The Fool’s Journey Disrupted!

The twenty-two World Cards of the Eilat Tarot do not follow the familiar numerical order of the Major Arcana. Instead, they follow the Hebrew alef-bet.

The sequence uses the planetary attributions found in the Gra-Ari version of the Sefer Yetzirah, along with Donald Tyson’s revised correspondences for Cancer and Sagittarius, Mercury and the Moon. The result is a familiar journey rearranged:

0. The Fool • Alef • Air
1. The High Priestess • Bet • Moon
2. The Tower • Gimel • Mars
3. The Wheel of Fortune • Dalet • Sun
4. The Emperor • Hei • Aries
5. The Hierophant • Vav • Taurus
6. The Lover • Zayin • Gemini
7. Temperance • Ḥet • Cancer
8. Strength • Ṭet • Leo
9. The Hermit • Yud • Virgo
10. The Empress • Kaf • Venus
11. Justice • Lamed • Libra
12. The Hanged Man • Mem • Water
13. Death • Nun • Scorpio
14. The Chariot • Samekh • Sagittarius
15. The Devil • Ayin • Capricorn
16. The Magician • Peh • Mercury
17. The Star • Ẓadi • Aquarius
18. The Moon • Quf • Pisces
19. The World • Reish • Saturn
20. Judgment • Shin • Fire
21. The Sun • Tav • Jupiter

The High Priestess now follows The Fool. The Tower and Wheel of Fortune appear near the beginning, while The Empress occupies the center and The Magician arrives much later. The journey ends not with The World, but with The Sun.

For readers who prefer the Golden Dawn planetary attributions for the Double Letters, the deck also includes six alternate cards.

2. The Magician • Gimel • Mercury
3. The Empress • Dalet • Venus
10. The Wheel of Fortune • Kaf • the sun
16. The Tower • Peh • Mars
19. The Sun • Reish • Jupiter
21. The World • Tav • Saturn

The standard Eilat Tarot card presents Peh as speech that shapes. The alternate Golden Dawn card presents Peh as a force that breaks through. One builds through words; the other breaks open what can no longer hold.

From First Draft to Final Form

Here is my original design for the Eilat Tarot, created last April using MSPaint and Google Docs:

This version carried the structure and ideas I wanted, but was still a working draft, something to think with rather than something ready to live in the world.

Here is the new version of the same card, redesigned by Amashé Etz Alon:

He has carefully reworked each element of the card, clarifying the images, refining the typography, and bringing a sense of balance and visual presence that my original version didn’t yet have.

Seeing the two side by side, I’m struck by how much of the original vision remains, and how much more vivid it has become.

He’ll soon begin assembling the full deck and finalizing the card backs. I’m eager to see the entire set come together, and, at long last, to hold a finished deck in my hands!

Eilat Writers Guild

The website is now up! It's an exciting milestone!

Eilat Writers Guild, L.L.C.

My favorite writing implement? The eraser!

I just deleted 10 pages of my guidebook and replaced it with a clearer introduction. Real progress!

If you're curious, the footnote says: "Throughout this guidebook, I’ve italicized Hebrew titles and terms such as Sefer Yetzirah and sefirot. Quotations from authors such as Aryeh Kaplan retain their original formatting."

Poll Time! Help Me Choose a Title for My Tarot Guidebook

Vote! Select a letter below to help me choose a title for my LWB, "little white book." 📖

I’m still deep in the writing process, maybe halfway there, but I’d love your help choosing a title. It's for a guidebook to my Eilat Tarot, a Jewish deck that draws on the Sefer Yetzirah, the Hebrew calendar, the Land of Israel, and the symbolism of numbers and letters.

Which title do you like best? Feel free to vote for more than one, or suggest your own twist!

A. The Eilat Tarot: Little White Book
B. Eilat Tarot: A Tarot of Sunlight, Stone, and Water
C. The Eilat Tarot: Numbers, Letters, and the Land

D. The World Was Created With Letters: A Jewish Tarot Companion
E. Path of the Desert Letters: A Mystical Guide of Desert, Voice, and Vision
F. Letters of Light: A Kabbalistic Tarot Guide

G. Voice in the High Places: The World Was Created With Breath and Speech
H. The Tarot of Returning: A Tarot Guide Through Soul, World, and Time

I. The Tarot of Formation
J. Letters of Formation: The Tarot of Creation According to the Sefer Yetzirah
K. Formed in Silence: A Tarot Guide Through Soul, World, and Time

Thanks for helping me shape this journey! Your feedback means a lot. 💙

I’ll post updates as the project continues!

