The Tuesday Newsletter (9.28)
The "other" Michael Dummett + an Antero Alli time capsule
Starting with some news: I’ve posted an introduction to Michael Dummett’s life and thought. Although it’s not directly about Tarot, I think it provides an interesting background to his writing on that topic. Dummett was one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century, so the fact that he devoted time to studying the iconography and social history of Tarot is fascinating in itself.
As I was polishing up that post, I came across a wonderful back-and-forth regarding Dummett’s approach to Tarot. In 1981, when his book The Game of Tarot was first published, Dame Frances Yates (a legendary authority on Renaissance history and occult philosophy) wrote a detailed response in the New York Review. So of course, Dummett wrote an equally detailed reply. Their exchange is quite interesting—and available to read, with a free registration.
Next item from my list of activities: Making good on a tease I sent out in my recent post about how certain images ended up on a set of gaming cards. The “exceptional website” I mentioned is TarotWheel.net—and here’s the reason it’s taken so long for me to offer that information:
The creator of the website—who uses the name “iolon”—has provided a page for each trump (almost), containing illustrations for a wide variety of early designs. Often they are arranged side by side, so you can see at once several different painted designs and several different printed designs, including sheets as well as decks.
There are also relevant illustrations from non-Tarot sources of the same period, as well as commentaries on iconographic, symbolic, and historical aspects of the particular trump. Though there are several excellent websites devoted to Tarot history, I just haven’t seen this type of comprehensive treatment elsewhere—and I’ve been finding this site extremely useful for comparing a lot of visual data in one place.
The catch is . . . as far as I can figure out, there’s no navigation built into the site that provides direct access to each trump. I don’t know if this was intentional, or just a matter of not done yet—but for ease of use, I’ve made my own “cheat sheet,” with links to each trump page. It’s posted here.
If someone reading the Exploration Project newsletter knows—or is—”iolon,” please convey or accept my appreciation!
Other than identifications for the illustrations, I haven’t read the text portions of the site, so can’t comment on any ideas presented. That’s purposeful, because I’ve been focusing especially on visual aspects, and what happens if you look at Tarot imagery apart from theoretical contexts.
Finally. I’m just starting on the rewrite/update of the last part of the last chapter from the “History” part of Tarot: History, Mystery, and Lore. While looking for a book to check something, I came across another book that I haven’t thought of in ages. I didn’t mention it in HML, and in fact I doubt I owned it then. Somehow, though, I seem to have acquired a first edition, originally owned by “David,” and signed by the author on the title page.
The book is angelTECH: A Modern Shaman’s Guide to Reality Selection, by Antero Alli. It was first published in 1985, with a Preface by Robert Anton Wilson, and has been through many iterations since. Alli and Wilson collaborated in a variety of projects, including the expansion of Timothy Leary’s “eight-circuit model of consciousness.”
I won’t make even the slightest attempt to summarize Alli’s work, except to say that he has written prolifically and has focused his work in recent years on the process of consciousness expansion through ritual practices and personal mythology—constellated in a type of performance art known as “Paratheater.” If you’re curious, see some here.
I also couldn’t begin to summarize angelTECH, except to say that it’s a perfect example of the period in which remnants of Beat philosophy converged with remnants of psychedelic psychology to generate new ideas about Tarot. Leary’s book The Game of Life was published in 1979, with the subtitle “—starring the 24 stages of your neurological tarot.”
Originally, angelTECH was printed in the sort of quasi-mimeo style popularized by the Whole Earth Catalog in 1968. But subsequent printings were somewhat normalized, and the in-your-face cover was replaced with fuzzy New Age art.
References to Tarot are woven throughout the text, but there’s also a collection of pages (hard to call it a chapter!) on making your own Tarot. In the Golden Dawn tradition, Alli insists you much make your own deck—by which he means make up something of your own that bears either a lot or a little relationship to traditional Tarot. Here are the three approaches he suggests:
TRADITIONAL TAROT:
Research the meanings of color. Specifically, the primary, secondary, black, white, brown, silver, grey, and gold colors. Discover the Kabbalistic meanings of the numbers 0-21 and how they relate to the Hebrew alphabet. Designate the correct Astrological symbols for each of the Major Arcana cards. Color code the cards so as to reveal their inter-relationships qualitatively. Read THE TAROT by Paul Foster Case and then, re-read it as if you are designing it another way.NON-TRADITIONAL TAROT: Designate your own meaning to each of the colors mentioned above. Make a list of at least 25 opposites and circle the pairs that are the most charged. Think in terms of contrasts while you are designing, i.e., humor/serious, safe/dangerous, etc., so as to instill your cards with both sides of the story. Naming: Get used to renaming big issues like Death, Rebirth, Sex, etc. in words that are more personal and exciting to yourself.
THE COMBINATION: Look through the Traditional Tarot deck itself and rename the cards according to what you see is a closer articulation of that archetype. Do the same with the images. Envision a more direct and true picture of what that card's all about to you. Don't hesitate to update the imagery a few centuries or. . .put it back a few. Play with Time. Do the research suggested for both Traditional and Non-Traditional Decks.
There are also a few suggestions for collaging your own deck illustrations—which at the time was still a novel idea.
angelTECH is a little like something found in a time capsule, in the sense that it summons up recollections of a bygone period. Not that some ideas about Tarot have not survived from from the 1980s til now, but only in small pockets of interest. I’ve decided (temporarily, at least) to call the Leary/Alli approach “consciousness Tarot,” in contrast to the currently dominant approach—which I’m calling “lifestyle Tarot.”
Although I didn’t write about consciousness Tarot in History, Mystery, and Lore, I did include it a little in Tarot: Methods, Mastery, and More. Here’s the main reference:
“Shuffling and dealing the tarot cards is like scrambling and rearranging by chance the numbered elements in the Periodic Table of Elements. OK, you deal out the element cards and find that Carbon initiates you, Iridium crosses you, Cadmium is beneath you, Strontium is behind you, Titanium is before you, Germanium is your hopes and fears, and Radium is what will come.”
That’s from Timothy Leary, and his point is that divination by chemical elements would be just as effective as Tarot or any other method if it led the questioner to look at his life in a new way—say, in terms of molecules, electron shells, quantum leaps, magnetic charges, and so on.
The real significance of Tarot, Leary contends in his book The Game of Life, depends on the user's understanding of what he calls the “scientific neurogenetic” meaning of the cards.
“If the cards are interpreted in a simple system of good-for-me/bad-for-me, then one can only be resigned to living out ethical dramatics and hive soap operas,” he warns.
Now that I’ve revisited Leary’s “Periodic Tarot” riff, I’m remembering how much I like it!
More to say on that—but for now, out of time.
As always, thanks for reading. Will hope to follow up on Thursday.
Warmest regards, Cynthia