Thoth Love
I haven’t visited this topic in quite a while, but after 1,255 posts over the last 4+ years I’ve reached a bit of a lull in my more philosophical (not to mention more acerbic) ramblings around the tarotscape, and thought I would spend some time with an old friend: the venerable and magnificent Thoth Tarot. Granted that it isn’t as hoary as the even more venerable Waite-Smith Tarot (with some 60 years between their publication), to which it is a distant second in brand recognition among both tarot enthusiasts and the general public, and it sits roughly equidistant in terms of popularity between that and the third-place entry, the precursive (by around 200 years) Tarot de Marseille (TdM), which is still a hit in Europe but not nearly as prominent in the United States. (This isn’t empirical data, just my seat-of-the-pants “gut-feel,” so don’t quote me.) I can’t help but think that its acceptance would be much greater among neophytes were it not for Aleister Crowley’s scandalous (and not entirely unintentional or undeserved) reputation; it’s that good.
The Thoth deck was my very first tarot pack back in 1971, when my only contact with the Waite-Smith Tarot (aka RWS) was through the illustrations in Eden Gray’s 1960 book, The Tarot Revealed. As a budding graphic artist, I was mesmerized by the complex synthetic projective geometry of the glorious, shimmering artwork of Frieda Harris, which seemed to leap off the surface of the cards, and I was even more enamored of the articulate writing of Aleister Crowley, which was erudite, confident to the point of narcissism, and irreverent. Perfect fodder for a young New Age intellectual (I still have my tattered Mensa membership card) harboring anti-establishment sentiments. Crowley’s Book of Thoth (BoT) was largely an enigma at that early point in my studies, so I cobbled together an interpretive approach using Gray’s words, Harris’s images and Crowley’s attitude. Since that bygone era I’ve read the BoT four times, and no longer hark back to Gray for much of anything now that I’ve upgraded my original dim view of A. E. Waite’s own pompous Victorian verbosity.
The Thoth along with its companion book was the perfect deck for contemplation, and I also obliged it to work for me as a divinatory tool through sheer force of will, since Gray’s writing owed too much to Waite and was light-years behind the stimulating and eventually illuminating essays of Crowley. Fortunately, I came to the Thoth with a grounding in the Hermetic Qabalah, so the various correspondences and other occult associations glibly flung about by Crowley were not entirely foreign to me. I studied and read exclusively with the Thoth deck for nearly 40 years before I finally got my hands on a copy of the RWS (not that I couldn’t, but I just didn’t see the need until I joined the online tarot forums). I had some catching up to do when discussing and using it, but in practice I tended to graft the Thoth meanings onto the RWS images for most of my observations, exactly opposite of what I was compelled to do with the Thoth cards and Eden Gray’s keywords. You might say I came full circle, but it was more of an ascending spiral.
Now, when the informed layman envisions the RWS deck at the mention of the word “tarot,” the Thoth illustrations swim before my mind’s eye. I find the Minor Arcana cards (which in the TdM feature geometric “pips” and arabesques, and in the RWS, prosaic scenes) to be highly evocative in mood and color scheme, such that a spontaneous “story” often emerges from the abstract images and the simple on-board keywords without recourse to Crowley’s written definitions (many of which, to be honest, I’ve committed to memory). The Major Arcana cards are mostly traditional in nature once Crowley’s idiosyncratic tinkering with a few of them is understood and either accepted or rejected, and the court cards truly shine beneath the descriptive spotlight of the BoT’s litany of “moral characteristics.” I don’t have much use for the various “clones” (creative reworkings) of the original Thoth (and far less tolerance for the ubiquitous and generally inferior RWS clones), since most of them — except for rare exceptions like the wonderful Tabula Mundi Colores Arcus — don’t stand up to the benchmark set by the Crowley-Harris masterwork.
The only exception I make to my routine employment of the Thoth deck occurs when performing public readings, since most sitters identify strongly with the RWS; I want to give them as straightforward and seamless a reading experience as possible, and the RWS hits the “sweet spot” there (the Albano-Waite is my go-to public deck, followed by the RWS Centennial Edition). When occasionally requested to bring out the Thoth deck instead, I cross my fingers and hope that the sitter doesn’t — among many other possible gaucheries — recognize what the Ace of Disks really portrays; or doesn’t ask me to explain the peculiarities of interpretation between Lust and the typical Strength card; or doesn’t inquire what the Aeon of Horus has to do with Judgement Day. They’re not paying me enough to go down those particular rabbit holes in Crowley’s arcane Thelemic dogma, and I doubt they would understand much of what I say anyway even though they had the incipient wisdom to request the Thoth deck.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on December 9, 2021.
