The Culture of Tarot with Mary K. Greer

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Culture of Tarot with Mary K. Greer

Podcast: New Thinking Allowed Audio Podcast
Host: Jeffrey Mishlove
Guest: Mary K. Greer
Date: October 10, 2025
Episode Theme:
This episode delves deeply into the multifaceted culture of tarot, exploring its history, symbolism, cultural evolution, and personal as well as mystical applications. Mary K. Greer, a prominent tarot scholar with over five decades of experience, speaks with host Jeffrey Mishlove about tarot’s academic and esoteric dimensions, cross-cultural perspectives, new intersections with artificial intelligence, and its future in both Western and Eastern contexts.

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Main Themes and Episode Structure

• Introduction to Mary K. Greer and her Tarot Journey – [00:36–04:34]
• Archetypes, Tarot Structure, and Card Interpretations – [04:34–09:34]
• Intuition, Interpretation, and the Role of the Reader – [09:34–13:18]
• AI and Tarot: Collaboration & Challenges – [13:18–20:38]
• Arthur Edward Waite and the Golden Dawn Influence – [20:38–29:25]
• Integrating Ritual, Magic, Astrology, and Aromatherapy – [29:25–40:26]
• Varieties of Intuition and Psychic Experience – [40:26–44:13]
• Rational, Analytical, and Holistic Approaches – [44:13–51:27]
• Tarot as a Holistic, Yogic, and Cross-Cultural System – [51:27–59:28]
• Global Perspectives and the Future of Tarot – [59:28–62:37]

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Detailed Summary

1. Introduction & Mary K. Greer’s Tarot Journey ([00:36–04:34])

• Early Spark: Mary describes how, as an English major exposed to archetypal criticism and the hero’s journey, tarot images resonated immediately:
  • "I could see in these images... that these pictures described Campbell's hero's journey... you could see where somebody was in their hero's journey and how these archetypes were playing out in their lives. So that's what caught me, and that's what gave me the drive and still does." – Mary K. Greer (04:41)
• Commitment to Tarot: She committed to teaching tarot academically and later authorship as early as 1968, cementing tarot as her life's path.
  • "I decided in that first year that I was going to teach tarot in college as an academic subject..." – Mary K. Greer (04:09)

2. Archetypes, Structure, and Interpretative Principles ([04:34–09:34])

• Major vs. Minor Arcana: The trump cards map the hero’s journey; minor arcana represent daily life.
• The Fool Card: Dynamic discussion on its placement and symbolism.
  • "The fool is both first and last...wise without necessarily knowing it... operates by instinct. The fool is totally present in the moment, nowhere else." – Mary K. Greer (06:40)
• Varied Interpretations:
  • On symbolism: "All of the cards actually have an entire range of meanings, from the most problematic to the most beneficial." – Mary K. Greer (09:01)
  • On the Tower card: Repeated appearances signal imminent change; both crisis and breakthrough.

3. Intuition and the Role of the Reader ([09:34–13:18])

• Essential Role of Intuition: Beyond technique, pattern recognition is central.
  • "That intuition is a pattern making experience that we have in the brain... it’s that ability to have that instantaneous pattern recognition." – Mary K. Greer (12:51)

4. AI and Tarot: New Frontiers ([13:18–20:38])

• AI’s Pattern Recognition: Parallels drawn to Jung’s “clouds of cognition”; AI can mirror, expand, and provoke tarot insight.
  • "AI operates by these clouds of related conceptual ideas..." – Mary K. Greer (13:37)
• Benefits & Hazards: AI can offer startlingly relevant insights but may also "hallucinate," providing fictional yet plausible information:
  • "Suddenly it will provide something that sounds like it's totally based on fact, but it's not." – Mary K. Greer (17:09)
• On AI’s Digestive Limits:
  • "If it did everything perfectly, we would be in a mess. And maybe digestion's one of the things that we do that AI doesn't do." – Mary K. Greer (20:31)

5. Arthur Edward Waite & Golden Dawn Cultural Roots ([20:38–29:25])

• Mentions of Scholar-Practitioner A.E. Waite: Polymath, ritualist, deeply mystical, and central to the Rider Waite deck’s ethos.
  • "He didn't believe in the Catholicism of the church regulations... he did believe in a kind of Catholic mystical approach to things." – Mary K. Greer (24:18)
• Waite and the Limits of Readings: Despite vast knowledge, he admitted difficulty in practical/intuitive readings, unlike his wife, a natural psychic.

6. Ritual, Aromatherapy, Astrology ([29:25–40:26])

• Aromatherapy & Tarot: Linking specific scents and essential oils to tarot cards and ritual:
  • "Essential oils and tarot are an incredible way to deepen and heighten your experience." – Mary K. Greer (29:36)
  • Aroma can reinforce or trigger states/affirmations related to particular cards (e.g., rose for the Empress).
  • "The sense of smell is the only sense that's directly connected to the brain... it's instantaneous, and it goes back to fight or flight as well as attractive, being held, nurtured..." – Mary K. Greer (36:34)
• Astrological Integration: Not just prediction, but to understand a querent’s current life cycle (e.g., Saturn return).

7. Varieties of Psychic and Intuitive Experience ([40:26–44:13])

• Range of Intuition: From analytical pattern-seeing to full-blown psychic flashes.
  • Mary describes a rare premonition: "I jumped up and said, 'I'll get the phone. It's my husband, he's been in a car accident.' I picked up the phone and it was my husband. First thing he said is, 'I've been in a car accident.'" (42:16)
• Effectiveness Beyond Psychic Ability: Analytical and rational approaches can make for powerful readings.

