We all live in our own parallel universe. Everyone in the audience sees me from a slightly different angle to everyone else. Each angle is unique since you all occupy your own space. Tonight, I am here to talk about the Thoth Tarot. Everyone here has their own unique perspective on the Thoth Tarot, but you are here to listen to me talk on the subject. This relationship between me, you, and the Thoth Tarot is a Hegelian Dialectic.
So, parallel universes, space, and the Hegelian dialectic are the topics for tonight.
Crowley says:
“He succeeded in uniting under the Schema of the Holy Qabalah, of which the Tarot is the greatest single element, all philosophical and magical soever, including that of the Chinese. This, and his “Naples Arrangement” are with little doubt his greatest achievements in scholarship.”
Speaking of Lady Frieda Harris:
“She accordingly forced him “the laziest man in three continents! “to undertake what is to all intent an original work, including the latest discoveries in modern science, mathematics, philosophy, and anthropology; in a word, to reproduce the whole of his Magical Mind pictorially on the skeleton of the ancient Qabalistic tradition.”
Note that Crowley does not mention Thelema here. It is such a surprise, but after we have discussed the background to the prediction he makes, we will see why.
The inspiration for tonight’s talk comes from a prediction Aleister Crowley made in the Book of Thoth:
“It is significant that Riemann, Bolyai and Lobatchewsky seem to have been the mathematical prophets of the New Revelation.”
Who are these people? Bolyai and Lobatchewsky are mathematicians who believed there was another geometry beyond Euclidean geometry, but they never proved it. Bernhard Riemann created the new geometry that did away with the Parallel Postulate. This happened in 1852. Riemannian geometry is all about space, curved surfaces and multiple dimensions.
In 1904, Einstein was working on his Special Theory of Relativity, but he had a problem. He did not have the mathematical formulae to make his theory work, and it was not until someone showed him Riemann’s theorems that he had the answer. Space-time geometry is Riemannian. Einstein’s theories held sway until until the beginning of the 1930s when Quantum Mechanics was king. Quantum Mechanics was so accurate that science thought it could answer the ultimate questions about universe.
In 1942, when Crowley wrote the Book of Thoth, Quantum Mechanics still ruled the scientific roost. What is remarkable about Crowley’s prediction is that in 1988, Stephen Hawking in his A Brief History of Time was able to dismiss theories that had multiple dimensions, but at the start of the 21st century, physicists are scrambling to learn Riemannian geometry as it is at the heart of Superstring Theory and M Theory.
String Theory has a vibrating string that is at the Planck Scale. String Theory requires particular numbers to make it work. This is a unique concept in physical theories. The significant numbers are 10, 16, 26 and 32, which are familiar to Kabbalists. String Theory has 10 dimensions, but there are five different theories, which is embarrassing to say the least. Scientists were struggling to incorporate 11 dimensional Super-gravity into the system, and it was not until they eventually gave in and decided to add an extra dimension and magically all five theories were united with 11 dimensional Super-gravity into one unit, named a brane. There is no space or time in M Theory. M Theory unites the four forces of nature: Strong force, Weak force, Quantum Mechanics and Gravity, but what is remarkable is that it is a mathematical and geometrical theory. This is important. Crowley predicted Riemann as a mathematical prophet.
There is a problem with M Theory. Gravity is not as strong as it should be according the calculations, so someone postulated that perhaps there could be another brane, where gravity leaked from it into our universe. So, if there could be two branes, why not an infinite number of branes? Now it seems that we have an infinite number of parallel universes all slightly different. There is a universe where David Seaman tips the free kick over the bar in the Brazil game. There is a universe where Tony Blair is a socialist. We are now in the realms of topology, all these universes or branes have a form, and they all work at the Planck Scale. There has always been a problem with the Big Bang that happened 15 billion years ago. Scientists can calculate what happens to within a billionth of a second what happened after the Big Bang, but they cannot say how the Big Bang happened. With M Theory, scientists believe they have the answer. It seems that before the Big Bang, two universes or branes came a bit too close, and touched. The collision of the two worlds resulted in the Big Bang. Now we know where all the matter came from that created us! It was the result of a cosmic Hegelian Dialectic.
The works of Riemann inspired the Projective Synthetic Geometry of Rudolf Steiner. There was a school of Projective Synthetic Geometry in London and Lady Frieda Harris was despatched by Aleister Crowley to study the system. She was quite open with the teachers; they knew she wanted to incorporate the geometrical designs on Crowley’s Thoth Tarot. Remarkably, even though her teachers disapproved of Crowley and his system of Thelema they approved and even helped her with the designs!
So far we have discussed Riemann, his profound influence on science over the last 150 years, and we have seen that Aleister Crowley and Frieda Harris went out of their way to include geometry in the Thoth Tarot. The Hegelian Dialectic is structured into the Book of Thoth as well.
