• Kabbalistic Tarot: Hebraic Wisdom in the Major and Minor Arcana
  • Dovid Krafchow
  • Inner Traditions, 2005

Dovid Krafchow, seems to have solid credentials for teaching about these topics; his biography states:

‘Dovid Krafchow has studied Kabbalah and practiced the Tarot for more than 30 years. He began his study of the Torah at the Hadar Hatorah Institute for Rabbinical Studies in Brooklyn, New York, and lived for 10 years in Zefat, Israel, the city where the Kabbalah was received by the Ari Zal (Rabbi Isaac Luria) 500 years ago.’

He has written eight other books, fiction and nonfiction.

After a short personal preface, this book begins with an odd counterfactual history in which the Tarot was created by pre-Exodus Jews in Egypt as a tool to study Torah. Krafchow then provides some basic information about Torah and Kabbalah, loosely related to the Tarot.

There are certainly ways in which the structure and imagery of the Tarot reflect and incorporate Kabbalistic themes (more obviously in the images of Jessie Burns Parke’s BOTA deck, based on the RWS deck, than in Pamela Colman Smith’s images). This is not surprising as the RWS deck’s creators were members of the Golden Dawn, which included the ‘Hermetic Qabalah’  in its teachings. The four suits, for example, can represent the four Kabbalistic worlds, and the idea that the 22 cards of the Major Arcana correspond to the letters of the Hebrew alphabet has been established for centuries. However, in the next chapter of his book Krafchow develops his own relationships between Tarot and Kabbalah, aligning the images of the Major Arcana in a somewhat idiosyncratic way with sefirot and body parts.

Krafchow then offers a description and meaning for each Minor Arcana card; these are also idiosyncratic, or peculiar, depending on your perspective. The Nine of Pentacles, for example, is identified as a ‘young man’, and said to represent ‘youthful sexual energy’. The Four of Swords is described as a man praying. One of the three figures in the Three of Pentacles is described as a ‘woman in the garb of wizardry’, and the card is said to represent ‘refutation of dogma’, demonstrated by the third figure ‘turn[ing] his cup down against what [the other two figures] proclaim’.

The last chapter, ‘The Cabbalistic Reading’, mostly consists of stories about Krafchow’s experiences with the cards. In the first paragraph of this chapter, in which he describes purchasing his first deck, he writes ‘I threw away the booklet because the cards do not have definite meanings’, which seems like an encapsulation of Krafchow’s approach to Tarot in general.

While an unreliable source of knowledge about either Tarot or Kabbalah, this book can be read as a personal narrative of Krafchow’s experience with the Tarot, and how his interpretation of the cards is informed by his own life experience and beliefs. Understood in this way, it’s an intriguing memoir of how Tarot featured in one person’s personal growth and spiritual development. ~CD

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