Tarot and Torah? An intersection of spirit and religion

Jewish wisdom teaches that leaving a dream or synchronicity unexamined can be compared to receiving a letter from the Divine left unopened. Coincidence is god’s way of staying anonymous. Then it was a fortuitous moment that led me to unexpectedly reconsider the Tarot. Vaguely familiar with this divination tool since my teens, revisiting the mythical card keeper as a maturing mystic, the number 22 caught my eye. Not 20, 21, or 25, which are more familiar groupings of numbers. Is it a coincidence that there are 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet and paths on the Tree of Life?

The Tarot consists of 78 cards divided into two decks, the Major Arcana and the Minor Arcana, the latter consisting of four 54-card suits, a precursor to family playing cards. The deck above, consisting of 22 images, named and numbered 0-21, is as mysterious as the origins of the Tarot itself. The cards may have first emerged in medieval Europe: the Tarot de Marseilles survived for hundreds of years without a verbal script, first appearing in Europe in the 16th century. The Rider-Waite card, more familiar to us in the English-speaking world, was created in London at the turn of the 20th century. However, the Tarot’s teachings, both timeless and timely, are believed to predate those medieval origins. Gypsies are probably the people most easily associated with the Tarot. Who has not seen a film in which, after ‘crossing the palm of the hand with silver’, the gypsy will predict what the future holds for her?

It is suggested that the ancestors of the Gypsy people carried and dispersed the wisdom of the ancient Egyptian mystery schools through the prognostic use of these cards. Is the similarity in the root of the words ‘gypsy’ and ‘Egypt’ a clue to this link? Wherever these cards originate, their mythic themes are universal. Contemporary media use the Major Arcana cards as a recognizable symbol of the mystical, triggering different emotional responses, ranging from fascination to fear. Restlessness, in its various forms, has prevented many from working with these intriguing illustrations. For those who assume only a literal reading of the cards, there is a fear of drawing the ‘Death’ card, especially one illustrated with an armor-clad skeleton, riding a horse, trampling bodies underfoot. This illustration in the Rider-Waite deck may have been a fitting symbol of medieval turmoil that now, like the rest of the cards, calls for reconsideration. To Jews, the Tarot can seem unwelcoming with its bizarre imagery of ‘The Devil’, ‘The Hierophant’ and ‘The Hanged Man’, all unknown to Jewish sensibilities.

Just as the origins of the cards, and the Major Arcana in particular, seem obscure, the teachings of Kabbalah were hidden for centuries. To survive the brutal and destructive power of medieval ecclesiastical consciousness prevalent in previous centuries, any association, interest, or affiliation with an intuitive wisdom tradition, by necessity, needed to be unequivocally broken and prohibited. So horrendous were the consequences of even the slightest suspicion of such an association only a few hundred years ago, that even today, a deep-seated fear of the mystical causes many to approach its tantalizing possibilities with great trepidation. With the dawn of a new age, as human consciousness spirals into ever greater dimensions and possibilities, mystical teachings are resurfacing and tentatively finding ready audiences who wish to rediscover and remember as they break free from the shackles of past fears.

So what happens when a contemporary mystic in search of the Sacred Feminine brings together an open and universal approach to Torah, the Tree of Life, and the Tarot? The Syzygy Oracle is born. Jung used this word to describe a balance of opposites, while to astronomers it applies to a certain repetitive alignment of the sun, moon, and earth. A perfect word that seems to describe a journey from the dark and mysterious unknown to the light of consciousness, an odyssey that takes us from the ego to the essence.

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