AUTHOR'S NOTE: This essay - the third and final installment of my Thoth "deep dive" series - is by far the most challenging. Crowley's take on the Major Arcana was nuanced and complex, full of syncretic flourishes and just plain ol' mystical ambiguity. But at least his rarefied excursions into occult profundity were a product … Continue reading The Thoth Atu or Keys: Major Arcana in Brief
Qabalistic Theory
The “Glorified Pip Cards” of the Thoth Tarot
AUTHOR'S NOTE: Today I'm embarking on my promised "deep dive" into the Thoth tarot, beginning with the Minor Arcana. Note, however, that I'm not going to present an exhaustive card-by-card analysis of divinatory content; I've already done that in my posted "Tarot 101" course material, which is primarily Thoth-based, and in a more general way … Continue reading The “Glorified Pip Cards” of the Thoth Tarot
Papus and the “Universal Fluids”
AUTHOR'S NOTE: As I delve deeper into The Tarot of the Bohemians by "Papus" (Gerard Encausse), I've encountered his mystical take on the Kabbalistic concept of "the Descent of Spirit into Matter." Although my brain is starting to feel like a pretzel, I'm soldiering on and trying to render the best of it into comprehensible terms. … Continue reading Papus and the “Universal Fluids”
Papus and the Trump-Card Septenaries
AUTHOR'S NOTE: With the numbers One through Ten, Papus (Gerard Encausse) found major inspiration in the quaternary paradigm, by which he managed to turn ten "pips" into a triad of four-card arrays. (See my previous essay.) With the trump cards he adopted a septenary model instead, and strove to bring the two onto the same … Continue reading Papus and the Trump-Card Septenaries
Papus and the “Formula of Tetragrammaton”
AUTHOR'S NOTE: In The Tarot of the Bohemians, Gerard Encausse (aka "Papus") spends the first 20% of the book playing with the numerology of the cards and relating them to the four Hebrew letters of the "ineffable Name of God" (euphemized as "Tetragrammaton"). Papus stacked up the trump cards in "quaternaries" (four-card sets) following the … Continue reading Papus and the “Formula of Tetragrammaton”
Rethinking the Chaldean Court
AUTHOR'S NOTE: During a recent online conversation, a question was raised about the reasons for the Golden Dawn's arrangement of the court cards on the Chaldean zodiac. I had a plausible answer for the Princesses: basically there was no place else to put them in the grand scheme, so the GD came up with a … Continue reading Rethinking the Chaldean Court
Creative Potential and “Two-ness”
AUTHOR'S NOTE: The current social antipathy toward "binary thinking" is a puzzler for the life-long student of occult number theory. Just because some college professor or Hollywood influencer decided that "binary is bad" in terms of self-identity doesn't make it a functionally sound or rational premise. We might have asked the last scion of the … Continue reading Creative Potential and “Two-ness”
Run, Don’t Walk – A Critique of “Pathworking”
AUTHOR'S NOTE: I was recently criticized in an online forum for having chosen long ago to avoid taking a "deep dive" into the tarot by not using the Major Arcana for "scrying in the astral vision." I decided to respond with this broadside. I think these matters deserve a mentor (I'm not volunteering!) since they … Continue reading Run, Don’t Walk – A Critique of “Pathworking”
The Hierophant, the Archetypal “Five” and the Maelstrom
AUTHOR'S NOTE: I credit Edgar Allan Poe with educating me about the maelstrom: it is the "Mother of All Whirlpools" that will relentlessly suck down any seafaring vessel careless enough to wander into its embrace, kind of like an oceanic "black hole." Here I'm drawing unflattering parallels to religious fundamentalism and its purveyors, although that … Continue reading The Hierophant, the Archetypal “Five” and the Maelstrom
Higher Octaves: The Outer Planet Conundrum
AUTHOR'S NOTE: While reading Aleister Crowley's Eight Lectures on Yoga, I came across his brief analysis of the ten planets of astrology, the seven "classical" orbs of the ancients and (at least in part) the three modern planets. Back in the 1970s, esoteric astrologers considered Uranus, Neptune and Pluto to represent the "higher octaves" of … Continue reading Higher Octaves: The Outer Planet Conundrum
Parsifal's Wheel Tarot & Astrology 