Tarot In-Depth

The intention here is to spend some time thinking more carefully about each of the cards, particularly those of the Major Arcana, and comparing the symbolism of the various decks in order to deepen my understanding of the tarot. I have no idea why, but this has become almost an obsession with me over the past week and a half, a persistent nagging desire to "dig in" and spend hours pouring over the cards and the various books on them. Part of it has to be the fact that I'm unfamiliar with the Thoth tarot deck and how its symbolism differs from the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, and after reading the first part of Lon Duquette's text on all of the various occult and kabbalistic concepts that went into its design by Crowley and Harris (though I know a great deal also went into the Rider-Waite-Smith, and they were both based on the Golden Dawn approach to tarot in any case), I feel like I need to spend some time working through some of these ideas.

I have a number of books that I'm going to try to read concurrently, card by card, though some of them I've read before and this will be review. I'm hoping that doing this will put ideas from different approaches and systems into juxtaposition. The books are:

• Rachel Pollack's Tarot Wisdom: Spiritual Teachings and Deeper Meanings
• Karen Hamaker-Zondag's Tarot as a Way of Life: A Jungian Approach to the Tarot
• Robert Place's The Tarot: History, Symbolism and Divination
• Lon Duquette's Understanding Aleister Crowley's Thoth Tarot
• Aleister Crowley's Book of Thoth
• Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism

I may also be referencing Dion Fortune's The Mystical Qabala and my various astrology books when correspondences are mentioned.

One thing I anticipate is that this work will slowly drive me mad.

I find that I am really struggling with the hierarchical worldview that seems to be taken for granted in almost all of the various approaches to the tarot, but in particular those that are influenced by the Golden Dawn and the Qabala/Kabbala (however you want to spell it). I'm running up against a basic source of cognitive dissonance: On the one hand, the symbolism of the tarot seems to work for me very, very well and I find that using tarot for divination is a very meaningful and accurate way for me to do inner/spiritual work (certainly far beyond, for instance, using the ogham or other abstract runic systems of divination). On the other hand, the symbolism as it's explained and explored in most of these books seems to contradict what I believe at a conscious/intellectual level about how the spiritual and material world exist and relate to each other (insofar as they can even be considered "separate" things). I feel like it's absolutely necessary for me to bring this cognitive dissonance more into the light and try to reconcile the symbolism and divinatory meaning of the tarot with a worldview more consistent with my understanding of ecology and what I've taken to calling "natural polytheism."

This is the same god damned issue as the basic grappling with mysticism — mysticism as having to do not only with transcendence and unity, but also with immanence and diversity. Can there be a polytheistic mysticism? Are there "Mysteries of the Many," and if so, what do they look like? Or is mysticism, as understood as a spiritual approach or thread running through the various world traditions, always bound to collapse under its own weight into the nondualistic All/One/Void?