Art – Page 4 – A Sacred Life

April 12, 2023April 12, 2023

The Lady Behind The Veil

When it comes to the origins of the third of the Major Arcana, we are clouted soundly across the face by a great patriarchal misogyny. The High Priestess as she is styled today in the RWS deck and it’s derivatives, was a symbol of derision and sacrilege. Her former title, that of “Papess” or “Popess” carries a complex history interwoven with the Medieval Church and its politics.

Though sources differ, the most likely source for this character is the story of Pope Joan. Supposedly, in the early days of the church, a woman (gasp) disguised as a man entered the priesthood, and was so successful that she ultimately was elected to it’s highest office, that of the Holy Father, or rather Mother. And mothering, according to the story, was ultimately her downfall, because in addition to committing the great sins of cross-dressing, impersonating a man, and becoming a priest (which is still not legal in the Catholic Church) she also fornicated and got with child. Going into labor during a long procession through the streets of Rome, she gave birth to a son (and some say it was AntiChrist) at which point the crowds tore her to pieces.

It’s hard to say where the story actually came from. Some believe it was created by the Church itself in order to show just how terrible an idea it was to give women rights. Other sources consider it to have risen during Protestant times as an example of the wickedness and corruption of the old order.

There sort of was actually a female pope, who is connected by extension to the Tarot’s rich tapestry of tales. In the 13th Century, Guglielma of Bohemia proclaimed herself to be an incarnation of the Christ and thus equal to the Pope in Rome. Among her other prophecies was the idea of a female papacy. She was quickly executed for heresy, but her followers elected another woman named Manfreda as her successor, thus claiming an apostolic succession of their own. The sect was ultimately suppressed, but this Manfreda was apparently a relation or ancestor of the Duchess of Sforza, whose family commissioned the Visconti-Sforza Tarot now in the collection of the Morgan Library.

For whatever reason, the Popess is historically depicted as a female version of the Catholic Pontiff. Remember that these trumps were originally for playing a card game, and not intended to have any deep esoteric meaning that we know of. So incorporating Pope Joan may have been a slap at the clergy in an era of emerging secular humanism, or it may simply have been a case of “Hey, Luigi, we need to come up with another card. Whadda ya think? We already got a Pope, how about She-Pope?”

Fast forward to the late 19th and early 20th centuries when these cards are transitioning from Catholic France and Italy into Protestant England, which had at the time a female head of the Church in Queen Victoria, and the figure perforce needed to take on a different character. We can find some of that character’s evolution in Smith’s depiction.

High_Priestess_RWS_Tarot — Smith’s depiction of the third card of the Major Arcana evokes mystery and antiquity. The symbols and exoticism were part of the zeitgeist of the time in which she worked.

The High Priestess sits between a black column and a white column. inscribed with the letters B and J respectively, and capped with a lotus flower. Between them is draped a curtain adorned with what may be pomegranates. She wears a white crown or headdress with a sphere in the middle and horns or half crescents to either side, from which extends a veil. On her chest hovers a Tau cross. She holds in her hands a scroll with the word “TORA” written on it. A loose blue cloak covers her shoulders and is drawn across her lap. Her dress is of some thin material, that pools about her. At her right foot is a crescent moon shape. Behind her, visible only slightly through gaps between the curtain and the columns, may be seen a vast sea and the intimations of a distant shore across it.

I think it is very likely that Smith had access to a copy of the Sforza Popess card when she designed this. If we look at the Marseilles, which were the common predecessors in circulation, and we look to the Sforza, we can find closer visual structure with this earlier Italian version. While the Priestess no longer sports the triple crown, the distinctive shape of her head gear may be seen as exaggerating the lowest of those crowns. The central jewel becomes the “moon globe” and the side crenulations – already curving a bit in the Sforza painting, become the “horns”. Very frequently this crown is called a “Crown of Isis” or the “Crown of Hathor”, referring to the horned disk often depicted on those deities in the artwork of Egypt. This always draws the connection between Isis and the High Priestess, and, fair enough, it’s a connection I make as well, but I don’t stop there. There are a lot of other clues to be found.

antique-popess — Predecessors as female popes. The depiction from Tarot de Marseilles renders the figure very similarly to the Pope card (V-The Hierophant in modern decks) with full alb and regalia. The older Visconti-Sforza depiction maintains the Trinity crown but she is clad here in an ascetic nun’s habit, holding a simple prayer book, rather than what might be a ceremonial gospel in the later version. It is this humility that leads some Tarot scholars to inscribe the artist’s work on the card as inspired by the later Sforza relation Manfreda rather than the apocryphal Pope Joan. Documentation for any such argument is scarce, and there is very little we can glean from the time as to what view the players held about the Popess card.

Those are Egyptian columns, after all, so why not just accept the Hathor Crown as canon and move on. Except, though they are Egyptian in style, the columns are labeled with B for Boaz, and J for Joachim, or Jachin. These columns come to the Tarot by way of Freemasonry, where they are used both symbolically and as part of initiation ritual. The origin in both cases is in biblical accounts the Temple built by Solomon to house the Ark of the Covenant when Israel had been established as a nation and the capital was in Jerusalem.

In the biblical versions, the two columns were made of bronze and their decorations included pomegranates, lilies (lotuses), and “mesh-work” or some kind of screen. If we accept their existence as historical fact, their purpose was likely ritualistic, or totemic. They constituted a magical threshold between the ordinary space of the world, and the sacred space of the Temple within. We can find the antecedents of such magical structures in the Pylons guarding the openings to Egyptian holy sites, or things like the Ishtar Gate of Babylon and the Lion Gate in Nineveh, and the the symbolism continues down to the Arch de’ Triumphe and the Gateway Arch in St. Louis.

The names have no good provenance, but they are generally said to mean “Strength” and “Establishment”. Since Hebrew is read right to left, we are looking at the phrase as Jachin Boaz which is usually rendered as “He will establish in strength”. Yet esoterically, and this is symbolized by the black and white colors of the columns – rather than the bronze they are made of, the two columns represent all opposing or dualistic forces in the cosmos. In this case “Establishment” may be read as “Structure”, or “That Which Is” or “Matter” and “Strength” then becomes “Force”, or “That Which Changes” or “Energy”.

We may find here a parallel to the attribution of Saturn and Jupiter to the Magician. The universe is a dualistic existence (or at least may be expressed this way) where everything is the result of the tension (or balance) between opposite points. It is not correct to see either point in terms of good or evil, because they are simply the nodes that make possible the spectra between them.

High_Priesetess-Cosmic Tarot — Approaching the Priestess card from a non-traditional depiction, yet maintaining some of the key symbols, these two versions are a study in similarity and contrast.

On the left is the card from the Cosmic Tarot by artist and esotericist Norbert Lösche. His aesthetic reflects his studies in Tibetan Buddhism as much as a deep understanding of Western Tarot iconography. He keeps her veil, the moon, the waters, and the book. expressing them in a surrealist everyspace that transcends time itself. The Alpha and Omega, though derived from Christian biblical text, effectively communicate the same extremes as the black and white columns, which are in this case show very accurately as Tao.

The right side is from the Legacy of the Divine Tarot by Italian artist Cirro Marchetti. I have two of his decks, and will probably be adding the others. His art is deliciously sensual and innovative. Like Lösche he preserves key pieces of the symbol language, while introducing or interpreting others. He has her holding the pomegranate, traditionally associated with Persephone. According to legend, Hades agreed to release her from the underworld provided she had eaten no food that was there. But she swallowed one aral from this fruit, and thus would only be allowed to visit her mother for a short span. During this time, Demeter her mother in happiness would make the world verdant and fertile, but when she returned to the darkness of her husband, Demeter would morn and the world would be bleak and barren. This ancient tale of the spinning of the seasons is tied up in the cycles of fertility in the female as well, and connects to pre-historic knowledge and mysteries. The White Owl, a symbol both of Wisdom and Death, give us a glimpse at what lies across the deep waters behind the threshold she guards.

And the High Priestess is the nexus of that spectra. She sits between these points. She appears to block the threshold. Through her we must pass if we are to enter into the Sacred Space. But it is as accurate to say that she is that Sacred Space herself.

I tend to view the first three cards of the Major Arcana as representing cosmic forces. They are the powers, the energies, the potentials. They are those things which are eternal, and though they are seen through many different masks, they are themselves immutable. In the old Hermetic and alchemical sense, they represent “That Which Is Above”. This will become more apparent in the coming weeks when I delve into the second set of three cards, as I see in them “That Which Is Below”; the forces as they manifest in our physical world.

Just as Aristotle ventured that all things partake of all elements, there is an intermingling in all the forces of aspects of the other, depending on time, space, and context. I have said that I view the Fool as the undifferentiated Chaos, the inscrutable Nothing That Is Everything And Everything That Is Nothing that defies our general senses. It is, and will be, and always was, but we cannot interact with it, because in order to do so, we have to bind it in ways our selves can understand. We, in fact, have to separate ourselves out of it. This is the Magician, seeking to clarify, direct, and form. What then does this leave?

The Light was divided from the Darkness and the Dry Land was divided from the Waters.

The vast sea behind the Priestesses vale clearly signifies that these are Waters of Darkness. They are the remaining part of the Nothing to be acted upon, once the Actor has become conscious and separated itself. Within this dark-eyed beauty is the potential for all that might be. It is the Womb of the Universe, the Sacred Egg, It is Bliss and Creation, but it also is Terror and Oblivion. The Priestess gives us access to that potential through her innate humanity. She is the compassion that allows safe entry to the Darkness, tethered to her inner Light.

Whereas the Magician represents the Consciousness and Active Will, the Priestess is the embodiment of the Subconscious and Intuition. Both are necessary for the fruition of the Big Bang creative power unleashed in the Fool card. The painter is worthless without the canvas, but the canvas is wasted without the painter.

Again, the gendered language traditionally used to work with these cards is problematic for some persons for whom gender is not as clear cut as it was perceived to be at the inception of the meanings of the cards. I hope here to demonstrate that because both “genders” and the concepts attached to them are necessary for the culmination of the full spectrum of existence that fixation on such polarity is not the object. Within the infinite possibilities that exist along those spectra, one can usually find an expression of their own identity that provides power in the self. The place of the Priestess is a place of Power. It contains mystery and illumination. It contains love and acceptance. Yet these are to be earned rather than expected.

Design Sketch-High PriestessTarot — This is the only Tarot image that I made with the intent to create a Tarot deck that I am actually satisfied with. The original sketch, though I felt it was “right” languished in my sketchpad until some years later when I digitized much of my traditional art from my younger years. Once in the computer, and with the benefit of the intervening years using tools like Photoshop and Painter, I realized it in the manner that, I hope eventually, it will appear on the Priestess Card.

You can see my homages to the symbolic vocabulary of Pixie Smith, but also the connection I make between this card and pre-historic and ancient artworks that, as far was we know, have nothing to do with Tarot. It is through the contemplation of the card in context with my art history and archaeological backgrounds that I have come to derive my own meanings and contexts for the cards, that I am sharing through this series of articles. To what extent these are “correct” is irrelevant. They are as correct and accurate as any that any reader can intuit or be inspired to by similar contemplation and research, and that is undoubtedly the method our predecessors used to invent the “traditional” meanings that we now evolve.

She is the equal to the He of the Magician card. They are the children of the Fool. They are Action and Reception. They are Will and Fruition. To Separate the I from the Fool, we perforce create the Not I. The Priestess is that Other. But we know that deep within the I is the Other, so again, the forces are never truly separated, and never truly different. This ability to understand that we are both ourselves and all others is the Empathy necessary to overcome that negative aspects of pure willfulness and desire, which are the barren and truly dead legacy of the Dry Land. For the Land to bring forth Life, we must have the Water also.

The blue robe of the RWS Priestess seems to flow and become water itself at the bottom of the image. I am certain this is intentional, as is it flowing across the crescent moon at her feet. The connection between the moon and the female principle is an ancient one, and I believe prehistoric. I have mentioned a number of times the Venus of Laussel, with her horn marked with thirteen notches. I make a very strong connection with Laussel and the High Priestess, to the extent that I would almost consider the ancient stone inscription as a prototype, were it not for the documented history of the preceding cards. But it certainly is a spiritual prototype in my mind. I equate the Sorceror image from the cave of Tres Freres with the Magician in a similar way. I think these distinctions have been with us for a very long time before they became manifest in the ideations of the Tarot deck. Our journeys into these cards must acknowledge how deeply the roots go down.

The “Tora” scroll on her lap is another pointer that Waite subscribed to the belief as did many of his contemporaries, that the Tarot were linked with the Hebrew alphabet. “Tora” is meant to be seen as “Torah” the Jewish Holy Scriptures – specifically the first five “Books of Moses” also called the Pentateuch in Greek. These were believed to have been written by Moses himself, and also sometimes are called, the Books of the Law, as Moses is styled the Lawgiver.

To thus claim for the Tarot a pedigree that they are in some way Universal Law is most likely a complete invention of Alphonse Louis Constant, who reinvents himself with the quasi-Hebraic epithet of Eliphas Levi. The Levites, that is the Hebrew tribe of Levi, were signified as the priestly lineage descended from Aaron (or Aharon) the brother of Moses. Moses was then also of the tribe of Levi. In Tarot, the wands suit, though probably something else in the earlier versions, are typically depicted as wooden branch with leaves. This alludes to the Staff of Aaron, which is said to have budded and brought forth flower and fruit (almonds) even though it was essentially a piece of dead wood. This miracle was claimed as a signifier that the priesthood was forever the role of the tribe of Levi, and the rod is one of the items that supposedly was kept in the Ark of the Covenant. Since Eliphas Levi these complicated ideas have been interwoven into Tarot symbology, many of them without the modern reader even suspecting it.

My favorite Hoi Polloi Tarot alters the inscription on her scroll to TARO, severing the arcane ties in the earlier deck. I don’t know that this was any sort of anti-Semitic thing, I suspect that they just thought it made more sense for a tarot deck to read “taro”. Smith herself performs that same permutation on the Wheel of Fortune. On the wheel, of course, it’s a gematric pun. The letters T A R O can be moved again to form R O T A, or Wheel. We can take this game a step further and link it to the famous magic square of SATOR-AREP0-TENET-OPERA-ROTAS. If one is inclined to play the letter scramble games (as many Kabbalists are) the connection to this enigma is an obvious one, and provides much to contemplate and explore.

The book image itself is important. In the earlier decks the book may be seen as a Medieval Book of Hours or book of prayer. The Book of Hours was called this because it delineated those prayers to be said by the faithful at particular parts of the day. These rituals are echoed in the Muslim call to prayer, though they have effectively vanished from modern Christianity. It may also be seen as a Gospel book, which would have been the first four books of the New Testament, a Christian equivalent to the Mosaic Law, and symbol of the New Covenant. The Gospel book is used as a part of the Catholic Mass, both as a functional text and a potent physical symbol in the ritual.

The Hermeticists can divorce themselves of the Abrahamic religions and see within the scroll a metaphor for the Emerald Tablet or the whole Corpus Hermeticum – those texts from the semi-mythical Hermes the Thrice Great, possibly a sage in the Alexandrian Library, and possibly an Egyptian priest, doctor, and architect named Im-Ho-Tep. Still others would simply write across the scroll Sophia – Wisdom.

cretan-snake-goddess — The Priestess Card from the Ghosts and Spirits Tarot immediately reminded me of the so-called Snake Goddess of ancient Minoan civilization. The artist is Lisa Hunt, and the imagery of this deck is unique. It can be startling, disturbing, and at the same time mesmerizing. The whole is dreamlike, the figures ethereal. The woman stands in the center, between the fertile world of life on the one hand, and the inevitable world of death on the other. Yet in the death there is not oblivion, and in life there is no permanence. The flow back and forth between the gate is metered by the figure of the Priestess.

The Minoan figures are the feminine cult object of that culture, just as the bulls (or minotaurs) are the masculine cult object. Whether she represents a priestess of deity is uncertain. She is depicted in frescos as well as in the various sculptures. The bare breasts and aproned layered gown is as ubiquitous as the snakes, but we don’t really know if this was a ceremonial garb or if it reflects the actual daily dress of the women of that civilization. Much is still unknown about Crete. We believe now that the culture may have inhabited multiple islands in the Eastern Mediterranean including Thera, now Santorini. The cataclysmic volcanic eruption that destroyed that island may have caused a tsunami that overtopped the great Palace at Knossos, or at least impacted life on that island to the extent that it was abandoned not long after. The people settled on the coasts of Africa and the Eastern Levant where they founded Carthage and Phoenicia respectively. The intricacies of the priestess cults were lost in that disaster, possibly because the people felt those gods may have forsaken them.

