Back to School with the Tarot

One of the greatest misunderstandings in the occult publishing world (I'm not going so far as to say it's a deliberate fraud) is the publication of books with titles such as 'Everything you always wanted to know about the tarot but were afraid to ask, 36th enlarged edition'. The reason this is a misunderstanding is that it shows the authors or publishers are missing something crucial, & by releasing such books may also lead their readers into missing something crucial.
The simple fact is that like all good occult tools, you never learn everything there is to know about it. Never. In fact I think this realisation is one of the reasons a belief in reincarnation is so widespread in occultism - we realise that the extent of what is out there goes way beyond the limits of one lifetime. In fact the tarot alone could still produce surprises after a lifetime of learning it, even without all the other sources of knowledge out there.
I think we come to learn our tools - or perhaps come to learn our teachers - from where we are at the time. For example the first tarot card that had a major personal import for me was the Hanged Man, for the reason that it kept coming up at a traumatic time of my life, when my life was fairly turned 'upside down'.
There are also so many different ways to learn the tarot, even they can't be exhausted in a lifetime. Telling stories, reading books, comparative magical models, daily draw, meditation, & so on, are all ways that are quick to say, but that when carried out carefull, take many years.
Another stumbling block in learning to read the tarot is that people learn to read the tarot. Even a knowledge of all the inner hidden meanings given to the cards in various magical systems can be a distraction from the point. That is that the magical art of divination is a way to see the stuff that's not visible: it aims to train the inner eye to see other levels of existence. For example, you know this is happening when you see something in a reading that is *not* indicated by the card. I get this most with the Morgan-Greer deck: I think because that is the deck I learned with & so have the most 'contact' with.
My only other personal advice in learning tarot is: get in among the cards & don't treat them like holy relics. You are guaranteed to have no use for a deck wrapped up in silk at home on your dressing table, but a deck in your bag will get much more use & become a friend. You *must* handle the cards: this is a witchcraft blog & so here is a witch's secret for learning the tarot. Merely by touching the cards you establish a connection with them & they will become friends.
Another thing I do that some people would be horrified at is to write on the cards. When I see a worn-out Marseille deck in a charity shop with some very old-school fortune-telling meanings written on them I know that it belonged to someone who really got intimate with their deck. Remember a major exercise in the tarot world is the BOTA tradition of colouring in your deck. The Golden Dawn had their initiates draw their own deck from the instructions in Book T: imagine the power of that, learning the depth of meaning of the symbols you yourself drew years before! Perhaps one of the reasons there is a great tradition of treated tarot decks as something so sacred they can hardly be touched, is that relatively recently they were terribly difficult to get hold of in English-speaking countries. I suspect that in France & Italy, where the tradition of playing the game survives, they would be treated differently, even by magical people. However the simple fact is that this is 2014, not 1910, & if I want a new deck I can buy one inexpensively.
I personally am on my second Morgan-Greer deck. What that first one went through! It looked like a proper antique deck after being laid out on buses, in the woods, in pubs. I wrote on them, told stories with them. I don't feel a sense of disconnection with my second deck, though; it seems to be Morgan-Greer I've connected with. I've written on these as well. One of the things I like to do is go back to school now & then & learn tarot with a different 'teacher'. So on the fronts these have Etteilla's keywords (obviously adapted to a slightly different deck). On the back I wrote the Golden Dawn titles, which I've always wanted to learn, plus their keywords & meanings of combinations. Now you may say that this is the equivalent of a bike with stabilisers. I don't care. And here's for why. I know that when I read I'm not really reading the cards at all & that the querent will be struck by how much I know about them. And this will not be visible in my scrawlings at all. So I needn't be ashamed of having a deck with stabilisers.
This week I've gone back to school again (more scrawls, there isn't room for more now), this time in the class of Waite himself. I think I'm probably now more prepared to sit with the attitude so many occultists take - I'll tell you this much, & there's some great secret & you'll have to find that out for yourself. Rather than being irritated by this, I think I'm more prepared to see the huge world of nuance behind the tarot that he can only drop hints about. Where he's wrong, in my humble opinion, is to say that other interpretations are definitely wrong. They seem more often to have part of the picture, or be getting at what Waite is saying from a different side.
The major benefit I find from going through these different approaches is that I can wallow in the approach of one time for a bit, & then compare it with others. For example a dominant approach nowadays is to consider what the querent sees in the card. This approach feels quite different from that of Eteilla, whose approach is redolent of fortune-telling in a French petit-bourgeois drawing room. The Golden Dawn's approach always surprises me by how close it is to conventional fortune-telling, while not neglecting the great void of the esoteric meanings of the tarot.
Where does this leave me? Like the physical training I wrote about in my last post, it makes one more flexible & therefore able to see as well as look at things. And that's the point.
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