A Taste of Bacon Sir? - The Secret of Shakespeare

[Steve Franklin]

Steve, I found it genuinely heart-warming that you have made your Origins of the Tarot Deck freely available on your website HERE.

I, obviously haven't read the entire thing, just speed read parts of it. I noted what you said about there being two main branches of tarot research, namely the fortune telling branch that has focused on the images themselves, and the "world gaming" branch that has sought the origins of there cards themselves (I think I have this broadly right?).

I think that occultists work on the basis that there is a correspondence between the 22 letters of the Hewbrew alphabet and the 22 major trumps - as you have pointed out, and adding that this link is untenable. But it is my understanding that the "fit" derives not so much from a contrived alignment but because both correspond to the 22 paths of the Tree of Life.

And herein lay one of the best kept secrets of the occult Qabalah that was not made public until 1983 (according to what I was told), when it was revealed that the great significance of the pathways of the Tree of Life, and the 10 - now 11 - Sephiroth themselves, were that they were used as imaginative doorways and a roadmap of the soul and the Collective Unconscious [microcosm/macrocosm] via the technique of meditational Pathworking. The purpose of this Great Work was, clearly, aimed at Consciousness.

This has powerful correspondences to Jung's Analytical Psychology, as Jung practised his own form of this that he called Active Imagination. It is my understanding that these techniques amount to the real inner workings of the Qabalah, Tarot, Alchemy etc.

Of course, the images of the Tarot change somewhat with the deck used. And, so far as I know, different decks are often peculiar to different occult schools, each of which have slightly (sometimes largely, I suspect) differing means of achieving their objectives. My father, who studied these things, concentrated on the Paul Foster Case tarot (though I can't now remember if he used Case's deck or not - he had a few, which I now have along with all his papers) because that was the one his school had adopted for use, although they had nothing directly to do with B.O.T.A.

Anyway, I wondered if you had done any study of Pathworking/Active Imagination on these subjects?

My approach is, and has been, purely historical, though I find it quite hilarious that I have been "accused" of being an occultist in print:

"In Tarot history, any connection is fair game. For instance, because there are fifty-six filled in holes at Stonehenge and fifty-six cards in the Minor Arcana, to an occult commentator such as Stephen Franklin the two not only might be but must be connected. (Franklin, who connects the cards with astrological figures in a far-reaching argument based on Pythagorean, Hindu, and Chinese sources, would recoil at being called an occultist, but in the strict sense of the word he is one.)"
--Jay Kinney in The Inner West

This from a cartonist and associate of R. Crumb. Well, I guess then I must be an occultist. ;-)

There is definitely a connection between the tarot and the alphabet, but it's another step removed, in that the 28 signs of the lunar zodiac are closely related to the 56 minor cards of the tarot; and the Phoenician alphabet, as well as the syllabic system used on the Phaistos disc, derives from the same lunar zodiac. I delve into this in the appendix to Origins and also in Chapter 9 of my current chronological reconstruction, Typhon: A History of the Holocene Period.

No, I have not done much with the kabbala or with the tarot as an occult device. I have done some work with the I Ching, which is distantly related to the tarot and more closely to 4 Kings or Chaturanga, the Indian 4-handed chess. I suspect that any complex graphical symbol system can be used for psychological/divinitory/occult purposes without regard to the original purpose of the device. Why this is true is beyond me at present. I do find that the calendrical aspects of the tarot are most obvious in the Rider-Waite deck, more obvious than the earliest surviving Italian decks, suggesting that A. E. Waite had either decoded it himself or received an explanation from someone on the inside. Any suggestions on who may have informed Waite on the matter? Associates, secret societies, etc.?

I find the suggestion that the Rosicrucians [substitute other secret societies here] existed before the time of Pythagoras quite interesting in that Pythagoras shows up in Southern Italy in the late 6th century BC, presumably already in possession of the tarot board, and it remains there unremarked upon for almost 2 millennia until it finally shows up in Milan in the 15th century in the form of a deck of cards. There almost certainly must have been some secret organization involved in maintaining it. Did this include da Vinci? Unknown at present.

My publisher wanted to republish Origins as a digital book, thus keeping it bottled up for another hundred years or so. I decided it was time to release it to the wider world for better or worse.

SF