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Mark Horn is the author of Tarot and The Gates of Light: A Kabbalistic Path to Liberation. He may be the only person who has taught at both the Jewish Theological Seminary and the Readers Studio International Tarot Conference.
He has studied Kabbalah with academic, rabbinic and practical teachers in organizations ranging from the highly respected to the highly unorthodox. And he has studied tarot with many of today’s most respected authorities on the subject. He offers readings and classes online.
Join the Aquarean+ for live readings and community!
You may be interested in
Mark Horn is the author of Tarot and The Gates of Light: A Kabbalistic Path to Liberation. He may be the only person who has taught at both the Jewish Theological Seminary and the Readers Studio International Tarot Conference.
He has studied Kabbalah with academic, rabbinic and practical teachers in organizations ranging from the highly respected to the highly unorthodox. And he has studied tarot with many of today’s most respected authorities on the subject. He offers readings and classes online.
This week's interview was very exciting. I had the opportunity to sit down with Mark Horn, the author of the book Tarot and the Gates of Light. Mark talks about his spiritual journey and how he created a Tarot practice that corresponds with Kabbalistic philosophy. 2s But before we begin, I wanted to let everyone know that I'm ready to expand the Aquarium Plus. Offer Rings so a subscription to the Aquarium Plus is only $5 a month, and becoming a member lets me know how many people are truly interested in learning and practicing Tarot, and, in later seasons, practicing all forms of magic, such as astrology, mediumship, and witchcraft. By subscribing, you're also giving me an idea of how many people will show up to live readings outside of monthly readings, how many people will join the new and full moon gatherings, live meditations, Tarot practice classes, and so on. 1s The big thing that's currently evolving in this subscription is when you subscribe to the Aquarium Plus, you'll have a gateway to an exclusive group on Clubhouse that's only for Aquarian Plus members. Clubhouse is the best way I've found that we can all connect without visuals. I will be offering Zoom meetings for specific events, but there's something about being able to show up and not be physically seen or feel pressured to communicate that I think is super special. 1s There's also a great chat section which gives us the ability to talk to each other without joining a virtual room. Monthly readings for each zodiac sign will be moved to clubhouse starting August 1 because I want to open up and offer live oneonone readings following the zodiac messages. So sign up. Like I said, it's only $5 a month, and I don't plan to change that price since it's really to let me know who wants to go deeper. I'll give you a bit more information before the next episode as well, but I wanted to throw that out there now so we can really grow this community. So without further ado, let's get on with the episode. 4s Mark Horn is the author of Tarot and the Gates of Light a Kabbalistic Path to Liberation. He may be the only person who has taught at both the Jewish Theological Seminary and the Reader's Studio International Tarot Conference. Mark has studied Kabbalah with academic, rabbinic and practical teachers in organizations ranging from the highly respected to the highly unorthodox, and he has studied tarot with many of today's most respected authorities on the subject. He offers readings and classes online. 8s Hello, Mark. Thank you for granting me your time, your precious time to come onto my show. I'm so glad you could make it. Oh, thank you for having me. It's always an honor to be asked. So, Mark, you have a book out called Tarot and the Gates of Light, and it explains a very interesting and enlightening practice with tarot cards. And we're definitely going to talk about that. But I want to ask a bit about your life first so we can all get to know who you are behind this practice. In your introduction, you spoke about your spiritual journey and how it led you away from Judaism, toward Buddhism and then back to Judaism. So my first question is, why did you feel the need to leave Judaism in the first place? What pushed you to seek elsewhere? It's fairly common, I think, among people who are in the tarot world that in one way or another, we're all seekers. And oftentimes the more conventional paths don't speak to us for one reason or another. So we find ourselves on other paths, sometimes paths that others have forged ahead, such as Wicca or various kinds of pagan paths which were very popular today, or searching on our own. I walked away from Judaism fairly young because I knew I was gay, and this was in the really most faith communities were not welcoming of alternate sexual expressions. So I decided to search for a spiritual path. Since I was a spiritual kid, I figured there must be someplace where I would be at home. So I started looking, and among the things that I came across along the way were tarot cards. And that was something that seemed to be free of dogma and also seemed to be a way inside be because it wasn't really so much about a belief system or a faith tradition, even though it came out of Western traditions, but it really seemed to be a technology to work with your inner soul. 1s That's very true. You can use tarot to reflect on your emotions, visualize different paths forward, and access a greater understanding of yourself and even your purpose here. Is that something that you would say that a lot of us are looking for when we pull cards? Oh, yes. Can you talk about what it feels like to be a spiritual seeker? I think a lot of people who listen to my podcast are spiritual seekers, but some of them may not know how to translate that into words. And I