B.O.T.A. Tarot | 1931 | Paul Foster Case & Jessie Burns Park |
The Golden Dawn Tarot | 1978 | Robert Wang (w/ Israel Regardie) |
The Hermetic Tarot | 1980 | Godfrey Dowson |
Golden Dawn Ritual Tarot | 1991 | Chic Cicero & Sandra Tabatha Cicero |
Tarot of Ceremonial Magick | 1997 | Lon Milo DuQuette & Constance DuQuette |
The Magical Tarot of the Golden Dawn | 2022 | Pat Zalewski & David Sledzinski |
This past week I posted deck reviews, which turned out to be more like discussions, on the above five occult decks and their companion guidebooks, with references back to Regardie’s texts, Waite’s Pictorial Key, and Crowley’s Book of Thoth. It was time-consuming and quite the Effort, but I thought, one-and-done, meaning let me just knock each of these out of the way and then have it memorialized on my blog for future referencing.
If you’re a tarot enthusiast, then I hope there were inclusions of insights from those discussions that you’ll want to add to your personal tarot journal. For me, even while I’ve worked with the tarot for two decades plus, the process of consolidating study of these Golden Dawn based decks in quick succession synthesized so much.
Even most of the light, fun, fast-and-easy pretty decks published as of late are at their essence rooted in the Golden Dawn system, whether or not it was consciously done.
No matter how you feel about the Golden Dawn system of correspondences or the melding of a Christianized perspective of Kabbalah (or calling it Hermetic Qabalah to make the distinction), it’s impossible for the tarot enthusiast to deny the objective influence of the Golden Dawn on the popularized versions of tarot today.
And so I thought, hey, somebody out there is going to maybe probably benefit from this focused study of select GD-based decks. I hope even scrolling and skimming the five deck discussions will impart a rudimentary foundational understanding of this Western occult heritage.
Continue reading “A Study of Golden Dawn Decks and the Western Tradition of Occult Tarot”