Why?

Why are you fasinated with the world of tarot and the golden dawn? The mumblings of Levi, the chunderings of Crowley and the rumblings of Regardie?

Why does it enthral you so much in your tarot journeys?

I ask this because this is something that I often ask myself. My spirituality is very muddled and practical, if I need 'bits' then I just walk away coz I like to do my ritual etc on the hop. I love tarot reading because its intuition, its you and the cards.

However I just cant stop thinking about it all. I love the history and how its part of our Western Magical Traditions. Even my druidry stems from the orders of whoever and to have that sort of parallelled in my tarot journey is just amazing. I bluetack decks to my wall in the tree of life thinking i'll gleem something deeper. I dont know a lot about it, but what I do of the GD traditions just fasinates me.

But it also blows my head, and confuses me. Gets me bogged down in the knowledge and what one original source says against the other... or getting headaches reading the BoT lol. It is a love/hate relationship which has sparked again as I now have the Liber T to admire and love.

So why do you guys learn it and live it? I'd love to know, coz maybe it'll help me find a few answers for myself

ETA - I've probably not posted the 'right' thing, but i sort of felt this was the best place to post it. I feel that sometimes with hermetics and tarot it gets so bogged down in the 'science' if you like, and i just want to explore the 'art' side of it with you, to get a good feel of the place ya know?

I started with the Thoth Deck because I loved the art, still do. And for a long time I enjoyed just the art, and had to consult other books and sites for meaning. The problem was I was getting a lot of opinion and found myself always trying to filter opinion from fact. For me it was such a convultuted way of learning that was taking me in circles. I hope to learn the system so I can have a more independant relationship with my cards. And I am discovering that there is beauty in this system. It has been impowering for me to drop my resistance to math and science as well.

AW

I agree with Always Wondering about wanting to know for myself instead of taking someone else's word for it. I also agree that a lot of what I have learned seems like fifth grade nonsense. But I love history and that is why I study it. I can't really see myself naming a toad Jesus Christ and sacrificing it any time soon, but I'm interested in knowing why Crowley felt it was necessary.

Well, first off, one could argue that Crowley's entire point across all of the books is that you shouldn't take ANYONE'S word for anything, least of all his. He once said "The Secret of life is paying attention." In fact, Crowley goes out of his way to urge people to think for themselves, explore for themselves: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law."

That's Crowley, natch... but in truth that's exactly what is intriguing about all these magician-types and strange schools of thought: they paid attention to things that are often forgotten or neglected. For me what I find fascinating about the Golden Dawn is the way they attempted to synthesize five million strands of esoterica (with varying degrees of success)... and sank an occult harpoon into the side of Industrial Victoriana that no one has been able to remove. The same holds true for Levi and Papus and Bruno and Agrippa and Majriti in their own times. They found ways to reenchant the world that proved infectious... no small thing. Frankly, I don't need them to agree with each other. The real secrets cannot be communicated.

Now as for my general interest in "occult" writings, the truth is that materialist scientism is a relatively new mythology and one that shows its cracks just as easily under pressure. All those wacky occult people were trying to describe something that cannot be articulated in literal language and that cannopt be reified in a laboratory... Any more than love or hope or inspiration can be dissected. Whatever you think of their results, their work continues to resonate a century later. If I'm embarassed by any of it it's the tendency of dimwits to enshrine their mistakes along with their discoveries. But then that's true of any tradition that outlasts its creators: Christianity, Chivalry, Communism, Bushido, Augury, Newtonian physics.

Why wouldn't I be interested in trying to map the supernal landscape and internal potential? Anyone who's ever studied a topic with any degree of depth does something similar whether it's gothic literature or paleontology or clockmaking. Such studies give scale and scope to our inner geography. I don't draw the line because I think it's an artificial one.

Everything in our world conspires to leech it of value, content, and meaning. I will always be drawn to people who made the attempt to find meaning and beauty in something as precarious and fragile as a human lifespan. Frannkly, I'd rather spend time going through the ideas of a complete lunatic with a vision, than the repackaged banalities of the creeping army of feeble naysayers. Give me wild ideas, rich imaginings, impassioned declarations of possibility!

I had a mentor when I was younger who used to say that you should approach every problem as if you had all the time and money in the world, and then work backwards until you arrived at a solution. Way I see it... If you approach everything in life focused only on compromise and limitation, you'll never make it out of the crib, let alone onto your own two feet.

