REVIEW: The Thoth Tarot is simply the best and most important Tarot deck ever made. Its designer was always conflicted, more than any other occultist, between a desire to express his ideas plainly and openly, and a belief that to be explicit about ancient and sacred mysteries was plainly wrong. So there are many layers of ideas and magickal traps and signposts carefully plotted everywhere in Thoth. The often disturbing first impact the cards make upon viewers is fully intended, the filtering out of the unready and the unreachable student continues at every turn, every card, every Tower-busting assault on normal sensibilities. This is the deck for true artists and magi, others may get something out of it, but despite what Crowley claims, in The Book of Thoth, this deck can't be seriously taken for a beginner's Tarot. However, if you begin at Thoth, and stay with Thoth, you will as with no other deck stand a real chance to learn Tarot. A final point, it has often been pointed out that Crowley's Tarot is a personal vision, to suggest that in some way this is a bad thing, when to the contrary it is certainly the thing that positively distinguishes any great Tarot, but one should realize that to learn Tarot by Thoth, he will certainly need to learn a good deal of Crowley's dogma. To learn it is of course not the same thing as to adopt it as one's faith, which is neither required nor recommended, even by Crowley on his clearer days.

REVIEW: A. E. Waite's Tarot, illustrated by the Art Nouveau artist Pamela Colman Smith, is the most popular Tarot deck in the world, whose design has been endlessly copied or stolen by people who knew and cared little for the symbolic ideas of A. E. Waite. It is fair to say that A. E. Waite and Pamela Colman Smith made Stuart Kaplan most of what he is today, of course without their intending any such thing. While Crowley's deck is certainly the superior aesthetically and from a dogmatic and even cartomantic point of view, it is Waite's dogma and symbolism which has really captivated (and mostly escaped the understanding of) the world. While Crowley agonized sometimes about how much to confess to the masses, Waite knew very well not to toss his pearls before the swine, and never attempted to do any such thing, hinting only at what he was really talking about, often leaving blinds to corrupt and confuse the unworthy, though he also left sufficient clues for a determined and educated student to find his way. So far, none of the latter has ever seen fit to write a book about Waite's deck, or the meaning of his cards. What we do have is Waite's book, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, in which Waite complains that Tarot has suffered for too long under the goofy fantasias of occultists and their invented histories, and where he nevertheless assures us there is a secret (and ancient) tradition being communicated in Tarot and that he, Waite, will be kind enough to communicate it to use—except, damn it!!—he's pledged certain groups and people not to do so. Thus, he will hint, as will his deck, and so it possesses little of the fine edge of Crowley's terrible swift sword, even though Waite's dogma is made from the same Golden Dawn matrix as is Crowley's. Both men, and the artists who illustrated their decks, contributed mightily to the visual representation of modern and post-modern Tarot, and both men have been rewarded by being thoroughly ignored (in Waite's case in large part forgetten altogether). Indeed, one aspect of postmodern dogma is to reject the supposedly male-dominated occultist dogma in favor of supporting some fuzzy cartofeminist lunacy about people making up whatever meanings they like. The latter is also a great aid to selling large numbers of esoteric Tarot decks to an audience woefully unprepared to understand them.

REVIEW: So far as anyone knows, this deck, reproduced here with some missing cards (of inferior quality) recreated to make a full deck of 78 cards, was the first Tarot design ever produced. There may have been an older Tarot than this, but if so it didn't survive or hasn't yet been found. When these cards were first painted, the Italian game was called Trionfi (one played carte da trionfi—cards with Trumps), not Tarot, and so were the cards with which the game was played. For postmodern audiences this is quite an inaccessible deck, providing few familiar dogmatic or cartomantic entry points. As with most early Tarots, no designer notes were left, no written indication of the meaning of the cards was provided, because of course the first audience for these images didn't need any explanation. The symbols, whose original meaning was largely forgotten even 500 years ago, were obvious and familiar illustrations of life, secular and religious, in north Italy circa 1450. No mystery was likely implied or buried in these simple playing-card ornaments, although to suggest that no dogma was intended to be communicated to viewers is to deny the great importance that such sequences of images had for Renaissance audiences. The last several cards, for example, depict with a compelling precision of correspondence the last few chapters of the Book of Revelation (whose 22 chapters match the number of trumps), and so the subsequent Apocalyptic content of occult Tarot can be seen to be rooted in that most terrifying of creatures to religiously skeptical playing-card historians—an antecedent tradition. The best work so far produced about this deck is The Tarot Cards Painted by Bonfacio Bembo, written by Gertrude Moakley, and published by the New York Public Library in 1966. The book has been out of print for some time now, and while one claimant (the original publisher also claims to own the work) to the copyright of this book, Stuart Kaplan, made a promise to Ms. Moakley several years before she died that he would reprint her book, adding new information she had gathered since 1966, he has so far failed to honor that promise.