8. Rational, Analytical, and Holistic Methods ([44:13–51:27])

• Analytical Techniques: The structure of numbers, card positions, and correspondences is meaningful.
• Vision Under Anesthesia: Mary had a vivid, otherworldly experience of walking among living tarot archetypes post-surgery:
  • "I'd been walking down a street, a path with tarot figures... they were teaching me patterns and understandings, deeper understandings of the cards as we were walking along. And as I came out of it, I could just barely remember the image... everything was exquisitely, vitally alive and bright." – Mary K. Greer (45:38)

9. Tarot as Holistic, Yogic, and Cross-Cultural System ([51:27–59:28])

• Holistic Complex: Tarot as psychology, ritual, yoga, and parapsychology; parallels with Taoism and Tibetan Buddhism.
  • "The study of Tarot is like a form of yoga." – Jeffrey Mishlove (54:52)
• Ritual Practices: Meditations with elements (tattvas), complementary colors, and full-body sensory experience.
  • "You're actually experiencing these things with your body in so many dimensions." – Mary K. Greer (53:35)

10. Global and Future Perspectives ([59:28–62:12])

• Tarot Beyond the West: Mary discusses her upcoming teaching in Asia, observing how Asian practitioners seek Western perspectives for synthesis.
  • "They bring me over not to tell them about their traditions, but to present what the Western view of it is. And I just hope to open the door a little with them of saying, now, when you integrate it with your traditions, what does that add to it?" – Mary K. Greer (59:37)
• Cultural Exchange: Many non-Western decks now reinterpret tarot through indigenous myths and stories.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Tarot’s Archetypal Power:
  • "You could see where somebody was in their hero's journey and how these archetypes were playing out in their lives." – Mary K. Greer [04:41]
• On AI and Intuition:
  • "For the most rational kind of way of thinking, it’s that ability to have that instantaneous pattern recognition." – Mary K. Greer [12:51]
• On Scent and Memory:
  • "The sense of smell is the only sense that's directly connected to the brain without having to go through other mechanisms. And therefore, it's instantaneous..." – Mary K. Greer [36:34]
• On Holistic Nature of Tarot:
  • "The study of Tarot is like a form of yoga." – Jeffrey Mishlove [54:52]
• On Tarot’s Cultural Expansion:
  • "Learning about another culture through one of these decks that explores that can be truly amazing." – Mary K. Greer [61:48]

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Key Timestamps

• Intro & Greer’s bio: [00:36–02:56]
• Mary’s first exposure to Tarot: [03:47–04:41]
• Fool card symbolism and sequence: [05:49–06:40]
• The Tower and its readings: [09:34–11:05]
• Intuition in readings: [11:40–13:18]
• AI collaboration and pattern recognition: [13:18–17:34]
• The pitfalls of AI hallucination: [17:09–18:56]
• Arthur Edward Waite’s background & influence: [20:38–21:51]
• Waite’s mystical philosophy vs. practical intuition: [24:18–29:25]
• Astrology and Saturn returns’ significance: [38:12–40:26]
• Varieties of intuitive experience: [40:26–43:48]
• Mary’s anesthesia vision: [45:38–48:58]
• Tattva ritual and elemental meditation: [51:27–54:52]
• Asian tarot culture and cross-cultural synthesis: [59:28–62:12]

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Conclusion

This conversation is a wide-ranging, insightful tour through the evolving world of tarot. Mary K. Greer grounds mystical, cross-cultural, and even technological approaches with deep experience and a practical, open-minded outlook. The episode reveals tarot’s power to act as a mirror for personal transformation and cultural exchange, and underscores the importance of intuition, ritual, and holistic practice in the art and science of tarot.

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Transcript

[Mary K. Greer]

So I had drawn a card. This is a deck that kind of attempted to merge the Marseille and the Rider. Waite Smith deck did an excellent job of it. And I got the high priestess for our discussion today and also the Queen of Pentacles, which suggests some practicality could be involved.

[Jeffrey Mishlove]

Keep watching to learn more.

[Mary K. Greer]

Book 4 in the New Thinking Allowed Dialogue, Charles T. Tart. 70 years of exploring Consciousness and Parapsychology. Now available on Amazon.

[Jeffrey Mishlove]

New Thinking Allowed is presented by the California Institute for Human Science, a fully accredited university offering distant learning graduate degrees that focus on mind, body and spirit, the topics that we cover here. We are particularly excited to announce new degrees emphasizing parapsychology and the paranormal. Visit their website at cihs. Edu. You can now download all eight copies of the New Thinking Allowed magazine for free or order beautiful printed copies. Go to newthinkingalowed.org thinking allowed conversations on the Leading Edge of Knowledge and Discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove. Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Our topic today is the culture of tarot. My guest is Mary Kay Greer, who has been studying and teaching tarot for the last half century. She is author of 11 books on tarot and magic. They include Tarot for Yourself, A Workbook for Personal Transformation, Women of the Golden Dawn Rebels and Priestesses, the Essence of Magic, Tarot Ritual and Aromatherapy, and Mary Kay Greer's 21 Ways to Read a Tarot Card. Mary has taught tarot for 11 years at the New College of California in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has a master's degree in English Literature from the University of Central Florida, where she first taught tarot in 1974. Mary lives in California. And now I'll switch over to the Internet video. Welcome, Mary. It is a pleasure to be with you today.

[Mary K. Greer]

It's really nice to be here. I always enjoy talking to you.

[Jeffrey Mishlove]

Thank you so much because the pleasure is mutual. And we're going to dig into one of my favorite subjects, the tarot. I first got into tarot as a young man. I think I was probably 21 or 22. And it's sort of been embedded in my consciousness since then. Even though I can't. I can't say that I've lived a life surrounded by tarot. I sort of moved more into parapsychology subsequently. But you stuck with tarot. I think you probably got into it roughly the same time I did in the early 1970s. I think in my case, 1969 or so.

[Mary K. Greer]

Yeah, it was 67, Christmas of 67 for me. So around the same time. Yeah.

[Jeffrey Mishlove]

Something grabbed you about Tarrou that we can look back now, over half a century later, and tarot has been, I think it's fair to say, the main focus of your professional life for over half a century.

