A lot of occult and esoteric writers make a big point of explaining that their writings and interpretations are not for "the masses," that only someone with genuine occult aspirations will be able to understand them and make use of them. There are those that make the same claim about the Tarot itself, as a whole system, that uses by "ordinary people" are misguided and doomed to failure.

This type of thing has a long history in the occult world, of course, and I've noted it in the past coming from both Waite and Crowley. But at least they both had a clear concept of who they thought was worthy to understand their cards and their writings: it was someone who was initiated into their occult orders (and, in many cases, who had reached at least a certain level therein.) That's easy enough. What isn't so obvious, though, is what the modern torchbearers of the occult tradition mean by their updated versions of the same claims. I don't think I've ever seen these people being clear on what they think characterizes a real esoteric seeker, and who qualifies. I've seen this sort of thing coming from everyone from Rachel Pollack to jktarot (warning on that link: if you're anything like me, reading it is apt to put you in a seriously bad mood).

I have to suspect that the purpose of these things is (consciously or subconsciously) to stroke the egos of people who consider themselves to be real esoteric seekers, while shaming those that don't. And therein lies my interest in the question, because I'm never quite sure where I stand and whether I'm supposed to feel ego-stroked or ashamed. I know Waite or Crowley would consider me to be a dabbler, and I'm okay with that. I mostly consider myself to be a dabbler. I just don't have the time to get seriously into these things. I don't like it, but there it is. A lot of esotericism falls into the "someday" category with me. On the other hand, I really do care about these things, I want to learn more, I have a broad idea of what my deficiencies are and how I should go about correcting them, and I occasionally make motions in that direction (see my last post for an example of precisely this). But when I do, I am so often confronted with this language decrying dabblers.

I want to clarify that I'm not looking for sympathy here, or comments saying "Aw, you're a real occultist, don't pay any mind to those mean people." I just don't quite understand this phenomenon, and why there's so much animosity to those of us who don't have the time and energy to devote to "serious" study, but who do want to study nonetheless.

I recently read the book Dreaming the Future, by Clifford Pickover, which is a broad survey of divination methods. Some of the information in the book is interesting, and I like his approach (skeptical but open-minded), but unfortunately I don't feel I can wholeheartedly recommend the book because it's extremely poorly organized and has more proofreading errors than I've ever seen in a published book.

The most amusing part of the book deals with "The Antinoüs Prophecies," which are a set of nine prophecies that the author himself wrote in "Nostradamoid" style and gave to various people to interpret. In general, people fit the prophecies to world events, predicting things like World War II, the sinking of the Titanic, and the American Revolution. One particularly determined interpreter read each quatrain as describing the demise of IBM at the hands of Microsoft. (You can see the prophecies toward the bottom of this page).

The book also made me want to try automatic writing, not so much out of any desire to try to contact spirits, but just to see what happens.

But the most interesting thing in the book from my perspective was the short section on geomancy. I had heard of it essentially only in the Book of Thoth, in which Crowley says that the seven and eight of Disks are in the form of the geomantic figures Rubeus and Populus, respectively. I've had that on my (long) list of "things to figure out about the Thoth" for years, without doing anything about it. So the figures' appearance in Dreaming the Future was a pleasant surprise, answering a question I hadn't bothered to seriously ask yet.

I'm glad I started out with the Pickover book, because the Wikipedia article on geomancy is rather odd and incomplete, and seems to be written for the occult specialist rather than a general audience. Geomantic figures is more focused but probably a better introduction. The other important related web link I've found is Crowley's Liber 96 (html or pdf--the pdf version is easier to read). It's a more detailed resource than anything else I've found but apparently includes blinds (intentional inaccuracies to, as it says at the top of the html version, "baffle any one who may seek to prostitute it to idle curiosity or to fraud") so requires some critical reading. I've only skimmed it so far, so I don't know how obvious the blinds might be.

Geomancy turns out to be a method of divination in which you start by making 16 lines of marks on the ground, randomly, and then counting whether there's an odd or even number of marks in each row. Then you use that to build figures of four rows of dots, one dot for even and two for odd. These figures are combined in various ways. The four that are produced directly by your 16 lines of marks are called the Mother figures, which are combined to form Daughters, Nephews, Witnesses, and finally a single Judge. Each figure has a divinitory meaning. For example, Populus, which is on the 8 of Disks and is simply four rows of two dots each, relates to a gathering or assembly of people and to Cancer and the Moon, and is a neutral sign.

Where you go from here depends on how complicated you want the whole thing to be. Pickover's method simply uses the Judge as the final answer. Crowley's entails a lot of complex astrological calculations, and reminds me in its complexity of the Golden Dawn's preferred Tarot operation (more than a single spread), the Opening of the Key. It's interesting, and absolutely esoterically correct, but not terribly practical for use on a day-to-day basis. Meanwhile, Pickover's method seems a little over-simplified, not least because the way that the Judge is derived means that it's always going to contain an even number of dots--so half of the figures aren't even possible answers using his method. I suspect that as I play with it, I'll find some sort of middle road that's practical but incorporates enough complexity for me.

I finally finished trimming my Thoth this week, and the results are stunning. I definitely recommend it. It's amazing how much the grey borders suck the color out of the cards.

I used an Exacto knife and a cork-backed ruler to cut them. I know a lot of people use scissors, but on the large cards I'd have had to do it in more than one stroke with any pair of scissors I own. The Exacto knife worked pretty well. It's not perfect, and in particular there are a few cards that the knife slipped on slightly. It's less than a millimeter in all cases, but it's still noticeable to the touch. Still, there's no noticeable bias in shuffling that I can determine, though I might have to be careful if I cut the cards.

After trimming, I sanded down the edges a bit with fine sandpaper. I was skeptical about this step, but it did help even them out, and got rid of some of the irregularities where I'd cut too little. I have yet to round the corners. For now I'm just enjoying looking at the geometry of the cards without the borders intervening. I will round them, though, because I'm worried about them fraying. They already are, a bit, after the sanding.

