It started off, as it always does, with reading one card. It ended up as a dissertation on the creative tension between paganism and Christianity in the course of two millenia of history in the western world. Tarot can do this to a person.
The Tarot is a kind of infinity box. It may look as if it has fixed dimensions on the outside – 78 cards – but its interior storage is unlimited. The Tarot is the Mary Poppins carpet bag of the western mystery tradition. Let me explain.
In our western culture we have been fortunate to have inherited an abundance of esoteric mystical systems. The Big Three, to my mind, are the Tarot, astrology and the Kabbalah. A lifetime of devotion to studying the symbological subtlety of any one of them would not be enough to grasp the profundity of the wisdom concealed in each. But there are more riches still.
Our earliest spiritual roots are grounded in the Goddess cults and fertility cults which date back to the Stone Age. Their primal religious impulse is still deeply encoded in the cultural DNA of the western psyche. Their latter-day descendents are the codified earth religions like Druidry and Wicca.
Mythology is an endless source of living archetypes to feed the ever-renewing imagination. We have been fortunate enough to have been handed down not only the Greek and Roman bodies of mythology but also the stories of the Norse gods and goddesses in the Icelandic Edda. Celtic and European folklore have added a distinctive flavour to the primal broth of the imagination that our modern souls swim in. The legends of Merlin and Arthur alone have proved to be a source of endless creative inspiration for seekers of the truth in the European tradition. And to all of this priceless legacy we must add the other half of our spiritual heritage: the Judeo-Christian worldview that contains everything from Eden to Armageddon. You might say that we western seekers have got more esoteric material on our plates than we can well digest.
The protean Tarot has succeeded better than any other of the thought systems I have mentioned to reach out and make connections between them. Tarot is infinitely adaptable. We have got hundreds of Tarot decks that explore different aspects of western esotericism. The theme may be herbs or animals, Shakespeare or fairy tales, but somehow each Tarot deck takes one facet of the confusing mass that is western symbology and organizes it around the 78-card template. In this way patterns emerge and cross-references can be made. Resonances are built up. As I see it, Tarot is the combined Dewey Decimal System and Rosetta Stone of the western mystery tradition.
In my next two posts I will show you this effect in action.
Infinity Tarot 