Welcome to the Christine Payne-Towler Tarot Library.
Included here are excerpts from her book, The Underground Streams: Esoteric Tarot Revealed.
Upon viewing the essays, you'll have the option of opening up a print-friendly PDF version in Acrobat Reader (free from Adobe).
Tarot's Major Arcana cards are linked to an astrological influence...a planet, zodiac sign or element.
Because both Tarot and Astrology have evolved over the centuries, so have these correlations.
Below are lists of common correspondences and are grouped in "schools of thought" with a link
for more in-depth information following the group. Note that this table does not
list the arcana number as these vary between decks, but a common card name. This name signifies
a card in every esoteric deck (though not every deck uses the same name).
by Christine Payne-Towler This exercise proposes Faivre's definitions of "Western Esotericism" and "esoteric spirituality", as showcased in his contributions to Modern Esoteric Spirituality (Crossroads Press, 1995) and Access to Western Esotericism (SUNY Press, 1994.) If we are interested in determining when Tarot became esoteric, it seems only logical for us to definie the idea -- what IS esoteric?
This work began in 1970 when I
purchased a used deck of the 20th Century Tarot in a book shop in
Salem, Oregon. I was a freshman in college. With parents who were
both therapists, I instantly recognized that Tarot was a tool with
great potential for helping people grapple with the changing circumstances
in their lives.
Modern Tarot is not a card game. It is a form
of divination. As such, modern Tarot does not originate in medieval
Italian card games, although they eventually became mediums through
which cartomantic divination was done. Modern Tarot has a much more
ancient derivation in the phenomenology of religions, iconography,
and in Western esoteric tradition.
The term "esoteric Tarot"
defines our approach to the unfolding history of Tarot. Throughout
this program, it is the key concept and watchword. So the reader can
follow the discussion, I have listed the following characteristics
that must be met to qualify a deck as an esoteric Tarot:
The subject of Gnosticism is entirely too
large to be dealt with in an essay such as this one. This spiritual
path has a history longer than that of Christianity and covers a
territory that includes most of western and eastern Europe, the
Middle East, North Africa, India, China and the Russian territories.
For the first three decades during which I
was assimilating information about Tarot, I avoided the history
of the Kabalah. Not only had it seemed too abstruse and foreign,
but the teachings had apparently fragmented due to the many forced
migrations imposed upon the Jews throughout their history. I did
not relish the task of sorting out all the nuances, and I was intimidated
by the volume of literature associated with this ancient study.
