I thought I would do a series of book reviews on this blog on old books that Plath owned and read, as I’m becoming aware that few others have read them. I’m going to start with the one scholars know Ted Hughes bought Plath for her birthday in 1956, The Painted Caravan: a penetration into the secrets of the tarot cards, by Basil Ivan Rákóczi. “It is my favorite book,” Plath wrote to Ted Hughes on October 17, 1956. (The Letters of Sylvia Plath, p. 1306)
Let’s get a couple of things straight: Rákóczi is a self-proclaimed Romany Gypsy. The word “Gypsy” today has fallen out of favor as a racial slur, but I will use it here because it is such a major part of this book. As we first called Native-Americans “Indians,” they were never from India; and the dark-skinned Gypsies of Central Europe were never from Egypt, but they’ve carried the myth along for a long time. Rákóczi perpetuates this myth of Gypsies and tarot all through The Painted Caravan. It is not a book to be read for historical accuracy or political correctness. The Painted Caravan is a book to understand what Plath learned about tarot and Qabalah (there are a number of spellings–I use Q for mine and I’ll quote the author as he spells it).
Beginning at the page preceding the Table of Contents, Rákóczi writes of the color plates on the book jacket, including the Fool chasing the butterfly (“moth breath” in Plath’s “Morning Song”), Gypsy Initiation rites, and a card designed just for T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” Talk about speaking her language: beautiful art, occult mysteries, psychological symbolism, and literature all in one! There is the Tarot Key (which is Kabala for Rákóczi —the traditional K spelling) and the “secret name of God and the Cosmos, in Kabalistic letters…” Yeah, you don’t have to even get as far as the Table of Contents before you’re deep into Kabala.
Preface: Let’s look at the first paragraph together:
“Symbols are doors leading to the hidden chambers of the mind. The uninitiated are stirred by the symbol but cannot divine its meaning. A Gypsy versed in the secret lore of the Tarot Cards holds the key to their mysteries. The writer is a lover of the Gypsies and a student at the feet of these masters of the Oracular Arts…” (p. 7)
A writer’s ultimate temptation! Here was a book promising divine symbols to affect minds, knowing or unknowing, through the influence of words. Hermes himself could not have said it better.
Rákóczi goes on to say that the Master Gypsy is:
“generally a woman, in spite of her title. She is not easy to meet, many caravans must be entered before she is found. Yet it is said that once in every man’s life the Master Gypsy must cross his path. If recognized, the Master has to give the Wisdom and may not accept money for it. That is the law.” (p. 7)
Here is fuel for Plath’s burgeoning feminism. We also see now why Plath says, “Do not accept it” in the poem that matches the (Gypsy) Magician tarot card, “The Couriers.”
In the Preface, Rákóczi introduces the pompous egos of famous occult theosophists, Kabalists, Rosicrucians, and Freemasons. But “The Gypsy is bound by both an outer and an inner pledge of secrecy,” he says. Yet another reason Plath might not have spoken or written openly about this. He goes on to explain that violating this oath “shows itself as a terrible disruption of mental powers.” (p. 8)
The madness and depression concur with what happens when one violates rules of Qabalah (one of which is that women can’t practice; another is that all must be over the age of forty. Plath broke both rules). In the Preface, Rákóczi refers to the tarot as Tarot Kabals, again recognizing it is a part of Kabala, and he explores the legends around tarot and Kabala, from Ancient Greece and Egypt, connecting to the Masonic lodges of modern day.
Chapter One: Tarot history according to Gypsy lore.
Rákóczi explains the wandering Romany people, with black Indian hair and skin and a language rooted in Sanskrit. Plath’s part-time job in the Sanskrit and Indian Studies department at Harvard in 1959 no doubt furthered her education in this subject. Rákóczi continues with a discussion of dress, dialect, occupation, and stereotypical statements such as “All agree that Gypsies steal.” Rákóczi examines origins of tarot next, saying the word tarot was proven to be from “a Q-Celtic language,” which is Goidelic or Gaelic, from Ireland (This was news to me, by the way. In my almost 40 years of studying tarot, I’m not sure I’ve seen anything to back that up. But that’s what Plath read).