I first came across the Hegelian Dialectic when I was researching the Golden Dawn Opening of the Key Tarot spread. The system of Elemental Dignities is based upon the Hegelian Dialectic. The Hegelian Dialectic looks at objects as either similar or different, thesis or antithesis, and then we can create the synthesis or relationship between the two. In Elemental Dignities, we see that Fire and Water are opposites, so they weaken each other, and create either Air or Earth. The Father and Mother unite to create the child, which is either a boy or a girl. Air and Earth are also opposites, and they cancel each other out. Fire and Air are active and friendly, while Water and Earth are passive and friendly. In other words, Elemental Dignities are a form of the Hegelian Dialectic. With Elemental Dignities we read cards in groups of three using the relationship of the elements to each other to determine relative strengths and weaknesses. Once this has been determined, we then add the divinatory meanings.
We are now in a position to understand what might be happening in a tarot reading. The parallel universe of the Tarot reader (thesis) and the parallel universe of the client (antithesis) meet at the synthesis of the tarot spread. Significantly, Crowley discusses the individual tarot cards has having their own universe.
The entire Book of Thoth can be seen as an exercise in the Hegelian dialectic. Crowley never actually mentions the phrase, but he mentions Hegel and Nietzsche in the section on the Fool:
“One must constantly keep in mind the ambivalence of every symbol. Insistence on either one or the other of the contradictory attributions inherent in a symbol is simply a mark of spiritual incapacity; and it is constantly happening, because of prejudice. It is the simplest test of initiation that every symbol is understood instinctively to contain this contradictory meaning in itself. Mark well the passage in The Vision and the Voice, page 136:
“It is shown me that this heart is the heart that rejoiceth, and the serpent is the serpent of Da’ath, for herein all the symbols are interchangeable, for each one containeth in itself its own opposite. And this is the great Mystery of the Supernal that are beyond the Abyss. For below the Abyss, contradiction is division; but above the Abyss, contradiction is Unity. And there could be nothing true except by virtue of the contradiction that is contained in itself.”
“It is characteristic of all high spiritual vision that the formulation of any idea is immediately destroyed or cancelled out by the arising of the contradictory. Hegel and Nietzsche had glimmerings of the idea, but it is described very fully and simply in the Book of Wisdom or Folly.”
For Crowley the Hegelian Dialectic works at the highest levels of the Tree of Life in the Supernal Triangle. Nietzsche is interesting in this context. His book, The Birth of Tragedy, states that Greek tragedy achieved greatness through a fusion of Apollonian restraint and control with the Dionysian passion and irrational. On the Tree of Life, the first path between Kether and Chokmah; the Fool, is dedicated to Dionysus, who is associated with stringed instruments, while from Kether to Binah, is the Apollonian forces of the Magus, who controls. We have chaos and order emanating from the Crown. Down the centre is the path of the High Priestess, who represents change and fluctuation as she is alternately pulled between Chokmah and Binah. Connecting Chokmah and Binah is the horizontal path of the Empress, love. So, we have the uniting energy of love separating chaos from order – it is a paradox. “Love is the Law, Love under Will” is an inspiration from this insight.
We can work our way through all 22 paths of the Tree of Life, and in the Book of Thoth, we will find that Crowley includes Opposites in every description. For example, the path from Binah to Tipareth is the Lovers or Brothers. Crowley starts with Cain and Abel, so we have the individual choice between good evil, while on the opposing path between Chokmah and Tipareth is the Star, which was of course transposed by Crowley from the Emperor to conform with the injunction “TzDY is not the Star” in the Book of the Law. The divinatory meaning of the Star is not much help, but when we look at Crowley’s commentary, he starts with the Star Sponge Vision of Lake Pasquaney. He then contrasts the old cosmic order of Newtonian physics with the curvature of space in Einstein’s theories, and of course he includes the prediction about Riemann. So we have another dialectic at work between the Lovers and the Star: on the one hand, we have choice at the individual level, while on the other we have two conflicting views of the universe.
We tend to see the Tree of Life as a static structure, but this need not be so. Can we see anything in the Tree of Life that can represent the annihilation of the universes that brought our universe into existence 15 billion years ago? Indeed we can. In the Supernal Triangle, Chokmah and Binah are separated by Love, the Empress. If we were to remove Love from the equation, Chokmah and Binah would swing down and collide at Daath, the 11th Sephirah, where Kabbalists and Magicians believe we access other worlds and other dimensions!
We are now in a position to see why Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot is not about Thelema. Hidden within the Thoth Tarot is a system of magic that is a synthesis of the Hegelian Dialectic and the spatial geometry of Riemann that parallels the latest theories of the origin of our universe and the unification of the four forces of nature. Thelema is Will, but the new magic which is based upon science, depends on the annihilation of opposites, only requires a polarity to work.