two volumes on Tarot and the Hermetic Tradition

[Mark Tarver]

This is rather concerned with my alternate identity; but some here may find it interesting.  In 2015 I recorded a series of lectures on the Minor Arcana of the Tarot.  I used artwork from many different authors with their permission. I've begun writing this up; from the Preface.

Anybody who engages in writing will have had the fortunate experience of feeling the words take life and flow onto the page.  There is a certain sense that one is taking dictation and this was so in this case.  Such a phenomenon has led people to talk about certain writing being channelled.  This is not an explanation that I discount, because the power of the spirit world, for both good and ill is something that has shaped my life.  But it may also be that the cards themselves and a lifetime of reading had seeped into my unconscious and therein had been ordered into a coherent whole.

The material shaped itself into five hours of continuous speech comparing a dozen different packs and the philosophy that shaped the Minor Arcana of the Tarot.  When I had finished the Minor Arcana; I paused instead of continuing straight to the Major Arcana.  I felt rather as a mountaineer does when scaling a mountain range, and having toiled to the summit, he sees a vast and even higher range of mountains in front of him.  

The magnificent icy peaks of the Major Arcana stood before me, but I felt disinclined to take them on immediately. The resulting lectures were advertised as a course on the Minor Arcana for people interested in designing their own Tarot cards, but such a specialist focus meant that finding an audience was difficult.

The resulting lectures were advertised as a course on the Minor Arcana for people interested in designing their own Tarot cards, but such a specialist focus meant that finding an audience was difficult.  I struck up a partnership with a very conservative woman who disapproved of 'that sort of thing' and for another two years the project stayed exactly where it was.

Then in the summer of 2017, following my belated realisation that this woman was stifling me in something I needed to do, as well as holding me back in many other ways, I shook off her influence and returned to the work.  I began to transcribe my lectures into written form.  I found that my intuition that the lectures would transcribe into the written word was correct; very little editing was required.

The genesis of this book from speech to text explains the easy and informal style and I retained the original division into ten or fifteen minute lectures that was a feature of the original.  In order not to allow scholarship to interfere with the flow of the narrative, I used endnotes to each lecture to gather the sources together.  Following the progress of my effort, I have split this work into two volumes.  The first dealing with the Minor Arcana and the second volume, in preparation, deals with the mysteries of the Major Arcana. 

The title of the book is simply A New Guide to the Tarot and corrects some of the misconceptions around these cards that developed from the Golden Dawn in the early part of the C20.  The New Guide restores much of the original significance to these cards using museum resources recently available over the Internet.  The text brings together sources from the Presocratics, the picture theory of the proposition of the early Wittgenstein as well as Renaissance thinkers such as Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim.  Because of the magnitude of the task, I've had to split the work into two volumes.  The first A New Guide to the Tarot: volume I, The Minor Arcana will total about 200 pages and should be done by Christmas.  The second volume on the Major Arcana follows at a later date - I cannot say when at the moment.

I'm not the first philosopher-logician to write on this subject btw;  Michael Dummett, onetime Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford, wrote extensively on the subject, though from a different perspective.  It is likely this text will pass through a limited edition and will be expensive to print, on account of the many colour illustrations requiring fine resolution.  If some people want to collect signed copies of this book, they should get in touch.

Mark

[Mark Tarver]

The resulting lectures were advertised as a course on the Minor Arcana for people interested in designing their own Tarot cards, but such a specialist focus meant that finding an audience was difficult.

Sorry repeated as a result of my pasting!

M.

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[Mark Thom]

Strange you should mention this! (Well, not really.) I've been wanting to learn expert systems by building one for the tarot for a while now.

[Mark Tarver]

Well there are online systems for doing readings.  For example; http://www.facade.com/; but what is there is very basic.  It simply pastes the meanings of the cards to the screen.  http://besttarotsoftware.com/wp/ I've not used; I expect it does the same but is more detailed and colourful.   I've not done many readings myself; my interest is more philosophical.

Mark

On Fri, Sep 22, 2017 at 6:50 PM, Mark Thom <markjor...@gmail.com> wrote:

Strange you should mention this! (Well, not really.) I've been wanting to learn expert systems by building one for the tarot for a while now.

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[Mark Thom]

Mine are as well. I'm interested in the tarot as an engine for interactive fiction. In that is also an opportunity to tackle a number of other subjects. Natural language processing, especially.

[Antti Ylikoski]

How about:

Dennis Merritt: Building Expert Systems in Prolog

physical book: Springer-Verlag

AJY