The Tarot and the Tree of Life: A Kabbalistic Synthesis

The tarot’s origins are complex and somewhat contested, but most historians trace its earliest forms to 15th-century Italy, where it emerged as a card game called “tarocchi” among the nobility. The earliest surviving decks, like the Visconti-Sforza tarot from around 1440, were primarily used for gaming rather than divination.

The connection between tarot and Kabbalah is largely a later development, primarily emerging during the 18th and 19th centuries through the work of occultists and esotericists. This connection wasn’t inherent to the original tarot but was deliberately constructed by scholars seeking to create a more sophisticated symbolic framework.

The key figures in establishing this relationship include:

Antoine Court de Gébelin (18th century) was among the first to propose that tarot cards contained ancient Egyptian wisdom and had connections to mystical traditions, though his theories lacked historical evidence.

Éliphas Lévi (Alphonse Louis Constant) in the mid-19th century made more explicit connections between the 22 Major Arcana cards and the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, suggesting each card corresponded to a path on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. This was largely his own synthetic creation rather than an authentic tradition.

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in the late 19th century further systematized these connections, creating elaborate correspondences between tarot cards, Hebrew letters, astrological signs, and the ten sefirot of the Kabbalistic tree. Members like A.E. Waite and Aleister Crowley developed influential tarot decks based on these principles.

From a psychological perspective, Carl Jung later found value in tarot imagery as representations of archetypal patterns, viewing the cards as useful tools for exploring the unconscious mind, regardless of their historical origins or mystical claims.

The Kabbalistic-tarot synthesis represents a fascinating example of how spiritual and philosophical systems can be creatively combined to create new meaning structures, even when the historical connection is tenuous. This synthetic tradition has become so influential that many people now assume the connection is ancient and authentic, when it’s actually a relatively modern interpretive framework.

Authors such as Eliphas Levi and Aleister Crowley consider the Tarot to be a symbolic representation of the universe, closely linked to the Tree of Life in Kabbalah. This relationship is clearly manifested in the correspondences between the 22 Major Arcana of the Tarot, the 22 paths of the Sefirotic Tree, and the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet.

In this article we will focus on the Ride Waite version of the early 1900’s which is the most popular and closely designed after the Tree of Life kabbalistic sephirot and symbols. On this article we will explore the relationship of the tarot and the tree of life and how to interpret its cards from the Tree of Life.

The Tarot as a Symbolic Language

Although the Marseille Tarot emerged in the Middle Ages, its structure seems to reflect an ancestral wisdom linked to the Torah (תורה). The word “Tarot” can be interpreted as a mirror transposition of “Torah”, where:

• Tau (ת) represents matter and the world (cross, end)
• Hei (ה) symbolizes breath or spirit

Thus, the Tarot can be seen as a bridge between spirit and matter, and its images allow the processes of the soul in its journey through the Tree of Life to be understood.