE HERMIT, Yod 201 STRENGTH, Teth 205 THE CHARIOT, Cheth 210 THE LOVERS, Zain 215 THE HIEROPHANT, Vau 220 THE EMPEROR, Heh 225 THE EMPRESS, Daleth 230 THE HIGH PRIESTESS, Gimel 234 THE MAGICIAN, Beth 239 THE FOOL, Aleph 245 PRACTICAL WORK Skrying 251 Divination 252 REFERENCE Colors on the Tree of Life 263 Colors and Sounds on the Tree of Life 264 Angels of the Decans 265 Divine Names of the Sephiroth 265 Thirty-Two Paths of Wisdom 266 NOTES, 267 INDEX, 279 ILLUSTRATIONS Color. Plate I, The Tarot Symbols on the Tree of Life Color Plate II, The Tree of Life in a "Solid Sphere" Fig. 1 The Ten Holy Sephiroth on the Tree of Life 30 Fig. 2 Development of the Tree of Life diagram 31 Fig. 3 The Path of the Flaming Sword 32 Fig. 4 The Triangles of the Tree of Life 32 Fig. 5 The Pillars on the Tree of Life 33 Fig. 6 The Divisions of the Soul 36 Fig. 7 Attribution of Elements to the Pentagram 37 Fig. 8 The "Secret Paths" on the Tree of Life 38 Fig. 9 The Four Worlds 40 Fig. 10 The Four Elements 42 Fig. 11 Attribution of the Minor Arcana to the Tree of Life 45 Fig. 12 The Court Cards on the Tree of Life 46 Fig. 13 The Signs of the Zodiac in the Twelve Houses 48 Fig. 14 The Decans 49 Fig. 15 Attribution of the Minor Cards and the Court Cards to the Zodiac 51 Fig. 16 Attribution of Planets to the Hexagram 90 Fig. 17 The Symbol of Venus on the Tree of Life 100 Fig. 18 Attribution of the Major Arcana to the Tree of Life 126 Fig. 19 Attribution of Maternal 127 Fig. 20 The Cards on the "Path of the Flaming Sword" 128 Fig. 21 Planetary attributions to the Tree of Life 130 Fig. 22 Signs of the Zodiac on the Tree of Life 132 Fig. 23 The Signs of the Zodiac on the Tree of Life as Cardinal, Fixed, and Mutable Elements 133 Fig. 24 The Cube of Space 134 Fig. 25 Cards considered as Opposites 137 Fig. 26 The Cards on the Middle Pillar 138 Fig. 27 The Paths from the Thirty-Two Paths of Wisdom 139 Fig. 28 Patterns of Form and Force on the Tree of Life 140 Fig. 29 Parts of the Soul 142 Fig. 30 The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil 165 Fig. 31 Levi's Interpretation of the Wheel of Ezekiel 196 Fig. 32 Two Ways of Representing that which is encompassed by Mercury 242 PREFACE The purpose of this book is to demonstrate the relationship between the Qabalah, a time-honored mystical system, and the Tarot. To do so is to pointedly disagree with some very great Jewish scholars, who state that no such relationship exists. What I have attempted to do in this work is to integrate some of the very complex threads of Qabalistic symbolism and interpretation, emphasizing the relationship of the Tree of Life (primary symbol of the Qabalah) and the Tarot as taught in the tradition of the Hermetic Qabalah. I must emphasize that I am not writing on the Hebrew Qabalah, but on a separate and distinct system also based on Hebrew texts. In my opinion, the Hebrew scholars have been mistaken in their perception of late nineteenth century occult developments as merely a romantic and misunderstood pastiche of mystical Hebrew lore. Moreover, I have attempted to demonstrate that the principles of the Qabalah are appropriately applied to any ordinary Tarot deck. To that end this work reproduces four entire decks, including the Marseilles Tarot. Very little discussion is accorded that work, chosen as a comparison with the more symbolically concise modem decks because it is the most common and popular of the decks crystallizing the cards' early imagery. The Marseilles Tarot is a "standard" deck, the other three decks used here are those related to the nineteenth century occult fraternity, The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Those decks are The Golden Dawn Tarot, The Thoth Tarot and The Rider-Waite deck. One other deck, not shown, but which I recommend very strongly, is that of the late Paul Case and his organization, The Builders of the Adytum. This is a deck to be hand colored by each student. Besides this deck, Case produced some exceptionally good Tarot literature, to which I have devoted considerable attention. His correspondence courses on Tarot, written more than forty years ago, are still being distributed. And, since distribution is restricted, I must quickly note that I am in no way xvi The Qabalistic Tarot associated with that organization, having been provided a complete set of his courses by sympathetic friends. Case was a brilliant teacher who must be credited as the first to apply the terms ofmodem psychology to the cards, an approach very much like that of Carl Jung. I consider Case to be the first great modem scholar on the Tarot, unrecognized as such generally because his major works have been available only to corresponding students of the Builders of the Adytum, who are asked that they be kept confidential. I have found his ideas, which have influenced my approach, very profound, but with reservations. I question his dogmatic reliance on Gematria (Qabalistic numerology), as well as some of his interpretations of Waite's symbolism. Moreover, at the time Case was writing, our psychological language was in a state of development, and