Seven Stages of Spiritual Unfoldment

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Seven Stages of Spiritual Unfoldment

Tarot has many secrets and systems locked inside what appear to be simple cards.  Some of these were found by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn while others were discovered by the many off-shoots that came from it.  One such order was Builders of the Adytum whose Golden Dawn trained founder, Paul Foster Case uncovered a secret in the last seven cards of the tarot.  Put simply, he worked out that the last seven cards of the Major Arcana represented a spiritual process which he called the Seven Stages of Spiritual Unfoldment.   In the decades since he made his discovery the idea has been studied by his Order and others and developed further.  This booklet represents our own work on the subject and has little taken from Case.

Using these cards in this sequence can lead you to an understanding of processes of development, help you deal with the various crises in your life, and, more importantly, quicken those developments.

Tarot is much more than a system of divination.  The Horus-Hathor Tarot deck contains symbols, and colours, that if meditated upon, will lead to a realisation of the state which is suggested in the card.  This meditation is more than simply staring at the card and trying to understand intellectual information about it.  It is a process of allowing yourself to live the principles illustrated within them. 

How are the seven stages of spiritual unfoldment found?

Take all the Major Arcana and lay them out thus:

The Fool is the spiritual principle that links all the cards and so is placed out of sequence.  The first row represents the cosmic Principles of the Universe.  The second row are the agencies that these forces use and the last row, which concerns us in this short paper, are the forces of spiritual unfoldment, the results of all these principles and agencies.

How can I use these cards to take part in the process of spiritual unfoldment?

Place the seven cards in sequence on the table.  Choose the card you want to study and hold it before you.  First think about all the information you know about this card, look at each symbol and work out what it means to you.  Allow the colours to subtly influence you.  Shut your eyes and imagine the colour of the frame of the key as circulating clockwise within your aura.  Then imagine your self as being inside the card, talking to the characters.  Ask them the questions you might have, but above all feel the energy of the card.  In your mind's eye withdraw from the card and think about what you have learnt and look for ways to test and apply the information you are given.

You can approach the cards to deal with any problems you are facing and by absorbing the symbols make these problems transform and develop into something more useful.  The seven cards apply to the spiritual evolution on the path, and also the transformation of every major issue in your life.  It is possible to deal with minor problems by holding them in your mind and allowing them to transform as you pick up each of the seven cards.

I am being deliberately simplistic here.  The technique works but it is not that easy to do.  There are no short cuts in esoteric study and it will take time to have the sort of realisations you need.

The Seven Stages

The Devil

We build out lives out of rules.  These are usually taught to us by our parents, friends, teachers and the society we live in.  To live successfully we need to have our mind on materiality.  Parents and society bend the mind of the child to think about how they will live in the future and how they will support themselves. But there comes a time when the lesson has been learnt, when a person has build their material life and is aware of what their mundane destiny will be.  Rather than being a moment of fulfilment this is one of sadness.  The person realises that there must be something more to life than their parents had wished for them.  Each day's routine becomes dry and dull, friends, partners, and all ambitions seem pointless.  It is as if we hit a barrier in our lives can proceed no further.  We realise that we are chained to the rules we created for ourselves and life becomes a depressing demon.

This is an important stage.  If we didn't realise how trapped we were, we would not want to get out of it, we would stay the same.  However the devil will not let us go that easily.  Within us there is a fear about what will happen if we step out and make those changes.  The devil tempts us to stay the same within our comfort zone.  It says: "If you want to make a change, make it small and undisruptive.  Remember you are a mother, or a father, or a manager, you are required to do things according to laws.  You have responsibilities to stay the same."   

The Devil card however is meant to be a challenge.  Just like in the Golden Dawn when the candidate faces the officer of the West and is told that "fear is failure". They must move on or else they will remain locked in the same place.

The Tower
After we have become aware of the nature of our lives we have a blinding realisation.  It is sudden and destructive. Having realised that the world we have created is wrong we have a sudden epiphany.  It is always sudden and quick and once we have had it the despair and depression of the last card is overthrown.  Depression is often caused by the fact that people are in the wrong place for them and for a variety of reasons cannot, or will not change it.  They might even have the realisation of the fact, but cannot change it.  Meditation on this card will result in change, but very often it is not the sort of change you might wish for.

This realisation, which comes from your higher self, destroys the universe we have created.  Our grand façade burns.  We know that we must make change and often it is at the cost of things that we thought were important.  Ideas of the universe that we might have loved, treasured views, all these things must be swept aside in this Tower experience.

Each person on the spiritual path must face this process many times as a result it sometimes feels as if they have lived many lives in just one incarnation.  It is a sign of spiritual maturity that you are prepared to just let it all go and start anew.

