"The Most Convincing Evidence Possible"

I will preface this entry with a question about the value of truth.

If you can save 1000 lives by lying, is a greater truth served than if you tell the truth and those 1000 lives are lost? And if by lying, you save these 1000 lives, but 10,000 more are made by this to think lying is always a life-saving virtue, and this results in the deaths of many thousands more eventually, have you done the right thing by saving life now, only to see the ripples of deadly consequences stain your good, dishonest intentions?

Of course you may wish to muddle more the simple consideration by asking me whether those 1000 lives were worth saving in the first place. Were they "good people"? And how can you truly know such a thing about all of them? And from that point we sink down into the abyss of real-life calculations, where truth that is rightly claimed to be something more than personal bias struggles to be seen or known or thought any more extant than the dodo.

I invite you to consider these questions as we engage tonight's discussion, which may upset some people, especially Thelemites.

EVIDENCE and MYTH

In the first ten pages of BOT, Aleister Crowley argues in favor of what he calls "The Theory of Tarot". While this theory is firmly planted in traditional occultism, especially Qabalism, Crowley wishes us to accept the idea that this is an organic planting, nothing manmade or arbitrary, and certainly nothing he himself invented. While he might be adjusting Tarot for the New Aeon, he claims to be making these adjustments according to the directions of Secret Chiefs who have long been the true authors of occult ideas and the true designers of the illustrations of these contained in occult Tarot.

While Crowley is not much interested in telling us about the long history of Tarot, he is all for telling us a certain version of its short side, as noted in the previous posting especially that side with which he has personal knowledge and in which he has a personal investment. Of course, just because he has these personal interests doesn't automatically mean everything he is going to tell us is wrong. But it does mean that as we encounter his claims, we should recall that he frequently begs questions any skeptical reader ought to have.

For example, on page eight, Crowley hones his history lesson about the antics of the Golden Dawn down to a personally useful point: "The point of these data is simply to show that, at that time the main preoccupation of all the serious members of the Order was to get in touch with the Secret Chiefs themselves." And to make the further point that "of all the serious members" he himself was the most serious and most worthy, Crowley modestly claims: "In 1904 success was attained by one of the youngest members, Frater Perdurabo." Of course Frater P. was our own AC.

One thing to recall, by the time of this alleged success, Frater P. was no longer a member of Golden Dawn, having been chucked out after an embarrassing tug-of-wills with a group of Order rebels led by W. B. Yeats and others. In fact, in 1904 Crowley was not making any conscious effort to get in touch with Secret Chiefs, of the Golden Dawn or anyplace else. He was on an extended honeymoon, and in the midst of a long, rather hysterical melodrama crafted by his wife Rose in Cairo, Egypt. At the culmination of their chimerical foreplay, Crowley allegedly acted as secretary to a Secret Chief named Aiwass, who he later admitted just might have been himself, and who told Crowley the rules for the New Aeon of Horus, which rulebook became the Book of the Law, the chief religious text of Thelema.

Now, putting aside the credibility of Crowley's account of the Cairo episode, which is another story, what does it have to do with Tarot, or any relevant evidence regarding its "theory"?

Simply this, Crowley tells us in the next page and a half, under "The Nature of the Evidence", that "the most convincing evidence possible that the Book of the Law is a genuine message from the Secret Chiefs" is contained in the most important and perplexing adjustment Crowley makes in his New-Aeonic Tarot, the switch of Hebrew letter correspondences between the Tarot trumps IV-Emperor, and XVII-Star. The switch, from the Golden Dawn key, corresponds the Hebrew letter Tzaddi to IV-Emperor, and the Hebrew letter Heh to XVII-Star. Many complications and furrowed Thelemic brows (including supposedly Crowley's own) have followed in the wake of this alleged revelation.

Now, it is easy to get bogged down with discussions of these correspondences, but the question here is a simple one. Did a Secret Chief supply Aleister Crowley with this allegedly new, "most convincing", information? Or was there perhaps another, more mundane, source for it available to him?

Unfortunately for Crowley's lack of interest in the long history of Tarot, we will have to go back in time to the beginning of public speculation about occult Tarot to get the answer to that question.

THE 1781 KEY

Before we start that investigation, it would be good to point out (to novices especially) a surprising aspect of the structure of Tarot decks, even the really old and mundane ones—there are twenty-two trumps (actually twenty-one trumps and a Fool) in addition to the four regular suits (Wands, Cups, Swords, Disks) in a Tarot deck. When public speculation about the occult nature of Tarot cards began in 1781, it was noted by the French authors—Antoine Court de Gébelin and Louis-Raphaël-Lucrèce [Comte] de Mellet—of these first essays that twenty-two just happened to also be the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet. And since one could easily make superficial links between the cards and the Qabalistic meanings of the letters, these French Freemasons believed this indicated Tarot must have been created to illustrate Qabalistic ideas. Of course, as you might surmise even knowing just these basic facts, getting the order of the correspondence between the trumps and letters correct was key to understanding the true meaning of the original Tarot symbolism, or so it was alleged.

