Chapter 4

Our life proceeds in patterns. Extending through all states of existence we find a great system of patterns, a magic maze of paths and by-paths, of crossroads, blind alleys, and dead endings. Looking at our past history and present state as human beings, it seems apparent that our presence within, and our journeys upon, the roads of this pattern of life have not been particularly successful. Many spiritual systems have arisen throughout our evolutionary history, and all are intended to produce, or at least to intimate, a master pattern that might enable individual travelers to familiarize themselves with the terrain they are to traverse. Many attempts have been made to chart the map of the Divine Design. These attempts have been made by so many different means that the seeker today is likely to be bewildered by the profusion and confusion occurring among the charts and guidelines that offer themselves for potential use.

Amid the teachings and systems present in our age, there is one that merits more attention than it has so far received. This is the great symbolic glyph of the combined Tarot and the Kabbalah. At first glance, the very concept of regarding the two as a unified pattern, designed to aid substantially in the inner uplifting of man, appears preposterous. The Kabbalah is a collection of mystic-cosmic ideas concentrated in a symbolic design called the Tree of Life, which shows the way in which the unmanifest and infinite Being has taken on a finite and manifest aspect through emanation. It also shows how the finite manifestation may recover its original condition of infinity by retracing the steps of its forthcoming. The Tarot is ostensibly a deck of picture cards, used for a variety of purposes ranging from fortune-telling to gambling but apparently unsuited to the sublime nature and purposes of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. Moreover, it is virtually impossible to establish with any degree of certainty that the symbolic systems of Kabbalah and Tarot had any relationship to each other until at least the eighteenth century—an exceedingly late date indeed to discover what purports to be an organic connection between two disciplines that coexisted side by side for many centuries. Academic historians, materialistic skeptics, and devout Hebrew Kabbalists, as well as a host of other critics, have for a long time condemned the combination of the Kabbalah and the Tarot into one unified system, as first openly accomplished by Eliphas Levi in the early nineteenth century and continued by modern occultists to the present day.

Eliphas Levi regarded the twenty-two cards of the Major Arcana (also known as the twenty-two Greater Trumps) as having unique mystic power to instruct and inspire the aspiring soul. He also noticed that the Tree of Life possesses twenty-two paths or channels, connecting the ten spheres or centers of emanated Divine Power (sephiroth) with each other and characterized by the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Critics observe with possible justification that the worthy Frenchman, being a romanticist, had simply mistaken a matter of coincidence for an organic and historical connection. To this objection, the mystical and magical scholars of France, as well as their English counterparts, replied that the connection between the Kabbalah and the Tarot was always known to certain initiates of the Hermetic and magical mysteries, but that it was simply not publicly revealed until the days of Eliphas Levi.

To the contemporary seeker after transcendental states of consciousness, these historical disputes are for the most part meaningless for two very good reasons. The first is that the combined system of the Kabbalah and the Tarot works. Whether the connection dates from the nineteenth century, or some century B.C., makes no difference to the considerable number of people who have experienced authentic reminiscences of their higher nature as the result of studying and meditating upon the Kabbalah in conjunction with the Tarot. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Past history matters less than first-hand experience. The second reason in favor of the Kabbalah/Tarot combination may be found (not unlike so many other valuable truths) in the psychological teachings of C. G. Jung. In Jung’s theory of synchronicity, we find the proposition that being coincidental does not negate the innate value of a fact. Coincidence, therefore, is no longer a dirty word, denoting a lack of meaningful relationship; far from it. Coincidence can be meaningful, and all the more meaningful, for the absence of the operation of causality. Applying this principle to our dilemma, we may state that whether the Tarot Arcana were ever applied to symbolize the twenty-two paths on the Tree of Life before Eliphas Levi or not makes no difference whatsoever. The coincidence of the two systems, if such it is, is not a mere haphazard concurrence of unrelated circumstances, but a meaningful coincidence of great psychological or, if you prefer, mystical power and purpose. Thus, from both the pragmatic and the psychological-theoretical point of view, the combined use of the Kabbalah and the Tarot appears fully justified.

