Post by Nalyd Khezr Bey on Feb 19, 2015 19:44:31 GMT
I'm curious about what tarot decks other members of this forum find relevant to the Typhonian tradition, or what decks are you using and why? And how do you make use of the tarot in your work?
I'll answer that last question first. I primarily use the tarot for skrying within ritual work. The cards are gateways for me and very, very seldom have I ever used the tarot for divination purposes.
Here are the decks I have, most of which I use or plan on using in the near future.
For me there is the first obvious choice of the Crowley-Harris Thoth Tarot which I personally feel was hardwired to conduct both Mercurial and Qliphothic energies making it the ideal deck for everything magical. I've been a long time user of this deck and was exposed to Crowley's The Book of Thoth even before I had an interest in the tarot. I had ordered that book back in 1994 along with a little red copy of Liber AL based solely on the strength of the references to Crowley in James Wasserman's Art and Symbols of the Occult where he called Crowley "the greatest magician of the 20th century" and listed several of his books as well as reproduced all 22 of the major arcana of the Thoth deck along with a few others. This was at a time when I was still feeling my way in the dark as the world of the occult fell into my lap. At that time though I did not make the connection that The Book of Thoth concerned the tarot and thought it was more about something to do with ancient Egyptian ideas of which I was interested in at that time. When the books arrived I went ahead and bought them without knowing anything about them, got them home and was initially disappointed in both. I had no use for a book about tarot cards. By the end of that same year I had somehow made a shift in consciousness to where I not only was on board but had also acquired my first Kenneth Grant book. I think that shift may have been an aftershock of reading Liber AL, the reading of which didn't do anything for me but of course it planted a seed. I only mention all of this to illustrate why this deck has become the most important for me personally.
Another obvious choice is Linda Falorio's Shadow Tarot as it was directly inspired by Grant's ideas in Nightside. I only finally acquired the more recent re-published version of this deck (the full version) this past year after a long time of actually wanting a copy to try out but the price of used decks was always a little outrageous. I think I first came across it online around ten years ago. I had been doing (and still do) my own experiments with Liber 231 utilizing the sigils and the Thoth deck in a variety of set-ups so I became more intrigued by Falorio's deck when I read about its usage in Mishlen Linden's Typhonian Teratomas a few years back. Her approach was quite different than my own and I did adapt some aspects of what she talked about to what I was already doing. So when I heard about the re-publishing of the Shadow Tarot I decided to finally get it to see if anything different could be gleaned from its usage. Well, I haven't taken the time to take it on as of this posting so I can't say. All I can really say about it is that the images of the trumps do resonate with me in a number of ways. In particular I like her rendition of Parfaxitas (the Tower) which portrays LAM as yellow along with several other alien-like entities. I had never really seriously examined the images of this deck until I actually had the copy in my hands so this image was pretty new to me. It is important to me because my own experience working with LAM caused me to paint its mask yellow as well as it being a kind of gateway to communication with a multitude of intelligences that I eventually just names the "architects" upon the realization of what their function may be.
I think Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule's The Book of Kaos is in line with the Typhonian current as well. There is an obvious resonance with the Horus-Ma'at current in this deck which I like. His artistic style also seems very influenced by Austin Spare. Another quality I like about it is that all of the minors contain full scenes just like the trumps which lends itself well to exploring them as such. It is a very oneiric deck and I've approached it in that way with the little bit I've done with it. It has inspired some very lucid dreams.
Now I'm going to go out on a limb with a deck I only discovered this past year and acquired a few months ago called The Lost Tarot created by Dominic Murphy. You can check it out on his website HERE. This one captivated me as soon as I saw it. It is not a typical tarot deck as it consists of 54 major arcana; the first 22 are renditions of the traditional 22 and the rest of the deck consists of "lost" trumps, hence the name. I love this guys artwork overall. I like the nightmarish children's book quality of the style. The images are loaded with symbolism from a variety of traditions, the most obvious on first glance being alchemical. I plan on exploring this deck in detail.