It is fair to say that the Priestess is Sophia, but she is also Isis, and Astarte, and Ishtar, and Lilith. She represents a pre-Hellenic concept of the divine feminine that merges both love and war, fecundity and famine, and birth and death. The Greeks would split this nature into Aphrodite and Athena and Demeter and Persephone and Hecate. The Celts would call her the Morrigan, and the Vikings Freja. The dual nature of femininity to be kind and cruel, nurturing and aggressive, and both fruitful and barren, and how this expresses the cyclic nature of the seasons, is all wrapped up in this enigmatic woman on the threshold.

She holds the key to what is beyond, but, like Mona Lisa under her veil, one cannot ever say that they certainly know why she smiles. Even though ancient sages and modern scientists can say they know the process whereby life is kindled in the womb, no one can truly explain the alchemy that results when two sets of genes are united. Separately neither egg or sperm will produce anything, yet when combined they result in a conscious entity that never was before. That’s extraordinary. It is what lies behind the curtain of pomegranates, that we can only know once we have been allowed to enter in. Her mysteries are profound and plentiful, and can be treacherous and terrifying. We must tread carefully upon her doorstep and approach her majesty with the utmost respect.

When I return next week we will look at another aspect of the feminine idea, that of Card IV, The Empress. We will see how the next cards form a reflection and a manifestation of the forces released in these first three. I hope you will join me. I thank you for your time and attention.

April 5, 2023April 5, 2023

The Gift of the Magi

The first numbered card of the Tarot deck is called the Magician in RWS. It is called also the Juggler in some decks, or the Magus. Like many of the other trumps, its original character and image have evolved over the centuries and what was originally not only mundane but essentially negative has been elevated to a nigh-divine status.

The Magus was initially, at best a street conjurer, and at worst a con-man running a crooked gambling game of “ball and cups”. This accounts for the discrepancy between the depictions on earlier decks. Curiously the name on the Marseilles deck “Le Bateleur” actually translates to The Fool, so perhaps someone got that mixed up early on. This just enforces that his original role was as an entertainer or performer, rather than as an occultist and true sorcerer.

RWS_Tarot_01_Magician — This is the Magician as he appears in the usual version of the RWS deck. You can see here that perhaps one of the reasons that this deck became so popular is that it employed a printing technology called photorotogravure. That is, metal plates were made using a photographic process which produced high fidelity color prints rapidly and cheaply. While ultimately these would wear out just as the wood blocks used in previous decks would, they could always be re-imaged from the original artwork. So they were subject to less “mutation” than decks like the Marseilles. The additional detail also allowed Smith as an artist to create visual messages on each of the Minor cards instead of just elaborately drawn pips. The printing method is a consequence of the Industrial Revolution and is still used today for creating large numbers of highly colored images with sharp small detail.

Pixie Smith’s rendition of the character is a good deal more formal and refined than his predecessor in the French deck. He stands center scene, behind a table on which are arrayed the pentacle, chalice, sword, and staff that define the four suits, and their emblematic elements. His right hand holds a white scepter aloft, while his left points to the earth. He is clad in rather Roman looking robes, with a simple white band around his brow. The Infinity symbol floats above his head. Above him the top of the card is bordered by a flowering vine (probably roses) and below by roses and lilies. If you look very closely you’ll see an ascending dove is carved into the edge of the table just above the leg.

I will stop here and note that I refer to the Magician card as “him” and “he” because this is part of the gendered language that is inherent in working with Tarot historically. I have a few decks where the figure on this card is portrayed as feminine. I realize that both the language and the depictions present some issues for LGBTQ+ persons. There are a number of works out there trying to address the historical genderedness of Tarot, and of the practice of magic itself. I believe many of them are probably in a better position to speak to that than I am. I can only say that I recognize this is a problem, but it is a problem that we have to be open about.

female-magicians — The Magician as Woman. These are from the Darkwood Tarot and the Green Witch Tarot respectively. There are some others that take this approach, but these were the easiest to find in my collection as an example. In this case, the Darkwood raison de etre is expressed as a Tarot journey (go look that up, there are a lot of books on it) where the adept evolves through each of the Majors. Here the Crone serves to initiate the adept onto the path, in the same way a traditional coven experience might. Prior to the reconstruction that lead to Wicca and other modern practices, a witch might be of either sex, and the role of head of the coven based on seniority or experience rather than a gender role. If men were not involved, then perforce a woman would have the same role. The Green Witch Tarot, being a witch’s Tarot, substitutes the Witch for the Magician, in expression of a rejection of the patriarchal term used by the Victorian ceremonial lodges. I don’t see it as necessarily hexing the patriarchy as much as simply distinguishing itself from that form in search of a more nature-centric tradition. I could easily be wrong about that. Hexing the patriarchy is never a bad thing anyway.

The problem with this language is not that something is considered to be masculine or feminine but that so many things have been grafted onto the ideas of gender that have nothing to do with it. Because we exist in four dimensional space-time we tend to express ideas in terms of duality. We are here or there, past or future, day or night, light or dark, and good or evil. These dualistic ideations (which are in themselves problematic) have been confuted with the idea of gender over time, and frequently the feminine side of things gets the negative attributions. In fact, just the idea of “negative” meaning bad, versus simply “the opposite of positive” is one of the problems. These examples of pure misogyny were perpetuated by the 19th Century occultists, even though in practice I am sure there was more than a little gender fluidity among them.

The use of this language in the Tarot and it’s symbols is old and deep, and even when we are conscious that it is not adequate to the task, we must acknowledge what it has brought to the current experience of the art. Like the baggage in the purse on the Fool’s staff, what came before exists, whether we are happy with it or not. While we can work toward a non-binary expression, the symbols themselves were chosen because they are mnemonic of certain concepts, and those concepts, right or wrong, may be historically associated with masculine or feminine genders. It is equally unsatisfying to adopt other terms that try to assert a positive spin while covering up the obvious duality.

For my part, no offense is intended here. If my use of gendered language falls short of the reader’s enlightened view, I beg pardon, and ask that they consider the difficulty with which we must pick through the rubble of the Fallen Tower in order to build anew.

In my earliest texts on Tarot, I was instructed to presume that the Magician was representative of myself as the card reader (unless, I was a woman, in which case it was the High Priestess, there’s that gender thing already). This offers several barriers to reading with the cards. The most obvious one is that if the Magician is me, he can’t ever be anything else. He ceases to a valuable symbol open to interpretation and becomes a fixed identity, and a personal one, whose presence in the layout of the cards is incongruous to say the least. It is akin to the doctor seeing himself as part of every diagnosis, and it’s just plain silly.

The derivation of this idea (and I don’t know if it’s still taught, as I don’t typically read most of the included books in “true” Tarot decks I acquire), is that there are some layouts that require a “querent” a card to represent the individual for whom the reading is being done. This is most notable in the Celtic Cross spread (which I suspect is not in anyway Celtic). If one is reading for a client, then one picks the face card that has similar physiognomy to that client. But if reading for oneself, then you always pick either the Magician or the High Priestess depending. And in practice, even doing a client reading, I would tend to identify myself with one of those cards when it shows up, thus again blocking it from being a proper tool for divination.

hoi_polloi_magician — My personal Magician from my 50+ year old Hoi Polloi deck. You can find similarities and differences here, some of the more important ones I cover in the text of the article. I will add here though, that the roses are gone, or rather, they’ve become blue. Grapes are visible, the foliage might now be identifiable as pea vines, but also they resemble hickory fronds to me. You will note that the wand that lays on the table has a sprout on the end. This is the symbolic Rod of Aaron, that budded and brought forth fruit even though it had been uprooted. The symbolism of this has a lot of Hebrew and Christian overtones, as does the Dove and Fish engraved in the table’s edge, but it can also simply be another manifestation of the miracles the Magician is capable of performing given the right intentions and focus.

So in shedding this traditional approach, I have returned the Magician to a useful role, and can begin to explore it solely as visual metaphor, and use it in that way for reading, meditation and magic. In all honesty I doubt I could have ever really been comfortable with the severe figure on the RWS card. For the first fifteen years of my Tarot practice, I had the very different, though similar, Hoi Polloi deck. In preparing for this article I dug out the Magician for comparison, and found some very interesting concepts. As you can see in the image above, the patrician toga of Smith’s image has softened to what might be a velvet robe, in colors of Earth and Water. While he still holds the rod, it is in his left hand rather than the right, and his angled pose does not now simply point to the ground, but to the elemental symbols arrayed on the table before him.

While I suspect the switch from right to left may have been aimed at forestalling a potential infringement suit (which it did not) from the owners of the RWS copyright, it does bring up some interesting ideas.

As I am a lefty (and in Latin the word for left-hand is sinister, so again, language) I can certainly consider this Magician to be more my Magician. But that means for most of the time I was learning the Tarot, I was seeing this version as bringing down the power into the tools on the table. The act of “charging” the symbols then, meant that this power was moving out into the Minors and thus energizing my entire deck.

It is on this card, in either version, where these symbols are united. In no other card in the deck do we find all four of the suit symbols, and inherently all four elements, brought together. We don’t see the wand again until the Hermit, and swords are only held by the Sphinx atop the Wheel and by Justice. Temperance has two cups, and the Star two pitchers. While we can suggest that the Pentacle is seen symbolically in starry crowns and perhaps even as the Wheel itself, it’s never clearly presented as a pentacle in the same way as these other objects. Except here for the Magician.

It is this mastery of the elemental forces that defines the purpose and meaning of this card. If he is not directly sanctifying them, he is still assuming a symbolic pose in their presence that implies the same thing. This is a Hermetic message, straight from that old Emerald Tablet.

“That which is Above is from that which is Below and that which is Below is that which is above.”

illuminated_magician — One of the more unusual decks in my collection is the Illuminated Tarot. It was a Yule gift from my Good Lady Wife a year or so ago, and initially I found it a bit off-putting. It has only 53 cards, so it’s essentially a playing card deck. Except that it isn’t. The images of the 22 Major Arcana are merged onto the designs of the various Minor Arcana Cards. This is the Magician, with his upraised baton, and his table with the sword, cup, and coin. It is also the King of Wands, and the King of Clubs if you are playing a basic game of solitaire. They’ve also thrown in Leo and sunflowers to affirm the fire energy of the Wands suit, and still place the Magician in his garden.

This ability of the artist to provide Tarot mnemonics with only a traditional playing card sized deck is fascinating. I find it challenges my imagination and intuition because I now find combinations and inferences that aren’t there in the standard 78 card decks. I think because this one is somewhat difficult to work with, it has ended up on the shelves of many discount stores. It’s a squarish blue box with gold imprint, and it generally retails in the discount stores for under $20. I highly recommend it for the experienced reader looking for a fresh view, or for the collector interested in it’s novelty.

This pose is derived into the Tarot from Levi’s “Baphomet”, cast most frequently wrongly as the devil or “god of the witches”. On Baphomet’s lifted arm is written “Solve” and the lower arm bears “Coagula”. These are lifted from alchemical texts, also derived from Hermetic tradition, but essentially meaning that things may be dissolved and reconstituted. That is, the upper arm is dealing with unformed energy, and the lower with structured matter.

If we consider the Fool to be representative of the raw energy of Creation, we can consider the Magician the process of Formation. It is where energy becomes idea and where idea becomes artifice. If all the alchemical mumbo-jumbo gives you a headache, simply look at the card and imagine the table is an anvil and the rod is the smith’s hammer. This is the Forge of Vulcan, it is the point where the Formless becomes Form.

And that is, after all, what we expect out of the Magician, whether we perceive him as Merlin laboring in his Crystal Cave or on stage in Vegas pulling a bouquet of flowers “out of thin air”. It is that act of bringing into being that we identify as “magic”. It is the assertion of intelligent will upon the unordered fabric of the universe.

The rod the Magician holds is not a “magic wand” though I have seen it characterized as such by other authors, who would mention similar wands in the hands of the driver in the Chariot, and in the World card. These are scepters. They are symbols of authority, deriving in form most likely from the consular baton of the Romans. The simple short ivory staff was replaced by more elaborate ones after the Republic became the Empire, but in any case, it signified someone who had the authority to exert control, and control is what this card is all about.

three-magi — Behold the Three Magi. As I was preparing for the article last night I went in search of some variable approaches to the Magician card that reflect other artists’ views of the prescribed symbols.

Al left is the Enchanted Tarot, which eschews traditional imagery entirely for an Arabesque style one might find in an Arthur Rackham edition of Scheherazade. At first I thought the suit markers were missing, but if you look closely, you can see that they are fastened to his belt, in the form of a star-shaped buckle, a bottle, an elaborate wand or scepter, and his dagger,. The flame he manipulates is the same as the *baton blanc* in the hand of the RWS version. In the sky above the palace dome, we find not the Christian dove but Buraq, the flying horse of the Prophet, said to have borne him to Paradise at the end of his life. These are not Islamic cards, but rather reflect as pseudo-Arabian style popular in the 19th Century Colonial Empires.

At center are a recent acquisition, the whimsical Pulp Tarot that cast all the cards as covers to the dime novels of the 20s and 30s. As a fan of this style of artwork, I couldn’t resist adding them to my collection, particularly when they were being offered new at deep discount in the Half-Price Books store. They keep enough of the keys in the artwork to serve as a functional deck, and will surely be a conversation starter at the writers retreat I am attending this summer in New Orleans.

At right is the Magician card from the Tarot Universal Dali, by the surrealist Salvador Dali. This deck produced as mixed media extensions of collage, employing multiple works from the history of art, was originally commissioned for the early 70s Bond film Live and Let Die. Dali apparently set to work on it before the ink dried, and when his requested fee exceeded the entire production budget, the deck was replaced by a more basic deck by Scottish illustrator Fergus Hall. These are now sold under the title Tarot of the Witches, though I think perhaps all that recommends them is the notoriety of their connection to the film. The Dali deck, however, is a fascinating study in how the themes created by Pamela Smith can be interpreted in the hands of a great master like this mad Catalonian. While my deck is not a first edition, it is a facsimile edition made in short run in Europe, rather than the currently mass produced Taschen versions. It is both a pride in my collection and an inspiration for journeys in Tarot and art. Dali has here substituted himself for the Magician, as well he might, and given us symbols from his own esoteric vocabulary in place of the traditional ones. Yet they are immediately readable.

If we go beyond the four elements as the suit symbols, and look into the historical associations with social class Joseph Campbell and others ascribe to them, we begin to see the Magician as a very powerful and potentially very dangerous individual. The suits at one time or another have connected the Wands to the peasants or working class, the Cups to the clergy, the Swords to the nobility, and the Pentacles to the merchants and bankers. The Magician then, exists beyond these groups. He is outside of the social definitions. He is a creature operating in those areas reserved for gods alone. Like Frankenstein, Prometheus, and Lucifer, he is calling down the fire of Heaven and making it do his personal bidding.

Indeed, the boundless nature of space and time itself is shown as residing within his mind. The infinity symbol above his head signifies that he has access to things that are immortal, and immaterial. Through the lightning rod in his hand, he controls how these forces are manifest, and metes them out to the rest of humanity as he sees fit.

These attributes; the desire for authority, dominance, and control, are, I must sadly admit, still considered masculine traits. So perhaps the gendered nature of it’s history is not that far off. I don’t find such traits positive or affirmative myself, because the arrogance that usually goes with them is self-defeating. Frankenstein in his hubris, creates a creature that he ultimately cannot control, and cannot destroy.

This is the trap of science in our modern world. We are experiencing massive environmental impacts because of our use of technology, and we are as yet unable to see any solution other than more technology. This next technology will be better. Except, of course, when it isn’t. The blindness with which we stumble forward, secure in our belief that we are smart enough to change the rules instead of learning to play the game better threatens to be our undoing.

The Magician won’t put down the scepter and pick up the wooden wand. Why? Well because it limits him. He can only use the wooden wand to do wooden wand magic. And why would he choose to do that, when he can do wand and cup and sword and pentacle magic? Remember, he’s the only one that gets to use them all, the only card in the whole deck with that power. And that makes him dangerous.

