Predicting the Present
Twenty-two Fingers Pointing at the Moon
Predicting The Present
(Twenty-Two Fingers Pointing at the Moon)
© 2018
Contemplations on the Major Arcana of Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot
By: Daniel A. Kelley (Fr. Oneiros Anathanatos)
"I have been in that heaven the most illumined by light from Him, and seen things which to utter he who returns hath neither skill nor knowledge; for as it nears the object of its yearning our intellect is overwhelmed so deeply it can never retrace the path it followed. But whatsoever of the holy kingdom was in the power of memory to treasure will be my theme until the song is ended."
-Dante Alighieri (The Divine Comedy)
DEDICATION
For Steven Bricault. This one’s for you.
Table of Contents:
Preface: In the Shadow of the Master Therion.
Introduction: About This Book.
Phase One: The Camel and the Larvae. (Trumps 0-6)
0. Contemplation on The Fool
Contemplation on The Magus
Contemplation on The Priestess
Contemplation on The Empress
Contemplation on The Emperor
Contemplation on The Hierophant
Contemplation on The Lovers
Phase Two: The Lion and the Caterpillar. (Trumps 7-16)
7. Contemplation on The Chariot
8. Contemplation on Adjustment
9. Contemplation on The Hermit
10. Contemplation on Fortune
11. Contemplation on Lust
12. Contemplation on The Hanged Man
13. Contemplation on Death
14. Contemplation on Art
15. Contemplation on The Devil
16. Contemplation on The Tower
Phase Three: The Child and the Butterfly. (Trumps 17-21)
17. Contemplation on The Star
18. Contemplation on The Moon
19. Contemplation on The Sun
20. Contemplation on The Aeon
21. Contemplation on The Universe
Appendix:
*Glossary
*Diagram of the Tree of Life with Crowley’s Tarot Attributes
*Emperor and Empress (Attached Essay)
*The Lovers (some interesting correspondences)
*The Animitariograph (An Integral Tarot Spread)
*Teatime in the Garden of Gethsemane (The Significance of Suffering on the Mystical Path) ---Attached Essay for The Hanged Man
*Through a Glass Darkly---Attached Essay for The Devil
Preface
In the Shadow of the Master Therion
The series of events that led to the writing and publication of this book have been so curious, that I feel these pages would be lacking were I not to share my story at the very beginning. More than a few publishers have advised me to omit this Preface, but I simply must obey the dictates of my own conscience and include it. After all, this is not just another book about the Crowley Tarot. This is also a book about how one might use this marvelous Tarot deck as a means of communicating the formula of his or her own Holy Guardian Angel. Without doubt, this has certainly been the case for me. In a sense, a good portion of this volume is designed to prove, by way of personal example, how the rich symbolism of the Thoth Tarot deck can serve as a type of language shared by you and your Daemon.
So, editorial admonitions be damned, let’s start from the beginning.
I first encountered the name Aleister Crowley when I was about eight years old, in my elementary school library. Strange as it sounds, this library had a small section dedicated to the paranormal, and I liked reading the books on American hauntings. I can't remember the title of the book, but it had to do with the neo-Pagan faith and its origins. Crowley was listed as one of its founders. There were no pictures in the book, only text, and many of its pages were torn and yellowed with age. Little did I know, the name Aleister Crowley would follow me like a shadow my entire life.
I was born and raised in a very Christian family. My father was a Baptist preacher and my mother's side of the family was equally pious. Like many American children of my generation, Bible verses were fed to me with my mother's milk and I was expected to have them memorized. And memorize them I did. So enamored was I of the stories and characters of the Bible, that I even attempted to write some Biblical stories of my own! At age ten, I astonished my mother by giving her a hand-written book on my interpretation of Christian morality. I entitled the book Rags for the Apocalypse, an allusion to Christ's statement, “Your good deeds are as filthy rags”. The book contained roughly eighty pages and consisted of a series of admonitions against pseudo virtue and false righteousness.
My mother was very pleased, to say the least, if not amused!
My youthful conversion to Christianity may seem perfectly consistent with my religious upbringing, but why should a Christian child convert to Christianity in the first place? After all, I'd been going to church since birth and was already fully indoctrinated. Right?
Wrong…
Like Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy, I couldn't be certain whether I believed in God or Jesus. Sure, I'd already been through the rituals of kneeling at bedside with my mother, confessing my sins before God, and accepting Jesus Christ as my Lord and personal Savior. But I felt no genuine emotional connection to these words and gestures. After all, with Santa Claus and his kin, at least I had proof of their existence! Old Saint Nick left gifts for me every December 25th, the Easter Bunny left me a basket of goodies every Easter, and the Tooth Fairy literally put money in my offering-plate whenever I lost a tooth. But God?
He hadn't answered a single prayer I could remember praying.
