Best Thoth book to start with

Miss Woo

I know I said I'm lazy, and I can't be bothered reading, but I was really only half joking and I don't consider (and I'm not hoping) that studying the Thoth will be easy. Of course I expect it to be a challenge and I have no problem with this. I just want to get a feel for the deck again because I haven't used it for 18 years. And I want to find out about the system and the symbolism, and from there I want to find out if the Thoth is the right deck for me :)

eta

Also, I used the Thoth deck for eight years without reading anything about it and I feel that it gave me a deep understanding of myself on a psychological level. I don't know how but it did. It's a very personal deck for me but the meanings are really my own and not based on any system.

In a way, I guess I read the cards in an open style like Yoav Ben-Dov's, but I didn't even know what TdM was back then.
 

Zephyros

I don't want to come off as saying it's my way or the highway, but I'm hardly the type to be asked an opinion of and answer "use your intuition." I really can't recommend the Banzhaf, as I feel that there is a world of difference between simply using the deck and actually studying it. In many instances I found Banzhaf veers off into his own interpretations that make no sense in the context of the Thoth. A beginner can begin simply, and I'm not saying everyone should be an esoteric master before coming to the deck. I myself began simply and branched out. However, a book consisting mainly of keywords is, for the Thoth, utterly useless, as they do not give the greater context of what makes the Thoth unique.

You just can't say "Ooh I love the Thoth, so special, so unique, I can't wait to treat it like any other deck!" It really doesn't work that way, and I'm surprised experienced users would suggest that.

What I can recommend is the Duquette book, and this is for several reasons. Firstly, it gives an exhaustive background and context on many things necessary for approaching the deck. It explains the general vision of the deck, how it is structured, how it came to be about and what this means for the reader.

Secondly, it is invaluable as a kind of "table of contents" in terms of telling you what you don't know and what you should find out. I still use it sometimes, as it hints in passing at things I need to find out, and study. It is definitely incomplete, but you don't stay with beginners' books forever.

Thirdly, it was written with students in mind. In almost every paragraph you get the feeling (and I think he discusses this in the introduction) that he has a feel for a student's confusion, he asks and answers questions a student would ask (and did ask, I know I did).

It does not spoonfeed you keywords or meanings, but operates under the correct assumption that in order to "get" the Thoth, you have to know what it means. And that has nothing to do with joining an order or indeed any practical magickal work at all, but with understanding the deck itself. Keywords or understanding this or that sigil is to take it apart, but it loses much in the process, even if you find out what that sigil is, it is still meaningless unless interpreted within the realm of the Thelemic symbolic language the Thoth uses. Taking apart a tapestry into threads gives you nothing but a handful of yarn.

You don't even have to be a Thelemite to study the Thoth. Most people use the RWS despite its strong Christian overtones. It never ceases to amuse me that the RWS is the "default" and people find nothing wrong with it, when it is actually the Thoth that is more fitting to modern times. Symbolically, the RWS about a thousand years old, and as prudish as anything.
 

Rose Lalonde

I'm reading (and enjoying) Duquette's book...

As someone who knew nothing about the Golden Dawn and Qabalah (literally zero - the decks I've read the most with haven't even been RWS inspired) -- I had an easier time starting with Robert Wang's Qabalistic Tarot. Once I read his intro, I started reading about each card in Wang and then in Duquette, so that I had some GD background before the extra layer of Crowley and Thelema. That may be an unnecessary step for most, but Wang offers what seems to me to be a straight forward, general intro, with the GD, Thoth, RWS and TdM decks side by side.

I've also read closrapexa's intro posts here & here. They clarify a lot for me.

Lastly, a Duquette ebook warning: on my Kindle Paperwhite, some charts - particularly those in in 'Recipe for the Small Cards' - are too small to read even when zoomed.
 

Miss Woo

Oh no, what I am saying?! My mum didn't give me the Thoth as teenager, she gave me the Rider Waite. She gave me the Thoth when I was in my early 20's!

But I couldn't get into either because I associated them with my mum and/or my strict Catholic upbringing* (with the Rider Waite, it looks really Christian to me).


*That I received from my grandparents while my parents were both working.
 

Barleywine

I'm reading (and enjoying) Duquette's book...

As someone who knew nothing about the Golden Dawn and Qabalah (literally zero - the decks I've read the most with haven't even been RWS inspired) -- I had an easier time starting with Robert Wang's Qabalistic Tarot. Once I read his intro, I started reading about each card in Wang and then in Duquette, so that I had some GD background before the extra layer of Crowley and Thelema. That may be an unnecessary step for most, but Wang offers what seems to me to be a straight forward, general intro, with the GD, Thoth, RWS and TdM decks side by side.

