Four of Disks - How do you read it?

Aeon418 said:

I think Crowley's mention of green was just an idea that wasn't implemented. The area beyond the moat is supposed to be fields, in the sense of organized farming and agriculture. I suppose using green would have made this a bit more obvious and a little less arid and dry.

Click to expand...

Ah, devolving from your mention in a thread I read recently that AC wrote the BoT well before Lady Harris painted the illustratiosn? That clears that up. I got it, that it was cultivated land . . . though the green would have given it an entirely different feel, not so much at the apogee of its expansion but still in the midst of its growing season.

Thanks for the list of colours

\m/ Kat

thorhammer said:

Ah, devolving from your mention in a thread I read recently that AC wrote the BoT well before Lady Harris painted the illustratiosn?

Click to expand...

It's possible. That certainly seems like the case with the Aeon card. And because the photographs of the cards are B&W, who knows what touch-up work was done later?

Some people hold the opinion that not all the material presented in the Book of Thoth was written specifically for that book. Crowley may have collated a lot of older notes and inserted them into the text as he was writing.

Today such editorial tasks are easy because we have computers. But back then it was good old fashioned pen and paper and a typewriter if you were lucky. Making multiple copies of text using those tools can be quite laborious and tedious.

Aeon418 said:

It's possible. That certainly seems like the case with the Aeon card. And because the photographs of the cards are B&W, who knows what touch-up work was done later?

Click to expand...

Were they really? I've read that all the paintings are on display somewhere - have they never been photographed in colour?

Aeon418 said:

Some people hold the opinion that not all the material presented in the Book of Thoth was written specifically for that book. Crowley may have collated a lot of older notes and inserted them into the text as he was writing.

Click to expand...

I can believe this. There's a real lack of cohesion between the sections; even from card to card. It did occur to me previously that it might be the case. It's a bit of a shame, really; it deserves to have been put forth in a more polished form.

\m/ Kat

thorhammer said:

Were they really? I've read that all the paintings are on display somewhere - have they never been photographed in colour?

Click to expand...

I was referring to the original B&W photographs in the Book of Thoth.

The cards have been photographed in colour of course. Those photographs are the basis for the modern decks.

thorhammer said:

I can believe this. There's a real lack of cohesion between the sections; even from card to card. It did occur to me previously that it might be the case. It's a bit of a shame, really; it deserves to have been put forth in a more polished form.

Click to expand...

In a certain way it's characteristic of nearly all of Crowley's literary output. I don't think he liked repeating himself or going over ground he had previously explored. If he felt he had already covered a subject in another place he would simply provide a reference and move on. To him it was the readers job to keep up with his train of thought.

I can imagine him writing the Book of Thoth, and at certain points he would remember that he covered a particular subject somewhere else. He would simply insert the older material and carry on. It might be one reason why some mistakes crept into the text.

Louis Wilkinson made this observation about Crowley's writing style:

Another thing that Crowley has never realised is that readers are not, as a general rule, men and women of leisure and that they want things made reasonably quick and easy for them. He never troubles to condense for their benefit, he never does anything to save them time. In fact, he has never troubled to cultivate a single one of the practical, cunning tricks of the literary trade, and he never had any flair whatever for "what puts a reader off." His innocence in this respect is one of the most singular of his many singularities.

Click to expand...

thorhammer said:

Ah, devolving from your mention in a thread I read recently that AC wrote the BoT well before Lady Harris painted the illustratiosn?

Click to expand...

That's what I thought too. In Do What Thou Wilt by Lawrence Sutin, it says Harris was initially given rough sketches of the images and text. Apparently it was a collaborative effort from then on and the book was published in final form in 1944.

Hello, friends. Here is my IDS on the 4 of Disks:

4 of Disks—Power

4 = Stability (or expansion)
Disks = Health and wealth

Holding onto your stuff

The disks are square corner towers of a fortress surrounded by a moat. We are looking at it from directly above. Each is marked with an element symbol. It seems that they are in the place of the mutable signs for each element, lower left Gemini, lower right Virgo, upper right Sagittarius, upper right Pisces. Or maybe it’s just Water and Fire at the top and Air and Earth at the bottom. The gate of the fortress is at the bottom, and the sign for Capricorn is on the road. It looks like the fortress is on a rise. Crowley says the lines border cultivated fields that are guarded by the power of the fortress. This is the power of law and order. The order is enforced. Nothing is moved around. Everyone keeps what he has.

Crowley also points out that 4 is the first sephira below the abyss, making this an even earthier earth/disks card. And that the disks are square, so they don’t even revolve/move. A little too much stability.
I started out learning with the Motherpeace. It made a very good (feminist) point that holding onto your stuff isn’t just selfish miserliness. It can mean physical (sexual) autonomy that everyone should have, and financial autonomy, too, which is very important and obviously sometimes and issue for women. And in these economic times, we would like to have some power to hold onto our stuff! So I feel this is a very morally neutral card, unlike the RWS counterpart, which emphasizes miserliness. (It’s my favorite BBCats card. That dude is a total sourpuss!)

I don’t know much about Sun in Capricorn, so I’m going to the book: Surprise! Law and order! Responsibility, father as provider, duty. It’s also the winter solstice, when the sun stands still, so more stability!
From Crowley, we get a hexagram (and a linguistics lesson) for this one. The hexagram is 2 Earth over Earth. 4 as stability with disks. As he says, it is the Female Principle and the opposite of 1, Heaven over Heaven, the male principle. The text describes the mare running freely over the earth. And then the dragons (male principle) fight in the field. (Fem turns to Masc turns to Fem over and over.) Here is the revolving the rest of this card is missing.
The linguistics lesson is about cognates for woman, queen, and the land. And cognates of castle for enclosure (including chaste). Use your power to guard your fertility—your women and your land? Or, as I mentioned before, women can guard themselves.

In a reading: You are concerned about your finances and are looking for ways to hold onto your money. Or you are concerned about your health and are thinking about a strict diet and exercise regimen. Or you have boundary issues, and now may be a good time to draw the line and take back your energy and efforts for yourself.