Tag Archives: Egyptian Tarot

In every true act of divination, in every true act of magick, something of the soul is born into the world. This book focuses on the structure of the Tarot and the system of Qabalistic correspondences that transform it from a card game or fortune telling device into a spiritual, intellectual and magical vehicle of the highest order. The major arcana cards each have a chapter to describe them; a complete method of divination is provided. Unique to the Egyptian Tarot is the use of British surrealist artist and occultist Ithell Colquhoun’s interpretation of the colour correspondences. This enabled us to produce the first figurative Tarot that is fully colour-integrated as according to the schema of the Golden Dawn. The book features 78 full colour illustrations of the Tarot.

Any set of Tarot that carries the proper traditional elements speaks directly to the soul, even when the person has no clue as to the internal keys or Tree of Life basis. And that is because it carries knowledge that pre-dates the religious, classical and Homeric eras, even while it includes the ideas and cultural contexts of the latter. In the same way, some very old churches contain stones and carvings that can be traced back to prehistoric times when the greater part of our whole land was covered with thick forests. The ancient Egyptians recycled building materials from much older temple structures and built them into newer structures, perhaps after two thousand years or more had passed, retaining some of the hieroglyphs and reliefs of the older works.

Clearly understanding the esoteric symbolism of the Tarot cards requires that we first liberate our minds from the baneful curse of modernism and of post-modernism within the occult, which has loudly suppressed all genuine tradition. When we refer to an ancient Egyptian source we are not speaking of the Egyptian civilisation as such. We are alluding to that Great Mind, whose heirs preceded the race of humans and established their divine image on the earth in times of unimaginable antiquity.

More information on the Egyptian Tarot and book may be found on our Ordo Astri ‘Books’ page here.

Scorpio: Egyptian Tarot Sokar XIII

Posted on 22nd October 2025 by Metamorphosis

The Egyptian Tarot trump for the twenty-fourth path of Scorpio is Sokar XIII. Mars is the ruler of the sign of Scorpio; Uranus is also given here as Lord of the Kerubic signs. The esoteric title of the trump is Child of the Great Transformers: Lord of the Gates of Death.

All tarots on this website are from our Egyptian Tarot and Guidebook.

Sokar is here depicted as a hawk-headed god, with black nemmys and white apron. He bears the was or Set-headed sceptre and the Ankh of Life. He is standing upon the hennu boat of the sun’s journey through the night and the underworld. The boat is shaped like a sledge with runners and was never intended to sail on water. It was built to be carried, and was said by some to be steered by the dead. The navigation took place among the stars, for the hennu boat is an astral vessel. The higher end of the sledge is fashioned in the shape of the head of an oryx, a species of desert antelope and the original type of the unicorn.[1] The hennu boat was in the charge of the high priest of Memphis called Ur-kherp-hem, ‘Great One of the Hammer’. The title is a reference to Ptah the cosmic creator god, with whom Sokar was identified.[2]

In the Tarot picture the boat’s runners rest upon an ark, which in turn rests upon the pure white mound of Sokar. Depictions of Sokar in the hennu boat sometimes show his hawk’s head only, while his body is completely covered in a white, luminous shroud. One may wish to note that Scorpio has three symbols: the snake, the scorpion (Scorpio) and the eagle. On the day of the festival of Sokar, the high priest raised up an ark or small wooden shrine at the moment of sunrise and placed it on the hennu boat. The shrine and hennu boat was then pulled along across the sands in a circular procession about the temple of the god, mirroring the revolution of the sun, planets or celestial bodies.[3] As always, one must remember that a true symbol does not represent earthly or even celestial things, but both point to metaphysical or principial truth.

The fiction writer Algernon Blackwood was able to convey some insights into the soul of Egypt, and of the vast expanse of the desert wilderness. In ‘Sand’, his writing was inspired by his experiences of the desert near Cairo.

Through this sand which was the wreck of countless geological ages, rushed life that was terrific and uplifting, too huge to include melancholy, too deep to betray itself in movement. Here was the stillness of eternity. Behind the spread grey masque of apparent death lay stores of accumulated life, ready to break forth at any point. In the Desert he felt himself absolutely royal.

And this contrast of Life, veiling itself in Death, was a contradiction that somehow intoxicated. The Desert exhilaration never left him. He was never alone. A companionship of millions went with him, and he felt the Desert close, as stars are close to one another, or grains of sand.

Power of Scorpio: Will and Word of Sokar

Sokar’s name is spelled in hieroglyphs at the top of the Tarot picture. It means ‘pure will’, or ‘word of power’. Sokar is sometimes shown adorned with the two plumes of Ma’at surmounting a solar crown. The plumes emphasise the True Will, or sacerdotal ordinance. The first hieroglyph of Sokar’s name is the sekhem wand or sceptre of power. The centre of the wand is a stylised form of the horned beast, usually a bull, indicative of the Ka. One may wish to note that Taurus, the Bull, is the opposite and complementary sign to that of Scorpio. The Ka is a vital reserve of strength required for the transformation of the soul into the eternally living Khu, the fabled phoenix bird, and which in turn reflects the radiance of the principial ‘star’, itself a symbol of both the human individuality and the supreme Atma, as it is called in Sanskrit.

