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Power of the Tarot

By on July 10, 2016 in Tarot

Psychic powers are common to all people, but some have not used their ability in the field of Metaphysics, so they consider that they don’t have them; everyone has them to some degree or another. Some brain researchers explain that the primitive brain is more intuitive and that hunches and psychic insight are activities of this more primitive part of the brain.

The energies come up through the medulla, through the cerebellum lobes, to and through the pineal in their twinned trinities (and note these trinities are not of opposing polarities). The energies that come through the trinities shine through their various avenues and that which is the first trinity channels initially into mainly the left hemisphere, then across to the pituitary gland.

Those energies cause an imprint on the energy already flowing through that left hemisphere. This imprint we call thought. So, we have the left hand side of the brain dealing with abstract thinking, music, art, and literature; the imprint called thought and the ability to think clearly. This, in turn, channels to the right hemisphere where it is necessary.

So, rather than a left brain, right brain phenomena, it could perhaps be described as an inner brain, outer brain phenomena. If we go along with this theory, traumatic situations may allow the thought processes to occur at a more primal level, so that decisions are made instinctively or intuitively. So we have an influence coming from the subconscious mind, which by its definition, resides below the threshold of consciousness.

Correct training can help this information come to the conscious mind at will. Practice with the symbolism of the Tarot can raise the level of awareness and hone the intuitive faculty. Symbols are the language of the subconscious mind and the Tarot, being rich in Metaphysical symbology will speak directly to your subconscious mind and allow intuitive insights. When you experience the symbolic nature of the Tarot, the experience is brought directly from your subconscious mind into consciousness awareness.

To learn how to do this: 1. Go into a deep state of relaxation 2. Connect with your higher self 3. Place your hand over the appropriate tarot card 4. Let the impressions come into your conscious mind 5. When the images or impressions have finished, you should have a fuller awareness about the problem you were trying to solve.

ORACLE CARDS
There are many sets of Oracle Cards and particularly Angel Cards now readily available. While these cards do not allow the intuitive process to flow as fully as the Tarot Cards, they may be beneficial for someone just starting out as they have the meaning of the card printed underneath the illustration. Using oracle cards is a great introduction to working on your spiritual path. Make sure you like the deck you choose as this enables you to feel more connected with the deck and connect better with your own guidance. The Tarot is part of the Ancient Wisdom given in modern guise to show the blessings and pitfalls along the Pathway back to the Source of Creative Energy, or if you prefer, the Godhead.

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Tarot as a Metaphysical Guide

By on March 13, 2015 in Tarot Studies

Screen Shot 2015-03-13 at 11.15.15 pmThe ultimate purpose of the Tarot is to be used as a metaphysical guide through your physical life, but the soul must have awakened before the value of the Tarot’s archetypal energies as they flow through you, can be fully appreciated. It is imperative to understand yourself in all aspects to allow your function to be fulfilled while you are upon the earth plane. To understand your characteristic traits and talents is to begin to understand your destiny. Working with the Tarot will help you to understand the archetypal energies that are constantly flowing through you, and which ones are influencing you at the present time. All cards pulled serve a learning purpose, and are therefore benevolent, even seemingly negative cards may be showing you the way to deal with a sticky situation.

Since all confusion is the result of ignorance, the Tarot seeks to answer those questions by turning you back on yourself with more questions. Since the answer to any question is always sought within the question itself. This why serious students will always consider tarot as a metaphysical guide along the many pathways to self-mastery.

All fate is the result of the thoughts that are the roots of your character. Change your thinking and you can change your destiny. “Know thyself” was a maxim given by the ancients so humankind could become wise and master their own destinies, but many do not want to know themselves; they are quite content to plod along buffeted by the winds of fate. Free will becomes a gift when you understand that you create your own destiny by your own thoughts and emotions. Otherwise fate will become your teacher and put you in positions that will ensure you learn certain lessons, whether you think you need them or not. The winds of fate will be caused to blow from your negative thought processes, in an effort to give you the clues you need to make the necessary adjustments. As you gain in understanding, you can avoid much of the negative conditioning and use the positive aspects to enjoy a life of happiness.

The Tarot has been with us since the dawn of time in one form or another as it is a pictorial representation of the journey back to the Godhead, using the analogy of the four elements in conjunction with the Kabbalah. We can see this even in religious ceremonies today.

