A History of the Occult Tarot by Ronald Decker

Author:Ronald Decker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gerald Duckworth & Co
Published: 2016-10-13T04:00:00+00:00

Glahn mentions the pack in his text, assigning the designs for it to Schubert and making the same claim for it as Kurtzahn had made for his, that it was the very first German Tarot pack. Glahn mentions both Lévi (whose name he spells Lévy) and Papus, and refers to Kurtzahn as reproducing their views. As for himself, he says that he does not agree with them altogether. All the trump cards of Schubert's pack bear Hebrew letters, and one point on which Glahn disagreed with Lévi and Papus was evidently how to attribute the one to the other: Glahn followed Uxkull in assigning Aleph to trump I and so on down to XX, just as Lévi and Papus had done, but continuing by assigning Shin to trump XXI and Tau to 0 (the Fool). In one section of his book, however, concerning the major Arcana and the Book of Job, Glahn reverts to Lévi's attribution, assigning Shin to the Fool and Tau to the XXI. Elsewhere in the book Glahn again borrows from Uxkull in discerning three sequences or paths among the major Arcana, the first beginning with trump I, the second with trump II and the third with trump III; in each sequence, each trump is followed by the one with a number higher by 3 (trump I followed by trump IV and so on). Despite his use of Hebrew letters, Uxkull had said nothing about the Cabala, evidently declining rightly to associate it with ancient Egypt. Glahn says much about the Cabala, and associates the numbers from 1 to 22, and thus implicitly the major Arcana, with the paths on the Tree of Life;13 he also says a very great deal about astrology, with which much of his book is taken up. He wishes to replace the zodiac with what he claims to be an older system of 22 ‘Moon-stations’, each associated with one of the major Arcana; but it remains unclear just what these Moon-stations are. The book contains also a brief section about runes, and a longer exposition of a numerological method of predicting someone's future from the date and place of his birth.

In Schubert's German Tarot pack, the main design of each card is enclosed in a rectangle. For the major Arcana, the name of each card in German is printed immediately below the rectangle. A Hebrew letter, followed by its equivalent in Roman letters (e.g. TS for Tsaddi), stands above the rectangle at the left, and a rune at the right. The number of each trump is given by a Roman numeral, with an astrological symbol below it, standing outside and at the top of the left-hand edge of the rectangle, and also, reversed, at the bottom of the right-hand edge; on Arcana I, XIII and 0, the symbols for fire, water and air respectively, are added to the astrological symbol. Except on trump I, divinatory meanings are given in the centre at the top, alongside the left-hand edge and, reversed, at the very bottom of the card, to give the meaning of the card when reversed.

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