Syllabus and the Fool

 

I am in the process of attempting to turn over a new leaf.  Since I am going to be seventy this year, this is no mean feat.

SInce my goal this year is to research and attempt an understanding of the Tarot and the Qabala, I will probably be posting more along these lines than my usual caffeine-fueled rants concerning the supposed injustices that I have perceived in the world.

I am working out just how to do this little trick of learning about something and then writing about it.  Then it struck me, I am doing this the way that my liberal arts professors did it to me back in the dark ages of higher education when being a student in a University was more than an expensive job-training/credentialing system.  

I get to write papers.  Thankfully, the papers won’t be graded and go into my permanent record, but instead, they will serve the purpose that I couldn’t comprehend back there in my salad days.  They will force me to express the understanding (or lack of the same) for what I am researching at the time.

So, I suppose that today will act as a syllabus.  I will get into the meat tomorrow but before I do, I might as well lay out the plan for the course.

Texts:

Eliphas Lévi; translated by Mark Anthony Mikituk

The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic

New York, TarcherPerigee, 2017

Yolanda M. Robinson, Ph.D.

The Revised New Art Tarot; Mysticism and Qabala in the Knapp-Hall Tarot

Circe’s Whisper Publications, 2015

Paul Foster Case

The Tarot; A key to the Wisdom of Light

New York, Jeremy P. Tarcher-Penguin, 2006

Anonymous, translated by Robert Powell

Meditations on the Tarot, A Journey into Christian Hermeticism

New York, Jeremy P. Tarcher-Penguin, 2002

John Michael Greer

The Doctrine of High Magic

Ecosophia.net (https://www.ecosophia.net/tag/doctrine-and-ritual-of-high-magic/)

2021 

The Rider-Waite Tarot Deck

Universal Tarot of Marseille

The Knapp-Hall Tarot 

The Plan:

Simply put, I am trying to figure out if there is any “there” there.  I think that the past three years have made me question the way that I have structured my understanding of the world.  For some non-rational reason, I am drawn to the Tarot and the Qabala, but I have just dabbled, maybe it is time for me to actually try for a synthesis.

By upbringing and intellectual training, I belong to the “children of heaven”; but by temperament, and by my professional studies, I am a “child of the earth”. Situated thus by life at the heart of two worlds with whose theory, idiom and feelings intimate experience has made me familiar, I have not erected any watertight bulkhead inside myself. On the contrary, I have allowed two apparently conflicting influences full freedom to react upon one another deep within me. 

(Pierre Teilhard de Chardin)

I have no clue how this will play out.