Variant approaches to the Thoth: Angeles Arrien's book

If you scroll down the page of that wiki article you will find Harris' inspiration.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelican#Symbolism_and_culture

If you want to see a swan look at the Princess of Cups. Notice the difference? Pay particular attention to the beak (bill).

If Arrien thinks the bird in the Empress is a swan I have to ask if Arrien has ever seen a swan?

Swan vs. Pelican

Aeon418 said:

If you scroll down the page of that wiki article you will find Harris' inspiration.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelican#Symbolism_and_culture

If you want to see a swan look at the Princess of Cups. Notice the difference? Pay particular attention to the beak (bill).

If Arrien thinks the bird in the Empress is a swan I have to ask if Arrien has ever seen a swan?

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Well, I can tell you that I've seen a swan. I lived with Swans for almost ten years. I have also spent many months in south Florida where the pelicans dive for fish right in front of you. The image on the Empress card is definitely a swan whether it was intentional or not on the part of Harris.

Here are two links. You can compare them yourself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelican

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swan

Here are the distinctions between a swan and a pelican which you can easily spot on the two pictures. The swan has a graceful neck that is often curved in a U shape when it is in a rested position, whereas the pelican not only has a much longer neck, it is rarely seen in the same U position as a swan. The swan's head is actually bent down towards the throat which is not something the pelican does in the same way. The pelican also has a huge beak and a huge crop/pouch which are it's distinquishing marks. The swan does not have these and neither are seen on the Empress card. The bird in the Empress card has a small head and the U neck of a swan and no visible crop. But the most telling of all really is the plumage. A swan's wings turn up with an arch forming a graceful curve from neck to wings. The pelican's wings turn downward. If you closely examine the two photos, you can clearly see what I'm referring to.

The questions are:

Was Lady Harris a bit sloppy when choosing her image of a pelican or did she actually mean to paint a swan? Had Crowley actually told her to include this image or was it done on her own?

Did Arrien mistake the so-called pelican for a Swan and run with it or did she actually believe that Lady Harris intended to paint a Swan and not a pelican?

And also...a question we might be able to ask Mary or Angie is....Was Arrien aware of the fact that Crowley claims this is a pelican and if so, why did she choose to represent it as a swan?

I guess the last question might be revealing as to Arrien's competence as an author but more interesting would be if she actually believed that contrary to Crowley's description of the bird, the bird was indeed a Swan....and why.

I have no interest in discrediting or defending Angeles Arrien. If she made mistakes ...so what. Who hasn't? If she wrote a book on Thoth and didn't respect the creator (well, one of them) of Thoth, at least she was upfront about that. Once alerted, we read things knowing what we're getting into.

I sense there is more afoot than we are able to get at here.

Rima

I'd have said the beak was way too long for a swan, and too pointed -0 more of a fish-hunting beak. (I know my birds too ! ) On the other hand - it is unquestionably a swan's NEST. Very strange; I think it was likely a simple lack of knowledge. Not a lot of people got to see pelicans a lot.....

And the neck of the pelican on wiki is very curved just like a swan's... If Frieda was relying on dodgy pictures from books, I can see why she would have painted what she intended to be a pelican that looked like that.

I still don't like Arrien - but on this particular issue I'd say the points were pretty much equal in terms of ornithology; however it was certainly INTENDED as a swan and Arrien shouldn't have suggested otherwise.

Here is the point again! If anyone knew much about Crowley's system, or undertook any of his initiations or read the Costitution he made for the OTO or was familiar with Freemasonry or even basic hermeticicm they would see immediatly what he meant and why it was on that card and why it IS a pelican ... has to be ... a pelican at the stage of development he is describing.

Rima said:

I'm curious, when you say that "she ignored far too many of the truly profound things Crowley had to say" were you suggesting that she did have her own agenda is some way and actually ignored some of Crowley's ideas......or are you suggesting that perhaps she didn't really understand these ideas and that's why she "ignored" them??

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Everyone has their own agenda - especially writers!
Additionally, she both ignored what Crowley had to say and didn't really understand it. This is both a strength (in terms of providing a fresh look at the images) and a weakness (missing significant details & references), and her book should be read with this in mind.

The symbolism of the mother pelican feeding her little baby pelicans is rooted in an ancient legend , that in time of famine, the mother pelican wounded herself, striking her breast with the beak to feed her young with her blood to prevent starvation. Another version of the legend was that the mother fed her dying young with her blood to revive them from death, but in turn lost her own life.

Exact Teheuti! That has been my point too here. Why cant we acknowledge mistakes that she made WHILE STILL ackowledging that there is much to learn from her fresh look.

/T

Hey gang,

Not to stir things up again, but can someone please identify anything we might "learn from her fresh look" specifically? I know that this book has fans, but in all these postings I have never seen a single specific example of utility (or even the hint of a "fresh look" for that matter).

Ligator, what exactly do we learn from Arrien herself, aside from a generalized sense that freeform association can be useful and it's okay to throw everything out if you don't feel like learning it? I am asking in sincerity, because I've asked repeatedly but in all the earlier kerfuffle it never got addressed.

Scion

I promise that I will give you such an answer... but not right now. I am working and then I will go on vacation, without computer!

/T

Constellations

Arrien’s work does have one key piece of information for understanding Thoth’s book: the Constellations. This number/symbol key organizes the deck into 9 chapters that tell of our journey through the Qabala Tree. One does not get the impression from The Tarot Handbook that Arrien was aware of this.

I don’t want to spoil the fun for you as this lateral thinking puzzle might have been devised by the Ancients to unlock dynamic capabilities of human awareness. To give away too much might not only rob you of the pleasure of deciphering its glyphs for yourself, but could also skip necessary exercises of both left and right brain thinking that serve to train one’s use of symbols and number in ways necessary to unlock the Mysteries.

Tarot is one of the current forms of an ancient codex enciphering a metaphysics based on the geometric progression of number. It reveals a system constituting a “sacred science” that unifies astronomy/astrology with acoustics/music, architecture/geometry and medicine/alchemy - the Hermetic Arts. This science has been utilized and advanced by its initiates since the dawn of human civilization as a means of comprehending the measure and meaning of space and time. A secret that has largely succeeded in avoiding scrutiny by the uninitiated due to ciphers of varying complexity employed by those charged with its safekeeping (as well as those who have tried to monopolize it for their own selfish ends).

Enter Crowley. Love him or revile him, he appears to have made an earnest attempt at making this system accessible to a wider audience without violating his oaths of secrecy. In compiling his deck with Lady Frida Harris, he disregards the ciphers and conceives a mostly unscrambled version of the codex (the flaws he left in place being necessary to set the story in motion once one deduces the sequential order of the constellations). Yet, even with the glyphic attributions corrected, this system of Tarot remains obscure if one is unfamiliar with the number/symbol key that organizes it. Thus, although he justly earns the rancor of his contemporaries for divulging secrets of the Hebrew alphabet, Crowley does not technically reveal the true shape of Thoth’s book.

How Arrien got hold of it is a question for her. Perhaps she intuited it.