July 16, 2026
“I am / am not religious — is tarot for me?”
Whether you are religious or not, tarot can scratch an itch because it taps into a structure of reality that underpins a particular school of thought - Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition. But you don’t have to be Jewish or even religious to study or benefit from it. You can be Christian or Buddhist or atheist.
“Kabbalah, where have I heard that word before?” Probably associated with Madonna and the scandal-magnet school in LA but don’t let that put you off. You may also have encountered the word spelled as Qabalah as well, which is what happens when the occultists of the Golden Dawn (Aleister Crowley et al) recognize something in this structure of reality and decide to build a system of magick around it. Again, you don’t have to don a robe (or, in Madonna’s case, a red string bracelet) and chant to dive into Kabbalah. These are safe waters.
Kabbalah describes how the energy of the Divine modulates down, like electricity through transformers, one step at a time until it becomes our 3D world. And once you “get it”, it just makes sense. At least it does for me. I’m still wrapping my head around it, but every time I learn something new, it’s putting another piece in the jigsaw puzzle that is reality itself. Not just time and space. Beyond time and space. And you don’t have to think about the Divine as a person or a being or an intelligence. Just as energy. You believe in energy, right?
So what does this have to do with tarot?
Tarot wasn’t designed as a Kabbalistic tool but as a card game. The cards showed figures from mythology, from history, from daily and courtly life. It was a fish born into the ocean of reality Kabbalah describes, and then some Kabbalists noticed that because the fish was designed to swim in that ocean, it had certain properties that reflected the ocean. Then the Golden Dawn guys got a hold of it and started to selectively breed fish. Today’s tarot makes for a very poor card game but a very good system for reflecting what’s going on around you, energetically, on multiple levels.
What levels?
That’s what the next blog post will be about.