The Jewish Tarot That Isn’t-- Yet

For years, I daydreamed about finding a Jewish tarot deck. Then, I started dreaming about making one. Betzalel Arieli's Tarot Yehudi almost convinced me I’d found one! Eugene Vinitski's Tarot of Magical Correspondeces came so close! And it gave me the idea of making a collage deck rather than a unimaginative combinaton of PCS image and Tree of Life glyph.

Here are my attempts to brainstorm two of the cards. They’re nowhere near finished and definitely not collages. They've been gathering dust on a shelf, but this project keeps tugging at me.

Maybe it will remain a daydream forever.

But I really want to make it real!

Tarot is not Kabbalah (and a brief review of The Raziel Tarot)

Many tarot decks show Hebrew letters on the Major Arcana cards. This supposedly indicates a long-standing connection between tarot and the Jewish mystical traditions of Kabbalah. In fact, the two traditions are distinct and arose in different cultures and periods.

Tarot emerged in fifteenth-century Christian Europe as a set of playing cards, which only later took on esoteric meanings. Kabbalah, by contrast, is an ancient and still-evolving Jewish mystical tradition.

There is no historical connection between Kabbalah and the creation of the tarot. The relationship was constructed centuries later by European occultists who grafted superficial elements of Jewish mysticism onto the tarot.

From its beginnings, Christian culture has appropriated and altered some aspects of Judaism. For more information about the origins of European interest in Kabbalah, read The Rape of Jewish Mysticism by Christian Theologians by Robert Wang.

By the the mid-nineteenth-century, faux Kabbalah had become a part of Western occultism. Éliphas Lévi posited a link between the Major Arcana cards and paths on the Tree of Life. Other occultists had created sets of astrological correspondences to the cards. Relying on those correspondences and their own quirky translation of the Sefer Yetzirah, the Golden Dawn developed their own system of tarot correspondences.

However, the Golden Dawn adopted planetary correspondences for the Double Letters that differ from those found in the Gra-Ari version of Sefer Yetzirah. For example, the Golden Dawn associated the Hebrew letter Dalet with Venus and The Empress, while the Gra-Ari version associates Dalet with the Sun. The Sefer Yetzirah, of course, makes no mention of tarot cards, which had not yet been created when that text was composed.

Jewish mysticism is not an intrinsic part of tarot, but today, Jewish tarot writers such as Isabel Radow-Kleigman and Rachel Pollack, are bringing authentic Jewish ideas and Jewish spirituality to the tarot. I appreciate that, and I want to explore the possibilities that connecting the two traditions might offer. So, although I am doubtful that including Hebrew letters on the cards is a meaningful exercise, I am willing to explore the idea.

French occultist Jean-Baptiste Alliette, aka Etteilla, numbered the Major Arcana cards in his 1789 occult deck 100 years before the Golden Dawn systematized Hebrew letter correspondences. The Golden Dawn ascribed first Hebrew letter, Alef (א), to The Fool, the first card of the Major Arcana. and the last Hebrew letter, Tav (ת), to The World, the last card of the Major Arcana.

When I first encountered these correspondences, they seemed arbitrary to me. Tav has a numerical value of 400, not 21, and Hebrew has no letter representing zero for The Fool. While I understand that the letters were intended symbolically rather than as Hebrew numerals, I remain unconvinced that placing them on the cards adds anything meaningful to the tarot.

Since astrology was a significant part of the Renaissance culture in which tarot began, the development of correspondences between astrological symbols and the Major Arcana cards of tarot does seem reasonable. However, the fact that the Hebrew letters are also associated with planets and regions of the zodiac is not a good reason to slap the Hebrew letters onto the cards. It is a step away from the intentions of earlier tarot designers. It is certainly leagues away from the intentions of the authors of the Sefer Yetzirah, a work Aryeh Kaplan interprets as a manual of meditative practice.

