Recently I have been taking time to colour the BOTA Tarot deck – which is famously left black & white for students to fill in as their appreciation of the esoteric significance of colour develops. However, instead of trying to colour in the actual cards, I thought it would be far easier for me – in terms of detail and control of colour – if I scanned them, printed them out A4 size, and then painted them. I used acrylic paints, simply because that is what I had to hand.
 Before… |
 … and after © 2014 |
It soon occurred to me, would I be able to convert these pictures I was making back into tarot cards? Or in other words, create my own deck based on the BOTA cards. After doing some research I found that the answer was theoretically yes – and surprisingly easier than one might think. But first a caveat. The BOTA deck, I am guessing, is still in copyright, so obviously one cannot create one’s own commercial deck this way. It would have to be a deck for private use only. If I have come up with 100% original designs, that would have been a different situation entirely. However, the fact of the matter is that there are companies – on the internet, even – that if you provide them with a full set of PNG files according to their specifications, they will print them and turn them into a Tarot deck on your behalf. Usually they do this as part of a wider scheme of creating customised playing card decks generally. Apparently quite a few professional Tarot readers do have their own personalised Tarot decks printed up to impress their clients when giving readings. Typical size for each image is 3″*5″ @ 300dpi, or 900*1500 pixels. Note that 1/8th of an inch is routinely shaved off each edge as the bleed area, leaving the printed product 2.75″ * 4.75″, which appears to be an industry standard. Clearly, a graphics program more sophisticated than MS Paint is required! I personally have an old version of Photoshop. I believe there is a freeware program called “GIMP,” although I didn’t particularly like it when I gave it a try. The typical cost for such a deck starts from about $15 for one deck – although if you want your tarot deck to come in a box, you are going to have to pay considerably more, e.g. $26. By way of comparison, the Rider Waite is currently retailing on Amazon for $11, the Crowley Thoth for $21 and Tarot of Marseille for around $16 (all boxed). The only way you would be able to compete with these big boys if you actually went and tried to come up with a proper commercial deck and market it as such. To compete with the Rider Waite, for example, you would only begin to break even by selling out a run of at least 250 decks. However this does not take into account either costs run up in the creation of the deck, or actual profit (is there such a thing???), which if you are going to be working on a professional basis will be considerable. Harry Wendrich, creator of the Golden Dawn Temple Tarot, once told me that he simply employed local people to sit for him as models for the characters he depicted in his cards, which is an excellent strategy for a professional artist, although some of them look particularly shady.
The Golden Dawn was my entry into occultism generally, and consequently the Tarot as well. Hence Robert Wang’s 
was the first deck I ever bought: it was the one on which I learnt. The trumps struck me as the most impressive, although I confess I thought the art-work was a bit ordinary. Nevertheless this is still my default deck today, the one which I most use for doing readings. I have to admit though that if I were buying a Golden Dawn deck for the first time today, I would probably get 
instead, mainly because the art-work is livelier.
Aleister Crowley’s 
).
This is not really a Tarot deck per se, more a Cartomancy deck. It is not based upon the traditional Tarot format at all: instead, each card represents a portion of the Enochian Watchtowers and the Tablet of Union. Meanwhile, the reverse of each card instead of having a uniform backing has elemental symbolism (corresponding to the Enochian associations on the obverse side) which can be used in skrying. The meanings of the individual cards take a bit of getting used to, although there is a logic to the general scheme which is based on GD teachings.
Given that the 
I decided to get hold of this after seeing a fellow Tarot reader use this. What I find most appealing is that the creators of this deck have based the artwork on Greek mythology. Hence: the suit of Cups is the story of Cupid and Psyche; Wands is the story of Jason and the Argonauts; whilst the characters in the Major Arcana are identified as Greek gods and goddesses. This is a visually appealing deck because, like the Rider Waite one, all 78 cards are fully illustrated. Also it is refreshing to see a deck which goes with an original idea for a change which comes off successfully.
