JM's DoW: RWS Again!

[Joan Marie]

There seems to be an RWS vibe around. Last week I tried out my 4 new RWS decks, the Neo Rider Tarot Collection, a gift to me from Ivy Feng my printer.

This week, I'm choosing my very own original RWS, which maybe goes to show I am old-school when it comes to RWS. I do like some of the variations that are made, especially when they try to have some fun with it, like the Winter Waite. But I'm not real enthusiastic about the ones where they try to gild the lily. It's not that I'm especially super crazy about the original RWS, but it has earned it's place and has launched a million clones that each played on the imagery of Pamela Coleman Smith, creating wholly original concepts inspired by her composition and use of symbols.

So anytime someone tries to "upgrade" her work with new colours or fancy effects, it just feels a bit, I don't know, unnecessary?

Anyway, this is the first deck I ever bought and I used the hell out of it for a long long time. It's been on the shelf for quite a while now.

oooh! these card are all bent, actually bowed in the middle from riffle-shuffling. they are grimy and lived in.
What fun!

and what do I get for my first draw from this deck I have not let out of its box for years?

Aw! It is kind of sad to think this was the deck, the actual physical deck, that I learned Tarot with, that I studied and practiced with completely naive, unaware of the forces I was awakening within myself. And then I just stuck it on a shelf.
I even thought recently about buying a fresh one just like it and just discarding this one I guess.
But what a mistake that would be!
There are things that get better with age and I think Tarot cards are one of those things, especially a deck like this that I poured so much of myself into.
Well, I hope to get reaquainted with it this week. And again, not just with the RWS, but with this specific deck. This old neglected friend.

[Joan Marie]

The Chubby guy with the condom hat!

I've had a pretty wild day so far already, but things seem to be working out. So this card can represent chaotic situations but in a lot of cases, it's up to us just how much we give into the chaos.

This morning when I knew I was facing some unexpected situations, I was reminded that it was just problems to solve. Nothing more. That carried me through.

I kind of love this card now that I really look at it. The rolling waves in the background, the man dancing as he juggles an infinity symbol.

It feels like my day.

[Joan Marie]

I missed my draw yesterday, and today I am super busy so I have t make this a quickie!

Another 2!

Life really is all about choices, just a constant stream of them.

Just staying on target (which is hard for me) is a choice that has to be made.

Funny thing about the Pictorial Key to the Tarot, funny to me anyway, is how innocent the images on the card look and how heavy and intense the meanings are as given in the book.

I am on warning today that if I am going to succeed I need to stay focused but light. I can't allow a heavy mood to influence my work, and yet, I need a kind of heavy influence to stay at it.

Choices!!!

[Scanner]

Hello Joan Marie,

unfortunately the "Original Waite Tarot" is not the Original Waite Tarot in the literal sense.
It's a copy from a Pam-C deck.
The colours are quite different and you can see this by the fact, that the original cards had no white lilys on blue background on the backside.

The current most similar deck to Pamela's original work is the Centennial edition.

I'm telling you this because the "Original Waite Tarot" is also my favourite tarot and I also assumed a long time it would be the "real" original Waite Smith deck.

[dodalisque]

I even thought recently about buying a fresh one just like it and just discarding this one I guess.
But what a mistake that would be!

So true. I'm having to wipe away a tear here, JM. "Où sont les neiges d'antan" - Villon. The cardback on that printing of the RWS is so much nicer than the sort of tartan "tarotee" pattern on later editions, and the colors are nicely subdued and understated. I definitely think you read better with a deck you have been carrying around with you for years. It's that wabi/sabi thing again. The precise scientific explanation of this phenomenon appears in Flann O'Brien's novel "The Third Policeman":
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/comedy ... plits-atom

[dodalisque]

Funny thing about the Pictorial Key to the Tarot, funny to me anyway, is how innocent the images on the card look and how heavy and intense the meanings are as given in the book.

