Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey Into Christian Hermeticism

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This book is a hermeneutic exploration of each of those relationships as they form an open but combinatory system for understanding who we are and how we are in the world. But there are many others who ought to be named as guardians of the ancient tradition of the arcanum of inspiration.

The author unfortunately, if memory serves, defends certain ideas that are incompatible with Christianity, such as reincarnation and universalism, so the faithful Christian should proceed cautiously if he's not ready to objectively encounter such ideas from an odd, apparently Christian source. These in their worst result in a teaching of forgiveness without repentance, and a quest for God without Obedience,. These are names which, like the yellow leaves of autumn, repose in forgetfulness beneath the immense white shroud of snow which covers pre-revolutionary Russia. They leave the Subtle Body and enter the Soul, in which case they either transform the soul into its Likeness or Annhilate it. It can at least be said that the previous Pope belongs to a milieu of influential German-speaking Catholics who have advocated Meditations on the Tarot in various ways.

Finally, there is another (admittedly very small) indicator of Ratzinger’s attitudes from public statements made by Martin Kriele, a significant cultural figure in German jurisprudence. The book contains scores of examples of what I mean by this delicate deconstruction of both pre-Christian paganism and today’s burgeoning New Age movement. In this work of staggering insight, intelligence, imagination, and service, an anonymous Catholic author metabolizes diverse cultural and spiritual terrains while participating in the Mystical Body of Christ. For myself, it was only after my seventh reading of the book in 2001 that I could answer that question in a satisfying way. If Love existed, Jesus himself would not have cast demons into the innocent animal kingdom, the pigs.

Tomberg is readable because he really does bring a more continental, older-sourced tradition to Catholicism. The Catholic Church, being catholic or universal, cannot consider itself as a particular church among other particular churches, nor consider its dogmas as religious opinions among other religious opinions or confessions. The new, most current, special Avatar can easily be accepted and be placed first on the list of Avatars. First, what this book is NOT: it is not a "how to" book that will teach you how to use and interpret Tarot cards for the purpose of divination.

This can only lead to surprising insights, and even if it ultimately leads us to where we were already going, it allows us to pick up a little more along the way.

This book is a tour-de-force in which Tomberg relates the symbolism of the Tarot cards to Christian doctrine, understood in both an exoteric (orthodox) and esoteric (mystical and/or heterodox) manner. Transitory in nature, full of riddles, temptations and desires for status -- the author shows us how these things are.as the author is not tired to repeat) is ultimately a failure and results more often than not in a kind of syncretistic theosophy ("pseudo-religion" as Guenon rightly dubbed it).

Now, each card is presented as a teaching tool of sorts for a particular set of ideas, and the anonymous author seems to harness the imagery to make his points quite convincingly. Tarot, like most useful forms of creative thought, is primarily about combination and juxtaposition, both with the problem at hand and between the cards themselves. For the New Age movement is based, above all, on Eastern forms of pre-Christian spirituality, which became outmoded by the Incarnation.Some anthroposophists have recognised and seen reflected in this work the same spiritual impulse working itself - though in a different form - as it did in the works of Rudolf Steiner. Before the Motu Proprio, I was living and travelling in France, profoundly interested in the rumours that existed that Benedict XVI was about to free the Latin Mass. It is an effort to revive the tradition of Christian Hermeticism - that spiritual tradition that seeks the depths and the heights of meaning and authentic tradition. John Paul II certainly knew the Meditations on the Tarot and would have known that von Balthasar had written the foreword. Well, yeah, in the sense that it's a long, complex book about so much more that the Tarot that it's like a bomb going off inside you when you start to follow where it's going.