De-coding Ithell Colquhoun’s TARO I - Navigation

“Ithell Colquhoun (1906-1988) painted her Taro designs in 1977. They were exhibited briefly that year but have not been seen in public since. Hers is not a figurative pack. For each card, she poured enamel paint onto a horizontal sheet of paper, allowing it to flow and mix. Sometimes she swirled it about with the pointed handle of a brush and sometimes she added dots added dabs of paint to emphasise certain features.”

Richard Shillitoe (2009) - from the text accompanying the cards.
…………………………….

THE MINOR ARCANA

Ithell Colquhoun uses the King Scale from Liber 777 which was used by the members of The Golden Dawn  including Aleister Crowley.

King Scale from Liber 777

1. Brilliance (White?)

2. Blue

3. Crimson

4. Violet

5. Orange

6. Rose

7. Amber

8. Purple

9. Indigo

10. Yellow


 NAVIGATING THE COLOUR SCHEMES

For a through exposition on the meaning attributed to each colour in each of the scales, I refer you to Crowley’s work in 777.

Although Colquhoun’s Taro is non-figurative the design, once revealed, tells you exactly where you are in terms of the card’s Element, Sephira and number attribution in the minor arcana (which for these cards, as for the RWS pack), is linked with Kabbalah.

Thus the key is the number/colour system of the King scale as given above.

So let’s start with the Four Elements

The four court cards are linked to the elements and thus to a colour as follows:

King Fire Red

Queen Water Blue

Prince/Knight Air Yellow

Princess/Page Earth Black (IC deviates from the King scale with this attribution).

Above we have along the top row the Court cards that would be Fire attributed in a figurative Tarot pack to Wands. Below them are those that would be attributed to the Element Water and therefore to Cups. L-R: King, Queen, Prince/Knight, Princess/Page.

As we know, the court cards represent the sub-element of an element. This is reflected by a small inner colour (sub-element) surrounded by the Element of the suit. So the King of Wands (top left), is Fire of Fire, whilst his queen is Water of Fire. This is reflected by red surrounded by red for the King of Wands and blue surrounded by red for the Queen of Wands. The Prnce/Knight is yellow/red and Princess/Page black/red, respectively.

This arrangement is repeated for Water/Cups only with blue (Water) as the surrounding colour.

For the moment I will ignore the meaning of the flecked outer edge of the cards. Suffice to say that it does identify the card as a court card belonging to one family.

These court cards are important because IC’s Tree of Life attributions follow an elemental coding throughout, as we shall see.

The Aces of each suit, as we know, represent the pure elemental principle nascent, which unfolds as the suit progresses through the following nine numbers.

The Aces of this Taro look like this:

So, we have the elemental colours in the centre with a gold flecked light background. This background is possibly from the Queen scale of colour in Liber 777 which is described as ‘white brilliance’, it may also be that surrounding that is the Emperor/Prince colour scheme also ‘white brilliance’ and finally the Empress/Princess colour scale ‘white flecked-gold’.

This would make sense as the Ace would then represent a ‘whole’ waiting to unfold.

The next level of attribution is on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life.

So, above we have a picture of the suit of Air/Swords. We know this because the background colour is yellow, which is attributed to Air as Red is to Fire and Blue to Water in our picture of the court cards above.

As soon as we see this yellow background we know that we are looking at the Air/Swords cards. However, we can also know what the number of the card is by looking inward from the edge at the next colour encountered as it reflects the King scale allocated to that number (see above).

2 - blue, 3 - crimson, 4 - violet etc.

But what about the central colour? Notice that the cards on the right side of the Tree - 2, 4 & 7 are all red. The left column are all centrally blue. Cards 6 & 9 in the central column are yellow and 10 (Malkuth), is black.

The reason for this is because of the court cards which rule the different parts of the Tree of Life. The King card rules the right column (Fire/red), the Queen the left (Water/blue), The Prince the central column apart from Malkuth (Air/Yellow), and the Princess/Page the earthy Sephira (Earth/Black).

The emphasis of IC’s Taro is on the correspondences rather than the images more familiar with Tarot packs such as RWS or even the Thoth pack. We must remember IC was a surrealist artist so apart from the ‘rational’ correspondences she was also wanting to leave open the forms suggested by the simulacra suggested created by the random application of paint. As her biographer, Richard Shillitoe points out in the text accompanying this Tarot pack:

“It was important to her that although she determined which colours to apply initially, many of the final forms and colour mixtures were influenced by forces that were not under her conscious control. Each card is signed with her monogram devised from her magical name: the letters S.V. enclosed in a circle, Splendidior Vitro: “more sparkling than crystal”.”
…


to be continued…
………………………………

The Life and Work of Ithell Colquhoun.

TARO pack published by Adam McLean