The Tarot in England

It is now fairly well established that Tarot cards were first created as a game in the courts of Renaissance Italy and it was not until early 19^th century France that they began to be invoked for use in fortune-telling and ritual magic. From here this idea spread, via the writings of Eliphas Levi, to Britain and was soon adopted and elaborated by occultists there. The pack that was most often found in England in this period was the Marseilles Tarot, imported from France and sold by esoteric booksellers.

Some late Victorian magicians and writers tried their hand at creating their own version of the Tarot, as described by Ronald Decker and Michael Dummett in their A History of the Occult Tarot (2019). Kenneth Mackenzie, whom they describe as an English disciple of Levi, had by 1879 ‘formed his intention of writing the book entitled The Game of Tarot: Archaeologically and Symbolically Considered’, and the prospectus for this said it would include a set of 78 illustrations in a case: as they note, ‘a complete Tarot pack, in other words’. But neither book nor deck ever appeared.

In 1886, Arthur Machen’s close friend, the occult scholar A.E. Waite, published selected translations from Levi’s work as The Mysteries of Magic, with major sections on the Tarot, which Decker and Dummett regard as ‘the fountain-head of modern occultist theories of the Tarot’. Around this time, Frederick Holland, a kabbalist and alchemist, devised a Tarot for his own use, and in 1887 published a book on the subject, The Revelation of the Shechinah. At this time also Wynn Westcott, one of the founders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, drew ink sketches of the Tarot trumps for his own use. His colleague in the magical order, S.L. MacGregor Mathers, coalesced all this activity and speculation in his The Tarot: Its Occult Signification, Use in Fortune-Telling and Method of Play (1888). From then onwards, the Tarot was inextricably linked with magic and prophecy.

Waite and Pamela Colman Smith then designed a new pack, the first finished and published English deck, issued by the occult imprint Rider (1909), and this has become the classic version in Britain. By the time of T S Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ (1922), with its celebrated allusion to Madame Sosostris and her ‘wicked pack of cards’, the use of the tarot for fortune-telling had clearly become well-known, at least in literary and artistic circles. Helen Simpson’s Tarot novel Cups Wands and Swords followed in 1927 and Charles Williams’ occult thriller The Greater Trumps in 1932.

Other occultists in England also developed Tarot designs: but Aleister Crowley’s Book of Thoth deck, illustrated by Lady Frieda Harris, was not published until much later; and a further possible pack (or at least some designs for one), begun by the esoteric author Bernard Bromage in the Fifties (as I describe in an essay in Sphinxes and Obelisks, 2021) was never issued, and is now presumed lost. In his memoir I Called It Magic (2011), Gareth Knight, like Bromage a follower of Dion Fortune, recalls how hard it was to find Tarot packs in England in the post-war period and his own plans to produce one in the early Sixties. There are now many versions and variants, including what are known more generally as ‘oracle cards’.

However, there was almost certainly no historical basis for some Victorian (and modern) occultists to claim that the Tarot had Ancient Egyptian or even Babylonian origins, except in a very wide sense that certain symbols (such as the sun, moon and stars) are common to almost all early faiths. As Decker and Dummett assert (pg 177), ‘The idea persists that Tarot cards originated in ancient Egypt. No facts support this theory, while many refute it, as we have emphasised.’ That idea took hold because ancient lineage was important to these circles, since it was seen to confer authority.

Is all this esoteric work, in which a card game has become a potent magical tool, founded then upon a misconception? Well, not quite. We should note two points that make the original meaning and use of the Tarot not quite so clear-cut as all that. The first is that any hard distinction between games and magic is a modern attitude. As Nigel Pennick has described in his book The Games of the Gods: The Origin of Board Games in Magic and Divination (1989), these activities were often intertwined. Players and seers in pre-modern times did not assume that games, including cards, could only be used for one thing or indeed that they could not be deployed for different purposes simultaneously: a game might also be a ritual. Chess, for example, has sometimes been thought of in this way, an idea I explore in my story ‘A Chess Game at Michaelmas’ (Lost Estates, 2024). (My own Tarot story is ‘The Uncertainty of All Earthly Things’ about a Sancreed Tarot).

Secondly, the imagery on the cards may have been enjoyed by patrons principally for artistic or aesthetic reasons, but it clearly draws on mystical, metaphysical and magical symbols. And, again, past ages did not necessarily draw any sharp distinction between art and magic. So we should keep in view that the Tarot cards come out of a cultural milieu in which they may always have been seen as having some magical resonances, even if they were not made primarily for ritual or divinatory purposes.

Moreover, in the later 20^th century and after, while this hankering for ancient, traditional authority continues in some esoteric streams, a distinct approach has developed which essentially shrugs and says: ‘who cares? If it works for you, use it.’ Perhaps influenced by surrealism, psychogeography and the d-i-y ethic of punk, lineage is no longer seen as essential. More valued is a practice that is informal, improvisatory, contingent, syncretic, and which does not separate the arcane from the mundane. Cast a spell, then do the washing-up sort of thing, or, even better, make the washing-up the spell.

Everyday life becomes its own magical practice, alert to meaning. A modern magician might use dice and cards, joss sticks and amulets, but they will also look out for apparent coincidences, for signs on walls, for scraps of paper in the street, for chance finds in bookshops and curio shops, for unexpected encounters with strangers. They are drawn by the suspicion that all life is magic and we should keep the keenest possible open-ness to its possibilities, content only to pick up a few clues and glimpses.

