Ebook: The Wandering Fool: Love and Its Symbols, Early Studies on the Tarot

In 1982 there appeared a remarkable book, written by an author who wished to
remain anonymous, entitled Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian
Hermeticism. This book was destined to become a spiritual classic of the
twentieth century. Distinguished scholar Antoine Faivre called it “the most
beautiful and instructive book of the twentieth century concerning western
esotericism.” Father Bede Griffiths said “to me it is the last word in wisdom.”
Trappist Abbot Basil Pennington wrote “it is such a rich collection of wisdom
drawn from such a staggering number of diverse sources that it leaves the mind
almost reeling. Besides the Bible we find the Upanishads, the Cabbala, the
Hermeticists, and men as diverse as Origen and Chardin, Plato and Bergson,
Jung and John of the Cross, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. It is without doubt the
most extraordinary work I have ever read.” And Cardinal Hans Urs von
Balthasar described the author as “a thinking, praying Christian of unmistakable
purity.”
Students of Meditations on the Tarot now have cause for celebration, for in 2007
a collection of the author's notes was published—preliminary studies of the
images of the Tarot cards, illustrating the method he followed. This methodology
is now revealed for the first time in English translation through the inclusion of
material published in Part Two of this volume. Unfortunately, the notes cover
only the last nine Arcana, from XIV to XXII, the notes to the first thirteen
Arcana having gone missing.