I get some faint impression that thoth tarot divination is kind of bait to allure people into esoteric literature.
You only got that impression faintly?
On a serious note, while it may not take that long to read 3-5 books, the understandings of those books, not to mention auxiliary reading if any concept is unfamiliar may take drastically longer. Lets face it, understanding the Thoth any more than marginally takes an immense amount of time, and there are entire lines of study dedicated to it. I agree that the layman over-exaggerates the difficulty of the Thoth, but I don't think that means that students of the deck and surrounding concepts should make it sound like a cakewalk either. That will create a false impression in the heads of new students. Dangerous, because even a dedicated person can feel overwhelmed if their expectations do not meet reality.
I agree that the Thoth deck is a gateway into the occult, and I say we treat it as such, especially when introducing the deck. It's a masterpiece that can be used with nearly no knowledge, but the richness of what you get out of it is directly proportional (As is anything) to what you put into it. Especially since the deck itself could be studied for lifetimes and still never reveal every secret it possessed.
Yogiman: Personally, your first question would be irrelevant to me in my search. Crowley doesn't need to be worth anything for his brainchild to be worth it all. That said, I find Crowley's work to be extremely enlightening overall. A student of the occult until the day he died, he gained immense insight from his practices. I also do not think he was a "god of the occult" as some will doubtlessly attempt to claim. He had his areas of expertise, and he has been worth studying in my own personal endeavors, but if you take his word as Law (Hehe) then you'll have missed the point entirely. Moralistically, I don't feel qualified to make a statement. I didn't know the man.
As far as the OOTK is concerned, I've personally never been an immense fan of positional spreads. I use them occasionally for ease, but workings like the OOTK capture what I see to be the essence of Tarotic Divination. I've always personally believed that the cards themselves will tell you what they're saying if only you have the eyes to see the message. Base guidelines and formulative ideas when entering a spread allow the end message to be much easier to read, and probably clearer. However, these guidelines seem to more accurately be ways of telling the cards how you want the message to be conveyed than anything else. I've sat down with people and just free flowed a reading in the truest sense, relying wholly on the cards to say what they will say, and it's not any more or less accurate than anything else I've done - just different. The OOTK, in my opinion, does a fantastic job of allowing the cards to structure the message for themselves while having enough of a framework for it to be able to be documented and replicable, therefore allowing it to be tested, studied, honed, etc. As Closrapexa brought up with his Crowley quote, the GD wanted their operations to be able to be tested and refined, and even dismissed if need be, according to methods at least similar to the scientific method. This is what I think the OOTK did, and why it is as highly regarded as it is now.
