Bardon's Tarot: Why Readers Call His First Book the First Card

Bardon tarot is a phrase that turns up often in occult forums, usually attached to a claim worth examining rather than repeating: that Franz Bardon himself called Initiation into Hermetics his "first card," a conscious echo of the Major Arcana's own numbering. The Key to the True Quabbalah: Bardon's Letters and the Hebrew Trumps showed how carefully Bardon kept his own alphabet separate from the Golden Dawn's Hebrew scheme; the same caution applies here. No surviving edition of Bardon's book uses that phrase in his own words. What is worth keeping is the reading itself, offered plainly as an interpretation.

Where the Comparison Comes From

Readers who hold Bardon's three books beside the Thoth deck notice a structural likeness: three books, each building on the last, much as the Major Arcana's twenty-two trumps build a sequence from the Fool's open potential to the Universe's completion. Calling the first book "the first card" is shorthand for that likeness, a mnemonic invented by later students, not a title Bardon chose. Naming the source of a claim matters more in occult writing than almost anywhere else, since unsourced lore travels fast and hardens into fact.

Reading Initiation into Hermetics as an Opening Move

If the comparison holds any weight, it is because Initiation into Hermetics does what an opening trump does: it establishes the terms everything after will use. Before a student touches an element, a fluid or a spirit, the first book insists on one thing only, a trained and steady mind. The Fool opens the Major Arcana on the same kind of bare ground, no tool yet chosen, no direction yet fixed, only the step about to be taken. The parallel is useful precisely because it is modest: an opening, not a prophecy of everything to come.

What a Closing Book Might Mean

If a first book reads like an opening trump, Bardon's third book invites the opposite question: does The Key to the True Quabbalah read like a closing one? Its subject, a language of sound meant to carry real force, sits closer to The Universe, the trump where the Major Arcana's sequence completes and folds back on itself, speech and form arriving at the same point. Bardon wrote no fourth book. Whether that was intended as completion or cut short by his death in 1958 is something his students have debated, not something any source settles cleanly.

Keeping the Claim Honest

A reader drawn to this framing should hold it the way Bardon asked a student to hold a single thought: firmly, but ready to let it go if it does not survive scrutiny. Franz Bardon's own writing offers no numbering of his books against the trumps, and inventing one on his behalf would be exactly the kind of unverified claim this series tries to avoid. The comparison earns its place as a teaching device, not as biography.

Why the Comparison Still Helps

Used honestly, labelled as a later reader's bridge rather than Bardon's own words, the first-book-first-card framing gives a tarot student a way into three otherwise demanding volumes: start where the Fool starts, expect the work to build book on book the way the trumps build card on card, and stop reaching for Bardon's authority on a point he never made himself. The next part of this series turns to Bardon's own account of his earlier incarnation in his novel Frabato, and to what that story adds to a tarot reader's sense of his path.