The Lost City of Muziris

The Tabula Peutingeriana

The Romans, we know, traded for spices at sites along the western shores of the Hindoostani sub-continent, but the most famous trading centre of all, usually known as Muziris (or Muchiri), and mentioned in several Latin sources, including Pliny, and marked on the famous Roman map the Tabula Peutingeriana, is lost to us. Southern Indian sources speak of the Yavanas (Romans) and their “beautiful ships” that “stir the white foam on the Periyar River” coming to the “city where liquor abounds”, the “city that bestows wealth… to the merchants of the sea…” But where exactly was this illustrious city? It was, we can surmise, somewhere in the vicinity of present-day Cochin – the port city now at the mouth of the Periyar River - but its exact location in that area is unknown.

The problem arises because cyclonic floods of catastrophic proportions in the year 1341 completely reshaped the Malabar coastline. Muziris – or the city that succeeded it, by then called Cranganore – was drowned and the ancient port silted up. It is estimated that the coastline shifted several kilometers. A new opening of the Periyar into the Arabian Sea was opened and a backwater formed by the long stretch of the newly created Vypen Island. 

The complex waterways where the Periyar River meets the Arabian Sea was reshaped by the floods of 1341. Muziris was lost. Kochi (Cochin) became the principle port. 

It was after the events of 1341 that commerce shifted to Cochin which then became the centre for inter-civilizational trade for a series of early modern colonial powers: first the Portugese, then the Dutch and finally the British in turn. The history of Cochin is well documented, but anything prior to 1341 is sketchy at best. The great trading port known to the Romans, once the meeting place of east and west, is lost. 

It would be a great boon to discover it again, because it was there, in ancient times, that Rome met China, and also where the three great Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Mahometanism are supposed to have made their first entry into India. The Tabula Peutingeriana indicates that the Romans had built a Temple of Augustus there. Jewish legend says that Jews from the period of Solomon settled there, and then over 10,000 refugees from the destruction of the second Temple made their way there in the year 72AD founding synagogues along the Malabar coast. Christian sources relate that St. Thomas travelled there in the year 52AD, founding seven churches and bringing Thomasine Christianity to Southern India. Then, Muslim sources relate that the king of Muziris travelled to Mecca, met the Prophet Muhammad and converted to Islam and in this way Islam was first brought to India. Land routes came later. The sea route from the Red Sea or Persian Gulf to the Malabar Coast was of prime importance in the beginning. 

Thus was Muziris axial in the contacts between India and the West, as well as hosting a community of Chinese traders (famous for their distinctive fishing nets which still characterize the coastline in this region today) and thus being the midpoint between great civilisations. Muziris was one of the great hubs, the great junctions of human civilization. 

Without knowing the location of the city, and until excavations of the location have been made, however, much of the history of the western or Malabar coast is in question and subject to sometimes rancorous debate. Was there really a Temple to Augustus? When did the first Jews arrive? How early was Christianity established in Western India? Was there a trade of ideas between Europeans and the Chinese? 

A historical marker on the foreshore of Fort Kochi relating the great flood of 1341 explains that the Chinese fishing nets previously located at Crangancore.

The author is presently residing in Fort Kochi, on Cochin island, and has been spending his days visiting historical sites and pondering some of the historical problems related to this lost city. His interest is mainly in issues concerning the St. Thomas Christians and, even more, the Malabar Jews, and the peculiar religious traditions found in this famous region. It is, though, a very tangled matter. Local debates concerning the long lost ‘Muziris’ have caught his attention in the last few days, and they are rancorous indeed. As noted above, the very geography of the region has shifted considerably since ancient times, and there is now no agreement about how the area might once have looked. Debate rages. There are contending camps, and efforts to locate the lost city are hindered by the peculiar ferocity that characterizes Indian historical debates.

