The “Glorified Pip Cards” of the Thoth Tarot

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Today I’m embarking on my promised “deep dive” into the Thoth tarot, beginning with the Minor Arcana. Note, however, that I’m not going to present an exhaustive card-by-card analysis of divinatory content; I’ve already done that in my posted “Tarot 101” course material, which is primarily Thoth-based, and in a more general way in my Tarot Hermetica e-book that captures a wide-ranging population of metaphysical essays, Thoth included. So here I’m going to share some of my personal observations and opinions about the deck culled from over 50 years of working with it.

Many people come to the Thoth after being thoroughly submerged (I’ll be kind and refrain from saying “drowned”) in the somnolent backwaters of the Waite-Smith (RWS) deck. This is nowhere more evident than in the Minor Arcana because the narrative baggage of Smith’s scenic vistas can be difficult to shake off. A conscious effort must be made to “leave it at the door” when entering Crowley’s domain, something I never had to worry about since I worked exclusively with the Thoth for 40 years before ever touching an RWS pack. When I finally did catch up to it, I was not impressed so I had no trouble dismissing its bland vulgarity.

I probably take too much curmudgeonly delight in sniping at the theatrical excesses of Smith’s images (which often send a message that is inconsistent with their Golden Dawn heritage and, it must be said, with Waite’s own text in his Pictorial Key to the Tarot). Instead, I heartily endorse the “glorified pip cards” of the Thoth for their elegance in both composition and color palette, as well as their underlying Qabalistic fidelity. Someone in the online tarot community commented that the Thoth strikes them as an “Air” deck, and I can see the point in that it harnesses the remarkable talents of two unique intellects: Crowley’s esoteric genius and the artistic brilliance of Harris.

Just a word about why I dub the Thoth small cards “glorified pips.” In the Book of Thoth, Crowley mentioned that he had originally intended to expand upon the work of the “Medieval Editors” in his own deck (by which I understood him to mean the creators of the Italian packs of the 14th Century), but Harris encountered insurmountable “technical difficulties” in trying to capture his vision in paint, so he had to retrench. However, she did manage to replicate the designs of many of the historical “pip” cards (notably of the Tarot de Marseille or “TdM”) in her imagery for the Minor Arcana; she crafted similarly sparse layouts that she “glorified” in a semi-scenic way through her artistic enhancements, not least of which was her mastery of synthetic projective geometry. Elsewhere in this blog you will find a thorough breakdown of those Thoth cards that align closely with their TdM antecedents and those that deviate (particularly the entire suit of Swords and those few cards of the other suits in which Crowley inserted his occult devices — inverted pentagrams, geomantic figures, Tree of Life sigils and the like.)

In my practice with the Thoth deck I get the most mileage from the Qabalistic (i.e. Hermetic Tree of Life) numerical model and its “Descent of Spirit into Matter” paradigm. The Aces occupy the most exalted spiritual position on the Tree (other than the three “veils of negativity” that transcend it). They radiate from the sephira Kether, the topmost of ten “emanations,” and represent the “Root of the Power” of their element; the Tens fetch up at the bottom of the Tree in Malkuth, the most mundane sphere, showing the final realization of that power in concrete form. Between the two extremes the devolving energy degrades in subtlety and quality, becoming increasingly encumbered by its immersion in matter and losing its fluidity of expression as it descends; in a recent essay on The Tarot of the Bohemians by Papus, I likened it to a snowball gathering mass as it rolls downhill. Especially in her evocative color schemes, Harris did a superior job of illustrating this slow “tarnishing” of the purity of the elemental force as Crowley explained it in the text of the Book of Thoth. Perhaps the most compelling examples appear among the Sevens and Eights, in which Crowley’s description of them as being unbalanced, “low on the Tree and off the Middle Pillar,” is on full display in their often dour appearance. I find the 7 and 8 of Cups and the 7 of Disks the most convincing (and disturbing) in this regard.

For those who would interpret the cards from an entirely intuitive perspective based on nothing more than the images, the inscriptions on the lower borders of the cards are a distraction at best, and an impediment at worst. The common complaint is that, by pushing a specific theme, they are too narrow in scope and therefore stifle free-association. I’ve looked closely at the correlation between the Golden Dawn’s titles and those of the Thoth, finding in many cases that Crowley merely truncated the originals by eliminating the “Lord of” prefix (perhaps because he felt it was already implied and therefore unnecessary). Where he altered the wording it was generally to good effect. For example, the Golden Dawn title “Lord of Success Unfulfilled” for the 7 of Pentacles (which reminds me of “snatching defeat from the jaws of victory”) Crowley simply renamed “Failure” in his 7 of Disks, thereby refusing to “tap-dance” around the dead-serious import of Saturn in Taurus and the dismal geomantic figure of Rubeus (an “overturned glass”) shown in the card. It’s not a matter of weak effort but rather of totally giving up the fight. My personal opinion is that Harris brought Crowley’s single-word descriptions to life with tremendous precision in a good many of the cards, and was no less than believable in all of them.