Magicians are masters of prestidigitation and legerdemain. These are very fancy terms for the idea of sleight-of-hand; the ability to palm a card, slip a ball under a cup, or retrieve a dove from a secret pocket with you being none the wiser. This art of distraction is also to be found in the imagery of this card. Harkening back to his early days on the streets of Milan, the Moebius over his head and the arms at ten and five echo that ability to make you look where he wants, not where you want. The Juggler has you following the ball in the air. The Magician has you looking at the bright shiny stick, instead of the other hand that is doing something down behind the table.

In this way the Magician’s appearance in a reading can indicate distraction, misdirection, and even outright deceit. As it is such a prominent personage, it may often mean self-deceit, or at least self-delusion. Again, because the Magician is smart enough to believe his own hype, he can get into trouble.

Yet, caution, focus, and adherence to structure are also hallmarks of his art. Depending on where he shows up, he can as easily mean sterility and rigidity as agility and quixotic energy.

He draws down the power of the old gods. He can therefore be Saturn or Jupiter. He can be so locked into his method that any innovation is thwarted, but in the right circumstance, he brings forth growth, generosity, and the bounty which he has access to.

Behind him the Fool stands as old Uranus, pure and violent creative energy. It takes both the Saturnine structure and the Jovian expansion to make anything of it. The balancing of the two forces is the Juggler’s dance. It is the loop that goes ever round and round, because if one of the balls drop, the whole thing comes crashing down. Creation through discipline is his motto. From the ethereal to the material. Solve et Coagula.

The Moebius appears twice more in the Tarot, in an identical fashion on the Strength card (which may be eight or eleven depending on the tradition) and in the Minor Arcana’s Deuce of Pentacles. While my articles here are aimed at exploring only the Majors, I find it instructive to see where symbols and themes get shared across the whole deck and this is one of those important parallels.

RWS_2P_Juggler — Can you find the Magician here? If you look carefully enough, and know the secret language that Smith was inventing for this deck, you can find the same pieces underlying the traditional reading of this card. I have gone to some depth in the text of the article on this, but I wanted to include the card for the reader to contemplate. All the Tarot should be viewed as having symbols hidden, or included, for interpretation or expansion beyond what Waite or any other authors have had to say about them. They are a visual tool, created by a truly gifted artist, that continues to find favor with new artist and Tarot artists alike.

Sorceror — I am frequently inspired by the Tarot, even if I am not attempting to make a Tarot image. I don’t recall if this was another attempt to find my “vision” of a new deck, or if it simply was using the Magician card as a jumping off point for an artistic experiment. This piece is somewhat unique in my work. I was trying to master the curvilinear styles of the Art Nouveau -inspired by the looping tableaus of Mucha, and also playing with the felt-marker as an art tool. In neither did I succeed well in this image, but it has grown on me over the years. If I were to consider it my Magician, I’d have to create a whole deck in the style, and then I’d probably come back to this liking it less. As it is, it serves as a blind alley, I stumbled into, that I might return to someday, but not with any intention of something so large and daunting in scope. The style, or a mature evolved version of it, still entertains me as an artist, but I have no intention of using it to interpret the cards.

The second Pentacle card shows a Juggler, with the Moebius wrapped around his hands, each of which hold a large pentacle. Behind him ships are driven across an unruly sea. The ships are clearly made of wood, so here we also have the air in their sails and the water they sail upon, taken with the pentacles in his hands. At least through symbolic extension, all four suits are also present here, in this Minor card. It’s difficult for me to believe that this was merely a coincidence, so when the Deuce shows up, I frequently read it as an extension, or echo of, those same qualities I find in the Magician. While the typical reading of this card involves competing forces in finance or perhaps work-life balance, it’s not hard to overlay the desire to exert control on an unruly world, or have things our own way. And perhaps again, we are being distracted by the Juggler from the dangerous tableau that is happening in the background. We are being told things are all okay when they are clearly not okay.

Pay no attention to that man behind the current.

Well, he was a magician, too. And not coincidentally, one who used artifice to appear as magic. To create with machinery the illusion of power. And this also is inherent in that nature of this card. If we believe in the thing that we see then the power is real. It is not any different from the real power, because our perception makes it so. Reality is what our minds tell us it is. If we want to change reality, it is as simple as changing our minds.

Yet this itself is an act of will. It is that very thing which separate the Magician from the Fool, that his work is made with specific intent. It still requires the raw forces, the pure energy of the unmade to power it, but it is useless without the intention. Electricity is a powerful force, but without a mechanism to direct it and control it, it is either an untapped potential or a destructive lightning bolt.

The Magician is that conduit that brings the fire from the gods. It is, according to myth, religion, and fiction, an unrewarding task. Prometheus is chained and has his guts gnawed out eternally. Lucifer’s name is synonymous with Satan. Merlin was sealed in his cave. Faust ultimately found his pleasures empty ones. Frankenstein died in the frozen wastes attempting to destroy that which he created but could not control.

My ambivalence toward this card has grown as I have grown older. I think this is a natural progression. As we (hopefully) mature we cease to be as entertained by the rabbit in the hat, though I admit freely that in my youth I bought such a hat just hoping to pull a rabbit from it. It has become my magic hat, though not in the way that I expected, and that perhaps is a good message for this card as well. Intention and control are only the beginning. What actually proceeds from it may not be at all what was expected. To paraphrase Galadriel from The Fellowship of the Ring ;”Not even the wise can see all ends.”

That character is also an example of the dual nature of the Magician card. Characterized as both a seer and a sorceress, feared as a witch, and tempted by the power she wielded and could wield, she eventually is redeemed and allowed to pass into the West, along with Gandalf, the only wizard that seems to have met a gentle end. I think this is because ultimately Tolkien couldn’t divest himself of that deep Anglican Christianity, even when he wanted to live among the faeries.

His recent antecedents and contemporaries among the Victorian and post-Victorian esoteric movements seem similarly hampered. I think this is perhaps why the tiny bird is carved into the edge of the Magician’s table. You can find it amplified in all it’s Catholic glory in the Ace of Cups, as the Holy Spirit coming to inhabit the Chalice of the Eucharist, but here it offers a small, almost secret protection for the Magician from his own ego. Like other Romantic symbolism, it’s presence tells us that the New Pagans are still secret Christians, unwilling to let go completely despite how debased and debauched their rites might become, just in case they were wrong.

We struggle with that Christian legacy in the Tarot because it is a Christian oracle. It was derived from Christian symbolism and re-invented multiple times to try and shed those roots. But the key players were frequently fallen, or at least faithless, Christians, looking perhaps in some way for redemption and re-admittance.

The Magician with the little dove is less problematic in this way than other cards we’ll access, including the next one in the Deck, which I will undertake in a week. I hope this journey has inspired you to greater insights on the Juggler, the Magician, and the Magus, or at least has instilled in you the desire to question the traditional meanings you may have read.

If you don’t you are following his right hand and not watching what the left hand is doing, and you have ceded your will to that of the Conjurer.

Thank you for reading. I’ll return next week with the High Priestess.

March 22, 2023March 22, 2023

In The Cards

Next week, and for the 22 weeks after that, I will be taking one of the Major Arcana of the Tarot and going deep, through my personal perspectives, techniques, and methods for the use of the card in divination, meditation and magic.

In preparation for that, I am going to spend this week’s article going over some things about Tarot in general, so that we don’t have to refer to it every week and can just work with the individual cards.

It’s safe to say that there are hundreds of books about Tarot. Maybe thousands. And that’s just considering the modern stuff that you might be able to order from B&N and the ‘Zon. Going back after works by Eliphas Levi, Court de Gebelin, and Atelier, or the various Golden Dawn texts, may be more illuminating, but are much harder to lay hands on.

You can find Levi in the original French and in Waite’s English translation on archive.org, if you want to dig into it. As I have noted there are a good many warts associated with the work of the Victorian occultists, not least of which are the misogyny and racism characteristic of European 19th century culture.

Yet it is from these tainted roots that the tree of modern Tarot practice has grown, and it is worth exploring that, if for no other reason than to cut away the diseased branches.

I have done considerable research on Tarot in the last several years, and what I put forth here is based on several sources, both in orthodox scholarship and occult studies. In addition to those texts I mentioned as being in the public domain online, I also draw from the works of the recently deceased Rachel Pollack, and occultist and Tarot scholar Paul Huson. I highly recommend their books on the subject.

Firstly, and most importantly, let’s be clear that Tarot are not, and never have been, a secret magical teaching from out of Ancient Egypt, or the legacy of any other lost civilization.

It would be great to believe that. It would make us all feel warm and tingly inside when we shuffle our cards. But unlike astrology and probably numerology, there is no such ancient pedigree for Tarot. The best we can garner for it is an origin sometime in the 1400s in certain parts of Italy.

tarot-problems — A Tarot problem – not nearly enough shelves. As you can see they are stacked and stowed, and this is not even all the shelves that are full. There’s at least a couple more, and then there are some that are on other altars and places of power throughout my house. I would guess there are over 45 sets of true Tarot cards, if not more, and probably another dozen or so oracle card sets, and at least one Lenormand style deck.

There are about eight more in my Amazon wishlist right now, and doubtless I will run across some more that tickle my fancy when I next make the rounds of the witchy shops on my travels. In the grocery the other day, i saw a set of cards for some sort of matching game that were or Hispanic origin, and I was intrigued with the idea of making an oracle with those.

And yes, I do actually use all of them, from time to time, as they call to me. I am moved by the art. I have none that I don’t like, I have several that I like more than the others (and don’t tell them that), but I am connected to every deck that I own. I do not think I am obsessed. As an artist first, expressing my occult leanings through the most visual of mediums seems obvious. As an artist trained, I am fully aware of the number of subjects that are repeatedly addressed and expressed by artists from the beginning of our human experience to the present day. The Tarot are a microcosm of that experience.

The cards were created for a game, called Tarochi. The game included special cards called Triomphi or Triumphs, which had additional point values. These later called “trump” cards were added to the values of cards in a deck of 56 (4 suits of 1-10, plus 4 face cards). The winning hand had the highest point value.

Sometime in the succeeding century, these extra trumps started to be used for the predictive art of sortilege. Sortilege selects something at random and then attempts to determine a meaning. Originally done by randomly picking a line from a book, usually the Bible, it appears that in the 16th century the cards became an additional method of randomizing, before ultimately having meanings associated with them directly.

Huson makes a compelling argument for these meanings to originate from certain philosophical texts that were prominent in Renaissance Italy. The images, he contends, are a remainder of iconography to be found in the Medieval Morality plays. The threads he pulls seem to connect very logically, particularly with images that are unquestionably Judeo-Christian.

To the extent that these potential sources can offer some insight into the intuitive use of the cards in divination, I may touch upon them from time to time, but my methods are very much driven by a visual experience of the cards. Certainly there are traditionally assigned meanings that I, as well as most other readers, will have learned over time, but I use those as jumping off point.

digital-cards — Tarot in the 21st Century. These photos of my tablet show daily card widgets that I also have on my phone (which are much more the size of actual cards). Thanks to the idiosyncracies of random number generation algorithms, the daily cards are different for every deck, and different for the same decks on the phone. In this way I get a kind of multi-card spread, without drawing out a deck. It comes in handy when I am on the road or busy at the office, because I can generally work in a moment or two to flip through the offerings.

My “reading” method is to countenance identical cards most importantly – say, if I get the Knight of Cups on two or more cards, then I expect news of a young friend’s wedding, for example. Next I weight the message of multiple cards of the same suit, and then the Trumps and finally any individual minors.

I’ve evolved this practice over the last few years of having these decks on my mobile devices. I haven’t run across it in any texts, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not out there. I know a number of friends on the ‘Gram post options using one or two decks for daily draw messages. I’m just a bit more ADD about it.

Having digital versions of all these cards shows the diversity that exists in interpretation. If I look up the meaning (the digital decks come with a data version of the little book) they vary incredibly for the same card in different decks. So the journey we are about to undertake into my own interpretive method is by no means simply ego. There are as many interpretations as there are readers.

All these apps are from The Fool’s Dog on Android. I don’t know if they make IOS apps, but I am sure someone does. The available decks are all licensed from the publishers, are generally under 5 dollars US (some are a little more) and come with several spreads and a built-in journal function. They can also be enlarged to see detail, and it’s a nice way to try out a deck you may be interested in. I have paper copies of several of these, but some, like *Journey Into Egypt* are out of print or cost-prohibitive.

Various occultists have added and subtracted from these meanings. If you pick up a deck today, and read through the little white book the meanings you get will likely be abbreviated from Waite’s Pictorial Key to the Tarot. If you want something deeper, Pollack’s Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom gives additional connections, and is one of the better analyses I have seen.

I don’t agree with all of it, nor do I agree with Huson, or Waite, or Crowley, or anyone entirely. I have found, that in the writing of this series of articles, very many of my interpretations of the cards have evolved away from the generally accepted meanings. I can only attribute this to how memory and perception change over time.

In 1972, with my first deck, I had a thin booklet that gave a few words on each card, it’s reverse, and I think about three layouts. Additionally I had the Tarot as described in The Encyclopedia of Ancient and Forbidden Knowledge – or at least how the Major Arcana were described. So much was presented in that book that Tarot was limited, but until 1987, when I received my second deck as a gift, these were the only resource.

During that decade and a half I learned to read the cards like almost everyone does. I laid the cards out, and I went to the book. Eventually I started to remember some of the meanings, and then I remembered a lot more of the meanings.

And then, of course, I started to forget some of the meanings, or at least they weren’t quite as clear to me. So, rather than being embarrassed in front of a client, I looked to the card, and tried to fill in the blanks.

I think that every experienced reader has probably gone through this process. It’s part of the mental alchemy that transforms it from being rote recitation into an interpretative and intuitive art form.

Imagine that a card layout is something like a jigsaw puzzle. The pieces do fit together to give us a complete picture, and like any jigsaw, they fit one way. The difference is that the shapes of the little connecting bits may change each time we consult the cards. That is, what the seven of cups means may alter depending on whether it is next to the six of pentacles or the three of wands. Or if it shows up in a particular place in a particular spread.

The books can only go so far, even when there are hundreds of books. Sometimes they can hint at these combinations and connotations, but the number of possible layouts prevents any absolute.

In the end, the reader is the one who has to find the key in the seven of cups that tells how it connects to that six of pentacles. And that is a synthesis of what the reader has been taught, and what the reader sees. Seeing in this case applies both to a mundane visual assessment of the contents of the image, and to that broader and murkier “gift” that really great artists have.

Over the years, the pecking of Odin’s ravens has altered some of those keys in my head. They’re not out and out wrong (at least I don’ think so) but my understanding of the mnemonic nature of the images on the cards has changed. Also, with the large number of decks I have in my collection, the varying ways those keys have gotten interpreted by different artists has had an impact on how I see the card in general.

Again, I think this is more or less true of most Tarot workers who have been at it a while. We’ve formed our own opinions after year upon year of seeing how these cards play out. Yes, there is the “book definition”, and all of us learned it (or tried to learn it), but that’s not the end of it. If it were, there’d only be one Tarot book, and not hundreds.

amber-turmps-gray-morrow — In my teens I read Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber. This epic fantasy series poses many intriguing questions about the nature of existence, archetypes, magic, and even quantum physics. One of the things that drew me most, though, was the particular implementation of Tarot in the series.

In the magic systems described in the books, there are a set of tarot cards belonging to the family of protagonists. In it the Trumps are replaced by portraits of the members of that royal house. Some of them are shown in the upper left of this image by Gray Morrow from the “Illustrated Zelazny” section on the Amber milieu. The truly intriguing property of these cards, though, were that in the hands of the royals, they could be used to communicate with their opposite members, and even as gateways to where those persons were. Part of the plot revolves around the use of the cards in sympathetic attacks as well.

I won’t drop anymore spoilers. The books are generally easy to find in used stores, thanks to their being a “free gift” for new members of the Science Fiction Book Club back in the 80s. But they had an influence on my own thinking about Tarot and taking it beyond the explicit use as divinatory oracles. Like much of the fantasy and science fiction I read in those days, side by side with occult books, Zelazny’s works had a profound impact on my world view, the experiments I conducted, and the mental language I used to quantity those results.

Tarot derives it’s power from our mind’s eyes. It is a conduit to that penultimate chakra, where we open up our perceptions to the infinitudes of the tiny and the cosmic. It can lift your soul to stand above the universe, and walk over to the next one if you want.

