The Tarot as a Map of Cognition and Learning

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I thought about posting this in a different thread but I felt like there was a bit too much here and it would be a side-track.

I might have mentioned that I've been studying the 22 major arcana of the BOTA deck now for a little over three years. There's a lot I won't get into here because, in the lessons, the amount of interplay with Hebrew letter association, astrological association, key number association, number of Hebrew letter to number of card, etc. would be too much to get into (add that I still can't say that I'm confident in my grasp of all of it).

I think the easiest way to understand it however is as a map of cognition and the learning process. It seems to follow the enrichment of a person's grasp on reality and life; how their observations hit memory, how that memory informs instinct or impulse, the process of a person's conscious reflection on the value of that impulse or instinct, and it attempts to explain further processes of the human cognition and experience beyond that point which I would say are handled arguably well. The additional beautify of it - if a person really studies it for decades and finds it maybe 70 or 80% accurate they can do what's been done for centuries which is make a new and better tarot. That process is not particularly bound in any dogma beyond that a person should really vet the ideas of previous versions properly before making their own amendments.

I'll try to take a quick walk through the Fool's journey below without getting lost in the extended details which a person can spend the rest of their life studying:

0) The Fool - Pre-birth state, whatever you might consider that to be.
1) The Magician - Honed selective attention.
2) The High Priestess - Unimprinted/unadulturated potential memory and subconscious environment.
3) The Empress - Imprinted memory giving rise to impulse and reaction, possibly extending to circumstance in some broader senses as well.
4) The Emperor - Analyzing the results of one's thoughts and behavior, resolving problems in one's own programming.
5) The Heirophant - Answers that come from one's own depths after enough contemplation by means of subconscious deduction and possibly ideas drawn from still deeper geometry of existence.
6) The Loves - The idea that your conscious and subconscious mind can be lead even further by a deeper geometry of life that's been the prime mover of your life from the start. That deeper geometry however can only be seen directly by the subconscious (which is a bit like your own inner supercomputer) - hence Eve studies Raphael while Adam studies Eve.
7) The Chariot - Living by the will of that higher geometry and balancing opposites.
8) Strength - The cultivation over time of an intelligence in your subconscious that helps better sort your impulses, emotions, motivations, and endocrine activity, ie. informed/educated instinct. Really applied knowledge distributing itself into the structure of a person's body.
9) The Hermit - The pull toward future state of life, in the case of the Hermit the ultimate state.
10) The Wheel Of Fortune - The machinery of time and space in which life occurs.
11) Justice - Sorting the useful from less useful, wheat from the chaff. In a lot of ways this card is reminiscent of the activities of Key 4 - The Emperor.
12) The Hanged Man - Submission to an understanding that the universe is mechanistic and one is along for the ride.
13) Death - Various aspects of rebirth, really seems to be a direct result of Justice and the smaller 'deaths' of old ways during the course of life's activity.
14) Temperance - Very similar to The Chariot, just that it seems like its more focused on the way forward rather than the mechanics of the balancing competency.
15) The Devil - The challenges in life such as baseness, meaninglessness, cupidity, etc.. that accompany one who's just going along with their animal drives rather than engaging their higher drives instead, possibly not knowing how to accomplish the later or even being unresolved as to whether higher ways of thinking are even a real thing. It's also what I think Dr. Peterson describes as a person using their intellect in strictly a self-serving capacity without regard for the broader scope of life or the paramount value of truth. This card also is an umbrella for any type of ignorance you still possess in your life - so even when you're on the track you can still have Tower (Key 16) experiences, just that they'll generally be smaller shifts in scope and less catastrophic.
16) The Tower - Direct consequence of living within the range, in some capacity, of the Devil. It can include either waking up from baseness or getting knocked over the head by something you didn't previously know about life. In the situation of the Tower the laws of reality stop a person's path forward in a particular direction and force them to face the reality that something in their equation with respect to life and the universe was either incorrect or not accounted for.
17) The Star - This card is considered to deal with meditation but in the flow of 15 to 21 it seems to have a lot to do with assimilating knowledge gained in the Tower experience and putting it to good use throughout the scope of their life. This card seems to show the use of the Magician, Empress, and Emperor in rapid cyclical motion such as in the case of any study or experimentation.
18) The Moon - The endocrine results of the Star. A person becomes more healthy and possibly the way their body works accelerates in a better direction. In some ways this card is highly reminiscent of Key 8 - Strength but from a slightly different perspective.
19) The Sun - This one tends to be a bit mystical but the best I can say of it; gaining enough from Tower, Star, and Moon experiences that you finally have mastered the laws of physical reality or life well enough to contemplate other things.
20) Judgement - The suggestion of one's conscious experience broadening into additional dimensions of the universe. Alan Moore seems to talk about this a fair amount in some of his interviews if he gets into ideas like the 4th spatial dimension or his analogy of Asmodeus flight.
21) The World - This is a really tough one to explain. The general idea it gives is completion but it's a completion without cessation of movement and, if one considers the bull's head turned in a different direction, it may very well mean switching tracks and moving on to different vistas.


