The Problem with the Tree of Life
Why abandoning the Kabbalistic Tree of Life became the most important magical decision I ever made
Sowing the Seeds of Doubt
In 2002, while preparing to write my first book on the tarot, I committed an act of magical vandalism. After years of study, countless diagrams of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, and mountains of notes from the Golden Dawn tradition and Aleister Crowley’s Book of Thoth, I realised something deeply unsettling:
Nothing was alive.
There was no movement, no discovery, no transformation. Only repetition disguised as wisdom.
So I burned it all.
What followed was not merely a rejection of a diagram, but a break from an entire worldview that treats tarot as a solved system rather than a living intelligence. This was the beginning of my real work with the tarot.
Burning the Tree
I formally entered my contract with the foundations of tarot in November 2002. I had just agreed to write a book about the Opening of the Key — the work that eventually became The Tarot and the Magus. The problem was that, although it was the only spread I truly used professionally, I had absolutely no idea how to write about it.
Like many writers facing panic, I turned to my notes for reassurance.
Over the years I had accumulated a stack of A4 paper nearly a foot high. Almost every page contained some variation of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, covered in annotations, correspondences, path attributions, Tarot trumps, astrological symbols, Hebrew letters, magical formulae and assorted revelations that had seemed profound at the time.
As I surveyed this monument to study, I experienced a genuine shock.
There had been no progress.
Years had passed. Thousands of hours of reading and contemplation had passed. Yet nothing had evolved. The same ideas repeated endlessly under slightly different branding. Golden Dawn writers repeated other Golden Dawn writers. Crowley repeated and expanded the Golden Dawn. Modern authors repeated Crowley badly. Every book promised revelation while delivering rearrangements of the same furniture.
The unanimity itself was supposed to reassure me. This must be true because everybody agrees.
But that was precisely the problem.
A living system evolves. It deepens. It surprises you. It challenges your assumptions. If a magical system produces no growth, then it is not alive. It is an empty shell masquerading as wisdom.
So I made a decision.
Over the next few hours I systematically burned every note in the fireplace.
Not symbolically. Not selectively. Everything.
It was one of the most liberating experiences of my life.
The Problem with Dead Systems
The difficulty with divorces, however, is that they are rarely final. Children are involved.
Abandoning the Tree of Life felt exhilarating, but it also left a vacuum. I had destroyed the structure around which almost all modern tarot literature is organised, yet I still had to write a readable book. Worse still, I needed to avoid alienating readers conditioned to believe that the Tree of Life is somehow the natural home of tarot.
Ironically, my publisher unknowingly rescued the situation by proposing an eleven-chapter structure. This immediately broke the tyranny of the familiar twenty-two or seventy-eight chapter format that dominates tarot publishing.
Something shifted.
The tarot no longer needed to be forced into predetermined compartments. It could breathe again.
Another deliberate choice followed. In none of my three published books did I include the famous Tree of Life diagram. Marco Visconti remarked upon this with genuine astonishment at the launch of The Secret of the Thoth Tarot. He immediately noticed the absence because the diagram has become almost mandatory within occult publishing.
Every tarot book appears contractually obliged to reproduce it at least once, regardless of relevance.
That omission was not accidental.
It was rebellion.
The Endless Reinventions of the Tree
Of course, many occultists recognised the limitations of the standard Tree long ago, even if they rarely abandoned it entirely.
Charles Stansfeld Jones famously inverted the Tree, provoking the fury of Aleister Crowley, and whose other student Kenneth Grant transformed the paths into tunnels. Others converted the Tree into three-dimensional structures, cubes, pyramids and fractal geometries.
Then the race began.
Fractal Trees. Quantum Trees. Multidimensional Trees.
Yet none of this added genuine depth to the tarot itself. The innovation remained architectural rather than experiential. The problem was never solved because the wrong question was being asked.
The Tree became an obsession in itself.
To my mind, this is the tail wagging the dog.
The Golden Dawn and the Machinery of Structure
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn is often portrayed as a revolutionary movement that revitalised Western esotericism. In many ways it did. The system dazzles with complexity and intellectual scope.
Yet, as Crowley himself observed, there was little within it that could not ultimately be found through diligent research in the British Library.
