My Tarot Thesis

Truth veiled in Beauty

Lust

The thelemic doctrine on which this entire deck is based comes from Liber Al vel Legis known to most as the Book of the Law. In it we find this most liberating, yet spiritually binding decree.

Do what thy wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Love is the law, love under will.

“Do what thy wilt” applies to every inclination of your true being. You should always try to expand your horizons challenging what you think you like or dislike by trying new things. But if something doesn't resonate with you, you must be true to yourself. Struggling with sexual identity has been a long burden imposed on men and women of all ages by society's moral norms. Among them, young people are the most tormented as they're really trying to find and define their identity. Society doesn't help when it constantly tries to label and categorize people pigeonholing them in definitions such as gay, straight, bisexual, transgendered and such. You are not defined by any of these labels! Your sexual preference is simply an expression of your divine Will. Much like a genuine religious ritual, not a banal dwelling on the superficial act, but the meaning of the act to your libido, in other words - what gets you off. If you were to stop and reason through the exchange of saliva and other bodily fluids it seems gross to the mind, yet in the heat of passion we transcend these limitations of cold reason and don't question what turns us on. This sexual “turn on” switch is subjective and unique to every person, exactly like the experience of spiritual enlightenment (This is probably the best allegory to explain the enacting of True Will uninhibited by reason). It would be frustrating and counterproductive to be caught up in minutia, your sexual preference is the means to an end, you're not defined by the mean but the end - the climax that unites us all. Sex between two or more consenting individuals is the crux of freedom and the pursuit of happiness.

So if you're troubled by your culture's view of what you do in the bedroom, let's dispel these social pressures right now! To paraphrase Crowley, 'we are all one in essence and many in manifestation'. By observing the unique individual nature in each other, we're learning something new about the whole, the supreme nature of the universe. God - The Supreme Deity, Manifest Universe, learns about it's own nature through us, therefore homogeneity is the enemy of all nature. Succumbing to external pressure to normalize the individual to a common denominator is often a direct violation of one's True Will.

In the Book of the Law the feminine receptive principle manifested as Nuit describes that the “Word of sin is restriction” As Queen of Infinite Space she states:

“...I love you! I yearn to you! Pale or purple, veiled or voluptuous, I who am all pleasure and purple, and drunkenness of the innermost sense, desire you. Put on the wings, and arouse the coiled splendour within you: come unto me!” -Al 1:61

Hadit, the manifestation of the innermost God within all of us responds in part two.

“I am the Snake that giveth Knowledge & Delight and bright glory, and stir the hearts of men with drunkenness. To worship me take wine and strange drugs whereof I will tell my prophet, & be drunk thereof! They shall not harm ye at all. It is a lie, this folly against self. The exposure of innocence is a lie. Be strong, o man! lust, enjoy all things of sense and rapture: fear not that any God shall deny thee for this... I am the secret Serpent coiled about to spring: in my coiling there is joy. If I lift up my head, I and my Nuit are one. If I droop down mine head, and shoot forth venom, then is rapture of the earth, and I and the earth are one.” -Al 2:22;26

The Lust card is a depiction of this sacred ritual that unifies all consciousness through the unique expression of the Self in its various forms, but always with the essence of the Yin and the Yang in ecstasy.

Sex is a powerful magick tool available to all of us. In a figurative sense we're all pubescent children playing with each other. It can be just casual fun or it can be our embodiment of the primordial creative forces of the universe. Either way the spiritual principle behind the depiction of male and female intercourse is NOT to be taken strictly as a literal heterosexual coupling. This divine state of ecstasy is always a result of intercourse between a projector and a recipient, men and women can play both roles. If it's two men, one is the recipient and he becomes the scarlet woman or a manifestation of Nuit, infinity beckoning to be filled. The projector becomes the beast, or Hadit, answering the call and filling infinite space. Its the same with two women or men/women role reversal. This principle can be extended to include poly-amorous sex where a group of projectors are worshiping the recipient who embodies the priestess of infinity. I know for sure, that its against my Will that anyone should ever use my artwork as a basis for discrimination against anyone else. The important point of all this is that Lust is universal, there is no discrimination, the whore Goddess depicted in this card is Babylon, the refuser of none.

Dream: Spirit Possession.

