If you love a good mystery, you’ll love the Tarot. If you love a good romance, the Tarot is for you. As a deck of cards the Tarot are used for fortune telling, and in casinos the cards are used for poker and all those other fun games of chance. It’s also been likened to a book of initiation by the mystics and occultists of old, and more recently, along the same lines, called the hero’s journey.

In the hero’s journey, the hero goes through several stages, the first, and most important, is to become aware that there is a problem to be solved. In order to solve this problem the hero realizes a need for change, but realizes that the first obstacle to overcome is fear. The hero will eventually go through major changes entailing feelings of life and death. But, eventually overcoming all the trials and adventures, the hero makes the changes necessary and gains mastery.

The hero’s journey is as popular a theme in movies today as it was in the great religious texts of the past, such as the Bible, The Book of Thoth, the Bhagavad Gita, and many others. The hero’s journey demonstrates the initiations that each of us must go through on our return to our Creator and to realize our true inner Self.

The Cards are also called Keys. Keys are used to unlock doors, and in our case, the locked doors in our head, in our mind. We will be covering how to first know that there is a locked door up there, between our ears, how to locate the keys that fit our locks, and then how to turn the Keys to open a door to another world within ourselves.

Then we will learn how to step into that world and understand how to live there and, best of all, to live here more fully with greater peace and joy. Please be aware that what interests you may be quite different than what your friends, family and others are looking for. This is a private undertaking, your personal hero’s journey, not anyone else’s.

From the Tarot deck we will be using what is called the Major Arcana, or trumps, on this adventure. They are the picture cards of the deck. There are 78 cards in the full set of the Tarot. The Trump keys, 22 in all, relate to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet.

Just as we universally use Latin and Greek in our sciences, the Hebrew language was chosen to be on the cards because each Hebrew letter is also a number and a word. This allowed for a great deal of information to be hidden in these picture cards, apparent only to those who understood their symbols and their use of color. And as we have probably heard a million times, a picture is worth a thousand words.

The story contained in the pictures is fundamentally identical with the wisdom taught in the secret schools of India, Tibet and China. The idea of hiding this information in plain sight has been very successful. By using the 78 cards to tell fortunes and play games, the cards traveled around the world, their true meaning unknown to most. And, of course, this allowed for the safe passage of the true initiates, who used them in their spiritual studies on the Path of Return. Prior to the creation of the cards, the wisdom taught was carried word of mouth from Teacher to student. The cards created a greater mobility of this sacred information.

The Tarot is also a great love story, the story of our Creator, the Breath of Life, and Its love for Its Creation. It is a story that teaches each of us how to truly love, and thereby, reap all the benefits that Life has to offer us. It is a story about understanding and wisdom and living, not as a philosophy, but as a reality in our everyday lives.