say you were an actual Magick magician, right? and you wanted to hide in plain sight. You want to be able to protect your ancient secrets, and invite new people to learn these hidden mysteries, but you want to be able to talk about it publicly without anyone coming snooping around who wasn't serious or who wanted to take advantage of you

Yeah, you want to set up a secret group, that is able to trade openly, teach openly, pay taxes, avoid taxes, all the normal stuff… all while protecting your secrets AND your treasures… what do you do?

with that question in mind, let's think about the occultist and symbolic artist Austin Osman Spare, Grandfather of Chaos Magic. he, among many other things in his weird life, hand-painted his own tarot deck in 1906. 1906!! that's 3 years before the famous pixie deck was published.

This hand-painted tarot deck is in London, in a museum. The museum of.... The Magic Circle.

As in, ta-da alakazam close-up david blaine saw'd your wife up fire-sparkle-shuffle shuffle cut this deck take any card sir bunny from a hat type magic ✨. What's going on there then?

the latin says something like… "unteachable private speech" i think?

yeah, that's right. what if the Magic Circle—as in, the guild of party magicians— is a real magick secret society. what better way to hide in plain sight? because these people seem like total dorks... nobody would believe they have the secrets! their whole shtick is that they are dorks who lie about having the secrets!!!!!!

anyway i'm going snooping