Pamela’s Pagans, Frieda’s Freakouts, and Spare’s Lost Envoy: A Tarot Tour

The ideological and aesthetic disagreements which plagued the British occult scene of the early 20th Century – a hotbed of splinter organisations trying to pick up the legacy of the shattered Golden Dawn along with more original thinkers – can be understood in part by consulting the tarot. I don’t mean by doing any sort of tarot divination – I mean by taking a look at the actual decks which were produced at the time as vehicles for esoteric messages and tools for cartomancy.

Though Victorian occultists liked to claim that tarot dated back to ancient Egypt, it’s fairly evident that it originated in 15th Century Italy – playing cards in general having been circulated for quite some time before then, prior to people having the brainwave of adding in a set of trumps with allegorical images on them. For some 300 years or so their use was more or less exclusively in card games; only in the 18th Century did people begin to experiment with them as tools for divination, and for a good while after that occultists seem to have been largely satisfied with using standard designs – the Tarot of Marseilles being the most popular one. Though a custom deck by “Etteilla” (AKA Jean-Baptiste Alliette), designed in the 1780s, is held to be the first deck designed specifically for divinatory purposes, it makes a number of changes to the ordering of the Major Arcana compared to the Marseilles deck.

Still, with the passage of time, practitioners loaded up more and more concepts onto the structure of the Tarot; Éliphas Lévi would draw specific links between the 22 Major Arcana and the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, the better to tie in Tarot and Kabbalah, and the Golden Dawn developed a complex system of arcane correspondences, ascribing the cards to different paths and features of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, drawing connections between them and the classical elements and signs of the Zodiac and so forth, and generally super-charging them with connections to other components of their occult cosmology. In fact, Tarot was so important to the Golden Dawn that it’s absolutely rife in the Cipher Manuscripts that its founders Totally Discovered Somewhere, Honest.

It was inevitable that sooner or later, new decks would be devised to incorporate these ideas. Before its split, the Golden Dawn itself never published an “official” deck for public consumption – that would hardly fit the “elite secret society” concept – but that would change in 1909. The deck which used to be popularly known as the Rider-Waite deck, but is increasingly known as Rider-Waite-Smith or just Waite-Smith, was conceived by A.E. Waite (who also wrote the accompanying book, The Key To the Tarot), but the actual art was executed by Pamela Colman Smith. (The “Rider” in the name refers to its publisher, the Rider Company.)

Waite and Smith were both members of the Independent and Rectified Rite of the Golden Dawn, sometimes known as the Holy Order of the Golden Dawn (as distinct from the original Hermetic Order). This faction was largely led by Waite and others of similar temperament to him, distinguished by having a strong preference for mysticism over magic – meditative exploration of personal spirituality they considered rad and cool, especially if it was Christian in flavour, but attempting to perform actual magic was not, as far as they were concerned, the point. Originally carrying along a fair number of significant members – including Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood – the group would eventually self-destruct when Waite would make the cardinal error of worrying too much about where the Cipher Manuscripts came from. Beginning in 1908, he undertook a determined investigation to try and figure out what their deal was, and shockingly enough came to the conclusion that they didn’t represent a source of secret knowledge dating back to ancient Egypt, and (whisper it) might even be bullshit.

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On the basis of this conclusion, Waite would revise the rituals of the Independent and Rectified Rite, stripping out all symbolism derived from Egyptian myth and kicking off a shitshow. Whilst some members were onboard with his approach, others felt it was a bridge too far – they were fine with a Golden Dawn which was less about doing magic and more about doing spiritual contemplation with some cool occult imagery, but once you start ditching the cool imagery there’s not much point being a Golden Dawn successor chapter. Eventually it seems Waite agreed; the Independent and Rectified Rite shut down around 1914 and Waite would establish the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, which was all about Christian mysticism and didn’t bother even pretending to care about Golden Dawn mythology.

