gregory
Tomorrow, maybe. I am busy reading Westcott now.Teheuti said:
But I don't "loathe the idea" exactly; I do loathe the current searching for easy ways to do everything. It is sad.
Variant approaches to the Thoth: Angeles Arrien's book
But I don't "loathe the idea" exactly; I do loathe the current searching for easy ways to do everything. It is sad.
Scion
Then we're not even really having a conversation, Mary. You seem to have drawn a circle around her based on your friendship that no amount of citation or discussion will ever cross. Fair enough. But let's take your above rhetorical statement for a moment. On the surface it seems like an argument, but actually it drives a spear into the heart of Arrien's efforts.Teheuti said:
I wish Arrien was a good old-fashioned flim-flam charlatan. I wish that her mistakes were a stew of humbug and transcendance. I would happily forgive the errors if there was something inspired or inspiring in all the goopy sentimentality.
I know, hell, I embrace the fact that all magic is mixed with chicanery. That has always been the case. I don't know if I'd allow that its entirely fraudulent; that's a question of belief, and pointless to debate. But your logic doesn't hold up here: Mathers, Westcott and Crowley weren't teachers. They were shameless synthesizers, visionaries, leaders. Arrien is none of those things (at least with regard to the Thoth deck). Arrien didn't design or execute the deck. Arrien is not an occultist. Arrien is NOT writing an esoteric book on the Thoth. Does she think she can or is or did?
She wrote an explicitly EXOTERIC book couched in the language of authority and competence. So her mistakes and falsehoods are not inspired or revealed... they are merely laziness and inattention with someone whose view of the world seems to occupy the span of an Open Center catalog. In a weird way, I'd LOVE it if she'd offered her take on the symbols and really gone outside the box, but the truth is her lexicon is so limited and her grasp of detail so loose that before she's finished naming a symbol I know where she's going to take it. Disappointing and boring. The simple fact is I know more stories than she does. That's me. I read a lot. But newsflash: Campbell knew more stories than I do or she does... and Jung and Eliade and Metzner. Their books are interesting for the richness of their content and the scope of their study. If she was going to be ballsy enough to throw out Crowley (which is a cool enough idea) explore the deck symbolically, why didn't she apply herself with some diligence? Why aren't her insights, ummm, insightful? Why aren't her references something I couldn't pick up in a freshman classics intro? Why didn't she earn my interest and respect? I love wacky iconoclasts.
I've read Campbell, Jung, Metzner, Eliade et al... often and carefully. Obviously my take on them is a little more complicated and contradictory than hers. I suppose Arrien's interpretation of them is reflective of a certain self-involvement that is perfectly acceptable to me in an iconoclastic occultist, but slightly embarrasing and silly in someone who supposedly writes in a context of modern commentary from an academic background. Frankly if I was reading Kenneth Grant on Crowley's deck I'd be willing to grok his flights of fancies because I'm aware of the context... but am I to understand that Arrien offers cosmic insight using the top ten texts of every comp lit class of the past 25 years?
Are you saying I've misread her and loathe because she's secretly cracking open a world of magic and possibility by reminding us that rabbits and rucksacks mean different things in different cultures? Her book is useful because it can teach us (incorrect, misattributed) soundbites about myths from different cultures, as if we're attending an exoteric symbolic kindergarten for people who are too scared to read Graves and Kerenyi on their own? Is that what constitutes vision and insight and satori now?! Again, she is willfully teaching mistakes. She is willfully repeating error. BY CHOICE.
Arrien is not Crowley or Mathers or Waite or Levi or Agrippa or Bruno or Mashallah. Frankly, aside from ability, she could not be because they represented moments in time as much as ideas. If she had stated on the cover that she believed that her glittered musings and Hallmark card interpretations of the Thoth were an apotheosis I would have chuckled, charmed and read it out of casual curiosity. That is not her statement or her intention. So with that interpretation, the book is deliberately deceptive. You're saying that: it seems to be academic and is presented as researched fact, but sub rosa it's actually Arrien's magical cosmological testimony which is divinely inspired cause she's really really nice. (?)
In essence it comes down to not being able to have it both ways. Either she is an esoteric visionary or an exoteric academic. Either she knew what she was talking about or she didn't. Either the book is researched and supported or it is her revealed gnosis that contains value because she says so. Either she believes the Thoth fell from the sky as "God's Picture book" or it was carefully, obsessively lovingly deisgned by people with nuclear talent and knowledge. Either she's writing about the Thoth or she's writing about ber beliefs in a Thoth framework.
