Turning Things Around: The Inner Tarot Revolution Week 18
To Dare
Welcome to Week 18 of The Inner Tarot Revolution! I’m happy (and relieved) to report that this week’s entry has a lot more in store than one might think. In contrast with the previous two weeks, this week’s cards were seemingly innocuous enough when I first turned them over that I had no problem at all forgetting about them throughout the course of the week.
As it happens, Preconditions to the Primary Utterance, published just this morning, makes for an excellent companion piece to this post.
Chronologically speaking, the very first post on this site that I wrote (although it was ported from a previous site, Gogo’s World of Ruin) was my review of Don Webb’s How to Become A Modern Magus: A Manual For Magicians of All Schools. If you read the review, you’ll see that although Ipsissimus Webb apparently believed enough in me to let me read a review copy of the book months in advance of its release, I didn’t even believe enough in myself to finish the thing; I discuss how, after a few hard-hitting chapters, I set the book down for quite a while. This story takes place during that hiatus, about a month before I got my shit together, finished the book, and wrote the review. By the time you’re finished reading this post, you’ll understand the connection between those facts.
Last year, my fiancée, Veronica, got a job offer at what was, for me, the worst possible time: The same exact day I got a job offer. Why was this a problem? Because unlike my job about a mile away from my house, her job was in Texas, and she took it hands-down, without even telling me she had applied. I found out about it all after it was a done deal; and this is why I’m moving to Texas in about 10 days.
Her new job is at a nationwide law firm with offices all over the country, and in November, the firm sent her on a business trip to their Chicago office. As part of this, they put her up at a very nice hotel, and so the two of us had a nice little “staycation.”
Wait until you see what was hanging in the lobby upon check-in:
Any readers who haven’t been following along for a while who don’t get the reference should read My Cousin Vine and then they’ll be on the right track. Long story short: I impulsively threw together a working to bind the demon Vine to my will. Vine is a demon who is considered a King of hell and he takes the form of an anthropomorphic lion riding a black horse. So, he’s a “Lion King.” And I had (perhaps presumptuously) called upon him to help me rid “my” city of The Priestess, as if I were the “King” of this berg.
(To be honest, the results don’t necessarily argue with the premises—she’s living far outside the city limits now).
So I saw this and, after I almost fainted, I laughed and then took a picture. Just wait. Wanna see what was just on the opposite side of this very wall? The establishment next door?
Yes; The Lion King happened to be running at The Cadillac Palace Theater. Right. Next. Door.
As any readers who are sufficiently familiar with the big picture unfolding on this site might imagine, before we even made it into our room, my head was already swimming with the weight and import of the moment. I’m going to use the word again: It was “auspicious.”
In Week 16 of this series, I mentioned this little vacation briefly, along with a podcast that I’ve had trouble listening to because of how hot and heavy the synchs are on the show, and they tend to hit me right in the Shadow, to boot. It often feels like the show is directly mocking me. I started listening to it again because dealing with it is a good way to build the kind of resilience I am going to need, because when a person reaches a certain point in esoteric work, this is just how life is. This, in short, is the reality of Choronzon.
Hardly anyone believes it’s even possible until it happens to them, either. I’ve spent my whole life reading about this shit, and after having lived in this state now for a couple of years, I’m really only getting comfortable accepting the reality for what it is.
Anyway, the name of the podcast is Unpopular Opinion (it changed its name to You Don’t Even Like This Podcast just in time for our move down to Texas), and the host has a Substack called In Broad Daylight; if you check out Veronica’s profile on this site, you’ll see that aside from this one, it’s the only other Substack she currently follows, and I am pretty sure she did that just to fuck with me. I mean, she does like it. A lot. I turned her onto it. There’s another interesting tie here back to yesterday’s post, and it’s that I started listening to Unpopular Opinion every week while I was living at the YMCA in 2016. I can sincerely credit Adam Tod Brown and his hand-built media network with inspiring me to believe enough in myself to do what I am doing here. Neat, right?
Anyway, the November 21st episode is important and relevant (and eerily-timed) here because in it, at around the 40-minute Mark, A.T.B. begins to discuss a story involving The Order of Nine Angles. For those who don’t know, the ONA is, in so few words, a Satanic organization with a definite neo-Nazi spin. Their mere existence highlights one of the most problematic aspects of Anton Szandor LaVey and his legacy: In its original, unaltered form as espoused by LaVey, Satanism provides a platform and a cozy little nesting place for straight-up fascist fucks to plan and perpetrate some dangerous shit. In the story they cover, a member of the organization leaked sensitive information about troop movements in hopes of causing a terrorist attack.
