Taking Tarot seriously
Some time ago, I went through some shit. Real deep, hardcore personal shit that took a real deep, hardcore effort to sort out and get through. A major part of getting through involved embracing the crazy and using the occult to navigate those deep, dark waters of the self. The most helpful tool in my neophyte occult tool box turned out to be The Tarot, a tool I'd been flirting with for years but had never taken seriously until such a time that I needed to.
So I started pulling cards.
I had bought a Thoth tarot deck 14 or 15 years ago and then, like most people that buy the Thoth deck, put it away and made periodic overtures toward learning to read with it before forgetting that it was even there in the first place.
I freely admit it. I bought the deck because of the sinister overtones that come with the name Aleister Crowley (Thanks, Ozzy) but over time I would come to learn that it was a tarot power tool, packed with so much deliberate symbolism that if the standard Rider Waite deck was considered a shovel, the Thoth was considered a Bagger 288.
Cult film director, Alejandro Jodorowsky is a world-renowned authority on the tarot and a psychologist. He combines psychotherapy with the tarot and has a number of books on the topic, like The Way of Tarot: The Spiritual Teacher in the Cards and Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy so I figured I would give it a shot in my own treatment since I'm a fan of his work. While getting sober and doing some real soul-searching, I found that my initial attempts to read tarot for myself in order to direct my treatment and dredge up the shit from the bottom of my soul resulted in some seriously therapeutic insight. I kept throwing The Moon; over and over and over. 78 cards randomly shuffled and 12 cards randomly dealt and that card kept showing up in my reads. The statistically likelihood of this happening is ridiculously small.
I was sold.
Over time, I would get better and better at reading and would form a meaningful bond between myself and the Thoth deck. I'm still lost in it, using it like a really elaborate Rider Waite deck and will one day grasp its full potential, but it's the one deck that seems to give me the raw truth when I need it. I've also done some readings for friends and found that it gives me way more information about them than I feel like I should have. The result can be really embarrassing. Like I have too much information about them and much of it is none of my business.
It's unclear, as an OTA magician, if the tarot ever factors into our training. It's a gap in the training that I haven't really gotten my mind around yet. For Thelema and Golden Dawn magicians, mastery of the tarot is a big part of initiation and the cover of Franz Bardon's Initiation into Hermetics is his own interpretation of card number 1, The Magician, but beyond that I don't know if Bardonian magicians put much training into tarot divination. The OTA current seems to be more Bardonian than Golden Dawn and as such hasn't made much mention of tarot in our training. Regardless, I've taken up some formal instruction in the tarot, lately. It's something that I've wanted to get better at so that I might be more efficient in my readings and spend less time referencing card meanings during the reading.
We started off with the Majors, obviously. The instructor gave me an interesting exercise to use to learn the majors better. Deal The Wheel of Fortune face up and then deal a second Major and divine it's meaning. This is something that fate is throwing your way. In my first exercise I pulled The Moon. Again. My initial reading of it insisted that I had some inner work left to do but in that moment, I couldn't be sure what that work was. Last night I had an unpleasant dream and upon waking, I knew what that work was.
This morning I did the exercise again. I dealt The Wheel, shuffled the Majors, and drew The Devil and again, I needed to think on it because its meaning didn't just jump off the card at me. On the way to work, it struck me: I'd put on a lot of weight over the last couple of months and had been eating like a pig, just total indulgence. Now was the time to cut that shit out and break the bad habits. This was The Universe dropping a card on me to guide me on my path.
I think it might do me some good to meditate on the individual cards of the Majors to build a better relationship with them.
In the meantime, I'm back from vacation and am looking forward to getting back to regular ritual practice and meditation. Today I sent out for the next step in my OTA training, the Pathworking DVD as well as the Red Ray edition of the Church's print publication, The Seventh Ray.