Crowley: What’s to Like (or Not)?

The subject of Aleister Crowley is a polarizing one among tarot enthusiasts. Many of those who truly "get" his Thoth Tarot and particularly its erudite and challenging companion tome, the Book of Thoth, think he can do no wrong, while others (when they don't find him completely opaque) consider him a preening egomaniac, the self-anointed …

Left or Right? A Matter of Orientation

There is a tradition in tarot reading that visually scanning from the left to the right in a linear spread presents a past-to-future panorama of circumstances signifying an urge to move forward, while looking from right to left suggests a need to first deal with past events in the situation that may still be unresolved …

The Court Cards: A Paradigm Shift

There is a premise in Liber T, the tarot canon of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, that relates the court cards to the exercise of worldly "power" in its various forms. The Kings represent "Potential Power;" the Queens convey "Brooding Power;" the Knights (or Princes) wield "Power in Action;" and the Pages (or …

Daily “Hermetic Meditation” #1

Casting around for something new to post, I decided to do a series of daily "Hermetic Meditations" using the various Golden-Dawn and Thoth-based decks I own. I have around a dozen of them now and will be rotating them in and out of the six-card pull regularly. The layout is the graphic for my "Pentagram …

Vole! Aude! Scie! Tace!

There is an Hermetic maxim that goes "To Will, To Dare, To Know and To Keep (or Be) Silent." It parallels the observation that those who truly know don't talk about it, and those who speak as if they do don't really know. There are several variations on this theme; the one that I like …

For What It’s Worth

In my book Tarot Hermetica, I made the following observation about the use of esoteric principles and practices in tarot reading: "Recent years have seen a groundswell of resistance to the theories of esoteric interpretation formulated by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and its chief architect, Samuel Liddell “MacGregor” Mathers, at the end …

Tarot Hermetica – Basics and Beyond

I finally completed compiling all of my blog posts on the subject of divination with the esoteric tarot. It's 265 pages, published as an e-book in PDF format, and available on the Lulu bookstore.

Pleasure and Fun, On The Double

This morning I was thinking abut the old Doublemint gum jingle and how it might be applied to the elemental dignities between the Minor Arcana in two-card sets. "Double your pleasure, double your fun!" But I switched it up a bit to create four "opportunities:" "Double your pleasure, double your pain;Double your money, double your …

Numerological Counterparts by Multiplication

AUTHOR'S NOTE: This essay duplicates a few of the details that appeared in my post on the planetary and elemental trump cards, but I started this one first. It addresses the idea of "correspondence by multiplication" more specifically. The idea of Major Arcana cards as "numerological counterparts" of one another has been floated in the …

The “Chalice of Earth” Taurus Ingress Matrix

Once again, I decided to try getting more interpretive value out of the Golden Dawn's Chaldean correspondence wheel beyond its card-by-card significance. As an experiment I created matrices of the five cards that are "in play" at the ingress of the Sun into each of the zodiacal signs: the Ace and Princess that relate to …