Hướng dẫn bói bài Tarot Tarot magick the structure of belief

Using the methodology of the Ethnography of Belief, this dissertation examines one Tarot reader's belief system in depth to see how four domains commonly associated with magic combine in

TAROT MAGICK: THE STRUCTURE OF BELIEF

Rebekah Zhuraw

A DISSERTATION

IN FOLKLORE AND FOLKLIFE

Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Robert St George, Associate Professor of History

Jean-Michel Rabate, Professor of English and Comparative Literature

UMI Number: 3414109

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First and foremost I wish to acknowledge my entire family—no-one left out—for their overwhelming support Next, to the families of Shakti's friends who supported her so that I could work—the Beckers, the Martins, the Oppenheimer-Abbots, the Simonian-Taylors, and the Watsons—thank you My great appreciation goes to the friends who supported me directly: Karen Cisario, who put up with me, and Norm Roessler, who gave me solace and reward Perhaps most importantly, my appreciation goes to my Committee: David Hufford, who as a teacher taught me understanding; Bob Saint-George, who taught me Love (creative emotion) under Will (intellect) in a purely academic sense (even if it took a long, long time) and is always a pleasure to talk to; and Jean-Michel Rabate for his generosity Lastly, I wish to acknowledge Balthazar and Nettle Spreng, who in this time of great

hardship made possible this work; may her dragons guard you always

ABSTRACT

TAROT MAGICK: THE STRUCTURE OF BELIEF

Rebekah Zhuraw Robert St George

Magic has traditionally been defined in Folklore Studies as a last resort of the powerless and poorly educated However, recent trends in popular culture coupled with an upswing in historical studies of magic have shown magic to be a perennial middle class pursuit and one currently on the upswing Using the methodology of the Ethnography of Belief, this dissertation examines one Tarot reader's belief system in depth to see how four domains commonly associated with magic combine

in the overall belief structure: magical thinking, practice, symbolism, and

manifestation A current life crisis guides the narrative, contextualized by an depth life history put into the historical context of Neo-Paganism Detailed

in-accounts of practices indicate a feedback loop between held beliefs and induced experience A binary system of organizing cognitive processes and magical powers ultimately emerges The dissertation concludes that Tarot Magick provides a form

of cognitive map, the goal of which is for practitioners to achieve a

multi-dimensional consciousness which integrates all dualisms, including the lifeworld and the otherworld, into a third perspective conceived of as God consciousness

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ii

Abstract iii Table of Contents iv

Table of Figures vii

Chapter 1 Introduction and Methodology: Ethnography and Magic 1

1 From a Book on Tarot to a Dissertation on Magic 1

2 The Problem of Magic 7

3 Defining Magic 21

4 Magical Thinking 24

5 Magic and Cognitive Theory 29

6 Final Notes and Outline of Chapters 34

Chapter 2 Life History 38

6 Practices 1: Astral Projection 74

7 Practices 2: Constructing a Battery and a Genii 82

9 Crisis 2: Dematerializations and Discovery 92

10 Europe and Franzel: 1989,1991 96

11 Practices 4: Shielding 113

12 Final Notes on Franzel 121

13 Franzel's Tarot Reading 123

14 Postscript 127

Chapter 3 Occulture 129

1 The Tradition of No Tradition 129

2 We're All Pagans Here (Neo-Paganism) 140

3 The Rosicrucians 146

4 The New Age 155

5 The Cultic Milieu 164

6 Neo-Pagan Self-Identification 174

7 Full Circle 184

Chapter 4 Magic in a Time of Crisis 199

1 The Gender of Tarot Magick 199

2 My Life in 14 Tapes 214

3 The Law of Love 223

4 The Law of Fate: Physical Plane (Law) 230

5 The Law of Fate: Mental Plane (Planning) 241

6 The Law of Fate: Spiritual Plane (Prophecy) 249

7 Grass Roots Magick 258

Chapter 5 The Third Personality: Manifestation 269

1 The Third Personality 269

2 The Cognitive Blend 280

3 Casting the Circle 285

2 Hagiography: Portrait of a Magus 319

3 The One You Seek Is No Longer Available 327 Bibliography 337

Index 351

TABLE OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Charge Structure of the Tetragrammaton 201

Figure 2: The Conceptual Blend 281 Figure 3: Ritual Blend Synthesis 283 Figure 4: Tetragrammaton: "Wheel of the Year" 286

Figure 5: Combined Cognitive Blend and Tetragrammaton 287

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION AND METHODOLOGY: ETHNOGRAPHY AND MAGIC

1 From a Book on Tarot to a Dissertation on Magic

In January 2003, having recently given birth to my daughter and needing

employment that would allow me to work at home, I was hired by my landlord, Balthazar Spreng, to help him write a book on Tarot In my dissertation proposal, I record the initial stages of this process:

I have to say I had no idea what I was getting myself into I was well

versed in comparative literatures and religions, and especially strong in

Greek and Egyptian myth As a student of Folklore and an ethnographer, I

am a trained witness and listener I am also, as well as a standard

writer/editor-for-hire, a poet and sometimes artist, which has in turn

influenced my research in the arts, orality and literacy, and intertextuality

Balthazar had stated that he wanted some of the book written in

incantation This cinched the intrigue on both sides

We first met to work on the book in his wife's study on the second floor of

his home on January 3, 2003 at 9 a.m The meeting consisted primarily of

his holding up Tarot cards and telling me their meanings—a stream of

numbers, Hebrew letters, geometric solids, planets, constellations, and

names of gods from a variety of pantheons which flowed forth in rhythmic

incantation I had never experienced anything like it, and I struggled to

connect the diverse details of what I had thought to be largely, mutually

exclusive systems We broke for lunch, then continued, stopping at

nightfall Through the entire process, my newborn daughter slept in her

basket, waking periodically to nurse We met like this for 5 days, during

which he explained the overall structure of the book and suggested that I

could begin writing At this my mouth dropped, and I declared that I

could not—or not yet anyway

Balthazar at first did not understand why I was a writer, he was paying

me—why couldn't I write it? I explained that I needed more

information—that, quite simply, I did not understand, and if I did not

understand the subject, I could not possibly write coherently about it

How exactly, for example, did the Tarot correspond to astrology—which

he had frequently mentioned—I asked him What was the system—the

big picture? He looked at me strangely then and laid out the Tarot cards in

a large, time consuming circle around me: that was how Then I was

given my first lesson: go buy myself a deck of Tarot cards, duplicate the

circle at home, and then come back and show him I did Thus began an

ongoing series of lessons through which I shifted from non-participant

writer to participant-observer apprentice as Balthazar taught me about the

Tarot, Hermetic Qabalah, and magical practices in the manner that his

teacher had taught him

Or so I thought at the time In fact, this last sentence turned out to be false, but I did not know that until I switched from writing a book of magic to writing a dissertation, which was not until last year But to mention this is to leap-frog chronology Thus to return to the unfinished story above and, notably, what I left out of my proposal, what followed was an odyssey into mysticism—a year and a half in which I memorized the many facets

of the Qabalistic Tree of Life and inhabited the conceptual realm of Qabalistic creation, according to which the Hebrew alphabet contains, fossilized yet still pulsing within, the very code and building blocks of life—all through the symbolism, definitions, and

mythology of the Tarot cards Daily I reported my progress, and once a week we met for

a lesson in Qabalah Throughout I wrote sample pieces of incantation and began the first entries of a dictionary of the cards Then, on May 12th, 2004, it all ended abruptly when,

in the early morning hours, Balthazar was arrested and his properties seized—all except for the one I was living in—for the alleged cultivation of marijuana

