When circumstances ruffle our complacency, we question the superficial happenstances in our lives. As we search for the elusive, unknown dimension of our experience that mysteriously intertwines with what we believe to be ‘real’ we open to the evolving and expanding possibilities that break through the boundaries limiting our understanding of ‘reality.’ We may be ready to reconnect with the wisdom of the intuitive— an ancient faculty and sense we all posses, that, in the scientific proclivity of the western mindset has been shunted aside in an attempt to validate logic and reasoning as the sole legitimate pathways to accessing truth. While the intuitive has been relegated to the stuff of fairy tales, as the Sacred Feminine energies rises from depths, attention is once again being turned to alternative methods of understanding the human journey of spiritual beings.
Jewish wisdom literature teaches that leaving unexamined a dream (or a synchronicity or hunch for that matter) is like receiving a letter from Divinity that we leave unopened. Coincidence, it is said, is God’s way of remaining anonymous. It was a serendipitous moment of awareness then that led me back to the Tarot. Vaguely familiar with this ‘fortune-telling device’ from my teens, in revisiting the mythic portent of the cards as a Jewish mystic, something I had not previously noticed caught my attention. It was the number 22— an interesting number indeed. 20, 21 or even 25 would be more in keeping with the way we tend to group and sequence numerically. My immediate associations with this number were the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet and twenty-two pathways of the Tree of Life. Coincidental?
As a pleasurable pastime intended only for myself, I wondered about Tarot’s connection with Jewish mysticism and the magical quality of the Hebrew alphabet. And so it began. What would happen, I wondered, if I removed the Christian feel of many of the cards such as ‘The Devil’ ‘The Hierophant’ and ‘The Hanging Man’— none of which were familiar concepts to me? Furthermore, if I was to replace the male figures in the cards with feminine archetypes, how would the cards then feel? I knew I wanted to honor the ancient mystery teaching in each image and its reading, but wanted to find a way that would make this more accessible to a 21st Jewish mystic.