REVIEW: In a way, jk owes much to this deck, it provided a benchmark against which all worthlessness in Tarot could be measured (in the same way Thoth functions on the opposite, worthy, end of that scale), and so provided jk a lot of useful material in his war on pomos (particularly cartofeminists) and YAMs. jk therefore has a lot of fondness for this coaster set and certainly intends to say whatever he can to place it in the historical and ideological context it so ardently strives to obtain. Hmm...let's try some sortes motherpeacean: "Aleister Crowley called this card Failure. It really is a failure of imagination if one cannot wait for what is to come." No, it really is, as Crowley says, "bad money" or a lousy investment, and that's what Motherpeace is all about, encouraging women, particularly, to waste their time and their money on a lousy investment of imagination called "The Goddess". If there was ever a good reason for intelligent men (and women) to suspect that perhaps women as a sub-species were simply incapable of rational thought, it is the vastly popular postmodern affection held by many women (and some men) for this asinine concept of "The Goddess". There was never such a creature, neither in reality nor in myth. It is the invention of Victorian men who relished the thought that once, long ago, women ruled (and spanked) so much better than the corseted wisps of bloodless idiocy they battered and buggered into Victorian "womanhood". That pomo women of a hysterical bent have now borrowed this pathological fantasy as a substitute for a truly educated interest in ancient history (and its modern implications) would have in fact disgusted Aleister Crowley beyond measure, as he would have recognized that tendency to daftness that embodied what he so despised about women, and here not encouraged and imposed by men, but rather by women themselves. Of course this feeling of disgust would be mutual, as Vicki Noble, the deck's co-creator, points out: "While the images in this deck [i.e., Crowley's Thoth deck] are magically potent and in some ways beautiful, they are tainted by Crowley's 'satanic' approach to the magical arts and embody a disturbing negativity." Read here for more on the Jungian-YAMian dogma of the cartofeminists.

REVIEW: I suppose the good news about the Aquarian Tarot is that should they ever make a movie out of the Waite deck, particularly a version of it where the characters are portrayed as nothing more than two-dimensional pieces of cardboard, these Aquarian cards would function as ready-made posters for it. Of course they would be those kinds of posters which merely, and sometimes ineptly, hint at what the movie is actually about; but if you think about it, the kind of Tarot people have been wanting for some time now, and really since about the time this deck forged an important new path in Tarotmania, is this misleadingly thin appropriation of a much greater and more interesting Tarot than the knockoff is prepared to offer. That said, I think it is a fair conclusion to make that David Palladini, the creator of the Aquarian Tarot, is a better-trained illustrator than Pam Smith. His technical skills often seem superior to hers. There remains however the question of whether he is a better artist than she. That he is an inferior Tarot artist than she is without question. And these comparisons are relevant considerations given the degree to which Palladini has depended upon, and indeed stolen from, Pam Smith's designs. According to Palladini, while he was attending art school (the Pratt Institute) some thirty-five years ago, a publisher approached him with a project to design a Tarot deck. The resurgent interest in Tarot, and all things occult, which had been fueled in the late 1960s by the counter-cultural movements, and which were understood to be evidence of a new spiritual age, had been condensed and commodified into a Broadway musical in 1968, Hair!. One of the huge hits from that production was Aquarius, which popularized for the first time the discussion of the Age of Aquarius, and what benefits the new age allegedly promised:

REVIEW: Back in the 1990s, we had of course an explosion of what came to be known as "pomo" Tarots, decks which had a surface that looked somewhat Tarotic, but which was often adapted to a theme or agenda that had little or no connection to occult Tarot tradition. One of the positives of this development, at least in the view of those who favored the Tarotic temple doors being thrown open to just anybody, was that "accessibility" to the surface of Tarot, and to an allegedly simpler version of its dogma, was significantly increased. Of course, along with the open-door, open-mind policy came a great deal of utter trash posing as Tarot.

