The Illustrated Key to the Tarot: The Veil of DivinationDe Laurence, L. W. (Lauron William)
Religion
The Illustrated Key to the Tarot: The Veil of Divination
De Laurence, L. W. (Lauron William)
Fortune-telling by cards; Tarot
In respect of their usual presentation, the bridge between the
Greater and Lesser Arcana is supplied by the court cards—King,
Queen, Knight and Squire or Page; but their utter distinction
from the Trumps Major is shown by their conventional character.
Let the reader compare them with symbols like the Fool, the
High Priestess, the Hierophant, or—almost without exception—with
any in the previous sequence, and he will discern my meaning.
There is no especial idea connected on the surface with the
ordinary court cards; they are a bridge of conventions, which
form a transition to the simple pretexts of the counters and
denaries of the numbers following. We seem to have passed
away utterly from the region of higher meanings illustrated by
living pictures. There 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. This notwithstanding,
there are vague rumors concerning a higher meaning in the minor
cards, but nothing has so far transpired, even within the sphere
of prudence which belongs to the most occult circles; these, it is
true, have certain variants in respect of divinatory values, but I
have not heard that in practice they offer better results. Efforts
like those of Papus in The Tarot Of The Bohemians are strenuous
and deserving after their own kind; he, in particular, recognizes
the elements of the Divine Immanence in the Trumps
Major, and he seeks to follow them through the long series of the
lesser cards, as if these represented filtrations of the World of
Grace through the World of Fortune; but he only produces an
arbitrary scheme of division which he can carry no further, and
he has recourse, of necessity, in the end to a common scheme of
divination as the substitute for a title to existence on the part of
the Lesser Arcana. Now, I am practically in the same position;
but I shall make no attempt here to save the situation by drawing
on the mystical properties of numbers, as he and others have
attempted. I shall recognize at once that the Trumps Major
belong to the divine dealings of philosophy, but all that follows to
fortune-telling, since it has never yet been translated into another
language; the course thus adopted will render to divination, and
at need even to gambling, the things that belong to this particular
world of skill, and it will set apart for their proper business those
matters that are of another order. In this free introduction to
the subject in hand, it is only necessary to add that the difference
between the fifty-six Lesser Arcana and the ordinary playing-cards
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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