"The essence of the tradition is not a doctrine, but rather a community of spirits from age to age." — Valentin Tomberg, the anonymous author of Meditations on the Tarot
Or, as I wrote about Dan Torday's novel The 12th Commandment:
"Torday’s novel is also about how we give each other our time. It explores what it means to have a teacher. You learn from the righteous person, the tzaddik, primarily by being in their presence, listening, witnessing, inhaling. The teacher’s statements don’t have to be logically consistent. This describes fiction and real life. 'All narrators are unreliable,' as Torday has said elsewhere, elsetime. People, fictional and real, seek to make sense of the chaos we find ourselves in. We narrate the mess and its meaning. Meaning can be a personal experience or connection, and these feelings and relationships can change. We don’t know the answers, but we can stay with each other."
Or:
"In a 1908 article, British artist, illustrator and costume designer Pamela Colman Smith shared how she thought paintings should be viewed. 'Learn from everything, see everything, and above all feel everything! Find eyes within, look for the door into the unknown country.'
Smith could well have been describing how to use a deck of tarot cards. After all, she was responsible for creating the illustrations used in the world’s most popular tarot card design. In 1909, Smith and poet and mystic Arthur Waite met through a secret society known as the 'Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn'. Their mutual belief in spiritualism, rituals, symbolism and psychic practices led to them to join forces and create a tarot card deck, combining Waite’s concepts with Smith’s Art Nouveau-style illustrations."
— The secret history of the world’s most popular tarot cards, Suyin Haynes, CNN, December 29, 2023
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