Thoth deck the one and only?

Le Fanu said:

But to refer to the "philosphy as freedom" as supporting this makes me think that the deck would - by extension - be in favour of absolutely anything! Intriguing stuff.

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yogiman said:

What he says is that rules and restrictions make us free. To me this is best illustrated in sports and music. Without rules there would be no fun and performance. It's an art to deal with the restrictions in the best way.

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Aleister Crowley said:

You may look sourly down a meanly-pointed nose, or yell "Whoop La!" and make for Piccadilly Circus: in either case you will be wrong; you will not have understood the Book.

Shameful confession, one of my own Chelas (or so it is rather incredibly reported to me) said recently: "Self-discipline is a form of Restriction." (That, you remember, is "The word of Sin ...".) Of all the utter rubbish! (Anyhow, he was a "centre of pestilence" for discussing the Book at all.) About 90% of Thelema, at a guess, is nothing but self-discipline. One is only allowed to do anything and everything so as to have more scope for exercising that virtue.

Concentrate on "...thou hast no right but to do thy will." The point is that any possible act is to be performed if it is a necessary factor in that Equation of your Will. Any act that is not such a factor, however harmless, noble, virtuous or what not, is at the best a waste of energy. But there are no artificial barriers on any type of act in general. The standard of conduct has one single touchstone. There may be—there will be—every kind of difficulty in determining whether, by this standard, any given act is "right" or "wrong": but there should be no confusion. No act is righteous in itself, but only in reference to the True Will of the person who proposes to perform it. This is the Doctrine of Relativity applied to the moral sphere.

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LRichard said:

You have described a typical American redneck, except that a redneck loves to barbeque in the back yard in summer as long as there is a generous supply of cold Budweiser to replace the fluids lost in sweat. Only in summer, however, and only outdoors, and only Budweiser.

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yogiman said:

. What he says is that rules and restrictions make us free. To me this is best illustrated in sports and music. .

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Aleister Crowley said:

It will be seen that the formula-'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law' has nothing to do with 'Do as you please.'

It is much more difficult to comply with the Law of Thelema than to follow out slavishly a set of dead regulations. Almost the only point of emancipation, in the sense of relief from a burden, is just the difference between Life and Death.

To obey a set of rules is to shift the whole responsibility of conduct on to some superannuated Bodhisattva, who would resent you bitterly if he could see you, and tick you off in no uncertain terms for being such a fool as to think you could dodge the difficulties of research by the aid of a set of conventions which have little or nothing to do with actual conditions.

Formidable indeed are the obstacles we have created by the simple process of destroying our fetters. The analogy of the conquest of the air holds excellently well. The things that worry the pedestrian worry us not at all; but to control a new element your Yama must be that biological principle of adaptation to the new conditions, adjustment of the faculties to those conditions, and consequent success in those conditions, which were enunciated in respect of planetary evolution by Herbert Spencer and now generalised to cover all modes of being by the Law of Thelema.

But now let me begin to unleash my indignation. My job—the establishment of the Law of Thelema—is a most discouraging job. It is the rarest thing to find anyone who has any ideas at all on the subject of liberty. Because the Law of Thelema is the law of liberty, everybody's particular hair stands on end like the quills of the fretful porpentine; they scream like an uprooted mandrake, and flee in terror from the accursed spot. Because: the exercise of liberty means that you have to think for yourself, and the natural inertia of mankind wants religion and ethics ready-made. However ridiculous or shameful a theory or practice is, they would rather comply than examine it. Sometimes it is hook-swinging or Sati; sometimes consubstantiation or supra-lapsarianism; they do not mind what they are brought up in, as long as they are well brought up. They do not want to be bothered about it. The Old School Tie wins through. They never suspect the meaning of the pattern on the tie: the Broad Arrow.

Eight Lectures on Yoga: Yama

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yogiman said:

. It is like viewing the world with a male perspective (Thoth) vs. a female perspective (Marseilles).

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firemaiden said:

I "discovered" tarot while living in Berlin : in that sphere, it appeared that the Thoth deck was indeed the **one and only**, because the Thoth had the strongest presence in the Berlin book stores. My first deck was a pocket Thoth, that came packaged with Gerd Ziegler's *Spiegel der Seele* (Tarot, mirror of the soul), so I supposed the Thoth was the deck of reference for everyone (until I came across AT). I would never have thought of the Thoth deck as a toweringly "male" presence, weren't the paintings all done by a woman - Lady Frieda Harris ? Think of the very powerful Lust card - woman as life-force, and the powerful princesses. I feel the Thoth is the most beautiful art deck, and the most powerful philosophically as well. I don't take Crowley's ramblings that seriously, he writes like a practical joker on drugs. Sometimes he is marvelously funny, and at best he's like a surrealist poet. But the deck is so beautiful, and incredibly evocative.

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