Of all the Tarot decks which are available, the ones that particularly interest me are those created by Occultists – as opposed to the many which appear to be novelty decks, or created by people with only a superficial understanding of the subject. Hence my reason for being drawn to not only the Golden Dawn, but also the Crowley Thoth, Rider Waite, etc decks. I suppose it was thus inevitable that I would seek out the Builders of the Adytum, given that it was designed by not only an occultist but by an actual Tarot scholar, Paul Foster Case. The thing about the BOTA deck is that it comes uncoloured: the point being that as a student learns about the Tarot, they use their own knowledge of the esoteric associations of colour to colour it in themselves. Unfortunately I discovered that the BOTA deck is very hard to come by on Amazon – with one going for over £100.
This is something of a curiosity which came into my possession, and of which I have not made use since acquiring it. The trumps feature a lot of lurid artwork – dragons, monsters, scantily-clad buxom women, etc – which only vaguely references traditional tarot imagery. Meanwhile the accompanying booklet puts a Vama-marga Tantric spin on interpretation of the cards.
Sol Ascendans - The Website of Alex Sumner 
Hyperspace
Do not read this blog post if you do not want your mind-blown outside the bounds of four-dimensional space-time. Kind of like what happens when the characters in The Great God Pan look upon the face of the supernatural unveiled. Or when the powder of Ibn Ghazi hits the spot in The Dunwich Horror. This happened to me as a side-effect of undertaking my Abramelin operation this year (i.e. my mind being blown, not literally having an experience with the child of Yog Sothoth), so now I’m inflicting this upon the rest of humanity. Muah ha ha! Ia Shub Niggurath!
But I digress. We normally think of space-time as having four dimensions: height, width, depth, and time. But ask yourself this:
How big is a Thought?
How wide is a dream?
How deep is a Memory?
Thoughts, dreams and memories all exist, hence they must exist within spacetime, yet they can’t be measured in terms of the conventional four dimensions. Hence they are Dimension-less, no?
It occurred to me, whilst I was in some altered state of consciousness or other, that if a thing exists yet cannot be measured in terms height, width, depth or time, then the fact of its existence must constitute a separate Dimension in addition to the preceding four. Hence, we are actually living in five-dimensional space-time, to wit:
Now, this is where things get complicated. Consider the following diagram:
Domain coloured representation of a complex function
Despite the lurid nature of the introductory paragraph, this is not meant to induce major SAN loss. Instead it’s essentially a colour-coded diagram.
Complex numbers are those which consist of a Real and Imaginary part, the latter being a multiple of i, the imaginary square root of -1. Such numbers cannot be represented on a number-line, but they can be represented on a graph – an “Argand Diagram” – where two number lines become the two axes.
However: what if one wanted to display the effects of a Function which involves Complex Numbers? If one were using only Real numbers, this would be easy – just plot a graph. However, this can’t be done with Complex Numbers, as the set of Complex Numbers on which the Function is already performed is already a graph – that is to say, a two-dimensional diagram. Hence the only way to plot a function with Complex Numbers is to somehow come up with a four dimensional diagram – two dimensions for the original Complex Number, and a further two to represent the results of the Function when applied to that number.
It is not literally possible to represent Four Dimensions in just two. Hence, some way must be found to approximate the results – one such way might be by “Domain Colouring,” producing a diagram like that above. In computing terms, every possible colour has an RGB value, or 24-bits. Hence a Complex Number may be represented by assigning 12 of those bits to the Real part, and 12 to the Imaginary part. The colour of the diagram thus becomes the two extra axes needed to complete the Four-Dimensional representation. We have in effect simulated the representation of four dimensions in two dimensions, by adding extra layers of Meaning to the two-dimensional plane.
What however would happen if one were to analyse the above picture from a Magical perspective? One might break it down as follows:
Again, consider the following photograph:
Aleister Crowley
This might be analysed thus:
Or again, this Tarot card, from the BOTA deck:
Key 1, “The Magician,” from the BOTA tarot deck.
Without going into as much detail as previously, one may say that this can be analysed in terms of:
In other words – “Meaning” is our way of depicting Higher Dimensions within the confines of conventional Space-Time. Meaning is not those Higher Dimensions themselves, but a convenient representation thereof. Consequently, it is possible if not to conceive of Hyperspace, then to conceive of approximations thereof, hence:
The final two being virtual categories allowing for a potentially infinite number of actual dimensions. Conversely when, in Occultism, one studies a Symbol and one perceives that it has many layers to it (as all good symbols do), one may conceive of the Symbol as an object existing in Hyperspace, either metaphorically or even literally.
