‘Taschen to release Waite-Colman Smith tarot collection’

    

Taschen has done it again. This time the publisher of lavish books and other sumptuous treats is poised to release its take on the A.E. Waite/Pamela Colman Smith tarot deck. You know, the one we all get started with, although it is more than enough for a lifetime of contemplation. Coming soon, and open for pre-ordering now, is a box of book and deck. From the publicity:

Doors into Our Uncharted Depths

The Story of the World’s

Most Popular Tarot

A unique edition of bright texts, brilliant images, and historic reprints, this kit provides everything that both beginners and advanced Tarot users might need and want to read cards for themselves and to study and experience this cultural gem in all its beauty and significance. The valuable collector’s box includes a complete deck of the Waite Smith Tarot cards and Waite’s famous companion book The Key to the Tarot. In this illustrated book, with texts and images compiled by Johannes Fiebig, the Tarot cards become psychological mirrors and signposts leading toward new answers and personal solutions. The fact that this works well can be attributed to certain advantages inherent to the Waite-Smith cards, and these points are illuminated in an essay by Rachel Pollack.

All 78 cards are presented individually and in detail. The explanatory texts provide several dimensions and levels of interpretation, including concrete practical tips. Further, the book offers a new feature: the quick check. This presents a concise hint regarding the meaning of each card in each possible position of all the spread patterns featured in the book.

When Arthur E. Waite and Pamela Colman Smith developed their Tarot deck in London in 1909, nobody could have predicted that it would have an overwhelming renaissance starting around 60 years later. What were the lives, works, and passions of these creators like? Pamela Colman Smith and Arthur E. Waite are brought vividly back to life in essays by Mary K. Greer and Robert A. Gilbert.

The authors

Johannes Fiebig is one of the most successful authors in the field of Tarot and a leading expert in the psychological interpretation of symbols. He published his first book in 1984. Since then, his books have sold more than 2 million copies, translated into more than a dozen languages. In 1989, he co-founded and co-owned Königsfurt publishing house, which later became the publishing houses Königsfurt-Urania and AGM-Urania, of which he was managing director until 2018. Since then, he has been an independent writer based in Kiel.

Mary K. Greer is one of the world’s leading Tarot scholars and experts, famous by her outstanding, both exciting and useful Tarot blog. She is an author, teacher, and professional tarot consultant known for her innovative teaching techniques. With an M.A. in English Literature, she taught Tarot in colleges for fifteen years. Since the 1980s and her book Tarot for Your Self (1984), Mary belongs to the pioneers of the tarot as self-experience and as a tool of personal transformation and empowerment. She is a co-author of Pamela Colman Smith: The Untold Story (2018). She lives in California.

Rachel Pollack is the author of 46 books, including two award-winning novels, a book of poetry, a translation, with scholar David Vine, of Oedipus Rex (2012), and a series of books about Tarot known around the world. Her first book, Seventy-Eight Degrees Of Wisdom, was published in 1980 and has been in print ever since. Her work has been translated into 15 languages, and she has taught and lectured on four continents. She also is a visible artist, creator of The Shining Tribe Tarot, and has collaborated with artist Robert M. Place to create the Raziel Tarot, and the Burning Serpent Oracle. She lived in Rhinebeck, New York for many years, where she died in 2023.

R. A. Gilbert is a retired antiquarian bookseller and a prolific author and editor in the field of Western Esotericism, specializing in the life and work of A. E. Waite and in the history and lives of members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. His books include A.E. Waite: Magician of Many Parts (1987); The Golden Dawn Scrapbook (1997); Gnosticism and Gnosis (2012). Gilbert read Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Bristol, and received his doctorate from the University of London for a thesis on the publication of esoteric literature in the Victorian era. He lives a Somerset Village, England.

Click here to explore the pre-order process. Treat yourself or someone else important to something extraordinary for the holidays.

     

‘Pamela Colman Smith at the Whitney'

    

A.E. Waite

Born on this date in 1857 in Brooklyn: Arthur Edward Waite, initiated into Freemasonry September 19, 1901 in Runymede Lodge 2430 in Buckinghamshire, England (Worshipful Master in 1910).

