Integrating the Tarot

Are you interested in learning how to incorporate the Tarot into your life? Are you already familiar with the Tarot and want to take your practice to the next level? Ideally, a tarot worker should be able to call upon a full deck of 78 mental images at any time or place, even if stripped of all belongings and put in prison. Can you do that? It isn't as hard as you might think. I'm about to share with you a system that naturally evolved from my work with the Tarot over my first decade of practice. If you work at it as described in this article, it won't take you ten years to learn!

First of all, I think of each card in the deck as a container. The Tarot is a kind of model of the world in which everything is broken down into 78 different categories. According to this model of the universe, everything fits into one of these categories. Also, according to the Hermetic doctrine of macrocosm/microcosm (aka "as above, so below" from the Emerald Tablet), each person is an entire universe in and of themselves. Therefore, everything in a person can also be divided up into one or more of these 78 categories. When a reading is performed for someone, you are essentially taking a photograph of the persons internal relationships between prominent categories.

Readings aren't the only thing you can do with Tarot, which brings us back to the point: If you can internalize the Tarot, you can use it to not only investigate those parts of yourself represented by the cards, but to modify them and the relationships between them as well. This is real magic and it can be understood as a type of psychotherapy if you wish. Like I said before, I prefer to explore some of these occult processes from multiple perspectives. So lets get right into it.

My method is simple. First of all, familiarize yourself with multiple decks - especially focus on the Major Arcana. You can do things like color your own deck, as recommended by the BOTA. This is helpful, and I have included an entire set of uncolored Major Arcana images from the now defunct "Whare-Ra" Temple of the Golden Dawn in New Zealand. They are found throughout this site in the right column. I invite you to browse my site and save these Tarot trumps to your computer for printing and colouring (or whatever else you would like to do with them.)

While familiarizing yourself with the Tarot, you're going to have to really learn the core elements of the Tarot. You don't have to learn 78 complex arrangements of symbols. Each card basically boils down to the 10 spheres of the Kabalistic Tree of Life (7 of which are the planets of classical astrology), the 12 signs of the zodiac and the 4 elements (Earth, Water, Air, Fire).

If you want to get serious with Tarot, you're going to have to memorize all 26 of these symbols. It's actually pretty easy. You probably already know a lot of them. You probably know at least a couple zodiac signs and their meanings. Even if you've never studied esotericism, you likely understand on an intuitive level that Earth is a symbol of the physical side of things, including health, wealth, home and family. You can probably also guess that elemental Fire is a symbol of the passions, such as Lust, Rage, Aguish and Devotion...

To read the rest of this article, please visit:
http://www.jeremycrow.com/arcana.html

For some more information on Tarot, also watch my video presentation on why there is no card for elemental earth: