Just starting to read about Tarot.

Ok, so I finally have four published books on Tarot in my possession. Before this, symbology studies, kokology exercises, symbol studies a smatterign of jung and personal reflection were my greatest teachers. Before now, I haven't read the LWB that comes with my decks, but if a deck comes with a bigger book, i would read some or all of it. I started on "normal" cards, and can still use them, sticks, rubber bands, or anything. I like to work freestyle, and have taken the radom bits from my pocket tossed them, and went with it.

I have started reading about Tarot Today, and I like to read in Fours, with a fifth pinnacle for actual work in conjunction with the books, and my own sacred book. That work will be B.O.T.A.; This time formally with testing. Impressions or suggested order, or other books welcome!

78 Degrees of Wisdom - Water -
A book I remember because Grace, my beloved Astrology teacher had it. It was a gift. Wisdom in Hebrew is Chokmah, and corresponds to Mezel Ha-Mazloth, The Hebrew name for the Zodiac. I wanted to read it, but I never got to even pull it off the shelf.

Secret Language of Tarot - Fire -
This kind of reading is the essential key to my own, heavy in symbol, and informed by history. Fire, is Tejas, the Luminiferous Aethyr, attributed to sight. This book teaches visual techniques, perhaps alot in common with my own. Also a gift.

Best Tarot Reading Practices - Earth -
This is sort of a conduct and protocol book. I flipped through this, and felt it might be a good one to balance all the other ones about meaning out. But, it seems to come from someone who is practical but knowledgeable about Tarot and essential keys of divination. This seemed like the most helpful to ground my practice.

The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination
- Air - I frankly loved the cover. This is the the one I started with, and it is well written. So far a useful study of paper with some highly opiniated ideas and, in my opinion, hasty conclusions. It particularly suffers the way anything which tries to be based on evidence does - it has little evidence that it must make BIG deals out of. For example, evidence shows humans compartmentalize data and have since we evolved to have cyanolabe which lets us see blue. So seeing a fifth suit of trumps with actual Zodiacal cards to the author, is enough for him to put his foot down on the subject:

"This deck suggests that Renniasance artists, unlike later occultists, did not attribute the trumps in what is now considered the standard deck to elements or astrological signs."

How so? Every deck I have ever seen comes with some extra cards. Furthermore, as this deck was privately produced, it may have been wrong, elaborative, or even just optional cards. As early as one thousand years before, in the fourth century, Roman Theologists were comparing the early models of the christian virtues and the cardinal virtues to 11 signs of the Zodiac. These are modeled straight out of the Laws of Li, and other attempts of creating a means of amicable society as a sign of Divine Providence. Furthermore, they trump each other, such as "duty to country" trumps "duty to family" - so soldiers may have to leave home for a long time. Symbolism has been around AT LEAST pre renn, and for the Coptic Christian Magic, for example, ALOT of the ideas in the Golden Dawn Book T begin to see shape. They likely came down the Silk Road, or at least some did. As for the Yetziratic Notebook (inspired Crowely's 777) such a book mirrors the work of iamblichus, who is said to have had such a order to things for the Pantheon. Similar texts existed in Pythagoras' Academia, and the Wu Tao Jia texts that are part of the Taoist Canon.

Furthermore, as these decks have no owners to speak for them or LWB, they may have been many things, including study decks or talismans. The Sging of the Zodiac were already attributed to the Breastplate of The Cohen, The Tribes of Israel, and Disciples of the Christ. We see numerical, animal, and color allegory in Revelations already.

We have no way of knowing, but here he takes a piece of singular evidence and immediately assigns it to his task, which at first glance seems to be that he has an opinion, and is going to *prove* it. Most of the early ideas of occult Tarot mirror views of Thomas Aquinas, and that was 13th century.

Tarot was, in the 14th and 15th centuries, a seemingly new medium for an old truth. That truth did not originate with it, nor did it end with it. It won't end with his book, and it won't end with me. It is the truth at the core of all religion, and I think he is coming to that conclusion in this book, but at the exclusion of some he misrepresents or misunderstands.

Frankly, as an occultist, ANYTHING in my hands or possession, and probably my line of site contains occult meaning. I can't trust that the publisher, musician, director, or artist intended it, but it is clear. These kinds of thought patterns are old enough to indicate someone back then easily sound have seen such symbolism, particularly a person family with the symbolic biblical prose, folk analogy, Chinese tales, or even Islam. I also feel that one of the reasons he tends more care to Eastern mystical allegory is because he might imagine everyone in the West can only see or express a literal truth.

A Chinese sage can say "The wind was in the trees before it had leaves."
A Western sage can say "The earliest book man wrote was on the nature of water."

They same the same thing, and neither cares for the literal truth of it.

sorry, had to share, so i can read the 25th page.... i'm better now.

I have read another chapter of Mr. Place's book. I am in the part of the text where he speaks of the mystical assumptions of Antoine Court de Geblin. I am curious how he imagines this one man's work informs so much. Also, his assertions continue. He, for example, contends that 7 is important to both Tarot and Egyptian mysteries, but he continues that it is to Christian and Jewish thought as well. It occurs to me that Judiasm holds its identity of emerging from Egypt, and Chrisitianity almost completely dissolveed back into it. He also question the notion of alphabetic script assigned to the trumps, as he asserts Egyptians used hieroglyphs. Has he never heard of Demotic Script or Coptic, the very Alphabetic language an entire christian sect from egypt use, to this day?

One that informs some of the higher teachings of even the 17th century mystics who employed tarot reference? Each letter is assigned a "root" sound, and these are correltated to hieroglyps that use the same sounds. This is how "barbarous" names are employed sensibly for active meditation, even today as they were before there was a Roman church.

