De Tabulis Thothi

DE TABULIS THOTHI

Or, On the Psychological and Philosophical Virtues of the Tarot of Thoth, considered in its Hermetic-Qabalistic Aspect, with reference also to the Stellar Wisdom of the Ancients

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I. Exordium

Often, my excellent reader, when I have withdrawn myself from the press of public affairs, and from those daily contentions which the forum multiplies upon us beyond measure, and have retired into that inner citadel which the philosophers, following the divine Marcus, are accustomed to name the acropolis of the soul — often, I say, in such hours of quiet and recollection, I have found my mind drawn, as if by some magnetic affinity which the Hermetic teachers call sympatheia, toward those seventy-and-eight painted leaves which the Lady Frieda Harris, that woman most accomplished in geometry and color, did execute upon the cartoons of the Magus Aleister Crowley, and which together bear the august and ancient name of the Tarot of Thoth.

Now I am well aware — indeed, who is so unfamiliar with the disposition of our times that he should not be aware? — that the very mention of such a thing as the tarot stirs in many breasts a kind of reflexive scorn, as though one had named some unprofitable superstition fit only for the ignorant or the credulous. Yet I would beg the indulgence of such a one, who reasons in this manner, to suspend for the space of a single essay his accustomed judgment, and to consider with me — not whether these cards possess any oracular power (a question upon which I shall not insist, and concerning which I myself remain in the temperate skepticism of the Academy), but rather whether, considered as a system — that is, as a structured assemblage of images, correspondences, and conceptual relations — the Thoth Tarot does not in fact constitute one of the most ingenious philosophical instruments which the late genius of the West has produced.

For my contention, which I shall labor in what follows to defend, is twofold. First: that the Thoth Tarot is not chiefly a tool of divination, but a machina philosophica — a philosophical engine, a meditative architecture — wherein the great wisdom-streams of antiquity (Pythagorean numerology, Platonic ontology, Hermetic correspondence, Qabalistic theosophy, and the astrological doctrine of celestial influence) have been so artfully bound together that the contemplation of any single card opens, by a chain of analogical reasoning, into the contemplation of the whole. And second: that the diligent and reverent use of such an instrument confers upon its user genuine virtues — virtues both of the soul and of the intellect; virtues of self-knowledge, of integration, of right proportion, of mnemonic capacity, and (dare I say it?) of philosophical piety toward the cosmos.

Let us therefore proceed in order, as becomes those who would reason rather than declaim. I shall speak first of the deck itself and of those who fashioned it; secondly, of the Tree of Life of the Qabalists, into which the seventy-eight cards are fitted as stones into a temple; thirdly, of the twenty-two paths of that Tree and of the Hebrew letters they bear; fourthly, of the celestial correspondences by which the cards are wedded to the stars; fifthly, of the psychological virtues which the system cultivates; and finally, of the philosophical virtues, which are higher still. May Hermes Trismegistus, the thrice-great teacher, look kindly upon the labor.

II. De Mazzo Ipso — On the Deck Itself

It is not, I think, a thing to be passed over in silence, that the deck whereof I treat was not produced by the labor of any single hand, but by the conjunction of two minds of remarkable, though contrary, gifts. For Aleister Crowley — a man concerning whose moral biography I shall maintain a Tacitean reserve, since the question of the man’s character is properly distinct from the question of his system — brought to the work an erudition prodigious in extent and prodigious in eccentricity: a man steeped in the lore of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, in the Sefer Yetzirah of the Qabalists, in the Corpus Hermeticum of the late Alexandrian sages, in the rituals of the Egyptian temples (so far as these were then recoverable to scholarship), and in the astrological techniques both ancient and modern. He brought, in short, the materia of the system. But the forma — the visual flesh, the chromatic intelligence, the geometric ordering — this was supplied by the Lady Frieda Harris, a student of the projective synthetic geometry of Rudolf Steiner, whose hand was guided by a sensibility austere, mathematical, and profoundly visionary.

The result, painted upon some four-score large boards over the better part of five years, and not seen in published form until well after both creators had passed beyond the veil, is a deck quite unlike any other that has come down to us. Where the Marseilles tarot offers a peasant gravity, and the Rider-Waite-Smith offers an Edwardian theatrical clarity, the Thoth offers something stranger and more demanding: a kind of crystalline phantasmagoria, in which every image seems at once a portrait, a diagram, and a glyph. Look upon the card which is called the Magus, and you behold not a figure merely, but a wheel of attributes set spinning by the caduceus of Mercury; look upon the Aeon, and you find not the trumpeting angel of older decks, but the Egyptian goddess Nuit arched above her consort Hadit, with the crowned child Horus at center — a whole cosmology condensed into a single emblem.

