Tarot Inspire Read online

  Marcus Katz & Tali Goodwin

  Published by Forge Press (2012)

  1 Wood Cottage, Old Windebrowe, Keswick,

  Cumbria CA12 4NT

  Tarot

  Inspire © Marcus Katz & Tali Goodwin, 2012. All rights reserved. No part of this book shall be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise – without written permission from the publisher.

  Tarosophy® is a registered trademark

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  Cover: ‘2 of Swords’, Tyldwick Tarot © by Neil Lovell

  http://www.malpertuis.co.uk/tyldwick/

  This Tarosophy® Tarot Kickstart Book is dedicated to Carrie Paris, Barbara Moore and Mike Hernandez, wise Tarot Triangulators.

  .

  The world becomes an apparently infinite,

  yet possibly finite, card game.

  Image combinations,

  permutations,

  comprise the world game.

  Jim Morrison, ‘The Lords and the New Creatures’, Poems (1969)

  The Fool cannot demand or orchestrate this unfolding. It naturally fills the void of the Fool’s empty heart, just as sunset follows night. He has to be fully immersed into the dark night of the soul, being prepared to relinquish all in order to empty the heart.

  Russell Sturgess, Metanoia: Renovating the House of Your Spirit (p. 252)

  INDEX

  Introduction 4

  The Return of the Oracles 18

  How You Work 26

  How Your Universe Works 28

  How to Find Your Spiritual Calling 36

  The Circle of Oracles 45

  Magick and Tarot 53

  Mysticism and Tarot 57

  Restoring a Spiritual Dignity to Tarot 62

  A Map of the Spiritual Mountain 64

  The Tarot Heliakos 85

  The Tarot Shaman 100

  Tarot in the New World 112

  Bibliography 118

  Websites & Resources 122

  TAROT INSPIRE: A TAROSOPHY KICKSTART BOOK

  A book to inspire your consideration of the spiritual dimensions of Tarot.

  Introduction

  In this third Kickstart book of Tarosophy teaching, we take a break from the reference work of Tarot Flip, the seventy-eight innovative Tarot methods in Tarot Twist, and offer a wider contemplation of Tarot – as a tool of spiritual inspiration. This is not a book about Tarot card reading in its sense of reading for yourself or others – although it may inspire new ways of considering that act. It is a short book of provocations, hints, and odd branches in the Tarot Tree – designed in a spirit of open wonder.

  It is sometimes difficult for people to reconcile their use of Tarot in contemporary society, which has little place for such “superstitious” interest, so this book is given as an antidote to that negative outlook. We hope that it inspires you to explore the spiritual path denoted by this pack of cards and make new discoveries at every twist and turn.

  This book is also a standalone title in the series, for those who are interested in opening channels to some of the philosophical and esoteric considerations of Tarot beyond the obvious mechanisms we have provided in our first two books. This may not be the book you are expecting, however it is meant to inspire your further discoveries beyond the matters dealt here – these are kickstart books of your creativity.

  We have had a lot of challenges to bring you this book, which draws on material as old as the oracles and as new as today’s latest tweet. We look forwards to continuing to accompany you on your own inspirational journey through Tarot.

  Marcus Katz, The Tarosophist &

  Tali Goodwin, TaliTarot

  A Brief Note on IS and ARE

  We usually try and avoid absolute statements. We think there is no “true secret of Tarot”, no one “real meaning of the Devil card” or any such sentiments. We usually try and write in e-prime, a method of avoiding such absolute statements.

  Whilst we may be lazy in this work, and not adhere to e-prime throughout, please take all forms of “X is Y” to be read as “in this particular case, X might be considered as holding some similarity to Y for your consideration”. Or perhaps we are just writing for effect and marketing in some places, where the intent is obvious.

  This is also why IMHO (In My Humble Opinion) appears online. No one thing can be seen as identical to something else, so when we say “The Moon is Red” we mean that in our language, to our perception, in a certain context, the object to which we refer looks like a particular color at this specific moment. We will take it as read from this point that we do not need to explain this in every sentence in this book.

  Furthermore, in the interpretation of symbols, we can go by no better advice than Joseph Campbell:

  Since one’s way of experiencing – and so, of interpreting –phenomenality cannot but be a function of one’s own level or state of consciousness, there can be no one true way of evaluating life, symbolic forms or anything else.

  Joseph Campbell, The Interpretation of Symbolic Forms.

  Tarot is the Book of your Secret

  The Tarot is your blank bible and the book of your soul’s secret. It has arisen - comparably recently in human development - over the last several hundred years and stabilized into a set of 78 images on material which can be arranged in a staggering variation of constructs.

