Monday, October 20, 2003

Dear Christine,

My own journey to the Tarot started in 1964 while I was an Art Student at the Johannesburg School of Art, South Africa.  For my History of Art paper, I decided to do Hieronymous Bosch, and by sheer chance at the same time, I came across The Egyptian Tarot deck, from the Church of Light, and the book, The Sacred Tarot, by C.C. Zain. It was love at first sight. Next year will mark 40 years  or research, and the fruits are now embedded in 1.6 gigabytes in about 32,000 files,  which fills up three CD's.

I have enjoyed your material on tarot.com and there are many resonance’s there. In 1972 I joined the Church of Light, and have not heard of them since. Now they have a website with some fascinating history of the life of C.C. Zain, Elbert Benjamin. But I am still convinced, that after 40 years of research, in all directions, the  Zain system has proved itself to be of the highest order and rooted in sound initiatory soil. 

My good fortune, also allowed me to live in Italy, on and off for the past 30 years, where I am based in Turin.  When not in that magical city, I live in Cape Town, where I am at present, also a beautiful city  and one that is developing a very alternative culture and spirituality.

As an Art Historian I followed the Church of Light material  into Renaissance research and eventually came to the Warburg Institute Journal, and Edgar Wind, Jean Seznac, and that whole school of thought. Gombrich and Wittkower, and so on. Francis Yates of course, an enormous influence in her methodology. Absorption in Alchemy imagery brought me to C.G. Jung, and along the way I became ordained as a Buddhist monk by H.H. the Karmapa of the Karma Kagyu Order of Tibetan Buddhism - but I gave up monk status and continued with studies in the Western Esoteric Tradition. 

The overview, or Big Picture has resulted in an archetypal architecture, [same words really], based on the 22 Arcana. Rather like the Memory Theatre, all research is filed in these 22 folders, pictures included, leading to the 32,000 files mentioned above.

One article was published in The Hermetic Journal in Edinburgh in 1985, and another short article in  Turin, otherwise I remain unpublished.  But the entire contraption has been designed as a massive webpage, with creative backgrounds, and hyperlinked text, plus PowerPoint slides shows of images, and list of links to Internet resources. I cannot publish this, because in the course of the years I have scanned in thousands of articles,  which I have a right to do for my own use, but am incapable of distributing, due to legal restrictions.

The reason was that having to commute between Italy and Cape Town, I suffered from problems shipping huge boxes of material that I had Xeroxed in Europe. When the scanner arrived on the scene, I felt as if I had died and gone to heaven, because I could now gather and store, ad infinitum. You must realize that in South Africa we have a critical shortage of funds for Libraries, and the previous regime did not look kindly on esoteric publications, what with its Christian Nationalist proto-fascist system, so resources are limited. Yes, there are old sets of the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, the Journal of Hellenistic Studies, and some Ambix, but everything is in broken sets. But nothing to compare with the British Library, or the University Libraries in Europe, such as Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetic in Amsterdam, which is Real Hermetic Heaven.

You echo this personal history of mine in your observations about Americans not understanding the history of the Tarot.

There is something of a renaissance of research on the Tarot and it can be placed in the context of the Western Esoteric Tradition  being developed as an academic  methodology by Hanegraaf, Versluis, Faivre, Godwin, Karen-Claire Voss and so on. Academic versus initiatory. Should such a dicotomy exist?

Where have we come from, where are we now, and where do we go from here?

The Chaos on the Internet  on the Tarot gives me a headache. There is so much corruption and distortion, that one feels almost contaminated  in trying to mine this Babel for seams of sensibility. In the sense of the Work.

A few thoughts, before plunging into deeper waters.

Yours sincerely

Samten de Wet  

Wednesday, 22 October 2003  

Dear Christine,

My own journey to the Tarot started in 1964 while I was an Art Student at the Johannesburg School of Art, South Africa.  For my History of Art paper, I decided to do Hieronymous Bosch, and by sheer chance at the same time, I came across The Egyptian Tarot deck, from the Church of Light, and the book, The Sacred Tarot, by C.C. Zain. It was love at first sight. Next year will mark 40 years  or research, and the fruits are now embedded in 1.6 gigabytes in about 32,000 files,  which fills up three CD's.

