The Connection between Tarot and the Angelic Choirs
- Martin Knapp
- Dec 30, 2023
- 3 min read

Angels are around us all the time, but it’s not often that we listen to them . It took me years to realize this. The problem for me is separating the wheat from the chaff. Because when we you bring up Angels, a lot of people envision beings with wings that are full of love, then you have to queue the fringe society who will fill you in on all of this yet those same people can’t figure out their physical existence any more than they can the spiritual plane.
But once you filter out all that nonsense, you will find history is littered with methodologies, grimoires and other such attempts to directly contact, invoke or evoke Angels. There are many practitioners throughout history, who are said to have been in contact with Angels… and demons as well. Think King Solomon from the First Temple Period, John Dee in Elizabethan England, and Alastair Crowley in the early 1900s. (If you haven’t read up on these, there are some wonderful resources out there). But going beyond the basic history of Dee and Crowley, the movement of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, put a significant amount of study into tying the tarot to the decans of the zodiac and the arch angels. In later years, others within the Golden Dawn were then able to further tie the 72 angels of the Shem Ha-Mephoresh (governed by the 9 archangels of Heaven).
Indeed listening to when an angel chooses to speak to you, is probably a lot more beneficial for your long term health than trying to contact them directly. According to historical record, they can be very pendantic, and a bit grumpy if you don’t do things their way. Aside from the misadventures of Mr. Dee, there are French grimoires from the renaissance talking about practitioners being reduced to puddles of bile, should they get a ritual incorrect. So much for lovely chubby babies with wings. But then, we are talking about getting in direct contact with the Heavens.
It turns out, in my own research stemming on from Hermetic Kabbalah and some of what the Golden Dawn have produced, it seems that Angels do speak to us from time to time through tarot spreads, should you choose to listen.
So how does it work?
If you study Kabbalah, you will be familiar with the four worlds: Assiah, Yetzirah, Briah and Atziluth. Each of these respectively corresponds to the Aces of: Pentacles, Swords, Cups, and Wands.
Within those four worlds are three sephirot, each having a correspondence to a specific arch angel.
What I have found over the years, is often if you have an Ace appear, with a corresponding court card, the lessons of that specific angel is often very close to the meaning of the reading.
However, what it allows the practitioner to do, is to go deeper by cracking the history books and finding the specific lessons that the corresponding angel deals with. This adds a tremendous amount of depth to a reading in ways that people don’t often recognize or realize.
I have also realized that in addition to tarot correspondences with Shem angels, there are also correspondences with the Watchtower angels from Dee’s system. This is something the Golden Dawn did not achieve in their years of study. However, I have more research to complete before I can fully describe the methodology.
Not every tarot reading involves an angelic message, but when it does, there is so much more to reveal to the querent.
Subscribe to be notified of the next posts on Hermetic Qabalah and Tarot
Comments