I have now completed my detailed instructional material for the cards of the Major Arcana. In going back over it, I realized just how much of a personal connection I’ve made with them over the last four decades, and how seriously I’ve taken Aleister Crowley’s advice to heart regarding the best approach to the cards:

(The student) “cannot reach any true appreciation of them without observing their behavior over a long period; he can only come to an understanding of the Tarot through experience. It will not be sufficient for him to intensify his studies of the cards as objective things; he must use them; he must live with them. They, too, must live with him. A card is not isolated from its fellows. The reactions of the cards, their interplay with each other, must be built into the very life of the student.”

Crowley considered the cards to be “living beings” (not human but semi-intelligent natural forces), and in another place said “It is for the student to build these living stones into his living Temple.”  I’ve always viewed them from that angle, mainly as psychoactive agents within the subconscious realm of projective cognizance (that is, innate awareness of, and subliminal intervention in, one’s destiny – or, as the New Age cliché has it, “you make your own reality”). They speak clearly to those who have ears to hear. Although I intended to  follow an entirely predictive model for my definitions and observations, my enthusiasm for Crowley’s visionary mysticism and razor-sharp intelligence led me astray more often then not. This hopefully produced a set of useful pragmatic insights with a profound sheen of  esoteric allure that is not too daunting for the novice. In a small way, I also attempted to showcase the interaction between pairs of cards in their natural habitat, in both a dualistic and incremental sense. The goal was to suggest how one segues into the next without covering every single instance of transitional handoff. I will dismiss the implied obligation by citing another breezy Crowleyism: “It is very important as a mental exercise to work out for oneself these correspondences” between the characteristic behavior of one card and that of the next.”

Next I will move on to the court cards, using this earlier tabulation of all the pertinent keywords and descriptive phrases (Crowley’s “moral characteristics”) in Part Three of the Book of Thoth as my starting point and inspiration:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/wptyqjybjnp1iec/Thoth%20Court%20Card%20Characteristics.pdf?raw=1