Book of Thoth - Tarot

[anagogy]

What do you think about this? Is Crowley LHP to you? What do you think of the Book of the Law and Aiwass? Or the O.T.O. For that matter? (I already know the OTO is left hand path order.)
Do you have any advice or suggestions to study the Tarot from a positive, preferably Qabalistic, approach? I hear the Book of Tokens is a really good one to meditate upon.

I think he was unwittingly left hand path, as you said, being warped by his association with the entity Aiwass and probably a whole bunch of negative physical people as well. I think he had some metaphysical talent but was quickly warped by negative forces (not surprised at all). I don't really respect Aleister Crowley or his works, and really never have once I sampled some of it. The more I learned of his life story, the more I realized he was no great magician. He was in constant conflict with others, and in legal troubles, and had constant poor health (I didn't see a great talent of changing reality to be in conformity with his will). But people in occult circles worship the ground he walked on. Old works create a spurious type of interest and fascination in people, regardless of it was just gibberish from another decade. One credit I will give him is he studied a lot of different traditions, but the words 'jack of all trades, master of none' comes to mind.

But then I think Qabala as a whole is mostly LHP to begin with. The Kircher Tree, which most Qabalists use, is in my view one of the most left hand arrangements of the archetypes I could possibly imagine. But that assumes I know what paths represent which archetypes (which I believe I do, but anyone can be wrong), so it really is a matter of personal discernment.

So unfortunately I can't advise you on a good Qabala approach to the tarot, because I don't see Qabala as directly corresponding to the pure archetypes as delineated by Ra (which were accurately linked to the cosmic mind). I think Qabala has some tertiary overlap with the actual archetypes but it diverges in some pretty big ways. Does that mean magic cannot be done with it? Not necessarily. Magic can be done with any system. But it is like the difference between programming languages. There is a more fundamental one, and then another one is built upon that one, which is sort of an abstraction of the more fundamental, and so on. The more the abstraction, the more you get away from the main power, but it doesn't mean it can't be effective. Sometimes abstraction makes some things easier, so it sort of depends what you are trying to do. This is just my personal point of view.

This is a long winded way of saying Qabala isn't for me, personally. Kabbalah, on the other hand, I'm still very much into. But if you learn something interesting about Qabala, I'm all ears. Maybe you will eventually show me its good side. As a side note, I'm reading Dion Fortunes's book right now just for kicks (I skimmed it years ago, but when you said you really liked it, it inspired me to reread it since I couldn't remember anything from the skim read years before).