Tarot; Talisman or Taboo?: Reading the World As Symbol

by Mark Patrick Hederman

A guide to connecting with our neglected unconscious through the Tarot cards. Getting in touch with the unconscious can be difficult and dangerous. Our ordinary approach to life, our trained and cultivated ways of thinking, are allergic to this swampy unknown. We lose our bearings, we panic. The Tarot cards are like 'an idiots guide' to the unconscious, an easy way to subvert the rational and allow the energies beneath to creep up through the floorboards. If you learn to shuffle and to deal the twenty-two major cards of this ancient museum of the unconscious, it will help you to familiarise yourself with a symbolic way of thinking and domesticate an underworld of otherwise meaningless shadows and shapes. This book gives an introduction to the Tarot, a history of its uses and abuses, a practical guide to its value as an underground map. It also provides a meditation on each one of the twenty-two major arcana which can help the reader to undertake their own spiritual journey. Mark Patrick Hederman is a philosopher and monk.

Genres: Tarot

264 pages, Paperback

First published October 10, 2003

Reviews

[Sandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written by the former abbot of Glenstal Abbey, County Limerick (Order of St. Benedict), Tarot: Talisman or Taboo? Reading the World as Symbol is a fascinating, although very idiosyncratic, look at what are referred to as The Major Arcana of the Tarot. For the first half of the book, you might not know the main gist if you didn't know its title. Published in 2003, Hederman is interested in the unconscious side of Western culture, but he goes all over the place in writing about it.

I did not know when I started reading this that I would finish it several days before the 20th anniversary of 9-11; this book was written soon after those events. The last chapter features a hand-painted card, The Tower, by an artist named Lorcan Walshe, an extremely interesting jumping-off place in "Tarot, Titanic and the Twin Towers," the chapter that looks at 9-11-01 from the perspective of the Western unconscious. I could go on about that; it was very impressive, especially as I read it on September 11-September 12.

The first mention of the tarot is on page 27; before that, we read about consciousness / the unconscious; Adolph Hitler and Nazi ideology, European philosophy (all a series of footnotes to Plato?), the legacy of Greek philosophy on the Western world, and on Christianity in particular; Alexander Pope (poet), the Trojan horse, Neoplatonism, the mystic Pseudo-Dionysius, Plato Plato Plato (the Republic, the Symposium, Philebus, the Dialogues), Virgil, the holocaust ("After the holocaust there should be no possibility of neglecting the unconscious in ourselves"), competing ideologies in the 20th century, accessing the unconscious with dreams, African dancing, King David dancing ecstatically, "whirling round before the Lord with all his might" before the ark of God (2 Sam 6:12-17, 20-23) and his wife Michal's derision (her attitude, he says, summarises our patrimony in Western European culture), and then Patriarchs of the Church, including Ambrose of Milan, Augustine of Hippo, John Chrysostom (whose prayer we read every week in Morning Prayer), Matthew's Gospel, Zorba the Greek . . . (And that's only in 14 pages, since it starts on p. 13.)

This monk has a wide-ranging, eclectic, psychologically- and spiritually-oriented intellect, and we get the full force of that mind; he definitely wanders all over the place and goes down whatever rabbit holes grab his attention. I would venture to guess that's due to his deep commitment to the workings of the unconscious, resulting in a book very different than one written by a systematic, dialectical type of author.

Hederman He tells us of King David's ecstasy before God as he danced, whirling and leaping while accompanying the Ark of the Covenant (2 Samuel); but his wife Michal was disgusted and "despised him in her heart" at his lack of propriety. "The attitude of Michal," Hederman says, "summarises our patrimony in Western European culture" (25).

The tarot cards, as well as teaching us to dance mentally, also provide us with an easier route to the unconscious." (27)

Hederman really likes C. G. Jung (and W. B. Yeats; his focus there was harder for me to follow, but I'm not Irish, am I then?) and quotes them liberally; I did get a little stuck when it seemed the entire book was really about Yeats.

Each of the Major Arcana gets a separate, detailed treatment of 3-4 pages, and Hederman plumbs the depths of religious symbolism throughout. I was worried that people would think I'd gone pagan if they saw this book on my "read" shelf; on the other hand, I'm pretty sure its relatively lousy rating is because of his emphasis on Christianity. I guess it's not fair of me, but I imagine many people interested in tarot want cool New-Agey divination, to be accomplished with lots of incense in low light on a velvet-covered table -- not the liberal use of religious themes and symbolism! I'm kidding, sort of, but a Christian approach to the tarot has to be relatively rare.

"Like the stained glass windows in Chartres, the tarot cards bring us back to a time before what we call the modern way of thinking started. They provide a window to an alternative world, another way of thinking. They are relics of a religious sensibility. Like secret agents in disguise they have been hidden as entertainment and as fortune tellers' gimmicks, but as such they are camouflage" (27). He goes on to say, "Between the mystery and the structures we have received as Church, Scripture, Tradition, there is an abiding testimony to the time before these were set in place. Such testimony was . . . oral or visual, pre-literal stimuli. The tarot trump cards are 22 spiritual exercises through which we can immerse ourselves in the spirit of that living tradition" (28).

Hederman complains that "for three centuries [the tarot] has been hijacked by occultists and necromancers . . . called 'the devil's pack'," but believes that these cards are a valuable source of spiritual growth, by meditating on the images common to humanity: archetypal mother, father, lover, hero, magician, fool, devil, etc. (29)

I bet most people don't know of the cards' rather banal origins, that "from the beginning of its recorded history this pack of cards was used to play a game . . . similar to . . . Bridge ... divided into four suits, as in the ordinary pack of cards today, except that an extra knight was added to our King, Queen and Jack, or Knave," and "added to these were 21 trump cards, plus a card called 'the Fool', which would have been equivalent to 'the Joker' in our contemporary pack." Somehow, though, according to enthusiasts, they ended up using images that mirror the human psyche.

I think it's much harder than we know to offend God; and I suspect that most Christians (me included) have been afraid of tarot cards (see the above part about occultists, etc., hijacking the tarot). But that's an inherited attitude; most haven't taken any time to investigate what terrifies them about the cards. If I sensed that the tarot conflicted with my faith, I don't think I'd be interested any more. But Hederman does a good job of dispelling that taboo.

[Gary · Rating 2 out of 5]

Rather uneven and unusual introspections on Tarot symbolism and meanings.