AUTHOR’S NOTE: Ever since Jungian group-think hijacked the New Age zeitgeist of the early ’70s, a great deal of emphasis has been placed on the tarot as a tool for innate self-understanding and cognate self-improvement. In that regard it’s a pale substitute for astrology, one that offers a gentler learning curve suitable for the casual aspirant. Psychological horoscopy blazed the trail beginning in 1917 with Alan Leo’s failed attempts to stave off conviction as a fortune-teller, reaching its popular zenith in the mid-to-late 20th Century, and tarot soon followed in its wake.
I used the cards as an adjunct to astrological character-analysis for the better part of four decades, but also pursued an unrelated interest in cartomancy. Recently, I’ve been reading about Chinese mystical practices centered on the Tao and the I Ching, which seem far more contemplative and unhurried than the self-empowerment angle of New Age tarot and the “instant gratification” leanings of its 21st-Century offspring. I was struck by the notion that, with a little thoughtful adjustment of our routine, the Western tarot can be approached with much the same relaxed, introspective attitude.
The 78 tarot cards can be read as a picture-book that tells an evolving story from its inception with the Fool to its conclusion in the 10 of Pentacles, the least active of the Minor Arcana in the least energetic element. I think of an individual reading as an abbreviated “storyboard” lifted from the more comprehensive scope of the full narrative. It’s fairly straightforward to interpret this subset as a snapshot of future events and circumstances occurring over time, but it is much more elusive when trying to peg it to the formal structure of the human psyche with its focus on conscious, subconscious and unconscious (or superconscious) modes of awareness.
I would also argue that it is not particularly robust or effective as a practical guide for this purpose since it is more anecdotal and impressionistic than analytical or clinical; it’s best used for inspired supposition, not psychotherapy. We can pretend to possess an intellectual grasp of its psychological implications, but I’m not convinced that we know anything definite about its psycho-dynamics beyond our reliance on intuitive guesswork to decipher the puzzle; in other words, we make it up as we go. (It is, after all, an interpretive art and not a “hard” science.) As I’ve said before, behavioral psychology is observational while tarot reading is largely presumptive with little reliable data supporting it since nobody’s been keeping track as they have for astrology since Hellenic times.
Shortly after I began studying esoteric subjects around 1971, I came across evidence in the literature that each of the tarot cards had been assigned a place on the Qabalistic Tree of Life (ToL), a metaphysical structure that raises its lofty crown to the heights of spiritual discernment while its lower extremities are buried in the depths of mundane intercourse. On this structure the Minor Arcana were allocated positions, the Aces in the formless World of Spirit at the ethereal apex of the Tree and the Tens in the concrete World of Action at “ground zero.” The rest proceed downward in numerical order through the increasingly dense realms of intellect and ideas, and of formative principles that feed the imagination and the creative faculties. (I should mention that I’m not an orthodox Jewish Qabalist – who might say I know just enough to be dangerous – but rather a dedicated Hermetic one, so my perceptions are skewed toward the syncretic magical worldview. Hopefully my word-pictures are evocative enough to give a sense of the concepts at work here; for the purist, they are described in more mystical language in the text of the Hebrew Sefer Yetzirah, and Robert Wang’s Qabalistic Tarot is a useful source-book as well.)
The court cards were also assigned places in the scheme, with the Kings and Queens elevated to the Supernal Triangle, the Knights in the Ethical Triangle at the heart of the Tree and the Pages standing apart at the very foot. Because there are 56 cards in this population but only ten “bins” to hold them, the model was further refined (or I should say co-opted by occultists) so the four separate “worlds” received 14 cards each, allocated by suit, number and astrological correlation. This architecture presents a roadmap for the “Descent of Spirit into Matter” via a chain of interconnected “spheres” (or “emanations”) that descend in an orderly way via four elemental channels.
The 22 Major Arcana are bound to a comparable network of “paths,” but their sequencing is not as rational although it does begin at the top with the Fool (Primal Air) as zero and end with the World (Saturn and Earth) at the bottom as 21. (Note that there is some astrological continuity to all of this). In my own practice I’ve found that the minor and court cards flow very nicely in this hierarchical setup, but the trump cards are less persuasive in their arrangement. Consequently, I’ve tinkered with the placement of these cards on the paths, realigning them to suit my own occult sensibilities.
In use, I like to include these Tree of Life considerations as supplemental to the more knowledge-and-experience-based card meanings in my repertoire. I will refer to the ToL design to see where each card in a spread sits on the Tree, which tells me how “numinous” or unimpeded by friction its operation will be. I then inform my narrative with the essence of what I discover. For example, the 10 of Pentacles – usually read as material wealth and comfort – is at the same time almost rigidly inert, a paragon of stifling domestic ennui, while the inspirational Ace of Wands is freewheeling to a fault (in the ’70s we would have called its influence “drifty”). The higher a card’s location on the Tree, the more spiritual (and therefore more mystical) its operation becomes.
The reading thus takes on a set of dynamic thumbnails that can resemble a “roller-coaster ride” at the rarefied level of cosmic attunement. The challenge for the diviner becomes relating the subtle effects of this parallel process to the realm of daily affairs shown by the more literal outlook of the cards. In the best sense, they can create a nuanced interpretation that offers both abstract philosophical observations and pragmatic advice that complement one another. Aleister Crowley used this “descent of Spirit” paradigm to good effect in the Book of Thoth, and I find that his insights give my work both a multi-layered complexity and a more profound slant, for which numerological and planetary associations complete the picture. Of all the esoteric correspondences, I value this one as furnishing the most coherent explanation of how transcendental energy works.
In 2017 I wrote an essay on the use of correspondences that is worth revisiting; it will be particularly enlightening for those new to the subject.
Parsifal's Wheel Tarot & Astrology 