  We begin and end – and transcend both beginning and end – with the unnumbered or sometimes zero Fool card. As with all Tarot, the secret is not where it appears to be - the secret of this card is in the dog which faithfully accompanies the figure. As a symbol of true faith, a faith in reality, the dog constantly attacks the Fool at the same time as guiding him. He is the constant companion of experience – your experience of the World. His barking is not a distraction, it is direction.

  And he holds an even deeper secret, woven into the very fabric of our experience of reality. The canine carries exactly 78 chromosomes. In life, these are the vectors of hereditary and are embodiments of two essential principles – continuity and individuality.

  The tradition of Tarot is the secret of the Fool’s Dog. These cards are a continuation of an evolving communication through your individual experience. Whether you simply read a deck, create a new deck, revert or recant the images, whether you follow one set of correspondences or another, whether you believe in angelic guides or the art of poetry to decipher the images, you are continuing an individual journey – through Tarot. And this is its tradition – a rose key (soul) to open the cross (experience) on which you are bound.

  Tarot also shares this emergent property – it’s most common number of cards (as ever, there are many variations) – with the atomic number of Platinum. This heavy metal has the properties of being resistant to corrosion and mall
eable to fashion into the finest of jewelry. Perhaps those attributes can be seen to correspond to Tarot in this contemporary gematria, or numerology? Perhaps our Tarot is the platinum level key to a spiritual world.

  If we were to give shape then to the number, to find its vibration between pure number and illustrated image, the 78 becomes the 78 lines of Metatron’s Cube, a geometric shape constructed from 13 circles and perhaps the most elegant arrangement of 78 lines possible.

  And of course, the 78rpm vinyl record. It appears that if you plug something into a hidden source of power, and try and give it shape and voice, the number 78 emerges naturally. In this context, the number is associated with that most nostalgic of personal items – a record of our own personal history, yet one common to all whom heard those songs. And so it is with Tarot – the same images, the same record – yet always, always, our own journey.

  You are the Fool and your Reality is the Dog. Tarot is the song you sing to each other on your trip.

  Tarot Spirituality?

  Are you the one who is living you now? This is the first radical question of the controversial spiritual teacher Da Free John (Franklin Jones, 1939 – 2008) in The Four Fundamental Questions. In this small book, he proposes four questions leading to a state of spiritual enlightenment, a state where:

  This realization thus becomes a radically new way of life, a completely new disposition relative to everything. You are no longer one observing and knowing. You are not other than what you appear to be. You are completely one with it. You are it. The release of the gesture of separation, of inwardness, makes the body whole. It becomes full. You are simply happy. You are simply the body. You are simply whatever is the case. You are removed from the game of conflict and discovery. You are at rest as whatever is the case. Thus, you see that you are radiant. You inhere and participate in everything and everyone. You are no longer separating yourself, no longer contracting, no longer entering into the hallucinated field of inwardness, but you are simply at rest in relations. In the midst of all this arising in which you have no independence, no view, no knowledge, you see that your radiance is perfect and infinite.

  The Four Fundamental Questions, p. 37

  This text, as many spiritual texts, finds its formulation also in our Tarot. As an enquiry into the relation of ourselves and the world, whether it be the Fool’s or the Adept’s journey (and they are sometimes one and the same) we produce descriptions of that journey both in text and in image. The Tarot is a montage of mystical experience – even in its most mundane presentations.

  This is treated admirably by Evelyn Underhill in her seminal Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness. In her chapter on Mysticism and Symbolism – an absolutely essential read for anyone wishing to explore Tarot spirituality (in our humble opinions) – she writes about the various diagrams of the spiritual world. Whilst referring to symbolism ranging from Dante to Bunyon, to the Heavenly Jerusalem or the Seven Valleys of the Sufi ‘Attar, she may as well be referring equally to Tarot:

  These special mystical diagrams, these symbolic and artistic descriptions of man’s inward history – his secret adventures with God – are almost endless in their variety: since in each we have a picture of the country of the soul seen through a different temperament … Thanks to the spatial imagery inseparable from human thinking and human expression, no direct description of spiritual experience is or can be possible to man. It must always be symbolic, allusive, oblique: always suggest, but never tell, the truth.

  Mysticism, p. 126

  Her analysis of the three “cravings” depicted by such symbolism can also be of use to us in understanding Tarot spirituality; she speaks of the three cravings of the lost home, the heart and perfection. In this we see most deeply the narrative of Tarot in a spiritual manner – for the craving of the lost home leads to the Fool’s Journey which is so often depicted in contemporary Tarot. The cards of the Fool, the Hermit, and in the Minors the Eight of Cups, speak of this pilgrimage. The craving of the heart for its perfect mate is seen not only in the images of the Tarot, but echoed in every question of the form, “When will Dwayne come back to me?”