This, then, is the deck. But what does it claim to be? Not, I insist, a mere parlor amusement; nor (as I have said) primarily an instrument of fortune-telling. Crowley himself, in that strange and frequently impenetrable volume which he titled The Book of Thoth, declares the tarot to be a pictorial representation of the forces of nature as conceived by the ancients according to a conventional symbolism. It is, in his understanding and in mine, an encyclopaedia — a circle of learning — made portable, made meditable, made (through the medium of its images) intelligible to the imagination as well as to the discursive intellect. And the encyclopaedia which it transcribes is none other than the Hermetic-Qabalistic synthesis: that great syncretism, growing from late antique Alexandria, flowering in medieval Spain and southern France, transplanted into Renaissance Italy by Pico and Ficino, transmitted to England by Doctor Dee and to France by Éliphas Lévi, and codified in its modern form, with such precision as is consistent with so subtle a matter, by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn at the close of the nineteenth century.

That a system of such venerable lineage, descending through so many hands and traversing so many cultures, should at last find its most complete pictorial expression in a deck of cards — this is a circumstance which the lover of philosophical history will not find without its proper interest.

III. De Arbore Vitae — On the Tree of Life

Let us now turn, with what brevity is consistent with clarity, to the central diagram upon which the whole edifice of the Thoth Tarot reposes: the Tree of Life, the Etz Chaim of the Qabalists. For unless this Tree be in some measure understood, the cards themselves remain mute; but once it be understood, they speak with the voice of a chorus.

The Tree, as the Qabalists conceived it, is a glyph composed of ten luminous emanations or Sephiroth — a Hebrew word which signifies “numerations” or “spheres” — joined together by twenty-two pathways. These ten Sephiroth descend, as it were, from the unmanifest Godhead (which the Qabalists triply veil under the names AIN, “Nothing”; AIN SOPH, “the Limitless”; and AIN SOPH AUR, “the Limitless Light”) down through every grade of being into the material world wherein we walk. They are, in their order: Kether, the Crown; Chokmah, Wisdom; Binah, Understanding; Chesed, Mercy; Geburah, Severity; Tiphareth, Beauty; Netzach, Victory; Hod, Splendor; Yesod, the Foundation; and Malkuth, the Kingdom. And they are arrayed upon three vertical pillars: the Pillar of Mercy upon the right, the Pillar of Severity upon the left, and the Pillar of Mildness or Equilibrium in the center — a triadic structure which the most casual reader of Plato cannot fail to recognize as akin to that trion meron of the soul which the Republic describes (the appetitive, the spirited, the rational), though here lifted from the level of the soul to the level of the cosmos itself, and clothed, moreover, in a vocabulary not Greek but Hebrew.

Now into this Tree the Thoth Tarot inserts itself with a precision worthy of the geometer. The seventy-eight cards divide themselves, as is well known, into two great companies: the twenty-two Major Arcana, which Crowley names the Atu of Tahuti (the Keys of Thoth), and the fifty-six Minor Arcana, which subdivide further into four suits — Wands, Cups, Swords, and Disks — each suit comprising ten numbered cards and four court cards. And the marvelous thing, which I beg you to consider with attention, is this: that the twenty-two Trumps correspond exactly to the twenty-two paths of the Tree, while the fifty-six Minors correspond exactly to the ten Sephiroth multiplied by the four Worlds of the Qabalist’s cosmology, with the four court cards of each suit appended. Let me unfold this in detail.

The four suits are assigned to the four Qabalistic Worlds, which are also the four elements of the Greek philosophers, which are also the four letters of the Divine Name Yod-Heh-Vav-Heh: Wands to Atziluth, the World of Emanation, the element Fire, the letter Yod; Cups to Briah, the World of Creation, the element Water, the first Heh; Swords to Yetzirah, the World of Formation, the element Air, the letter Vav; and Disks to Assiah, the World of Action, the element Earth, the final Heh. Thus when one draws a card of any suit, one is invoking not merely (as the cant phrase has it) a “category of meaning,” but an entire plane of being: a stratum of the cosmos, with its own laws, its own qualities, its own characteristic operations and its own characteristic illusions.

