The deck of 1909 is full of architecture, and one image appears in it again and again: two pillars. Nowhere are they plainer than on the card of the High Priestess, who sits between them. Anyone who knows anything of Freemasonry finds them hard to ignore, because two pillars stand at the foundation of Masonic symbolism. And so students ask us, more often than one might expect: is the most famous tarot deck in the world a Masonic code?
The answer is more interesting than yes or no. Much of what follows was taught to the keepers by our friend, a Mason of many years who has served in the offices of a working lodge and gone on into the higher degrees, and who has spent as long again with the cards. We have checked what we were told against the books, as our friend asked us to.
Streams Running Together
Modern Freemasonry took shape in the early eighteenth century, and like Western esotericism generally it drew together several streams: the craft of the working stonemasons, biblical symbolism, the philosophy of the age of reason, Christian mysticism, Hermetic thought, and in time some elements of the Kabbalah. Then, late in the nineteenth century, came an explosion of esoteric societies that borrowed heavily from the way Freemasonry was organized: Rosicrucian societies, the London order of 1888, the Martinists. By the time the deck was made, these traditions had been mingling for generations.
That makes the provenance of any symbol very hard to trace. When a student finds a symbol in the tarot that also appears in a lodge, she has a real question: did the designer get it from Freemasonry, or did Freemasonry get it from somewhere older? The internet prefers more dramatic answers, secret governments and hidden religions and the perennial occult conspiracy. In an age when anyone can open the books, it is remarkable how much of that mythology survives.
What the Lodge Actually Does
Our friend describes the genius of Freemasonry this way. Its method of teaching is remarkably simple. It takes the tools and the language of the old building trades and uses them to convey moral lessons. A rough stone becomes a picture of the imperfect human being, and the working of the stone becomes a picture of the improvement of character. These are perfectly sensible instructions. A lodge room is laid out in stations, and a member begins by the door as inner guard and moves through the offices of deacon and warden toward the master's chair in the east. Instead of handing a candidate a list of things to read, the lodge places him inside an allegory, so that he experiences the lesson rather than watching it.
Much of that allegory is built around one of the great building projects of the Hebrew scriptures: the temple of Solomon. Not every detail comes from scripture; there are later legends and allegorical developments, and much from the history of the trades themselves. But the debt to the biblical account is large. Our friend says the greatest disappointment of many new members is that they come expecting the mysticism the internet promised them, and are given lessons from the Bible.
And here is where the confusion starts. Few of those members have ever sat down with the books of Kings and Chronicles. So the first place they meet the pillars, the temple, the working tools, and the name of Solomon is in the solemn setting of their own initiation. Naturally they come to associate the imagery with Freemasonry. The pillars become Masonic pillars. The temple becomes Masonic architecture. Then they meet the same images somewhere else, in a cathedral, a painting, an old manuscript, or a tarot card, and announce: that is Freemasonry.
But learning something through Freemasonry does not mean Freemasonry invented it. Our friend sometimes wonders whether the lodge's most extraordinary achievement was not the preserving of ancient secrets at all, but persuading generations of people that knowledge sitting in plain sight in every printed Bible had been secret in the first place. The temple of Solomon was never a secret. Jachin and Boaz were never a secret. Freemasonry took public material and did something new with it: it arranged it into a system of initiation.
The Church and the Lodge
One institution certainly did object to the new fraternity. In 1738, twenty-one years after the first grand lodge was formed in London, a pope threatened Catholics who joined the lodges with excommunication. Read the document itself and its concerns are revealing. Men of different religions were meeting together. They were binding themselves with oaths. They kept their proceedings private, and civil rulers were already uneasy about bodies they could not easily supervise. Historians have argued since that the quarrel was as much about authority as about theology: who may organize men, who may define morality, who may create fellowship across the boundaries of religion, and above all, who may interpret the symbols.
The fellowship notes, with a smile, that the Essenes too bound themselves with an oath at entry and kept their books and the names of the angels from outsiders, and that the historian's Greek readers found this quite as strange as the pope found the lodges. A community that keeps some things to itself is not thereby a conspiracy. Neither is it thereby holy.
The Designer and the Artist
The designer of the deck was genuinely a Freemason. He was initiated in a London lodge in 1901, raised a Master Mason the next year, and went on into the Royal Arch and the higher degrees. His Masonic experience is relevant to understanding his work. But relevance is not the same as origin. He was also a Christian mystic, a student of the Kabbalah, a figure of importance in the London order, a man fascinated by the relations among the traditions of initiation, and a prolific author. And the deck was not his alone. The artist who painted it belonged to the same order but was never a Freemason, and her contribution was anything but incidental: the illustrated scenes of the minor cards, which earlier decks did not have, are a large part of why the deck has lasted.
So we have two people working inside the overlapping worlds of early twentieth-century esotericism, and naturally those worlds show in the cards. The question is whether two traditions that share a symbol mean that one secretly planted it in the other, or whether both inherited it from something much older.
The High Priestess
The High Priestess sits between two pillars, one black and one white, marked with the letters B and J. Behind her hangs a veil decorated with pomegranates. Across her lap lies a scroll, partly hidden by her mantle, on which can be read the word Tora, the Law. To a Freemason the pillars are instantly Boaz and Jachin. Is this a secret reference to the architecture of the lodge?
