Description
Ali~Star is a 50+ year veteran Student of esoteric and '"Occult" literature and the theory and practice of divination.

As a Tarot reader or "Transcendental artist" He worked from 1976 till 2010 at the northeast corner of Channing and Telegraph ave. Berkeley Ca.

Now available by appointment only.

Ali-Star is also owner and moderator of
facebook groups:

Joe Tarot

https://www.facebook.com/groups/joetarot/

Tarot CHAT noir
https://www.facebook.com/groups/tamchat/

Aleister Crowley's Post Thelemic Tea Shoppe
https://www.facebook.com/groups/arwiccam/

Fortune Telling 101
https://www.facebook.com/groups/tarotstudyanddiscussion/

Bibliomanics
https://www.facebook.com/groups/biblomanics/

Aleister Crowley Resource library and thoth deck

https://www.facebook.com/groups/899624576843925/edit/

liber aleph vel cxi The book of wisdom or folly discussion group

​https://www.facebook.com/groups/tbowof

I wont claim to have more familiarity with Wirth's book than i have of other texts on the same subject.

I have yet to find an English translation of Stanislas de Guitia's text on Kabbala and its theoretical associations with the tarot "La Clef de la Magie Noire." Which had a major impact on both Wirth and Papus.

He, and other 19th & early 20th centuries tarot authors, were highly influenced not just by each others texts but all tend, to varying degrees to accept and dissimulate Antoine Court de Gébelin's essay on the Tarot, in Le Monde Primitif 1781 as an original source text with some of them pointing out Geblen's "errors" as a way to dissimulate his thoughts and ideas.

A familiarity with this line of authors writings on the same subject is interesting to me as indicative of a positive evolution and growth of the analysis of the tarot/divination phenomenon.

The refinement, exegesis and literary deconstruction of an entire genre of writeing that has had a positive effect & evolution there of, can thereby, be demonstrated.

And when we consider the mid 20th century and later writings of the subject we find 2 distinct trends in this literature.

One line of authors presenting their ideas (often highly influenced by the above authors works on the subject) and asserting a claim of 'revealed knowledge' received from some sort of 'higher source' traditions, temple, and even 'inner planes knowledge.' (A. E. Waite being a prime example thereof.)

The other more distinct and growing trend in Tarot literature these days acknowledges all its primative irrationality, mundane origins (card games) atavistic reverence for and use there of, from divination to active theurgy of the most formal and ceremonial sort.

And another line of writers on the Tarot  dismissing  these in favor of a concept of "Mind Games" (Mind Games: The Guide to Inner Space: Robert Masters PhD.)

And other texts (i.e. Sallie Nichols “Jung and the Tarot”) that take a more psychoanalytical approach to divination in general and Tarot in particular.

Seeing it as a kind of technology that however irrational and primitive in origins the act is, it, like all other atavism's able to be studied in the modern world with all its advantages of information storage and retrieval.

We are now entering an age in which one of mankind's most enduring and universal fetishes "Magick™" & Divination can be studied and talked about with our fear of social, political or economic repression.

Some of mankind's deepest, most primitive cognition, the sense that randomness and chaos can provide us with information can now be openly and in a scholastic environment  discussed.

And more important than any 'predictive' quality of divination is its ability to produce in us an altered state of consciousness that can produce a 'hyper awareness' of, at best, our self. But, like many Tantric techniques an intensity of focus on anything other than our self is even more difficult than applying the technique to ourself, for our self's own understanding of itself.  Why we are who we are, and for that matter “IF” we are at all …. :D