TARO PACK, 1977
Enamel on paper. A series of designs for a Taro pack. Each suit individually framed:
1. Swords 29½ x 33½in. (75 x 85cm.)
2. Cups 29½ x 33½in. (75 x 85cm.)
3. Wands 29½ x 33½in. (75 x 85cm.)
4. Disks 29½ x 33½in. (75 x 85cm.)
5. The Major Arcana 37½x 33½in. (95 x 85cm.)
Provenance
National Trust bequest.
Exhibited
Newlyn, Newlyn Art Gallery, 1977.
The term Tarot is applied to a pack of 78 cards. It consists of four suits of fourteen cards each (there is an extra court card than in ordinary packs) and twenty-two symbolic cards, known as the Major Arcana.
Use of the Tarot formed an important part of Golden Dawn workings. Original research on the Tarot had been done by (or revealed to) MacGregor Mathers. The cards have complex symbolic meanings, said to be traceable to ancient Egypt and the Quabalistic Tree of Life.
Colquhoun believed that the pack had applications that went far beyond mere fortune telling. Placed within its Golden Dawn context and supplemented by astrology and divination, she saw its use as a mantic practice that could help the adept achieve higher and more subtle planes.
In her writings Colquhoun always used the more unusual spelling of Taro without the final ‘t’ and referred to the Suit of Disks rather than its more usual name of Pentacles. The best known Tarot pack with Golden Dawn affinities is that pictured by Pamela Colman Smith under the instruction of A.E. Waite. Colquhoun regarded that pack as a distortion of Mathers’ researches. In particular, she accused him of introducing a gender imbalance into the court cards by substituting Knaves for Princesses (see The Sword of Wisdom, p.250).
In 1977, in what turned out to be her final one-person show devoted to new work, Colquhoun exhibited her own designs for a Taro pack, ‘rendering the essence of each card by the non-figurative means of pure colour, applied automatically in the manner of the Psycho-morphological movement in Surrealism’ (catalogue note). In her designs she emphasised the links between the four suits and the four elements: ‘Basic to the cards is the concept of the Four Elements: Air (Swords, pale yellow), Water (Cups, deep blue), Fire (Wands, scarlet) and Earth (Disks, indigo).’
The catalogue note was later published separately.
References
Colquhoun, I. The Sword of Wisdom. MacGregor Mathers and the Golden Dawn. Spearman, London 1975.
Colquhoun, I. The Taro as Colour. Sangreal, 1978, Vol 1. No. 2 pp31-33.