I would like to become better versed in the Waite Tarot deck but find Arthur Edward Waite's book The Pictorial Key to the Tarot obtuse and difficult to read. The descriptions of the individual cards are coherent but his preface and introduction is unreadable. Its possible the introductory texts are slights and criticisms to other scholars/participants of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn that I am missing. I suppose like most scholarly texts Waite is addressing a very specific audience who would recognize the references he is making to various occult groups of the time and their various beliefs and digressions from each other.

In the introduction on page one, he speaks about the inconsistencies in the texts written about the cards, "I do not think that there is a pathology of the occult dedications, but about their extravagances no one can question..."

He describes the cards as "the true Tarot is symbolism; its speaks no other language and offers no other signs. Given the inward meaning of its emblems, they do become a kind of alphabet which is capable of indefinite combinations and make true sense in all."

Its the connection of the cards to each other I find difficult to decipher. The relationship of the cards to each other is what confuses me.

Here is a very early Tarot card of The Fool. This card might have been intended for playing games rather then telling a person's fortune. Wikipedia says it is from Yale University. Comfortably out of copyright. Oddly enough, the Waite cards are still under copyright through U.S. Games Systems.

Class, beauty, sexy

All intertwined. Today we see so many images depicting the dynamics between social class and beauty, social class and sexuality.

henry taylor author of philip van artevelde

henry taylor author of philip van artevelde

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Wrong Man

In my last post, I accidentally mixed social documentarians. I was speaking of Milton Rigovin, the social documentary photography who documented the effects of the declining steel industry in Buffalo. But my mind thought and then typed Lionel Rogosin. My mind frequently mixes and matches names and places, people and purposes as it sees fit.

One Christmas, I gave my father a copy of Rigovin's The Forgotten Ones. At the time, my father's explanation to me regarding the declining steel industry and its consequential effect on the African American community in Buffalo seemed too simplistic to me. After the work ran out, some of the men who worked in the steel factories abandoned their families. To my father, the answer was simple. To take away a man's livelihood and leave him with the inability to support his family left him impotent (my words not his). To my father, it meant taking away his manhood and purpose for being. Simple. When you have nothing to offer, why would you stay?

Buffalo, New York

I can never find images that articulate Buffalo for me. Library of Congress documents the industrial hey days. Grain mills, Erie Canal, World's Exposition and the Catholics. Lionel Rogosin takes care of the rest. I like his photographs but they do not document my own history. His portraits document something diminishing in Buffalo. Eventually it would all go to hell. His photographs reflect the death of the industrial age for African Americans but my father and his ilk still were hanging on. Suburban ranch housing and the white folk blue collar work force still had a tiny piece of the Buffalo pie. Benefits, pensions and salaries to comfortably support a family. So I found this broad. The fleshy, good humored types who littered my childhood. She was at the picnics, on the beach gossiping with my aunt, attended my parents parties, paid me no mind, laughed loud, drank a lot, ate a lot and more or less lived a lot.

It isn't out of copyright. Its from the Library of Congress. 1943.