The Star
In the chaotic aftermath of the tower, there is a pause for reflection and of planning what to do next.  If we stay in the spiritual state represented by the Tower we would have nothing upon which to build our lives.  The Devil card was correct in some ways, we do need stability in our lives.  It is just that we cannot carry it too far.  The Star is the period of planning the universe we hope to build.  If we look at this card we see the planets and a single star.  The star is Sirus which when it rose in Ancient Egypt heralded the flood of the Nile, which bought the fertile earth to the farmers. This is why Venus is shown pouring water into a lake, but it also means that in the destruction experienced in the tower there is hope of a new life.  The Hebrew letter of this card is Tzaddi which means fish hook.  This gives us the clue to what we should be doing next.  We should be fishing inside our selves to work out what we really want in our universe and creating it.  This is done through meditation on what we want and why.

Venus indicates that if we build our universe around the principles of love we bring it in accord with the plan of God.  Mediation on this card will slowly bring us an awareness of what we should be doing in our life and how we should order our universe.

The Moon
Regularly meditating on what we want creates a slow evolution of consciousness.  In this card this evolution is depicted.  We see the path of evolution from the state of a fish emerging from a pond, to the animal, finally the human.  You will notice that the path carries on past that of an ordinary human.  Even in this card the fish has evolved into a shellfish that walks on land, jackals have evolved into Gods, and the human has become the Goddess Hecate.  Above, the Gods have merged into the stars which is their evolutionary destiny.

What this card is saying is that gradual evolutional change is created by the flux and reflux of our lives.  Through meditation we slowly become more than human and are able to walk into the beyond.  We can step between the pillars into a new existence.    

The Hebrew letter Qooth gives us a clue here.  It means the back of the head.  It is that part of the brain which is the most primitive and part of the automatic consciousness.  The changes we are making are glacial but are wired deep within our minds.

The Sun
Evolution brings us to our solar self, or Higher Self, which begins the process of rebuilding our universe in its image.  Just as the sun is the centre of our solar system, so our spiritual sun is the heart of our personal universe.  When we have made the evolutionary changes necessary then our solar self takes control of the chariot of our lives.  In this card you will notice that a new wall has started to be built, but instead of the bricks of the tower it is built from the energy of the Sun.  It is not a pattern which is controlling our live in a direction that we do not want to go, but rather the threads of the magic carpet of our spiritual destiny.

This is a rebirth, or being born again, and it feels like liberation and freedom.  It was what Jesus Christ meant when he said that unless you become like a child you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven. By this he meant that you must see your universe as a child does, with wonder, fascination and imagination.  A child sees the sunset, delights in the detail of a butterfly wing and above all plays without restriction.  This is the state of someone who lives in accordance to the life destiny of the Solar self.

In this card the children are playing each within their element.  The earth boy dances on earth and the water girl dances on water.  Both represent the lower elements of the personality reaching up to the spiritual sun which is their God.

Judgement
The next stage of spiritual awakening comes only after we have aligned ourselves to our Higher Self.  It is similar to the Tower experience in that it is a sudden awakening into spiritual life.  Those spiritual powers which were dead and inaccessible are awakened to life as the Higher Self integrates with the lower.  The water and the earth (the lower parts of the self) are awakened as gods and goddesses.  The child-like aspects which were polarised in the previous card are now integrated and in balance.  Their energy is now positive, but still not completely developed.  All the developed aspects of the psyche are awakened to new levels of spiritual consciousness.  This is the consciousness of a spiritual adept.  Those demonical aspects that we saw in the Devil card are now divinised as the God Set, who in ancient Egypt was the God of Power.  He arises on the left had of the adept which means that power is not being mis-used.  The female unconscious side of the adept is on his right hand which is traditionally the hand of action.  This is a reversal of polarity which is the state of consciousness of the next plane of reality.

The World
This is the end of the cycle.  It shows the state of perfected consciousness which the adept has completed as a result of their work.  It shows the adept as a dancing goddess with the forces of light and darkness under her control. The sphere of sensation, or aura,  of the person is a mirror for the planetary and angel forces and she is surrounded by the four elements in their highest divine evolution.  She dances and creates and destroys universes.  It is worthwhile pointing out that the universes she creates will one day become the same restrictive world of the Devil card but they will at a higher level than before, for the entire universe is a gradual spiral evolution back toward the Divine.  This stage of development is over, but new ones are always about to begin.

The seven stages in daily life

What we have described above is for major life processes and spiritual development, but with a little imagination it is also possible to use these principles on ordinary problems ranging from work to dealing with an emotional crisis. Ask the following questions and work with the cards to find the answers.

 

Onwards

In this short booklet there is not enough room to provide all the details of the Seven Stages of Unfoldment.  That task would fill many books. But the nature of real occultism is that you find your own way according to the hints and guidance provided.  Tarot is the great instructor and, if you let it teach you, it will guide you into all the magical and spiritual knowledge you need.  Your quest starts now and we wish you well upon its path.

 

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