This is the first of what will be a series of daily posts on the tarot court cards. They are drawn from lesson material I created last year for a beginner's course. The quoted sections were taken from Tarot Divination: A Description of the Cards of the Tarot, Aleister Crowley's publication of the Golden Dawn's … Continue reading Court Card Thumbnails: The King of Wands
Esoteric Tarot
Of Ants and Grasshoppers
If I may exercise a little alchemical "creative license" here, in the last half of the Fool's Journey, it is the Hanged Man's mission to submit to sacrifice on the altar of Justice, then undergo radical reduction (Death), transmutation (Temperance), testing (Devil), purification (Tower), sublimation (Star), infusion (Moon), revitalization, (Sun) retrial (Judgement) and restoration (World). … Continue reading Of Ants and Grasshoppers
Jiggery-Pokery
“Hey, Rock, watch me pull a rabbit out of a hat!” The modern tarot Magician began life as “le Bateleur,” a clever, street-wise conjurer skilled at juggling and ingenious sleight-of-hand diversions or, alternatively, a cunning mountebank, charlatan or trickster. The only thing “occult” about him was what he chose to keep hidden from the gaze … Continue reading Jiggery-Pokery
The Fool Abides
When is a Fool not an utter fool? When he's given a mission, obviously, regardless of his readiness to undertake it. In the annals of tarot's "creation myth," the Fool was a stereotype of the medieval court jester, a madman in motley and bells. I sometimes wonder how many of those historical fools had a … Continue reading The Fool Abides
A Candle in the Darkness
I've always thought that hermits and remote caves go together like bread-and-butter, pretzels-and-beer or salt-and-pepper; the sequestered hermit covets outer solitude to stimulate his inner vision. So what's this guy doing out of his hole and on a mountain-top in the middle of the night? The answer would seem to be "aspiring;" he stands at … Continue reading A Candle in the Darkness
“Who’s the Boss?”
I once had a 95-pound German Shepard who fully understood the authoritarian zeal of the Emperor. He was big and strong enough to have ripped my throat out, so every informal training session included a demonstration of my "alpha male" superiority. He loved to mock-fight, so I used to don a pair of heavy work … Continue reading “Who’s the Boss?”
Extreme Makeover: Imperatrix to Earth Mother
The esoteric revisionism of the 18th and 19th Centuries produced many imaginative additions to the existing lexicon of divinatory keywords for the tarot trump cards, which was previously anemic at best. What was once a simple court jester - and mad at that - became a "wise Fool" with a mission, what began as an … Continue reading Extreme Makeover: Imperatrix to Earth Mother
Leaving the Crossroads: A Chariot to Go
In reading Roberts Place's volume, The Tarot: History, Symbolism and Divination, I encountered his association of Plato's threefold subdivision of the human soul with the septenary (3x7) arrangement of the tarot trumps (the Fool is set apart as a “wild card”). Plato's unevolved “soul of appetite” corresponds to the seven-card series from the Magician to … Continue reading Leaving the Crossroads: A Chariot to Go
An Astro-Tarot Meditation, Part Two
Continuing from my last post: The 51 cards I extracted from the full deck according to the astrological features of my natal horoscope form what I call a "prepared" deck, or in this case, partial deck. Normally, when I pre-conditon a deck in some way, it's usually by separating out the trump, court and pip … Continue reading An Astro-Tarot Meditation, Part Two
An Astro-Tarot Meditation, Part One
This post is yet another installment in a long-running theme that has been intriguing me for several years: the blending of tarot and astrology in more practical ways than simply using the latter to provide depth to the meaning of the cards. It will also pull together several other ideas that have been gaining traction … Continue reading An Astro-Tarot Meditation, Part One
Parsifal's Wheel Tarot & Astrology 