“SUMMARY OF THE QUESTIONS HITHERTO DISCUSSED” [AND BEGGED]

On page ten of BOT, Crowley sums up the points he alleges to have made so far in the book. It is not quite a masterpiece, but it is certainly an exercise in begging the question(s):

1. 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.

Repeatedly, Crowley begs the question of Tarot’s origin (and more particularly the relevance of Tarot history to his theory), saying it is obscure: “The origin of this pack of cards is very obscure”—and disputed: “There is here no need to enter into any discussion of these disputed points”. Common minds often fall for the trick Crowley employs here, of suggesting disputed points (especially about obscure matters) are battlefields of equally valid opinion, and so of dubious value in establishing something relevant and true. This perception is even more popularly held in our time, when “debate” is understood to be a contest to see who can scream his point the loudest and most abusively. Yet, the question of what Tarot was, what it was originally designed to be, and how it came to be what it did by the 1940s, hovers over Crowley’s entire argument and “theory” of Tarot.

This is amply demonstrated by his next assertion:

2. [Tarot] is beyond doubt a deliberate attempt to represent, in pictorial form, the doctrines of the Qabalah.

Perhaps so. But the question Crowley begs is when exactly did this deliberate attempt begin? He implies the structure and the symbolism of Tarot have been Qabalistic since the beginning of their recorded existence. For example: “But the Tarot certainly existed, in what may be called the classical form, as early as the fourteenth century”. This classical form was allegedly recognizable as Qabalistic right from that time, needing only an initiated viewer to see it that way. Crowley says that came in the person of Eliphas Lévi who “seems to have understood that the Tarot was actually a pictorial form of the Qabalistic Tree of Life, which is the basis of the whole Qabalah”.

Crowley of course fails to mention to us, having dismissed the value of studying Tarot history, that Lévi was mainly initiated into an extant literary tradition which asserted the Qabalistic nature of Tarot, a tradition that was established in 1781, by two French Freemasons. Their essays introduced the ideas that Lévi and Crowley, and other occultists, have since developed about Tarot and its supposedly deep but obscure Qabalistic heritage.

Crowley, hoping to get the reader very much invested in a questionable tree so as to avoid consideration and discussion of the question-begging forest, now tries the “Wheel of Fortune” argument:

3. The evidence for this is very much like the evidence brought forward by a person doing a crossword puzzle. He knows from the "Across" clues that his word is "SCRUN blank H"; so it is certain, beyond error, that the blank must be a "C".

Here Crowley’s error (and attempted trick) in argument is to beg an erroneous analogy between the evidence offered and the answer it implies in his word puzzle, and that offered and implied by Tarot’s Qabalistic evidence.

In fact, it is quite reasonable to say that there is no puzzle at all regarding the origin of Tarot’s Qabalistic nature, which means the correct analogy would be to say the word should be spelled out in full—SCRUNCH—which is precisely what Crowley is doing with a lot of the relevant evidence. This is an important point—Crowley himself is making, and is in need of, the “C” to go missing. He needs there to be both mystery to attract us, which would not be as likely if the mundane facts were considered, and some kind of blank to be miraculously filled in, by Aiwass of course.

4. These attributions are in one sense a conventional, symbolic map; such could be invented by some person or persons of great artistic imagination and ingenuity combined with almost unthinkably great scholarship and philosophical clarity.

Now, here Crowley prepares a kind of argument much loved by people such as Erich von Däniken, where a great achievement or artifact is claimed to be so stupendous that it is beyond the ability and intelligence of even the most gifted human beings to have created. This idea has been repeatedly tested; for example respecting von Däniken’s claim that ancient astronauts must have built the Egyptian pyramids because it was too daunting a task for primitive humans to accomplish on their own; and found to be nonsense, or worse racist nonsense.

Of course, Crowley is here talking specifically about the correspondences of the Qabalistic Tarot Key, and he admits that, up to a point, a human genius could have accomplished a certain level of it. But, it is important to Crowley's purpose, proving his link to the Secret Chiefs, that he dismiss once and for all the idea that mere humans could have made this most brilliant Qabalistic instrument, the Tarot. Therefore, the Jews have got to go. Qabalah, after all, and Tarot's illumination of it, must be preserved as a great Mystery.

Therefore, in BOT, Crowley dismisses the idea that Jews could have invented or originated Kabbalah. As he says: “To explain [Kabbalah] at all, one has to postulate in the obscure past a fantastic assembly of learned rabbins, who solemnly calculated all sorts of combinations of letters and numbers, and created the Hebrew language on this series of manipulations.” Crowley of course rejects his own strawman at that point, telling us the “facts of history”, which have suddenly become relevant to him, could never support it. But from this he concludes the Jews could not therefore have invented Kabbalah.