I'm smart enough to know when I disagree with people. I can do my own thinking! I can chew all my own meat, and I keep strecthing my jaws. I don't need to be gently nudged back into bourgeois daydreams: truths we already know and lies we wish were true. That stuff bores me stupid. It is always easier to throw a stone than be a window.

Lon DuQuette always says that this is the root goal of Qabalah: to blow our heads open, by stuffing them so full of connections and ideas that we make a crack through which our divinity can pour freely. I'd second that... and not because I'm agreeing with anyone. I know bettter.

Scion

Like Always Wondering, I was first attracted by the images and the art of Freida Harris, I did not care about Crowley when I got my Thoth in August last year.

At first, I read a book that not many people like in this forum: "Mirror of the Soul" by Gert Ziegler. It felt OK for a while, then I started to feel that some of his explanations did not make sense. I bought Angeles Arrien's book, and it made even less sense. I am still thankful that these books gave me a stepping stone into the Thoth.

At that point, I wanted to know more about Crowley and the deck he designed. That's when the Book of Thoth started to make sense to me. One thing after another, I want to know more about the tradition in which Crowley grew and the Golden Dawn. THe deck opened my appetite to know more.

As Scion quoted from Crowley, "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law." I will study with a critical mind and keep what I believe is necessary in my path. But I believe I can learn a lot from the Golden Dawn tradition.

inanna_tarot said:

Why are you fasinated with the world of tarot and the golden dawn? The mumblings of Levi, the chunderings of Crowley and the rumblings of Regardie?

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Chunderings? Sounds like Barry McKenzie meets Uncle Al ... good Lord!

inanna_tarot said:

Why does it enthral you so much in your tarot journeys?

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It was the first tarot I came upon that had so much information from other traditions cross-refrenced to it.

inanna_tarot said:

But it also blows my head, and confuses me.

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welcome to the club.

inanna_tarot said:

So why do you guys learn it and live it? I'd love to know, coz maybe it'll help me find a few answers for myself

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It started when I was 13 and allowed to catch the train by myself and go to the biggest nearest regional centre which had the areas branch library. I started working my way through (from 000.01) until I got to 133.00 occult science ... BINGO!. That library also had a v.good Crowley selection, for some reason.

Why? Well. IMO hermetic knowledge is THE source of human knowledge and advancement and has been throughout history. Europe was in the dark ages (seriously, the cities were disqustingly dirty, foul and backwards) when Islam was at it's golden heights. It wasnt until we were hermetically influenced via Islamic culture that us Euro white trash started getting it together.

And probably ... I've done it before ... I seem to remeber being a Templer or Tycho Brae (or perhaps the dwarf he kept in his private dungeon for occasional whippings) something like that .... but not a priestess from the Temple of Isis in Ancient Egypt (gee.... I must be the only one that wasnt there!)

Like ravenest my occult education began in a public library. Unlike him my local library's occult section was absolutely pathetic. The best book they had was a dog-eared copy of Colin Wilson's, The Occult. At the time (age 13) an important book for me. Prior to that I had been wrestling with religion and science. In secret I had enrolled on a bible correspondence course with the aim of answering the big questions. Who am I? Why am I here? What's the meaning of life? I was absolutely tormented by those questions.

Fortunately for me I also became interested in science at the same time. Between the ages of 11 and 13 Science and Religion duked it out inside my head. To this day I thank God that Science won. Unfortunately science couldn't answer my questions any better than religion could. It just posed more questions than it answered. Then I found the occult section in my local library. It was hidden away at the back with a lot of left-wing political stuff and conspiracy theories. By chance (?) I picked up Wilson's book and turned to chapter 1, Magic - The Science of the Future. From that moment on I was hooked. I read every single occult themed book in the library. Most of it complete rubbish. But two names kept cropping up. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and Aleister Crowley.