Having thus disposed of the principal objection to our appointed task, we may turn our attention to these two symbolic systems. If it is our intention to meditate on the Tarot symbols in their relationship to the Kabbalah, we must be conversant with the main features of the Tree of Life itself. All authorities in the field of Kabbalistic meditation agree that unless the structure and attributions of the Tree of Life are firmly implanted in both the conscious and unconscious psyche of the student, meditation on the symbols will be without reward and, at times, might even prove counterproductive.

The Kabbalah, which represents a special transmission of soul wisdom outside of the canonical Holy Scriptures of Judaism, and which is possibly of non-Jewish origin, has as its central feature the unsurpassed universal symbol of the Tree of Life. This remarkable Design of Designs can be most effectively approached by describing it in three ways: (1) As a universal psychological Archetype as Such, as distinguished from an archetypal image. (In some of his later works, Jung made a distinction between archetypal images in the collective unconsciousness and Archetypes as Such, which he described as the sources of the archetypal images. Archetypes of this characterization are of sovereign numinosity and an unending fountainhead of power and inspiration to the outer man). (2) As a glyph of general applicability, upon which all aspects of experience, internal and external, can be placed and arranged in proper sequence and proper relationship. The Tree is likened in this respect to a filing system into which all experience and knowledge that comes our way may be deposited in an appropriate slot. (3) Lastly, but most importantly, the Tree must be recognized as being, not a system of information, but a method of using the mind or consciousness. It is this third definition that declares the suitability of the symbol of the Tree for the purpose of meditation.

The Tree of Life may also be said to reveal four great laws of universal being that apply as well to the human soul: (1) the Law of Emanation, which declares that all things are the successively emanated portions of the same divine essence; (2) the Law of Balance and Equilibrium, which states that life and growth imply balance, while imbalance leads to death and/or stagnation; (3) the Law of Unity in Diversity, reconciling the multiple emanations of the Tree with the monotheistic concept by stating that the essence is one, while its outpourings are many; and (4) the Law of the Ability to Return, according to which any manifestation of the emanated essence is capable of ascending to its own original source by climbing the paths and traversing the emanational centers (sephiroth) of the Tree. Kabbalistic meditation consists of effectively traveling along the branches of the Tree, up to and perhaps beyond the highest or crowning emanational center, the Sephira Kether.

The Tarot is in outward appearance a deck of cards, similar to any deck of playing cards—of which, in fact, it is the original form and prototype. One way of describing the full Tarot deck is to say that it consists of two packs in one, the larger of which, consisting of fifty-six cards, being known as the Minor Arcana, while the smaller, possessing twenty-two cards, being called the Major Arcana, or the Greater Trumps. Since the Minor Arcana, divided into four suits, may be taken symbolically to stand for the lower self or personality of man, this leaves the twenty-two cards of the Major Arcana as the symbols of the secret kingdom of the inner or Higher Self. Thus it is evident why the suit cards have been put to the personal and trivial use of gambling, while the symbolic cards of the Major Arcana became and remained a mystery to humanity, associated with magic and divination. It is this smaller pack, which in all existing decks consists of more or less identical figures, that serves as the visual group of symbols for Kabbalistic meditation within the tradition of the Western mysteries.

It was Eliphas Levi who described the Tarot as a philosophical mechanism that keeps the mind from wandering while leaving its initiative at liberty. It takes no imagination to recognize that he was referring to the use of the Tarot in meditation. By finding a useful way of correlating the cards of the Major Arcana with the paths which lead upward on the Tree of Life, we can easily and successfully put them to use by meditating on them in the sequence corresponding to the Tree’s ascending paths and thus climb from its terrestrial base to its celestial crown. In order to do so with any degree of informed efficiency, it will be necessary to acquaint ourselves with the essentials of the emanational centers as well as with the paths of the Tree.