Scion
No, Ligator.Ligator said:
Crowley created a deck. Arrien did not. Crowley took the Golden Dawn material and transformed it; he didn't merely regurgitate it. Picasso once said, "A good artist borrows; a great artist steals." Crowley STOLE the Golden Dawn material: he made it his own by reimagining it and built a deck that was his. Now, we could get into a semantic debate about creation and originality, etc, but the fact is that Crowley and Waite both "stole" the Golden Dawn material and reimagined it by looking at it through their own eyes in the same way that Shakespeare "stole" Pyramus and Thisbe from Ovid to create Romeo & Juliet. They created something personal and specific that changed the world.
Arrien didn't create anything. To discuss them in the same breath, you have to deal with the fact (as I mentioned above and elsewhere) that she not only didn't create anything, but she didn't even bother to understand the deck enough to reimagine it wholly as a "Jungian" or "cross-cultural" document or whatever she thought she was doing. Again, I feel like I keep saying this and saying this. I even say it in the post you're quoting! I WISH she'd had the chutzpah to actually reinvent Crowley's deck by approaching it as a collection of Universal symbols. She just trots out the same tired, overused Mythology 101 "insights" in an unstructured stream of consciousness. But actual invention? No. This is where I think her "archetypal" perspective is such a load of wank. Jung was NOT a lazy thinker. Jung's writings on alchemy, myth, mandalas, gnosticism, etc are not based on generalized soundbites. Jung went to the primary source, even when it baffled him... and completely reimagined them in the framework of his own approach.
I feel like I'm repeating myself for the hundredth time: Crowley's mistakes are part of the fabric of his deck. Just as much as his insights. He designed it and built those mistakes into it. Crowley's (and Harris') mistakes are like the horns on Michelangelo's Moses; they can be "ugly" or "puzzling", but they can't be "wrong" because they are part of the actual creation. Crowley included the limited periodic table on the Universe card because he wanted to incorporate as much hard science as he could. The fact that the hard science he used has been superceded doesn't make the deck worthless or plagiaristic: it is part of the deck. Arrien's mistakes are part of the fabric of... well... nothing but a cheesy book from the early 80s that enshrined a sloppy, self-involved interpretation of someone else's creation.
If Arrien had created a deck as mushy and incoherent as her book on the Thoth I would have raised my eyebrows in embarassment and moved on. If people manage to wring some kind of value out of The Tarot Handbook, then I'd argue it has more to do with their own patience and anxiety about Crowley than any actual content. Arrien did NOT do the "same thing as Crowley did," by a long shot. She created NOTHING. Her Handbook was derivative, sloppy, and self-involved. Crowley's's Thoth, both book and deck, were the summation of his entire singular life. There is literally NO equivalence between them whatsoever except that they both spoke English and both published books on Crowley's deck.
I'd agree that discussing her unwillingness to cite Crowley is central, except that there's nothing to discuss! She didn't and she chose not to purposefully. That's embarassing, but true. But Crowley didn't do anything with the Golden Dawn tarot... he reimagined it wholly, which is the action of all artists.
Recently, Dan Brown (author of the Da Vinci Code) got into a LOT of trouble with the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail for plagiarism... In point of fact, he did lift the entire meat of his book straight out of HBHG without a nod or a reference (with a little help from New Age twit Margaret Starbird, who was cited and did share in the backend wealth). Now the truth is HBHG was long ago proved a fraud. This is not news. The trouble for the HBHG authors when they got into court was that because they had presented the original HBHG material as FACT, that in a plagiarism case they had no argument. You can't plagiarize historical "fact." History cannot be copyrighted. Brown won the case and the HBHG authors missed out on the chance to share in the windfall for his epic dippy beachbook... because they couldn't have it both ways. They'd called it fact first and later it was proved fiction, but Brown didn't directly lift the expression of their amateurish bullshit so they had no copyright case.
Now, Crowley did not and could not have "taken" anything from the Golden Dawn because the Golden Dawn material was presumably "the hidden truth" of the Universe. It was an occult order not a franchise! The GD figured and presented their teachings as knowledge, not invention. In our modern world of copyright we point at the Cypher manuscript and megalomaniacal Mathers and shake our heads in condescension, but Crowley believed in the system he used as something eternal and immanent. You cannot "rob" the Anima Mundi. Gnosis cannot be copyrighted. Debating whether or not he was right is another topic, but the entire Golden Dawn exercise is based on the idea that the members would each connect to the teachings personally, would even create their own deck. After his hysterical split with Mathers and the implosion of the GD, Crowley (as usual) just took it a step farther and into the public light.
The feeble argument that Crowley somehow "robbed" the GD of the mysteries of the Universe is supported only by the assumption that the GD is a complete (copyrightable) fiction AND the mistaken belief that reimagining an idea is the same as presenting it unchanged as your own. Maybe if you're a robot, but not in the real world.
Again, this is something I feel like I keep saying, but this dead horse is still being beaten to zero effect.So, no. I will not allow that Arrien and Crowley are "doing the same thing," even for an instant.
Scion
