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Here in the US, "U.S. Game Systems" (which is the country's main source of tarot cards) stocks most major bookstores with a sampler display of their decks, with sample cards from each one speared on d-rings for perusal. Borders and Barnes & Noble [conspiracy factoid of the day: both of these chain stores are owned by ONE company, which also owns Ingram, the only real book distributor in the country!] should have this.
The main problem with the Thoth deck is that Crowley, being Crowley, tried to bend the whole thing to fit his system when he helped design them. Specifically, he switches out the positions of the Emperor and the Star (which can evidentally be supported qabalistically and was prompted by a section of the Book of the Law where AIWASS says "All those old letters in my book are right, but Tzaddi [Hebrew letter corresponding to path 28] is not the Star." However this throws things all out of kilter unless you're doing specifically Thelemic magick, and although Modern Magick incorporates some Crowleyan ritual (specifically his "Liber Resh" exercises), it's mainly the rituals of the Golden Dawn–so using the Thoth deck would be very confusing.
Personally, my first Tarot deck was the Rider-Waite. I shoplifted it from a mall bookstore in white-trash mecca Santee, California when I was 14 and still wearing a trenchcoat in 90º weather. I looked at it a bit, decided it really was an ugly piece of shit, and sold it to a friend at school the next day for five bucks and went and bought a pack of Skittles and a Dr. Pepper. The next time I decided to buy a deck was when I was 16 and decided I really wanted to do da magick, inspired by old Hellblazers and Colin Wilson's "The Occult." Modern Magick was the first real book I picked up (my friend Andrew had bought one and traded it to me for some others books because he didn't like it–since it was, in his words, "Jew magic." Ahh, SoCal) and it said to go out and buy some cards, so I had to go out and actually buy the Rider-Waite again because I'd developed at least some inkling of a conscience by that time, and then convince my parents that "I only liked the art..." Of course this excuse was flimsy because, yes, the art was utter shit and I hated the things so much that I never learned tarot and rejected the whole Modern Magick system, which led me to the evil clutches of "Liber Null & Psychonaut," but that's another story... four years later, I found myself in the exact same position of "well, I'm really going to have to learn some tarot now," so, digging the same ganky, geeky pack out of the closet, I proceeded to learn the fuckers for once and for all, only to discover–hey! The art is still shit but it doesn't matter, these things rule!
The best thing to do, anyway, is to learn a pack first and then design your own. Everybody seems to agree that the art is all arbitrary, is founded on questionable tradition, and is usually butt-ugly. What I want to do, now, is learn the Rider-Waite fully, navigating the symbols of each card to the specific esoteric meaning of each so that I can then filter that specific meaning back out through my consciousness and my own mental symbol-set and create a pack that perfectly suits my own consciousness... this is the kind of thing that everybody should have enough knowledge to do after doing "Modern Magick." You can always make a pack without any qabalistic structure, just off the top of your head, also–Spare gives some instructions for this in his "Zoetic Grimoire of Zos."
Anyway, I guess the point of all this is that I would think of learning a basic tarot deck like the Rider-Waite as a preliminary step towards making your own; but that the underlying structure should probably be learned first, and the Thoth Deck is working off a structure that doesn't work with Modern Magick. |
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