Many Christian occultists, and Crowley here was certainly writing from a Christian-occult literary tradition, rejected the notion that Jews had invented Kabbalah; because the system seemed too perfect, too linked to some obscure ancient wisdom, for the “Christ-killing” race to have figured it out. Instead, Western occultism adopted the idea that Jews borrowed or stole Kabbalah from an even more ancient people, the Egyptians. This is precisely the Tarot dogma established in the essays of Court de Gébelin and the Comte de Mellet in 1781. And Crowley is following in that Egyptomaniacal tradition.

Having rejected, or begged off, the scholarship and philosophical clarity of the Jews, Crowley moves in for the spiritual kill:

5. Such persons, however eminent we may suppose them to have been, are not quite capable of making a system so abstruse [i.e., obscure, once again] in its entirety without the assistance of superiors whose mental processes were, or are, pertaining to a higher Dimension.

So, let us be clear here. Crowley, by adding that little “or are” bit, is clearly saying that Aiwass is of the very same class of spiritual superiors responsible for creating Kabbalah/Qabalah in the first place. In order to make this seem like something more than the preposterous claims of a con artist, or the ravings of a lunatic, Crowley has first to beg the question of the impossibly abstruse nature of Qabalah, so impossible that no humans, and certainly no Jews, could have invented it. Only creatures of “a higher Dimension” could have intervened to assist in the making of such a divinely-inspired artifact.

And isn’t it fortunate he just happened to choose Aleister Crowley to converse with?

But, as we have seen, there may have been other, more mundane, more traditionally occult, explanations. Certainly the latter do not require quite so much beggary, or bigotry.

Now, at this point in the proceedings, any educated reader of BOT could not be blamed for tossing the work into the fire, as it seems to be merely an euchering mockery of scholarship and (un)common sense. But, as in so much occultist writing, that is the traditional point of departure, one certainly well understood by Crowley, for finally writing something useful and interesting. In other words, the veils of cautionary tales, of reason, and certainly of certainty, are intended to stop most readers from going on.

And it is precisely at this point, having made an excellent case for thinking occult Tarot, and especially Crowley’s version of it, to be utterly valueless, that AC finally offers a credible and interesting justification for what he and other occultists have done to the game of Tarot. It comes at the end of the summary, indeed backs the intervening page of occult symbols (page 11), on page 12 (“He departed, went forth”).

One might take, by way of an analogy, the game of chess. Chess has developed from very simple beginnings. It was a mimic battle for tired warriors; but the subtleties of the modern game—which have now, thanks to Richard Reti, gone quite beyond calculation into the world of aesthetic creation—were latent in the original design.

Isn’t that all Crowley needed to say to the skeptics? The “subtleties...were latent in the original design.” Of course the skeptics would reply: But the subtleties of chess, however latent, are still used for playing a game, not demonstrating higher Dimensions or Intelligences.

But Crowley is prepared to deal with the random, evolutionary, heretics:

It is of course possible to argue that these subtleties have arisen in the course of the development of the game...One can argue that it is merely by chance that modern chess was latent in the original game.

Yes, one could argue that if, unlike parsimonious Aleister, the foolish controversialist wanted to make the most absurdly wild conjecture based on boring old likelihood, and in all ignorance of things like—uhm—oh, the theory of inspiration:

The theory of inspiration is really very much simpler, and it accounts for the facts without violation of the law of parsimony.

Of course it is one thing to argue that chess’s subtleties were latently laid by game designers unconsciously linked into the great cosmic chess archetype, which is questionable enough; and quite another to argue that the Secret Chiefs inspired the creators of Tarot, which is what Crowley is arguing, and what he wishes us to think is still happening with his Tzaddi-Heh switch.

Nevertheless, in spite of this, as so many commentators about Tarot have seen and discussed for over two centuries, it is interesting to see how easily the old gaming deck can be Qabalistically tricked out. There does seem to be a latent Qabalism in Tarot. Whether that latency is a product of archetypal or spiritual inspiration, or is just an interesting and inspirational coincidence is a question that will not be definitively settled simply because no matter what Tarot may have once been or once was intended to be, it is certainly a book of Qabalistic symbolism today.

And, despite what certain, dreary, cardgame historians have to say, Tarot has benefitted greatly from its Qabalistic development, becoming a fruitful aesthetic medium for many kinds of artists as a consequence. If Aleister Crowley had only exploited this quality of Tarot’s Qabalism, he might still have created an interesting Tarot deck. But because he required Tarot to do service in his Great Work of Thelema, he transformed it from a gaming deck, and from a quaint occult pastiche, into a true work of Art.

On that point, I will somewhat gratefully dispense with (some of) the mean-spirited skepticism I have so far employed in this examination, and prepare myself and you, reckless readers, for our trip in the next entry down the rabbit hole of Crowley's "Holy Qabalah".

(jk)

"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)

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)