Implements on the Golden Dawn Magician Card.

In Tony Fuller's article on the The Elusive Tarot of the Golden Dawn – A small part of the Solution, (found in the Universal Mysteries file section), we are informed that the implements upon the altar are the “Z.A.M. Lesser Implements,” more commonly known as the Four Elemental Weapons of the Inner Order. This identification is further elaborated upon in the ThAM paper on the Heptagram. In the Rider–Waite–Smith deck, the altar likewise displays the familiar elemental weapons, as does the Regardie–Wang deck. Regardie himself adapted this arrangement, departing from the imagery found in his personal Felkin deck. The difficulty, however, is that outside the Whare Ra Temple in New Zealand, very few people had any clear understanding of the significance of the particular implements shown in the Felkin version, the sword, spear, chalice, and stone. To complicate matters further, Mrs. Felkin, in her paper on the Tarot Trumps, specifically states that the implements on the altar of the Magician card were the elemental weapons. The result is something of a puzzle, and for many students it remains a considerable head-scratcher.

What Regardie, Wang, and many subsequent writers discussing Felkin’s version of the Golden Dawn Tarot appear not to have fully appreciated was the profound influence that Felkin’s Order of the Table Round had upon his thinking and symbolism. This Arthurian Order, inherited through Neville Meakin, became an important part of Felkin’s spiritual and magical worldview. Indeed, when Felkin died, he was buried in the robes of the Head of the Table Round rather than those of a Magus of the Stella Matutina, a fact that speaks volumes regarding the importance he attached to the Order. While Felkin undoubtedly believed in the mystical reality of Christian Rosenkreutz and the Rosicrucian current, he was equally captivated by the Arthurian Mysteries and the spiritual symbolism of the Grail tradition.

The influence of these two streams, Rosicrucian and Arthurian, is woven throughout Felkin’s tarot imagery. In particular, the uppermost trumps display a strong orientation toward the symbolism of the Grail Hallows. Viewed from this perspective, the altar implements of the Magician take on a different significance. Rather than being understood solely as elemental weapons in the conventional Golden Dawn sense, they may also be interpreted through the lens of the Grail Mysteries.

The Four Talismans of Ireland, the Stone of Fal, the Spear of Lugh, the Sword of Nuada, and the Cauldron of the Dagda, have long been compared with the Four Grail Hallows, and in many esoteric traditions the two sets of symbols are treated as functionally interchangeable. The presence of the stone in Felkin’s imagery is particularly revealing, for it immediately evokes both the Stone of Destiny and the Grail Stone traditions, concepts that have no obvious place among the standard elemental weapons of the Golden Dawn. This suggests that Felkin was deliberately creating a dual symbolism, one that could be read both in terms of the elemental weapons of the Inner Order and in terms of the Arthurian Grail Hallows.

My own conviction regarding this interpretation arose the first time I witnessed the Order of the Table Round ritual involving the Grail Hallows. The parallels were striking and difficult to ignore. At that moment I became convinced that the unusual altar implements depicted in the Felkin version of the Magician card derived directly from the symbolism of the Grail Hallows as employed within the Order of the Table Round. In this light, the image ceases to be an anomaly and instead becomes a subtle but deliberate expression of Felkin’s synthesis of Golden Dawn and Arthurian mystical traditions.