Rákóczi discusses tarot as an anagram of rota, Latin for wheel but also meaning circle and womb, thus giving it more feminine power. I discussed this for the poem matched to The High Priestess, “The Rabbit Catcher,” in my first book, Fixed Stars Govern a Life: Decoding Sylvia Plath. Rákóczi also speculates as to whether the Greek god Hermes or his Roman counterpart Mercury (mentioned in Plath’s “Thalidomide” and “Nick and the Candlestick” poems) was the “Genius” of the tarot cards.
The author speaks of Gypsy connections to the wisdom of Chaldea and Egypt, the northern Druids, the Yoga teachings of the East, the Gnostics, and many other peoples I’ve never heard of until we get to the Albigensians, who:
“by reason of their belief in dualism, utilised wisdom symbols, now found in the Tarot cards, to initiate their converts into the hidden secrets of their doctrines of Absolute Evil and Absolute Good – a heritage which the Gypsies, versed in Zoroastrianism, transmitted to them.” (p. 13)
Dualities! Absolute Evil and Good! This is up Plath’s alley once again with Dostoevsky-like dual symbolism and Nietzschean philosophy. Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra is about Zoroastrianism. It is a book important enough to Plath that she put its cover in her scrapbook and wrote of reading all Nietzsche’s work. FSGL shows that Plath’s “The Night Dances” nods to this novel/poem, Nietzsche’s most poetic work.
The Book of the Dead is discussed, and we know that Hughes studied this at Yaddo. Ultimately, Rákóczi calls the tarot “a portable library” for the eternally wandering Gypsy:
“to house and to transmit, the means for augury, a chart of the heavenly bodies and notes on their influence upon man, to say nothing of hints on how to find the philosopher’s stone and the distillation of the elixir of life. […] Into these cards the Gypsy’s whole stock of emblematic wisdom and his secret science of numbers were condensed. They held, under veils, astrological, alchemical and necromantic keys, which only he knew how to use.” (p. 14)
The author discusses sexism in the tarot and among the Romany (and society in general), with some decks leaving women out completely outside of the High Priestess. He talks about the oldest decks found and their variations, which came to include representation of the Liberal Arts and Sciences (what I call the “Arts and the Humanities” mirror in FSGL). He discusses the use of tarot in Masonic lodges:
“Did they want an Egyptian rite? The Tarot provided it. The Kabalistic lore of the Jews, methods of alchemical transmutation, the direction of one’s life according to the stars, Scottish rites, Hindu rites, those of the Aztecs – why, a Gypsy could produce any of them. Incredible as it may be, out of this Tarot wisdom, he could draw the whole gamut of occult lore and ceremonial magic.” (p. 18)
Rákóczi explains that psychologist “C. G. Jung’s theory of the universality of the archetypes is well supported by the Tarot symbols,” (p. 20) and goes on to discuss the collective unconscious and family imagery we all share, mother and father especially, which is so prevalent in Plath’s work. (p. 21) It’s a regular Plathapalooza of her interests! He discusses High Priestesses of the Tarot in history and witch covens, and closes the chapter with a few nice paragraphs of T.S. Eliot’s significant use of the tarot in the “prophetic work, ‘The Waste Land.”
Well, we’ve only gotten through Chapter One, but you get the idea. The Painted Caravan is enough all alone to say that Plath most certainly knew a great deal about Qabalah, alchemy, and all of the wonders of the tarot deck. Used copies of the book can still be found online for about a hundred dollars.
The Painted Caravan: a penetration into the secrets of the tarot cards
by Basil Ivan Rákóczi.
Hardcover: 121 pages
Publisher: L. J. C. Boucher; 1st edition (1954), The Hague. Holland
Language: English