B.O.T.A. Tarot

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The B.O.T.A. Tarot was created by Paul Foster Case, founder of B.O.T.A. and artist Jessie Burns Parke. The B.O.T.A. Tarot, revealed many of the inner secrets of Qabalah and The Tarot for the first time. Though the B.O.T.A. Tarot for the most part closely resembles the Rider-Waite deck, Paul Foster Case corrected what he felt were mistakes or "blinds" in the Rider-Waite edition. A comparative study will allow all to judge the two decks for themselves. See also Paul Foster Case's books "The Tarot," "Highlights of The Tarot" and "Book of Tokens" regarding the aforementioned inner secrets and rationale behind the B.O.T.A. Tarot.

In "The Tarot," Case published the correct Hebrew letter attributions of each Key, publicly linking Qabalah and Tarot for the first time. Also made public for the first time was the Tarot tableau, a pattern for laying out all of the Tarot Keys which reveals certain relationships and dissimilarities between them. This tableau was used by the American branch of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn when Case was Praemonstrator of that Order. This was the first published book to reveal almost all of the Tarot attributions on the Qabalistic "Cube of Space" diagram. Until the publication of this book, most occultists had never heard of the "Cube of Space" and were not aware how it related to the much better-known "Tree of Life" diagram. In fact, until the mid-1990's there were almost no other books in print which even mentioned the Cube of Space. The ones that do refer and defer to Case's pioneering and authoritative work on the subject.

Despite the fact that B.O.T.A. repeatedly emphasizes that Tarot is primarily a tool for meditation, not fortune-telling, Case's "The Tarot" also includes the B.O.T.A. method for Tarot divination, with specific instructions and explanation regarding the differences between divination and fortune-telling.