Trumps
The Magus
The work of making meaning
Skill turns an intention into something another person can understand or use. Watch the gap between a persuasive account and the thing it actually accomplishes.
What would make your words answerable to your actions?
Correspondences
- Attribution
- Mercury
- Hebrew letter · Thoth
- Beth
Sources
Book T lists The Magician with Beth and Mercury. The Thoth letter is shown above; changes are explained below.
Symbols
The instruments of an intention
The Magus chapter discusses the wand, cup, dagger and coin as elemental instruments.
The Book of Thoth · Part II, The Magus ↗Try this
Translate an intention into four practical questions: what starts it, what sustains it, what needs a distinction, and what gives it material form? This is an editorial exercise, not a claim that each instrument has only one meaning.
The word and its distortion
Crowley’s account sets Thoth’s communication beside an ape that distorts it.
The Book of Thoth · Part II, The Magus ↗Try this
Make two records: what you meant to communicate, and what someone could reasonably understand from what you actually said. The gap may reveal a useful revision without requiring either person to be dishonest.
Mercury and Beth
The chapter attributes the card to Mercury and the Hebrew letter Beth.
The Book of Thoth · Part II, The Magus ↗Try this
Follow the act of mediation. Who carries the message? What changes when an experience becomes a sentence, an image or a number? Study the transformation itself before deciding that your account is identical with the thing it describes.
Two accounts
Book T: The Magician · Beth.
Thoth: The Magus · Beth.