Blogging To A Thoth Book

Tomorrow I will begin an exploration of Aleister Crowley's Tarot book The Book of Thoth. When this exploration is over, on December 1, 2007, I will publish a book, title yet to be determined, which will be just what the title of this blog says: a concise reader's guide to one of AC's most important books.

Why am I blogging about it? For one thing, since the guide is intended to be concise, I will be coming up with a great deal more material than I will put into the book. So, as a preview of what the best of the those bits will be, I will include some (not all) of these along with secondary and tertiary matters most would find misplaced in a concise guide.

And why is the guide going to be concise, instead of gargantuanly comprehensive? Well, first off, if I felt like writing that gargantuan work, I would have done it by now. One could write, or I could write anyway, ten books about "Book of Thoth", but only a few scholars or (oc)cultists would be interested in spending the time to read them. For the people still interested in understanding what Crowley was doing with Thoth, but who would like that explanation in as plain of language as one can use when speaking of deeply occult, and so complicated and convoluted, ideas, I will try to serve up an offering of Thoth pearls that will both satisfy a beginner's curiosity, but still lure on those who want something deeper.

Crowley's work was an ongoing, ever-developing commentary upon his own life as lived according to his understanding of occult principles. He poured out his life in pursuit of accomplishing things most people would have considered utter nonsense, or at best the mutterings and putterings of an irrelevant eccentric. Sadly, Crowley always imagined that he and his religion were going to bring on a popular deluge of revolutionary change. Unfortunately, as with so many things Crowley attempted, there were people better equipped and far more motivated than he to become successful revolutionaries. Aleister might bring himself out into the street to observe and to cantankerously critique the grumbling, unwashed, masses, but he wasn't about to put himself out to lead them in any kind of real, dangerous, fight for freedoms he wasn't convinced they merited.

Ultimately, he ended up talking, meaningfully taking, to very few people. His dense library of works is muddled over by a small crew of researchers and zealots, but as his books stand now, they will never reach even a small minority of people. Ultimately, Crowley was born to be, and died in the poverty and obscurity of being, an occultist. The only notice he got at the end of his life was for being a caricature of evil, a devilish piñata whacked about for a few final days by the tabloid press that loved to hate him.

But, as with A. E. Waite, Crowley left an artifact that ended up attracting considerable attention—a Tarot deck. The "Thoth" Tarot, and its illustrations of his view of the occult factors and equations of what he called the New Aeon, or New Age, combined with his book explaining his cards, became the most popular work Crowley ever did. Of course it was a work that he accomplished with the considerable aid of his friend and student, Frieda Harris, one of the few people who remained loyal and reliable to him right to the end.

For five years they toiled to craft seventy-eight mnemonic portraits of Crowley's Qabalistic mind. He poured out his ideas, and she poured out the watercolors, making many drafts to achieve the effects we have come to appreciate as the finest occult Tarot ever produced. Harris knew right from the inception of the project that her work was also his work, and that, no matter what reception her cards were going to have in the public, they were pictures of a particular person's mind, and so could not be justly or meaningfully divorced from what that person had to say about them. Therefore, Frieda begged Aleister, who was old and ailing, to set himself to make one more stone in his great work. She frankly told him it was so important that she didn't much care if she killed him to get it out of him. And so Crowley wrote the guide to his Tarot deck, The Book of Thoth, publishing it in a limited run of 200 copies in 1944.

Crowley made a real effort at simplifying his ideas in this brief book. The problem was that his ideas are not so simple, and he was constantly shorthanding his presentation by referencing his other works, leaving many readers feeling they had been had—the bastard won't tell us what's up unless we get his other books—and leaving most readers feeling baffled by the deep and personal esoterica. Just what the hell was Crowley talking about? But the cards, the beautiful and sometimes terrifying cards, suggested that whatever he was talking about might just be really interesting IF you could figure it out.

So much has been said about the inadequacies of The Book of Thoth as a beginner's book that a number of people have in the past written Thoth guidebooks, or their own personal takes of what Crowley may have meant. They range in presumption from things like Angeles Arrien's anti-Crowley A Tarot Handbook to Lon Milo DuQuette's silly Crowley whitewash, Understanding Aleister Crowley's Thoth Tarot, a work that claims to be "The Rosetta Stone of the Thoth Tarot", but which reads more like the Blarney Stone. I plan to include in this blog reviews of all the other alleged guides to the Thoth deck. And yes, how self-serving will it be for me to bash them now, while I am preparing to better and bury them. But I have bashed them before now as well, so it is nothing nefarious, or at least not insincere, on my part to do it now.

Anyway, I think that is enough for tonight. I will begin this exercise tomorrow, with Part I, page 3.

If you want to ask a question, make a comment, or make a discussion, go ahead. I don't know how much time I will have to join in any discussion, since I am researching and writing this book, and trying to get some things done at jktarot.com too, but I will attempt to answer your questions.

See you tomorrow.

(jk)

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