Back to School with the Tarot Again, Incorporating a Review of Katz and Goodwin’s Secrets of the Waite-Smith Tarot

I have written here several times about my own experience of reading and learning tarot, which is that I repeatedly come to it with new eyes, repeatedly learn to read all over again, repeatedly find a new teacher. For me this often means making a deeper acquaintance of a different deck. I rarely buy tarot decks nowadays – I find that I just don't fancy any of the ones around, or else that the ones I do want are prohibitively expensive, such as the Carney tarot deck, which never comes up on ebay and will probably remain an elusive treasure. My reason for changing deck is usually simply that I feel drawn to another one after reading for some time with the same one. I have been using my 'duvet deck' – the Morgan-Greer tarot, on which I originally learned to read – for some time, but recently I have found myself dreaming about the Etteilla deck and the Swiss 1JJ tarot. The latter is a deck I bought for £1.50 in a charity shop earlier this year. Stop the press – the  hound has bought a used magical tool and broken all the rules. Well, if it hadn't felt ok to me, I wouldn't have bought it. It has obviously been used, but not in any great way. I feel that it was probably bought by someone who was put off by the non-pictorial pips cards, and gave it away. When I change deck, I usually draw a card from the new one to ask it what it has to teach me, and in this instance I immediately got the Sun. What more could a witch want?

I am also reading a very new book on the tarot – this one . When I say reading, it actually sits in my bathroom so that I can chew it over a bit at a time while making my offering to Cloacina. I may be a gay man, but I am still a man, obviously. This review is only provisional, because of the piecemeal way I am reading it, but one of the things I like best about this book is that it is not slow to deal with the problem perceived among some tarot readers, that the Rider-Waite-Smith's deck's imagery is overly Christian. This goes in tandem with where I am in reading the tarot, since the 1JJ deck is of course the one which replaces the Pope and Popess with Juno and Junon. Finally, a book which deals in a truly historical way with the origins of the tarot. The historical difficulty in our world is that many of the readers belong to the modern Pagan movement, which is in no way a continuation of pre-Christian Paganism, but is a modern movement inspired by popular ideas of what ancient Paganism would have been like. Anyone claiming any origin for the tarot other than the mediaeval world, which was thoroughly Christian, is at best engaging in wishful thinking, and any historical claims they make should be seen very suspiciously. Rather the obvious origin for the tarot's images is the mediaeval world. Have I mentioned here before that tarot started off as a game? This simple fact of history is not to detract from the wonderful way in which a card game came to interact with an underworld of fortune tellers, occultists, and mountebanks to be transformed into a magical tool. Our hypothetical pseudohistorian would probably also try to avoid the fact that the magical imagery incorporated into the tarot came from thoroughly Judaeo-Christian sources such as the kabbala and freemasonry, so that correctly to understand the tarot as we have it now means engaging with these Judaeo-Christian images. 

My personal opinion is that actually there is no harm in these Christian images. The Sun card, for example, that I mention above, can validly incorporate Christian, Masonic, and Pagan imagery without detracting from any particular meaning. I suppose here I am drawing on an undercurrent in humanity's search for 'spirit' over the past couple of hundred years, that there are (so to speak) 'vibrations' underlying the manifestations in external religions, and which can be found in all sorts of odd places. Of course, this view is about as Pagan as you could wish to get, since I'm not claiming to have *the* truth, but to be able to find the same truths hidden in different places. Ironically, this was going to be a Christian message to Christians pointing out that they should stop decrying the Islamisation of Europe, when their Christianisation of Europe was formed in blood shed, continues to be reinforced in misuse of power and abuse, and reinforced by the relatively restful public recitation of the Quran compared to the hysterical ranting of the fundamentalist preachers at the bottom of New Street. The point from which I have strayed is that this book engages with the Christian/Masonic/Golden Dawn origins of the RWS deck, and as such can be a corrective to much denial and neo-Pagan subjectivism.

In fact, apart from one point which I shall make below, I am finding it very difficult to criticise this book. I have been reading tarot for years, but bought this book because I opened it in Waterstones and knew immediately that it could teach me so much. I would recommend this book both to people who know this deck backwards and to anyone who wants to learn to read the tarot using the RWS deck and knows nothing. The authors incorporate a method they have adapted from the Kabbalah for a beginner to learn to read from any deck. It's not a way which terribly appeals to me, but this is not to criticise it. To me the whole point of tarot is that as a magical tool it is capable of being understood in all sorts of ways, and as the below representative of above, it is not for me to say that a particular system is 'wrong'. From this book I learned the origins of a way of reading tarot I particularly life – that of firstly looking at the figures' postures – and am surprised to discover it is the way favoured by Pamela Colman Smith herself. When a friend recently couldn't understand how a man she fancied could see her as the King of Pentacles, assuming his position immediately helped her to see.

One of the hallmarks of magical knowledge is that you never get to the end of it (just as one of the hallmarks of magical charlatans is to assert that you have to pay them large amounts of money to get magic), and sure enough this book gives just enough while providing a springboard to further exploration. The divinatory meanings and hints are just that – they would allow a person to move beyond the hint. Of course that is actually the point of a magical tool. It is a tool and a divinatory tool should open your eyes in such a way that you begin to see what is not contained in the cards. Nonetheless it gives interesting snippets of information, such as for instance who the people falling from the Tower are supposed to be. Since the book only deals with the RWS deck, there is no mention of the Marseille tradition that there is actually a door in the back of the Tower, which is an interesting point for me in this card and illustrates how the world of tarot keeps opening up the more you explore.

My one criticism is that in one place I think Katz and Goodwin have stretched the evidence far further than it is possible to go. I can only applaud their brave engagement with the Christian iconography of the High Priestess as Mary as Stella Maris. I am also prepared to accept their theory that a tomb in the church at Winchelsea could have been the model for the tomb in the 4 of swords (the book actually says 6 of swords, but I assume this is a proofreading error), since Colman Smith was known to have been to have known the area in the years preceding the publication of the deck. Where the evidence will not hold up in my opinion is in what they call 'the final mystery of the Waite-Smith tarot' (Marcus Katz and Tali Goodwin: Secrets of the Waite-Smith Tarot. Llewellyn Publications, Woodbury, Minnesota, 2015, pp.126-7 in the second printing of the first edition). Their final mystery is that 'a chalice, an angel pouring fire and water, the scales of Justice, the lion called Fortitude,' which they call 'a collage of symbols specific to the tarot' appear in a window in the church which was installed after the Great War. This just will not do, and there is no mystery here. The simple explanation of this is that the symbols used in the window are actually specifically Christian symbols, which are also used in the tarot. There is not enough 'synchronicity' between the images in the window and those in the RWS tarot for the latter to have inspired the former. The number of absent symbols – hermit's lamp, sun, moon, stars, evangelists, and so on, is far greater than the number of symbols present. There is no mystery here, and this is the one place where an otherwise excellent book is marred by wishful thinking.

Nonetheless, I am looking forward to using this book to a springboard to further reflection on the map which we call the tarot, and would otherwise unhesitatingly recommend this book to both new and experienced tarot readers.