Quick Answer
An anonymous author wrote seven hundred pages on the Major Arcana, forbade publication until after his death, and got an afterword from a future cardinal. It is not a book about reading cards. It uses the twenty-two images as objects of contemplation inside a Catholic frame, and it is digressive, demanding, repetitive and unlike anything else in the tarot literature. Read one letter a week or do not read it at all.
Key Takeaways
- Not divination. He treats prediction as a misuse of the images.
- Anonymous by instruction, published posthumously, and the anonymity is part of the argument.
- Tomberg left Steiner for Rome, and both camps have been uneasy since.
- Balthasar wrote the afterword, which is the strangest fact in modern esoteric publishing.
- Seven hundred pages, twenty-two letters. Pace yourself or abandon it.
🕑 17 min read
What This Book Is
Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism was written in the 1960s, published in French in 1980 and in English in 1985, seven years and twelve years respectively after its author's death.
It consists of twenty-two letters, one for each card of the Major Arcana, taken in order from the Magician to the World. Each runs twenty to forty pages.
The letters are addressed from an Unknown Friend to an unnamed reader, and the epistolary form is not decoration. It sets the register: personal, unhurried, willing to digress at length, and free of the apparatus of scholarship.
The English edition runs close to seven hundred pages, which for twenty-two images is an unusual ratio and tells you most of what you need to know about the book's method.
What it is not. There are no card meanings here in the usable sense, no spreads, no reversed positions, and no guidance on reading for anyone. A reader who wants to learn tarot will find nothing they can apply, which is deliberate.
Who Valentin Tomberg Was
Tomberg was born in St Petersburg in 1900 into a family of mixed Baltic German and Russian background.
The revolution destroyed the family. His mother was killed during the civil war, and he fled with his father to Estonia, where he studied and where he encountered the work of Rudolf Steiner.
He became a prominent figure in the anthroposophical movement, lecturing and writing extensively through the 1930s, with a substantial following in the Baltic and later in the Netherlands.
He then broke with the movement, converted to Catholicism in the 1940s, moved to England, and spent the rest of his working life at the BBC monitoring service, translating and analysing foreign broadcasts.
He wrote this book in his retirement, in French, and died in 1973 in Majorca. He had spent thirty years in ordinary employment, publishing nothing, after having been a public figure in a spiritual movement.
The Break With Anthroposophy
Necessary context, because the book is shaped by it and never quite says so.
Tomberg's anthroposophical work had been well received, and then increasingly not. He had begun making claims about his own spiritual perception and about the significance of his own role that the movement's leadership regarded as excessive.
His conversion to Catholicism was, from the movement's side, a defection. Steiner had been sharply critical of Roman Catholicism, and a leading anthroposophist entering the Church was a considerable embarrassment.
From Tomberg's side the move was a correction. He came to hold that esoteric work without institutional and sacramental grounding produces exactly the inflation he had fallen into, and the book's insistence on obedience and on the Church is written by someone who thinks he knows what the alternative costs.
The bitterness persists. Anthroposophical readers frequently treat the book as apostasy, and it is rarely discussed neutrally within that movement.
Why No Name
Tomberg stipulated that the book appear anonymously and only after his death, and he gave reasons.
The stated reason is that the content should be judged on itself. A reader who knows the author's history reads the biography rather than the argument, and Tomberg had a great deal of history to read past.
The deeper reason is in the form. The letters come from an Unknown Friend, and the anonymity makes the transmission impersonal in a way he considered proper to the material: the reader is not receiving a teacher's system but overhearing a conversation.
The attempt failed in practice. The authorship was established fairly quickly and is now stated openly in most editions, so the reader who wanted the pure text has to work at not knowing.
The anonymity is also, less charitably, a device with an effect. A named author with a controversial history can be argued with. An Unknown Friend addressing you personally cannot, and the intimacy of the form makes disagreement feel like ingratitude. Whether Tomberg intended that is unknowable and the structure produces it either way, and a reader is entitled to keep a little distance from a voice that has been engineered to be so close.
What He Refuses to Do
The first thing that distinguishes the book from everything around it on the shelf.
