What is Divination

Can we see into the future and tell if we are going to be happy and rich or miserable and poor?  What does fate have in store for me?  How long will I live?  These are the kinds of spooky questions that come up when we mention divination to a lot of people.  Because these questions do not seem very smart and many people think this is what divination is about, they may think that divination is unscientific, or worse, superstitious and just plain dumb.  But, divination is not an effort to predict a future that is fated and unchangeable.  If this were true, then divination would not have been respected as it has been throughout most of recorded history.  It would not have been respected by the greatest minds of the ancient world and played the role it did in the formation of our political, philosophical, and religious history.  The superstitious effort to predict fate is better characterized by the label fortune telling.  As we will see, Divination is something else.

Divination is and, at its best, always has been the practice of looking to one’s inner wisdom for guidance.  Cards, star charts, bones, or crystal balls are all just tools designed to help us find this inner wisdom.  At times divination may point out what is likely to happen in the future, but its main concern is to provide insight and guidance that helps one create the future.  Don’t you wish, sometimes, that you had a wise seer as a friend, someone who not only knew a great deal but had insight into how things work, and that this friend was available for you to ask for help when you needed to make important decisions.  Well, that is really how divination works.  It is a way of contacting part of the human mind that lives in the unconscious, that has greater perspective and has access to psychic abilities.  It is the oldest and wisest part of one’s mind.  The ancient Greeks, Romans, and Hebrews, who are the founders of our Western culture, believed that this instruction came from the gods or from God and that is why the word divination was formed to describe it.  The word divination literally means to get in touch with the divine.  It is derived from the Latin “deus,” meaning god.  In modern terminology, we may refer to this source of wisdom as the Higher Self or our Wiser Self. 

A Word from Carl G. Jung

If you are not, however, convinced that a physical object like a deck of cards or that the planets wandering around in the sky can have anything to do with you and how you live your life, let us look at the exploration of how this works by one of the greatest minds of the 20^th century, the famous Swiss psychoanalyst Carl G. Jung (1875-1961).  Jung and other psychologists who worked with dreams and explored the unconscious part of the human mind observed a lot of things happening with their patients that could only be described as predictions, telepathy, or clairvoyance.  What these words mean is that in their dreams the patients saw what was likely to happen the next day, they knew what someone was thinking without speaking to them, or they knew details about something that should have been hidden from them.  Jung also noticed these things happening with himself, his colleagues, and members of his family. 

Jung’s conclusion was that if anyone investigated his findings and the findings of other psychologists fairly without bias, they would see that telepathic abilities were undeniably real. Also, it showed that the human mind did not seem to be limited by time and space.  In other words, for a person to know things in the future or to know things that he could not physically see or touch in any way, meant that his mind was not really confined in the body but exists beyond it.  In the modern world most of us have become accustomed to thinking of our minds as living in our brains, but what Jung was saying is that the brain works something like a television set and the mind is like the signals that it picks up.  Just like we would think it is silly to believe that the actors we see on the television are living in the set, we should not think that our thoughts and feelings are just in the brain.  Not being confined by time or space, the mind is capable of connecting with the minds of other people far away and because the connections are outside of time they happen quickly.  Also, because the mind is not hampered by time it can just as easily look at where we are likely to be in the future.       

Besides seeing these things happening in dreams, Jung observed that often coincidences would happen in everyday life that seemed magical or dreamlike.  For example, Jung was talking to his patient about the symbolism of the Egyptian scarab beetle while he was looking out the window of his office and at that exact moment a large beetle walked across the glass in front of him.   Ancient peoples would consider these events messages from the gods and called them omens.  Jung decided to create a new term for these events, one that sounded more scientific.   He said that these events were examples of “synchronicity.”  Synchronicity sounds like a handful but it just the combination of syn, which means together, with chron, which means time.  Then Jung just tacked icity on the end to make it into a noun, so that it would be a thing that could be studied.  

Jung defines synchronicity as an event happening in the physical world that coincides with an event happening in our minds, together in time, in a way that the mind feels it is meaningful, like a message from the gods or God.  Not that anything causes this to happen, it just happens because somehow the outer world of physical reality and the inner world of the mind are connected.  Jung also found that each moment in time had its own quality and certain things just seemed to happen together.  Once Jung created this term, he was able to study synchronicity as a part of psychology and he realized that synchronicity was also at work when people did divination.   He started looking into astrology and spent a lot of time studying the ancient Chinese book used for divination, the I Ching (pronounced EE jing).  

