Monday Reflections: Notes from Meditations on the Tarot

I.

The Magician 

The Anonymous author of Meditations on the Tarot is not writing a book on divination. This is not a book for the reader of the cards, and the reflections are only on the major arcana. It is a book which uses the images of the cards to bring us into a deeper relationship to the world of symbol and faith. 'A journey into  Christian Hermeticism' - the author calls it, and what is Christian Hermeticism but a journey itself, an ever growing relationship.

In the first card, we're invited to meet Symbolism itself in the form of the Magician, who like symbols themselves "conceal and reveal their sense at one and the same time."

The magician is linked by the author to "the rapport of personal effort and of spiritual reality" - the card that opens the door to understanding the others. 

                          Learn at first concentration without effort; transform work into play;

                          make every yoke you have accepted easy and every burden that you 

                          carry light!

Seen that way, it's obvious we need a magician of some sort - we need to bend the exterior life to reflect the will, shape it, as a magician does. It is not an easy task though, each person has a burden which seems impossibly heavy; but Christ has called us to do the same, with his own magic lifting the yoke until it is easy to bear. The key our anonymous friend gives is in disinterested concentration - focusing not on the burden, but on the One who makes burden's light and there, concentrating 'without effort' on the absorbing beauty of Christ, our work becomes the serious, joyful play of the child.

I'm finding as I read these reflections, that I love the quiet of them, the abundant symbolism, and the different and completely non-divinatory view of the cards. It's a way of looking at them I'd never really explored before, and it's a blessing to have the chance now.