For those who have never encountered the process of the legal system in the "war

on drugs", I will summarize simply by saying that it was devastating for Balthazar and those who shared his life, with many twists and turns Initially, Balthazar was held for $3

million dollars bail and the D.A vowed "to put him away" for 20 years A skinny, 55

year old, vegetarian, hippy, pacifist with a series of pre-existing injuries and illnesses and

a 20-some years prior conviction for selling LSD, because of the amount of his bail, was housed with the most hardened murderers Suffice it to say the conditions reported were deplorable—lights left on for days on end, sleeping on a sheet of metal, freezing cold, people having epileptic fits left unattended on the floor Visits—I went twice, once bringing my child—were surreal: a roomful of men in giant, orange jumpsuits, no-one allowed to touch anyone, the visit rushed and business-like, and Balthazar inevitably streaming tears Meanwhile, his wife, suddenly homeless, came to live in the apartment below me, where, after the months it took for the audit of his financial records which allowed him to put his last remaining property, the house I lived in, up towards bail and

to find someone else to put their house up, as well, he came "home" on house arrest

Deprived of sleep, essentially starving, leery of the future, and having simply not seen sky for months, he was a nervous wreck, distracted to say the least—certainly not the warm, energetic, abstract artist and often silly mystic I had come to know

It is strange how people react in an emergency Most of his friends simply

evaporated (though some have since returned) Others turned mean I had not known him long in the scheme of things, but it was not my inclination to do either Within months of his return, a tenant who had been arrested in the sweep, the artist William Riley, a friend from his Academy days who lived on disability, having been deprived of his chemo and having suffered two heart attacks unattended, along with other hardships

in jail, died at 60 years of age Another person, similarly arrested, who was bipolar and whose house was ravaged by crack addicts and his dogs "euthanized" in his absence, went off his meds and lost his mind It just went on and on It was not long before I had

to move because he had to raise my rent to cover his expenses, but I returned to visit I

always returned The book was necessarily shelved—it was not even a topic of

discussion There was only one topic of discussion, and I listened endlessly to it I volunteered to attend his hearing dates when his wife had to work and I did not, as I intrinsically knew it was not good to be alone in a courtroom, and there were many

hearings on many issues as each side gained and lost ground Eventually, in spring of

2007, when it became clear that this was going to take a long, long time, we decided to begin work again on the book—not to write—neither of us were ready for that yet— but

to do research for a star map which was, he now revealed, along with the Tree of Life, the basis of the Tarot cards

By this time, Balthazar had adjusted to his situation enough to have regained much of his original disposition When asked how he was, he answered with his

signature, "Paradoxical." While he had continued to practice Tarot all along—one of the first things he did upon release from jail was a Tarot reading on his situation (to which, as

a student and now one of few remaining friends, I was invited, as I was to most of the fourteen total readings on his situation which he has performed over the elapsed five years)—he had begun occasionally reading Tarot for others again, as well Moreover, he had physically healed enough to resume his magical practices (which include strenuous yoga and chi gung forms) in full Overall, his general standard of living had improved

No longer regarded as a flight risk, his house arrest requirements had been greatly

reduced so he was less of a shut-in and could sleep uninterrupted through the night Plus

he had made practical and aesthetic improvements to his "temporary" home, and he seemed in a peculiarly German way to enjoy the calculations of budgeting In short, he had learned to live again in the present

Our renewed work on the book coincided with his setting up of a tiny, but

functional studio, and, stimulated it seemed by our renewed conversations about the book, he began once again to paint, first painting a series of yantras (geometric designs used as Tantric meditation tools in Buddhism and Hinduism), but soon settled into

sketching designs for his proposed Tarot deck, to accompany the Tarot book The card

he selected to begin with was the Justice card, for which a friend posed, and, as with everything, I soon realized it was to be a "magical" painting The painting was produced through precise mathematical calculations and purposeful meditations using specific imagery In the course of my now renewed weekly visits to work on the star map, he displayed his progress and discussed his set backs on the painting, at one point veiling the painting for weeks as he struggled with a turn for what seemed like the worst in his court case It was through this painting that I came to realize that everything having to do with Tarot—everything about his life, it seemed, really—certainly everything to which he put any intention at all—had to do with magic

When we began our work on the book in 2003, "magic" was not a word I would have associated with Tarot I would have called it divination, but not "magic" Even at

the time of Balthazar's arrest, at which time I had fully experienced, conceptually

(mythically), the Qabalistic story of creation symbolized numerically through the

transition from zero—nothing—to one—something—and knew that "one" was

represented by the Tarot card called "The Magician", upon whose definition—Hermes, the inventor of language, mathematics, and magic, the embodied Mind of God, the

breath, the juggler of life, life itself—we had dwelled for some time, magic had not been

the focus of our conversations Or I had not noticed that it was But then I was only at

the beginning of such studies, and, typical of beginnings, I did not know it I was focused

on mastery of the underlying structure, but I knew nothing of its application, and in truth,

as the summer of 2007 came to a close and I broached the idea of writing a dissertation

on the topic of Balthazar's practices, first with Balthazar and then with members of the Folklore Program, I had only the glimmer of an idea of what that magic was And in truth, not being an initiate to these practices, there are definite limitations to what I can claim to know now Mine is not insider's knowledge

Ultimately, Balthazar's arrest was, however, what gave me that glimpse of the massive shadow of the iceberg beneath the waters, the small tip of which I had been chipping diligently away at In the wake of the arrest, he talked about his progress in healing and the gathering of his strength for the final showdown, which, of course,

included magical practices, and, true to my nature, I asked questions Thus I learned what this man, who I'd gotten to know better since his arrest than I'd ever known I

would, had been doing in ritual every night for over 20 years—meditations, astral

projection, conjurations—and how these general practices, as well as magical practices specific to his law case, tied in with his practice of Tarot reading, both in terms of how the Tarot is used as a tool in his other magical practices and how his other magical

practices, in turn, are tools for his development as a Tarot reader I began to see that these were all related magical practices, and through witnessing reading after reading on his personal situation, I began to understand that the process of reading itself was magic and why

