Golden Dawn Tarot Decks 1

This post is intended as the background to a review I intend to do for a new tarot deck coming out this week.

I have commented here before about my interest in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn's approach to the tarot. The reason for this is that this approach is what lies behind the ubiquitous Rider Waite tarot - Waite and Colman-Smith published an exoteric version of what they (mostly Waite, because he was a higher grade) knew about the order's understanding of tarot. In fact the order was primarily responsible for first making the connection between the qabalah and the tarot. The way the order revealed the knowledge to learners was by a series of knowledge lectures (strictly lections, rather, because they were written down) and initiations into the knowledge and energies of each degree.

In true witch fashion I personally come at this backwards by not learning properly about astrology and the qabalah first but coming to the information about the tarot and kinda letting the other stuff sink in. I suspect the true definition of a hedgewitch is someone who nobody else will have in their coven or order. If you want to do it the hard way there are various warring groups claiming descent from the Golden Dawn and you can join one of them and go through the degrees. Anyway, through some lucky chances of history the order's teaching about the tarot was contained in a book called Book T which is out in public. It contains descriptions of the cards in the order's deck, meanings and ways of reading which are surprisingly close to fortune telling meanings. You can read it in this book and if you want to read almost all the available Golden Dawn material you can find it in this book. The order's tradition was that the initiate would make their own deck following the descriptions and I can't praise this practice highly enough. If you have been through the knowledge lectures and understand the colours, making your own deck will produce a powerful magical tool. Many of us don't have the ability or leisure to do this unfortunately.

There are some exoteric decks related to the Golden Dawn deck which may commonly be used. Rider Waite, of course. Paul Foster Case produced a deck intended to be coloured in but not drawn, the BOTA deck. In today's free thinking world BOTA tends to be criticised for being a bit dogmatic about what people should think, but there is nothing to stop you buying the deck and colouring it in Case's colours, the Golden Dawn colours or any other. My only criticism of it would be that it is clearly derivative of Rider-Waite but doesn't have pictorial minors, and they also don't follow the descriptions in Book T. There is also Uncle Al's Thoth deck. Bless him, he is the proof of the advantage for everyone else of battles in magical orders, because one of the parties is quite likely to reveal the order's secrets. His writings on tarot are very close to the orders teachings with a few corrections of his own. If you want a book on the Thoth tarot I would recommend the one by Lon Milo Duquette and I would also recommend his book on Qabalah. My only caution about the numinous Thoth tarot is that it doesn't like working with other decks so if you use it it tends to be your only deck.

The Golden Dawn Magical Tarot

There are a number of decks drawing more or less closely on Book T. My personal criteria for a Golden Dawn deck is that it should be close to the descriptions in Book T. Some decks have updated the colours and those will do for you if you have a thorough understanding of the tree of Life and the vibrations of the colours. But I don't.

There are a number of esoteric tarot decks which do not meet my criteria of being close to the descriptions in Book T, but nonetheless are influenced by the Golden Dawn and all have very good reputations as esoteric decks. They are the Servants of the Light Tarot, the Gareth Knight tarot and the Hermetic Tarot. The tarot as envisaged by the order is supposed to pop with colours as an essential link to the qabalistic tree of life, and this last one would fail on the basis of being black and white!

Of published decks which claim to draw directly from the Golden Dawn tradition, I will go through them one by one and give my humble opinion on which is best. Another problem we have is that because no original decks from the order are known to survive (although there are some drawings, and one of them, Yeats's drawing of the World in his notebook, illustrates this post) modern creators of the deck can't recreate something which would have existed then. On the other hand they have a high level of artistic freedom to stick to the descriptions but use their own style. I will go through them in ascending order of fidelity to Book T.

I would not recommend Lo Scarabeo's Initiatory Tarot of the Golden Dawn. It is highly praised for the fidelity of its court cards, and they have followed the order's deck in the Majors, particularly the Fool and the Lovers, which in the Golden Dawn deck are quite different to the way we are used to seeing them, however it tends to diverge in the minors.

The Golden Dawn Temple Tarot is rightly highly praised and gives the authentic feel of the Golden Dawn Temple. The cards fizzle with colour. However it is described as a modern reinterpretation so I would recommend it if you already have a good understanding of the qabalah and the colour scales. It may be more useful for path working than reading because the cards are 'king HUGE.

Next and most affordable of the currently two decks I would highly recommend is Robert Wang's Golden Dawn Tarot. I note from online reviews that you either take to this deck or you don't. It doesn't fizzle with colour and the minors tend to be much less colourful than you would expect, because the colours are intended to reference which part of the tree of life they are on, and that in this system is a whole layer of meaning. You can read the booklet about the deck here although it is very much a little white book and no more. I do recommend his more comprehensive book about tarot and qabalah very highly, and here and there he does comment about bits he missed out in his own deck, without giving a reason for it. I am currently chewing over this book slowly with much benefit.

Next comes my current favourite The Golden Dawn Magical Tarot by Sandra and Chic Cicero. This is the closest I know to the descriptions in Book T and comes in a box with a very informative book which I highly recommend.

This deck is coming out this week and I have (unusually for me) pre-ordered it. I can't wait till it turns up. Judging by the book Zalewski wrote about the Golden Dawn tarot, if the deck is consistent it will be excellent and I will review it when I have it. The book is another one I recommend by the way, so to summarize my reading about the Golden Dawn tarot I move between chewing over Zalewski, Wang and Book T.