The Endless Journey — The Path of Advancement and the Diverse Faces of the Tarot Tradition
The Landscape Beyond the Threshold
Over the course of the previous eleven chapters, we have walked together through a long and richly rewarding journey.
You have come to understand the historical arc of Tarot's evolution from a fifteenth-century Italian court game into a spiritual tool. You followed The Fool from that first leap off the cliff's edge, traversing the archetypal journey laid out across the twenty-two cards of the Major Arcana. Through the four suits of the Minor Arcana, you touched the ardor of fire, the tenderness of deep water, the keenness of the blade, and the solidity of earth. You learned to weave narratives within a Spread, to enter the card's imagery through meditation, and to engage with your own inner patterns through journaling. More importantly, you have internalized the central position this book has repeatedly emphasized — that Tarot is not a machine of fate, but a mirror reflecting the present moment, a path leading toward self-knowledge.
And all of this we accomplished almost entirely within a single system: the Waite-Smith Tarot.
This was no accidental choice. As noted in Chapter One, the deck that Arthur Edward Waite and artist Pamela Colman Smith collaborated to create in 1909 — revolutionary for being the first to furnish the Minor Arcana pip cards with complete narrative scenes — became the cornerstone of modern Tarot reading and the starting point for the vast majority of beginners. Centering this book on the Waite system was a considered and practical pedagogical decision: you need to put down sufficiently deep roots within one system before you can understand and appreciate the distinctive beauty of others.
But now, you have those roots.
And so in this final chapter, I invite you to rise, to walk to the threshold of the Waite system, and to look outward. You will find that the world of Tarot is far broader, far more diverse, and far more vibrantly alive than any single deck or single system can contain. This is not a repudiation of what you have already learned — on the contrary, it is precisely because you have built a solid understanding within the Waite system that you now possess the capacity to compare, to discern, and to learn more deeply.
Let us walk through that door.
The Three Great Traditions: The Different Grammars of the Tarot World
If Tarot is a language, then the different Tarot systems are its dialects — they share certain basic vocabulary and grammatical structures, but each places its own emphasis on modes of expression, aesthetic style, and philosophical weight. Over the course of several centuries of development, three great traditions have shaped the fundamental character of modern Tarot.
First, the Tarot de Marseille tradition.
For the several hundred years before the Waite-Smith Tarot appeared, the Tarot de Marseille was the most widely circulated Tarot deck across the European continent. Its history stretches back to the seventeenth century and beyond, and its visual style carries the austere dignity of medieval woodblock prints — clean lines, vivid colors, restrained figures. Its most striking characteristic lies in its Minor Arcana pip cards: unlike the Waite system, the Marseille Tarot's pip cards contain no narrative scenes. Instead, they present the suit symbols in geometric arrangements — the Six of Swords, for instance, is simply six swords in symmetrical configuration; the Three of Cups is a pattern of three chalices, with no figures, no story, no situational context.
At first glance, this might appear to be a kind of "absence" — after all, it was precisely the vivid narrative scenes of the Waite system that helped us so intuitively grasp the meaning of each card. But practitioners of the Marseille tradition will tell you that this is precisely where the deck's power resides. When the pip cards offer no pre-established narrative, the reader is compelled to draw more deeply upon their own intuition, their understanding of numerical symbolism, and the visual interplay between cards in order to construct meaning. Within this tradition, a reading resembles an improvised visual dialogue more than a translation of fixed symbols. In recent years, the re-elaboration of the Marseille tradition by scholars such as Alejandro Jodorowsky has lent it a renewed vitality in the contemporary world.
In broad terms, the interpretive approach of the Marseille tradition emphasizes numerical symbolism, compositional relationships, and intuitive resonance. The reader confronts pure pattern and form; the generation of meaning depends upon the reader's own inner workings rather than upon any narrative situation presupposed by the card's imagery.
If you are drawn to explore the Marseille tradition, I suggest beginning with the most fundamental of exercises: take a Marseille deck, look only at the geometric arrangements on the pip cards, set aside every book and explanation, and ask yourself — "What do these lines and shapes make me feel?" You may be surprised to discover that when the crutch of narrative is removed, your intuition awakens in an entirely new way.
Second, the Thoth Tarot tradition.
