Tarot and the Tree of Life

by Isabel Radow Kliegman

  Tarot cards may have been the original deck of playing cards. In fact the Italian word for Tarot is Tarrochi, and there are those who believe that the first Tarot deck was designed for the Visconti family by Bonifaccio Bembo for the purpose of gambling. Here we see the emergence of good from evil, or at least trivial, interests.

  In fact, the Tarot eventually became associated with the Holy Kabbalah, and in particular, the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. There is the predictable controversy about when and how these two giants of metaphysical thought came together, with theories ranging from biblical times to the nineteenth century. However, it is clear that by the nineteenth century, the two modalities were used in concert, to the great enhancement of the Tarot cards. We will explore Kabbalah in the next chapter; what follows is a brief history of its association with the Tarot.

  In 1856, Alphonse Louis Constant, known as Eliphas Levi, published the first book to associate the twenty-two cards of the Major Arcana with the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the four suits of the Minor Arcana with the Tetragrammaton—the four-letter name of God. In 1889, Gerard Encausse, a student of Levi known as Papus, published The Tarot of the Bohemians, which asserts that the Tarot was generated by the Tetragrammaton and is to be understood in terms of it. Another student of Levi, Paul Christian, created a system combining Tarot with Kabbalistic astrology. Also in 1889, Oswald Wirth published a deck of Major Arcana whose twenty-two designs incorporated the twenty-two Hebrew letters. Both his teacher, Stanislos De Guaito, and Papus were members of the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose Cross, which has come into modern times as the Rosicrucians.

  The connection between Kabbalah and Tarot continued to be recognized in the execution of decks by such proponents as Aleister Crowley, Paul Foster Case, and Manley Palmer Hall. The Rider Waite deck, to which the discussions in this book specifically refer, furthers this tradition. Although the Hebrew letters do not appear in his deck, Arthur Edward Waite, a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, assigned Hebrew letters to the cards in his writings. The Golden Dawn deck, executed by Robert Wang, associates the ten sefirot, or vessels, with the ten numbered cards, and the four olams, or realms, with the suits of the Minor Arcana. Aleister Crowley, in the Book of Thoth, went so far as to assert that “the Tarot was designed as a practical instrument for Qabalistic calculations.”

  The point is simple: regardless of the actual origins of Tarot and Kabbalah, by 1890 Kabbalistic teaching was integral to Tarot design. It is my contention that the expanded understanding and use of Tarot has Kabbalah—properly understood—at its root.

  The foregoing is presented only to suggest the rich history of the Tarot in relation to Kabbalah, fertile ground for exploration should readers’ interests so incline them. The history of the Tarot, however, is incidental to the study of the cards themselves, so let us now return to them and to the Minor Arcana in particular.

  The Minor Arcana fall into four suits: Pentacles, Cups, Swords and Wands. Pentacles became Diamonds (the word pentacle refers to a coin within which is a five-pointed star, or pentagram), Cups became Hearts, Swords became Spades, and Wands became Clubs. Often, if someone says, “I can read your fortune from regular cards,” it’s because they have learned to read the Tarot and are familiar with the correspondences. They are simply translating.

  Of course, our deck of playing cards has fifty-two cards, and the Minor Arcana of the Tarot, as I have mentioned, number fifty-six. The disparity can be explained in that we have three royalty cards in our modern deck—the jack, queen, and king. But the Tarot equivalent is composed of four court cards—the page, knight, queen and king. The page and the knight collapsed into one another to make the jack, thereby eliminating one card from each suit and four cards from the deck.

  The deck with which we will be working is, as I have mentioned, the Waite deck, designed by Arthur Edward Waite and executed by Pamela Colman Smith. Its designs are wonderful and have been published by a number of companies. The differences among them (with one exception that occurs in the Major Arcana) are in the rendering of color. The designs are identical. What the various versions share is Waite’s innovation of depicting the cards of the Minor Arcana as people in action or process, involving the symbols of their suits. Thus, the Four of Wands, the Two of Pentacles, the Seven of Swords, and the Six of Cups show us not only wands, pentacles, swords and cups in the number named, but also human beings somehow interacting with them. Prior to Waite’s designs, the pip (or numbered) cards of the Minor Arcana simply displayed the symbols of the suit in some abstract or geometrical design. It is for this reason that I have selected the Waite designs as a reference point for our work. The Universal Waite, delicately illustrated by Mary Hanson-Roberts and published by U.S. Games Systems, Inc., is reproduced here for the purposes of reference.

  What we learn from the Tarot is very much akin to what we learn from Kabbalah. One of these important messages is that we need everything we’ve got. Everything we have is of value, which is why it was given to us. We don’t have to get rid of anything. What we need to do is integrate everything.

  If we look at the aces of the Tarot, we see in every case a similar image. We see the hand of God, a huge, oversized hand coming out of the sky, out of the heavens through a cloud, shining in a halo of white light. Doing what? Offering a gift. Kabbalah means “receiving.” The aces are doing the giving, and the universe is doing the receiving. They give us the gift of pentacles, of cups, of swords, and of wands. There’s one ace for each of these suits. Now, since this is the first deck of playing cards, it didn’t have to be that way. If Wands were more valuable, for example, than Swords, the deck could have been designed so that there were seven Aces of Wands and three Aces of Swords. If Pentacles were not of very much value, that suit could have been designed without an ace. So there is something to be learned from the fact that each suit is represented by an ace, and one ace only.

