Tarot and books on individualized path work

General Discussion
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I was at a local tarot group discussion today and someone brought a book that got me thinking about something again. I’ve been on pause with BOTA for a few years, which started for work-related reasons but not I’m really starting to think my relationship with the tarot needs to be slightly refactored.

When I first started studying the tarot it seemed like, running into Golden Dawn and diaspora authors, there was a sense that there was ‘one right way’ or some relatively tight cluster of right ways to look at the keys, or… maybe not right but I think the better term might be ‘effective’. I’m actually coming to see that the effective way might be a fair bit different than just taking up the assumption that the keys are to be mapped onto the kabbalistic tree of life. As far as I know that was a Levi innovation (someone could correct me if there was a precursor to Transcendental Magic that touched on this) and TBH kabbalah started going a bit sour for me when people confirmed for me that it’s not really a map of reality in the rather literal sense that’s often claimed.

Where I’m left then - I see these symbols as logical operators or constraints. They’re containers that can fit certain force and form dynamics but at the same time are broad enough to accommodate many different things. I also get where you can chain these operators together to make useful structures although I really think there’s a leap of faith where they get liberally applied to the Hebrew language. In a way this form of mysticism is very punk, anarchistic, wildstyle graffiti, it’s something extremely innovative and guiled up and I like to think of it a bit like open-sourcing theism but at the same time - as part of that guile, there seems to be plenty of chicanery and it seems to be every bit as quirky and slippery as nature itself.

I’m wondering, with the paragraph immediately above, if any tarot books or work books come to mind for you that really take the logical operator or module piece seriously and treat the tarot first and foremost as a tool for mining the depths of your own psyche? For me that’s where this stuff gets interesting, and I’m much more interested in doing that than I am collecting promissory notes on which god names and archangels I’ll be able to work with in which sphere after I’ve crossed which path or promises of sidhi-like blessings received from mastery of the 22 paths. If I stumble on some of that along the way and find that it has some form of tangible reality more substantive than human projection then great, otherwise I feel like a bit too much fibbing and BS goes on around the tree of life and I’d rather any contact I have with it be organic rather than promised.

I’d love to get back to a really deep relationship with the tarot and parsing my own substance with it and I’m curious how many other people who’ve hit similar places and found particular authors or open-ended processes that seemed to be good catalysts for further work.

Thank you in advance!

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I recommend you to take a look at the shallow world of girls who think that tarot is for doing readings and helping people, those girls usually have no idea about those things that you don’t like (nor know that those things exist in some way) or are overly traumatized by anything that could be related to the Jew god. I’m serious, those girl don’t give a shit about trees that they can not physicaly hug and they are interested in psychology in a non-professional way most of the time

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I actually wouldn’t bother making fun of those girls because I kinda see that they are who they are where they are and if they weren’t doing that they’d probably be into something even less helpful and more cargo-culty in the classic American new thought meets megachurch meets ‘get rich quick’ way.

TBH I don’t really have Yahweh trauma, I just see most of the assumptions in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam being a big mash of regional astrology, deities, and means of social rule hence it’s very brash, combative, and power-oriented, in a lot of ways it’s surprising that the Mongols were as powerful and vicious as they were without a ‘the gateway to heaven lies beneath the enemy’s blade’ sort of religion.

Where I think I am at though - there’s something empirically valuable in this stuff and I’d rather focus on the goods that yield dividends no matter which glyphs, symbols, or mandalas have actual existence and then worry about those if, like the E8 Lie Group, it does somehow just come bouncing out of nature without being heavily massaged by religious contexts or historical contingencies of the Greco-Egyptian sort. It’s not that that stuff is necessarily wrong or not useful, but it does seem like there’s an awful lot to pick through that’s purely there because the state of knowledge about the world when said systems of thought came about suggested such relationships. This really just makes me want to dig into my own psychology, self-integration, and wellness long before I dig into the rest of any of that, otherwise I’m swimming neck-deep in an ocean of suggestions that I can neither confirm nor deny and that seems like it’s just a big motivation suck.

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I don’t bear the qabbalistic correspondences or significances of my cards in mind at all in a tarot pull; the cards speak, I read, the shit comes to pass.