Tarot and Astrology: Convergence or Collision?

AUTHOR'S NOTE: In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I was already a natal astrologer of the "psychological" school and had been for a couple of years before I began pursuing tarot study and practice in a systematic (primarily esoteric) way. So I have an abiding appreciation for astrological principles even though …

The “Equal-Opportunity” Skeptic

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Those of us who follow a qabalistic approach to the esoteric tarot recognize that the roots of our study and practice lie in Hebrew religious mysticism that has been adapted for ritual use by the 19th-Century Hermetic occultists of the Western Mystery Tradition. We may invoke the words and concepts but we don't …

Sublimation as a Reading Strategy

AUTHOR'S NOTE: As I'm using it here, to "sublimate" something means to "elevate it to a higher order of excellence." I'm focusing this principle on the problem of how to deal in a constructive way with particularly discouraging cards in a tarot reading that stubbornly resist interpretive mitigation. We may not be rewarded with a …

Tarot Worldview: A Matter of Perspective

AUTHOR'S NOTE: The Germans have a precise but rather fierce-sounding word for it: weltanschauung. As an esoteric thinker with Germanic roots and a decidedly rational (as well as curmudgeonly) approach to tarot matters, I've always had reservations about the metaphysical worldview that assumes everything in existence is mystically entwined in a matrix of perfect congruence, …

A Confluence of Perfection: The Hermit by Threes

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Several years ago I came across the revelation that the numbers Three, Six and Nine represent the "Three Perfections" of ancient Greek (or possibly Hindu) philosophy. I was unable to discover the historical source of this information, but the idea has stuck with me. The "magic number" in the following meditation is the …

Mental Over-steering: Mercury and the Tarot Eights

AUTHOR'S NOTE: In the Book of Thoth Aleister Crowley expounds at length on the fact that the Sevens and Eights are unbalanced, "low down on the Tree and off the middle pillar." In the case of the Eights they represent an over-emphasis on intellectual rationalizing divorced from the more mystical, intuitive and fluid outlook of …

The Birth Card: A Matrixed Approach

AUTHOR'S NOTE: The subject of birth cards sometimes comes up in online discussions. Many people use a numerological approach, adding together the numerals for the day, month and year, reducing "Theosophically," and coming up with a Major Arcanum as a symbolic avatar that can be used as a "significator" in tarot readings. Here I'm looking …

The “Elemental Agenda” Clarifier

AUTHOR'S NOTE: As an "old-school" tarot reader with metaphysical roots in the early days of the New Age, I take a dim view of drawing additional cards to clarify an original pull merely to avoid struggling with what we at first don't understand, instead of trying to puzzle our way through it. But after arguing …

A Meditation on “Oddness”

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Although as students and practitioners of the mystic arts we can be excused for often feeling "odd" in a world that rewards conformity, that's not what this essay is about. One of the most useful bits of metaphysical wisdom I've received from Joseph Maxwell's Tarot de Marseille book, The Tarot, is that the …

The Problem of Pronunciation

" . . . the relationship among letters, words and reality is potent, magical and central to human life." (Isabel Kliegman, in Tarot and the Tree of Life) The truth of this quote is apparent in the lives of those for whom the spoken word seems to be vital to their sense of self-identity beyond …