Aleister Crowley was born on October 12, 1875, and died on December 1, 1947. He left behind many writings and the Thoth Tarot deck. It is not the purpose of this article to chronicle this man’s history, nor to offend anyone their own due purpose, but to discuss the Tarot in general. It could be said that Aleister Crowley, during the time in history of his efforts, brought forth some major bread crumbs for the future. All of this under the guise of “The Wickedest Man in the World.”
Lady Frieda Harris called the tarot “God’s Picture Book.” Interesting note: “God’s.” Let’s stick with that. Two people working on a project together with the word “God” being at least speculated as being a topic between the two as evidenced by her own statement. Speculative, yes. However, that is how I, myself, like to look at everything, as “God’s.” Even the knowing of that can be hidden behind a mask, even a mask known as the Tarot.
From the time period of Aleister Crowley’s life, 1875 to 1947, what limitations were then the norm within society as a whole, or in part, as he endeavored his own pursuits? You might say that his endeavors would be under scrutiny among the population of his time to at least a minor degree. The ideas coming to the forefront of the public, there must have been some resistance to some degree within some of the mainstream social, political, and religious circles. The irony is that those same resistances exist still today, even after over 70 years past his death. Have we made progress in, even at a minimum, of seeing what it might have been that he was trying to communicate? Others have done the same as he. Volumes of information left behind that hint at something.
Let’s break this down simply. The knowledge and conversation with the holy guardian angel. An alien named Lam. Visions. Volumes of writing. An understanding of something about our reality. A tarot deck created. I’m not saying the man was a saint, those stories of his own dark nature are left to interpretation as they will be. I’m talking about the overall theme of his life. What was he trying to tell everyone? There is more to reality than meets the eye.
It takes someone with a vision beyond the norm to bring into this world concepts that do not exist. The reasons behind this are just as mysterious, but the Tarot explains this. Just by his very nature, what he left behind, the message is that it is there for anyone to find for themselves. He even left a road map behind, a picture book, explaining in a way which included understandings that he himself discovered along the way.
If you bind a book filled with written pages and set it on a shelf, it is just another book. However, if you hollow the pages, glue them together, put something in it, close the cover, place the book back on the shelf, what is it? To the passer by, it is just a book sitting. However, if one takes a closer look, they will find that it was created as an illusion to hide the fact that it contained something else hidden, not written pages, but something else entirely. The Thoth Tarot, and the tarot in general, is just that. In fact, one could say, in a way, there is no Tarot. There is only Arcana, or the Mystery of it.
The tarot is used today for many reasons, but the main theme is for divination, for communication with “Spirit.” Many tarot readers there are today, giving readings from the cards to others with questions about their lives. The knowledge of numerology, astrology, kabbalah, and the symbolism within the tarot can take anyone quite a long time to learn. Remember the “Book” mentioned above? What would happen if you stripped all of that away? Remove the numerology, remove the astrology, remove the kabbalah, remove the symbolism, what would remain? An underlying story, as someone so eloquently stated, called God’s Picture Book.
Jumble up the images to work within and relate to several different systems and what is the result? You basically get everyone looking at your widget. Everyone is interested because it works with many systems. One effectively puts the Truth right under the noses of everyone working in differing systems. You achieve creating a message of simplicity within and around, intermingled with, and masked by the inclusion of all of the complexities that others can relate to. All the reasoning’s become relatable and the interconnections of a myriad of possible junctures become a language of interpretation that requires complex understandings. Know how to look past all of the complexities and see how the story was intended to be told. The Mystery behind the complexity is sought after.
One can finally realize that the Tarot is not a tool for divination. It is a puzzle, with a key, so to speak. Put the pieces in the right order and the Truth is revealed. Aleister Crowley knew this eventually, but the challenge came when the task of ultimately explaining this came to the forefront. How to show the truth? Should the truth be shown? Another person of notability in this concept is Friedrich Nietzsche. A reading of his biography will show where his realization of truth came. The complexity of explaining the Truth of Reality, no matter the time in history, has always been an ongoing and difficult affair for those who took it under their belts to attempt.
