Raine: Yeats, The Tarot and the Golden Dawn

Raine: Yeats, The Tarot and the Golden Dawn

YEATS, THE TAROT AND THE GOLDEN DAWN
Kathleen Raine (1976)

I BECAME CURIOUS about Yeats's use of the Tarot cards because my attention had been caught by an observation in Hone's¹ Life that among the young poet's few and treasured possessions in his rooms in London in the 1880's was a Tarot pack. His allusions to certain Tarot Symbols (Tower, Wheel, Magician, Chariot) are bound to strike anyone who has played at fortune-telling with Madame Sosostris' 'Wicked pack of cards'. What I did not know thirty years ago when under the spell of The Waste Land², I bought myself a Tarot pack, was that the set I used, with a commentary by A. E. Waite, had been designed by initiates of the Hermetic Society of the Golden Dawn, of which both A. E. Waite and Pamela Coleman-Smith (who executed the emblems) were members.
So of course was Yeats; who also published, with Maseﬁeld, Synge and others, in Miss Coleman-Smith's little magazine, The Green Sheaf³. So I took unawares my ﬁrst step into the deep waters of those magical studies about which Yeats knew so much and his academic commentators know so little; for the kind of knowledge to which members of that Order aspired cannot in its nature be understood in academic terms. Te merely academic study of magical symbolism may be likened to the analysis of musical scores by a student who does not know that the documents he meticulously annotates are merely indications for the evocation of music from instruments of whose very existence he is ignorant. Magic, in other words, is an art.
The Tarot, although associated with Gypsy fortune-tellers, especially in Italy and the South of France, was clearly not invented by the Gypsies. That it embodies, in the form of emblems, ancient Egyptian mythology is also unlikely, though Court de Gebelin,⁴ the ﬁrst scholar to come under the spell of the Tarot, put forward this theory as long ago as 1781. Another theory of the origin of the Tarot associates it with the Jewish esoteric tradition of the Cabbala. This is the view of Eliphas Levi, from whose Histoire de Magie (1860), MacGregor Mathers, (that 'learned but unscholarly man', as Yeats calls him) quotes:
The absolute hieroglyphical science had for its basis an alphabet of which all
the gods were letters, all the letters ideas, all the ideas numbers, and all the
numbers perfect signs. [Mathers, The Tarot, 1888]

According to this view, the Tarot is a form of that alphabet, 'the Book of Thoth'.

1. William Hone (1780-1842) was an English writer, satirist and bookseller.
2. By T.S. Eliot (published in 1922) and regarded as a signiﬁcant literary phenomenon
in Modernist poetry having reference to the Grail and Fisher King.
3. Launched in 1903 with contributions from Yeats, AE and other notables
it ran for just over a year with 13 issues.
4. A French scholar and writer (1725-84) who introduced the Tarot cards as a repository for esoteric wisdom in his Le Monde primitif, analysé et comparé avec le monde moderne (The Primeval World, Analysed and Compared to the Modern World), Paris, 1781.