I didn't take Christianity seriously until about the age of nine, when my entire life turned upside down. Starting at around that time, I became the target of a variety of terrifying experiences. For reasons still unknown to me, the line that separates the conscious from the subconscious, the angelic from the demonic, had suddenly become nonexistent for me. I've discussed some of these experiences in another book (Behind The Veil: The Complete Guide to Conscious Sleep), so I won't go too much into the details here. Suffice it to say that many of these experiences left my parents bewildered. As for me:
They left me traumatized…
First came the lucid dreams. Within seconds of the bedroom lights going out the hypnagogic visions would begin. Within minutes, I'd be consciously wandering the halls of my psyche without a compass. I'd learn later in life that this is actually very rare, as the average sleep cycle begins with non-dreaming (NREM). As if this abnormality wasn't enough, I began having spontaneous out-of-body-experiences. These were no less than terrifying, and I resisted with them with every fiber of my being. Oftentimes these resulted in accurate precognition, like the time I called out the name of a local boy who (it turns out) was raping a local girl. A few days later, the boy was caught red-handed and locked up in an institution.
Then the strangeness went to a whole new level.
I was awoken one night in the middle of a process known as sleep paralysis, which occurs as you enter the dreaming phase of sleep. It's a sort of twilight zone between the REM (rapid-eye-movement) and NREM (non-rapid-eye-movement) phases of the sleep cycle. During this time the body becomes unable to move, or moves very sluggishly, and a condition known as REM atonia ensues. Most people are completely unconscious at this time, but natural and trained oneironauts (lucid dreamers) can enter this phase of sleep with full awareness. At any rate, I was awoken on this night to the feeling of a presence standing over my bed. I couldn't see anything at first, but I knew it was there. Then, to my horror, I felt some
thing take hold of the back of my neck. I could feel its nails digging into my neck and there was nothing I could do about it. I was paralyzed. For some baffling reason, I began painting the image of a pentagram in my mind. At the time, I had no idea what a pentagram was or what it meant, but I intuitively felt it to be a symbol of power.
And it worked!
Whatever that fearsome specter was, it vanished immediately. I called out for my mother as loud as I could, and my older brother, sleeping in the twin bed next to mine, let out an irritated groan.
My mother ran frantically to my bedside and asked me what was wrong. The strange thing was that I didn't recognize her. I asked her who she was. I can still recall the shocked looked on her face when I asked that question. As soon as I saw that look in her eyes, I immediately remembered who she was and felt embarrassed. She asked me what had happened, and I didn't tell her about the dark presence that had dug its nails into the back of my neck. She dismissed it as a night-terror and we all went back to sleep.
The next afternoon, as I was outside drawing on the sidewalk with orange-colored chalk, I began drawing the figure of the pentagram I'd imagined the night before. When my friend asked me what the symbol meant, I said “It means good luck”. So I went around the entire neighborhood and drew the pentagram on the pavement, believing it to be a beneficent symbol. Eventually, my mother was notified and caught up with me in the playground. She was furious! And can you blame her? This was the 1980’s! The era of the “satanic panic”. I’d learn later in life that the pentagram, though not necessarily a symbol of good luck, is a symbol of protection. My mother, of course, knew it to be the very footprint of the Devil himself, and her nine-year-old son was drawing it on the doorstep of every house in town! This wouldn't have been so bad were in not for the fact that two-thirds of the neighborhood belonged to the same church we went to, in a city that lived in the shadow of that church.
And then came the mysterious infection on the back of my neck.
The very same spot where that dark presence had grabbed me a few nights prior had become infected! My mother was baffled. She took me to a doctor to uncover the source of the infection, but the doctor didn't know what it was. He said that perhaps it was an insect bite that had become infected because I kept scratching it. But I hadn't scratched anything.
This had become my life:
I couldn't sleep. My school work suffered. My health declined. I lived in constant fear and anxiety. Besides a handful of fellow misfits, most other children avoided me, and the alienation I felt in those days was truly heartbreaking. I rapidly went from being an outgoing, happy child, who used to ride his bike all over the city, singing and laughing and playing, to an introverted and overly sensitive child who spoke to trees and hung out in cemeteries because, as I used to explain to people, the dead are very lonely. Then one day, as I was walking home from school, I was followed by a group of bullies, dragged into a nearby park and beaten quite severely. I fought as hard as I could, but there were too many of them. It ended when one of the little monsters picked up a brick and sent it crashing down onto the top of my head, at which point they all ran away.
Then something unexpected happened.
As I lay there on the grass, alone and bleeding, all the rage I felt suddenly vanished. It was as if something or someone had reached inside me and pulled out every ounce of anger and self-pity I was capable of feeling. I was overwhelmed by a tremendous feeling of compassion for my attackers, and a powerful illumination seemed to fill every cell in my body. It was as if the heart of Jesus’s teaching had revealed itself to me. I understood quite clearly that those bullies were living in a sort of sleep, and that tortured cry of the crucified Christ suddenly made absolute sense to me:
“Forgive them! For they know not what they do.”
