Observation #2—Whatever may once have been of the Tarotic intelligentsia has either gone entirely underground, far beneath the happy storefronts of the various modern incarnations of the "secret" societies, or it is (and they are) extinct. And if the latter, is that such a bad thing? It is not, after all, like occult Tarot ever turned out bumper crops of brilliant technicians and artists. At best, it is one or two every generation who can write and draw tarotically with any special aesthetic gift. The vast majority of practitioners and purveyors of modern Tarot are Regardie's "cosmic Foo-Foo", who he points out would have been chewed up and spat out in short order by someone like Aleister Crowley. When they attempt to grok Tarot, they grope treacles and superficies instead.

Late in 2003, even one of the OTO's caretakers validated this hopeless state of affairs, in order to "bring it down to the level of...the silly people", the sort of people Crowley and the OTO attract instead of geniuses. Lon Milo DuQuette's book on Crowley's Thoth deck, ironically entitled "Understanding Aleister Crowley's Thoth Tarot" and even more ironically subtitled "an authoritative examination", strives as no tarotbook has yet done to divest Crowley's work on Tarot of anything drearisome to morons, which is to say—anything interesting. So concerned was DuQuette that Thoth be made accessible to the sillies and the YAMs (who of course just might sign up for their secret decoder rings from OTO if DuQuette can sell them the timeshare in Crackerjack skypies), he systematically squelched sense to protect sensibilities at every turn.

One of his chief concerns was of course to sanitize Crowley's reputation, which is only really possible if one outright lies or attempts to make Crowley's life appear to be an insipidity. What DuQuette admits, and in a way promotes, as Crowley being "bizarre", "repugnant", "an affront to most of the world's religions", and maybe, just maybe, insane, is tersely dumbed down by DuQuette to Crowley being "colorful", and is begged off with an expectant wink that it's all just something to chuckle about, like a Halloween mask that nobody could seriously think represented anything truly threatening. And by the time DuQuette is through declawing Thelema, it sounds like a Sunday-school lesson in that Old Aeon faith, Christianity—"We, like the sun, do not die. Death, like night, is an illusion." He even adopts Christian labels to make familiar sounding the supposedly unrepentant blasphemy: "This [the not exactly new promise of immortality] is the 'good news' of 'The Book of the Law'." Funny, it sounds exactly like the "good [old] news" of the Christian "New Testament".

But it is when DuQuette starts "authorizing" all over the actual cards of the Thoth deck that Aleister and his ideas are almost thoroughly extinguished, "almost" because DuQuette does at least have brains enough to quote Crowley. From what is offered in DuQuette's "Understanding" one can assume he means by "understanding" a plain blind or lie—that is, the very opposite—or he himself has only a pauper's possession of the intellectual wealth of Thoth Tarot. It could of course be both. For example, in discussing Eight of Cups-Indolence, we are treated to the fascinating tidbit that DuQuette's wife is upset that this, her birthday card, is such a "downer". The "sinister" Five of Cups-Disappointment is—amazingly—"very disappointing". The contradictory Three of Swords-Sorrow, which does not fit into DuQuette's "all the aces, twos, and threes are happy" insouciant prattle, "does not sound like a happy card" and is "very difficult to understand" because it is above the Abyss (where DuQuette has certainly never visited) and because, apparently, DuQuette can not or will not pay attention to anything Aleister Crowley actually wrote about the card. The best he can come up with is Three of Swords is "happy" to be Sorrow!?

Of course, all these dreadful defects merely point to the book's outstanding potential to be successful in the current aggressively anti-intellectual Tarot market, one where people dearly wish to be seen with the right (powerful) decks and the simple (powerless but benign) books that together suggest—perhaps to people even more ignorant than they—that they too can talk the talk of the "luminaries". That is why jktarot.com predicts that DuQuette's new book will soon replace Crowley's "Book of Thoth" as the main guidebook for the Thoth deck. And that is why the name of Lon Milo DuQuette will be well remembered for his important role in the final diminution of Thoth Tarot to the level of ornate bubblegum. What Angeles Arrien could only pick at by replacing Crowley's ideas with her own inane babblings, DuQuette has finished off in the grand "authoritative" style of the most vulgar sophister that Crowley only in his death-throe despair could have imagined.

Resolution #2—In 2004 jktarot.com will increase efforts to offer alternatives to the dumbed-down mindless anti-tarot currently strangling Tarot in the marketplace.