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)