Reddit mentions of Qabalah: A Magical Primer

Much better specific question. :) Tarot and Kabbalah can each stand alone without the other. They also can be potent tools for deepening understanding of each other. The major arcana are said to exemplify the paths between the sephiroth on the tree of life. Understanding how the sephiroth on each end of a path relate can shed light on the cards, and vice versa. It's kinda like a two way street. That said, the scale between the two is like a bike and a car. Both can take you places. Kabbalah can go 'further' faster, but is much more complex and takes more fuel (will) to get there. Neither is 'better'. Just different.

A good intro level book on Kabbalah is ["Qabalah: A Magical Primer"] (http://amzn.com/1578632110).

Also, ["The Tarot And The Tree Of Life"] (http://amzn.com/1161499156).

Not an uncommon story. The occult is so alluring because it hints at truth. I had a similar experience to find divinity. While I did play DnD a little bit, that's not what got me. I found a primer on magick and Qabbalah (not kabbalah, the real stuff. we pronounced it quaballah to differentiate.) Actually, after a little googling I found it. I had read Daniel C. Matt's Essential Kabbalah already, but my knowledge of Judaism was way too lacking at that point to get it. I dived head first into the occult and am still conversant in it. I read Aleister Crowley, collected Tarot cards, astral projection, some scary meditations, and even learned to read and cast runes. I have an Encyclopedia on all things Golden Dawn. I could still sit down and draw up a chart that had all the elements, planets, signs, and their associations from memory. The more I read, the more I critiqued. Everything in Western Occult can be boiled down the the tree of life. I found that you could cut through 5 layers of symbology as just symbols of symbols and, how I explained it, just getting lost and going in circles of symbols. If you cut through all the shit, there's a very very simple base. The more I studied the tree of life, the more I realized that the reasons for all those extra layers of symbols is to avoid having to deal directly with the tree of life, and I realized that I wasn't prepared at all to figure it out. I wasn't conversant enough in Judaism to understand the symbology. So I started studying Judaism and unlearning everything I learned in the Occult. I wasn't anywhere near approaching considering being practicing. This was all just intellectual exercises. But I learned something about Judaism. The deeper you go, the closer you get to getting somewhere. There's a truth at the bottom. With the occult, you learn the other way. You start with the tree of life, and learn it by building symbols on top of symbols and the deeper you go, the further away from the truth you go. It's all just wheel spinning.