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The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as of all serious endeavor in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind
—Albert Einstein
Mystery is delightful, but unscientific, since it depends upon ignorance.
—Bertrand Russell
It has always been fatal when somebody finds out too much too suddenly.
—Aleister Crowley
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Mysteria & Mysterians


mysterium, plural mysteria—a secret service, secret rites, secret worship of a deity.

Mysteria is the blood and soul of non-gaming Tarot. One might say this view of Tarot makes it the Loch Ness Monster of symbolism, eternally immune from the death blow of being identified as any particular beast, and yet open because of this to virtually any and every theory regarding what MIGHT BE living just out of sight beneath the murk of mystery. Because of its imputed mysteries, Tarot (the Jungian Archetype) can become the container and the blowup doll for everyone's prurient projections of possibility—i.e., it means everything, and many questionable things, to everyone. And also because of this it ends up meaning nothing much to anyone. That is, what Tarot is really about, and what it is really not about, means very little to people who demand, on what seem to be religious grounds, that mindless and often painfully ignorant conjectures concerning the origin and meaning of Tarot should stand side by side in pride with ideas borne out of true scholarship or at least reasonable speculation. It is easy to see a connection between the Mysterian's need to see "The most beautiful and deepest experience" validated by being treated as something deeper and truer than mere facts and their indications, and the Creationist's need to see the Bible treated as a modern book of science.

Indeed, Madame Blavatsky herself despised the implications of Darwin's party-pooping theory of evolution, which finally, and one might say bloodly belatedly, removed God from the equation and demoted humans to at best a temporary and coincidental "best of breed". Theosophy was in part a reaction against what its adherents saw as the brutalization of human potential, or destiny, by science, or rather by what they viewed as the corrupted science influenced by people like Darwin and Thomas Huxley. Contra the soulless truths of science, the occultists offered the ever-hopeful truths of mysteria, which promised a Christian-like salvation, not however one provided via faith in a beneficent deity, but rather in the supposedly inherent deity each human possessed as a kind of birthright from what Theosophists claimed was the true evolutionary process. That anti-Darwinian Theosophical evolution sounds a lot like "creation science", with pseudo- or anti-scientific dogma being offered as a substitute for rigorous and skeptical inquiry. Example, Blavatsky actually saw Neoplatonic emanationism as the spiritual process governing vulgar Darwinian physical evolution.

Of course that implied a purpose and a goal for evolution, and this goal was identified by Theosophists as the integration of the human soul with its deific higher (spiritual) nature. One was intended, in other words, to evolve "higher", toward a better place. This notion is utter nonsense in Darwinian evolution, which dispenses with imputed and undemonstrated intentionalities (especially of deities) and also moral distinctions such as "higher" or "lower", for the sake of attempting to scientifically describe a physical process. This failure to understand what science was about, and what it really could be about (without it becoming merely a rubber-stamping tool for a religious faith), drove occultists in the 19th century to adopt an antagonistic attitude towards science, to anoint mysteria as the language of the supposedly initiated elite (those capable in other words of doing real science), and yet which by this opened the door to a popularization of the occult, via this same mysteria. The masses, never enemies of mystery, nevertheless reacted against traditional occultism as well, seeing it as just another version (others being the Church and science) of an anti-democratic gatekeeper of truth.

The occultists, in other words, found themselves cut adrift, thrown out of the icy intellectual boat of science, and offended by the goofy and entirely transient mythology of the masses, the occultist mysterians attempted to protect their self esteem and their self promotion by plunging even deeper into complicated evocations of mysteria, for example going on the endless key quest which seeks to find the correct Kabbalistic letter-Tarot trump correspondence. This quest had begun as an intriguing but ancillary part of the Egyptian Tarot theories of Antoine Court de Gébelin and the Comte de Mellet. To the Tarot occultists who followed them, and of course who borrowed or stole from them, the quest was elevated from an academic footnote to a crusade to locate or decipher the Holy Grail of Tarot. Variations of this most important Tarotic quest have both plagued, but also in a sense vivified, Tarot and interest in it, ever since.

The links below will take you to more information about the mysteries of Tarot.
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Mysteria Links

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The Naples Arrangement

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The Triple Veils of the Negative

 Fundamental to Aleister Crowley's whole system of magick, and certainly to the structure and meaning of his Thoth Tarot cards, is the Qabalistic paradigm he called "The Naples Arrangement". Surprisingly, for such an important concept, Crowley wrote very little specifically about it, and certainly not explaining it in detail. This article discusses the ideas and complications of Crowley's most important key.

