1.2.2025

Entering the garden . . .

Hello everyone. And welcome new readers!

We’re starting off 2025 with a series of Thursday posts that explore the Ten Doors to Tarot model I came up with a few years ago. It was meant to show the varied facets of Tarot engagement—some of which overlap quite a bit, while some differ considerably.

A post explaining that basic structure has been perched center-top of the EP home page for years now, and I refer to it occasionally in other posts. But to be honest, I hadn’t looked at it substantively in rather a while.

So I didn’t realize that the post now featured on the home page no longer contains this useful illustration:

A companion post, Ten Doors, Ten Books, suggested starting places for the different paths. It’s just titles, but you could think of it as a list of books to read (or at least scan) if you wanted to get a sort of big-picture view of the Tarot landscape.

Here’s what I said originally about what I had in mind for this model:

Imagine a walled garden, with ten doors. If you enter by one door, you will gain a particular perspective on the garden — and if you enter by another, a different perspective.

From each door runs a distinctive path. Though the paths start in separate places, they cross and converge at many points. Sometimes predictably, sometimes quite unexpectedly.

What I didn’t think of then, and am just realizing, is that the amount of traffic through each door changed significantly over the period during which serious interest in Tarot developed. When I look at the model from that perspective, it seems like the doors should be placed in a way that reflects their popularity, influence, and/or relevance over time.

So here’s a sketch of what might be a more meaningful order.

• I probably thought of Symbolism as Door 1 because at the time I was writing both my books (and continuing well into the 21st century), the Jungian approach to Tarot was dominant. But in terms of how interest in Tarot began and evolved—Door 1 would have to be Esoteric, in the sense of “information known only to a few.” From the late 18th through the 19th centuries, Court de Gebelin and others thought of themselves as discovering a trove of ancient knowledge concealed beneath the exoteric conceit of a card game.

• Starting from there, Door 2 should be Magick, as that was the approach taken by the influential occult groups that formed and fractured around the turn on the 20th century. Door 3 should be Creativity, considering the influence of Tarot among poets (Yeats, Eliot, and others) during the Modernist period. And Door #4 should probably be Aesthetic, given that I decided it would be useful to divide the verbal and the visual into two categories.

• All four of those doors are related to Symbolism, but in different ways over time. And it wasn’t until the Beat poets and Surrealist painters of the mid-century took up Tarot that symbolism became more overtly considered. That overlapped neatly with the popularization of Jungian psychology—so let’s make this Door 5.

• History is another door that probably seemed more important to me because at the time I was writing my books, the serious study of Tarot history was only just getting underway. And from the 1980s to the 2000s, there were many books, blogs, and forums dedicated to sorting out the many questions about what happened when in the evolution of Tarot—both as a deck of cards and as a topic of speculation. So I’m now going to place History at Door 6.

• And after that . . . the Therapeutic, Meditation, and Social doors all blur together into what we have today. So I’ll give them Doors 8, 9, and 10, in any order.

• By now you may be wondering what happened to Divination—and so was I! Although I’ve been quite focused on this aspect of Tarot as both a practitioner and a commentator, I didn’t really appreciate until now how much the idea of Tarot divination came into its temporary prominence during the so-called “New Age” period. So Divination gets Door 7.

Needless to say, there are other structures I could use to rearrange the doors. I’m pretty happy with this one, though, for the time being . . .

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I probably won’t be able to resist creating a new graphic, and will share that when it comes to pass. In the meantime, there will be a bonus EP on Sunday—and next Thursday, we’ll open Door #1.

As always, thanks so much for reading. And best wishes for the New Year! C