Time to dispel big Tarot Myth Number Two – that the Tarot are in any way connected to the Kabbalah or Judaic tradition. This was almost entirely the assertion of Eliphas Levi, based on a few intimations from previous occultists, but most notably because there are twenty-two trumps and twenty-two Hebrew letters. The Golden Dawn took this and ran with it, and so by the time we get to present day, it’s considered canon, but there’s not any real evidence for it.

That said, there is an Instagram account theorizing that an early version of the Tarot of Marseilles includes secreted Hebrew symbols as part of an attempt to preserve certain Jewish teachings during a time of rampant anti-Semitism in Europe. It’s a fascinating theory, and some of the evidence is compelling, but even the author doesn’t suggest that Tarot itself is a secret Hebrew code. The images cited were, he asserts, added to traditional versions of the cards in this one printing, in order to give covert Jews a means of teaching their heritage. But this is not Kabbalah, nor is it presented as existing in previous Tarot decks, and by his own admission, it does not occur in other Marseilles versions.

The other typical myth associated with these cards is their connection with the nomadic Romany people, called in previous times “gypsies”. The tradition is most commonly propounded by a contemporary and countryman of Levi’s who used the pseudonym Papus. Papus is the author of a text that was retitled in English “Tarot of the Bohemians”, but in the original French would have used the term gypsy.

Atelier also suggested that he learned some of the multiple card layouts from readers who may have been part of the Romany culture. However, the Romany are just another group of people who used these Italian cards for fortune telling. Cards were generally cheap, easily transported, and could be used for games of chance as well as cartomancy. So any group of people who lived a transitory lifestyle might employ them. Sailors, peddlers and merchants, even traveling priests have figured in the spread of Tarot and Tarot lore. No one has a particular monopoly, which adds to the mystery surrounding it’s origins as a mantic tool.

Fortune telling was a good business – as it still is – and a set of cards with possible inscrutable meanings was both more immediate and simpler than complex astrological analysis (prior to computer software, I have spent up to a week calculating the positions and aspects on a single person’s birth chart). Of course, the more exotic the process was, the more the client was enthralled, believing in the supernatural power of the cards, and the reader, and willing to part with their cash.

If you’ve read more than a few of my articles, you know I tend to tear back the curtain on a lot of the occult practices. I have always been, and remain, skeptical of claims which fly in the face of verifiable facts.

Yet I use the Tarot and find it to be useful. I find that in the hands of a good reader, the information it provides is well worth the coin it demands.

I have had my cards read by good readers and bad readers. Bad readers are of several kinds. There are the unskilled, the unpracticed, and the unimaginative. And there are outright frauds.

The frauds are easy to spot. I know what the cards usually mean, if they feed me a line of bovine excrement, I smell it immediately.

The unskilled are those folks who still chase back to the book to look it up. Perchance that’s the novice, the new reader in unfamiliar territory. But it’s as often not a matter of not knowing as much as not believing that they know. This is one of the advantages of Tarot. It’s a shorthand that gives us hints. Given enough time and exposure we stop thinking about what the book is saying in dry and hard to remember text, and start seeing what the card shows us.

Seven of pentacles. The gardener. resting on his hoe, satisfied with the fruits of his labor.

“A job well done. Work rewarded. Plans coming together. Pride in one’s craft.”

Of course, this is much harder to do with a pip-based deck like the Tarot de Marseilles. My brain always switches the pips to the pictures and then I just do that. But honestly, I don’t use a lot of decks without pictures. Had I encountered those decks first, I might have learned them and eschewed the more pictorial.

The unpracticed readers have the skill, but they don’t use it often enough to make the magic happen. While this dulls the memory of the meanings, it also blunts the intuition, the very faculty of taking those memories and making a narrative or context that can’t be derived from the individual cards. If that seven of pentacles shows up next to a three of cups, does that mean it’s a good year for burgundy, or that next week is the harvest festival?

Saddest are the unimaginative. They see the cards right there in front of them and just parrot the same answers every time. The meanings are the meanings and the cards are the cards. So what if the three of cups and the seven of pentacles show up on either side of the Tower. They still mean celebration and reward.

Well, no. No they don’t.

But a good reader can pull one card from the deck and give you a reading that will make your hair stand up.

pixie-smith — If there is one person that is responsible for the popularity of Tarot at the dawn of the 21st Century it is Pamela Colman Smith. Pixie Smith was barely recognized in the misogynistic world of the 19th and early 20th Century occultists, and her contributions to this artform largely swept under the rug until recently.

The Tarot deck she is responsible for is one of the most popular, if not *the* most popular, in the world. Prior to her work, the majority of Tarot decks had only pips, or arrays of the suit symbols, for the minor cards.

Like modern “playing cards” also used for divination, the meanings associated with the individual values had to be rote memorized and parroted back. This skill may have limited the number of active readers, but it also narrowed the space for those readers to engage their imaginations and intuition in explaining the message of the cards.

Smith’s work changed all that. With possibly little to no instruction from Arthur Waite, who commissioned her creation of the card artworks, she came up with 78 distinctive representations of the essential nature of each of these meanings (which were not always clear even at the time).

Any artist working with these themes can tell you what a daunting prospect that is. To accomplish not just the quantity, but to create images that resonate so profoundly that even today “new” decks use her images as archetypes, is a wonder.

And despite the number of folks who use the word psychic hand in hand with Tarot reader, I don’t actually believe that is required.

I’m old school. I tend to reserve “psychic” for things like you see Professor Xavier and Mr. Spock doing.

No offense to my friends who use that term, but I simply don’t consider my own powers of intuition, observation, and imagination to be psychic. I can’t tell you whether the card you are holding up is a star or wavy lines. I am not good at “getting a signal” from someone a hundred miles away.

But give me a deck of Tarot cards, and I will chill you down to your immortal soul. Or at least I used to, which is one big reason I stopped reading for people. But I may be coming out of retirement.

In any case, I thought I would take my readers on a tour through the black morass of my unconscious and show you the Majors through my eyes, with the lore of fifty years of working with and researching these odd bits of pasteboard.

As a basis I will be using the cards of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, which is probably the most well known deck in the world. It has recently passed into the public domain, which is why the images are showing up everywhere. It is an unofficial standard. The meanings attributed to most of the cards in various versions largely derive from it, and certainly the hundreds of alternate Tarot decks most frequently interpret the images of Pamela Smith, the illustrator who designed it. In case you didn’t already know, Rider was the original English publishing company, and Waite, is Arthur Edward Waite, poet, occultist, and author of the text giving the meanings for the cards.

My first deck was a modified version of the RWS, one that apparently was not modified enough to avoid a copyright infringement in the early 70s when it was produced. My RWS deck was that second one I received as a birthday gift in the mid-80s.

Since then my collection has expanded significantly. I acquire decks purely based on the art. While a few of them have come with expanded and innovative texts, it is the images that I must relate to, and the images that I ultimately use to inform my reading and response.

I will most likely also include the Thoth/Crowley/Thelema images, as they constitute one of the more influential variants. These were created by Lady Freida Harris at the behest of Aleister Crowley, some decades after Smith made her deck, but they weren’t published until much later.

As the muse strikes, I will share other cards from my own collection, bits of my own artwork, and where appropriate, external references you may find useful.

I hope that by the time we reach the end of the summer you will have been challenged to revisit your own cards and look into the symbolism and meaning from your own perspective.

And then maybe I’ll right that book. There’s room for another book on Tarot surely…

Join me next for the Fool.

January 25, 2023February 2, 2023

Hidden Figures

A black draped figure seemingly glided to the front of the classroom and began scribbling on the chalkboard.

Professor Snide spoke without turning.

“Turn to page twelve-thousand, six hundred, and seventy-four and begin reading the rubric at the end of the third paragraph; subsection two, heading four, chapter eight hundred eighty-two. . .” Pausing he added “. . . aloud. . . in four part harmony. “

Wes Rongley peeped his bright orange tufted head above the antique leathern tome on the desk in front of him and peered at the board. He squinted.

To his growing horror, he could clearly make out in the ever-growing scrawl that flowed unceasingly onto the slate from the chalk in Snide’s hand integers, operators, exponents, and not a few letters of Greek.

He shuddered. He had inexplicably stumbled into a maths class.

Wes slunk back down behind the ponderous mouldering volume and wracked his hazy brain for some memory of how this could have happened. The first few days here at Hogwash’s had been a heady blur, but surely he could not have made such a colossal blunder.

There was nothing for it but to try and escape.

He slid further down in the seat, as if he could melt into liquid form and seep quietly out under the classroom’s big oaken door. He tested the floor board with the slightest pressure of his left toe.

It creaked.

“Going somewhere, Mr. Rongley?”

Caught in the act, betrayed by the ancient timber, he had little choice but to respond to Snide’s withering gaze.

“I. . .uh. . .I’m in the wrong room, sir. I don’t think I’m supposed to be in this class.”

Snide inspected the desktop and at length drew out a square of browning parchment.

“You are Wes Rongley, First Year?”

“Yes sir.”

“Then you are on my list and you are in the right room.”

The room seemed to dim when Snide had said ‘my list’. Wes felt every follicle of his flaming shock of hair contract. Perspiration formed on his upper lip. On his tightening scalp. beads of sweat began to coalesce into rivulets that ran down the nape of his neck. He ventured.

“But . . .sir . . . that looks like maths. . .”

Snide turned, his expression softening . . .which for some reason was more disturbing.

“Hmmm. . .really? Are you sure?”

Wes nodded meekly. Professor Snide leaned a bit back and regarded the unfinished equation he’d been scribbling.

“By, Jove, Mr. Rongley, you’re right! It is maths! Seen them before, have you?”

“Yes. . .yes, sir!”

“Well, now you’ve seen them again. Turn to page twelve thousa-“

“I was told there’d be no maths, sir.”

“What?”

“I was told there wouldn’t be any maths. When I signed up, sir. That old chap, Humblebore was it? He said that maths weren’t required for my programme.”

“Headmaster Mumblesnore,” Snide corrected, “may have been a tad vague on this point. Let me assure you, Mr. Rongley, maths are indeed required.”

Wes felt Snide’s dark presence swirling toward him down the aisle but couldn’t move. He was a mouse transfixed by a great black cobra, knowing doom was coming but powerless to escape.

“How else do you expect to tease out the subtler courses of the orbs on their wanderings through the heavens, or divine the sublime secrets of the Gematria, or calculate allowed deductions for consumable spell components and the depreciation of cauldrons of more than a hogshead’s capacity when filing with the Inland Revenue?

‘Let there be no doubt in your mind, Mr. Rongley. Maths. Are. Required.”

Satisfied, Snide turned and had made it halfway back toward the front when Wes exploded:

“But I don’t like maths!”

Snide whirled. There was a flash and puff of sulfurous vapor.

There, atop the vast ancient folio, in the middle of an unwholesome looking greasy spot, sat a rather confused looking amphibian with a shock of flaming orange hair.

-Excerpted Unabridged from Hairy Plodder and the Half-Done Script

Like young Mr. Rongley, I too, did not care for ‘maths’ as it is commonly styled in Britain. Seeking a similar avoidance of all things mathematical, I pursued a career in the creative arts.

It is one of life’s little ironies, that when my own term at the Hogwash School of Wizardry, Witchcraft, and Computer Repair was over, that I entered a field where mathematical calculations are both necessary and intensive.

In further evidence of the universe’s perverse sense of humor, my personal occult studies are repleat with examples of the necessity of mathematics, algebra, geometry and trigonometry, and yes, calculus.

Having avoided many of these courses in school it fell upon me to educate myself over the years as required. The result is that I perhaps have not approached the topics in the same staid way that they are typically taught, and though I do get the needed accuracy of result, my methods are more in tune with the way my left-handed right-brained operations work.

I feel confident that, insofar as I am not building a nuclear reactor in close proximity to inhabited areas, said methods are sufficient for my goals. I’m sharing a bit of them this week in order to acquaint you with the delight I often find now in working with purity of numbers and the permutations thereof.

In a previous article I have spoken about the absolute reality of number itself. That is, number is a real immutable infinite and eternal thing, which remains fixed regardless of time, space, velocity, or dimension. One is always one. Two is always two. One and two are and have been and will always be three. Whether we call that three or tre or trois or drei is irrelevant, the actual thing that it is never changes.

There’s a comfort to that. It’s nice to know that regardless of how much chaos swirls around us there’s still something that remains unchanged. It is the Anchor in the Sea of the Night. It is a Fulcrum in the Void. It is a Beacon on the Shores of Infinity.

Of course, sometimes, it’s fun just to play around and see what comes up. My subject for today is the hexagon, a regular geometric shape having six equal sides.

While the word hexagon doesn’t have a connection with our use of the word hex in occult circles, the doctrines of sympathy and correspondence would argue otherwise. Hex in witchcraft comes at us out of Old German and Old Norse, and probably shortens and corrupts from hagatesse – a word used to refer to the Norns, the old women who sat at the base of the World Ash Ygdrassil and pronounced the fates of man. The connection between Norn and witch is an easy one, and the term haxa and haxxen have been used to apply to witches since early times in various north and central European dialects. Thus it crossed the Channel with Hengst and entered into the Anglo-Saxon tree.

The hex in hexagon, though, is ancient Greek for six, and merely means it’s six sided, or six angled, and there’s no magical connotation at all.

Except that there is. And frequently this confutation between the witchy hex and the mathematical hex is expressed in the darnedest of places.

For instance, among the “hex signs” of the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch. The Dutch are more accurately Deutsch – Germans, who settled in Penn’s Woods along with other emigrees seeking arable land and the ability to worship openly. They are noted – among other things, for the curious geometric designs that grace barns and some houses, which are said to drive away the “devil” and other malicious spirits. In this case the “hex” is the old German haxxan – a specifically magic application. Yet many of these geometries are based on six sided figures, though perhaps as many, if not more are eight-sided.

The hexagon is the natural regular shape that is formed if you outline from point to point on a hexagram. Now the hexagram is an established magical and talismanic shape, known as the Star of David, Solomon’s Seal, and other specific names. It is the figure below, which is composed of two overlapping triangles, and as you can see, it fits neatly into the hexagon.

In the parlance of the occult, this image has many meanings. The following image comes from Eliphas Levi’s Histoire de la magie and demonstrates the maxim supposedly extracted from the Emerald Tablet penned by no less a personage than Hermes Trismegistus himself. It is “As Above, So Below”

The actual text,

That which is above is from that which is below, and that which is below is from that which is above

translated into English from Latin or Arabic, which was probably translated from Greek, essentially says that all things in nature are aspects of a single cohesive whole.

From the standpoint of Greek philosophers laboring in Alexandria, this might be a convenient expression for the atomos proposed by Democritus in 400 B.C.E. and a forerunner of our idea of the atom.

Thrown into the rather more fanciful environs of medieval Europe, accompanied on it’s way with tales of djinns and efrits and the glorious magics of Solomon the Wise, the idea became a binder between the heavens and the earth, and justification for the correspondences of metals, stones, plants, and the like with the natures and virtues of the planetary wanderers.

And yet in this aspect was the roots of modern medicine, metallurgy, and chemistry, as well as enduring metaphor for the expansion of the consciousness. Alchemists revered this phrase and it’s interlocking trines throughout their search for the Elixir of Life and Philosopher’s Stone. It carries within it even more secrets, hinted at in the texts of the Emerald Tablet.

Its father is the Sun and its mother the Moon.
The Earth carried it in her belly, and the Wind nourished it in her belly,
as Earth which shall become Fire.
Feed the Earth from that which is subtle

Here then are references to at least three of the four classical elements – Earth, Wind, and Fire. This kind of phrase, along with the most imaginative of illustrations, form the rhebus instructions of the alchemical manuals. But I think the really neat trick is how we find the elements with our hexagon/hexagram.

First, of course, we just have to separate the “Above” from the “Below” and we get Fire and Water. But look more closely at the joined triangles. If you take the upward pointing triangle and the bottom line from the downward pointing triangle, you get the sign for Air. Flipping that to the downward pointing triangle gives us Earth. So the four elements are hidden figures within the As Above, So Below hexagram.

But, like any good late night infomercial pitch, that’s not all. The hexagon/hexagram combination does that same nifty trick that the pentagon/pentagram does. Within the hexagram inside the hexagon is another hexagon. You can then create another hexagram in that, which creates another hexagon inside it, ad infinitum.

Welcome, my friends, to the concept of fractals. And also the basic ideas that lead us into the murky waters of quantum theory – no matter how small something is, it’s always made up of something smaller. And, well, no matter how big something is, there’s probably something even bigger outside it, that maybe you don’t see until you get outside that, and outside that, and outside that…

So again, turtles all the way down. Most of which have no connection to Renaissance artists or togakure-ryu. But if it helps, you can think of all those repeating hexagon/hexagrams as being diagrams of turtle shells.

