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.
July 23, 2026
EVERYTHING, EVERYWHERE, ALL AT ONCE
So our story starts with EVERYTHING.
To quote a brilliant movie title, everything, everywhere, all at once.
This is the sum of everything that is, was and will be. It's simply impossible to describe in any other way. It doesn't have any other properties. It isn't big or little, bright or dim, fast or slow, it simply IS.
This isness can't do anything but exist. It can't know itself because it can't differentiate between itself and anything it's not. What you can say about the isness is it has WILL.
This first level is about will.
It is the meta level, if you will. It holds the concepts of action and inaction, the concepts of repetition, of cessation, of abundance and boundaries. But again, it's not being those things, it just has the will to become them. Later. But that's not really important for tarot. For tarot, just think of it as potential.
The suit that corresponds with this first world (called Azilut in Kabbalah) is Wands. Readings that contain a lot of cards in the suit of wands are asking you to look at your creativity, inspiration, ambition, goals, dreams. If there were no limits, what would you do? The corresponding element is fire.
The court cards - page, knight, queen and king - are archetypes that represent authority figures that are somehow "above it all" ... because they are. They exist beyond petty worldly concerns, emotional intrigues and manipulations, and mindgames.
Azilut is the world of the Divine. The energy that dwells here is so far removed from our lives in the "4D" (space-time) that it is difficult to relate. Even the archangels in the next world down don't really understand life in the physical. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to communicate. Just understand that messages from Wands are going to be the most abstract.
Next week, Beriah and Cups!
July 30, 2026
THE CUP THAT RUNNETH OVER
Last week we talked about Azilut, the world of pure Will - the meta-level, the "isness" that simply exists without yet being anything in particular. This week we step one rung down the ladder: Beriah.
If Azilut is Will without form, Beriah is the first stirring of awareness. And awareness feels.
This world is where the Divine, for the first time, differentiates - where "I" and "not-I" become possible. Beriah is often called the World of Creation, because this is where something can first be conceived of, even though it hasn't taken shape yet. While an emotion is an absolutely real thing and that emotion causes actual real chemicals to move through our body, the emotion that kicks off the neurochemicals doesn't exist in our physical world, but in Beriah. Carl Jung (who drew heavily from Kabbalistic thought) might say it belonged to the collective unconscious.*
The suit that corresponds with Beriah is Cups. Readings heavy in Cups are asking you to look at your emotional life - relationships, intuition, love, grief, connection. If Wands asked "what would you do with no limits," Cups asks "what do you actually feel, underneath everything else." The corresponding element is Water.
The court cards - page, knight, queen and king of Cups - are archetypes of emotional authority. Where the Wands court are "above it all," untouched by worldly entanglement, the Cups court are the opposite: they're fluent in feeling. They represent people (or parts of yourself) who lead with empathy, who read a room instinctively, who can hold someone else's pain without flinching from it.
Beriah is closer to us than Azilut, but it's still not the physical world. The archangels here can conceive of form - they can want something to exist, can feel drawn toward it - but they don't yet touch matter. That's still two Worlds away. Messages from Cups will feel more relatable than Wands, but they're still speaking in the language of feeling and intention, not action.
Next week, Yetzirah and Swords.
Too much waffle to go in the middle:
* I want to be clear here: things that exist in these upper worlds are absolutely real. But they are different forms of energy that we cannot measure, see, weigh, or touch. Because we don't yet have the science to measure, see, weigh, or touch it, and our physical bodies would probably just evaporate on contact, we have faith and the experiences of mystics. I'm not asking you to believe. But I also don't want you to think I'm saying your emotions aren't real because I'm saying they are non-local, i.e. they are not 100% created by and tied to our physical bodies. They use our bodies to create the neurochemical cascades, absolutely. That is real and measurable. And you are free to believe whatever you want about what causes that to happen. I'm just sharing what I believe.