His is a vexing biography. Click here for R.A. Gilbert’s paper from the 1986 Ars Quatuor Coronatorum and read of Waite’s—what I’ll call—duality of nature. He is remembered for books on Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, and Golden Dawn, but it seems some personality foibles leached into his mystical life. We’re all human. I have no problem with him, except that his A New Encyclopædia of Freemasonry is so disorganized as to prove the mystics ought to keep out of the reference and history book business.

It is beyond the confines of Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, and Golden Dawn where Waite’s name is best known, as he was the designer of the most ubiquitous tarot cards: the Rider-Waite deck. Rider was the publishing company that printed the cards. Waite provided the concepts for the illustrations. And the third wheel was the artist who brought those ideas to life: Pamela Colman Smith. Thus we reach the point of this edition of The Magpie Mason.

Pamela Colman Smith (1878-1951) was an English mystic and artist known to Waite through the Golden Dawn, and she was chosen to create the seventy-eight images of this new tarot deck. Following Waite’s specifications, we understand how some of these cards display Masonic hints. Anyway, the Whitney Museum of American Art currently exhibits “At the Dawn of a New Age: Early Twentieth Century American Modernism,” which includes Smith and the tarot cards. The show will close February 26, 2023. From the publicity:

“At the Dawn of a New Age: Early Twentieth Century American Modernism” showcases art produced between 1900 and 1930 by well known American modernists and their now largely forgotten, but equally groundbreaking peers. Drawn primarily from the Whitney’s permanent collection, it provides new perspectives on the myriad ways American artists used nonrepresentational styles developed in Europe to express their subjective responses to the realities of the modern age.

America’s early modernists came of age during a time when the country’s predominant mood was one of youthful confidence. Racial violence and social and economic injustices existed, but so too did insurgency and social reform. American technological and engineering ingenuity had made the country the world’s largest industrial power at the same time that political Progressivism and cultural shifts, such as women’s suffrage, had upended bourgeois codes of respectability. The combination gave rise to an excitement about an era that critic Walter Lippmann characterized as “bursting with new ideas, new plans, and new hopes.”

Against this backdrop, large numbers of American artists embraced the new over the traditional and fixed by rejecting realistic depictions of the world in favor of art that prioritized emotional experience and harmonious design. The results were largely ignored by the Whitney Museum, whose loyalty was to the urban realists who formed the core of the Whitney Studio Club, out of which the museum had grown. A handful of non-representational works were acquired when the museum was founded in 1930 and more were added in subsequent decades, but it was not until the mid-1970s that the museum vigorously began to acquire vanguard art made between 1900 and 1930. While extensive, these acquisitions largely excluded work by women and artists of color. The Whitney had already begun rectifying these biases, but in anticipation of the opening of “At the Dawn,” it added more works by these artists to the collection. The result is an exhibition that recasts the story of American art by celebrating the mood of optimistic excitement with which American artists embraced modern styles and illuminates the complexity and diversity that are at the heart of the American experience.

In 1909, Pamela Colman Smith was commissioned to design a set of seventy-eight tarot cards by A.E. Waite, the leader of the Independent and Rectified Rite of the Golden Dawn, a secret, mystical society to which Smith belonged. Known as the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck, it was the first to feature fully illustrated, symbolic images on each card, and integrated Judeo-Christian ideas into a visual vocabulary that often drew heavily on occult magic. Stylistically, the designs in the deck reflect the era’s widespread embrace of the sinuous, organic lines of Art Nouveau and the flowing patterns of Japanese prints. Smith used the style in her tarot cards and in watercolors, such as The Wave to suggest the existence of a mystical occult world beyond the visible one.

Click here for a quick video.

Seeing how Smith was English, I’m not sure how she fits into an exhibition of American artists, but that’s okay. In closing, let me offer the stock disclaimer on how tarot cards are for reflection, circumspection, contemplation, etc., and never for divination.

     

‘A Hermit’s Winter Night’

     

Hermit card of the Rider-Waite tarot deck, c. 1910.

I’m not saying either Robert Frost or his poem here has any connection to tarot symbolism. I’m only personally putting the two together during a cold weekend on the precipice of winter. H/T to the Academy of American Poets for all the text below.

“An Old Man’s Winter Night”

By Robert Frost

All out of doors looked darkly in at him

Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars,

That gathers on the pane in empty rooms.

What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze

Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand.

What kept him from remembering what it was

That brought him to that creaking room was age.