If infinity has you’re head spinning, let’s jump back onto a more solid ground. Platonically solid ground, in this case, as a few choice lines from the angles in the hex give us a nice diagram for the first two platonic solids, the pyramid, and the cube. From two dimensions we have moved into three, or at least we are representing three dimensions in a two dimensional space, and that’s nifty in itself. The cube is more elegantly expressed of course, because in addition to just looking better, we have the added symbolic link of a six-sided object being used to represent a six-faced object. I’ve tried to find some sacred number related to the four faces and six sides, but it’s not there, so it’s just that you can draw it if you need to, though again it’s not as isometrically clean.

On the other hand, if you wanted to get a four faced pyramid (which is actually five sided; four triangles and a square) you just have to modify that upward pointing triangle and the square of the cube. It’s not exact to the one’s that the Egyptians built, mind you, and I make no claim that it has any relation to them. I think I will probably due a future article on the legend, myth, and symbology associated with pyramid structures in human history, but that’s not for today. In the meantime, it’s a satisfying exercise.

Of course, one of the most basic ideagrams that we can render from the hexagon shape is the “hex” itself, as six-rayed assembly of lines. This equivocates to the “grove” symbol in the Ogham script. Again, I can’t say there’s any evidence of a connection, but that doesn’t prevent you making one, and drawing on the power of that symbol. In some permutations of the Ogham grove I have found it also flexes to represent the transits of the luminaries on the equinoxes and solstices. That is, if you take an aerial view of Stonehenge – or the Great Pyramid of Giza for that matter – and plot the sunrise and sunset positions of the sun and moon on the equinoxes and solstices, you get a hex line shape. In this case, the angles are much more shallow, as the Tropic are around 23.7 degrees north and south of the equinoctal line, and in a regular hexagon, the angles are 60 degrees.

Which is to say, they are sextile for the purposes of astrology. Which we can also derive from the hexagon shape. For instance, if we take one of our inner triangles, and draw a line from each corner to the middle (instead of all the way across) we get a three rayed shape with angles of 120 degrees. This is a trine. you can also achieve the same design by erasing half of the rays in the hex. Have of six is three. Half of sextile is trine, even though the angle measurements double. I always had trouble understanding that relationship until I started playing with these hex diagrams. Maybe this will help you.

You can find the 90 degrees of a square aspect with a hair more work. Put the hexagram back in and draw a line from the top of the upper triangle to the bottom of the bottom triangle. Now draw a line across the point where the two triangles join in the middle. Erase the extra lines and viola – a four rayed shape with 90 degree angles.

You have now derived the three major aspects used in astrology. Of course, you’re going to need a chart.

So take the hexagram, and draw lines through each point of the triangle, like we do to get the hex, and then draw lines through each of the intersecting angles, like we did to get the square. You end up with 12 rays, and the cusps of 12 signs. In the diagram I’ve reduced the size of the hexagram, so the relationship is clearer, but you can see it does indeed contain the keys to a zodiac.

Overlaid in color here are two of the trine diagrams, one in blue, which shows you the relationships of the water signs. You can rotate this to locate the air, earth, and fire signs, respectively. The red one also shows the locations of the cardinal, fixed, and mutable triplicity, in this case for the signs of fire, but just rotate it around and the others fall into place.

Is this all that we can tease out of the humble hexagon? No. Fiddling around in my art software I was able to come across a few more totally unrelated, but poignant connections using just the geometry and some imagination.

Taking our hex lines again, you can look to them as Cartesian coordinates. They are the X, Y and Z axes of three dimensional space. Anyone who struggles with that train leaving Chicago problem may remember some of these exercises from algebra classes. I do a lot of 3-D animation work, and the 3-D grid is almost second nature to me. Essentially the center where the three line cross is 0, and any point in space can be plotted using positive or negative values along those lines, so X is left and right, Y is up and down, and Z is forward or back. In order to see clearly the values of all three lines, the diagram is usually tilted in almost exactly the same way as our hex. So you can use a hex to put anything anywhere.

Now, I have mentioned before that we all live in a four-dimensional space-time. If I want to diagram it on my hexagon, I can just drop it in at a right angle to Y axis, and get the following figure.

So any point in space and time can be reached by virtue of the hex. That might explain why the capacious interior of a certain blue phone box has had hexagon wall decorations for several decades. Or not. Still, it’s an intriguing expression of the concept.

Moving back into more esoteric spaces, I was also able to take the basic hex, add a few curves, and arrive at the Xi-Rho symbol, usually with Alpha and Omega, this is supposedly the vision of Constantine at the Malvern Bridge, with motto “in hoc signio vincis” – In this Sign, you will Conquer. While historians generally believe that Constantine took it as a message from Sol Invictus, later Christian records give it as the Xi-Rho, a short hand for Cristos, and the basis for what became Christian Rome. While his mother was a devout Christian, and Constantine did order the Council of Nicea which firmed up the Nicean Creed and laid the foundations of modern orthodoxy, the Emperor himself didn’t convert until his deathbed.

Another imaginative permutation is the zig-zag “lightning bolt” that is said to travel down the Quabbalistic Tree of Life bringing Divine Wisdom (Ain Soph) into existence in the material world. You need to stack a couple of hexagons for the full diagram, and add a tail at the bottom, but you can get there from here. Those claiming that abracadabra derives from the Hebrew “what I speak I manifest” might want to play with this idea a little further.

Am equally interesting object from the hexagon and As Above/So Below angles is a three dimensional construct known as a merkaba. The word merkaba comes from the Hebrew as “Chariot” and so we have an immediate link with the seventh card of the Tarot major arcana. As many others have posted, 2023 is considered a “Chariot” year as it numerologicaly resolves to seven. Seven is a sacred number all on it’s own, so if a merkaba is a chariot, then we’ve managed to find seven hidden in six. That’s an alchemical spontaneous generation worthy of old Bombastis himself.

The merkaba is the three dimensional extension of As Above, So Below. It is the two triangles, expressed as interlocking three-faced pyramids (see there was a reason I talked about the platonic pyramid) such that each face of each pyramid is pierced by the the point of another one. The diagram here is derived from the hexagon. I have mocked up one in Lightwave 3-D to show how interesting this thing becomes as an object. Pretty nifty trick for an old Hebrew chariot I think.

Some also say the word merkaba is derived from the ancient Egyptian root words mer-ka-ba. Several online sources style this as “light, spirit, and body” or “love, spirit, body”, It may be more accurately translated “Pyramid of the Soul and the Shadow” or “Food of the Blessed Dead” since “mer” can be either pyramid or cake. The Greek “pyramid” derives from “pyramis” -wheat cake. The Egyptian wheat cake was called ben-ben, which is the word for the top of the pyramid or the obelisk, which had a similar shape. These shapes were also symbolic of the sun’s rays, and the primordial mound of earth rising from the flood of the celestial Nile where the Lotus that Ra emerges from grew. Mer, then, is not the cake, but the ritual use of the cake, either in feeding a god or a deceased relative, both rituals we know of. It’s not fair to say the Greeks got it wrong, because over the long age of Egypt mer came to mean “love” and “pyramid” as well as the ritual use of the cake.

Those are fascinating concepts to explore. Relating them onward to a Hebrew chariot that is visually complex and symbolically loaded, draws to my mind some of the Old Testament angels connected with the prophet Ezekiel. Plenty of places to go with this one if one is interested.

Speaking of going, in my own explorations, I have used the hexagon/hexagram as basis to develop this symbol, which I will eventually put on an amulet or an altar stone. To my mind it connects with symbols of Hekate, and well, Hekate, Heka, Hex, Haxxan, Hagatesse and Hexagon can all blur lines in rhyme, alliteration, and the verbal games we play in spell work. And now you can see that there are mathematical and geometric games you can play as well, so if you are looking for right angle (pun meaningfully intended) to approach a particular magical operation, I hope I have given you some new tools to work with. If nothing else, I hope it encourages you to spend time looking past the surface of things as presented.

Before departing this week’s article I fully admit to lifting the title from a very much more important work. Even though you can’t copyright titles, and the words fit my little exercise, equally well, I clearly acknowledge, respect and admire the work of the pioneering African-American women the book and film Hidden Figures is about. Their contribution to the advancement of both the space program, and cause of racial justice in this country, cannot be minimized. If you are unaware of it, I strongly encourage you make yourself familiar.

Thank you again for reading all the way to the end of this week’s piece. It is longer and potentially more complicated that what I have offered in the past. More like this is forthcoming, so I hope you find it useful. I’ll be back again in a week.

January 18, 2023January 11, 2023

Graveyard Dirt

This article was originally supposed to be focused solely on the magical ingredient in the title. However, recent events here in Houston have inspired me to go a bit afield and discuss something very important in regard to magic, ancestors, and the rights of peoples and cultures.

Last week a rather unusual Egyptian sarcophagus that had been displayed at Houston’s Museum of Natural Science was repatriated to Egypt. The mummy case was a staggering 9 1/2 feet tall and sported a bright green face, leading to it being nicknamed the Jolly Green Giant. My good lady wife and I have seen this case multiple times during visits to the museum’s excellent Egyptian Hall, and we joked about that being one of mine due to the size.

It’s tragic that it was discovered to be stolen from it’s tomb, and had wandered the world through one elicit buyer and another, until the final owner – who may or may not have known it’s provenance -loaned it to the HMNS.

I imagine there’s an extensive audit of the rest of the museum’s collection going on right now, and the pieces across town in the Houston Museum of Fine Art are doubtless receiving equal scrutiny. And they should be. As should every collection in any country besides Egypt herself.

This is a sticky point for artists, archaeologists, diplomats, and the citizens of the world’s various local and indigenous cultures. It is something we need to pay particularly close attention to. If the most reputable museums in the world can be seen to participate in the illegal trade of art and antiquities, then the entire context of the museum system begins to unravel.

These are big questions.

I have had the great good fortune to see Egypt’s antiquities in the old Cairo Museum, and I hope one day to visit the new Egyptian Museum which is state of the art in both education and preservation.

I have also seen seminal pieces of Ancient Egyptian history and culture in the British Museum, the Louvre, the Musee de Beaux Artes in Lyon, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and our own HMNS here. The Met was guilty of purchasing a looted sarcophagus from the same ring of thieves that sold the Giant that was in Houston. It has also since been returned to Egypt, and the Giant’s recovery was a part of that extended investigation.

There’s shaky ground here.

The Met also has a hall dedicated to the Temple of Dendur which was “gifted” to the United States in 1965 to keep it from being swallowed by the rising waters of Lake Nasser. Like the Temples on the island of Philae, and the Temples of Ramesses II at Abu Simbel, this little piece of ancient Egypt was rescued by international efforts, and now has a permanent home on Fifth Avenue.

There are a number of other pieces that were gifts or on loan from either the nation of Egypt, or other museums and private collections. The same is true for the art and antiquities of the other nations and cultures that are in that museum, and other museums around the world.

While we can establish an authentic, and hopefully amiable provenance for Dendur, the same can’t be said for items in the British Museum and the Louvre, which are unquestionably the results of imperial pilfering in the 18th and 19th century. Much of the collection in London can be traced back to Giovanni Belzoni, a former circus strongman that can only loosely be termed an “archaeologist” . While his contributions include the acquisition of giant statues and numerous attractive artifacts for the museum, he is known to have literally trampled on the mummies of the tombs he “discovered” in a search for the shinier prizes.

Another sticking point with the Brits is the Elgin Marbles, so called because Lord Elgin paid to have them collected from the Acropolis in Athens, where they had been lying in pieces for some time, and crated up for shipment back to Merry Olde England. The present government of Greece would like them back, thank you very much, and they have been trying for ages to get international law on their side.

Basically, if you have gotten hold of something that was discovered or stolen in the years after WWII, the international laws and treaties recognize this is bad, and will prosecute, as well as seize your ill-gotten gains and return them to the rightful owner.

But if you happened to be an expanding imperialist nation-state doing it up until the end of the 1930s, the rules are a bit murkier.

The Elgin Marbles are a Greek antiquity. There can be no argument about that. They are the fine sculptured pediment and frieze from the Temple of Athena Parthenos (the Parthenon) on the Acropolis Hill in Ye Olde Athens that was blown apart in 1687 during one of the numerous wars between the Greeks and Ottoman Turks.

But in 1800 when Lord Elgin had them transported, the government of Greece at the time was Ottoman, and they didn’t particularly care, and only when a natively stable Greek government came into place was the issue brought forth. Talks apparently are ongoing even now, to have these returned to the Acropolis, but there are several significant considerations rather than just their illegal taking.

looted-sarcophagus — The name Ankh-en-Ma’at appears on the sarcophagus, but as it is very old and made of wood, it’s not possible to say for certain if this really belonged to that ancient personage. The inscriptions are missing in places, either due to the ravages of time, or the less than ethical way it was handled and stored during it’s journey to the museum. While better artifacts bring bigger bucks, it’s unlikely that everyone in the chain of custody had a curator’s skill or motivation. Being loaned to the Houston Museum of Natural Science may have been the luckiest thing to happen to it since it left Egypt in the mid -2000s.

First of all, people come to the British Museum from around the world to see the Elgin Marbles and Egyptian and Mesopotamian artifacts. I did. It offers an ability for people to get up close and personal to the remains of a culture that otherwise they may only experience through a book or a TV program.

There is also the argument for preservation. This is even more complicated. Let’s just start with events of the last century. During the past 50 years, radical Islamic factions have knowingly destroyed ancient temples and artifacts from non-Islamic cultures because they violate the Quran’s ban on idolatry. Let’s suppose that the political tides brought such a group to power in Egypt. It is entirely possible that the safety of that nation’s heritage might reside in what is left in museums outside her borders.

In fact, the British Museum, the Louvre, and other prominent museums assisted in the removal and temporary curation of many irreplaceable artifacts from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, fearing the storm of war would destroy them, or that they would be systematically looted by government officials desperate to fund their military campaign. I don’t know to what extent these pieces have been returned. The stability of the region is not by any means certain.

And it’s not only religious iconoclasm that is an issue. Mao’s Cultural Revolution practiced the same kind of eradication of Buddhist and Taoist art, architecture, and literature as it rolled across China. The Nazis seized works in museums and collections throughout Europe and Africa. The so-called “decadent art” of the impressionists and moderns was ordered destroyed. Some of it only survives because prominent Nazis took it for themselves, and it was later found by the Monments, Fine Arts, and Archives program.

So there is a legitimate consideration for the purely humanitarian goals of preservation, education, and access.

Weighing against this is that very many of the disputed pieces are taken from the so-called “developing world”. That is, basically countries where the indigenous people were non-whites, and their governments were potentially corrupt, and the citizens extremely impoverished.

Looting of the tombs in Egypt is an industry that dates back to the Pharaohs, and was a cottage industry for the disenfranchised even then. When colonizing Europeans arrived at the end of the 1700s, they simply switched to selling to them from the earlier invading Greeks and Persians.

In the later 20th century it became harder for the worker on a dig to pocket a piece of jewelry and sell it to a tourist in the Cairo bazaar. They search luggage at the airport -everyone’s luggage. Still, even today, Egypt is a comparatively poor country, and money talks.

The people on the lowest part of the ladder get a few pounds, enough maybe to stave off hunger for the family for another week or so. By the time it reaches the black market in Europe, Asia, and America, millions are being handed around. The largely white imperialists are still at it, and still patting themselves on their rich backs for it. One might even argue that the person who bought the Giant and loaned it to a museum was expressing exceptional hubris.

I’m going to bring this back around to the “graveyard dirt” thing, now.

The use of earth, usually taken from the top of a fresh grave, or dug out from an abandoned cemetery or the grave of a specific person (like a child or a criminal) is a staple of magical practice in many folkloric beliefs.

Its inclusion derives from the breaking of taboo. We are taking something from the dead, or at least from the place of the dead. We have something that doesn’t belong among the living. It belongs to the dead and world of the dead. As a piece of malefic magic we are counting on no good coming from that.

So what then, do we expect when we plunder the artifacts and habitations of the past?

The whole earth is someone’s graveyard. In the eons that it’s been here, countless multitudes have lived and died unknown to us, and the present surface potentially has had a corpse decomposed on just about every bit of it.