Clearly with some of the cards there are a lot of assumptions loaded in that person has to vet for themselves. Part of what I can relate to strongly though, particularly with Keys 10 and 12, is the lack of a libertarian free will in the universe. That tends to be a place where a lot of people end up when they have some moment of their life where they're wracked with moral agony over whether something they could do at one moment could have a sort of Chaos Theory butterfly effect and then they realize that if the world was really prone to that it wouldn't have lasted long. Similar they may come to the notion, like I did, that all of the other things they hypothetically 'could have' done weren't really potentials but something closer to streets you might have passed while riding in a cab. I think what I've talked about in some other places is my outlook on the nature of time and it's immutable effect on the situation but overall I'd consider there to be a lot of strong arguments for the propulsion of human experience and activity over self-direction.

What it edifies for me also is something I think a lot of critics of temporal and will-determinism tend to miss in their arguments; learning is inescapable. What a walk through the Fool's journey in the major arcana of the tarot seems to do is really awaken one to the question of how conscious and subconscious bounce off of one another and, in a certain way, help restrain one another from going off the deep end. Similarly, and it's something the Greek Pythagoreans, Platonists, and Neoplatonists were really big on getting people to grasp - the quality of that learning and the lessening of suffering were and are joined at the hip and that movement has a lot to do with a person engaging wilfull desire to learn. If a person sort of just rolls through the situations of their life doing the bare minimum or doing whatever propels them but not really caring what's happening the pain accrues fast and their forced to learn. If they only want to learn when things get pushed that far they'll generally have a lot of pain in their lives and little internal resource to deal with that pain so its effects will reverberate through them in an amplified manner (it reminds me of a quote Baruch Spinoza made about the anguish of the unwise or foolish in life).

All of this is why I think meditation on the tarot spoke to me more immediately than any other part of esotericism - ie. it's not just a road map, it's a modular system of road grading/smoothing tools that you can apply to your life to increase the yield of positive outcomes. It's like training wheels for certain sets of awareness that can be deployed whenever problems arise or while coordinating the present or planning for the future. While I won't lie, I had my hardships in the last three years, my internal resource at dealing with that hardship has gotten a lot better. That hardship is mostly disability related and it may never be fully gone, but the strength of my own attitude adjustment seems to have undergone such an improvement that the comparsion is like night and day to where it was in 2012 when this path of inquiry first opened up for me. Also I can't help but consider that I was able to stave off a good portion of what would have been further accrued debt of pain and destruction in my life if I hadn't found tools like these to apply to how I function.


This may be a bit too much to spur conversation because most of it is likely to be relatively new to people reading this and I went pretty far down the rabbit hole with what I wrote above. Still, fascinating stuff and I'm hoping to see how much more more of the Tower, Star, and Moon dynamic I can rake in to better inform my life. I consider myself an avid reader and I also try to find the best thinkers on whatever topics (politics, philosophy, sociology, religion etc..) on Youtube than I can so thankfully more of those Tower events can go on in my cognition rather than external life blow-ups.

