The prime agents of this bullying, bruising, and archetype distortion are culture and religion. These, the founding blocks of 'human civilisation', have their own prior, often unspoken agendas, which encourage and promote certain attitudes and energies, ignore others, and demonise others still. Archetypal life is forced into the synthetic straijackets of officially-sanctioned morality, goals and value systems, incapable of giving free rein to its pure energetic spontaneity.
Even such a clearly archetypal system as Tarot is subject to the twistings and distortions of culture and religion; of 'the age', 'the time'.
Take the Waite-Smith Tarot, the classic Tarot deck; far and away the most popular deck, and often the only one that people know of. It was earlier this year that I purchased a copy of 'Secrets of the Waite-Smith Tarot'. I'm a real sucker for books with the words 'secret' and 'mystery' in the title: I have an entire bookshelf of such tomes in the living room. At the same time, I find it hilarious: it's not much of a 'secret' if the whole world can read about it with a couple of clicks on Amazon!Be that as it may. In 'Secrets.......', writers Tali Goodwin and Marcus Katz, two people with lots of experience with Tarot, teach us many things. Description and discussion of the meanings of all 78 cards as interpreted in the Waite-Smith system. Biographical info on Waite and the hitherto under-recognised Pamela Colman Smith. Information on how to read the cards. Most interesting to me, and new at the time, details of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life and how Tarot connects up with this system.
This is all good stuff. 'Secrets......' is a substantial, weighty tome, with enough material to keep you going for quite a while. But there's the culture, the religion......
A.E.Waite is the chief mystical intellect and intuitive, providing authoritative inspiration for the deck. It is Pamela Colman Smith who gives the ideas of Waite physical form; she is the artist. The illustrations in the Waite-Smith Tarot are clear, crisp, precise in outline, providing a host of symbolic meanings in the details for those in the know. Endless heady esoteric entertainment for the curious.Waite was a mystic, but a mystic with a Catholic foundation. And it shows. A good deal of symbolic detail comes down from orthodox Christianity, some from more esoteric Christianity, while the entire deck is subtly pervaded with the perfume of the religion. As an illustration, I have included pictures here of the Judgement card, sometimes wisely called 'Aeon' instead. It is the card of renewal, of the phoenix, of the arrival in ones life of the magnificent 'Other', even. The top one (above) is the Waite-Smith depiction. Below there are two more modern manifestations of 'Judgement'. Words from me are superfluous: I leave the reader to make their own judgement.
And the culture, the culture. The Waite-Smith Tarot was given birth a little over a century ago, shortly before the First World War. I get the shivers every time I think about the cultural-religio norms of the first half of the twentieth century. What an era of dead and deadly conventionality, of repression of the life force; what a time at odds with nature and natural instinct, at odds with the body. Shadow, to use a term from Jung, was denied both personally and collectively, to such an extent that it had no choice but to be projected outwards in the form of two awful world wars. My early childhood was spent in the late 1950s, and it quickly became clear to me: a main aim in life was to escape the horror of that unspoken air of repression which pervaded....... everything.
As time goes by, I find myself having increasing respect for those who dared to champion the body, sexuality, the senses in that dark age for the natural world. Nowadays, it's not such a big deal (among some people, at any rate), but then....... I think of D.H. Lawrence, as prime example, a man with many flaws and who made many errors in his life, from what I can see. But a man who had the courage to go against the flow, come what may, and proclaim the resurrection of the flesh, the divinity of life within a body.Above all, in the Waite-Smith Tarot, there is the 'high seriousness' of so many of the cards. The figures are sometimes referred to as resembling cartoon cut-outs, but above all they convey the feeling that life, especially spiritual life, is something extremely serious. Take a look, especially, at the Court Cards (King, Queen etc). They are a dour, crusty-looking bunch. Not a lot of laughs to be had on the way to enlightenment, that's for sure.
The cards of the Waite-Smith Tarot reflect too much of the era for me. Apollo has won out over Dionysus; Logos reigns supreme, while Eros has gone missing. Which has suited down to the ground the following generations of 'alternative' people in northern Europe and the USA, where the protestant, puritan heritage has continued to infect the mindscape. We can be 'progressive', 'alternative' without coming out of the comfort zone provided by mentality, rationality, the clarity of Apollo.
With the Waite-Smith Tarot, we can be clear, we can be clever, spotting and interpreting the mystical symbols half-hidden here, there, and everywhere. For me, at least, my 'wholeness' is left hungry, wanting, if I contemplate this version of Tarot alone. This 'number one Tarot' is not the one for me.
To be continued.
Images: Judgement from Waite-Smith Tarot
Judgement from Archeon Tarot
Judgement from Wild Unknown Tarot