If the Tarot de Marseille represents Tarot in its classical guise, then the Thoth Tarot represents one of its most ambitious modern transformations. This deck was conceived by British occultist Aleister Crowley and painted over five years (1938–1943) by the artist Lady Frieda Harris. Crowley had been a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn before striking out to establish his own magical system, and he poured the full essence of that system into this deck.
In terms of structure, the Thoth Tarot bears both similarities and significant differences to the Waite system. The numbering sequence of the Major Arcana has been adjusted — most notably, Strength is renamed "Lust," numbered XI, while Justice is renamed "Adjustment," numbered VIII, reflecting Crowley's divergent understanding of astrological correspondences. The court card system is entirely reconstituted as well: the Page is replaced by the "Princess," the Knight becomes the "Prince," and the original King becomes the "Knight" — a reorganization grounded in Crowley's distinctive interpretation of the relationship between the four elements and the Tetragrammaton.
At the visual level, Lady Frieda Harris's paintings are deeply informed by Abstract Expressionism and projective geometry, producing imagery of intense color, bold composition, and a sense of flowing energy combined with geometric precision. If you are accustomed to the gentle, narrative pictures of the Waite Tarot, your first encounter with the Thoth Tarot may feel like something close to a visual shock — it does not attempt to tell a story you can easily "step into," but rather seeks to project a particular energetic state directly into your consciousness.
The threshold for learning the Thoth Tarot is a high one; it requires the student to possess a substantial familiarity with Kabbalah, astrology, and alchemy. Crowley's companion volume, The Book of Thoth, is renowned for its opaque prose and its densely esoteric references. But for those willing to pursue this path in depth, the symbolic dimensions opened by the Thoth system are extraordinarily rich. In summary, the interpretive approach of the Thoth tradition emphasizes occult correspondences and energetic structures — each card is a node where Kabbalah, astrology, and alchemy converge, and what the reader must bring is not the narrative associations of daily life, but rather a sensitivity to, and resonance with, the workings of hidden forces.
Third, the Waite-Smith tradition and its flourishing descendants.
The Waite-Smith system you have already come to know is itself a great tree that has been growing for more than a century, and from its branches have sprung thousands of variations. The vast majority of Tarot decks commercially available today — whether rendered in cats, botanicals, watercolor, minimalist linework, or cyberpunk aesthetics — follow the basic structural framework of the Waite system: twenty-two cards of the Major Arcana plus fifty-six cards of the Minor Arcana, with the Minor Arcana pip cards containing narrative scenes and the court cards comprising Page, Knight, Queen, and King. These decks are collectively referred to as "Waite-pattern" or "Waite-Smith derivative" decks.
Among these derivative decks, several have achieved the status of independent classics. The Morgan-Greer Tarot is celebrated for its rich, saturated colors and its borderless design. The Robin Wood Tarot weaves the symbolism of the Waite system into a more contemporary pagan aesthetic. The Mystic Dreamer Tarot employs a blend of photography and digital painting to infuse the traditional imagery with a new visual texture. These are not mere copies — each artist's interpretation brings a distinct emotional tone and cultural context to the same archetypal themes.
The core interpretive approach of the Waite-Smith tradition emphasizes narrative situation: each pip card is a miniature story painting, and the reader derives meaning by "entering" the scene depicted, reading the postures and expressions of the figures within it. This approach is especially welcoming to beginners, and it is the fundamental reason this book chose the Waite system as its pedagogical backbone.
Choosing a deck of your own is a subtle and significant moment in a Tarot student's journey. My advice is this: do not rush to collect. Once you have grown sufficiently familiar with the Waite-Smith Tarot, walk into a shop where you can handle decks in person (or browse high-resolution images online with care), and allow your gaze to rest on different cards. Notice which deck's imagery stirs something deep within you — not the aesthetic preference of "beautiful," but the intuitive sense of "this deck is speaking to me." That feeling is the first recognition between you and the deck that belongs to you.
The Numbering Debate and Systemic Differences: Learning to Think with Flexibility
When you begin engaging with different Tarot traditions, a question you will almost inevitably encounter is: the numbering dispute between Strength and Justice.
In the Waite-Smith system, Strength bears the number VIII and Justice bears the number XI. In the Marseille tradition and many older decks, Justice is VIII and Strength is XI. Crowley's Thoth system follows Waite's adjustment, but offers its own rationale — mapping these two cards onto Leo and Libra respectively in the zodiac.
