Summary of Rachel Pollack's Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 The image of a young man hanging upside down by his left leg from a wooden frame was derived from Christian tradition, which described St. Peter as being crucified upside down so he could not be said to be copying his Lord.

#2 The Tarot cards seem to be a representation of the Kabbalah, a Jewish mystical tradition, despite the lack of evidence connecting Bembo to any occult groups. The cards seem to demand an esoteric interpretation, despite the lack of evidence.

#3 The Tarot is a path of personal growth through understanding of ourselves and life. It is a way to draw us into its mysterious world, which ultimately can never be explained.

#4 The Tarot of Arthur Edward Waite, whose Rider pack appeared in 1910, is the most popular version of the cards today. It has been criticized for changing some of the trump cards from their accepted version, but it has a wide range of pictures that reflect the cards’ meanings.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Jun 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9798822541832

IRB Media

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Insights on Rachel Pollack's Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The image of a young man hanging upside down by his left leg from a wooden frame was derived from Christian tradition, which described St. Peter as being crucified upside down so he could not be said to be copying his Lord.

#2

The Tarot cards seem to be a representation of the Kabbalah, a Jewish mystical tradition, despite the lack of evidence connecting Bembo to any occult groups. The cards seem to demand an esoteric interpretation, despite the lack of evidence.

#3

The Tarot is a path of personal growth through understanding of ourselves and life. It is a way to draw us into its mysterious world, which ultimately can never be explained.

#4

The Tarot of Arthur Edward Waite, whose Rider pack appeared in 1910, is the most popular version of the cards today. It has been criticized for changing some of the trump cards from their accepted version, but it has a wide range of pictures that reflect the cards’ meanings.

#5

The Tarot is an experience, not a system of objective knowledge. It is both the total of all the different versions over the years, and an entity apart from any of them. When reading the cards, consider them as an archetype of experience rather than as a symbolic system of objective knowledge.

#6

The Tarot is used for fortune-telling, or divination. The practice stems from the simple desire to know what is going to happen, and more subtly, from the inner conviction that everything is connected. The idea of randomness is modern, and stems from the dogma that cause and effect is the only valid connection between two events.

#7

Tarot readings teach us a general lesson: no card, approach to life, is good or bad except in the context of the moment. Giving readings gives each person a chance to renew their instinctive feeling for the pictures themselves.

#8

The Major Arcana of the Rider Pack Tarot cards is made up of four basic archetypes that represent different stages of existence. The Fool, the Magician, the High Priestess, and the World, show us passing through different stages of existence to reach a state of full development.

#9

The Tarot, like many systems of thought, symbolizes duality as the separation of male and female. The Kabbalists believed that Adam was originally hermaphroditic, and that Eve only became separate from him so that they might regard each other as independent beings.

#10

The Fool is the first card in the Tarot, and it represents true innocence. It is a feeling of being one with the spirit of life at all times. The Fool does not belong in any specific place, and he is not fixed like the other cards. His innocence makes him a person with no past and an infinite future.

#11

The four card pattern of the Fool, the Magician, the High Priestess, and the World shows us a restored unity, but a higher and deeper unity achieved through the growth outlined in the other eighteen cards.

#12

The Magician and the High Priestess are the archetypes of action and passivity, maleness and femaleness, and consciousness and unconsciousness. They represent the archetype of inner truth, but because this truth is unconscious, it can only be maintained through total passivity.

#13

The Major Arcana is designed to help us resolve our different elements and bring them together into a unified whole. In reality, we may never have been innocent. Somehow, we experience as if something is lost. The Major Arcana tells us how to get it back.

#14