What I still did not know, however, was "the whole picture"—that elusive subject about which I'd demanded information those first weeks in which I had been hired to

write a book on Tarot, except the meaning of this had now shifted for me from

underlying system to context I had, for example, only vague notions of "The Heidelberg School of Hermetic Qabalah," the tradition into which Balthazar claimed to be initiated Nor did I know much about his teacher, Franzel Meyer, whose picture sat atop his altar, nor his relationship with him Thus, once my dissertation proposal was accepted, while

on the one hand I searched for everything I could get my hands on related to magic in Folklore and related disciplines, in traditional Folklorist style I returned to "the field" to collect a detailed life history This produced treasures: letters, photographs, and even a journal and audio-tapes of his sessions with his teacher We poured through photo

albums and discussed readings, but mostly Balthazar lectured, as is his wont, telling the story of his life as if giving a series of structured lessons on the Qabalah—all of which I tape recorded and dutifully transcribed and from which I have built the substance of this dissertation

2 The Problem of Magic

As Robert Cantwell states in his examination of the manifestation of culture,

Ethnomimesis, "In the modern world, the idea of folklife belongs to the romantic tradition

and, like that tradition, is a response to, an instrument of, and a phenomenon of

modernity" (Cantwell 1993: v) Well, there is nothing more romantic than magic, which,

in popular usage, is both the sine qua non and the je ne sais qua of love—and, for that

matter, most things mysterious, ecstatic, and compelling But as with all ideals, it also finds itself at the point-end of the double edged sword of passion, where it is as often vehemently denounced as it is otherwise enthusiastically embraced, most often in the

name of either science or religion, and, as many a philsopher-historians has successfully unveiled, such cultural phenomena are more oft than not mirrored in the academy Thus

in Making Magic: Religion, Magic, and Science in the Modern World, Randall Styers

painstakingly traces the path by which magic becomes the ultimate foil of the forces of modernity, including Christianity, capitalism, and the modern university (Styers 2004) But to finish Cantwell's thought: "And yet, in a larger sense the idea of folklife surely belongs to the long and complex pastoral dream founded in western civilization's primary myths" (Cantwell 1993: xv) So, too, magic

Folklore partially inherits the problem of magic from anthropology, where one can say the subject is foundational, but it also co-creates this discourse through its own invention of "the folk" This discourse finds voice in both hemispheres of Folklore studies, folk-literature, via folk and fairy tales, and folkways, primarily through Folk Religion and Folk Medicine, through which related fields of inquiry Belief Studies has its ostensible beginnings This dissertation is founded in the impulse of Belief Studies, but from here moves in a necessarily interdisciplinary direction, as ubiquitously called for by the scholars who have constituted a recent and compelling resurgence of academic study

of magic, many of them anthropologists (Styers 2004; Greenwood 2000, 2005; Sorensen 2007), some sociologists (Berger 2003, 2005; York 2005a, 2005b), also scholars of

Religion (Lehrich 2003, 2007) Notably, Christopher Lehrich opens The Occult Mind: Magic in Theory and Practice (whose subtitle he acknowledges borrowing from

renowned magus Aleister Crowley) with the following declaration:

Modern academe does not recognize a discipline devoted to the analytical

study of occult, magical, or esoteric traditions Work in these areas,

though on the increase, remains hampered by various methodological and

political blinders The primary difficulty is simply explained: work on

magic is tightly constrained by the conventions of the disciplines in which

it is locally formulated Academic scholars working on magic have often

been strikingly anxious to situate themselves indisputably within a

conventional disciplinary framework, as though thereby to ward off the

lingering taint of an object of study still thought disreputable if not

outright mad But it should no longer be necessary to defend studies of

magic, given the long line of distinguished predecessors in several

disciplines 1 hope that this book will act as a preliminary to an

interdisciplinary field of magic" (Lehrich 2007: xi-xiv)

About this declaration and the overall thrust of Lehrich's work, Chris Miles, in a review

in Pomegranite (an international review of Pagan Studies) notes, "Lehrich's 2005 work, The Language of Demons and Angels: Cornelius Agrippa 's Occult Philosophy, which

applied structuralist and deconstructionist methods in a groundbreaking reading of

Agrippa, also contained a number of passages examining the assumptions and intellectual paradigms informing modern scholarship on esotericism It was clear in that work that Lehrich had a lot more to say about the job of doing scholarship on magic and doing

theory in general—and The Occult Mind: Magic in Theory and Practice represents an

extraordinary blooming of some of these earlier concerns" (Miles 2007: 198) I will return to Lehrich's proposal and use of structuralism momentarily, but for now I will take

up the theme of apology

I had three wishes in writing this dissertation: 1)1 did not want to apologize for the subject matter Given the perennial popular groundswell of interest in magic, as British anthropologist Susan Greenwood notes, the very lack of serious scholarly

attention to the subject warrants attention (Greenwood 2005) Plus Lehrich has given me

an out here Thank you, Christopher Lehrich 2) Closely related to wish number one, I

did not want to do an exhaustive review of how precursors to Lehrich's proposal of an interdisciplinary study of magic have addressed magic historically—in Folklore or in any discipline, for as Lehrich notes, philosophies travel well beyond Philosophy departments, quickly becoming cultural discourses, both in the academe and society at large Each of the previously noted sources has done an admirable job of locating the major names and trends in magic theorizing in Anthropology, Sociology, and Religion and established reasoned objections to them—not surprisingly, as many are the end results of

dissertations—as have recent Folklore dissertations in my home department at the

University of Pennsylvania established the decisions that lead to the formation of Belief Studies and its application to the fields of folk medicine and folk religion Abject

repetition is, to my mind, not far from abject poverty when it does not adequately address the issues at hand The problem of the discourse on magic is not simply its modernist legacy, but the dearth of attention it has received in its own right in post-modernity Thus

at the risk of grand reductionism, I will state that there is one great divide in the

interdisciplinary history of the study of belief as it applies to magic, and that is the

attempted break from positivism and evolutionism that accompanied the philosophical critique of Western relativism and the reified, hierarchical, cultural machine of

modernity, of which the university is part and parcel "But," as notes Cantwell in