Speaking of Saturn in Taurus, the Golden Dawn ascribed astrological signs and planets to all of the minor cards from Two to Ten (the Aces being a special case), using the 36 “decanates” of the Chaldean zodiac as its framework. Crowley maintained this arrangement in the Thoth deck, substituting Disks for Pentacles. In astrology, the sign of Aries — the harbinger of Spring that rises in the East on the Vernal Equinox — is considered “Cardinal” (or “action-oriented”), and every fourth sign of the sequence thereafter is of a similar nature (Cancer, Libra and Capricorn, all of them beginning on the date of either an Equinox or Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere). The Golden Dawn placed the Twos, Threes and Fours of the tarot in these signs, moving around the quadrants of the zodiac from Wands to Cups to Swords to Pentacles. The second sign in each quadrant (Taurus, Leo, Scorpio and Aquarius) is labeled “Fixed” and is designated “security-oriented;” the Fives, Sixes and Sevens were given to them, rotating through the suits from Pentacles to Wands to Cups to Swords. The last sign in each of the four quadrants (Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius and Pisces) is designated “Mutable” and assumed to be social, or “people-oriented;” these signs received the Eights, Nines and Tens in the sequential order of Swords, Pentacles, Wands and Cups.

However, that’s only half the story; the planets must still be brought into the equation. The Golden Dawn worked exclusively with the seven visible orbiting bodies of antiquity (Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn), which meant that they had five sets of seven “planets” to distribute across 36 decanates (in other words, they were one short). They began with Mars as the 2 of Wands (Thoth’s “Dominion”) in the first ten degrees of Aries, followed by the Sun (3 of Wands, “Virtue”) and Venus (4 of Wands, “Completion”) in the remaining ten-degree segments of Aries; next came Mercury (5 of Disks, “Worry”) in the first ten degrees of Taurus, succeeded by the Moon (6 of Disks, “Success”) and Saturn (7 of Disks, “Failure”) in the second and third decanates; Jupiter (8 of Swords, “Interference”) completed the cycle in the first decanate of Gemini, after which the seven-card series began anew with Mars (9 of Swords, “Cruelty”) in the second decanate. This seven-card pattern continued, ten degrees per planet, until the second decanate of Pisces, after which there were no more planets to assign. My understanding is that MacGregor Mathers had a brainstorm and decided that two doses of Mars straddling the Equinox would perfectly capture the irrepressible vigor of Spring, so he doubled up on it across the cusp between Pisces and Aries (Mars as the 10 of Cups,”Satiety,” in the third decanate of Pisces and Mars as the 2 of Wands described above).

During the course of a reading, I find that the Thoth Minor Arcana segue into one another much more fluidly and cleanly than those of the RWS deck regardless of suit, which in the latter case can be jarring in its discontinuity. A good example would be the RWS 5 of Pentacles followed by the 6 of Wands, and their Thoth counterparts in the 5 of Disks (“Worry”) and the 6 of Wands (“Victory”). The diorama of destitute beggars giving way to one of a triumphant procession strains one’s credulity (I’m reminded of the sly old Maine punch-line” “You can’t get there from here”), while the Thoth rendition makes me think of a ray of sunlight poking through heavy clouds. In Thoth space, Earth (Disks) and Fire (Wands) are elementally cooperative, so I would be inclined to expect a favorable change in the weather from this combination.

I sometimes create tarot spreads that employ only the Minor Arcana in their performance, and the Thoth is usually my first choice for execution. Its minor cards can stand on their own quite well without the ramification of court and trump cards. In much the same way that many of my European friends use only the Major Arcana in divination and treat them with no more significance than they would accord the small cards, I can shine the light of the Thoth “pips” in all the dark corners of a matter and little or nothing will escape my scrutiny. Because I came to the Thoth decades before I took up with the RWS and even longer before I got serious about the TdM, I’ve found that I can skip right over the RWS and use the Thoth as a firm foundation (minus the occult trappings and the elaborate color scales) for understanding the legitimate pips of the Tarot de Marseille. The Pythagorean number theory and traditional suit symbolism I bring to my readings works equally well with both decks.

Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on February 11, 2024.