Why on earth do they keep reissuing that ridiculous book, "Pictorial Key to the Tarot", which E.A. Waite wrote about his deck? It can take years to get that thing out of your system. So misleading. Sometimes the descriptions have absolutely nothing to do with the image on a card. It's like he never bothered to check back with Pamela Colman Smith once he had sent her off to do the artwork. Waite may have been a great scholar but he was one of the worst writers in the world. Crowley described him as "not only the most ponderously platitudinous and priggishly prosaic of pretentiously pompous pork butchers of the language, but the most voluminously voluble. I cannot dig over the dreary deserts of his drivel in search of the passage which made me write to him." But it must be admitted that Crowley's companion book to his own Thoth deck is 10 times worse!

[Joan Marie]

Why on earth do they keep reissuing that ridiculous book, "Pictorial Key to the Tarot", which E.A. Waite wrote about his deck?

The answer to that question probably has a lot to do with the fact it is in public domain and saves the publisher the trouble of writing a companion book. The other possibility is a lack of curiosity.

I agree that it is so weird how Waite's descriptions have f**k-all to do with Pamela Coleman Smith's illustrations. I really wonder how those two actually collaborated.

In Lon Milo DuQuette's "Understanding Aleister Crowley's Thoth Tarot" he includes a bunch of excerpts of correspondence between Crowley and the artist, Lady Harris. It gives a lot of insight into just how closely they worked together. Seems a long ways from RWS.

By the way, when are we ever going to talk about how "Rider" got his name on that deck at all, much less be the first one? I know he was the publisher but still, how did that happen? And why is it carried on? I mean for a long time it was just known as the Rider-Waite. The artist wasn't even acknowledged in the name of the deck until very recently. But the publisher was? And still is?

Regarding Crowley's book, I needed to first read DuQuette before I could even begin to get through Crowley. I needed a whole book as a primer to a book. But it really did open the door and now I rather enjoy reading Crowley's book. It was like LMQ had t unlock part of my brain of brain or something.

[Joan Marie]

I had a lot going on this week and unfortunately missed a few days of this week's reading. But I am here to finish up with:

I've drawn a lot of Knights in the past couple of weeks.

This one is getting ready for Halloween.

I'm going with the imagery end eschewing (nice word, eh?) the Pictorial Key.
I like the wings on the helmet and feet.

Okay you can tell I'm not getting real deep here.
This guy has something to offer and is close but biding his time. No sudden movements here despite being capable of them.

Seems like good advice. Remain open but chill.

Not deep, but also not bad advice. I could write a couple of paragraphs that would basically just say the same thing.

I should offer Tarot Readings for the Gal on the Go Or guy, obviously.

Have a lovely Sunday everyone.

See you next week!!!

[dodalisque]

Regarding Crowley's book, I needed to first read DuQuette before I could even begin to get through Crowley. I needed a whole book as a primer to a book. But it really did open the door and now I rather enjoy reading Crowley's book. It was like LMQ had t unlock part of my brain of brain or something.

Jeepers, you should read Lon's amazing book about Enochian Vision Magic. He must be a genius to have clarified so succinctly the convoluted system as described by Dr. John Dee. The funny thing is I have no desire whatsoever to experiment with Crowley's ideas or ritual magic, but at least Lon let's us know what fun it can be for those with a taste for opera and thrill-a-minute spirituality. The difference between the peaceful "right hand path" of New Age meditation and "left-hand path" of Crowley and the devil-worshippers seems to me a matter of temperament. Both paths are concerned with speeding up evolution and encouraging us to expand our consciousness and grow into our full humanity. But the left-handers are in a big hurry. "Shadow work" in the tarot world is admirable but pretty pale in most cases compared to what Crowley and Lon do to explore the concept. Crowley really went for it. He just carried shadow-work to it's most extreme limit. He got a lot out of it but, damn, he caused a lot of suffering for others along the way, and for himself.

I'm reading a bio of Crowley at the moment by Gary Lachman, who used to be a member of the group Blondie and now has written 40 books about philosophy and occultism. But he's not a magical practitioner like Lon. He writes as an intellectual academic it seems to me. He hates Crowley and the book is a hatchet job. He seems to want his holy men to be supernice people. It ain't necessarily so. In fact societally acceptable niceness (i.e. repression) is what they are trying to transcend. I'm thinking of heavy drinking zen masters and Indian saints who throw lazy students in the briar patch to wake them up.