For example, on the first card, the Magician, we see depicted the four elements, in the form of the sword, the wand, the cup and the coin resting on a table. If you look at the symbology depicted in some churches today, you will see something similar. It only takes a little bit of imagination to come up with the analogy. The cards are simply used to show the many blessings and pitfalls along the way. The blessings can be enjoyed; the pitfalls can either be avoided if you have your wits and understanding about you, or grin and bear it if you can’t. The four elements represent the Tetragrammaton, which is representative of the secret name of the being who ensouls our planet and works with the interactions of those four sacred elements.

There are various cards that can help you on your journey and these are your Personality Card and your Soul Card.

Your personality card can be ascertained by adding up the numbers of your birthdate one under the other. First the date, then the month and finally the year; then add all the numbers together. Remember there are only 22 major arcana cards, so keep any number that appears up to the number 22. This is your personality card.  If you have double digits add them together to get your soul number. For example if your personality number is 13 (Death) which means transformation, then your soul number is 4 (Emperor) the male principle inside you. This means you are learning to transform from a perhaps a rather normal type personality to a personality that is ready to take control of your life by balancing the four elements within you by your own power and divine authority. So use the tarot as a metaphysical guide to assist you on your journey back to the Source.

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Tarot and Kabbalah

By on March 9, 2015 in Tarot and Kabbalah

In the middle of the nineteenth century, an Abbe of the Roman church called Alphonse Louis Constant translated his name into the Hebrew form of Eliphas Levi Zahed. Today he is known simply as Eliphas Levi. This man was a great mystical scholar, a great Kabbalist, as well as a philosopher and an artist. Levi attempted to produce a complete treatise on Magic, dividing his subject into two parts dealing with theory and practice. He came to the conclusion that the Tarot was actually a pictorial form of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, which is the basis for the whole Kabbalah. So Tarot could be seen as a form of Initiation into the mysteries.

THE TAROT AND THE HOLY KABBALAH

The Kabbalah teaches that our universe evolved organically and sequentially from the formless void or the Great Unknowable Source into matter. The information contained in the Kabbalah deals with the nature of God; the Sephiroth, or divine emanations deal with angels and man. God is known as Ain Soph and fills the entire universe. As He is infinite, the mind of man cannot conceive Him. Mind cannot perceive something that created it, because mind is only part of it, not the whole. In a certain sense, God is perceived as being non-existent. To validate His existence, God became active and creative, gathered primal energy around Himself and projected the ten Sephiroth or divine ideas. The numbers one to ten are Kabbalistic cardinal numbers corresponding to the original divine ideas by which the invisible and visible world was created.

THE TREE OF LIFE

This is a simple diagram composed of the ten spheres known as the Sephiroth and 22 connecting lines called Paths. The Sephiroth and the Paths together are commonly called “The thirty two Paths of Wisdom.” At this point, we will only touch briefly on some of this information, and will be expanded at a later date.  For this particular study of the Tarot, we will look at the information in a slightly different way to give a better understanding.

Kether, Chokmah and Binah are abstract concepts beyond our human comprehension and relate to the Supreme Mysteries of the Spirit or the Archetypal World. Chesed, Geburah and Tiphareth pertain to the Higher Self or the structure of the individuality, and relate to the Greater Mysteries or the Creative World. Netzach, Hod and Yesod pertain to the structure of the personality or the Lesser Mysteries or the Formative World. Malkuth relates to the physical body or the Active World.

From the unmanifest, the Ain Soph, which is symbolized by a closed eye, emerged number one, called KETHER, the Crown, which is symbolized by an open eye. Symbolically, as long as this eye remains open, the universe is preserved, when it shuts, it returns into a state of non-being or pralaya.

Number one represents the highest form and everything that is made of it, that is God, the manifested Light, divine white brilliance, the light which lighteth the universe and beside which the light of mortals is but darkness. According to the Bible, number one is identified with the first day of creation when God said “Let there be Light”. The colour relating to Kether is Pure White Brilliance. It is androgynous; microcosmically it is the Monad or the Atman. In ancient times, in the Hebrew Kabbalah, whenever God was to be identified, this was done by number one. Number one has been symbolized by a point or a dot, which represents the symbol of divine unification, ie becoming one with God. It should always be borne in mind that number one means the highest unity, the highest wisdom. While Kether is symbolised by the point or tree of life, Bible, God, the Source highest wisdomdot, it is not static. In the material world it represents the first swirling around the point, self contained but in motion. As we move through various explanations, you will begin to see the correspondence between Tarot and Kabbalah.

