Hermetic Tarot

Tarot really isn't essential to Hermeticism. It looks like it started out as a game. It snowballed into something much more mythic than it started. It'd be a bit like if a thousand years from now Monopoly became part of a sacred rite.

However! Hermetic mages folded tarot into the Qabalah — their map of all worlds — in a way that turned the deck of cards into something truly powerful.

This means that if you have some taste of the Tree of Life, you can learn to use the tarot as a guide through the Tree. It can become part of your spellcraft.

And yes, you can (obviously) use it for divination — but folk tend to seriously miss what this really means. The KIND of oracle the tarot offers is not a magical future-teller. It's both more subtle and more profound than that.

Summary

The idea is to have every part of Hermeticism — each part of the Tree of Life, each element of astrology, each aspect of alchemy, each stage and state of theurgy — represented in the deck of cards.

Once you know how the cards represent all of that, you can use them as a source of divination, and to “cast spells”.

Each card falls into one of these categories:

1. It’s a trump — usually called “major arcana”. This means it stands in for one of the Paths on the Tree of Life. There are three kinds of trump:

   1. Elemental trumps represent the four classical elements: Earth, Air, Water, and Fire.

   2. Planetary trumps stand in for the seven classical planets: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury, and the Moon.

   3. Zodiacal trumps represent the twelve signs of the zodiac: Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, and Pisces.

2. It’s a numbered card, which means it stands in for a facet of one of the ten Spheres of the Tree of Life. Each Sphere is shown as having four facets, represented by the classical elements — but in the numbered cards these are depicted using suits (usually something like wands, cups, swords, and disks).

3. It’s a court card. These represent identities. Or you can think of them as characters you encounter in different parts of the Tree. These are aspects of theurgy. Each character resides in a Sphere. Since each Sphere has four facets, so do these royals. Their names are inconsistent between decks, but there are always four:

   1. The King, who resides in the Sphere of Stars. The father archetype. Conscious essence beyond time.

   2. The Queen, who’s in the Sphere of Saturn. The mother archetype. Eternal threshold consciousness.

   3. The Prince, overseeing the Sphere of the Sun. He is the son, and is also the “higher self”. (In many decks this is the “Knight” — but in some, like the Thoth Tarot, “Knight” refers to the King!)

   4. The Princess, living on Earth. She represents the mortal human (i.e. you!). She is the daughter. (This card is often called the “Page”. She corresponds to the Jack in standard playing cards.)

(One card deserves special mention: The final trump card, often called “The Universe” or “The World”, is both the planetary trump of Saturn and the elemental trump of Earth. It’s the only trump to get two correspondences. It stands in for the Path from the Moon to Earth, which is often taken as the birth canal.)

Here I’ve emphasized the Qabalistic and astrological correspondences. Alchemy is present too but is more subtle: it requires a rich familiarity with the symbols and processes of alchemy, as well as how the Paths of the Tree relate to the Spheres.

That’s not beyond what I’m willing to talk about! But it’s more in depth than I go into in this particular video.