I did my first reading with the trimmed cards a few days ago, and it was incredible. The colors were incredible and the connections between the cards were clearer than I'm used to. One nice thing is that since I did study and use the cards extensively before trimming them, I know all the names of the pip cards and can choose to use them when that seems like the right thing to do. In particular, in this reading the 8 of Swords came up, and "Interference" was exactly what I was feeling. For me, it's not about getting rid of or ignoring the card titles; I know them, and I'll use them if they seem appropriate, just like all the other information that's not necessarily printed on the cards.

I haven't tried using them for meditation yet. I'm not sure how that would go. I think in that case, having the border might actually be helpful as a way of focusing yourself into the card. On the other hand, having the larger image would help a lot. One of the first things I thought when I bought and looked through the big deck, before trimming it, was that they would have been so much easier to meditate with. It's much harder to focus on the smaller ones.

Talking myself into trimming a deck was a big part of the reason I started the study that spawned this journal. It's grown into a lot more than that, obviously, and so trimming was kind of like icing on the cake. I would have been happy with what I learned even if I'd never trimmed. The degree to which the Thoth can speak once you've spent some time with it is incredible, and I have a hard time making myself use another deck.

I've been stuck for a while on trying to learn how the Trumps fit onto the paths on the Tree of Life. I think I'm finally unstuck, thanks to some helpful people over at Aeclectic, and hopefully will be moving forward (and posting more) now. I'm making it a goal of mine to actively learn and create, rather than passively take in what other people produce, which is a trap I'd been falling into recently.

I am very picky about my Tarot spreads. I'm not a fan of the novelty spreads--you know, like a spread called "The Key to His Heart" that's shaped like a key. (I made that up off the top of my head, but I'd be surprised if it didn't exist.) It's popular to bash the Celtic Cross these days, but I actually like it for what it does. If you want a detailed, many-card overview of a specific situation, then in my book it's as good as it comes, especially since it's stood the test of time so well. I learned the spread from Joan Bunning's site (linked above) years ago, and I prefer her take on the spread over anyone else's. What captures my imagination about her version the Celtic Cross--and any spread--is the symmetry, and the way that the positions reflect the meanings. In my opinion, some of the variants, particularly the one that has the "below" and "behind" positions as "distant past" and "more recent past," respectively, lose that.

What I don't like about most of the novelty spreads is that they lack that symmetry, that sense of fitting together, the sense that given some of the positions, others are inevitable. It lets you read the cards in pairs or larger sections, to follow a thread all the way through a reading. When we say something like "A figure in a card facing to the left is oriented toward the past," it only makes sense if we're seeing the past on the left side of the spread. It doesn't make any sense at all if the past is both to our left and below us, symbolically--much less if the past and the future are oriented on the spread only with respect to where someone thought they'd look good on the teeth of the key to his heart.

I don't use the Celtic Cross very often because I rarely feel the need for a spread that large. Generally, I use one card, a three-card spread, or something of my own invention in the 5-6 card range. When I invent spreads, it's always with the principle of symmetry in my mind. I suppose it's a reflection, in its way, of "As above, so below." If my spread is disordered, how can I expect to get clarity out of it? On the other hand, if I can put everything I want to know from this spread into its proper relation to everything else, then I've already begun the process of getting clarity out of it, even before I start shuffling.

And that's another part of why I rarely use the Celtic Cross. It's not just that it doesn't allow me to include the creation of the spread in the process of reading. It's more that in the context of a specific situation, when reading for myself, I usually already know the answer even in my conscious mind, and I just need the clarity of the reading situation to bring it out. So it's not necessarily to my benefit to do a large spread.

I keep saying that the Celtic Cross should only be used in a specific situation, and I want to clarify that. I know a lot of people use it for general readings, and that's actually a pet peeve of mine. If you use the Celtic Cross, it is going to focus on a specific situation anyway. It makes no sense otherwise--since when does a general overview of your life involve an outcome? How could we possibly have the hubris to try to sum up your entire past in a single card (or two, if you use that variation)? So if you want to know about a situation, for goodness' sake, ask about a situation!

That said, I actually think spreads of that size are more often useful for general readings. I like the idea of the astrological house spread, but in real life I'm not sufficiently familiar with astrology to get all the possible information out of that one. Instead, I actually favor using a ten- or fifteen-card (depending on how ambitious you want to be) four elements spread, with 2-3 cards per element and an additional pair/trio either for spirit or for an overview (but not both!) All of these larger spreads are ambitious and tiring, but that seems like the best way to get your energy's worth if you actually want a general overview.

Here is a very interesting article about the correlation of Tarot suits to the four Western elements. I think it's fascinating to look at the other possibilities, other than the four used by the Golden Dawn and many modern Tarot readers. I also particularly like the author's suggestion of considering each suit as potentially encompassing all four elements. I'd never thought of that before, and I think it has the potential to open up readings interestingly, particularly with Marseilles-style decks.

I'll confess here that, despite my love for the Thoth and other decks that use the "standard" correspondences, I would actually prefer the swords-fire and wands-air correspondence. I came to Tarot via Paganism, where that way around is fairly common (I wonder when and why the split from Golden Dawn correspondences came about?), and it just makes more sense to me. I've gotten used to the other way around, though, and I might have to deal with some serious cognitive dissonance if I were to go back to doing ritual frequently--especially if I wanted to incorporate Tarot into it.

On the other hand, I respect the idea that any possible combination of correspondences *could* make sense, if you think about it right.

I used to draw daily or weekly cards on a regular basis, but I've fallen away from that practice lately. In part, the Thoth study took its place, and in part it just got to be too time-consuming. I would draw a card in the evening, and then the next evening I would pull that card out of every deck I owned and write about whatever struck me in one, any, or all of the cards. Then I would pull out all of my Tarot books and write about anything that struck me in any of their descriptions of the card. I like looking back at those readings--they chronicle my life and thoughts of those periods. I could bring out anything from some minor occurrence in my daily life to my philosophy of life in general.

