“If I had the chance, I’d ask the world to dance
And I’d be dancing with myself”
– from Dancing With Myself by Billy Idol

AUTHOR’S NOTE: As I began reading Joe Monteleone’s Tarot Mysticism: The Psycho-Spiritual Technology of the Thoth Tarot, I came upon his premise that one of the three primary uses for the tarot is self-reflection. Using the cards as a prompt, we can “sit with ourself” and contemplate our place in the Universe.

Because I was out-of-touch with the physical tarot community for the better part of twenty years despite fruitlessly trying to connect with my rural peers (no internet forums back then), the Thoth deck was my constant companion and sounding-board. I didn’t buy a Waite-Smith deck until I had been working with the Thoth for almost forty years, and the RWS tarot has never measured up to the excellence of the Thoth. This is primarily because in many cases the “canned narrative vignettes” in the Minor Arcana don’t capture the gist of their Golden Dawn roots, or even the essence of Waite’s own text from The Pictorial Key to the Tarot. (On that score, tarot historians tend to agree that Waite gave Pamela Colman Smith free rein to impose her own non-esoteric viewpoint on the images, and they sometimes spirit [or shamelessly hijack] the narrative well away from its source material.)

Although fans of the RWS will assert that it is more “conversational” than the Thoth deck, what it is saying may not be what needs to be heard, and an act of translation is necessary to bring it into line with the thrust of the message intended by its metaphysical origins. I will admit that it inspires numerous storytelling tropes with its prosaic scenes, but these often steer the reader even farther afield, missing the heart of the matter entirely. Less happily, it also encourages rampant free-association from the pictures (something that is less prominent in the Thoth deck and its historical predecessors like the Tarot de Marseille), and this furthers the widely-accepted folkloric “bloat” (I see it as insidious, creeping adulteration) that has grown up around quite a few of the cards over the last century.

I have a soft spot for anything to do with the Thoth tarot (unless it comes attached to the name Ziegler or Arrien), and I will be keen to dig deeper into Monteleone’s work. It will be interesting to see whether he acknowledges the superiority of the evocative designs and color palette of the Minor Arcana, or the suggestive contribution of Crowley’s onboard titles. Regarding the latter, in his zeal to condense the Golden Dawn’s phrases into single cogent keywords, I don’t think Crowley invariably hit the mark. While I agree that “Lord of Illusionary Success” is an unwieldy mouthful, I could have done without “Debauch” (degeneracy, depravity, etc.) for the 7 of Cups and would have substituted the related but less scurrilous idea of “Debasement,” but I guess he was after the lewd sexual connotations of Venus in Scorpio. At least the unflinching artwork of Harris nailed it.

It’s not clear yet whether the author – with his stated goal of exploring Thoth mysticism – will spend much time dissecting The Book of Thoth, which is itself awash in mystical impressions and recondite hints but also includes a vast amount of technical content with an occult slant. While the deck is an enduring inspiration, the companion book offers a lifetime of serious philosophical study, especially when backed up with Crowley’s Book of the Law and some of his other erudite writing. If Monteleone even comes close, I will judge his effort a success.