I ordered some new Tarot books from Fields Book Store last week and they arrived yesterday!
The first pair that I ordered was the Robin Wood tarot deck and book. I’m not sure how I’d never noticed the deck before, but I was really drawn to Wood’s style. Her evocation of the tarot is, first, illustration, which I’m a sucker for, and second, is evocative of the fantasy aspects that are inherent in the tarot. Lastly, it’s also reminiscent of comic books, which I’m looking forward to addressing in another post. The book seemed like a no brainer to accompany the deck.
Second, and perhaps more exciting for me, is Robert Place’s The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination. After having read the introduction and a bit of the first chapter I’m very excited for this book. It appears to be a scholarly, grounded approach to the history of the tarot, dispensing with any of the Egypt nonsense, and intent on exploring the real medieval roots of the tarot and the symbolism inherent in its origins, which I find exciting, since the roots of the tarot really interest me, as you can see from the way that I dealt with the Magician. I suspect that this book will become a close companion to Rachel Pollack’s 78 Degrees of Wisdom (which I still haven’t finished) as essential tarot reading.
Lastly, tho’ I didn’t order this from Fields, I also discovered an old copy of Paul Foster Case’s The Tarot: A Key to the Wisdom of the Ages, which I must have purchased just before I left Oakland 3 years ago, and then put into storage.
So, very exciting reading in front of me. I’ll keep you updated on how it comes along and what I take away from each book.
Originally I’d intended my next card after the 
So I whipped up a few versions of a bald old man with a scruffy beard and was immediately enamored with him. His kindly eyes and gentle expression showed an understanding of human suffering because he had suffered much, and through that understanding a compassion for those of us who suffer without the intimate self-knowledge that the Hermit has acquired through abandonment of civilization and companionship. This, for me, is the dichotomy, the contradiction that defines and crystalizes the Hermit: he sees clearly the roots of human suffering, understanding it completely through his intimacy with his own suffering, but simultaneously wants no part of it. It is a powerful paradox that lies at the heart of the Hermit and one that I personally feel on a daily basis as I sort through my Facebook page. To listen to much of the drama and strife that bombards us in our daily lives, and to know that much of it is our own doing, whether to distract us from the things we may be afraid of (failure, success, disappointment, joy), to give meaning to an otherwise seemingly meaningless existence, or sometimes because life is just hard. I both understand what many of my friends are going through, and simultaneously want no part of it for myself.
Lastly, the imagery that came with the discovery of the yamabushi, specifically the 
The Magician is a card with two distinct personalities. Before the early 20th century resurgence of interest in the occult the Magician existed humbly as Le Bateleur, which Wikipedia defines as ‘the Mountebank.’ A mountebank, for those of you less interested in 19th century jargon than I am, is simply a cheat. The Magician wasn’t much more than a street hustler, his cards and his shells laid out to draw in simple marks for easy money in confidence games like 3 Card Monte. But with the onset of the 20th century and a revived interest into the mystic and the occult, folks like Waite, Crowley and Oswald Wirth significantly altered the status of the Magician from humble street hustler to all-powerful mage. Even given the card’s astrological and planetary attributions the Magician’s promotion has never sat well with me because I can’t see the reason for it. Thus, as I am examining the Magician and his motivations for the deck, a simple question arises: What brought about his change?
Interestingly, Crowley can’t abandon the origins of the card completely. In the penultimate paragraph of his chapter on the Magician discussing the symbolism of the Egyptian god Thoth as a god of writing and communication Crowley says, "…but it was seen from very early times that the use of speech, or writing, meant the introduction of ambiguity at the best, and falsehood at the worst…In philosophical language one may say: Manifestation implies illusion," and goes on to imply that this aspect of the Magician might be compared to the Buddhist concept of Maya, or the "Lord of Illusion". My feeling is that this is the Magician’s core and original aspect and its most important.
There is of course a back door in my Beth, an alternate entry to the house I have created for this idea, and that is that Crowley was, in fact, playing the role of the Magician in his description of the Magician. Perhaps this is why he describes a card called the Juggler in The Book of Thoth, while including a card called The Magus in the Thoth Tarot; hinting to us that something doesn’t quite add up, that something is amiss. The greatest weapon of the illusionist is of course illusion. If he can convince us that he is not merely a street magician but something grander, if he can convince us that his works are real and not illusion then he is a much more powerful figure than he would be otherwise. This camouflage allows the illusionist a level of respect and intimidation that he would otherwise lack without it. The trick is based on his skill and abilities, but is carried off by his sense of grandeur and bravado, and there is no one better at this than our friend Mr. Crowley. It is appealing, then, to say that Crowley saw something of himself in the card, though it would be lazy of me to push the autobiographical elements of my theory that far. But, oh, what a tempting analogy to draw between the card and the man, that the magic of transforming the Magician from Le Bateleur to Magus did the same thing for Crowley himself.
The Super Nintendo game 
It was probably impossible for any real deck to really capture the magic that I felt using the deck in the game. Video games create their own worlds, and trying to recapture what happens in their world outside of their world never works. So I admit that I am a bit disappointed with the cards that showed up. 
From an intuitive perspective, it is not a deck that lends itself to reading, which for me is fine, since I hadn’t planned on reading with it, but rather framing it and putting it on my wall. The illustrations are, from my perspective as a reader and interpreter, too generic to draw much from. There is little alchemical or esoteric detail and the characters themselves are fairly neutral in their poses, leaving much to be desired from an occult point of view. No tarot deck is easy to make, and it’s clear that Yoshida did his homework in interpreting and reinterpreting these images, but it still feels, after looking through them a number of times, that something is lacking, some key ingredient is missing for them to be useful cards. Many of the illustrations don’t feel as finished or as active as many of the concept art illustrations, which is disappointing. I know from experience that I’m a picky reader and art critic, so take my opinion with a grain of salt, but ultimately this feels more like a vanity deck than a real tool in my tarot arsenal.
Second, the little dog is wearing a collar with a tag on it. The tag, completely invisible to the human eye, says ruach the Hebrew word for the second of the three-part soul, loosely correlating to the conscious self or the ego, as opposed to nephesh (loosely, the subconscious, id, fetch) and neshama (loosely, the superego, auamakua, godself). The conscious self is often at odds with the desires of the id for more reasons than I care to go into here, but needless to say that the purity of our desires is often manifested in the id while the discipline of our social training, for better or for worse, is manifested in the ego. The Fool is not pure id, but rather pure connectedness, the ability of ourselves to let go of what we know and embrace the reality of what is, the reality that our id is often in touch with, but our ego, our talky self, has a very difficult time embracing because there’s no "proof" for it. Thus, when we can fully embrace our the hunches of our fetch in the beautiful manner of the Fool it leaves our talky self barking behind us all the good reasons we shouldn’t be doing this, following its training to the very last. Leaving talky self behind isn’t possible, really, and true Foolish transcendence comes not of leaving it behind, but of embracing both talky and fetch fully, combining to form a unique third piece in the godsoul.
Hey All,
