The Tarot is often presented as a medieval curiosity, a set of painted cards that wandered from Italy into France and became a favorite tool of fortune tellers. But to stop there is to stay on the surface of the ocean without ever diving into its depths. In truth, the Tarot is not a mere game, nor a system of shallow prediction. It is what Samael Aun Weor called the "tablets of the cosmic law" — a symbolic book that predates paper and ink, where every number, every archetype, and every image encodes eternal truths about the human soul and the structure of the universe.
The origins of Tarot stretch back much further than the Renaissance. Its archetypes are universal and timeless. The twenty-two Major Arcana correspond directly to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, each a cosmic vibration, each a channel of divine force. This same structure is mirrored in the Kabbalah’s Tree of Life, where the paths between the ten Sephiroth form the invisible architecture of both cosmos and consciousness. To lay the Tarot cards is to walk through those ancient pathways, not by theory alone but through images that strike the subconscious like lightning.
The Tarot as a Book Without Pages
Samael Aun Weor insisted that the Tarot is not read in the ordinary way. It is not a book of ink, but a book of images and numbers. Each card is a living glyph, a doorway into meditation. The Fool, labeled with the number zero, is the raw and unshaped essence of the spirit, infinite and eternal. The Magician, marked as the first Arcanum, is the willpower that directs the elements, the creative spark that begins the work. Each card after unfolds like chapters of a cosmic journey: The High Priestess as the divine mystery, The Emperor as law, Justice as karmic balance, Death as transformation, The Tower as the fall of pride, The World as integration and return.
In this sense, the Tarot is both a calendar of the soul and a cosmic mirror. It describes not only the external events of life but the internal steps of initiation. Samael taught that the twenty-two Major Arcana are like cosmic formulas that the initiate must study, meditate upon, and live. They are not just symbols — they are forces. To meditate on them is to awaken dormant faculties within the consciousness.
The Roots in Kabbalah and Alchemy
The Tarot is inseparable from Kabbalah, the mystical system of Judaism that maps creation through ten spheres and twenty-two paths. Every Tarot card resonates with a Hebrew letter, and each letter carries a numerical value, a sound, a vibration. This is why Tarot is also linked to numerology: the number of the Arcanum reveals its law. The 22 is not simply “The Fool,” it is also the circle of eternity, the cycle of completion. The 13 is not simply “Death,” it is the mystery of transformation and the hidden work of regeneration.
Alchemy, too, flows through the Tarot. The four suits of the Minor Arcana — Cups, Wands, Swords, and Pentacles — are not random. They correspond to the four elements of nature, the four letters of the Tetragrammaton (Yod-He-Vau-He), and the four aspects of the alchemical work: fire, water, air, and earth. To work with the Tarot is to work with these elemental forces, learning how to transmute them within the crucible of the soul. Samael was emphatic: Tarot is not for entertainment. It is a laboratory of initiation.
The Law Written in Symbols
When Samael Aun Weor called the Tarot the “Moses tablets of the law,” he meant that these cards preserve eternal commandments, not in words but in archetypes. Moses descending from Sinai with stone tablets is the same image as the initiate receiving the 22 Arcana. Both are laws carved into reality itself. To ignore them is to live blindly in the mechanical world; to study them is to begin the path of liberation.
The Tarot also holds karmic truth. The card of Justice, for example, does not flatter or condemn arbitrarily. It reveals the equilibrium of cause and effect, the exact balance of action and reaction. The Wheel of Fortune is not luck, but the inexorable law of return — what you sow, you reap, across lifetimes. The Hanged Man shows the sacrifice necessary for awakening, the inversion of values, the death of ego. Every image cuts straight to the soul, bypassing rational defenses. Tarot is not information; it is initiation.
The Fool’s Journey and the Initiate’s Path
In esoteric circles, the Major Arcana are often described as stages of the Fool’s Journey — the path of the soul from ignorance to enlightenment. Samael deepened this vision: the Fool is the initiate himself, stepping into the unknown, carrying nothing but potential. Each Arcanum after is a test, a key, a gate. To truly walk this path is not to shuffle cards but to live the Arcana internally. The Tower must fall within, tearing down the ego’s false structures. Death must be embraced within, allowing the old self to die so the new may be born. The World is not an external success but the inner marriage of spirit and matter.
The Minor Arcana, often ignored, also carry immense weight. Their sequences reveal the struggles of daily life, the cycles of effort, conflict, love, and material reality. They are the battlefield where the Major Arcana’s laws play out. To study them is to see how cosmic truths manifest in ordinary experience.
The Tarot and Gnosis
For Samael Aun Weor and the Gnostic tradition, Tarot is not speculation but practice. Each Arcanum is meditated upon, visualized, and invoked in the consciousness. To truly know Tarot is to integrate it into the soul. It is not about predicting the future but about transforming the present. In Gnostic meditation, the student contemplates the imagery of a card, penetrating beyond the surface into the vibration it contains. Over time, the initiate awakens clairvoyance, intuition, and comprehension — the faculties needed to read the great book of life itself.
Samael also linked the Tarot to the Book of Revelation, seeing in the Apocalypse of St. John the same archetypes: the seven trumpets, the four horsemen, the woman clothed with the sun. For him, Tarot is the universal language of symbols, appearing across all sacred texts. It is the common thread of esotericism, the pure science of the soul.
Conclusion: The Eternal Book
To dismiss the Tarot as superstition is to miss the point entirely. These 78 cards — 22 Major and 56 Minor — are the crystallization of millennia of wisdom. They are the universal archive of humanity’s inner journey. From Babylonian star-watchers to Egyptian priests, from Hebrew prophets to alchemists, the wisdom of the ages is distilled in this symbolic deck. Samael Aun Weor called it a “book of stone” because it cannot be erased, cannot be falsified. Its truths are eternal.
To walk into the Tarot is to walk into yourself. It is the encounter with destiny, with karma, with the eternal laws that govern all existence. It is the Moses tablets reimagined not in stone but in living archetypes. The initiate who studies Tarot with reverence discovers not fortune telling, but the keys of liberation. And in that discovery, the Fool finally completes his journey — realizing that he was never just a wanderer, but a fragment of the eternal, returning home.
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