* * * 

The rancor was on full display just a few days ago. The President of the Indian Republic made a visit to the area and was due to visit the so-called 'Muziris Heritage Project', this being a set of archaeological diggings in the village of Pattanam. His visit caused an uproar, however. A group of historians rose up to denounce the 'Muziris Heritage Project' as fake and urged the President to stay away. This, at the eleventh hour, he did, and that decision was duly denounced as "painful" and "hurtful" and "perplexing" by a counter group of historians who have worked on the diggings at Pattanam for many years. What, the present author wondered, was all the fuss about? It is difficult to work out. The entire matter is hopelessly politicized in a thoroughly Indian way. In such a climate of disputation it is almost impossible to establish the truth. The matter, however, seems to have gone as follows:

*It is generally agreed, based on all records, that Muziris was in the vacinity of the medieval city known as Cranganore (known to the Jews as Shingli) and this is identified as the modern village of Kodungallur. 

*Diggings at Kodungallur, however, have been fruitless. No evidence of an ancient city on that site have been discovered. There are artifacts from the medieval period, but no earlier. So it happens that Muziris is not where we expected. 

*In the early 2000s another excavation was made at nearby Pattanam. This was done by the Kerala Council for Historical Research mainly consisting of amateur local historians. Diggings turned up some Roman coins and other artefacts along with a profusion of glass beads.

*The KCHR announced that Muziris had been found at Pattanam. Subsequently, the 'Muziris Heritage Project' was established and promoted to tourists. 

*But the identification of Pattanam with Muziris is premature. The fact that Roman coins etc. were found there is not in the least conclusive. Roman coins etc. have been found at many sites. It does not mean that Romans were at those sites, only that people at those sites traded with Romans, or traded with people who traded with Romans. 

*There are now contending groups of historical opinion. Some - mainly locals - proclaim Pattanam as the long lost city. Others - mainly outsiders - are sceptical or indeed denounce the Pattanam diggings as spurious. These critics believe that Pattanam was nothing more than a centre of glass bead-making and a marketplace. The 'Muziris Heritage Project', they say, is a tourist scam. 

*Nevertheless, the diggings at Pattanam are, at least, promising and perhaps indicate part of the ancient city. Much more exploration is needed. This, however, is hindered because the good people of Pattanam fear that their land is being taken from them and have resisted further archaeology. 

*It was into this tangle that the President wandered. At the last minute his advisors told him to back out, which he did. Thus the furore. History in modern India is like that. The experts agree on nothing. There are religious and ethnic sensitivities at every turn.  Parties are always eager for legitimacy. The slightest affront unleashes tirades of dispute. 

The present author has visited at least some of the areas of contention, but he is certainly in no position to make his own determination on such vexed matters. We know that Muziris was around here somewhere, but where? The land is low-lying, a maze of islands and backwaters. There are many layers of history, but the catastrophe of 1341 seems to have been decisive. History earlier than that is well and truly lost. Is Muziris at Pattanam? Unfortunately, it is just as possible that the original site of the great ancient city is currently somwhere at the bottom of the natural harbour of which Cochin now forms the gateway. 

Yours

Harper McAlpine Black

Roger Sworder the Platonist

Science & Religion in Archaic Greece

Amidst the madness and cacophony of late post-industrial modernity there are, hidden here and there, still a few quiet voices of perennial sanity. One of them is Roger Sworder the Platonist. Since retiring from a long and distinguished career as a University lecturer – known for his inspiring and compelling lectures – he has been especially productive, publishing numerous books of essays on Platonic and related themes. He stands among the company of a new breed of Platonic scholar who reject the dry, purely textual and theoretical approach to Plato and ancient wisdom traditions promoted in the Western academy over the last few centuries. Instead, like such scholars as Arthur Versluis, Pierre Hadot and Peter Kingsley – and following such maligned advocates as Thomas Taylor in former times - he sees the Greek heritage as a sapiental tradition, a spiritual tradition, that was and is central to Western civilization. 

