The Holy Book of Thoth: The Great Arcana of the Tarot (Silver Age Russian Occult Rosicrucian Schools)

**This is a large format colour book and the Amazon costs are high. I was only making 16p per book so have had to up the price. I'm sorry it's so expensive - I did try to publish a cheaper B&W version via IngramSpark but there was confusion over the different covers and print quality because they also sold that version via Amazon. I do give readings for free on my Youtube Channel and have uploaded extracts to Academia and Scribd.** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvaF7Fllal4&list=PLFQyJjrXwGYWTbEdo6SZGY1enfY5byaUx Vladimir Alekseevich Shmakov entered a doorway into my mind whilst I was reading Meditations on the Tarot (MotT), where I first learned about the mysterious group of occultists working in Russia prior to the Bolshevik Revolution and during the civil war years. In letter XIV, Temperance, the author writes: "I have mentioned some Hermeticists whom I suppose that you, dear Unknown Friend, know of. But there are many others who ought to be named as guardians of the ancient tradition of the arcanum of inspiration. But what will the name of Shmakov say to you, for example? Or the name Roudnikova? These are names which, like the yellow leaves of autumn, repose in forgetfulness beneath the immense white shroud of snow which covers pre-revolutionary Russia.” Shmakov was the metaphysical genius who bequeathed to us the Holy Book of Thoth, with all its awesome synthesis of sacred scripture and philosophy, spanning the abyss between the Vedas and the Talmud, the Zohar and the Upanishads, Blavatasky and Spinoza with a relentless intensity and an extremely high degree of occult knowledge. Predictably, perhaps, given the well-documented purging of the Russian intelligentsia in general and occult schools in particular, there is very little surviving information about his life. We know that he was born in Moscow in the 1880’s (1887 according to one testament) and died in Argentina in 1929. He was highly educated in the outer world as well as the inner, being a railway engineer by profession. He displayed a lifelong passion for esoteric philosophy and spirituality, which in the pneumatic world of fin de siècle Russian high society attracted many like-minded souls to his salon. He was still living in Russia as late as 1923 – a year after Stalin came to power – where he stood at the centre of an esoteric circle of approximately twelve regular members and a few secondary figures. The pressures of the Stalinist regime soon proved too great, however, and in 1924 he left the Soviet Union with his surviving family, moving first to Germany, then Prague (in some accounts, Switzerland), before finally settling in Argentina and remaining there until his death. Like so much occult philosophy, the Law of Synarchy proposed by Shmakov is revealed through antinomies, the resolution of which is the key hermetic task expressed in the Ninth Arcanum (The Hermit) of Meditations on the Tarot and fulsomely described throughout the whole of G.O. Mebes’ and Nina Roudnikova’s work, as well as the present volume. The binary laws of Synarchy are the law of unity and its antithesis, the law of hierarchy. The antimony is resolved as the hierarchy is ascended, with a unification of lower elements attained in successive upper levels, via mysterious processes of attainment which we see unfolding in the Holy Book of Thoth and the later works. This is the resolution of binaries via a transcendental synthesis, the Gift of Black Perfection, the act of drawing light from darkness. Shin Publications is excited and proud to present this occult masterpiece for the first time in English, completing our Tarot series from the Silver Age Russian Masters. Also in the series are the G.O. Mebes Tarot Majors and Tarot Minors and Nina Roudnikova's The Solar Way - all interlinked luminaries of the esoteric ethers. PLEASE NOTE: A CHEAPER B&W VERSION IS ALSO AVAILABLE