An Immersion in Tarot
From time to time, we offer a two-day intensive in a special aspect of tarot study. These intensives cover each subject in much greater depth than we could ever hope to do in a regular class or teleclass.
Held at our Forest Hills, NY location, each day runs from 11am – 6pm. Tuition is $250 for the weekend. To register call 800-804-2184.
Descriptions of our current intensives are below. Click Here to see what we're teaching now.
Card & Symbol Intensives
Court Cards: Advanced Techniques
Even experienced readers are often mystified by the Court Cards. What do they mean? How do you read them? What is their role in divination, contemplation and magick? The answers to these questions make an intricate jigsaw puzzle of tarot symbolism. When the pieces come together in this intensive, they make a beautiful picture and a tool of unexpected power.
What's in a name? Or a picture? Hidden within the four Aces, like the seeds in a pomegranate, there are divine names, elements and worlds. There are alchemical properties, physical and metaphysical qualities, the potential of numbers and the vibrations of color and sound. There's more — so much more that even the full two days of this intensive can only begin to tell it all.
Tarot & Qabalah
Pain-Free Qabalah for Tarot Readers
There was a time when tarot and qabalah were not connected — but that hasn't been true for 200 years. You don't need to know any qabalah to be a good reader, but it will make your readings so much stronger — more useful, deeper and more accurate. Qabalah once had a reputation for being dry and intimidating — but if it's well taught, it's fascinating and not difficult at all. This intensive makes the essential knowledge of qabalah both enjoyable and practical, and puts it in your hand for immediate application in your readings.
The very top of the qabalistic Tree of Life is the Supernal Triad. This is the place where both tarot meaning and tarot spirituality begin and end. There are pleasures to be found in these high places of tarot learning that have little direct connection to divination. This intensive introduces you to the level of tarot that contains the tradition of spiritual meaning far beyond standard interpretation.
There are three Major Arcana cards whose images, at first glance, seem intended to frighten us. Death, The Devil and The Tower have been the source of dire predictions since tarot began. But, along with Temperance, they come together to create a flashing mystical energy that leads straight to the light at the heart of the Tree of Life. This intensive is a rare introduction to pathworking, the central esoteric practice of tarot.
Tarot Techniques
You have lived before, many times. And you have many lives yet to live. In a very real way, you could be said to be immortal. This intensive will show you how and why that happens, and using just the tarot cards (without hypnotic regression) you will actually experience entire past lives from birth to death.
Magick is as learnable as any other skill and requires as much work. It has principles, theory and a wide variety of practices, each of which produces different types of result. Tarot by itself contains several subsets of magickal practice, some with spiritual and some with worldly objectives. This intensive introduces you to a kind of tarot magick that is both playful and worldly and has very interesting consequences.
Tarot Psychology
From the perspective of tarot, you are a magickal being whose special qualities are clearly, beautifully and accurately described by the Major Arcana cards associated with the day of your birth. These cards are called Birth Cards. They are the gateposts or pillars through which you enter the world, and the banks that define the flow of the river of your life. To discover your Birth Cards and learn their significance is the first major step on the path of magickal self-discovery. This intensive shows you how to find your own Birth Cards and those of anyone whose birthday you know. And it tells you the secret of how to read and understand them.
Birth Cards create a simple, instant, graphic, and incredibly useful and accurate form of psychological portrait. But beneath the lovely simplicity of each Birth Card pair lies the profound matrix of the ten numbers of the Tree of Life. When you know how, Birth Cards open up naturally into the Tree of Life. We call this the Personal Tree and everybody has one. What happens on the Personal Tree is an exponential increase in the depth and precision of what Birth Cards can tell you about anyone whose birthday you happen to know. This intensive explores the Personal Tree and is advanced material. To get the most from it, you should have a solid background in tarot and be comfortably familiar with the Tree of Life.
The four Aces of tarot embody the elements of fire, water, air and earth from which everything, including you, is said to be made. The Elemental Array is a simple process of arranging the four Aces. Everyone does it differently, and each array is a virtual encyclopedia of individual personality. This intensive shows you how to do an Elemental Array for yourself or a querent, and how to read all that it reveals. It is a second great step on the path of self-discovery begun with the Birth Cards, although it is a powerful separate technique in its own right and knowledge of Birth Cards is not required.
The four courts of tarot are the expressive human face of the four elements. It has been said that court cards are to personality what notes are to music. The Court Card Array is an arrangement of all 16 court cards that reads like a musical score. It records the important and often surprising inner shifts and changes that happen all the time within every personality. This intensive shows you how to do a Court Card Array for anyone and see and understand these changes as they happen. It is the third step in tarot's progression of magickal self-discovery. Familiarity with the Elemental Array is a prerequisite for this intensive.
If you never turned the cards face-up, could you read them? The answer is, "Absolutely!" A brilliant reading can be done with the backs of the cards alone, which have their own vast and powerful symbolism. They describe a human being as an energetic being, whose shape changes from moment to moment like the flame that dances on the wick of a candle. You can learn to read the flickering patterns of your querents' energies and know at a glance how likely they are to get what they want or avoid what they fear. Their happiness or pain, present and future, lies plainly on the table before you.
The reading done with the backs of the cards is called The Hidden Face, and you can easily show querents how to read and understand it for themselves. It is one more big step on the path of self-knowledge, and it can be done with little or no previous tarot experience.
Non-Tarot-Specific Intensives
A great meditation master once said, "Learning bears no fruit without contemplation." What an interesting and enigmatic statement. Could it be true? What does it mean?
Contemplation is slow. It takes time. It is a method of going within. It changes something you learn into a question, and allows that question to seek its own answer deep inside you. Learning then undergoes a kind of alchemy, and what began as information slowly turns into wisdom. When something learned about tarot is contemplated, it begins to become wisdom in just that way. This intensive teaches you the beginnings of contemplation.
Your eyes are a doorway that opens on the whole world. When your eyes are open, the world of everyday manifests before you in all its reality. But when you close your eyes, your own inner world appears, a world as intense and full of possibilities and meaning as your outer one. Journeywork creates a practical doorway to your inner world. When you step through it, the inner world is where you live and act. This intensive will show you the way to your inner world, in which tarot cards are real places where real things happen.
The world you are accustomed to seeing is not the only way it can be, nor is it the only world that is. Will and intent are tools of awareness that can reassemble the world right before your eyes, or bend it to your need and desire. This intensive will begin to show you how to use will and intent to live powerfully and where to find them in tarot and in yourself.
In 1947, back in the all-but-forgotten days of the mid-20th century, The High Deck was created as a beautiful world of symbolic forms parallel with, equal to, and completely different from tarot. It contains unique treasures of vision that have found their way quietly into modern esoteric tradition, with a great enriching and clarifying effect. The High Deck is the source of the concept of emergence and return, without which tarot symbolism and spirituality remain incomplete. This intensive brings The High Deck out of the shadows of obscurity, teaches some of its secrets, and reveals its hidden and powerful influence on tarot.