Valentin Tomberg, the true author of Meditations who is identified in the book merely as “your friend from beyond the grave,” took on an even more dangerous task when he attempted to reconcile what insights he could from the fringes of German and French Romanticism and Esotericism with orthodox Catholicism. John the Apostle who unlocked the cosmic implications of the Logos, and end with Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day, whose Catholic Worker Movement reconciled the Anarchism of Peter Kropotkin with the personalism of St. A list of such thinkers might begin with St.

This type, though, is not limited to the Angelic Doctor. Thomas Aquinas is the most obvious example of such a figure, reconciling the insights of Aristotle, and through him the best of the Greek philosophical tradition, with the Catholic Faith. These figures appear when some new body of knowledge, when some great insight or edifice of thought must be reconciled with the Christian Tradition. Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism is the work of a great reconciler. Calhoun, a 2021 Fellow in Ideas, for today’s post. This eclectic quality distinguishing Meditations on the Tarot simultaneously reflects modernity's religious and intellectual fragmentation and traditional esotericism's tendency towards syncretism.Thanks to A. To highlight the connection between these sources and Tomberg's work, I have compared elements of Tomberg's cosmology with central ideas from each. These influences are the nineteenth-century French occult tradition, epitomized in the work of the French tarot theorist Eliphas Levi (1810- 1875), Rudolf Steiner's (1861-1925) esoteric movement of Anthroposophy, and a curious Roman Catholic/Eastern Orthodox/Russian mystical blend, which alternately conforms to and diverges_from standard Catholic doctrine.

However, three intellectual sources for Meditations on the Tarot are particularly salient. In his key work, Tomberg draws spiritual insights from a variety of Eastern and Western sources and fuses them into a larger Hermetic/Christian cosmology. The present study is a textual analysis of Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism (1972), a significant work of twentieth-century Western esotericism written by the Russian-born, apostate Anthroposophist Valentin Tomberg (1900-1973).

Meditations on the tarot tomberg