Fool's Tarot

The Fools' Tarot, also known as the Masonic Tarot is the common Rider-Waite Tarot created by Freemasons during the industrial revolution as an ideological tool to help them spread Capitalism. The Masonic Tarot contains Old Energy Archetypes designed to create compliant individuals subservient to The System.

List of Old Energy Masonic Archetypes as implemented in the Masonic Tarot

Masonic Tarot archetypes> Chariot, Death (archetype), Duality, Hermit, Hierophant, High Priestess, Judgement, Justice, Star, Strength, Sun (archetype), Temperance, The Devil, The Emperor, The Empress, The Fool, The Hanged Man, The Lovers, The Magician, The Moon, The Tower, The Wheel of Fortune, The World (old energy)

List of Old Energy Archetypal Constellations

The Masonic Tarot helps inscribe into Collective Consciousness the following Old Energy Archetype Constellations

Old Energy Archetype Constellations > Binary Gender, Chosen One, Compliance and Submission, Excuse and Justification, Fool in School, Good versus Evil, Isolated Individuality, Judge and Punish/Reward, Only the Chosen, Secrets

Related LP Terms

Masonic Tarot > Archetype Deck, Old Energy Archetype, Triumph of Spirit Archetype System, Zoroastrian Narrative

Non-LP Related Terms

Masonic Tarot > Archetype Deck, Old Energy Archetype, Triumph of Spirit Archetype System, Zoroastrian Narrative

Notes

The Masonic Tarot is not a spiritual tool. It is a propaganda tool. It was created by Freemasons during the French and Industrial Revolutions to help lubricate the transfer of power from Feudal elites to Capitalist elites.

Elisabeth Haich makes outlandish, undocumented, and now thoroughly debunked claims about the ancient nature of the Tarot. "The initiates of prehistoric times who created the tarot cards were familiar with all these different levels and states of development of the human consciousness. They depicted these levels of consciousness from the first awakening to divine all-consciousness in twenty-two pictures. These are the 'Greater Arcana' of tl1e tarot pack."

Haich proselatizes the deck and suggests psychologists should avail themselves of its ancient wisdom. "Moses, one of the greatest prophets of all time, received the pictures from the great Egyptian initiates and handed them on as religious treasure to his people, the Jews. If Moses esteemed these cards so highly as to regard them as religious treasure, then the serious psychologist should certainly also be able to discover their profound inner value."

Haich says "Yet for the person who understands them, these cards are a wonderful means of acquiring self-knowledge....The nature of these cards is such that they can produce a strong awakening effect on man's unconscious....They are like a spiritual mirror in which we can not only recognise but also thoroughly examine and study ourselves. "

The world’s foremost tarot scholars suggest that the Tarot has been the "...most successful propaganda campaign ever launched; not by a very long way the most important, but the most completely successful. An entire false history, and false interpretation, of the Tarot pack was concocted by occultist; and it is all but universally believed. "

The tarot is designed to be constitutive of personal identity suitable to the Capitalist Mode of Production. It purports to locate the individual in relation to the System and the "Cosmos." "The Tarot is a system of enlightenment, a system whose ultimate aim is "assisting the individual in understanding his relationship to the Cosmos." It provides "seed ideas" intended to lead to a certain understanding of the human condition.

The Masonic Tarot, in its esoteric form, is elitist. It is a "secret oral tradition." Knowledge and power given only to the worthy. "It has revealed Itself, in a measure, to the wise."

The Masonic tarot has two "streams," an elite esoteric stream aimed at elite members of exclusive fraternities (Freemasonry, Rosicrucians, Golden Dawn, etc.) and an exoteric stream aimed at the masses. This dual-stream is an explicit and openly admitted feature of Western esotericism. For example,

"The religion of the masses differed very much from that of the Initiates. They did not share in the Mysteries, nor in the advantages of the Initiates, in the same way as they were never in danger of the penalties to which the trespasser of the Mysteries was exposed. The greatest of the Mysteries was that they should eternally remain mysteries to the masses. he initiated worshipped the one true God under the name of Demiurgos. The masses, on the other hand, worshipped without let or hindrance the secondary kind of gods, whose worship, when amongst themselves, was forbidden to the Initiates. In public even the Initiates adhered to them, in order to deceive the masses, and the better to preserve their secrets amongst themselves."

Pianco calls this the Secret Philosophy.

The difference between the two streams is one of intent. The esoteric stream is aimed at socializing elites into mechanisms of power and control, while the exoteric stream is aimed at creating compliant bodies. In this regard, the TOSAS distinguished between the Book of Slavery (the exoteric version intended to create compliant bodies) and the Book of Power.

