In an IM conversation today, I got reminded that the ‘further reading’ section of the Silicon Dawn’s book got cut for space reasons. Looking in my notes, it also feels kinda lacking. So here is a revised ‘for further reading’ for that deck:
Mathers, Book T. 1888? My primary source for the Majors.
Aleister Crowley, The Book Of Thoth. My primary source for the number cards and the Courts. (Which would totally be public domain now if not for Disney’s attempts to ensure that ‘Steamboat Willie’ never goes out of copyright, decide for yourself if you want to flaunt the law.)
Michael Hurst, Michael’s Tarot Notebook. A lovely little web site on the history and evolution of the Major Arcana. Geocities is now shut down, but the site lives on in archive.org’s Wayback Machine. He has a blog now that is also probably pretty interesting if you care about the history of Tarot decks.
Tim Powers, Last Call. Powers’ descriptions of the various Tarot cards that show up in this book were lurking somewhere in the back of my head for much of this project. I didn’t use any of his images but I hope I got some of the power to shock and surprise that he describes them having.
Robert Anton Wilson? Wasn’t he in this appendix? Wasn’t this document in Markdown anyway? When did I accidentally convert it to HTML? Anyway. The appendices of the Illuminatus! trilogy, and ‘Cosmic Trigger’, were quite interesting. And of course there is Prometheus Rising which may have done something interesting to my head when I read it. I can’t be arsed to link all of these, also the Illuminatus! trilogy is quite frankly kind of totally sexist and possibly terribly written, but I definitely had my head turned inside out when I devoured it as a teenage boy in the 80s – there’s a manual on magic and philosophy lurking under the surface of its absurd story of Every Conspiracy Theory, Ever being true. Hail Eris; all hail Discordia.
Philip K Dick’s VALIS and the history thereof – ask Google, or try to make your way through the copious notes he left behind.
Advanced Magick for Beginners is one of my favorite post-Chaos magical texts. Seriously it is short and sweet and, well, there’s a reason there’s a hand grenade on the cover okay? Read it, think about it, try some of its experiments with great care.
Also just google ‘chaos magic’ and read what looks interesting, t. Make some sigils or whatnot and see what happens. Have I mentioned that the Silicon Dawn deck is arguably a sigil to attempt to create a certain sort of future? Because it totally is.