So I picked myself up, dusted myself off, and walked home. As soon as my mother saw me she became enraged. My left eye was darkened, my lips were swollen, and blood was oozing from the top of my head. “Who did this to you?!” she asked. I could see that my mother was prepared to do battle with the parents of those bullies, but I hadn't a shred of anger in me. I calmly looked my mother in her eyes, started weeping, and said, “Forgive them! For they know not what they do.”
This moment marked my conversion to Christianity as a nine-year-old boy.
You see, I'd gotten the notion in my head that these horrifying experiences were happening to me because I was somehow rotten inside. The night-terrors, the dark presences, the out-of-body experiences, were the spiritual symptoms of a soul torn between heaven and hell. My mother, of course, confirmed this. At one point, she even took me to see a pastor at another church we occasionally frequented, and he refused to see me! He insisted I had demons inside me, he smeared my forehead with oil, said a brief prayer, and bid us farewell.
The peculiar thing about my conversion to Christianity was that it made my “symptoms” worse. The night-terrors increased dramatically, and I began having visions. I'd accurately predict political events, family crises, and so on. This alienated me even more from those around me, but I was now unbothered by it. My parents divorced, my mother eventually remarried, and we moved from Chicopee Falls to Springfield Massachusetts, where my bizarre experiences reached a new level. At one point, when I was putting my clothes away in my dresser drawer, there was suddenly a series of loud knocks on my bedroom door. I assumed it was my brother playing a prank on me. The knocks would begin at the top of the door, then the bottom, and end in the middle. As these knocks were occurring, I swung the door open, expecting to see my brother standing there, giggling. What greeted me instead was an empty hallway. I then went into the adjacent bedroom and looked out the window overlooking the backyard. Everyone, including my brother, was outside in the yard!
Then, it happened…
That night, my brother decided to sneak two of his friends into the basement, which was renovated to become his bedroom. His plan was to sneak his buddies in through the basement hatchway after the adults had gone to bed. My job was to sleep on the couch in the living room so that, should my mother or stepdad awaken, I could alert my brother by whispering down to him through the floor-vent in the hallway. So, I laid down on the couch and fell asleep.
A few hours later, I woke up in the throes of sleep paralysis again; only I'd somehow ended up on the hallway floor next to the floor-vent. My body and mind were in the grip of a terrible sensation, which can only be described as a feeling of impending annihilation. The consciousness I called “Daniel Kelley” seemed to be shrinking to the size of an atom, soon to be extinguished forever. Then, as if compelled by forces beyond my control, I was forced to my feet and led up the stairs to my mother's bedroom. I opened the door and frantically told my mother that she must go into the basement and “make them stop”. My stepdad, who had to wake up at 4:00 in the morning for work, was understandably annoyed and demanded I go back to bed.
But I couldn't move a muscle…
My mother came out into the hallway and asked me what was wrong. For some reason, I wouldn't let her touch me. It was painful to be touched. I was crying and commanding her to go downstairs into the basement. “They're downstairs!” I hollered. “You must make them stop!” I yelled.
When my mother finally made her way downstairs, into the kitchen, and opened the basement door, I instantly snapped out of the agonizing trance I was in. My body shaking and clammy with cold sweat, I stood there at the basement door as my mother walked down the cellar stairs and exclaimed, “What's the meaning of this?!” Soon thereafter my brother marched angrily up the cellar stairs, followed by his friends, and looked me in the eye: “You're a freak! he scolded.
The next morning, my mother told me what she found my brother and his pals doing in that basement. They had a Ouija board set up on the floor by candlelight, and they had two books with them. One was a book by H.P. Lovecraft, called The Necronomicon, and the other was a book by Anton LaVey, called The Satanic Bible. These books, I'd eventually discove
r, are more fiction than fact, and I don’t take them seriously. But at the time I was struck by the synchronicity between my waking trance and the activities my brother and his friends were up to at the time it occurred. I made it a point to get my hands on those two books to see what they were all about. Besides the fact that The Necronomicon is a fictional work, and The Satanic Bible is more a marketing ploy than an actual Bible, the one thing common to both books is one name:
Aleister Crowley…
The synchronicities didn't end there. At age fifteen, I began dating a girl with an impressively large occult library, where I once again encountered Aleister Crowley. Still, I never took it upon myself to read any of his work, as everything pointed to the man being either a complete psychopath, a black magician, or both. It wasn't until five years later that I'd eventually commit myself to a thorough study of the man. But before that would happen, I would first sever ties completely with Christianity. Not with Christ, mind you, but with the Christian religion. There were just too many holes and inconsistencies in the Bible, too much suppression of basic human nature, and just downright hypocrisy of the most insidious kind.
My break with the religion of my family was thorough and complete, and tensions began to rise in my household. All non-Christian books were burned or thrown away as soon as my mother discovered them hiding under my mattress. Whether they were books on Buddhism, the Occult, Philosophy, or Meditation; it didn't matter. All of them had to go. I was eventually made a ward of the state and placed into foster homes. This was a very challenging time for me, but there was one benefit to this situation:
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