I have enjoyed your material on tarot.com and there are many resonance’s there. In 1972 I joined the Church of Light, and have not heard of them since. Now they have a website with some fascinating history of the life of C.C. Zain, Elbert Benjamin. But I am still convinced, that after 40 years of research, in all directions, the  Zain system has proved itself to be of the highest order and rooted in sound initiatory soil. 

My good fortune, also allowed me to live in Italy, on and off for the past 30 years, where I am based in Turin.  When not in that magical city, I live in Cape Town, where I am at present, also a beautiful city  and one that is developing a very alternative culture and spirituality.

As an Art Historian I followed the Church of Light material  into Renaissance research and eventually came to the Warburg Institute Journal, and Edgar Wind, Jean Seznec, and that whole school of thought. Gombrich and Wittkower, and so on. Francis Yates of course, an enormous influence in her methodology. Absorption in Alchemy imagery brought me to C.G. Jung, and along the way I became ordained as a Buddhist monk by H.H. the Karmapa of the Karma Kagyu Order of Tibetan Buddhism - but I gave up monk status and continued with studies in the Western Esoteric Tradition. 

The overview, or Big Picture has resulted in an archetypal architecture, [same words really], based on the 22 Arcana. Rather like the Memory Theatre, all research in filed in these 22 folders, pictures included, leading to the 32,000 files mentioned above.

One article was published in The Hermetic Journal in Edinburgh in 1985, and another short article in  Turin, otherwise I remain unpublished.  But the entire contraption has been designed as a massive webpage, with creative backgrounds, and hyperlinked text, plus PowerPoint slides shows of images, and list of links to Internet resources. I cannot publish this, because in the course of the years I have scanned in thousands of articles,  which I have a right to do for my own use, but am incapable of distributing, due to legal restrictions.

The reason was that having to commute between Italy and Cape Town, I suffered from problems shipping huge boxes of material that I had Xeroxed in Europe. When the scanner arrived on the scene, I felt as if I had died and gone to heaven, because I could now gather and store, ad infinitum. You must realize that in South Africa we have a critical shortage of funds for Libraries, and the previous regime did not look kindly on esoteric publications, what with its Christian Nationalist proto-fascist system, so resources are limited. Yes, there are old sets of the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, the Journal of Hellenistic Studies, and some Ambix, but everything is in broken sets. But nothing to compare with the British Library, or the University Libraries in Europe, such as Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetic in Amsterdam, which is Real Hermetic Heaven.

You echo this personal history of mine in your observations about Americans not understanding the history of the Tarot.

There is something of a renaissance of research on the Tarot and it can be placed in the context of the Western Esoteric Tradition  being developed as an academic  methodology by Hanegraaf, Versluis, Faivre, Godwin, Karen-Claire Voss and so on. Academic versus initiatory. Should such a dicotomy exist?

Where have we come from, where are we now, and where do we go from here?

The Chaos on the Internet  on the Tarot gives me a headache. There is so much corruption and distortion, that one feels almost contaminated in trying to mine this Babel for seams of sensibility. In the sense of the Work.

A few thoughts, before plunging into deeper waters.

Yours sincerely

Samten de Wet  

I cannot and will not get involved in partisan activities. THE Work, is too incandescent to allow that. After all, as H.E. Tai Rinpoche once said, or words to the effect, There is only One Truth. The Mind is like a rapidly rotating wheel, and an electric fan, and we know what happens when the shit hits the fan? Everyone is splattered with fragments of waste matter. No integrative vision, no Unified Field theories, just splitting and cutting and breaking down critically. With lashings of Ego territory. Unfortunately this is how most universities operate, the testosterone crowd. Lacks the oestrogen of the feminine, the linking and networking, weaving and connecting threads, that will lead us to a new vision to balance the decay of dogmas and theologies, that suck us into a collective vortex of negativity. The Pluto in Sagittarius phase, which codifies much of the above. Most of the World Religions are undergoing a nigredo at the moment. And with Uranus in Aquarius and Neptune in Pisces, we can expect decay and renewal to be indistinguishable.

