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A Lecture on the Tarot Delivered by Lady Frieda Harris to The Tomorrow Club
circa 1944
I must apologise for standing up before all you learned and interesting people. I hope not only interesting but interested people—to talk on the Tarot.
Some months ago when I held my Exhibition of my designs for the Taro cards, I had the good fortune to meet your chairman Mr. Trevor Blackmore and inflamed by his scintillating wit I managed to utter a few obvious comments on the pack which led him to imagine that I was competent to explain these Mysterious images, and gave him the idea that I should address the Tomorrow Club on the subject.
I was foolhardy enough to accept (probably be bombed out by January or I should know more by then) and comforted myself by the reflection that I should be allowed to give a lantern slide lecture and that the symbols when looked at, would penetrate to the spectators sub-conscious so that they would be understood according to the range of each one's capacity.
But the War, always this helpful bromide, the difficulty in obtaining a magic lantern, the expense of doing so, the time it would take to display 78 slides, (and I am sure no Tarot enthusiast would permit one card to be omitted,) all this has made it impossible and I am only able to show you the large coloured photographs of the original pictures which I regret very much, as the colours on the photographs only indicate but will not convey to you the right radiance, as I have taken great care to use the primitive four colours on each card allotted by tradition to the Sign of the Zodiac, Planet and Element which governs it.
So I feel like a particularly small lion-tamer, forced into a cage of fierce lions when I attempt to explain the meaning of the Tarot without the help of their imagery.
Also I believe a painter has no gift for gab or why paint. However, as briefly as I can I will try and say how I have understood the Tarot and will leave it to Mr. Bryant [Edward Bryant] who has studied the subject and who has kindly come to help me out of this morass of words and will certainly initiate you more fully.
The Tarot could be described as God's Picture Book or it could be likened to a celestial game of chess, the Trumps being the pieces to be moved according to the law of their own order over a chequered board of the four elements.
The legend runs that the Adepts in the Sanctuary of the Gnosis at the time of the Christian Era that the Adepts being anxious to conceal their heretical doctrines from the extravert Christian teaching, decided to put their secrets in the form of a game of cards to be seen by all and understood by few. In many cases the letters and signs attributed to the Trumps have been willfully interchanged to confuse the true meaning.
The first records we have is in the 14th century, when the Saracens imported the game of Tarot into Italy and the Moors to Spain. In 1319 Jaques Gringonneau painted his famous pack for Charles VI of France. This set, of which there remains 5 cards, is very beautiful. We have also got the receipt for the same, which not only guaranteed the mad monarch from duplicating his payment but us from a fraudulent credulity in the origin of this pack.
Since finishing my work (I was careful not to do so before in case I should be accused of plagiarism) I have seen many reproductions in the British Museum of the Tarots of Eteila, Mantegna, Marselles etc. These packs were made in the middle ages, for French, German, Austrian, Italian, Spanish and Dutch nobility and merchants, and were the cause of endless controversies and law suits, for they were regarded, either as a source of state revenue, or with a superstitious fear by the Church. That an opportunity they could make for a special War effort taxation to be announced on the B.B.C. in an unctuous warning on the immorality of cards.
This recurrent combination of moral and financial obstruction makes me anxious about the future of my cards. We are warned of the [illegible] of fortune in the Trump XI which is a picture of the revolving Wheel of Fate with the attached Sphinx of Wisdom, the ape of Reason, and the monster of ignorance. Possibly the monster is on the ascendant at the present time. Shall I be driven in like manner to print underground, the tube for reference, only to be raided by the Police, the uttermost farthing extorted by the Government, and a press correspondence from half baked mystics on my track.
The cards were undoubtedly used as a game of chance. They still are.
In South America, the Tarocchi is a great gambling game and the players, I am told, indicate to their partners what they hold in their hands by secret signs such as touching their noses or moving their cigarettes, perhaps unconsciously going through all the traditional gestures of magical ritual.
All over the Continent the game is still played.
It is very difficult, only to be learnt with tears, a victim told me, but the element of chance plays a large part, it seems a corrupt form of divination. This leads us to the gipsies or bohemians (meaning sorcerers) and with them the cards have found a permanency in fortune telling. So we arrive at the more serious art of divination and the Tarot becomes a book of Holy Learning. The imagination flies to India, the Hindoo Tarots, then to Egypt, the book of Thoth, the Book of the Dead, then to China with the Ying and the Yang, the Magician and the Priestess, the Book of Changes and so on until one might fancy Traces of this Ancient magical Map of the Universe could be found in Atlantis, had we the formula to discover it, and there perhaps we should find it in its original simplicity as the Folk song of the Planets.
Each of the ideas embodied in these pictures seems in space, so that you can approach them from many different aspects such as Alchemy, Symbolism, Science, Geometry, whatever your favourite kick-off is, and you will probably find out that the conclusions would bring you out in the words of Omar Kyam at the same door wherein you went, but you will also have sensed the feeling of movement and rhythm proper to elemental forces which is implicit in the Tarot.
This tidal movement adds to the difficulty of defining the cards, but as I painted them I did get some idea of forces beyond the control of human intellect, the relentless procedure of a cosmic plan, the inevitability of the solution of every problem, and the necessity of finding this solution, not in personal emotion but in controlling law—which I believe is the right use of the Tarot.