We have already been using another term that Jung used in his study.  The word unconscious.  Before we go any further, we will need to look at this term also.  The conscious part of our mind is the stuff that we are thinking, feeling, and noticing right now.  The unconscious part is just like the word says, not conscious.  Normally people use this word when they are describing someone who is knocked out or asleep.  Like, “he was knocked unconscious.”  When you are in this condition, you have probably noticed that your mind is still working but it works differently, it creates dreams.  Dreams have a different logic about them and things can happen that cannot in conscious reality, like we might see ourselves flying or we could suddenly be in a different place.  Well, what Jung and other psychologists discovered, is that the way this not-conscious part of the mind communicated was with symbols instead of just words.  Symbols are images and sounds that have meanings that cannot always be put into words.  Also, they discovered that this process is always going on in our minds, even when we are awake, just outside of the focus of our conscious mind and these dreams were just the surface of something even larger.

Last Saturday was my birthday, and Rose Ann and I, along with our friends Sue and Bill, celebrated by going to the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass. The museum has a collection of Rockwell’s originals and examples of works by other 20^th century illustrators.  

Norman Rockwell was the most successful American illustrator of the 20^th century. He created more than 4,000 oil paintings, illustrated over 40 books, and numerous magazine illustrations, calendars, advertisements and logos. But he is best known for his 321covers for The Saturday Evening Post.  He painted the first in 1916, when he was 22 years old, and continued for the next 47 years.

Many of The Saturday Evening Post covers, especially the early ones, were successfully humorous depictions of small-town America. They are like photo realistic cartoons. Many are reminiscent of movies from the same decades and at times they are sentimental and cute. For example, Rockwell created four recurring characters, four young boys, who engaged in various humorous exploits. These covers remind me of the Little Rascals movies that I watched on TV when I was young.

Because of the fame of his Post covers, “Norman Rockwell’s America” is often cited by conservatives as the bucolic vision of American that they want to return to. This has always irked me, because Rockwell was anything but conservative. Recently on MSNOW, I heard a commentator complaining about this same issue. Then she added, “Norman Rockwell was not conservative; in the 60s he got WOKE.” She was referring to the illustrations on the theme of integration that Rockwell made for Look Magazine in the early 1960s. These are some of his most famous paintings, and we will return to them later. But I would add that his themes were always liberal, and he always championed the common man and the underdog.    

Here is an example, a Post cover for the New Year in 1945. Instead of depicting the celebration, Rockwell chose to depict the plight of the waiter tasked with cleaning up the mess the next morning. Rockwell traveled to the Waldorf-Astoria hotel and used the Wedgewood Room as the sight and the actual waiter, Anton Ashenbrenner, posed as the model.  

In another example, in two consecutive covers he made for Boy’s Life in the 1930s, he depicted three boys going fishing and then for the next issue returning with their catch. Obviously, he is taking the side of the poor boys over the rich kid with the expensive equipment.

Some of his most memorial paintings are the ones that he made for the war effort during World War II. In 1942, Rockwell was working for the Ordnance Department of the Army, when he was inspired by FDR’s speech on the Four Freedoms, the four truths that characterize liberty and that we were fighting a war to preserve. He decided he would illustrate the Four Freedoms. While attending a town meeting in Vermont he witnessed one man stand up in the meeting and express a minority viewpoint, and yet everyone in the room listened to him with respect. Rockwell realized that this was Freedom of speech in action, and he had the subject for his first painting. This was the one that he felt was most successful.

Freedom of Religion, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear soon followed, and the illustrations were published in consecutive issues of the Saturday Evening Post. The magazine received thousands of requests for reprints of the paintings, Because of their popularity, the Post and the Dept. of Treasury jointly issued war bonds and stamps with Rockwell’s images. It was the most successful money raising campaign of the war. The four large canvases are now displayed in the central domed ceiling room in the Museum, one to each of the four directions, like a temple of freedom.        

For Freedom from Want Rockwell depicted a Thanksgiving dinner. As with many of his paintings, his friends and neighbors posed for him.

Freedom from Fear depicts parents tucking their children into bed. The black curtain in the background is a blackout curtain, designed to protect the home from bombings. This is a detail often missed by modern viewers.  

Freedom of Religion seems the least like a painting in Rockwell’s style. There is no story represented. Also, although it is meant to depict a verity of religions the three main characters in the forefront of the canvas represent, from right to left, Judaism, Protestantism, and Catholicism: all religions of the Bible. The rest of the world is not represented.

He made up for this oversight, however, in his 1961 Saturday Evening Post cover, “The Golden Rule,” which he felt best reflected his person philosophy. Here is what he said about the painting:

“I had tried to depict all the peoples of the world, gathered together. That is just what I wanted to express about the Golden Rule.”

During the war, Rockwell also championed the role of women workers with his depiction of “Rosie the Riveter.”  The name Rosie the Riveter came from a popular 1942 song by Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb, but the famous poster that is now the most recognizable image of Rose was not actually tiled “Rosie the Riveter.”  The poster of the female worker with a red polka dotted bandana was painted in 1942 by J. Howard Miller for the Westing House Company’s war production factory. It was called “We Can Do It.”  It was only displayed in the factory, and nowhere else. It was only in the 1980s that it was rediscovered and became a feminist icon.  

