Valentin Tomberg was one of the greatest Christian mystics of the Twentieth Century. He moved from Russian Orthodoxy, through Anthroposophy to the Roman Catholic Church. He wrote in a strange mode that I find partly compelling (and certainly authentic), but also off-putting due to its highly systematised symbolism and numerology.
Anyway, people regularly keep writing to me and recommending him - so presumably some of this blog's readers are strong admirers. If so, you will want to be aware that William James Tychonievich (the Grand Old Man of commenters at this blog) in part-way-through his own card-by-card analysis of the Tarot - in the spirit of Tomberg's Meditations on the Tarot.
William has always been an outstanding, but frustratingly infrequent, blogger; however the good news is that he is attempting to blog several times per week from now.
Please visit and encourage him in this endeavour by leaving comments!
I remember reading that Tomberg began life in an Estonian Lutheran household.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the plug, Bruce, but I should clarify that I'm writing about the cards themselves, not about Tomberg's Meditations. I've read the latter work a couple of times in its English translation and find many parts of it very insightful, so it certainly informs my commentary, but I actually only discovered Tomberg quite recently, after 15 years or so of prior engagement with the Tarot.
ReplyDelete@Wm - I've modified the phrasing.
ReplyDeleteI agree with your description of Tomberg's writing. Meditations on the Tarot is a great work and worth the read.
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