Kabbalah and Tarot — A Collision of Concepts
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I recently read a fascinating essay by Mark Horn on the Tarot History Facebook page that proposed Italian nobleman and scholar Giovanni Pico della Mirandola as the forefather of the esoteric connection between the tarot and the Hebrew Kabbalah via his association with philosopher Marsillio Ficino in the court of Lorenzo de Medici in mid-15th-Century Florence. Pico was supposed to have used the tarot trumps as “flash cards” for teaching Kabbalah, and was cited along with Ficino as a major inspiration for the trio of 18th-Century European occultists most associated with the esoteric tarot: Comte de Mellet; Eliphas Levi; and Jean-Baptiste Alliette (Etteilla).
Mark’s essay has crystallized my own thinking on the tenuous link between the trump cards, the Tree of Life and the Hebrew letters. Although I’ve studied the Hermetic Qabala and its conflation of trumps, paths and letters for over five decades, I use its principles sparingly in my daily tarot practice since I find it to be suspect (where it isn’t obviously flawed). For all its symmetry, the court-card arrangement on the Tree seems even more arbitrarily conceived. The pip cards are on much firmer ground regarding the sephiroth and the mystical concept of the Descent of Spirit into Matter.
I’ve written on this subject several times before, offering more than one revisionist theory on the whole thing. While there is an undeniable similarity in the structure of the series of 22 Hebrew letters and the 22 tarot trumps, at times the conceptual associations between the two seem more than a little forced. It begs the question “Is it really necessary to go down this particular rabbit-hole?” Granted, it’s an engaging intellectual exercise on which I’ve expended quite a bit of thought over a long period of time, and it’s an essential undertaking for any serious student of Hermetics. However, when it comes to routine divination with the tarot cards, all of the research and contemplation may add a bit of nuance that can be brought to bear on our more prosaic impressions, but the learned input does little to enhance the substance of the narrative. (Not to mention that it must remain largely unspoken since most querents won’t have the faintest idea what we’re talking about.)
The court cards also receive scant benefit from being hung on the Tree of Life. The ‘Father-Mother-Son-Daughter” model makes some sense as a Medieval motif (King/Queen/Prince/Princess) and a sociological blueprint for interpersonal relations, but it doesn’t put much utilitarian “flesh on the bone” for dealing with the appearance of the cards in a mundane tarot reading. As I see it, the hierarchical distribution attempts to personify in the associated sephiroth what was never intended to be so used. (For the record, Papus [Gerard Encausse] has quite a bit to say on the subject in Tarot of the Bohemians.) Although he delves deeply into the Qabalistic abstractions in his Book of Thoth, Aleister Crowley has provided a boon to the tarot community by also offering his more humanistic “moral characteristics” for each card in Part Three of the book; in my estimation, this is the best reference material available.
The ten numbered “pip” cards gain the most traction when pegged to the ten sephiroth of the Tree of Life. Unlike the irregular and highly speculative placement of the trump cards and the seeming afterthought of court-card alignment on the Tree, the pips can be shoehorned neatly into the existing architecture when viewed from a “Descent of Spirit into Matter” perspective. Although it’s an over-simplification, the Aces are purely spiritual and belong at the crown of the Tree while the Tens are entirely material and form its deepest roots; everything in between is a devolving progression of Spirit emerging into Form. This is another area where Crowley shines in portraying the metaphysical consequences of this cumulative act of manifestation.
For most tarot readers, the “Qabalistic connection” will be of only passing interest. Personally, although I’m well-acquainted with the occult reasoning behind the concepts applied in forging that link, for everyday use I’ve decided that it’s best to take only what is immediately relevant from the well of esoteric knowledge and leave the rest for occasional revisiting when the complex circumstances of a reading invite a more profound philosophical treatment. It’s prudent to have more than one “arrow in the quiver” for any given interpretation as long as it’s still possible to draw meaningful parallels between the insights obtained. Lacking such continuity, we might as well not bother.
Here is a link to a previous essay on esoteric correspondences that captures my thinking on the subject:
https://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com/2017/09/01/correspondences-how-much-is-too-much/
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on December 24, 2024.