Based on this timeline, a case can be made that the Waite-Smith deck is Waite’s last major work which was at least somewhat in the vein of the old-style Golden Dawn – the last contribution he made as someone who was essentially willing to go along with the old symbolism. For although there’s notes of Christianity in there, like the placement of the Lovers in the Garden of Eden, so too was esoteric Christianity always a feature of the Golden Dawn – and as well as retaining the Kabbalistic connotations Victorian occultism had ascribed to the Tarot, the Waite-Smith deck looks firmly to the Golden Dawn’s Tarot system, as enunciated in part in the Cipher Manuscripts. There’s even splashes of Egyptian symbolism in there, prominent and blatant enough that they can’t be ascribed to Pamela Colman Smith going rogue and adding them in herself in defiance of Waite’s intentions. Honest-to-goodness Sphinxes in Egyptian-style head-dresses are in pride of place on the Wheel of Fortune and the Chariot – and by Waite’s own admission he applied most of his supervision to the Major Arcana. If you are going to reform your portfolio of symbols and rituals to the extent Waite intended with the Independent and Rectified Rite, this isn’t a deck you produce once you’ve undergone that process.

That said, whilst the Major Arcana symbolism was particularly dictated by Waite, there is basis to think that Smith had somewhat more leeway in respect of the Minor Arcana; she’d have still been working to requirements he set, but by his own words he did not focus on the Minor Arcana as much as the Major. That’s interesting, because it’s the Minor Arcana where the major divergence in the Waite-Smith deck happens. Whereas prior decks restricted their allegorical scenes to the Major Arcana and the court cards, with the numbered Minor Arcana being presented as mere abstract arrangements of the relevant court symbols, each and every card in the Waite-Smith deck carries with it a little scene.

To my mind, this is key to its charm, and a big reason why it ended up becoming the most well-known deck in wider popular culture. Having a fun little scene on every card means that you’ll get a fun little scene with any reading – with prior decks, a 3-card reading of, say, 3 of Swords, 8 of Cups, and 9 of Pentacles might be invested by you with all manner of meaning, but it doesn’t feel as good to just get some bland patterns as it does to get a cool little image like the Major Arcana enjoy. This, of course, may have also helped their percolation into wider pop culture – if you use them in a movie people see them and instantly think “Tarot”, regardless of which card comes up, and of course the wide variety of scenes involved mean you have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to picking out thematically suitable cards.

It’s possible that the Minor Arcana owe more to Smith’s execution than Waite’s conceptualisation. Waite might have come up with the basic imagery, but it was Smith who invests the deck with an overall atmosphere and aesthetic, making it a window into a sort of late medieval/early Renaissance world with intriguing features. Though Christianity is very much a presence, there’s a streak of paganism in here, especially in the Minor Arcana, which feels like Smith has smuggled in something Waite didn’t intend and might have even not spotted, having underestimated her. (Some of Waite’s comments about Smith were incredibly patronising).

Take, for instance, the 4 of Wands – in Waite’s description of it in The Key To the Tarot (which one suspects transcribes his original instructions to Smith), he makes it sound like it’s illustrating a genteel country fete, and his discussion of the card’s implications are in line with that. In Smith’s execution, however, the women brandishing garlands look like classical priestesses. Waite gives the 3 of Cups cups only perfunctory attention at best, describing it as three maidens toasting one another, but this too takes on the air of pagan ritual. The King of Pentacles is swamped in Dionysian imagery that Waite flat-out doesn’t touch on.

And like I said – like many divinatory systems, Tarot is about vibes first, complex occult symbolism a fairly distant second. To my mind, the value in this stuff isn’t so much about any supernatural influence which may or may not exert itself through the cards – a good proportion of people who use Tarot or similar things don’t give serious credence to any of that, though many do, and that aspect of it is very much down to personal taste. If there is a universal value to Tarot which can be partaken of regardless of your belief system, it is – as with any divinatory method – more about providing a means to interrogate your thoughts from a different perspective than to foretell the future. Think on your query, get a random image, and your brain is going to try and link that image to the query – that’s just how our powerful pattern-matching circuitry works. If the image is in line with what you were already thinking, it can help clarify that thought; if it’s at odds with it, then that can prompt you to look at the matter from an angle you did not previously consider.

This being the case, it’s the aesthetic impact of the imagery which perhaps determines whether people gel with a particular Tarot deck or not more than any esoteric dogma encoded in the deck. I am willing to bet the vast majority of people who’ve played around with the Waite-Smith deck have no particular insight into or interest in the Golden Dawn take on Tarot. Nor does that impede them from getting personal value out of it.