I don't feel like writing anything at all right now, but I have to put this down because its significant. The night before last I had a dream, the usual large dark haunted house that recurs often. I was sometimes alone, sometimes with Lisa and Irv somewhere near. The place was haunted by a presence, an intelligent spirit that danced just on the edge of my peripheral vision. This wasn't a shade or a print of someone stuck in time and space, this was a spirit presence. It would rattle and move things around the house and while the base instinct of fear came over me, I easily overcame it with my urge to investigate the unknown. But as soon as I reached it, it would drop its manifestation and move on someplace else in the house, never actually confronting me or revealing anything of its nature beyond pointless mischief. After many frustrating repetitions I was very aware of the fact that I was dreaming and decided to wake up. I would get up from the couch, the house would be supernaturally dark, a dream darkness that permeates everything, defying physics, though somehow leaving the environment just visible enough to see my way around. A dream in a dream, how frustrating... I then forced myself to wake up and every time I thought I succeeded I would roll off the futon mattress only to realize I was still dreaming. After several times I concentrated hard enough to at least move on to different dreams, as though dream scenarios were windows navigating on the edge of my lucid dream state. I was able to move on to darkness of sleep then another dream entirely about an scenario in which I had never met Lisa and was perpetually stuck on the fringes of the dating game while trying to make it as an artist.

I told Lisa about this dream, same night when she had a zombie dream. The very next night it came back much worse. In this dream I remember being in the house in dream darkness as I've described before. I was on the computer when a feeling of what felt like drunkenness came over me, I get up and see Alden up and staring at me silently. I try to say something to him and realize that conscious movement and speech is much harder than I've ever experienced in my most drunk and stoned state of mind. Alden was puttering around the house getting something to eat in the kitchen when I started to levitate uncontrollably. I remember bumping into his coffee and spilling it over the counter. I felt a the beginnings of supernatural connection to something powerful, tried to channel it to fly away but only bumped my head against a glass window, not being able to break free to the outside. I could see the dark overcast day outside, empty, filled with possibilities, but I couldn’t break free on my own. I once again tried to wake up and rolled off bed, ran upstairs to Lisa and Irv and told them about this horrible nightmare. Staring at their dumbfound faces I realized that I was still dreaming, no matter what I said, they couldn't understand what I was talking about. I would feel goosebumps and numbness all over my body, I could just about feel my laying body, but couldn't wake up.

I tried again and roll off bed once again. This time I was in a different house, it was the house I lived in with my family in 2000, though only part of it, as though it somehow fit in with my current home in a hybrid form. I walk into a small room where Lisa was sitting in, dressed in her pink nightgown sitting on a single bed. There was another single bed across from her with a TV tray between the two, where she was readying her tarot cards for a reading. I walk in, she greets me, and I proceed to desperately tell her about my experiences for the past few dream-hours. I knew it was another dream. She was listening attentively and nodding when I explained to her that she wasn't the real Lisa, only a dream version, that in reality she was much more, a Goddess by comparison to this limited fraction of a psyche standing before me. I loved her just the same, and held her hands. I could tell that dream Lisa understood the meaning of everything I said and was still ever a comforting presence even if only being my unconscious projection of her. We sat across from each other and just was she was starting to shuffle cards I felt the beginning sparks of holy rapture within me, the sense of levitation again and soon, the realization of my inability to transcend the room I was in. I immediately understood that this was a state of false enlightenment, a simulation induced by the spirit toying with me, an experience so incomplete that later I would actually feel sorry for the spirit's inability to understand what its really like. It was only able to reproduce the most superficial sensations of enlightened rapture in my nervous system. Only I can complete the circuit as a conduit of Divine Will, connecting the above to the below, so it was really limited if it had tried to really fool me. (The highest demons can ascend to in the Tree of Life is Daath, where the Arch-demon Choronzon resides. It is Knowledge, their false summit, whereas Understanding lies beyond it, in Binah, the Mother, womb which birthed the Universe. Only souls birthed as humans starting at Malkuth can cross the Abyss. In this journey, demon spirits under your Will are redeemed and given a chance to ascend to higher realms. As we get promoted, so do they, filling the cosmic vacancy we leave behind as we ascend.)

I once again struggle to get up and roll off bed, repeating this series of fake awakenings until I murmur something out loud and momentarially wake up for real, for a brief second. I made a conscious mental note of the whole thing and went right back to sleep, hoping for relief in dreamlesness or some other dream. Instead the cycle continued, I've never before in my dreams experience this kind of demonic possession. Finally in the last fake awakening I immediately fell limp to the ground, by now I I'm sick of it all. Not yet sure if this was dream or not I thought If only I could get upstairs I could get some help from Irv and Lisa, they're all I have when I'm in distress. So crawling on the floor near the foot of the stairs I yell “I'VE HAD ENOUGH OF THIS!” and I roared so loud that if it was real someone in the house would wake up and help me, I was furious. With that I broke free and woke up again to the sound of my voice. This time I opened my eyes, wiped off some of the drowsiness and looked around the room. I could hear the spirit inside my head still whispering generally dickish musings, mostly unintelligible gibberish which I can't recall. I seriously thought about going upstairs and sleep on the side mattress next to Lisa, but I had work the next morning and didn't want to risk not getting up from the alarm clock in the living room. So I mentally told the spirit “Go to sleep or whatever the hell you do. Let me sleep, I have have work in the morning, this is not a good time for this.” I then promptly fell into a pleasant dreamless sleep.