  This is important because each of the suits corresponds to what the ancients called elementals and also to what the great psychologist Carl Jung called the functions of consciousness. The Suit of Pentacles refers to earth, the Suit of Cups refers to water, the Suit of Swords refers to air, and the Suit of Wands refers to fire. Having announced that authoritatively, I must add that you can find reputable writers who disagree with almost every one of these associations: C. C. Zain pairs Pentacles with air and Swords with earth, and Stephan Hoeller relates Swords to fire, for example.

  Of more interest, in Jungian terms, the Suit of Pentacles refers to the sensate function, information that comes to us through our five senses. The Suit of Cups refers to the feeling function, our emotional response to stimuli. The Suit of Swords refers to the thinking function, how we consciously process information. The Suit of Wands refers to the intuitive function, that mysterious way of somehow knowing, and to what Freud called libido, our primitive life force. Each of these is equally valuable. The four court cards have similar associations: pages with earth and the sensate; knights with air and the mental; queens with water and the feeling-toned; and kings with fire and the intuitive. Kabbalistically speaking, we don’t want merely to get to a particular place on the Tree and stay there; we want to identify with the sap that moves all through the Tree. Similarly, we don’t want to find our favorite suit or our favorite card, achieve an understanding or mastery of it, and live there.

  The universe is in constant motion. Nothing in the universe is static. The chairs on which we sit are composed of molecules racing through the space between them. The blood circulates in the body. The air flows in and out of the lungs. If we lock our knees and say, “Now I’ve got the Truth! This is where I want to be and this is where I’m going to stay!” something will happen (instantly, in my experience) that forces us to make a readjustment. In order not to fall over, we have to be on the balls of our feet.

  We don’t want to be in our thinking mind when we’re floating in eighty-degree water in the Caribbean, but we also don’t want to rely on our intuitive fu
nction when we’re trying to balance our checkbooks. As always, the key is appropriate response. If we can avoid rigid attachment to a single perspective, a single way of being, a single truth, we are more likely, as our universe continues to change, to be ready for whatever happens next and to answer the demands of the experience.

  The Suit of Pentacles is my personal favorite among the suits, which means that I have a lot more work to do on some of the other suits than I do on Pentacles! (Pick your favorite suit and then ignore it! Work on the other suits; the ones with which you need to gain affinity.) It is a grossly misunderstood suit, the underdog of the Tarot. Many people think that Pentacles has to do with money, career, health—with the material world. That’s not how I see it. The Suit of Pentacles has to do with how we relate to money, how we relate to our career, to our state of health, to the material world. If I get sick, how do I feel about that? What do I do about it? When I go to work, is it just a way for me to earn money, or is there a sense of service involved? Not the world, but how we interact with the world, is the domain of Pentacles.

  The Suit of Cups has to do with our feelings: how we feel, how we express feelings, and how we respond to the feelings of others. The Suit of Swords has to do with our clarity, our ability to analyze, our capacity to think clearly. It also has to do with our courage. The Suit of Wands reflects the fiery energy that on one end of the spectrum expresses as frank physical sexuality and on the other end of the same spectrum as intuition, psychic knowing, and inspiration. Please note that you did not read the “lower end” of the spectrum and the “higher end” of the spectrum. There is nothing intrinsically “lower” in sexual expression than in any other expression of our life force. We were given the gift by God’s own hand to experience fully.

  That we need all the suits of the Tarot is clearly seen in the creative process. When we speak of the creative process, we do not limit ourselves to the writing of a symphony or a poem, or the painting of a canvas. We address anything we do, or any way we live, that involves creative thinking. Functional relationships require endless creativity, the ability to engage another in a way that enhances the lives of each rather than rigid adherence to old patterns that result in conflict. To be ourselves demands creativity, achieving what Jung calls individuation. Any time we free ourselves from preconception and habit we are engaged in the creative process.

  If we look at the act of creation, we can see that it best begins with the Suit of Wands, with intuition. The first thing that happens is that something comes through for us. It’s not the end of a logical process. If we want to write a poem or open a store, we don’t begin by making a list of all the things we can write a poem about or all the different kinds of stores we can operate. An inkling flickers within us: a “What if…? I wonder…Eureka!” phenomenon. The creative process begins with intuition, with Wands.

  The second phase the creative process needs to go through is feeling, because if we don’t feel very strongly about a new project, we’re going to drop it. It takes so much effort to start something new that if we don’t have a tremendous emotional investment in it, it will simply be abandoned or forgotten. We need the fervor of Cups.

  Third, the act of creation must move to the thinking phase. Herein lies the difference between a dream and a goal. A goal has a plan. To have an idea about which we have strong feelings does not make anything happen. We have to think things through. If I want to open a retail clothing store, is it going to be high- or low-end clothing? Is it going to be for very young girls or mature women? In what part of town do I want to open it? Where am I going to find my buyers? Where am I going to find my suppliers? Only Swords will help us in this phase.

