AUTHOR’S NOTE: My mother-in-law, who was a devout Catholic, had a small figurine of an angel with spread wings in her living room. My wife had been reading children’s books to our two-year-old son, who glanced quickly at the angel and said “Look at the duck, quack-quack.” The title of this essay comes from my reading of Lon Milo DuQuette’s Tarot Architect and thinking absurdly “Old Lon Milo had a farm, Ee i ee i o, And on his farm he had some angels, Ee i ee i oh . . . ”

Although he was being facetious, DuQuette mentioned that the Hebrew Kabbalists who came up with the elaborate hierarchy of 72 angels and 72 “Goetic spirits” (i.e. demons) based on the Shem HaMephorash (72-lettered name of God, aka “Shemhamphorash”) must have had “far too much time on their hands.” I tend to agree with him. In the unlikely event that I encounter them unannounced (the spiritual beings, that is, not the Kabbalists) and didn’t intentionally evoke them for ritual magic work, I would have little use for the knowledge of their existence in general, and none for practical tarot-reading purposes. (To be honest, if I did meet one unexpectedly I would probably run away just like God urged Abraham to do in Bob Dylan’s Highway 61.)

DuQuette gets a lot of mileage out of the perceived connection between the spirits, the cards and the Enochian system of magic developed by John Dee and Edward Kelley in the 16^th Century; I once tried to read the companion book to his Tarot of Ceremonial Magic but failed miserably. It was so cluttered with Enochian minutiae that it utterly defeated me, and I don’t give up easily (the last time was while trying to penetrate MacGregor Mathers’ translation of the Zohar in The Kabbalah Unveiled, and before that it was when attempting to work my way through Sir James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion). Can you say “boring?”

According to DuQuette, these entities all have links to the 36 minor cards (minus the Aces) of the tarot. It’s obvious that no sane tarot reader would trot them out when explaining a spread to a client, and I’m hard-pressed to figure out how I might use them to augment my own understanding of the tarot. It’s a whole different metaphysical system that (like the astrological associations ginned up by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn) is entirely dispensable when performing prognostication with the cards. I don’t doubt that exploring Enochian on its own turf could be rewarding from both a magical and philosophical perspective, but I certainly don’t intend to mingle it with my study and practice of divination until I can do so with confidence. I’m not holding my breath on that score since it’s a major commitment (and I’m getting “majorly old”).

I do make regular use of the astrological relationships shown in the Golden Dawn’s “Chaldean” wheel of correspondences and the alignment of the forty numbered cards (Aces included) with the ten sephiroth of the Tree of Life. But those embody esoteric principles, not disembodied personalities, and I believe that trying to cozy up to the entire cast of characters in the angelic/demonic pantheon would add little to my effectiveness as a diviner since I don’t plan to ask an angel or demon whether or not “Joe likes Mary.” I assume they have better things to do than stoop to such trivia, and so do I.

Hmm, maybe knowing all of that stuff would prepare me for small talk at Qabalistic cocktail parties . . . now I’m being facetious! I’ve had enough trouble getting my head around relating the cards to the decans without having to consult the chart to want to take on another layer of meaning. (This reluctance is the reason I don’t bother much with oracle decks other than Lenormand.) I’m quite content with where I am at the moment.