In 1943, Rockwell designed a Saturday Evening Post Memorial Day cover depicting, with his characteristic sense of humor, a brawny Rosie taking a lunch break in front of the American Flag. With her right foot she steps on Hitler’s Mein Kamph. Her pose is actually based on Michelangelo’s painting of the Prophet Isaiah on the Sistine Chapel Ceiling. Rockwell’s version was seen by millions of people during the war.   

Now let’s return to Rockwell’s illustrations for Look Magazine in the 1960s. The first, “The Problem We All Live With,” 1964, is probably one of his most famous paintings. After the Brown v. The Board of Education ruling, schools in the South were ordered to desegregate. The last state to comply was Louisiana. In November 1950 four black girls were escorted into an all-white school in New Orleans against the wishes of an angry crowd. Rockwell chose to depict one of the small black children being guided past raciest graffiti and a splattered tomato by four US marshals.   
 

Rockwell made a study of the girl’s head. He used Lynda Gunn, a relative of the actual student, as a model.

In 1967, Rockwell created “New Kids in the Neighborhood,” using children again to depict integration in the suburbs.

One of his most startling illustrations depicts the murder of civil rights workers in Mississippi. For this 1965 illustration he was influenced by Goya’s “The Third of May 1808.” The Magazine chose to publish the black and white preliminary drawing instead of the finished oil painting.  
 

In 1969, The Colorado River Storage Project commissioned Rockwell, as well as other illustrators, to create a series of paintings depicting the Glen Canion Dam. Rockwell said that he was not a landscape painter, but realizing that the dam was displacing local Navajos and flooding their sacred ground, he chose to humanize the picture by adding a Navajo family contemplating the dam. The painting is displayed in the same room in the museum with the Look Magazine paintings. 
 

In 2025, the Trump Department of Homeland Security used several of Rockwell’s paintings in social medial posts promoting their anti-immigration policy. The Rockwell family denounced their action in an article in USA Today. They wrote, “If Norman Rockwell were alive today, he would be devastated to see that his own work has been marshalled for the cause of persecution toward immigrant communities and people of color.”

Maiolica it is red terracotta pottery with a tin oxide glaze that covers the red clay surface with an opaque white layer. The white layer forms a background that allows the ceramic artist to paint imagery with the addition of brightly colored glazes. The artist’s palette was primarily restricted to five colors: cobalt blue, antimony yellow, iron red, copper green, and manganese purple. The figures are delineated primarily with blue lines and filled in with washes of pale blue for shading and then the other colors. After the painting is complete, the vessel is given a second firing to secure the colors.The plat below has gold luster added to create the stars

Maiolica tin glazed pottery was first made in Spain in the 8th century. And was introduced to Italy in the 15^th century where Italian Renaissance artists developed its pictorial potential to its full effect. The Italian name, Maiolica, is said to come from the fact that the pottery was introduced to Italy from the Island of Majorca or from the Spanish city of Malaga. In English the name of the pottery is often spelled Majolica, but there was no letter J in Italy until 1524. Centers of production included Faena, Deruta, Urbino, Orvieto, Gubbio, Savona, and Florence, and it is still produced in some of these areas today. Whenever I have visited Florence, I have been sure to buy some modern examples. when Italian maiolica was exported, it was referred to as faience, because much of it was made in Faenza.

In Holand a type of tin glazed ceramic developed that made use of cobalt blue alone on the white background. This was called Delft. It was often used on flat architectural tiles.  Later Dutch artists used tin glazed terracotta with a blue glaze to imitate Chinese porcelain. European potteries had not yet figured out how the Chinese had managed to make pure white porcelain clay. In 1709, however, Johann Friedrich Bottger, a German alchemist, determined how to make porcelain. In 1710, a German pottery factory near Dresden began producing porcelain ware. Porcelain eventually took over the market. But Maiolica continues to be made in Italy.

I first discovered Maiolica when I was studying art in college, in New Jersey, in the 1960s. I found a large art book about Maiolica in the school library, and I was amazed to find such a treasure trove of free spontaneous Renaissance art works. These 15^th and 16^th century works had something modern about them. The delineated drawings, the free brush work, and the limited palette, as well as the mythical subjects and grotesque ornaments, appealed to me and had a lasting influence on my art.

While I was in college, I would regularly take a day every other week to drive an hour into New York City to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art. While exploring the museum on many occasions, I had not encountered any Maiolica. But one day I was in the Medieval section on the first floor, and I noticed a stone stairway leading to a lower section below ground. I was intrigued and decided to investigate. What I found amazed me, this entire below ground gallery was dedicated to European decorative arts, mostly Maiolica (the works have since been moved and are now spread throughout the European galleries on the first floor). I was now able to study the pieces close up and I returned on many occasions to made drawings of some of the objects.

