by Marcus Katz
THE RESURRECTION ENGINE:
Gated Spread Book 3
Change Your Life with Tarot & Kabbalah
By Tali Goodwin & Marcus Katz
Copyright © Tali Goodwin & Marcus Katz, 2013
Published by Forge Press, Keswick
All rights reserved.
WHAT OUR STUDENTS SAY …
Wow! I am REALLY going through some changes with this method.
S.L.
This exercise as well as the others have spoken volumes. Thank you for sharing this experience with us.
R. G.
Incredible knowledge so easily shared … This has been a journey in which I have learned a lot of new things and feel very satisfied.
L. J.
Very moving and effective. I cannot wait for the next gates!
Y.
I suddenly realized I have been dreaming like crazy since I started these exercises! Very intuitive stuff about my situation, and about my Tarot!
L.
We have used real-life examples and authentic feedback throughout this series, anonymously, from our students in Tarot-Town. We thank them for their engagement with these experiences over the years.
About the Authors
“When you’ve finished 8,000 words, I’ll show you the Sephiroth.”
Katz to Goodwin, Typical Conversation.
Tali Goodwin is the co-author of award-winning and #1 best-selling Tarot books, including Around the Tarot in 78 Days, Tarot Face to Face, and Learning Lenormand. She is also a leading Tarot researcher and is credited with the discovery of A. E. Waite’s second tarot deck, kept secret for a century, published as Abiding in the Sanctuary. She has also uncovered and published the Original Lenormand deck, and with co-author Derek Bain, the original Golden Dawn Tarot images in A New Dawn for Tarot. Her research into the life of Pamela Colman-Smith with new photographs will be published as The Secrets of the Waite-Smith Tarot by Llewellyn Worldwide in Spring 2014. She is co-Director of Tarosophy Tarot Associations (Worldwide) and organizes the international tarot conventions, TarotCon.
Marcus Katz is author of the ground-breaking Tarot book and teaching system, Tarosophy, and is the co-founder of Tarosophy Tarot Associations (Worldwide). In addition to Tarot books with Tali Goodwin, he is the author of The Magister, an 11-volume opus on the Western Esoteric Initiatory System, The Magician’s Kabbalah, and the forthcoming Path of the Seasons. He teaches students privately in the Crucible Club, available by application.
Contents
WHAT OUR STUDENTS SAY …
About the Authors
Contents
Preface
What is the Tarot?
What Are The Top 10 Wrong Ideas About Tarot?
Tarot & Kabbalah
Chapter 1: The Schemata
Chapter 2: Cogs
Chapter 3: Fuel
Chapter 4: Tea Break
Chapter 5: Struts & Ignition
Conclusion
Bibliography
Websites & Resources
Kindle Tarot Books & Series
Preface
Just as it is inconceivable that a ship be without a captain, so too is it impossible that the world be without a ruler.
Rabbi Azriel of Gerona
You are about to go on a journey and experience Kabbalah.
Grab a Tarot deck, and we are good to go!
The purpose of Gated Spreads is to overturn the common use of Tarot cards as a means of “telling” the future, or providing a brief insight into our life and motivations – and hence our future possibilities. The teaching of Tarosophy encourages the use of Tarot as a divine language; one which connects us to the deeper world underneath the apparent one which we often take for granted. A gated spread requires you to take action in your life, from which change emerges naturally. This is not the empty promise of a feel-good self-help book, but a call to action – your action – to change your life through Tarot.
Our Gated Spread experiences have been offered for several years to the public, and now for the first time we provide them in handy self-study packages on Kindle. In each of these individual books, you can experience shamanism, relationship and romance insight, creativity, alchemy, and even delve into your ancestry, all using just a tarot deck.
We have also ensured that this is not a book of fictional examples that sound too good to be true. Our books are based only on real-life testing and the actual experience of real people like you, encountering magick often for the first time. We have taught these methods and ran workshops and gated spread weeks for many years, and have hundreds of experiences which have constantly shaped what you are about to experience for yourself.
This book is ideal for first time users of Tarot or the experienced reader who is looking to activate the tarot in their life. We have ensured that you are given the necessary instructions and clarifications (from our previous teaching and feedback given by students) to experience true magick in your time using this book.
Before you begin, you may wish to join our free Facebook group if you have any questions about Tarot, and also download our free keyword guide to tarot cards and standard spreads from our site:
www.mytarotcardmeanings.com
What is the Tarot?
The tarot as most commonly recognized is a family of card decks, most often 78 cards divided into four suits of 14 cards (10 numbered cards and 4 Court cards for each suit) and 22 Major cards. There are presently about 1,000 different decks in print or circulation, and many more out-of-print, rare and collectable decks.
Although it can be proven that the tarot was developed in the early 15th century, a lot of books still suggest that it was used by the “ancient ...” and then provide lists of the unproven, non-factual ideas which results in a conflation of tarot and those very ideas.
