Sola-Busca

JasonLion

There is no proper source for that, though it seems very obvious to me. I guess you would call it an inference from other facts.

Waite had been thinking about creating a "rectified" tarot deck for five or six years prior to actually doing so. The decision to fully illustrate, or not, the minors would be a fairly major decision, something that would presumably have come up fairly early in the process.

His stated reasons for illustrating his own minors also follows from experiences he would have had much earlier. The use of the illustration of cards as a focus for meditation, as a "door" to additional knowledge, would have been something he was first taught in the Golden Dawn years before.

It also seems unlikely that the Sola Busca could have inspired the illustration of the minors and then subsequently gotten disparaged for doing "nothing to raise the significance of the Lesser Arcana".

Wait's decision to go through with the project was made fairly quickly in late 1908/early 1909. He felt pressure from Crowley's threat to publish all of the secrets of the Golden Dawn to act quickly and get his tarot out first. The selection of Pamela as the artist, and choices of what source materials to share with her, would have been finalized quickly at that time. Pamela's own choices of what material she would draw upon on her own initiative would likewise have happened at around the same time, following Waite's commissioning her to do the work.

We don't know Waite's true though process, nor are we likely to discover any proper sources for how his thinking progressed over the time he was developing the ideas for a Tarot deck. So there is certainly room for things to have happened in a different order than I imagine.
 

Abrac

Jason, sorry to be a stickler, but you're throwing a lot of stuff out there I've never heard before. If you would be so kind as to share your sources it would be educational, for me at least.

For example,

Waite had been thinking about creating a "rectified" tarot deck for five or six years prior to actually doing so.

Never heard that before.

His stated reasons for illustrating his own minors also follows from experiences he would have had much earlier. The use of the illustration of cards as a focus for meditation, as a "door" to additional knowledge, would have been something he was first taught in the Golden Dawn years before.

By Waite's own account he wasn't very impressed with the GD's approach to tarot and in his autobiography he states that it was he who introduced the GD to such meditative techniques:
"I am not of course intimating that the Golden Dawn had any deep understanding by inheritance of Tarot Cards; but, if I may so say, it [the GD] was getting to know under my auspices (leadership) that their Symbols—or some at least among them—were gates which opened on realms of vision beyond occult dreams."—Shadows of Life and Thought

To hear Waite tell it the GD's approach was little more than occult fantasy. If there's something that discounts this, it would be of interest.

Wait's decision to go through with the project was made fairly quickly in late 1908/early 1909. He felt pressure from Crowley's threat to publish all of the secrets of the Golden Dawn to act quickly and get his tarot out first.

Again, source?
 

macoram

Just to keep in the thread's original subject...

The various Italian tarocchi decks of the Renaissance period seem to have been both works of art used as socio-political statements and allegoric moral philosophical documents with a practical use for both teaching and gaming.
They seem to have been lavishly produced (building on the already widespread regular playing cards and card games) in order to celebrate important occasions (marriages, alliances, victories, etc.) or following the fancy of important ruling families.
The Sola Busca and the Mantegna (the latter not a "real" deck but a set of pictures) are the most captivating because of their rich symbolism and mystery: a testimony of the icons, values and thoughts of the Renaissance long-gone society from which our western culture originated.
No divination use is documented for any of them...


I find the RWS divination deck to be in a complete different (much inferior) league. It's the product of a seemingly pretentious person (Waite) who created it in order to promote his miscellanic recycled metaphysical views as the only truth allegedly "rectifying" and "perfecting" arcane iconographic documents (tarocchi/tarots) which came from the Renaissance more than five centuries before. In fact just reducing them to distorted victorian/edwardian caricatures which nevertheless have been (and still are) countlessly reproduced, dissected and built on.
All this success certainly due to the easy (but severely restricted) pictorial interpretation of the minors in a divination process Waite even explicitly pretended to scorn of.

As you may have guessed I personally don't fancy the RWS in spite of having several versions of it in my extensive tarot deck and book collection. Both decks and books on the RWS and other "Golden Dawn", "new age or similar" decks of recent invention are clearly separated and identified as "modern tarot" in my database in order to avoid any confusion.

Not to raise polemics and no offence intended...
 