I told Lisa about this dream and we speculated this being my depression or something. I've been working on compositions of the Holy Guarding Angel present symbolically in Hierophant and figuratively in the Art card. She suggested it could be a backlash from below. This merits a tarot reading.

Edit: What Lisa said wasn't just simply dismissive of me chalking it up to depression, it was much more complex. I just got tired of writing tonight, this was for a dream record only.

Government

Percival is the true champion of the Holy Grail. Galahad was a later sterilization of the myth, taking it from a left hand path, to a right hand path mythology, supporting the inhumanity of Christian philosophy. Percival, being fully human, attains the Holy Grail by Love, not the sterile purity of Galahad, he is thus the rightful knight depicted in the atus 7, The Chariot. He is the paladin, the holy warrior of the new Aeon.

4 + 7 = 11

Seven who rest in seven, seven who live by seven, the seven who govern the seven, and seven by whom all government is.

Love is the Law

This is the most supreme expression of government there is, the secret to my improved understanding of The Emperor. The king and the land are one, to change within is to change without. The king without the grail withers and dies and the land with him. This is manifested in the raw tyranny that curse the land choking individual free will, if government upsets the universal balance, the universal balance is bound to upset government, and eventually overthrow it. This cycle has often resulted in the death of empires. But if the king is transformed at his core by the power of the grail, he not only heals himself, he also heals the land and his subjects, bringing longevity to his sovereignty.

This Law of Liberty can be applied in many levels. In goetia this means that Divine Love must be applied to the demonic parts of your psyche to compel it to positive change in compliance with True Will, effectively building your own temple. I've often pondered on the menial demands of ego-seeking magicians upon these entities. As reflected in their own blogs, this apparent tyranny is the very thing which upsets the balance and overthrows the magician.

4 - This is the square, its the terrible four letter word of the Almighty, the Tetragrammaton, The Emperor, the four elements manifested in all matter. The human need to quantify, label, rationalize, categorize and organize the volatile forces of nature. Its a necessary foundation essential for human development, for patronage of the arts and sciences, for civilization as a whole. We are housed in square boxes, protected from exposure to the elements, from total anarchy. Left unchecked it becomes tyranny, stagnation, no room for growth.

On a grand scale, applied to the world's governments, this is a great paradox in human existence, and its most evident in America, “land of the free”, which brings to mind the saying “freedom isn't free.” For ages freedom has not been in the best interest of governments. Even today, the media, religious institutions and corporations are metaphorical expansions of government. They're inseparably tied in a net mutual interests with the government, influencing policies in ways that individuals can't compete. They're allowed to inhibit personal freedoms without outcry from the masses because they have ways of manipulating public opinion in their favor, or diverting attention away from their sleight of hand. This is why government is always slow to catch on with the their own subjects demands for personal freedom as seen in the civil rights movement of the 60's and the current issues of gay marriage and decriminalization of marijuana. The fact is, this has been going on since the birth of this nation, since the birth of government in ancient tribal civilizations.

7 - The metaphorical “Holy Grail” in this case is that instinct within certain individual leaders within government to lead the nation in a new progressive direction even while still manipulating the old network of special interest groups that fund the government. It takes a heroic individual to every so often lead the masses and outwit the machine, they're the great leaders in human history. This is king Arthur, energized by the grail, charging forth conquering his foes and healing the land. These heroic individuals, often driven by a need to leave their mark upon the world, are the sum of the parts 4 and 7. They're 11 in the world of government, symbolic of the ultimate victory of the individual Will over the masses and all of the complex machinery that resists change. This is not exactly a moral statement. As love and hate are twins, this individual could be manifested as Franklin D Roosevelt or Adolph Hitler, playing an active role for “good” or “evil” in the human drama. The difference, as in these two examples, is that one ultimately unites and the other ultimately divides his nation. In the big picture, both have brought about irreversible change upon the system.

Christian Morning.

Facebook status:

I just woke up from a terrible nightmare. Self-proclaimed Christian churches everywhere were misleading men and women. I'm really glad it was just a bad dream...

How I actually feel:

Sometimes I wake up in the morning and ask myself, what can I do today to eradicate Christianity from the face of the Earth? And your answer might be "they're already doing it themselves". To that I say "not fast enough".

RIP Tortured Programmer.

http://gizmodo.com/5726667/the-agonizing-last-words-of-bill-zeller

Sorry I didn't get to you in time. I would give 5 years of my life span, for 5 minutes to connect with you, and perhaps save your life. Rest in peace in your embrace of infinity. Let every aspect of your consciousness be filled with Joy and Strength in your next journey with us.

