The Importance of “Focus”

AUTHOR'S NOTE: While ordering my thoughts for this essay, I toyed with the idea of talking about "landscape" and "distance" (near, middle and far) as displayed in the scenic cards of the tarot, since both imply "action in the world" (Alejandro Jodorowsky's supple phrase) that can be explored during the interpretation. But then I realized …

An “On-Point” Alternative Choice Reading

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Although the issue has already been settled in principle if not yet in fact, a client has reached a "tipping-point" in a major life decision and is seeking additional insight from an impartial Universe regarding the wisdom of a pending action that was chosen and is soon to be taken. I used my …

The “Active Witness” and the Minor Arcana

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Here is another interesting observation from Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Way of Tarot. In it he notes that, when a "pip" card of the Tarot de Marseille exhibits a red dot or figurative "eye," the symbol represents an "active (that is, actively involved) witness" to the action signified by the card. This idea inspired …

The Overturned Cups: Half Full or Half Empty?

AUTHOR'S NOTE: There is a wonderful metaphor that speaks directly to our attitude about life's occasional downturns and hints at whether we are naturally optimistic or pessimistic in our outlook: "Is the glass half full or half empty?" As a lifelong skeptic, my first thought when confronted with this conundrum is "What's in the glass?" …

The Eights: Concentrated Fulfillment or Adaptation and Adjustment?

AUTHOR'S NOTE: This essay is a reprise of more than one prior post, but I recently came across Alejandro Jodorowsky's extremely favorable assessment of the number 8 in its role as tarot symbolism and felt compelled to restate my case. While some esoteric thinkers consider the number 8 to be the ultimate "perfection" of the …

A Matter of Succession

AUTHOR'S NOTE: I'm leaping right over other European contributors to the esoteric tarot like Papus, de Guaita, Peladan, Pitois (Paul Christian) and Wirth, mainly because I haven't explored them to any depth yet; I'm still getting my feet wet with Etteilla. In The Book of Thoth, Aleister Crowley (apparently echoing the now-disputed sentiments of Eliphas …

Crowley: What’s to Like (or Not)?

The subject of Aleister Crowley is a polarizing one among tarot enthusiasts. Many of those who truly "get" his Thoth Tarot and particularly its erudite and challenging companion tome, the Book of Thoth, think he can do no wrong, while others (when they don't find him completely opaque) consider him a preening egomaniac, the self-anointed …

Daily “Hermetic Meditation” #1

Casting around for something new to post, I decided to do a series of daily "Hermetic Meditations" using the various Golden-Dawn and Thoth-based decks I own. I have around a dozen of them now and will be rotating them in and out of the six-card pull regularly. The layout is the graphic for my "Pentagram …

Vole! Aude! Scie! Tace!

There is an Hermetic maxim that goes "To Will, To Dare, To Know and To Keep (or Be) Silent." It parallels the observation that those who truly know don't talk about it, and those who speak as if they do don't really know. There are several variations on this theme; the one that I like …

The “Chalice of Earth” Taurus Ingress Matrix

Once again, I decided to try getting more interpretive value out of the Golden Dawn's Chaldean correspondence wheel beyond its card-by-card significance. As an experiment I created matrices of the five cards that are "in play" at the ingress of the Sun into each of the zodiacal signs: the Ace and Princess that relate to …