Book "T" (edited) The 36 Pips

Fulgour

1888 ~ no way!

kwaw said:
Book T was first written and privately circulated c. 1888.

Utterly impossible, since Wynn Wescott had only just translated
the Sepher Yetzerah (see last chapter of Mathers "The Tarot").
You'll need to put the horse before the cart to haul that wagon.

Fulgour

Crowley had the Rider Tarot

kwaw said:
A substantial portion was first made public by Aleister Crowley in the Equinox Vol I. No 8, p.143 onwards, published in September 1912.

THREE YEARS AFTER the 1909 deck by Pamela Colman Smith.

Fulgour

kwaw said:
Israel Regardie also published the text of Book T in vol.4 of the 'Golden Dawn' [in four volumes published 1937-1940].

By then everybody in the world was familiar with Pam's deck!

Lee

In his book Mystical Origins of the Tarot (Destiny Books, 2004), Paul Huson says that Regardie based his 1984 edition, Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic, on "a set of Golden Dawn documents dating from between 1894 and 1896 that had originally belonged to Golden Dawn initiate F.L. Gardner", including the decan assignments of the pip cards.

The dates of commercial publication of Book T are irrelevant, because, as kwaw has pointed out, Book T was written for and used privately by the members of the Golden Dawn (including Waite and Smith) for several decades before they were published.

-- Lee

Fulgour

Lee said:
The dates of commercial publication of Book T are irrelevant, because, as kwaw has pointed out, Book T was written for and used privately by the members of the Golden Dawn (including Waite and Smith) for several decades before they were published.

And yet evidently re-written to reflect the "popular" edition
of cards widely in use, rather than a magickal cartoon deck.

Lee

Fulgour said:
And yet evidently re-written to reflect the "popular" edition
of cards widely in use, rather than a magickal cartoon deck.

Huh? Are you saying that Book T was rewritten to reflect the RWS deck? You say "evidently," would you care to cite the evidence, if there is any besides your own speculation?

-- Lee

Fulgour

Hi

Lee! It's easy ~ just compare the "official" descriptions
of the cards (right there in Book T) to the illustrations from
the Tarot drawn by Pamela Colman Smith. There you have it!

Nothing about the Golden Dawn cards even remotely implies
the very specific and detailed references to Smith's artwork.

Lee

The pip cards of the Golden Dawn deck were designed to be what we would call "non-scenic," in other words they weren't meant to specifically illustrate the Golden Dawn's divinatory meanings. But the Golden Dawn still had specific divinatory meanings which they used for these pip cards, as listed in Book T, even though these meanings aren't specifically referenced on the cards. It is these meanings which influenced (among other influences) the pip cards of the RWS, which, unlike the Golden Dawn's deck, used scenes to suggest meaning.

The fact that there are clearly identifiable similarities between the Book T divinatory meanings and the RWS pip card scenes is evidence that Book T influenced RWS, not the other way around.

It's a commonly accepted axiom by historians that usually it's the simplest explanations that are most likely to be true, rather than convoluted conspiracy theories with no evidence to support them.

-- Lee

Fulgour

a picture is worth a thousand words

Lee said:
It's a commonly accepted axiom by historians that usually it's the simplest explanations that are most likely to be true, rather than convoluted conspiracy theories with no evidence to support them.

I'm sorry you think that I consider your theory a convoluted conspiracy,
but we do seem to be in agreement that Book-T is not a historical text.

Lee

Sorry if I wasn't clear, but we are in no such agreement.

-- Lee