[Mary K. Greer]

I decided in that first year that I was going to teach tarot in college as an academic subject and that someday, when I got to be elderly, I would write a book of the wisdom I had gathered through all the years. Luckily, I wrote my first book earlier than that, but it was the commitment I made by 1968 that this was the direction I was going in.

[Jeffrey Mishlove]

What drew you so clearly and strongly toward Tarrou? Was there any particular.

[Mary K. Greer]

Yeah, I was an English major and we were discussing archetypal criticism as well as being in the theater department. So I could see in these images that a friend showed me at Christma in a book by Eden Gray, that these pictures described Campbell's hero's journey, which I had just read, and that you could see where somebody was in their hero's journey and how these archetypes were playing out in their lives. So that's what caught me, and that's what gave me the drive and still does.

[Jeffrey Mishlove]

In other words, you saw, if I understand correctly, a sequence in probably the tarot trump cards.

[Mary K. Greer]

Yes, definitely. And then the minor arcana cards were the playing out in everyday occurrences with these bigger principles.

[Jeffrey Mishlove]

Well, and if I recall correctly, isn't there some controversy amongst different decks as to which is the first card in the deck?

[Mary K. Greer]

Oh, yes, the Fool. And my favorite image of it is that the fool is both first and last, although some people put it next to last. So a lot of it depends on the correspondence system you use to the Hebrew letters, the numbers and astrology. And so many people that go deeply into tarot work with these multi levels of correspondences. And that makes a difference as to placements of the cards.

[Jeffrey Mishlove]

Well, the fool is a fascinating card because on the surface, the fool would appear to be an idiot of some sort. And yet there is a sense in which the fool is the wisest one in the whole deck, is there not?

[Mary K. Greer]

Of course, it's wise without necessarily knowing it, because it operates by instinct. The fool is totally present in the moment, nowhere else. And in the older decks, we can see it more as a street person, although they call it folly. So it can just be somebody who's being stupid at any point in their life, or it can be that divine nonchalance that carries us forward into life experiences that we never would have dared to go if we had stopped and.

[Jeffrey Mishlove]

Thought about it, if I recall correctly, and correct me if I'm wrong. In the traditional weight deck, the fool is about to step over the edge of a cliff.

[Mary K. Greer]

Yes. With a dog barking behind him, which may be a warning. Maybe the dog's going to come with him. Yeah. And one of the first pieces I ever wrote on Tarot that was published in a newsletter was that the fool steps off and just keeps walking through air like, oh, what's that movie where they walk across the expanse on air?

[Jeffrey Mishlove]

It's a wonderful movie. I know which one you're thinking of. One of the Spielberg films. Characters are in a dark cave, and they just have to step into the darkness. And then an invisible glass bridge is there.

[Mary K. Greer]

Yes. Support them across the cliff. And that was the image that came to me in that very first piece that I wrote back in the 70s.

[Jeffrey Mishlove]

In other words, the fool has invisible helpers.

[Mary K. Greer]

That or a lightness of being.

[Jeffrey Mishlove]

And an obvious contrast to the fool would be the magician, which I think is the next card in the deck. And the magician seems to be somebody who is a master of his art.

[Mary K. Greer]

The magician likes to think he's a master of the art. The magician can be a cunning man opposed to the fool, who is not cunning, doesn't think ahead. And so we get this kind of Dionysian Hermes character that can lie, can cheat, but also can create, so knows how to direct his will in order to create the garden that's seen around him and to use the tools which are the images that go with the four suits, minor arcana suits of the tarot. He has those before him, so he can manipulate all of these. So the full. And all the cards actually have an entire range of meanings, from the most problematic to the most beneficial. All of the cards actually epitomize it perfectly in their own way.

[Jeffrey Mishlove]

In other words, if you're doing a reading and a particular card comes up like, well, the tower is a scary kind of card. The tower is on fire and people are jumping out of it. As I recall, it would seem to be like a really negative thing. But you're suggesting it could be interpreted in a positive way.

[Mary K. Greer]

Yes, and in a whole range of ways. One of the things I've seen come up so strongly in readings of Friends, people I've known over time is when they've gotten the tower over and over again and they've said, oh, I have to leave. Where I'm living, I know I have to leave. Another friend was saying she couldn't stand being in her job Anymore she had to quit. And every time the tower would come up over a period of weeks or even a couple of months, it was like, I have to quit. I have to leave. And. And then suddenly the friend with the job got fired. And the other friend had a situation. She had to leave where she was living. And so she left and moved to another country, which is what she had been contemplating. I never had it quite so dramatically. For me, it's come up more like situations where I needed to be angry, for me to explode, for me to have that strike of lightning where I just blew up. And I rarely blown up like that in my life. So those times really are marked very strongly.

[Jeffrey Mishlove]

It would seem, if the cards have so many different possibilities of interpretation, that if you're doing a reading for someone, your intuition becomes very important in terms of how you're going to interpret that particular card. And I suppose there are many different ways to read a tarot card. Many configurations and sequences and. But ultimately, I would think the intuition of the person doing the reading is the most important factor.

[Mary K. Greer]

I consider that kind of the basis of it. It's intuition that comes from a number of different things. There's the querent that you're reading for. Even if it's yourself, you're still also the querent. There's the card on the table. There's the position, meaning of the card in a spread or layout, which is kind of a pattern of issues. And all of those. And of course, the other cards in the reading, they all make a difference. So it's coming to see a pattern. You're looking for a pattern. And that intuition is a pattern making experience that we have in the brain. Rather than thinking logically or rationally, which you can do when you're kind of trying to sort the card or you can't figure out what one card particularly means, you might go through that rational step. But intuition steps in when our knowledge and our experience triggers with pathways that have been established in the brain through prior knowledge and experience in a flash of a pattern. And so all of those factors work together instantaneously. Some people also ascribe it to channeling an external entity, a spiritual being, or to psychic or other things. But I think behind it, for the most rational kind of way of thinking, it's that ability to have that instantaneous pattern recognition.