know it was hard for me to explain, and because of that, I think I stumbled in the dark for longer than I wanted to. So what are we craving? What are we trying to connect to? What is it the oneness that we're trying to feel? 2s I think it's very much an individual thing. I knew that there was a deeper experience of reality and that there was a greater meaning to the world around that I just didn't know how to connect with. And I found the explanations provided by organized religion to be lacking. It didn't speak to my soul. It didn't answer the deeper questions. It only engendered more questions for me. I had any number of rabbis and eventually gurus who said to me, oh, no, we don't go down there. We don't ask those questions. That's not important. And some of the things the Buddha doesn't talk about all kinds of things because the Buddha's teaching was, I'm here to sort of end your suffering. Everything else is really extraneous to what I want to teach. So if you want to know what happens after death, well, there are a whole bunch of people who believe all of these things. And I can tell you if I've experienced past lives, but I'm not here to talk about this. I'm here to free you. And anything else is just sort of getting lost in the weeds. And I understand that because when I walked away from Judaism as a teen, eventually I found my way to Buddhism, and I found it to be a very rich, meaningful experience. Because it's not so much a teaching as it is a practice, and it's a meditative practice with very specific techniques that you can learn whether you decide to actually believe all of the mythology around Buddhism or not. The technique is to use my teacher's own words non sectarian. If you're just following your breath or paying attention to what's happening in your body that doesn't have any connection to Judaism or Christianity or Buddhism or Taoism or Zoroastrianism, it's simply observation. 1s And anything we put on top of that is story. But part of what we're here to free ourselves from is story. Because stories can keep us trapped. 1s They're not necessarily reality. As I began to learn all of these things in Buddhism, I began to actually recognize the very same deeper teachings in Judaism. Just never met a rabbi who understood or taught those things. But I went off in search of one and I found communities full of them. They were just not available to me. Growing up in Brooklyn in the 1960s yeah, that's very important to remember. You couldn't be open about a lifestyle or opinions that were contrary to the beliefs of whatever organ ##ized religion you were a part of that was a no go for a long time. Everything's been explained. You don't need to look into anything. Right. You know what's expected of you now just go along with it like a good little human. 1s But Tarot gives you or any of these practices, I think, like you said, give you your own storytelling, your own kind of way into yourself and your place in the grand design. Like, if you think about the way the major arcana cards are taught is usually by walking through the fool's journey, which you know is the fool meeting the other 21 cards one by one. And the fool's journey is also said to be everyone's journey through these big spiritual manifestations throughout our lifetimes. Kind of the same way these gigantic stories and these religious texts were about people facing these massive spiritual situations. So tarot for someone who doesn't come from a religious background and who needs the symbology to help connect the spiritual dots. Or someone who is turning away from their religious background but still longs for a spiritual conversation or presence in their life tarot can give you. 1s You know, one of the know, I just actually posted something on Instagram today about the Page of Cups, because I look at the Page of Cups and I connect it to two stories. The story of Joseph in the Hebrew Bible because Joseph used a cup for divination. And in the rider Waite Smith deck, there's a little fish peeking out of that cup speaking 1s to the page. And it's sort of a symbol of connecting to the unconscious. And so that connected to me to the story of Joseph's cup. And in fact, cups and goblets were used certainly by Jews and probably by other people for divination know centuries. And then of know, I thought about the story from Grimm's Tales. The Fisherman and his wife. I don't know whether you're familiar with it. It's a story with many variants in India, in Japan, in South America, but it know as many stories folktales are. It comes out of an archetypal pattern that we all connect with. And I looked at this card and I said, yes, that's the story of the fisherman and his wife. And there are times when. 1s Actually connecting that story to when we're doing a tarot reading. That story may have meaning in the context of that reading. There's a story I tell when the fool comes up. Actually, there are several stories that come up when the fool appears in a reading. There's a story of the Balshem tov stepping off of a mountain and what happens to him. And that's exactly what you're seeing in the image of the fool. But I also talk about images in popular culture. So you can think when you look at the fool stepping off of the mountain you can think of Neo in the Matrix stepping off of a building, expecting to fall and hoping he will actually end up on the. Next building or the roadrunner who goes off a mountain but keeps running and doesn't fall. But the coyote who chases him and gets halfway across and then looks down and thinks, uhoh, I'm out of here and falls. And this directly relates to the idea in the fool of the belief that there is a power, a greater power in the universe that will hold you up. But if you aren't connected to that power, if you don't believe that power, down you go. And it comes out in all kinds of places in our culture because I think it is a universal truth. And when we can sort of connect it to these stories, I think it becomes more real for people. Strangely enough. 