Although the Sefer Yetzirah was composed during a period of intense syncretism between various Mediterranean cultures, religions, and philosophies, there is no link between that text and the much later Renaissance European culture which produced the tarot.

Furthermore, it seems unlikely that teachers of the meditation techniques presented in the Sefer Yetzirah intended a literal connection between the letters, days, organs, planets, or other items mentioned in the text. They were describing a mystical vision of creation in which breath and language allowed divine unity to become the multiplicity within the cosmos.

If literal correlation had been intended, each version of the text would link the same planets to the Double Letters. In fact, different recensions of the text list different correspondences. For example, Dalet is linked to the Sun in the Gra-Ari version and to Mars in three other versions of the Sefer Yetzirah. The Golden Dawn later associated Dalet with Venus in order to retain the traditional order of the tarot Majors and the order of the planets from fastest to slowest.

The Sefer Yetzirah does not teach anything about tarot cards, which were created centuries after the Sefer Yetzirah was composed.

There is no demonstrable connection between the Sefer Yetzirah, or other Jewish mystical traditions, and the tarot. So if we do wish to place Hebrew letters on the Major Arcana, we might first examine the attributions developed by European occultists.

Four versions of the Sefer Yetzirah, as well as the Christian-influenced Golden Dawn, agree on the associations of the Simple Letters with the regions of the zodiac and of the Mother Letters with the three celestial elements of Air, Water, and Fire. (See the chart below.) For now, then, let us accept the Golden Dawn’s further association of those letters with particular tarot cards.

However, a difficulty arises connecting the Double Letters with celestial bodies. There are several different sets of correspondences between the Hebrew Double Letters and the seven planets. Section 4.8 in the chart shows correspondences names in the Gra-Ari Version of the Sefer Yetzirah, in the Short and Long Versions of the Sefer Yetzirah, and in Donald Tyson's revised Golden Dawn correspondences.

Summary of attributions for Mother Letters, Double Letters, and Simple Letters

In the next few paragraphs, I'll show you how correspondences based on different versions of Sefer Yetzirah radically alter the traditional progression of the tarot Majors. Then I'll show you how the amended Golden Dawn system more closely maintains the traditional progression of the cards as well as the order of the Hebrew letters.

Gra-Ari Version: If we relied on the correspondences from the Gra-Ari version of the Sefer Yetzirah, the result would be the following series of cards with planetary correspondences:

Priestess (Moon - Bet)
Tower (Mars - Gimmel)
Wheel (Sun - Dalet)
Empress (Venus - Kaf)
Magician (Mercury - Peh)
World (Saturn - Reish)
Sun (Jupiter - Tav)

In nineteenth-century occult thought, the High Priestess card was connected with the moon. In the Gra-Ari version of the Sefer Yetzirah, the moon is mentioned in connection to the letter Bet. Thus, according to the Golden Dawn's rationale, the Hebrew letter Bet should be associated with the High Priestess card of the tarot deck.  

Short and Long Versions: If we used the correspondences of the Short Version or the Long Version of the Sefer Yetzirah, the resulting order of the planetary cards would be as follows:

World (Saturn - Bet)
Sun (Jupiter - Gimmel)
Tower (Mars - Dalet)
Wheel (Sun - Kaf)
Empress (Venus - Peh)
Magician (Mercury - Reish)
Priestess (Moon - Tav)

In these versions of the Sefer Yetzirah, Saturn is linked to the letter Bet. In nineteenth-century occult thought, Saturn is connected to the World card. Thus, according to the Golden Dawn's rationale, the Hebrew letter Bet should be associated with the World card of the tarot deck.

Tyson’s revised Golden Dawn system keeps the Double Letters in Hebrew alphabetical order while preserving most of the familiar progression of the Major Arcana. Among the planetary cards, it exchanges The High Priestess and The Magician, corresponding to the Moon and Mercury. Tyson also exchanges Temperance and The Chariot, corresponding to Cancer and Sagittarius.

Priestess (Moon - Bet)
Magician (Mercury - Gimmel)
Empress (Venus - Dalet)
Wheel (Sun - Kaf)
Tower (Mars - Peh)
Sun (Jupiter - Reish)
World (Saturn - Tav)

The Fool as the
Biblical Yosef,
a fool and a visionary.

