Two responses to both the book and the comments so far:
1) While consulting with my ex-editor (since retired after a catastrophic illness, thus the MS is in pause mode), I was informed that "the average reader these days won't buy a Tarot book if they can see that the book departs from the OGD system. Therefore, if you want people to actually think about your ideas, you have to embed them in the text rather than lay them out in a graph". I was floored, but it's true. At this point, if a book for the Tarot market doesn't support the market leader, it languishes on the bookstore shelves.
I find this paradoxical. One reason that magic arose out of the hidden pages
of private grimoires and began to pierce into the collective mind is because ideas that had been "hidden" in reams of text began to be graphed, imaged, and tabulated into very concentrated presentations for the first printed books. People figured that if these images and calligraphic renderings of spirits, planetary deities and demons were mass-printed, then they wouldn't be "potentized", as they were when sketched by hand or illuminated like the old royal Books of Hours. That's what made the printed Tarot cards seem less scary too -- because they were knockoffs rather than bespoke originals.
We have reached the flip side of the coin. Now, if one's work of history doesn't instantly and demonstrably match the 20th century "revised" packs, it is cast aside as too complicated, incomprehensible and inaccessible. Leon is even advised to give up his affection for the earliest cards, indeed he is to consider modifying his theory to make it conformable to the RWS pack or some other modern best-seller. It's the classic cry of "My mind is made up, don't confuse me with facts!"
Yes, Leon writes circularly. He's trying to help the reader reweave their assumptions, working his way around and around the ideas, as if he were climbing a 10-story tower by way of a spiral staircase of 22 steps per floor. Leon is supplying the steps as you read, carrying you through the pattern and letting you witness the organic interrelatedness of every layer. Perhaps it does give the book a rather more mystical, contemplative, spiritually resonant tone, but is this really a problem? My feeling as I was reading it was "He's writing from the musical, artistic, mystical side of his brain". The idea is (hopefully) to evoke a response from that same side of the reader's brain. Isn't that traditionally the side from which the Oracle speaks, after all?
2) Here's a quote from another respected Perrennialist to give a sense of the attitude, or perhaps altitude, pervading a work like Dai Leon's. This comes from John Michell's fascinating 'Dimensions of Paradise', p. 204. He's talking about the medieval presentations that show Adam Kadmon or First Man at the center of a divinized cosmos, the way the 'Melothesic man' image divides out the human body around the 12 signs of the Zodiac:
"Acceptance of human nature as a true standard (a concept bravely but briefly revived by Pelagius in the fifth century) does not of course imply that any of one of its manifest examples is perfect of infallible. Just as the forms of nature -- the rose, the crystal and so on -- reflect an ideal symmetry which no individual among them ever achieves, so it is with humanity. In deriving all the forms of nature from ideal, unmanifest prototypes, traditional philosophy reverses the evolutionists' notion of human ascent from lower creatures and inculcates the opposite myth, that we are descendants from a divine creation and may properly aspire to re-enter the primeval paradise."
Along these lines, Leon is trying to acquaint his readers with a traditional internal symmetry informing the '22 faceted gem' of the Trumps. He's not saying that anybody else's system is "wrong", but he's asserting an insight that is organic to the times in which Tarot appeared. The message seems clear -- the classic Decave Mysticism of the Ancients (along the lines of Platonic , Pythagorean, and Kabbalistic 10-based number theory) is ancient, vastly widespread and evident within the Tarot Trumps as well. In the course of connecting the dots, Leon draws correspondences to the range of staged "return to Origin" myths being cross-referenced in the milieu of the Tarot Trumps' first appearance. He's not taking any mytho-poetic leaps of faith here, only noting the overlaps between documented traditions and the fascinating way those interdisciplinary values found their way onto the Tarot trumps.
It seems to me that Leon is responding to a long-recognized need in the study of Tarot; the need to catologue Tarot's antecedents across the multiple cultures that contributed to it. He's not trying to elucidate what the Trumps mean "in a spread; in a divinatory application with a modern pack". Instead his goal is to bring forward the chains of linked ideas we have inherited from Antiquity, which over centuries distilled and eventuated into the Trumps.
Nor is this work to be compared to the more romanticized presentations of our Tarot forefathers (Wirth, Levi, Etteilla etc.) because Leon's conclusions rest on conclusions derived from modern scholarly research. (Our Tarot elders had, in contrast, the records of the Lodges and Orders, plus the dusty shelves of the university collections and antique book dealers for their archives.) In the course of reading Leon's book, one might encounter ideas that sound like echos of old Tarot myths-of-origin, but that doesn't make them wrong! It might be possible that our elders were actually onto something that the 20th century Tarot revisionists obscured.
My suspicion is that readers who are unwilling or unable to suspend their culturally-constructed disbelief long enough to envision the Tarot from this deeper, older angle are probably using their cards at a different level than the one Leon is speaking to/from. I don't see Leon's book written in the style of a diatribe, against which to react and with which to content. More, it's a long meditation on the Ancient Tradition, as revealed through the interior logic structuring the oldest expressions of the Tarot Trumps. The reader might have a more coherent experience of reading this book once they understand that Leon sees the Trumps being formed in the mold of Tradition, rather than the other way around.
