Digitized by the Internet Archive 2012 in http://archive.org/details/introductiontogoOOwang 3- An Introduction to DAWN THE GOLDEN TAROT An Introduction to DAWN THE GOLDEN TAROT Including the Original Documents on Tarotfrom the Order ofthe Golden Dawn with Explanatory Notes WANG ROBERT SAMUEL WEISER, INC. York Beach, Maine FirstAmericaneditionpublished in 1978by SamuelWeiser, Inc. Box 612 ME YorkBeach, 03910 01 00 99 98 97 96 95 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 Copyright © 1978 RobertWang All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted inanyformorbyanymeans, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, without permissioninwritingfromSamuelWeiser,Inc Reviewers . may quotebriefpassages. LibraryofCongress Catalog CardNumber: 87-107165 ISBN 0-87728-370-2 OurthankstoDr.IsraelRegardieforpermissiontoreprint Book Tfrom The Golden Dawn. Printed in the United States ofAmerica The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirementsoftheAmericanNationalStandardforPer- manence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48- 1984. TAROT Throughout history some of our greatest philos- ophers, artists, scientists and even politicians have hinted at a knowledge which, possessed by them, was generally inexplicable in other than symbolic terms. Those who may easily dismiss materials called "esoteric" or "occult" may experience greater diffi- culty in dismissing the same ideas when expressed in the works of Aristotle, Plato, the Fathers of the Church, Thomas Aquinas, Emmanuel Kant or Carl Jung. These and hundreds of other learned men and women have concluded that the individual has the capacity to know more than he has been led to expect about the reasons for his own existence and his rela- tionship to that Cosmos of which he is an integral part. The key is the means of exploration of die Self. While such keys have long been passed down secredy, and were guarded for posterity by the Roman Catholic clerics of the Middle Ages, the modern church has al- ways suppressed these ideas as heretical. The tradi- tional theological explanation of supernatural know- ledge is that while the individual may gain such know- ledge, it is purely a "gift." It is not in the west, as it is in the east, considered a natural heritage of the human condition. Science, on the other hand (perhaps wisely) An Introduction to neither rejects nor accepts the possibility that individual consciousness can be expanded. It merely states that its current tools for study are limited in these areas. Ex- pansion of consciousness, and exploration of the Inner Worlds cryptically described (though with such similar- ity that these descriptions cannot be ignored) by liteiatii through the centuries, does not lend itself to classical experimentation. There each aspect of a process must be repeatable and productive of essentially the same results every time. The intention of this work is not to persuade those committed to either empirical science or pure faith that there may be value in other approaches to com- prehending the mysteries of the Self (such arguments have been skillfully developed by Alice Bailey in From Intellect to Intuition and by others as well). What we in- tend here is merely to define our terms as precisely as possible. One basic premise can be stated: The Tarot is a system ofenlightenment, a system whose ultimate aim is assisting the individual in understanding his relationship to the Cosmos. It is not a game; it is not primarily for fortune-telling. Those who fashioned this system promulgated it with the assurance that thev had, in fact discovered, and were therein symbolizing, some very basic truths about the Microcosm and its relationship to the Macrocosm. Support for this idea is beginning to come from some increasingly respectable sources, not the least of which is the school ofCarlJung, which views the Tarot images as agreeing perfectly with the archetypes of the collec- tive unconscious. More and more writers today are be- ginning to translate die language of medieval symbol into the language of psychology, with the result that systems such as the Tarot are being regarded as having more to offer than had been previously thought. Until recently, the serious study of Tarot was in the hands of secret occult groups, who communicated the "true" meanings ofthe Tarot only to their initiates. One