Another out-on-the-limb mention is Austin Spare's two books The Book of Ugly Ecstasy and In the Valley of Fear (and maybe a nod to Earth Inferno*). I mentioned my having worked with these books along these lines recently in THIS THREAD. Though not tarot decks I have long held, quite intuitively, that these sets of images are like grimoires of oracles in a similar fashion as a tarot. In Ugly Ecstasy the images are even numbered 1-22 by Zos himself with an additional 23rd image unnumbered. Of course these images are of an entirely different order than what we find in traditional tarots. As I said, maybe more akin to grimoires but I think they are worth mentioning in this context.
Some decks I don't have but am interested in looking into getting and which I think are in line with Typhonian themes are The Azothoth Tarot (don't know much about it other than being personally attracted to its imagery) and the decks created by Sean Woodward. The latter I was introduced to about a year ago in the book Qliphoth: Opus III where Woodward talks about one of those decks in an article titled "The Living Atua of the Carrefour Tarot" which captivated my interest. I've not immersed myself much in the Voudon Gnostic stuff outside of Grant's discussion of it and having Bertiaux's VGWorkbook on hand as a reference (I have incorporated a few practical things from it into my own practices over the years though) but I have more recently been following a discussion on another forums where a couple of members there had been discussing their experiences working with the Lucky Hoodoo and one of them is utilizing one of Woodward's decks and that caught my interest further. Definitely a note for future investigation.
* I mention Earth Inferno because I have always treated that book as a kind of oracle. I even utilized the "Synopsis of Inferno" diagram as an inspirational basis for a tarot spread I created that correlates with the contents of the rest of the book. This would be one of the few instances of my using the tarot in a divinatory fashion. There are 14 images in the book if one counts the synopsis diagram. 13 of these images seem to comprise a cycle outlined in that diagram that is similar to Joseph Campbell's "hero's journey" mono-myth cycle which lends itself well to viewing it in the same light or complimentary to the major arcana of the tarot.
I'll answer that last question first. I primarily use the tarot for skrying within ritual work. The cards are gateways for me and very, very seldom have I ever used the tarot for divination purposes.
Here are the decks I have, most of which I use or plan on using in the near future.
For me there is the first obvious choice of the Crowley-Harris Thoth Tarot which I personally feel was hardwired to conduct both Mercurial and Qliphothic energies making it the ideal deck for everything magical. I've been a long time user of this deck and was exposed to Crowley's The Book of Thoth even before I had an interest in the tarot. I had ordered that book back in 1994 along with a little red copy of Liber AL based solely on the strength of the references to Crowley in James Wasserman's Art and Symbols of the Occult where he called Crowley "the greatest magician of the 20th century" and listed several of his books as well as reproduced all 22 of the major arcana of the Thoth deck along with a few others. This was at a time when I was still feeling my way in the dark as the world of the occult fell into my lap. At that time though I did not make the connection that The Book of Thoth concerned the tarot and thought it was more about something to do with ancient Egyptian ideas of which I was interested in at that time. When the books arrived I went ahead and bought them without knowing anything about them, got them home and was initially disappointed in both. I had no use for a book about tarot cards. By the end of that same year I had somehow made a shift in consciousness to where I not only was on board but had also acquired my first Kenneth Grant book. I think that shift may have been an aftershock of reading Liber AL, the reading of which didn't do anything for me but of course it planted a seed. I only mention all of this to illustrate why this deck has become the most important for me personally.
