by Marcus Katz
One-Card Reading with the Majors
As an example of how quickly we can learn to read tarot, here is an exercise that installs the skill of reading just one card of the twenty-two majors for an answer to any question. In the Tarosophy training methods, we always split out skills and methods—we learn the skill first, and then apply it to a method. Sometimes the teaching of the skill doesn’t even involve tarot! Here we apply the major cards to any aspect of life.
The major arcana cards feature images of “archetypes,” fundamental patterns of our experience. So they can be applied to anything; if we take the Tower, this is an image of the archetypal energy of change as we have previously listed. We can apply that to anything; Tower + Learning = “total change of mind”; Tower + Love = “shocking admission that changes everything”; Tower + Residence = “sudden change of house.” So take any major, make a note of one word that has its energy; i.e., the Hermit might be “tradition” as we give it, or “solitary” might come to your mind. Then apply the word to any of these aspects of life:
Love
Relationships
Family
Children
Career
Money
Residence
Law
Education
These are the main areas you will be asked about in tarot reading, according to a survey of some 80,000 questions we conducted. Actually, three out of five questions will be about relationships!
If we take our Hermit card to the area of law, we get “solitary law,” which we might translate as “single law” or “unique ruling,” something that stands on its own ground (the mountaintop in the card image) or apart from previous rulings. If we take the Hermit to education, we get “traditional education” using our keywords.
If you practice this exercise for a while, you will see how powerful these archetypes are; they embody the human experience, universal to every life. When someone then asks you a question, such as “I feel stuck in my job, but it is safe and pays well. What should I do?” and you pull the Star from the twenty-two majors, you might just find yourself automatically and easily saying, “It is time to go for what you have always aspired.”
Waite’s Rose Cross Spread
As a purely spiritual self-reading method using the majors as seen by Waite, we share here a previously unpublished method from a private esoteric group, the Order of Everlasting Day.7 This is called the “Waite’s Rose Cross” method as it uses Waite’s language (actual methods used by Waite appear towards the end of this book). It is a method that uses the majors to divine one’s state of personal connection to the universe.
Take the twenty-two major arcana cards from your deck.
Shuffle whilst contemplating the symbol of the Rose Cross.8
3. Rose Cross Lamen. (Illustration courtesy of James Clark.)
4. Waite’s Rose Cross Spread. (Illustration courtesy of James Clark.)
Take the first card and lay it in position 1, saying: “The rose is the first, most beautiful, and perfect of all the flowers. Such is my soul.”
Lay down the following six cards in order to the diagram, saying:
It is guarded by thorns everlasting, preserving its purity.
It is in the centre of the garden of philosophy, wherein the
true rose blooms.
The sun and moon are the red and white of the roses and
herein is all mystery.
The green lion eats of the sun and feeds the rose.
The rose is a perfume to the wise, and a balm to the blessed.
It is prepared in blood and turns to the light, to its own
perfection in this art.
Say: “In hoc signo vinces” (“by this sign you will conquer”).
You can now read these seven major cards in the following context, and we will see later how each of these keywords may be expanded for practical, self-development, and spiritual readings.
The Rose Card: This card shows how your soul is seeking to bloom at this time. If for example you receive the Hanged Man, it is secret traditions, esotericism, and magic you should next explore, not external religion, which would be indicated by the Hierophant.
The Thorns Card: This card is what protects you, but also hinders you—it is a challenge card to your spiritual progress at this moment.
So if you received the Star card here, it would indicate that your aspirations are worthy but perhaps too much to handle at this time.
You should aim to be more realistic in your appraisal of your progress.
The Garden Card: The Garden shows the situation and environment around you from a spiritual perspective. It includes all aspects of your everyday life, which are seen as examples of the lesson you are being called to learn. The Tower here would show that the events of your life are fundamentally teaching you about change. Only after you’ve fully comprehended this lesson will your life move on from the events of
the present.
The Sun and Moon Card: This card shows what is presently divided or separated in your life and thus what you must get together. If it were Judgement, it would suggest that you are splitting your calling, feeling pulled between two aspects of your life that both have value. Your task would be to unify these two callings, should you receive this card.
The Green Lion Card: The Lion shows us how to go about incorporating the spiritual lessons of this spread. It is the action
card—if it were the Tower, the Lion would be asking us to make changes in our life; if it were Temperance, then communion would be called for, perhaps in meeting others or seeking fellowship and/or communication with others of like mind; the Hermit however would task us to find solace in ourselves.
The Healing Card: Representing the balm and perfume of the soul, this card is about “spiritual resources” and indicates our best avenue of assistance in accomplishing the work of the Lion. Receiving the World card here would mean that our assistance comes from our everyday and commonplace activities—hobbies, crafts, volunteer work, action, travel, and all the possibilities of the outer world. If it were the High Priestess, we may find assistance and reward in our devotion to a particular task, project, or cause.
