A fascinating exploration of the symbolic foundations of the Western magical tradition.

Using the Cabalistic Tree of Life and the tarot deck, this book takes the foundations of Western esoteric tradition as a basis and goes onward into the deep places of magical spirituality.

Written by the influential American tarot teacher and occultist John Gilbert, it is enriched by insights drawn from modern Gnosticism, spiritual alchemy, neopagan nature worship, and ceremonial magic.

This book offers a wise and practical path to awakening for the modern student of the mysteries.

John Gilbert was a teacher of alternative spirituality active in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. He was born in 1938 in Dakota into a Christian household, but his personal spiritual vision called him in other directions. Gilbert was an extraordinarily capable tarot diviner, as well as teacher of tarot, eventually founding the Tarot Institute. He was also the presiding bishop of the Universal Gnostic Church and the House of Independent Bishops, and the head of the Magickal Order of the Golden Dawn, the Order of Spiritual Alchemy, and the Modern Order of Essenes. Gilbert played a very active role in the Ancient Order of Druids in America. He died in 2021 in Wyoming, where he had moved with his wife Charlene, to be close to his children. 

John Michael Greer is the award-winning author of more than fifty books, including The New Encyclopedia of the Occult, The Druidry Handbook, The Celtic Golden Dawn, and Circles of Power: An Introduction to Hermetic Magic. An initiate in Freemasonry, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, Greer served as the Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA) for twelve years. He lives in Rhode Island with his wife Sara. Greer is also the author of eleven fantasy and science fiction novels and ten nonfiction books on peak oil and the future of industrial society, and also blogs weekly on politics, magic, and the future at www.ecosophia.net.