In Dr. Sworder’s case he is a graduate of Oxford University, but he has few kind things to say about that august institution. He argues that the way the Greek philosophical tradition has been taught in such institutions of higher learning amounts, in fact, to a type of anti-philosophy, the very opposite to a tradition of spiritual wisdom. Indeed, he supposes that the strangulation and deformation of the ‘Classics’ in such institutions has been a deliberate device in the construction of the atheistic wasteland of Western modernity. In part, this is why he has spent his entire career teaching and writing in the remote backwaters of regional Australia. It was in a small, insignificant rural college that he was able to construct and teach a viable programme of studies outside of the strictures of the academic mainstream. This programme took the form of a degree course entitled ‘Studies in Western Traditions’ and then, later, in the wake of the endless amalgamations and restructurings to which Australian universities are prone, in a major programme entitled ‘Philosophy & Religious Studies’. His special expertise in all incarnations of those programmes was the Greeks – Plato, the Presocratics and Homer – and also the English Romantics. Away from the stuffy conventionalism of Oxford he was able to teach as he saw fit for over thirty years. Now he devotes his days to a semi-monastic contemplative existence writing and publishing.

A strident critic of corrosive technologies, he is happily internet-free, has never sat at a computer, composes his work in long-hand and indulges in neither email nor mobile phone. This is not just a stubborn Luddite posture, though; he has a genuine and deeply Platonic concern for the dehumanizing impact of technology, especially on meaningful human work. His deepest fear is that mankind is busily constructing what he calls a “toy store” of gadgets for itself without any notion of why or to what end. For many semesters his flagship subject was entitled ‘Philosophy of Work and Art’, delivered to students of both the Bachelor of Arts and the Bachelor of Fine Arts. Citing the teachings of the Republic – as also the Bhagavad Gita from the Hindoo Tradition – he sees meaningful work as the centerpiece of the human estate and the degradation of work as the most damning feature of industrial modernity. Further still, in the tradition of Thomas Taylor, he is a careful and precise critic of the methodical excesses of the modern sciences that underpin technology, the great shibboleth of our times. His disdain for the vulgarity of techno-modernity is legendary among his friends. A non-driver, he curses the age of the automobile. He has a Pythagorean devotion to fine music (he is married to the Chinese concert pianist, Nan Chien) and a corresponding hatred of noise. Nothing rouses his ire like the infernal racket of machines.

Mining, Metallurgy & the Meaning of Life

A deliberate anonymity is an important feature of Dr. Sworder’s entire manner. He lives in a remote corner of the world, communicates little, and writes his books without fanfare or efforts at self-promotion. He trusts that his work will reach those few who might profit from reading it. He does not indulge in the egoic antics of some and is wary of academic careerists. More to the point, he stays aloof from the New Age fads that occupy the borderlands of the ‘spirituality’ movement. He is neither a shaman nor a Sufi nor indeed an upper-case T ‘Traditionalist’. His writing is simple, clear, sparse and unadorned. He feels no need to show off his skills in Greek and Latin nor the great depth of his reading. His style is understated and modest but readers can be assured that it rests on the solid foundations of a lifetime’s earnest and dedicated study. He avoids verbosity. He is not out to match wits with self-important professors or to dazzle readers with his references. Nor is he building a personality cult. He is offering a sober, penetrating reading of Plato and the ancients relevant to our times and to the impasse in which we find ourselves based on hard-won observation. He receives little credit or acclaim, yet he is – without doubt – one of the foremost Platonists writing in English today. 

A Contrary History of the West & Other Essays

The cornerstone of Dr. Sworder’s ouvre is his work on the father of occidental ontology, Parmenides of Elea, and the relation of that thinker to Plato. He offers his own translation of the famous (fragmentary) poem of Parmenides and an interpretation of its symbolism and implicit cosmology. Although Parmenides is counted as the great metaphysician of the Western tradition, Sworder proposes that the proper way to approach his metaphysics is through cosmology. He reconstructs the parallelisms of this cosmology, seeing the goddess Aphrodite (and her star, the planet Venus) as central to the Parmenidean vision. It is Aphrodite (Venus) who is sentinel to the Palace of Night. Moreover, in a series of simple and elegant correspondences, Sworder shows how this reading of Parmenides demonstrates how the Delphic oracle worked in principle and how it offers a solution to Plato’s most intractable mathematical problem, the Nuptial Number. This was published in a private edition many years prior to the now best-selling venture of Peter Kingsley in The Dark Places of Wisdom and has been republished. For those who are wary of Kingsley’s neo-Shamanic and anti-Platonic primitivism – a journey into a pre-rational darkness - Roger Sworder offers a different account, one that unites Parmenides and Plato in the same tradition. 

