Thursday, July 11, 2013

Tarot: Elemental Dignities a la Golden Dawn

In one of Sir Terence Pratchett's excellent textbooks of witchcraft, Granny Weatherwax says to a girl who wants to be taught witchcraft, 'I can't teach you witchcraft, but I might let you learn.' This very much chimes with my approach as a hedgewitch: the only place that you can learn witchcraft is by entering the hedge and so it's ultimately no use asking me or anyone else to tell you about my hedge. Of course it does help when you are feeling lost in the hedge to see that others are having the same experience: perhaps this is the most remarkable thing about our movement, that people thousands of miles away from each other can have the same experience without having read about it or having met each other. In line with this I find that some of the most popular posts on this blog are ones that started out life as being me trying to sort something out in my own mind: the post about the tarot aces would be one of them, for example.

Today I have to stay in and wait for UPS to deliver a parcel so I'm going to spend the time constructively by getting my head around elemental dignities in the tarot. Don't get me wrong: I'm not holing myself up all day and I have no doubt that when I get bored of this I'll be out in the sun on the front wall! This refers to the way in which cards in tarot spreads relate to each other based on the interactions between the elements they are related to. There are other methods of doing tarot dignities: I recently tried to read a book called Tarot Decoded and ended up grinding to a halt because I don't understand astrology, and a lot of the book was heavily based on astrology. So if you want astrological correspondences and dignities this is not the place to look for them.

On the other hand, for someone who reads intuitively like me, and who still sometimes has to look up the meanings of cards after over a decade of reading, a simpler method of dignities which doesn't involve learning from books has served me quite well. If you're using a pictorial deck it is easy to see literally how the cards relate to each other by the non-verbals of the figures. For example, if all the cards but one are facing in the same direction that one card may be being ostracised or standing out against the crowd. If the movement in a spread is all in one direction except for one card that can mean going against the flow in a situation. If the characters are facing each other that can mean variously a love interest or a confrontation depending on how it feels in the spread.  On the whole I don't do reversals, so if a card manages to get reversed in a spread I would normally interpret it as literally standing on its head to get my attention.

For this reason I don't find court cards in a reading to be that much of a problem because they can often help the cards relate to each other. A friend often interprets them as the energy or attitude they represent, and so I will tend to ask her when I need a second opinion, because for some time I've been seeing them as people. I do this less for the 'pip' cards, tending to see them as actions or events, and major arcana as major events, forces or 'karma' which usually cannot be ignored. However I'm not a fortune teller, I'm a witch, and reserve the right to throw these principles out of the window if it feels right in a reading. This is the point of a reading by a witch, we don't tell your fortune, we hold a mirror up to you and force you both to face your shit and decide on how to move on from there.

There is a further method of working out dignities I like very much, and that works better with pip decks than with pictorial decks. Have I said loudly enough that the tarot started out life as playing cards and not as some esoteric map of the universe? When you play a game with playing cards there are some cards that go together and others that don't. This depends purely on the rules of the game you are playing, so whether you adopt a system based on the rules of tarocco, which is a trick-taking game, or on some other method such as wands/swords vs cups/coins, you can see what the 'fortune' looks like by the cards that are in your 'hand'. You could also do this with a poker scoring system, and there is a whole tradition of divination by playing a game of patience, and the outcome of the game is the answer to your question. I was inspired in this approach by discovering that in one or all of the French tarot games (I don't really know a great deal about them) the Fool can appear anywhere, can be placed anywhere, and alters stuff by his appearance: exactly the function of the Fool in the esoteric tarot. I find this approach to elemental dignities exciting because it places us in the intersection of time where a card game transmogrified into a map of everything. This approach *feels* as if it's actually probably the oldest, and to my mind is close to the heart of the matter, since both being able to play games and divine with something such as a pack of cards appeals greatly to me.