Within each suit, the ten numbered cards correspond to the ten Sephiroth as those Sephiroth are expressed through the world of that suit. Hence the Two of Wands is Chokmah in Atziluth — the energetic outpouring of pure Wisdom in the fiery world of pure spirit, which Crowley fittingly titles “Dominion.” The Ten of Disks is Malkuth in Assiah — the most material, most earthbound, most fixed of all possible expressions, fittingly titled “Wealth.” Between these two extremes, the forty numbered minors chart every possible meeting of Sephirah and World, like a great matrix whose every cell is illuminated by its proper image and named by its proper title.

The four court cards of each suit, in turn, are mapped upon the four letters of Tetragrammaton within that suit: the Knight (Yod, fiery father), the Queen (first Heh, watery mother), the Prince (Vav, airy son), and the Princess (final Heh, earthy daughter). These figures Crowley reconceived with considerable originality, replacing the static royal portraits of older decks with figures dynamic and almost vibratory in their depicted motion — the Knight a rider in headlong charge, the Prince in his ascending chariot, the Princess in her elemental landscape, the Queen seated yet radiant with the receptive power of her element.

What emerges, when all is said and counted, is no mere deck of cards: it is a complete cosmography, in which every grade of being, every elemental quality, every shade of force and form, finds its appointed place. And the Tree, you must understand, is not the Thoth Tarot’s external scaffolding, imposed upon it from without; it is its inner skeleton, its bone-architecture, without which the whole would collapse into a heap of pretty pictures. He who would understand the Thoth must understand the Tree; and he who would understand the Tree may scarcely do better than meditate upon the Thoth.

IV. De Viis et Litteris — On the Paths and the Letters

But the Sephiroth, however brilliantly they shine, are only half of the Tree; the other half consists of the twenty-two paths which connect them, and these paths bear — what I cannot too strongly emphasize — the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and with them the twenty-two Major Arcana of the Thoth Tarot. Here we touch upon what is perhaps the most ingenious feature of the whole Hermetic-Qabalistic synthesis: the doctrine, derived ultimately from the Sefer Yetzirah, that the Hebrew letters themselves are not mere phonetic signs, but the very building-blocks of creation — the stoicheia, the elements with which the Divine Logos shaped the world.

These twenty-two letters are themselves divided, by the same ancient treatise, into three classes: three “Mother” letters (Aleph, Mem, Shin) corresponding to the three primal elements Air, Water, and Fire; seven “Double” letters (Beth, Gimel, Daleth, Kaph, Peh, Resh, Tav) corresponding to the seven classical planets; and twelve “Simple” letters corresponding to the twelve signs of the zodiac. Behold, O reader, the wonderful economy of this scheme! For by this single classification, the Qabalist binds together the elements of the Greek philosophers, the planets of the Babylonian astronomers, and the zodiacal constellations of all the peoples of antiquity into a single, harmonious, twenty-two-fold structure — a structure which the twenty-two Atu of Thoth then proceed to clothe in image and color.

Thus the Fool, the first and zeroth of the trumps, is Aleph, is Air, is the breath which moves upon the face of the waters in the Genesis account, is the pure undetermined potency that precedes all manifestation. Thus the Magus is Beth, is Mercury, is the principle of articulation and communication, the Hermes who speaks the world into being. Thus the Hierophant is Vav, is the sign Taurus, is the great Teacher who roots the divine voice in the patient earth. The Hermit is Yod, is Virgo, is the discerning intellect that seeks in solitude. Death — or, in Crowley’s nomenclature, the same dread figure under its zodiacal name — is Nun, is Scorpio, is the transformation which is no end but a passage. The Tower is Peh, is Mars, is the catastrophic breaking of false structures, the lightning which destroys the unfounded edifice. The Aeon is Shin, is the element Fire, is the New Aeon which Crowley believed to have dawned in the year 1904 with the reception of the Liber AL vel Legis. And so, by such correspondences, onward through the deck.

