Missionary of Wands. Art by Celeste Pille, from The American Renaissance Tarot.
“George Lippard, our Missionary of Wands (our version of the Knight of Wands) was an amazing individual who wrote the most popular American novel of the 1840s. He wrote obsessively about secret societies like Freemasonry and the Rosicrucian Order. It is to Lippard that we owe the fiction that the founding of the United States was engineered by Freemasons and, by extension, angelic ascended masters. So think of him as the 19th century version of Dan Brown. I was fortunate to get to study Lippard’s hand-written ritual book for The Brotherhood of the Union, a Rosicrucian-style order based on American history that he founded in Philadelphia (the Brotherhood’s effects are now owned by Library Company of Philadelphia). You can see Lippard dressed in his ritual regalia in the subsequent image. Lippard really believed in Universal Brotherhood, it was the founding principle of his occult order. We’ve placed the Philadelphia State House, birthplace of the Constitution, in the background. The State House is invoked as a powerful symbol in Lippard’s lurid novel, The Quaker City; the noble promise of the State House contrasts painfully with the excesses of social corruption and political hypocrisy he depicts.” — Thea Wirsching
