MEDITATIONS ON THE TAROT
No book has been more confoundingly and imaginatively expressive of catholic orthodoxy than the anonymously authored Meditations on the Tarot, now known to be the Estonian Catholic convert Valentin Tomberg. Featuring a preface from major 20th century Roman Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar and rumored to have been on Pope John Paul II’s nightstand, Meditations seeks to illuminate traditional catholic doctrines such as the Incarnation and the Resurrection by the inner light of spiritual experience and, importantly, practice: as the title suggests, the book prescribes meditations on the 22 major arcana or trumps of the tarot (a standard tarot deck includes these richly allegorical cards alongside suit and court cards, as in a playing card deck), each card offering its own "spiritual exercise," similar to those of Ignatius of Loyola. Curiously, the tarot abounds with Christian imagery, originating in medieval Italy. From the memento mori of the Death card to the presence of Adam and Eve and the archangel Michael in the Lovers, the tarot is a ready-made manual of Christian visio divina, divine viewing, that engages the imagination, the emotions, and the intellect in the pursuit of spiritual truth.
In addition to the traditions of Roman Catholicism, the Meditations also integrates the traditions of Rudolf Steiner’s “esoteric Christian” Anthroposophy, to which its author at one point belonged, in addition to a kind of esoteric universalism that sought to reconcile competing worldviews and religio-philosophical systems. Indeed, the Meditations proposes the integral non-system (because it does not seek to supplant Christian revelation or scientific or artistic learning) of Christian Hermeticism, Tomberg’s idiosyncratic understanding of Christian spirituality that incorporates the theories and methods of the Western esoteric traditions. He understands the Christian Hermeticist’s vocation thusly: “Now Hermeticism, the living Hermetic tradition, guards the communal soul of all true culture. I must add: Hermeticists listen to—and now and then hear—the beating of the heart of the spiritual life of humanity. They cannot do otherwise than live as guardians of the life and communal soul of religion, science, and art… saints, true scientists, and artists of genius are their superiors.” (1)Christian Hermeticism thus represents a peculiar vocation—and the peculiar patronage of John the Beloved Disciple, who also listened to the beating heart of Life.
As a young man, Tomberg assumed a leadership role in the Anthroposophical Society before becoming a catechumen in the Orthodox Church. He would eventually abandon this effort, dismayed at the collaboration of the Church’s officials with the Nazi regime. It wouldn’t be until he and his family resettled as refugees in London, where he worked as a broadcast journalist and earned a law degree, that he would join the Roman Catholic Church.
Though most would not call this a work of orthodox Christian theology, Tomberg’s project in the Meditations is surely a conciliatory one, aiming to reintegrate the energy, imagistic intensity, and the emphasis on praxis of Western esotericism back into a catholic Christian framework under the banner of “Christian Hermeticism.” Hermeticism is a slippery term, much like esotericism or, indeed, Christianity: It at once refers to the stream of Late Antique Greco-Egyptian philosophy ascribed to the mythical Hermes Trismegistus; an organic, analogical worldview identified with the occultism of the Renaissance; and, of course, with the collection of movements that came out of the 19th century occult revivals of France and England.
In addition to the text’s strange roots and perhaps even stranger branches, it was also the book that, more than any others, helped me frame my own pilgrimage towards the Christ, often, admittedly, traversing the same spiritual landscapes that the Meditations' author sought to integrate. Like Tomberg, I had spent the last several years exploring what scholars now refer to as the Western esoteric traditions, those systems of discarded knowledge that include alchemy, astrology, magic, and others (traditions I now study academically, especially their intersection with Christian communities as typified by the Meditations to a very large degree). This represented for me an early attempt at identity formation, searching for a religious philosophy that I could find myself within, especially a countercultural one, a submerged and subterranean religious current that ran through European history—but broken by regular bouts of oppression by the orthodox.
