Bell Wen
The following is an excerpt from The Book of Maps, the companion guidebook to the Spirit Keeper’s Tarot, a hand-illustrated black and white tarot deck crafted with practitioners of the mystic arts in mind. The pen and ink drawings were inspired by woodcut prints from the late Renaissance.
Symbology called upon is based predominantly on medieval European alchemy, astrology (the Sacred Seven), Hermeticism, Zoroastrianism, Abrahamic angelology, Kabbalah, Catholicism/Christianity, Sufism, and Egyptian mythology.
For more information about the deck, go to: https://benebellwen.com/spirit-keepers-tarot
Minor Arcana: Seven Upper Realms In lay terms, the Upper Realms relate to conception and the first signs of growth or development. The Aces are the divine seeds that are implanted into our minds and hearts, which we then channel outward to materialize.
The Tens from the Lower Realms are linked to the Aces because, after the material pinnacles that the Tens represent, what had manifested is returned to dust, back into the intangible realms from where they first sprung—and that’s the Aces. The cycle continues, and what is in the intangible realm of the Aces will begin to manifest in the Realm of Twos.
The Threes, then, give birth descending from the Upper Realm to the Lower Realm, and the first sign of what has materialized having function is in the Fours.
MINOR ARCANA KEYS WITH TRINITARIAN PRIMORDIAL INFLUENCES
Lower Realm
Upper Ream
Lower Realm
Ten
Ace
Two
Three
Four
Key 1
Key 1
Key 2
Key 3
Key 4
Key 10
Key 10
Key 11
Key 12
Key 13
Key 19
Key 19
Key 20
Key 21
Key 0
Note that only the Aces, Twos, and Threes in the Upper Realms and the connecting point between the two realms of the Minors—the Tens and Fours—are the sets with three numerological progenitors from the Major Arcana. All other numerological sets in the Lower Realms are linked to only two progenitors from the Majors.
NUMEROLOGICAL FAMILIES IN THE MAJOR ARCANA KEYS
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
0