[Jeffrey Mishlove]

I would agree. And at the same time, I know that you have delved very deeply into the use of AI in doing a tarot reading, which would. I guess you could say AI is also a form of pattern recognition, definitely.

[Mary K. Greer]

That'S how it operates. And Carl Jung talked about clouds of cognition. So one of the things is that we've got these patterns that have been established in our lives through trauma, through various experiences, our whole life journey, our parents, all of these things create these kind of groupings or complexes. And AI operates by these clouds of related conceptual ideas, what they call tokens and so bits and pieces of words. But because it doesn't think in a particular language, it thinks in these tokens, it actually later gets translated into the words, back into words. So there's a concept or a cloud around the idea of up and another cloud around down. And so you could be talking about the difference between up and down. And the AI can output the whole discussion into any language you want, relating those concepts of up and down through its own clouds of cognition that are not as based in the sensory world that we live in, but based totally on these fragments of meaning.

[Jeffrey Mishlove]

Well, I'm under the impression that you've been very pleasantly surprised when you use AI in combination with tarot, that the insights provided by AI are maybe even astonishingly relevant.

[Mary K. Greer]

Oh, definitely. It can go off. And every once in a while it starts going off on something. I go, no, not there. And it might give me a few are on AI at all. Sometimes it will go on and on. And halfway through I see an idea that just grabs me. And for me the excitement in it is that I can go anywhere I want, pick up any little fragment of an idea that my curiosity grabs onto, and it will follow with me. You know, as soon as I type it in, it will go off in that new direction or into that little area that I suddenly recognized and then connect it back to my earlier concept and tell me, oh, Mary, how brilliant you are that you connected these things. I have to tell it no more telling me brilliant. I put a lot of restrictions on it and go back and forth between the more speculative and metaphorical idea based explorations. And then periodically and very often I say, now let's look at it rationally, logically, based on fact, and see what we can kind of come up out of that with. So the way you work with it, going back and forth, setting limits on what you want and don't want, and I don't want it telling me all the time how brilliant and great I am. So it doesn't do that anymore, you know, because that, you know, it feeds into it. I go, oh yes. And then I realize that's not helping the discussion really. And then going back so I use it collaboratively, just like we're going back and forth.

[Jeffrey Mishlove]

And it sounds like it's particularly good at being logical.

[Mary K. Greer]

Yes, and it's also particularly good at not being logical. They talk about hallucinations where it. And I asked it about where suddenly it will provide something that sounds like it's totally based on fact, but it's not. It's completely made up. And that runs into problems when people are doing papers in schools where they cite sources that don't exist.

[Jeffrey Mishlove]

Well, I've heard of a case in which one of the attorneys working for the President of the United States filed a legal brief written by AI and included legal references that didn't exist.

[Mary K. Greer]

Yes. And the CDC did the same thing. So, yeah, we have to watch it. And for me, what happened was I was getting ideas from its perusal of the works of Arthur Edward Waite and Pamela Coleman Smith and a couple of other members of the golden dawn and their ideas around Tarot. I wanted more justification for a particular idea. So it came up with the perfect quote from a source in which it mixed the name of Arthur Edward Waite. I think it was like the last name was Edward Edwards and the first name was Pamela, like Pamela Edwards. And I said, I've never heard of Pamela Edwards. So I looked it up online and there was no book with the title it had given me. And I'm going, what is going on? So I went back to it and said, you made this up, didn't you? And it said, oops, I'm sorry, you're right. It always acknowledges it right away, but it's up to me to check it. Always check everything.

[Jeffrey Mishlove]

But I suppose it's fair to say, given that AI can access anything on the web these days, ChatGPT5 seems particularly skilled at doing that, including reading whole books, that AI is capable of digesting the writings of perhaps hundreds of other authors who have written about Tarot in a way that be very hard for a human to do.

[Mary K. Greer]

Definitely very hard. It doesn't really digest them though, because it's a scattershot. So I asked it to look up all the works by weight, which are over a hundred books and countless articles, and it came back with a few helpful things. But I knew from my own research into him, and I've read a lot of his books and have extreme notes on them relating to his use of symbol symbolism and so on, and I knew that it was missing tons of them of relevant things. So it doesn't digest the whole necessarily. You've got to ask it from different directions and each direction. Each time you ask, it's going to come back with other pieces of the puzzle, which I'm glad it does. If it did everything perfectly, we would be in a mess. And maybe digestion's one of the things that we do that AI doesn't do. I collect these items. I'm going to add that one to my list.

[Jeffrey Mishlove]

Digestion, yes.

[Mary K. Greer]

AI does not digest in the same. Or the way we think of it.

[Jeffrey Mishlove]

You brought up Arthur Edward Waite, who was the originator of probably the most popular tarot deck, the Rider Waite deck. And it might be useful for our viewers to understand what kind of a person he was, because he deeply embodies the culture that went into that deck. I know amongst other things, he was quite a scholar. He has written books about alchemy, Definitely the Grail.

[Mary K. Greer]

The Grail was another area, and that deeply influenced the direction that the tarot took. So, yeah, he was amazing. He was polymath, and he translated books from French. He got other people who translated books from other languages to help out with him. So his understanding, especially of the magical works was humongous. Yeah.

[Jeffrey Mishlove]

And in addition to being a scholar of these things, I gather he was also a practitioner. He was deeply involved in the Order of the golden dawn, was he not?