JasonLion

"It had been Waite's goal for several years to create a "rectified tarot" as he called it and due to his relation to William Rider this could finally be realized . . . he had been contemplating for the last 5-6 years"
from The Story of the Waite Smith Tarot by K. F. Jensen pages 75-76

"Not until 1909, a date whose importance when have already seen, did Crowley begin breaking his oaths. In that year after having established the A.:.A.:., he founded it's official publication The Equinox. This journal successively revealed all the rituals and teachings of the Golden Dawn of which Crowley had gained knowledge."
from Aleister Crowley and the Temptation of Politics By Marco Pasi page 59 and similar from other sources, for example the lawsuit by Mathers.

"It is regrettable in several respects that I must confess to certain reservations, but there is a question of honour at issue. Furthermore, between the follies on the one side of those who know nothing of the tradition, yet are in their own opinion the exponents of something called occult science and philosophy, and on the other side between the make-believe of a few writers who have received part of the tradition and think that it constitutes a legal title to scatter dust in the eyes of the world without, I feel that the time has come to say what it is possible to say, so that the effect of current charlatanism and unintelligence may be reduced to a minimum"
from The (Pictorial) Key to the Tarot by A. E. Waite. A little veiled, but the thought is clearly there. Also discussed in more depth by later commentators.

I can't find the original reference on the origins of the meditation on tarot cards ritual at the moment. I might have it mixed up with a later period, but I'm reasonably sure I remember it correctly.
 

Abrac

Thanks Jason.

I found that Jensen quote in his 2005 article "The Early Waite-Smith Tarot Editions." At the end of the article he acknowledges several people for providing him with information including R. A. Gilbert, that could be the ultimate source. It's hard to use sources like this for serious research since it doesn't give specific references. Maybe he's more specific in the book you quoted.

Interesting info you posted, thanks.
 

OnePotato

Yes, of course Waite was aware of earlier decks that had fully illustrated pips. He was actually quite disdainful of them.

"There in was a period, however, when the numbered cards were also pictures, but such devices were sporadic inventions of particular artists and were either conventional designs of the typical or allegorical kind, distinct from what is understood by symbolism, or they were illustrations—shall we say?—of manners, customs and periods. They were, in a word, adornments, and as such they did nothing to raise the significance of the Lesser Arcana to the plane of the Trumps Major; moreover, such variations are exceedingly few." Waite - The Pictorial Key to the Tarot
(snip...)

I believe it is pretty self-evident that Waite was not referring to the Sola-Busca as he referred to the earlier illustrations as mere "adornments" that "...did nothing to raise the significance of the Lesser Arcana...", since his own deck heavily drew upon a number of Sola-Busca designs, without even altering their context, for his "rectified tarot", in which the pip cards were elevated in meaning/content.

I believe he is likely referring to a number of earlier playing card decks that had domestic or other decorative animal scenes worked into the pips, without a clearly defined program of "meaning", such as the Jost Amman deck, or any number of other decks by the early engravers. Sola-Busca IS a clearly defined program, presented in the context of playing cards, and Waite undoubtedly recognized this as he was conceiving his own deck, though he perhaps didn't want to advertise that it had actually been done before.
 

JasonLion

We have every reason to believe that Waite was familiar with the Sola Busca at the time he wrote this text, so I don't really see how he could not be including it in with the others in one sense or another. His primary focus could well be on German Tarock decks, where the illustrations have little, if anything, to do with which particular card they are printed on. But I feel strongly that he is dismissing everything that came before, including the Sola Busca, with a broad brush.

He tended to do that kind of thing, in effect saying that everyone before him had gotten it completely wrong. Sola Busca does have a defined program of meaning, but it is not Waite's program of meaning, and thus not worthy of notice from Waite's point of view.

By the by, I wouldn't say that RWS drew "heavily" on the Sola Busca. Yes, a couple of cards are nearly identical, and several more borrow elements from Sola Busca, but the majority are quite different.
 

Abrac

I believe Waite’s inspiration for illustrating the minors probably came from several sources, including the Sola Busca. He was no doubt familiar with the SB and probably admired it to a certain degree. There was also apparently a sense of dissatisfaction with those decks that were “adorned” with pictures that he felt didn’t reflect the divinatory meaning in any way. Illustrating the minors to reflect the divinatory meanings was part of the “rectification” but it also included redesigning the majors so they would better illustrate the mystic doctrine that he believed was underneath it all.

In summary, there were a lot of decks before Waite that had illustrations of one kind or another on all the cards so it would be difficult to say he wasn’t influenced by them, but his contribution would be creating minors with illustrations that closely reflected the divinatory meanings; at least from reading the PKT, that seems to be his assessment of the situation, whether justified or not. :)