This was starting to get cumbersome when I had five decks and about ten books, and now I think it would be impossible. I miss doing that, but I simply can't use all of my decks at once anymore. I think it's partly because I quit, though, that I don't know my newer decks as well. It was a great way to get to know a new deck in a real situation. So what I'm going to do this year, is to follow the examples of Quirkeries and Tarot Dame, and draw a card a day from one deck only, using a different deck every week. I'm going to go through the decks in the order that I got them, so this week I've been working with the Röhrig Tarot.

I'm not going to post my readings here like AJ and Tarot Dame do, though--as I hinted above, they just tend to be too personal and cathartic for that. I do hope to post some thoughts on each deck, though.

As for my Thoth study, it's still moving along, sort of. I've been reading about the Qabalah and don't have much that's worth posting at the moment. I'm just waiting for it all to sink into my brain and start to make sense. That could take a while.

I've been meaning to do this for a while. Livejournal only allows free users to have a maximum of ten links in the sidebar, and I know of far more Tarot sites worth visiting than that. Unfortunately, I rarely visit some of them because they aren't in my sidebar...and they aren't in my sidebar because I rarely visit them. So I'm just going to make a post with blogs, and link to that from the sidebar.

Shuffle, by Corrine Kenner
The Tarot Channel
78 Notes to Self
Quirkeries
Tarot Dame
Marseille Music
Eye Rhyme
Roswila's Tarot Gallery & Journal
The Tarot Cafe
Willow Tree Tarot
Archertarot's Weblog
O-where
Tarot by Sonic
The Red Tent
Mary K. Greer's Tarot Blog
Arcana XV

And one in Spanish, for those that can read it:
El Intuitivo

Last year, a good friend of mine received the Medieval Scapini Tarot as a gift. He asked me to sit down and look through it with him.

After I'd glanced at each of the cards, I handed it back to him. "It's nice," I said, "and I'd like to spend some time with it someday. But it's not a good beginner's deck at all."

"Why not?" he asked.

"Well, because it doesn't follow the Rider-Waite-Smith system, which is the standard system of Tarot interpretations in the English-speaking world, at all."

"And why should that matter?" he asked me with a puzzled look.

"Well, because all of the books are written with RWS in mind."

"So what? A beginner won't have read all of the books!"

It was like the proverbial lightbulb going on in my head. Of course a beginner won't have read all of the books, and they don't even necessarily have to. And even if they do, who's to say that having a deck that agrees perfectly with your books is necessarily a good thing? I've written a little before about the beginnings of my Tarot journey. I didn't start with RWS or a clone, and I actually think that's part of why I'm still interested today. In my opinion, one of the most interesting things about Tarot is finding the differences and similarities among decks, and trying to understand why they are the way they are. Obviously, that won't be the case for everyone, but it's doing a disservice to our beginners to assume that the opposite will be.

So now I believe there's exactly one criterion that makes a deck a good beginner's deck: It inspires a beginner. If it doesn't inspire you to know and/or do more, it doesn't matter how many books are written about that deck. It doesn't matter whether there's a coherent system behind it or not. It doesn't matter if it's a highly sought after out-of-print rarity or something you found on clearance. What matters is how you respond to it.

The only thing that makes the RWS a "good beginner's deck" is that it has inspired a lot of beginners. You read stories by people who came to Tarot in the early 1970s, bought the 1JJ Swiss, and didn't feel inspired by Tarot until they got the RWS instead. Does that make the 1JJ Swiss a bad beginner's deck? No, it means that it was a bad beginner's deck for those people. In general, I'll admit that it could be a difficult deck for beginners because of the non-illustrated minors--but who's to say that one beginner won't be absolutely inspired by those minors? I'm not willing to make that decision for someone else, and I don't think the rest of the Tarot community should be either.

EDIT: I should have been keeping up with my Tarot blogs. It turns out that Arcana XV wrote a very similar post recently. Good to know I'm not the only one that thinks this way.

"My father found a tumor in his chest
It was his body, but it scared me half to death
It scared me back to life, just a little more awake
Miracles are brutal, but they never make mistakes."
-Stuart Davis, "Love Causes Cancer"

The first Tarot reader I met in my adult life was a friend in college. He would occasionally read for our friends in a group, and had a fairly unusual approach, by the standards I've learned since. He used the RWS deck and Waite's original divinatory interpretations from the PKT, pretty much exclusively. At least in his hands, this produced almost laughably dramatic readings. We were, after all, a bunch of college students, 18 and 19 years old, generally middle class-ish, mostly interested in our hypothetical love lives and future careers. We were a laid-back, fairly drama-free group. And yet, hardly a reading went by without the appearance of the word "treachery." It wasn't exactly "You will meet a tall dark stranger," but it came close sometimes. (I don't think any of us wrote those readings down, so I can't say anything about whether they seem more realistic in retrospect; at the time they seemed highly unlikely.)

He explained this by saying that really, the Tarot was a better tool for exploring the fates of nations than the love lives of college students. Although he never shared these with us, he said that he sometimes did readings on the political issues of the day, with presumably more intelligible results than he got for us. Certainly there's more room for intrigue in politics.

When I started learning Tarot, shortly after this, I never had that problem. Of course, I bypassed Waite and the old divinatory meanings that he was drawing from pretty completely, especially at first. I found the Tarot easy to apply to my non-dramatic, mostly psychological problems.

But now that I'm learning the I Ching, I'm finding that I'm having the same problem that my friend had. The I Ching seems tailor-made to affairs of state, rather than to ordinary problems an a human scale. The term "chün tzu," which Wilhelm and Baynes translate as "the superior man," actually means "young nobleman," the person who (in my understanding) was originally supposed to be consulting the I. Naturally, a young nobleman in feudal China would have been directly concerned with politics. I'm not a young nobleman in feudal China.