his courses do not reflect today's more precise terminology. A student must "read between the lines," considering forty years of publications on the occult since Case wrote his courses. A great deal of what Case did not say to his corresponding students has been published explicitly by Regardie, Butler and others. Such criticism does not apply to his small work entitled The Book of Tokens, written in 1934. If there is one single book which I would recommend, it is that collection of essays on the Hebrew letters. It is a milestone of philosophical literature, showing the Tarot to be a key part of the Western Mystery Tradition. A comment might also be in order here about my frequent reference to the works of Aleister Crowley, considered by many to be one of the twentieth century's great fiends, and by others to be the torchbearer of the religion of the future. It is very difficult to be objective about Crowley, but in making the attempt I have been impressed by the profundity of his writings on the Tarot. His work remains instructive despite criticisms which may be leveled against his personal behavior. I suspect that history will view Crowley as very much a representative of the early twentieth century, a period which espoused the aesthetic of the avant garde: What was new and shocking was better, by definition, than what was old. This idea actually underlies all of modem art, music and literature, not to mention the behavior patterns of the artistic elite of London, Paris and New York during the nineteen twenties and thirties. Crowley's behavior fits this pattern, as does the very style of his cards, which is essentially Cubist, the most important and avant garde of all styles of modem art during his prime. It is important to appreciate this conceptual difference, imbedded in the Crowley deck versus the others. The Order ofthe Golden Dawn (1888-1900) was created at a period when an idea was revered according to its antiquity. Thus the leaders claimed that their Order's history traced deep into the past of mankind, and invoked the monolithic ideological structure of the Gods of Egypt. Crowley, on the other hand, says that a new age has arrived (of which he is, not coincidentally, the prophet). Old may be good, but new is better. I may well be criticized for staying too close to traditional symbolic lines in this work, particularly since the climate today is one of rather sweeping re- Preface xvn organization of symbol systems. A number of books have recently appeared in which the traditional placement of Tarot cards on the Tree of Life has been radically altered. And, frankly, there are several keys which I might assign differently were I starting with no prior conceptions about where the cards should be placed. But the system, while drawing vitality from gentle modification, does not graciously suffer radical overhaul at the hands of any single individual. It appears intended to develop slowly, each authority incorporating some socially- based alteration, making the discipline of greater value to the contemporary society. A system, whether cult, religion or meditative program, is an access pattern into the inner worlds, one agreed upon and strengthened by generations of use. It is a path into the unknown paved with culturally-determined, though universally applicable, symbols. And within any given school, the symbols may be manipulated and variously applied. Certainly, I have no quarrel with those who have virtually turned the Tree of life upside down with their combinations and permutations of ideas. But to do so mitigates the powerful group effort called "tradition," and potentially creates a new Path. Expressed in another way: It is the agreement over time on the meaning of a set of symbols which makes a system a Path. To this end I have given only those attributions which are now commonly accepted. This is not to imply that such attributions are immutably correct, rather to suggest that their accepted interlock is of greater immediate utility to the student than some of the many divergencies. In this regard, Gareth Knight makes a profound observation. In his Experience of the Inner Worlds he describes the workings of a group using the Tarot cards as psychic doorways. He states that "From a formal Qabalistic point of view it was found possible to start any Path working from virtually any Tarot trump - which suggests that the sacrosanct and rigid application ofTarot correspondences to the Tree of Life is of little real importance."