Nicholas Swift

Nicholas Swift is a researcher and writer in Ontario, Canada. He used to live in London, and for a time worked near the British Museum, where many examples of the cylinder seals, some of which ultimately became the images on the Tarot cards, may be seen. He currently works as a freelance copy editor. An independent film maker in London hopes to make a documentary based on Mirror of the Free .

The images on the Marseille Tarot cards started out as illustrations of Sumero-Babylonian myths, preserved through the centuries on cylinder seals. They were copied by people who didn't understand them but who also had access to some form, whether written or oral, of the wisdom encoded in those myths and in Bible stories. That wisdom is identical with Sufi teachings as espoused by teachers like Ibn al 'Arabi, Rumi, and others, including Gurdjieff and his teachings about the enneagram. The myths and stories are decoded in this book using the multiple meanings conveyed by Arabic consonantal word roots and by reference to those doctrines and to modern discoveries about conditioning and the hemispheric specialization of the brain. Arabic is the closest existing descendant of the ancient Protosemitic language. The Kabbalah, long rumoured to be linked to the Tarot, is shown to come from the same sources, and originally had eight, not ten, sefiroth. The visual evidence alone is overwhelming: the mystery of where the Tarot comes from has been definitively solved.