If this sort of approach has any need of a prophet (or role model), it is surely Arthur Machen’s Mr Dyson, that inspired idler and connoisseur of the curious, that wanderer among the backwaters and byways of London, that champion of an ingenious improbability theory always on the look-out for signs and coincidences. Ever delighted to find in my own town roamings the chapels and tabernacles of obscure sects, such as the Sandemanians, the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion, the Church of the New Jerusalem, the Ancient Church of Albion (in crumbling red brick), I sometimes wonder whether one autumn day I might see the bronze and golden leaves leap around a faded and peeling painted notice-board for the Original Atlantis and Baghdad Temple of the Dysonites (est.1895).

(Mark Valentine)

'Cups Wands and Swords' - Helen Simpson

The Greater Trumps (1932) by Charles Williams is a powerful metaphysical thriller inspired by the symbolism of the Tarot cards. According to his latest biographer, Grevel Lindop, Williams possessed a copy of the Marseilles pack, and probably also the Rider-Waite pack. He may have learned aspects of the Tarot from A E Waite, since he was an initiate in the latter’s Fellowship of the Rosy Cross.

However, his book was not the first novel to use the Tarot as a guiding motif. As a widely-read editor at the Oxford University Press, in touch with contemporary fiction, Williams may also at least have heard of an earlier novel involving the cards.

Helen Simpson’s Cups Wands and Swords (Heinemann, 1927) begins with a Tarot reading, and each chapter is named after a Tarot card. The novel follows a group of young bohemians in Chelsea and Oxford in the 1920s. Tony and Celia Riddle are orphaned twins, by turns tender and quarrelsome with each other. From an old and fairly well-off Australian family, they were separated when Tony was sent to public school in England at an early age, while Celia remained behind. He now has the Oxford accent while she still retains Australian intonations: but the differences seem to go deeper than that.

In the opening chapter, Dominick, an Irish friend of Tony, reads the cards for Celia and finds them difficult, puzzling. The book will, in oblique ways, follow the fall of the cards and illuminate what they may have meant. The ambience of the book is not unlike Mary Butts’ modernist Grail novel Armed With Madness (1928), also about tempestuous bohemians getting involved with the esoteric.

The mystical and supernatural in Helen Simpson’s novel, apart from the influence of the cards, is subtly drawn. The first hint is when Celia, looking at the sunlight glinting on a teaspoon, seems to hover close to another dimension and is briefly able to read her brother’s thoughts. Shared understandings are not uncommon in twins but here it is implied that this is more than that: she ‘receives’ a picture of what he was thinking. The possibility of telepathy between twins is strongly present throughout the novel. 

Supernatural incidents and impressions continue to pervade the book, not forcefully but allusively, interweaving with the lives of Celia, Tony and their friends. There is a glimpse of the majestic figures from a 17th century grimoire, and there is a seance in which a mysterious form links three of those present.

Aspects of the book are evidently autobiographical. Helen Simpson was born in Sydney but came to England as a young woman in her late teens and made her home there. Celia’s responses to the country and its contrasts with her homeland are fresh and observant and no doubt reflect her own experiences. She also evidently had an interest in the esoteric, and shared this with two close writer friends, Clemence Dane (with whom she collaborated on detective novels) and Gladys Mitchell.

She was thirty years old when Cups Wands and Swords, her second novel, was published. It shows a keen, sophisticated understanding of the Tarot symbolism. There are today hundreds of Tarot designs and Tarot-like oracle cards, but in her time it would have been a much more arcane matter. No doubt, however, it became better-known as part of the upsurge of interest in the esoteric that followed the Great War (see, for example, my catalogue for 1920 in an earlier post). Packs could be obtained from Rider, the noted occult publisher, and no doubt from certain avant-garde emporia.

T S Eliot’s allusion to the ‘wicked pack of cards’ consulted by Madame Sosostris in ‘The Waste Land’, first published in periodicals in late 1922, no doubt gives a sense of the Tarot’s reputation just a few years before Helen Simpson was writing her novel.

As well as the Tarot and the subtle supernatural elements in the book, another attraction is the cast of picturesque characters, particularly the minor characters. These include a female conjurer, who occupies the top floor of the lodging house where Tony and Celia live, and imbibes ‘port and splash’ (of soda) for her health; and a foppish Oxford aesthete who is a connoisseur of incense and rare liqueurs.  Another brief supernatural moment occurs when she burns one of the incense cones he gives her and the smoke begins to form a shape. Again, incense, now widely available in new age shops and elsewhere, was evidently still regarded then as exotic and faintly suspicious.

The emotional tension of the book derives from Tony’s dislike when his twin becomes attracted to one of his friends, Philip. He at first finds devious ways of preventing them meeting, but then acquiesces, thinking he will be able to retain his influence over her. Partly this could be due to his feeling of being ‘in loco parentis’ and responsible for his sister, who has not his experience of cosmopolitan life, but he is also presented as petulant and possessive. The plot follows Celia’s halting liberation from this. There is a powerful, eerie, well-devised ending involving an apparition that may be in part psychological in origin but yet also strongly implies a supernatural presence.

Helen Simpson went on to write ten more novels (including the collaborations), several of them historical. Boomerang (1932) won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, then perhaps the leading prize for fiction, and Under Capricorn (1937) was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock. She also wrote two historical studies, some miscellaneous non-fiction and a handful of plays.

The Australian Dictionary of Biography notice by Alan Roberts evokes her thus: ‘Handsome, dark, with 'bright brown eyes' and a determined chin, Helen was a fine horsewoman and fencer, who collected antiques, Elizabethan cookery books and works on witchcraft. She had great charm and vitality and developed a forceful style, with a touch of showmanship in some mannerisms such as taking snuff.’

While the Williams novel is told with his customary gusto and clamour, Helen Simpson's Cups Wands and Swords offers a nuanced treatment of the Tarot and its possibilities, but is equally compelling. It is an excellent example of an intelligent metaphysical thriller with contemporary edge, and ought to be better-known among savants of the esoteric and the fantastic.  

(Mark Valentine)