The earliest names for the tarot are Italian. Originally the cards were called carte da trionfi (cards of the triumphs), but around 1530 A.D. (about 100 years after the origin of the cards) the word tarocchi began to be used to distinguish the tarot cards from a new game of triumphs or trumps then being played with ordinary playing cards.
You are actually seeing in the cards some direct examples of the triumphs – the procession of floats common at festivals in Italy at the time – particularly in such cards as The Chariot and the Court cards. There is even a Christian tarot in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; the cards were used to depict virtues, the liberal arts and sciences, and other aspirational notions from their earliest development. In fact, it could be said that the cards were originally educational or self-development tools, although that could also be debatable.
There is no evidence that the tarot were used by gypsies, originated in Egypt or were used for divination prior to the 1700s, despite popular occult lore that the cards have embodied ‘ancient teaching’ from time immemorial. It was not until a pseudo-connection between the Hebrew letters and the tarot was published in 1781 – by Comte de Mellet, in Antoine Court de Gebélin’s Le Monde Primitif – that esoteric interest began to appropriate the cards to embody occult teaching.
The earliest list of the 22 cards which have become known as the Major Arcana is given in a sermon against their use by a monk writing in Latin around 1450-1470 A.D. This sermon is sometimes called the Steele Sermon as it belongs to the collection of Robert Steele.
[This above section which we think is so important to teach is repeated in each booklet in this series, and is an extract from Tarosophy, by Marcus Katz].
Which Tarot Deck is Best for This Gated Spread?
Our students have used a range of decks for this experience, and of course the standard Waite-Smith is a favorite.
However, students have
used this deck with particularly good results:
The Thoth Tarot
What Are The Top 10 Wrong Ideas About Tarot?
There are many wrong ideas about the tarot that seem to be popular. We would like to present quickly some common myths about tarot that you may have heard already, and change your view!
1. The tarot did not originate from Egypt, the gypsies, the Templars, Atlantis or a secret order.
2. You do not need to be gifted or given your first tarot deck – you can simply buy a deck for yourself.
3. You do not have to keep your tarot in a silk bag or bag of any particular color.
4. You can let other people touch your cards if you choose.
5. There are no real ‘rules’ in tarot, but some generally agreed good ideas.
6. The keywords for cards are not set in stone; they can be modified depending on the deck, the reading and the question. However, there are basic concepts specific to each card in the deck, which form a basic language.
7. The cards are not evil – no more than any art or printed material is “evil”.
8. You do not have to be intuitive or gifted in some special way – you can learn, and develop your tarot skills in any way.
9. The ‘ancient Celtic Cross’ spread has not been used for centuries, and it is not particularly ancient and it is not Celtic.
10. There is no single right way to read tarot – we encourage every reader to discover their own unique voice.
Tarot & Kabbalah
We will be primarily be teaching ways of approaching Kabbalah through Tarot, and exploring Tarot through Kabbalah. Whilst our “Gates of Valentine” experience covered relationships and the Court Cards, this gated spread covers the Major Arcana and the Tree of Life. We hope you will find this method entirely revolutionary and useful to you in your personal life as well as a method to teach your own students if relevant.
A Brief History of Kabbalah
The Kabbalah (a Hebrew word meaning "handed down", or "oral tradition") is the term used to denote a general set of esoteric or mystical teachings originally held within Judaism, but later promulgated to a wider audience in the 12th century onwards through centers of learning such as Spain. It consists of a body of teachings and analysis dealing with the nature of the Universe, the aspects of divinity, and the method of creation. From this set of teachings is derived the role of man in the revealed scheme of things.
The history of the Kabbalah is difficult to fix to dates and linear sequences of succession due to its nature as oral, traditional, teachings. Long before printing presses, the Kabbalistic teachings were passed from teacher to pupil as oral teachings and collections of manuscripts, which in turn may have been copies of other sets being used by other teachers. The original impulse of Kabbalah, however, emerged from a first century school of Jewish mysticism termed "Merkabah", meaning "chariot". These mystics utilized secret methods of "spiritual ascent" in order to attain mystical experience. These experiences can be recognized as those common to any modern adept following the occult initiatory system, for example; "the world changed into purity around me, and my heart felt as if I had entered a new world".
The teachings of the Merkabah mystics became part of the "Heikhalot" school, whose name means "palace", referring to the spiritual planes through which the mystics ascended. The description of these journeys seems to bear similarities to the journey of the soul into the Underworld depicted in the Egyptian Book of Coming Forth by Day, with magical words or appropriate names of the gods to be spoken before each door is passed and each palace entered.