My personal experience is that you can't go wrong with The Qabalistic Tarot as a place to start. It was the last such book I read before dropping tarot for a while in favor of astrology and geomancy, and Duquette was the first I read upon returning (after false-starting with Ziegler). I still prefer Wang and Paul Foster Case to Duquette as far as thoroughness, but their subject wasn't exclusively Thoth.
 

Zephyros

I love the Wang book. I read it in conjunction with Dion Fortune's book. They both cover roughly the same material, but from slightly different angles.
 

Miss Woo

I have just remembered why I gave up using the Thoth deck... It's because I associated it with my mother, and my relationship with her, and after a while I realised I was struggling to find a meaning in it for myself.

But now that I'm older I'm hoping that I have let go of all of that stuff and I can approach the Thoth from a new/fresh perspective.

Does that make sense?
 

Barleywine

Oh no, what I am saying?! My mum didn't give me the Thoth as teenager, she gave me the Rider Waite. She gave me the Thoth when I was in my early 20's!

But I couldn't get into either because I associated them with my mum and/or my strict Catholic upbringing* (with the Rider Waite, it looks really Christian to me).

I'm with you on the Christian taint of the RWS. I especially cringe at the "cross" arrangement of the "Ancient Celtic Method," which looks like a thinly veiled emulation of the Catholic "sign of the cross:" 3 = forehead, 4 = solar plexus, 5 = left shoulder, 6 = right shoulder. I much prefer Eden Gray's version, which looks like it follows the clockwise progress of the Sun in its diurnal motion: 3 = midnight (bottom); 4 = sunrise (left); 5 = noon (top) and 6 = sunset (right).
 

Barleywine

I have Paul Foster Case's Tarot book which does looks interesting. It appears to be Golden Dawn based as he seems to mention Waite a lot and discusses his revisions towards his own concept.? (I'm not familiar with the Builders of the Adytum)

However, he is not using or describing the Thoth deck imagery and does not have the revised cards such as the Aeon, or Lust, so I found it a bit confusing as a beginner focusing on the Thoth.

I'm probably getting muddled but I wondered if this book is about the Thoth at all? it kind of looks like it has an overlapping Qabalistic base from the Golden Dawn, which I understand both PFC and Crowley's Thoth uses...but the two have gone separate ways from there with their own underlying perspective/concepts.

It draws from the same well as the Book of Thoth but has none of the Thelemic innovations, such as swapping the Hebrew letters of the Star and the Emperor, nor the several renamed Major Arcana. Otherwise its qabalistic roots are also in the Golden Dawn tradition. Its usefulness is in laying out the conceptual landscape that both decks travel in company - before Crowley diverges. Case seems to be almost entirely in the Hebrew tradition, while the BoT casts a much more far-reaching net. Case is like "the classics" and Crowley is like "avant-garde."
 

Richard

I'm with you on the Christian taint of the RWS. I especially cringe at the "cross" arrangement of the "Ancient Celtic Method," which looks like a thinly veiled emulation of the Catholic "sign of the cross:" 3 = forehead, 4 = solar plexus, 5 = left shoulder, 6 = right shoulder. I much prefer Eden Gray's version, which looks like it follows the clockwise progress of the Sun in its diurnal motion: 3 = midnight (bottom); 4 = sunrise (left); 5 = noon (top) and 6 = sunset (right).
The CC seems to have been introduced by W. B. Yeates. Waite describes it in PKT, but in any case he is abivalent about the divinatory use of Tarot, particularly the Trumps.

To some extent Waite de-Christianized Tarot compared to the historical decks of the time, such as TdM. Christianity, rightly understood, is not the bad guy anyhow. The problem is with the institutional form of it. As Waite writes in The Hermetic and Rosicrucian Mystery (1908):

...The difficulty which the [Latin] Rite has created and the inhibitions into which it has passed arise more especially not alone on the external side but from the fact that it has taken the great things of symbolism too generally for material facts. In this way, with all the sincerity which can be attached to its formal documents, produced for the most part by the process of growth, the Church Catholic of Latin Christianity has told the wrong story, though the elements which were placed in its hands are the right and true elements. I believe that the growth of sanctity within the Latin Church has been- under its deepest consideration-substantially hindered by the over-encrustation of the spirit with the literal aspect....​