     But to turn to Africa, we have the hippopotamus, which was actually indigenous to the brak wetlands of Cape Town, still commemorated in the name Seekoevlei – in Dutch.  This animal has a wonderful strategy. It whirls its little tail at the speed of light when it has a crap, with the result that its waste products are spread out over a wide distance. That way, it marks its territory.

 THE CITY OF ALEXANDER & THE LIBRARY 

There is a Tale in Plutarch's Life of Alexander about the city:

"And when he [Alexander] saw a site of surpassing natural advantages... he... ordered the plan of the city to be drawn in conformity with this site. There was no chalk at hand, so they took barley-meal and marked out with it on the dark soil a rounded area... The king was delighted with the design; but suddenly birds from the river and the lagoon, infinite in number and of every sort and size, settled down upon the place like clouds and devoured every particle of the barley-meal, so that even Alexander was greatly disturbed at the omen.

         However, the seers exhorted him to be of good cheer, since the city founded here by him would have most abundant and helpful resources and be a nursing mother for men of every nation, and so he ordered those in change of the work to proceed with it, while he himself set out for the temple of Ammon."

 See Also: L.Durrell: The Alexandrian Quartet. Also, in context, with the following:

  "With respect to the birds I refer to Matthew XIII, 4: " And when he sowed, some seeds fell by the wayside and the fowls came and devoured them up."

 [Silberer, Herbert,Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts, rpt. New York, Dover Publications, 1971, pp. 199 - 200.]

  The above is an exoteric version. Here is another I have rephrased from an oral story:

      A blind seeress came forth from where she lived by the sea, and said to Alexander: "Nay my Great Lord, this great cloud of birds now flying to their nesting places on the Nile and the lagoon, do not portend a bad omen.”

     The goodness of the omen is not so obvious, but it refers to the shit hitting the fan habit of the hippo. There were different seeds used in the plan, not only barley-meal. Birds migrate, and when they do so, seeds are embedded in the linings of their digestive systems. These seeds are eventually dislodged in their droppings during their migrations. Thus the migratory patterns of birds = the dispersion of plant species across the globe.

     The esoteric implications, are, that Alexandria became a seed-bed, of wisdom, during its Ptolemaic, Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic phases, from which many birds, of various species, fed, and eventually dispersed, carrying the seeds within, which were sown across world, in both time and space.

      There are many geographical points of special interest in the Transmission, but one of the most vital for the Hermetic Transmission, is of course the city of Alexandria.

 That is why we call ourselves, Alexandrine Birds.

And to finish off with another such Bird:

 "The learning of the ancients, in so far as it existed outside secret occult orders, was collected in the Alexandrian Library. This library was begun by Ptolemy I in the third century B.C., and was added to in great measure by Ptolemy II. With the ascendancy of Christianity no pains were spared to destroy every record, monument, or scroll of more ancient times, either in the fear that it would contradict the Bible, or in the belief that it was Pagan. The second Library in the Serapeum was completely destroyed when the Christians sacked that temple in 390 A.D. The main library also disappeared under persistent hostile influences, the Mohammedans, when they had gained the power, finishing the work of destruction commenced earlier by the Christians."

 He continues:

 "...not all of the scrolls were consigned to the flames. Some found their way to secret safe sanctuary in the heart of the Arabian desert.

C.C.Zain, `Spiritual Alchemy'.

 But to codify the above even further, to get down to the nuclear level, the symbolism of the bird can be reduced, in shorthand to a feather, and the White Feather, was the Egyptian Hieroglyph for Truth. I suspect, it is a feather of the Ibis sacra, sacred to Thoth. And this bird too, according to Aelian, De natura animalium, used to cleanse its bowls using its own beak, as a sort of enema, or clyster-pipes as Aelian has it. In other words, Uroboros.

 Here in Maynardville Park, where I take my poodle Muffy for a walk every afternoon, there is a lone Ibis sacra who hangs out with the Egyptian Geese.

 Samten de Wet