Lon Milo Duquette - Understanding Aleister Crowleys Thoth Tarot

FIGURE 1. THE STELE OF REVEALING, OBVERSE AND REVERSE.

FIGURE 2. BACK OF THE THOTH TAROT.

THEREFORE I SAY UNTO THEE: COME FORTH UNTO ME FROM THINE ABODE IN THE SILENCE, UNUTTERABLE WISDOM, ALL-LIGHT, ALL-POWER! THOTH, HERMES, MERCURY, ODIN, BY WHATEVER NAME I CALL THEE, THOU ART STILL UN-NAMED AND NAMELESS TO ETERNITY! COME THOU FORTH, I SAY, AND AID AND GUARD ME IN THIS WORK OF ART.

UNDERSTANDING
ALEISTER CROWLEY'S

THOTH
TAROT

LON MILO DUQUETTE

First published in 2003 by
Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC
With offices at:
500Third Street, Suite 230
San Francisco, CA 94107
www.redwheelweiser.com

Copyright 2003 Lon Milo Duquette

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC. Reviewers may quote brief passages.

ISBN: 978-1-57863-276-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

DuQuette, Lon Milo

Understanding Aleister Crowley's thoth tarot / Lon Milo DuQuette.
p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 1-57863-276-5

1. Tarot. 2. Crowley, Aleister, 1875-1947. I. Title.

BF1879.T2D873 2003

133.3'2424dc22 2003014475

Typeset in the United States
Cover design by Dutton & Sherman

Printed in the United States
QG
10 9 8 7

THIS WORK IS LOVINGLY DEDICATED
TO BETTY LUNDSTED.

FIGURES

TABLES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author wishes to recognize and thank the following individuals for their friendship, wisdom, and support: Constance Jean DuQuette, Judith Hawkins-Tillirson, Rick Potter, Jody Breedlove, Hymenaeus Beta, Sabazius, James Wasserman, Bill Heidrick, Carolyn Tillie, Donald Weiser, Clive Harper, Tim Maroney, Kat Sanborn, and Donald Kraig. And to the brightest stars in the firmament of tarot:

Janet Berres, Dr. Arthur Rosengarten, Stuart Kaplan, Mary Greer, Rachel Pollack, Thalassa, Ruth Ann and Wald Amberstone, Linda Walters, Robert Place, and Bob O'Neil. Finally, I give special (and most humble) thanks to my dear Brother, Dathan Biberstein, who revealed to me the mystery of the Kerubic emblems of the Thoth Tarota mystery that taunted me for over thirty years.

PART I

Little Bits of Things You Should Know Before Beginning to Study Aleister Crowley's Thoth Tarot

CHAPTER ZERO

THE BOOK OF THOTHA MAGICK BOOK?

The Tarot is a pack of seventy-eight cards. There are four suits, as in modern playing cards, which are derived from it. But the Court cards number four instead of three. In addition, there are twenty-two cards called Trumps, each of which is a symbolic picture with a title to itself.

At first sight one would suppose this arrangement to be arbitrary, but it is not. It is necessitated, as will appear later, by the structure of the universe, and in particular the Solar System, as symbolized by the Holy Qabalah. This will be explained in due course.

These are the brilliantly concise opening words of Aleister Crowley's The Book of Thoth. When I first read them, I was filled with great expectations. At last, I thought, the great mysteries of the Thoth Tarot are going to be explained to mein due course.

At the time, I considered myself a serious student of tarot, having spent three years studying the marvelous works of Paul Foster Case and his Builders of the Adytum my own deck of trumps and dutifully followed the meditative exercises outlined for each of the twenty-two cards. Now, with Aleister Crowley's Thoth Tarot and The Book of Thoth in hand, I knew I was ready to take the next step toward tarot mastery and my own spiritual illumination.

It took a bit of bravado on my part to arrive at this threshold. My first introduction to Crowley had not been particularly

Eventually, I came upon an early edition of Aleister Crowley's Thoth Tarot deck. I had never seen anything so beautiful in my life. The name Aleister Crowley sounded familiar and I vaguely recalled seeing his name footnoted in a Qabalah book that I had read by Frater Achad. I referred to my occult dictionary and discovered to my horrorAleister Crowleyfamous Scottish Satanist.

I may have been a wild and crazy heretic, but I sure didn't want anything to do with Satanism. Knowing my brother owned a copy of The Book of Thoth (the companion text), I promptly gave the cards to him. Good riddance!

I was soundly disabused of this notion a few days later by our dear friend Mad Bob (a name that only begins to describe his bizarre and wonderful character), who had returned briefly from a Central American adventure. Bob had read Crowley's autobiography It doesn't matter if Crowley was a Satanist, he was a good kind of Satanist. You'll just love him! Trust me.

That was the strangest thing I had ever heard, but I respected Mad Bob's opinion and took the cards back from my brother and asked to borrow his Book of Thoth. Bob was right. Even though I didn't understand most of what I read, I could see that Aleister Crowley was brilliant, funny, and everything I was looking for. I bought everything I could by or concerning the man (precious little in those days) and eventually wrote to Crowley's Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.) at the address published on the Caliph card included in the Thoth Tarot to ask for initiation.

And so began what (for good or ill) I must call my magical career. The Thoth Tarot being not only the catalyst that triggered my metamorphosis from dilettante to magician, but also the talisman that obligingly provided the mailing address of the Holy Order that would remain my spiritual home and university for the next quarter century.

Please don't think that by relating the above story I am suggesting that everyone who wishes to understand more about the Thoth Tarot or The Book of Thoth need run right out and join the O.T.O. or any other group, magical or otherwise. Occult societies are not for everybody, and no matter what any of them may suggest to new or potential members, no organization has yet cornered the market on the wisdom of the ages. In fact, all the information one will ever need in order to master the subject has already been published and is readily availablemore available, in fact, than at any other time in history. At the dawn of the new millennium, it is not a matter of whether or not the answers are out there, rather it is a matter of arriving at a place where one knows the right questions to ask.

Naturally, because no two individuals are alike, we should not expect to find the answers in the same places. For me, the answers most often come, not from teachers or from mystery school lectures, but from booksbooks, curiously enough, that I have already read (or thought I read) many times before.

Crowley's Book of Thoth is one such book. It seems to change miraculously as it rests on the shelf. I can say with certainty that, in the last thirty years, I have read it cover-to-cover at least a dozen times, and have referred to it hundreds of times. Yet every time I pick it up, I find something profound that I have never seen before. More often than not, this new intelligence is precisely that bit of information I have been combing my brain or library for, or else it satisfies some spiritual frustration currently gnawing at my soul.