“Ghosts are real. A ghost is an entity made up of psycho-physiological electrical energy.” Valentin Tomberg (d. 1975) was writing about Tarot’s Death card and the knot of the living and the dead. He was author of Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism. He wrote the book anonymously. According to Roman Catholic Cardinal Hans Urs Balthasar, he did so “to allow the work to speak for itself.” For my part, I have to wonder if he simply wanted to avoid the assured critique for placing the words Christian and Tarot in the same sentence. I’ve felt that backlash. In January, I was removed as a priest in the Episcopal Church for my book The Bible and the Tarot.
Tomberg’s work is a classic. As a Christian, he drew upon the Bible, as well as the earliest of theologians: Paul the Apostle, Origen, and Thomas Aquinas, among many others. Frequently, he referenced Christian mystics: Jacob Boehme, Saint Catherine of Sienna, and Saint Teresa of Avila.
As a Hermeticist, he sought truth from several traditions. He cited Hermes Trismegistus, whose teachings are the foundation of the tradition. But he also discussed the value of Platonist cosmology, often citing Plato, Plotinus, Porphyry, and Proclus. He discussed the intersection of Jewish mysticism with Christian ascetism and Tarot. And Tomberg referenced several contemporary personalities, the likes of philosopher Henri Bergson, wisdom teacher George Gurdjieff, psychiatrist Carl Jung, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, Tarot theorists Papus, and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
The power behind Tomberg’s keen insights was his varied background including his writings about Anthroposophical ideas. He was not afraid to search for truth in whatever tradition it was presented, even going beyond Rudolph Steiner. I found his Christ and Sophia well worth the time.
The point here is not so much about Valentin Tomberg, but more about his willingness to consider the truth as a universal reality inhabited within the wisdom of the dead. A truth not confined to any one religious tradition but a truth seen and felt as interwoven in the mystical fabric in every tradition. If our world is ever to become more than a globe of divided nations, we must embrace our ghosts moving in and about this tapestry. These ghosts are the shadow entities of energy that provide us all with a field of potential. The potential to build a network that spans the wisdom of the ghosts who haunt us with a knowledge and love that has been buried under modernity’s divisive ideologies.
Our ghosts have the way forward. But this is not about going back to a past that does not exist. This is the pilgrimage Carl Jung insisted was a seeking of the wisdom of the past in order to move forward. We must stop and listen to the lament of the ghosts. Especially “when the way ahead…is blocked by an obstacle from which we recoil.” Today “we need something out of the past in order to climb over the wall ahead.” That something is a love that is courageous enough to love not only God but more importantly our enemies. For what we do to our enemies, we’re doing to God.