Tomberg treats divinatory use of the tarot as a misapplication. His objection is not that it fails, and he is not much interested in whether it works. It is that asking the cards about events puts the images to a use beneath what they are.
On his account the Arcana are instruments for developing a faculty: a way of seeing that the images train by being held in attention over long periods.
The distinction he draws is between a question that seeks information and a practice that changes the questioner. Divination belongs to the first, and the whole of this book belongs to the second.
Readers who use the cards for reading should know this position is stated firmly and repeatedly, and that the book offers nothing to that practice and does not intend to.
What He Means by an Arcanum
His definition is the most useful single idea in the book and it is stated early.
An arcanum, he says, is not a secret in the ordinary sense: not a piece of information withheld that could be handed over. It is something that has to be entered rather than learned.
His formulation is that an arcanum is that which must be known in order to be fruitful, and which cannot be communicated by being told. What can be given is the conditions under which someone might come to it.
This governs the whole method. Tomberg does not explain the cards. He circles each one, approaching from several directions, telling stories, quoting scripture and philosophy, and never arriving at a statement of what the card means.
The digressiveness that frustrates readers follows directly from this, and once you see the intention the frustration is easier to bear.
The Letter as a Form
Worth pausing on because the form carries the content.
Each letter takes a card, describes the image in detail, and then moves through whatever the author finds attached to it: a passage of Genesis, a point of Thomist theology, an alchemical operation, a personal recollection, an argument with a nineteenth-century occultist.
There is no visible structure to the movement. Letters return to earlier material, take up problems left open, and go on at whatever length the subject takes.
The intended effect is accumulation rather than exposition. A reader who has spent forty pages in the vicinity of an image is expected to have a relation to it that a definition could not produce.
Whether it works depends heavily on the reader's tolerance. Some find it the most nourishing spiritual writing they have encountered. Others find it seven hundred pages of a very learned man failing to come to the point.
The Four Kinds of Magic
The most quoted passage in the book, from the first letter, and it is genuinely clarifying.
Tomberg distinguishes four operations that get called magic.
Divine magic, which works through the will of God and in which the operator is an instrument rather than an agent.
Sacred magic, in which a human being acts in accordance with that will, having aligned their own.
Personal magic, in which the operator works from their own will and by their own force, for ends they have chosen.
Sorcery, which uses forces the operator does not understand and cannot control, for purposes that serve the self.
The distinctions are moral and structural at once, and the criterion running through them is whose will is operating and whether the operator has submitted to anything. This gives him a way to be interested in the Hermetic tradition while rejecting most of what the modern magical revival does with it.
The Card That Is Not There
A structural decision worth examining, because it tells you what kind of book this is.
The Marseille Fool carries no number. In most modern orderings it is placed either at the beginning as zero or at the end before the World, and the choice reflects whichever system the arranger holds.
Tomberg gives the Fool its letter in the position the Marseille numbering implies, between the Judgement and the World, and he uses the ambiguity rather than resolving it.
His treatment is among the strongest passages in the book. The Fool as the figure who has passed through the whole sequence and retained nothing of it, who cannot give an account of what he knows, and who is indistinguishable from a person who never began.
The theological material he attaches is the tradition of holy folly: the fool for Christ, the figure whose wisdom is unrecognisable as wisdom and who is protected by being dismissed.
What makes this more than a pleasant reading is the use he puts it to. He treats the Fool as the answer to the danger the whole book runs, which is that esoteric knowledge inflates the person holding it. The end of the path, on his account, produces someone who cannot use what they have to establish a position, and any practice that produces the opposite has gone wrong somewhere.
Given that Tomberg's own break with anthroposophy followed from claims about his spiritual standing that his colleagues found inflated, the letter reads as autobiography with the names removed.
Christian Hermeticism
The programme, and the thing that makes the book unusual.
Tomberg wants the Hermetic inheritance held inside Catholic orthodoxy: the doctrine of correspondence, the symbolic reading of nature, the contemplative work on images, the analogical method.
What he rejects is the claim, standard in the occult revival, that this constitutes a superior alternative to institutional religion, available to initiates who have outgrown the exoteric forms.