For example, I recently drew Hexagram 16, "Providing for" or "Enthusiasm." The Image here, according to the Karcher translation, is:

Providing-for, advantageous to install feudatories to move legions.
Harvesting.

I know it's not impossible to come up with a metaphorical interpretation for this, especially when you move to the Wilhelm-Baynes translation:

Enthusiasm. It furthers one to install helpers
And to set armies marching.

But the underlying image is still martial and political, and generally something I have no experience with. As I said, it's not that I can't apply this to my life; it's just that I find it more difficult than applying the images of the Tarot. Maybe it's just a matter of experience? I don't know.

Arguably, I should have guessed that the unreferenced I Ching to Tarot correlations I saw on Wikipedia were Crowley's own. The inclusion of Lingam and Yoni as sort of honorary elements should have tipped me off. On face value, it's as good as any other system I could come up with, and comes up with logical pseudo-elemental placements for all of the trigrams that don't fit into the four-element scheme, which is more than I could say for anything I could come up with. Certainly assigning trigrams to the Sun and Moon neatly gets around the fact that there are two that could represent Fire and Water, respectively.

The appeal increases on reading Crowley's rationale for the placement, which is in figure 3 in the Book of Thoth. See the top figure in the main part of this website for a fairly good representation of it, although for some reason it leaves out Daath and thus the Heaven trigram, making the whole thing curiously unbalanced-looking.

Crowley is starting from a Qabalistic standpoint (another "should have guessed"), fitting the eight trigrams on the tree along with Tao-Teh, Yang, and Yin, in Kether, Chokmah, and Binah, respectively. The Tao itself is in Ain. So far, this all makes good sense to me. After that, he focuses on balancing the trigrams on the tree. I'm not sure how I feel about putting the Heaven trigram in Daath, but then I can't say that I really understand Daath at this point. From a naive point of view, it seems odd to put one of the two "parental" trigrams in the illusory Sephira. On the other hand, the way the middle pillar works in this schematic, it does make sense to put it at the top, and Kether is out of the question. I think I might be more comfortable if I read up on Daath. It also seems odd, given the importance of Tiphareth, to put Radiance there, although the symbolism works (again, from my limited understanding).

So then the four trigrams that are actually assigned to the traditional four Western elements are on the outer pillars of the Tree--Water and Earth on the Pillar of Mercy, Fire and Air on the Pillar of Severity. The first two are the traditionally "feminine" elements, but there's some emphasis in Qabalah on the fact that neither pillar corresponds directly to a gender. That suits me just fine, since I don't completely accept the gender assignments to the elements either.

The form of symmetry that he uses was not something I managed to come up with, but makes as much sense as any. Water and Earth are inverses of each other, Youngest Daughter and Youngest Son respectively. So are Fire and Air with the elder children. The middle children, being symmetrical, are on the middle pillar as Sol and Luna. I can't come up with a convincing rationale for that, but I think it probably works.

I would like to get hold of a copy of Crowley's "translation" of the I Ching, not to refer to on its own, but to compare with the others that I have and to use to think about his philosophy.

In the comments, fyreflye pointed me to I Ching with Clarity, which seems to be a fairly comprehensive website--not quite the Aeclectic of I Ching, but getting there. Depending on how much further I decide to go into the I Ching itself, I may be spending some considerable time there.

In sum, I respect Crowley's I Ching attributions because they're better than anything I could have come up with, but at the same time I'm firmly of the opinion that there are no perfect attributions. And I don't mind that. Maybe this should be another post, but I think the points of disagreement are more illuminating than an Absolutely Perfect correlation would be.

As an aside, while I've been back in the section of the Book of Thoth with the figures, I reread the caption to figure 2, which is the assignment of Tarot cards to the Qabalah. Crowley says of it, "It should not be used as a table to which to refer when in doubt; it should itself be committed to memory before proceeding to the detailed study of the pack." Busted! So I think the next thing I do is going to be to spend some time with the Qabalah, and particularly with the Hebrew letters and their correspondence to the trumps.

It's definitely tempting to try to correlate the I Ching with Western Esotericism, especially for people who believe they can find the Grand Unified Theory of Esotericism (*coughcrowleycough*) encompassing every bit of esoteric knowledge (however that's defined) from every culture ever. There certainly are intriguing similarities, although I would probably argue that the similarities derive from basic human concerns and the workings of the human brain. It starts with the basic duality, male versus female, yang and yin. From this, it builds up an elemental structure, including such elements as fire, earth, and water. These can also be placed onto a family structure, mother and father with sons and daughters.

I should note here that I still haven't looked to see what Crowley's system for correlating them actually is. I'm just talking through the considerations that would be on my mind if I were creating a system.

If you're not familiar with the I Ching, this is probably going to get complicated really fast. The I Ching article on Wikipedia is a good reference, in the absence of a different text. The image below is taken from there. (Edit: sorry about the black on grey. I hope it's legible enough, because I don't have the software to tinker with the image.)



So. The theory here is that certain hexagrams of the I Ching correlate with the Tarot courts. The courts, according to the Golden Dawn system, are combinations of two elements: Wands, Cups, Swords, and Disks are Fire, Water, Air, and Earth, respectively; so are Knight, Queen, Prince, and Princess. So the Knight of Disks would be Fire of Earth (lava?), the Prince of Cups would be Air of Water (mist?), and so forth. Not all of them are as easy to tie to physical phenomena as I just quoted (what would the Knight of Swords, Fire of Air, represent?), and I don't think it's at all clear what the difference is between Fire of Earth and Earth of Fire (Knight of Disks and Princess of Wands). Obviously there is a difference; the appearance of the cards shows that, if nothing else.

The I Ching hexagrams are made up of two trigrams each, one above and one below, and the trigrams have interesting possible correlations to the Western elements. The Wikipedia page I linked above gives one possible correlation (in the table under the "Trigrams" heading), without citing a source. It's obviously not the only one. The problem, of course, is that there are eight trigrams to correlate with four elements.