Besides bowls and plates, the most common objects that the artists chose to decorate were apothecary jars called albarello, and apothecary vases with or without handles. They were designed to hold medicinal herbs, spices, dyes, or ointments and they livened up the shelves of apothecaries in Italy’s cities. The flared lip on the albarello allowed the apothecary to cover the jar with a piece of parchment or cloth and tie it closed with a piece of string. This sealed the contents and kept them fresh. The parchment was often bleached white so that the contents of the jar could be written on it. Sometimes the label was glazed directly onto body of the vessel instead. The apothecary as well as the physician in the Renaissance were both considered to be practicing branches of alchemy (modern chemistry did not emerge from alchemy until the mid-17^th century). So, to my mind, it is fair to consider these colorful vases examples of alchemical vessels.

When I first designed the Alchemical Tarot in the 1990s, I decided that the suit of Cups should depict alchemical Lab equipment made of clay or glass. Therefore, I changed the name of the suit to Vessels. Since then, after examining many historical Tarot and Minchiate decks, I came to realize that in the past the suit of Cups often depicted what we would consider vases, as we can see in this Four of Cups from an 1810 Minchiate card. So, I decided when I was redesigning the Alchemical Tarot, for the new Alchemical Tarot Reimagined, that I would keep the Cups title for the suit. Also because of my fascination with Maiolica, I decided I would take on the task of depicting alchemical Maiolica apothecary vessels. Because of the glazing on the jars, this presented me with the challenge of depicting the vases with three-dimensional shading while maintaining the colorful imagery. But the imagery also provided an extra vehicle for the symbolism on the cards.  And I was able to add meaningful labels. This is the most challenging suit of cards that I have designed. I hope you like the result.    
 

Learn more about the Alchemical Tarot Reimagined here:

New: The Alchemical Tarot Reimagined
 

In my last article I discussed the Lovers Card in the Tarot of Marseille, which depicts a male lover being offered a choice between two women. The lover must make a choice between a woman with flowers in her hair, representing sensuality or one wearing a laurel wreath representing virtue. I was able to trace this theme to the Iliad, in the 8^th century BC.

Before the hero of the Iliad, Achilles, could decide on joining the siege of Troy, he asked his mother, the sea nymph Thetis, for advice she told him that he had a choice of two fates: either he can die a young and glorious death at Troy and his name will be remembered forever, or he can stay home and live a long sensual but unremarkable life and his name will be forgotten. He goes to Troy. But the story continues, and he is offered the choice again.

While at the battle in Troy, Achilles is awarded the beautiful female captive, Briseis, as his slave, which is considered a war honor. Achilles loves Briseis and it seems he plans to marry her. So, he is greatly angered when Agamemnon, the commander of the Greek forces, takes Briseis from him. He leaves the fighting and stays in his tent enjoying the affection his friend Patroclus. Patroclus, however, gets permission from Achilles to enter the battle wearing Achilles armor, and he is killed by the Trojan hero Hector. Achilles is angered and realizes that he must again choose honor, or Thymos, over sensuality, or Eros. His mother intercedes again and brings him new armor crafted by the blacksmith god Hephaestus (as depicted in the 18^th century painting below). In the course of the battles, he kills Hector, but eventually, he himself is killed. And his name is remembered for all time.    

Here is the same scene with Achilles receiving his armor from his mother on this 6th century BC Attic black-figure hydria.

In the last article, I also told a related story that was written in the 4^th century BC by Xenophon about the hero Hercules and it became a theme often repeated in European art. The young Hercules is offered a choice between a life of vice presented by Kakia, the amoral goddess, or of virtue presented by Arete, the goddess of virtue. as depicted in the 16^th century painting below. In other words, he was offered a life of selfish pleasure or one of hardship and honor. He chose Arete.

Now, looking into the origin of this theme further, I discovered an older Egyptian image, a statue in the Cairo Museum that seems to relate. It depicts the pharaoh Ramses III, who reigned 1187–1156 BCE, between Horus and Seth, or harmony and chaos. The gods Horus and Seth are two main characters in the most famous myth from ancient Egypt.

It was said that in the golden age of Egypt, the god Osiris was the pharaoh who taught his subjects art and culture and brought prosperity to the land. He was married to his beautiful mystical sister, the goddess Isis. Osiris’s evil brother, Seth, was jealous and managed to drown Osiris and let his body float away. Then he took his place as pharaoh. Isis was relentless and managed to fine Osiris’s body and bring it back, but Seth found out and cut the body into fourteen pieces. Relentless Isis found the pieces and put his body back together with linen wrappings. With the help of Thoth, she brough Osiris back to life and mated with him. The result was the birth of their son, the hero god Horus. When mature, Horus defeated his evil uncle and became Pharaoh himself.

