If you’re just focusing on memorized meanings it might not make any difference, but, as far as inspiring card art goes I would definitely recommend switching to the Crowley Thoth or one of many beautiful modern decks. True Christianity, says the New Age, has been lost, or, alternatively, retreated to some esoteric circle.

And again, speaking very personally, it was only through my repeated reading of Tomberg’s deconstruction of paganism that I could free myself from the New Age. Dense and difficult—the more so as I entered the book woefully uninformed about Catholic and Christian Hermetic ritual and terminology—but also endlessly fascinating and edifying, especially in the recondite and convincing manner with which scientific, psychological, and anthropological phenomena are reconciled with the spiritual revelation of Christ.

Whilst the link to Spaemann is obvious from his dedicating a book to him, the connection to Hans urs Von Balthasar may be even more profound. He mentions the Indian practice of using Bija-mantras to awaken the Chakras and suggest alternatively a “Christianisation” of the Chakras would be to co-relate them to the Seven “I AM” sayings of the Gospel of John. as an Anthroposophist, stressing Steiner's ideas of the spiritual development of the INDIVIDUAL through freedom in Thinking.

My main recommendation once you put down the book would be to look further into the works of Bergson, as he ended up being quite the influential figure for certain Continental philosophers (especially my all-time favorite, Gilles Deleuze). It is only later that this knowledge, wisdom, teachings had to be written down, since MAN was starting to evolve differently. Still, our disagreements are not unbearable; the spirit of friendship overwhelms particular ideas and points, and the flow of thought itself is very agreeable.But one cannot exclude the possibility that the Incarnation of Christ helped fertilize the growth of these latent possibilities within Buddhism, as the Mahayana truly took form only after the mission of Christ. The nice thing about tarot is that it concretizes the problem in a form that’s out of our control, forcing us to take the extra step of mapping the issues we’re mulling over onto the array of symbols that the deck has generated. This author dives deeply into the meanings of many deep traditions, as is his chosen methodoloy: Christian Hermeneutics. I also have an archive of posts devoted to Valentin Tomberg with material from him which is unusual and hard to find in the Anglosphere: http: // corjesusacratissimum.