He stood with barrels round him—at a loss.

And having scared the cellar under him

In clomping there, he scared it once again

In clomping off;—and scared the outer night,

Which has its sounds, familiar, like the roar

Of trees and crack of branches, common things,

But nothing so like beating on a box.

A light he was to no one but himself

Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what,

A quiet light, and then not even that.

He consigned to the moon,—such as she was,

So late-arising,—to the broken moon

As better than the sun in any case

For such a charge, his snow upon the roof,

His icicles along the wall to keep;

And slept. The log that shifted with a jolt

Once in the stove, disturbed him and he shifted,

And eased his heavy breathing, but still slept.

One aged man—one man—can’t fill a house,

A farm, a countryside, or if he can,

It’s thus he does it of a winter night.

Bro. Colin Browne’s Masonic tarot deck Hermit.    

“An Old Man’s Winter Night” was originally published in the 1916 edition of Mountain Interval (Henry Holt and Company) and appeared again in the revised edition of Mountain Interval in 1921 (Henry Holt and Company).

Robert Frost was born on March 26, 1874, in San Francisco. His collections of poetry include New Hampshire (Henry Holt and Company, 1923), Steeple Bush (Henry Holt and Company, 1947), and In the Clearing (Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1962). Frost won four Pulitzer Prizes during his lifetime and served as U.S. Poet Laureate from 1958 to 1959. He died on January 29, 1963.
     

‘Things to do in December’

     
With 60° weather during Thanksgiving weekend in New York City, one might forget that December is only days away. There is so much to occupy our thoughts at year’s end, independent of current events and the unexpected happenings of daily life, that perhaps you may be interested in these opportunities to focus the mind and, maybe, form a few questions too.

On Saturday, December 5, Builders of the Adytum will host its Qabalistic Christmas Ritual at Masonic Hall (71 West 23rd Street) in Manhattan. Two o’clock inside the Chapter Room on 12.

BOTA members, guests, and the public are invited to participate in the traditional celebration of light and the holy season as written by Rev. Ann Davies. (This is a special annual event not to be confused with the regular fourth Saturday meeting of the pronaos.)


If you are in the mood for music, the School of Practical Philosophy will host its Concert Matinee at three o’clock in the Great Hall of St. Jean Baptiste Catholic Church (184 East 76th Street) in Manhattan. Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, and more for just 25 bucks. Register here.

On Saturday, December 12, the Rosicrucian Order will host “Learn About the Martinist Tradition” at 1 p.m. at the Rosicrucian Cultural Center (2303 Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Blvd.) in Manhattan. From the publicity:

Focusing on the works of Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, we will explore the foundations of Martinism, a mystical movement deeply rooted in the Western Esoteric Tradition. The facilitator of the discussion will be Julian Johnson, long-time member of both the Rosicrucian Order and the Traditional Martinist Order.


Also on Saturday the 12th, the Gurdjieff Foundation of New York will offer another session in its introductory series titled “The Search for Meaning and Purpose in Our Lives.” The subject that afternoon will be “What are you?”

The Gurdjieff Foundation now meets at Quest Bookshop at the Theosophical Society, located at 240 East 53rd Street (between Second and Third avenues) in Manhattan. Starts at 3 p.m.

For more information, send an e-mail here.

Click to enlarge.

New York Open Center (22 East 30th Street, Manhattan) will have a three-lecture program on “The Way of the Mystic: Insights, Wisdom, and Practices of the Masters.” 8 to 10 p.m. on Tuesdays, December 1, 8, and 15. From the publicity:

What is mysticism? What are mystical experiences and under what circumstances do they occur? In this three-week series, Jon Mundy will first explain what mysticism is, and then identify many of the characteristics of mystical experiences including: the loss of subject/object identity, timelessness, egolessness and experiences of wonder, awe, reverence, freedom, happiness, and bliss. He will then delve into the lives, experiences, and teachings of a number of history’s greatest mystics and, most importantly, describe meditative and other practices that can lead to the exalted states they describe.

Tuesday, December 1

What is Mysticism?