Who knows if our looting of that graveyard in the form of petroleum is not now reaping a toll on our own future?

But more specifically, how can we continue to expand our knowledge of the culture and history without trampling on the bones like our predecessors did? Archaeology, even at it’s best incarnation, is tomb-robbing. Even if it is being done by the local native people, under the aegis of the local native people’s governing authority, the dead are still being disturbed for no reason other than just our modern nosiness.

We aren’t melting down the golden treasures and packing it back off to Spain, like the Conquistadors did to the Aztecs, but we’re certainly making bank on it in T-shirt sales and plush King-Tut dolls at the Little Shop.

And why is that? Well, because it’s expensive to dig up ancient relics and conserve them and haul them halfway across the world so that people who buy T-shirts and plush dolls can gawk at them behind a glass case.

I’m sure that’s a comfort to Ankh-en-Ma’at. That’s possibly the real name of the Jolly Green Giant. He was likely a very prominent and wealthy priest to afford an outer coffin of such size and grandeur, even if it is just made of wood.

If he resides with Osiris beside the Celestial Nile in the Great Hall by the Field of Reeds, having his name spoken of today will insure he continues on for millions of millions of years. At least that’s how the spell in the Book of the Dead goes. And maybe that’s a fair trade for his coffin being dug up and swapped around like a pricey baseball card.

Our technology is beginning to make it possible for us to address the needs of preservation, education, and access with minimal harm to the remains of the ancients.

Currently the cave of Lascaux where Cro-Magnon man etched greats herds of bulls and horses has been reproduced from LIDAR scans, and the replica, faithful to within millimeters of the actual site, is open to tourists. Tut’s tomb has received a similar treatment, and I believe it is scheduled for a tour at the Houston Museum of Natural Science in 2023. That’s wonderful, as my time in Egypt did not allow me to travel up the Nile to the Valley of the Kings.

LIDAR and 3D printing tech make possible truly faithful, portable, and reproducible versions of sacred sites that are endangered. Where a full physical experience is impossible, virtual reality is being combined with physical simulation to generate an alternative.

I was able to enter the Great Pyramid of Giza in the mid-1990s, climb the Ascending Passageway, marvel at the Grand Gallery, and clamber across the sill into the King’s Chamber to put my hands on the remains of his sarcophagus.

Sphinx-photo — You can love something and still damage it. I live with the realization that my brief time inside the Great Pyramid has contributed to some erosion of valuable archaeological evidence. My passing in the world has erased traces of other’s passing, as someday in some future, the remnants of me will be erased. All we can do is as little damage as possible, and maybe try to keep the memory alive.

In doing so, my breath and the evaporating sweat from the exertion ever so slightly eroded markings and inscriptions on the great stones in the relieving chambers overhead (well, mine and the thousands of other visitors-I didn’t do it by myself). For this reason, the Pyramid was closed to general tourists in the early 2000s. Like the Stonehenge site in Britain, it is accessed only under strictest controls.

But with some creative use of treadmills, black box style props, and immersive headsets, it would be possible to give someone an idea of what it is like to be in that space. You can even have virtual guides tell you the same lies about the pyramid’s construction they told Heroditus millennia ago. They were still using the same schtick in the 90s, so I assume there’s someone around who can record the patter.

Its not as cool as something like the Starship Enterprise’s holodeck, but as a means of bringing the exotic culture of Ancient Egypt to the masses it can work. My eldest experienced a test version using this technique to re-create the trenches of WWI. She found the experience so believable that it was unsettling.

And we can fund such exhibitions with the same T-shirts and plush dolls we’re selling now, while the dead rest comfortably in their graves. Their names will continue to be spoken for eternity across the bright sparkly wonder of the Internet, and their memories made immortal in bits of binary code.

The code will take up considerably less space, be easily transported and replicated to prevent loss, and maybe someday it can be used on that mythical holodeck.

At worst, in our darkest day when we have reached the brink of self-destruction and all that we are and have done is about to be lost in some great cataclysm, we can beam it out into the stars and hope someone else might remember, and speak our name.

Until, then, it’s a new year. The sun is shining. Birds are singing. Let’s not go digging up any ancient tombs.

See you next week.

Note- The photographs of the Giant sarcophagus here are my own, taken some years ago at the HMNS. While I find it’s journey here to be deplorable, I am happy to have met this part of Ankh-en-Ma’at while it visited and hope his spirit finds peace now that his relic has returned nearer to home.

November 2, 2022November 1, 2022

The Birthday Article

This article is scheduled for publication just before my birthday of November 7th. I’ve always been fond of saying that I was born 7 days after Halloween, but I have only recently become aware that my birthday may be the actual date celebrated by the ancients as Samhain.

The ancient calendar (or so I was told) was based on the Equinoxes and Solstices that divide the year into quarters. The Cross-Quarter Days, were the midpoint between those, which, being a middle space, heralded the Opening of the Ways.

Apparently our modern November 7th is the Cross-Quarter Day midpoint between the Autumnal Equinox and the Winter Solstice. It’s 15 degrees through the sign of Scorpio which sits between the Libra of the Equinox and the Sagittarius of the Solstice. The equinoxes and solstices are 90 degrees apart on the zodiac, and 15 degrees of Scorpio is 45 degrees from either side.

So, like I told the clerk at the store the other day, I am Halloween.

That certainly would explain a lot.

Lab Experiment 2 — Since last week’s article fell before the Samhain/Halloween holiday, I thought I would adorn this week’s posting with pictures from my Haunted Firehouse setup. The props are things I have collected or made over the years, employing lighting and basic stage trickery to delight and frighten the visitors. It seems to have been effective. The lab experiment is a hairdresser’s mannequin I acquired in one of my other lifetimes when I worked as a professional stylist. That was between being the cemetery caretaker and international man of mystery.

The good news is, we all get Halloween for another week, and that can’t be a bad thing. I no longer have to call it second Halloween. It’s Halloween. Which I guess makes the other Pre-Halloween, but let’s not spoil it with technicalities. Tis time, Tis Time!

My birthday this year commemorates 57 trips around the Sun. I still have a little time ahead before my second Saturn return, but when you get close, you start feeling it. The first one in our late-twenties/early-thirties usually knocks us on our ass, dropping a load of adultness on us in one fell swoop. I am hoping that this second round is a tad more refined, mature, and circumspect, owing to those changes in myself. I think, perhaps, I needn’t be conked on the head quite so forcefully this time to get the message.

Though if this year is any indication. the conking has begun. My family has been visited by death three times closely, and three more times nearby, and the year still has a few more weeks to work. Despite the months that have passed, I still find myself working through things related to the realization of the permanence of these losses. Regardless of all other things that may come to be, these things will never be altered. They are now a permanent part of the web of memory and thought and emotion that constitute who I am in the universe.

So pardon me, Saturn, if I say I’m ready to get through this return thing sooner rather than later.

This blog is partially due to hearing that ticking of the clock a bit louder every day. Now, I am in relatively good health, I am taking steps to improve my health and hope to see Saturn return at least once more, if not twice (it’s possible). But as you reach certain points in life, you start thinking about things that you’ve put off, or allocated to someday.

My life has been full. It has moved in unexpected ways, and I consider every twist and turn to be one step closer to where I stand now. Some of the things that have happened I planned. Some of them I dreamed. Most were thrown at me by the universe in a mad game of existential catch. I’ve done my best not to drop the ball, though I’d be a liar if I said I hadn’t a few times.

In walking down that road, some things that were the dreams and ambitions of my youth were cast aside, to be filled with more useful, enjoyable, and worthy pursuits. But there are those that linger, that I still find joy in, and thanks to the advent of the Internet and the broad community connected to one another by it, I have opportunities to explore those things.

The fire department has excellent fog machines. They are used to simulate the conditions inside a burning building and boy howdy do they work. It was difficult to get pics of the various stations of the spooky tour, and this clip from the video is about the best shot I got of my coffin. Yes I have a coffin. Oddly enough I got it at work. Not the job at the cemetery.

The series of articles I have been posting here since around April are part of that. Originally I intended this to be something of an aside to the webstore, which I still hope will appear on this domain. But life, the universe and everything frequently interferes with my plans, and this has become a larger, and hopefully more enjoyable, offering.

I get that even today a written blog is fast becoming an anachronism. In an environment dominated by “influencers” and social media, anyone wanting to be seen and heard has moved on to the podcast circuit, and my friends know I considered that at the beginning. It’s not been completely ruled out, as I have the equipment from my filmmaking work. But the time required to produce, record, edit, and publish a regular podcast is just not something I have right now. Maybe in 2023. Or 2024. Still lots on my plate.

The weekly dribbling from my mind’s eye that you will find here was initially motivated in a previous incarnation by my feelings that many in the modern occult community were getting a lot of surface but little depth. I think that may still be true for a lot of people, but either the tide is turning, or I am just becoming more aware of the deeper voices.

This clip is Charlie who you might just make out on top of the coffin in the previous image. Charlie was made for a sculpture class I took in the mid-90s. Over the years, the latex and foam rubber have naturally degraded to give him a wonderfully creepy countenance. He comes out now and again. He was seen briefly in my short film Silent for the 48 Hour Film Festival, but usually he stays in his cage. It’s better for everyone that way.

I have been working with the unseen since I was about 7 years old and got my first Tarot deck. Along with a book on a broad range of esoteric disciplines, and a later book on witchcraft directly, this journey was undertaken in comparative secrecy and on a solitary path. After decades, it is likely that I will always be more or less solitary, but in later years the secret part has slipped away. This is the result of moving from a very restricted rural community in the hills of Eastern Kentucky to the suburbs of the largest city in Texas. There are more weirdos here than me, and I have been lucky enough to meet up with a few.

I am that guy on the Hermit card. While it is relatively easy for me to be loquacious on the most bizarre of subjects here on the internet, in person I am less so. This is a holdover from those years when talk of such odd things was considered evil sacrilege or worse by the local populace. But I still am not entirely trusting of people I meet who present a strange and unusual vibe.

Let’s be honest. Some of them are crazy. For that matter, I might be crazy, too. But there’s a good crazy and a bad crazy, and I have had that experience of sharing perhaps too freely with someone who needs professional help.

There are doubtless some who might say I would probably benefit from professional help, myself. But it’s hard to find a reliable alchemist these days.

See, that flippancy is what the therapists call a deflection. Avoiding the deep complicated stuff by making a joke. There’s the meme that goes around about “sarchotic” being the state where people don’t know if you’re being sarcastic or if you’re psychotic.

I never know either. But it’s usually fun, and it can be entertaining for those paying close attention. For the rest, well, I’m not really all that interested in keeping their company. There’s that Hermit thing again.

The world has over 7 billion people on it, and a lot more in it. You can’t possibly be friends with all of them, and you’ll go mad trying. In my youth, I lived in a community where conformity was the standard. Think about that. Being like everyone else meant you had to be like everybody else. That’s soul-crushing and sadly not isolated to small towns in remote regions.

I chose not to conform, and that rebellion ultimately got me cast out. Figuratively at first – being ostracized from the social groups, both in school and afterward. I was considered as weird by “adults who should know better” as my so-called peers. The kids had to learn it from somewhere. Eventually I just up and left, because there was a wider world beckoning.

And in that wider world, I ran across, from time to time, others who had a similar outlook, and formed connections both short and long. I also ran across people who were utterly despicable, wasters of my time, lost souls, mad, bad, and dangerous to know. I was lucky enough to recognize those encounters and move away from them as fast as was practical and possible. You can’t always tell the boss to shove it.

Esmerelda here was probably my favorite setup. The Temple of the Golden Idol had to be drastically scaled back to comply with new fire codes, so the Fortune Teller ended up being a big hit. Of course when you have Tarot Cards and crystal balls around the house, it’s a fairly easy scene to put together. Esmerelda has been seen on my instagram multiple times as Erasmus. It’s handy to have gender fluid props when trying to set up something like this.

I find as the years pass that some of that latter group might simply have appeared to be that way because of who I was at the time. And to be honest, some of the “friends” I made along the way turned out to be that only because of who I was at the time. We change, we transition. we hope that we grow. Or at least learn not to mistake simple change for actual growth. I am as guilty of seeking greener grass as the next person.

The Hermit is not at the end of his path. He is just at a stopping point for this moment.

“The road goes ever on and on, down from the door where it began.”

I use my birthday as a kind of regeneration. I attempt to assess, improve, reject, and jettison any unneeded parts of myself that have ceased to serve. In a way, it’s a personal Samhain. It signals a new beginning for the next year.

I hope that you will continue to join me for it. Back next week with hopefully less introspective content.

October 5, 2022October 5, 2022

The Face of the Mask

Let the bells ring out, it’s Halloween month again!

I am fairly sure my readers feel the same jubilation when October rolls around (unless I have an audience south of the Equator, in which case, insert “Beltane month”). Some of us sniff that scent in the air as August draws to a close, even though here in coastal Texas “fall” is relegated to a state of mind for the most part.

It seems an apropos time to discuss the concept of the mask. I am a collector of masks (I’m a collector of a lot of things, books, guitars, swords, cats, skulls…). I have been fascinated by them since I was a child, through my years working in theatre and film, and as an intriguing part of popular culture. And of course, the ritual and magical use of the mask easily commands my attention.

Que tous les masques que vous portez soient les vôtres

I know I promised at the end of last week’s article to stop referring to the root words of things. Technically this is a direct translation, but our word mask is “larva” in Latin. I find this extraordinary. We can see of course why this term is used to apply to the untransformed infant stage of insects. The larva “masks” the true creature it becomes. But so too, can donning a mask be a transformative experience. When we mask ourselves, we are becoming something else.

This goes way way back to pre-history. We find evidence in the Sorceror of Tres Freres. Underneath his deerskin and horns he is becoming the Spirit of the animal. Whether he is personifying the deity locally for his tribe, or using this to hide himself as he travels the unseen world, we may never know.

The masks here are from various Pacific Island cultures. They are probably ceremonial, though they might have been used in battle to terrify the enemy. My personal favorite is Batman, there in the middle. His resemblance to the comic book Caped Crusader is telling. In earlier cultures the mythic beings represented by ritual masks are equivalent in a way to our modern superhero. The being portrayed is powerful, inscrutable, and quasi-divine. Underneath, the secret identity of the wearer is protected, both from the audience, and from any other quasi-divines that might mistake the mask for the legendary hero and come after them. This layer of protection is an important spiritual function of the mask.

masks-02 — A mixed selection of African masks and idols from New York’s Museum of Natural History. I took these photos in 2021 as we toured the extensive permanent collection. It underlines how universal the idea of the mask is in human society, probably because we are hardwired to recognize faces.

masks-03 — Another image from the museum trip. As you may infer from the style of the bronze work in this case, the example here is from central Asia. Although the tag did not mention it, I couldn’t help wondering if it was meant to represent a yeti, the fabled giant man-ape of the Himalayas. I think this was a shaman mask, so it fulfills the same role as the deer skin on the Paleolithic sorceror in that cave in France. It allows the shaman to transform into a being capable of entering the other worlds safely, and conversing with the beings that live there. it might also serve to scare off any potential evil or troublesome spirits that are attracted to the bright light of the shaman as he walks the paths between the worlds.

Yet there are tribal communities extant who use masked rituals for similar purposes, as well as to illustrate tribal history and legend. In many cases ritually re-enacting a story from myth is a kind of spellwork. In performing the ritual, the acts that brought about the desired ends are reintroduced into the universe, hopefully to remind the forgetful skies to bring rain, or the bored earth to make the fields green.

The ritual use of masks are not relegated to tribal cultures alone, though. Masks, and by extension costume, are integral to much ceremonial magic. And even when we are not garbed in robes the color of darkest midnight, we frequently use metaphorical masks in our work. We take on the role of a particular spirit, deity, or even abstract concept, when performing ritual and spellwork, as surely as that ancient sorcerer donned his deer skin.

armor-mask — Masks and mask-adjacent exhibits in the armory wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. These artful bronze helmets were typically Italian, and date from the time of the Renaissance. It is at the end of the jousting tradition, though some probably were used on the field of honor. In the age of the cannon, protecting the face and skull from shrapnel was vitally important. The cast helms would most likely have had visors that covered at least the lower half of the face. The designs served a double duty, in that the wearer might be easily identified on the field of battle. This would have a drawback when cannon gave way to musket, and more practical, and anonymous, headgear evolved.