His position is the reverse. The Hermetic method is a way of deepening participation in the sacraments and the creed rather than a replacement for them, and the esotericist who sets up in opposition has misunderstood what they are holding.
He accordingly reads the Hermetic texts and the Kabbalistic material as compatible with, rather than prior to, Christian revelation, which is a position with a Renaissance pedigree and a difficult modern standing.
Why the Marseille Deck
A choice with an argument behind it.
Tomberg works with the Tarot de Marseille, the French pattern that stabilised in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, rather than with any of the occult redesigns.
His reason is that the later decks were designed to illustrate systems. The Golden Dawn tradition and the decks descending from it encode a specific set of correspondences to the Hermetic Qabalah, astrology and the elements, and reading those decks returns the system that was put into them.
The Marseille images are, on his view, older and less determined. They were not designed to teach anything, which leaves them open in a way the designed decks are not.
The historical claim here is roughly right and the images are less loaded, and a reader working from a Rider-Waite or Thoth deck should know the letters will frequently describe details their cards do not have.
The Balthasar Afterword
The fact that makes this book unique in its field.
Hans Urs von Balthasar was among the most significant Catholic theologians of the twentieth century, author of a vast work on theological aesthetics, and named a cardinal shortly before his death in 1988.
He wrote an afterword for this book, appearing in editions from the 1980s onward, and it is not dismissive. He takes the work seriously as a spiritual document, engages with its method, and treats the author as a serious Christian thinker while noting where he departs from what the Church teaches.
There is no comparable case. Esoteric works are not generally engaged with by theologians of that standing, and the endorsement has been used ever since as a certificate of respectability by the book's admirers.
The complication, noted by critics, is that Balthasar's afterword is more measured than its use suggests. It is an assessment with reservations, not an imprimatur, and the book has never carried official approval.
Trouble on Both Sides
The reception is the most interesting thing about the book's afterlife.
Traditional Catholics have objected that the Church has consistently condemned divinatory practices, that using tarot images at all is imprudent regardless of the author's intentions, and that Balthasar's involvement was an error.
Occultists and anthroposophists have objected from the other direction: that Tomberg surrendered the independence of the esoteric path, that submitting Hermetic work to ecclesiastical authority defeats its purpose, and that the conversion was a failure of nerve.
Being attacked from both sides is not evidence of being right, and it does indicate that the book occupies a position genuinely its own rather than restating either camp.
The readership it has found is largely people uncomfortable in both, which is a specific and not small constituency.
The Objections
Three, stated plainly, because the admiring literature does not.
It is undisciplined. Seven hundred pages is a great deal, the digressions are frequently digressions from digressions, and a firm editor could have produced something better at half the length.
The framework is asserted. Tomberg's Christian Hermeticism is announced rather than defended. A reader who does not already accept Catholic doctrine is offered no argument for it, and the synthesis works only for someone who arrived holding both halves.
The historical claims are loose. The book makes assertions about the tarot's origins and about the transmission of Hermetic material that the scholarship does not support, and it makes them without evidence because it is not that kind of book. Readers wanting the actual history must go elsewhere.
How to Actually Read It
Practical guidance, since most people who start this book do not finish it.
Do not read it straight through. The letters are self-contained enough that one at a time works, and a common practice is one letter a week with the corresponding card kept in view.
Have a Marseille deck to hand. The descriptions are detailed and mean little without the image, and the differences from a modern deck will otherwise confuse.
Skip when you must. Not every digression will be for you, and the structure permits leaving a passage without losing the thread, because there is no thread in the ordinary sense.
Expect no conclusions. The book does not build to anything and it does not summarise itself, and a reader waiting for the payoff will wait through all twenty-two letters.
What It Offers
Three things, for the right reader.
A contemplative use for the images. Almost the entire tarot literature is about reading. This is the fullest treatment of the cards as objects to be held rather than consulted.
A worked synthesis. Whatever its argumentative weaknesses, it demonstrates what a Hermetic practice inside Christian orthodoxy would actually look like, in detail, over hundreds of pages.