I think he knows history of Tarot as cards, and has written this book I highly enjoy, but he has throw the baby out with the bath because he has no informed base for victorian occult use. All Initiates vow to not openly disclose all. It keeps the journey fun and makes no one definitive. The ways to obscure are threefold, lie to veil truth behind keys, destroy in part, or to make openly known so none will believe.

Myth is a veil. Tear it down and there is truth, but truth is an evolving thing. Every degree of every order reveals the last was a lie you needed to climb through as you journey toward that truth that you can only find within. But the techniques are sound!

Over 80% of everything humanity is done is obscured or destroyed, and one dares to speak definitively of the past. Amazing... None of this people lived in an atomic world, their idea of truth was not objective like most people assume today. The transition even to the age of information is turbulent.

Ok, finally some 72 pages into Mr. Place's book, I am enjoying myself greatly.

The errors are few but typical. The greatest false notions I see are that including subjects not connected to Tarot. In particular, his understanding of Qabala are sadly typical and inadequate. He also gives no credit the the origins of qabala as samothracian, as most thought considered occultism occurs on the silk road. The oldest thing resembling a Tree of Life is proto-Chinese.

The other major flaw of his book is he is sadly misrepresenting ligusitics and not providing the language he is transliterating. Also he is regurgitating without integrity. For example, he is saying Zain means "sword". IT DOES NOT AND NEVER HAS IN HEBREW. The word in hebrew, for sword is "CheReBh", Heh-rev. The word Zain means essentially "food tool" and it was used for a mattock, or "pickhoe" as well as a cudgel used to thresh grain much like the japanese nunchaku, one of the tools that allowed the peoples who were nomadic to become agricultural is the pick hoe and the grain thresher. This was a tool set nomadic herders do not need. It's root is phoenician and connected to the word" Cherub". As a tool, it was introduced after Ao conquest and the gentrifying of Canaan. It represents a tool of planting and bounty, thus the phallus.

"****" is a word that has common roots in beating with a stick, threshing. "Threshing" is hitting with a stick to loosen up for bounty, This has translated in Hebrew to the word "Zain" meaning informally "penis" but with a casual use, more like the word "tool."

This word "tool", indepedent of gardening is" Keli", and has a value of 60. This is a key to considering this card in relationship to Temperance, in relation to Sagittarius.

I studied proto-hebraic linguistics and can tell you this man did not. I would rather he not include stuff which has little to do with his subjects of study. If you have not lived a life of herding, moving, gardening and hunting, you will not understand the proto-hebraic meanings. These are not allegory. Zain is both a tool to open the earth to plant a seed, and a tool used to thresh the crop to yield a greater harvest from that seed.

It seems interesting to me that the authors who seek to divorce Tarot from Qabala seem to not know as much about Qabala at they may think. He speaks English words of English writers of preciselely two perspectives of Qabala. When he speaks of the Sepher Yetzirah, he seems to not realize there are five different versions, all different in startling ways. Aryeh Kaplan's book gives the best treatment to this. He also is opening my eyes a great deal to the history of Tarot. This is a fascinating book!

This book is fascinating though; just shortsighted, particularly about the idea that anything can be excluded from a Perennial Philosophy. This is the reason NeoPlatonism had to die so it could evolve, which is what is occurring right now.

He also speaks of the Animal Soul, The Willful Soul, and the Soul of Reason as though one can seek one after another, and you transcend one to another. It is very clear in Plato that you achieve all three parts of the soul before you should let go of one, then the next, and then finally the last - to accomplish the Great Work. That is the only true way to wisdom. This is why the illustration of the Trumps all travel together, but some have begun to fall away.

I include all this in my Enochian approach to Tarot, but that is where most of my Alchemical approach was developed from. I wonder if Mr. Place has much exposure to Dee's work? I shall read on and find out!

I finally finished this book, and don't really understand what I just read in a lot of cases. It started as a great introductory history lesson in cardmaking, and he went through finding evidence of the "correct" structure of the major arcanum, and then it devolved into a breakdown of each card's divinatory meanings.

I can say for all he may know about Tarot history, he knows very little about the Golden Dawn. He should have added that disclaimer in my opinion, and I think that there are still enough facts open ended for their to be some wiggle room in the origins of Tarot, depending on what you consider the origins and influences to be. His work on Qabala and Golden Dawn shows he knows little of the subjects, and it is no wonder he has no appreciation for these elements of Western Esotericism. He I think misses important points between what was published in its time, and what was not. He leans heavily on Waite not attributing letters to the Major Arcanum, based on some quotes in PKT, but using them to include the (at waite's time) unpublished correspondences he used in ritual work.


All in all, it was a good read, and I give it 3 out of 5 stars. The author organizes words well in sentences, if not chapters. Not sure what I was supposed to take away from this book, and it, in my opinion, ends dead flat hypocritical on the whole Minor Arcanum and happily describing specific cards and where their artistic inspiration was perhaps derived.

The whole book seemed to assert divination is not the point, but the cards real purpose is illustration of spiritual attainment, and then he basically proceeds to give accounts of that that are in select pieces of art, and then just gives divinatory meanings of the cards, which he has already asserted is not the point. I do not know "traditional" meanings of the cards, so I can't verify he is accurate.

I am usually fairly cautious of people who claim to reveal the *real* orders or values of things, and this book is a good reason why. They usually fall flat on how to apply the tools they claim to be unleashing. Then again, if someone is actually claiming they have the REAL order, they miss my point, which is EVERY order has keys to the interrelations of the cards.

Next is Secret Language of Tarot, a book I expect I will get through very quickly and hopefully enjoy much more. Anything which treats cards as an ensemble of images is more conducive to my own interpretations, in many regards. I was going to read 78 degrees of wisdom next, but I decided to read it after the symbolism book.