Hopefully at least a few people will find this information useful or inspiring in one way or another. I'll keep exploring this system and it will likely continue to inform my ideas for a long time to come.

Forgive me for writing such a short post and asking this question, but do you give out free tarot readings?

I tried to read and understand some of that, it is a lot to take in. That world is kind of a minefield to me.

Usually I don't but if you have a deck or do something online with the Rider-Waite deck, particularly celtic cross, I could help you interpret it at least if you PM me the results. I'd be making no claims to read anyone's future, I'd just be trying to help elucidate what seems to be in the cards - that said knowing what the question was would be helpful.

My only warning though is that I don't do social interpretations of the court cards and majors - ie. a lot of readers interpret the kings and knights as men in one's life, queens and princesses as women, I tend to interpret them by their stock definition with respect to the four elements and sub-elements so anything I'd say would be very much about your internal state and how it's hashing out with the world around you. Also, to the extent that you have your own deck and spread, shuffle and deal them yourself you may very well be getting direct input back from your subconscious and I've found that idea particularly credible.

I understood that the images were supposed to be timeless archetypes but would still be interested in how they were compiled, in such detail.

Maybe, it is something that sort of aggregated or snow-balled, over time.

Paul Foster Case liked to suggest that in the beginning of the 13th century (somewhere right around 1200), a group of adepts got together and had a convention in Fez, Morocco for the sake of crafting a pictorial teaching tool.

Manly P Hall suggested in Secret Teachings of All Ages that the now collapsed hall beneath the sphynx leading to the interior of the pyramids was lined with images very similar to the tarot (none of which is available for examination so I can't comment on that further), just that he also mistakenly gave credence to the idea that the gypsies carried this same tarot out of Egypt - which is now known to be incorrect, they drifted into Europe across Asia from India. Robert Wang in his Qabalistic Tarot had an interesting insight into that - he suggested that when one looks into the astral or the, for lack of a better term, akashic history of things, you'll see things grouped by similarity of content rather than by accurate historical content, so the modern tarot and the Egyptian meditative panels could have a high degree of overlap and look very close but hold no direct historical link - that I also can't comment on and I haven't experienced on my own the kind of trips to the astral he's describing so I have no idea.

My guess is that bits and pieces of it have symbolically been around for a long time and that it was a slow association of elements. I can say with relative confidence that the Jewish Kabbalistic book Sefir Yetzirah was mostly likely crafted in the 2nd or 3rd century however there's no clear record of it having any influence on the tarot until Eliphas Levi made the 32 intelligences of that book (possibly already associated with the 10 spheres and 22 paths of the Tree of Life) line up with the 22 major trump of the tarot by assigning them Hebrew letters and making that idea public knowledge. That idea took off strongly in the back half of the 19th century and 1st half of the 20th but it's difficult to say whether it had been there all along at the core of the tarot or perhaps only in the minds of some of those who left their fingerprints on the updating of the tarot such as in the case of the Marseilles which seems like it's the basis for all of the modern esoteric decks.

One of the best books I ever read, albeit it's on the Levi-Papus-Worth structure with the Fool on Shin rather than Aleph, was Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism by Unknown Author translated by Robert Powell ( the pdf version on like has a horrific amount of typos that aren't in the printed version). Partly it's fascinating just on how much very high-profile interest it stirred among the top brass in the Catholic church, ie. it was very pro-Catholic and attempted to bridge the history of Catholic mysticism with that of French occultism, but I think the author of that book did a wonderful job of discussing and thinking of the cards in the way that they should be - a growing corpus of knowledge and a knowledge base that's meant to transcend subject and object. The author of that book went unnamed as he was a member of the Order of the Unknown Philosophers (which is either a subset of Martinism or just a more intimate name for Martinism in general) and even being a Russian expat living in England he wrote it in his mid to late 60's, during the mid 1960's, to only be issued and published after his death, which occurred in 1973, and he wrote it in French for the sake of comradery with the French tradition - so it had to be translated right back to English for the UK and the Americas! Each chapter he did was something like 25 to 30 pages discussing the history of the church, mysticism, occultism, the perils of the 20th century, the current state of crass commercialism and strip-mining as a variety of sorcery in its frame, discussions of calculus and differential equations (yes - the guy liked his math!) - it was a bit like each card was a launching point for him passing his observations of the world on to the reader.

