with ten numbers and twenty-two letters. Since the Tarot’s Major Arcana contains twentytwo cards, and each suit has ten numbered cards (ace–ten), the comparison is striking. In the mid-nineteenth century, a French occultist named Éliphas Lévi (his loyalty to Kabbalah led him to take a Hebrew name) developed a more complete system of correspondences between Tarot and Kabbalah. Following Lévi, a man named Paul Christian (originally Jean-Baptiste Pitois) developed Egyptian imagery for the Tarot, along with ideas for what the cards mean that have influenced readers ever since. An artist named Maurice Otto Wegener created a set of Tarot trump images based on Christian’s work, and this too influenced later Tarot art. A modern version of Wegener’s pictures has recently been published as the Egyptian Tarot, and we will see this deck with the Major Arcana here. Then, in 1888, a small group of esotericists led by Samuel L. MacGregor Mathers, Wynn Westcott, and William K. Woodman started a remarkable organization known as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Using Tarot and a Kabbalistic symbol called the Tree of Life, the Golden Dawn synthesized a vast amount of information from many sources—Kabbalah, astrology, Neo-Platonism, esoteric Christianity, Freemasonry, medieval magic, Pagan gods, and much more. All of this served a great cause: to raise a person’s level of being so that he or she could become a true magician. This was Paul Christian’s idea of the Major Arcana, that it outlined the development of the “magus,” but the Golden Dawn carried this project much further, creating powerful, complicated rituals along with their complex structure for Tarot. As we go through the cards and how to interpret them, we will encounter the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn again and again. Ultimately, the greatest influence on modern Tarot comes from a single deck produced by two former members of the organization, the scholar and magician Arthur Edward Waite (who actually headed the Order for a time) and the artist Pamela “Pixie” Colman Smith. In 1909, the Rider company of London published their deck, which Waite called “true and rectified.” The Rider deck, as most call it (its American publisher has titled it “Rider-Waite” which many of its fans have extended to Rider-Waite-Smith, or simply RWS), revolutionized Tarot through a change in the Minor Arcana. Previously, almost all decks showed only arrangements of symbols for the suit cards. That is, the Eight of Cups would display an arrangement of eight cups. Smith, however, painted a scene on every card.
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