Qabalah and Tarot

QABALAH·to receive

Qabalah is the esoteric, oral, initiatory tradition established by the Beni Elohim, Divine intelligent beings, who gave humanity an ancient system of spiritual metaphysics through which the initiates could attain realization of the True Self which is Divine. The Qabalistic traditions teach humans to awaken their higher functions and thus to know the nature of God. This knowledge leads to the full understanding of and union with the Divine Self.

This tradition of God Realization for the West, which began with Enoch's initiation, was continued through the initiatory lineages of Gnostic Christianity, the Knights Templar, the Cathars, various European Qabalistic Orders, and the traditions of Rosicrucianism. 

Union with the Divine is a highly moral act, which requires devotion, dedication, and discipline in order to develop an intense state of receptivity to the Higher Self. Outside of a proper spiritual environment, it is very challenging to develop and maintain the needed discipline to attain Self-Realization. The teachings, practices, and rituals of the Ancient Esoteric Traditions of the West have often been removed from their original devotional context. 

In ancient times, the sacred teachings were traditionally transmitted from the initiates to the aspirants, usually in a community setting. The advanced members of these orders would often choose new students by clairvoyantly assessing children in the local communities to determine whether any particular child had the necessary personality traits that would enable them to understand and practice the secret science. The knowledge was then passed on through a series of metaphors applied to specific situations or to the general drama of life.

There is no written book called Qabalah, because it is an oral tradition in which the mature initiates instruct the aspirants through classroom presentations, and through metaphors applied to every day life. The primary mechanism through which the teachings are revealed is the Tree of Life. This ancient glyph of ten Spheres (Holy Sephiroth) and twenty-two Paths is a compendium of existence, manifest and unmanifest. It is also a representation of the ways in which creation moves into and out of existence. The Tree of Life as a geometrical configuration exists within every created being. Thus it is also a comprehensive representation of the True Divine Self of every human.

The twenty-two Tarot Keys of the Major Arcana are associated with the Pathways of the Tree of Life, and represent the states of subjective consciousness we obtain to in our journey back into Unity. The origin of the Tarot Keys is shrouded in mystery, however, our Tradition teaches that they were invented by Adepts who foresaw a time when practitioners and initiates of the Western Path would be persecuted and killed. These Adepts concealed the mysteries of the Sacred Science of Self-Realization in pictorial form so that the esoteric knowledge they contained could be retrieved when safer times returned. They also associated the Tarot Keys with the Tree of Life to give further meaning to the symbolic knowledge. We can access these sacred teachings only through the subconscious mind, which uses symbols as its natural language.