[Mary K. Greer]

Yes. And when the golden dawn eventually kind of splintered, he had a Golden dawn group himself that was continuing that work, of which Pamela Coleman Smith was a member. So that's where their connection came together. Interestingly, both he and Pamela Coleman Smith were actually Americans. He was born in America from an American sea captain and British woman who was coming over on the ship that the captain was on. And then Pamela Coleman Smith was born of American parents, but she was born in England and then went back to both Brooklyn, where she was from, and that's where Waite was born, and also lived for a while in Jamaica. So they both had this background of kind of Anglo American, which was more difficult, I think, for Waite because he always felt like he had to prove himself. His father died when he was very young. There were rumors that his parents hadn't been married, which they were. The marriage certificate's been found. But it kind of haunted him through his youth because when his father died, his mother and sister, younger sister, they came back to England. He was always in this kind of situation of proving himself. And part of it, he wrote in the style of Coleridge, which was one or two generations before him. So when people try to read his work, he was writing at the same Time that William Butler Yeats was, who was very influential in the modern expression of literature. Whereas Waite was going back a couple of generations to the works of Coleridge in his style of writing, which makes everyone very confused as to what he's saying.

[Jeffrey Mishlove]

As a member of the golden dawn, he would be familiar with astrology. He would be familiar with ritual magic and the various exercises that accompany ritual magic having to do with concentration, evocation of different symbols, the use of language, the use of even costume.

[Mary K. Greer]

Oh, yes. But for him, it was more about a mystical relationship to spirit. So one of the golden dawn premises was that you would develop the knowledge and conversation with your holy guardian and angel. And that was kind of a goal. So Waite took that very seriously in terms of it being a mystical process where the goal was the marriage of the priest, the ceremonial magician priest, with Shekinah. Because he was also very much into the whole Jewish kabbalistic system, but within a kind of experiential Catholic framework. He didn't believe in the Catholicism of the church regulations and so on, the. The actual official church, but he did believe in a kind of Catholic mystical approach to things. So even though he knew and practiced and did the ceremonial magical processes, he always kept a very skeptical mind about the true value, that they were more getting in the way of the real, deeper meaning, which is this intimate relation to build the temple, rebuild the Temple of Solomon in your heart, where you are in direct contact with that. In a sense, for him, opposite sex expression of divine unity. So there was a marriage between the two. I don't know if that explained that well, but that was the core idea.

[Jeffrey Mishlove]

Well, it sounds like we're talking about a lifetime commitment, Something that is very deep, very profound for him. It's probably very different than the average person who might pick up a tarot deck and say, should I marry this person or should I stick with my girlfriend or do I need to change a job?

[Mary K. Greer]

Yeah. And he lamented all his life that he was not facile at doing the kinds of readings that people came to tarot for. So he recognized that that was not his proclivity. Although in having some medical situations where he was given some drugs, and I think that was his own only real experiences of them. He did have some experiences that told him that there could be this seeing that he never found it easy for himself to do. He could write the stories, the experiences, but it was only rare for him to have that deep intuitive. That's also kind of a sensory knowing and not just the ideas being Put together his wife, his second wife actually had that ability. And he writes about it in his autobiography, where he did ask her a very concrete question and she gave him the immediate answer. And he kind of wished that he was able to do that. So he recognized that there was value in that. Even though for his own personal journey, he was committed to what he could do. And I think that's a good lesson for us. Because the tarot can be so many different things to so many people depending on what your own natural proclivity is. Whether you automatically go into mediumship and you see a person's relationship in the cards with a dead relative, or you get channeled messages from an entity on another planet, or whether you are able to put together keywords in a way that makes. Makes total sense of exactly what's going on in the person's situation. Or you get a flash of their having just been on an island out in the Pacific somewhere, wearing particular clothes. And the person goes, how did you know? There's no way they could possibly have known. All of these are different ways that people interact with the tarot. And part of our journey, if you're serious about tarot, is you find out what you're naturally good at, develop that. And then through the years, which I've tried to keep doing, keep adding and stretching my ability into other areas so at least I get a sense of them, or can bring them up, or not be startled too much by them when they happen suddenly, unexpectedly, in a reading.

[Jeffrey Mishlove]

I know in your own writings you've referred to astrology, You've referred to ritual, magic and aromather therapy even as part of your tarot practice.

[Mary K. Greer]

Yes. The essence of tarot, ritual aromatherapy, or essential oils and tarot are an incredible way to deepen and heighten your experience. And the rituals that have traditionally been part of the use of ritual and of essential oils in the 70s of plants and their actual sensory experiences within our bodies have been used in cultures around the world in divinatory type of experiences. So we can learn so much and expand further by exploring what other peoples have done.

[Jeffrey Mishlove]

Could you amplify that a little bit? I have to admit, I've never worked with essential oils at all. So would you choose a particular set if you want to achieve a particular result? Is that how it would work?

[Mary K. Greer]

Definitely. And ceremonial magicians, both in France and England, have connected the sense of essential oils or incenses with the different tarot cards. So which ones augment? Different ones. And I don't always remember ones, but of course, one of the most obvious is the empress, who's associated with Venus astrologically and the scent of rain and jasmine to a lesser extent. But rose first, and then more exciting ones like peppermint or something, is more awakening and might be associated with a much more active card. So they can be associated with more than one card, but when you're kind of concocting it, you want to come up with the best balance, usually two or three, in order to bring in. Because any card has multiple meanings, as I had mentioned before, and therefore you want to combine a couple of those essential oils. But oils that are also basically what's released in incense is the scent that's released from the oil in a plant. There are a way of sending prayers up to heaven, and that's very strong in the Jewish tradition and many Native American traditions. So you burn sage or sweet grass, and you're sending your prayers with that scent up to the heavens, into the divine, into wherever. And then after saints die, there's usually, or sometimes occasionally a scent that seems to remain around them that people keep reporting.

[Jeffrey Mishlove]

So if I'm doing a reading and a particular trump card becomes prominent in the reading, would I then use the oil to help me understand further the depth of the card? Is that how it would work?