Sokar is called the ‘Great God, he who came into being in the beginning, he who resteth upon darkness’. Sokar was ancient even when the Pyramids were built, as are his rites, if we view such a beginning in terms of time-bound consciousness. In metaphysical terms, that darkness is the primoridal or undifferentiated ground or ‘substance’, from which manifestation emerges. Sokar is also ‘Lord of the gates of the tomb’ as the opener of the sealed entrances to the labyrinthine Necropolis. Sokar is and has always been Lord of the Saqqara Necropolis near Memphis and Giza. In predynastic times, a labyrinth was dug out of the desert sands beneath the Saqqara complex. Finely fashioned, highly polished granite arks weighing upwards of 50 tons were placed in cavities there. The arks or vessels are cathodic, for they are polished like glass on the inside. There are no historical records of the builders of these impossible artefacts but they are thought by some to be the ‘old ones’ or ‘elders’ referred to in sacred texts, or their descendants.

The Great Old Ones is a term used in scriptures referring to an elder race that pre-existed that of the human, indistinguishable from gods. They are referred to in the book of Genesis as Nephilim or ‘giants’, the ‘men of renown’. Between Memphis and the Saqqara Necropolis was once a sacred acacia tree. One of the Egyptian names for Memphis is Ankh-Tawy, ‘Life of the Two Lands’. Thus the Tree of Eternity spreads its roots and branches between the worlds of the living and the dead. However, we should not be too hasty in drawing conclusions as to which world is that of the living and which is that of the dead.

Notes

All tarots on this website are from our Egyptian Tarot and Guidebook.

1. The hieroglyphic determinative for ‘oryx’ is frequently mistaken for that of a goat. The Egyptian name is ma’au hetch, denoting the bright white colour of the Arabian species of oryx and the straightness (ma’at) of its horn. The Aramaic re’em is translated in the King James Bible as ‘unicorn’. The same word was translated into Greek as monokeros (μονοκερως) in the Septuagint. In Psalm 22: 21, the word karen, meaning ‘horn’, is written in the singular form. A legend has it that Noah strapped the long, sharp horns of the oryx to the Ark so the animals inside could breathe. Thus the tale of Noah’s Ark is not without antecedents as true symbolism conveys the primordial wisdom.
2. Memphis was the location of the temple of Ptah in Lower Egypt, called by the Egyptians, Ankh Tawy, ‘Life of the Two Lands’.
3. Budge, Gods of the Egyptians Vol. I, pp. 504–505.

Books by Oliver St John
Oliver St. John YouTube Channel

Unicorn of the Stars

Posted on 23rd October 2020 by Metamorphosis

The Practicus of the Golden Dawn has the eponymous title, Monokeros de Astris, ‘Unicorn of the Stars’. This is best explained through the name of the Titan, Astris (Αστρις), which means, ‘Starry One’. Astris was born from a marriage of the Sun and the ocean (Moon or sea-foam), alchemical types of fire and water. The Practicus degree corresponds to Hod (Mercury), the Water Temple that receives the fiery solar influence from Netzach (Venus).

The Initiate of Hod, Unicorn of the Stars, has first to traverse, at least symbolically, the fiery paths of Shin (thirty-first) and Resh (thirtieth) before entering Hod, the Water Temple. Hod is thus seen in every way as a sphere of transmutation. Although Hod sometimes symbolises the concrete mind, as ‘form-building’, it is not the goal of Initiates to become detained by the limits of ordinary reason. In fact, Hod, the 8th path or sephira from the Crown or root of the Tree of Life in heaven, is traditionally called the Stellar Light, and is also the ‘Seat of the Primordial’. This is usefully affirmed by the Greek value of Monokeros de Astris, which is 1,175. As 29 x 75, the unicorn’s horn corresponds to the ‘Divine Pillar of Nuit (or the sky)’. The twenty-ninth path corresponds to the Hebrew letter qoph, which is the ‘head’ or ‘pinnacle’, while 75 is a number of Nuit (NVIT).

This article is abridged from Nu Hermetica—Initiation and Metaphysical Reality [Ordo Astri books].

While it is true that the letter qoph is more frequently referred to as the ‘back of the head’, owing to the shape of the letter, it is a misleading and possibly incorrect attribution. Qoph is not merely the ‘back of the head’ as the complement of resh as the ‘front of the head’. Resh refers more to the ‘chief’ or ‘leader’, which is also the ‘first’ or ‘highest’ in an order of hierarchy. But qoph (or quf in Arabic) is more specifically the skull or cranium, and as such it has a special meaning of indicating the gate of egress from the cosmological sphere to the heavenly or primordial sphere. For this reason Christ-Jesus was crucified on a hill called ‘Place of the Skull’ (Golgotha).

