The Tarot Garden Library
About the Author
Ed Buryn is an author,
photographer, poet, editor and bookseller currently residing
in California. He has written several best-selling travel
books, but his most well-known contribution in the world of
tarot is his noteworthy and thought-provoking William
Blake Tarot of the Creative Imagination.
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The William Blake Tarot:
Old Symbols for a New Age
by
Ed Buryn
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[NOTE: This article is
transcribed from a paper presented at the First
International Tarot Conference in Melbourne
Australia, July 12, 1997. We are pleased to
present it here, in our online library of
articles, with Mr. Buryn's permission.]
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The idea of a New Age is, of course,
not new. Many periods long gone were
contemporaneously defined as such.
Today's oncoming New Age, however, is
more promising than most. It's not just
the onset of the millennium, for many
critical indicators signal that our New
Age is really unprecedented, warranted
by everything from the end of the Mayan
calendar and Harmonic Convergence to
the prediction of revolutionary
breakthroughs like nanotechnology,
biogenetic technology, hydrogen fuel
cells, quantum computing, and real-time
translators.
For a more mundane example, how
about just plain old data overload?
With the exponential growth of
information of every sort, as propelled
by business, government, media,
publishing, computers, and the
internet, for the first time we will
soon be deluged with more data than we
can possibly process. When we reach
this point, societally or personally,
with too much to think about, we face a
real danger of becoming anesthetized,
paralyzed, or psychotic - especially
because so much of the ever burgeoning
data is also wildly contradictory.
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However, as we near the limits
of our rational abilities this may well
stimulate a major awakening of our
inner or intuitive abilities. In both
the near and distant future we are
likely to explore and greatly expand
our imaginative minds and spiritual
perceptions, which have enormous
untapped power to reshape our personal
and global realities. Albert Einstein
said that "No problem can be solved
from the same consciousness that
created it." Obviously we need to
develop magical consciousness to deal
with the realization that scientific
progress and material prosperity by
themselves are not enough. We must
become aware of other dimensions of
life if we are to survive, let alone
prosper. Buckminster Fuller said that
"the more we master the physical
universe the more prepared we are to
transform to higher consciousness." Now
is apparently the time. Those of us
living in this amazing historical niche
at the end of the 20th century, in what
is being called a period of "extreme
novelty," are about to experience the
most profound New Age so far - the
third millennium, the third wave, the
third degree, the third rail, the Third
Man, the 3-ring circus, the 3-star
show, where we may well meet the three
Fates, the three Graces, and The
Trinity itself.
I agree with Terence McKenna who
said that "the future of communication
is the future of the evolution of the
human soul." In what promises to be a
new psychic frontier working more
intensively with symbols and dreams,
these explorations in communication are
unlikely to be mastered by teams of
scientists and engineers equipped with
colossal computers, or by corporations
and governments unleashing unlimited
funds. Many future breakthroughs will
be advanced and experienced by unique
independent persons possessing only an
open mind and the courage to evolve.
Individual consciousness will be the
key to making "an evolutionary
transition to a higher level of
culture," which I think will be about
the recovery of Soul. From this point
of view, it seems destined that Tarot,
a multifaceted metaphysical wisdom
system that develops both intuition and
imagination, will become ever more
prominent. Inevitably, the future will
emphasize the increased use and
understanding of its archetypal and
subliminal symbology as a powerful
adjunct to the old establishmentarian
approaches to reality-comprehension.
Already, the so-called "new physics"
suggests the possibility that such
things as psychic powers may have an
underlying physical basis, the
understanding of which may profoundly
change our view of the universe and
ourselves.
In turning to the symbols and
archetypes of the Tarot, we go back to
old symbols from the Medieval and
Renaissance periods onto which were
grafted Romantic and Victorian
interpretations. Many symbols have lost
their original meanings or are less
clear than they once were. For example,
we note that most decks today employ
symbols with outdated referents such as
the court-card figures (kings and
queens, et cetera), suit-glyphs such as
swords and pentacles, and points of
view based on ideas of secrecy and
occultist methodologies. Because the
new millennium will call everyone to
seek new levels of intuitive and
imaginative insight, it may well be
time to revise our Tarot symbology and
reconstruct some of our underlying
assumptions about the tools of Tarot
that will be used in our brave new
world.
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One of the reasons I designed the
William Blake Tarot of the Creative
Imagination was to introduce a new yet
classically proven symbology based on
universal truths that are eminently
suitable for psychological and
spiritual awareness. William Blake's
art and ideas represent a tested vision
of life That is eternal and yet fresh.