[Mary K. Greer]

Yes. Yes. So at the end of full readings, usually at least an hour reading, where we're really going in depth, we end up with a card from the spread that represents the qualities the person most wants to develop in their life. I have them state those qualities as they're looking at the card. I make quick notes on it and trying to use only their own words very quickly because of time constraints, I create an affirmation for them that I then have them check they can modify. And then if that's. We use the essential oil that goes with that card and that affirmation, and they're able to use that over, I recommend, at least three weeks. It changes and focuses on another level of awareness, their energy and the direction that they're taking so that they're bringing the experiences more into their lives as well as expressing that energy more. So you're wearing rose oil, and the tendency is to kind of, you know, move more with that rose energy to be more attractive to other people, to feel yourself as an attractive person. So with peppermint, you're going to be more active and mental in your. And then there's other scents that are grounding more from. Or meditative. So you've got sandalwood and frankincense, whereas myrrh is more from the oil itself. From a plant, yeah.

[Jeffrey Mishlove]

In other words, the scent helps to reinforce the affirmation.

[Mary K. Greer]

Yes, it reinforces it. You can begin with scent, you can combine scent, you can end with scent. However it is that you want to integrate it into that particular ritual or reminder or whatever you're doing. So, you know, people have scents that they remember from their childhood that they may really like. Or, for instance, if you meet someone and you're wearing a particular scent, they may be attracted to that scent or they may be put off by it. So they might just reject you because of the scent you're wearing, because that's the scent that person's mother used to wear. And you don't want a mother. You want somebody with a different kind of energy. So, yeah, those kinds of things can make a huge difference, which is why it's used in airports and department stores when you go to have a spa. All of these things, they're using scents that are most likely to get you in the mood to buy something to calm yourself when you're in an airport, but make you feel refreshed. So each of those has a particular purpose. They're using magic, in a sense. When they use essential oils and the smell of the incense in a church, it immediately takes you into whatever your family and tradition background evokes.

[Jeffrey Mishlove]

This is really fascinating, I have to admit, because I've almost never worked with scents. I don't like to wear scents generally at all. But the idea that the different scents are associated with different tarot cards sort of opens up a whole new way of thinking about it, for me at least.

[Mary K. Greer]

And it involves the sense of smell is the only sense that's directly connected to the brain without having to go through other mechanisms. And therefore, it's instantaneous, and it goes back to the fight or flight as well as attractive, being held, nurtured. All of those kinds of experiences can be instantaneous through scent. So in experimenting with it, yeah, it's really rather interesting the places that you can go. But when you find scents that take you to places that you want to go or through repetition, because that's another way that it works. If you have a scent that works well for you in meditation, and you use it in every meditation, then the minute that you smell that, after kind of establishing that connection, you will find yourself breathing deeper, slower, automatically starting to go into that place, your body relaxing, however it is that you do it in meditation, you might try that just as an experiment for a little while. A scent that you don't mind or enough at a distance that you don't feel overpowered by it, but it's still there. And use it only in a particular kind of meditation. And after a month of doing it fairly regularly, try just lighting that incense when you're not about to sit down for meditation and notice the changes in your body.

[Jeffrey Mishlove]

Another aspect of tarot is astrology. And astrology has a lot to do with timing. For example, Ronald Reagan, when he was president, his wife was deeply into astrology, and they consulted an astrologer regularly to determine should he travel on a particular date or not. I think, especially after he was shot, she became very concerned to follow astrological indications. Do you use astrology, for example, to determine what is the best time to do a tarot reading?

[Mary K. Greer]

I don't use it as much for prediction as I do for understanding the state somebody is in at the moment. One example is that a lot of people get tarot readings or astrology readings just by happenstance, you might say, around their Saturn returns. And the first one is between the ages of 27 and 30. Somewhere in there you have where Saturn comes around for the first time to the exact place it was when you were born. And when they say, never trust anyone over 30, it's because Saturn represents responsibility and limits and reality checks. So that someone who's gone through a Saturn return has had those things kind of dumped on them. And they either learn to respect that and understand how to work with that in their life, or they rebel and have a series of problems after that. So it's interesting that so many people come during that time. And if I look at someone and say, ah, you're between that age, I will often pull out my astrological calendar to see if they are in their Saturn return. Because I know that that's a real pivotal point. And to pay special attention to the fact that they came to a reading at this time and that that's part.

[Jeffrey Mishlove]

Of the issue you mentioned earlier, especially in reference to A.E. waite's wife, who had a unique intuitive ability. The idea of getting visions or seeing things in a flash, having insights that come in a very particular way while you're doing the reading.

[Mary K. Greer]

Yes. And some people are really good at that. I get the intuitive pattern flash. That's my kind of skill that's been there right from the beginning as I start seeing how they relate together. But the psychic ability of actually seeing something that is not there in the conversation directly in the cards, like that somebody had just come back from Hawaii. They're not wearing A Hawaiian shirt or anything that would clue you into that. Those are the kinds of things I've had maybe five times in my life. Enough that I know how extraordinary they can be and I know how different they are, but they're. And that they're not the same thing. And there's some people who can read like that. They see actual pictures or images, some that need to be interpreted metaphorically and some of them actual things of seeing somebody that's got the exact characteristics of a person's mother or father, and they see them holding something that person always held, always had with them. I don't see that. My strongest one that I ever had was I was working in an office and the phone rang and I jumped up and said, I'll get the phone. It's my husband, he's been in a car accident. I picked up the phone and it was my husband. First thing he said is, I've been in a car accident. We were young then. The car was really important for us to be able to get around. And I said, and how's the car? Because I knew he was okay. It was part of that knowing that I had jumped up with that. I didn't even know that I knew. He and his mother never forgave me for that. We were divorced probably within the next six months. I didn't realize at the moment because it was such an unknowing and it couldn't possibly. There was nothing in my life experience that would have led me to that assumption. And it was such an absolute knowing that that's what it was without question. As if somebody had just handed me a piece of paper that had said that and I was reading off the paper. I didn't see the car accident. I didn't see any of that. I didn't just knew. So part of the journey, and I'm sure you found it in parapsychology, is that people have these experiences in such a range. Some people see, some people hear, some people get tingles in different places in their body. I mean, what's your experience?

