You can’t just walk on into the Rose-garden, you need a key, and that key is revealed in the Cathar Code hidden in the symbology of the cards of the Marseille Tarot major arcana. Joseph Campbell in The Mythic Image make reference to the Rose of France, the centre of the rose window in the northern transept of Chartres Cathedral. “There, in the center, sits the Virgin, crowned, the scepter of world rule in her right hand and her left supporting the infant Christ. She is in thi

In just the same way the Fool had the test of the flaming sword after their sojourn through the Dark Night of the Soul (Hanged Man, Card XIII, Temperance, and Devil cards) so too is there a test on leaving the Treasury of Light, called the test of the Cherubim. These were the gatekeepers that God put at the Eastern gate of the Garden of Eden, making sure that Adam and Eve qualified to re-enter the Garden. You may recall that prior to their expulsion, they had eaten the fruit

Rebis was an alchemical term that was typically represented as one body having two heads, one being masculine and the other feminine. Sophia (as the fallen daughter, depicted as the Fool in the Marseille Tarot) was symbolic of matter and the soul, where Christ (the son sent by his heavenly parents to rescue Sophia) symbolised the mind and spirit. The Sun card is about these four (matter - the bull, soul - the eagle, mind - the man/angel and spirit - the lion, the four aspects

The Moon card is full of surprises. There are four key symbols, the crustacean, the dogs, the buildings, and the Moon herself. We saw in The Star card a naked woman who in many versions of the Marseille Tarot appears to be pregnant. It’s possible that The Moon card, since it followed The Star card, could actually be a birth card. But where is that in the symbolism? In her JSTOR published article, “June’s Zodiac Sign & ‘Lobster-Like’ Crabs“, Jessica Savage writes, “Well into t

The Fool is now passing through the outer portal of the House of God, which in the Temple of Solomon lead from the the Court of the Congregation to the Holy Place. They are about to enter the Treasury of Light (as it was called by the Gnostics), also known as the Holy Place, evidenced by the fact that all of the cards from here on are all about light. Both the Christians and Gnostics taught about the varying degrees of glory, the mysteries of the Kingdom of Light. Clement of

The Buddha taught that there where three poisons, essentially equivalent to how the seeds were sown in Jesus’s parable of the sower. As explained in ‘plain English’ by Lama Surya Das, the first poison was Ignorance of the Truth (Jesus’s seeds that fell in sealed soil). The second poison was Attachment (Jesus’s seeds that fell in soil that was populated with rocks). The third poison was Aversion (Jesus’s seeds that fell in soil with that also possessed the seeds of weeds.) The

The Cathar were dualists, meaning that in their beliefs there were two worlds, each ruled by a different God. They saw this world as having been created by an ‘evil God’ and heaven as the world of the ‘good God’. In the majors of the Marseille Tarot, the Magician is seen as the billboard advertising the nature of the world of the evil God, where Strength, as explained in the first blog in this series, is the billboard for entering the world of the good God. This dual world co

This card may not actually be about physical death, thus why it has no name...it may well be the death of human consciousness.

The Cathar had made “…the Sermon on the Mount the essence of their ethics…” (Durrant, The Age of Faith). The two parts of this sermon that most people today are familiar with, which were also fundamental to the Cathar, were The Lord’s Prayer, and the Beatitudes. From the perspective of the Cathar, the Beatitudes defined the passage that the Fool as a pilgrim had to follow in order to return to the world of the Good God, the kingdom of Heaven. It seems that they allotted one c

Like the Magician Card, La Force, or Strength as she is sometimes called, is essentially a billboard at a crossroad.