Because of course you don't need to have some special tool to divine with - for example it's amazing how witches can foresee the future in the froth on the side of a pint glass when the pint in question has been paid for by someone else - you merely need a method of assigning meanings to how things happen, for example how sticks or shells fall, or what the score on dominos means. Once you remove the pseudo-history - intended to give the system the authority imbued by age of Egyptianness - from it, this is exactly what happened to the card game of the tarot to turn it into a tool for divination. This also explains why there are a number of different systems for what means what in the tarot, although the one used in this essay will be the elemental attributions of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

Another aspect of working out the whole of a reading rather than just individual cards is by the proportion of suits, compared to the whole deck, that appear in a reading. The four suits have been linked to the four elements of western esotericism, which are a way of dividing *everything* into four, so that everything can be placed into one of these four categories (these are what the tables of correspondences in magic textbooks are intended to illustrate, although I can't think why these people bother because actually the important thing in magic is what the magician's own correspondences between things are). For example a preponderance of pentacles (earth) may mean money troubles, issues around work, the home, etc. Cups in a reading (water) will refer to emotions of any sort, anger, love, etc. Swords (air) mean thought. For users of the Rider Waite deck, which is *not* the one used by the Golden Dawn because Waite took his vows seriously and didn't let secrets out, you will notice that he partly draws on the alternative tradition of swords and cups being the other way around, so the images both contain elements of the other, so there's a hell of a lot of water in the RWS Swords cards. Air here can mean conflict, notoriously so in RWS, clear speech, decisions, concord, agreement, arguments, and so on. Wands (Fire) refer to action, will, willfulness, stubbornness (no, before you ask, I don't always get a lot of wands in my readings!).

To reiterate: the four suits of the classic divinatory tarot are attributed to the four elements of western esotericism as a map of everything. By correspondence everything will fit into one of these elements somehow. In fact even the suit symbols have correspondences. Remember how in a previous post I talked about understanding the meaning of the suits by what the suit symbol means? Wands hit, swords cut, coins support and provide, cups contain except when they overflow: it is clear to see how the Golden Dawn attributed the correspondences they did to the suits. Incidentally the Golden Dawn's actual tarot deck is no longer secret: the authentic way to get one for yourself is to paint it yourself using the descriptions in Book T. For the full experience I would advise getting Israel Regardie's Golden Dawn so that you can read all the colour correspondences. This experience, carried out meditatively over a period of at least a year, should leave you in a position of having entered the tarot that no amount of book learning can do!

In the system of dignities I'm studying here these correspondences govern how the cards relate to each other, including in readings - remember these are no longer simply how cards relate to each other but how aspects of everything relate to each other. This approach can seem slightly dualist when put on paper flat, so please bear in mind that there is room for shades of interpretation in the traditional tarot correspondences which are:

Swords (Air): hot, moist, light, active.

Wands (Fire): hot, dry, light, active.

Cups (Water): moist, cold, heavy, passive.

Pentacles (Earth): dry, cold, heavy, passive.

Just to pause and give my own jaded view on these basic correspondences before coming to what the Golden Dawn has to say about them: they actually make a great deal of sense. For example if you put fire and water together, if there's less water you'll get steam, but if there's enough water, because it's heavy, it'll put the fire out. Similarly water and earth mixed, being both cold heavy and passive, you'll get mud, mud, glorious mud. I'm not going to beat about the bush here: the active quality of swords and wands very clearly refers to an erect penis, and the passive quality of cups and pentacles very clearly refers to a vagina. This is where I personally begin to have a problem with this map of reality because it doesn't resemble what I know nor yet what I want, which is why it is important to make your own correspondences. Yes, opposites attract, but it doesn't have to be that everything is either active or passive: one could be both or neither. The lesbians tell me that it isn't necessary in sex to stick with those active/passive divisions, and I would agree that it isn't necessary in gay male sex either (I have a certain number going through my head as we speak). Since we're on correspondences, as above so below, as in sex so in life, I expect my sex and my life to mirror each other and what I want my sex and life to be like.

