Daniel Kelley - 29 July

Predicting the Present

Twenty-two Fingers Pointing at the Moon

Predicting The Present

( Twenty-Two Fingers Pointing at the Moo n )

2018

Contemplations on the Major Arcana of Aleister Crowleys Thoth Tarot

By: Daniel A. Kelley (Fr. Oneiros Anathanatos)

"I have been in that heaven the most illumined by light from Him, and seen things which to utter he who returns hath neither skill nor knowledge; for as it nears the object of its yearning our intellect is overwhelmed so deeply it can never retrace the path it followed. But whatsoever of the holy kingdom was in the power of memory to treasure will be my theme until the song is ended."

-Dante Alighieri ( The Divine Comedy )

DEDICATION

For Steven Bricault. This ones for you.

Table of Contents:

Preface : In the Shadow of the Master Therion .

Introduction : About This Book .

Phase One : The Camel and the Larvae . (Trumps 0-6)

0. Contemplation on The Fool

1. Contemplation on The Magus
2. Contemplation on The Priestess
3. Contemplation on The Empress
4. Contemplation on The Emperor
5. Contemplation on The Hierophant
6. Contemplation on The Lovers

Phase Two : The Lion and the Caterpillar. (Trumps 7-16)

7. Contemplation on The Chariot

8. Contemplation on Adjustment

9. Contemplation on The Hermit

10. Contemplation on Fortune

11. Contemplation on Lust

12. Contemplation on The Hanged Man

13. Contemplation on Death

14. Contemplation on Art

15. Contemplation on The Devil

16. Contemplation on The Tower

Phase Three : The Child and the Butterfly. (Trumps 17-21)

17. Contemplation on The Star

18. Contemplation on The Moon

19. Contemplation on The Sun

20. Contemplation on The Aeon

21. Contemplation on The Universe

Appendix :

*Glossary

*Diagram of the Tree of Life with Crowleys Tarot Attributes

*Emperor and Empress (Attached Essay)

*The Lovers (some interesting correspondences)

*The Animitariograph (An Integral Tarot Spread)

*Teatime in the Garden of Gethsemane (The Significance of Suffering on the Mystical Path) ---Attached Essay for The Hanged Man

*Through a Glass Darkly---Attached Essay for The Devil

Preface

In the Shadow of the Master Therion

The series of events that led to the writing and publication of this book have been so curious, that I feel these pages would be lacking were I not to share my story at the very beginning. More than a few publishers have advised me to omit this Preface, but I simply must obey the dictates of my own conscience and include it. After all, this is not just another book about the Crowley Tarot. This is also a book about how one might use this marvelous Tarot deck as a means of communicating the formula of his or her own Holy Guardian Angel. Without doubt, this has certainly been the case for me. In a sense, a good portion of this volume is designed to prove, by way of personal example, how the rich symbolism of the Thoth Tarot deck can serve as a type of language shared by you and your Daemon.

So, editorial admonitions be damned, lets start from the beginning.

I first encountered the name Aleister Crowley when I was about eight years old, in my elementary school library. Strange as it sounds, this library had a small section dedicated to the paranormal, and I liked reading the books on American hauntings. I can't remember the title of the book, but it had to do with the neo-Pagan faith and its origins. Crowley was listed as one of its founders. There were no pictures in the book, only text, and many of its pages were torn and yellowed with age. Little did I know, the name Aleister Crowley would follow me like a shadow my entire life.

I was born and raised in a very Christian family. My father was a Baptist preacher and my mother's side of the family was equally pious. Like many American children of my generation, Bible verses were fed to me with my mother's milk and I was expected to have them memorized. And memorize them I did. So enamored was I of the stories and characters of the Bible, that I even attempted to write some Biblical stories of my own! At age ten, I astonished my mother by giving her a hand-written book on my interpretation of Christian morality. I entitled the book Rags for the Apocalypse , an allusion to Christ's statement, Your good deeds are as filthy rags. The book contained roughly eighty pages and consisted of a series of admonitions against pseudo virtue and false righteousness.

My mother was very pleased, to say the least, if not amused!

My youthful conversion to Christianity may seem perfectly consistent with my religious upbringing, but why should a Christian child convert to Christianity in the first place? After all, I'd been going to church since birth and was already fully indoctrinated. Right?

Wrong

Like Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy, I couldn't be certain whether I believed in God or Jesus. Sure, I'd already been through the rituals of kneeling at bedside with my mother, confessing my sins before God, and accepting Jesus Christ as my Lord and personal Savior. But I felt no genuine emotional connection to these words and gestures. After all, with Santa Claus and his kin, at least I had proof of their existence! Old Saint Nick left gifts for me every December 25th, the Easter Bunny left me a basket of goodies every Easter, and the Tooth Fairy literally put money in my offering-plate whenever I lost a tooth. But God?

He hadn't answered a single prayer I could remember praying.

I didn't take Christianity seriously until about the age of nine, when my entire life turned upside down. Starting at around that time, I became the target of a variety of terrifying experiences. For reasons still unknown to me, the line that separates the conscious from the subconscious, the angelic from the demonic, had suddenly become nonexistent for me. I've discussed some of these experiences in another book ( Behind The Veil: The Complete Guide to Conscious Sleep ), so I won't go too much into the details here. Suffice it to say that many of these experiences left my parents bewildered. As for me:

They left me traumatized

First came the lucid dreams. Within seconds of the bedroom lights going out the hypnagogic visions would begin. Within minutes, I'd be consciously wandering the halls of my psyche without a compass. I'd learn later in life that this is actually very rare, as the average sleep cycle begins with non-dreaming (NREM). As if this abnormality wasn't enough, I began having spontaneous out-of-body-experiences. These were no less than terrifying, and I resisted with them with every fiber of my being. Oftentimes these resulted in accurate precognition, like the time I called out the name of a local boy who (it turns out) was raping a local girl. A few days later, the boy was caught red-handed and locked up in an institution.

Then the strangeness went to a whole new level.

I was awoken one night in the middle of a process known as sleep paralysis , which occurs as you enter the dreaming phase of sleep. It's a sort of twilight zone between the REM (rapid-eye-movement) and NREM (non-rapid-eye-movement) phases of the sleep cycle. During this time the body becomes unable to move, or moves very sluggishly, and a condition known as REM atonia ensues. Most people are completely unconscious at this time, but natural and trained oneironauts (lucid dreamers) can enter this phase of sleep with full awareness. At any rate, I was awoken on this night to the feeling of a presence standing over my bed. I couldn't see anything at first, but I knew it was there. Then, to my horror, I felt something take hold of the back of my neck. I could feel its nails digging into my neck and there was nothing I could do about it. I was paralyzed. For some baffling reason, I began painting the image of a pentagram in my mind. At the time, I had no idea what a pentagram was or what it meant, but I intuitively felt it to be a symbol of power.