Behind this numerical discrepancy lie different understandings of the narrative logic of the Major Arcana. In the Marseille tradition, Justice (VIII) appears immediately after The Chariot (VII), suggesting that external victory is immediately followed by an impartial reckoning with its consequences — a linear logic of "action and consequence." Waite's choice to place Strength in the eighth position, by contrast, was made to emphasize the turning point from outward conquest to inner taming: after The Chariot has subdued the external world through will, the next step is not reckoning, but learning to gentle one's instincts with tenderness. This is not a matter of one being right and the other wrong; these are two equally coherent narrative choices.
Understanding this point is important, because it teaches you an attitude that is indispensable when approaching Tarot — and indeed any symbolic system: flexibility. No system created by human beings holds an exclusive monopoly on ultimate truth. Every system is a window, and every window lets you see a portion of the landscape. What you have learned within the Waite system will not become "invalid" because you have encountered the Thoth system — it will only grow richer, more layered, like a melody you know well that has suddenly been arranged in a different key: in the new key you hear new colors, and at the same time you understand the structure of the original piece more deeply.
The Call to Depth: Kabbalah, Astrology, and Numerology
In Chapter One of this book, we mentioned that the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn systematically integrated Tarot with the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, astrology, and elemental theory. Over the past eleven chapters of study, you have repeatedly brushed past these connections — the detail in Chapter Nine of the Ten of Pentacles arranged in the pattern of the Tree of Life, for instance, or the occasional references to planetary and zodiacal correspondences scattered through the chapters. But out of consideration for the beginning student, we never unfurled those threads.
Now, let me briefly sketch the entrances to these advanced domains, so that when you are ready, you will know where to step.
Kabbalah and Tarot. Kabbalah is a philosophical system within the Jewish mystical tradition concerning the structure of the cosmos and the nature of the divine, and its central diagram is the "Tree of Life" — composed of ten Sephiroth (divine emanations) and the twenty-two "paths" that connect them. The Golden Dawn assigned each of the twenty-two Major Arcana cards to one of these twenty-two paths; the forty Minor Arcana pip cards (Ace through Ten in each suit) were mapped onto the ten Sephiroth as they manifest across the four elemental worlds; and the sixteen court cards correspond to the projections of the Tetragrammaton across the four worlds. This system of correspondences adds a profoundly deep philosophical dimension to every card — in the Golden Dawn system, The Fool corresponds to the eleventh path connecting Kether (the Crown) to Chokmah (Wisdom), and when you understand this correspondence, your sense of the card as "pure potential" acquires an entirely new metaphysical foundation. It should be noted that different schools differ in their specific assignments of Tarot cards to the paths of the Tree of Life; what is described here represents the most commonly encountered version within the Golden Dawn system.
Learning Kabbalah requires considerable patience and systematic effort. If you feel called in this direction, I recommend beginning with Dion Fortune's The Mystical Qabalah, one of the most enduring introductory works on Kabbalah within the Golden Dawn tradition.
Astrology and Tarot. The Golden Dawn system assigned each card of the Major Arcana a corresponding planet or zodiacal sign — The Empress corresponds to Venus, The Tower to Mars, The Hermit to Virgo, and so forth. The Minor Arcana pip cards (Two through Ten) were assigned specific degree ranges of the zodiac, corresponding to the thirty-six decans — the Two of Wands, for example, corresponds to the first decan of Aries (ruled by Mars), and the Eight of Cups to the first decan of Pisces (ruled by Saturn). These astrological correspondences add a temporal dimension and a fine-grained discrimination of energetic quality to interpretation. When you notice two cards in a Spread that correspond to the same zodiacal sign, the themes represented by that sign receive a particular emphasis.
It should be noted that astrological correspondences are not consistent across systems — divergences exist even between the Waite system and the Thoth system. This again confirms the flexible attitude we emphasized in the previous section: systems of correspondence are interpretive frameworks constructed by human beings, not immutable cosmic laws.