The Blood Card: This card shows the light to which we must turn
our spiritual life above all things. A card such as the Hermit here would show that we should seek more learning in tradition, and teaching; a card such as Justice would tell us that we should look to understand the rules of the universe, science, esoteric sciences and models, and discern all things in the light of law.
This spread is one suitable for consideration, contemplation and journaling, and is given here as a method you can return to several times throughout studying the materials in this book. As you learn more about Waite and Smith’s lives, philosophy, and likely meanings intended in their deck, this spread will continually open to you, for as it is said, we progress “through the rose to the cross, and through the cross to the rose.”
[contents]
Two
The Pixie—
Pamela Colman Smith
We are the tyrants of men to come; where we build roads,
they must tread; the traditions we set up, if they are evil, our children
will find it hard to fight against; if for want of vigilance we let beautiful
places be defiled, it is they who will find it a hopeless task to restore them.
–Ford Maddox Ford, “A Future of London” (1909)
London, 1909
It was a cool, changeable, and generally dull year for weather in London; by November, the residents of York Mansions, overlooking Battersea Park, would have had to be wearing scarves and hats against the cold, despite the sun. At least as is said in England, “It was dry.” One particular resident would have been pleased with this, we think—a certain Pame
la Colman Smith (1878–1951), artist and stage designer, was on her way on Friday, the nineteenth of that month to post a letter.
Leaving her small apartment lit by gas lamp (electricity would only be installed a year or so later), Pamela would have a wonderful view of the now winter-bare trees of Battersea Park, the promenade by the Lady’s Pool and Boating Lake, with the river Thames winding just beyond the park itself. Her letter was going to be sent to her art agent in New York, Alfred Stieglitz. It had one important line for the story you are about to discover in this book:
“I’ve just finished a big job for very little cash!”
5. A Letter to Stieglitz from Pamela, 1909. (Scan courtesy of authors, private collection.)
That job was eighty designs for a tarot deck—a tarot deck that became the best-selling deck of the following century and set the tradition for most decks that followed in its wake.9 In this book, you will learn the secrets of this deck, and we will reveal the magic that Pamela Colman Smith and Arthur Edward Waite evoked into these images.
Before we begin to look at the deck and reveal the secrets scattered throughout it card-by-card, we will take a new look at the life of Pamela Colman Smith and Arthur Edward Waite, who together created this legacy in just less than a year over 1909.
We will see how Pamela’s visits to her friends Ellen Terry, a famous stage actress, and Edith Craig, Terry’s daughter, set the scene for the images of the cards and express their secret meaning.
The Pixie
The year 1909 was one of endings and new beginnings. The Edwardian era would officially come to an end with the death of King Edward VII the following year; society, class, and equality were slowly shifting, and on some levels life appeared to be almost cosmopolitan. The world still unknowingly awaited the two great wars that would so swiftly follow. On the surface, the old geographical and social barriers were being assailed, some conquered for the first time. The world was cracking open. However, the struggle continued for women; the suffragette movement would become increasingly active over the following few years.
It was the year that Louis Bleriot made aviation history with the first record-breaking channel flight from France to England. Later, the monoplane, accompanied by Bleriot, was exhibited at the newly opened department store in Oxford Street, London called Selfridges, owned by American entrepreneur Harry Gordon Selfridge. More than twelve thousand people flocked to see the spectacle.
Known as Pixie, the nickname given to her by the famous stage actress Ellen Terry in 1899, Pamela was living at 84 York Mansions on the edge of Battersea Park. She was desperate for money—a situation that would be common in her life. A self-styled bohemian artist, fey and diminutive, she had spent the last several months working on a deck of tarot cards. However, this was not really what she wanted to tell her agent in the letter she sent that November day—she was mainly asking about a payment she had not received for an art piece for a Mrs. Busches called Moon. It was that time of year; she wrote simply, “I want some money for Christmas.”
6. Pamela Colman Smith in the Critic, 1899. (Photograp courtesy of Koretaka Eguchi, private collection.)
Pamela had always struggled to make ends meet; her early letters mention her working on commissions such as hand-painted boxes (at least one example survives in Smallhythe Place, Ellen Terry’s cottage) and lamp shades. Whilst not being regarded by biographers as particularly proactive when it came to finances, she did briefly open a “prints and drawings” store in London. It is likely this did not meet with success. In the meantime, she was performing a little in crowd scenes in the theatre through her association with Ellen Terry and Henry Irving.
7. Pamela Colman Smith in The Craftsman, 1912. (Illustration courtesy of authors, private collection.)
It was actually Edith (Edy) Craig, Terry’s daughter, with whom Pamela had a strong relationship. She drew particularly playful sketches of the two of them. The photograph of Pamela at Smallhythe shows her in the company of a group of women—who would dress in men’s clothing and smoke cigarettes—and it is Edy to whom Pamela is turning to smile.
Pamela’s art was influenced by a number of other prominent artists and illustrators, though it was her earlier life she drew on when having to create so many illustrations for the tarot in such a short period of time. In contemporary times, it is often graphic novel (comic book) illustrators who create tarot decks, as they have the speed and style to produce story-board images in a reasonable time. Asking a classic oil painter to produce seventy-eight large paintings takes some time!