Ethnomimesis, "it is not my purpose to tell again the story of modernity, already

admirably told by Paul Mantoux, E P Thompson, Raymond Williams, Walter Ong, Michel Foucault, among many others I have chosen instead to concentrate on those configurations in the cultural text that, because they are imaginative, admit of many

imaginative transformations" (Cantwell 1993: 2) Still, the subject requires some

reckoning, as it is intimately bound up with the discourse on magic

Notes Don Cupitt in Mysticism After Modernity, "Opinions may differ about just

when it was that the Modern age suddenly confronted its own deepest assumptions and found itself compelled to recognize that it didn't actually believe them any more, but perhaps the best candidate is the year 1968, a turbulent time in Prague, Paris and

Chicago Since then we have increasingly thought of ourselves as living in a

'postmodern' period—a term that we use not by way of dignifying that we have

successfully completed the transition to a new understanding of the human condition, but

rather by way of admitting that at yet we haven Y" (Cupitt 1998: 1) In apparent

concordance with Cuppit's projected "D day", I C Jarvie published The Revolution in Anthropology in 1964 (reprinted in 1967), a self proclaimed inter-disciplinary and

"rebellious" study in which he critiqued the "scientific attitude" of social anthropology — specifically, lingering structural-functionalism—and proposed instead a "philosophical anthropology." Jarvie frames his concept of a philosophical anthropology by quoting

Kant, "Kant put philosophical anthropology well in his Introduction to Logic when he

said that philosophy tried to answer four questions: what can I know (metaphysics); what ought I to do (morals); what may I hope (religion); and what is man (anthropology) 'In reality, however, all these questions might be reckoned under anthropology, since the first three questions refer to the last'" (Kant 1885: 15 quoted in Jarvie 1967: xx) Kant's postulate is complex, but amongst its implications picked up by Jarvie are that

anthropology—and all related studies of man—are always bound up with an innate

metaphysics and an innate issue of ethics

Jarvie's text, also an outgrowth of his dissertation, again provides an excellent summary and critique of his anthropologic fore-runners, ultimately exposing

ethnographic methodology as "impregnated with interpretations and theories", by which

he primarily meant the ethnographers' own metaphysics, now brought into question procedurally and ethically Jarvie uses the example of a "concrete, first-order problem", cargo cults, to address this meta-methodological issue His conclusion: "the reason social anthropologists got stuck [in theorizing cargo cults] is because they get stuck with all problems of social change." This point is illuminating, both in its own right and in its applicability to the innate problems still underlying theorizing magic and magic

traditions But that aside, one might call all subsequent critique of the ethnography of belief within the social sciences "variations on a theme of Jarvie's", and there have been many well-stated, thoughtful permutations of these, including some made along the way

by Robin Horton, Jonathan Z Smith, and Stanley Tambiah, amongst others, which directly address the study of magic, but given the groundswell of subsequently redirected energy to addressing maligned and misunderstood subjects, the fact that, instead of being

a hot topic, magic mostly went to the back burner is curious One cannot blame this on the academy mimicking popular historic trends as, in fact, the sixties, seventies, and even eighties were rife with magical-religious trends, as this dissertation graphically addresses Yet in a keyword search of the sixteen Folklore journals archived by JSTOR (which includes the top four U.S Folklore journals), despite that there were 2,463 hits for the word "magic" between 1960 and 2007, only 52 of these had the word "magic" in the title, and more than half of these were book reviews Examining the articles that did not include the word "magic" in the title, the word was almost always superfluously or

generally used, essentially an epithet or catch-all, and magic was not itself usually an object of focus Further, the years 1970 to 1979, where, noting popular trends, one might expect a surge in academic interest in magic, one instead experiences a noticeable dip A slight upswing in the eighties can probably be attributed to the attention sociologists were giving to the "New Age Movement", an apparently suddenly ubiquitous outgrowth of sixties spirituality with a decidedly capitalist flavor, which sociologists took the role of attempting to normalize, applying the toned down term "New Religious Movements", especially to the various eastern religious elements under the New Age umbrella, though

in fact these eastern elements had been present in American and European culture long before the sixties (especially in the arena of Philosophy) The term never caught on much outside of Sociology, and by the nineties the JSTOR numbers were as low as in the seventies again, though census numbers show that in fact another sixties-generated groundswell was in formation: the neo-pagan movement (Berger, et al 2003, Pew Forum 2008)

Outside of magic, per se, however, ultimately such redirected energies as

represented in such texts as The Revolution in Anthropology freed the

social-sciences-minded academic intellectual imagination to new levels of curiosity, exploration, and experimentation of many kinds, most inherently interdisciplinary, breeding such foment

as ethnopoetics, ethnomusicology, literary and cultural studies, the anthropology of the emotions, bodylore, and other intersections of otherwise distinct departments with the arts, each other, and the popular milieu, as well Meanwhile, back in Folklore, in both the areas of Folk Religion and Folk Medicine, Don Yoder produced, in 1972 and 1974, respectively, groundbreaking definitions of each, reconfiguring the stigmatized "exotic"

spiritual beliefs of the socially and economically marginalized "folk" into what David Hufford would later characterize simply as "the intellectual work and insights of ordinary people" (Hufford 1995a: 23) In "Beings Without Bodies: an experience-centered theory of the belief in spirits," Hufford, characterizes spiritual belief as follows:

There is a common core, and it consists in the belief that there exists an

order:

(1) that is objectively real, (i.e., not "all in the mind")

(2) that is qualitatively different from the everyday material world (e.g.,

invisible at times),

(3) that interacts with this world in certain ways (e.g., answers to prayer,

visits from deceased loved ones), and

(4) that includes beings that do not require a physical body in order to live

(e.g., God, souls of the deceased, angels, evil spirits)

In different traditions, this order is variously called "the spirit world," "the

supernatural," "land of the ancestors," etcetera

These four elements are held in common by folk belief traditions and

religions around the world

How this spiritual order is different, when and how it interacts with the

mundane world, and who the persons in it are, constitute major differences

in cultural and religious traditions, and frequently between institutional

religious tradition and folk belief (25-26)

Hufford debuted his experience-centered theory and methodology with the

publication in 1982 of The Terror That Comes in the Night: An Experience-Centered Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions, with which publication Belief Studies had

officially arrived, and with a distinctly political orientation In a series of subsequent publications, Hufford deconstructs the production of knowledge and cultural authority by

"a powerful, self-regulated intellectual elite", refraining all knowledge as inherently occurring within structures of belief (23) Like Jarvie, Hufford uses a particular case

study (the "old hag" tradition) to expose the meta-methodological problems involved in ethnography, and in his case, to suggest a concrete framework for interpreting belief