I don't hold anyone to a standard to which I don't also hold myself. As you say, maybe my expectation that people should strive for excellence rather than concede to inadequacy is basically depressing. Aristotle once said, "We are that which we repeatedly do. Excellence is therefore, not an act, but a habit." If Arrien's feeble, superficial comments on someone else's vision are really, deeply helpful to folks then I'm even more of an anachronistic alien than I'd suspected. And it seems all the more important than when people suggest that this book is valuable that they immediately qualify how and in what way, and which sections contain that value. Specifically. Warn people about the murky bits and screwups. Because I will happily stand on the perimeter pointing out exactly how, when, where and why it is a callow opportunistic attempt to leech the vitality and rigor out of something she not only doesn't understand, but seemingly doesn't want understood.
Right now somewhere, a person is buying a copy of The Tarot Handbook and a Thoth deck and excitedly headed home to make sense of it all... taking the first steps. Let's take it ad ridiculo. Maybe reading that the bird on the Empress card is a swan will make them... not commit suicide, say. That misreading is powerful and valuable. But that moment, when they don't commit suicide, belongs to them and them seeing the swan. Not to Arrien misnaming it so. And in fact, on the opposite side of the world, someone equally suicidal may be wanting/needing/wishing it were a pelican... and denied the accurate understanding of a mother pelican feeding her chicks with blood, I think they are betrayed. I don't think it HAS to be a pelican, but teaching someone it's a swan out of laziness and inattention is wrong, morally, factually, logically, spiritually wrong.
Whether you believe it or not, many people would argue that the reason ANY of us are reading Tarot decks is because a bunch of visionary charlatans somehow stumbled onto a very great truth borne out by experience. If the symbols are unimportant, if the meanings are arbitrary, if the structure is meaningless, if the design was random, then why would you bother looking at Tarot at all? Arrien could write a book about reading cocktail napkins or postcards. It's perplexing why she should opt to "interpret something" carefully designed and impregnated with meaning and then DISCARD the very content that distinguishes it. And there's your answer: because there is Truth in the Tarot generally and the Thoth specifically. The symbols are not random. The world is not an enormous clockwork. Symbols do have power beyond interpretation and psychology. The Below does have an Above. The minute you concede that, then the rest of the towering edifice of just-wing-it and whatever-feels-right crumbles. Not that it can't add flavor, but it is the snow on the top of the iceberg. About as useful as learning to play tennis by wearing sneakers.
If you find any value in the system, then you're also admitting that the system is not worthless fraud. So the decision to not study it, to not learn it, to just bumble through, is willful, measured laziness and inattention.
Scion
Teheuti
Well - it seems pretty clear that Crowley said nothing should be thought, felt or done with this deck outside of what he says in the Book of Thoth. It exists as "the" fundamentalist tract to the world he created in the deck. In this fundamentalist view all fortune-telling is "a form of fraud"—inherently base and dishonest—against which the founder had set himself, insisting there be no "prostituiting" of his deck in such a fraud.
I'm afraid I'm a scarlet woman! Oops, he liked scarlet women!
Mary
I'm afraid I'm a scarlet woman! Oops, he liked scarlet women!
Mary
Teheuti
I never said any of this. Why is it so important to you to make up things that I didn't say?
By your own evaluation you know Jung, Campbell, Metzner, et al, better then she does. Yet it is Angie who co-taught with Campbell and Metzner many times, and Metzner who was her partner for several years - not you.
Please do. There are plenty of them. But I haven't seen a single objective criticism of something concrete and specific from her book in this thread - only accusations. I do know that you accuse me of saying things I've never said (see the quote above). If you would lie about me, why am I to believe you about her? What makes you so reliable?
Should we throw out Crowley because he was so lazy and inattentive that he mixed up vajras and dorjes? I won't.
And how do you know this?
Mary
Always Wondering
gregory said:
Well, that's a bummer. But it sure explains a lot.
AW
Lillie
We can do Thoth history here too...
gregory
Indeed we can. All I meant was that it wasn't exclusively history !Lillie said:
I have now read Westcott. I was not that impressed. I don't know what it adds to this discussion either. Maybe I'm a bit thick.....
