This spread borrows an existing symbolic structure rather than inventing one, and the borrowing has a specific and quite recent history that is worth knowing before using it.
What the Tree is
The sephirotic Tree, ten emanations from Kether to Malkuth, connected by twenty-two paths, is a diagram from Jewish Kabbalah, developed principally in medieval Spain and Provence and elaborated in sixteenth-century Safed by Isaac Luria and his circle.
It is a serious body of religious thought with its own literature, its own controversies and its own communities of practice, and it has nothing to do with playing cards.
How the cards got attached
The connection was made in France in the 1850s by Eliphas Levi, born Alphonse Louis Constant, who observed that the tarot has twenty-two trumps and the Hebrew alphabet has twenty-two letters, and that the Tree has twenty-two paths.
The correspondence is arithmetically real. It is also the entire basis of the claim. Levi built an elaborate system on it, and the further claim that the tarot was a Kabbalistic instrument all along rests on the coincidence of a number.
The tarot trumps had reached twenty-two through the development of a fifteenth-century Italian card game, for reasons internal to that game.
The Golden Dawn
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, from 1888, took Levi's association and systematised it. Its members (Mathers, Westcott, later Waite and Crowley), assigned every card a position on the Tree, an element, a planet, a decan and a Hebrew letter, and produced the interlocking correspondence tables that most modern decks still assume without saying so.
The Rider-Waite-Smith deck of 1909 and Crowley's Thoth deck are both products of that system. When a modern guidebook says a card corresponds to a particular sephirah, it is repeating the Golden Dawn.
Using the spread honestly
The ten positions carry real content and the spread does not work as ten generic slots. A reader who does not know what distinguishes Chesed from Geburah, mercy and expansion against severity and restraint, and the necessity of both, will read the two positions identically and lose the spread's point.
Two things should be held at once:
- The Tree is a Jewish religious structure, still in living use, and the Hermetic version of it is a nineteenth-century adaptation by people outside that tradition who were often working from imperfect sources.
- The Hermetic Tree is nonetheless a coherent system in its own right, developed over more than a century, and this spread belongs to it rather than to Jewish Kabbalah.
Calling the result Kabbalah without qualification is the error. Calling it the Hermetic Tree, and knowing when it was assembled and by whom, is accurate and costs nothing.