Ironically, given their obligation to be viewed as iconoclastic, there was an implied Hierophantic function of the pomo exotericists, and their communitarian Tarots. Since occult Tarot brings with it both the popular attraction of something intriguingly mysterious, and the obstacles of something deeply veiled in esoteric symbolism, the maker of a pomo Tarot has always to be evoking and using the surface of tradition, without burdening his audience with too much or any demand that they should bring a pick and shovel for a deeper exploration. He is a guide to their expeditious and always indolent passage to a discount transformation.

Therein lies both the dilemma, and the opportunity, for an artist who finds inspiration in traditional occult Tarot symbols. Everyone after all knows what the surface of things is going to look like, and so they will hope and expect that a modern Tarot artist is going to be able to translate that surface into something both new but also accessible (and so not just an updated version of occult obscurity). At the same time, that very inspiration that sends the artist on his mission to apply his own, personal, view of the tradition, should pull him deeper into consideration of its true parts and meanings. If not, he can only hope to render something at best pleasing to the eye and utterly shallow to any serious mind.

But you may object, serious minds are not the only players. And you are quite correct. But occult Tarot remains an esoteric and quite elitist paradigm and practice. Not even the herd wants its Tarot only skin-deep, even if it knows full well its investigation of the mysteries will barely disturb the hair on the skin of the cards. It likes to think that, if one day by some miracle or some annoying wild hair up its brain, it wanted to dig a deeper well in its popular, accessible, decks, it could do so. To aid in this conspiracy of ornamental aspiration, an artist must of course produce along with his deck an accompanying book (typically written by some self-ordained Tarot pundit), which should tell us something more than what is obvious; once again without suggesting to any reader that he is obliged to consider his personal, ignorant, feelings about his accessed deck to be inferior in any way to whatever the Tarot artist intended.

Given these potentially difficult navigations to making a good pomo Tarot, it is not surprising to find many decks, which do in fact aim higher than to merely entertain or to ape profundity while offering the pap of dumbed-down dogma, failing to walk that very thin line between being antagonistically elitist or a popular trifle.

And that is, ultimately and unfortunately, the verdict we must give to the Cosmic Tarot deck, a set of cards much muddled by the conflict between the artist's obviously occult inspirations and his desire to nevertheless make his deck inclusive and accessible to modern, exoteric audiences.

The artist, Nobert Lösche, makes the typical pomo-Tarot error of attempting to be inclusive by offering a smorgasbord of vaguely articulated and disjointed symbols, some of them clearly based in earlier occult Tarots, but others based in the even more obscure dogma of popular culture. Again quite ironically, the latter has a shelf life so very short that it renders almost any systematic reference to its components, especially to its gods and goddesses (Lösche supposedly incorporated Hollywood movie stars of ages past in the card images), just as meaningless to an increasingly ignorant modern audience as any collection of goetic demons or Enochian angels to which Aleister Crowley may have alluded.

If you don't think so, then Google* the following names:

1. Clark Gable—1.6 million hits

2. Rita Hayworth—just under 1 million hits

3. Aleister Crowley—1 million hits

4. Paris Hilton—67 million

5. Paris Hilton (next year)—6 or 7 hits

*-These numbers obtained from Google on July 3, 2007.

It is actually remarkable that any of the stars of Hollywood's Golden Age still manages to google a million hits. Of course Gable and Hayworth were two of the biggest ancient divinities. And yet consider that they only poll around about the popularity of that ultimately obscure, or at least unknown, occult figure of Aleister Crowley.