  And finally, we need our Pentacles. We’ve got to do something. We have to take action in the world. That’s the difference between a plan and a retail store, the latter providing a better chance of weekly income. We’ve got to get into the car and drive around and find a location, get on the phone, find out whether or not we can afford the rent, or whether a particular building is for sale. We’ve got to handle merchandise and deal with the public. A novel isn’t a book until we set pen to paper. In the creative process, in all of life, we need each of the suits, each function of consciousness, and none is superior to any other.

  I would like to make a final point about the Tarot. It is my belief that everything that is part of human experience can be expressed by, and is expressed in, the Tarot. One excellent way to work with the cards is to think in terms of Tarot, so that when you have a significant experience, you immediately ask yourself, “What would be the card for that? There’s got to be a card!” If you follow that practice, you will find a much-enriched understanding of the cards.

  Conversely, we are all capable of experiencing everything that the cards suggest. In fact, it is fruitful to assume that there’s nothing in those seventy-eight cards we won’t experience at some point in our lives—each and every one of us.

  Finally, each card carries both a positive and a negative charge. What a card conveys is determined by a complex of factors. So how do you know? How do you know when you’re reading the cards what interpretation to put on them? Ah, that’s what makes the game so interesting. That’s why, over the centuries and our personal lifetimes, the Tarot is never in danger of boring us. It demands our intuition as well as our knowledge. It requires feeling, perception, and an awareness of all the other cards in a spread as a distinctive pattern. It also exacts a sense about the person for whom one is reading. Sometimes things we intuit seem to be coming not from the cards but through them. When that happens, the process is amazing and wonderful.

  If you are approaching the Tarot as a novice, be prepared for the adventure of a lifetime! If you are an experienced practitioner, the exploration of the Minor Arcana that follows will, I hope, serve to deepen your understanding, enhance your skills, and encourage you along lines of personal discovery as your intimacy with each card grows.

  Having put the Tarot in this skeletal context, we can turn our attention to the central question of use. The Tarot can be used in a variety of ways and for a variety of purposes. It will be as important to understand what this book does not set out to address as to grasp what it endeavors to accomplish.

  Tarot has often been associated with occult practices; the names that most readily come to mind are Aleister Crowley and the Deck of Thoth, which he designed. It is neither in that tradition nor in that spirit that this work is undertaken.

  The Tarot cards can be used for meditation in various ways, and although the objects of this meditation are more usually the Major Arcana, this seems to me less a consequence of their intrinsic superiority for that purpose than a historical tendency to undervalue the Minor Arcana in general.

  Although meditational practice will not be the subject of our study, such practice is most compatible with it and is enthusiastically recommended. There are two methods that work very well in this regard. The first is to allow the card to act upon us, to surrender our active, intellectual investigation and simply invite the image to do its work. The second involves entering into the card; this in turn can be done in one of two ways. We can assume the identity of any or each of the characters portrayed, or we can join the scene, otherwise maintaining our own identity, and confront or interrelate with any or all of the figures depicted. In either case, we can explore what spontaneously comes up for us, without an attempt at directing or controlling it.

  By far the most popular uses of the Tarot, however, are prognostication, or fortune telling, and divination. I list these as distinct, for despite a superficial similarity, they are quite different. The similarities are that in each case a querent (or questioner) enlists the services of a Tarot-card practitioner for a reading. Cards are shuffled and generally laid out in a spread, a configuration in which each position carries a fixed meaning independent of the card that falls to it—“the past,” “the obstacle,” “the possible outcome,” and so on. Here the similarities end.

  What is the d
ifference between divination and prognostication? Both involve foretelling future events through signs, but the former carries as well the suggestions of hidden knowledge, the aid of supernatural powers, unusual insight, and intuitive perception. The great difference between the two apparently similar modes lies in the more subtle, introverted question of what we bring to the process, the attitude with which we approach a reading.

  People who want their fortunes told often approach their reading as entertainment or as a test of the reader. They are dazzled by specific information—the names and ages of their children, an accident injuring the left ankle that occurred three years previously, and other facts that we may safely suspect were already in their possession. So what have they learned from the encounter?

  Sometimes people have their fortunes told at the insistence of others, at a party, or on a boardwalk. These people often approach the reading with the opposite but equally fruitless attitude of skepticism. Their posture is to dare the practitioner to tell them something true. Generally, their complaints are either a gleeful, “That’s not true!” or a grudging “Yeah, but you could say that to anybody!” If something true and idiosyncratic emerges, the unruffled client generally asks for proof that it wasn’t an accident or coincidence. This is expressed in the challenge for the reader to do it again.

  Finally, there are those who approach prognostication with awe and trembling. “Your husband is full of cancer,” a kindly fortune teller informed a trusting woman. This constituted proof to the loving wife of what she had long suspected—that Western medical diagnostic techniques were benighted and farcical. Seven years later, her husband continues his daily routines of work and leisure, but for the wife, some esoteric healing must explain it. Certainly so powerful a figure as a reader of fortunes could not have been wrong!