OK.....so, I'm just a couple months into the Tarot, specifically the Thoth. I've read LMD's "Understanding" book 2.5 times (working on the 3rd), BoT once through with a lot of subsequent browsing, Chicken Qabalah....and a bunch of online material etceteras. I mean, I'm studying up on this stuff, ya know? It's fascinating, riveting, powerful stuff.
So.
I was poking around Amazon for something more to read and ran into Arrien's book --hey, cheap used copy...probably interesting...thought --well, okay....why not? So. It arrived today and when I got home from work thought I'd have a crack at it....I mean, I was barely out of the introduction and couldn't continue reading because I was rolling my eyes so much. I mean, damn! So I came here, and after a few pages of posts felt amazingly affirmed by some of the basically brilliant criticisms here.
The book is junk. It's lazy. And her writing is kinda crappy.
I mean, it's like.......what's it like? It's like she's applying her personal rules of baseball to the official baseball rulebook because, well, she just doesn't think it's fair that you only get 3 strikes when you're at bat....why not 4? Why not 5? Or better yet, it's like she's fallen in love with Cricket...but damn, it's SO HARD to absorb all those damn crazy Cricket rules, so she decided to write about Cricket via the rules of baseball. I mean, they're kinda sorta similar games....but.......ugh. UGH!
Only a few pages in and it really felt like she had some kinda anti-Crowley ax to grind.
I'll close with a quick story. A few weeks back I took a Tarot class, just the major Arcana, and although I was already basically fully onboard with the Thoth I took a RWS kinda deck (Fenestra)...cause I was already aware of the Thoth bias in the Tarot universe, and sure enough the instructor said she'd prefer if I would use my other deck. That was fine. At the end of the class someone asked what the difference was between a "regular" deck and the Thoth...interestingly enough the instructor punted to me and said --you probably know more about it than I do, wanna take that question? Now at that point I had only read the Duquette book, but I was off to the races explaining the differences...tree of life...blah blah blah...and it was clear that she kinda didn't know anything about it, just, you know CROWLEY (AHHH!!!! SCARY!!!!). I mean, this is someone who has been doing Tarot for 30 years, who called the deck "controversial," but didn't know basically the first thing about the basic principles of the Thoth, couldn't explain the controversy.
Anyway. Crap book. Ugh.