Grand Cohen, orange tabs/pink tabs, tarot wandering

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

      mikebailey:
      . . . .linking the Grand Cohen 
     (Crowley/Nookshaft) to Genghis Cohen 
     (Lot 49 stamp maven) and putting them in the 
     Alternate Communication Channel category together...
 
     RL::
     Czech!

     MB: now the consequences of that multiply, but I'm probably 
     barking up a bunch of wrong trees:

     1) age of aquarius stuff, new era/aeon (new world order?)
     is to established church & state as W.A.S.T.E. is to Thurn & Taxis?

Er, ah, yes & no---really something else entirely viz the AtD/49 hook-up. 
There's plenty of commentary on "New-Age mindbarf" and such in Vineland, 
TRP usually sideswipes everything in his path, no reason to exclude "Magick" 
in the mix. And the "New Age" is the "New Aeon". There's little arrows to 
Enochian Magic in 49, bigger ones in GR and bigger still in AtD. We might 
consider this a "growing concern" in TRP's writings, like a prostate in a 
man his age. Lots of folks doing scrying and suchlike in AtD are with the 
bomb-throwers, that's old news, seems to have been going on in TRP's 
writing from the start. Lots of interesting "New Age" flavors inthe spiritual 
blandishments proffered in the early twentieth century. That I expected. 
I was hoping for [and got] the presence/action of Crowley.

But there are some Pink tabs---wasn't that Sandoz' preferred color?
Those will follow, on a separate missive.

Consider, if you will, that there is some connection to Owsley here, those
little anarchist stamps. . . .   . . . .maybe you had to lick them to get the 
message? Anyway, there's a shitload of stamp-licking going on in AtD.

     2) Lot 49 is one of the 3 books envisioned in the Donadio letter?
     or, the plan changed to accommodate more books?  or, the
     concepts from the major arcana of the Pynchon deck also
     animate the lesser arcana?

I think that Against the Day probably, in some form, was on his mind all 
along. In an odd way, The Crying of Lot 49 can be regarded as a waste 
product of the realm explored in Against the Day. So far, I see Gravity's 
Rainbow, Mason and Dixon and Against the Day as those three books, 
but have to wonder if the author has a Civil War novel hidden away in 
some drawer. Although I understand your Major/Minor Modal notions, 
there seems a particular purity of intent and execution in The Crying of 
Lot 49, and I'm sorry, but Vineland is just a perfect portrait of my Mother's 
stomping grounds, and a particular favorite.

     3) - Tarot trumps correspond to letters of the Hebrew alphabet 
     (Crowley scoffed at the Golden Dawn initiation: "they swore me 
     to secrecy, and then taught me the Hebrew alphabet") which 
     also correspond to the little lines between the circles in the Tree, 
     they are pathways. between sephiroth (that's the plural, as if 
     a Castilian cabalist with an aristocratic lisp were saying, 
     "Sephiros") - so technically when astral traveling it's as if the 
     sephiros were towns and the trumps/hebrew letters/paths were 
     the roads in between...
     or the sephiros were nouns and the trumps verbs? Cohen's 
     weird sense of humor maps the trumps to people... and he's 
     one of them, by virtue of his title: Grand Cohen roughly equals 
     "High Priest" which is a Tarot trump

And you have to wonder on account of there being three versions 
of the "Magician" card [the obverse of "High Priestess"] in the 
Crowley/Harris "Thoth" deck. Also remember Hermione's time skew
in "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban". So now I've got to
wonder---how many Cohens are there, anyway?

     5) alternate communications equate to and/or result in
     a counterculture (or Counterforce) 

Alternatively: these alternate systems of info are the waste products of 
anarchy.

     6) In the channeled Book of the Law, the entity Aiwass ("eyewash" to
     non-believers??) says "to worship me, take wine and strange drugs"

And remember Mucho Maas' epiphany upon hearing "She Loves You"
in an illuminated state of consciousness? 

     R: The rare Orange tab is for music, which might end up as 
     Yellow tabs {got plenty} with Orange stars {ditto} for music. 

     M: guy in the park has some orange tabs...

I've had the best luck with the little purple pyramids.

     R: What I'm doing is really is more like a horse race---

     M: like studying the racing form?

Hmmm. . . . It's statistical sampling, of sorts. What sort of topics are being
worked over? How often? What's the mood, the vibe? What sort of lingo is
involved? What sort of narrator do we have here? That sort of thing, 
leaning heavily in the direction of controversial topicks, like Anarchy and 
Drugs and All-American Fascists and Occult Practices and so on.