! Thus, one must always approach these materials with the attitude that no matter how specific the system, it is only one means of approaching an inner reality. My own style of approach involves building a solid intellectual foundation for the ideas of each Tarot card, yet doing so with full understanding that every tower of ideas must eventually fall, and a new tower built in its place. Each of us builds our own Qabalah, which changes as we learn. What this means is that we all begin with the same concepts, which we personalize and incorporate into our own systems, so that they take on real meaning. And the more we learn, the more we see the original concepts in a different light than when we began. In attempting to present a basic framework for study, I have tried to show how concepts have been derived wherever possible. Most of all this means a frequent repetition of the Tree of Life illustration, applying different sets of corresponding symbols. To understand the Hermetic Qabalah means to draw literally hundreds of Trees of Life, until the myriad interrelationships begin to make sense. What I have done here is to provide examples of my own manipulation of Qabalistic ideas, i.e., those ideas which when seen graphically, have led to special insights. A work such as this can only be a record of its xviii The Qabalistic Tarot author's learning process. I must add that this work focuses entirely on the philosophy, rather than on the practical exercises involving the Tarot. Those exercises, both meditative and ritual, have been so extensively discussed by others that there is no need to repeat them here. Of course, I have cited the most important books in which these procedures are to be easily found. Let me say, finally, that this book has been extremely difficult to write, and I doubt that it will be much easier to read, although I have done my best to simplify abstract concepts wherever possible. The irony is that the baroque and convoluted system of ideas called Qabalah, that impossibly complicated intellectual exercise which is the topic of this book, leads to an inner reality of such beauty and simplicity thatit could be explained to a child. Yet itis the very complexity of this exercise of approach that makes the inner simplicity meaningful and comprehensible. Robert Wang Columbia, Maryland 1982 INTRODUCTION MODERN TAROT STUDIES: A NINETEENTH CENTURY LEGACY This is a book of philosophy, of metaphysics, describing a profound system of self-exploration imbedded in seventy-eight simple pictures known as the Tarot. And while these cards have long been publicly associated with odd cults and gypsy fortune tellers, they are increasingly capturing the attention of serious students, who view the cards as a repository of a very complex system for the development of inner knowledge. Perhaps the inventors of the Tarot cards intended that they should be understood as a graphic summation ofthe principles of the Qabalah, or perhaps not. At least there is no written evidence to suggest this, and the great Jewish scholar of the Qabalah, Gershom Scholem, is probably correct in his assertion (however deprecatory) that the connection was made by late nineteenth century English and French occultists. One way or the other, the interlock of Tarot and Qabalah is so precise that the systems are mutually explanatory. And actually, the likelihood that the two systems developed independently gives far greater authority to the ideas of both because it points toward their mutual roots in universal Truth. Yet, a great deal of nonsense has been written about both the Tarot and the Qabalah, the sale of a large percentage of occult literature being a tribute to the public's gullibility. Thus, we should be grateful for the scholarly works of the past few decades. Scholem pioneered studies on the Jewish Qabalah, while the western trends have been admirably researched by scholars such as Frances Yates, D.P. Walker, Francis King and Ellic Howe. Serious research is increasingly disabusing us of incorrect notions about the roots of modem 2 The Qabalistic Tarot esotericism, and we should not be disturbed to see sand-eastles tumbling. If a system has inner merit it will remain unscathed. We must also appreciate that what is known as The Mysteries has apparently, until very recently, been transmitted through a secret oral tradition. Despite increased public interest, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the Tarot by academia, though the cards are a veritable gold mine of art history and metaphysical philosophy. They should be of great interest to any medievalist, being clearly of the same temperament which produced the sculptural programs of the Gothic cathedrals. It is likely, also, that the cards in some way relate to the medieval books of Emblemata and to those delightful, and supposedly historical narratives called the Chansons de Gestes. What the Tarot represents is an allegorical journey, each card being the experience of something (a universal energy) along the way, rather like the episodes in Dante's Divine Comedy, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress or even Tolkein's Trilogy of the Ring. And the idea of an adventuresome and perilous journey through unknown territory was typical of medieval literature. The analogy here is that to travel in the middle ages was as dangerous and difficult as to travel the inner paths of the Mysteries. So one might agree with the monk who in 1377 suggested that the Tarot was a mirror offourteenth century society, saying that the cards represented"... the state of the world as it is now most excellently described and figured."2 Early decks show many of the Virtues and