AUTHOR’S NOTE: I just rediscovered the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn’s description of the Queen of Swords as presenting a “good exterior” despite being inwardly “cruel, sly, deceitful, unreliable” and generally rotten to the core when ill-dignified in a reading. She would have us believe she is pure in all her ways while she works her subtle wiles behind the scenes.

This led me to the realization that all of the court cards and numbered small cards have an “outer” and an “inner” expression of their inherent nature. One is largely mundane and observable “on the street,” while the other is abstract and mystical in a more symbolic way. (Before I continue, I’ll mention that, in modern esoteric terms, the Major Arcana as archetypal influences generally portray spiritual absolutes that go beyond such distinctions, so it can be difficult to equate them to everyday circumstances in this fashion, a subject I addressed in a recent post.)

In the Waite-Smith (RWS) tarot, the posed figures on the court cards and the commonplace vistas on the minors convey what I call “prosaic canned narrative vignettes” that speak of Pamela Colman Smith’s background in stagecraft. These cards exemplify the “outer dimensions” of the title, and it can take some intuitive mental gymnastics to re-imagine them as “inner motivators” when the need arises. (This fact is the basis for many of the quaint folkloric assumptions that have grown up around the cards that exhibit little evidence of their Golden Dawn roots, a disconnect that a quick comparison of recent poplar tarot literature to the Order’s Book T tarot curriculum will demonstrate quite clearly.) But I prefer the RWS tarot for public sessions because most sitters aren’t looking for profound psychological or mystical insights from a reading, they just want to know if they’ll get the job or whether Joe or Mary likes them, and in its exoteric mode this deck works just fine for such inquiries.

On the other hand, the Thoth deck excels at generating what I think of as proto-psychological interpretations in that the work of the Golden Dawn, later updated and in many ways improved upon by Aleister Crowley, prefigured the psychoanalytical discoveries of Carl Gustav Jung through its adjectival delineation of the human condition in tarot terms. Especially with the court cards, Crowley delivered a powerful set of divinatory meanings that I’ve found to be unequaled in much of the other writing that tried to cover the same ground, including that of Mathers, Waite and other stellar “lights” of that era.

Although it’s been a lifetime study to really get my head around it, Crowley’s Book of Thoth (BoT) has been an unerring source of philosophical inspiration, and – with a little reining-in of its occasionally overheated rhetoric – its guidance is as useful for practical matters as it is for more esoteric subjects. However, his Book of the Law, which he cites as the groundwork for many of the passages within the BoT, is another matter entirely; while intriguing [and, to put it mildly, ethically provocative] in its own right, I find it to contain half-a-dozen nuggets of pure metaphysical brilliance while the rest is mostly euphoric faux-Egyptian window-dressing that came straight from the fertile (and often lurid) imaginations of Crowley and his “Scarlet-Woman” channeler.

Despite Hamlet’s advice to Horatio, there are some things in Crowley’s oeuvre that push the limits of credibility beyond my comfort zone, and I’m widely read in the work of other occult thinkers on the tarot. I could say simply that he was a “true original” while also acknowledging that he was a relentless inquisitor of conventional wisdom who wasn’t immune to shameless intellectual “grandstanding” when the spirit moved him.

For me, much of the fun in reading the cards comes from facing the challenge of having to bridge the gap between mundane “outer” and mystical “inner” impressions when one or the other doesn’t quite fit the situation. I crank up my vocabulary and leverage my past reading experience, sparking imaginative wordplay that involves massaging key concepts, phrases, nuances and metaphors into a customized outlook that will ideally come closer-and-closer to what needs to be said about the matter. I don’t exclude my sitters from this roundabout, “cut-to-fit” rumination because quite often something completely off-the-cuff will elicit the coveted “Aha!” reaction from them. Then I can chase down the reason for the sudden epiphany and fill in any blanks that will complete the narrative to their satisfaction and mine. This is the “mutual voyage of discovery” that I tout as the benchmark of excellence in my practice.