יְהִי אוֹר Let there be Light! ~ Genesis 1:3
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Almost 20 years in development, during a lot of that time I often visualized and daydreamed about seeing the day I would hold the actual NUR Tarot cards in my hands. That day has now arrived and it has been surreal with me going through every known emotion of these past 20+ years as the cards sit in my hands. I wish Roya was still physically present here to see it! I know she is smiling from the Other Side.
God(ess)[head] is truly Good, and it is to It/Her/Him that I owe everything accomplished here together with the vehicles It put on my path to see it through (i.e. Its own theophanies and self-disclosures)! First, it was my late Iranian Sufi murshid from Isfahan, Saifialishah II, who seeded this idea by giving me as my first 40 day meditation the Light Verse of the Qur'an (24:35) to recite and in his final instruction to me the singular meditation on the symbol of the Greatest Name (ism al-a'zam), telling me to make of it from that point forward my Guide on the Path -- and what a Guide it has been since this is its Tarot and out of it manifested the very apparition of the Mother I had dreamed about on the night before my Sufi initiation who initiated me Herself into the Path inside the Ka'ba within the Imaginal World of the Dreaming before even he did in this one!
Although I accumulated close to 20 thousand pages of electronic notes during these 20+ years - initially going from 101 cards to 88 cards and finally to 95 cards (i.e. to the abjad numerical value of 'God guides' يهدي الله) -- it took less than 2 years to wrap things up, and under 8 months for the production. As such I owe Habib Shahbazi -- perhaps amongst the greatest living visionary artists alive - a debt of gratitude that is impossible to repay because he literally helped to bring this to life. So a huge share of the accolades belong to Habib for the absolutely amazing artwork he did for the Major Arcana of the NUR Tarot. No doubt in my mind that She guided him in their final execution.
Habib's own Shirazi pedigree and the fact that he physically lives there
is also not to be taken lightly as a mere coincidence, given that to me and to
the Bayanis Shiraz is the point of adoration (qiblah) itself. Perhaps the
residents of that holy city of Shiraz should consider directing their prayers
towards Habib (beloved) who is Halim (clement) and even perform the tawwaaf
(circumambulation) around him and his house rather than waste their money, time
and energy on the ugly neoliberal Wahhabi Disneyland religious theme-park the
Saudis have disgraced and turned Mecca into!
That said, the Work around this system of the NUR Tarot is far from
over, although a major chasm and abyss has been crossed, since I still need to
finish The Book of the Tree of Hermes: An Introduction to the NUR Tarot and
work a little with the deck myself for some time on a practical level beyond
the abstractions around it that have been floating in my mind during most of
this time.
In any case, we now have the NUR Tarot, and I want to tell everyone who believed in this project and participated in it in some way that I love each and every one of you more than you will ever know because all of you are as much responsible for it as I am and so also possess a share in the acknowledgements for its official birth!
الله انور يا وجه الله