The threat of violence is used to prevent initiates from revealing "the secrets."

The Masonic Tarot, in its exoteric form, exerts control over individual consciousness and inscribes a Fool in School ethic on the individual. Life is all about karma and lessons and so don't struggle or fight back, passively accept and learn your lessons. If things don't go your way, it is your fault, your karma, your lack of sensitivity, talent, receptiveness, etc. For example, Metzner notes that "If we are receptive with innocent purity, the blessings of the light of the stars pour abundantly into earth-body and emotional waters."

A classic statement of this perspective is "The Tarot is a deck of 78 cards, each with its own imagery, symbolism and story. The 22 Major Arcana cards represent life's karmic and spiritual lessons, and the 56 Minor Arcana cards reflect the trials and tribulations that we experience on a daily basis."

Many respectable scholars and well-educated folk, take tarot to be a tool of deep spiritual, archetypal, or psychological wisdom. A "holistic tool that can help us mine our own unconscious..."

Psychologist Ralph Metzner discusses the "Hero's Journey" and suggests that tarot is a reflection of that journey, a reflection of "archetypes of psychic transformation." As he says, "In these myths the inner journey to the discovery and realization of the Higher Self—the trials and obstacles to be overcome as well as the sudden breakthroughs and steps of initiation are disguised as an outer journey, a hero’s quest. And we find that there is always a common pattern to this myth of the hero “with a thousand faces”:2 whether his name is Gilgamesh, Rama, Orpheus, or Siegfried, there exists a communality which stems from the fact that all these heros are en­gaged in the same eternal quest."

The Masonic Tarot is sexist. All authors who comment upon the archetypes reproduce binary and stereotypical notions of gender. "He is the objective aspect of consciousness....she is the subjective aspect..."

Writers, like Paul Foster Case and Aleister Crowley, etc. use EPMO to obscure the basic ideology. Long paragraphs of tortuous prose with complicated and largely meaningless associations obscure the basic ideological statements. See for example Case

The Masonic Tarot is based on an ancient Old Energy Creation Template, a Zoroastrian Creation Template.

This analysis focuses primarily on the major arcana. The minor arcana are considered less important, even (in personified form) a perversion of occult principle."

Patriarchal, Judeo Christian roots. "It is forbidden to blaspheme against his creation."

Although the tarot deck itself was originally merely a pack of playing cards, it was particularly suited to the creation of an archetypal system because, as can be clearly seen in the symbolic pastiche on the Wheel of Fortune card, the Tarot cards are rich with symbolism. The rich symbolic content makes it easy to project any content one would wish to project onto the cards (Decker et al., 1996, p. 171), a particular useful function for elites attempting to create a new discourse.

Recovery

Many tarot aficionados and writers attempt to re-write the esoteric and exoteric tarot, trying to find alternative, sometimes more progressive, "less disturbing" more "life-affirming" messaging.

Doreen Virtue exposed her process: For example, "...symbolism was very carefully reviewed. When something distressing was removed from an image, we were diligent about replacing it with something peaceful that signified the same thing. Card names were changed when necessary to more accurately convey the loving message embedded in even the most challenging cards."

Virtue also makes effort to remove "mystery" and "secrets." However, she still duplicates the a-political, blame-the-individual tropes of the masonic tarot. We are still here to learn our lessons, and we should "give thanks" for that. She just presents the tropes and the masonic perspectives in a more "loving" and inviting manner.

Metzner also discusses the "Tarot for the Aquarian Age" from 1962 was as one such attempt. "This Tarot was obtained, according to the authors, from an unnamed source referred to only as “One,” through the Ouija board, in a series of sessions involving a group of four persons and lasting several months in 1962.... In the Aquarian Tarot each of the twenty-two cards, with a new image and new name, is regarded as a progression from a corresponding card of the old deck. The reason for the progression is said to be first, to rescue the Tarot sym­bols from their degenerate use as fortune-telling cards, and secondly, because we are entering a new phase, the Aquarian phase, of the cycle of human evolution-in-consciousness and new sym­bols are called for." " His discussion, like Virtue's, contains no awareness of the political and ideological nature of the original tarot, though both are noteworthy as attempts to recover/imprint authenticity.

Various attempts to recover or insert authenticity are documented in the Recovery section of the individual tarot entries.

Citation and Legal

Treat the SpiritWiki as an open-access online monograph or structured textbook. You may freely use information in the SpiritWiki; however, attribution, citation, and/or direct linking are ethically required.

Footnotes

References