Two writers have adopted the first view without prejudice to the second, and I shall do well, perhaps, to dispose at once of what they have said. That combination may, ex hypothesi, reside in the numbered sequence of its series or in their fortuitous assemblage by shuffling, cutting and dealing, as in ordinary games of chance played with cards. It is also the most catholic, because it is not, by attribution or otherwise, a derivative of any one school or literature of occultism it is not of Alchemy or Kabalism or Astrology or Ceremonial Magic but, as I have said, it is the presentation of universal ideas by means of universal types, and it is in the combination of these types-if anywhere-that it presents Secret Doctrine. As I am not drawing here on the font of imagination to refresh that of fact and experience, I do not suggest that the Tarot set the example of expressing Secret Doctrine in pictures and that it was followed by Hermetic writers but it is noticeable that it is perhaps the earliest example of this art. They belong respectively to the end of the seventeenth and sixteenth centuries. It may be mentioned as a point of fact that both tracts are very much later in time than the latest date that could be assigned to the general distribution of Tarot cards in Europe by the most drastic form of criticism. I have never met with more curious intimations than in this one little work. The tract contains the mystery of what is called the mystical or arch-natural elixir, being the marriage of the soul and the spirit in the body of the adept philosopher and the transmutation of the body as the physical result of this marriage. The spiritual side of Alchemy is set forth in the much stranger emblems of the Book of Lambspring, and of this I have already given a preliminary interpretation, to which the reader may be referred. The operators-curiously enough-are male and female. Above these vessels there are mythological, planetary, solar and lunar symbols, as if the powers and virtues which -according to Hermetic teaching-preside over the development and perfection of the metallic kingdom were intervening actively to assist the two operators who are toiling below. There the process for the performance of the great work of transmutation is depicted in fourteen copper-plate engravings, which exhibit the different stages of the matter in the various chemical vessels. Its material side is represented in the strange symbolism of the Mutus Liber, printed in the great folios of Mangetus. Now, Alchemy had two branches, as I have explained fully elsewhere, and the pictorial emblems which I have mentioned are common to both divisions. As regards Tarot claims, it should be remembered that some considerable part of the imputed Secret Doctrine has been presented in the pictorial emblems of Alchemy, so that the imputed Book of Thoth is in no sense a solitary device of this emblematic kind. It is obvious that in a handbook like the present I can do little more than state the claims, which, however, have been discussed at length in several of my other writings, while it is designed to treat two of its more important phases in books devoted to the Secret Tradition in Freemasonry and in Hermetic literature. Behind the Secret Doctrine it is held that there is an experience or practice by which the Doctrine is justified. The theory is that this doctrine has always existed-that is to say, has been excogitated in the consciousness of an elect minority that it has been perpetuated in secrecy from one to another and has been recorded in secret literatures, like those of Alchemy and Kabalism that it is contained also in those Instituted Mysteries of which Rosicrucianism offers an example near to our hand in the past, and Craft Masonry a living summary, or general memorial, for those who can interpret its real meaning. THE Tarot embodies symbolical presentations of universal ideas, behind which lie all the implicits of the human mind, and it is in this sense that they contain secret doctrine, which is the realization by the few of truths imbedded in the consciousness of all, though they have not passed into express recognition by ordinary men. PART II The Doctrine Behind the Veil ยง 1 THE TAROT AND SECRET TRADITION Sacred Texts Tarot Tarot Reading Index Previous Next The Pictorial Key to the Tarot: Part II: The Doctrine Behind the Veil: Section 1: The Tarot and Secret Tradition
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