  And the craving of perfection, the “inward purity”, this is seen in the various cards of devotion and religious or magical work, be it the Magician or the Hierophant, or the chapel of the Six of Swords.

  So perhaps we can wonder how the deck of seventy-eight images speaks to us of these spiritual longings; and look at each card afresh with three questions;

  How does this image help me find my place?

  How does this image open my heart?

  How does this image bring clarity to my mind?

  Furthermore we would recommend a number of books throughout this present work which may inspire your sense of spirituality in the western perspective. Here are several titles with which to begin that for us represent the pinnacle of spiritual experience:

   The Path to No-Self, Bernadette Roberts

   The Love-Ananda Gita, Da Free John

   Daughter of Fire, Irina Tweedie

  There are so many more, of course. All books throughout are given in the bibliography or fully referenced within the text where possible. A useful anthology of western mysticism is A Dazzling Darkness, by Patrick Grant (London: Fount, 1985).

  Is the Tarot a spiritual tool?

  That cards have been utilised as a mechanism of spiritual, religious or ethical education is in no doubt. A pack of cards called the Chartilidui Logicae was published in 1507, being a “progressive instruction in the art of reasoning” (Hutton, 1979). There exists in the Victoria and Albert museum a deck of Christian Tarot cards. Kaplan gives examples of such decks demonstrating geography in a 1725 deck (Kaplan, 1985) and such decks as the early Minchiate of the late 17th century included cards expressing theological and cardinal virtues such as faith, hope and charity.

  We understand that the esoteric architecture of Tarot was grafted onto the cards following de Gebelin’s assertions, with the mysterious Comte de Mellet, of an ancient Egyptian origin. This was rapidly propagated in popular culture almost immediately by the marketing of Etteilla, in the late 1700’s (see Dummet, The Game of Tarot, pp. 102-11). Following on from this offshoot of the original Tarot, the occultist Eliphas Levi then cemented the notion that Tarot was a repository of secret teaching – of which, he, of course, had been able “to understand the enigmas of every sphinx and penetrate all sanctuaries” (Levi, Transcendental Magic, p. 103).

  It was then a rapid assimilation into the grand synthesis of the Golden Dawn (mainly through the Tarot work of S. L. MacGregor Mathers), and from there to Waite, Colman-Smith, Crowley, Harris, Paul Foster Case and all who followed.

  From the 1960’s to the present day, authors have touched upon the spiritual possibilities of the Tarot, notably in Spiritual Tarot, by Signe E. Echols, Robert Mueller and Sandra A. Thomson (1996). Here, for example, the Tarot Major cards are seen as a two groups of ten cards depicting the journey to spiritual wholeness; the first ten Major Arcana being “strengths and weaknesses”, split into five “developmental tasks” and five “inner resources”. The remaining ten cards provide “tests and dilemmas” on the journey to the wholeness symbolized by the World card. This is described as the successful outcome of the spiritual journey, representing “unity consciousness” (p. 101).

  More recently, authors and teachers such as Rachel Pollack have provided spiritual contemplation through the deck, deeming it “an instrument of our wisdom because it contains the intricate details of creation, [but] also the method to use all that information” (Pollack, 2003). Dai Leon states that “used in the context of divination, the symbolic meanings, intuitive gestalts, and overall vision contained within each distinctive Triumph define the reading, guidance, and wisdom of a worldview founded upon ancient yet perennial knowledge and authentic spiritual realization” (Origins of the Tarot, p. 479).

  So through the early teaching cards of virtue, the Christian icono
graphy of early Tarot, the layering of esoteric teaching and its translation into new age thought and occultism, the Tarot itself has had a spiritual journey. Its spirit, if such it can be called, has reflected our own development – and continues to do so.

  The Difficulty of Teaching Tarot

  There is an elephant in the room when it comes to teaching Tarot or any other spiritual practice. This is not the methodology of training itself – although there are often good things to be said for teachers understanding the difference between training a “skill” and training a “method”. It is the nature of teaching and education – and more particularly, its reception. We often have difficulties accepting hierarchy and teaching, particular where “fringe” areas are involved.

  As an example, the concept of apprenticeship has almost vanished from western society outside of specialist trades and certain professions. The mastery of a skill in order to practice it professionally previously required an apprenticeship phase, a journeyman “proof by experience” phase, leading to a mastery that would be recognizable in and of itself. This guild structure – requiring a skilled master craftsman as its founder – has been largely thrown out as an obsolete hierarchy. We believe that there is still a lot to be said for learning ones skills from those who have mastered them through knowledge and experience.