AUTHOR’S NOTE: The title of this essay alludes to an episode from one of the Presidential terms of Bill Clinton during which he proposed building a bridge spanning the Aleutian Islands in Alaska. Conservative critics at the time immediately panned the idea as a costly boondoggle, a “bridge to nowhere” (which would almost certainly have been accurate had it been pursued), and radio personality Don Imus meanly proposed that maybe Ted Kennedy should drive Hillary Clinton across it, referring to Kennedy’s Chappaquiddick misadventure. This historical factoid has nothing to do with my objective here other than to support the assumption that a conceptual bridge can be constructed between the esoteric and mundane sides of tarot practice.

Anyone who has spent time examining the metaphysical roots of the tarot (apart from its prosaic origins as an Italian card-game and its discredited Egyptian connections) will most likely have developed a philosophical appreciation for its deeper implications. Three major historical currents are embraced by where we stand at present:

1) traditional decks like the Tarot de Marseille, if they have a more profound basis at all, are rooted in Medieval European civilization and its fascination with Neo-Platonism (which can be deduced from The Discarded Image, a cultural overview of that era by C.S. Lewis);

2) decks like the Thoth tarot were founded on the occult principles formulated by the late-19th-Century Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn riding on the 18th-Century shoulders of Jean-Baptiste Alliette (aka Etteilla) and Eliphas Levi, among later European progenitors like “Papus” (Gerard Encausse) and “Paul Christian” (Jean-Baptiste Pitois).

3) the Waite-Smith tarot created by Arthur Edward Waite and artist Pamela Colman Smith (commonly know as the “RWS” deck), which was intentionally presented as “Golden-Dawn-Lite” due to Waite’s reluctance to cast esoteric “pearls of wisdom” before proletariat “swine,” nevertheless became the populist darling of modern fortune-tellers who have no clue about, and little interest in, its academic underpinnings.

This is a long-winded, roundabout way to get to my main point. I went down just such a metaphysical path myself, beginning with Qabalistic studies in 1971, and unavoidably became something of an esoteric philosopher along the way, following the school of thought originated by the Golden Dawn (as have many other serious students of the tarot in my position) that was itself inspired by Qabalistic, Neo-Platonist and Pythagorean thinking. Years ago when I was developing a curriculum of “Tarot 101” teaching material for a series of courses that never happened, I decided to give it a comprehensive “Golden Dawn/Thoth/RWS” slant. (My later work with the TdM deck was a parallel project.)

To do this I judiciously selected and correlated key concepts from all three sources, adding my own summary comments to tie it all together. This was a worthwhile undertaking that eventually found its way into this blog. Rather than expounding on this effort any further here, I figured it would be useful to “bump” it forward by posting a link to the introductory essay of the “Tarot 101, My Way” series. If you choose to enter, be advised that this is a very deep and recondite “rabbit hole” that will require considerable dedication to work all the way through. But you will definitely come out the other side much more aware of the current state-of-the-art in esoteric tarot practice.

Tarot 101, My Way – An Overview