Since the connection between the Hebrew letters and the cards is tenuous, I see no compelling reason to make any changes to the letter attributions presented by Donald Tyson in his book, Portable Magic: Tarot is the Only Tool You Need.

Astrology is not part of my practice, so I am not concerned with the astrological correspondences of the cards. It would be more interesting to consider other associations from Sefer Yetzirah, such as the pairs of qualities associated with Double Letters, the months and tribes associated with Simple Letters, and the celestial elements associated with the Mother Letters.

These are pairs of qualities associated with the Double Letters:

• Bet - Wisdom and Folly
• Gimmel - Wealth and Poverty
• Dalet - Seed and Desolation
• Kaf - Life and Death
• Peh - Dominance and Subjugation
• Reish - Peace and War
• Tav - Grace and Ugliness

The Raziel Tarot: If you are interested in obtaining a tarot deck created specifically with Jewish ideas in mind, consider obtaining the majors-only deck, The Raziel Tarot, by tarot greats, Robert Place and Rachel Pollack. Sefer Raziel is a medieval Jewish magical and kabbalistic text that incorporates materials from several earlier traditions. In the Raziel deck, Hebrew letters appear on the following Major Arcana cards:

• א appears on The Fool
• מ appears on The Empress (the Golden Dawn placed it on The Hanged Man)
• The Mother Letters, אמש, appear on The Lovers and on Temperance
• The root צדק appears on Justice
• A portion of the word שָׁלוֹם appears on Strength
• The letters י and ב appear on the pillars Boaz and Yachin of The High Priestess, and the garment worn by her contains numerous letters, including some final forms

The Raziel Tarot shows only two of the mother letters: Alef (א) for air and Mem (מ) for water. Pollack and Place did not choose to include the penultimate letter, Šin/Śin (ש), which is associated with creative fire. I wonder which Major Arcana card could be linked reasonably with the third mother letter ש. What do you think?

The Empress as Miriam the Prophet, whose life
included many events associated with water.

Early Ideas for A Tarot Deck

Over the years, several people have encouraged me to create my own tarot deck, but I always felt it was too big a task (too much to design, draw, and decide) not to mention unnecessary (there are already thousands of decks available). I’m no artist, and the idea of tackling seventy-eight cards felt impossible.

Recently, I started to reconsider the idea of creating a specifically Jewish tarot. I've experimented with a few designs using found photographs (not my own) and started to imagine how Jewish history, mysticism, and symbolism might reshape the traditional structure of the deck.

So far, I’ve created five Major Arcana cards and one Minor. Here are two of them:

The first is The Emperor, reimagined as Titus Flavius, the Roman emperor whom some see as the “inventor” of Christianity, a syncretistic theology designed to control the Jewish people. The second is The Hierophant, depicted as the Masculine Face of Shekhinah, inspired by my beloved Rabbi Berg, a figure of spiritual transmission and profound compassion.

Certain tarot writers raise more questions than answers, especially around sex and gender. One of my ongoing struggles with tarot thought is its use of the vague and puzzling language of “the Masculine” and “the Feminine.” What do those terms mean? Is there such a thing as a fixed, universal idea of maleness? I’ve never identified as particularly feminine—nor, for that matter, as a tomboy. If I were to generalize at all, it wouldn’t be toward some Platonic ideal of gender—it would be toward the messy, human truths: women have babies, men are slutty. But that's not archetypal. I’ve never viewed The Emperor and The Empress as male and female opposites. Energetically, The Emperor has always felt more aligned with The High Priestess as both are self-contained, inward, and silently commanding. The Empress seems to pair more naturally with The Hierophant, each of those figures offering forms of nourishment, guidance, and tradition.

The court cards complicate this, too. In my readings, Kings and Queens don’t always pair neatly within their suits. I often find deeper harmony across suits: the King of Cups with the Queen of Pentacles, or the Queen of Swords with the Knight of Wands. While I’ve never loved renamed court cards (they are disorienting and seem gimmicky), but the Kabbalistic Tetrad of Father, Mother, Son, and Daughter, might provide a familiar structure with a meaningful Jewish note. The divine family could emphasize spiritual lineage rather than hierarchy.

I don’t know where this project is going, but I’m letting myself play with the idea. Even if it doesn’t become a full deck, perhaps it will be worthwhile simply to reimagine a few cards through a Jewish lens.