Mathematical Plato

In the opening essay of his more recent book Mathematical Plato, he provides an altogether luminous reading of Plato’s most troublesome dialogue, called the Parmenides, in which he offers a simple way to resolve apparent difficulties – from a Parmenidean point of view – arising out of Socrates’ pet theory, the Theory of Forms. Sworder sees Plato as using the monism of Parmenides to resolve the apparent dualities of that Theory and in the process offer a vision of an ‘optimal’ world, the best of all possible worlds. Sworder’s Platonism, that is to say, is not in any sense world-denying.

It is worth quoting the final paragraphs of that essay, since they provide a capsule statement of Sworderean Platonism:

Plato’s theory of ideas expresses that view of the world around us where everything is very beautiful. The myths of the Phaedo and Republic, Phaedrus and Statesman spring from this same visionary power. This is the world of Parmenides’ chariot ride to the palace of a Goddess who reveals all things to him; the world of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Divine and mortal freely mix. Everything is well made and performs at the limit of its potential; our everyday activities are archetypal. It is perhaps a greater injustice than Socrates suffered that Plato should ever be considered a Utopian idealist who despised the world.

Fully to understand how this world is the most perfect possible realization of the fullest totality of the most exquisite ideas is a Her- culean education. The deepest seclusion is needed to complete a thorough study of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music and dia- lectic. After these come their applications to the natural sciences. These studies are typically pursued through early adulthood to middle age. That done, the meaning of our human life emerges as a vision in which no further parting is possible between the absolute and the relative, the eternal and the temporal. There is apocatastasis. This is the goal of Plato’s theory.

The present writer must confess to being a student of Dr. Sworder and to regarding him as a mentor. 

The works of Roger Sworder are available through Sophia Perennis Press. 

The Romantic Attack on Modern Science in England & America

* * * 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

The Forgotten Queens of India

We account for the rise of the modern Indian nation state through the retreat of the British Raj and the decline of the British Empire, but in fact it was more than that: more than a movement for independence among Indians, it was also a movement for republicanism and Indian unity and the end to the many centuries of all the various kingdoms and principalities that had existed as a shifting patchwork in the Hindoostani sub-continent. This was its wider ideological agenda. It was essentially a socialistic national movement - altogether typical of that part of the XXth century - that matched "anti-imperialism" with a liberal egaliatarian nationalist ideology. Independence activists were not only against the British but also, necessarily, against many time-honoured Indian institutions as well. The British Raj had, in fact, been an umbrella over a network of local kings, princes, maharajas, nizams and others. When the Raj ended - more because of the exhaustion of war against the Germans in Europe than because of the merits or methods of so-called 'freedom fighters' in India - the influence of Indian royalty ended as well. Today, the Maharajas have no official power, although many of them continue to be influential, wealthy and widely respected (where they have not degenerated into buffoons or tourist celebrities.) 

A new book, published on the last day of 2015, celebrates the forgotten queens and princesses of the wide lands of Hindoostan. The simple purpose of this post is to recommend it. The book, Maharanis: Women of Royal India, is a collection of exquisite photographs of the women of those royal houses that became officially defunct in 1947. The photographs have been collected from diverse sources and are presented with accompanying essays, mostly concerning the photography and the role of photography in modern Indian history. It is a book, that is, by and for photographers, first and foremost. But it is also a beautiful and timely book for those of us who remain firm in the conviction that royalty and monarchy are worthy expressions of human dignity, embodiments of the sublime, and not just "outmoded forms of inequality" as the envy-driven would have it.

