Something strange in the AO Tarot

I was going through my pile of NISI AO manuscripts to help a friend with a research project and I found something a little surprising.

In amongst the knowledge papers was a list of the titles of tarot cards and their numbering (see picture). It is important to realise that this was post Golden Dawn and Samuel Mathers was fully entitled to break with tradition. However, he was extremely pleased with his contribution to the Golden Dawn tarot and particularly the numbering and allocations to the paths.

Given that these paths are now considered standard, it seems a little odd that Mathers' AO appeared to go back on them and returned to the traditional system.

There are some other interesting things on this list, including the alternative title for the Judgement card as “The Angel” and the more traditional “Fortitude” for “Strength.”

But the flipping of Justice and Strength is the biggest eye opener. Given that this was a knowledge paper, it would have meant that all the AO students would have copied it and had to memorise it.

One does wonder if Mathers had started to use “blinds” in the outer order so that his students would effectively have been knobbled from using his knowledge until they had been around long enough for him to trust him.   If that was the case he would have had to have given them a corrected numbering later, or maybe he had simply abandoned his old theory.   

Still, it is surprising that this reversion back to the traditional numering and the flipping of Strength and Justice by the AO has not been noticed before.

Unpublished AO and Golden Dawn Alchemical diagrams

I was reviewing some of the unpublished AO documents I have  to see if there were any noticeable differences from either the later Stella Matutina versions.  These two diagrams come from the early AO and the Nisi collection, which formed the basis of my Mathers' Last Secret and King Over the Water  book.  Since it was different from the Stella Matutina versions printed by Pat Zalewski in his Golden Dawn Rituals and Commentary Book, I thought that readers of my blog might appreciate it.  The diagrams are simpler than the Whare Ra versions which now appear to be a later development.
These two diagrams were shown to the candidate during the 2=9 ritual and they provide a somewhat strange attribution of the metals to the Tree of Life.   In Whare Ra students were given a copy of Westcott's translation of Aesch Mezareph which was supposed to explain it. It does not very well.
The two diagrams actually show two stages of the great work, but it is not explained how this is useful.  The Nisi document header seems to suggest that Mathers was trying to show how the different metals could be placed on the tree to show different things. However it doesn't really do that either.
Quoting his teacher, Jack  Taylor, Zalewski said that Mrs Felkin refused to remove the diagrams from the ritual.  He suggests that it might be only there to encourage students to study Aesch Mezareph.  But in my opinion the diagrams presentation might be magical.  They are placed in the South West and shown to the candidate by the Hierus before the Hegemon shows the candidate the geometric shapes diagram.
One of the things that I have noticed is that the candidate's sphere of sensation changes when exposed to these two diagrams.
One of the reasons why Felkin did not want the diagrams changed or removed is that they were forcing the sphere of sensation into an alchemical process.  In otherwords the diagrams were not meant to be understood intellectually, but their symbolism accepted.  The fact that the are shown the diagram by the Mars  and fire orientated Hierus would be significant to that process.
Regardie never saw this diagram during his initiation.  When he was initiated into the Bristol temple it was one of many which had been removed and set aside for "later study."  Thus he would have missed out on any magical exposure to these tablets.  As an alchemist he would have looked at them later and wonder what the hell they meant really.  

Organised religion who gets involved?

I generally have a problem with organised religion as prefer not having to outsource too much of my thinking to someone else and being a triple leo I don't like the idea of being told what to do.  It is not as if I hate any religion.  I actually find them fascinating, it is just that settling on one Organised one gives me a headache. All religions as having an element of truth in them, but they also contain huge amounts of bullshit which appears to come from the fact that their original founding premise was a little screwed.

I was watching a BBC programme about religion and it touched on several of the points I find weak about the whole experience. Religions seem to identify problems which we may not have and offer solutions that we don't actually need.