In despair of arriving at any lucidity I will tell you how it happened that I painted this pack.
I was interested in the Tarot after reading Ouspensky's book The Model of the Universe.
I could find very little information or research about it until I met Aleister Crowley. He had studied the cards seriously for 40 years. This sounds like a retreat in the wilderness but it can scarcely be described as that.
I asked him to help me and with great patience and courtesy he did so and we tottered along for 5 years wrestling with the accumulated mass of tradition emanating from sources such as Freemasons, the Geometricians, the Gematricians, the mathematicians, the Symbolists, the Diviners, the Numerologists, the Druids, the Spiritualists, the Psychologists, the Philologists, the Buddhists, the Yogas, the Psycho-analysists, the Astrologers, even Heraldry, all of whom have left traces on the symbols employed, and from these multitudes, we endeavoured to reinstate the cards in their original sacred simple forms and, in addition, indicates the New Aeon of Horus a terrifying apparition.
I have gone a long way and some of the stuff I have been talking smacks of transcendentalism and woolley sentiment. I can't help it, the cards push me off my feet and I get into a train of thought that can only be expressed in gasps and hiccups.
In spite of which I must say, very definitely, although these symbols with their profound meanings excite my imagination, I have never tried to paint them with the help of automatic writing, trances, seances, mediums, auto-suggestions, drugs, absent treatment, Yoga meditations, mysterious masters, or any other emotional approach to inspiration.
They are the result of hard work, honest investigation and common sense which I believe are the true magics and were done in the open air and sunshine of the country.
I will take one Card only. The Fool, No. 0, and try to define it. It is my favourite card and though, as you see from the picture the posture is strange and not at all like the numerous traditional designs one sees of this card, which shows a gay careless fellow with a sack on his back, a dog or tiger, and perhaps children and is seen in profile, this drawing is really all I found out and felt about this strange figure and the posture vaguely suggests the Crucification by the descent of Spirit into Matter.
This is the figure who has passed through all literature and all religions.
1. He typifies Air. 2. He is Potent Innocence. 3. He is a Vacuum. 4. He is a bi-sexual being, stationed above the Abyss, where the sexes are still undivided. 5. He becomes the Green Man of the Spring in Fraser's Golden Bough. 6. He is Daluah of the Celts. 7. He is Parsifal, innocently untouched in the garden of Kundry, but when armed with the lance, he becomes a holy Creator. 8. He is Bacchus inspired with ecstatic wildness to the Greeks. 9. He was Baphomet to the Gnostics. 10. He reaches out to us in Russian literature as the Idiot of Dostievsky. 11. He is the silent bagman in the Jewish Dybbuk. Now I see him as Watteau's lovely white Pierot, a denizen of a different plane to the other characters in the masque. 12. Then he is Eulenspeilen. 13. Again is both Harlequin and Clown in the Comeia de l'Arts, hence their rainbow coloured costumes. 14. He is the insane Punch in Punch and Judy. 15. Perhaps we find him today reincarnated in the movies in the motley dress and idiotic laughter of Harpo or shall I call him Harpocrate Marx.
All these figures are one, the Fool, the creature, who by dint of his foolishness is not caught by the sophistry of matter, and his trick of magic is what we may have experienced in a Divine moment when by the annihilation of our reason everything becomes magically happy and simple.
This is God in Man and Man in God.
For a description of this actual card that I am showing you, I will read you a short paragraph from Aleister Crowley's new book of the Tarot, as he describes its details so clearly.
The Fool is the Gold of the Air, He has the horns of DIONYSUS ZAGREUS and between them is the phallic cone of white light representing the influence from the Crown upon him. (Kether in the Tree of Life)
He is shown against a background of air, dawning from space; and his attitude is of one bursting unexpectedly upon the world. He is clad in green, according to the tradition of the Spring, but his shoes are of the phallic gold of the Sun. In his right hand he bears the wand tipped with a pyramid of white of the all Father. In his left he bears the flaming pinecone of similar significance but more definitely indicating vegetable growth, and from his shoulder hangs a bunch of purple grapes. Grapes represent fertility, sweetness and the basis of ecstasy. This ecstasy is shown by the stem of grapes developing into rainbow hued spirals—the Form of the Universe. This suggests the Threefold veil of the Negative manifesting by his intervention in divided light. Upon this spiral whorl are other attributions of the Godhead, the vulture of Maut, the Dove of Venus (Isis or Mary) and the Ivy sacred to his devotees. This is also the butterfly of many coloured Air and the Winged Globe with its twin serpents, a Symbol which is echoed and fortified by the twin children, embracing in the middle spiral. Above them hangs the benediction of three flowers in one. Fawning on him is the tiger and beneath his feet in the Nile with its Lotus stems, crouches the crocodile. Resuming all his many forms and many coloured images is the centre of the figure, the focus of the microcosm, the Radiant Sun.
Sometimes, when I am sufficiently crushed by all these meanings I say in the words of "Alice in Wonderland," "Who cares for you" "You are nothing but a pack of cards."
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