And yet, I became aware of precisely the “peculiar temper of mind” noted by our very own Evelyn Underhill in her magisterial Mysticism. In it she describes “the cold intellectual arrogance, the intensely individual point of view which occult studies seem to induce by their conscious quest of exclusive power and knowledge, their implicit neglect of love.” Mysticism, in many of its popular varieties, can lead us further away from the divine. And yet, paradoxically, in our time as in Underhill’s, such fascinations, when pursued for the sake of truth with sincerity, have led many “to the cradle of the Incarnate God.” (2)
A major stumbling block to me, and probably many who are Christo-curious, was how to conceive of the Church itself: is it ephemeral and ultimately arbitrary or is it concrete and necessarily restrictive? One of the most elements of the Meditations is the metaphor it offers of the two Churches, the Church of Peter and the Church of John (not so unlike the more traditional metaphor of the church visible and church mystical), the latter of which safeguards “the spirit of John, the disciple loved by the Master, he who leaned on his breast and heard the beating of his heart,” whose “mission… is to keep the life and soul of the Church alive until the Second Coming of the Lord.” The Church of Peter, of the first bishop of Rome according to Roman Catholic tradition, represents the external structures and authorities which maintain the Church in its entirety: “[I]t is the head which makes decisions, directs, and chooses the means for the accomplishment of the tasks of the entire organism—head, heart, and limbs.” (3) In other words, the Church is not just authority and structure, but the community wherein Christ’s heartbeat reverberates, if we have but ears to listen. And conversely, the Church is not just the totality of spiritual experiences of the Incarnate God, but indeed also a network of structures tasked with preserving His truth. This is not so dissimilar from the inner church that one of Western Christianity’s most heroic modern saints, Martin Luther King, Jr., described in his letter from Birmingham jail, expressing his dismay at the outer Church’s inaction in the face of injustice and calling for it to accomplish its grave task.
While I, too, would find myself darkening the doors of a Christian church again, like many others through the influence of the Meditations, the great benefit I received from this wonderful book is the knowledge that Christian orthodoxy already always was and is as expansive and imaginatively rich as one might expect a complete doctrine of God, humankind, and the cosmos to be. Certainly, we can find many antecedents to this way of thinking about Christian orthodoxy, from the neo-Romanticism of G.K. Chesterton to the explicitly reformist Rosicrucian manifestos of the 17th century, whose shadowy brothers “heal the sick” of their tumultuous age—and for free. Yet, the Meditations doesn’t so much define a new, alternative, or esoteric Christianity as much as it draws out the threads of Christian orthodoxy in the imagistic tangents of the—indeed—subterranean thought currents of the Western esoteric milieu—which, historically, only became divorced from Christian apologetics and cosmology from the late 19th century onwards. The Meditations implicitly argues that Christianity is not merely a philosophy that one can take or leave in the modern religious marketplace, but if it is true, then, in the formulation of Justin Martyr, it contains and perfects as such all partial truths, especially insofar as they themselves reach for an understanding of God and humankind.
And this is not so alien to us in the Anglican communion, after all. In my studies, I have never failed to delight in how our richly aesthetic, incarnational traditions have undertaken similar projects, especially amongst our beloved authors and artists like Evelyn Underhill, Charles Williams, and Arthur Machen, all of who made their flight to Christian orthodoxy on the wings of the occult, coming to see its theories and methods as shadows of those of the one holy, catholic and apostolic church.
Meditations on the Tarot will remain dear to my heart as a testament to the vastness of our God, in whose dwelling places are many rooms, and in whose Church even those inclined to the mysteries may find their especial vocation, as Tomberg himself did.
Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey Into Christian Hermeticism (New York: Tarcher/Putnam, 1980), 6-7.
Quoted in J. Patrick Pazdziora, “Improper Grimoires: Evelyn Underhill’s Representation of Ritual Magic in The Column of Dust,” Literature & Theology 33, no. 1 (2018): 31.
Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, 6.
