Jewish wisdom teaches that leaving a dream or synchronicity unexamined can be compared to receiving a letter from the Divine that we left unopened. Coincidence is god’s way of staying anonymous. So it was a fortuitous moment that led me to unexpectedly reconsider the Tarot. Vaguely familiar with this divination tool since my teens, revisiting the mythical gatekeeper of the cards as a maturing mystic, the number 22 caught my eye. Not 20, 21, or 25, which are more familiar groupings of numbers. Is it a coincidence that there are 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet and paths on the Tree of Life?

The Tarot consists of 78 cards divided into two decks, the Major and Minor Arcana, the latter consisting of four suits of 54 cards, a precursor to family cards. The deck above, consisting of 22 images, named and numbered from 0 to 21, is as mysterious as the origins of the Tarot itself. The cards may have first emerged in medieval Europe: the Tarot de Marseilles survived for hundreds of years without a verbal script, first appearing in Europe in the 16th century. The Rider-Waite card, more familiar to us in the English-speaking world, was created in London in the early 20th century. However, the Tarot teachings, both timeless and timely, are believed to predate such medieval origins. Gypsies are probably the people most easily associated with the Tarot. Who has not seen a film in which, after ‘crossing the palm of the hand with silver’, the gypsy is going to predict what the future holds?

It is suggested that the ancestors of the Gypsy people carried and dispersed the wisdom of the ancient Egyptian mystery schools through the forecasting use of these cards. Is the similarity in the root of the words ‘gypsy’ and ‘Egypt’ a clue to this link? Wherever these cards originate, their mythical themes are universal. Contemporary media use the Major Arcana cards as a recognizable symbol of the mystical, triggering different emotional responses, ranging from fascination to fear. Anxiety, in its various forms, has prevented many from working with these intriguing illustrations. For those who assume only a literal reading of the cards, there is a fear of pulling out the ‘Death’ card, especially one illustrated with a skeleton clad in armor, riding a horse, trampling bodies underfoot. This illustration in the Rider-Waite deck may have been an apt symbol of the medieval turmoil that now, like the rest of the cards, begs for reconsideration. To Jews, the Tarot may seem unwelcoming with its strange imagery of ‘The Devil’, ‘The Hierophant’ and ‘The Hanged Man’, all unknown to Jewish sensibilities.

Just as the origins of the cards, and the Major Arcana in particular, seem obscure, the teachings of Kabbalah were hidden for centuries. To survive the brutal and destructive power of the medieval ecclesiastical consciousness prevalent in previous centuries, any association, interest, or affiliation with an intuitive wisdom tradition, of necessity, had to be unequivocally broken and prohibited. So horrendous were the consequences of even the slightest suspicion of such an association just a few hundred years ago, that even today, a deep-seated fear of the mystical causes many to approach its tantalizing possibilities with great trepidation. With the dawn of a new age, as human consciousness spirals into ever-wider dimensions and possibilities, mystical teachings are re-emerging and tentatively finding prepared audiences who wish to rediscover and remember, while freeing themselves from the shackles of past fears.

So what happens when a contemporary mystic in search of the Sacred Feminine brings together an open and universal approach to the Torah, the Tree of Life and the Tarot? The Oracle Syzygy is born. Jung used this word to describe a balance of opposites, while to astronomers it applies to a certain repetitive alignment of the sun, moon, and earth. A perfect word that seems to describe a journey from the dark and mysterious unknown to the light of consciousness, an odyssey that takes us from the ego to the essence.