First of all, this is not a tarot deck. Tarot decks have 78 cards: Major, Minor and Court cards. This has 89 cards that are reversible; that is to say, on one side are aspects of the Angelic Watchtower system, while the other side has a conglomeration of tattva and I Ching symbols. Confused? You bet!

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At the top of the blurb is the claim “The synthesis of Eastern and Magick”. Fortunately it does not seem to refer to anything – let us forgive the copywriters’ excitement. If any system of magick and divination can lay claim to this statement, it is the Tarot. There are so many confusions, and we haven’t even started to look at the deck. For a start, the use of “Magick” is strange, since this is a Crowleyan term, and he has been a Bad Boy in Golden Dawn circles for nearly one hundred years!

There are serious problems with the Golden Dawn version of Enochian magic. Quite simply, the Golden Dawn fudged the whole system, incorporating bits and pieces of ceremonial magic that have nothing to do with John Dee’s Enochian system. For example, Dee and Kelley skryed the system using nothing more than crystal balls, and earnest prayer. Where are the ceremonial weapons and rituals? They exist only in the mind of the GD Magician. Let me make this clear – John Dee never used the banishing and invoking rituals, or Licenses to Depart, or the Telesmatic images that are described in this book.

This deck of cards only uses some of the powers of the Enochian Watchtower Tablets, which entirely ignores the 93 Governors, the 30 Aethyrs, the 24 Seniors and a number of other important areas of Enochian Magic. Furthermore, some of the letters on the squares are incorrect.

So, what do the Watchtowers represent? They are the four tables 12×13, which represent counterchange of the four elements in a number of combinations of levels of creation. The Golden Dawn added a ‘truncated pyramid’ to each square so that the elemental forces could be more easily visualised by the magician, except of course that this is not part of Dee’s original system. The Tarot has a similar system in the 16 Court cards.

At its simplest, this card deck gives a number of permutations of the four elements plus spirit – just like the Tarot. I get the impression that what happened during the creation of this card deck it was realised that the Enochian system as it is portrayed would not be enough. So, the creators added the tattva and I Ching on the reverse as a ‘bonus’. Both these systems were incorporated into the Tarot by the Golden Dawn and Crowley one hundred years ago – see Liber 777.

The ‘Western Tattva Tarot’ is not mentioned on box front, but in the book, it is found in Chapter 5. The Aces and Court Cards represent the Tattvas in the basic combinations, and relate to the Tablet of Union, a small but important grid of twenty squares. If you remember, the Queen of Wands is the Watery part of Fire. This deck has an extra level, so there would be for example, Water of Fire of Air. There are 22 cards for each element, which leaves one extra card, which is the Tablet of Union. However, do not fall into the trap of thinking that these 22 cards are in anyway associated with the Major Arcana. That is not how the Enochian system works.

None of the cards depict the I Ching hexagrams, which is rather surprising. As you know, the 64 hexagrams are comprised of the permutations of eight trigrams. However, this system uses the permutations of the three bigrams that make up each hexagram, and are described in the book.

When I was given this deck to review at the TABI weekend in Birmingham at the beginning of July, the cards had no power, but as I write this in September, there is now some energy associated with them, but I have not had the time or real inclination to explore exactly what has happened. So, unless you are expert in Enochian magic, do not expect any magical results. If you are an expert in Enochian Magic, why would you purchase this deck? I have difficulty asking this question. Learning the meanings of the cards given by the authors will be extremely tedious, while the lack of variety of colour in the cards will add to the problems of identifying the cards.

There are other decks that in my opinion do a better job of incorporating Enochian into the Tarot. Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot is one, while Lon Milo DuQuette’s Tarot of Ceremonial Magick integrates most of the Enochian system with the I Ching and standard tarot cards. There is also the Schueler’s Enochian Tarot deck, which is non-standard, but at least has the virtue of better artwork.

The Tarot and Enochian magick represent the pinnacles of the Golden Dawn system of magic. We are still waiting for the definitive book on the subject.