The Golden Dawn was never truly secret in the romantic sense people imagine. Like many hierarchical organisations, it required continual recruitment and fresh income. Membership expanded through social networks, fashionable introductions and careful cultivation of aspirational seekers.
Nor was advancement always determined by spiritual attainment.
There were undoubtedly talented magicians within the Order, but influence, money and personal favour frequently mattered just as much as magical capability. Crowley himself benefited from this dynamic. His inheritance from his father allowed him to support Mathers generously, and Mathers was hardly inclined to reject a wealthy and loyal disciple.
One of the Golden Dawn’s greatest innovations was the standardisation of the now-familiar Tree of Life diagram.
That standardisation was also its greatest limitation.
The diagram froze the system.
The Forgotten Problem of the Thirty-Two Paths
What many students fail to realise is that the famous Tree is not an ancient universal structure handed down intact from antiquity.
It is one solution among many.
The Sepher Yetzirah speaks of the Thirty-Two Paths of Wisdom: ten numbers and twenty-two letters. Yet it does not provide the neat modern diagram occultists now treat as sacred truth.
That arrangement had to be invented.
And therein lies the real challenge: how does one join twenty-two letters to ten numbers coherently?
Numerous structures were experimented with historically. The issue is hidden in plain sight and has never been resolved. The title itself refers to Thirty-Two Paths, not ten static points connected by decorative lines.
The modern occult Tree conceals this problem beneath familiarity.
Once fixed into a canonical diagram, questioning ceases.
Tarot with Stabilisers
The magical function of the Tree of Life within secret societies resembles stabilisers on a child’s bicycle.
Stabilisers prevent the child from falling. They provide reassurance, order and structure. Parents love them because they reduce danger and uncertainty and keep the child in the yard.
But stabilisers also restrict movement.
They reduce speed. They limit manoeuvrability. They prevent genuine balance from developing.
At some point the child must remove them or forever remain trapped cycling in tiny circles at walking pace.
Without stabilisers the bicycle becomes a vehicle of freedom. Distance opens. Speed emerges. Confidence develops through direct experience rather than protective structures.
That was precisely my experience after abandoning the Tree.
I immediately lost all interest in joining secret societies. Why would I submit myself to systems built upon foundations I had already rejected?
Eliphas Levi and the Missing Tree
What fascinates me most is that nineteenth-century tarot authorities such as Éliphas Lévi never actually used the modern Tree of Life structure.
It simply is not there.
Viewed entirely through the lens of the modern Tree, Levi becomes confusing, inconsistent and incomprehensible. Consequently many modern readers dismiss him as primitive or incomplete.
That is a serious mistake.
Levi belongs to an entirely different magical worldview — one far closer to dynamic polarity than rigid structure.
And this is where Crowley’s formula of 0=2 becomes essential.
0=2 and the Return of Duality
Crowley’s formula 0=2 returns us to a world of tension and polarity. +1 plus -1 = 0
Everything exists through its opposite:
Heaven and Hell.
Black and White.
Expansion and contraction.
Life and death.
Terms only possess meaning through contrast.
If there is a Tree of Life, then there must also be a Tree of Death, a logic few will countenance. There is a solution.
Western occultism needs to be reminded of the biblical image of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil — and suddenly we are back in Eden, with the serpent suspended between Adam and Eve, duality already active at the root of consciousness itself.
This is far more dangerous territory than the sanitised diagrams of modern occult publishing.
And infinitely more alive.
Living with chaos and a new tradition
Perhaps that is why so many tarot readers cling desperately to fixed meanings, reversals and comforting systems of interpretation. The Tree offers safety. It offers certainty. It offers the illusion that the tarot has already been solved.
But tarot is not a crossword puzzle awaiting completion.
It is a living current.
And living currents are dangerous because they demand growth, movement and transformation. They refuse to let us remain intellectually comfortable. The moment a system becomes incapable of surprising us, it ceases to be magical and becomes merely administrative.
Burning those notes in 2002 was not an act of destruction.
It was initiation.
I loved the Tarot and the Magus and have recommended it to many people who were seeking to understand the Thoth Tarot. I’m curious whether you have another proposal for the layout of the tree, or whether you’ve let it go entirely.