I’ve been thinking about reverence quite a lot these past few days. I wrote an essay1 about its importance to Freemasonry that was well received, but I think that essay is applicable beyond Masonry, that it applies to all ritualistic work, including our work with Tarot.
Today, I encountered this quote from John Milton:
“Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world.”
I pulled the following Tarot card to explore it:
It is an often repeated, and just as often misunderstood saying in Freemasonry that:
“You get out of it what you put into it.”
And Judgement seems to directly symbolize that here.
If we don’t treat those things that should be important in our lives with reverence, are we not debasing and devaluing them? And if we debase those things that could “change forever how we experience life and the world” are we not precluding those changes from ever actually coming into our lives?
This certainly has implications for ideas around manifestation, and for our Tarot practices as well.
Many of us, perhaps most of us, have rituals that we have associated with our Tarot work. I certainly have mine. I seek to ground myself, focus my perception, and both open and close the reading(s). For me, these are very brief rituals, things I’ve developed myself based on my own unique experiences, and that have changed here and there over the years. Other readers I know have longer, perhaps more elaborate rituals than mine, I presume also uniquely developed for their own use, based on their own experiences.
If we have little rituals like this, as a part of our work with Tarot (I won’t claim that everyone does) it is vitally important that we perform them with reverence. For without reverence they are nothing but meaningless babbling. And if we approach Tarot without any kind of meaning, will it actually work for us? I must presume that no, it will not work. That it requires reverence and belief in order to work.
Ultimately this comes down to energy. We put positive and powerful energy into the cards when we practice Tarot with reverence. Energy that provides the very foundation that our practice rests upon. Energy that isn’t present, or even worse is negative, if we approach the cards with sacrilege or scorn.
As Judgement symbolizes here, we get what we have coming to us. A reverential Tarot practice can, and I would argue will, provide us with “transcendent moments of awe.”
And that applies to all that we practice with ritualistic intent as we make our way through life.
