AUTHOR'S NOTE: As I recently told one of my online tarot groups, I've saved "the worst for last." When compared to the majority of modern diviners, I'm very far off the beaten path in my dim view of the RWS deck. While the Waite-Smith (RWS) tarot may be the most popular deck in the world, … Continue reading The Maverick Cartomant, Part 4: The Waite-Smith Tarot
Golden Dawn
The Maverick Cartomant, Part 3: The Thoth Tarot
AUTHOR'S NOTE: It may be disingenuous to claim "maverick" status when my approach to the Thoth tarot is at least 95% aligned with the content of its companion volume, The Book of Thoth, and the Golden Dawn's Liber T tarot curriculum on which it is largely based. But I do have reservations about a couple … Continue reading The Maverick Cartomant, Part 3: The Thoth Tarot
Qabalistic Mercury and the Tarot Trumps
AUTHOR'S NOTE: In my theoretical reworking of the Golden Dawn's astrological correspondences for the Major Arcana a few years ago, I realigned Mercury with two of the four trumps - Temperance and the World - via sign rulership and left it in place with the Magician, which represents the archetypal personification of its energy. Here … Continue reading Qabalistic Mercury and the Tarot Trumps
Recasting Saturn: The Devil, the World and the Hermit
AUTHOR'S NOTE: Here is the next installment in my series of follow-up essays examining the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn's astrological notation for the Major Arcana of the tarot. The planet Saturn has traditionally shared equal billing with the element of Earth as the corresponding symbol for the World (Thoth Universe) card, which has … Continue reading Recasting Saturn: The Devil, the World and the Hermit
Swapping Correspondences for the Empress and the Lovers*
*Empress = Taurus (the most fertile of signs) and the Lovers = Venus (the Goddess of Love) In an earlier post (linked below), I explored "rethinking" the Golden Dawn's astrological assignments for the Major Arcana based on my five decades of practice with the esoteric tarot and astrology. This is the third in my series … Continue reading Swapping Correspondences for the Empress and the Lovers*
“I Want My MTV” (Metaphysical Tarot Values)*
*Riffing on the song Money for Nothing by Dire Straits AUTHOR'S NOTE: In Liber T, the Order's tarot curriculum, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn assigned esoteric correspondences to all 78 cards of the deck, ranging from astrological associations to Qabalistic notation to scraps from the Medieval grimoire,The Picatrix. In routine practice, these sometimes-forced … Continue reading “I Want My MTV” (Metaphysical Tarot Values)*
Affinity or Dignity? – Elemental Compatibility in Tarot Reading
AUTHOR'S NOTE: In its Liber T tarot curriculum, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn presented elaborate and prescriptive rules for the analysis of elemental associations between cards of different suits in a tarot reading, an interpretive technique known as "Elemental Dignity." The classical premise was that Fire and Air are "friendly" to one another, … Continue reading Affinity or Dignity? – Elemental Compatibility in Tarot Reading
Zodiacal Segmenting of the Court Cards
AUTHOR'S NOTE: I've written about this subject before, but I've just been reading T. Susan Chang's very precise description of it in her book, Tarot Correspondences: Ancient Secrets for Everyday Readers, that brought me back to my own assumptions. In the Golden Dawn's Chaldean model of zodiacal associations for the tarot, all of the court … Continue reading Zodiacal Segmenting of the Court Cards
You Tell Me!
AUTHOR'S NOTE: One of the directives of the Golden Dawn's "Opening of the Key" (OotK) method and its five-step progression is to abandon the reading if the cards pulled fail to accurately identify the seeker's unspoken reason for pursuing the divination. This is the "tell the Querent why he has come" stipulation that must receive … Continue reading You Tell Me!
The Delusion of Perfection
AUTHOR'S NOTE: I hate to say it, but far too many of the tarot readers I encounter online are convinced they've attained the pinnacle of tarot mastery and make sage pronouncements based on that assumption, when it's clear to this seasoned observer that they're still finding their way and may in fact be going in … Continue reading The Delusion of Perfection
Parsifal's Wheel Tarot & Astrology 