So, in the case of Aleister Crowley, he chose to hide the truth within obscurity. Or, one could say, during his life, he was lead to hide the truth within obscurity. If the truth is told, no one will believe it, it will be rejected. So, hide the truth in a system that others will work with. People admire the projectors of knowledge and wisdom, they allure to attain those understandings. For Crowley’s time, that was his avenue for being able to somehow, some way, bring forth the simple truth, albeit in an obscure manner. He had everything to lose, and in the end, he basically did lose everything. However, was everything lost?
Everything was not lost. A life is sometimes misunderstood from a point of biographical interpretation. A human experience we all have. Amidst the chaos, the success, the failure, a major theme unfolds and exists even beyond what an external human analyzer can communicate or even fully comprehend. Only Aleister Crowley truly knows what his human experience was in full. Even though he attempted with great effort, even as Friedrich Nietzsche did, to communicate his awareness within his own consciousness, there exists the understanding that it is not so much the minute details, but the end result that is the final mosaic revealed. Within a field of flowers planted, THE flower exists. The Flower.
The Major Arcana are arranged in a spread of six. The Minor Arcana are arranged in a spread of five. It is from this Key Arrangement, that the story is told. The Story of Creation, the Major Arcana, or the Major Mystery, and the Story of Consciousness, the Minor Arcana, or Minor Mystery. The entire deck of the Thoth Tarot is the story of life, not just on Earth, but beyond. God’s Picture Book revealed.
We Are The Avatar
We enter the this world upside down. We remember not where we came from and we assume an entirely new identity upon birth. We eventually assume different archetypes as we grow in age. We see this in ourselves and others.
The Creation, The Illusion
We experience in a world of creation. We experience good and evil. We experience movement and adjustment. We experience success and failure. We see this in ourselves and others.
The Truth
We experience the unknown or the hidden in this world and beyond. We see others being born into this world and we see others leaving. We learn of things and places divine and of journeys of the soul. We wonder what vastness there is beyond this world and what our origins are and place is in that vastness. We see this in ourselves and others.
The above marks the Major Arcana, or Major Mystery. We are a part of the Creation, the Illusion, the Matrix, whatever you wanna call it. We each are in it and we see others in it as well.
The Hermit, God
There is God who is responsible for this Creation. This is represented by The Hermit Card. It stands alone. For not only is it for God to see, but for each of us can be the Hermit as well, seeing through the illusion created, knowing the Creation for what it is. It is the Hermit who sees the story amidst the complexity. The Hermit knows the key.
The Minor Arcana, or Minor Mystery, tells the story of each of us individually. It tells us of the nature of our individual consciousness and its basic parts. This is the internal experience, or the experience of consciousness. We each have a Father and a Mother, we each are a Son and a Daughter, and we each fall into illusion, or the Creation. Knowing that Family is a Spiritual affair, and that THAT affair IS a major theme of our true spiritual form, IT is mirrored in the Tarot. From that, we each have a resource for experience, a lineage of parentage to teach us and guide us beyond our present sight. This is true within Creation in all forms, be it the illusion here, outside of illusion, within illusion elsewhere, and even within consciousness realized, and especially unrealized. We have a physical, an emotional, a mental, and a spiritual experience within consciousness. Each one of these is understood not only from an experience within illusion, but also within our own true spiritual embodiment and from the wisdom and knowledge that comes from our parentage, and from our true spiritual identities that exist outside of illusion here on Earth. The Hermit is our true understanding of “God,” the ultimate in understanding and experience. The idea of God, a Father, a Mother, a Son, a Daughter, and ourselves in illusion gives us an understanding of the breadth and width available to us within the realm of consciousness alone, either in the illusion of Earth, or outside of.
Within our Physical Nature, Change is our ultimate purpose. We are here to refine, to learn. We can experience all the other iterations of our Physical nature in the Illusion, but Change is a quality that brings us closest to our own true personal representation of our spiritual self.
