I recently received the following questions via private correspondence:

I want to ask you some detailed questions about the Trumps & the hebrew letters if you don’t mind? Do the hebrew letters play any part in Tarot readings? Ok for example the Chariot is assigned Cheth/Fence well we know that a fence can keep people/things out but it can also keep a person trapped or imprisoned. So what then is the real meaning to Cheth what are we protecting & keeping out or in? I want to know how to use the hebrew letters when applied to a reading. I wish you could teach me more on this subject. Can i ask you if you have received any Tarot papers from the O.T.O or any other Mystery School giving the true hidden meanings to the cards? You seem like you know a lot about the cards…if you or someone is looking to teach the Thoth Tarot please let me know I would love to learn the “True Meanings” to the cards.

My response was as follows.

You appear to have picked up some rather strange ideas about the Tarot. The Tarot originated in 15th century Europe as a game. The Tarot was, originally, a deck of playing cards. The occult associations of Tarot began, as far as anyone can tell, in 1781 when Antoine Court de Gebelin published a speculative and spurious essay asserting that the Tarot was descended from Ancient Egypt and represented the mysteries of Isis and Thoth. It isn’t. It started off as a deck of playing cards and then, from the late 18th century, occultists started overlaying symbolic meanings onto it.

The point of this is that there are no “true hidden meanings”. In particular, the Tarot is not (or originally was not) a pictorial representation of the Qabalah. Some occultist at some point once noticed that there were 22 Tarot trumps, and 22 Hebrew letters, and so he assigned one of latter to each of the former, but the trumps categorically do not originate with the Hebrew letters. The same thing goes for the astrological, numerological and other symbolic attributions – they are, as the name implies, attributed to the trumps, they are not some kind of hidden meaning underlying the trumps. The Tarot is not an embodiment of ancient secret wisdom – it is a deck of playing cards to which some occultists have attributed symbols several centuries after it was invented.

The upshot of this is that the only “objective meaning” for any particular symbol attached to any particular card resides in the intent of the creator of that attribution. In other words, if you want to learn about the symbolism in the Rider-Waite deck, for instance, you’ll need to read Waite’s “The Pictorial Key to the Tarot” where he tells you about the symbols that are on his cards. If you want to learn about the symbolism in the Thoth deck, then you’ll need to read Crowley’s “The Book of Thoth” where he tells you about the symbols that are on his cards. There is no “hidden meaning” that either Waite or Crowley “discovered” – if you want to find out what the symbols on their cards mean, then you have to consult their writings to find out what they intended those symbols to mean. There is no meaning beyond this.

Similarly for “Do the hebrew letters play any part in Tarot readings?” – they do if the reader in question wants them to. Tarot cards do not tell the future. They were, once again, created as a game. There is no secret true method out there which can be discovered for doing an occult reading. All that stuff was invented out of thin air several centuries after the Tarot cards were created. There is a body of tradition which gives some more or less consistent meanings to the cards – and the divinatory meanings often differ markedly from the symbolic meanings – but that’s all it is, tradition. It’s not “true”, or “secret”, or “hidden” – it’s just tradition. The meanings could easily have been something totally different if the creators of the tradition had so preferred. If you want to learn about this tradition, then again, “The Pictorial Key to the Tarot” and “The Book of Thoth” are the places to start. Neither the OTO nor any other “mystery school” has any “secret knowledge” about the cards which is anything other than pure invention. Every other Tarot reader in the world simply starts with the traditions I have mentioned (in many cases they don’t even do that) and then simply makes the rest up as they go along. Do not make the mistake of thinking they’ve tapped into some secret source of knowledge, because they haven’t.

And that’s the long and the short of it. There are no “true hidden meanings” to be found. You can read about what symbols various Tarot designed put on their cards, you can read about what they intended to mean when they did this, and you can read about what meanings other people read into those symbols, but that’s all you can do – there is no “true hidden meaning” to be discovered other than this. If anyone tells you “what [we are] protecting & keeping out or in”, for instance, then that is just their interpretation of the symbols – it’s not fact, and it’s not knowledge. Even if there were a definite and concrete set of interpretations about the symbolism of any given Tarot deck, the chance layout of the cards is just that, a chance layout, and those interpretations would not convey any information about events happening in the real world anyway. You’re looking for something which simply is not there. There is no secret body of “true occult knowledge” out there waiting to be communicated to you. Excise this idea from your mind before it leads you further astray.