A voice. The intimacy of the letters is real, and readers who take to it describe a relation to the book that is unlike reading and closer to correspondence.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you want the Major Arcana treated as contemplative objects rather than as a vocabulary for readings.
Read it if you are Christian and drawn to esoteric material and have found nothing that holds both.
Read it if you are interested in Tomberg himself, since the book is the record of where a serious esotericist ended up after leaving the movement that formed him.
Do not read it to learn tarot, do not read it for history, and do not start it if you need a book to arrive somewhere.
The distinction worth keeping from Tomberg is the one between a question and a practice. Asking the cards what will happen treats them as a source of information about a situation outside you, and the answer either helps or does not, and either way you are unchanged at the end of it. Holding one image for a month, without asking it anything, is a different activity with a different object, and the object is the person doing the holding. You can decide that the second is not worth the time. It is worth noticing that they are not the same activity, and that almost all the available literature is about the first.
Twenty-two letters from an Unknown Friend, published only after he died.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. Our account of the book's length, its undefended framework and its loose history is set out above and is independent of the link.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Meditations on the Tarot about?
Twenty-two letters, one for each card of the Major Arcana, using the images as starting points for a Christian Hermetic spirituality rather than as a system of divination.
Who wrote it?
Valentin Tomberg, a Russian-born esotericist, 1900 to 1973, who published it anonymously and stipulated that it appear only after his death without his name attached.
Why was it published anonymously?
Tomberg wanted the content judged without reference to his biography or his earlier positions, and the book is addressed from an Unknown Friend to an unknown reader as a deliberate feature.
Is it a book about fortune telling?
No, and the author is emphatic. He treats divination as a misuse of the images, and uses the cards as objects of contemplation intended to develop a faculty rather than to predict events.
What is Christian Hermeticism?
His term for a Hermetic practice held within Catholic orthodoxy: the correspondences, the symbolic method and the contemplative work, without the claim that they constitute a rival to the Church.
Did a cardinal really endorse it?
Hans Urs von Balthasar, one of the twentieth century's major Catholic theologians who was later made a cardinal, wrote an afterword for it, which has caused ongoing argument in Catholic circles.
What was Tomberg's relation to Steiner?
He was a prominent anthroposophist who lectured widely within the movement, then broke with it and converted to Catholicism, and the break was acrimonious and is still resented by some anthroposophists.
Which deck does it use?
The Marseille tradition, which he considered the least contaminated by later occult redesign, and he works only with the twenty-two Major Arcana rather than the full deck.
Is it difficult?
Yes, though not obscure. It runs to nearly seven hundred pages, digresses constantly, and assumes familiarity with Catholic theology, Kabbalah, alchemy and the Hermetic tradition.
How should it be read?
Slowly and out of order if necessary. The letters are self-contained enough that one a week is a common approach, and reading it quickly defeats what the form is designed to do.
What are the main criticisms?
That it is undisciplined and repetitive, that the Catholic framing is asserted rather than argued, and that occultists find it too orthodox while traditional Catholics find it not orthodox enough.
Who should read it?
Readers who want the tarot treated as contemplative rather than predictive, and anyone interested in the rare case of an esoteric work taken seriously by a major theologian.
One image, one month
Whatever you make of Tomberg's theology, the experiment he proposes costs nothing and almost nobody tries it. Take a single card, the one you understand least, and keep it somewhere you will see it daily for a month. Do not look up its meaning, do not ask it anything, and do not try to work it out. Just let it be in front of you. What Tomberg claims is that at the end of that month you will have something you cannot state, and that the inability to state it is the point rather than a failure. He may be wrong. It is a cheaper test than reading seven hundred pages about it.
Sources & References
- Anonymous [Valentin Tomberg]. Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism, trans. Robert Powell.
- Von Balthasar, Hans Urs. Afterword to the published editions.
- Tomberg, V. Earlier anthroposophical lectures and writings.
- Steiner, Rudolf. The anthroposophical background Tomberg left.
- The Tarot de Marseille, the image tradition the letters work from.
- Scholarship on the documented history of the tarot in Europe.