The present writer, in any case, makes no secret of his fondness for royalty as an institution and for monarchy as an element of tradition and government. (The organic principle of monarchy is that the best analogy of the state is a family, not a corporation, not a contractual partnership, not a machine.) This book records and celebrates a dimension of the royal houses of Hindoostan - and some of their marital interconnections with royalty from other lands - that is usually overlooked or has, indeed, been kept from public view. Alas, in contemporary India these women have been replaced by the vamps and tramps of Bollywood - you cannot really abolish aristocracy, you only end up replacing it with secular dynasties and  ill-bred pretenders. 

The photographs are beautiful in themselves, as are the women, but also of interest in the way that royal portraiture developed in India, usually by the adoption of British Victorian conventions. In some cases, though, distinctive Indian traditions intrude, such as conventions borrowed from the traditions of the Moghul miniature, especially among official the court photographers in the larger royal courts in the north of the sub-continent. 

Click on any photograph for an enlarged view.

Thakorani Vijayalakshmi Devi Sahiba of Kotda Sangani, c. 1941 – 1942 

Rani Sethu Parvathi Bayi and Rani Sethu Lakshmi Bayi of Travancore

Maharani Gayatri Devi of Jaipur, c. 1960s

Rani Prem Kaur Sahiba of Kapurthala, Hyderabad 1915

Princess Rama Rajya Lakshmi Rana, undated

Princess Rafat Zamani Begum – Bari Begum Sahiba of Rampur, of Najiabad Family, 1960.

Kanchi Bada Maharani Balkumari Devi Rana of Nepal in 1908

Maharani Vijaya Raje Scindia of Gwalior, c. 1940s

Shrimant Maharajkumari Mrunalini Raje Gaekwad of Baroda, the Maharani of Dhar, 1940

Princess Durru Shehvar, Princess of Berar by marriage and Imperial Princess of the Ottoman Empire by birth. c. 1940–1945

Maharani Gayatri Devi of Jaipur, also known as Princess Ayesha of Cooch Behar, 1951.

Maharani Sita Devi of Baroda in 1948

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

The Ginger House in Jew Town

Museums in India can be disappointing affairs that demonstrate more a lack of funding and archival expertise than they do the history and culture of the great lands and peoples of Hindoostan. Indians of a post-colonial mind often fume about artificats that have found a home in foreign museums, but when the same artifacts are returned to the bosom of Mother India they end up in shabby, poorly lit, dusty museums, wrongly labeled and deteriorating rapidly with the humidity and direct sunlight. Even the great collection that was once the Royal Asiatic Society in Calcutta, as the present writer discovered, is these days poorly presented with many displays unimproved since the 1950s. Moreover, the official museums often present tardy collections because the real jewels of Hindoostani history are pirated by a corrupt trade into private hands; the public museums are just so-so because the best pieces fall into private collections.

By far the most impressive collection of Indian artifacts that this writer has encountered during his long sojourn in the sub-continent was not in a museum but in an old warehouse in the back streets of Jew Town in Cochin. The warehouse is called the ‘Ginger House’ because, in former days, it was a store for the Dutch trade in ginger. It fronts directly onto the water and an area that was once a busy dock. Now it is an extensive series of large rooms brimful - overflowing! - with remarkable art objects, statues, idols, and other paraphernalia taken from old temples, churches, mosques and sundry holy places from throughout the length and breadth of India. It is the most extraordinary collection of such pieces imaginable.

It is a private collection with all items for sale. It is said to be “government approved” although it is uncertain exactly what this means. The present author was curious about the legitimacy of purchasing objects from there if they were to be taken out of India. Upon this inquiry a woman of earnest demeanor arrived reiterating that everything is “government approved” and testifying to the soundness of the mailing system. “But what if I buy this Ganesh statue for $10,000 only to find that it can’t be taken out of the country?” the author persisted. “No, no, sir,” she said. “It is packed in a secure crate and sent to your home address.” She explained that their clientele are wealthy collectors from far and wide.