Whatever reason Crowley had for finally deciding not to use the face of a movie star in his deck (he had at one point thought that the then quite recognizable mug of the great silent clown Harpo Marx would be perfect for his Fool card), he was absolutely correct to reject that always attractive solution to the problem of accessibility. If Crowley had wanted his Thoth deck to have a synchronic attachment to the 1940s, he would have built it up out of the popular culture and conditions of the world at that time. As it was, he did that to some extent, since WWII was seemingly a hell-born validation of the prophecies of his Liber AL. But, Crowley didn't use Marx's face (poor fellow only rates a 1/4-million google-hits now) after all, because he realized that Thoth Tarot was supposed to be an encyclopedia of symbolic imagery that would be relevant for 2000 years!—not just till the next decade of easily-forgettable celebrities.

Certainly, I do not think that Norbert Lösche had any such grand designs for his 1988 Cosmic Tarot, but he did go fishing, among other places, into the occult tank of Crowley's ideas and symbolism. And yet he does not borrow or steal heavily, but only lightly, that is only in accord with the needs of an artist rendering accessibility. Consequently, from an occult Tarot perspective, his deck is often a journey along a road marked with signposts in all kinds of disparate languages and motifs. That kind of mix-and-muddle is alleged to be a great aid to learning (something) about Tarot, especially for those who come from backgrounds ill-preparing them to sift and comprehend occultism. Unfortunately, what they are likely to end up learning from that approach is how to get things only partly and then tepidly and so hardly at all.

An example of this problem is apparent in two cards which I rather like, because they do in fact nicely and concisely allude to a few aspects of the occult cards (and one in particular) from which they borrow-steal.

Lösche's Four of Pentacles is clearly based upon the Thoth Four of Disks, although we must point out that the clarity is only available to a person who understood the meaning of that progenitor. In Crowley's card the idea is of a a defined and defensible space expressing and determining power. Crowley uses a fortress and its surrounding, supporting, fields to make this point. Lösche abandons architectural and landscape metaphors and focuses upon people—which he does throughout his deck.

Cosmic Tarot, 1988	4 of Disks, Thoth Tarot, 1944
Yep, these are basically the same card, same ideas, different ways of putting things visually. But, do note the big Disky diploma on Doctor Winter's wall, signifying his having been paper-trained at the Thoth School of Tarotmania.

The problem with being too specific however, and one sees this in the "Minor" shortcomings in Waite's deck as well, is that you lead your horse to water in just one place instead of getting him to recognize the elixir anyplace he might find it. In Lösche's card the bits and pieces are mostly there—the astrological decan (Sun in Capricorn), the elements suggesting worldly power and authority, but it is misleading in that this gives us a very constrained, gender-specific, interpretation, with the man (who appears to be some kind of doctor, possibly a psychiatrist), dealing with a young female who is apparently feeling diminutive in his very white and withering presence (note the solar heat from his badge of authority and from the overhead lamp).

Crowley's idea for the card however is that the fortress, the authority, is protective of the fertile fields around it and expresses its power mainly by projection of the meaning of the signs of its power, not through violence. It could, as Crowley says, be seen in that view, and given its astrological decan, as a sign of a rebirthing womb, that place wherein the Sun is reborn in winter. It may be that Lösche's white man is in fact the dying winter, indeed Father Winter, looking at his Daughter Spring who shall weirdly also be his mother, or that of his son. Recall Crowley's use of this incestuous hierarchy and dynamic in his court cards.

Needless to say, that level of occult speculation belies any suggestion that Cosmic Tarot is easily accessible to Tarot novices. And one does not encounter any deep insights about the card and its possible meanings from its accompanying guidebook, The Cosmic Tarot, by Jean Huets. While not insultingly stupid, and that is really saying something for a pomo-Tarot book, Huets' guide is also never penetrating in its insights, nor is it aimed at being that, emphasizing the accessibility factor for modern "seekers", those looking for the quick fix supposedly offered by simple "doctrine[s] for the New Age".

Now, the next card in the suit, Lösche's Five of Pentacles, illustrates quite well why the mix-and-muddle approach isn't really all that helpful to real, as opposed to fashionably undernourished, seekers.