Outcomes like this are one of the reasons it’s so important that Michael A. Aquino did what he did in founding Temple of Set. His philosophical vision was much deeper than LaVey’s, his understanding of the magic(k)al currents played with by LaVey much more advanced and refined. Frankly, Aquino was just a much more decent human being than Anton LaVey. One of the most important consequences of his Utterance of the Word “Xeper” and the foundation of the Temple of Set was the explicit introduction of ethics to the platform of individual sovereignty and empowerment established by LaVey. This is different from the more moral as opposed to ethical thrust of lists like “The Nine Satanic Statements” or “The Eleven Satanic Rules of the Earth.” However, to be fair, lists like these are often good to use as bases for an ethical stance.
Ragnar Redbeard’s doctrine of “Might Is Right”—which was heavily plagiarized to form the first chapter of The Satanic Bible, the Book of Satan—was done away with out of recognition of the fact that if you condone hatred and oppression, you don’t really believe in the sovereignty of individuals, because true individual sovereignty can’t abide while other people are attacking you and holding you down. If you really believe in the sovereignty of the individual as a philosophical principle, rather than a weak excuse to just do whatever the fuck you want, then you recognize that your own freedom needs to be balanced with the freedom of other people to also flourish and be themselves.
How did Aquino accomplish what he did? I’ll tell you what he didn’t do: He didn’t ask Anton LaVey’s permission. He put his magic(k)al principles to the test and simply got busy doing the work of seizing the Black Flame for himself. In gang parlance, he tagged all over LaVey’s shit…just walked up to the wall and added his own can of Krylon to the work in progress.
And since I was staying right there in Chicago, I knew what I had to do next to further the development of my own Word.
I selected the date of November 23rd on purpose for its resonance with Robert Anton Wilson’s ideas on the number; the whole Sirius, Illuminati thing.
Setting out from the hotel, I went on a magic drift to the John Hancock Tower, entered through the basement, bought a ticket for the skydeck, went up to the top, and took photos of each of the windows marked with the cardinal directions.
What was I doing?
I was tagging all over LaVey’s shit. He saw that building as his own monument, evidence of his work and legacy on this planet; so I climbed up there myself, called the quarters my own, and shared the photos to Facebook. With a basis in the Semiotic Theory of Magic, the act of going up there with the intention I held and sharing the fact to the world on Facebook was a magic(k)al working meant to “usurp LaVey’s throne.” His Word of Indulgence, which sat upon that throne, went out into the world and the Word of Xeper was its result. My own Word, in turn, issues forth as a consequence. This working brought the magic(k)al current “full circle” (funny because the name of the Skydeck there is “Chicago 360”) back home to roost, but with the added overlay of the Aeon of Set. In so many words, Chicago was a LaVey town until I added my “metaphysical graffiti” to the picture. At least, that’s the theory I was working with.
I had not yet read Temple of Set at the time, but what I was doing there was basically seizing what Michael Aquino himself described in that book as “the Infernal Mandate,” or the “mantle” of Satan’s “deputy” on Earth.
Theoretically, there’s a “give-and-take” to such things; Satan taps certain people for certain “projects,” but owing to Satan’s nature and the nature of such “projects,” the mandate must also be positively claimed.
One must take it by storm.
This is a built-in “filter” because if you aren’t the kind of person who would steal something like the Black Flame from someone like Satan, you also wouldn’t use it to its full potential. It would honestly be wasted on someone who simply waited for it to “happen to them.”
Anyhow, after my ceremony, I visited the souvenir shop and bought a metal desktop figurine of the Hancock Tower and a t-shirt with a triangular logo pretty damn reminiscent of that there Illuminati eyeball (as well as the Triforce in Zelda; by the way, when I did this, the events I described in the post The Wisdom Eye had already taken place, and that whole thing was in my mind as I did it, too).
Anyway. Let’s get to cards, as finishing the story sort of relies on the context they bring to the picture.
Top/Sun Card
This week’s Top Sun Card, 8 of Wands: Swiftness, is basically the Thoth deck’s most direct expression of The Semiotic Theory of Magic as it was used in the working described above, which is….pretty neat. And the first thing I want to point out about this card is the rainbow arching over the top, because I think it’s really fun that the same Word I was Uttering in that working is what eventually led to the establishment of The Rainbow Flame, and that this card falls on the post I add to cap off the first week of Pride Month this year. In the year 20….23. I am telling you, I am the bearer of the Psychedelic Flame and I mean that shit! This is half true. I didn’t want to speak for the lady at the time, but there is another.
