Thoth Study Grp 2nd Thread ? Books

I'm not sure but this may be the second thread for the Thoth study group. "BOOKS"

I bought the book The Crowley Tarot by Akron.Hajo Banzhaf ISBN 0-88079-715-0 today. It's a terrific book.

The book has a comprehensive intro section which discusses:-
* What is Tarot?
* The Special characteristics of the Crowley Tarot
* The Cabala and the Tree of Life
* How you can learn to read the cards

Just to name a few....

Then it continues onto the "Interpretive section" which for each card. Each card section has a grale scale image of the card and discusses aspects of each card broken down into these catagories:-

- Foundation,
- Analysis and Description (of the main image on the card),
- Background (detailing the background images on that card with analysis),
- Foreground (same as background),
- Interpretations (subtitled into background, general, connection (the shadow side), consciousness, profession, relationships
- Analgous Correlations (subtitled into archetypes, letter, number, Tree of Life, I Ching, Runes, Astrology, Deities, Mythology etc
- Associations and Perceptions

I looked at the book called "Thoth", but it seemed heavy going.

So shall we begin by using The Crowley Tarot book as the main text book for this study group or would you prefer to use a combination of books depending on what you all have?

I'm itching to get going with this.....


Blessed be.

Good Morning MysticMoonlight,
I am glad to see you are moving us along into this study group.
As far as the books are concerned, perhaps we can use the book you started with to "outline" the sequence of topics we discuss, but use other books based on the Thoth Deck to bring in a variety of ideas.
Any one else having other books could relate the specific topic from The Crowley Tarot we are discussing to whatever book they have. Thoughts??
A Peaceful Day to All
moondust

The Crowley book sounds good to me to start I also have the Mirros of the Soul book which is also very good. Let me know I ready when you are. Blessings to all.

I have all three of the books that are mentioned so far, also the 'Qabbalistic Tarot' by Robert Wang. So I am open to using any one or combination of books. 'The Book of Thoth' by Crowley can be heavy going but well worth it. I also have 'The Golden Dawn' which has information that Crowley drew upon when designing the cards. Not always a lot of detail but can be helpful.

Tarot Hermit

Let's get started then

Well then we seem to have a wide resource of information available to us all via each other so maybe we should get started.

Perhaps we should work one of the following ways (if I may be so forward as to push a couple of suggestions), that way we can get this study group happening.

We could either:-

1. Work through each card via the other thread
2. Work through each card accompanied with the interpretations in our books and discuss these interpretation with each other on this thread
3. Discuss our individual interpretations of each card and then refer to the relevant chapter in our books to broaden our interpretations using this thread
4. Both 2&3

After this we could then move on to sharing our readings and discuss those readings providing our individual interpretations of everybody else's readings and advice in those areas we each get stuck on from time to time.

What do you all think?

Sounds good to me. But just want to say in advance that I can only use my computer at work the one we have at home is out of the stoneage. So it may take me awhile to get back to everyone so I apologize in advance. Also please forgive me Iam the worst speller. With that said I look forward to sharing with all of you.
Many Blessing to you all.

We already have the individual card thread going, so we can continue with that. Perhaps we can include the "interpretations" in this thread also??
I'd like to see us explore more of the concepts that Crowley has/applied to his tarot deck. Perhaps starting with the topic out of Banzhaf's book "The Special Characteristics of the Crowley Tarot".

Wishing everyone a good New Moon.
moondust

I think it is relevant to discuss the special characteristics of the Thoth Deck.

To be honest I was never one for the RW deck or RW clones. For some reason the cartoon type characters never inspired me. I started with Haindl and love it, but then realised the Thoth deck was the originator of these.

At first I kept the Thoth deck at bay because of the social stigma surrounding Alester Crowley. However a strange fascination drew me to them and I succumbed.

As a Practioner of the Old Ways the symbolism in this deck holds special significance to me. The Qabala, Tree of Life, Hebrew glyphs, runes etc all have a significance in my (and people's) life. The numbering system and it's importance within the Tarot and how it relates to the universe is also special.

The RW's and such decks have a certain influence by the patriarcal system of it's time as to almost say "....we now approve of the use of Tarot because we have adapted it's suitability to our institution" Well this is how they read to me anyway. Whereas decks such as Thoth are based on more ancient and powerful systems (be that pagan, hebrew, egyptian etc) without any real bias to any politically religious influenced system.

I hope we can discuss further in this thread the significance of the Qabala and Tree of Life to this deck and it's interaction in our lives. Perhaps this will also bring a much broader knowledge to us.

An interesting note though:
on 8,9,10th of April Alester Crowley received the Book of Law

on 8,9,10th of April I received the Thoth and it's literature to study. My intials are by the way "A.C. Our names are not too disimilar in fact. Almost spelt the same.

Odd huh!

Blessed be......

Wow!!! I love this deck from first time I saw it and even though I have other decks. These are my guys as I like to call them. I would love to look deeper into the deck. I have very little knowleage of the tree of life and the other things you mentioned but of course heard of. If you have any good books that are good for a newbee. I would love to hear about them. Thank You have a blessed weekend.

Good Morning All,
MystiqueMoonlight,
that IS an odd & interesting occurrance about the books and the intials. I find many people in someway or another have some such odd things happen with the tarot. I wonder if it is us as we connect to a greater whole such as the tarot represents thru the archetypical and symbolic images.

The Thoth Deck and Book were my 1st. I was actually a little spooked by the book at first and gave it away, keeping the cards, but then later bought the book again. I enjoy the Haindl deck also. I do agree that Crowleys study of Kabbalah as well as runes, etc. deepened his insights into the Tarot. And among others that belonged to the Golden Dawn (Waite among them) I think he came away with the greater understanding and insight into the depths of the cards. Working with them seems to reach those same very depths of our being.

Dragonfly and any others interested in the Kabbalah (It is spelled many ways, and we each probably use the way we've been exposed to), there is a website aish.com that has a 25 lesson sequence on the Kabbalah.
Go to aish.com, in the left upper corner in dark blue you will see spirituality, click on that, then again in the upper left you will see in gold listed kabbalah 101, click on that, scroll down and you will see the 25 lesson sequence plus other. There are MANY sites on the web about the kabbalah. Browse around.
There are many different approaches and thoughts on it, read some of these sites, and many of them will list books to further your study.

Have a good day everyone.
moondust