And, regardless of what you may think about the credibility of those conjectures, they have been critically influential. The question of the correct letter-trump correspondences, known as the Tarot "keys", dominated much of the work of Western occultists since 1781, as Tarot became the centerpiece artifact of their speculations and their aspirations. That is why the "serious members" of the Golden Dawn were battling over who had the right number for the Secret Chiefs, who among other things could validate or correct one's Tarot keys to make sure they were "aright", as Crowley claimed Aiwass had done for him in the Book of the Law.

But, just one thing. Hadn't the keys been published back in 1781, back when the original authors of the original occult Tarot theory offered it up for public consumption?

Answer—yes. And, unlike their successors, those first occult authors, behaving most un-occcultly, were more concerned to report what they considered an important archaeological discovery, that Tarot was the lost Book of Thoth, than they were to conceal true Tarot keys. No, they revealed it all, noting specific trump-letter correspondences in the second essay, written by the Comte de Mellet. And it is this Hebrew-letter correspondence key for the Tarot trumps, again the first ever established for Tarot, that interests us here. For in that key, one claimed by Mellet to be the original ancient Egyptian key, the trumps were reversed from what they eventually were in the Golden Dawn key, with the first Hebrew letter, Aleph, corresponding to the last trump, XXI-World, and counting up (or down) to the final letter, Tau, corresponding to the Fool card.

A very interesting consequence of this key is the following set of correspondences: XVII-Star corresponds to the Hebrew letter Heh, and IV-Emperor corresponds to the Hebrew letter, Tzaddi.

Sound familiar?

Again, that key was published for all the world to see back in 1781. It was not something hidden away, or unknown, as Eliphas Lévi had read the essays and makes mention of Court de Gébelin as an "erudite" commentator on Tarot. In other words, Aleister's alleged previous incarnation had certainly read the 1781 essays. Indeed, they were considered fundamental Tarot texts back in the 19th century. So important were these essays, that A. E. Waite, in his "Pictorial Key to the Tarot", spends many pages discussing Court de Gébelin's ideas and influences, and provides bibliographical information about the essays at the back of his book.

If Crowley was not aware of the essays and of the original Tarot key in 1904, it seems a little odd that Aiwass would not have told him to check at the British Museum.

On that point, Crowley once wrote:

It is simply bad faith to swear a man to the most horrible penalties if he betray…, etc., and then take him mysteriously apart and confide the Hebrew Alphabet to his safe keeping. This is perhaps only ridiculous; but it is a wicked imposture to pretend to have received it from Rosicrucian manuscripts which are to be found in the British Museum. To obtain money on these grounds, as has been done by certain moderns, is clear (and I trust, indictable) fraud.

I suppose then pretending to have gotten it from a Secret Chief named Aiwass must be pretty bad too.

And if he wasn't pretending in 1904, and for some years afterward while he claimed to be struggling to make sense of Aiwass's instruction, Crowley seems to have been actively ignoring the truth, in 1944, when he wrote BOT, and was so intent on dismissing the importance of the part of Tarot history that would have challenged his most basic beliefs (or claims).

Of course, by that time, at the end of his life, Crowley had a magickal legacy to protect, a reputation that, if not exactly seemly or popular, did give him some credibility in the occult world, and some means to access financial support from always ready followers. Would those followers have been as enthusiastic and as faithful if they had known, for a fact, that Crowley had been lying to them? Or that, at the least, his alleged spiritual connection wasn't capable of providing any better evidence for its praeternatural knowledge than one could get at a good library?

Now, maybe this revelation about a revelation is just a curious footnote on Crowley's magickal enterprise. Certainly, it is something religiously avoided by the industrial purveyors of Crowley's legacy. But, in 1944 at least, when he published what many people consider one of his masterpieces, Crowley claimed Aiwass's Tarot tip was "the most convincing evidence possible."

I will close tonight with a quotation from one of Crowley's most important teachers, A. E. Waite:

I know that for the high art of ribaldry there are few things more dull than the criticism which maintains that a thesis is untrue, and cannot understand that it is decorative. I know also that after long dealing with doubtful doctrine or with difficult research it is always refreshing, in the domain of this art, to meet with what is obviously of fraud or at least of complete unreason. But the aspects of history, as seen through the lens of occultism, are not as a rule decorative, and have few gifts of refreshment to heal the lacerations which they inflict on the logical understanding.

(jk)