Category: Meditations on the Tarot

Ask, and it will be given you
seek, and you will find;
knock, and it will be opened to you. ~ Luke xi, 9

Hermetism differs from both religion and science, although it does not attempt to replace them. Unlike religion, which accepts things on faith, and unlike science, which is based on facts and theories, Hermetism seeks knowledge. Not knowledge of facts, no matter how mystical, sublime, or luminous, nor knowledge of articles of faith or scientific knowledge, but knowledge of the mysteries, a direct, unmediated, intuitive knowledge.

Hermetism is a way or a path, so it must be traversed. Reading another book or article, or following another guru, will not lead to Hermetic knowledge. Instead, spiritual practice is absolutely essential.

In Letter IV on the Emperor, Valentin Tomberg explains the essential prerequisite of spiritual exercises:
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Sacred Magic

Letter III on the Empress is about Sacred magic, which is putting mystical revelation into practice. This requires preparation:

• Mysticism, or real contact with the Divine
• Gnosis, or taking this contact into consciousness
• Magic, or executing what mystical revelation has made known

Unlike sacred magic, personal magic, i.e., in which the magician decides himself when and how to put esoteric teachings into practice, has certain dangers, including physical problems as well as emotional. I knew a woman, quite closely in fact, who got involved with Enochian magic. Despite her esoteric training she was anxious, emotional, inconstant and paranoid. I don’t know which came first, but at the very least the magical practice did not help her. Sacred magic offers healing, not harm.
Continue reading “The Open and Closed Universes”

Before there was Valentin Tomberg, there was Gregory Ottonovich Mebes, or G.O.M. He led an esoteric school in St. Petersburg, from which we get his own Meditations on the Major Arcana of the Tarot.

In Meditations on the Tarot (MotT), Tomberg describes his encounter with that school:

At St. Petersburg in Russia, around fifty years ago, there was a group of esotericists who composed the flower of the capital’s “intelligentsia”. This group was internally hierarchical, i.e. it comprised “grades” — Martinist, Templar and Rosicrucian. It was, properly said, a school of teaching and training comprising three “courses” or “classes”—first or Martinist, second or Templar, and highest or Rosicrucian.
Continue reading “Gregory Ottonovich Mebes”

In Arcanum VIII Justice, Valentin Tomberg discusses the ideal of equilibrium, which is the general meaning of the card. Although many readers consider that meaning to be the goal of their efforts, on the contrary, that is just the first step on the path to the Hermetic meaning. Tomberg explains:

[The meaning] does not lie in the generality obtained by the method of abstraction, but rather in the depth obtained by the method of penetration.

The most abstract ideas are most superficial. One of the meanings of the first commandment – Thou shalt have no other gods before me – is that one should not substitute an intellectual abstraction of God for the spiritual reality of God.

Thus abstractions like the First Cause or the Absolute are not substitutes for the living reality of God. Nevertheless, they have their use as a starting point for a deeper meditation. We read:

Because no one accepts a hypothesis as absolute truth, just as no one worships a sacred image as absolute reality. Yet hypotheses are fruitful in that they lead us to the truth, in guiding us to it within the totality of our experience … a concept or abstract idea does not replace spiritual reality, but rather gives an impulse and direction towards it … Let us take abstract ideas as hypotheses leading to the truth.

The following passage, published in 1914, expresses the same notion.

The intellectual arguments for the existence of God are necessarily of a somewhat dry and speculative nature … The arguments will prove that God exists, but they will not present God vividly as a real living person, felt to be existing and intimately present, as an imposing reality exercising, so to speak, the magnetism of personality on the soul … Man does not live by pure intellect alone. What he longs for, what he is influenced by, is concrete reality Now this is precisely the purpose of the religious instinct—to seize on the dry, cold, abstract truth of the intellect, and to make it concrete; to clothe the dry bones with flesh, and warm the cold speculative idea till its object is vividly realized as a present and imposing thing. It is only when this happens that God will become in practical effect a Being to be reckoned with, and to be entered into communion with as the object of religious worship and moral service. ~ Ernest Hull, God, Man, and Religion