“A Powerful Group Effort”
AUTHOR’S NOTE: One of the problems with electronic reading devices is that they will run out of power if you forget to charge them. (I know, “Duh!”) I like to read my tarot books on the Kindle while doing my morning treadmill jog, but yesterday the tablet died and I had to resort to the clumsy alternative of a hard-copy volume balanced on the console with one hand. So I dragged out Robert Wang’s Qabalistic Tarot, a long-time favorite that I haven’t opened except as a reference in the last 35 years.
In the Preface Wang talks about the hazards of dramatically altering an established system of esoteric thought based on nothing more substantial than personal whim (I have slightly condensed and reorganized his comments):
“A system, whether cult, religion or meditative program, is an access pattern into the inner worlds, one agreed upon and strengthened by generations of use. It is a path into the unknown paved with culturally determined, though universally applicable, symbols. And within any given school, the symbols may be manipulated and variously applied. But the system, while drawing vitality from gentle modifications, does not graciously suffer radical overhaul at the hands of any single individual. Certainly, I have no quarrel with those who have virtually turned (the model) upside down with their combinations and permutations. But to do so mitigates the powerful group effort called “tradition,” and potentially creates a new Path. Expressed in another way: It is the agreement over time on the meaning of a set of symbols which makes a system a Path.”
Before I go any further, I should admit that I have been prone to such “radical overhaul” in my own approach to the arrangement of the tarot cards on the Qabalistic Tree of Life. (Although I didn’t realize it at the time, Gareth Knight’s observation quoted in the book lies at the heart of my revisionism: in navigating the Astral Plane, “the sacrosanct and rigid application of Tarot correspondences to the Tree of Life is of little real importance.”) I agree with Wang that “there are several keys I might assign differently were I starting with no prior conceptions about where the cards should be placed.” But for me this is primarily a scholarly or academic pursuit because, in the practice of divination, I make little use of the position of the Major Arcana on the paths of the Tree (the numerical qualities of the Minor Arcana are a different matter).
In past essays I’ve railed against the modern assumption that the wisdom accumulated through several centuries of dedicated work by recognized authorities is of little value in understanding and applying the cards. Some tarot writers have even advocated ignoring the literature completely (even though you have just bought their book) and “winging it” in an entirely unstructured, psychic way. The idea is that, when reading for others, we can just throw our mind wide-open like a big fishing net and accept as legitimate any stray impressions that fetch up in it. (In this view, there are no “trash fish,” although I would submit that there is usually more than one breathtaking “whopper.”) “Trust your intuition” is the mantra, but in my estimation we may simply wind up trawling our own subconscious by way of “subjective navel-gazing,” with results that have little to do with the seeker’s private reality. During a past conversation with tarot author Tony Willis, he labeled this open-ended approach to reading the cards a “free-for-all,” but I’m more inclined to quote Chuck Berry: “Too much monkey business for me to be involved in.” Given the Lower Astral trajectory of most undisciplined psychic quests, during which we mistakenly suppose that we’re receiving spiritual illumination from a higher source, we could characterize it as “bottom-feeding” .
In my own case the “core knowledge” is so deeply ingrained after decades of practice that, with a few notable exceptions like Eden Gray’s The Tarot Revealed, Aleister Crowley’s Book of Thoth and the Golden Dawn’s Liber T, I forget precisely where it came from. But assimilating the metaphysical vastness of the tarot and all of its nuances is a lifetime proposition (and perhaps the goal of several incarnations), one that undergoes constant metamorphosis as experience is gained and more is learned. (I like to say that I still encounter something new almost every time I read for another person, even if only about the human/tarot interface.) Wang notes that his own style “involves building a solid intellectual foundation for the ideas of each tarot card, yet doing so with full understanding that every tower of ideas must eventually fall, and a new tower built in its place.”
I endorse this objective in principle, but in practice I do so with my eyes open and my critical discernment well-honed, looking for opportunities to reach beyond “internalized ideas derived from others” (Isabel Kliegman in Tarot and the Tree of Life). It’s all part of an analytical mindset that still embraces mystical sensibilities. Just because “it is written” doesn’t mean it’s gospel, although one should arguably start somewhere other than amorphous flights-of-fancy when forging a personal path into the unknown (the less-savory denizens of which might see us coming and take a big bite out of our exposed “psychic backside”). Intuitive “leaps of faith” do occur, but more as an adjunct to my thorough grounding in the fundamentals of interpretation that serves to “snap” them into focus for a specific reading. To be honest, though, as a storyteller I often perceive these flashes of insight as the centerpiece of the narrative while the “book learning” provides a touchstone and safety net of self-confidence that I keep at my finger-tips for those rare occasions when inspiration fails.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on June 10, 2023.