Uknown Author (ie. Valentin Tomberg) and Mouni Sadhu were apparently from the same school of mysticism and from what little I've been able to read from Mouni Sadhu's Tarot book it seems like both he and Valentin were big on Hegelian dialectic analysis of the world in thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Interesting enough modern Rosicrucians are also really big on mapping out ideas in triangles for a similar reason; seems like they have some sense of being able to map the universe in such triads.

These descriptions of the Major Arcana and related ideas are interesting, but how do you see them as a map of cognition or map of learning.

I may have missed the forest for the trees, but I don't see it.

Here's a nice actual map which positions the Major Arcana on the Tree of Life:


How is this a map of cognition or learning?

How would you use these cards to understand learning or cognition? Or is there something else that you would do with this?

The thought experiment is whether expectation effects future events, or vice versa.

Eh?

Tarot is supposed to be capable of prediction but also to offer insight into present and past events, a lot of what Techstep was talking about seems to focus more on the insight side. I can see that he is looking at the cards as a system that makes a commentary that will be suggestive in light of whatever the issue or question under investigation might be.

But I don't see the step from that to "a map of cognition" or learning, for that matter. Some of what Techstep says about "Tower events" and the "Star" "Moon" sequence make sense as a kind of framework for interpreting events to extract learning about where and why things went awry. I suspect Techstep may have had more to say about that but it may have been lost in the detail.

One thing that's helpful if to look at the tarot as being structured like this:



So you typically view the concepts in three flights of seven with the columns and rows being interrelated.
In that schema 1-7 are considered root causes, 8-14 are activities articulating them, and 15-21 are end results.

1-7 are pretty direct in their implications on cognition. Keys 1-4 and what they stand for are pretty non-controversial - ie. you see, you imprint what you see to memory, you react from memory, you self-consciously evaluate who you are, how well your adaptations are working, and you also evaluate your memories to see if there are better ways to adapt. Keys 6 and 7 could be considered controversial, 5 maybe but all depending on whether a person's just talking about subconscious spitting back up an epiphany or whether they're considering it to be more.

8-14 reflect a process of what's happening deeper down - ie. while attention impresses on memory it also informs your body and endocrine, if something's decisively off your own deeper structure can and will shake things up and initiate a crisis or purge of some type (that's part of how key 9 flows into key 16), I don't know how I'd relate the jump between 9 or 10, just that 10 relates to 3 in that it elaborates on the flow of a person's life as images grow and colonize the brain, key 11, in close reflection to 4, handles, keeping things that are useful and purging things that aren't. key 12 is an admonition that we're more like pass-through entities than anything else in a broader universe, and I think a lot of our neurological conversations about free will deal with this. key 13 - death, that goes back to changes that occur as the results come in of things being jettisoned or added, and 14 - the end row 7-14-21 is a bit more difficult than the rest but it ties out with 7 in balancing. 15-21 are considered general stages that a person moves through, starting from ignorance and moving toward relative completion.


I'm not sure if any of that had what you were looking for? If not we'll have to figure out whether I'm using 'map of cognition' too loosely.

As far as the Tree of Life is concerned, I can't say the same thing for that. With the Fool's Journey and the 3x7 tableau it makes sense, with the Tree of Life TBH there's a lot that gets mystical and for anyone who'd consider that the inverse of credibility I can't make a great case for it.

How do you to tell whether you have predicted something or made it happen.

I hate to say it but the forum advertisements are getting really bad and I'm losing posts now on account of it.

