What would tarot look like in a post Tree of Life Age? This is a question I ask myself a lot. There is a total unquestioning blind belief that the Tarot is wedded to  the Tree of Life (ToL), without any proof whatsoever.

The pervasive,, and to me iniquitous influence of the ToL blinds us to all other possibilities. Not least, the ToL does not make  sense.  There is a huge amount of redundancy in the attributions – each planet has a sephiroth for example.

Remember how the ToL came about? It was a sixteenth century invention to diagrammatically represent information found in the Sepher Yetsirah. It took centuries for someone to come up that, and it has been modified since to the version we have today. The Golden Dawn version is the most copied, but it is still a version (others are available).  Looking at the diagram of the ten sephiroth and 22 paths does not explain it. The Tree of Life is the microcosm of the Universe, a small, pale imitation of life and the cosmos.

Re-assessing the ToL forces me to rethink Liber 777, the Golden Dawn book written by McGregor Mathers and other GD adepts, including Aleister Crowley as a Bible for all their magical rituals. I have a soft spot for this book, but you have to be ruthless. Continual questioning of what you know and what you don’t know is vital for healthy growth.

A bit of double-think has to go on in all of this because I still have to communicate in the language of the Tree to other people. I liken the adherents of the ToL to tarot and magic as in a goldfish bowl. I can step into the goldfish bowl, but equally i can stay out, and I am free to go elsewhere and explore.

Students think you have to ascribe and attribute everything to the ToL, but this is a false notion, especially when there is no truth that the Tree is a correct model of the universe.

Re-assessing the ToL also means that I have to totally rethink the way I look at my favourite deck, Crowley’s Book of Thoth. I will endeavour to take no prisoners.