That led me to spend my 14th birthday money on a copy of The Book of Thoth. I couldn't understand any of it, but I was gripped by an inner certainty that it was very important. Also the mystery of the book's contents spurred me on in my efforts to understand it. A little over a year later, on a whim (?) I walked into a discount bookshop that I had never been in before and have never been in since. On one of the shelves was a single copy of Gerald Suster's, The Legacy of the Beast. (I think it was £3. ) In that book I was exposed to the extraordinary personality of Aleister Crowley, Golden Dawn initiation, Thelema, Magick, and Yoga. (If Suster were still alive today I would shake his hand and buy him a pint. )

All of this struck a deep chord with me. So much so that during the ensuing years I have tracked down every single book I could written by Crowley and on the Golden Dawn tradition and emersed myself in it. The intial facination is still as strong as ever. Of course, over the years I have wandered from the path many times and tried to bury myself in the mundane world and normative society and it's brain-dead values. But after a while life begins to feel flat and there's a nagging sense that something is missing, something is wrong. That's when I hear the siren call of the Path once again. As Crowley says in Book 4:

Once take one step on the path, and there is no return. You will remember in Browning's "Childe Roland to the dark Tower came":


For mark! no sooner was I fairly found
Pledged to the plain, after a pace or two,
Than, pausing to throw backwards a last view
O'er the safe road, 'twas gone: grey plain all round,
Nothing but plain to the horizon's bound.
I might go on; naught else remained to do.

And this is universally true.

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Scion said:

Whatever you think of their results, their work continues to resonate a century later.

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For me personally, this is the most intriguing thing about the Golden Dawn. I could say a lot more but I probably wouldn't articulate it particularly well so I'll leave it at that

Fabulous replies! I'm so nosey, and whilst we can get all 'heavy' in this sort of forum, its good to kick back and see how people came to this spot. I just love stories

So i'll share mine...
My interest in kabbalah and that came when I first started getting interested in Paganism, around 13ish so I went to the library and got all the books from 133 hehe. One of the first books I read on Wicca, Spells and How They Work by the Farrars had a chapter about the tree and tarot cards and that seed sort of sent me spiralling since then.
When I was about 14ish my mum bought me the Witches Tarot, the Cannon Reed one, where there was paganism and the Tree of Life all roped into one! I was in heaven! Im so lucky to have a mother that loved to buy me tarot decks when she was shopping for herself hehe.

Then I think when I was about 16ish I started to read more about Crowley. I'd heard stuff before but I think at this time I loaned out his Hagiography (sp!) and read lots of his poems (BORING lol) and I think the Diary of a Drug Fiend. I loved this crazy character and got the Thoth book and deck though it sort of became useless to me as I didnt understand it all.

So 16/18ish I learnt lots of things, kabbalah, astrology, started to explore my spiritual path some more and arrived at druidry. So now I can look at the cards with all this background info and it all 'clicks' now.

But the Tree and my Druidry do fight between each other. Because I want ogham and everything else to fit on the Tree of Life, for it all to make sense on this map. And then I give up on the idea of it and let it lie until I start to do it again lol. Maybe theres something there for me, perhaps there isnt, but its fun all the same lol.

Whilst I dont use the ritual and 'knowledge' of the High Magick stuff I learnt years ago, I do love the theory and exploring the Tree of Life. Maybe I'll write a book on it some day - a druids take on a Tree hehe.

Thanks all of you for posting, been fab to see what others think

Ahhh . . . old threads Since I love to talk about myself, I shall bore whomsoever of you is foolish enough to keep reading

My story is similar to many here in its bare bones . . . early teens, libraries, life-changing books on magic(k) in its various forms. I found Tarot when I was fifteen - read it for about seven years without really getting far, though I am certain it changed who I was. Then I had to leave my cards when I went a-viking around my country, a nomad with few possessions. Then, the cards didn't make the cut (though it wasn't a conscious decision); now, they'd be the first thing in the bag.

I found Tarot again last year, for some reason that can only be described as an extremely insistent siren call and since then have collected many decks and tried more than a few reading approaches. I keep coming up against this wall, though . . . I know that I should be incorporating both intuition and knowledge into reading, and that the two can lead me into greater knowledge of my Self . . . but my mind kept shying away from anything resembling discipline or application. Because it's become lazy, since we stopped studying our Degree. So, in a way, this is me punishing my mind for being lazy, and my Self for allowing it to get that way.

But it's more about not copping out. I feel a responsibility to learn these things, a deep need. A call? Not yet. I have to go further to hear the call, I think. But the need is irresistable now . . . so here I go.

I'm so confused now

\m/ Kat