I just lost what I was typing but I tried to say something helpful in describing what I could of the kabbalistic tree of life. I need a nap before class so I won't go into detail here but there's a whole high-pagan theology of the descent of the soul through the planetary spheres, picking up qualities that yields a drunkenness of the senses and then a maturing out of that state, back up through the spheres, and overcoming the spheres by having matured to where the gifts they gave aren't needed anymore. The story of Ishtar's entry into the underworld seems to be a slightly different variant of the same thing, ie. she strips seven layers of vestment, dies for Tamuz to be resuscitated, and receives her vestments again in reverse order as she leaves. You also, with 10 spheres, have Pythagorean number concepts and that does factor in with respect to the dimensionality of the numbers.

Seems like the TOL concept has a lot of coded wisdom about the cultivation of people, the map itself is geocentric which doesn't do much for it aside from nest it inside - at least as far as I see it - a Greco-Egyptian set of symbols well constructed at the time which can't keep reattributing spheres to match newly discovered planets or try to keep pace with modern astrology because IMHO it really doesn't have anything more to do with that than people telling themselves, and upping a placebo, with the concept that they're trying to do something on one of the days of the seven planets, at that planet's hour, with that planet's incense and god/goddess, the right colored table cloth and the right shaped polygon on the altar in the opposite color.

Some of this stuff I'm more bearing out, going along with, and trying to see really whats there and what isn't. The trouble with Kabbalah as well is that people generally say it sets in over time, they get to understand it better but really can't explain it well and it's one of those things that's so open and abstract from that end that to say much more than that it's a conceptual build of emanation from the one, the Good, etc.. is more than I can really expound on with any certainty.

The Fools Journey, to me at least, is a bit more relatable even if some of the meanings and concepts do overlap.

Yes, I think that's the bit that was missing. Thanks for elucidating the schema.


I don't consider the mystical to be the inverse of credible. I just get irritated when people make grandiose claims about what it is in relation to quotidian reality on the basis of no solid evidence.

I have tremendous respect for those who can tend their creative imaginations with a playfull and enthusiastic energy and am perfectly happy to hear them talk about what they do in whatever metaphorical or conceptual framework they like. Please don't limit your discourse on these subjects on my account. I have a lot of sympathy for the ideas Alan Moore expressed about the subjects of imagination.

On the other hand, the unusual experiences I have had in martial arts and non-theistic Buddhist practices also make me realize that there are varieties of experience which can't be meaningfully discussed unless the subject is experientially known to all the parties to the discussion rather in the line of Morpheus offering the red pill to Neo. You really do have to experience it for yourself, and then some of the conceptual approaches with which you might have wanted to discuss it before hand become meaningless and irrelevant.

I suspect that some of what seems like pointless obfuscation in these discussions falls into that sort of category.

Some of the places, which I visit, wouldn't even be usable, without an ad blocker, comments blockers, etc, etc.

That's part of why I've really enjoyed listening to a lot of Sam Harris's podcasts - he may well have found a particular corner, ie. Zaochen, that he's preferred to build an expertise in but he clearly gets the importance of subjective hygiene and health.


I think also seeking such experiences seems to be a niche interest. Adding to what you're saying as well a lot of people who either haven't had that proclivity or haven't had the luck of a powerful mystical experience catching up to them for other reasons have difficulty parsing out whose off their rocker vs. whose overembellishing something vs. whose had a particularly intense experience and it tends to get lumped into the same unfortunate category of brain malfunction. Seems like when it can be brought on my meditation and the like it can also be an occurence of peak health/performance and that casts at least a certain quantity of it in a different light.

BTW, have you ever run across a book that's aimed to run the gammut of mystical experiences, their variety, and tried to contextualize them aganst one another? I'd love to find something like that which does maybe a meta-analysis across systems, across east vs. west, etc. because it would be really interesting to see if there are things that can be induced by eastern systems that aren't as likely to occur in western system or things in western systems that are less likely to occur in eastern (in terms of dynamics - symbology aside). Somewhere between Rudolph Steiner, Valentin Tomberg, and Theresa of Avila (I think this might have been dealt with most at length in one of Steiner's books) there was the dynamic brought up comparing experiences with strong visual manifestations and then, for the lack of a better term, 'dark' visions that seemed to consist of something like an image not built on vision but something like a kinaesthetic knowing. Both Rudolph Steiner and some particular church expert, back in the 16th century Spain who discussed visionary experiences with Theresa of Avila, agreed that the second variety were of a higher order. It was interesting to hear that because they seem to, on the rare times I had them, take my nervous system a lot farther and as an analogy (although a somewhat awkward one) of times where I might have been in pain, sick with the flue, vs. apendicitis/peritonitis - in the later case the pain came with loud enough alarm bells that I knew something of considerable urgency was happening; that's how I could compare the intensity of those kinaesthetic visions and their results to any other visions I'd had which were less viscerally involved. Admittedly, the meditation vision I had of being on the plane with the Goddess outside - that combined both, it was a kinaesthetic that took on blinding visual power when I turned to look out the window.

