Yygdrasilian said:
Tarot, Qabalah & Astrology are 3 parts to One system.
NO.
Yyg, that's a ridiculous statement in a thread that is manifestly debating the appropriation of ideas by the various esoteric schools of Tarot.
At best, that's a
theoretical position undefendable by recourse to even the most outrageous academic scholarship. Their origins are divided by thousands of years and miles, unless you're speaking them as worldviews along a very generic continuum. Only speculative folks have ever claimed a
unified tradition for these three, and none of them have agreed on the why's and wherefore's. If these did represent a single system, they would cohere... And for the love of all that's holy please don't take this as an invitation to play 7th grade math games "proving" that 7+3=10=1. For you to claim that Qabalah, Astrology, and Tarot are (*
cue ominous chord*) "part of One System" you have either to mangle the definitions of all three so completely as to render them valueless as designators or to consider them at such a distance that their specificity has blurred into meaningless homogeneity. And actually, Bernice raises a great point, but whether the appropriation was organic or artificial is a topic for another thread.
Rif's question is an excellent one and tests the margins of a topic that has been coming up quite a bit in recent months. Zeitgeist, I s'pose. I think I'd say that the Tarot is useful in the same way a cookbook is useful. A cookbook isn't an enormous trunk filled with the author's entire tasting menu on a hundred plates under Saran Wrap; it's an abstraction that allows them to communicate and you to experience their "tasting menu" symbolically in a way that's more intuitive and specific than talking about the molecular composition of crème brûlée. IMO, the art of cooking (like the art of divination) uses symbols for more than simple designation. Reading a list of ingredients is not the same as cooking, let alone eating.
Cards that merely depicted astrological symbols would at best be a simplistic, literalist rendering of one (important) tradition absorbed into cartomancy. The decan of Jupiter in Leo isn't
literally the celestial body of Jupiter in the chunk of the ecliptic we call Leo... it's astrological shorthand. The attributional architecture of astrology (oy, that's a mouthful
) allows for subtlety and precision. To my mind, the strength of Tarot is in building on a solid estoeric
base (syncretized at whichever point floats your theoretical boat) and translating it effectively into images that maintain the meaningful coherence of the underlying symbols. Someone asked in another thread, "Why read cards when Horary astrology is so much
more specific?" The truth is, I don't think we're talking about quantity as much as we are about quality. so your question is a bit like asking why we read Austen when there are so many more regency romances in print in the world... Or why restaurants in Italy serve pizza, when it's an American invention? There are books and books, questions and questions, divination and divination.
RichardT said:
Black bones in the death skeleton? Saturn. You know? So, as those things get internalized, the imagery will send your subconscious mind all over the place. At least, it could.
Exactly. Applying those symbols is much the same process of applying any symbol set: learning the basic characters, the common configurations, and then experiencing their permutations over years and years and years... Think of how long you've known how to read, or to do basic arithmetic. You've wired your head to note and categorize those patterns... why should these other symbol sets be any different? It stands to reason! And if anyone seriously wants to come to grips, we're talking YEARS of daily use, observation, and application. Crowley recommends daily exercise with these critters over
decades. Not seeing the Black bones and having to think: "Mars? Chokmah? Rubedo? OH! Saturn/Binah/Nigredo!" But actually, instantly reading the blackness the way you can read the letter P wherever you see it:
polysemically. What I've come to believe is that of these schools of thought (astrology, QBLH, alchemy) represent a way of discussing time in a spiral of increasing specificity. Time not just as a straight line running in one direction, but Time as a terrain, a force, a shifting matrix. In fact, the fundamental difference between the scientific materialist view and the Hermetic/magickal/religious view is the characterization of Time.
For the scientific materialist, one moment is
by definition identical to any other. If I drop an apple at 3 am or if I drop an apple at high Noon, the apple accelerates at 9.8 meters per second squared. In the absence of mitigating variables, in experiment performed on 12 consecutive Thursdays won't get different results than one performed in a different country or in the middle of the night. It is silly to suggest that completely different experimental data will emerge if a rock millions of miles away occupies a different space in the
apparent vault of empty space. Events are relative and meaningless and random. Any subjective distinctions are projected by humans. There is no inherent meaning or power that distinguishes moments. Time is a uniform neutral background that does not affect and is unaffected by phenomena.
The magickal folks are the exact opposite. No time is like any other. The daemon I summon at 2 pm on Friday is NOT the same spirit I'd want to summon at 11pm on Wednesday. A baby/project/question born at
this moment is not the same as one born at
that moment. There are times when it's better or worse to close a deal, end a fight, or overcome illness. The funny thing is, that's the way most people live even though they'll tell you over annd over they aren't "superstitious." It's instinctive; Time isn't uniform; it has a shape, a quality, a charge... no matter how many times scientists assure us it's neutral and beige. Of course, I'm biased.
But whenever rationalist types get stroppy, I'll point out that you can't put two people in a lab and tell them to fall in love or to have an inspired idea.
That said, I think the exercise of wedging all of these symbol sets into one enormous übersystem is misguided and vaguely dopey. People do it because their aping the Golden Dawn (consciously or no) but it smacks of the Victorian-era all-cultures-are-one idiocy that makes people say things like, "That's the Egyptian Satan."
Uhhh, they weren't post-Babylonian Yahwists. Try again. Anthropology and theology has
moved on in the past 150 years. The Victorian mush-it-together impulse, is entertaining but it isn't very useful. We know that Aphrodite and Venus weren't the same goddess, let alone Aphrodite and Hathor (no matter what Herodotus says) or Aphrodite and Parvati
... They aren't uniform alphabet blocks. Sadly, the GD's influence means that New Age hacks treat everything as if it's identical to everything else, but it is not. Or at least, no one who claims it is has looked very hard. Where these schools of thought overlap there are interesting variables, but they are not identical or equivalent unless you're reading a Silver Ravenwolf book and worshipping the bogus, generic McGoddess in a Starbuck's bathroom.
The other thing is that most people
can tell you where the Qabalah fits without really bothering with the Astrology. That's a fluke of academic history and has been the way for the past century or so, because most books cover Qabalah and most credible, accessible research on Astrology occurs relatively recently. The Golden Dawn didn't have access so they went with what they had. But actually the same specificity holds true there, whatever your symbol set: the landscape of time is either charged and meaningful or it isn't. QBLH at its root is about the character of time because it is a "map" of manifestation. How do you make a Universe? Very carefully.
rif said:
if the correspondences define the cards, why not just go directly to the correspondences?
And I'd answer, respectfully, because the map is not the territory. If I type the word
APPLE, you can't bite or smell or taste or feel the slip of its skin... but the minute you read that - APPLE - the symbols did something inside your head (and mouth and nose and hand and ear). It took an entire lifetime of APPLE(s) to charge those 4 shapes of those 5 letters with all the mundane, sensory information it holds for you. Esoteric symbols are no different, just harder to exercise and less commonly used. It's like my decan example above. The
quality of "Jupiter in Leo" is not equivalent to one squiggle that looks like a whimsical four next to another that looks like an anxious sperm... any more than we should decide that rather than reading books we should just "go directly" to the alphabet and forget all that pesky grammar. I believe that the grammar, the style, the
Art reveals the potential of that symbol set, not its limitations. The meaning and power and possibility arise
between symbols; the connections, the context is everything.
The distinction is the same as the one between a pair of wings and a handful of feathers.
Scion
