The Tarot

[DannyL]

Was six years earlier, Google tells me.

 

[mind_philip]

His writing is really good. Probably the best post-Crowley Thelemite writing I think. Freedom is a Two Edged Sword is great (caveat: so great I've not looked at it in like 15 years).

Have you got a physical copy of the essay collection? If so, you might be surprised at how fucking expensive it is to get hold of a second hand copy now. In decent nick, you're looking at somewhere between £400-1000.

 

[mind_philip]

I've been touting a Crowley/Parsons/Cameron/Anger novel around various literary agencies for the past six months. Only to modest interest, sadly.

 

[DannyL]

Have you got a physical copy of the essay collection? If so, you might be surprised at how fucking expensive it is to get hold of a second hand copy now. In decent nick, you're looking at somewhere between £400-1000.

Sadly, no.

 

[mind_philip]

Sadly, no.

I was tempted, but had to be satisfied with online scans/transcriptions. I think most of the stuff is out there, though some of it is only accessible through archive.org. I did buy myself a first edition of Crowley's 'The Soul of Osiris' when I finished my first draft, but it was a fair bit cheaper.

 

[DannyL]

I had no idea, used to be everywhere, fairly common paperback iirc

 

[catalog]

in the later 20th century and after, while this hankering for ancient, traditional authority continues in some esoteric streams, a distinct approach has developed which essentially shrugs and says: ‘who cares? If it works for you, use it.’ Perhaps influenced by surrealism, psychogeography and the d-i-y ethic of punk, lineage is no longer seen as essential. More valued is a practice that is informal, improvisatory, contingent, syncretic, and which does not separate the arcane from the mundane. Cast a spell, then do the washing-up sort of thing, or, even better, make the washing-up the spell.

Everyday life becomes its own magical practice, alert to meaning. A modern magician might use dice and cards, joss sticks and amulets, but they will also look out for apparent coincidences, for signs on walls, for scraps of paper in the street, for chance finds in bookshops and curio shops, for unexpected encounters with strangers. They are drawn by the suspicion that all life is magic and we should keep the keenest possible open-ness to its possibilities, content only to pick up a few clues and glimpses.

If this sort of approach has any need of a prophet (or role model), it is surely Arthur Machen’s Mr Dyson, that inspired idler and connoisseur of the curious, that wanderer among the backwaters and byways of London, that champion of an ingenious improbability theory always on the look-out for signs and coincidences. Ever delighted to find in my own town roamings the chapels and tabernacles of obscure sects, such as the Sandemanians, the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion, the Church of the New Jerusalem, the Ancient Church of Albion (in crumbling red brick), I sometimes wonder whether one autumn day I might see the bronze and golden leaves leap around a faded and peeling painted notice-board for the Original Atlantis and Baghdad Temple of the Dysonites (est.1895).

The Tarot in England

It is now fairly well established that Tarot cards were first created as a game in the courts of Renaissance Italy and it was not until earl...

wormwoodiana.blogspot.com

 

[luka]

Tarot - Origins & Afterlives

warburg.sas.ac.uk

 

[version]

The Court of the Fool

As the parade of Tarot Trumps returns in legend, we see they’ve been disguising a secret for centuries. The unhappy juggler, the throned ...

courtofthefool.blogspot.com

The errant liberty of the Foolish escapes the consecutive march of the Trumps- in the Tarot he is given over to 0, the numerical symbol for nothing. Our word for zero is derived ultimately from the Arab sifr, which means cipher. The word is translated from the Sanskrit sunya meaning “desert, empty place, naught.” (OED) In this light, 0 is a puzzle, a cipher. For how can nothing be identified as a singular entity? It stands as a placeholder, a signifier of absence. Sometimes it is nothing and at other times it is something. Place a zero in front of another digit and it might as well be invisible and unexpressed. Here the Fool leaves but a light mark on the world. But write a zero after a number and suddenly it becomes something, a transformation of magnitude. Multiply a number by nothing, and there is only nothing. Here in his suspended changeability, the Fool is potentially capable of both creation and annihilation. A point in space occupies zero dimensions, yet to be sure and certain; the point is definitively an entity. The Fool, like zero, is at once distinct and obscure- his positivity is the presence of a problem and a question. He is always oblique, a presence made of absence, a number twisted out of vacuity, a lively zero, a signifier that does not signify.

 

[IdleRich]

I've been touting a Crowley/Parsons/Cameron/Anger novel around various literary agencies for the past six months. Only to modest interest, sadly.

Sounds interesting... I wish I could know what happened in the end with this.