It's those extrema that have helped sell me on the realization that there's something of profound worth to be found in this stuff even if it were just pushing one's neurons in novel ways. I can't even imagine, for instance, what my life would be like if I could go into and explore anything near that intense at will rather than by accident. The possibility that it could be done serves as a powerful motivator.

Also my experience, especially now that so many feature autoplaying video or audio. It's so invasive. If the advertiser knew that ther ads were engendering hate for their brand, I wonder if they would still think it was a good idea to get attention by sensory assault in this way.

I wonder, if it's not too personal or noncommunicable in a forum, if you could give an example of how you use this system, Techstep?

You posted your fascinating longer answer while I was typing this, so this isn't a reaction to those accounts. It sounds like you have had some very interesting experiences.

The trouble is its a series of systems and I'm still shopping around to figure out where my place is in all of this.

The two orders I'm in that have ongoing monograph work are AMORC which is US Rosicrucian Order (I'm currently in 7th temple degree which is a little over 3 years in) and I'm at about the same place in Builders of the Adytum which also teaches by monograph but they're night and day in terms of involvement - with BOTA there's twice daily exercises with respect to meditating on the tarot and it's recommended that you read each monograph, if you can, each day of the week - not many people do it, I did stick to that on the earlier courses like Tarot Fundamentals and Supersensory Perception, they're both immersion courses about the tarot itself, I'm just finishing Tarot Interpretations and will be heading into a three month course called Master Patter next (which my guess is going to be a phrase-by-phrase parsing of the Pattern on the Trestleboard).

AMORC I have to admit is incredibly slow. It seems like it's relatively low commitment, really just a couple hours per week so far with most of what they've been teaching and the way they teach it tends me to want to evaluate the system more on the suggestions about reality they're giving to see if it ties out. So far the more I look at what they're offering it seems like it does tie out will with a lot of sensible philosophic traditions and they're not particularly kabbalistic the way BOTA is - they seem to focus their deconstruction of life more on the three gunas or salt/sulfur/mercury of eastern and western alchemy. Overall I think AMORC would be a great order for anyone whose married with a few kids and busy attending their sports games - apparently they have 30 years worth of lesson for the atrums, 12 temple degrees, and Summum Bonum planes however I've often heard that the most dense material in terms of practical mystic exercises is in the 9th temple degree - from there the monographs slow from four per month (the way BOTA does through the entirety of their classes) down to one monograph per month.

BOTA has 15 years of lesson plan but, TBH, it's always been a lot more challenging and particularly Paul Foster Case's monographs are very cerebral (which I like) and he handled the writing of most of the courses up through Sound and Color, the rest after that are largely pulled from Ann Davies lectures. I've been somewhat active in local bodies for both orders and they're great people all around - for people who aren't familiar with what kind of crowd it is think of Unitarians, Episcopalians, and a lot of what you'd think of as more liberal/progressive Christians or nondenominationals trying to get more out of their spirituality.