Messing with unconscious/archetypal forces is for spiritual athletes and the very brave or stupid or impatient only. You are bringing forward your shadow selves but ordering them around like a circus ringmaster. It's why those involved with that kind of approach simply HAVE to have big egos. They tend to be jerks like Crowley. There are lots of battles of wills in the magic world. I'll bet Lon can be very tough customer too when he wants to be. If you don't have that kind of personal power and self-belief the energies you unleash can rip you to pieces. I don't have the imagination or the talent or the guts to mess with "darkness". I admire the lefthanders in the same way I admire people who skydive for fun into flooded underground caves.

It's no wonder Crowley appeals to the rock 'n' roll bad boys, Black Sabbath/Death Metal, etc. Not to mention devotees of the Weimar Republic. It's the same process, isn't it: making friends with your own shadow side, or at least acknowledging those "negative" parts of yourself. My own guru Sri Chinmoy prefers a slower approach. His is the Path of the Heart. If you strengthen your connection to the light for a few dozen incarnations then your consciousness can grow strong enough to enable you to deal with powerful archetypal energies when they come forward. I tend to notice that someone new to a spiritual discipline is glowing with optimism and happiness. A few years later they are a mess. The trick is just to keep going when the initial glamour fades. When you have light it encourages negative forces to come forward to be transformed. Either that or you only become aware of the darkness in you when there is light to see. Whatever. And the left/right choice is not an either/or thing. Like everything else it's a series of greys rather than a black or white choice. We all find our own balance between the left and right hand. People on the right hand path simply invoke light and let their spiritual life unfold as it will. The lefthanders are ALL about will.

I always laugh at Crowley's "Do what thou wilt." He doesn't mention the kicker that there are repercussions to doing that and you have to be willing to deal with those consequences. Most people who decide to follow Crowley's advice by indulging every whim are not willing to do that. And he's not talking about the ordinary human will - the one that tries to quit smoking but can't - but the deep will. The great cosmic joke is that most of us have no idea want our deepest self truly desires until AFTER it has happened. But I never want to give the impression that I know what I'm talking about. This Lachman/Crowley book is bugging me - Crowley's frightening me and Lachman's haughty disapproval of Crowley is even more annoying. Lon is the only person to read on the subject of Crowley. You know he wrote a novel about Crowley's destruction of the Golden Dawn. Hilarious.

[Joan Marie]

Jeepers, you should read Lon's amazing book about Enochian Vision Magic.

Messing with unconscious/archetypal forces is for spiritual athletes and the very brave or stupid or impatient only. You are bringing forward your shadow selves but ordering them around like a circus ringmaster. It's why those involved with that kind of approach simply HAVE to have big egos. They tend to be jerks like Crowley. There are lots of battles of wills in the magic world. I'll bet Lon can be very tough customer too when he wants to be. If you don't have that kind of personal power and self-belief the energies you unleash can rip you to pieces. I don't have the imagination or the talent or the guts to mess with "darkness". I admire the lefthanders in the same way I admire people who skydive for fun into flooded underground caves.

"Do What Thou Wilt" is one of those phrases like "One bad apple" that gets truncated and consequently loses all meaning.

People refer to "bad apples" like they are some rare thing that just happens and you have to accept that, as in "Sure there are a couple of bad apples but that doesn't mean all ________ are bad!" (cops for example)
They forget the rest of the saying is "...spoils the whole barrel." It means you cannot by any means let a bad apple in. If you do, it taints everything. There needs to be true diligence to prevent the entry of any bad apples. It's not something you deal with AFTER the fact. It's something you cannot allow.

The full saying of "Do what thou wilt" is:

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Love is the law, love under will.

This implies a serious underpinning to the will: Love. I really wish I had asked LMD when I had him for the interview to explain it. I'm sure it's somewhere in one of his many books.

I may just start this in a discussion in the Thoth section. Nobody will ever find it here.

I must say though my friend you have pointed out something about ceremonial magic that I had not seen. And now that you mention it I seem to recall LMD saying this, differently, but saying it, that the "demons" he summons are shadow selves. And I love your description of how he orders them around like a circus ringmaster.

That makes so much sense. I'm really interested in ceremonial magic, but not in actually doing it. I just can't bring myself to. But I find it interesting. I have my own ideas about how magick works. But I can definitely see how for certain personality types ritual magick could hold a lot of truck.

