Data And Magick

Karen Gregory

@claudiakincaid

The oldest known surviving deck was created for Francesco Sforza and his wife Bianca Visconti, who ruled Milan from 1440 to 1465.

By the beginning of the eighteenth century, a standardized pack of Tarot cards and images had been established.

These types of cards are known as the Tarot of Marseille.

1775

Antoine Court de Gébelin, a French Freeman and student of mythology, archeology, and linguistics, encountered the cards (while visiting a Swiss or German friend), the history of the cards had been all but forgotten.

Gébelin, in a fateful mistake, mistook the cards to be an “allegory” representing ancient wisdom forming the lost Book of Thoth.

Gébelin suggested that this book had been brought to Europe from “the gypsies” of Egypt and that it had been translated into a card game to protect its secrets.

Gébelin will remove the Christian symbolism.

Éliphas Lévi Zahed1850s France

Coins the term “occultism,” oroccultisme, in French.

Makes the connection between the Tarot cards and Hebrew mysticism, or Kabbalah.

Draws linkages between the twenty-two Major Arcana trumps and the Hebrew alphabet.

Lévi transformed a divinatory tool into what he called a “philosophical machine” that is “mathematics applied to the Absolute, the alliance of the positive and the ideal, a lottery of thoughts as exact numbers, perhaps the simplest and grandest of conception of human genius” (Giles 1992, 30).

Lévi seems to have meant the notion of machine in a somewhat literal sense because the Hebrew alphabet is, as Giles writes, “not just a system of writing, but an expression of all the fundamental facts and forces of creation—which are in turn organized in a complex image called the ‘Tree of Life.’”

1888: Golden Dawn

• As Drury writes, “for the Golden Dawn magician the ultimate mythic attainment was to come forth ritually into the Light, for this was the essence of spiritual rebirth” (2011, 58). Here, creative visualization was the essential vehicle by which one attained such rebirth.

Arthur Edward Waite & Pamela Coleman Smith

Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris 1938-1943