I may have mentioned a few (or possibly hundreds) of times here that the tarot started off as a game. It wouldn't be true to say that it was never used for fortune telling (there is after all a long tradition of fortune telling by dominos and playing cards) but the tarot subsequently got connected to the Qabalah and that is where my problems begin. They continue with the ongoing efforts to reconcile the tarot with the several magical maps of reality. To be frank probably the only thing I will do in this post is state them and get confused, but hey.
My first problem is that the ten sephiroth on the tree of life, which is a map of everything are the emanations of God. You can see them in the form of the coins in the ten of pentacles. That's the shape of them. They're the really big sources of everything. In between are twenty two paths which represent the Hebrew letters which are the building blocks of everything.
This would be OK except the sephiroth have the minor arcana allocated to them and the pathways have the major arcana allocated to them, which reverses the importance. You read in Crowley about the light from the different sephiroth being seen in various cards and this means you've got the minor arcana illuminating the major.
Even if you've never heard of the tarot that should sound confusing and wrong. And so we come to the second problem.
If you've noticed I've left the court cards out of this that's because only the top sephiroth get a court card attributed to them and not the others. These are the sephiroth above the line in the tree which marks our world from above so in the Qabalistic map of the tarot and everything they are attributed to the bit where nothing has manifested in reality yet so really don't exist in a way we could touch.
Confused? Good. Why should I be the only one?
I'm hoping that I will come back to this post in months and years to come and say it makes sense but I suspect you have to live with the contradiction rather than resolve it. Despite this confusion I'm finding my understanding of the tarot is deepening hugely.
It's not even as if nobody else is dissatisfied with this. Famously the Golden Dawn moved round two of the major arcana from the Marseilles tarot they started with, to make them fit the astrology better. Then Crowley swapped round another two of the major arcana.
So I suppose what I've really learned is to sit with it and probe the questions in a magical system gently. I still hope it will miraculously fall into place and make sense though!
Actually another thing which makes no sense is our Tory scum energy minister, Greg Hands.
Clear as mud! As in to say, not clear to me at all. I tend to appreciate tarot cards for their art than for what they are supposed to represent because representation can be manipulated, and I have trust issues. ;)
ReplyDeleteThe different ways tarot cards impact on people never fail to fascinate me, Proxima Blue. Inexplicable thinks they look shifty and I tend to see dirty old men...
DeleteTarot cards look shitty? Where I live tarot card art is its own genre of art. You can see a variety of art styles on this Pinterest board before it insist you sign in. Don't some of these make Rider-Waite look so mundane?
Deletehttps://www.pinterest.com/tarotfannn/
Nooo! Don't start me with new decks! The bank balance!
DeleteYes they are very badly drawn. However I've stopped buying other decks because I usually find I will never be able to read them, or simply don't have the inclination to make the connection. My first deck was the Ancient Tarot of Lombardy, which I bought because I liked it then found I couldn't read it - although I can now. Then I really learned with a Morgan Greer then settled on RWS which is my everyday deck. I commonly use the Golden Dawn tarot as you know and have some Etteilla Decks, but they're temperamental and take some careful handling.
Incidentally there are some redrawn versions of RWS to make it look better but I can't read any of them!