Where does it all come from? It was explained that it had been collected from all over India for a period exceeding thirty years. (So, the author thought, this is where the artifacts pilfered from the temples of Tamil Nadu end up!)

In any case, it is far more extensive and comprehensive - and impressive! - than any public collection, by far. Upon walking in one is simply gobsmacked by the extent and the quality of the work for sale. There are literally entire temples, pillars and all, for sale. In one room there seems to be all the panels and icons and decorations from an entire Catholic church. 

There are signs throughout saying ‘Sorry, no photography’ and yet people were wandering through photographing it right in front of the staff. The photographs below give only an introductory impression of just how extensive, how vast - room upon room upon room, a wonderland, of religious artifacts - is the collection at the ‘Ginger House’ in Jew Town.

Yours

Harper McAlpine Black

Pamela Colman Smith - A Savant With a Child's Heart

Anyone with even the slightest familiarity with the tarocci or “tarot” cards will be acquainted with the work of Miss Pamela Colman Smith, although they may be excused for not knowing her name. In the early years of the XXth century Miss Smith – an Anglo-American illustrator – was commissioned by the Masonic occultist Mr Arthur Waite to design a complete set of all seventy-eight cards of the traditional tarot deck. She completed this work in a remarkably short period of time between April and October 1909 and some time after this the cards were published by William Rider & Sons of London under the title ‘A Pictorial Key to the Tarot’. They have thereafter been known as the ‘Rider-Waite’ tarot and the name of the illustrator was not included in the title or on the box. This omission was then duplicated in 1971 when the American company US Games Inc. purchased the copyright to the cards and reissued them to the American market, making them the most well-known and popular tarot cards of the modern era. Today, the ‘Rider-Waite’ cards have become infused into popular culture to the extent that they may be regarded as prototypal; there are countless new sets on the market today, each with new illustrations on new themes, but the Rider-Waite cards are, as it were, a standard. It is a great pity then that the illustrator, the person most responsible for the indelible images of the cards, is not better known. It was an injustice she suffered in her own lifetime. Mr. Waite paid her only a token fee for her work and she received no royalties from sales. Born in 1878, she died penniless, debt-ridden and forgotten in 1951. 

By virtue of the ‘Rider-Waite’ tarot, however, Miss Smith – she was generally known as “Pixie” – must be credited as having had a profound impact upon the visual imagination of the modern West. Her tarot cards, rendered in her simple, linear style with Art Nouveau influence, are her masterpiece. The remarkable thing is that she was able to translate the instructions of the verbose and tedious Mr. Waite into compelling images that arrest the imagination and, most importantly, impose themselves upon the memory. No other design of the tarot comes near to Miss Smith’s in this respect. Others are more beautiful and yet others are more symbolically exact, perhaps, but Miss Smith made the tarot her own. She entered into the spirit of the cards and conjured images of a strongly mnemonic concrete lyricism that truly captured something of the zeitgeist of the modern occult revival, a defining counter-modernist trend that shaped early XXth century. 

They bear comparison and contrst to the cards made by Lady Frieda Harris under the instruction of the sinister Aleister Crowley. Superficially, those of Lady Harris have a deeper artistic merit, and Mr. Crowley has packed the designs with Qabbalistic allusions, but finally, compared to the charming directness of the Pixie Smith designs, they are turgid and pretentious. Miss Smith understood one of the keys to the tarot: the images on the cards are essentially caricatures. This is so in the medieval designs and she has retained that medieval flavor. The Crowley or ‘Thoth’ deck is, in contrast, a modernist mess. The same can be said of other more recent designs. They are contrived by comparison. No one quite captures the spirit of the tarot, and renders it modern yet integral, like Miss Smith.