Especially today, with our neo-Romantic
renewal of interest in artistic,
emotional, visionary, and
transcendental views of reality,
Blake's works blaze forth with
extraordinary depth and ability to
inspire. After all, Tarot cards are
just colored pieces of paper; what
makes them "work" is what Blake called
"the Divine Arts of Imagination," which
he also called "the Eternal Body of
Man" that "manifests in his Works of
Art."
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The earliest Tarot cards, which date
from the mid-15th century, were
apparently used primarily for gaming.
It was not until 1781, when Blake was
24 years old, that the Frenchman
Antoine Court de Gebelin asserted that
the cards were receptacles of the
ancient Egyptian mysteries. This
started what is sometimes called the
1st Tarot Revolution, because it turned
Tarot from what had been a parlor game
towards becoming, first, a divination
fad, then a magical method, and finally
a metaphysical system. Blake was
apparently unaware of this occult
revolution, which took place at the
same time as the American Revolution,
the French Revolution, and the
Industrial Revolution). His
uninvolvement in Tarot can be deduced
from the fact that most of Blake's
influences are traceable in his works,
in references to books he was reading,
and people that he met.
His Tarot ignorance is hardly
surprising, for Tarot was unknown in
England at the time, and there was no
tradition, as in Italy, of the game of
Tarocchi being played. Moreover,
England and France were at war and
there was little exchange of ideas. For
another thing, the new magical view of
Tarot was in its infancy, with scarcely
any audience outside France. The few
books written about Tarot were
unavailable and untranslated until the
late 19th century. The prevailing
intellectual climate of the time
supported a belief in a rational god
and a clockwork universe, as propounded
by Newton, Bacon, Locke, and other
thinkers of the Age of Reason, and so
there was little interest or room for
the concepts of Tarot. Finally, England
had long forbidden the importation of
all foreign playing cards to protect
the home printing industry. There were
no Tarot decks produced in Great
Britain, nor could any be imported. In
fact, the Rider-Waite deck was the
first Tarot in English, and was not
published until our own century.
Nevertheless, Blake mystically
required a deep and comprehensive view
of life, and thus began to develop his
own spiritual system in accordance with
his famous dictum: "I must create a
system or be enslav'd by another
man's." In effect, Blake deliberately
set out to invent his own version of
Tarot, or rather, what Tarot was
eventually to become: a profound
metaphysical tool for personal and
spiritual development. In his many
works of poetry and painting, Blake
gradually defined a complex personal
mythology in which godlike characters
he called Zoas symbolize the divine
aspects of the human psyche or soul. In
the William Blake Tarot these
archetypal figures and their mythic
roles are depicted in what I call the
Tarot Triumphs, which exactly
correspond to the traditional Major
Arcana, although many are renamed to
reflect Blake's view of the Tarot
concepts. As far as the workings of the
psychical forces, especially in their
forms of art activity, Blake defined
these as being fourfold; and therefore
in the William Blake Tarot these
functions are represented in what I
call the four Creative Process Suits,
which exactly correspond to the
traditional Minor Arcana. By renaming
the so-called Tarot Major and Minor
Arcana as Triumphs and Creative
Processes, I have intentionally
discarded the idea of Tarot "secrets,"
for this is a reflection of a
century-old, Victorian mindset opposed
to the ideas of openness and spiritual
equality. In fact, the term "arcana"
(or secrets) was not applied to the
Tarot until the mid-19th century (by
the occultist author Paul Christian),
and as another example, the traditional
suit of Denier or Coins was not called
the suit of Pentacles (or "talismans")
until even later. Focusing on
nomenclature may seem trivial, but, in
fact, reflects a serious view that the
tools of soul transformation and the
deepest powers of mind should be
reserved to an elite group of magicians
for ritualistic purposes.
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Only an open, overt, accessible,
cooperative model of thinking and
acting can induce the mass of people to
strive to integrate themselves into an
expanded, millennial view of the world.
Openness to change and exposure to new
ideas and new kinds of functioning
leads to innovation and progress, to
growing tolerance and appreciation of
diversity and expansion of personal
power. The opposite view, with its
ideas of mystery and privilege, is
closed and more likely to inspire fear
and rigidity. The way we name and use
our symbols is of great importance.
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In the Blake Tarot, the four
Creative Process Suits are named after
Blake's four "arts in Eternity" -
Painting instead of Pentacles, Science
instead of Swords, Music instead of
Cups, and Poetry instead of Wands.
