I was thinking about whether to continue with Chapter 5 of Methods, Mastery, and More in today’s note, or keep that for tomorrow and write about something less weighty first. But in the process, I realized that I couldn’t immediately remember the alchemical term for renewal, so I did a hasty search—and that led me to the sort of journalistic discovery I wish I hadn’t made.
More precisely, I wish the story did not exist. But it does, and that presents a quandary.
After some reflection, I’ve decided to tell that story in tomorrow’s Daily Note. For preview . . . it’s about crime and/or mental illness; “professional” Tarot; international exploitation; and ethical dilemmas. So if you want to explore a dark but true episode, open tomorrow’s newsletter. If you’d just as soon not—well, Tuesday will bring a brighter Note.
In the meantime, I’ve decided to present more of the Chapter 5 material. And by the way, that term I was not-quite-remembering is renovatio, the Latin for “renewal.”
Condensed into a single sentence, Chapter 5 is about (a) the need for a radical shift in consciousness in order to transform the world we have constructed, and (b) ways in which Tarot can be related to that quest.
Which, as I’m thinking about it today, sounds absurdly ambitious, and/or sadly naïve, and/or seriously outdated. Nevertheless, I’ve decided to revisit my original ideas, and share some snips of the process. So here are three quotes to start with:
First, from Robert E. Ornstein’s classic work, The Psychology of Consciousness (1972):
A shift toward a comprehensive consciousness of the interconnectedness of life--toward a relinquishing of the “every man for himself” attitude inherent in our ordinary construction of consciousness--might enable us to take those selfless steps that could begin to solve our collective problems. Certainly our culture has too severely emphasized the development of only one way of organizing reality.
Compare that passage with one written eight decades earlier—making an explicit connection between Tarot and world renewal. Papus, Tarot of the Bohemians (1889):
We are on the eve of a complete transformation of our scientific methods. Materialism has given us all that we can expect from it, and inquirers, though disappointed as a rule, hope for great things from the future, and are unwilling to spend more time in pursuing the path adopted in modern days. Analysis has been carried, in every branch of knowledge, as far as possible, and has only deepened those moats which divide the sciences. Synthesis becomes necessary: but how can we realize it?
The key to this synthesis, Papus believed, was the Tarot--a book containing the lost knowledge of the ancients in a set of simple principles that would explain all the systems, processes, and phenomena in the universe.
Now fast forward again, and notorious provocateur Timothy Leary becomes the first (as far as I know) to connect Tarot with changes in species consciousness. Leary’s The Game of Life (1979) contends that Tarot reveals an evolutionary formula:
Assume that the Tarot symbol-sequence is a message: a scientific formula, an ethological Rosetta stone, with great explanatory and predictive value. . . . We call the Tarot a Neurogenetic script because the numerical system sequence of the cards seems to describe the past twelve metamorphic stages of human evolution and to spell out quite specifically ten (really twelve) later phases involved in extraterrestrial migration.
Leary’s multilayered, shock-valued explanation of the Tarot is at least as arcane and idiosyncratic as that of Papus, and it proceeds from exactly the same assumption—that Tarot contains encoded information which, if understood, could utterly alter our understanding of the world.
More to come.
That’s all for this Note, which clocks in at exactly 3 minutes reading time! C
Timothy Leary, who knew? (Not me, thank you). I wonder if the Tower was in his thoughts. The lightning bolt in astrology takes us back to the Romans who believed that when Uranus was castrated by Saturn, and the old structure of the world fell in a shocking way - two of his children, sheet and forked lightning, both escaped. Yeats was also fascinated by towers and lightning. His Golden Dawn linked the Tower with Mars but in astrology it's more like Mars-Uranus...