Fire and water are seen, at least in Crowley's Qabalistic Tarot, as representing what you might call the male and female principle, respectively. The same roles are taken by the all-yang and all-yin trigrams in the I Ching (Heaven and Earth in the diagram above). What's more, Fire and Water (or Knight and Queen) are seen as the parents in the family drama of the court cards; similarly, Heaven and Earth are the parents of the other six trigrams. Can the systems be linked as easily as that? Only if you're willing to assign the symbol of water to the trigram Earth, whose symbol is a field.

So, what else might be water? There are two symbols that fit the bill: Gorge/stream, and Open/swamp or lake. They're both symbolized by different aspects of water; how would you choose between them? Similarly, earth could be, simply by symbolism, either Earth/field or Bound/mountain. The confusion is even more obvious when you realize that in the Wikipedia table, the two trigrams whose "image in nature" is a Western element are listed as being elementally Luna and Sol. I wouldn't have even thought of Shake/thunder for fire (Radiance/fire seems like a more obvious choice), but that's what Wiki thinks.

Interestingly, the two Western elements that most obviously have two possible trigrams are the two traditionally "feminine" elements, water and earth. I seem to recall reading at some point, though I can't find the reference, that the Chinese saw Yin, the feminine, as essentially dual in nature. I don't think that idea is expressed as explicitly in Western esotericism, but there are places in Qabalistic thought that seem to resonate with that idea.

I don't have an answer to these questions for myself. I don't think there is a good answer. I don't believe in a Grand Unified Theory of Esotericism. I think that both the Chinese and Western systems have useful insights into human life, but I don't think the insights are identical. I would actually argue that the differences and incongruities are as important to understanding as the similarities. In what ways is water the quintessential feminine element? In what ways is it earth? What viewpoints make each of those ideas valid, and how do they complement each other? Those are the kinds of questions that you can't even approach if one or the other way has to be "correct."

Next up: what Crowley actually did.

In preparation for getting back into the Thoth study, I've been studying the I Ching lately. I know that Crowley had a system for associating the I Ching hexagrams with the court cards, and I wanted to spend some time looking into the I Ching before learning his system, so that I could judge it for myself.

I have two I Ching books, both of which have their disadvantages. The first is the classic and ubiquitous Wilhelm-Baynes edition with the foreward by Jung. It's certainly the one that most English speakers are most familiar with, and has a certain amount of credibility based on age and fame. On the other hand, the organization is less than intuitive. Also, I fear that the translation from Chinese to English via German may have obscured meaning or fixed meaning that wasn't there in the original. Obviously, any translation is in that danger, but taking it via a third language seems particularly dangerous that way. Finally, the translation was published in 1950, and although I don't have anything to base this particular worry on, I fear that it may depict outdated ideas, either about Chinese culture or about humanity, which don't come from the Chinese text.

The other edition I have is a newer one by Stephen Karcher. This is a particularly odd edition. Where I worry about added interpretations in the Wilhelm-Baynes translation, the problem here is not enough interpretation. He attempts to give a word-for-word translation of the Chinese text, with a listing of the possible meanings for each word below. This does allow for a concordance, much touted as the novel feature of this translation, but I'm not sure whether that's worth the loss of clarity. What is probably clear enough in Chinese becomes strange and tortured English: in the Image of Hexagram 4, we have "In no way me seeking the young and ignorant." In the Sequence of Hexagram 53, "Beings not permitted to use completing stopping." For the most part, the meaning is clear, but I'm not convinced that it wouldn't have been useful to iron out the grammar.

As an example of the difference between the two texts, take Hexagram 20. For the basic text (called the Judgment in the Wilhelm-Baynes, and the
Image in the Karcher), we have from Wilhelm-Baynes:

"Contemplation. The ablution has been made,
But not yet the offering.
Full of trust they look up to him."

And from Karcher:

"Viewing: hand washing and also not worshipping.
There is a connection to the spirits like a presence."

Wilhelm-Baynes obviously wins in the first line. Looking at the two side by side, it's obvious how "hand washing and also not worshipping" can mean "The ablution has been made, But not yet the offering," but reading the Karcher on its own I'm sure I wouldn't have made any useful connection. Obviously the original ancient Chinese readers would have made a useful connection; I can only hope that it would have been the same one that Wilhelm and Baynes make.

As for the second line, I don't see any clear connection between the two texts, and am in no position to make a judgment.

The two translations also have slightly different instructions for consulting the yarrow-stalk version of the oracle (my favorite, though I confess I use bamboo skewers instead of yarrow). They give the same results--I checked--but Karcher's is significantly easier and more intuitive.

So I'm still looking for the perfect translation of the I Ching, but like the perfect Tarot deck, I suspect that it doesn't exist. In a way, the two balance out each other's faults, and between the two I hope it's possible to get a reasonably comprehensible view of the situation.

I've had I Ching books (well, at least the Karcher) almost as long as I've had Tarot decks, but I've used the I Ching much less. Oddly enough, though, I've turned to it in a few very emotionally charged situations. I think it's because in difficult emotional situations, I find it hard to face the images of the Tarot that I've spent so much time thinking about in happier times. The I Ching doesn't have the memories behind it that the Tarot does (although if this goes on much longer, most of the hexagrams are going to have painful emotional memories behind them--probably not a good situation).

I find the I Ching difficult because, despite the existence of various I Ching decks, it is primarily a text-based oracle. One of the wonderful things about Tarot is that you could give a deck to someone who didn't speak English and had never seen a deck before, someone who was from a culture with minimal connections to ours, and I think they could still extract meaning from it. They would certainly miss nuances, but the symbolism at least in the Major Arcana should be relatively universal. Obviously, nothing like that is the case with the I Ching. By being in words, it engages and requires the left brain, and I think that makes it harder to use it intuitively.

