A Fully-Packed Few Words

When Aleister Crowley began writing BOT (I will use this abbreviation for The Book of Thoth), he was pushing seventy years of age, and was pushing the thin envelop of the time alloted to him in his life. Thus, with his energy dissipating, and his mind full of personal symbolic resonances for all the occult ideas he had absorbed and developed, he was bound rather like one of the Devil's imps, to worship concision in the writing of his tarotbook.

Now, the dictionary definition of "concision", that is being "concise", is to pack "a lot of information...in a few words". How exactly that paradox works in reality is not explained by Mr. D (dictionary, not Devil). Well, one thing about it, a twenty-year-old's understanding of "a few words" is likely to be much different than a seventy-year-old's. The concision in the mind of the older person, his ability to say what he means in a few words, and, as Mr. D also paradoxically puts it, to be "brief but comprehensive" is naturally going to escape the ready grasp of the younger person, who does not possess the great store of experience the older person attaches to the few words. And that is particularly an issue when we are talking about the information storage regarding magickal and qabalistic data that resided in the brain of Aleister Crowley at the end of his life. Many readers of BOT, being utterly unprepared for the deeply-linked ideas they will encounter in Crowley's book, decide his concision is nothing but laziness or a kind of swindle, forcing them to seek out his other writings to decipher his cryptic few words.

Let us examine the few words Crowley writes in his first paragraph , and see what if any concision is working there.

After informing us of a few structural details of the Tarot pack, and making an error of history (modern playing cards are not derived from Tarot, but Tarot is an adaptation of an early form of these), Crowley tells us this structure is itself fundamentally important:

At first sight one would suppose this arrangement to be arbitrary, but it is not.

Do you find that an extraordinary statement? Because you should, if you are getting the information intended in the few words.

Crowley admits that to all beginners the mundane explanation of the structure of a Tarot pack must seem quite arbitrary. In other words, it could have been sixty-seven or thirty-eight cards as well as seventy-eight, right? It's a pack of cards after all, and one which people used to play card games. That must be arbitrary, "based on whim" rather than "reason or a system", right?

But Crowley says "no", it is not arbitrary. So, if not that then a reasoned, systematic design must have been imparted to the Tarot, either in its inception or somewhere along the way of its development.

Crowley then expands upon his first few words on this notion, and tells us in fact that the structure of the Tarot pack is "necessitated"—"forced" or "compelled" by "the structure of the universe".

Of course, for that to be true, and for Crowley to know it to be so, he would have to be knowledgeable of oh—the structure of the universe, which would make him the most knowledgeable human being who has ever lived. For even today, with physics in an alleged "golden age", we do not know with deep understanding the structure of the universe. We know a lot about forces and phenomena, but not enough to claim we could pattern an accurate representation of it in a pack of playing cards. And how much less likely would it be that a non-scientist writing more than sixty years ago would be able to do this?

But, maybe the universe Crowley speaks about is not entirely or merely material, or the one which concerns physicists. Maybe it is a deeper and broader idea than that. Crowley in fact uses a few more words to specify what he means to say:

The Tarot's structure, he claims, is necessitated by "the Solar System, as symbolized by the Holy Qabalah". And with those few words, Crowley has succinctly revealed everything you need to know about occult Tarot, and about his ideas concerning it—well, except that his ideas do take some unusual twists and turns that will require more than a few words of elaboration. But in fact, making clear from the start that the fundamental necessity in understanding occult Tarot is to grasp the assumption that it is patterned on a Qabalistic mapping of the local, human, portion of the universe, is the most important example of his use of concision in the book.

Yet, how many readers skim over these concise opening lines, noting Crowley's promise to explain them "in due course", and never really consider the implications of what they have just read? Of course, many readers will not even know or understand what it means to say the Tarot pack is structured on a Qabalistic map of the Solar System. What is the Holy Qabalah, for example? How does it tell us anything useful about our solar system, or about Tarot? If you have asked those questions, instead of getting irritated, as many do, at perceiving yet another layer of instruction to be engaged and mastered, you should feel a sense of gratitude to Crowley for putting things so simply and clearly and comprehensively—i.e., so concisely, in his first few words.

And, the key to getting BOT is to understand how the old magus was habitually doing this throughout the book, making it in fact a kind of legend, concisely explaining the (literally) cartographic symbols Harris had painted.

Tomorrow: The Origin of the Tarot—as Crowley sees it

(jk)

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