Gertrude Moakley

Gertrude Charlotte Moakley (February 18, 1905 – March 28, 1998) was an American librarian and a Tarot scholar.

Moakley is notable for having written the earliest and most significant account of the iconography of Tarot, a card game which originated in the Italian Renaissance.

She had worked at the New York Public Library.

Today, Tarot is both a popular game, and an object of fascination for occultists, fortune-tellers, and New Age enthusiasts around the world.

Moakley was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on February 18, 1905, to parents Arthur Irving Moakley and Josephine Henry (née Barrett).

She received a B.A. degree in classics from Barnard College in 1926 and a B.S. degree in library science from the Columbia University School of Library Science in 1928.

While attending Barnard in 1926, she was awarded the Tatlock Prize.

After graduation, Moakley began working as a librarian for the New York Public Library (NYPL).

She lectured on catalog arrangement at New York University, published articles in the NYPL Bulletin and the Journal of Cataloging and Classification.

She served as chair of a special committee which revised the Filing Code of the NYPL Circulation Department.

Moakley had served as the chairperson for the American Library Association.

She was also chairman of a committee that revised the ALA Rules for Filing Catalog Cards.

She appears in directories of librarians from 1933 through 1970, and she published several books on filing codes.

Although Moakley wrote and spoke on these latter subjects (in Moakley, 1954; Papus, 1958; Waite, 1959), she is remembered for having written one of the few scholarly books about the history of Tarot and the meaning of the allegorical trump cards.

She published articles, wrote introductions for two of the most influential books on the subject, and was invited by Eden Gray to appear on the Long John Nebel late-night radio program In 1954, Moakley published an article, "The Waite-Smith Tarot: A Footnote to The Waste Land" about T.S. Eliot's use of Tarot motifs in his 1922 work The Waste Land.

In his notes to the poem, Eliot refers to the "traditional" Tarot deck.

Moakley argued that he was actually alluding to the Waite-Smith Tarot deck.

Traditional Tarot decks date back to the Fifteenth Century, while the Waite-Smith deck was created by Arthur Edward Waite little more than a decade before Eliot's poem.

This modern deck incorporated many substantial differences from earlier decks.

Moakley argued that "the man with three staves", which Eliot insisted was "an authentic member of the Tarot pack", confirms the identity of his deck as Waite-Smith, the only deck at that time to have such a card.

Her article has been cited repeatedly in the literature on Eliot's poem.

Her 1956 article on the subject and her 1966 book were both praised by Erwin Panofsky, the foremost art historian of the Warburg School, as well as by Michael Dummett, the preeminent scholar of playing-card and Tarot history.

In 1958, Waite's translation of Tarot of the Bohemians, by Gérard Encausse (Papus), was republished with an introduction by Moakley.

As background, in the hope that even non-cultist readers might appreciate the book, she summarized some of the notable appropriations of the Tarot of the previous fifty years.

These included Eliot, Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance, and Charles Williams' The Greater Trumps.

She also mentioned W.B. Yeats's interest in the Tarot and the occult, and the relevance of Tarot to some of Carl Jung's followers.

Moakley argued that understanding the Tarot required knowledge of both the literal facts of Tarot history and the mythic musings of artists and occultists.

This dual focus is characteristic of the more thoughtful New Age writers who promote Tarot today.

In 1959, Waite's Pictorial Key to the Tarot was republished with an introduction by Moakley.

The reprint was prefaced with a quote from one of Waite's last books, The Holy Grail.

It alluded to a relation between Tarot and the Holy Grail, and "certain secret records now existing in Europe...."

It connects the suit-signs of Tarot to the so-called Grail Hallows, and thereby to Celtic lore.

(Waite and Eliot both borrowed from Weston).

Moakley repeatedly mentioned this common theme of 20th-century Tarot enthusiasts, including writers like Eliot as well as occultists and folklorists.

This connection was later incorporated into works like Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Da Vinci Code.

Moakley's introduction to The Pictorial Key provided some personal insight into Waite's character, his humor, mysticism, and scholarship.

Moakley also foreshadowed the emphasis of later writers on the artist of the Waite-Smith deck, Pamela Colman Smith.

The contemporary fascination with Tarot developed in the 1970s, but two decades earlier Moakley was writing and speaking about the subject.

She had moved to Florida in 1984.

Moakley died in St. Petersburg, Florida, on March 28, 1998.