Belief is the certainty that something is true (This is belief in the

cognitive sense; belief also has important emotional meanings that

associate it with such terms as faith, but those aspects are beyond the

scope of this paper.) Knowledge is a particular kind of belief, that is,

belief that has met customary criteria of justification; this is the basis for

the strong distinction between the two terms—that knowledge is justified

true belief However, different criteria for justification are customary in

different cultural settings, so this distinction does not serve us well in

examining belief in a cultural way In cultural terms knowledge is what

particular people call the beliefs that they consider to be most justified and

true This usage relies on local values and does not require the outside

observer either to impose alien criteria or to enter into local debates

Under this usage we may determine which beliefs are knowledge simply

by asking those who hold them, rather than by attempting to finally

determine matters of truth (13-14)

Folk beliefs, Hufford states, are neither inherently "false" nor stupid, but rather are better understood as "unofficial beliefs" (18) The automatic attribution of

irrationality and falsehood to informant's testimony (the latter often based inappropriately

in literary models), without thorough investigation as to the nature of the truth claims contained within, notes Hufford, is both unethical and, perhaps more to the point, does not contribute to the purpose of the investigation of belief in the first place: "to

understand why widespread beliefs are held" (31) Notes Hufford:

"The natural vehicle of folk belief, perhaps of most belief, is stories that

show what is true by what is said to have happened This process

combines beliefs with some of their reasons and some of their

implications But for tacit and embedded beliefs to be described and

understood, the investigator must infer them and state them as

propositions The investigator must also ensure that the propositions as

stated are agreeable to those who are said to hold them In the cognitive

sense it is wrong to attribute to someone a belief they disagree with or do

published in Current Anthropology in 1973 In this article, Hahn, then a social

anthropology graduate student working on his dissertation, puts forth a comprehensive methodology for studying native—or any "foreign"—belief systems Hahn foremost

"recommends a conception of beliefs as general propositions about the world

(consciously) held to be true [and] suggests that other concepts (e.g., of beliefs as

unconscious as well as conscious) have never been adequately explicated." (The latter subject is further taken up by Hufford in "Response: The Adequacy of Freudian

Psychoanalytic Theory", 2003.) Most intriguing is Hahn's proposition of ethnography as

an act of translation in which "(1) a series of beliefs is stated as a system and (2) the beliefs and systems so stated are analyzed and compared with others," through which

"the epistemological limits of the knowledge of foreign beliefs" are reached (Hahn 1973) (This is a subject that Lehrich will revisit in critiquing the pros and cons of the structural analysis of magic.) Hahn's analysis is especially evident in Hufford's "The Scholarly Voice and the Personal Voice: reflexivity in belief studies" in which Hufford warns of the

"domination of belief scholarship by a particular religious tradition", by which he means Christianity, whose proclamation of "skepticism" towards "unofficial" belief systems, has the tendency to smack loudly of disbelief rather than neutrality This pronounced

"skepticism", he notes, ironically developed in the academic community out of the

academe's history "as a community of professional experts who had first to wrest cultural authority from the Church" (Hufford 1995b: 67-68) This point has particular resonance for the study of magic

Hufford's theory is also informed by J Kellenberger's The Cognitivity of

Religion: Three Perspectives, published in 1985, in which, through analysis of Psalms

and other mystical and devotional works within the Judeo-Christian tradition,

Kellenberger locates a common narrative of realization and discovery which is "rational", that is: based on empirical evidence—though Kellenberger, noting likely objections to

the term, suggests: "We can use as well experiential grounding or even manifestations in

place of 'evidence'" (110) Kellenberger's text also provides a thorough summary and critique of the forerunners to Belief Studies from the perspective of Religion, noting, for

example: "Phillips, referring to the Psalms, says that 'any event can lead the believer to

God,' " to which Kellenberger retorts, "Yes, and non-believers too—if their eyes are opened" (109) This is in agreement with Hufford's findings regarding the "Old Hag"

tradition in The Terror that Comes in the Night, in which people with no prior knowledge

of the tradition in widely disparate cultural contexts and religious—or distinctly religious—traditions report a spiritual dimension (in this case, primarily negative)

non-associated with what the Western medical establishment calls "sleep paralysis." Based

on this evidence of his own ongoing case study, Hufford challenges the prevalent

assumption that pre-established, faith-based belief "produces" the experiences that give rise to such personal narratives Rather, he posits that "core experiences" with

"distinctive characteristics" give rise to "core beliefs", and he points out that while

doctors may accurately diagnose sleep paralysis, they neither know its causes better because of their diagnosis nor does their diagnosis explain away the "Old Hag" matrix of experiences Finally, Hufford points out that the testimony provided is often richly descriptive and quite specific, providing a phenomenology lacking in conventional medical diagnosis which may in fact be beneficial to a scientific understanding of certain medical conditions and to the study of states of consciousness (Hufford 1982, 1995a)

This theory is corroborated in Genevieve Foster's personal experience narrative in The World Was Flooded With Light: A Mystical Experience Remembered, to which Hufford

wrote a companion commentary, and which, like Kellenbergers's analysis, was also published in 1985 and to which I'll return in Chapter Five

While not an initial focus within Huffordian Belief Studies, magic falls logically under its purview, and Belief Studies provides a welcome vehicle for the study of magic within and beyond Folklore Yet while post-modernity ushered in a host of new,

sensitive, smart, reflexive ethnography and historicity, not until after the millennium has

a post-Jarvie surge of academic interest in magic occurred with real vigor, offering provocative, new insight, beyond apology This has been lead by sociologists, following the increasingly politically visible, neo-pagan beat, but the really groundbreaking

theorizing has come from Anthropology and Religion One is tempted to ask why—and why (and why)? To the first "why", we can only assume that it was largely felt that, in fact, the problem of magic had been answered—that modernity, in this one place, was in its analysis, essentially right But an absence of news does not in itself indicate an

absence of discourse As my keyword search indicates, in the underground of what is, on the one hand, the rumor mill, and on the other, secrets—if often open secrets—magic

prevails Research into magic as a topic of popular and academic discourse over a

broader "geologic" time period reveals a topic at once perennial and constant, arriving both in points and as a continuous, sonic wave Thus, in answer to my second "why", perhaps, popularly, historically, and ultimately academically we can say that seeds sewn

in the sixties (which, in fact, have a far longer genealogy) have finally blossomed in an unpredicated fashion This is a topic I will take up in Chapter Three As to why Folklore has not been at the forefront of this movement, it is a mystery, perhaps tied to a

previously undiagnosed provinciality unwittingly outed by Cantwell in the research that

would eventually lead to his publication ofEthnomimesis

In 1991 Cantwell published an article containing the results of his research on the

1985 Smithsonian Institution's Festival of American Folklife As he recounts in the preface to Ethnomimesis, he had been hired by the Office of Folklore Programs to write a history of the festival in conjunction with its upcoming 20th anniversary Applying his ethnographic skills to the project, Cantwell indeed produced provocative findings In the article, titled "Conjuring Culture: Ideology and Magic in the Festival of American

