Origin and Evidence, part I

After discussing the contents of the Tarot, and what he thinks that means, Crowley briefly turns to a discussion of the origin of the cards. One should realize, as is the case with allegedly historical accounts of the cards made by any occultist, that historical accuracy, or being bound to the mundane world of facts and their likely implications, is not the object of the exercise. Instead, an occultist seeks to provide a mysterious, or more pertinently an ancient, matrix for his speculations. He knows that people expect occult ideas, no matter how rooted in some ethereal plane they may be, to have a real-word tradition that has preceded his own profession of them.

If, for example, Crowley had used his "origins" section to talk about the historical facts, which were pretty well known at his own time of writing BOT, that the occult dogma of Tarot had largely been created by two 18th-century French Freemasons, and not by 18th-century BC Egyptians, the credibility of his claim of "necessity" (which I talked about in A Fully-Packed Few Words) might have been obviously challenged in many people's minds. Yet, Crowley was seeking to gain respectability for his methods outside the tiny world of occultism. And he sought that respect by claiming to go about occult matters scientifically. So, he could not entirely ignore the historical part of his exposition. Let us say that his treatment of the historical facts was more artfully spun in defense of his essay than what most occultists manage.

Crowley starts with the popular occultist claim that the origins of Tarot are "very obscure". I would say if you searched for words aptly summarizing the occultist position of the history of Tarot, "unknown" and "obscure" would be the most beloved descriptions for the inconvenient facts. Once something is "very obscure", you have opened the door to alleging that any and all opinions about that origin may have some, or maybe equal, credibility. And that way you can appear to be paying homage to the methods of science (you appear to be "open-minded"), while remaining loyal to the aims of occultism's holy mysteria. This is an approach much used in a more vulgar (and highly profitable) way by people such as Erich von Däniken.

Having opened everyone's mind to the equality of authority that must attend to these questions of Tarot origins, Crowley uncritically reports that "some authorities" seek an origin for Tarot "back as far as the ancient Egyptian Mysteries". He does not report to us that these unnamed authorities who claim an ancient-Egyptian origin were crafting (or repeating) historical romance, and not history, when they authoritatively put Tarot cards, or their hieroglyphic equivalents, into the hands of ancients.

I think Crowley understood, since he had at least read the straightforward debunking of the Egyptian origins claim made by A. E. Waite in Pictorial Key to the Tarot (first published with the Waite deck in 1909), that the Egyptian basis was weak or purely mythical, since he notes the fact that people had for a time mistakenly called the Tarot a "Bohemian" deck, meaning "Egyptian", on account of their misunderstanding the "Asiatic", instead of ancient Engyptian, origin of Gypsies (who early Tarot occultists wrongly claimed had brought the first Tarot cards into Europe).

Crowley, having briefly stated the uncompelling historical situation of Tarot's origin, now sweeps away the history problem with typical occultist boldness : "There is here no need to enter into any discussion of these disputed points."

And why is that?

Because, Crowley claims, right below (heading the section "The Theory of the Correspondences of Tarot"): "Unimportant to the present purpose are tradition and authority."

One might at that point ask, then why even mention those things?

However Crowley, seeking to authorize what he just claimed, attempts to enlist Albert Einstein! to his cause, and claims, against any reasonable understanding of the scientific method, that Einstein's Theory of Relativity "does not rest on the fact that...it was confirmed." Well, scientifically, it certainly does rest on this fact, if one means by "rest" to "depend upon" a demonstrable relevance; since if the opposite had occurred, and Einstein's theory, when tested, had been shown to be incorrect, its claim as an accurate description of a fundamental reality of the universe would have been rejected.

Crowley, whenever he refers to science, is certainly not deferring to its real-world relevance and authority, but is using what he understands to be a popular perception of these as another potentially helpful meme. Unlike many pseudo-scientists, who misinterpret scientific ideas and findings solely to provide their unscientific notions with an authority the facts deny them, Crowley also seeks to employ science as another Qabalistic tool set (recall it exists in his Tarot at the Six of Swords), and considers the mundane workings of its theory-testing to be utterly irrelevant to his occult aim.

As he plainly states in his summary on page 10 of BOT, "The origin of the Tarot is quite irrelevant, even if it were certain, It must stand or fall as a system on its own merits."

So, clearly, the merits of which he speaks are not those of mundane science, but of Hermetic science—a higher, spiritually based, knowledge.

Crowley is telling us that even if Tarot was invented to play card games, by people demonstrably uninformed about and uninterested in Qabalah, this does not matter a bit, IF it can be shown that somehow a Qabalistic map of the universe was nevertheless imparted to Tarot in some way. In other words, whether intended or not by Tarot's human originators, at whatever point Tarot was liberated from the mundane ludicrous world, it now reveals "a deliberate attempt to represent, in pictorial form, the doctrines of the Qabalah". More than this, Crowley would argue that this deliberate attempt, particularly if unconsciously manifested, proves beyond all doubt the deliberator was a praeternatural entity, working through mundane matrices and unwitting minions, to provide evidence of its presence and intent to the initiated.

This notion of Tarot as a veiled revelatory "book" goes back to the beginnings of published occult dogma about the deck. The very name "Book of Thoth" originates in the idea the Tarot represented the leaves of an ancient Eyptian book of wisdom, perhaps the encyclopedia of the universe which was Thoth's book. Crowley's own occult experience was both inspired by this idea and led him to exploit it for his own purposes.

More on this and Crowley's evidence of a Qabalistic Tarot in the next post.

(jk)

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