Ritual House

You may have heard the rumors: Arthur Waite had a second, secret Tarot.

These recently discovered images do not comprise a new deck, and in keeping with Waite’s beliefs about the true purpose of the Tarot, they are useless for fortune telling.

The emblems were created by a stained glass artisan named John Brahms Trinick as instructive tool for members of Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, the secret society that Waite founded shortly after leaving the Golden Dawn in 1914. Though Waite considered the symbolism of the tarot to have been rectified in 1910 by the deck he created with Pamela Coleman Smith, Waite still sought to dig deeper by creating an entirely new and wholly esoteric version of the Major Arcana, with all the outer meanings stripped away. Meditation on them is a raw, visceral experience. I felt astonishing transformations in my consciousness almost immediately after viewing them.

Though all of the images diverge from or even ignore the standard formulas for Tarot imagery, the most striking alteration in the Waite-Trinick Tarot is the Hanged Man. You may recall that there is someone here at Ritual House with this card as his significator. Though he continues to abide in this sanctuary, he left the material plane by his own free will on the last day of 2011, when he ended his life just before dawn.

Shortly after I received the news of his death, I received the Waite-Trinick images by mail. When I looked upon the new image of the Hanged Man, I was totally arrested by what I saw. He now appears as “the sacrificed god, the crowned master, the drowned giant, beneath the flood on which the ark of tradition rides.” (Abiding in the Sanctuary, p. 135)

The Hanged Man is depicted lying dead on his back, submerged underwater … the dying god entombed in the depths of the subconscious. His body is suspended in a huge, glowing swastika, the symbolism of which has been my focus for months as I explore ever deeper meditations on the sun.

I generally do my best to share Waite’s skeptical approach to mysticism, but the synchronicity between the Hanged Man’s death and the appearance of this image, along with a great many other strange events surrounding his passing, continue to shake my foundation of rationality.

Of the 250 existing copies of the volume containing the Waite-Trinick images and their story thus far, a few are still available here. The book is very rough and full of typos due to the fact that it was rushed to press in an effort to make these images available for study, but the reproductions of the images themselves are very good.

You can read more of my thoughts on the Hanged Man’s death in an article I recently wrote for Heathen Harvest.

To my knowledge, the picture above is the only image of the Waite-Trinick Hanged Man on the internet. Look deeply. You may see something holy.