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The History of Tarot

By on March 9, 2015 in Tarot, Tarot Studies

An Egyptian High Priest, Hermes Trismegistos, probably one of the greatest initiates that walked the earth before Christ, left for humanity the Book of Wisdom entitled “Thoth” or the Emerald Tablet of Hermes, containing some of the highest wisdom that has ever been left on our planet. His Hermestablet or Tabula Smaragdina, from which comes the saying, “That which is above is also that which is below,” serves to prove the macrocosmic and microcosmic laws of analogy. These teachings are termed Hermetic Science by those who have studied them and have been initiated into them. Originally, this Book of Wisdom was composed of 78 slabs which later become known as the 78 Tarot cards we have today because of the genius of one of the Masters of wisdom who had the ability to inspire his earthly disciple.  The meaning behind these Tarot cards became corrupted over time and although they were used in card games, what better way of keeping the ancient wisdom before the public eye? Much has been said about the history of Tarot, but this information comes straight from the Master R.

During the early Christian period the Tarot cards fell into disfavour with the church because they contained many so-called pagan symbols and Tarot reading was forbidden to Christians. Universal truths always survive and so too, the cards managed to survive in the East and were reintroduced into Europe during the Crusades. In the fourteenth century when the Tarot first made its appearance in Europe, Christianity reigned supreme, and the earliest references to the cards in Europe are prohibitions against their use by the church, which body later referred to them collectively as the Devil’s Picture Book. Paganism still lurked in many fairly obvious forms and resulted in extreme ecclesiastical persecution of heretics. The church pursued its own ends with a zeal combined with both passionate devotion and political opportunism. To be found in possession of a pack of Tarot cards was, according to them, proof of Witchcraft, and lead to death by burning at the stake. Rather strange activity for an organization whose Master gave as his most powerful commandment, “Love one another.”

How then did the Tarot survive in the face of the considerable effort made on the part of Christianity to stamp it out? Universal truths always survive and resurface at the appropriate time; and one way to discern whether a religion contains universal truths, is by the amount of time it is able to persist through the annals of time. What we commonly term Gnosticism, which is one of the collective terms for paganism and other esoteric information was preserved within the fold of the church itself and studied under a mask of learning consonant with ecclesiastic respectability.

The esoteric principle behind the deck of Tarot cards may owe a lot to the ascetic measures placed upon the monks during the medieval period. Forced to rely on memory, the medieval monk would have retained the pictures in the mind by the process of visualization and association, a practice that we are once more utilizing today. The idea of an adventurous and perilous journey through unknown territory was also typical of medieval literature. To travel in the middle ages was as hazardous and uncertain as travelling the paths of inner knowledge. Also, throughout the middle ages there existed various metaphysical orders and secret societies that kept the knowledge of the Tarot intact but hidden and preserved for future generations.

The Major Arcana shares a lot of symbolism with the metaphysical teachings associated with Buddhism, whose founder, Gautama, is thought to have been born some 500 years or so before Christ. The Fool might well be said to represent the wandering monk himself. The Emperor and Empress, Buddha’s parents; the chariot, the triumphal vehicle of Vishnu; the Pope, the Hermit, the Hanged Man and Death, the Man of Religion, the Ancient One, the Cripple and Corpse are said to have been encountered by Buddha prior to his enlightenment; The Lovers, the raising of the Kundalini through sacred sex; the Wheel of Fortune, obviously the Wheel of Rebirth and Karma, and so on, were of course well known. Undoubtedly the Tarot represents the same concepts, but simply filtered through the Western Mystery tradition.

The most popular deck of the modern era is undoubtedly the Rider-Waite Deck, designed by A.E. Waite, who was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Two other decks were designed by members of that fraternity, The Golden Dawn Tarot, designed by MacGregor Mathers and the Thoth Tarot designed by Aleister Crowley. These are not as well known as the Rider-Waite Deck and were probably designed for private use by the members of the Golden Dawn. The Golden Dawn placed greater emphasis on the Tarot as a pathway to higher knowledge than any other known group.

The Tarot represents an allegorical journey, each card being the experience of universal archetypal energy, rather like the episodes in Dante’s “Divine Comedy.” The idea of an adventurous and perilous quest through unknown territory has also been handed down through the legends of Merlin and King Arthur. These are all symbolical of inner journeys to find the Holy Grail.

The ancient wisdom as revealed in the Modern Tarot Deck remains basically hidden even today, but we have been given enough clues to be able to open the doorways and enter into the ancient mysteries. The Journey through the Tarot is showing the Return Path to the Source or God showing the blessings and pitfalls along the way.

 

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