Tarot has exploded in popularity in the last decade. Most people understand it as a collection of images that can give insight into the unconscious mind or even offer information about the future. But Tarot is so much more than that. It’s a complex system that has encoded some of the deepest wisdom— physical, metaphysical, and spiritual— of the ancient world.
When our ancestors looked up at the sky, they saw themselves at the center of a vast Cosmos that was fully living and overflowing with meaning. To watch and remember the movement of the sun across the sky as it cycled through the seasons, the planets through their years-long synodic cycles, the moon through its “monthly changes in her circled orb,” all set against the fixed patterns of the stars required a long, careful, and patient attention. It was a relational process. This relationship with the natural world not only inspired poetry, myth, and visual art, it laid the foundation for the development of writing, mathematics, geometry, architecture, and music. All of these arts were embedded in layered patterns of repeating cycles and meaning. The arts were not separate from science, which were not separate from metaphysics, spirituality, and religion— it was all bound together in a coherent and fractal whole.
This understanding of the Cosmos persisted into the Christian era, through the Middle Ages, and into the Renaissance before it was kicked to the curb in the Early Modern era. The Tarot, properly understood, is a window into this older way of seeing and relating to the world.
I had the pleasure of sitting down with the creator of my favorite Tarot deck, Christine Payne-Towler for a deep dive into the history of the Tarot and the long lineage of western esotericism.
In the bonus portion for paid subscribers (available in a separate post), we talk a bit more about how to get started with Tarot and dive a bit deeper into ancient mysteries.
Christine has been an esoteric researcher and practitioner in the Pacific Northwest since the 1970’s. She wrote the core interpretive Tarot text that launched the seminal and ever-popular website www.Tarot.com. She is the author of the book The Underground Stream: Esoteric Tarot Revealed (currently out of print but hopefully re-released soon) and the creator of The Tarot of the Holy Light, along with two accompanying interpretive books.
You can find her publications at https://noreahbrownfield.com/
Teachings on Tarot, astrology, and esotericism at her Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/NoreahsNet/
And in addition to the physical Tarot of the Holy Light deck, there is a fantastic app with all the cards and full interpretations from the book— a steal at only $3.99:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/holy-light-tarot/id555363251
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.foolsdog.holylight&hl=en_US&gl=US
Timestamps:
00:00 Credits
00:52 Intro w/ background on Tarot
06:00 How Christine got into Tarot
10:43 What is the Western Esoteric Tradition?
15:12 Origins of the Tarot in Arabic playing cards
24:40 Astronomical and scientific lineage in esotericism
31:08 Wheels within wheels and the fractal model of the Cosmos
34:55 How modern decks “break” the holistic system of correspondences
40:38 The origin of numbers and letters and astrological symbols
47:32 Reconciling the heliocentric universe with the geocentric way of seeing
56:08 How ancient wisdom can help us make sense of the world
The Ancient Wisdom in the Tarot with Christine Payne-Towler