It may be noteworthy that most of the other threads in the Kabalah section incorporated
within the subscriber 'Magic' Forum also specifically mention Tarot...
With regards to Holmes post, it is worth reiterating his point that there are
various ways in which Kabbalistic associations have been promulgated by various individuals.
Firstly, not all instances of depictions of the Tree of Life have twenty-two connecting branches (which some have called 'paths'). Some important ones have sixteen, making, with the ten
Sefirot, a numerical total of twenty-six (the value of the letters of YHVH).
One of the 'traditions' of Major Arcana allocations on the Tree has the Bateleur/Magician in
Keter, the Papess/High Priestess in
Hockmah, etc until one gets to the Wheel of Fortune in
Malkut, with the remaining and successive twelve cards (either ending with the World then Fool, or Fool then World) having no such allocation.
What the Golden Dawn did is to take the Kircher version of the Tree of Life, adopt a small text called the
Thirty-Two Paths of Wisdom (remember, Wisdom is here
Hockmah), and make certain attributions from the higher emanating spheres towards that of the world (
Assiah) between the Tree's presumed branches as 'paths' and the twenty-two Atouts/Major Arcana, and the successive 32 'paths of Wisdom' (allocating the first ten to the
Sefirot).
One of the links I gave in my first post discusses possible correlations between the letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the Tarot's Atouts/Major Arcana.
In terms of the Kabalah, possibly the three aspects to begin are some familiarity with the first five books of the Bible (the
Torah), the depiction of the ten
Sefirot which forms the Tree of Life (without, at first, any 'connecting branches/paths'), and a beginning familiarity with the division of the Hebrew alphabet into 'mother', double and single letters.
For this last, I would highly recommend, above other texts, Aryeh Kaplan's
Sefer Yetzirah.