To many modern readers this would seem like a simple story of good triumphing over evil. Therefore, in this sculpture we might assume that Ramses III, like the lover on the Marseille card or Hercules in Xenophon’s story, is being offered a choice. But it seems that the Egyptians did not see it that way. Seth, besides being selfish and ruthless, was a god of strength, and in an older myth he was a hero who saved the sun god Ra by defeating the serpent Apophis. Although Horus defeated Seth, the two gods came to a truce in which Horus would rule the fertile Nile valley, and Seth would rule the desert and foreign lands. The statue of Ramses does not depict a choice. Both gods are honoring the pharaoh as the ruler of all of Egypt, the river and the desert. Instead of choice, it represents union. 

The theme of union can also be seen in the relief sculpture of Horus and Seth from the throne of Seti I, 1294/1290–1279 BC (whose name is actually derived from Set or Seth) . Here we see Seth holding the lotus representing Upper Egypt and Horus holding the papyrus stalk of Lower Egypt. The two gods are tying the plants together to represent the union of Upper and Lower as one unified Egypt.

And here is another relief sculpture from the Temple of Horus created in the later Ptolemaic period. On this relief we see the pharaoh standing between two women, who are reaching out for him, so that it seems even closer to the theme of the Tarot card. The pharaoh is facing to our right as if he is choosing one over the other. But as we look closer, we find that the woman on our left is wearing the red crown of Lower Egypt and the woman on the right is wearing the white crown of Upper Egypt. The Pharaoh himself is wearing the combined crown of the unified Upper and Lower Egypt. It seems that he already had the affections of the woman with the red crown, and he is welcoming the woman in white to join him. Again, the theme is union.

Although the theme of the French Lovers Card is intended to be the hero’s choice. Like Hercules he is supposed to embrace the virtue of the soul of will, Thymos, and become the Charioteer facing the hardships of life depicted in the next sequence of cards with cards representing suffering and death. I interpret the Lovers, when it appears in a reading, as a choice between physical desire or comfort and idealism. Although excessive self-interest is dangerous and self-defeating, excessive idealism may also be dangerous. The Tarot teaches us this lesson by including the virtue, Temperance. This virtue was praised by Plato as a way of bringing the soul of desire, Eros, Into balance and health. Temperance was the virtue associated with Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty and art. It was her tempering wisdom that reigned in the excesses of her son, Eros, as we can see in this Renaissance painting by Lucas Cranach in which Eros is crying to his mother because the bees sting him after he Impetuously grabbed some honeycomb. In the third section of the trumps, we progress into the soul of wisdom, Logos, in which we achieve the right balance between Eros and Thymos. As in the first Egyptian image, it seems the healthiest path is to harmonize these two aspects of our personalities in the right balance or union.  

The Lovers Card

In my class, Symbolism of the Tarot Trumps: Through the Eyes of the Artists, I spent a lot of time on the Lovers card. It seems that this card, in particular, illustrates the profound theme that is found in the trumps. It also illustrates the failure of the occultists who associated the Tarot’s trumps with Hebrew letters and Kabbalistic correspondents to appreciate that theme.

From the time I first became involved in the Tarot in the 1980s, I have been fascinated by this card as it appears in the Tarot of Marseille. The Marseille card depicts a male lover standing between two women, suggesting that he needs to make a choice. In some versions the drawing is crude, and at first, I was not sure the second woman was a woman. The figure might have been a priest performing a marriage. Barbara Walker in her book on the Tarot stated that it was a woman performing a marriage. But after viewing many early decks, especially the Jean Noblet (the earliest example, from 1650) it became clear that the lover must make a choice between a woman with flowers in her hair, representing sensuality or one wearing a laurel wreath representing virtue.

This insight was verified by another historic example. The title page of Triompho di Fortuna, by Fanti, a 1527 Venetian book on divination with dice and astrology, depicts the pope sitting on top of the globe. The signs of the zodiac form a belt around the globe and there are crank handles extending from both sides. On the left an angel, known as Bona Fortuna, tries to turn the handle clockwise, and on the right a devil, known as Mala Fortuna, tries to turn his handle counterclockwise. Two women sit next to the pope with their names written above. On the angel’s side, sits Virtus, Latin for virtue, and on the Devil’s side, sits Voluptas, Latin for pleasure or sensuality. The pope’s fate depends on his choice. 

Further research uncovered that this theme can be traced to the Iliad, in the 8^th century BC. Before the hero of the Iliad, Achilles, could decide on joining the siege of Troy, he asked his mother, the sea nymph Thetis for advice she told him that he had a choice of two fates: either he can die a young and glorious death at Troy and his name will be remembered forever, or he can stay home and live a long sensual but unremarkable life and his name will be forgotten. He goes to Troy.