Within our Emotional Nature, Love is our ultimate purpose. We can experience all the other iterations of our Emotional nature in the Illusion, but Love is the quality that brings us closest to our own true personal representation of our spiritual self.
Within our Mental Nature, Peace is our ultimate purpose. We can experience all the other iterations of our Mental nature in the illusion, but Peace is the quality that brings us closest to our own true personal representation of our spiritual self.
Within our Spiritual Nature, Dominion over self , or Self Control, is our ultimate purpose. We can experience all the other iterations of our Spiritual nature in the illusion, but Dominion over self is the quality that brings us closest to our own true personal representation of our spiritual self.
We can examine and identify all of the other cards as experiences to recognize within ourselves at any given moment. Recognition is the key. Self Control, Peace, Love, and Change are the ingredients that overshadow all other states of the Spiritual, Mental, Emotional, and Physical experience we encounter within the created Illusion.
The understanding of the Thoth Tarot truly comes from knowing a few Truths. Strip everything else away. The you that you are experiencing right now can simply be changed. You are not bound by the forces of anything else included in the Tarot. That includes astrology, numerology, kaballah, or symbolism. You are not even tied to archtypes, aspects of creation, or even the unseen. The Truth is that what one seems to be under control of is simply an illusion. We all are sovereign spiritual beings, even if our current experience is as a human being on the planet Earth currently. The realization of that, or more correctly, the re-realization of our own sovereignty is the simplest knowing to envision. You are the spiritual you right now, nothing has to have any influence over you but that which gives you life. And there is only one thing that gives you life, that is God. Things become very simple upon these realizations. That connection to our true spiritual home, the idea of God, it is within each of us, as a real potential “remembering” and “reconnecting” that is the right of each and every one of us. Embrace Self Control, Peace, Love, and Change, knowing all is seen by the eyes of God, and miracles cannot cease to happen within a Life.
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The missing information that we as humans do not possess each individually is only a matter of awareness within our own consciousness. This was the realization within not only Crowley’s own consciousness, but many, many others. The external world, or the illusion, does not, as of yet, have concrete evidence convincing enough to show these Truths. So, it is up to individuals who are sitting at such levels of conscious awareness to guide others towards those same realizations, if it so precludes the external individual.
The Thoth Tarot, if simply explained, can be a great teaching aid towards bringing Truth into their own lives and Consciousness. If fact, The Tarot, simply translated into written words, serves the same purpose. From God’s Picture Book, translated into God’s Written Book, it’s very simple. It was always meant to be simple. The Mystery becomes Truth.
External Truth:
- We are born into this world created.
- We live a life.
- There is a place we came from and are going to.
- There is God.
Internal Truth:
- Self Control
- Peace
- Love
- Change
That’s the entirety of the Thoth Tarot message. However, there’s one final Mystery to be revealed. There is no Tarot. There is only Truth. Truth hidden amidst obscurity, within an illusion. Be it a deck of cards, images, symbols, numbers, etc, there is only truth. Differentiating Truth from False, how to do that in an illusion created? Seems one would have to consult the illusion creator. Who created the illusion and all that resides under such dominion? Who created the Tarot and why? Who created all the messages that reside within the Tarot? If someone such as Aleister Crowley received such inspiration to create what he did, who gave the initial inspiration to create the Tarot at its inception hundreds of years ago?
It seems much inspiration has been entering human consciousness for a long, long, long time. That mystery alone does not have to be a mystery either. If you could meet God, what would be the first thing you would say? I, myself, might say “Hello.” Sometimes the greatest mysteries are just an elaborate obscuration of simplicty. Everyone has a right to know that. Everyone has a right to know that spiritual truths can be attained personally without any obscuration involved. Look and you will see, ask and you will receive, listen and you will hear, feel and you will sense, question and you will know.
The ultimate spiritual guru to consult? God. “He sees you when you’re sleeping. He knows when you’re awake. He knows when you’ve been bad or good. So, be good for goodness sake!” Only God could inspire a man to become “The Wickedest Man in the World.” How many have become that? How many have thought that of another? How many have looked past the obscuration, even that of their own?
Zoltan Blue 