Not in the slightest. Open the first book of Kings at its seventh chapter. Solomon sends to Tyre for a craftsman named Hiram, a worker in bronze, and the text describes, in loving detail, the two great pillars he cast: their height, their capitals, their network and lily work, their rows of pomegranates. And then: he set up the pillars in the porch of the temple, and he called the right pillar Jachin and the left pillar Boaz. There they are. Not a hidden Masonic doctrine, not a document recovered from an Egyptian tomb, but the Hebrew scriptures, which are wonderful enough in their own right. Turn to the second book of Chronicles, at its third chapter, and you will find the veil of the temple, of blue and purple and crimson and fine linen, the two pillars, and the pomegranates hung on chains. Pillars, a veil, pomegranates, and a scroll of the Law. Does a student begin to see the trouble with calling these objects Masonic?
Nor is the card a mere illustration of Kings. Hanging the pomegranates on the veil, for instance, is a new composition. The designer and the artist were interpreting what they had inherited. And we need not guess what the designer meant, because he wrote it down. In his book on the cards, published the year after the deck, he calls the pillars those of the mystic temple and speaks of the concealed law, the secret church, the house of God and man, and the Shekinah, the presence of God that dwelt between the cherubim. Then he moves on into Kabbalistic correspondences, some of which our friend, reading the Book of Formation, would dispute. But notice what the designer is doing. He is taking scripture and setting it inside a wider mystical frame. A Mason may recognize the objects in the picture. Recognition is not explanation, and it is certainly not ownership.
Pillars That Are Not the Same
The designer gives us another useful clue. The Hierophant also sits between two pillars. More Masonic symbolism? Perhaps. But the designer says plainly that these are not the pillars of the temple which the High Priestess guards. He sets the two scenes apart. The Hierophant stands for outward religion: established doctrine, institutional authority, the mediation of the holy by an office. The High Priestess stands for what is withdrawn, hidden, and interior. And when he comes to the card of Justice, a third figure between two pillars, he distinguishes those pillars again.
So the author himself was making careful distinctions between images that look alike on the surface. A careless reader merges them all into one meaning, because there are two columns. And this, our friend says, is one of the real dangers of modern esotericism.
Seeing It Everywhere
Once you have decided what you want a symbol to mean, you can find evidence for it practically everywhere. Two pillars: Freemasonry. A stone: Freemasonry. A triangle, an eye, a star, a pair of scales: more Freemasonry. By that method every cathedral in Europe is a secret Masonic temple.
Try a different question. Instead of asking what a symbol reminds you of, ask where it came from. On the card of the Wheel of Fortune, in the four corners, are four strange creatures: a man, an eagle, a lion, and an ox, each with a book. A student might take such a fourfold arrangement for evidence of Masonic or Rosicrucian or London order symbolism, and the creatures do appear all through Western esoteric art. But the designer tells us where they come from: they are the living creatures of the first chapter of Ezekiel, the same four faces that surround the throne in the last book of the Christian scriptures, and that Christian art made into the signs of the four evangelists. They appear again in the corners of the card of the World. Once again we are looking at an inherited religious vocabulary, not a symbol that appeared when somebody founded a society.
When the layers are run together, a whole artificial history results. A biblical image becomes a Masonic secret. A Masonic interpretation becomes an ancient Egyptian teaching. A correspondence invented in London becomes an unquestionable feature of the Kabbalah. In the end the whole becomes such a tangle of overlapping associations that no one can tell the original text from what somebody added to it two thousand years later. And once everything is interchangeable, the original sources quietly lose their authority.
A Puzzle in Plain Sight
Our friend left us one puzzle, and the way it is held is as instructive as the puzzle. Look at the card of the Chariot. The canopy over the charioteer is not decorated with one kind of star. There are stars of five points and stars of six, and on the front of his crown is a star of eight. Elsewhere in the major cards these shapes appear in very particular places. The clearest five-pointed star is on the Magician's pentacle, a figure Masons call the pentalpha. The Hermit's lantern holds a six-pointed star, which Masons call the hexalpha. The card of the Star holds only stars of eight points. On the Chariot, and on no other card, all three meet.
Does this prove that the designer hid a Masonic cipher in the deck? Our friend says no, and says it firmly: nothing in the designer's writings allows anyone to claim it. Our friend has only noticed it, written it down, and left it as a question. That is exactly how a student should hold such an observation. Notice it. Record it. Do not build a doctrine on it.
The Messenger Is Not the Source
When we recognize a symbol in the tarot that also appears in Freemasonry, what are we looking at? A Masonic symbol? A Hermetic one? A Kabbalistic idea? Or something much older that all of them inherited? The institution that hands on a teaching is not necessarily its source. If we forget the difference, the institution gradually becomes the authority, and the source becomes almost incidental.
The fellowship applies this to itself first. We hand on the Essene way as we have received it, but we are not its source, and a student should go past us to the scrolls and the scriptures themselves, read in their own world and on their own terms, as the page How We Read asks. Our friend put the deepest question of this page in these words, and we leave it with the student. Have we become so fascinated by the machinery of esotericism that we have lost sight of the message of God?