Hanukkah Begins (12.18.2022)
Celebration and reflection . . .
A couple of weeks ago, I promised a further account of some signs I’d been receiving. But every time I tried to write “Part 2,” I got more and more tangled up. So I’ll just abbreviate the whole thing down to my new thought: since the whole signs journey turned out to be about the relationship between Tarot and Kabbalah, the eight days of Hanukkah offers a perfect framework for a series of Daily Notes.
I’ll begin with a little bit of background.
On November 25, Substack’s weekly “What to Read” newsletter arrived in my Inbox. Every issue highlights a Substack newsletter/writer, and this time it was:
I’ve mentioned
and his terrific newsletter——more than once on EP. Here’s how he described his work in the first interview question:What’s your Substack about in one sentence?
I use astrology as next-level psychoanalysis of the culture, the arts, and the individual.
Clear, concise, thought-provoking! There’s an unedited version of the interview on Woodruff, and I urge you to read it.
But for right now, here’s the passage I want to highlight:
You can’t work with the cards without comprehending the Tarot’s history within the 18th-century occult tradition. That tradition relates directly to the Kabbalah, and that system must be mastered before the cards actually “do” anything meaningful. The notion that they are simply a “mirror” for the person’s ego is childish and in direct opposition to what the Tarot might otherwise convey if applied correctly. That “conveying” thing is the Tarot’s x-factor.
That’s a pretty strong statement. And though I’m completely aligned with the “not a mirror” part—the first two sentences are very different from my own thinking.
So I had to give this a lot of thought. And that led me to a new insight, which I’ll try to share over the course of these notes.
In the meantime, though, I’ll cover a couple of preliminary bases. One of my concerns about the Tarot/Kabbalah connection has always had to do with whether it represents an instance of “cultural appropriation”—by which I mean, adopting the surface structures or visible symbolism of some belief system without truly understanding their spiritual context.
There’s more about that topic in an earlier EP newsletter.
Along the same lines, I wondered whether there’s a genuine connection between Kabbalah (a spiritual/mystical practice) and Hanukkah (a religious celebration based on specific events in Jewish history). I sampled several commentaries, and found a core theme. Here’s one version:
According to Kabbalah each holiday opens a gate during that particular time of the year and offers us spiritual powers that are not available during other days. Each holiday opens a gate to a unique and different kind of spiritual enlightenment.
On Hanukkah the gate that opens connects us to the power of miracles and the power to overcome the mundane nature in order to turn the impossible into a reality.
I really like that idea! And it seems supportive of my plan for a Hanukkah series of Daily Notes on Tarot and Kabbalah.
I have a few other items to share in the notes as well—including a remarkable new deck, and an experiment with AI Tarot.
See you tomorrow. C