Scion
I CRACKED IT!!!! I finally figured out the missing piece that pulls together those wacky Liber T minors.
I should warn you that this will sound like gobbledegook unless you use the Liber T, but this is my main reading deck. As many of you know, I've been whittling-whittling-whittling away at those scenic minors and by a weird accident I finally found the last large piece of the Liber T design I'd been overlooking.
The "solution" was actually stupid once I realized how dopey I'd been in my research. Let me explain... The deck's 36 scenic minors are Thoth-based, and scenically illustrated using "images from the Decans." The tableaus are fantastic and bizarre and although I have been compiling every scrap of data I can find on the Decans (including picking through stuff in german
), there were all these strange details I couldn't find a place for, like a mutilated puzzle. Layers and layers and layers but some elements just made no damned sense, artistically or magically. Why the pinecone tail on the 2 of Cups snakedog? Why the boar-warrior on the 7 of spheres? Why the crushed rabbits on the 9 of Swords? Why the little goddess standing between those horns on the 5 of Spheres? Nothing that interfered with readings but maddeningly subtle... like sand in your sheets. Reader I tell you: I could not rest!
Well...
For two years I’ve been operating under the assumption that the general agreement between Decan images meant I had addressed the topic in the slowly expanding "study guide" I've sent to several folks here. The problem is the Liber Hermetis is not readily available in English, so I'd sorta skipped it,
just like every person who reviewed this deck when it first came out. The Hermetis is not available online, and so in a sense it doesn't exist for casual research purposes. Then, last weekend, I was talking to a Latinist friend who knew the actual Liber Hermetis fairly well, and discovered in passing that the Decan images often depart radically and specifically in the Hermetis. Note to self: ALWAYS GO TO THE PRIMARY TEXT. Hermes Trismegistus, duh!! Sure enough, after picking through an untranslated Hermetis with my small Latin (and less Greek)… In about 5 minutes, I spotted the description of the jug and scorpion in the 2 of Swords. The hybrid dog-serpent-pinecone in the 2 of Cups. AND the man holding his head in the 2 of Spheres! SO STUPID! I smacked my head.
The Hermetis is the first thing Negrini cites as a source in the LWB, but I'd assumed if you've read 6 Decan image descriptions you've read them all... the more fool I. Hair on end, I quickly dragged out the Zoller translation of the Hermetis which I’d bought for research on the Behenian stars (more on that later...) back in June. Eureka! All of the question marks, all the ominous characters, all of the confusion about the unknown details, suddenly translucent. It looks like Negrini & Serio blended the conflicting Decan images, personifying them as mythological/Thelemic figures, but the Hermetis was the baseline. Read the Hermetis text and 99% of the scenic choices become clear, instantly. Even more, the Hermetis descriptions blend pretty seamlessly with the mythology and Thelemic overlay through which I’ve already been gnawing. Interpolations from Picatrix/Drekkana/Agrippa/Bruno usually seem to occur wherever the Hermetis is vague or nonspecific or visually dull. Amazingly, Negrini and Serio managed to braid together these astro-magical images within the Thoth framework.
The more I've dug through this deck the more I've found. My readings with it grow ever more uncanny in accuracy and power. While the Liber T remains true to the Thoth, the iridescent resonance of the images just gets deeper and more compelling the more you pay attention to it. Of course, as I've chiseled away at the puzzle, the deck has literally exploded into articulate life in my imagination. These images are not just illustrations that "evoke a mood" or "suggest a keyword." They are ancient and powerful and this deck kicks about 93 kinds of ass!
Now that I can actually see the scope of what Negrini and Serio attempted and accomplished, I gotta say: what a magical piece of work, in every sense.... what an unrecognized piece of mastery. A million thanks to Scarabeo for having the insane vision, passion, and courage to produce something complicated, rich, and challenging that isn't just thematic pablum for the dingdongs.
And now a moment of soapbox. Feel free to skip if you dislike soapboxes (or soap!
)For anyone who's ever given LS crap for not "pushing the envelope" or "pandering to buyers" this deck is a ferocious rebuttal: clever, beautiful, and singular and no longer distributed in the US by Llewellyn because it doesn't feature unicorns and rainbows with scratch-n-sniff psychobabble. The sad fact is that Andrea Serio will probably never illustrate another Tarot because the market would rather have G-rated mermaids-in-Tshirts. Someone like Negrini can't afford to create anything else for our community because investing time in a Tarot this complex is simply foolish in a stripmall economy that seeks to return our brains to the streamlined reptile model. And that is OUR fault.
Everytime I read a wholesale criticism of LS, I feel like we should be pointing the finger at ourselves. People pine for the antique Tarots, art editions, and intelligent crafting of new classics, but we aren't willing to support them when they emerge. Every time we support crappy writing and half-ass decks we are exacerbating the situation. We elevate a pantheon of great Mediocrities and then whinge about the weight of it on our backs. Hell! We keep asking for cliches and paying for twaddle: we get Dan Brown and Umberto Eco be damned.
End of soapbox.
As I reread this post, I realized that all this almost sounds like an endless "farewell" but I'm just excited to have finally solved the riddle of these Minors. This post is more a period on the answer to the bigger questions I've been asking about the Liber T for 3 years. I'm still learning more than I'd ever imagined about classical astrology and Hermetic Qabalah and Egyptian mythology and Renaissance magic. I still have a few minor questions that will never be answered without a book that the market cannot support from LS. And frankly who cares? My journey with this deck has been and will continue to be inspiring.
For anyone who thinks I'm off my beam, the Liber T is an astonishing piece of Craft and Art and Scholarship. If you've ever even thought of picking it up, I really encourage it. If you've let your copy languish in confusion, pick it up!
Anyone who has even a passing interest in astrology or Greco-Egyptian hermeticism or the Golden Dawn system will discover refractive world-embedded-worlds within it. And if anyone has any questions, I'd be thrilled to discuss all this further. If you don't own an English Hermetis and want an updated copy of my unofficial "Guide" (version 2.2!) with the relevant Hermetis updates, just give a shout and I'll send the PDF along.Many thanks to everyone who's been so encouraging as I put this crazy puzzle together.
Scion