Two re-attributions of Crowley’s are perhaps worth noting, since they distinguish the Thoth from older decks of the Western tradition. The card which the older decks call Justice he renamed Adjustment, attributing it (as is traditional) to Libra, the sign of the scales — but emphasizing that the figure represented not human juridical justice, with its rough approximations and its frequent injustices, but cosmic equilibrium, the adjustment by which the universe continually re-balances itself, indifferent to human preference. The card traditionally called Temperance he renamed Art, attributing it to Sagittarius, and depicting upon it the alchemical coniunctio oppositorum — the marriage of fire and water, of king and queen, of red lion and white eagle — which is the Great Work itself. And, following a cryptic instruction in the Liber AL (“All these old letters of my Book are aright; but Tzaddi is not the Star”), he exchanged the astrological attributions of the Emperor and the Star, assigning the Emperor to Aries and the Star to Aquarius — a controversial alteration, but one that produces, by its very controversy, a symmetry of the Tree which the geometric mind finds pleasing.

The result, then, of all this elaborate apparatus is this: every one of the twenty-two paths of the Tree of Life bears a Hebrew letter, an astrological or elemental attribution, and an Atu of Thoth; and the meditation upon any one of these terms necessarily evokes the other two, in that mutual implication which the medieval logicians called convertibility. The path from Chokmah to Tiphareth bears the letter Heh, the sign Aquarius, and the trump called the Star. The path from Geburah to Tiphareth bears Lamed, Libra, and Adjustment. The path from Hod to Yesod bears Resh, the Sun, and the trump called the Sun. To know the cards, therefore, is to know the paths; to know the paths is to know the Tree; to know the Tree is to know the cosmos — or such, at any rate, is the immodest promise which the Hermetic-Qabalistic system makes to its students.

V. De Astris et Decanis — On the Stars and the Decans

But the astrological correspondences of the Thoth Tarot are by no means exhausted by the assignment of signs to the trumps. They extend, in a manner perhaps unique to this system, deep into the Minor Arcana also, through the ancient doctrine of the decans — a doctrine which, descending to us from the Egyptian astronomer-priests through the writings of Ptolemy and the medieval Arabic astrologers (Abu Ma’shar, Ibn Ezra, and others), divides each of the twelve zodiacal signs into three sections of ten degrees, yielding thirty-six decans in all, each with its proper planetary ruler.

Now if you have followed the arithmetic of the preceding sections, you will already perceive what is coming: there are precisely thirty-six numbered minor cards (the Twos through Tens of four suits, which is to say nine cards times four suits), and they correspond, in the system of the Golden Dawn which Crowley inherited and refined, exactly to the thirty-six decans of the zodiac. Each card bears its decan, its planetary ruler, and (in the Thoth) a title which encapsulates its meaning — a title not invented arbitrarily, but derived from the conjunction of its Sephirothic position, its elemental world, and its astrological signature.

Thus the Five of Disks, called “Worry,” is Mercury in Taurus — Mercury (the planet of mental agitation and fluttering thought) operating in the second decan of Taurus (an earth sign of fixed possessions), producing precisely that quality of fretful, material anxiety which the title denotes. The Six of Cups, called “Pleasure,” is Sun in Scorpio — the Sun (vital joy) shining through the first decan of Scorpio (the watery sign of the depths), producing a deep and somewhat melancholy delight, the pleasure that knows itself transient. The Ten of Wands, called “Oppression,” is Saturn in Sagittarius — Saturn (restriction, heaviness, the weight of time) bearing upon the last decan of Sagittarius (the fiery aspirational sign), producing the experience of one’s noblest impulses crushed beneath a burden of duty or doubt.

In this manner the entire wheel of the zodiac is mapped, with planetary inflection, upon the Minor Arcana; and a complete horoscope might in principle be constructed using only the cards, or, conversely, a single card reading might be illuminated by reference to the astrological forces operating at the moment of the draw. The Aces, which stand outside this decan-system, are assigned not to particular signs but to the roots of the elements themselves — the Ace of Wands to the Root of the Powers of Fire, and so for the others — and to the four cardinal directions and the four quarters of the zodiac. The Court Cards likewise stretch across the decans, each Knight, Queen, and Prince ruling a span of thirty degrees (the last decan of one sign together with the first two decans of the next), while the Princesses are assigned to the four quadrants of space surrounding the celestial Pole.