8. Sir Pellias, the Gentle Knight by Howard Pyle, 1903. (Illustration courtesy of authors, private collection.)
So Pamela drew upon her early inspirations, one of whom was Howard Pyle (1853–1911) a prolific illustrator who started a class at the Drexel Institute of Philadelphia in 1894. Pamela applied to the class in 1898, aged twenty, and met Pyle, who described her work as “very ingenious and interesting” but she did not get a place. In fact, it was Pyle who suggested she would be far better travelling to England with Terry. We can perhaps see the influence of Pyle’s illustrations for the legends of King Arthur, Robin Hood, and fairytales—even pirate ships out at sea—in the Waite-Smith tarot.
Pamela’s Life
Corinne Pamela Colman Smith—or Pamela Colman Smith as she is more commonly known—was born to American parents, Charles Edward Smith and Corinne Colman Smith at 27 Belgrave Road, Pimlico, London, on February 16, 1878. Queen Victoria was on the throne and Benjamin Disraeli was Prime Minister. Pamela spent her first ten years living in England; when she was three years old, her parents moved to the north of England in 1881. The census tracks her living in Didsbury, Manchester, on the city’s outskirts.
This industrial city was a place of expansion and a hotbed of women’s emancipation. Prime Minster Disraeli noted that “what Manchester does today, the rest of the world follows.” Considering Pamela’s worldwide lasting legacy of her tarot art, it is fitting that she spent her formative years in this part of the world. It could even be argued that she was a “Lancashire lass” in addition to her other guises and personas.
There is often talk of what Pamela’s speaking voice might have sounded like and whether she had a pronounced accent. It would most likely be that she was taught to speak properly, as she was living in the time of “the Queen’s English.” However, those formative years in Northern England, where the local accent would have been pure Lancashire, would no doubt have influenced her way of speaking, even where that was inherited from her parents. Her natural ability to mimic would have served her well even as a child, and she would likely have been able to switch her accent to suit the occasion and her whereabouts.
Unfortunately we do not know very much at this time about Pamela’s formal education, whether she was taught by a tutor at home, or if she attended a local or boarding school. It must have been tricky for the Smith family living in England at this time; it was Victorian and still stuffy and repressed, partial to social discrimination on many levels. To be Americans and therefore outsiders in England—and particularly Lancashire in the 1880s—would have raised a few eyebrows.
This attitude is evident in the letters of J. B. Yeats (the father of William Butler Yeats and his brother Jack) where he remarks about Pamela and her father, made much later than when Pamela was growing up:
Pamela Smith and father are the funniest-looking people, the most primitive Americans possible, but I like them much.
Here is how Arthur Ransome described his first encounter with Pamela:
The door was flung open, and we saw a little round woman, scarcely more than a girl, standing in the threshold. She looked like she had been the same age all her life, and would be so to the end. She was dressed in an orange-coloured coat that hung loose over a green skirt, with black tassels sewn all over the orange silk, like the frills on a red Indian’s trousers. She welcomed us with a little shriek. It was the oddest,
most uncanny little shriek, half laugh, half exclamation. It made me very shy. It was obviously an affectation, and yet seemed just the right manner of welcome from the strange little creature, “god-daughter of a witch and sister to a fairy,” who uttered it. She was very dark, and not thin, and when she smiled, with a smile that was peculiarly infectious, her twinkling gypsy eyes seemed to vanish altogether. Just now at the door they were the eyes of a joyous, excited child meeting the guests of a birthday party.10
Pamela perhaps knew what it was like to feel lonely and be an outsider, that experience of not quite belonging. An only child herself, Pamela would never marry and have children of her own. Her relationship with her father seemed rather restrained and not very emotional, heavy on convention and less on intimacy—not that this would be anything too unusual for the time. The Yeats’s letters suggest this, with a comment relating how her father spoke to her:
“Miss Smith” her father always said even when addressing her.
Pamela and her partner in deck creation, Arthur Edward Waite, had quite a lot in common, from family misfortune to them both converting to Catholicism. Early in life, Waite and Smith would experience the loss of parents; Pamela’s mother died in Jamaica in 1896 when Pamela was only eighteen years old. This was followed three years later, on December 1, 1899, with the sudden death of her father in New York (New York Times obit). This shared experience did not stop there; Waite and Smith both had family roots in America, as Waite was born in America to an American father and an English mother, brought up in England from an early age and residing in England until his death. He very much styled himself an English gentleman.
The comparison with Pamela ends there, however. Pamela’s parents returned to America and divided their time there with long trips to Kingston, Jamaica. In 1888, when she was eleven years old, Pamela and her parents set sail to New York from Liverpool. They arrived on December 17, no doubt in time for the Christmas holidays with their extended family. The lifestyle Pamela lived, travelling and experiencing different cultures, influenced her; she was bohemian in nature, almost butterfly-like, not one to be pinned to the mundane. It was as if she was more at home with her imagination than any land physical.
