Learning Kabbalah

You start out trying to work out why the Major Arcana are numbered the way they are, and every book you open eventually puts a diagram of ten circles in front of you and says the answer is in there. It takes most of us a long while to believe them. This page is the short version of what I wish every reader was told at the start.

Where it comes from

Kabbalah is the mystical tradition that grew inside Judaism over many centuries. The word means something like receiving, as in a teaching handed down from one person to the next. It reached its classical form in thirteenth century Spain, in a long and difficult book called the Zohar, and it was a way of reading scripture, of praying and of thinking about how the world comes out of its source. The Tree of Life, the diagram of ten spheres and twenty two paths, grew up inside that tradition as a way of drawing the answer.

Then, in the 1850s, a French occultist named Eliphas Lévi set the twenty two cards of the Major Arcana against the twenty two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. That one idea changed the tarot for good. A few decades later the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in London in 1888, built on it and worked out the whole system: each Major on a path, each sphere with its planet, the Minor Arcana ranked down the Tree from the Aces to the Tens. Nearly every tarot book written since, and nearly every deck, carries that work whether it says so or not.

So there are two things called Kabbalah in the world. One is a living religious tradition with its own teachers and its own rules. The other is the Western esoteric version, sometimes called Hermetic Kabbalah, that the tarot tradition built on top of it.

What I use and what I leave alone

I use the second one. I want to be plain about that.

I am not a teacher of Jewish Kabbalah and I have no business pretending to be. I work with the English names and the plain transliterations. What I know is the Tree as the tarot tradition uses it, and that is what every page in this section teaches. I use it with respect for where it came from, and I want to say so plainly, once, here, so you know exactly what is on offer.

What I do with the Tree is practical. It is a map. I put cards on it, I put planets on it, I put the letters of a name on it, and I read what lands where. The Tree does not ask you to believe anything to be useful in that way. It only asks you to learn its shape.

Why a tarot reader learns the Tree

Because the cards already live there.

The Tree of Life Spread lays ten cards on the ten spheres and reads them down the Tree and across its pillars. It is the deepest spread I use, and it is the one that shows most clearly why the shape matters. The spread is on this site already, and I would read that page beside this one.

The twenty two Major Arcana sit on the twenty two paths, each path joining two spheres. When The Tower turns up in a reading, I know it sits on the path between feeling and thinking, and that changes how I read it. When The High Priestess appears, I know she sits on the long path straight down the middle of the Tree, from the Crown to the heart. The Twenty Two Paths page gives you every card and its path.

The Minor Arcana sit on the spheres. The four Aces sit at Kether, the four Tens at Malkuth, and every rank in between has its own sphere. So the Six of Cups and the Six of Swords share a home, Tiphareth, the heart of the Tree, and that tells you something about every Six before you look at the picture.

Once you know the Tree, the deck becomes one picture with seventy eight places on it, and you can find your way around it the way you find your way around your own suburb.

How it sits beside numerology and astrology

The Tree carries the planets too. The tradition gives each sphere a planet, Saturn on Binah, Jupiter on Chesed, Mars on Geburah, the Sun on Tiphareth, Venus on Netzach, Mercury on Hod, the Moon on Yesod and the Earth on Malkuth. So when I read your natal chart and your Kabbalah number in the same sitting, they are talking about the same ten places.

And it carries numbers. The ten spheres are numbered 1 to 10, and the letters of your name can be given Hebrew style values, added and reduced to a single digit, which places you on a sphere. That is Kabbalah numerology, and it is a different stream from the Pythagorean numerology I teach in the Numerology section. The Pythagorean values run 1 to 9 across the alphabet. The Kabbalah values climb to 800. The same name comes out with two different numbers, and in my experience the two together are more telling than either alone. The Kabbalah Numerology page shows the arithmetic with two worked names.

How this section is laid out

The Tree of Life walks you through the ten spheres in order, the three pillars, the three triads, the lightning flash and the hidden sphere Daath.

The Twenty Two Paths takes every path with its Hebrew letter and its Major Arcana card.

Kabbalah Numerology gives you the letter values and the method for your own name.

The Sephiroth gives each sphere its own page, with what it means when your name lands there.

Where to start

Start with the picture. Find a diagram of the Tree, or draw one, ten circles and twenty two lines, and keep it beside you while you read The Tree of Life. Then lay the Tree of Life Spread with your own deck and watch the spheres fill up.

Do not try to learn the Hebrew letters first. Plenty of readers do, and plenty give up right there. Learn the ten spheres, learn the three pillars, lay the spread a few times, and the letters will come later when they have somewhere to sit.

You will be your own teacher here as everywhere else. The Tree is only a map, and you are the one walking it.

If you would like your own chart read, my readings are here.