The Tarot as a Map of Cognition and Learning

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As for literally what I do in a day:

BOTA meditation - morning, evening maybe 10 minutes per.

Pattern on the Trestleboard - four times per day, actually doubled right now with the Liber Resh salutes from the preface of One Year Manual (also happens to be an integral part of Thelema). Each instance of those coupled is maybe a minute, minute and a half tops.

This month, for One Year Manual, isn't regimented that intensely although there was some suggestion in this chapter (ie. Step XI) of using a version of the Middle Pillar that's in Regardie's Art of True Healing. I may try that by next Monday, I'm still decompressing from the holidays but this particular lesson plan is devotion to the concept that one's Holy Guardian Angel, ie. the collection of forces supervising your life, does have control over everything and that all events are integrated with your growth and learning.

That last part has been one of my bigger challenges with the whole of Hermeticism actually - ie. there's a lot that happens in life that's very difficult for me to accept a being sent to people for any preordained purpose. Some situations are too sadistic, others don't make people stronger or better - rather they end up overpowering a person and turning them into something like a living black hole. When I do run into dogmas I like that I try to at least meet them halfway and consider that every hardship has silver lining in potential if you're able to engage it. Also I can't rule out the possibility that it might be true, everything that's ever happened to anyone on this planet could be preordained as a necessary step forward in their evolution - just that, well, the challenges to truly accepting that rather than just trying to parrot it are manifold and obvious and I'd rather admit to myself that even if it were true I'm not in a place to take it to heart literally at present.

I once had a music teacher who was annoyed with me because he felt I was continuously altering my behaviour in response to his teaching style, while he was continuously altering his teaching style in response to my bhaviour. He asked me to stop, because it was preventing him from teaching most effectively. I was hardly aware that I did that, part of a lifelong habit of trying to "fit in" as much as possible, so it was sort of shocking to be asked not to do it.

I can see you having a similar problem trying to choose which system is just right for you, even while the effort you are asked to put into the system involves acts of imaginative interpretation, remaking the system in your own image, to some extent.

My question about how you use the system(s) was much more narrowly focussed. Only this: how do you use the pattern on the trestleboard? What are you doing when you do that exercise?

To avoid putting huge image up and having it scaled:

https://www.meetup.com/B-O-T-A-Los-Ange ... stleboard/

I memorized the Pattern early on, said it maybe two or three times a day at first, now say it four (possibly adding to that somewhere shortly before or after my meditations). They follow the spheres so I'll visualize the first statement of line zero like it's everywhere without sight or color, and I proceed to visually draw the Tree of Life on myself, Kether is a white ball above my head and I say line 1, I see the yellow path of Aleph, the letter aleph in violet, extending down to a glowing ball of gray light which is Chokmah where I say line 2, I extend a glowing deep green line with a bright red Daleth to my right ear for Binah which is line 3, etc. etc. down to my feet where I have line 10.

I don't imagine all of the connections of the tree with that, just the 'lightning path' and the sephira which is 8 of the 22 paths (nothing between 3 and 4), but it works for invoking the visual image (which has gotten a lot easier now). You also reverse this process before you go to bed starting with 10 and ending with 0. That visualization wasn't something that I remember BOTA explicitly teaching but it's something people often figure out to do on their own and at least a few senior members who've been with the order 15 or more years confided that they do something similar and have noticed that rather than just seeing one path or one sephira at a time they can see it from top to bottom in a glance. That's pretty good short-term visual memory!

It sounds like you are doing a sort of conceptual/emotional variation on the method of loci, or one of Ramon Llull's memory palaces or the similar mnemonic systems of Roger Bacon or Giordano Bruno.

I was looking at Tarot stuff online today and came across an image that induced an epiphany, suddenly revealing the missing esoteric secret that none of the other sources of information on the cards dares to show.

The subject was Crowleys' Thoth Deck.

The image:


Until I saw this I did not realized that the cards must be selected and arranged by cat. Now it all makes sense.
Magnum mysterium opened.

Heh, I should see if that cat can give me a reading - that's a Golden Dawn 15-card spread which gets into elemental dignities. He/she apparently knows his stuff.