Numerology and Tarot. Numerical symbolism is perhaps the most easily overlooked yet genuinely useful advanced dimension of Tarot. When you notice multiple cards of the same number clustering in a Spread — three "Threes," say, or two "Sevens" — the symbolic meaning of that number itself becomes worthy of special attention. Within the Pythagorean-Hermetic tradition: One represents unity and origin; Two represents duality and choice; Three represents creation and expansion; Four represents structure and stability; Five represents conflict and change; Six represents harmony and balance; Seven represents introspection and assessment; Eight represents movement and power; Nine represents the final trial before completion; Ten represents the fullness of a cycle and the seed of a new one. This numerical language runs across all four suits — the Five of Wands, the Five of Cups, the Five of Swords, and the Five of Pentacles all share the theme of conflict and instability associated with Five, each expressing it through the lens of a different element.
Mastering this numerical language will greatly enhance your ability to grasp the overall atmosphere of a Spread rapidly in practical readings. When you face a Celtic Cross Spread and notice at a glance a concentration of Fives and Sevens, you can sense — even before reading each card individually — that this person is passing through a period dense with conflict and deep reflection.
A Living Tradition: The Growth of Tarot in the Contemporary World
Tarot is not a museum exhibit. It is a living tradition — a symbolic system still in continuous growth, adaptation, and self-renewal.
In the past two decades, the world of Tarot has undergone a transformation that might rightly be called an "awakening to plurality." A growing number of deck creators have begun to consciously engage with a question long neglected: the figures in traditional Tarot imagery default to white, heterosexual, and Western cultural norms, making it difficult for many users from different racial, gender, and cultural backgrounds to see themselves reflected in the cards. In response, a new generation of Tarot decks has emerged presenting more diverse representations — figures of different skin tones, non-binary gender expressions, and visual vocabularies drawn from African, Asian, Latin American, and Indigenous cultures. These decks are not a repudiation of tradition but a deepening of it: if Tarot's central mission is to mirror the universal human experience, then its visual language must be capable of reflecting the faces of all human beings.
At the same time, the digital age has created unprecedented conditions for Tarot learning. Online courses, podcasts, social media communities, and digital deck applications have made access to Tarot knowledge more convenient than at any previous point in history. This is a welcome development — but it must be accompanied by discernment, for not all the Tarot information circulating online is accurate or responsibly presented. I recommend that even as you browse widely, you continue to return to time-tested classic texts to calibrate your understanding.
On the subject of classic texts, the following works constitute the core reading list for advanced study, and I commend them to you without reservation:
Rachel Pollack's Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, referenced repeatedly throughout this book from Chapter One onward, is a foundational work of modern Tarot scholarship; its psychological and spiritual reading of each card has yet to be surpassed. Waite's own The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, though somewhat archaic in style, is irreplaceable as a first-hand commentary from the deck's designer. Mary K. Greer's Tarot for Your Self is a practical guide to using Tarot as a tool for self-exploration, and it complements the Tarot journaling and meditation methods discussed in the preceding chapter closely. For those with ambitions to delve into the Thoth system, Lon Milo DuQuette's Understanding Aleister Crowley's Thoth Tarot offers a far more welcoming introduction than Crowley's own text.
The Eternal Fool
Now, permit me to return one final time to the figure we first encountered at the very beginning.
The Fool. Numbered Zero. A white-clad youth standing at the cliff's edge — pack light upon the shoulder, white rose in hand, small dog at the heel. The step he is about to take is simultaneously the beginning of a journey and — as we explored in depth in Chapter Two — the renewed beginning that follows the end of all journeys. Having passed through the wholeness symbolized by The World, The Fool does not come to rest. He returns to the cliff's edge, once again facing that unknown void, carrying all the wisdom born of everything he has lived, yet retaining still that original innocence and courage.
This is the deepest lesson Tarot has to teach us: there is no ultimate arrival — only an eternal setting forth.
You have turned the last page of this book, but your Tarot journey has not ended thereby — it has only truly begun. The seventy-eight cards in your hands are seventy-eight doors that will never close. Every shuffle, every draw, every moment of gazing by candlelight at those ancient and ever-new images is a conversation with some larger part of yourself that lives far beneath the surface. That part does not require certain answers; what it requires is the courage to keep asking.
So go. Like The Fool, bearing your curiosity, your wonder, your imperfections, and the fullness of your possibility — take that step. What lies beneath the cliff is not an abyss. It is sky.
May your journey be endless, and may your cards always be new.