The Golden Dawn had a number of principles of how these related to each other in readings, which I've never quite got my head round, but I was reading somewhere on Mary Greer's blog that the way to understand them is to study the actual examples given in Book T so that is exactly what I intend to do in the rest of this post. This is what Book T says about this:

'A card is strong or weak, well-dignified or ill-dignified, according to the cards which are next to it on either side. Cards of the same suit on either side strengthen it greatly either for good or evil, according to their nature. Cards of the suits answering to its contrary element, on either side, *weaken* it greatly for good or evil. Air and Earth are contraries as also are Fire and Water. Air is friendly with Water and Fire, and Fire with Air and Earth.' (Israel Regardie: The Golden Dawn, 6th Edition. Llewellyn Worldwide, Woodbury, Minnesota, 2009, p. 585).


So to translate this into real terms:

Principle 1: Three cards of the same suit in a row strengthen the existing nature of the middle one. Presumably this is what they mean by well-dignified.

Principle 2: A card surrounded by two cards of the same suit to each other but opposite to the central card (i.e. sword/pentacle/sword, pentacle/sword/pentacle, wand/cup/wand, cup/wand/cup) has its own instrinsic nature weakened by the two surrounding it. Presumably this is what they mean by ill-dignified. Reference to the correspondences above will show that the reason they give these as complete opposites is that these two suits differ from each other *in every way*: if they were on either side of a door looking through a keyhole they'd still not see eye to eye. I think I'm going to try finally committing this to memory pictorially by picturing the 6 of Cups and the 4 of Wands together.

Hold for a moment the thought of which suits are friendly, because I think only those first two principles are adequately explained in that paragraph; it confuses them and is in fact explained in the next paragraph:

'If a card of the suit of Wands falls between a Cup and a Sword, the Sword modifies and connects the Wand with the Cup, so that it is not weakened by its vicinity, but is modified by the influence of both cards; therefore fairly strong.' (Ibid, p.585)


Principle 3: If the cards on either side are not opposites to each other, but one of them is of the opposing suit to the central card, the central card remains fairly strong, and is connected with its opposite card. This is the bit that has always given me trouble and the bit where I've thrown Regardie across the room and gone back to not understanding Golden Dawn elemental dignities. I think what is happening is that the friendly card to the central card modifies the central card so that it is less unfriendly with its opposing card, and the opposing card therefore doesn't weaken it so much. The central card remains strong.

'But if a card pass between two which are naturally contrary [to each other], it is not affected by either much, as a Wand between a Sword and a Pentacle which latter, being Air and Earth, are contrary and therefore weaken each other.' (Ibid, p. 585)


Principle 4: A card between two cards of opposing  suits to each other is unaffected by them.

And so we come to the examples in Book T (Ibid, pp. 585 - 586) that Greer refers to. She says that if you study them it makes the whole thing clear. I'm hoping it will because that's what I'm going to do, trying to relate them to the principles I've identified.

Example 1: '9 Sw. 10 Sw. 5 Sw. Very strong and potent in action. Very evil.' Principle 1 applies here - the two cards of the same suit greatly strengthen the nature of the 10 of Swords.

Example 2: '10 W. 10 Sw. 2 W. Not quite so strong. Ruin checked and perhaps overcome.' The cards on either side are the same suit as each other so will hold their influence over the central card. They're also friendly with the central card, so in fact none of the four principles I've identified applies. Presumably because the two outside cards are strong with each other and also friendly with the central card they modify the drama queen aspect of the 10 of Swords so that it is only ruin checked and *perhaps* overcome. This example illustrates how elemental dignities can be used to give delicate shades of meaning to a reading, and also explains why the Golden Dawn system seems so complicated because of the permutations of suit that can occur in a reading. So I'm going to make a fifth principle:

Principle 5: When a card is surrounded by two cards friendly to it and of the same suit as each other, they modify its power slightly so that its power is present but modified by the outer cards.

