Well, I am very appreciative that this thread spawned into a lot of interesting information for me.
Thank you for linking your review to the Underground Stream, Scion.(as well as sending me your pdf via email)
With regards to your review, I agree with it almost completely. I"m barely starting to get a grasp of all this Tarot literature, so picking up that book has taught me a lot I didn't know, if anything familiarizing me with names like Levi and Ettellia.
However, I knew the book wasn't all I was thinking right out of the box, looking like it was printed in someone's basement in an Oregon forest town. Then like you said, when she gets into "Holy Blood, Holy Tarot" I was taken aback by all of a sudden reading a Mary Magdalene romance story...
I like the idea Bradford has regarding all of this, because really, it's all we can do, is test out all these arbirtary attributions and see how they work. And as Scion points out, that's where most of civilization comes from....
and I do lament, just at how unorganized this Tarot book is, especially when the majority of the Tarot's writers who I read about these correspondences from argue and contradict each other. They remind me of snobby intellectuals in school fighting over who is right and more elite than the other person, getting hot-headed and biased in the process. I'm thinking of Waite and Christine Payne Towler specifically, at the moment.
I mean, put yourself in my shoes,or anybody wanting to read about this stuff. I got into Tarot about 3 years ago simply because a coworker gave me a reading with the Thoth Tarot deck, and everything he said came true, so specifically. Wanting to harness this power myself, I try to educate myself on the subject. I consider myself somewhat intelligent, and an avid self-reader, and this has been one of the hardest subjects I've encountered to get straight answers on. How can I feel comfortable knowing what the Tarot is when the first two books you can read on the subject on the shelf of any bookstore or library mostly state completely different card interpretations, different astrological correspondences to court cards, and spread guidelines?
You have to sift through the bullshit and in the end we become just like all these writers and people we have been talking about. We, out of sake for what we feel works for us, plug in what we feel works and use our own system. Arbitrarily attributing, just like Mathers.
This can be a very frustrating in the process, and a lot of the knowledge pursued can seem useless- I mean, when do you decide what you've learned, or what Mathers or anyone has learned, is good enough for you?
I do agree with something in Israel Regardie wrote in the Golden Dawn though, and that's that it is best to have any method of divination be executed in tandem with the closet esoteric correspondences possible, in order to give you a more accurate reading. As I already have stated before, the I-Jing's is built in, and makes it a whole lot easer to use.
If you're planning a road trip, you do get to your destination quicker and more efficently with proper knowledge of directions, or directions based on a directions website based on proper cartographic and geographic correspondences, right? Hey, don't get me wrong, I've been reading a lot of this new age/law of attraction literature and it tells you all you gotta do is listen to your intuition and it can tell you when to turn right on a certain street to avoid traffic, and even get the closet parking space to the mall entrance. I'll use that, but let me tell you I will still be using MapQuest too.
Oddly enough as well, researching what all these occultists have to say about what the Tarot is and isn't brings me closer to a spiritual and intuition based understanding of the cards I wouldn't have otherwise, whether I agree with their system or not. This in turn has given me a completely different perspective and approach to life, in a manner most would call spiritual growth.
Spiritual growth, that's supposed to be worth more than all the gold in the world right? I mean, that's what the Buddhists say right? I mean, that's what I've read at least....