2s I completely agree, especially because it is so entrenched in our culture, organized religions, archetypes and storytelling. Everything is trying to explain or become one with different forces that are greater than us, that can help and sometimes turn against us. And there's so many parallels you can draw in that way between Tarot and these old texts. So let's continue on with your life a little bit. You talk about your journey to Japan and how you were introduced to the Pasana Meditation. Why were you in Japan? What was the motivation to move there in the first place? So I was in Japan, actually, because I was employed there. I took a job to work in Japan. Although when I arrived there, literally within a month of arriving, I met a man I was with ten years, and man I think of as the great love of my life. And he said, you know why you came here, right? I said, Well, I came here for a job. He said, no, you came here to meet me. And he said, we have known each other in other lives. We've been together before, we will be together again. 2s This is a Karmic connection. And years later, when we were separated and living in different countries, he was back in Japan, I was back in the States. He said, I always feel connected to you. I always know what you're feeling and what's going on. I'm not somebody who has those feelings generally, but 1s when he died, I knew, 1s and I didn't know that that's what happened. I just knew that something, 2s some connection that I had in the universe had been cut and that I was miserable for a week until he was found. A friend in Japan had called to tell me and said, I have very bad news for you. I said, don't you tell me that he 3s I didn't I didn't understand until the phone call came, and then I put it together. So that was a physical experience? Yes, it was a physical experience. And there have been physical experiences since he's died that have given me a real understanding, even though that I've always wanted to believe there's more, and I've always wanted to believe that we were connected in other lives and will be connected again. Things have happened since that have really told me that this is true. Fears that I've had in the past, I no longer have. 1s That is, I mean, in a way, incredibly special, but also incredibly tragic. It was. But your story is similar to why I think a lot of people come to this work through their experience with death. I don't know how much the Jewish religion really talks about death, or the afterlife, let's say, but Christianity speaks a lot about the afterlife. At least we have this idea of what it's supposed to be or what we're supposed to do to get there. But we all have some story in our mind. Even atheists say they have it all figured out. We're all stuck in the ground. Yes, but somebody dies in our life and our stories can drop and we experience things we may have never considered possible or have never felt before, like you said. And it can change everything for that person. Right. I haven't had somebody close enough to me die that has really shown me that. But. I've had circumstances that have died. And in that death I've been shown a lot of symbology and felt things I can't really explain. And I think this is a lot of why we need spirituality to allow a conversation that is so personal. And yes, yes, but I want to get back to your life in Japan and how you found vipassana meditation. And you say in your book that it was through vipassana meditation that you came back to Judaism. Can you tell me, what was it about vipassana that resolved something for you? It's funny. So I was talking a little bit about vipassana earlier when I was talking about meditation that focuses on the breath and on sensation in the body. And I really got deeply into it. One of the funny things about vipassana, as it's practiced by the students of Goenka, if you go to a rabbi and you say, I'd like to become a Jew, they try and turn you away three times. And if you come back a fourth time, they will say, okay, well, we'll teach you 2s the same thing with vipassana. They said to me after my first retreat, I had a very deep experience, a deep experience of reality that was beyond anything I'd ever known. So I said, I want to learn more about this, that, and the other thing. And they said, no, just do the practice. You don't need to learn any of these other things. The practice is really all that's important. But I was very insistent. So eventually I got very deep into the Buddhist mythology and Buddhist psychology and all of that. And one of the things that ended up happening, I was on a retreat where I was studying something called the Satipatana Sutra. It's basically the Buddhist meditation instructions as they were written in the language of poly, which was the language the Buddha spoke 2500 years ago. And there I was reading this language which no one speaks, and I found myself laughing hysterically that when I was a kid, I didn't want to learn Hebrew, biblical Hebrew, because it was just sort of a dead language, it was just a liturgical language. But now I was studying another dead language and I thought it was really pretty funny. And when I came out of the retreat, a friend of mine said, what do you find in Buddhism that you don't find in Judaism? And I explained my experiences. 