Example 3: '6 C. 10 Sw. 10 C. Rather good than otherwise. It is bounty overcoming loss, like a piquant sauce which adds to pleasure.' Principle 5 again: the outer cards are of the same suit as each other and friendly with the central card, so that the loss is still present but it is overcome by the outer cards, rather than it being a case of 'no loss'.

Example 4: '9 P. 10 Sw. 10 C. Very weak, slight loss in material things, but more anxiety than loss.' Principle 3 applies here, so the central card ought to remain fairly strong if I've got it right, because the two outer cards are friendly to each other and only one of them is opposite to the central card. However, the example makes it plain that the loss of the 10S is only a slight loss so it is slightly weakened. The loss is specific to material things, so the 10S is modified by the 10C and by it connected with its opposite, the 9P.

Example 5: '5 Sw. 2 W. 9 Sw. Moderately strong. Rashness which brings evil in its train. Evil.' Principle 5 again: the surrounding cards are of the same suit as each other and friendly to the central card. The keywords given for 2W in Book T are 'influence over another, dominion' (Ibid, p. 583), so this card can be seen as influence gone wrong under the influence of the swords surrounding it.

Example 6: '9 P. 2 W. 6 P. Fairly strong. Good. Considerable gain and victory.' Principle 5 again, with the wandiness of the 2W modified by the pentacleness of the outer cards to make it gain rather than influence.

Example 7: '10 C. 2 W. 6 C. Weak, evil. Victory which is perverted by debauchery and evil living. But other cards may mitigate the judgement.' Aha, principle 2 at work! The nature of the card is weakened by the cups surrounding it. But it's interesting note the magician's insistence that all is not yet set in stone and this could be mitigated by other cards in the reading.

On a personal note I'm finding this exercise interesting on two levels: one is that for someone who has learned to read tarot in a post-Mary Greer and Rachel Pollack era, how old-fashioned I find the Golden Dawn's method of reading tarot. It seems clunky and overly prescriptive. The other one is that I've been wanting to get my head round Golden Dawn elemental dignities for years, but now that I'm getting a glimmer of understanding (don't get me wrong, I'm going to have to come back to these principles and examples over and over again actually to understand them), I'm finding I don't really like this approach to relating cards to each other! For example when I put the three cards in example 7 together my gut instinct (I'm actually using Morgan-Greer, because that's my duvet deck), was to interpret it as being someone taking the power to turn the back on whatever's happened in the past and move towards a more positive future. Yes, there's definitely debauchery and evil living present but I would put the accent on this combination being mitigated by whatever else is present in the reading. The illustration to this post is this combination: the keywords I've written on the cards are Etteilla's, which is why they will seem strange to modern tarotists!

There is definitely a point to this exercise, even if I don't start slavishly sticking to this system of elemental dignities: it's interesting to read the cards the way the Golden Dawn would have done. We can too easily forget that that order is the source of the majority of modern occultism, so there can be no waste in going back to the source for a little drink now and then. This is essentially exactly what I am doing by learning Etteilla's meanings for the cards, which brings me to the other reason this kind of exercise can be useful. We get stuck in our own little world. Learning another magical system than ones own reinvigorates you, challenges preconceptions and can give you ideas to contribute to your own system. Besides, seeing how the other half live is always beneficial to a person. But this is all by the by. Back to the examples.

Example 8: '9 Sw. 10 C. 5 Sw. Medium strong. Evil. Sorrow arising from pleasure and through one's own pleasures.' Principle 5 again. Again clearly sours the Golden Dawn meaning for 10C: 'Matters definitely arranged and settled in accordance with one's wishes. Complete good-fortune.' (Ibid, p.583). A case of making your bed and having to lie in it: you've arranged matters according to your wishes only to discover that what you've willed isn't what you thought it was!

Example 9: '9 P. 10 C. 6 P. Perfect success and happiness.' Once again principle 5 - it would have helped if Book T had actually spelled out this one principle that so many of the examples depend on! The 10C is modified slightly by the pentacleness of the outer cards to add success to happiness.