Three classical texts formulate the basic structure of traditional Kabbalah, being ;
The Sefer-ha-Zohar; Book of Splendour - First printed 1558-60 and 1559-60
The Sefer Yetzirah; Book of Formation - First printed in Mantua 1562
The Sefer-ha-Bahir; Book of Light - First printed in Amsterdam 1651
The Zohar was written around 1280-86 by Moses b. Shem Tov de Leon in Guadalajara, north-east of Madrid, Spain, where there was a lot of Kabbalistic activity at this time.
Many of the later Kabbalistic schools are formed about these books, finding in them interpretation and meanings revealing the work of God and Creation. The school formed at Safed in the sixteenth century produced many of the leading thinkers of Kabbalah, particularly Rabbi Isaac Luria, called the Ari (1534-1572), and Rabbi Moshe Cordevero, the Ramak (1522-1570). The former is responsible for much of the current structure and cosmology of Kabbalah, as the "Lurianic" school of thought provided answers to many of the more complex issues of Kabbalistic thought, particularly relating to the "breaking of the vessels".
The next major historical development of Kabbalah came with the formation of the Hasidic Movement in the mid 1700's, based around the Rabbi Israel, more commonly known as the Baal Shem Tov (1698-1760), which means "master of the word", a high mark of respect in Kabbalism.
The Kabbalah later passed into western esotericism through translations via German scholars to English esotericists such as S. M. Mathers and W. W. Westcott, two of the founders of the Golden Dawn. It had already been suggested that Kabbalah and Tarot were associated by Comte de Mellet writing in Antoine Court deGebelin’s “Le Monde Primitif”. It is through these and other occultists such as Eliphas Levi that Kabbalah and Tarot became entwined.
We do not delve too deeply here into that history, which you can explore further through the suggested reading list at the conclusion of this present experience.
Resurrection Engine: Gate 1
The Schemata
This is the first gate of our Resurrection experience, and is called the “Schemata”. The concept of gated spreads is that they are designed to a fundamental pattern – archetypal – and linked together in a series so that each spread depends on the one before it. Not only that, but each spread requires an engagement in real life in response before progressing to the next spread.
In this way, a spread may not make sense unless you have accomplished the task of the previous gates – this is why the technique is called a “gated spread”.
For this particular spread, we are teaching Kabbalah and Tarot, particularly the relationship of the Majors to the Paths on the Tree of Life. In doing so, we will also introduce a new concept called “calibrated spreads”, another innovation of Tarosophy.
Before we begin our first gate we will perform a calibrated spread which we will examine and learn over the entire week, returning to it so that even if it makes little sense to begin with, by the end of the week, you’ll be able to perform this spread for any event or question in the future. This will be our schemata.
As the theme of our week is resurrection, We would like you to ask this question of this spread – “What aspect of my life which has died requires to be brought to life again?”
This is a powerful question, so please do contemplate it before approaching this spread.
The Tree of Life
The Tree of Life – the central and most well-known glyph of Kabbalah - provides a comprehensive map of processes and relationships as an idealised structure of creation. The Kabbalistic scholar, Gershom Scholem, writes that the Sephiroth, usually drawn as circles on the diagram:
… constitute a well-structured form, in which every part or limb operates upon every other, and not just the higher ones on the lower. The Sefiroth are connected with one another by means of secret “channels,” tsinoroth, whereby each radiates into the other and in which the other is in turn reflected [1].
We will return to these secret channels later, but for now we will use our Tarot and the basic Tree of Life model as a means of examining and exploring the nature of what it is which we wish to resurrect in our life.
Illustration. Tree of Life with roots in heaven.
This method is also particularly useful for exploring a long-past event, one which was traumatic, crucial, life-changing or otherwise notable. It is best used to re-calibrate ones lessons and values which emerge from such ev
ents in our lives, whether we believe it to be resolved or otherwise. We would like to thank a particular intermediate group of students who allowed us to test this method with them using important and real-life experiences [2].
This is not just a simple re-imaging of an event in the light of a Tarot reading. It is a comparison of such an event against a congruent structure or map through correspondence. In this manner, we engage with our life experience, calibrating it to a map – refining both in the process. It also honors the structure of both Tarot and Kabbalah in using specific cards for the divination and comparing them to fixed cards on the chosen map – in this case, the system of correspondences as developed and utilized by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
The depth of this method and variety of outcomes and insights precludes a comprehensive overview of all potential results. Over this week, the method will be presented and a sample reading given, with a list of some of the main routes of enquiry you might like to pursue on adopting this method.
DO NOT worry if this doesn’t make any immediate sense – the aim of this week is to present the method up-front and explore it over the course of the Engine Running! For today, just perform the spread itself and notice whatever you can.
The Method
This method uses only the Minor cards. Take the 40 Minor cards, Ace to 10 in each Suit, from your Tarot deck. Set the others to one side.
Consider the question “What needs resurrecting?” When you do this spread at other times, you can also ask about a past event, unresolved, or a present unfolding where you wish to explore the lessons being taught or which you need to learn. In effect, this method provides a large contextual frame in which your life-story can be explored.