That might be why I get the sense that it's easier to see exactly what you want to see in the I Ching than it is in the Tarot. Or rather, when you have two possible courses of action, it's easy to justify either one using the information from the I Ching. That could just be an impression that will dissipate once I know the oracle better, though.

That's a lot of verbiage, and I haven't even gotten around to connecting it with the Tarot yet. That will have to wait for another day.

I haven't been around here much lately, but I have been thinking and writing about Tarot, at least a little bit. You can read my review of the Rock Art Tarot at Aeclectic. I'll share some personal thoughts about the deck that didn't fit in the tone of the review here.

This deck got under my skin, in more than one sense. I bought it on impulse, just a couple of days before I dedicated myself to the Thoth. As a result, I had looked through it briefly, but I hadn't paid much attention to detail, and I certainly hadn't used it. I wasn't expecting to like it; I bought it thinking it might be useful as a trade.

But when I got into the Thoth study and forbade myself from using other decks, I started thinking about this one, more than the others that were sitting unused on my shelf. I think it's because it's so very different from the Thoth. I don't think anyone would ever accuse the Rock Art of being "dark." The Thoth is based on a detailed esoteric system; the Rock Art is based solely on the creator's intuition. The Thoth is self-consciously modern, to the point where I think it could probably be called modernist; the Rock Art is derived from some of the most ancient records that we have of human activity. And so is it any wonder that I longed for this deck when I despaired of ever being able to remember the difference between beth and kaph, mem and samekh?

Now when I say that it occurs to me that both rock art and the Hebrew alphabet are ancient symbols that it may be possible to relate to modern life in any number of ways, if you look at them right. It didn't then.

So I thought this would be the first deck I would run to when I finished the study. It wasn't, for various mostly personal reasons. But when I did pick it up, that was what I had in mind. I don't have any particular personal connection to rock art, but I thought this deck might be the one that would clear away all the esoterica while incorporating the lessons learned. I don't know that that's my ideal deck overall; if it is, my best bet is probably the RWS. But it is desirable at some points.

So I picked it up, and immediately I was confronted with the keywords, telling me what the art meant. Now, the keywords on the Thoth have never bothered me. I'm not adamantly anti-keyword like some people are. But in this case, I felt that the keywords were limiting me. I found it hard to get an impression of what the art meant without relying on the keyword. So I started flipping through the deck at random, covering the bottom of the card and coming up with an impression of its meaning from the art alone. I found that most of the time, my impressions lined up with what was on the card. But sometimes they didn't. I mentioned the Four of Emotions in the review: it's the example that bothers me most, but it's not the only one.

I guess I feel--and I probably should have said this in the review--that the deck is a betrayal of intuition. Jerry Roelen used her intuition to tell her what the images meant, but by putting keywords on the cards, she doesn't trust us to do the same. And for that reason alone, I struggle with this deck.

I've thought about trimming it, cutting off the keywords. The idea has some appeal, for the free rein it would give to my intuition. I hesitate because by cutting off the keywords and the card identification, I'd lose all connection that the deck has to Tarot and would make it an oracle deck. That might be a good thing; I'd rather have a usable oracle than an unusable Tarot deck. But it would be a big change, and so I hesitate.

I recently bought a used deck of Soul Cards 2. I'd been thinking I wanted one of the two decks for a while. I'd never used a non-Tarot oracle deck before, and these intrigued me with their beautiful artwork and insistence on the lack of a received meaning. I figured it wouldn't hurt me to jump-start my intuition by taking the intellect out of the picture as much as possible.

I don't mind buying used decks, but I do always check to make sure that all the cards are there. I once found a used "greenie" Thoth for sale that only had 65 cards, and I fear it's made me a bit paranoid. The Soul Cards set was taped shut in the store, but I confess that I did peel the tape off before purchasing the deck, after deciding that I would buy it if and only if the set contained all 60 cards. I flipped through quickly, counted 60, and bought it, satisfied.

When I got home I looked through them. Some of the cards in the deck as it was were upright, and some were reversed. I don't read with reversals, so I was going through idly righting them all. However, some of the images don't have an immediately obvious "correct" orientation. I flipped over a random card to see if the backs were reversible, and discovered that it had a big puddle of purple candle wax on it.

Oh.

I contemplated taking the deck back to the store and asking for my money back, and I probably would have been within my rights to do so. But it had been deeply discounted, and I wanted the deck more than I wanted my money. So I started scraping the wax off with my fingernail. Luckily, the cards are heavily laminated, so the wax was fairly easy to scrape off. When I'd gotten as much off as I could with my fingernail, I buffed the area with a cotton cloth. Visually, you wouldn't be able to tell the back of that card from any other card anymore.

Tactilely, you would. It's waxier (surprise!) and less sticky than the other cards. I actually almost prefer it, since the other cards stick together too much for hand-over-hand shuffling. That doesn't mean I'm going to coat the other cards with wax (I contemplated it briefly, but I think it would backfire), but I'm not actually going to complain about the way this one turned out. Besides, now I have a story about this deck.

Does that card in particular have a message for me? I'm not sure. It's card #88 on the page I linked above.

I've been doing a little more reading into the Osho/Bhagwan/Rajneesh phenomenon. I stayed up late last night to finish My Life in Orange, by Tim Guest. The author's mother was a sannyasin, a follower of Bhagwan, through his heyday. Guest describes his childhood in communes, largely neglected by his mother as she worked for the cause.

Aside from being interesting in its own right and bringing up questions about the consequences of idealism and about alternative parenting, it helped clarify my thinking about Osho himself. I don't think he was a genuinely enlightened spiritual leader. It's not difficult to crib bits and pieces of other people's spiritual messages and give them your own spin. Somehow, this man tapped into the spirit of his age, and his message touched a lot of people. That in itself certainly isn't bad. Reading about the beginning of the movement, and the way that Guest's mother entered it, makes it sound harmless enough. The communitarian, alternative spirit was in the air at the time. Having watched a couple of the Osho videos on YouTube, I can see how a tape of one of his lectures would be entrancing and intriguing.

