The Revived Tarot

Introduction

The Tarot really is a Key, buried for five hundred years in the collective subconscious of the West, influencing popular culture and esoteric thought with its fascinating images, producing endless speculation and authoritative commentary. And that is in its de-activated state. The basic problematic and unconscious dialectic of two hundred years of Tarot commentary can be described as the avoidance and repression of the obvious -- the Hebrew and Jewish Kabbalistic roots of the twenty-two images which turned a card game into the Tarot and engraved the Hebrew alphabet into Western consciousness in a disguised and encoded form. We will expand upon this premise: The Tarot is actually a key to the alphabet of Creation (ma'aseh Bereshit) -- the alphabet of basic structural energies which God uses to "speak" His creation. This key -- left in plain sight for half a millenium -- was "encrypted" (seven or so of its letters were scrambled, or "hashed") and must be deciphered before it can be used to decrypt the "encoded" texts. Then, in its "activated" state, the Tarot functions as an iconic key to the analogical formative language of structure and energy embedded in the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Tarot commentary seems to consist, one the one hand, of an acceptance of a system of correspondences and attributions, one level of which involves a one-to-one match (if incorrect) with the Hebrew alphabet, and on the other hand, either the rejection or complete ignoring of both classical geocentric astrology and ancient Hebrew cosmological and cosmogonic systems as relevant to an understanding of the Tarot ("there just happen to be twenty-two of them ... sorry, we meant 21+"0=1"). The authorities who deny astrological or Hebrew/kabbalistic influence on the construction of the Tarot, after tripping over the coincidence of the 22-ness, need to explain why so many of the Tarot are obvious classical representations of the zodical signs and planets, and then the coincidence of their sequential positions with the zodical and planetary formatives of the the Hebrew alphabet as described in the Sepher Yetsira (even if the wrong planet is assigned to the planetary formative position in seven cases in the Golden Dawn system, destroying Chaldean order). In other words, they need to ask themselves why the zodiacal assignments (Aries through Pisces) are in order (thanks to the Victorians seeing the blindingly obvious and interchanging Leo and Libra) and why the seven planets (Mercury though Saturn in their system) are not. You can unlock the Tarot yourself, but you will have to do what no Tarot "authority" has apparently ever wanted to do: the experiment: 0. Take the test for fun (hint: look at horizontal, vertical and numerical symbolism) or skip it if you want to figure it out yourself. 1. Look at the astrological Hebrew letter formatives in the Sepher Yetsira. 2. Decide which Tarot images correspond best with the astrological and formative/numerical symbolism. 3. Put the Tarot cards where they make the most sense. Most published correspondances of the seven double letters of the Hebrew alphabet (and the seven classical planets) to the Tarot are based on 19th century non-Hebrew sources, primarly the "magickal" systems of the Golden Dawn and their followers. For instance, when we see Beth=1=Mercury=Magician, everything after the Beth is not derived from Hebrew sources, but rather an "improvement." The Tarot must be aligned with the primary symbolic system, the Hebrew alphabet, not vice-versa. Until it is, it remains "locked" and unavailable for the transformation of consciousness, its primary function. By the end of the story, we hope to be able to understand why is not the same word as Back | Contents | Next