The Baddeley Tarot

The Tarot has always been be more than a just deck of cards and the Baddeley Tarot shows the reasons why this must be so. All the evidence suggests that far from being just a game, it is truly a continuation of the ancient Mystery Traditions wrapped in a Renaissance dress.

In Italy during the Renaissance, the revival of Hermeticism and Neoplatonism opened a Pandora’s box of forbidden heretic philosophies, often at odds with church doctrine. Tarot imagery, which developed in elite intellectual circles, functioned as a coded initiatory map, a moral and spiritual allegory as well as a safe carrier of ancient wisdom, masked as a card game.
Tarot, although it has long been suspected be a tool of divination or esoteric wisdom, may actually carry something much older, more profound, and more sacred: the encoded structure of an ancient Greek initiation rite known as the Eleusinian Mysteries.

The Eleusinian Mysteries were sacred rites practiced in ancient Greece, centered on the myth of Demeter and Persephone. These rituals symbolized the soul’s journey through death, darkness, and eventual rebirth. These secret rites, long lost to history, live on in symbolic form. They are hidden in plain sight within the images of the Tarot.

Just like the Mysteries, the Tarot preserved ancient wisdom in symbolic language, accessible only to those ready to perceive it, and inscrutable to those who were not. In this way, the Tarot becomes a portable temple of the Mysteries.

Both Tarot and these rites are paths of transformation, both are metaphors of the cycles of life and death, they both invite the seeker to pass through the gates of the underworld, emerge into the light, and through a symbolic death become transformed. This is not mere metaphor; it is a guide through life using the encoded wisdom of a 3000 year old tradition, lost for centuries, now restored, renewed and reawakened.