Here, though, is the hypocrisy that I see. Surely, if you were going to place the archetype embodied by Bhagwan/Osho in the context of the Tarot, it would be as the Hierophant, the wise spiritual teacher and leader. There's nothing wrong with the Hierophant card in itself, although some decks created by people who had bad experiences with organized religion show a negative side to it. There's nothing wrong with embodying the Hierophant archetype in itself. If I were creating a deck based on the Osho phenomenon, the man himself would be in the Hierophant slot, and I would think no more of it.

In the Osho Zen deck, as many of you probably know, card 5 of the Major Arcana is a totally black card, titled "No-thingness." By placing this card in this position, I think the deck implies that emptiness, nothingness, is the greatest teacher. I can see that perspective, and I think arguably it takes a lot from traditional Zen. I don't think that the Osho phenomenon really embraced this idea, though. Sannyasins were (are?) required to wear a portrait of Bhagwan/Osho on a beaded necklace (a mala) around their necks at all times. So who is the teacher? What should we respect? What should we look up to and look to for our answers? The deck itself gives one answer; the actions of and requirements for sannyasins give a different one.

I think I would be more comfortable with this deck if the positions of the Master and No-thingness cards were reversed. By placing Osho outside of the traditional Major Arcana, the creator is alluding to his supposed enlightenment, his placement outside of the typical circle of life. I don't believe that he was enlightened; I believe that his actions demonstrate that he was thoroughly placed within typical life with its concerns. He embodies both the negative and the positive aspects of the Hierophant. Meanwhile the No-thingness card could be used to represent the idea of the blank card, the blank rune, something outside the cards as we know them and outside our experience as we know it. If these cards come up in a reading for me, I might well think of using them that way.

My problem with Osho is mainly his hypocrisy. He preached surrender, but his inner circle exercised tight control over the lives of his followers. He owned 93* Rolls Royces, and yet toward the end his followers weren't allowed to own more than two sets of clothing. There's nothing wrong with the teachings themselves; what was wrong was how they were put into practice. I think the reason that the Osho Zen Tarot can still be a valid spiritual tool is that it is largely based on the teachings, not the practices.

*I think the Thelemic resonance of this number is sheer coincidence, but I'd be interested in any theories about why it might not be.

I'm back online, settled in with internet access in my new home. Thanks for your patience.

When I've been working with the Tarot lately, which admittedly is not that much even by my standards, it's been with the Osho Zen. I think it's a beautiful deck, and as you may have gleaned, I've gotten some good readings from it. On the other hand, some things about it disturb me. Part of this is that I'm not a Buddhist, and some parts of a Buddhist-influenced worldview that I'm not entirely comfortable with show up in the deck. Trump 18 is renamed "Past Lives," for example, and shows a collection of people from various historical eras. A more serious problem is Osho's legacy, which is fairly sordid in places and doesn't necessarily line up with what I expect of a spiritual leader.

Does all this sound familiar? It does to me. It sounds exactly like what some people say about Crowley, some of their discomfort with the Thoth. I happily use the Thoth and am not bothered by Crowley's legacy; why can't I do the same with the Osho Zen? If Crowley had been active in the 1980s, rather than when he was, I can fully imagine this speech coming from him (except that he probably would have known the difference between an intransitive and a passive verb). Both emphasized sex as an important part of a spiritual path, Osho rather more openly than Crowley simply due to the different times they lived in. Both are reputed to have been drug users. Both repudiated the idea of asceticism.

And yet, for all the negative things that can be said about Crowley, he was never involved in bioterrorism. That's really the one allegation that bothers me the most, the one thing I can't get past, because even if Osho wasn't directly involved, he at least allowed a culture among his followers that made that kind of thing acceptable.

Other differences are hard to pinpoint. Crowley never got followers to give him multiple Rolls-Royces (or the equivalent), but he probably would have thought it was a grand joke if he could have gotten them to. Did Osho see it as a joke? Maybe he did. On the other hand, I think there's good evidence that at least some of Crowley's modern followers get the joke. I haven't delved as deeply into modern Osho followers, but I'm not as sure that they do. Maybe I'm not giving them enough credit.

I'm going to keep struggling with the Osho Zen Tarot, because I can't come up with a convincing reason that I should give it up as useless. I'm even leaving the Master card (a 23rd trump depicting Osho himself) in the deck for the moment, although I'm not sure how I would interpret it if it came up. I believe in pushing my boundaries, and if something really isn't going to work for me, I believe in fully understanding why.

This is just a quick note to explain my prolonged absence. I have a lot on my mind, tarot-wise, but I'm also in the process of moving, which became all-consuming faster than I thought it would. I'll be back with you once I have internet access in my new place.

In the meantime, I'll leave you with an interesting quote about divination. This is from Trader, by Charles DeLint. The main character is talking to a character called Bones, who reads fortunes for people on the street with a set of bones. He has just admitted that he made the system up, and that it doesn't come from any tradition.

" 'I guess it all depends on how you look at it,' Bones says. 'Now me, I figure all oracular devices are just a way for us to focus on what we already know but can't quite grab on to. It works the same as a ritual does in a church--you get enough people focused on something, things happen. The way I see it is, it doesn't much matter what the device is. It's just got to be interesting enough so that your attention doesn't stray. Fellow reading the fortune, fellow having it read--same difference. They've both got to be paying attention.

'What you get's not the future so much as what's inside a person, which,' he adds, 'is pretty much the real reason they come to you. They're trying to sort through all this conversation that's running through their heads, but they get distracted. Me, what I'm doing with my hands, with the bones, it forces them to pay strict attention to me. The noise in their heads quiets down a little and they can hear themselves for a change. It's my voice, but they're doing the talking.' "

I am not a Tarot reader.