Tuesday, December 8

Medieval Mystics: Meister Eckhart, St. Francis,

and Rumi

Tuesday, December 15

Modern Mystics: Thoreau, Ramana Maharshi,

and Eckhart Tolle

A Lecture Series—Three Sessions

Members: $70/Non-members: $75

Individual Sessions: $28

New York Open Center also brings back Mr. Robert Place for another “Introduction to the Tarot” series of sessions on Wednesdays, December 2, 9, and 16, from 8 to 10 p.m. From the publicity:

An Introduction to the Tarot:
Guidance and Wisdom for Our Spiritual Journey

The Tarot, ostensibly a deck of decorated cards, is in fact a symbolic system whose images express Pythagorean, Platonic and Hermetic mystical ideas. Once one grasps the Tarot’s philosophy and structure, the cards can be used as an intuitive device to connect with one's inner wisdom.

The Tarot, ostensibly a deck of decorated cards, is in fact a symbolic system whose images express Pythagorean, Platonic and Hermetic mystical ideas. Once one grasps the Tarot’s philosophy and structure, the cards can be used as an intuitive device to connect with one’s inner wisdom. In this class we will study the symbolism of the Tarot as its Italian Renaissance creators intended, come to understand its spiritual messages, and then learn and practice techniques that develop our intuition and enable us to read the cards as messages from our Higher Self.

Note: you will need a Tarot deck for this class, preferably The Alchemical Tarot or the Tarot of the Sevenfold Mystery by Robert Place, or the Waite-Smith Tarot. It is also recommended that you have one of Place’s books as a text, Alchemy and the Tarot or the Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination.

Members: $105/Non-members: $115


If you’re baffled by the names of various tarot decks, please understand there is a limitless variety of decks. There probably is a Simpsons tarot deck. A new Masonic deck is in the works, I’m told. Today I learned of the Hillbilly deck, which has this variation of The Fool:

But the aforementioned Rider-Waite deck surely is the most common and familiar.

And the month of December ends and the New Year will begin with the Anthroposophical Society’s Holy Nights programming. No announcements there yet, but I’ll post the news on The Magpie when it becomes available.
     

‘Tarot and the Western Hermetic Tradition’

     

On the whole, New York Open Center provides programming that I would say leans to the East (Zen, yoga, et al.) in spiritual matters, but it does host occasional lectures, classes, and other events that look at Western esoteric traditions. Case in point: This workshop next Friday. From the publicity:

Tarot and the Western Hermetic Tradition

Presented by Ellen Goldberg, MA

Friday, May 9

7 to 10 p.m.

Members: $55 / Non-members $65

New York Open Center

22 East 30th Street

Manhattan

The Tarot is a book of wisdom disguised as a pack of cards. The ever-evolving Tarot is an extraordinary compendium of Western esoteric knowledge, a river of Hermetic wisdom into which the streams of Kabbalah, Alchemy, Pythagorean mathematics, and astrology have flowed. In accord with Hermetic ideals, the object of the Tarot journey is the transformation of individual consciousness into a state of unity with the One.

Today we will learn the basic principles of Hermeticism and see how they breathe life and meaning into the Tarot. Viewed as Hermetic Mandalas, the 22 cards of the Major Arcana allow us to radically enhance our quest for self-realization. Through active imagination and inner journey, we will learn to engage these archetypal images. The workshop will leave you with an ability to use the Tarot for your inner development. The Rider-Waite cards will be used as a basis of discussion.

Note: The workshop is appropriate for students at all levels of study.

Ellen Goldberg, MA, is a psychotherapist, artist, and mystic who has been working within the Hermetic tradition for 35 years. She has been teaching Tarot at the New York Open Center since 1986, and is the founder and director of the School of Oracles.


Click here to register.
     

‘The Tramp and the Fool’

     
“God hath chosen the foolish things of this world to confound the wise…For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.”

Corinthians 27:3


Sure, I wish the History channel would incorporate historical documentary into its programming, but I don’t think that’s “in the cards” any more, and I do enjoy some of its popular shows, like Pawn Stars. The episode broadcast this evening caught my eye thanks to an Al Hirschfeld caricature of Charlie Chaplin that was shown. To wit:

Titled “The End,” this is the final work of the artist intended for sale. I had no idea Hirschfeld was a lifelong friend of his subject. That story is explained here:

Al Hirschfeld and Charlie Chaplin were life-long friends. And Chaplin was the subject of Hirschfeld’s pen many times in Hirschfeld’s long career. The affection and respect that Hirschfeld had for Chaplin is fully evident in this and every other Chaplin that Hirschfeld drew.

