Mark Horn: Tarot + Kabbalah

This practice offers fascinating, spot-on insight into difficult quandaries and questions.

Admittedly, I booked a reading with Mark Horn out of curiosity—what is Kabbalah + Tarot in action?—but was blown away by the insight the cards shared (and Horn’s fascinating interpretation through Jewish mysticism). It’s one of the more fascinating (and affordable) readings I’ve ever had (and I’ve had…a lot). Tarot, explains Horn, became an interest when he was a young, gay teen, alienated from the Judaism that defined his family’s faith. As he explains, “As a kid in the 60s, there was a ‘new age’ buffet to explore and I tried a little bit of everything, from astral projection to Zen Buddhism. Tarot was mostly used for fortune telling, but when I spent time with it, I realized tarot offered a self-directed path of inner exploration that quenched my thirst for deeper spiritual connection.” While Horn had heard tell of a tradition united Kabbalah and tarot the connection mainly irritated him when he was younger—after all, he had abandoned Judaism. But when he returned to the faith in his ‘40s, “as denominations began to change their teachings of sexuality and the LGBTQ community,” he came to embrace the Kabbalah roots of the tradition. Below, he explains more. In addition to readings and classes, Horn also wrote a book, Tarot and the Gates of Light, which offers a daily practice for integrating the two.

Session Style: Mark likes readings (45-60 mins, $100) to be positioned around a central question—follow-ups as needed!

Q. Is there a long history between Kabbalah and tarot, or are they just natural friends?

From a traditional Jewish point of view, there’s no connection between Kabbalah and tarot. However, when tarot was first developed as a card game in 15^th century Italy, there were philosophers like Pico Della Mirandola, who saw a structural connection between the deck and core Kabbalistic teachings about the nature of reality and the path to Divine connection through the Tree of Life (as a Renaissance history fanatic, I am fascinated by these details). Importantly, Kabbalah became connected to tarot when it divorced its Jewish origin. My goal is to bring the two back together. When you understand how the structure of the deck reflects these Kabbalistic teachings, you can use the cards to go much deeper. I often describe the way I read tarot now as giving people a psycho-spiritual MRI so they can see what’s blocking them from experiencing the Divine in their lives, and Kabbalah is a tool for reaching that dimension.

Q. What is the meaning of the Sephirot? And do you always do readings in that formation?

The Sephirot, or “Tree of Life.”

The main symbol in Kabbalah is the Tree of Life. It is a diagram serving as the Divine blueprint that underlies everything, from the structure of the Universe right down to the way the human personality is constructed. It is a fractal model of the building blocks of reality and the process through which God creates the world, showing a path for humans to experience Divine connection.

Think of the Tree of Life as a metaphoric diagram of the subatomic structure of the Universe. It shows the process through which Divine Energy manifests all creation—in stars, books, furniture, money, you, and me. The Sephirot are the ten nodes in this diagram, and they act as step-down transformers for Divine Energy to become successively more reified. It’s the opposite of Einstein’s equation—energy, as it slows down from the speed of Divine Light, becomes matter.

Each Sephira has its own quality of energy, and because it also reflects the energies of the human personality, the Tree of Life diagram is an excellent map to use with tarot to explore what’s going on for someone on many different levels, providing a stunning depiction of both nuance and depth.

Sometimes I use a spread that is less complicated, it is made of only five cards and reflects the Kabbalistic concept of the five worlds. Plus, it’s a good spread when someone prefers a concise reading or is seeking a yes/no answer that still provides some detail.

Q. In my session with you, you gave me the interpretation of the Fool through a story about Baal Shem Tov, which was beautiful (I made a video about it, here). How do you interpret the Tower, or is it entirely contextual?

Context is important, but with a card like the Tower, because the image is so strong, many people find it disturbing. People are often anxious when they come for a reading. So, while I don’t sugarcoat challenging information, when a difficult card like the Tower comes up, it’s important for me to quickly determine how serious it is and to address it right off the bat.

I like using cultural touchstone stories to help people connect with the meaning of certain cards. One way I sometimes explain the Tower is by referring to the scene in the movie Moonstruck, when Cher slaps Nicholas Cage and says, “Snap out of it!” A Tower moment in your life can be an event that feels like a surprising slap meant to wake you up from some way in which you’re deluding yourself. But if the cards suggest that there’s a Tower moment coming, you can avoid the pain of that slap by looking at where you might be under the power of a delusion or unconscious defense mechanism and doing the work to see it, let it go, and wake up.

I’ve also written about the Tower, relating it to a spiritual story in the Jewish tradition where a tower is described in Hebrew that can be translated two ways: (a) either as on fire or (b) filled with glowing light. Tower moments are there so you can see the light, but if you are lost in illusion, you can experience it as a consuming fire. This connects to the image of Moses and the “burning bush.” Was the bush really on fire or had he reached a level of consciousness where he was able to see the holiness of everything around him so that, instead, he interpreted it as a bush glowing with light?

When the Tower comes up in a reading, it can simply be saying, hey, wake up and see the light before I have to slap some sense into you!

Q. Within the way you read, do you have favorite cards?