These evocative and action-oriented
suit-names stimulate awareness of our
godlike powers of creativity and
healing through art. The prevailing
suit names are less appropriate for
open-ended interpretation. Pentacles
represent talismans of protection
around material concerns, whereas
Painting focuses on the artistic
depiction of the world and its people;
Swords tend to suggest conflict and
pain whereas Science suggests mental
exploration and the search for
understanding; Cups are enclosures or
containers for our emotions whereas
Music suggests the open expression of
our passions; Wands are power objects
whereas Poetry expresses eternal
truths. In like manner, the Tarot
Triumphs, which have historic overtones
of the triumphal parades of the Italian
Renaissance, suggest the magnificent
stages of life through which our souls
must pass, and the ways we can
personally triumph in our lives.
Personally, I find this more appealing
and more pertinent than the clandestine
mumbo-jumbo suggested by names that
mean the Big and Little Secrets!
Another innovation unique to the
Blake Tarot is the inclusion of an
additional (or 79th) card with the dual
numeration of 00 (double-naught) and ƒ
(infinity-sign or lemniscate). Based on
Blake's central idea of Eternity as the
soul's true home, it represents a point
of departure and return, a goal and a
reminder of our spiritual reality and
destiny. In one sense, all the other
cards in the Tarot pack can be derived
from, and grounded in, this new card.
Next, and equally important, is
Blake's assignment of the elements to
the four arts, which became my four
suits. These are vital keys to
understanding Blake's spiritual view of
life, and for using Tarot as a
spiritual system. Blake's use of the
elemental correspondences is extremely
precise and intentional. Although
seemingly idiosyncratic, his use of the
elements is, in fact, based on a
definite spiritual understanding of how
the universe works.
• Elemental
Water is associated by Blake
with the world of Matter because
material things are mostly made of
water or depend on it; for example,
both the human body and planetary
body are approximate 71% water.
Water is also the first element
mentioned in the Bible. Blake
asserts that matter (and everyday
reality) is an illusion of the
senses; although seemingly solid and
permanent, our bodies and all
material things are as fluid and
protean in nature as water, when
viewed from an eternal perspective.
Painting is designated the art (and
suit) of depicting the ordinary and
practical matters of humanity. Blake
specifically symbolizes the human
body by clouds because although
seemingly of substance, it only too
soon evaporates and disappears when
viewed from Eternity. Clouds and
running water are used as symbols of
element Water in the borders of the
cards of the suit of Painting, which
correspond to Pentacles.
• Elemental Air is
associated with Mind, the intellect
that, although insubstantial, is yet
capable of roaming the entire
universe; therefore Science is
designated the art (and suit) for
understanding how reason and logic
seek to define and control our
reality. Stars are used as symbols
of universal Air in the borders of
the cards of the suit of Science,
which correspond to Swords.
• Elemental Fire is
associated with Emotion, which to
Blake is an overwhelming force
neither material nor mental but one
that sings to our souls; therefore
Music is designated the art (and
suit) for expressing how it feels to
be human in all its joy and terror.
In the Blake deck, emotion is
described more as fiery passion than
traditional watery sentiment. Flames
and smoke symbolize elemental Fire
in the borders of the cards of the
suit of Music, which corresponds to
Cups.
• Elemental Earth is
seen as eternally everlasting and
therefore associated with
Imagination or Spirit, the prophetic
voice of humanity that magically and
everlastingly renews itself;
therefore Poetry is designated the
art (and suit) for speaking the
beautiful and permanent truths that
Imagination creates. Poetry thus
represents the true ground of
reality, which is spiritual in
nature. The long lived,
ever-fruiting, and potentially
intoxicating grapevine is used to
symbolize magical Earth in the
borders of the cards of the suit of
Poetry, which corresponds to Wands.
The entire key to Blake's system,
and part of its revolutionary
appeal, is that elemental Earth
unequivocally represents Imagination
and Spirit, thus asserting the firm
and solid belief that these are the
only permanent forces in the
universe, literally the ground of
reality. The illusion of Matter
becomes symbolized by Water, as
mentioned before, and the emotions
or passions become Fire.
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One way of thinking about the
assignments of the elements is that the
Rider Waite-Smith pack describes our
everyday reality and its elements work
well at that level, while the Blake
deck looks beyond the physical plane to
higher reality of spiritual substance.
By the way, the Blake deck uses
equivalency glyphs so that the standard
elements can still be used as
appropriate. In this standard scheme,
as we know, Earth is associated with
Matter or Pentacles, Water with Cups,
and Fire with Wands. The association of
Fire with Wands, in particular, can be
thought of as representing our intense,
fiery expansiveness and yearning for
Spirit. When we shift our point of view
to Blake's mystical vision, the way we
see the elements is transformed by
deeper insight. In particular, our
yearning for Spirit, which was fiery,
now transforms mystically into Earth,
representing the fruition of our
yearning in the ground of reality,
where only Imagination rules eternally.