In Platonic philosophy the human soul is believed to be composed of a hierarchy with three parts: the soul of Eros, which longs for personal pleasure; the soul of Thymos, which takes on challenges or hardships for the sake of ideals; and the soul of Logos, which exhibits greater wisdom and judgement. Achilles’s choice illustrates that he is guided by Thymos not Eros

A similar story was told about the Classical hero Hercules. In Xenophon’s 4^th century BC Greek parable, the young Hercules is offered a choice between a life of vice presented by Kakia, the amoral goddess, or of virtue presented by Arete, the goddess of virtue. In other words, he was offered a life of selfish pleasure or one of hardship and honor. He chose Arete, accomplished his famous twelve labors, and became immortal. The image of the young Hercules standing between the two goddesses became a popular theme in Renaissance art and continued into the 19^th century. Various artists created variations on this theme with an everyman figure standing in for Hercules. The Tarot of Marseille Lovers card is one example. The title page of the Triompho di Fortuna is another. One entertaining version was painted by Joshua Reynolds, in 1760. It depicts the actor David Garrick standing between two women who represent Comedy and Tragedy. An engraved rendering of the painting was used as the title card for one of the first oracle decks, Hooper’s Conversational Cards, for 1775.

Starting with the Eliphes Levi in the 1850s, occultists began associating the twenty-two trump cards in the Tarot with the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet and their Kabbalistic celestial correspondents. Levi started by assigning the first letter aleph to the Magician. So, the Lovers was assigned to the sixth letter vau and the constellation Taurus. Most of his followers followed this assignment, but some chose Sagittarius or Virgo. The Golden Dawn started by assigning aleph to the Fool and the Lovers to the seventh letter zain and the constellation Gemini. Gemini at least represents duality, but none of these associations has anything to do with the actual theme of the card, a theme that has been part of Western philosophy and art for around 2,600 years.      

To complement the 2024/25 exhibition in the Oxford Weston Librar; Omens and Answers:

https://visit.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/event/oracles-omens-and-answers

The Library wants to explore some of the variation in how people use oricales. Theye want to see what types of divination or oracles people are using and for what purposes. They also are using a very wide understanding of what counts as ‘divination’.

Follow this link to go to the questionnaire:

https://app.onlinesurveys.jisc.ac.uk/s/oxford/using-oracles-questionnaire

I don’t use the Tarot to make predictions. I find that the best use of the cards is for obtaining advice from a place of inner wisdom that I call the Higher Self. Most often I use the cards to get advice on practical questions that come up in everyday life, and it is often surprising to see how the images on the cards adapt themselves to the situation. Here is one recent example, but first I need to supply some background.  

For the past sixty years I have followed a pescatarian diet. A pescatarian is someone who adds fish and seafood to a vegetarian diet. During these years I also consistently exercised with weights. About ten years ago I was told that I have high blood pressure, so I switched to a vegan diet; a diet totally based on pant foods not food derived from animals; and this helped to lower my blood pressure. Occasionally I still eat fish when traveling or on holidays, but I no longer use eggs, butter, or cheese.   

As I mentioned, I have been working-out with weights since I was a teenager. Six years ago, I entered a powerlifting competition, and because I was in my seventies, with little competition in my age category, a won a metal for the deadlift. Then Covid happened, and to avoid contagion, I stopped going to the gym. I have continued working out at home but only with light weights. Recently, I rejoined the gym to workout with my friend Bill, who is a personal trainer, and he wants me to enter a competition again. This is requiring longer workouts with heaver weights. My strength has not declined much, but I don’t have the same endurance. After a long workout I felt exhausted later that day and on the next day.

This is a picture of me practicing the deadlift in the gym six years ago:

My wife, Rose Ann, suggested that for my recovery I might need animal protein on the days that I workout. So, I did a Tarot reading to ask my Higher Self if it was a good idea to eat more fish. I did a three-card layout with my Alchemical Tarot. The three cards are meant to be read as one message. They seem to be directing me to read them from left to right. Here is a picture of the reading:  

On my left I see the Queen of Staffs. She offers me a choice between the bronze torch or staff in her right hand and the raw wooden torch in her left hand. This symbolizes a choice between what is refined and what is unrefined. Rose Ann quickly pointed out that my vegan diet is a refinement of my pescatarian diet. Therefore, moving toward the unrefined torch on my right would mean going back to the pescatarian diet.    

Continuing to my right, I see the Moon card, depicting Dianna forcefully walking in the same direction. This is what I wrote about this card in my book, “The Moon represents the night before the dawn, a time of patience, rest, and reflection. The card may simply represent a need for sleep or recuperation, but she is also in a state or expectation, waiting for her lover, the Sun, to join her at dawn.” Recuperation is certainly what I need, but is she just saying that I need more sleep? However, the Queen suggested that she represents the pescatarian diet, and then I remembered that Diana is also the Goddess of the hunt; a role that is more obvious in my new Reimagined Alchemical Tarot Moon card where she is walking with her hunting hounds and holding her bow and arrow. She is certainly looking for animal protein.

