10 years of Thoth Boycott and now ...

Nevada

The only thing I've ever found dark about it was some of the keywords, which I tune out these days anyway. But as a beginner they could really distort a reading for me. I wish he'd left off the keywords or that someone would publish a version without them, since I can't bring myself to trim a deck.

Nevada
 

Lillie

I keep saying this. They are not keywords, they are names.
The cards have names. The 2 of cups is 'The Lord of Love' and so on.
I like them. I use them when I'm doing a reading.
I generally do the CC. nd I speak it out as I lay them down.
And I use the names.
Here you are, and you are dissapointment.
You are covered by lust
You are crossed by cruelty
Blah blah blah.

I have always got a kick out of doing that.

I have had this deck for so long. I can see each and every card in my mind.
It's very hard to use another one.

Crowley never bothered me.
The first thing I ever read about him was the Symmonds book, The Great Beast. And I read it like a story, and it was so cool. This amazing bloke doing amazing things.
And I suppose I never got that image out of my mind, of this semi fictional libertine doing whatever he wanted and shocking the victorians.
More than anything else, he was interesting.
I liked him, like someone might like a character out of a story.

It's been too long now, and I can't remember what came first, the deck or the book.
If it was the book then that was the reason I got the deck.
Because I was young, and Crowley was everything I wanted magic and the occult to be.

There are far darker people than him walking around. And they don't dress up in robes and shout about it.
They look just like 'him next door', except they have bodies buried under the shed.
 

coredil

Lillie said:
They look just like 'him next door', except they have bodies buried under the shed.
Uhh! Though I dont really understand this sentence, it sounds very dark to me
 

Lillie

Should I really explain this?

The real evil people don't make a show of being the 'wickedest man in the world'. They keep it quite.
They look just like the man next door to you, or me, or anyone.

Only in secret they are doing evil, terrible things.

Far worse than anything Crowley ever did.

And we never even know they are there, till someone finds the bodies.

Compared to this real evil, Crowley was just a performer. Putting on a big show, just to shock.
 

coredil

Thanks for your explanations Lillie.
I intuitively thought it would mean what you now clearly have explained
but I had difficulties to translate this expression "buried under the shed"
 

Sophie

Lillie said:
Compared to this real evil, Crowley was just a performer. Putting on a big show, just to shock.
In many ways, he was a child of his time - rebelling against his restrictive Victorian upbringing and Christian über-morality, while at the same time inheriting the Victorian sense of pride and showmanship.
 

Lillie

Yes. Totally a child of his time and his upbringing.

Crowley, created by the plymouth brethren!
Their most famous son!

Buried under the shed...
Is the garden shed a totally British phemomenon?

We have little wooden sheds in our gardens, to keep lawn mowers and such in.
But a lot of men use them for their hobbies, and to eascpe from their wives.
The garden shed is a sort of symbol of both secretive masculine persuits (not usually murder, often model building, growing cacti, that sort of thing) and also it is a symbol of polite middle class britain.
 

kwaw

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


Those two sentences course through that deck - words of love and responsibility.

And perhaps here he has brought to blossom what was always rooted in the design of the Tarot, or at least in the pattern and sequence of the TdM.

The lower rank of the 3x7 sequence, commencing with the wand bearer, also called a bagatelle, a 'trifle' or 'little thing' and ending with the vehicle of life, image of body and soul the Chariot, called in the Steele sermon 'parvus mundum' or 'little world', surely relates to the sphere of the microcosm, that is, the world of man.

The bateleur the player representing all men; why a trickster and deceiver, because in Augustinian theology all men as citizens of this world, like the Devil who is typologicaly related to the Bateleur in the higher rank, are fallen. Nonetheless, he has within him the capacity to be either a citizen of the City of God, which Augustine relates in an ideal way to the Church [Atout II: Popess] or the City of the Damned, which he relates to the Secular State [Atout III: Empress].

However he is talking allegorically of 'ideal' cities here and in the 'real' world a citizen of the City of the Damned or of the City of God is not defined by whether they are members or representatives of the State [Atout IV: Emperor] or of the Church [Atout V: Pope]; for clearly an Emperor can be good and a Pope depraved and corrupt. What defines a Citizen as being either of the City of God or of the Damned rests upon the individual dynamics of Love [Atout VI: Love or Lover] and Will [Atout VII: Chariot].

But it is especially a triumph of will [which Augustine attributed as a function of reason or the virtue of wisdom, the charioteer holding the reins in the tripartite soul over the appetite with the virtue of temperance and the passions with fortitude], as love comes from God and even the love of mundane, secular and temporal things, even though such desire for the mundane and temporal leads to sorrow, is ultimately the relfection in man of the power of Love that derives from God; it takes reason and wisdom for Man to see behind the visible beauty and pleasures of the mundane [Venus Natura, the woman with the flowers in her hair in the Lover card] to the invisible but true source of beauty and pleasure in the eternal and infinite [Venus Urania, the woman with crown of laurels in the Lover card]; but mere recognition of the invisible source is not in itself enough, it takes 'will' to act upon that knowledge and to direct our Love to the invisible, eternal and infinite source of the beauty and pleasures reflected in our mundane and temperal world we find ourselves in to the true source of Love, Beauty, and pleasure, that is to God. And such acts of will is not easily won, but is a constant battle and source of strife, and like minerva our soul find itself in a battle in the garden of virtue and vice.

The number one, which the bateleur, the player of common man holds, is attributed to eros, whose arrows cause not only love but also, when dipped in lead, enmity; and in this inner dynamic of the mundane world of man between love and strife, it is his 'will' in Augustinian terms that enable him to triumph as a citizen of the City of God; suitable then that the chariot, platonic vehicle of life, ends the triumphal sequence of the rank of man, the microcosm.

The psychological dynamics between Love and Will St. Augustine stated in the phrase, "Love God, and do what you will." Crowley's title of his autobiography, Confessions: An Hagiography [biography of a saint], is I think probably a reference to the Confessions of St. Augustine, an identification Crowley makes possibly in reference to his [admittedly individualistic] interpretation of the dynamics of Love and Will.

[historical question: could pattern C be connected to Pavia? Both St. Augustine and Boethius are buried there, though not sainted Boethius was treated as a saint by the residents of Pavia. This could possibly relate to the strong Augustinian and Boethian elements in the tarot sequence. Both Augustine and Boethius were important references for the Christian Platonists and Neo-platonists too of course, and Decembrio who worked in Milan and translated Plato's republic was born in Pavia. Decembrio the younger who also translated Plato also identified his ideal city with Augustine's City of God and the New Jerusalem, and used such identification in propoganda for the City of Milan and his patrons, which propaganda use could relate to the use of an ideal city as one of the cards in in the early painted decks?]

Kwaw