We can see the impact of aesthetic when we look at the other major Golden Dawn-derived deck of the first half of the 20th Century – the Thoth Tarot by Lady Frieda Harris and Aleister Crowley. Her Ladyship – whose involvement makes this a true “toff/Thoth” deck – befriended Crowley in his last decade or so of life, and soon after they met was initiated by him into the A .’. A .’., his own Golden Dawn-derived magical order. She would essentially be one of his last significant patrons, providing him with some financial support and, towards the end of his life, arranging for him to have suitable care; she also arranged his memorial dinner on the anniversary of his death.

The connection between Crowley and Harris, in other words, seems to have been decidedly friendly, and remained so over the span of ten years. Given that Crowley never met a bridge he wasn’t at least tempted to burn, it’s rather telling that Harris not only put up with him over all that time, but seems to have championed him even when he was good and dead. Crowley himself would doubtless have appreciated the irony that A.E. Waite had this goody-two-shoes image but seems to have been kind of a shit about Colman Smith, whilst Crowley is infamous for his bad boy persona but was able to cultivate this association in later life. He’d also be pleased to know his Tarot is still widely known and appreciated to this day; it would have infuriated him to let Waite have the last word. One suspects that this may come down to Lady Frieda being an aristocrat who was brought up to be deferred to, rather than deferential, and close to Crowley in age, so there’d be no question of him trying the sort of bullshit he attempted with more malleable friends – she’d slap him down if he tried, and he was probably old and canny enough to know it.

Early on in their friendship, Crowley hit on the idea of putting out a new Tarot deck, with Lady Frieda doing the artwork. His initial idea was to simply follow the traditional style with a few updates. (For instance, he’d come to the conclusion that some aspects of the Golden Dawn attribution of Hebrew letters to Major Arcana and other correspondences needed work – and wouldn’t you know it, the Book of the Law agreed with him!) Harris, however, got enthusiastic; feeling ambitious about the project, she cajoled Crowley into coming up with card specifications crammed with all of his esoteric knowledge, taking in not just the Golden Dawn symbolism but generous doses of Crowley’s own magical system of Thelema and an eclectic blend of other cultural traditions he’d dipped into here and there. (“She convinced Crowley to do more work than he wanted to”, in itself, reveals a lot about Lady Frieda’s likely personal character.)

It took some five years for her to paint them all, putting on art exhibitions to show off the canvases of the artwork (for she executed them on that scale). By that time, it was midway through World War II; production restrictions and rationing meant that making a mass market version of the deck wasn’t viable. Crowley would put out The Book of Thoth – an intricate meditation on the Tarot and its connections to all manner of other occult ideas – in 1944, with the cards depicted in the illustration section. but it wouldn’t be until the 1960s. well after Crowley and Harris were dead, that the cards would see the light of day as actual cards.

They did, however – and they soon became popular in their own right. Although they have not reached the level of use in pop culture that the Waite-Smith deck did, basically anyone who mucks about with Tarot is going to hear about the Thoth deck. A lot of this comes down to it having a somewhat fearsome reputation as being scary or intimidating. This was inevitable given Crowley’s public image – which he wasn’t averse to playing up to – but even if it had come out anonymously, the imagery here would be startling.

After all, these cards were designed by Aleister Crowley – Aleister “I fucked Victor Neuburg in the desert so hard he went mad” Crowley, Aleister “I tried to bullshit my way into taking over the entire German occult scene and they almost let me do it Crowley”, Aleister “I started a hippy commune before it was cool and we let it get covered in blood and shit and someone died because it was so disgusting there and Mussolini deported us all” Crowley, Aleister “I’m mad about being raised in a puritanical home so I’m going to use as much Antichrist imagery in my magical system as possible even though I’ll happily keep in as much esoteric Christianity as I want too” Crowley, Aleister “L. Ron Hubbard ripped me off but I could smell his bullshit from across the Atlantic years before he even wrote Dianetics” Crowley – that Aleister Crowley. And they’re drawn by the only woman who was enough of an aristocratic dommy mommy to keep that Aleister Crowley in line. You should go in expecting a trip.

And again, whilst the symbolism and the parameters were set by Crowley, it’s Harris’ execution which really makes the deck sing. Lady Frieda, on the strength of these cards, strikes me as the sort of person who could drop acid and then after the trip go “Wait… that was it? That’s chickenshit stuff.” Rippling with geometric patterns, painted in colour choices which creep under your skin and make you shiver, Harris’s style mashes up Futurism, Symbolism, and Surrealism just as Crowley’s mandated content mashes up relativity, quantum mechanics, Kabbalah, Golden Dawn occultism, the symbolism of as many ancient and modern religions as Crowley could get his hands on, and the occasional big dose of horny.