Diana is walking toward the third card, the Ace of Staffs, Aces represent a new beginning, and Staffs are associated with the element fire and energy, New energy is exactly what I need, It seems that my Higher Self agrees with Rose Ann.   

Here is the same layout with my new Alchemical Tarot Reimagined:

Robert M. Place

The Greek philosopher Pythagoras, (c 580-500 BC) was was the first person to call himself a philosopher, which means a lover of wisdom. After traveling through Egypt and the Middle East gathering knowledge, he founded a school for his mystical philosophy in Croton, Italy.

In the Pythagorean school, ten was considered the perfect number. To illustrate this point, they constructed a triangular arrangement of ten dots with one at the top, two on the second layer, Three on the next, and four at the bottom. This diagram was called the Tetractys, and the Pythagoreans considered it sacred. in the simplest form, it expressed the concept of emanation form the unseen divine world of the One to manifestations in the physical world, which is defined by having four directions, four seasons, and four elements. It could be used as a meditative device leading from the base, up the emanations, and back to the unity of oneness at the top.

There are many classes of symbolism that can be attached to the Tetractys. One of the most basic is a geometrical progression. With this theme, the single dot at the top depicts a point, a theoretical beginning with no dimension. The second layer has two points, which describe a line. Although a line has length it has no depth and still cannot be perceived any easier than the point. Next, are three points, which are necessary to form the first polygon, the triangle. This gives us a two-dimensional plan. The base has four points, which allows us to form the first three-dimensional object, the tetrahedron, which is composed of four triangular sides, like a pyramid with a triangle for a base. This is the beginning of physical reality.

If we also look at the relationships between the layers, called ratios, these describe numerically the vibrations of the three essential notes in the music scale: the whole note, which had a ratio of one to two; the perfect fifth, which has a ratio of two to three; and the perfect fourth, which has a ratio of three to four. Together with the four physical layers these musical layers give us seven layers altogether—four physical layers and three non-material layers. Like a Babylonian ziggurat, the Tetractys had seven layers but here numbers have re-placed the physical layers as emanations. To fill out the music scale Pythagoras devised four other notes and created our familiar Western diatonic scale with its seven notes, and he used the seven vowels in the Greek alphabet to indicate the notes in written form. The Tetractys can be correlated to all seven notes in the scale, and just like the notes, the seven layers can be correlated to the seven planets of the ancient cosmology and to the seven soul centers in the human body. I describe these concepts in more detail in my book: The Tarot, Magic, Alchemy, Hermeticism, and Neoplatonism.

The Tetractys can also show us that there is an archetypal essence behind what we are experiencing in our conscious reality. With this in mind, I devised a Tarot card layout based on the Tetractys, with a single card placed in each of the ten positions.  The top single card represents the archetypal realm illustrating the impulse that is at the source of what we are experiencing. The second layer depicts the dual forces at work in the conceptual realm. The third layer with its three cards depicts the plan in the realm of design. And the base depicts what we are experiencing in the physical realm.

Those of you who are familiar with the Kabbala may recognize that the Kabbalistic description of the formation of the emanations in the Tree of Life called the ten sephiroth may be derived from the ten circles in the Pythagorean Tetractys. The Kabbalists explain that God drew himself out of Ain Soph Aur (nothingness), thus creating the first emanation, Crown. Next God wanted to know himself and began to contemplate his nature, thus creating the next two emanations, Wisdom and Understanding, which are God looking at himself. His awareness of this duality created a third point, the awareness as a separate entity, and these three were reflected in the Ether below as the next three sephiroth: Mercy, Strength, and Beauty. Again, the awareness of this development led to fourfold pattern, which created the bottom four sephiroth: Victory, Splendor, Foundation, and kingdom, and as a result, the physical world came to be. We can see that in this story the sephiroth are grouped with one at the top, two on the next level, three on the next, and four on the bottom, as are the circles in the Tetractys.

The four levels of the Tetractys are also reflected in the four Kabbalistic levels of existence. Atziluth, the highest world, is the archetypal realm, where creative impulses are born. Below Atziluth is the world of creation and ideas, called Briah. Next in the descent is Yetzirah, the formative world where the forms of everything in the physical world are created. The fourth world is Assiah, the material world, where impulses, ideas, and forms, manifest as physical reality. These four worlds are another system of emanation. Further it was said that a separate Tree of Life exists in each world. So that there would be ten emanations on each of the four levels, for a total of forty emanations. The system is like a Tetractys composed of four Tetractys, or like the shamanistic vision of the Axis Mundi extending through separate worlds.

 

Here is a Tetractys spread that I did for myself using my Alchemical Tarot. The question I asked is: where am I now in my career?

