Warning: If you're bored or baffled by esoteric number theory and the numerological approach to the tarot, skip this piece. It's one of my enduring passions, but then I'm a mystically-inclined former engineer. On one of the tarot forums we have been discussing the image of the arch-demon on the Waite-Smith Devil card. One of the first … Continue reading The Devil Is In The Details
Tarot Card Meanings
Astrological Significators
For tarot spreads that require a "Significator" card to represent the querent or the topic of interest, the challenge has always been how to go about selecting the "right" card. The old books advised using a querent's appearance (light-haired, dark-haired, fair-skinned, swarthy, etc.), gender and relative age to make the call. This provided a rough … Continue reading Astrological Significators
Where There’s Smoke . . .
One objection that some tarot readers have to so-called "positional" spreads - those that typically bear a fixed positive or negative meaning for each card position in the layout - is that they can create an uncomfortable setting where a nominally good" card must be interpreted in a "bad" way according to its position and vice versa. The Celtic Cross is a perfect … Continue reading Where There’s Smoke . . .
Medieval Cat Tarot Deck Interview
I should be clear up front that I'm not a huge fan of animal decks, unless they're a little (or a lot) quirky like the Tarot of the Magical Forest, the Marseille Cats or the Baroque Bohemian Cats (which I unfortunately missed buying when it was still in print). But I was gifted the utterly charming Medieval Cat Tarot for … Continue reading Medieval Cat Tarot Deck Interview
Omar’s Picture Book, Episode #3
Here is the third installment of my "Rubaiyat as Tarot Cards" visual narrative. I have a hunch this is going to get difficult due to the sheer number of iterations. As expected, I'm finding more situations where the pictorial story-telling vignettes in the RWS minor cards dovetail at least as vividly with the text as … Continue reading Omar’s Picture Book, Episode #3
Omar’s Picture Book, Episode #2
This is the second of my episodic attempts to translate the quatrains of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam into the visual language of the tarot cards, approximately one card per quatrain. I'm looking for logical transition points in the flow of the text so I can limit these posts to four or five related paragraphs … Continue reading Omar’s Picture Book, Episode #2
“Better a Live Sparrow”
In my ongoing (and lately intermittent) attempts to transform classic English-language poetry into visual narrative via the tarot cards, one work stands out as the "Holy Grail" of my lofty aspiration: The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. It is one I have been reluctant to tackle because it is so heavily laden with metaphysical imagery (the … Continue reading “Better a Live Sparrow”
Earth Abides*
(*Thanks to George R. Stewart for the title of his 1949 science-fiction novel and its main character "Ish," the word for "Man" in biblical Hebrew.) For most of us, at any given moment the one thing we can rely on in our experience of objective reality is the ground beneath our feet. The element of … Continue reading Earth Abides*
Air Apparent
I put the Book of Thoth's slant on elemental Air under the microscope next. In his discussion of the Ace of Swords, Crowley called Air "all-embracing, all-wandering, all-penetrating, all-consuming." He also said "In nature, the obvious symbol of Air is the Wind, 'which bloweth whithersoever it listeth.'" Taken together, these observation could be seen as … Continue reading Air Apparent
Water, Water Everywhere
Expanding on my analysis of elemental Fire as described in The Book of Thoth, I examined Crowley's observations regarding the other two "primal" elements ("completely spiritual forms of pure energy"), Water and Air, and the special case of Earth, which represents a "crystallizing out" or coalescing of the other three in order to effectively impinge … Continue reading Water, Water Everywhere
Parsifal's Wheel Tarot & Astrology 