I was going to answer a question on Quora.com, “What do I do if I just threw my tarot cards on the ground out of anger?” A number of respondents answered along the lines of “Get rid of them, for they come from Satan!” Some more respondents answered “Get rid of them, they are a load of rubbish anyway.” A number just responded, “Just pick them up and clean them up, they’re just cards.”
“But,” I thought to myself, “they’re not just cards.” The simple answer to such a question would go like this:
Assume for one moment it is your unconscious mind which does the divination, and the tarot cards are just tools it employs for the purpose. Your Unconscious Mind will remember the day you treated its tools with disrespect, and will respond by showing you a similar lack of concern, by not providing you with an accurate tarot divination again.
However, a hyperspatial analysis might go like this: they are cards with pictures on them; pictures which have multiple layers of meaning both objective and subjective – and moreover, the connections which one builds with them in ones mind become reified as the psychic keys which unlock the intuition which in turn provides the real answer to the divination. A Tarot Card is thus a perfect example of a Hyperdimensional magical object – nay, a Hyperdimensional Entity – of which the Card laying on the ground where it has been carelessly thrown is but a five dimensional cross-section: which is a long way of saying that a Tarot card is far too important to ever be treated lightly.
I rather think that many of the concepts across which one comes in the Western Mystery Tradition, which at first sight are unexplainable to the rational mind, suddenly become explainable when one starts thinking in terms of the geometry of higher dimensions. For example: the Qabalistic Tree of Life. We all know that it has Ten Sephiroth and Twenty-Two paths, but some theories also say there are four Qabalistic Worlds, and moreover, each Sephirah has a Tree within it. Is there one Tree, four Trees, or forty? Are there Ten Sephiroth or four-hundred? Are (e.g.) Kether of Atziluth, Kether of Briah, Kether of Yetzirah, and Kether of Malkuth the same, different, related to one another, separated or conjoined and if so how? Is each one within the succeeding one like Russian dolls, and how can one conceive of any of them if they are or they are not?
One could try to resolve the incongruities by assuming that curious position of the meditative mind in which all dualities are resolved and the critical intellectual faculty is by-passed… if one wanted to limit oneself to thinking in three-dimensions. Alternatively, one could regard the Tree of Life as a Hyperspatial Object – that each Sephiroth is not a Sphere but a Hypersphere – in which case one can perfectly reasonably say that there is only one Tree of Life, one set of Sephiroth and Netivoth, and that a particular part – e.g. Malkuth of Malkuth of Assiah – is but a cross-section of the Hyper-Object (in this example, the Malkuth Hypersphere) that happens to be visible to us at one particular moment.
Ironically, though, Higher Dimensional Geometry also forces us to re-evaluate what we think we know about esotericism. For example: many of the theories which are candidates for a “theory of everything” in Physics posit the existence of multiple dimensions. If one were therefore to look at this from a Magical perspective, one would have to say that if the Universe is inherently Hyperspatial, then the Creator of the Universe must be a Hyperdimensional Deity. Hence, when we try to represent this Hyper-God using lower-dimensional symbols, we must accept the inevitability of failing to capture a fully accurate picture. The Sepher Yetzirah, for example, suggests that the Twenty Two letters of the Hebrew Alphabet can be arranged to form the Cube of Space. But what if the cosmos were more accurately represented not by a Cube but by a Tesseract? Or a Hypercube of five or more dimensions? If the former, then the Hebrew Alphabet would have to have forty-nine extra letters. Hey! Perhaps that means the language spoken by God and His angels in Heaven is infinitely more complex than anything of which us lower-dimensional creatures can conceive? I have not calculated how many letters would be required to make a hypercube of any higher order, primarily for my own convenience, but also because I feel that without knowing just how many dimensions in total are involved, it would be idle speculation.
“If the Universe is inherently Hyperspatial, then the Creator of the Universe must be a Hyperdimensional Deity.”
Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) – Salvador Dali, 1954.
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Tagged as Aleister Crowley, BOTA, Builders of the Adytum, Cube of Space, hyperspace, hypersphere, Salvador Dali, tesseract