Hidden Resentment.

So another needless fight with Lisa. This one though, I think I should write down because I can learn something about myself, and how to react to others.

It was Friday 1:30 PM, a week before Christmas, she was tired from baking cookies the night before and had been sick for quite some time. We had not been intimate for a week since the Friday before This was something that didn't bother me even though I had a higher libido than usual, she was after all fighting bronchitis all week. I had been planning what I had to do for that day so I was somewhat aloof. I'm not a practical person, so I was forcing myself to exhibit practical efficiency so I could get things done.

We talked about it and she agreed to go out with me, get something to eat and run a few errands since she had to go to the bank anyway. She was playing some new pop cap game on facebook and I asked, “are you having fun with that game?” I said it with the intent to get her moving so we could go out, we never linger until after noon in the house if we have to go out and do things. So the immediate answer was “Yes” So she proceeded to finish getting ready to leave as I was putting my coat on. She casually proceeded to tell me more about the game and how I'd even like it myself. It seemed interesting and I really would like to know more about it. But as I was getting ready to walk the dogs, something we normally do before leaving the house, she went deeper into the rules of the game to the point that I realized I wasn't following her anymore. I instantly interrupted her in a way that I would later understand was very rude. I said “I”m only going to tell you this so you don't hold it against me in case I forget and ask you again about this game and you get annoyed at repeating yourself, but I'm not listening to you right now.” My honesty, which I repeatedly asked her to give me credit for, did not reward me, she got very upset. In the context of what should've been a casual conversation between two lovers I can really understand how rude, and uncalled for those words were, and if nothing else, we agreed that it was a poor choice of words. It would've been nicer to say “I'm really interested in what you're saying, can we continue this conversation later when I can give you my undivided attention?” Instead, my head was someplace else and I just wanted to get moving, so my mental “PR” was off that morning. Furthermore, in retrospect, I realized what prompted that nasty interruption, it the entire reason I'm writing this down at all, I'll explain it later.

That first comment set the stage for an ever speeding emotional roller coaster response from her, until I got made another mistake. I asked her to stop being so emotional, “making mountains out of mole hills. I said “Whenever you get emotional like this you can never see any good in me.” Off course I know that she must only be her truest self, not some idealization of mine, but at that point, I was fed up with what I perceived to be emotions ruining my day. Minutes before she told me how I was “the best soul mate anyone could wish for”, and when I reminded her, she said “That was before you opened your mouth” At this point she was referring to how during the argument I pointedly reminded her that I only asked “Are you having fun with that game?” and not asked for a whole explanation of it - a very cold thing to do. She then decided to behave strictly “rational” with me warning that I wouldn't like it. That's when I admitted to being wrong about asking her to be anything that doesn't feel right for her to be. To be honest, I'd like to see her coldly evaluating two sides of an issue, instead of being really passionate about a single point of view, the emotionally hurtful one. It's something that I myself am learning to do, like admitting that I'm not an easy or fun person to play games with. But she shouldn't do it at the cost of who she really is. No matter how much two people love each other she is not me, and I'm not her, we have to come to terms with our differences.

Now here is why I said what I did, after a flash of memory came back to me. It was unconscious, something I think that I sweep under the rug, but is now coming back to bite me in the ass. Only later, by myself while reflecting on the whole thing, did I remember the exact words before I said “I'm not listening to you.” I remembered saying “I”m only going to tell you this so you don't hold it against me in case I forget and ask you again about this game and you get annoyed at repeating yourself” In a moment of “PR” weakness, frazzled by the urgency in my own head to get out of the house, my long running resentment came out of nowhere. I often ask casual questions like “what's for dinner?” and get a ration of shit for having no memory of what she may or may not have said about dinner before, with me in the room. Its a known deficiency they know – I don't listen very well. I can listen, if I'm making eye contact, really trying to listen. But to follow an idle conversation while I'm busy, or my mind is someplace else, is the hardest mental exercise I've ever had to do in my life. I can do it, but never reliable. I am very resentful of the many times I've been yelled at, like a retarded person being yelled at for being retarded. I't enrages me so much, that if I don't subdue it, I'll start a domestic dispute. So if I ask and I get a funny look, a chuckle or an outright rebuke, I give up. Whatever I'm asking, whatever I should've known, should've listened to is just not worth the trouble. I love Lisa and the family too much, I'd rather be stupid. Lisa was right about Freudian slips, at least this time. What came out was a genuine resentment, even though it was uncalled for in the moment. Honesty doesn't have to come out so nasty, so if I can deal with this problem of listening to idle chat, I won't have to bottle up anger. God... Its not easy, I have to literally transcend the limits of my brain. I really am doing my best.