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There are many other new features
incorporated in the William Blake Tarot
of the Creative Imagination in the same
spirit of combining the old and new,
but I leave these to its users to
discover and employ for themselves. We
can now reasonably say that after two
centuries of intensive study and
development by many artists and
metaphysicians, Tarot is finally
beginning to be recognized as a Western
wisdom system comparable to those in
the Oriental and Eastern traditions.
Many of us here, for example, would
agree that Tarot, after an extremely
checkered and peripatetic history, has
finally reached a high degree of
practical perfection and clarity
through myriad versions and changes. In
fact, Tarot experienced periods of
charlatanism, fortune-telling, and
fakery; it has a long and associated
with Gypsies and the Devil. At the same
time it has also enjoyed consorting
with hippies, occultists, and
magicians. And now it is being
increasingly used as an intentional
tool of higher consciousness, used by
psychologists and analysts, by
spiritual counselors and
human-potential readers, and most
importantly, by large numbers of
ordinary people sincerely wanting to
deepen and improve their lives.
Interestingly, William Blake's works
were widely considered to be madness,
mysticism, mystery, and mediocrity, not
only in his own time but long
afterwards. It was not until the late
19th century that the poet William
Butler Yeats began the process of
deciphering Blake's texts and restoring
them to public view. Of course, this is
the same Yeats who was a member of the
Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, from
whence came the Rider-Waite-Smith deck
and hence modern Tarot. Now, in the
20th century, after being explored
intellectually by countless scholars
and mystically by many artists and
poets, Blake has exploded into our
modern consciousness as a master
spokesman of the soul's journey.
And so we see that Tarot and William
Blake have been on separate but
parallel paths since they both appeared
at the same time about 215 years ago.
Now, in the William Blake Tarot, for
the first time these two perfected
systems are joined and deepened by each
other's insights and formative
structures. I designed this deck as a
blessed marriage between two
compassionate and imaginative spiritual
entities, one being the genius of Tarot
and the other being the genius of
Blake.
What is especially pertinent about
Blake for Tarot is his stature as a
master symbolist. He created more than
2000 paintings and graphics, and wrote
more words than Shakespeare. Throughout
the 58 years his working life from the
age of 12 in 1769 to his death at the
age of 69 in 1827 he was consistently
focused on developing and refining his
own symbolic universe. As a result, his
symbols and words are never haphazardly
used nor isolated from an intentionally
meaningful context. Speaking of his own
paintings he said, "I entreat . . .
that the Spectator will attend to the
Hands & Feet, to the Lineaments of
the Countenances; they are all
descriptive of Character, & not a
line is drawn without intention, &
. . . not a grain of Sand or a Blade of
Grass insignificant."
It is this quality of deeply
meaningful and consistent use of
symbols that made me recognize Blake as
potentially the greatest Tarot artist
of all time. Although the Tarot through
the ages right up to the present day
has attracted the skills of countless
fine artists, and even some renowned
artists such as Salvador Dali, none
approach the stature of William Blake.
Even though I have adapted and collaged
Blake's designs to suit Tarot, they
form an uncanny and near perfect fit
because they are all from his own
parallel, harmonious, and
contemporaneous system of thought.
Blake was not just a great artist and
poet but also a profound spiritual
thinker and psychological mythologist.
What we therefore have in Blake is the
compleat painter, scientist, musician,
poet, philosopher, and mystic - he
represents the perfection of all the
Tarot suits combined. He not only gives
us mythic characters in a spiritual and
psychological context, he illustrates
them and makes them speak. The facial
expressions of his figures, the exact
placement of their hands and feet, for
example, whether the left foot is
forward or the right hand upraised,
together with every gesture and sign,
the clothing or lack of it, the
physical interactions with each other,
everything about the figures and their
surroundings is always symbolic and
charged with invisible yet highly
accessible meaning. Only Blake has this
supreme degree of intentionality that
invests and informs every aspect of his
images and his thought. And therefore I
have renewed the old symbols of William
Blake for our modern age, and I believe
that he may speak even more clearly to
the future in its great New Age.
"Children of the future Age, Reading
this indignant page; Know that in a
former time, Love! sweet Love! was
thought a crime."
