Shin Publications is proud to present this occult masterpiece - The Holy Book of Thoth: Great Arcana of the Tarot - 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.
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.
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.
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, before finally settling in Argentina and remaining there until his death.
He published two major works in his relatively short lifetime: The present volume, The Holy Book of Thoth, Great Arcana of the Tarot (1916) and Fundamentals of Pneumatology (1922). The Law of synarchy is central to Shmakov's cosmology, underlying his attempts to synthesise immense cultural fields of philosophy, spirituality, myth and religion - spanning the globe from East to West - into a cohesive universal whole. Synarchy is thus considered to be a cosmic prototype of being itself - of becoming - and corresponds to the Archetype of Sophia, the divine feminine principle, bearer of the Divine Plan and World Mind.
Like so much occult philosophy, the Law of Synarchy 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.