Behold, then, the totality of the synthesis. The cosmos, as the Hermetic-Qabalist conceives it, is composed of: ten Sephiroth (the modes of divine emanation), four Worlds (the planes of being), three Primary Elements (Air, Water, Fire), seven Planets (the wandering stars), twelve Signs (the fixed zodiac), and thirty-six Decans (the subdivisions thereof). And every one of these terms — every single one, without remainder — has its corresponding card. Nothing is left out; nothing is unaccounted for. The deck is, quite literally, a model of the universe; and to shuffle the deck is, in a certain figurative but not wholly unmeaning sense, to shuffle the cosmos itself, and to draw a card is to ask which of the cosmos’s innumerable configurations stands, at this particular moment, in significant relation to the soul of the questioner.

I shall not press here the question — a question that vexed the ancient Stoics no less than it vexes our contemporaries — of whether the celestial bodies in fact influence sublunary events. This is a question for another essay, and one upon which (in the manner of the Academy) I prefer to suspend judgment. But I will observe, in passing, that even if the astrological doctrine be considered as a purely symbolic system — a language for describing psychological and existential configurations rather than a physics of celestial causation — it remains, in its complexity and its internal consistency, one of the most elaborate symbolic systems ever constructed by the human mind; and the Thoth Tarot, by binding this system to the Tree of Life, doubles its expressive power and renders it tractable to imaginative meditation.

VI. De Virtutibus Animi — On the Psychological Virtues

I now come to that part of my argument which is, perhaps, of the greatest practical interest to the contemporary reader: the question of what virtues of soul are conferred by the disciplined and reflective use of so elaborate a system as I have just described. For if the Thoth Tarot were merely a curiosity of intellectual history — a sort of museum-piece of late Victorian and early Modernist occultism — it would scarcely deserve so extended a treatment as I have given it. But I maintain that it is something more: a spiritual exercise, in that sense which the historian Pierre Hadot has so usefully recovered from the philosophical schools of antiquity — that is, a practice, repeated and structured, capable of producing genuine and durable effects upon the soul of him who undertakes it.

The first such virtue, and the foundation of all the rest, is self-knowledge: that gnothi seauton inscribed upon the lintel of the Delphic Oracle, which Socrates declared to be the chief business of philosophy, and without which (as he taught the Athenian young) the examined life cannot begin. For when a man draws a card, or lays out a spread, and then sits with the image, attempting to discern its bearing upon his current situation, what is he doing? He is, in the language of the depth-psychologists, projecting: he is casting the contents of his own unconscious mind upon the screen of the image, and reading there what he could not otherwise have read in himself. The card, with its rich and ambiguous symbolism, functions as a kind of structured mirror — but a mirror freighted with millennia of accumulated meaning, a mirror whose every line and color has been wrought by a tradition far older than the inquirer. And so the projection that occurs is not random but guided: the soul, in confronting the card, confronts a structured version of itself, and learns thereby its own contours, its own preoccupations, its own previously-unacknowledged hopes and fears.

The second virtue is integration of opposites. For the Hermetic tradition, following Heraclitus and the alchemists, holds that the soul is composed of contraries which must be reconciled if the work of self-perfection is to advance: light and shadow, mercy and severity, expansion and contraction, masculine and feminine, conscious and unconscious, sun and moon, sulphur and salt. The Thoth deck is structured by these contraries at every level: Chesed and Geburah upon their opposite pillars, Chokmah and Binah as the supernal Father and Mother, the suits of Wands and Cups as fire and water, of Swords and Disks as air and earth. The cards which the diviner draws frequently embody one pole or the other; and the discipline of the practice consists in holding these poles together — refusing to identify exclusively with either, finding what the alchemists called the coniunctio, the marriage in which the contraries are simultaneously preserved and transcended. He who learns to do this with the cards learns also to do it with himself; and the man who has integrated his contraries is, by that very fact, more fully a man.

The third virtue is what I shall call, borrowing a term from the Stoics, prosoché: attention, watchfulness, presence to the present moment. The user of the tarot, if he is serious, must attend to the card — must really see it, in its full complexity, without rushing prematurely to a verbal interpretation or a “meaning.” He must notice, today, what he did not notice yesterday: the precise color of the Empress’s robe, the angle of the Hermit’s lantern, the spiral motion implicit in the Wheel of Fortune, the geometric tension of the planes in the background of the Aeon. This is no small thing. The discipline of seeing — of really looking, with patience and without haste — is rare among us, in an age when most images are designed to be glanced at and discarded, when the eye is trained to consume rather than to contemplate. The Thoth Tarot, with its dense and demanding iconography, repels the glance and rewards only the gaze; and so it trains, by simple insistence, a faculty which is otherwise atrophying in our civilization.