     R: spying/encryption of all sorts.  The mere presence of Nookshaft focuses 
     on a co-joining of the occult and  spying/intelligence gathering that 
     mimics and greatly exceeds COL49.

     M: yeah, I wanted to agree and supplement that with a perception
     of how a wavefront of detection & spying ripples through the book
     and laps up against spiritualism in Nookshaft's London,
     but beyond the bare saying of that I'm not sure where to go...

     I did have this stray thought while failing to progress with 
     the other, though: [B]asnight's innate detection skills, a gift from 
     nature, like Tesla's visionary abilitywhereas Cyprian's skills evolve 
     slowly through work, like Merle's technical abilities

But remember; Merle is first and foremost an Alchemist. That's a techinical
ability of sorts. I know a gifted engineer, famous for his audio designs---
something seemingly perfectly left-brained, but he told me that these 
concepts came to him in a manner quite similar to Tesla. Or Mozart.

     R: What I'm wondering is: is Post-Modernism really "Post-God"?, where the 
     old mono-theological myths eventually perish, as did [for the most part] 
     the old polyandry of the deities? Or is it the intellectual equivalent of 
     the Neo-Cons?

     M: what I think that question means, is, does Post-Modernism bring us
     to a "higher level" where belief in a "God" appears as clearly
     unnecessary and hindersome as belief in the gods of Olympus
     does from a rationalist-Christian standpoint?

A little, but not all. 

     M: Or does post-modernism, post-structuralism signal a retreat from
     the challenges of modernism & structuralism into philosophies
     that aren't definable in layman's terms and might not actually
     have any meaningful content...just as the neo-cons retreated from
     the drubbings that history inflicted on their Trotskyism, to
     find refuge in excusing the excesses of the American empire?

Right, no-one outside of those living in academe talks like that
[with a little nod to "White Noise" in the bargain]. On the one hand: 

     Paul Mackin:
     But modernism is supposed to be post God (more or less anyway), 
     so  postmodernism would have to be post-post God or possibly  
     neo-God.

     Or maybe neo-theo.

     Except for the fact that what  you're talking about is the pursuit of  
     ANY kind of advanced knowledge or enlightenment existing 
     beyond the  bounds of the merely rational--God not necessarily 
     being required.

     A nice term would have been neo-creo (creo equalling I believe)  
     except neo-creo is already in use by the intelligent design people.

     The beliefs or quests under discussion here seem to easily fit into  
     that wide array of pursuits  said to have been freed up and made  
     intellectually respectable by French structural and post-structural 
     philosophy of forty years ago. E.g., feminism, post-colonial studies, 
     gay studies, anti-globalism. In other words, postmodernism as it 
     still may exist (to some degree anyway) today.

And this is true. Obviously, it wouldn't hurt to look into Philosophical 
writings on Post-Modernism, that's why I picked up "Postmodern Pooh" by 
Frederick Crews---figured I'd start with a subject more appropiate for my 
current level of intellectual development. At the same time, there's a kind 
of language I've encountered in the few post-modern essays I've digested 
that strike me as able to exist only in a very closed enviornment. I think 
there's a touch of counter-reaction in the sort of "neo-populism" to be in 
found in TRP's writings from "Slow Learner" on: 

     You'll notice that toward the end of the story, some kind of 
     sexual encounter appears to take place, though you'd never 
     know it from the text. The language suddenly gets too fancy to read. [6]

     I was operating on the motto "Make it Literary," a piece of bad advice 
     I made up all by myself and then took. [4]

     It is simply wrong to begin with a theme, symbol or other abstract 
     unifying agent, and then try to force characters and events to 
     conform to it. [12]

Towards the end of GR, we given Weissmann's Tarot card reading:

          The King of Cups, crowning his hopes, is the fair intellectual-king. 
     If you're wondering where he's gone, look among the successful 
     academics, the Presidential advisers, the token intellectuals who 
     sit on boards of directors. He is almost surely there. Look high, 
     not low.
          His future card, the card of what will come, is the World.

Look high, not low, for the Nazi Intelligentsia's perches in The U.S. after 
the war. High up in the Government and Military-Industrial interests, 
high up in the social registers and income brackets. But Pynchon seems 
usually to be looking for those who otherwise would be left down and out
of the story. I guess that sort of attitude goes along with revisionist history 
and "feminism, post-colonial studies, gay studies, anti-globalism", but I think 
it's OBA's weird sense of humor drives his narratives most of the time. 
Pynchon's satrical sense generally is the guiding force of his narratives. 
There is some sense of  "Rough Justice" going on here and a predictable 
set of wrongs to be righted, a predictable set of good guys and bad guys 
and all of them folks between.