UPDATE: I was just going through my I Ching Pack looking for a card for one of my tarot/I Ching syncretism essays, and out popped the missing Devil card. I last used the pack in November of 2023 but there is no evidence that I combined it with my Conver Ben-Dov TdM at the time; … Continue reading Lost Tarot Card: A Horary Certainty
Jumping the Gap: Multilayered Tarot Reading
AUTHOR'S NOTE: In the past I've written about the fact that every tarot card contains several layers of meaning, and reading one can resemble peeling an onion. If a practical, action-and-event-oriented approach fails to illuminate the matter, a deeper cut could reveal the psychological angle of "attitudes and behaviors" to be adopted or avoided by … Continue reading Jumping the Gap: Multilayered Tarot Reading
Old Wine, New Wine, Wrong Bottle
AUTHOR'S NOTE: Although I've been studying and working with tarot for over 50 years, I still occasionally dip into the literature. My chosen subject matter is most often from the traditional canon but once in a while the material is of more recent vintage just to assess how the world of tarot is evolving in … Continue reading Old Wine, New Wine, Wrong Bottle
The Lover and the Devil: Trump-Card Bookends
AUTHOR'S NOTE: I've been playing around with the 7x3 array of trump cards (minus the Fool because zero adds nothing to this exercise) by running out the numerological expressions for each row and column. I used both Theosophical reduction (adding together the digits of any sum larger than 21) and "casting out nines" (subtracting increments … Continue reading The Lover and the Devil: Trump-Card Bookends
Creative Potential and “Two-ness”
AUTHOR'S NOTE: The current social antipathy toward "binary thinking" is a puzzler for the life-long student of occult number theory. Just because some college professor or Hollywood influencer decided that "binary is bad" in terms of self-identity doesn't make it a functionally sound or rational premise. We might have asked the last scion of the … Continue reading Creative Potential and “Two-ness”
2024 Celtic Wheel of the Year Layout
AUTHOR'S NOTE: For the next solar cycle, I chose not to pull random cards to represent the Celtic year, but rather to use the tarot trump cards associated with the eight Celtic holidays and the four zodiacal ingress dates for the Sun, thus creating a universal layout with slightly more irregular sequencing than the typical … Continue reading 2024 Celtic Wheel of the Year Layout
Red and Blue: “Living and Knowing”
AUTHOR'S NOTE: Except for the traditional block-printed Marseille decks, I get very little mileage out of color symbolism in the tarot. Even then, I stay mainly with the three primary colors red, blue and yellow (along with black and white), scarcely noticing the uncommon secondary hues of green, orange and purple, and even less so … Continue reading Red and Blue: “Living and Knowing”
Moon Mastery: Making the Darkness Conscious
AUTHOR'S NOTE: Although not alluding directly to the tarot Moon, Carl Gustav Jung wrote the following observation that has a bearing on the subject: "One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious." In other words, we must draw it forth and examine it, not try to hide … Continue reading Moon Mastery: Making the Darkness Conscious
Rebirth of the Sun: A Solstice Meditation
AUTHOR'S NOTE: For those of us who are more attuned to the mystical significance of the Winter Solstice than to that of Christmas, I can think of nothing better to read on that occasion than this clever piece of poetic appropriation from the work of Clement Clarke Moore.* It doesn't take a doctorate in theology, … Continue reading Rebirth of the Sun: A Solstice Meditation
A Tarot Reckoning: Descent into Impressionism
AUTHOR'S NOTE: Lately I've been spending some time on the r/seculartarot sub-reddit, and after viewing numerous posts I've concluded that they categorically reject any kind of unstructured approach to the tarot (as one might suppose from the title of the sub). I find myself wondering "If you stifle creative inspiration, imagination and ingenuity in tarot … Continue reading A Tarot Reckoning: Descent into Impressionism
Parsifal's Wheel Tarot & Astrology 