The fourth virtue — and here I shall be brief, for it touches upon Crowley’s own most idiosyncratic doctrines — is discovery of one’s True Will: that deep current of intention which is, according to Crowley, the unique vocation of each individual, distinct from the surface desires and conditioned wishes which constitute the false or social self. Whether one accepts this specifically Crowleyan terminology, or prefers (with Jung) to speak of individuation, or (with the Stoics) of the daimon that guides each life, or (with the Christians) of vocation — the practical operation is much the same: one uses the cards as a mirror in which to discern, by long and patient contemplation, the difference between what one wants and what one truly wills — a distinction which the unreflective life perpetually elides, often to its considerable cost.

And the fifth virtue, which I shall name last though it is in some respects first, is equanimity. He who has truly assimilated the structure of the Tree of Life — who has understood that every state of soul has its proper place upon the Tree, that joy and sorrow are alike Sephirothic, that the worst calamity (the Tower) and the highest illumination (the Sun) are alike included within the great economy of being — such a man finds it harder to be wholly overwhelmed by his own experience. He has, as the Stoics would say, taken the view from above; he sees his own life sub specie aeternitatis, under the aspect of eternity; and this prospect, far from rendering him cold or indifferent to his fellow creatures, gives him rather a kind of cheerful and patient steadiness which is among the chief goods that philosophy can offer to its practitioners.

VII. De Virtutibus Mentis — On the Philosophical Virtues

But beyond these virtues of the soul, which pertain chiefly to the affective and volitional life of the practitioner, the Thoth Tarot fosters also virtues of the intellect — virtues which I have called philosophical, since they pertain to the love and pursuit of wisdom in its more strictly cognitive aspect. Let me name four such virtues, in ascending order of dignity.

The first is the appreciation of correspondence: the capacity to perceive, beneath the surface diversity of phenomena, the deep structural analogies that bind them together. This is the great Hermetic principle, quod superius sicut quod inferius — “that which is above is as that which is below” — which the Tabula Smaragdina of Hermes Trismegistus enunciates as the foundation of all the higher sciences. To use the Thoth deck is to train this capacity continuously and almost without effort: to see, for instance, that the Five of Cups is Mars in Pisces, and that Mars represents conflict and Pisces represents the dissolving flux of emotion, and that the title “Disappointment” therefore expresses the truth that anger drowned in feeling becomes a peculiar mode of sorrow. The mind that has done this for years — that has rehearsed such analogical chains daily — acquires a fluency in analogical reasoning that is increasingly rare in our age of relentless specialization, an age in which knowledge is broken into ever-smaller fragments, each fragment fiercely guarded by its own guild, and the great connective tissue between them allowed to atrophy from disuse.

The second philosophical virtue is memoria, the art of memory, which I myself — if I may, for a moment, dispense with the dramatic conceit and speak as the historical Cicero — praised in the De Oratore as a chief ornament of the orator and the philosopher alike. For the Thoth Tarot is, among other things, an enormous mnemotechnical device: a system in which the seventy-eight cards, by being assigned to determinate places in the Tree of Life and the wheel of the zodiac, form what the Renaissance mnemonists called a “theater” or “palace” of memory. He who has memorized the deck has memorized not merely seventy-eight images, but the entire structure of correspondences I have been describing throughout this essay; and he can use this structure, at need, as a place in which to deposit and retrieve other items of learning. Giulio Camillo, the great memory-artist of the Italian Renaissance, attempted (with what success history still disputes) to build precisely such a theater on Qabalistic principles, that a man standing within it might survey the totality of the sciences at a glance; the Thoth Tarot is, in effect, a portable version of Camillo’s theater — a memory palace that fits in the pocket, and that one may carry from place to place as the Stoic carries his Enchiridion.