[Jeffrey Mishlove]

I have profound psychic experiences on rare occasions. And I think the way you've described it, it might be similar to you you mentioned maybe five times has happened that strikingly for you, which suggests that you don't need to be a gifted psychic in order to be an effective tarot reader, right?

[Mary K. Greer]

Definitely. Yeah. Because there's so many different modes. There's an analytical aspect to tarot readings where you're taking. Taking the keywords and the correspondences and you see how they fit together in a very logical, rational kind of way. And I mean, one of the things is, I've got a list, two page list of, you know, integrating tarot card meanings in a spread, because there's so many different ways you can look at their numbers. So if you've got all the cards are in the early numbers, the ones, twos, threes in a spread, it suggests that you're at the beginning of an experience. If the numbers tend to be the 7, 8, 9 and especially tens or the later the world 21, then you know that the person is toward the end of experience or the culmination or the full mastery of something. And so. So you can use these techniques in combination with many other techniques.

[Jeffrey Mishlove]

Well, if I can jump around a little bit earlier when we were speaking, you mentioned that you recently had a surgical procedure and while you were under, you had a vision associated with the tarot.

[Mary K. Greer]

I'd only ever been one time before, taken out of myself with an anesthetic. And this was nothing like that. It's nothing like anything else I've ever experienced in my life, including recreational jugs and so on. So they were kind of waking me up after the procedure. And I had been in this environment. It's hard to explain because the memory was gone almost the moment I woke up, except that I felt like was pulling onto it to try and remember any little pieces I could because I'd been walking down a street, a path with tarot figures little taller than normal human beings, all of them from the major arcana of the deck. And they were teaching me patterns and understandings, deeper understandings of the cards as we were walking along. And as I came out of it, I could just barely remember the image. I dream really vaguely and mostly with no sense of color. Rarely do I have a sense that there's any color in a dream that was mauled. This was in hyper real color. Everything was exquisitely, vitally alive and bright. And it was, it was as if our three dimensions were enhanced more than that. So I was in this hyperreal environment that was vivid and alive, and the teachings were there in this powerful way. And I suddenly was being pulled back by the nurses calling to me into a supposed three dimensional world that looked flat. I'm looking around me and everything looks flat, as if it no longer has real dimension, as if I'm looking at a picture that doesn't have that. And I was saying to them, I want to go back. I have to go back. Because I needed those teachings. I needed to hear what they were telling me. And I couldn't remember that, and I couldn't. Mostly I had. It's like this flower picture of how vitally alive. Never had any experience like that before. I cherish. Gives me a sense that there is more to everything. And I do. When I look out, even now, I can look out a window and see a beautiful crepe myrtle tree that's still in bloom with pink flowers across from me, and it moves in the breeze. And I can appreciate the three dimensionality of it, especially because it's nature, but it's only halfway there towards the vitalness of what I was experiencing. So I do feel like somewhere there is that vitalness or something else above and beyond what I normally experience here on this plane. And I'm grateful for that, if I.

[Jeffrey Mishlove]

Understand correctly, and I probably don't, but the idea of the golden dawn system, as I recall, sort of merges the tarot cards with the Kabbalistic Tree of life. And my understanding is that the Kabbalistic Tree of Life is sort of a map of the inner planes, and it guides you to. You could call it the astral plane or reality. So when you experience each of the Tarot figures as a teacher at a certain level, wouldn't that be completely consistent with the way it's taught in the golden dawn system?

[Mary K. Greer]

Definitely, definitely. And even beyond the golden dawn system, almost all the occult organizations that have picked up the tarot have used that kind of concept and idea. And when you meditate on a card and get into conversation with the figure on the card, you can sit down and do a dialogue in writing, which is a wonderful, wonderful way to do it. You start out just by making up what the figure on the card would say. And I suggest being silly, like, why did you contact me? Leave me alone. And then you keep going, but I really want to know. And he goes, oh, well, if you really want to know. And as you go along, for one thing, your handwriting changes. Partly it's just becoming more loose because you're trying to get all the ideas down as fast as you can. But you're also letting go of your inhibitions, of your precision of things, so that it starts surprising you what the figures have to say. So by writing it down, you've got it there and you can go back to it. You can get advice, you can get predictions, you can get recommendations. It usually won't predict, but it will recommend ways that you can approach things. Whatever figure you happen to have chosen or that came to you by picking the card out at random. So when I say random, fated to come to you in the moment. So the synchronicity of the moment, as Carl Jung would say. So, yeah, those can be very enlightening.

[Jeffrey Mishlove]

The tarot represents a journey into inner dimensions that you take. And I suppose it can be augmented through various ritual processes.

[Mary K. Greer]

Definitely. There's one that just came up recently on a Facebook group that somebody was asking about, and that's what's called the tattvas. And the tattvas are related to the elements. And so the four suits of the tarot in the Minor Arcana, which also are magical, implies. So, for instance, we've got the fire tattva, which is an image that's done on a large sheet of cardboard or paper, and it's a red triangle with a complementary green surround. And when I say complementary, the actual complementary color in color theory. So there is a physiological thing that happens when you look at complementary colors right next to each other, like pure red, pure green that are touching each other and right next to it, and that's that there's a shimmer along that point there. And then another effect which the golden dawn used, which was to have a very large square that has the green surround with the red triangle for fire and the suit of wands in the center. And you would stare at it for a good minute or more, and then you would close your eyes. And the physiological effect is that the colors switch, and they switch rapidly. And then there can be the feeling that you're being thrown through this now green shimmering, breaking up into little fragments of things. The green triangle in the red surround, which is just a momentary experience before you get thrust through it. I worked with a group for a while that was doing this kind of meditation. So you're thrust into the element of fire with all the associations, because when the golden dawn would do it, there were the whole range of things that they would associate with fire, which you could use to make sure that you're purely in that fire environment. And the cards that go along, even the major arcana cards that are associated with fire, like the tower for Mars, is a fire energy, and Aries, the Emperor, is a fire energy. So those are the kinds of things that you might look to anything like a scepter, that the emperor holds, any kinds of these symbolism and other sensory experiences that correspond. And while you're there, you can explore what is this quality. And you might even have questions or feelings that come up around a situation. I've been getting a lot of wands cards, the suit of Fire. How do I handle this energy? So you can bring that question into the experience and maybe get visual hallucinations, imagery while you're there. Or it could be verbal in your head, or it could be a feeling in your body because of the complementary color, physiological reaction. You're actually experiencing these things with your body in so many dimensions.