[dodalisque]

And now that you mention it I seem to recall LMD saying this, differently, but saying it, that the "demons" he summons are shadow selves.

Lon was asked once whether he really believed in all these spirits and demons and things or whether they were all in his own head. "Oh, they are all in your head. But no-one has any idea how big their head is." He used the last part as a title for one of his books. His point is that our head contains all these "beings", and in fact the whole of what we think of as the material universe, which includes the universe of the imagination.

Crowley once spelled it out for a student, saying something like, "They are all, I suppose, interior psychological states, but it's more convenient and poetic to think of them as people." Greek mythology is the same thing. In fact,as Jung discovered, these archetypal forces do seem to have an independent existence of their own. But they would seem like that to our conscious ego since they emanate from an unconscious region within our Self over which we have no control. Isn't this exactly what Christians do with their pantheon of otherworldly beings such as Christ or Mary or St. Sebastian. They were real people on the earthly plane at one time but have become "thought forms" or symbols for qualities like peace, love, etc., whose image we can summon up to invoke those qualities in ourselves.

The danger in occultism as well as in Christianity is that fundamentalists can tend to forget that these beings are not literally true but poetic conventions. The silly thing is that they are probably more emotionally potent for religious inspiration when we DO allow ourselves to forget that they are conventions. If you are going to choose a religion, really go for it, accept the symbols as literal facts. Maybe they have a paradoxical liminal status partaking of both fantasy and reality. I'm channeling Patrick Harpur here.

[dodalisque]

The full saying of "Do what thou wilt" is:

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Love is the law, love under will.

This implies a serious underpinning to the will: Love. I really wish I had asked LMD when I had him for the interview to explain it. I'm sure it's somewhere in one of his many books.

I may just start this in a discussion in the Thoth section. Nobody will ever find it here.

Yes, exactly, you put your finger on it, JM. Crowley would argue that he WAS inspired by Love, but the Lachman book describes in agonising detail a trail he left behind him of lies, drug addiction, suicides, insanity and criminality that boggles the mind, so we would need to establish a pretty broad definition of Love to defend Crowley's lifestyle. Waking people up is what religious teachers do, and sometimes kicking a dog to wake it up is a form of love, I suppose. I sometimes think we in the Christian tradition are often handicapped in life by an exaggerated respect for kindness, because, as we know, Love isn't always the same thing as being nice. But there are limits, surely. Not being kind tends to be misunderstood and makes problems for spiritual masters, so the smart ones prefer to toe the social line so as not to get distracted from their mission by dull idiots who haven't got a clue about what constitutes a truly passionate spiritual life. I am one of those dull idiots so I know what I'm talking about.

When Crowley was in court one time on obscenity charges - which happened a lot because the stuffy Christian establishment in England were out to get him - the judge asked him what was signified by the number 666, which Crowley had taken as part of his one of his magickal identities as To Mega Therion - which is Greek for "The Great Beast". Of course, 666 is the number in the kabbalistic system of gematria for the Devil. Crowley answered that, "666 mean 'light', so I suppose you could call me "Little Sunshine". He got a laugh in court but judges generally don't like being made fun of and things didn't go well. Crowley loved to bait people in this way. Jesus had similar problems with Pontius Pilate. It is funny when sensible Materialists expect nice cozy logical explanations for arcane spiritual concepts and otherworldly experiences. In his own world, and Jung's world too probably, he WAS invoking light, releasing vast chthonic forces within in his own consciousness. It wasn't his fault that the "straights" didn't know what he was talking about.

Incidentally, I did read somewhere that 616, not 666, is the proper number for the Devil in the kabbalah. If that's true I wonder what 666 relates to. Something kabbalistic that adds up to 666 is being slandered on the spiritual plane! We need to start an online petition to redress this injustice. That's the kind of joke that used to get Crowley into trouble.