The Unicorn and Sokar

The primordial is variously symbolised as a pillar, mound or mountain—for there is nothing beyond the peak of a mountain except the sky or heaven. The unicorn’s horn points straight upward to heaven, and is spiralic. The Arabian white oryx is the original type of the fabled unicorn. The higher end of the ancient Egyptian hennu sky-boat of Sokar is fashioned in the shape of the head of an oryx. The unicorn’s singular horn is not descriptive of the beast itself, which has two horns, but is an esoteric assignment for the Primordial Pillar, as well as the upward ascent of consciousness, as in yoga. Sokar, it may further be noted, is frequently depicted as the head of a black hawk, a symbol of the primordial in the very particular sense of the unmanifest or ‘dark’ state, which necessarily comes first, or is greater than, all dual manifestation. Both the unicorn and the yearly rite of carrying the wooden boat of Sokar around the temple’s location, symbolises the circumpolar revolution of the ‘seven’ around the ‘eighth’ or Pole Star. The Pole Star marks the visible axis of the universe and the height of the visible heavens.[1]

The Unicorn and the Flower of Mind

The oryx is reputed to dig a bed out of the desert sand with its hooves, to lie in and keep cool. This explains the attribution of the one horn, for the shifting sands of desert dunes have always symbolised the Abyss that lurks on the upper limit of human reason. The penetrating horn of mind (reason) must be made concave, so to speak, on the abysmal threshold that closes in upon the limits of human reason. Over time, through yoga, contemplation and devotional Tantras, the Flower of Fire (or Mind) is cultivated as the ‘fruits’ of the flower are rejected in favour of pure receptivity to the intelligence from beyond.[2]

It should be noted that the Gnostic term, ‘Flower of Mind’ or ‘Flower of Fire’ is not the mind or intellect in the ordinary sense; it may be likened to an essence that is drawn out and upward. The Egyptian ‘flame’ hieroglyph has both a physical and a metaphysical level of interpretation. It carries all the meanings of a fire, flame or luminosity, and that of a ‘flame of flames’. The latter is comparable to the yogic realisation of atmadarshana of Advaita Vedanta.[3

Veritably, the threshold to the post-abysmal Mind of Minds is fiercely guarded and barred. The role of guardians or ‘watchers’ such as Anubis, and other Setian creatures including the crocodile and jackal, as well as the Cherubim in various traditions, is complex. They are guardians of the gates, ferociously attacking or even devouring those who would enter. At the same time, they symbolise the drawing forth of the bolt, which is the means by which the gates are opened.[4] The action of the bolt symbolises both ‘opening’ and the image-making or phallic power withdrawn or inverted, which is a reversal of the usual flow of consciousness.[5]

The door of the sky or of heaven is not opened by any mortal man but, for example, it was the office of Ankh-af-na-khonsu, the priest and scribe of the Stele of Revealing, to literally ‘open the doors to the sky’. He performed the ritual of opening the doors to the roof of the temple at certain times of the year, so the image of the Goddess, taken from the subterranean vault below, could observe Sirius rising.[6] Sirius (Σθις), the Star of Egypt and of the Order, symbolises both Isis (or Hathoor) and her ‘son’ or divine child, born of the ascent of consciousness arising from the depth. Hathoor was also known as the ‘Divine Pillar’ at Iunet in Egypt, which has the same meaning.

Notes

1. The three-yearly Jubilee of the Pharaoh coincided with the rite of the ‘round’ of Sokar, proving an identification between Sokar and Set or Saturn, and also the primordial mound. Thus the unicorn, as a horned creature, has an association with both Saturn and the Pole.
2. See G.R.S. Mead, The Chaldean Oracles.
3. It is impossible for Egyptologists to construe ancient Egyptian sacred texts, as they cannot admit to the existence or even the possibility of an esoteric level of interpretation. They are thus dogged by the limitation of their reasoning faculties. They then produce nonsensical ‘translations’ of the texts, and say it is nonsense because the ancient Egyptians were themselves confused and irrational!
4. See John Anthony West, Serpent in the Sky, pp. 149–157 (on Spell 316).
5. Phallus (Greek φαλλος) literally means, ‘image’ or ‘image-making’.
6. This is explained in detail in ‘Star and Snake of Egypt’, pp. 150 Babalon Unveiled.

This article is abridged from the book Nu Hermetica—Initiation and Metaphysical Reality.

The hennu boat with oryx illustration is a detail from the Egyptian Tarot.

Books by Oliver St John
Oliver St. John YouTube Channel