The Christian problem "solved by Christ.  But sin requires you to believe in
it even more than you believe in Christ,

For example, Christianity creates the problem that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. This sin can be removed by a faith in Jesus Christ who died so you can be forgiven. But surely the real answer to this is not to think “how can I escape from this terrible sin problem?” but rather to say that the whole concept is rather silly. It requires me to first believe in a God that punishes me for the actions of a mythical ancestor and then states that I need to be forgiven. If someone tries to lock me away because the British did bad things in India, I would fight the unjust nature of the thing. I would not buy into a system that would allow me to be forgiven for the blame.

The Wheel of Birth and Death only keeps rolling when you see it as a problem
in the first place.

Hindu and Buddhism strikes a similar problem. Those faiths say we are trapped in a wheel of birth and death and must re-incarnate until we become enough like god. The cure is to remove all those desires and things that make us human so that we can transcend the wheel. But a much simpler approach is possible. Since the problem has been created by the idea that the wheel of birth and death exists, it is better not to believe in it at all. Who was it that came up with a silly idea in the first place... er the Hindus who invented a religion to over come something that might not exist. Buddha simply came up with another way to escape that wheel.

Judaism was created on the premise that a particular god had chosen one tribe of nomads and was going to look after them and give them a promised land. All they had to do was lop their foreskins off and obey some rules.

The only problem was that the God had decided that this Promised Land happened to be on a part of the world which was the main road for almost every blood-thirsty empire that the world created. Egyptians, Hittites, Persians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, and Mongols, Christians all have past through the area and left their boot marks firmly on Jewish heads. Not only did the Jewish god seemed to forget to protect his people he claimed it was a punishment. As a result, Jewish believers who have piously followed the original premise have spend several thousand years being kicked around the world. When they get their Promised Land back they have placed their faith in arms and nukes which sort of defeats the purpose.

Obey or die and you will get to live in the arse end of the
world where everyone will want to kill you.

It would have better off if they said actually this Promised land is not that great and if you are not going to protect us we will go to another God. They should have known better as the first act of their new God, after giving them the law was to slaughter huge numbers of them who happened to be worshipping Apis and his next few acts involved making them walk around the desert in circles for forty years.

These problems are those which monothestic religions face. This was a problem with the Greco-roman state religions too. They were based on the fact that if you did not respect the Gods then they would make life unpleasant for you. It was also possible that if you did them a few favours they might look after you. This seems logical, but then when you release that there were a lot of Gods it was difficult to find out which one you have pissed off. It was easier to belong to a different religion where that God was not recognised so you couldn't hack one off.

My point is that most of the organised religions were founded to solve problems that they themselves created. They all, to some measure, reflect the fears of the society at the time they were created and as we say in the Golden Dawn “fear is failure.” This fear was one of the reasons why Christianity defeated the more heady mystery cults and Neo-Platonism. Ordinary people found them too hard and they were desperate for something simple that would provide them with some security.

Anne Davies: You can tell an adept by whether they
 accept all races  as part of the One Thing.
Of course that does not apply to gay people
 they need fixing.  I need a chicken sandwich is there a place
I can get one? 

This is why modern occultists need to find their own answers to religious questions and why it is impossible to judge another person's solutions. It is also why you cannot spit hate at another person's religion and use it as a definition of “other.” Anne Davies once said that a good test of whether someone was an adept or not was how much bile they spit at another's race. This was good counsel only for the perfect as Anne had a problem with homosexuality and believed that gay people were broken and could not become adepts until they were healed!

But Davies' point is correct. You cannot experience state of unity that an adept is supposed to have and claim that another human else must be separate from that. Nor can you claim that your race or religion is superior to another because they are all an expression of the One Thing.

More negatively they are all pretty silly when contrasted with the reality of that which is ultimately unknowable. How you approach that unknowing is your spiritual path. Practically it does not require you to sign up to any religion ancient or modern.  It just requires you to form your own ideas and relationship with the One Thing.