Using Kabbalah and Hermeticism with Tarot Cards: A History

Open almost any modern tarot guidebook and you will find Hebrew letters next to the Major Arcana, astrological signs on the Minor Arcana and a diagram of ten circles joined by twenty-two lines. People often assume that this apparatus is as old as the cards. It is not. It is the product of about 150 years of occult writing, mostly French and English, layered on top of a Renaissance card game. Knowing where each layer came from makes the system easier to use and harder to be misled by.

How the cards acquired a secret history

1. 1430s, northern Italy. Tarot appears as a game, with four ordinary suits plus a fifth set of picture cards called trionfi, or triumphs, and a fool. Britannica dates the game to this period. There is no sign of any religious or magical use for the next three centuries.
2. 1781, Paris. Antoine Court de Gébelin, a Protestant pastor and scholar, publishes a volume of his encyclopedia “Le Monde primitif” claiming the tarot is a surviving Egyptian “Book of Thoth”. An essay in the same volume by the Comte de Mellet first suggests pairing the 22 trumps with the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Neither man had evidence; Egyptian writing was not deciphered until the 1820s.
3. 1780s, Paris. Jean-Baptiste Alliette, writing as Etteilla, publishes books on reading the tarot for fortune-telling and in 1789 issues the first deck designed for divination rather than play, with meanings printed on the cards.
4. 1854 to 1856, Paris. Éliphas Lévi (Alphonse-Louis Constant) publishes “Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie”. He assigns each trump a Hebrew letter in order, starting with the Magician as Aleph, and links the four suits to the four letters of the divine name. This is the foundation every later system builds on or argues with.
5. 1888, London. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn is founded. Its tarot paper, known as Book T, rebuilds Lévi’s scheme: the Fool moves to Aleph, every trump is placed on a path of the Tree of Life, Strength and Justice swap numbers to fit the zodiac, and the Minor Arcana are tied to the sephiroth, the elements and the 36 decans of the zodiac.
6. 1909, London. Arthur Edward Waite, a Golden Dawn member, commissions Pamela Colman Smith to draw a deck published by William Rider and Son. It keeps the Strength and Justice swap and hides the Golden Dawn correspondences inside the pictures rather than printing them. It becomes the most copied deck in the world.
7. 1938 to 1944, England. Aleister Crowley, another former Golden Dawn member, designs the Thoth deck with the painter Lady Frieda Harris and explains it in “The Book of Thoth”. The cards carry Hebrew letters, astrological glyphs and Tree of Life colouring openly, and Crowley makes his own changes, including swapping the letters of the Star and the Emperor.

What “Hermeticism” and “Kabbalah” mean in this story

Hermeticism refers to a body of Greek-Egyptian texts from roughly the second and third centuries CE attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, a figure blending the Greek god Hermes with the Egyptian god Thoth. The Corpus Hermeticum was translated into Latin in the 1460s and became fashionable in Renaissance Florence. The “Emerald Tablet”, source of the slogan “as above, so below”, is a short Arabic text of the early Middle Ages that reached Europe in Latin. The “seven Hermetic principles” that circulate online come from “The Kybalion”, an American book of 1908, not from antiquity.

Kabbalah is a Jewish mystical tradition with its own texts, above all the Zohar, which appeared in Spain in the late 13th century, and the much older Sefer Yetzirah, which discusses the 22 Hebrew letters and ten “sefirot”. Jewish Kabbalah has nothing to do with playing cards. What the tarot writers used was a Christian and then occult adaptation, often spelled “Qabalah” to mark the difference, that passed through Renaissance figures such as Pico della Mirandola and Cornelius Agrippa and reached the Golden Dawn by way of the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher’s 1652 diagram of the Tree of Life. It is that diagram, not a Jewish one, that the Golden Dawn mapped the cards onto.

The Tree of Life in brief

The Tree is a diagram of ten circles, the sephiroth, arranged in three vertical pillars and joined by 22 lines, the paths. The right-hand pillar is traditionally called Mercy, the left Severity, and the centre the Middle Pillar. Reading from the top, the sephiroth run Kether, Chokmah, Binah, Chesed, Geburah, Tiphareth, Netzach, Hod, Yesod and Malkuth. The Golden Dawn numbered the sephiroth 1 to 10 and the paths 11 to 32, and gave each path one Hebrew letter and one trump.

The Minor Arcana attach to the sephiroth by number: every Ace sits in Kether, every Two in Chokmah, and so on down to the Tens in Malkuth. The four suits run as four parallel “worlds”, Wands for fire, Cups for water, Swords for air and Pentacles for earth. The court cards are placed by rank: the Golden Dawn’s Kings (shown on horseback, and renamed Knights in later decks) in Chokmah, Queens in Binah, Princes in Tiphareth and Princesses in Malkuth.

The ten sephiroth and the Minor Arcana

The 22 paths as the Golden Dawn mapped them

Where the systems disagree

The table above is one system among several, which is the clearest sign that it is a convention rather than a discovery. Lévi started his letters with the Magician as Aleph and placed the Fool near the end as Shin. The Golden Dawn moved the Fool to the front as Aleph and shifted every other letter by one. Crowley kept the Golden Dawn order but swapped the letters of the Star and the Emperor to fit a line in his own scriptures, and renamed several trumps: Strength became Lust, Justice became Adjustment, Temperance became Art, Judgement became The Aeon and the World became The Universe. Continental readers who follow the French school often keep Lévi’s order, and Marseille-pattern decks carry no letters at all. A reader who learns one scheme is learning a dialect, not a law.

How to use the correspondences in a reading

Treated as a vocabulary, the system adds a layer of structure that many readers find useful. Three habits make the most of it.

• Read Minor Arcana numbers as positions on the Tree. A Five, whatever its suit, sits in Geburah, the sephira of conflict and cutting back; a Six sits in Tiphareth, the point of balance. That is why the Five of Cups, Five of Wands, Five of Swords and Five of Pentacles all describe some kind of struggle, and why the Sixes tend to describe recovery.
• Read a trump as a path between two states. Temperance joins Tiphareth to Yesod, balance to imagination; the Tower joins Netzach to Hod, feeling to thought. When a trump appears, ask which two things in your situation it is trying to connect.
• Use the Hebrew letter as a picture. Each letter has a traditional meaning as a word: Beth is a house, Gimel a camel, Daleth a door. The Magician as a house, the High Priestess as a camel crossing a desert, the Empress as a door: these are memorable prompts, which is all a correspondence needs to be.

What the correspondences are not

• Not evidence of Egyptian origins. The “Book of Thoth” story was a guess made before anyone could read hieroglyphs, and nothing found since supports it.
• Not Jewish Kabbalah. The tarot mapping uses a Christian and occult adaptation built on a 17th-century diagram; it should not be presented as part of a living religious tradition.
• Not a method of prediction. Placing the Tower on path 27 tells you what two ideas the tradition connects. It does not tell you that anything will fall.
• Not a requirement. Readers worked with the cards for a century before any of this existed, and plenty of good readers today never use it.

Related reading

• Tarot and the Fool’s Journey
• How to Pick the Right Tarot Deck
• Understanding Tarot Card Numerology
• Astrology and Tarot
• The Tree of Life Tarot Spread
• Introduction to Tarot Cards and How They Work

Frequently asked questions