The actual processes by which the Waite-Smith collaboration took place are not certain, but it seems likely that Mr. Waite’s input was largely restricted to the twenty-two Major Arcana. Of the fifty-six pip cards – the Minor Arcana – it is likely that Miss Smith had a very free hand. They, therefore, are her creation, and it is there that we see her genius. Mr. Waite’s Major Trumps display elements of his eclectic and sometimes misleading mash of symbols. Miss Smith’s Minor Arcana is a playhouse of little dramas and quaint allegories that bring the much-neglected minor cards new vitality. The chief inspiration for the Major Arcana seems to have been the XVIIIth century Tarot of Marseilles, while for the Minor Marcana Miss Smith appears to have looked to the Sola Busca Tarot of the XVth century for her model. The illustrator has successfully retained the essence of those earlier decks and recreated them in a new pictorial vocabulary. This is no small achievement. It is an achievement that is too often underestimated by those who like to criticize this tarot and sing the virtues of newer designs that are full of reckless innovations and artistic egoism. Miss Smith’s designs are not technically accomplished, but at least she shows faultless judgment as to how and when to depart from her medieval models and there is no egoism to be seen in the least.

The present writer, in any case, is an outspoken enthusiast for what should rightly be called the ‘Pixie Smith’ Tarot, and more broadly for Miss Smith’s art in general. Her tarot – even where Arthur Waite imposed his cranky symbolism upon the Major cards - is simply unsurpassed. She made the form her own. Her designs define the tarot in this epoch. She was not, admittedly, a great artist by the usual standards, and she was certainly not a successful one in monetary terms or in terms of wide recognition. Had she not made tarot cards for Mr. Waites she might have disappeared into obscurity entirely. But her work is beautiful and distinctive by other standards, with a unique charm, a delightful sense of decorative whimsy, a lovely innocence, an enchanting sense of the fay. Stuart Kaplan, director of US Games Inc., once remarked that had she lived in his day he could have made her a millionaire.

Miss Smith designed bookplates, made illustrations for numerous books and at one stage edited and illustrated her own magazine, the ‘Green Sheath’ which claimed its own ‘school’ of fellow artists. She came into contact with Mr. Waites through the poet W. B. Yeats who employed her as an illustrator for his poems and who inducted her into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Despite this dalliance with the occult, however, she later converted to Catholicism and throughout her later years ran a boarding house for old priests in Cornwall. 

Her real qualifications for illustrating the tarot was her passion for folklore; wrote or co-wrote and illustrated several books on the subject, including one of Jamaican folklore entitled Annancy Stories. It sold poorly but it was the work that first attracted the attention of the Yeats family who were, at the time, looking for an artist to illustrate Gaelic tales. The father of W. B. Yeats, John, once described her work in an extant letter as follows: “Pamela,” he said…

“…is bringing out a book of Jamaica folklore. Her work, whether a drawing or telling of a piece of folklore, is very direct and sincere and therefore original - its originality being its naïveté. I should feel safe in getting her to illustrate anything. She does not draw well, but has the right feeling for line and expression and colour.”

Then he adds in summary:

“I don't think there is anything great or profound in her, or very emotional or practical. She has the simplicity and naïveté of an old dry-as-dust savant - a savant with a child's heart.”

This is a blunt assessment but also a very accurate account of her character and work - nothing great or profound but a savant with a child’s heart. This is the quality that Mr. Yeats recognized in her and that she brought to Mr. Waite’s tarot cards. It is the quality that makes her one of the most endearing of the supposedly lesser female artists of her time. We see this quality in all her work, samples of which are given below. It is her folkish lack of sophistication and her naïveté that made her the perfect vehicle for the spirit of the modern tarot. In the estimation of the present author, at least, Pamela Colman Smith – Pixie Smith – deserves far greater appreciation than she received in her lifetime or since and should be counted as an important artist in her own right. It is fashionable in some circles to disparage the ‘Rider-Waite’ tarot because it is now deemed ‘old fashioned’ or lacking in a contemporary aesthetic. This is a miscalculation of its worth. It is still the best tarot. The inspired naïveté of Pixie Smith lives still. The simplicity of the 'Rider-Waite' designs – the simplisticity of their illustrator – is an original and honest simplicity that taps deep into the medieval roots of the tarot and speaks directly to the modern Western consciousness. Her other work has the same charm and deserves to be celebrated in wider circles today. 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black