I know that sounds like a strange thing to say at this point, but I'm starting to feel it more and more strongly. I haven't done a reading for someone else in some six months, and at this point I'm not sure if it's a good idea to change that.

kobarot wrote a very nice post recently on the question of why we choose to read for others, prompted by some questions from the inimitable Umbrae. I posted my thoughts a bit in the comments there, but I want to expand here.

I haven't done a lot of reading for others. I'm not entirely convinced that I should. I'm about as psychic as a block of styrofoam--or, for those who believe that everyone is psychic, I'm about as in touch with my psychic powers as a block of styrofoam. I wouldn't mind cultivating any powers that I do have, but honestly it's not high on my to-do list. So that leaves me with a style of reading that I feel is uncomfortably close to cold reading. I certainly wouldn't intentionally deceive anyone, but it wouldn't be hard to give out vaguely plausible advice aided by good guesses and random cards.

I don't mean to denigrate those of you who are non-psychic readers, by the way. If you've found a way that works for you, then I am absolutely behind you. I just haven't found a way that works for me.

And when I think about why I want to read the Tarot for others, I can't come up with a reason that isn't fueled by ego. Generally it's some combination of "I want practice" and "I feel like I should." If, as Umbrae also frequently says, it's about the sitter, then my reasons fail. My reasons are about me, and I'm honest enough to be uncomfortable with that.

So, with that in mind, here's my first reading with the Osho Zen Tarot. I asked two questions: Why do I want to read Tarot for myself? Why do I want to read Tarot for others?



The 5 of Rainbows is fairly obvious as why I want to read for others. I feel like that's where the "real" Tarot people are, where the "grown-ups" are. I'm looking at this rainbow-tinted world and it looks wonderful. And the thing is, I don't even know if I could cross over there. It looks as though the lock is open on the chain of the gate--but I'm so busy admiring the view that I haven't even tried to open it.

The 4 of Clouds is a little tougher. It's obviously a variation on the same theme--a person in a grey world outside a rainbow-tinted one. How that relates to why I want to read Tarot for myself wasn't obvious for a while. Finally it was the keyword--"postponement"--that clued me in. I read Tarot for myself as a surrogate for real spiritual practice. It's a type of spiritual practice, and it's been unquestionably good for me, but I think I'm ready to jump in to the deep end. The Tarot has evolved into a feel-good practice for me, telling me, "Someday you should really..." And that's not what I want.

None of this is to say that I'm going to completely give up reading and studying Tarot. This deck is giving me a gentle prod away from itself, but the prod is so pointed and so well expressed for a first reading, that I can hardly give it up completely. And there is something to be said for postponement, particularly given the place I'm in in my life right now. I'm committed to finishing the Thoth study in the near future. But I may decide to move in other directions for a while after that.

I've contemplated writing about my spiritual journey in this journal. Those posts would be a lot more personal than anything I've written so far about the Tarot, though, and so I would want it to be friends-only. Having a journal might be useful for keeping me honest and keeping me moving, as it was for the Thoth study. On the other hand, I fear that I would bore people or lose people with my ramblings, and I don't have such a large audience for that to be a trivial concern.

So, now I'm done with what I had explicitly planned out. I still intend to jump into the Minor Arcana at some point, but due to both mental burnout and upcoming life events I need to take a break. The break was in the plans too, except that it was supposed to be the month of February. I started this with expectations that, looking back on it, are thoroughly unrealistic.

Part of it was that I really wasn't sure what I was hoping to achieve. What I have achieved is both more and less than I think I expected. I think I thought I would become a better reader. I don't think I did. I'm still not entirely certain that reading is what I want to be doing with the Tarot. (I think I'll post a bit more about that during my break.) But I have become comfortable with a deck that I used to think of as a difficult deck. Lacking this kind of impetus, I probably would never have picked up the Thoth for comfort when I was unhappy. It never struck me as that kind of deck. It still doesn't, I guess. But I know I can use it for anything I need to--and by extension, I believe I could use any other deck as well, within reason.

And I learned a bit about myself, too, which is the main appeal of Tarot for me overall. I'm thinking of looking more seriously into Thelema. I learned I could do meditations, something I wasn't at all certain about when I started. I've come to respect Crowley a lot, not least because he believed in intellectual rigor in a field that tends to attract a lot of "woo-woo." I know that trend has taken off after Crowley's death, and I owe to it the popularization of Tarot, but Crowley's uncompromising intelligence still makes me happy.

So now what? I didn't intend it, but my deck collection has doubled over the time I've been doing this (from 6 to 12). That means I have a bunch of new decks that I've barely looked through, or in one case, that I haven't even opened. I owe them some quality time. I want to spend some time thinking about the mechanics and meaning of readings, and what I can expect them to mean to me. That's the direction I'm probably going to take this journal in for the moment, at least until I start the Thoth minors. And after the minors, I can see a life of study ahead of me, between the various Tarot decks and other oracle systems (both the I Ching and the runes have been sitting on my shelf for years waiting for me to get around to them). I'm looking forward to it.

Here's my advice for anyone thinking about studying the Thoth:

1. Do it! Seriously, I am still amazed at how many people are terrified of this deck. Intellectually, I understand the fear a little better since I've made an effort to, but I still don't understand it viscerally. I don't see anything but beauty in the cards themselves, in the artwork. I can see how Crowley would frighten people--but he was just human. I think if other deck creators were such public figures, we might not be all that fond of them either--but if we never know about their quirks, we never know what to fear.

2. Give it plenty of time and intellectual space. I couldn't have done this if I'd been reading with other decks at the same time. Giving myself permission to focus was one of the best things I could have done.

3. Don't be afraid to do "outside" research. I wish I'd been able to do more of this; I'm still vaguer than I'd prefer to be on astrology and Qabalah.

4. Find your own way. Don't listen to me; I'm no authority =) I probably never will be. (Though I'm happy to discuss the deck, or pretty much anything else, with anyone who wants to.) Reading is helpful, particularly Crowley and DuQuette, but really your intuition and native intelligence are your best friends here.

5. Keep moving. Have fun. Don't panic.