It’s confrontational, and what it confronts you with is a universe in a state of flux from which these patterns and images nonetheless emerge. This feels particularly the case with the Minor Arcana. In some respects these revert to abstract arrangements of the suit symbols, with the basic arrangements derived either from Kabbalah (the 10s cards will tend to be arranged in a Tree of Life pattern, for instance) or the Tarot of Marseilles. But Harris enriches the basic symbolism so much that you get the sense of these abstract patterns giving rise to concrete forms – which, given the version of Kabbalistic cosmology outlined by Crowley in The Book of Thoth, very much seems to have been the point.

Whilst in Waite-Smith one has the sense of Smith smuggling in themes and a bit of fun under Waite’s nose, and Waite in turn having a very patronising attitude towards Smith, the Thoth Tarot comes across as the product of two people egging each other on, with their creative agendas remarkably in sync. In The Book of Thoth, Crowley concludes his essay on the theory of the Tarot by putting forth the idea that the Tarot cards are, in and of themselves, living entities in some respects – living on the plane of archetypal ideas rather than flesh and blood, but alive nonetheless. I can believe he gave Harris that brief and she got across the idea magnificently. I could also believe he was inspired to end on that idea because of Harris’ cards and the power her artwork exerts. Just as the Waite-Smith deck exerts a far wider cultural influence than any of Waite’s somewhat dense Christian mysticism he spent the rest of his life on has, one could make the case the Thoth Tarot is the biggest impact Crowley made in terms of actually propagating occult practices. Sure, people are aware of Crowley as this spooky occult boogeyman, and lots of people pay lip service to Thelema, but I bet many orders of magnitude more people have used the Thoth deck than have baked Cakes of Light. (Look it up. But turn SafeSearch off first.)

Between them, Waite-Smith and Thoth cover what you could class as the two extremes of thought within the Golden Dawn – Waite and his party thinking that the Golden Dawn was a bit too keen on magic and should dial it back in favour of mysticism, Crowley thinking they were way too timid about magic and should use tons of it (and also loads of mysticism, and if there’s space on the agenda for yoga, cocaine, and anal sex so much the better). At the same time that Crowley, Waite, and others were still having rhetorical slapfights amidst the ruins of the Golden Dawn, however, an occult thinker and artist who had never been a member of the original Golden Dawn – at most briefly signing up to Crowley’s A .’. A .’. before being expelled at an unprecedently early stage of his training – was developing his own occult philosophy.

Enter Austin Osman Spare – and the actual thing which inspired this article in the first place – yes, I was going somewhere with this all along!

Spare’s occult endeavours were largely overlooked by the wider world in his lifetime, during which he was primarily known as an artist – having the reputation of an enfant terrible when he first emerged and then, once the controversy around him died down, having lesser success without ever quite disappearing altogether. However, late in his life he became close friends with Kenneth Grant – he of the Typhonian OTO and mashing up Thelema and Cthulhu – and although Spare’s occult writings had largely vanished out of trace (having been put out as small private printings of very limited circulation), Grant’s citations of Spare in his own work kept his ideas and name alive. Then Peter Carroll drew heavily on Spare – especially his sigil-based version of homespun magic – when cooking up Liber Null, and the rest was Chaos Magic history.

Spare is primarily known for his sigils, and secondarily known for his homebrewed cosmology based on the concepts of “Zos” and “Kia”. (This was dubbed the “Zos Kia Cultus” by Kenneth Grant – much as August Derleth came up with “Cthulhu Mythos” to describe Lovecraft’s legendarium, and I’m 99% sure that Grant was trying to copy Derleth in doing so, perhaps hoping to be the custodian of Spare’s occult legacy as Derleth had made himself the custodian of Lovecraft’s literary legacy.) A very few people have dug deeper into his legacy. Some have even been aware that Spare was responsible for making an idiosyncratic set of divinatory cards towards the end of his life, following no known Tarot structure and illustrated with strange, abstract patterns.