Example 10: '10 W. 10 C. 5 Sw. Rather evil. Pleasure that when obtained is not worth the trouble one has had in obtaining it.' Principle 3 applies here: the Cups card is attached to its opposite, the Wands card, by the Sword, souring the meaning of the 10C.

Example 11: '10 Sw. 6 C. 9 P. Fairly strong and good. The Sw and P being opposite elements counteract each other. Therefore it is as if they were not there.' That'll be my principle 4, then. The Golden Dawn, incidentally, saw 6 of Cups far more positively (Wish, happiness, success, enjoyment) than I do; I prefer Storm Cestavani's phrase for this card of 'Get in the car, I have candy.'

Example 12: '10 Sw. 6 C. 10 W. Fairly good. Some trouble, but trouble which is overcome. If 6 C were a bad card the evil would carry the day.' Principle 3 again: the Cups card is once again attached to its opposite, the Wands card, by the Swords card. Ironic how there should be that comment straight after I typed my negative comment about the 6 of Cups - I swear I hadn't looked ahead! Interestingly, I feel Etteilla would also have interpreted this combination more negatively than the Golden Dawn, judging by his keywords on my cards: tears, the past, and betrayal respectively.

That point brings me nicely to another aside on divination, namely that there is no absolutely right way to interpret tarot cards. When people start learning we tend to learn the meanings of the book or deck we're learning with, which act as a foundation. As we associate cards with particular readings, people or events, we give them our own attributes. That said, the point of divination, like much of magic is not to divine. The point is to open up the inner eye so that you will see, hear, or just damn know things that you have absolutely no evidence for, but will nonetheless prove to be true. So don't ever feel disheartened by the fact that occult studies lead you round in circles or just open up successive layers of stuff you don't know - that's the point. Once you know what you know it will always fall away for you to learn the next thing. Is it any wonder magicians go crazy?

Example 13: '9 Sw. Death 3 Sw. Death accompanied by much pain and misery.' Interesting, an example with a major. I think it's principle 5. However in this particular example if you didn't interpret it as death (or an involuntary ending) accompanied by much pain and misery, you really wouldn't be on the right page of the textbook!

Example 14: '9 W. 9 Sw. High Priestess. Recovery from sickness.' In the Golden Dawn system the High Priestess refers to change or alteration. So this example would be slightly different, because surely everyone would agree that a Major Arcana would 'trump' the pip cards in exerting its influence? And Book T gives sickness for 9 Sw anyway. However I do believe that this combination may be open to different interpretations, especially if you are not using a Godlen Dawn-influenced deck. Reading the three cards linearly for example would give a different outcome, for example the conflict between the high wands and high swords energy, finding resolution in the High Priestess.

Example 15: '6 Sw. Q. W. King P. An active woman, courageous and reliable with dark chestnut hair, and open fearless expression.' Principle 4: the two outside cards are opposites to each other so the central card is unaffected by them. Personally I don't like this interpretation of this combination at all. I would either read it as a woman with a choice between staying with her ?husband/present situation or moving on to something else, or else I would still see them as a couple but going on a journey together. However i realise that this is to ignore the elemental dignities approach altogether!

Example 16: '7 C. King C. 5 Sw. A rather fair man but rather deceitful and malicious.' This one seems different again, with different cards on each side, not opposites, and one of them the same suit as the central card. The meaning given seems to draw on the meaning of both of the outer cards somewhat. I feel obliged to invent another principle right at the end.

Principle 6: When a card is surrounded by cards of different suits, one of which is the same as the central card, and the other of which is friendly, the central card's meaning is modified by both of them.

I hope this has served as an introduction to another way of interpreting tarot cards, admittedly a rather complex one and one not well explained in its major primary source! No doubt anyone wanting to use this system will experiment and refine my principles. For me it has given me a glimpse into a long-gone world of tarot interpretation, reinforced the respect I always feel for the work the Golden Dawn did in its short life span, and spurred me on to study the Golden Dawn system of tarot more. No doubt there will be further posts forthcoming on this theme!

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