Origin and Evidence, Part II

In the last post, I talked a lot about how Crowley was carefully crafting a certain kind of argument in the early pages of BOT, with a certain kind of occult aim. I said that when he employs mentions of science, he is certainly not doing so to demonstrate any legitimate interest in science or its methods, but he is using a popular understanding of science as a kind of meme to communicate what he sees as a higher, spiritual, idea.

And I concluded the last post pointing out that Crowley, contradicting his claim of being unconcerned about authority and tradition, was certainly employing these things to make a very personal and extraordinary claim about the Tarot's central place in his own occult experience.

Crowley is well known for being, or seeming, contradictory. One example of this is how, after telling us that the history of Tarot is not really relevant to what he is attempting to argue about the "theory" of Tarot, he changes his mind when it comes to considering the evidence of its "quite modern history", that is the portion of Tarot's history that directly concerns Crowley's interests and claims. As we shall see, the problem for Crowley and his claims is that he arbitrarily decides when the "quite modern" or quite relevant portion of his report of the "evidence" begins, and by doing this he is intentionally distorting the truth.

What Crowley calls "the initiated tradition of Tarot" he alleges begins, or at least comes into relevant consideration, with Eliphas Lévi in the middle of the 19th century, but the truth is that Eliphas Lévi would never have written a thing about Tarot if he had not inherited a literary tradition that claimed Tarot was a centrally important artifact in Western occultism. Why does Crowley imply otherwise, saying for example that Lévi "seems to have understood that the Tarot was actually a pictorial form of the Qabalistic Tree of Life", as if that understanding were the product of Lévi's initiated insight, instead of his having read this claim in a book?

The main reason Crowley starts with Lévi is of course that AC so strongly identified with him he counted Lévi as one of his personal avatars, that is an earlier incarnation of Crowley's spirit. Crowley is then talking mainly about himself and his personal "initiated tradition of Tarot". We shall see however that his failure to look deeper into the past regarding this tradition is a calculation of his, intended to protect the spiritual authority of his entire belief system of Thelema. And that is because Lévi's predecessors, the people who inspired his own interest in Tarot, had done something terrible to the "initiated tradition"—they had revealed its true keys to everybody, right at the start of the occult version of the game!

The Veil-less Tradition

Have you ever wondered how Tarot came to be associated with Qabalah? Or how it acquired Qabalistic keys or correspondences? It was not, as Crowley suggests, a natural condition of its original symbolism. In other words, Tarot was not originally made to be Qabalistic. Rather, its structure and its symbolism fitted nicely into a Qabalistic scheme of interpretation, so long as one did not push that interpretation too far along. For if one did that, he would naturally bump up against the symbolic poverty of the older Tarot decks, whose symbols were clearly intended mainly to function as gaming mnemonics, and not as the Book of Thoth. That is why so many occultists complained of a corrupted Tarot, and of the need to "rectify" it. The notion that somehow that true Qabalistic symbolism of Tarot had gotten changed or was intentionally veiled, is a key part of the occult Tarot mythos.

And when and where did that mythos begin? Recall, Crowley doesn't want to discuss that, does he? In fact, he leaves any origin for that mythos veiled in what he calls the obscure mists of time.

Unfortunately, for true (Qabalistic) believers of many stripes, including Thelemic ones, we actually know the answer to this question. Occult Tarot began in 1781 in France, with the publication of two essays written by French Freemasons, and these essays conjectured for the first time publicly that Tarot was in fact the long lost Book of Thoth.

Tomorrow, I will discuss how those essays provided all the basic working parts of the "initiated tradition", and how they also provided a particular part of the Thelemic tradition that Crowley would later allege was given exclusively to him by the spiritual entity, Aiwass.

(jk)