#stories from alt.tarot

[queen-susans-revenge]

I don’t have time to do it right now but one of these days I really need to write down everything I learned from alt.tarot back in the day Some of it is about tarot but more of it is about how to fight with people on the Internet. I was reminded re-reading the Dickwolf Discourse and how Mike’s hard-won lesson from that is that he could have Just Stopped much earlier. Just Stopping is a great skill that I learned through many bruising fights on Usenet and specifically alt.tarot. See, most people who think they are Knowledgeable About Tarot in fact are Jon Snows to the subject: they know nothing. The received wisdom on tarot is complete garbage; you can easily spend years and read dozens of published books and come away believing things like “tarot was invented by gypsies and contains secret wisdom smuggled out from the fall of the Library of Alexandria.” Insert Luke Skywalker gif: every part of that is wrong. Playing cards were actually invented by the Chinese, reached Europe around 1360, and in the middle of the fifteenth century Italian nobles started using tarot decks to play a trick-taking game resembling bridge. The so-called Major Arcana, or trump cards, were mostly drawn from Petrarch’s poem I Trionfi which translates to “The Triumphs” (triumph=trump). I Trionfi was enormously popular, especially in Italy, and you see imagery from it everywhere during the time period and all kinds of card decks using it. (Looks down at wall of text I have just produced. Whelp. Time for a read-more!)

