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To: alt.tarot,alt.magick.tyagi,alt.magick
From: tyagi@houseofkaos.abyss.com (nagasiva)
Subject: Re: Emblems/Symbols, Meditation/Reading and Case-workers (was Re: Plotinus, evil, ....)
Date: 26 May 1997 05:50:43 -0700

49970526 AA1  Hail Satan!

brz@u.washington.edu (R Brzustowicz):
#What, no GD fundamentalists?  Too bad.  

hey, you can have that category if you like it. ;>

brz@u.washington.edu (R Brzustowicz):
#>#-- do "author" and "artist" mean anything to you?  

nagasiva :
#>of course....  Jess rejected the 'original artist' phrase, and I 
#>can see why.  you reject 'undefined intelligence', and I agree it 
#>is overly generalized, though it could be applied by those who 
#>have a more loose view of the tarot and its origins (say, of 
#>mythologic character).

brz@u.washington.edu (R Brzustowicz):
#Think of popular Catholic or Hindu devotional pictures -- they are painted
#by some human being (though precisely which human being is generally
#unknown), and they exist within a context of conventional understandings
#and received ideas that 

change


#(if one knows what they are) allow one to go quite a way in saying what 
#such a picture is supposed to mean.

within any given social context.  outside such a context, or given a
transplantation (such as into modern Neopaganism) you cannot continue
to maintain a persistent signification.  this is also true amongst
the oracular tarot readers, and it can have more than just a 'random' 
meaning.


#It is even possible, if one's familiar with a wide variety of such
#pictures, and the context from which they emerge, to notice cases in which
#the painter has misunderstood some conventional motif, or not understood
#that there was anything to understand, and just fudged it -- or changed it
#into something that did make sense.

#(In the same way, knowing how scribes work, it is often possible to see
#claer examples of manuscript errors in which a scribe "corrects" something
#that seemed wrong, but which in fact the scribe just did not understand,
#into something the scribe understands, but which is clearly, to
#someone who knows the history of the text, wrong.)

a very important and valuable discernment, agreed.


#>is it?  isn't 'art history' a very particular perspective on the cards?
#>your comments above about precise deriviations of interpreted meaning
#>strike me as quite close to at least the first phrase in my paragraph.
#>let us say that BOTA (since you and Jess both seem simultaneously to
#>reject Case-BOTA as the Primary Source) is merely a bastion for the GD-
#>inspired Correct Procedural in the use of tarot.  in such a case I have
#>merely missed my mark by degree (by being too exclusive), not altogether.

#But the whole issue of the GD Tarot is a very different one.  It doesn't
#have much to do with the origin of the Tarot emblems, 

I gather that it takes the emblems out of de Gebelin or other usages which
drew from card games in Italy.  that is, it uses the symbols in manners
not originally intended (sound anything like oracles yet?) for its own
purposes and develops these into a systemic process of reflection and
self-exploration.


#or the context in which (as emblems) they were produced.  The two things 
#are almost completely independent of each other.

if this is true then I think it is important to ask why this is the
case (that the origin of the emblems and their integration into a
divination system are independent incidents.


#...I find an *exclusively* "oracular" approach irrelevant to the Tarot 
#(since it can use absolutely anything -- tea leaves, clouds, molten wax 
#thrown into water, the flights of birds, a telephone book, etc -- with 
#equal effectiveness). 

except that tea leaves, clouds, molten wax thrown into water, the flight 
of birds and the telephone book aren't as often seen *as* tools which 
were developed for oracular purpose.  tarot is almost always seen as such.


#When looking at the Tarot, I find it more reqarding to pay attention to 
#the Tarot itself, rather than paying attention *only* to the oracular 
#process.

now that I've made this distinction I would like to abridge it to one
of DEGREE and argue against your usage here.  the development of tarot
includes oracular origins, not the strictly emblematic.  the two are
important elements in tarot reading, each feeding the other in a
developing and living tradition.  my point in bringing up their
division was not to radically-separate them (which I feel that some
such as JK may be doing), but to take a step away from this radical 
separation and appreciate both poles of tarot usage, each an extremity 
and only a portion of the whole range.


#I find the idea that there are only two voices -- a pro-oracular voice and
#an utterly anti-oracular voice -- to be inaccurate, and to lead to rather
#inaccurate reading of what various people (myself included) have been
#writing.

excellent!  thank you for making this known to me.  perhaps we'll begin
to see a broader range of discussion concerning the intersection of these
and how they facilitate one another.

tyagi@houseofkaos.abyss.com)
nagasiva