I think I did the Lachman book a disservice. He's a lively writer who thoroughly researches his books. Very wisely he leaves Crowley's philosophy and mysticism to the experts in such things, like Lon. Instead, his book is a picture of "Crowley the man" and it makes for difficult reading. The sheer physical energy of Crowley is staggering. It's a miracle how Lachman can keep track of his hundreds of travels and scandals. The wealth of detail is so exhausting that the book eventually, like Crowley himself it, gets wearying. But Lachman as a successful rock star in the 70s saw lots of friends adopt the sex and drugs lifestyle and go crazy, so his goal with this book is the demonstrate that Crowley was not someone who deserves to be a role model for his generation. The final chapter in particular is a very passionate plea for us to choose our heroes more carefully.

[Joan Marie]

I think I did the Lachman book a disservice. He's a lively writer who thoroughly researches his books. Very wisely he leaves Crowley's philosophy and mysticism to the experts in such things, like Lon. Instead, his book is a picture of "Crowley the man" and it makes for difficult reading. The sheer physical energy of Crowley is staggering. It's a miracle how Lachman can keep track of his hundreds of travels and scandals. The wealth of detail is so exhausting that the book eventually, like Crowley himself it, gets wearying. But Lachman as a successful rock star in the 70s saw lots of friends adopt the sex and drugs lifestyle and go crazy, so his goal with this book is the demonstrate that Crowley was not someone who deserves to be a role model for his generation. The final chapter in particular is a very passionate plea for us to choose our heroes more carefully.

I can't remember if I ever told you this or not but some years ago an antiquarian friend of mine in London came into possession of a collection of books by and about Crowley and he gave them to me. I went to look if I had the Lachman book,I don't, but I have these 3 biographies:

I feel like somewhere along the line I read a biography of Crowley but I don't think it was any of these.
You've piqued my interest now and I wonder if you are familiar with any of these 3.

And in regard to role models, I think that's something you always have to be careful of, even if it's Mother Theresa. (ask Christopher Hitchens about her.)

And writing that made me think of "every man and woman is a star."
Wasn't that a sort of plea to be your own damn role model?

Here is how Lon Milo Duquette answered my question in our interview, when I asked him what that meant:

LMD: Every man and every woman is a sovereign consciousness-unit and a perfect fractal reflection of the Supreme Singularity. Like stars, we each (at any given moment) have our own unique and particular place in the great scheme of things, and our own unique and particular duty to the cosmos. You and I are stars ... absolutely necessary to the totality of existence itself.

Like the stars in space, we each have our own "WILL", that is, our own position, trajectory, velocity, magnetic charge, gravitational properties, and function in the universe. We are self-radiating stars.... not planets orbiting stars, not cold moons orbiting planets. Each of us is the absolute center of the universe, the main character ... the Star of the master-movie of existence.

[dodalisque]

And writing that made me think of "every man and woman is a star."

That quote from Lon is typically brilliant. If only everyone wrote with such clarity, humor and honesty. He's a great teacher. The Lachman book is the only bio of Crowley I have read. I'm really not interested in that part of his life. I'm not even sure I have much patience for his occult speculations. It all seems such a lot of intellectual clutter and baggage compared to something crystal clear like Zen or eastern meditative disciplines. I'm not very curious and being lazy doesn't help either, though what I know of Crowley's take on astrology and the kabbalah is very beautiful.

The problem, if it is a problem, and I don't think so, with having my own spiritual master in Sri Chinmoy is that I never really feel the need to study anyone else. I think that's what that ridiculous quote from the Gospel of John is about: John 14:6, Christ says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” I've always objected to that, or to the fact that fundamentalists interpret it literally and deny all other religions. But, in fact, for Christians what Christ said makes absolutely perfect sense. If you have a path you stick with that path. It's safer anyway. Otherwise the vocabularies of multiple systems can cause a great deal of inner confusion. I think that's what causes people so much inner torment nowadays. We can read about Jungianism and Zen and Crowleyism and Vedanta and a hundred other isms through books and the internet. They are all describing the same inner world but describing it in many many different ways. I hated the dull Anglicanism I grew up with - though I have met many serious dynamic Christian seekers since then - but at least people in those days had something simple to hold on to to make sense of their inner world. Perhaps people were generally more content then. You have to be an intellectual genius nowadays to keep your mental equilibrium as you translate one system into the language of another. But maybe we are picking and choosing and trying to make our own unique synthesis. Re-inventing the Wheel of Fortune, perhaps?