So almost nobody knows this basic fact, that the structure of the Major Arcana and a lot of the imagery on the cards comes from Petrarch originally. Instead they spend years reading dumb newage books that all regurgitate the same content, like, “Death doesn’t mean death, it means change.” To Petrarch, and to the Renaissance Italians, and to the likes of Waite and Crowley, Death literally meant death. Now they all believed that there were things like Christian faith that could triumph over/trump even death: Petrarch’s poem is structured like a Roman triumphal parade except with metaphysical forces involved, so like the great conquering emperor is brought low by the power of love, and the lovers in turn are brought low by the power of chastity, and the chaste in turn are brought low by the power of death, but death is conquered by fame, and fame is conquered by time, and time is conquered by the eternal Kingdom of God. This is the basic procession that you see in the trump cards. And yes this does mean that tarot was also explicitly Christian, from the beginning, and remained so even as the robes-and-wands set started appropriating Jewish kabbalah and mapping tarot onto it. That happened in the eighteenth century, in France. The two dudes responsible are Antoine Court de Gébelin and M. le Comte de Mellet, two more names that most people who think they know a lot about tarot will never have heard of. The line goes from them through Eliphas Levi, Papus, Wirth, those guys, through to Waite and then Crowley. Now all these dudes were occultists, and occult means clandestine, hidden, secret, so as you might expect they were not at all good at clearly explicating their beliefs. Back on alt.tarot I used to use a Waite quote as my signature: “Superfluities and interpretations notwithstanding, it is directly, or indirectly, out of the recent view, thus tentatively designated, that the consideration of the present thesis emerges as its final term, though out of all knowledge thereof.” (That’s from The Hidden Church of the Holy Graal. It’s all like that.) So, it’s definitely not their fault that most people don’t know about Petrarch and kabbalah and what Crowley really meant when he made such a big goddamn deal about how “Tzaddi is not The Star.” Even when the likes of Crowley or Waite did write books supposedly detailing the meaning of the symbolism of their decks, they threw in lots of misdirection and outright lies “to mislead the uninitiated.” Kabbalah is the key, they’ll tell you, but they won’t tell you that they used it as an athbash--forward and back, just like the Fool’s Journey goes both up and down the Tree of Life; divine power can be called down into Malkuth, the physical world, but one born into Malkuth can also ascend to Kether, unmediated experience of the divine. (So The Star is both Tzaddi and Heh.) Anyway, if you can’t trust the newage books and you can’t trust the occult books, are there any good books on tarot? Yes, there are two: Gertrude Moakley's groundbreaking (and out of print) book The Tarot Cards Painted by Bonifacio Bembo for the Visconti-Sforza Family: An Iconographic and Historical Study, and the equally groundbreaking and equally out of print Rhapsodies of the Bizarre, a collection of essays by Court de Gébelin and M. le Comte de Mellet, with translation and commentary by J. Karlin, the terror of alt.tarot. Jess Karlin was not his real name. He knew more about tarot than, I gradually came to believe, anyone else in the world. He was a jerk, and proud of being a jerk: Thelema is a religion of war, he said, and he came not to affirm but to destroy. He was my teacher, and he taught me a lot, and I tried to repay him both with money and by acknowledging the debt whenever the subject comes up, like now. One of the things he taught me was how to learn from someone who is giving you an actual answer but insulting you while they do it. (Try ignoring the insult and saying thank you, for the answer. They may have more to teach.) I say Karlin knew more than anyone else in the world because the academics after Moakley were disappointing; the field became dominated by playing card historian Michael Dummett, who was so invested in debunking the occultists that he really doubled down on trying to argue that no link between tarot and fortune-telling existed before the French guys came along. Which is stupid, because the links between games of chance and systems of divination have always been super tight--Fate and Luck are the same damn bitch. And you can find (and Karlin did find) very early references to witchcraft performed with playing cards. So because the playing card historians would have nothing to do with the occultists, and Karlin was doing these serious deep dives into formerly-untranslated eighteenth century French occult texts and even earlier stuff, he ended up understanding the iconography and symbolism of tarot way better than the people like Dummett who were much too serious to touch the occult traditions. That was another thing Karlin taught me: that academic consensus can sometimes be just as wrong as newage gobbledegook, and it really is possible, when you start doing deep dives into niche subjects, to outstrip the experts. Sometimes it’s not just possible but frighteningly easy. Anyway, he knew a ton--and he knew it in a field where the vast majority of people think they understand the material, but are very wrong. I think this had the effect of making him quite crabby. Some people came to alt.tarot saying they wanted to learn tarot; and those people, J. Karlin was willing to teach, although he might yell at them some for believing stupid things, if they did. And they probably did--I remember being twenty-one, a shiny new-minted college graduate, proud of my A in an undergraduate Quantum Mechanics For Non Physics Majors class, trying out some “maybe fortunetelling is a quantum effect” angle and getting my ass handed to me, deservedly so. But many, many more people came to alt.tarot back in the day thinking they already knew tarot. And they very much did not want to be corrected. They just thought the cards looked cool and they were perfectly content with their own “I’ll just intuit what I think the cards mean” approach to tarot. And to those people, Karlin was a relentless asshole. Because the symbols did in fact have an original meaning, and it is possible to trace the evolution of the iconography through time, and in fact all those centuries of artists and writers and...I dunno, warlocks and whatnot...working on the cards has created a much, much, much deeper and richer symbolic framework than what most people can make up off the tops of their heads just by looking at a random image from The Tarot of the Cat People or whatever. So that was maybe the first important thing he taught me: there is a truth. Even in symbolic matters, even in stuff that was all “just made up” at some point, it is possible to distinguish what’s important and true from what’s just people spouting off the tops of their dumb heads. And fourth or fifth was that if you argue with someone long enough and you find yourself getting boxed into a corner, fighting desperately to support propositions you’re not even quite sure how you ended up needing to defend, you can just...stop. Usually that’s the cleanest and clearest path. Karlin would not let people save face and he would not let them have the last word: if they were wrong, they’d either have to admit it, or they’d have to flounce off to another Usenet group, orrrr...they’d have to learn how to fucking shut up. It’s a good skill to have. I learned it in alt.tarot, being wrong a lot. I had many fights with Jess Karlin on alt.tarot. But to my knowledge I was the only one from that group that he offered to formally initiate into Thelema. If I have siblings in this lineage I don’t know them; and I never considered myself a Thelemite, even after the initiation. But I have tried to pass on what he taught me. Crowley wrote that the adept “must teach; but he may make severe the ordeals” and I always sort of thought Karlin was living by that principle. At the same time he liked to point out that it’s not necessary to hide your pearls from swine: they won’t take ‘em no matter how brightly you polish and how neatly you letter the sign, FREE PEARLS OF WISDOM, PLEASE TAKE. My worst fights with J. Karlin were always when I was trying to do something nice for him. I still wince remembering when I tried to give him a copy of Alan Moore’s Promethea; that ended with us not speaking for several years. So if he reads this he’ll probably be mad at me all over again but anyway he eventually started using his real name, Glenn Wright, for his Internet writings instead of the Karlin nym. He hops around websites too fast for me to keep track, but as recently as 2015 he had a blog on Tumblr​. Sometimes he offers tarot readings for sale--one card, yes or no question only. I recommend these without question whether you “believe” in tarot or not. (I’ve grown out of my quantum woo days and I don’t now think the cards are anything but a fantastic system for self-reflection). This is super long so I’m gonna stop now. Maybe it’ll do for that “what I learned from alt.tarot” post I always meant to make.