Esoteric Tarot

I've begun studying the occult aspects of tarot. In anticipation creating my own deck, I will try to explain the tarot attributions I'll be relying on.

The association of Hebrew letters with Tarot's Major Arcana cards was made explicit by members of the Golden Dawn in the 19th century who relied on a Jewish Kabbalistic text, the Sefer Yetzirah.

In the Sefer Yetzirah the letters alef, mem, and shin are associated with celestial air, celestial water, and celestial fire. Seven of the Hebrew letters (the six begedkefet and one guttural) are associated with seven celestial bodies. The remaining letters are associated with twelve regions of the zodiac.

The Golden Dawn applied the zodiac signs (and thus, the single letters), in their natural order, to the Major Arcana cards in their numeric order. They did not do the same with the celestial bodies (and double letters) because the symbolism of the Majors in their traditional numeric order and the symbolism of the celestial bodies (in order of their apparent speed) do not align.

To place the first astrological planet, the Moon, on the first Double letter would result in the planet the Moon being linked with the Magician. The Moon is a feminine planet, whereas the Magician is a strongly masculine trump. Similarly, the second planet... Mercury, would fall on the trump the High Priestess. This also seems incorrect. Mercury is a masculine planet, and is associated with magic, but the High Priestess is a feminine trump and is associated with mystery.

So he put Mercury first and the Moon second. (He also inverted Strength and Justice to make the numeric order of the cards match the order of the zodiac signs.)

Donald Tyson found that this wasn't ideal and changed the sequence of the Major Arcana so that the celestial bodies assigned to them would be in order from fastest to slowest: Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. In his system, The High Priestess is the first card after The Fool, The Magician is the second card, Temperance is the seventh card, and the Chariot is the fourteenth.

To my mind, the warlike Archer is a much more appropriate zodiac sign for a trump of war than the Crab, particularly since chariots were used as mobile platforms for archers during war. On the other hand, feminine and nurturing Cancer seems well suited to Temperance. There is a natural yin-yang balance in the glyph of Cancer itself, which resembles the symbolism on the traditional version of the trump Temperance of two vessels linked by a stream of liquid.

In the Golden Dawn system, the Wheel of Fortune is linked to Jupiter and The Sun to the sun. Tyson disagrees with those associations.

If the natural order of the planets is to be preserved, we must assign the astrological Sun to the trump the Wheel. And what could be a more perfect fit? The Sun is the great wheel of the heavens. It has been depicted in this way in the mythology of countless cultures. It is a good deal more appropriate, symbolically, than Jupiter.

When we come to the trump the Sun, which receives the astrological planet the Sun in the Golden Dawn correspondences, we must use another planet since the Sun has been linked to the Wheel of Fortune. The obvious choice is Jupiter, termed in astrology the Greater Fortune and renowned for its beneficence, and Jupiter falls here naturally in the order of planets.

Some critics may object that the most natural planet for the trump the Sun is surely the planet the Sun. Yet, if this is so, why is it that the planet the Moon is never assigned to the trump the Moon? It seems to me that either both Sun and Moon should be linked to the trumps that bear their names, or neither should be so linked. Since the astrological Moon has never been placed on the trump the Moon, I have no reluctance to associate the trump the Sun with the planet Jupiter.

Lacking any background in esoteric studies, I can only say that Tyson's system feels right.

Tyson's re-sequencing of the Majors slightly alters the "Tarot Tableau." The Tableau is an arrangement of the Majors in three rows of seven, with The Fool above. It is purported to illustrate different levels of consciousness. At one level of consciousness, you may be experiencing Temperance, but at a higher level of consciousness, you learn the lessons of The Chariot, and at a still higher level, the lessons of The World.

My meditations on the traditional Tarot Tableau have seldom yielded significant insights. Arranging the Tableau in Tyson's sequence was immediately illuminating. The Priestess, Strength, and The Devil each address the powers of the unconscious. The Magician, Hermit, and The Tower are about our world view.

The attributions in the table above are the ones I will rely on when studying the Major Arcana. Since the concepts connecting the letters and the cards are primarily astrological, I will have to learn a little about astrology at some point. Initially, however, I will focus on the meanings of the Hebrew letters.