In the archetypal realm, at the top, we see the Lady of Vessels. She stands on water and has the symbol for water on the vessel on her head. Water is one of the most often used symbols for the unconscious mind. Like the unconscious, water allows us to see its surface, but the depth underneath remain unseen. The woman stands on water showing that she trusts the unconscious to support her. She follows and trusts her intuition. 

As you may know from the introduction in my book, my career did take a turn that led me to where I am now when I had a series of dreams and synchronistic events that led me into studying the Tarot and eventually creating the Alchemical Tarot.

On the Conceptual level, we find two cards that many may consider the worst in the deck: Death and the man stabbed with ten swords. But Death simply means the end of something, the Ten of Swords refers to severe criticism. That is why I included the book. It is like he wrote it and then the critics stabbed him. This is sort of what happened when I first created the Alchemical Tarot and wrote my first book. I was following my own insight about the Tarot and contradicting many of the Kabbalistic and astrological associations that occultists had grafted onto the deck. And my research showed me that the Tarot did not stem from ancient Egypt, as was commonly claimed at the time; also, that Pamela Coleman Smith was the principal designer of the Waite Smith Tarot, not Waite. The truth in what I was saying and writing won out, in time, and the criticism came to an end. 

The third realm of design level, may also be called the plan. Here, following the direction of the figures, I am reading the cards from left to right. The Three of Vessels depicts three women balancing vessels on their heads like the Lady at the top of the reading.  Their vessels display the symbols for the other three elements: earth, air, and fire. They are the Lady of Vessels support group. They complete the fourfold plan. Next, the Knight of Staffs takes his burning staff into the desert. Like fire, the desert is hot and dry. But it also symbolizes the new or unclaimed territory.  The Five of Vessels, on the left, depicts vessels falling off shelves and breaking. But birds emerge from the one hitting the floor, as if it was an egg and giving birth to something new.

The plan would seem to be saying that now that I have people following my work, I am free to keep exploring and keep breaking old patterns, even ones that I created.   

On the base in the physical realm, two cards hold the center and the cards on the right and the left face into them, as if they are drawn to the center. Center left we see the Ace of Swords. Aces represent the beginning, and here we see an upright, positive sword symbolizing positive thinking. A serpent basilisk, symbolizing wisdom, entwines the sword, transforming from unripe green to ripe red. The Ace is drawing Temperance toward it. Temperance depicts Mary the Jewess, one of the first alchemists. She invented distillation, which is what is symbolized by the two cups to her right. Distillation is the most important operation in the Magnum Opus, which is the principal work of alchemy, and intended to lead to the perfection of the elixir known as the Philosopher’s Stone.     

Back-to-back with the ace is the Empress, which depicts the White Queen, a symbol of attraction. She is attracting the Nine of Staffs, which depicts the gray wolf burning in a fire. This is an alchemical symbol of sacrifice. In combination with the other three cards, what seems to be sacrificed are preconceptions.

After over 50 years of working with the Tarot, the cards are telling me I am at the beginning, but I am on the right path.  

 

In 2018, Rachel Pollack and I worked on a graphic novel called Forever.  Rachel wrote the dialogue, and I drew it. The title character is the goddess of the dead, and in the first chapter she gets tricked into taking on human form. The rest of the story is about what happened to her as a human.  But all we created was the first chapter, and Rachel died last year, So the first chapter is all that will exist, forever. As a homage to Rachel, I am posting that first chapter here in my blog.  
 

FOREVER

by Rachel Pollack and Robert M. Place

You may wonder what a Tarot designer does all day. Some people see me as a romantic artist, turning out one illustration after another at a fast pace. Often they wonder what is taking so long for me to complete a deck. I am asked, “when will this new deck be ready for sale?” I actually have no idea. I have completed designing a deck in a year, but my Tarot of the Sevenfold Mystery, for example, took 10 years to complete. Of course, I was working on other decks at the same time. When I received a contract from Harper/Collins for my first deck, The Alchemical Tarot, They gave me a year to complete it, but it actually took two years. Luckily, they liked what I was doing and kept extending the schedule for me. Now I find I do my best work when I draw for a few hours and then leave the work for the day. When I come back to it, I see it with fresh eyes and I can see what needs to be improved.

Besides drawing, I write, and the writing I do involves a lot of research in books and museums. I also teach workshops and lecture on the Tarot. Luckily, my reputation as a teacher has gotten me invited to Tarot gatherings around the world. I have taught on five of the seven continents. (I have no plans to teach in Antarctica, but I would like to be invited to Egypt) But the one thing I do consistently every day, is copy orders, pack them, and take them to the post office. I am there every day and I know all the clerks by name. I often joke that I am a highly paid shipping clerk.

Here is a photo of me that Katrina Wynne took me preparing to pack an order in my library/studio.