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In our growing materialistic
quandary, Blake is a beacon of
imagination, showing us how to
transform our personal realities. Blake
was perhaps the first person to foresee
and warn us about the dilemmas that
would arise for a future world that
dedicated itself to technological and
political goals instead of pursuing
artistic and spiritual vision. He tried
to warn us that by embracing Industry
we would sacrifice Soul. Blake believed
that exercising the Imagination is the
invoking of God, and there is no other
god than the human Imagination. In this
sense, he was a pagan, and for him the
Ten Commandments symbolized spiritual
tyranny. (He said, "He has observ'd the
Golden Rule, Til he's become the Golden
Fool.") Yet Blake loved the Bible
because it was filled with Imagination,
and he made Jesus one of his symbols of
Imagination. Blake envisioned the human
body and psyche as a metaphor for the
universe, ruled by eternal powers he
called Zoas, who in humanity symbolize
the parts of the body and psyche. As
above, so below. Blake asserted the
values of mercy and forgiveness of sin,
against those of obedience, judgement,
and punishment. Blake believed that
Energy or life force is holy, and by
extension, that sex is sacred and
beautiful.
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Blake urged and pleaded with us to
discover and use our Divine
Imaginations, to awaken the latent
powers of god-like creativity within
ourselves, by throwing off our
"mind-forg'd manacles." He knew his
mission perfectly well: "I rest not
from my great task! To open the eternal
worlds, to open the immortal eyes Of
man inwards into the worlds of
thought." That is, to locate and expose
the visionary promise in others and in
himself. Blake teaches us to see the
world symbolically so that we can
discern the truth behind the seeming
reality, which is this: we can reclaim
our souls by recognizing that our
bodies and senses are only material
extensions of our vital spiritual
essence. He maintained that by
practicing the principles of the arts
in our daily lives, we can heal and
unite our divided psychological selves
and thus break through into a vision of
the exalted higher reality that he
called Eternity. By way of example,
despite his perennial poverty and lack
of recognition, Blake was cited by his
contemporaries as the happiest of men,
who on his deathbed worked on his
paintings, singing songs of praise and
gratitude.
Here is an example of how the Blake
Tarot works: I asked the cards what
this audience needed to know about
them, and randomly selected one card to
suggest an answer. The card I drew was
the Triumph Reason (which 'happens' to
be the theme card illustrated on the
cover of the book and the merchandising
box). Numbered IV , this card depicts
Urizen, Blake's mythic figure who
symbolizes the reasoning Mind and
corresponds to the Emperor in the
traditional Tarot. Urizen kneels in his
airy realm of sky, blocking the light
of the Imaginative sun behind him, and
reaches down out of dark clouds to
assert his worldly control by wielding
the calipers of his trademark compass.
What does this card mean? First of all,
its name literally pertains to giving
us the "reason" behind the deck, which
is to help us mentally understand
ourselves and our world. Secondly, the
card emphasizes one of Blake's primary
messages, warning us that Rationality
is the enemy of Imagination. Urizen's
technology (which symbolizes our own
fascination with technological
cleverness) is powerful but devoid of
spirit and heart. Blake asserted that
revealing Error was the first step in
casting it out; thus this card tells us
that the Blake Tarot (of which this
particular card is the lead or
trademark image) can be a means for
freeing our imaginations, in part by
identifying what inhibits and threatens
our imaginations: namely, the
calculating, logical, scientific lord
of the laboratory. Finally, I also
interpret this card to mean that for
Tarot to be accepted in the broader
context of everyday life by millions of
people, they will first need to
understand in a "reasonable" way what
Tarot really is, and why it works, and
what it can do for us. Because we have
been indoctrinated by rationality, we
require a rational reason to believe in
Tarot even as a counter-rational force.
Particularly in the last few
decades, Tarot has grown explosively
even in the face of skepticism and
widespread belief that it was only a
fad, or really a fraud, or actually an
outright fiend. But more and more new
decks keep appearing every year, and
sales keep going up despite its own
publishers' disbelief. Year after year,
people keep saying that the Tarot boom
is about to bust, that the market is
oversaturated, and yet Tarot keeps
expanding in delightfully unpredictable
and outrageous fashion. As a result,
many of us believe that Tarot has at
long last arrived. However, I don't
agree. What I believe is that Tarot is
only now about to arrive; that what has
happened so far, amazing as it is, is
just the beginning. Tarot for the 21st
Century will be a mass phenomenon and a
household word as a new age embraces
its old symbols.
As for William Blake, the acclaimed
but shadowy genius who "discover'd the
infinite in every thing," a new dawning
continues. His 200-year-old wisdom has
been retooled for the 21st Century, and
I'm letting him have the last word:
Re-engrav'd Time after Time
Ever in their youthful prime,
My design unchang'd remains.
-- William Blake (1757 - 1827)
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© Ed Buryn August 1997
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