I've also been in OTO for a little bit but I see that more as an initiatic order. There's no monographs for example. They have two prongs - MMM which is initiatic, and EGC which is the gnostic mass. It's definitely a geekier crowd than AMORC or BOTA, I say that in the best sense possible. They tend to be more along the left-brained continuum and, consistent with the Law of Thelema, they like to hash a lot of different ideas and thinkers out, different kinds of spellwork from different traditions, and while there isn't any ceremonial magick in OTO there are a lot of people who practice it and will do workshops dedicated either to some aspect of Hermetic knowledge or sometimes it will be ceremonial magic workings. Another interesting thing about OTO I've found out is that there are a lot more people there who are something like Jungian atheists; ie. there's a healthy blend of people who at one end of the spectrum very much believe that contact with the inner planes and gods/goddesses are real (most of them by very consistent experiences to that effect) and others who are more of the outlook that it's 'all in your head' but that said it still doesn't diminish the value of it - both crowds are equally sharp thinkers and it seems like most people there you can strike up an intelligent conversation with pretty easily.


Right now I'm also finishing Israel Regardie's One Year Manual. Admittedly some exercises did more for me than others, I can't say what another person's mileage would be with that book or system - it's 70 pages, I think available online too so it's a pretty easy read, but it amounts to one exercise a month for 12 months, which I made 1 1/2 months per for 18 months; that may not have been the best idea because going too long can reek some havok on your dediction/discipline, also in Step VIII you do Middle Pillar twice per day, which is a great exercise but after a little over a month of that I did get overloaded and I think at work around lunch one day on a Monday my body was essentially saying "Do you want to be in the ER? If so keep it up, if not - stop and get some rest" so I took the next couple weeks off and Step IX wasn't energy-work intensive the way that was.


So at this point I'm still walking it out with the three orders I mentioned and trying to sort out what kind of groove or what particular magickal system I want to devote the rest of my life toward (ideally it should just be one) and I realize that I like all three of the groups I'm in but none of them would be 'it' in that sense, I could find that 'it' system that gives the results I'm looking for and seems to fit like a glove and be in some of the others as well so long as there aren't too many contradictions of symbol.

Some of the other orders, systems, and authors I'm curious about:

Mark Stavish's Inistitute of Hermetic Studies - Great guy, I've met him, read several of his books, and I'm hoping to work through his Between The Gates book maybe starting this summer.

William G Gray's system - Sangral Sodality; he seemed to be working along the same lines as Servants of the Light ie. Dion Fortune, Gareth Knight, W.E. Butler, etc.. but what really impressed me about his offerings in Magical Ritual Methods is he offered a similar path of self-development as the other orders do but his versions of the rituals were *very* utilitarian and stripped down. Not just that, they were also a lot more elegant in their simplicity. Comparing, for example, something like Golden Dawn LB/IRP to Bill Gray's Triple Cypher exercise from Chapter 2 of that book - it's night and day different in terms of quantity of symbol but the Triple Cypher seems to just radiate with primal elegance for what it is. Likewise for the rest of what I read of that book he seemed to have a really good grasp of the neuro-linguistic programming aspect.

That and if I'm ever lucky enough to be invited, I'd love to check out the Elus Cohen and see how they do things. Really the whole of Martinism - Elus Cohen, Voie Cardiaque, and the CBCS, seems like really interesting stuff. Elus Cohen in particular is a theurgic division of Martinism, and Martinism is a mystic and magical stream that's always seemed to be loaded with some of the most famous names of 19th and 20th century French occultism, it originated as an order strictly within Freemasonry and kept a very tough standard of piety and mysticism on one hand and intense mathematics on the other. Very formal stuff and it seems to have also taken off quite a bit in Russia. Also one of the best single books I've ever read on esotericism/occultism was Meditations on the Tarot - A Journey into Christian Hermeticism by Uknown Author (Valentin Tomberg) translated by Robert Powell, and at the stage of like in which Valentin wrote that book, in his 60's, he was both a deeply devoted Catholic and member of the Order of the Unknown Philosophers, another name for the Martinist mystical/magical current.

That's a lot I'm chewing on, I know, but what can I say - I like to shop around and I want to make sure I end up where I should be in the right mindset and with the right requisite respect for any given system to be there and stay there. That tends to look bad up front but I do have to, in a way, invent the wheel for myself here and I don't think there's another way to find out.

Last edited by techstepgenr8tion on 06 Jan 2017, 9:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.