In many witchcraft practices these roles are binary and gender-specific, deriving in some cases from more ancient fertility rites. This inbuilt duality is becoming problematic as we welcome into the larger occult community persons who do not fit easily within this paradigm. It’s time to understand that these restrictions are, in fact, just masks to express concepts that are not absolutes, but aspects of the Divine.

It is ridiculous to believe that LGBTQ+ persons did not practice witchcraft in elder times, or that their involvement in the craft did not form a vital part of their personal identity as much as it does for heterosexuals and cisgender individuals. Human sexuality has always been complex, variable, and fluid, depending on culture, time, and belief. It is only one component of that enigma we call human identity, which is still barely understood by modern psychological disciplines, and a total mystery to empirical science.

I’m talking here about the thing that drives around our meat suits, which are as much of a mask as anything you’ll find down at Party City this time of year. The physical body, though we may enjoy it while we occupy it, is not really what we are. We are made of rarer stuff. Stuff that is capable of assuming a number of different forms, playing a lot of different parts, and experiencing the greater Divine nature in a myriad of ways.

We are spirits in a material world.

mummy-mask — Egyptian art has many examples of the last mask anyone would ever wear. These mummy masks were placed over the head and shoulders of the embalmed corpse, and used as stand-ins during the all-important “opening of the mouth” ceremony. This was performed at graveside by a priest wearing a mask of Anubis, the guardian and guide of the dead. Using a set of special tools, touched to the lips of the mask (or sometimes the coffin) the deceased was given both the power of speech needed for the sacred spells, and the ability to eat and drink in the afterlife.

The mummy mask was sometimes an alternative to the elaborate carved and painted coffins, which some could not afford. The deluxe model belonged to Tutankhamen, and was made from pure gold, and precious stones. This one is only gold leaf over a substance called cartonnage by archaeologists. Essentially it’s papier-maché. Others were merely painted, some even painted directly on the wrappings. When the Roman settlers embraced the trend to mummification, they shifted to beautiful encaustic portraits (a painting medium using pigment, oil, and beeswax) on panels that were bound in the outer layer of wrappings.

Even in death, the ritual mask still has a purpose. In this case, it identifies what our meat suit looked like before time, desiccation, and decay took it away.

Certain Buddhist and Hindu teachings put forth that even that material world is an illusion. Our experience is happening in our minds, and our minds are ineffable, infinite, and eternal.

But as spirits we do enjoy wearing masks from time to time. They make it easier to go shopping for decorations down at the Spirit Halloween store. And to have conversations with other mask-wearing spirits about the nature of human identity, the cosmos, and our role in it.

It’s easy for us to confuse the mask for the wearer. Our minds are fertile places that concoct all manner of fantasies to keep us entertained when we should be paying attention in math class. We see the mask and infer, and elaborate, and imagine, and by the time we actually encounter the other person we probably have them dead wrong. When get to meet the wearer, if we are ever that lucky, it can be a shattering experience.

We must cultivate the practice of seeing through the mask, to those little bits of the wearer that come through the eyeholes and around the edges. While we may still be wrong when the masks come off at midnight, maybe we won’t be tragically so.

It’s also very important to remember that our own masks are on, and that impacts our own perception. I think we’ve all had the experience of wearing that mask where the eyes aren’t quite in the right place, or the mouth doesn’t match up. The bodies we wear and the baggage that we carry in the form of cultural roles and other outward expressions of identity can restrict and color our view of the world we are in. It’s vitally important that our masks fit us properly. Otherwise, we are stifled and miserable and angry all the time.

Remember that the spirits and deities and such that some of us work with are also wearing masks. They may need to go shopping down at the Spirit Halloween store, too. Very often they wear a mask so we can understand and interact with them.

Consider it a kind of metaphysical social media. We interact with the equivalent of a text message with a profile pic, and see the occasional meme post. The actual being we are communicating with may bear little resemblance to what we think they are. Meeting them “irl” could be devastating, disappointing, or ecstatic. But like social media, they may live far away and the chances of that happening are slim to none.

Our meat suits are not up to the challenge of such an encounter anyway. The grimoires are replete with entreaties to “appear in a form pleasant to the eye”. Otherworldly beings exist in forms and fashions that are not that same as the world we inhabit. To come into our space-time, necessitates a “container” that responds to our laws of physics. But that doesn’t mean it’s comfortable or pleasing to experience.

Mohammed was required to look only upon the angel Gabriel after he had passed by, because to see the full countenance would cause him to drop down dead. It’s safe to assume that we are only in the presence of a small portion or aspect of beings of this nature.

On the other hand, mythology and lore has many examples of spirits that live in a single tree, or protect a stream or river. These genius loci are more on our human scale, at least when that scale is limited by the meat suit.

Of course, these creatures could be as the mycelium of the mushroom. They are a greater whole, of which only a part is visible (and even they may not be fully aware of it).

This is not an uncommon concept. There are many versions of the cosmic Divine that suggest all our personal identities are merely a piece of this greater continuum, and that our moments incarnate in the meat suit provide a convenient situation for the self knowledge of that Divine. In which case, all the variations and viewpoints of everyone and everything are just masks that the Divine wears to know about itself. It is an exploration of wonder on an unimaginable scale, and so encounters with any and all should be welcomed, and cherished for what they are.

We are more than just the masks we wear. We wear a lot of masks. Don’t confuse the mask for the wearer. Especially when the wearer is you.

May all the masks you wear be your own.

Thank you for the taking the time to read this. It’s my busy season, so some of these may be shorter than the usual. I’m sure the tl;dr folks among you will appreciate that. I’ll be back next week.

Featured image and Instagram/Facebook/Twitter attachments are cropped from Fritz Lang’s 1927 masterpiece Metropolis. In the frame the Great Machine that powers the city and exhausts the workers is transformed into the demon Molloch, who consumes them into his fiery insides. Another lovely occult reference in this film, and evidence that even a machine can wear a mask on occasion.

August 17, 2022August 3, 2022

The Play’s the Thing

When the magician writes as poet or novelist, are we to take his literary works as a veiled grimoire?

It’s not as uncommon as you might think. Crowley, of course, published poems, plays, and other fiction. Although certainly more recognized for his literary work, William Butler Yeats was an enthusiastic member of the Golden Dawn. A. E. Waite and Eliphas Levi were both considered poets as well as occultists, and more modern authors on occult subjects pen fictional works under their own name, myself included.

Alternatively, if the magician writes as poet or novelist, are we to take his occult works as fraud? This is an unfortunate tendency by those looking to debunk. But the non-believer just sees it as evidence that he was right all along. What about the believers? As those who practice various occult disciplines, does the appearance of a fictional occult novel penned by a known occultist make the ground slippery?

It’s not unfair to say that there is a history of fraud within the occult. Orthodoxy, of course, has it’s own share of charlatans and money-changers violating the temple. It is only reasonable to consider that any spiritual or supernatural belief is likely to attract con-artists. After all, traffic with the unknown and invisible is easy enough to claim.

When we look at the cyclic flowering of interest in magic and spirituality, we see a trend. Prominent figures intermingle with the intellectual and artistic celebrities of the day. Said celebrities often are dabblers themselves- certainly they are drawn to it. Pixie Smith worked in the theatre with Bram Stoker. Her works were exhibited by Alfred Stieglitz, and admired by Georgia O’Keefe. That she is responsible for the most widely know modern Tarot deck seems a minor footnote.

Believer’s see her work as inspired by esoteric powers. It certainly gives life to Waite’s text, and allows us to explore beyond it. And this is true of the works of many artists that use magic, myth, and spiritual dimensions as part of the creative process.

Austin Osman Spare is cited as instrumental in the foundation of Chaos Magic but this was secondary to his career as artist and illustrator in his lifetime, at least in context of the wider public. It is with the hazy fog of time that his magical workings have gained more prominence. I first encountered him through his art, which resonates very much with my own personal tastes and style. I could clearly see the inclusion of occult subject and symbolism, but then I know what I am looking at. An untrained eye will just see “spooky pictures”. I have heard that applied to my work as well.

But I am also trained with the eye of an artist and a good-sized library of art history books and I can think of numerous examples of symbolic art using occult imagery that has little, if any relation, to the artist’s personal spiritual belief. So if I am looking at an overtly occult piece, I don’t automatically assume that the artist is actually involved in the occult.

Nor am I likely to assume that if someone is an open follower of spiritual disciplines, that their creative output is an overtly spiritual act. As an artist, myself, I can speak to this being a very confused landscape. While every work I make has some infusion of will, intention, and perhaps even symbol and construction derived from magical sources, they are not all works of magic. A painting is not a spell, nor is it necessarily enchanted.

arkham01 — This is the tour de force double-page spread from the Grant Morrison (author) and Dave McKean (artist) masterpiece **Batman: Arkham Asylum – A Serious House on a Serious Earth.**

Supposedly the author (who is openly involved in the occult) and the artist (who uses occult symbols but is officially an atheist) were somewhat at odds during the creation of this piece. Perhaps it was this strife that resulted in such a unique and enduring episode in the multi-faceted Batman genre. The image above incorporates a number of familiar occult symbols, such as the Hanged Man and The World from the Thoth Tarot, astrological symbols, Hebraic and Kabbalistic ideograms, Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica and other scribbles and scratching fit for the finest Medieval grimoire.

arkham02 — Another selection from the graphic novel, making reference to the use of the Tarot as a means of retraining the “Two-Face” character from his monomania for outcomes based on a single coin toss to 78 options (156 if you count reverses). The artwork is experimental, often disjointed, and seems to contain all kinds of hidden meanings. Yet neither author or artist represent this book as anything other than a creative expression designed to entertain.

On the other hand, anything that partakes so profoundly of my own inner spirit, cannot but be charged with it. So a painting does have some power about it. This magic is separate from incantation or ensorcelment. It is creative energy made manifest, and in being that, perhaps is even more richly imbued with that power than an actual intentional work of magic.

It’s a question for philosophy majors and not artists or magicians. As both of the latter, I am in a unique position to appreciate the works of the artist/magician. The artist looks at the work and sees only the art. The magician looks at the work and sees only the symbols. And the rest of humanity just sees the spooky picture. Maybe they are drawn to it or repulsed by it, but their connection is, to my mind, a lesser one.

The fusion of mythology and creativity is by no means a new one. The great masterpieces of the Renaissance are taken from both the Judeo-Christian teachings and the tales of the ancient Greeks and Romans. The Roman arts copied the Greeks, and the Greeks were influenced by the Egyptian, Persians, and possibly even Hindus. The magic and the art flowed together, as it always had, since those first scribblings on the walls of Lascaux and Alta Mira caves.

It is only recently that the distinction between art made for sacred purpose and art made for commercial purpose has diverged. It’s part of that secular humanism of the Renaissance.

While it is true that the ancients plopped down their denari at the idol store in the forum for the same kind of mass produced imagery that lines the shelves at your local occult shop, they did not see this as reducing it’s sacred nature.

Ancient peoples understood that the gods lived in every idol, whether carved in finest marble by Phidias for the Acropolis, or poorly modeled in clay by slaves in a foreign port. The magic was in the talisman, whether you paid dearly for it at the temple, or got it from a street vendor outside the bath or brothel.

The craft of the magician, the priest, the witch, and the sorceror were seen as an equally valid career in ancient times. Although the spread of Christianity and later Islam would do a great deal to make those careers socially unacceptable, illegal, and evil, they more or less continued to operate. The Black Books of the Middle Ages simply adopted the monotheistic deities as the inscrutable source of all that was. Angels and demons were at His command, so the sorceror simply used God to bully them into doing his will.

But when we get to the Renaissance and start questioning the nature of that God, the nature of Nature, and the nature of the human role in it, sacredness begins to disappear. Yes, there are certainly spiritually inspired works of art from this period. They are some of the more famous and celebrated works of all time.

But we talk about Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling, not God’s, or even the Popes. The focus has shifted to the individual, the personal, away from the divine. While architects had apprenticed in the ancient traditions of Sacred Geometry that drove ever higher the great Gothic cathedrals, they eagerly sold these secrets to build palaces for a new merchant elite, who wielding power and wealth from their own achievement, rather than a heavenly mandate.

By the time we get to the Industrial Revolution, machines are making the art and craft. This triggered several artistic movements aimed at reclaiming the sacred and mystical nature of art, as well as making art a vehicle to communicate these ideas. The Pre-Raphaelites are a strong example of this, using classical and mythical themes in recurring tableaus.

One of my favorites of this period is John William Waterhouse, whose use of Greek and Arthurian myth is ripe with resplendent examples of magical practice, paraphernalia, and iconography. Yet there is no evidence that Waterhouse had any direct experience of occult practice, despite being a contemporary of Waite and Crowley.

Waterhouse was working with a vocabulary common the people in his movement, whose meanings were symbolic, but perhaps more philosophically than spiritually so. The Crystal Ball and Destiny are virtually the same painting, with the same model in the same pose, and communicating a similar idea. But the eponymous crystal is not seen to be a symbol of magic, but of the ideation of future time.

Of secondary consideration is that the Pre-Raphaelites and related movements were very obsessed with the richness of surfaces. The figures exist in complex drapes, flowing dresses, shining armor, reflected in glass and water. There are wide varieties of flowers and plants rendered in accurate detail. Furniture and artifice are exquisitely designed.

Arnolfini-portrait — The *Arnolfini Portrait* is a splendid example of late Medieval symbolic painting. This is as much message as masterpiece. The various secret/sacred cues include:

The shoes cast aside indicating that this is a sacred space.
The single candle symbolizes the presence of God.
The little dog is code for fidelity – marital faithfulness.
The bed to the right foretells the consummation of the marriage.
Her “pregnant pause” is symbolic of the children she will bear.
Her domestic role is heralded by the little broom on the bedpost.
The figure of St. Margaret on the bedpost offers protection to expectant mothers.
The mirror is surrounded by images of Christ’s passion, indicative of the piety of the couple. This is enforced by the rosary next to it.
The red bed curtains and chair drape represent the Blood of Christ (a source says it’s symbolic of romantic passion but that seems out of place with all the other religious symbology).
The chair itself is topped by a pair of carved cherubim (in the Old Testament sense- the winged bulls of Babylon.) The chair may represent the Throne of God or the “Mercy Seat” on the Ark of the Covenant, which was flanked by two such creatures. The lion on the chair arm may be connected to St. Mark.
Her shoes are closer to the Throne and red. The exposed part of her dress is blue. These are indicators that she is a virgin, and identified with the Holy Virgin Mary.
The green in her robe is further indication of fertility.
His black robes indicate sobriety and dedication.
The hat is another marker that this is taking place in a holy space.
The apples on the left are said to represent original sin. Tangentially, they may also represent the “fruit” of that sin. Much of this painting is about the getting of offspring.
The window indicates that the man is connected to the outside world, whereas his wife (at this time in history) was given dominion over the household only.

The truly interesting part of this, however, is the fact that there is a snuffed out candle over the bride’s head. Though this purports to be a painting of an actual event done at the time, she was dead by the time it was finished.

This emphasis on surface can be found in the late Medieval works in northern and central Europe, notably the painting of Jan Van Eyck. Van Eyck’s most famous painting is The Marriage of Giovanni Arnolfini and his wife. It is a study in esoteric symbolism, and also a marriage license. The painter’s signature indicates he was present to witness the wedding vows, and in fact, he is reflected in the mirror at the back of the room.

Van Eyck was employing a number of sacred codes that would have been familiar to viewers of his day, but this doesn’t mean that he had any specific religious intention in crafting this portrait. As noted in the caption above, Arnolfini’s wife did not live to see it, so it may be a memorial as much as a marriage certificate.

Michelangelo was by most reports a devout Catholic, yet he created imagery that celebrates humanity more than heavenly forces. His works and those of his contemporaries shifted the focus away from a constant piety to a more worldly mindset. The impetus for this movement was the reintroduction of classical Graeco-Roman art and literature through the ports of Venice and the Moorish Kingdom of Cordoba.

Among these works were translations of Ptolemy, the various Greek Magical Papyri, and the Ghayat Al-Hakim – translated into Latin as the Picatrix. The roots of the Tarot probably came by the same route. Fascination with magic and astrology went hand in hand with the philosophy of Aristotle and the science of Archimedes. These were new exotic ideas that had been “lost” during the Dark Ages, and were lustily embraced by those who had survived the Black Death and prospered in the New World Order. Maps of the world now listed many terra incognita and the potential that strange beings and powerful forces lay just beyond the horizon was a very real thing.