Another obvious choice is Linda Falorio's Shadow Tarot as it was directly inspired by Grant's ideas in Nightside. I only finally acquired the more recent re-published version of this deck (the full version) this past year after a long time of actually wanting a copy to try out but the price of used decks was always a little outrageous. I think I first came across it online around ten years ago. I had been doing (and still do) my own experiments with Liber 231 utilizing the sigils and the Thoth deck in a variety of set-ups so I became more intrigued by Falorio's deck when I read about its usage in Mishlen Linden's Typhonian Teratomas a few years back. Her approach was quite different than my own and I did adapt some aspects of what she talked about to what I was already doing. So when I heard about the re-publishing of the Shadow Tarot I decided to finally get it to see if anything different could be gleaned from its usage. Well, I haven't taken the time to take it on as of this posting so I can't say. All I can really say about it is that the images of the trumps do resonate with me in a number of ways. In particular I like her rendition of Parfaxitas (the Tower) which portrays LAM as yellow along with several other alien-like entities. I had never really seriously examined the images of this deck until I actually had the copy in my hands so this image was pretty new to me. It is important to me because my own experience working with LAM caused me to paint its mask yellow as well as it being a kind of gateway to communication with a multitude of intelligences that I eventually just names the "architects" upon the realization of what their function may be.
I think Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule's The Book of Kaos is in line with the Typhonian current as well. There is an obvious resonance with the Horus-Ma'at current in this deck which I like. His artistic style also seems very influenced by Austin Spare. Another quality I like about it is that all of the minors contain full scenes just like the trumps which lends itself well to exploring them as such. It is a very oneiric deck and I've approached it in that way with the little bit I've done with it. It has inspired some very lucid dreams.
Now I'm going to go out on a limb with a deck I only discovered this past year and acquired a few months ago called The Lost Tarot created by Dominic Murphy. You can check it out on his website HERE. This one captivated me as soon as I saw it. It is not a typical tarot deck as it consists of 54 major arcana; the first 22 are renditions of the traditional 22 and the rest of the deck consists of "lost" trumps, hence the name. I love this guys artwork overall. I like the nightmarish children's book quality of the style. The images are loaded with symbolism from a variety of traditions, the most obvious on first glance being alchemical. I plan on exploring this deck in detail.
Another out-on-the-limb mention is Austin Spare's two books The Book of Ugly Ecstasy and In the Valley of Fear (and maybe a nod to Earth Inferno*). I mentioned my having worked with these books along these lines recently in THIS THREAD. Though not tarot decks I have long held, quite intuitively, that these sets of images are like grimoires of oracles in a similar fashion as a tarot. In Ugly Ecstasy the images are even numbered 1-22 by Zos himself with an additional 23rd image unnumbered. Of course these images are of an entirely different order than what we find in traditional tarots. As I said, maybe more akin to grimoires but I think they are worth mentioning in this context.
Some decks I don't have but am interested in looking into getting and which I think are in line with Typhonian themes are The Azothoth Tarot (don't know much about it other than being personally attracted to its imagery) and the decks created by Sean Woodward. The latter I was introduced to about a year ago in the book Qliphoth: Opus III where Woodward talks about one of those decks in an article titled "The Living Atua of the Carrefour Tarot" which captivated my interest. I've not immersed myself much in the Voudon Gnostic stuff outside of Grant's discussion of it and having Bertiaux's VGWorkbook on hand as a reference (I have incorporated a few practical things from it into my own practices over the years though) but I have more recently been following a discussion on another forums where a couple of members there had been discussing their experiences working with the Lucky Hoodoo and one of them is utilizing one of Woodward's decks and that caught my interest further. Definitely a note for future investigation.
* I mention Earth Inferno because I have always treated that book as a kind of oracle. I even utilized the "Synopsis of Inferno" diagram as an inspirational basis for a tarot spread I created that correlates with the contents of the rest of the book. This would be one of the few instances of my using the tarot in a divinatory fashion. There are 14 images in the book if one counts the synopsis diagram. 13 of these images seem to comprise a cycle outlined in that diagram that is similar to Joseph Campbell's "hero's journey" mono-myth cycle which lends itself well to viewing it in the same light or complimentary to the major arcana of the tarot.