1s And she took down from her shelf a book of the Jewish the daily and the weekend and the Shabbat liturgy. And she opened to some pages, and she said, read this. And I read it. I read the couldn't read the Hebrew very well, but I could read the English translation. And I looked at it, and I said, oh, this reads like meditation instructions to me. And she said, yeah, except I said, but I've never met a rabbi who taught it like that. They just read it, right? It's like, instead of you get some medicine, and instead of actually taking the medicine, you read the label and you chant it. Take two aspirin in the morning, take two aspirin in the evening. Take it with water, right? And you chant it as though that's going to help. But you have to take the aspirin. And it's instructions, right? But nobody taught these things as instructions. They just taught them as things you say. So I said, do you know anybody know knows actually how to do this? And she said, I live in North Carolina, and I've met rabbis who can teach me. You live in New York now. You can find somebody, I'm sure. So I went off in search and found people who do this in my tradition. And what's more, because many years had passed and the LGBT liberation movement had really changed many faith traditions. So that the synagogue where I met the rabbi who could teach this was also a synagogue where they were holding potlucks for the LGBTQ community. And I thought, okay, I found a home. Let's see what happens if I start coming here. Things had changed, and I understand some of the reason why 2s these things weren't taught when I was younger. First, I was younger, and I think they probably didn't think someone my age could understand these things. But also. 2s The Judaism that I grew up with in the these people were traumatized. 1s These were people who had gone through the war. I mean, I grew up with photographs of relatives who never made it out of Europe, who died in the camps. And for many of these people, judaism became a life craft for them that they clung to, but they'd lost the deeper parts of it. And as I say, they were traumatized. So anybody who was sort of looking to go deeper, they couldn't go there. I think that a lot of that has changed. It's two new generations now. And there was a book written a number of years ago called The Jew and the Lotus by Roger Kaminetz. And it's a story of five rabbis who went to meet with the Dalai Lama to ask the Dalai Lama, why is it that all these young Jews are going to Buddhism? 2s And the Dalai Lama actually had a question for them. He said, you guys, you lost your country 2000 years ago, but Judaism survived the Tibetans. We have lost our country and we're looking for a way to keep our tradition alive. How did you do it? You have something to teach us and we have something to teach you. And this book is about what they learned from each other. I have since studied with actually every one of the rabbis who were in this book. And I've sat with the Dalai Lama. And I feel like these two traditions have really enriched each other in important ways. I used to have a blog called Another Queer Jewish Buddhist. 1s I sort of laugh at the title of it, but I gave it that name because you think about Alan Ginsburg, for example, who fit that description. He was queer, he was Jewish and he was Buddhist. You think about a rabbi like Jay Michaelson who teaches Buddhist meditation, but he is a rabbi and he's quite queer. It's an interesting mix. And one of the know. As I began to really get deeply into Kabbalah, I learned that in fact you go beyond the God of the Bible, this sort of thing with a personality, the hairy thunderer in the sky. In Kabbalah you get past that to what is called ain't SOF often translated perhaps as poorly as endless Infinity and nothingness. 1s Which is kind of what nirvana is. It is when you begin to sort of get to the mystical traditions in both of these groups, you find that they start to converge in strange and surprising ways. You don't find this in exoteric Judaism. Ask any Jew on the street that you just run into. You'd say, do Jews believe in reincarnation? They'd say, well, no, of course not, but kabbalists do. And there were many kabbalists who could talk to you about their past lives or tell you what your past lives were. They were connected, and they used the technology of the tree of life and the meditation that goes with it because it is a meditative practice. Just as Buddhism is more a practice, it's less about the story. It is more about the practice and getting past the story. And the more you do this, the more you free yourself from these kinds of I say, you know, when I came back to Judaism and then I got really deep into kabbalah, I realized tarot had been with me all along. I took it with me to Japan. My Japanese boyfriend got very deep into tarot and astrology, much better astrologer than a tarot guy, but he loved it. And one of the things I never connected with in tarot was kabbalah. And I say kabbalah because it was hermetic. And also I had walked away from Judaism, so I wasn't interested. And the way it was written about in most tarot books was, oh, it's so holy and mysterious and complicated. And my feeling was, I'm not interested in that. But when I learned kabbalah notice there's a pronunciation difference there, because in Judaism it is pronounced kabbalah. And when I learned the traditional Jewish practices, which are not in the hermetic practices, it all made sense to me and within the context of the Jewish meditation that I'd learned. So now when I was looking at the cards and connecting them to kabbalistic teachings, I went deeper. And then when I learned the kabbalistic practice of counting the omer, I realized, wait a minute, you can do this practice with tarot cards. And I'd done it for a few years without the cards, but then I thought, let's try it with the cards and see what happens. And I went deeper than I'd ever gone before. It was transformative for me, and I felt that it was essential. After I'd done this, I felt like I had to do it for a number of years until I really got it, that I write about it and share it, because it just felt like something that would benefit other people if they knew how to do it. 1s Well, it's meant a lot to a lot of people, I'm sure. I'm usually employed to use tarot and my psychic senses for practical problems like looking into love or understanding