What almost nobody knew, however, was that a few years prior to Waite and Smith putting together their Tarot deck, Spare was developing his very own Tarot deck, illustrating all the cards himself. In a turn of events so odd that if this were fiction it would be too on the nose, the deck had been stashed away in the private museum of the Magic Circle – not an occult society, but Britain’s pre-eminent trade body of stage magicians. As a group just as prone to secrecy as ceremonial magicians, the Magic Circle hadn’t exactly widely advertised the contents of their museum, which so far as I can tell exists primarily for the edification of members; the only passing reference to its existence was a brief article in the Magic Circle’s in-house magazine, after which nobody commented on it for literal decades.

When Jonathan Allen took on the job of curator at the Magic Circle Museum, he stumbled across the deck and realised what he had on his hands; in 2016, Strange Attractor Press released Lost Envoy, a collection of articles about the deck edited by Allen, its centrepiece being carefully reproduced images of the deck’s cards. (The main issue is the Strength card, which is missing, though a monochrome image of it was thankfully taken for that article years ago in the Magic Circle’s magazine; a careful reproduction, the colours guessed at based on other cards, was produced for the book.) Now, thanks to a successful Kickstarter, Lost Envoy is back in a second edition – and this time it’s accompanied by a print of the deck itself.

Let’s look at the book first. After a foreword by Strange Attractor head honcho Mark Pilkington, noting how Spare has always been not entirely overlooked but certainly not fully embraced by the art world until comparatively recently, we get Jonathan Allen’s introduction, setting a tone in which the esoteric aspects of what Spare was up to with his deck are respected but the tarot is also appreciated as an aesthetic cultural artifact and as a storehouse of images which, through random reordering, can be an aid to picking over our inner thoughts. Allen notes how Spare’s deck takes its Major Arcana from traditional tarot but its Minor Arcana from the standard playing card suits (hearts, diamonds, spades, clubs) and not the tarot suits (cups, wands, swords, pentacles/coins), making it a bridge between two similar but distinct cartomantic traditions.

Allen further provides A Gift of Fortune, digging into the Magic Circle museum that the deck lay dormant within and the circumstances under which it ended up there. In support of this volume also reprints Tarot Cards and a Pack In the Magic Circle Museum by Arthur Ivey, a brief article from the Magic Circle’s internal magazine The Magic Circular which is more or less the sole attention Spare’s deck got before its recent rediscovery. He also, in notes at the end of this second editions provides some new developments since the original publication of Lost Envoy, the most major being the identification of an overwhelmingly likely source for Spare’s Minor Arcana attributions, this being the enigmatic “Rapoza” whose How To Tell Fortunes By the Cards compiled information previously published in articles in Weldon’s Ladies Journal.

Helen Farley offers Austin Spare and the Ages of Tarot, which recounts the deck’s place in the history of tarot’s evolution from secular Italian playing cards to sacralised occult tools, and teases out how Spare’s approach dips into both traditions, with the Juggler card (his Magician) both being clearly packed with occult significance but also reverting to the less flashy name more associated with the playing cards than with the somewhat self-important tone that 19th Century occultists liked to apply to the cards (and thereby take on themselves). This further expresses the idea of Spare as a man of the people – hailing as he did from working class origins and forging a form of esotericism perhaps a touch less elitist than the Golden Dawn’s pretensions to occult aristocracy.

Gavin W. Semple, in A Work For Artists, does a careful analysis of the deck and considers the likely sources Spare used for imagery and interpretation, the probable date of composition (1904-1907, most likely 1905-1906, based on parallels between recurring imagery here and images and techniques showing up in other Spare work of the era), and where Spare might have made allusions to the deck in his later work. In particular, he identifies Spare’s essay Mind To Mind and How, By a Sorcerer as presenting Spare’s own guide to how one would make their own deck – likely informed by his own experience making this one – and the relevant extract of that essay gets reprinted here in turn. Here he gives a fairly clear statement that we should, perhaps, not rely too heavily on his tarot as anything other than a worked example of how someone else did it; “you must evolve your own meanings, symbols and methods. That is vital.” That one statement more or less sums up Spare’s contribution to occult thinking – that a syncretic, eclectic construction of a personal approach is not only a valid tool, but it is an essential part of the process.