Folklife," Cantwell describes what amounts ultimately to the production of a third level festival culture, wherein the performance of culture, deployed under the idealism of a conservation ethics loosely modeled on eco-conservation, yet constituted within the public domain, ultimately defied that ideal, revealing instead the complex, erotic, and ephemeral contours of the very cultural apparatus by which culture is conveyed and deployed The article was published along with a response by folklorist Peter Seitel, then the director of the Office of Folklore Programs at the Smithsonian, itself followed by a counter-response by Cantwell Here is a highly compressed excerpt of Seitel's response:

Robert Cantwell's article (1991) on the Smithsonian Institution's Festival

of American Folklife seems an unfriendly way to mark the Festival's 20th

year Cantwell's ornate argument ridicules the knowledge the festival's

staff has developed about producing living cultural presentations He

dismisses this knowledge by ironically calling it "magical thinking" and

compounds his figurative predication with complex irony and

metaphorical assertions of how festival planning becomes "purely

symbolic and combinatory" (1991: 159), that is, magic In his summary

Cantwell talks of Festival visitors' and participants' "reality" (1991: 148)

as though the article contained evidence collected through interviews or

some other systematic technique apart from his own brief,

impressionistic glimpses Cantwell relies on paradox In doing so he

avoids the responsibilities of honest discourse Does Cantwell believe in

magic or doesn't he? His rhetoric allows him to have it both ways" (Seitel

1991, pp 495-6)

Coming in many ways as an insider ethnography, Cantwell's analysis was clearly highly unexpected and perceived as unwarranted whistle blowing and name calling Apparently

the problem was not so much in Cantwell's summoning of the magic of the festival, a

popular and acceptable use of the term perceived as "positive" within academic culture, but the perceived damage stemmed from his turning back upon academics the accusation

of "magical thinking" Seitel's response thus provides a quick tally of the accusations against magic: it is ornate; it is compounded by figurative predication, complex irony, and metaphorical assertions; it is symbolic and combinatory; it is false, clever, and a trick; it dares to address the topic of "reality", yet uses no apparent systematically

collected evidence; it is impressionistic, paradoxical, dishonest, and unfriendly It also, ironically, carries within it counterclaims that religious and magic practitioners

characteristically produce in their own defense: that theirs' is a separate, if contingent, order of knowledge manifested and transmitted through lived traditions Cantwell, gracefully, does not address this in his response to this response However, in the long

run, that Seitel's response was to Cantwell equally unexpected apparently paled in

significance to the potential threat of his message

3 Defining Magic

My third wish in writing this dissertation was 3) not to get caught in the trap of trying to "define" magic, for magic is deliberately elusive That said, beyond apology and a lack of appropriate academic attention, the chief problem of magic is of definition Academic definitions of magic tend to be either narrowly assumptive and implicitly pejorative, as previously discussed, or at the experiential end, wildly floundering in their

attempt to convey every nuance, as in Susan Greenwood's The Nature of Magic, in which

I found countless, separate, descriptive words in a single section said to "define" magic Notably, most of these were analogies or metaphors, not actual descriptions or

definitions, meant to impressionistically convey the experiential and cognitive

dimensions of magic which, in an attempt to avoid the traditional anthropological phrase

"magical thinking", Greenwood calls "magical consciousness" For my purposes, her

first text, Magic, Witchcraft and the Otherworld: An Anthropology, (based on her

doctoral thesis) which involves a participant-observation based study of two specific traditions, one Qabalistic, the other Wiccan, was far more compelling and useful than her later more diffuse exploration of "magical consciousness" and the claims of "earth

religions" of being eco-religions

On the insider angle, the majority of magic texts adamantly declare, by way of a

"definition", magic to be either an "art" or a "science" or both (My informant adamantly calls his a "science.") Sidestepping momentarily the other obvious issues involved, such

declarations do not adequately define magic either, as both are essentially umbrella categories, much like magic itself, and, placed on a continuum, all partake in some way

of each other, as do the triad of magic, science, and religion Take, for example Frank

Burch Brown's observations in Religious Aesthetics: A Theological Study of Making and Meaning More a survey of potential issues and interests than a treatise on theory or

methodology, Brown ultimately calls upon the work of Mircae Eliade regarding the relationship of religious art and theological states of consciousness "whereby the

individual or group participates in sacred time and space and in this way discovers

transcendent, timeless meaning" (Brown 1989: 190), in which, taken together with

earlier discussions of texts such as of The Body in the Mind by Mark Johnson wherein

"bodily states, processes, and perceptions continually supply the tacit basis for abstract mental operations and for the very meaningfulness of concepts and propositions" (Brown 1989: 96), we have essentially come full circle Perhaps, as the popular lack-of-clarity-other-than-general-excitement-and-intrigue, yet alternately situational-specific definitions

of magic earlier invoked makes clear, there can apparently be no absolute clarity about magic outside of the direct experience of it, and as Phenomenology has lain bare, there is something ineffable about experience in general—without the added consternation of

mystical experience

Thus I have made a series of executive decisions

First, as magic is both an apparently "universal" phenomenon, appearing

ubiquitously across cultures, yet magic is also culturally determined and socially

constructed, a specific definition of magic can clearly only come from within a specific

tradition, and then one must be prepared for potentially ambiguous use of language For

the purposes of my study, I needed to ask my informant his definition of magic, which I have done This discussion is taken up briefly below and is developed throughout this dissertation

That said, the only generalized approach that seems possible to take prior to having such a definition of magic is one borrowed from aesthetics—i.e that a piece of art

is "art" foremost because it is declared by the "artist" to be so, as in the case of

Duchamp's famous urinal Transferred to the realm of magic, the ethical rule of thumb would be that a practice (or its "result") are "magic" because the magician says so As the quotes around the words imply, this is a matter of framing, a subject taken up by

Erving Goffman in Frame Analysis In Frame Analysis, framing, achieved through

cultural markers for which the gilded frame around a classical painting becomes a

metaphor, is taken to be the primary method of organizing both ordinary and

extraordinary experience, by which "definitions of a situation are built up in accordance"

(Goffman 1974: 10) As Susan Stewart summarizes in Nonsense: Aspects of

Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature (her dissertation), "Framing involves, and, indeed, is the articulation of a boundary between domains, a statement of relationship

between domains" (Stewart 1978: 38-39) This topic also will come up again in new ways in Chapter Five

That said, as magic is, conversely, not only culturally determined and socially constructed, but it is also apparently "universal", appearing ubiquitously across cultures, this suggests an underlying, inherently "human" element to magic It is to an

understanding of this underlying "human" element to which I ultimately wish to add in this dissertation on magic