a career issue. But spirituality and ritual changes you from the inside out. It aligns you with your potential, your authenticity, your humanity in ways that the material world can only utilize. So I'm excited to begin. I've only so far read up to the practice. But it's a 49 day practice, right? And you work with two cards at a time. 1s Well, yes, but at the same time, I want to emphasize something for folks, because, yes, this is a 49 day practice, which requires you to work with two cards every day in a very specific way. But what I tell people is, once you've done this, because you're working with a finite number of cards, you're not actually working with the full deck. You're working with a finite number of cards in combinations over the course of 49 days. So that each day, your interpretation of of the card changes both in relation to the card it's combined with, and the sephirotic, the Tree of Life energies that you're working with that day. So that when you come away from this practice, you have 13 ways to interpret each card. 1s So as a reader, it enriches your ability to see what the cards mean in different combinations. So whether this is a practice you want to do to go deep within yourself or whether it's a practice you want to do to learn how to be a better reader, I think both of those are excellent motivations to do the work. Yes. That's very good to know. Said it's the 50 minor arcana. It doesn't include the majors or the court cards. And that's great because I think that the minors are the ones that a lot of times we overlook. Yes. Or we'll say, Well, I'll kind of get there when I get there. But the majors are the ones that people tend to focus on the most. Even the court cards will get more attention because they can be really challenging to wrap your head around. So this practice you've created gives us a way into the minor arcana without simply going over the definitions a million times. Yes, exactly. So let's go a little deeper into counting the OMERS. What's the historical story of counting the Omares? It's a 3000 year old tradition, right? It's pretty old, right? Yeah, it's 3000 years old. So originally it was an agricultural practice. It takes place between the holidays of Passover and Shavuot. Now, Shavuot is known in the Christian world and also in the Jewish world, since it has a couple of names. This holiday is known as Pentecost. Pentecost actually just means 50 days, because between the holiday of Passover and Shavuot, it's 49 days. And the 50th day is a very particular holiday where things happen, where things are supposed to happen. Now, the goal was 3000 years ago is that every day you would bring an omer, which is about 2.5 quarts of barley, to the temple as a sacrifice for 49 days. And on the 50th day is actually when the wheat harvest started. But it was also mythologically and ritually. It follows the journey of the ancient Israelites because Passover is the day that the Israelite slaves were freed from bondage in Egypt. And then over the next 49 days, they wander through the desert. They go through the Red Sea, and they wander through the desert, and they have all these adventures. And on the 50th day, they arrive at Mount Sinai, where they all have an experience of revelation. Everybody talks about it as Moses going up and getting the Ten Commandments. But if you actually read the Bible before he goes up to get the Ten Commandments, everybody hears let me rephrase that everybody sees the voice of God. 2s Everybody hears the colors that are happening. One of the things that is described is this what's called synesthesia, that is, everybody's senses become crossed so that you can see things people say or words have colors that are associated with them. And that's what happened. And then all of the people say to Moses, this is way too intense for us. Can you just go up there and talk to God yourself? Because if it goes another minute, we're all going to die. And that's what happens. But the idea is though, that all of us can receive a revelation that each of us is able to receive. We're able to take in as much as we are able to get at that moment. And the idea is that this revelation is available to us anytime. But we're all blocked spiritually in different ways. So some of us have better access to it than others. But there are ways that we can clear these energies within us, so that we're better able to receive our own personal revelation. So there's this diagram of the Tree of Life and it is these ten energy centers which like the Chakras, they live within us. And the goal of the Omer Count or the practice is to purify or to cleanse each of these energy centers of the blocks, so that on the 50th day we have a better channel to receive the revelation that is for us alone. 1s Because it is also part of the Kabbalistic belief that each of us has our own Torah, each of us has our own mission in life that we are given, and it is ours alone. Part of that mythology is there are sparks of divinity that only we can find and raise up. And part of the mythology of Judaism in Kabbalah is that the reason the Jews were dispersed all over the world is that there are sparks all over the world that need to be raised up. So that the reason I went to Japan, from a Kabbalistic point of view, is that there were things there that only I could find and only I could raise up. And the more we are able to receive our revelation, the clearer our path is to find these sparks and raise them. Yeah, I think if you're a part of this community, you probably believe in synchronicity, right? And that kind of sounds like maybe a much more in tune way of looking at synchronicity. Yes. So how does one count the OMERS in a Kabbalistic way? What's the process? 2s So, as you know, there is this diagram called the Tree of Life. If you take out your rider waite Smith deck and you pull out the ten of pentacles, you will actually see