The third philosophical virtue is holism: the disposition to see the world as a whole rather than as a heap of disconnected parts. The Thoth Tarot teaches this disposition not by argument, but by example — and example, as I have always maintained, is more persuasive in such matters than precept. It places before the contemplative eye a system in which everything fits, in which no element is arbitrary, in which the macrocosm and the microcosm reflect one another at every level, in which the smallest detail of human emotion (the Five of Disks’s “Worry”) and the highest reach of divine emanation (Kether, the Crown) are alike accommodated within a single rational order. Whether this order in fact corresponds to the structure of reality — a question to which I have already pledged not to commit myself dogmatically — is in some sense secondary to the cognitive virtue of attempting such a synthesis. For the very attempt is medicinal against the great vice of modern thought, which is fragmentation; and the man who labors patiently to fit the parts of his experience into a coherent whole is performing, whatever the metaphysical merits of his result, an act of philosophical hygiene. He is restoring to himself, as much as in him lies, that unity of mind which is the necessary precondition of any deeper inquiry.

The fourth philosophical virtue, and the highest, is what I can only call philosophical piety — that disposition which Plato, in the Timaeus, recommends as the proper response of the philosopher to the discovery that the cosmos is intelligibly ordered. For when one has spent long hours with the Thoth Tarot, when one has traced its correspondences and meditated upon its symbols, when one has watched its strange figures yield up their meanings in season — one is led, by a kind of irresistible induction, to wonder at the very fact that such a system is possible: at the fact that the human mind can construct, and find consoling, so vast and intricate an architecture of meaning. Whether this architecture be the discovery of a real structure inherent in things, or the projection of a structure native to the human soul, in either case it is something marvelous; and the proper response to the marvelous, as our ancestors well understood, is reverence — not the cringing reverence of the slave before the master, but the upright reverence of the free man before the order of which he is himself a part. The student of the Thoth need not become an occultist; he need not subscribe to Crowley’s mystical doctrines; he need not even believe in the efficacy of divination. But it will be very strange if, after long acquaintance with the deck, he does not find himself looking upon the cosmos with new eyes — with eyes that see, in even the most ordinary phenomena, the trace of an inexhaustible significance.

VIII. Peroratio

I have now, my excellent reader, said what I had to say, and brought my argument by its appointed paths to its appointed destination. I have argued that the Thoth Tarot, far from being the trinket which a hasty observer might take it for, is in truth a machina philosophica of remarkable subtlety: a system in which the great wisdom-traditions of antiquity — Pythagorean number, Platonic ontology, Hermetic correspondence, Qabalistic theosophy, and astrological symbolism — have been brought together into a single, intricate, internally consistent whole. I have shown that its seventy-eight cards map with arithmetical precision upon the Tree of Life and the wheel of the heavens, so that the deck constitutes nothing less than a complete cosmography in miniature, a speculum mundi, a mirror of the world. And I have argued, finally, that the disciplined use of such a system fosters virtues both of the soul (self-knowledge, integration of opposites, attention, discovery of one’s true vocation, equanimity) and of the intellect (analogical insight, the memorial art, holistic vision, and philosophical piety toward the cosmos).

It remains only to say a word in conclusion, after the manner of the orators. There are many roads, no doubt, by which a man may pursue the philosophical life; and I would not for a moment suggest that the road which passes through the Thoth Tarot is the only one, or even the best for every traveler. The schools of antiquity — the Stoic Porch, the Platonic Academy, the Peripatetic Lyceum, the Garden of Epicurus — each offered its own discipline, its own askēsis, its own road to wisdom; and the great religious traditions of East and West have multiplied these roads beyond all counting. But among the many roads, this one has its peculiar virtues: it engages the eye as well as the mind, the imagination as well as the reason; it offers a discipline at once intellectual and contemplative, at once austere and gorgeous; it makes available to the modern student, in compact and portable form, a synthesis of the Western esoteric tradition which would otherwise require years of specialized study, and access to rare books, and acquaintance with reclusive teachers, to assemble for oneself.

For these reasons, then, and not because I would have any man become a Crowleyan adept (which I emphatically do not recommend, the doctrines of Thelema being a separate matter altogether, upon which the moral judgment of the reader must be exercised on its own terms), nor because I would have any man place undue faith in the oracular pretensions of the cards (concerning which I remain, as I have throughout maintained, in the temperate skepticism of the Academy) — but because I believe the Thoth Tarot to be one of the most ingenious philosophical instruments which the late Western tradition has bequeathed to us, and one of the most reliable mirrors of the soul which the patient student may consult — for these reasons, and for these reasons alone, I commend its study, with such warmth as I am capable of, to any reader who has the leisure and the patience to undertake it.

May the labor be light, the discoveries fruitful, and the wisdom won not merely catalogued in the memory but lived in the conduct of the days. Dixi. Vale.