I went looking early. Church first, then Buddhism and Taoism, then the older, stranger books that nobody around me had read. Somewhere in there I noticed that every one of them, once you got past the vocabulary, was pointing at the same thing. Different words. Same thread.
Then I found where the thread had been hidden. There was a time when the people who saw it couldn't say it out loud, so they said it in pictures. Tarot. Astrology. Qabalah. Alchemy. A language hiding in plain sight. Learn the language, and a tarot card stops being a fortune and becomes a piece of a map. The map leads inward.
I've been reading that map for more than twenty years. I taught it in classes at local shops here in Utah, where we'd pull the roots of each card up into the light. My favorite moment never changed. Someone leans back and says, "Oh wow, I didn't know that's what that meant, but it totally makes sense now."
This whole thing started as a handwritten book of symbols for my children. I may never leave them a fortune, but I can leave them a map. At some point I realized the map wasn't only theirs.
So here it is, for you. If you've ever held a deck and felt there was something underneath, you were right. You don't need to know the meanings first, and you don't need to change what you believe. Start with the first lesson, and I'll show you the thread.