4 Magical Thinking

Call them negative theologies, but my three wishes were sincerely and openly made, and thus they could be granted But as with all things occult, I had also a secret wish: like Greenwood, I wanted to avoid the pitfalls of the phrase "magical thinking" which I perceived to bear a tinge of the "skepticism" discussed by Hufford Like

Greenwood, I toyed with the idea of "consciousness", but ultimately dismissed it, saving

it for my discussion of Balthazar's hippy dialectic, where it would come from his own mouth, but for my own purposes I would upgrade my language My first choice thus was

to eliminate it as subject altogether: I would explain how in the past many people had neglected the praxis for the thinking (true) and catalogue the faux pas of default past uses

of the term which fail Kellenberger and Hufford's requisite inquiry (That this flatly contradicts my wish #2 seemed to have escaped my notice.) I would then present a narrative of my discovery of Balthazar's intricate web of practices (also true), and then,

by some fancy sidestepping, I would rush past magical thinking, embracing praxis—yes, somehow, some way I would separate magical thinking from magical practice! (False.)

I don't know what I was thinking I guess I was desperate—caught up, as

Cantwell would say, in the protective politics of folkloric public display Lucky for me,

however, I had chosen a magic tradition which directly addressed the subject of magical thinking in its own meta-theorizing and could not help but teach me so—one which also

made clear that, within this tradition at least, no one practice could be isolated, especially not the practice of thinking On the one hand, my informant did not simply read Tarot;

he did a series of practices that were mutually supportive, all clustered around or

associated with (thinking with) Tarot and that were subject to almost endless variation to suit different purposes (more thinking) On the other, each of these focused directly upon

the imaginative processes of mind Then there was all that talking My informant likes to

talk, and the main practice I engaged in with him as a student and "fellow Qabalist" was talking Yes, there was eventually the demonstration of "shielding" (see Chapter Two); and there was once an egg used to show the spin of The Fool—zero—as it became not

just "one", but in being now both zero and one, "two" (see Chapter Five); and there was

sometimes pizza; and there was even the march on Washington we attended together— but mostly there was talking Certainly from the recipient's end, a Tarot reading is

mostly in the talking

Ultimately, there was a discourse of Tarot that made up its theory that (like so many folk practices)—much like ethnography—was embedded entirely in a methodology invisible to those not in the discourse Some of the method/praxis was physical, some

was more abstractly intellectual—yet still, awkwardly, practice—but mostly the physical

and intellectual came packaged together or at least referenced each other imaginatively, involving a fusion of linguistic, mathematic, and visual processing Finally, all in all, in the text of Tarot-speak there was very little prose, and what there was, was often

squeezed into the contortions of a poetics through rhythm, metaphor, repetition, puns, and sometimes even rhyme Here is a brief textual example involving a favorite saying of Balthazar's amongst the lore of what I'll call "favorite Tarot ditties" that Balthazar spouts when we are in Qabalistic discussion This one he calls, "a sentence in the Tarot to represent the Knight of Discs" (a "Court" card, counted amongst the Lower Arcana); it is

followed by a brief excerpt of a conversation surrounding it in which "B" = Balthazar and "R" = me:

The first curse a mother gives to her child is,

Don't believe in your imagination It's only pretend

And there draws the fine line from beginning to end, for as a child plays, they're acting out their incarnations

in every way But you take the imagination away and call it pretend, the third eye closes then, and so ends the vision And without the vision, the child is lost So great is the cost (Life History Tape 6: 10)

This particular rendering of this poem came up while we were discussing the icons on his altar and the making of a "genii" He went on after this recital to discuss how the

"consciousness" of such "vision" is both universal and eternal, a latent capacity that he compared to art, for which everyone has a basic capacity:

B: It's just as much as every child has the nature of being a yogi and

bending around, and if you encourage it, it becomes very easy to them So be magic As a little girl or boy you have these little dolls, and they're your friends in so many ways, and you dress them up and you play with them You tell them your stories and you take them to bed with you And then somebody tells you that they're not real and they're not true And you put them away on the shelf, and the spirits wait for a long time Sometimes the spirits go away

R: How did the spirit get there?

B: Because the people believed in the spirit being there The child

always knew it And then you go and get knocked around with all these conditioning patterns, and then you find out that those little belief systems that you had before someone called it pretend were the keys to magic and making a genii Somebody said, Oh, the laws of physics, and all things are energy, and it's just a different form of energy and a different form of motion And you already have a conceptual energy because it's been formed as a statue, and the more dense it is the more powerful the energy could possibly

be in it So you could add your conceptual energy in and make a pact with this statue that is now your friend You can put it up on a shelf and it has a spirit in it, and you can make a pact with it and play with it just like you did as a little kid, but now you can call it magic and you can be all mature about it [laughs] (Life History Tape 6: 10-11)

There are many complex, yet familiar layers of belief here that must be extracted as propositions, as Hufford says, but for now I want instead to examine this on a different level In the conversation above, Balthazar is quite articulate and speaks directly about belief, imagination, and conceptualization, even comparing magic to childhood play Had I done so without his prompting, this might have appeared to be "condescending." Clearly he does not see it so

The poem is one with which I am at this point intimately familiar and can recite

"by heart," having heard it called up countless times to define many different topics in magic: astral projection; the general metaphor of visualization; aspects of magical

memory, temporality, and reincarnation; conjuration (as here); the limits of the

imagination; and more—all contained within the rubric of what he calls "a sentence in the Tarot to represent the Knight of Discs" I have also witnessed him recite the poem in the context of a Tarot reading for a person not otherwise involved in Tarot discourse as an exegesis on a particular point raised by elements in the reading It is notable that

Balthazar does not claim authorship of the poem As with most of his information on Tarot, he attributes it to the Tarot, i.e that he has read it there According to Balthazar

the cards have very specific semantic meanings whose basis is mathematical Any other more impressionistic "reading" of the cards is "mere divination" His system is "magic" because it is based in a sacred, mathematical system attributed to Hermes Trismegistus

However, the vocabulary generated ultimately by this mathematical system—i.e the semantic meanings of words delivered in a Tarot reading or in the poem above—are the end result of a process of bringing a much broader indexical and relational symbolism derived from Hermetic Qabalism into the realm of semantic meaning Thus on the one hand the cards contain clues as to vocabulary, and on the other they contain whole stories and elements of stories, such as the poem above, with almost endless combinatory

possibility These are all subjects that I will attend to in later chapters However, the

more I listened closely to the meta-conversation in Tarot, it seemed not merely to engage mental processes but quite transparently to be a dialogue about mental processes

Ultimately "magical thinking" passed Hufford's litmus test: Balthazar accepted the term as semantically encompassing important aspects of his own concepts of agency This sent me back to the subject of "magical thinking" with a new question: what was

"magical thinking", but a name for a form of cognitive process? In many ways, Tarot magic's dialectic seemed, in its self-consciousness, if anything, a precursor to or, more

properly, a form o/cognitive study Was it—or could it be conceived to be so? This was

ultimately a question I sought to answer in my dissertation, and if so what is the

relationship then posited by Tarot Magick between cognition and consciousness?