Phil Baker, a biographer of Spare’s, gives us more context on where the deck sits in Spare’s wider life story in “His Own Arcana”: Austin Osman Spare and the Borders of Tarot, further corroborating the notion that this represents an early part of his occult career prior to his wholesale rejection of conventional tradition. This was prompted in part by Crowley flunking him out of the A.’.A.’., an organisation that in the final analysis was all about purporting to be the voice of long-standing occult tradition, though in fact it incorporated many innovations either cribbed from the Golden Dawn or devised by Crowley. One wonders how much Crowley booting Spare before he even hit Neophyte came down to Crowley’s classism or impatience with Spare’s dyslexia, and how much was the result of him realising that Spare wouldn’t be satisfied to just follow someone else’s scheme.

The two most eccentric contributions are The Deputation by Sally O’Reilly, a little fiction imagining a conversation between Spare and suffragette artist Sylvia Pankhurst, inspired by them moving in common circles, and A Cartomantic Mirror by Alan Moore. Yes, the comics guy – Moore’s drawn on Spare in his material in the past (especially in Promethea, a crash course in occultism disguised as a superhero comic), so it makes sense he’d contribute here.

Specifically, he uses the Crowley-Harris Thoth deck to perform a bit of divination about Spare’s deck, asking what the significance of it is. The answer he comes to – that it’s a challenge to the conventions of traditional occultism – is basically the answer you would expect, since as is often the case in tarot readings Moore is actually primarily steered by his knowledge of the subject and the cards merely prompt him. The main interesting thing about the card he draws is that they are all Minor Arcana and there are multiple runs of consecutive cards – the 2-5 of Cups and the 3-7 of Wands – so the major insight here is “Alan Moore isn’t very good at shuffling cards”.

As for the deck itself, the main reason it took a fair while to get it printed once it was rediscovered – and several tries before the Kickstarter-funded version was printed to Strange Attractor’s satisfaction – is that you can’t print this thing with any sort of conventional borders – because as well as drawing on the cards, Spare would draw between the cards, adding in symbols and patterns ranging from little moon symbols to entire glowing yellow arcs or full-grown snakes spanning multiple cards.

This exciting elaboration makes up for the otherwise straightforward design of many of the Minor Arcana; as for the rest of the cards, the court cards use interesting close-up portraits of figures who may well be drawn from life, whilst the Major Arcana largely follow the Tarot of Marseilles with the tweaks made by Éliphas Lévi, but with the odd shocking twist. For instance, in Spare’s deck, the Chariot looks much like the one in Waite-Smith, due to being based on the Marseilles Chariot but adding in the feature from Éliphas Lévi of the horses being replaced with Sphinxes… however, it differs starkly from prior and subsequent decks because there’s nobody driving!

The deck was self-evidently concocted for Spare’s personal use, since each card has cartographic meanings jotted down on it – sometimes in several colours of ink, suggesting he kept adding further details as he made use of the deck. Some cards even have notes crossed out! All of this adds to a very down-to-earth, DIY ethos to the thing. This is in keeping with Spare’s sources; the Kickstarter goodies include a back-to-back reprint of that guidebook by Rapoza and a book on Tarot for mass audiences which MacGregor Mathers knocked out for easy money back in the day, eliding all the Golden Dawn-specific stuff. Afterwords by John Choma to these texts clearly illustrate how Spare clearly used these as his primary sources for his deck’s structure and interpretive meanings – as mentioned before, he took the Minor Arcana stuff from Rapoza (and may well have begun with just an ordinary card deck structure) and the Major Arcana from Mathers (and they may be a later addition).

Such material is the sort of stuff the snooty Victorian aristocrat-magicians (and wannabe-aristocrats) of the Golden Dawn would have turned their nose up at; both Waite and Crowley in their own way expressed the view that the primary purpose of occultism is personal spiritual development and enlightenment, not grubby personal enrichment. (The main difference is that Waite thought that using magic for personal gain is very, very naughty and never a good idea, whilst Crowley seems to have thought it was a side perk of enlightenment). Spare, conversely, seems to have sourced his material from a tradition that is less about highfaluting metaphysical philosophy and spiritual goals and more about providing gentle advice and little words of comfort. There’s class undertones to this, as well as a gender politics dimension – remember, Rapoza’s book was sourced from articles knocked out for a popular mass market magazine aimed at women, not an occult periodical like Crowley’s The Equinox.

Perhaps the best thing about Lost Envoy and its associated deck project, then, is in the reminder it offers that there’s interesting cultural history to be explored in less high-minded and more practically-inclined magical traditions than has hitherto been acknowledged. That’s just as true if, like me, you are interested in the occult as an aesthetic current rather than a practice attaining concrete results.