There are two main 'difficulties' which present themselves with the Waite-Smith. First up is the undoubted Christian influence on some of the imagery, and hence on the nuances of meaning associated with the cards. This influence is overt in some of the images: Judgement, for instance. The issue first came to light for me with regard to the Hierophant card (see my post 'Hierophantic Revisitings' dated 24/06/2016), but as time has passed I have come to see that Christian touch as all-pervasive. It acts like a wash over everything.The second element -related to the Christianism - is the aesthetic. Some people seem to like them, but I find the figures stiff, lifeless and lacking in joy, cartoon-like (nothing wrong with cartoon, but quite bad cartoon at that). Little of the magnificence of archetypal manifestation jumps out at me from these cards.
The creator-in-chief of this deck was Arthur Waite, a Christian mystic with his roots in the Catholic tradition. The artist, Pamela Colman Smith, converted to Catholicism shortly after completing the Tarot deck. Yet, despite the Catholic leanings of its creators, the Waite-Smith Tarot oozes a Protestant aesthetic and Protestant ethic as I experience it. The figures are in the main gaunt, dour, static, weighed down with the seriousness of something or another. Delight in the sensuous aspect of life is notable through its absence. The figures are manifestations, if you like, of Logos; Eros, meanwhile, has gone missing.
It's a thing about Protestantism in general, its puritan strains in particular: its unease with, fear of, even, the image, the human form. It's an old story, harking back to the days of the Reformation and the destruction of images in churches. Plain, simple, austere, and with a total absence of sensuous response: these are the hallmarks of worship in such places, reflecting a flight from the flesh, from the body; from the Word made flesh, from the sacred expressed through the beauty of human form, through the realm of the senses. For all its faults, the Catholic side of Christianism has at least held onto this element, the sacred image.
These characteristics are amply reflected in the history of the visual arts. On the whole, the Protestant countries have given us landscape art. Landscapes and still life - pots of flowers and dead lobsters in bowls. Think 'British art' and you think Constable, Turner: cornfields, haywains, sunrises and sunsets. The human form is painted by Gainsborough, but it is stiff, formal, as far from the sacred image as possible. And in more modern times there is Francis Bacon, testament to the inability to rise up in joy at the sight of archetypal beauty. More comfortable and at home with the ugly than with the beautiful. Contrast this with what's come from the Catholic-based nations, especially those south of the Alps: Titian, Veronese, Michelangelo, Caravaggio (OK, a dodgy character....). The gods speak through the splendour of lovingly-created human forms, the splendour of silks and satins, the radiance of youthful flesh - and sometimes the flesh of the ancient and decrepit.
Actually, I sometimes land too much at the feet of Christianism. It's a trend that started way before Jesus Christ turned up on the scene, and in which Christianity is merely one player. An essay by D.H.Lawrence, called 'Puritanism and the Arts', much of which I find to be excellent, covers some aspects of this theme. He writes of the growth of the 'spiritual-mental' consciousness at the expense of the instinctive-intuitive consciousness, a process which Lawrence articulates both clearly and with passion. It's worth quoting a little from this essay of his. "The dread of the instincts included the dread of intuitional awareness. 'Beauty is a snare' - 'Beauty is but skin-deep' - 'Handsome is as handsome does' - 'Looks don't count' - 'Don't judge by appearances' - if we only realised it, there are thousands of these vile proverbs which have been dinned into us for over two hundred years. They are all of them false." And "This is the real pivot of bourgeois consciousness in all countries: fear and hate of the instinctive, intuitional procreative body in man or woman. But of course this fear and hate had to take on a righteous appearance, so it became moral, said that the instincts, intuitions ..... were evil, and promised a reward for their suppression....." Lawrence doesn't say so, but maybe we're back with Luther: suppress, have faith, and your reward shall be in heaven.What is true for visual art in general applies to Tarot in particular: Tarot is, put one way, an attempt to communicate the workings of consciousness and the universe through the medium of image. Dark, mysterious, lunar, sensuous, embodied, feminine: these are a few of the adjectives which come to mind if I consider what appeals to, and therefore works for, me in the realm of Tarot today. It is no accident that most of the Tarot decks which speak to me are creations of artists from non-Protestant cultures. Some of the 'dark' and 'gothic' decks I have discovered have a particular resonance. OK, they might be a bit obsessed with bats, dragons, and fairy-like half-human female creatures with long fingernails and streaks of blood across their forehead; I can live with that.
Best of all, in my view, are the Tarots by Luis Royo, in particular his 'Dark Tarot'. Read about this deck and words like 'primal', 'empowering', 'confronting', and 'darkly beautiful' turn up.
Royo hails from Spain, and his art work literally could not be created by anybody from north of the Alps (and Pyrenees). If Titian were alive today, he would paint like Royo, I imagine. He is a true artist, with a remarkable grasp of how to communicate through the medium of the human body, especially the female form. If you are averse to depictions of scantily-clad warrior nymphs who sometimes fail to tick any politically-correct boxes, stay away from the art and Tarot of Luis Royo. But while a few of his paintings and drawings come close to being mere pin-ups, many capture real mythical and archetypal themes. They are meditations on the relationship of basic dualities: sun and moon, beauty and ugliness, sweetness and terror, dark and light, feminine and masculine, beauty and beast. Royo is an alchemist for our age.Some of Royo's cards are also, by the way, achingly beautiful, such as the magnificent 'Judgement' card accompanying this post. And, interestingly (to me), the Royo Dark Tarot seems to have more female than male enthusiasts, despite some of its images, which the tedious and deluded Protestant mindset will undoubtedly condemn as 'sexist'. Maybe some males are intimidated, I don't know.
That's it for now. There may be more on the dark tarots in future. Or maybe not. I'm not sure where I'm going at the moment, with this blog or anything else.... if anywhere at all. New voices wanting to be heard, but how......?
Images: The Judgement card. Top: Waite-Smith Tarot
Centre: Gothic Tarot
Bottom: Royo Dark Tarot