5 Magic and Cognitive Theory

The concept of experiential grounding is the foundation of Hufford's cognitive theory of belief This is a very general, practical application of cognitive theory, upon which more nuance can readily be built by simply shifting grounds the way Tarot magic

notably shifts experience to a cognitive ground The basic dynamics of the cognitive ground of magic has recently been mapped by anthropologist Jesper Sorensen in a book

simply and directly titled, A Cognitive Theory of Magic, published in 2007 (Yet another

dissertation text, and the one that gives the most precise, concise history of the

configurations of magic as it has been addressed in the social sciences, while also

providing a thorough outline of cognitive theory as it has been understood and applied in the social sciences.,) Hailed by Pascal Boyer, himself a theorist in the cognitivity of religion, as "the most thorough investigation to date into the workings of magic," in the text Sorensen first divides the aspects of human categorization into domain-specific and domain-general categories "[The] domain-specific approach entails that different areas

of human learning and cognition might be constrained by different principles, not only in the organization of knowledge, but also in the mechanism selecting and processing information" (34) This includes the physical domain, the "biological or animate"

domain, a "mental or psychological" domain, and the social domain These specific features were generated by psychologists and have been employed previously by anthropologists using cognitive modeling Conversely, the domain-general approach is more responsive to domain-external information, providing a counter-balance of

domain-cognitive flexibility Domain-general features include basic-level categorization, based

on "bodily interaction" and "the formation of perceptual gestalts, image-schemata, dynamics, and "Psychological essentialism, ascribing hidden properties to entities as a defining character" (43) These domain-general features were generated by linguist

force-George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson in Metaphors We Live By (1980) and

subsequently developed in later work It is by the cross-indexing of the domain-general

approach that "Humans everywhere seem to be able to connect different domains, treat physical objects as animate and intentional, animals as humans and social groups as intentional agents" (39) Then, through an example of cultural models provided by Malinowski's Trobriand Islanders, Sorenson shows how event frames, such as ritual, provide the mental maps for "conceptual blending."

Conceptual blending is "the projection of structures and elements between

different domains of knowledge." Notes Sorensen, such "Metaphoric projection is one of the basic mechanisms guiding the construction of complex concepts" (51) As Sorensen states, "The importance of blending does not lie in the fact that it combines structures and elements from several domains of experience, but that it facilitates the emergence of a new structure and a new meaning not found in any of the domains and mental spaces" (53) This capacity governs the functions of identity, metonymy, and index; metaphor, similarity, and icon; and role value In conceptual blending, input spaces, constructed from both domain-specific and domain-general knowledge domains, combine to form an emergent blended space, but the blended space represents only a selection or partial projection of attributes from the input spaces, not a full index of all of their qualities While the blended space is "a temporary mental and discursive construct," "[a] blended space may solidify and become a conventional mapping or even a conceptual domain" (61) Sorensen then maps how in ritual, through combinations of sensual agents, actions, objects, and linguistic markers, "essences" from "sacred" domains are transferred to

"profane domains" through basic "essence" and "container" metaphors which form a fourth "generic space" and by whose agency the blend is ultimately accomplished and the profane domain transformed due to its perceived contact with the sacred Sorenson's

basic cognitive model of magical agency is ultimately applicable to every level of Tarot magic

J Peter Sodergard similarly models semiotic and cognitive processes in what he

calls The Hermetic Piety of the Mind in the discourse of Hermes Trismegistus located in the Hermetica, "a religious discourse stemming from Hellenistic and Roman

Egypt intended to capture and transport the mind of the reader into a particular story world, thereby conveying a persuasive 'presence' of the unlimited and divine, so that this fictive world became the true version of the world" (Sodergard 2003: iv) Drawing on psycho-linguistic and postmodern sources which examine the cognitivity of reading and its linguistic expression, Sodergard describes how, "deictic shift"—changes in the self-world/space-time orientation of the speaker of a narrative—in this case "Hermes

Trismegistus"—affected by declaratives such as "I am here now", alter the cognitive orientation of the reader and potentially the author, as well Notes Sodergard, "A

Hermetist attributing the text that he is writing to Hermes Trismegistus himself

exemplifies the latter deictic shift from the perspective of [in Umberto Eco's terms] an Empirical into that of a Model Author" (43) Sodergard quotes Erwin M Segal's

summary of Eco's analysis in relationship to deictic shift theory: "Diectic Shift theory states that in a fictional narrative, readers and authors shift their deictic centre from the real-world situation to an image of themselves at a location within the story world This location is represented as a cognitive structure often containing the elements of a

particular time and place within the fictional world, or even within the subjective space of

a fictional character" (44) Taken together with Sorensen's statement that, through processes of cognitive blending as exemplified in, for example, shamanic practices,

humans can be identified with and even "understood as genuine incarnations of gods, demons or spirits" (66-67) Sodergard's analysis has potentially rich implications for the study of Tarot magic Further, like Sorensen, Sodergard maps a basic source and target domain schemata of deictic shift Despite that Sodergard only mentions in passing

magical applications of Hermetic doctrine, his overall analysis of Hermetic

conceptualization is fully relevant to the topic of this study

A related, but more generally-oriented cognitive study of linguistic processes, also highly relevant to the cognitive processes involved in Tarot magic, was done by

anthropologist Dan Sperber in Rethinking Symbolism, published in French in 1974 and

first published in English in 1975, in which Sperber contrasts the infinite, unbounded aspect of symbolic representations to the bounded domain of linguistic knowledge to ultimately argue against a semiological concept of symbolic representation Symbolic representation, says Sperber, is "an autonomous mechanism that, alongside the perceptual and conceptual mechanisms, participates in the construction of knowledge and in the functioning of memory" (Sperber 1974: xii) Like our capacity for spoken language (part of our conceptual mechanism), but separate from it, it is innate to cognitive

structure, not induced—as for example reading written language is—by experience, i.e., one does not have to lay down neural pathways to initially "read" symbolism as one does

to "read" written language, as described in detail by Maryanne Wolf in Proust and the Squid: the Story and Science of the Reading Brain (2007) Symbolic representation

occurs spontaneously Symbolic representation is, in effect, says Sperber, a

conservationist effort of the brain to retain and sort all traces of potentially useful

information and comes into play verbally specifically when the scan of linguistic memory