The second thing I want to point out about it is that it governs the first 10 degrees of the sign of Sagittarius, which corresponds with the dates November 23rd (!) through December 2nd.
From DuQuette’s chapter on the card in Understanding Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot:
If this card doesn’t electrocute you, it may tickle you to death. Harris departs dramatically from the Golden Dawn model, and offers us a portrait of energy becoming matter: “Light-wands turned into electrical rays, sustaining or even constituting Matter by their vibrating energy.”
p. 220
So let’s look at one of the ways this working manifested from energy into matter.
When I bought that little figurine of the Hancock Tower, I specifically did so with the intention of doing another magic(k)al working, connected with the one in-progress, that I had decided would be a of a Self-Initiatory nature; it would be the physical representation of the manifestation of my Word that I was already setting in motion by being there in the first place. I also remind the reader that I had set aside my reading of Don Webb’s Modern Magus.
Chapter 9 of that book, named Set, deals with two soul-parts derived from ancient Egyptian belief and practice: The Kat and the Akh. The Kat is the physical body and needs no further explanation. The Akh, by contrast, is called “the Effective Body” and it is the sum total and synthesis of all of the other bodies. We aren’t born with one, we have to establish one (and Don Webb tells us how in the book). This is important because the Akh is the soul-part that confers immortality in the afterlife and allows us to travel the stars after our Kat gives way. Last week’s Top Sun Card, the Chariot, is essentially the tarot card corresponding with the Akh.
According to Webb:
The first three dynasties of Egypt were strongly fixed in the Akh cult, which imagined a stellar afterlife. In later dynasties, the afterlife was seen to be Osiris’s kingdom or in the Barque of Re. The cult of the Akh was remanifested on Earth in 1904 when Set said to Aleister Crowley: “Every man and every woman is a star!” This is why Crowley’s work is so important to Western magic, but the star cult had existed in many shamanic traditions since the New Stone Age.
p. 285
In the chapter, Webb provides a ritual to Consecrate a Symbol of Aspiration, which would be one major step toward the establishment of one’s Akh (my understanding is that the Symbol of Aspiration will serve as a physical anchor for the Akh during life and beyond). As it turns out, an object like my little desktop figurine of the Hancock Tower is the perfect object recommended by Webb for a Symbol of Aspiration. He himself used a desktop figurine of the Great Pyramid instead of a skyscraper. Close enough, right?
Shadow Card
This week’s Top Shadow Card is 5 of Swords: Defeat. Not a fun card to get in a reading, huh?
Before I discuss the card’s symbolism and how it fits into the big picture here, I want to quickly get the Shadow aspect out of the way because it’s not at all complicated: This card appears in my Shadow Stack for two reasons. One of them is that, as I work toward fulfilling my purpose here on Earth, I too easily feel the sting of defeat, often before it’s even an objectively real thing. My self-doubts have been horrendous over the years. However, I never stay down for too long. I always bounce back! So it could be said that this card is in my Shadow Stack because Defeat is simply “Not-me.” I don’t quit. I’m determined to do what I came here to do. Defeat is not an option. The rest of this post will highlight why it’s so important.
This card is tied in deep ways to yesterday’s post, War Magic(k)* (a post I have since removed for ethical reasons), in a few ways, but most unnerving is that yesterday was D-Day.
In the Thoth cards that fall under the suit of Swords, there is a repeating motif of the “wings” in the background, the “windmill-like” designs made of lines and sharp angles. DuQuette comments on the fact that some of the designs really look like swastikas, and on how Lady Frieda Harris painted this card “at the height of England’s struggle with Nazi Germany.” He suggests that this is anything but coincidental.
This has chilling ties to the mention of the Order of Nine Angles in the very podcast episode that led me to do the working discussed in this post. My Word—logoic carrier as it is of the Rainbow Flame—stands against such forces as are represented by these extremists. And right now, though it’s nowhere near as literal as World War II was, the esoteric world is in the middle of a war where those are basically the battle lines.
From DuQuette:
Venus rules Aquarius and, for a moment, she is very happy to have him as her date. After all, they’re both pacifists. They are a friendly, mellow, and sentimental couple. Unfortunately, this sensitive pair has shown up at the wrong party. A terrible fight has broken out in a very rough and well-armed area of Qabalahville—Geburah, the House of Mars, which is located in Yetzirah (the world of Swords).
Naturally, Venus and Aquarius volunteer to be peacemakers, but they are just too nice, too peaceful, too weak to handle themselves in this violent neighborhood. The inevitable result is Defeat. Sorry kids. I hear things are quieter down in Tiphareth.p. 246