It's giving me a great education because he makes hundreds of references (The dude is uber-erudite) to things I've never heard or things I've heard of but never took the time to understand - he inspires me to look up his various references - just so I can know what the heck he is talking about. (I'm not a scholar in these matters this is just my take on it) Anyway I am neither Catholic nor to I practice Hermeticism but something about this book facinates me. He uses the Tarot Deck to reconcile the modern church with the Gnostic traditions.

This is no airy fairy, hippie dippie new age book it's a intensely researched tome. The unknown author is actually a fellow (I've heard that his name is Valentin Tomberg) who was deeply involved in the Golden Dawn/Rosicrusion/Rudolf Steiner crowd and then converted to Catholicism - perhaps becoming a monk (not sure about that). This is not a book to read cover to cover. A book not to be read so much as studied, pondered over and, inevitably, returned to for another dose of enigmatically bracing wisdom. One need not be a Christian, nor even a believer in God, to become lost within the pathways of the Tarot as so rendered-indeed, if it does nothing else, this tome will spark the imagination and stir the creative juices of any reader still capable of drawing breath. Entire volumes of disparate material have been sifted and parsed through this pen wielded by an unknown hand in order to provide thoroughgoing directions for a mystic augmentation of one's spiritual life.

Most astonishing is the vast wealth of scholarship invested by the author in this labour of love. A billion microbes of bacteria find their explicatory place in the Hermetic tradition. Dense and difficult-the more so as I entered the book woefully uninformed about Catholic and Christian Hermetic ritual and terminology-but also endlessly fascinating and edifying, especially in the recondite and convincing manner with which scientific, psychological, and anthropological phenomena are reconciled with the spiritual revelation of Christ. The anonymous author-who insisted that his French original be published posthumously-delivers his perceived insight and transcendent guidance from beyond the grave, in a manner of speaking, via epistolic essays on the twenty-two Major Arcana of the Tarot. A profound, beguiling, and massively erudite exposition upon Christian Hermeticism built from within the traditions of the Roman Catholic church. Sui generis, at least as regards my reading experience so far.

Tomberg meditations on the tarot