The symbols are important, and so is the esoteric stuff (if knowledge isn't the right word for some !) that Crowley put into it all. I say this as one who actually reads without using generic meanings (referred to elsewhere here as the glorpish method
) But the Thoth deck is something else; that is why I am taking the trouble to look into it in detail - and Scion's post:is precisely what I mean by "dumbing down". There is so much in that card that is missed by this approach. If people need or want to take an easier route - fine - but please let's not have books helping them to do so. Working for something does give a sense of achievement. And that takes us all that bit further in understanding so many things that might otherwise be out of our reach.Scion said:
But as I said - I'm no expert. I would just like to see Crowley's deck taken in in all its full esoteric power, not with liberal doses of candy and Coke (that's the drink, not Crowley's version
.) If it doesn't appeal in its "real" form - try another deck. There are plenty to choose from.Bernice
I thought this thread was supposed to be about Crowley Thoth Books. So why is there so much discussion about non-crowley books?
They (Crowleys writings) contain enough for a life-time study and are paramount for information about the Thoth deck. Any other 'take' on the cards would not only remove the original content for which they were created, it would almost amount to sacriledge - historically speaking.
Having said all that, I'm NOT personally a Crowley/Golden Dawn fan, they created a 'new' unique system that works. And because it works, in order to understand the full import and depth of the Thoth deck, Crowleys' writings are of prime importance.
Unfortunately, although he wasn't a very nice man, he was well informed and clever, and his writings abound with many arcane references. This can be a great challenge for a 'newbie' - and even an 'oldie'.
Lets not forget it was primarily designed for magical workings on the Tree of Life, and even talking about using it for divination, flies in the face of it's creation. So, lets talk about it, but at least stick to the esoterica that is integral to it.
O.K. that's my two-penneth. Off to make a coffee.
Bee
They (Crowleys writings) contain enough for a life-time study and are paramount for information about the Thoth deck. Any other 'take' on the cards would not only remove the original content for which they were created, it would almost amount to sacriledge - historically speaking.
Having said all that, I'm NOT personally a Crowley/Golden Dawn fan, they created a 'new' unique system that works. And because it works, in order to understand the full import and depth of the Thoth deck, Crowleys' writings are of prime importance.
Unfortunately, although he wasn't a very nice man, he was well informed and clever, and his writings abound with many arcane references. This can be a great challenge for a 'newbie' - and even an 'oldie'.
Lets not forget it was primarily designed for magical workings on the Tree of Life, and even talking about using it for divination, flies in the face of it's creation. So, lets talk about it
, but at least stick to the esoterica that is integral to it.O.K. that's my two-penneth. Off to make a coffee.
Bee
Aeon418
It may be clear to you but it is quite obscure to me. In The Book of Thoth Crowley gives us the grammar and syntax of a symbolic language by defining the symbolism of the Thoth deck. He also provides a few generalised lines of interpretation, but beyond that you are on your own.Teheuti said:
It's much like when we were both taught how to use the symbolic language we call English. It's an agreed upon system of hieroglyphics through which we can express thought and intention to other people who use the same symbolic system of communication. But how I choose to express myself through that symbol set is up to me.
The grammar and syntax laid down in The Book of Thoth is based upon the Hermetic Qabalah and the philosophy of Thelema. It is what makes the Thoth a distinctive symbolic language and sets it apart from other Tarot decks.
Arrien, for whatever reason, has seen fit to throw it all away. In the place of a spiritual philosophy and a system that draws parallels between the macrocosm and the microcosm, we now have the psyche of Angeles Arrien. Essentially it's a different language, and a highly personal language at that. It is no longer the language of the Thoth, it is the private language of Arrien.
This raises a question. If anyone can arbitrarily change the language of a deck, why bother studying any particular deck. For that matter why even bother with Tarot at all? We could just pretend to read the tea leaves with equal success and make it all up as we go along.
How are we able to discuss the cards on this forum? It's because we have an agreed upon definition of the symbolism. We can pick a particular card and speak about it on equal terms and discuss the implications of interpretation in a reading. But if one person is using the language of Thoth and another is using the language of Arrien where are the common points of reference? There are none. They have gone. For example, how does the previously mentioned Empress symbolism of the self-sacrificing pelican match up to the "ugly ducking syndrome" swan of Arrien? It doesn't. It's a completely different language that radically effects the interpretation of the card.
If I were to do a similar thing to the English language, by possibly calling my car a horse, who's fault is it if I ask for help with my broken horse, and then an hour later a veterinarian turns up to mend my car. Symbols are useless unless they have a common definition. Likewise if you change the language of the Thoth it ceases to be the Thoth. If you want to talk the language of Arrien you need a different sub-forum.
Bernice
I think that maybe the language of Arrien might require a different deck! A Jung one perhaps....
Bee