Regarding the mnemonic system though - it seems like it's centered around breathing life into the concepts. I may over time gather more interest in chasing down specifics on what came from who but primarily I'm hoping to have my subjective resonance with it grow and to be able to say useful and intelligent things from within it. Of course that can promise to be a very tedious, drawn out affair. While I wouldn't compare it to science in any other way than this - both take a lot of dedication, willingness to weather long periods of seemingly nothing coming of it, and being willing to stay the course on certain lines of inquiry for extended periods of time when there's no instant gratification forthcoming (ie. the the kind of perseverance that a long-time eastern or western mystic, or particularly someone whose doing something as socially absurd as physical alchemy, needs is similar to what Edison needed when he failed to make a working light bulb over 1,000 times).

When using the Tarot, what spread would you typically use and how would you use it?
What sort of query do you bring to it and what sort of answer do you get from it?

A couple things I'd separate quickly:

BOTA (Builders of the Adytum) teaches their whole system as far as I know and at a minimum the first five to ten years by way of the tarot. However there's hardly any divination - there's a later course that I think does touch on that but everything I've done so far in three years and what I'll probably be doing for another five years will be strictly meditating on the cards. So far that's either been single cards on their own or some combination of two to four cards. Most of the western mystery stuff is really that much more so than divination.

As far as trying or testing divination most of that has been with the Celtic cross. It's a quick and dirty spread, highly supported online, and I think I've gotten down how the placements juxtapose and support each other. Here and there I've tried three-card, mostly if I had a really simple question and I'd view the two side cards as augments. What I think I've learned over time with divination - the consistent pattern I've seen with the cards is that they'll tell you what you think deep down about a situation, not necessarily what you should think about it. To that end I'm finding it to be a good way of piercing the veil regarding where I stand on something when I've got too many factors interfering with ability to distance myself from a situation and see it clearly.

What you describe reminds me somewhat of the Richard Willhelm translation of the I Ching, including the view that it's not so much as an oracle as an instrument to focus introspection by the user. It seems like a method for the user to practice "cold reading" on their own subconscious mind.
The relevant introduction: http://www.iging.com/intro/introduc.htm
The table of interpretations of the hexagrams: http://www2.unipr.it/~deyoung/I_Ching_W ... ation.html

I found this Tarot video, a little history of Tarot organized along a Fool's Journey and narrated by the deliciously rich voice of Christopher Lee:

A non-woo approach to Tarot:




He also has "Learn the 78 Tarot cards in 2 hours (in 2 parts)"



And a shorter one on reversals:

I have maybe nine or ten decks. I just ordered this one as well because, IMHO they're beautiful and quite close to the original Wirth design albeit I'm questioning whether the sparkles in the background is a little over the top. I'm also lucky enough to have a copy of Oswald Wirth's 'Tarot of the Magicians' so I may be able to use this as a meditation deck when I have a chance to go through that book.

I've been browsing through Arthur Waite's "Pictorial Guide to the Tarot" and it's pretty fascinating stuff. It seems like you could almost write a small book about each of the Major Arcana. Waite writes long paragraphs about the symbolism in each card and it feels like he's barely even scratching the surface.

What drew you to look into tarot and what do you find most fascinating about it?

This is a cool thread. I'm bumping it because I had an interesting experience this morning. I pull one tarot card every day and journal about its meaning because I've always wished I were more familiar with each card's meaning. I don't believe in any of the spiritual aspects of tarot; I think they are helpful in getting me to think about different aspects of my life.

This morning's card was Justice reversed. I use Benebell Wen's book Holistic Tarot as my main guide to interpretation, and it says that Justice reversed can indicate that what is fair will not feel fair, and when you draw Justice reversed, you should interrogate why the situation felt unfair and think about how you can accept it as fair. Immediately upon reading this, I thought, "Well, that's just the autistic experience, knowing that the things that drive you crazy are not objectively wrong; your reaction to them is wrong." That probably sounds harsh, I guess, but I experience autism as a total nuisance at best and disabling at worst. I'm not into the concept of neurodiversity or autism being a superpower or a good thing. I relate to the theory of missing synapse pruning, where it is suggested that autism results from brain synapses not being pruned enough in childhood, making the person ultrasensitive to sensory input (among other things).

I pulled Justice reversed after a few tense days thinking about my upcoming wedding and being very frustrated at myself and my inability to enjoy the "normal" wedding that is being planned. The situation feels unfair to me, but it's really not.