One of the complications was the way in which Crowley dealt with a Qabalistic idea, shorthanded by occultists to "The Triple Veils of the Negative". Interestingly, Crowley's Triple Veils complication has led to some questionable political and dogmatic maneuvers by (C)OTO, and its leader, William Breeze, to attempt an explanation and rectification. This article reviews these developments and highlights Crowley's own struggles to come to terms with what precisely he thought he meant or understood about Qabalah.
The Secret of the IXth Degree
 Now, I know what some of you are thinking oh, it's just another rendention of Crowley's (or the OTO's) supposed secret we all already know all about—the sex fucking or fucking sex magick secret that ain't any secret at all. Except that ain't the secret I'm going to tell you, nor is that the secret of the OTO's IXth°. But the idea of there being a supreme secret whose access is only available to the highest paying (in the euphemism, the most spiritually advanced) customers is very old, going back at least to the time of Pythagorus, or the stories about him and his secret order. The secret of the IX° isn't about sex at all in fact, but certainly sex isn't the worst premium to supply to the poor saps who have sometimes spent a great deal of money (and horrific amounts and qualities of time) just trying to become eligible, as they used to say in EST, to "get it". And one could reasonably argue that there isn't really anything much different morally between the OTO's or Golden Dawn's initiation rackets and those run by supposedly legitimate initiatory organizations such as the Catholic Church or Harvard or Oxford universities. After all, they all claim to possess valuable knowledge, and they offer it up or down to aspirants in measured amounts in grades of accomplishment for which the organization expects to be paid regularly billed fees from the aspirants. So, is there really any difference between the secret of the IXth° and the secret of E=MC2?
Egyptian Mysteries or Court de Gébelin's Misguided Missile How one enthusiastic man's obsession to reveal a truth in light of a long but falsely rooted Egyptian tradition gave rise to movement and then an industry devoted to veiling endless numbers of lies in the secret service of Tarot con games.
The Kabbalistic Key to Tarot What is the true, one and only, Kabbalistic key to Tarot? Would you know it if you saw it? Would you change it if you knew it? Would any self-respecting Kabbalist have anything whatsoever to do with Tarot cards, especially if he knew that Kabbala has nothing essentially to do with Tarot, but only with Court de Gébeblin's cultural prejudices—particularly his prejudice that anything from way or middle East is probably all the same secret stuff—or as we like to say in WWII movieland: "All them Japs look alike, you know that, just shoot 'em and let their ancestors sort 'em out." Or, perhaps something closer to home and our topic: "All them towelheads look alike, you know that—just turn 'em into the FBI so they can be locked up (or down) in Cuba or preferably shot on sight and let Allah sort 'em out." You mean, gulp!!, Tarot has racist roots?! Well, not all of it (as far as I know), but the occult stuff sure has some questionable assumptions guiding it.
Golden Dawns & Tin Dusks How secret orders capitalized on Tarot mythology to scam thousands and make millions (sometimes), using special sauces to serve up secret rites (to the highest bidder) and secret worships of the deity called Tarot.
Aleister Crowley and the Golden Goose How a guy with every advantage, well except for being born into a family of religious fanatics which caused him to rebel in every naughty (but in hardly any effective) way imaginable, plugged his need to make God in his own image into the old Book of Thoth, and despite the fact he ended up living one of the more tragically ridiculous lives the occult has ever produced (and that's saying something), he nevertheless made the best Tarot the world has ever seen, (and that's saying something more). Seriously, dogma aside—well, OK, dogma really can't be set aside in these matters—but if you could set it aside entirely, Thoth would still be the most honest (which is to say the most absurd) explication of the logical extensions of Court de Gébelin's misguided missile. Hmm…that's not setting aside the dogma either, is it? Never mind.
The Dumbing Down and the Burning Down of Mysteria What's left of Tarot at the Remains of the Day? After the masses of simpletons have munched mysteria right down to the roots, and indeed have pulled those up too to see how they're doing? Is the burning down of Tarot, or of its mysteries, really so much worse than the dumbing down which has befallen it and them? What would Tarot look like without mystery? We explore that question and its answers.
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