Ross G Caldwell
Aeon418 said:You're a master of understatement, Ross.
Thanks. You don't know how much I appreciate that compliment.
I think a large part of the problem is that, on the surface, most of the Golden Dawn system seems to have absolutely nothing to do with Tarot. It's only when you begin to see how the Golden Dawn viewed and used the Tarot that it begins to make sense. Tarot seen as an intiatory framework, rather than a simple oracle doesn't make a whole lot of sense to some people and I'm not surprised.
I agree with you entirely, and I suspect implicitly. The GD tarot, like Enochian Chess, was a summation of their doctrine. You can't begin to understand it until you study it (say, from Regardie's Golden Dawn or Crowley's recension in The Equinox), and, of course, *practice it.* It isn't a morality *on* the cards, like the 16th century moralizers, nor de Gébelin, nor is it a tarot on a theme, whether cities in Germany, being gay, Egyptian gods, or lewd imaginings from Boccaccio (I love them all, of course) - all of these are tarot as art, as beauty, as morality or homily, but they do not claim to be an attempt at a summa of all truth (nor history either). With the GD, Tarot was transformed into a religious text with infinite dimensions, and in that form, in one way or another, it has spread all over the world.
The major difference I see today between old school and new school users of popular tarot is their approach to the content of the cards, and that approach comes down to the hermetics of tarot - whether to learn, dryly and painfully, the now old-fashioned "correspondences" - or, to try to respond to the images as images, without learning, to use them as magic mirrors. It seems to be an issue with people just starting out, because of course they are impatient - they just want to read as quickly as possible. But the GD is the source of both doorways into the hermetic tarot - they taught them as magic mirrors, inspiring divination and clairvoyance, as well as an iconographic repository of ageless (and pedantic) wisdom.
But the greatest thing is that the GD seamlessly combined them, so that by practice of their Tarot, you could be a fortune-teller as much as a mystic filled with inspired verse. And there is no difference, in the end (shhh, that's a mystery).
Ross