Summary: An legacy of a singular pack of tarot cards that correspond to images of the Greater Trumps arranged in a dance on a platform of gold in the retreat of a gypsy master drives his grandson to risk love and life to uncover the powers of the cards.

Charles Williams is known as one of the members of the Inklings who wrote supernatural fantasy thrillers. Lesser known was his interest in the occult arts, particularly through the influence of A. E. Waite and his Fellowship of the Rosy Cross. This work reflects some of those interests, centered around the Tarot.

Lothair Coningsby, an English civil servant of undistinguished refinement, inherits a small legacy from a friend including various packs of cards. Among them is a most unusual early set of Tarot cards representing the Greater Trumps, a suit of twenty-two cards. As it happens, his daughter Nancy is deeply in love with Henry Lee, a descendant of Gypsies, whose grandfather, Aaron is a master who has devoted his life to the studies of occult mysteries. In his home is an inner sanctum with a gold table on which the figures of the Greater Trumps are arranged in the dance. When Henry sees the cards he realizes that they are the exact visual counterparts of the statues on his grandfather's table. To bring the cards together with the statues would be to unleash great power, and great insights into the mysteries of the universe.

Henry explains their powers to Nancy:

“It’s said that the shuffling of the cards is the earth, and the pattering of the cards is the rain, and the beating of the cards is the wind, and the pointing of the cards is the fire. That’s of the four suits. But the Greater Trumps, it’s said, are the meaning of all process and the measure of the everlasting dance.”

There is only one problem. Coningsby will not part with the cards. So Henry and his grandfather invite the Coningsbys to spend the Christmas holidays. This includes not only Lothair and Nancy, but also Sybil, the most spiritually centered, who seems to have a mystical communion with the world about her, and brother Ralph, a young man who lives in a common-sense, practical world. Coningsby reluctantly brings the cards and permits them to be tested in the presence of the figures, which come to life in a glorious dance. When Coningsby continues to withhold the cards, Henry determines to "borrow" the cards, and use them to whip up a super cyclonic snow storm to strand Lothair, out for his Christmas walk, and bring about his death.

He succeeds in whipping up the storm, but Nancy catches him in the act, disrupting his efforts, but also the power to end the storm. Lothair is saved when Sybil braves the storm, and with the help of Henry's half-crazed Aunt Joanna, brings him back to the house. But this is only a temporary respite as the unleashed powers behind the snow storm threaten the destruction of the house, and all those in it.

Is there a power greater than that unleashed by the cards? When arcane knowledge cannot save, is there anything else that can? Nancy, Sybil, and even Lothair and Henry in their own ways choose in different ways to lay down their lives. Will they succeed, and what will happen to them in the process? What will happen to crazed Joanna, and will she find the lost child?

Like William's other works, seemingly unremarkable people in an ordinary English village and manor house become caught up supernatural events reflecting unleashed spiritual powers in a sequence of fantastic and sometimes bizarre events (like the gold cloud). Christians who have reservations reading about the "occult" may decide this work is not for them. Yet what Williams portrays is both the perils of the pursuit of spiritual power and hidden knowledge, and the great power of love. ( )

The Greater Trumps is one of Charles Williams' cycle of occult fantasy novels, and this is the one that foregrounds the tarot. I found it less engaging than War in Heaven or Many Dimensions. It has a few interesting visionary episodes, but the characters are fairly static, and the plot, although conveying a real sense of distress, neither excited nor illuminated me. The book will be most enjoyable to those with some prior orientation to tarot symbolism, and in particular a knowledge of the central images of the trump series. But such readers should not assume that their own understanding of the tarot informs this novel.

Williams is said to have been an initiate of the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, a Christian magical order descended from A.E. Waite's Golden Dawn schism. It was a little surprising to me that the tarot symbolism in his book departs so far from the system of correspondences developed in the Golden Dawn. There is no use of Tetragrammaton as a key to the minor suits, and the element of Fire is attributed to Swords, while Air is assigned to Wands, in the manner of Gardnerian Witchcraft. The particular "Greater Trumps" of the novel are the usual array, but numbered in an unaccustomed sequence: Empress before High Priestess, and Emperor before Hierophant; Hermit numbered VIII, Temperance IX, Fortitude X, Fortune XII, and Death XIV.

This edition of The Greater Trumps carries a foreword by American writer William Lindsay Gresham, who lionizes Waite as THE great authority on tarot. While one might (I would) dispute such an award, it is fitting in reflections on the work of Williams, for whom Waite was certainly more important and useful than any of the competing figures of modern occultism.

~A DRAGGING DANCE~

I was ever so excited. My love, Tarot, was about to meet my other love, reading novels, and dance together to the sounds of life going by...

But it was a boring dance; the musician did not perform well. The sentences towards the end of the book seemed to repeat each other over and over and the ending was quite unsatisfactory though a predictable and wished-for one. I dragged myself to the end of the book, to the end of the snow fall just to make sure I was not missing something.... oh no, I was not!

I am looking forward to find a GREAT Tarot+novel book!

Victoria Evangelina Belyavskaya ( )

I started reading this book a couple of years ago, when it was a selection for the Rosicrucian book club. I set it down when I was about three-quarters finished, and have just now picked it back up again and read to the end. I can't say I enjoyed it. While the concept is interesting, I had a hard time with the antiquated prose, and with the author's (overly florid, IMO) way of describing things. Also, some of the biases of the time (sexist and classist ones in particular) were jarring for me. ( )

See What I Have Been Reading, April 2010 at From Word to Word