Cosmic Tarot, 1988	5 of Pentacles, Waite Tarot, 1909
Eighty years later the snow has turned to smoke and dust—or fallout—but same basic ideas and symbolic representation. The thing is, following a Thoth card with a Waite card might make things more multi-Tarotical, and doesn't everyone just love anything multi- or mega- or just more, but it tends to muddle the dogma. But, who cares about that anyway, right? Well, Lösche certainly seems to have cared about it.

In the CT Five of Pentacles, we have a scene right out of a post-WWII newsreel, which is perhaps the part of the mass-mediated-mixture from which Lösche gets the image. The scene, and it is very cinematic (most of the CT cards look like story-board illustrations for movies or lobby cards), is of zombie-like refugees, wondering through the wreckage and burnt pillars of a destroyed city. The people in this card, unlike the vast majority of Lösche's Hollywooden beautiful faces, look more like ghosts than the living, and the only indication they still belong barely in the world is that they cling to coats and rugs and anything they can get to keep warm, and they adhere, snail-like, to their bundles of few material possessions. As they pass by, we notice to the left five bright but shattered pentacles.

Note that there is no astrological decan marking this card, and its narrative is quite disconnected from the previous card. In fact, this card seems much more inspired by Waite's depiction of the Five of Pentacles than Crowley's of the Five of Disks. Crowley's card is, as he says, about mental strain much more than material deprivation. The "worry" of his card he describes as the tightness one gets in the throat fretting over some material concern that refuses to resolve itself to one's satisfaction, or at all. Thus one feels a kind of slow strangulation.

Waite's card is much more exoteric, showing poor and crippled lost souls struggling past a bright window. The view in Waite's card is of the poor, or the barbarians, looking in toward the protected and powerful fortress—the place where they are neither welcome nor likely to ever obtain access. There is a suggestion in Waite's card, unlike in Lösche's, that the victims will be worrying past many lighted windows before they are done, i.e., that their journey is circular and unendingly bitter, which is something of the idea of Crowley's card as well.

In Lösche's however, the people are moving on and out from a place of devastation. They could not very well be thought victims deprived of something just on the other side of a wall. There are plenty of walls all around them, and their access is complete now. It is just that there is nothing any longer worth accessing or having in this pile of rubble.

Of course that description could rather aptly apply to pomo Tarots as a genre. By the time the exotericists have performed Mary K. Greer's "throwing out" spell on their respective targets (i.e., the occult Tarots they are stealing from and bowdlerizing), hoping to pick the lock at the gate and let in the barbarians, there isn't much left inside the sanctuary of worthwhile ideas for the vandals to pillage.

Eyes-Wide-Shut Pomo-Tarot "Seeker", from The Cosmic Tarot (Five of Pentacles), not exactly Harry Potter playing quidditch.

I suspect that Lösche did not intend his card to be an excellent metaphor for the kind of Tarot he was doing, or the kind of audience to whom he was offering it, but one often exceeds one's intentions, or crashes into one's deficits, that is one's audience, in pomo Tarot.

In closing, I will say that there is much more that I could say about this deck, but it is mostly of this same regretful nature. "Regretful" because I do think Lösche was capable of designing and illustrating a real, and not merely a pomo-accessible, Tarot. But, twenty years ago, the Tarot world was first seriously beginning its march to pomoist sodality (or mainly, sorority), and this artist perhaps could not help himself but be in the forefront of where things seemed to be headed. That is too bad, since Lösche is a much better illustrator than most people killing trees for Tarots. His images are capable of subtlety and some useful degree of emotional evocation balanced by an informed symbolic cadence.

That is to say, I like a lot of his cards.

The problem I have with his deck is his party affiliation and its implications and its clear and present detrimental effect upon his attempt to make a coherent Tarot.

I find that his failure in that regard is a much worse one than the many absurdities that call themselves Tarot and which are nothing much more than witless smudges on cardboard.

As we have seen for years now, ideology does make a difference.

Final recommendation, and this may seem a little contradictory (hey, it's pomo), by all means buy this deck. For most of you, it shall be an enlightening experience. For the enlightened amongst you, it may give you some light here and there, some frustration generally, but it will at least look pretty good (not) doing it.