[Jeffrey Mishlove]

All of this suggests to me that as you get immersed into Tarot, it's a very holistic system. It deals with psychology, it deals with parapsychology, it deals with ritual, magic and literature and symbolism. I would say. It wouldn't be incorrect, I guess, to say that the study of Tarot is like a form of yoga.

[Mary K. Greer]

Yeah, definitely all of these things. And the work that I've been doing with AI and looking at some of the characteristics of Tarot and Chinese, Taoist and Confucian things, where it talks about the qi, the energy, the xin, which is the heart, mind connection, and the shen, which is the connection to the divine, to spirit, where they've kind of. I shouldn't say mapped it out. They've defined these characteristics of qualities of things that can be experienced in Tarot, in various physiological practices, in the whole Chinese traditional medicine theme, and in our interactions with AI. Because AI is actually the. And I'm pronouncing this wrong, but the chu, if I'm pronouncing it right, which is a Confucian idea of it being a tool, it being a framework for the experience. So that's what it brings. And we bring the others. We bring the chi and the chin and the shen.

[Jeffrey Mishlove]

It's so extremely elaborate. When I mentioned yoga, I was thinking actually of the Tibetan forms of Mahayana Buddhism, which involved tutelary deities and certain sounds and certain visualizations in a very complex fashion. I hadn't really considered it, but I suppose the ritual magic approach, as exemplified in the golden dawn, is very much akin to that.

[Mary K. Greer]

Oh, I'm sure it is, yeah. And I can't speak to that one in particular, but I. I think underlying, like the Chinese ideas, which I'm not sophisticatedly knowledgeable about at all, I've got the barest surface level of it, but it kind of opened a door and said, don't just look at the Western thing of humans. By comparison with AI, we've got the senses and we've got our emotions and we've got our ability to know when to challenge somebody and when to move back. In a reading, especially face to face reading, also even over the phone, you can hear somebody's change in their voice. We know when to move forward, we know when to move back. And AI doesn't have any of that. But each of these different traditions teaches their own parallel. It's like each tradition comes in and says, it's this, it's this, it's this, that. And when we can get a sense of not only our own, but the others, like what I was talking about with the essential oils and incenses, how different cultures have used them and experienced them, it kind of breaks open our little cosmic egg a little more, gives us a new crack in it, so that we can understand our experience in a larger framework. Or like my vision that I had coming out of that procedure, that medical procedure that opened me to a dimensional vitality of experience that I had never experienced before.

[Jeffrey Mishlove]

I think it's probably worth mentioning in closing, Mary, that you are about to leave on a trip to Asia. You'll be, I think, if I recall correctly, in Korea and also in. Is that right?

[Mary K. Greer]

Yes, yes. I'll be teaching in China especially, and doing some studies, hopefully going to a shaman in. That's the generalized term. There are so many different kinds of people who do that work in South Korea, so I'm hoping to have an experience there, too.

[Jeffrey Mishlove]

So what we're seeing, of course, is that in Asia, they're also very interested in the Western Tarot culture.

[Mary K. Greer]

They are. And they bring people over from the west because they're interested in what we see in the cards from a Western perspective. And most Asian people are much more aware of our culture. Western culture, like, they often have some familiarity with our great myths and our philosophical systems that we tend to lack in terms of. Of them. So they bring me over not to tell them about their traditions, but to present what the Western view of it is. And I just hope to open the door a little with them of saying, now, when you integrate it with your traditions, what does that add to it? They may prefer to keep that in their traditional, you know, like traditional Chinese medical. And understanding of those mechanisms, the Taoist and Confucian and so on. But there are many people who have translated Tarot into other cultural frameworks. And some of them are just a pictorial transition without a lot of depth. And others have found parallel myth that they illustrate in the decks that they create. So more and more. And this started with US games back in the 70s, when Stuart Kaplan started reaching out to artists from different traditions and saying, how would you interpret this from a Native American point of view? Or somebody would come to them and say, you know, my culture, my family, Finnish culture has the same myths and stories that we tell in our own way. Let me do a deck around this. And he was open to that and that continues to this day that when people go back to their creation myths, their teaching stories, that there are usually as the archetypes that Carl Jung talked about, these archetypal stories that can be explored using the 78 cards, either the 22 major arcana or the whole 78 card deck through their own stories. So I think it's fabulous. And learning about another culture through one of these decks that explores that can be truly amazing.

[Jeffrey Mishlove]

Well, Mary, I look forward to having more interviews with you in the future. Perhaps after return from your Asian trip, you'll be full of all kinds of new ideas and it would be great to touch base again.

[Mary K. Greer]

Oh, I certainly hope that I will have all kinds of new experiences to add on. And thank you so much for inviting me. I really love our conversations.

[Jeffrey Mishlove]

Thank you Mary. It's a joy to be with you. And for those of you watching or listening, thank you you for being with us because you are the reason that we are here.

[Mary K. Greer]

Book four in the new Thinking Allowed dialogue series is Charles T. 70 Years of Exploring Consciousness and Parapsychology, now available on Amazon.

[Jeffrey Mishlove]

New Thinking Allowed is presented by the California Institute for Human Science, a fully accredited university offering distant learning graduate degrees that focus on mind, body and spiritual it the topics that we cover here. We are particularly excited to announce new degrees emphasizing parapsychology and the paranormal. Visit their website at cihs. Edu. You can now download all eight copies of the New Thinking Allowed magazine for free or order beautiful printed copies go to newthinkingallowed.org big.