Charlie Chaplin, The End was the last edition that Hirschfeld signed. And there is something else that is very important about Chaplin: In the 1930s Hirschfeld took a sojourn around the world as a passenger on successive commercial cargo ships. It was not comfortable, no, but as a young artist, Hirschfeld didn’t mind. The cargo ships carried him around the world, and when Hirschfeld found a port of call to his liking he would disembark and then continue his journey when the wanderlust grabbed him again.

When his ship docked on the isle of Bali, Hirschfeld fell in love with the magic he found around him. During the weeks that he stayed there, it was his routine to set up an easel near the piers and capture his surroundings with his brush.

Hirschfeld became used to the crowds of passengers from luxury liners who would often gather around him as an audience, onlookers over the artist’s shoulder. On one particular afternoon, Hirschfeld could feel the crowd thinning behind him as usual, but he was aware that one person still lingered to watch him work. Not wanting to be distracted by idle conversation, Hirschfeld was determined not to turn around. Hirschfeld continued to watercolor.

His fan kept watching. After what seemed to be an interminable amount of time, the man spoke: “Tell me how much money it would take for you to support yourself for one full year, so that you can continue to be an artist without worrying about money.” Hirschfeld took this question as idle chatter and fired back an unconsidered answer as he continued to work. A few moments later, Hirschfeld saw a hand reaching over his right shoulder. In that hand was a piece of paper. “Take this,” the man said. The piece of paper was a check made out in the exact amount that Hirschfeld had cited. The signature read: Charles Chaplin.

It was the beginning of a life-long friendship.

It brings tears to my eyes, still, that Hirschfeld’s first patron would also be the last portrait that Hirschfeld would ever sign, on January 20, 2003. The name of that portrait had been settled before Hirschfeld even began the working on it. Its title: “The End.”

Margo Feiden

(Emphases mine.)

It was Chaplin’s character, the Little Tramp, which made him an international superstar and Hollywood’s first millionaire actor. As iconic as any personality ever invented for film, the Tramp magnificently portrayed the eternal outcast—socially undesirable and suffering all manner of dangers and degradations, yet triumphant in the end thanks to his quick wittedness and happy adaptability. Like any of the fools in Shakespeare’s tragedies, Chaplin’s Tramp sees the truth, because he is not foolish at all, and he speaks the truth when truth is needed most. We’ve all seen him ambling about in his distinctive, humorous gait, with his cheap bamboo cane, and finding a flower to display in his scruffy lapel to attain some semblance of dignity and beauty.

Now consider The Fool of the Tarot:

Author Gordon Strong in his The Five Tarots writes:

The Fool has no identity; he is the phenomenal element, one always at odds with the causal. And we must never neglect his sense of the absurd for he refuses to accept any conventional or absolute truth. He also teaches us that humor is a path to the transcendental. We must never be too serious where transcendental matters are concerned, for this makes us heavy-hearted and it is impossible for our joy to take wing. The Fool thrives on improvisation, spontaneity—making the moment exclusively his own. He does not reflect or employ reason, yet his elevated state of awareness enables him to grasp the unity within chaos—the apparently haphazard events which make up existence. The Fool is every one of us, but he is also beyond our understanding. From that place originates his power—he is part of the unknown.

He carries in his left hand a white rose, the Rosa Mundi—soul of the world. The most perfect of flowers, the bloom of Eden—it sustains purity and passion, life and death… The rose is a sign of paradise, that of expanding awareness—its five petals representing the five senses… The Tarot Fool never causes sorrow by committing a rash deed; he is without guile. He never hides the truth from us; it is there for all to behold—if we have the sense to recognize it. It lies always within us, if only we could acknowledge it.

(Again, emphases mine.)

Charles Chaplin in City Lights, 1931.

I have no idea if Charlie Chaplin had any interest in hidden wisdom of any kind, let alone the Tarot, but the Rider-Waite deck, with its illustrations by Pamela Coleman-Smith, was published for the public and began its ever rising popularity in 1910, only five years before Chaplin stars in The Tramp, indelibly imbuing the collective consciousness with that loving and lovable symbol on celluloid.

Not making a point. Just an observation.