Liberal Arts so important to the iconographic programs of Gothic Humanism, some of which remain in today's standard Tarot keys: TEMPERANCE is Prudence, STRENGTH is Fortitude, JUSTICE remains Justice, etc. All of these cards are female, as the Virtues and Liberal Arts were always represented," Even an Emperor was visible in the real society. That had been especially true since 1200, when the Pope crowned Charlemagne Holy Roman Emperor in an attempt to strengthen Christianity by aligning it with a great secular power. And when we come to THE HIGH PRIESTESS, we find that tradition related her to the legend of a "Female Pope,"! circulating at just this time in history. The evidence for the fourteenth century origin of the cards is convincing, and hopefully some historian of medieval art history will pick up these fascinating threads and provide us with the real historical answers. On the other hand a considerable number of well-trained esotericists insist that the cards are of very ancient origin. Itis likely that these individuals are, through the Tarot, encountering the shadows of other systems which have been used to approach the same universal energies. Such differentiation is often extremely difficult on the inner plane, which may explain why the experiences of so many students contradicts historical evidence. Of course, if the Tarot can be of use to us in something so important as the development of inner understanding, study of its origins is little more than a pleasant side trip. The same is true for the very question of an original link between Qabalah and the Tarot, although we are not here proposing that such a link was originally intended between Tarot and the Hermetic Qabalah on which this present book is based. Introduction 3 That system, developed in Europe from the time of the Renaissance, is a westernized Qabalah. It grew from the improbable attempts of fifteenth century philosophers to incorporate the essence of Jewish mysticism into Christian thought. The history of the modification of these ideas by the philosophers of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is particularly interesting. But it is the nineteenth century developments which are most important for us. During that time the Hermetic Qabalah, largely de-Christianized, reached its fullest expression with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The leaders of that fraternity performed the remarkable task of unifying the disparate elements of the Western Mystery Tradition (Qabalah, Hermeticism, Astrology, Neo-Platonism, Dee's Enochian Magic, etc.) in such a way that it formed a coherent method of inner exploration for the fin de siecle temperament. There are few modem schools of western esoteric thought which have not been affected in some way by the developments of that group. And as one discusses Hermetic Qabalism, one of necessity refers to the Golden Dawn as its primary modem expression. Hermetic Qabalah and Golden Dawn must be considered virtually synonymous. Nor is it significant whether the esoteric tenets of this group were handed down secretly for generations, or if they were meticulously culled from ancient manuscripts in the British Museum. The authority of any group derives entirely from its inner contacts. The "Secret Tradition," "The Mysteries," or whatever this may be called, can be tapped into by anyone. An individual or group becomes a part of an ancient tradition by contacting inner teachers in that tradition, and it would certainly appear that the decks used to illustrate this book are the result of such inner contact. The three key decks of the modem era were all produced by members of that fraternity: The Golden Dawn Tarot (designed by MacGregor Mathers), The Rider-Waite Deck, designed by A.E. Waite, and the Thoth Tarot designed by Aleister Crowley. A fourth major deck, already mentioned, is that of Paul Case for the BOTA. His version is an excellent correction of that issued by Waite. The Waite deck, one of the most popular ever published, seems to have been designed with such concern for oaths of membership in the Order that it remains entirely exoteric. It is included in the hope that those who may have chosen to study the deck may find its (often admirable, occasionally unaccep- table) symbolism more useful when considered from the standpoint of the Hermetic Qabalah. The Golden Dawn Tarot is an esoteric deck, intended for the private use of members of the Order. Crowley's deck is also esoteric, in that it conceals the nineteenth century Order's symbolism. Certainly, Crowley's Thoth Tarot is the most original recent contribution to Tarot studies. Unfortunately neither Crowley nor Mathers has received appropriate credit for their work with the Tarot. And because of their occasionally outrageous behavior, both men have been fair game for social historians. Moreover, their scholarly limitations have made them the butt of jokes by meticulous researchers on the Hebrew Qabalah. But a study of any Mystery

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Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.