As I have mentioned before, the flowering of secular humanism did not go unchallenged by the orthodoxy of the Church. The Renaissance and the years following it were some of the bloodiest in human history, as the establishment sought to maintain control over a population through the Witch Trials and the Holy Inquisition. These paranoid reactions spread to the New World, as well, and have left a stain on our heritage comparable to the Holocaust.

This stain perpetuates today when people characterize anything with a touch of occultist mysticism as “the work of Satan!”. Art, music, and literature that employ the symbolism of spirits, ghosts, deity, and mythology comes under fire as being infernally inspired and corruptive of the consumer. Yet sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

I like fantasy imagery, like the works of Frank Frazetta, Michael Whelan, and Bernie Wrightson, to name only a few. I am equally interested in Salvador Dali, Gustav Klimt, Alphonse Mucha, Frida Kalo, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, and Eugene Bernan, all of whom are considered “real” artists as opposed to “illustrators”¹. Am I drawn to this imagery because it has a mystical context? Probably so. But, I have no idea where that yen came from. I have always been more interested in the wild and incredible. This drew me to the works of authors like Tolkien, Zelazny, Herbert, White, and Poe. While these works and the attendant imagery and films certainly informed my awareness of mystical and occult materials, the desire to explore it was always there.

I still locate the occasional tidbit of lore or discover a different approach to a certain magical procedure from works that are technically fiction. Sometimes I am reminded or inspired by things that are not, in their intention, designed to have a mystic quality.

So, at least from where I stand, not all works by a magician are intended to be magic, contain mystic revelation or coded secrets, or be anything other than a work of art. And in that context, it doesn’t reduce the respect I have for the magician in any way. All of us do things to gain our daily bread that are not necessarily connected to our spiritual universe (whether we wish it were or not).

I have so many such irons in the fire. Some are magic oriented, like this blog. Some are just art, and some fall somewhere in between. I try to view what other practicioners and creatives do with a similar eye. I encourage you to consider it. We can but gain access to a wider world.

Thank you for reading to the end. I will be back again next week with more or less obtuse obfuscations.

July 27, 2022July 27, 2022

The Delicate Art of Seeing

In addition to my penchant for Shakespeare, I spent a good deal of my youthful free time engaged in the adventures of a certain consulting detective residing at 221B Baker Street. Like the works of the Bard, many of Conan Doyle’s stories have been adapted and revised for film, but it is the written word I first encountered, and still connect with.

Latter day incarnations of the Great Detective portray him as an anti-social know-it-all with no people skills. I suppose that’s one way of looking at it. To my semi-adolescent self, this person was, if not a kindred spirit, at least a similar one. His command of vast regions of abstruse information and the ability to rationally synthesize viable patterns from the mundane was a great inspiration to me. I never saw him as cold, rude, or brutal. But then I also may have been an anti-social know-it-all with no people skills.

Imagine you are playing a group guessing game. I’m not sure how many people would remember charades, though it pops up in modern commercials. Now suppose that you have figured out the clues. You know the answer, but you have to wait there while everyone else makes ridiculous guesses.

Sherlock Holmes lived that 24/7. It’s a wonder he didn’t kill anyone. His choice to turn his faculties toward the solution of crimes is showing wonderful restraint.

Modern interpretations make the same mistake universally, and that is seeing Holmes’ best friend and sidekick as being ill treated by the genius detective. The problem with that is that John Watson is not Holmes’ friend. He’s not even a character. He’s a literary device. His sole purpose is to be a mask over Holmes’ thought so that when the why and how is revealed at the end, it’s a wonderment.

Watson is there to give us a version of the story without all the details and clues and trivial tidbits that Holmes sees as valuable. Or rather his job is to make them seem like trivial tidbits. His job is misdirection.

Conan Doyle didn’t invent Watson. He stole him from Edgar Allen Poe. Poe wrote about a genius detective and his thick friend in the first half of the 19th century. The Parisian sleuth C. Auguste Dupin astounds his unnamed narrator by deducing who committed the murders in the Rue Morgue (which sadly about a street and not a morgue).

Poe only wrote two other stories about the amateur investigator before his passing, but it’s enough to credit him with the creation of the detective story, and why the Mystery Writers of America give out an Edgar instead of an Artie for exceptional work.

It evens out, of course. Agatha Christie stole the same device from Doyle to use for Hercule Poirot. Without the dunderheaded sidekick, the Great Detective can’t appear great. You would see how the sausage is made.

Doyle, I will say, shows us how Holmes does it, if only after poor Watson scratches his head and looks dumbfounded at the clues. He spells it out very well in A Scandal in Bohemia. Watson visiting for the first time in a while since he married and moved out, is told by Holmes that he has gained weight, been out in the rain, hired a lazy servant girl, and has returned to his work as a doctor. Watson’s incredulous response is the usual jaw dropped.

“My dear Holmes” said I, “this is too much. You certainly would have been burned had you lived a few centuries ago.”

Great Detective — Holmes and Watson per illustrator Sidney Paget in the Strand Magazine on their way to decipher the odd goings-on at Baskerville Hall. The pair would be transformed into House and Wilson in the Fox Networks House M.D series. British actor Hugh Laurie gave us the first modern reworking of Holmes as self-absorbed and brutal monomaniac. This take was further refined by Benedict Cumberbatch in the BBC series Sherlock and Robert Downey, Jr. in the film versions. Keen observers will notice that the four actors in the last two photos have migrated from Baker Street to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Strange isn’t it?

Holmes then patiently lays out all the little signs that make up the bigger picture. The weight, well he looks heavier, obviously. The servant girl is marked by a cut on the inside of Watson’s boot, made, while scraping off mud; hence the rain. As to his medical practice well he smells of antiseptic, and has dented his hat with the earpiece of a stethoscope. All easily seen and connected dots according to the master.

Watson’s jaw remains dropped. To which Holmes adds:

“You see. You do not observe. The distinction is clear.”

This was a fundamental idea for me. As with any young person who is impressed by a fictional character, I strove to emulate that hero. I endeavored to learn to truly observe.

Humans think they see a lot of things.

Science says that our brains aren’t capable of processing all the visual information our eyes take in, so we fill in the gaps. This is sort of how digital video compression works. A frame shows everything, and the next frame only shows what changes.

Our brain fills in the gaps so that we can function in a visual world without walking off a cliff or driving into a tree because if we had to process all the pixels, we’d never respond in time.

That seems a bit unreal to me, but it’s one of those widely held theories.

We’re really much better at just making things up.

This faculty of imagination would seem to lay at cross-purposes with Holmes’ rationalist approach. But it requires a certain degree of imagination to take all those little bits and pieces and concoct a working theory. Yes, it does have to be strained through the sieve of logic and reality.

“Eliminate the impossible. Whatever remains, however improbable, must be true.”

So the capacity to leap beyond logic and experience a world that cannot be wholly explained rationally can still work in concert with that rational critical world. It’s a matter of knowing when to apply each.

If you’ve gotten to this point and are starting to wonder when I’ll start talking about the usual weird stuff, just hold on. It’s coming.

A reliable and effective use of the mantic arts is based upon knowing when to apply imagination and when to refine that information with critical reasoning.

Pure intuition, while it may have the cachet of a psychic experience, is not always useful in the absence of the reasoned context. I’d like to believe that my “gut instincts” will serve me effectively in every situation, but it has been my experience that it doesn’t. And this is following five decades spent honing that instinct and learning how to listen to it.

Sometimes, you’re wrong.

Ordinarily we filter these kinds of things automatically. We experience an input from the beyond, and assay it’s relative chance of being real and useful. But this process can be improved, and the controlled application cultivated.

You may know that Conan Doyle was deeply involved in the Spiritualist Movement. It is surprising to a lot of people that the creator of a character so attached to reason and logic would hold such a powerful belief in the existence of spirits.

He’s also known for his staunch defense of the photographs known as the Cottingley Faerie Hoax, and continued to persist in the reality of the Bright Folk. Some would suggest that had he applied Holmes’ methods he could have discovered the hoax. It seems obvious he didn’t want to. Belief can override our senses. We see what we think we see.

We may be doubly damned if we’re used to hearing these kinds of revelations from our own “inner voice”. Some of the meditative practices I have been working with lately involve going deep down into one’s own mind, and then bringing up that consciousness to the everyday. My experiences with this have been startling in the results. I have received “signs and portents” relating to what I am studying at a much higher frequency than before.

Or perhaps I am imagining it. Perhaps it is a trick my mind is playing, or rather replaying. My tricksy brain is externalizing the material I am working with to “create” correspondences in the real world. It is possible that because I am engaged in heavy study of the subject matter than I am subconsciously identifying that material in the world around me. As they say, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

But what if it’s both?

What if my brain is projecting the work I am doing through meditation into the world, as a means of improving my perception? In other words, yes, I am seeing signs and portents because my brain is subconsciously engaged in signs and portents. But also, the signs and portents are there, and this process has me noticing them more. It’s really not possible to say objectively if my “heightened powers” are a quirk of neurochemistry or a “real” external phenomena.

And it actually doesn’t matter.

A person with schizophrenia can perceive things that aren’t there. We consider that mental illness in our modern society. In other times and cultures these people were considered touched by the gods, and sacred oracles. And other times and cultures they were considered possessed by demons and burned as witches.

The degree to which our perceived world is a detriment to how we function in society varies from person to person and culture to culture.

Persons on the autism spectrum connect to that “exterior” world very differently than neurotypical people do. Sometimes this can manifest in a preternatural eye for detail, much like the fictional Mr. Holmes. Complex patterns may be observed that are only otherwise discoverable with cutting edge search algorithms. This can be attended by obsessive behaviors, difficulty or inability to communicate emotions properly, and a host of other challenges. These are not the result of impairment, but of a brain that moves differently from idea to idea, linking them in non-standard ways; at least by the “standard” of the general populace.

For a short time Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini were friends. Houdini spent a good deal of time debunking “psychic phenomena” including divination. Houdini had been a stage performer since a young age and had witnessed hundreds of “mind-reading” acts. The trick with mind reading on stage is to start with something general, which is likely to be true for most of the people in the audience. Then you circle in with some details, the letter of a name, a piece of clothing. This is still quite vague, but you start to get a reaction. “My Uncle Henry” someone will shout, and then you keep drawing the circle closer, looking for the mark to give you more clues.

It’s part trick, part observation, and part suggestion. People want to believe, so they’ll let their brains be led, especially if you lead them in a way that can be a kind of hypnosis.

Now if you think this is disingenuous, I invite you to go find an old recording of a TV preacher faith healing in the 1980s. This is exactly the process they are using. ¹ The extent to which someone who is anxious, or depressed, or suffering from a psychosomatic illness being “healed” by such a practice is equivalent to the audience member believing he received a message from his Uncle Henry. But I am extremely skeptical about the lame walking, the blind seeing, and cancer going into spontaneous remission.

To be fair, and openly honest, when I was reading Tarot for clients, I also employed this technique to some extent. I very closely observed the client as I drew cards and performed the interpretation. You can pick up things from body language, vocal tone, etc. that indicate when what you are saying is hitting a nerve. The setting for a reading is almost universally made intimate, and often dramatic, to encourage a receptive mood in the client. It has the added effect of eliminating distractions so that I can concentrate on what I am picking up from them.

Now some people call this a psychic connection, and I am not about to argue that. I personally don’t consider myself any more psychic than Sherlock Holmes. I know his methods and I apply them. When I get a “vibe” from a client it is because I have spent many years honing my perceptions to pick up those cues. And these cues are vital.

A modern incarnation of the Great Detective was the television series House, M.D. An anti-social iconoclastic diagnostician whose genius was such that it mystified all his associates, Greg House flaunted convention at every turn until he was able to ferret out the mystery disease (spoiler alert: it’s not lupus). House had a maxim that was proven out in almost every episode.

“Everybody lies.”

The Tarot client comes to you either skeptical, or timid. They either don’t believe you or they don’t trust you and in either case you will not get the full story from them unless you employ these deep observational skills.

This is not a trick. It’s not a con. It’s a method to get inside the head of the client and really truly help them, which is why they came to you in the first place. If I had an M.D. I could call it psychiatry and charge $150 an hour. But my parents couldn’t afford medical school, so here I am with a deck of cards, and a spooky knack for reading people.

My cards are not mere props, nor is the reading just a fun mask for psychoanalytic counseling. The client and I, in our little purple draped space, are participating in a ritual that is hundreds, if not thousands, of years old.

Ritual is in itself an altered state of consciousness. The roles we both play are not what we are outside the curtain, this event is special, the space sacred, the time suspended. Both reader and client are engaging in a semi-hypnotic symbiosis.

In this state, the interaction of keen observation, willing responsiveness, and the mnemonic and evocative imagery of the cards produce a result that is more than the sum of the parts. The skilled reader will already have a deep understanding of the codified meanings of the cards, but in the moment, they may see something beyond.

This is also the result of heightened observation. For example, a few weeks ago I did an article on the Tower card, and used an example from my set of the Via Tarot. One of the messages is, in general, the fall forecast in the Tower is redeemed in the Star card that follows it.

Now as I was mixing decks for the article (because I have about 50 and I like showing them off) I didn’t immediately notice an artistic conceit in Via’s Tower and Star combination. The temple shown on the Star card (XVII) is the same as the “House of God” (XVI-the Tower in most decks). On XVI, when the tower is falling, all is in chaos, and the wolf is literally at the door, the viewpoint is close. In XVII, the viewpoint is more distant, the perspective relaxed, and overall feeling much light. Yet this is the same building architecturally.

tower-star-via — The Tower and The Star from the Via Tarot. This deck derived from Thelema doctrines and influenced by the Thoth Tarot was produced around 2005 in the UK. As Thoth took inspiration from the modern art movements of the time, Via has several images that remind me of the artist Michael Whelan. Whether that is homage or coincidence I can’t say.

The dome behind the star is a cleansed and renewed version of the House of God in card XVI. If we step back from the central arch of the Tower edifice, we can see that it is a much bigger building, able to accommodate more entrances. The piercing Eye of Omega has become a gentle nourishing afterglow. Isis approaches us, no longer wearing her veil. The Light that burned and broke is now refracted through the stellar heptagram, and cast as the steps of the rainbow she descends.

The 7 points of the Heptagram are the old Chaldean planets, – Sun, Moon, and Mercury through Saturn. The twelve pillars of the temple roof are the Zodiac. The Pentagram in center is the Microcosm and Macrocosm, Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and Spirit.

Tarot is a journey through symbols. It’s equivalent to a waking dream. While the images recur, the meaning changes.

So what meaning does that give us? Is this even an intended meaning, or did the artist do it unconsciously? Is my connection a “trick of the mind”? It doesn’t matter if the idea gives me a new avenue to explore when these cards show up in a reading.

I’ve had this deck for the better part of two decades, and I never saw this until I was writing that article. The additional study, contemplation, and multiple exposures to the various cards stimulated a number of new observations.

Some times, even when we observe we do not observe.

And sometimes we take in a massive amount of seemingly trivial data until some trigger causes it all to coalesce into a meaningful pattern. ²

This is aim of the Tarot. It exists to be that one electron spark that starts the lightning strike. But for lightning to strike the conditions must be right. The mind must be receptive, alert, and observant.

The skilled reader will develop a rhythm that achieves these conditions naturally, without stopping to think about “Am I watching their body language?”; “Does this card in this position mean something differently than normal?”; “Am I listening to my intuition?”

For the novice this can be terribly frustrating, and made even moreso by the myriad decks and books on the subject. Even if you have a “talent” for the cards, for reading people, and observing their reactions, getting comfortable with the basic and reverse meanings is a process. It goes beyond just not having to check the book (and sometimes even old hats still have to). It’s about knowing them well enough to see where they sit in context of the a reading. And then once you get that working, you can start to see where they sit in context of your client and how they are responding that day.

It can help to just start with the Major Arcana. If you really go deep into a standard Waite Deck that alone can keep you busy for weeks. Once you’re happy with that, pick a suit and work through them the same way, until you get all 78 more or less.

Don’t expect to recite the full pages of the text. Get it down a to a few sentences at most, so when that card comes up you know immediately what you are dealing with. That’s actually on Pixie Smith’s cards, which is why the deck became so popular, and why it’s the best “starter”.

Don’t worry about esoteric meanings, numerological, astrological, qabbalistic, or alchemical meanings. Just learn that this card means this, and if it’s upside down, it either means the opposite, or that the meaning is lessened.

When you get past that point, you will start to make those connections naturally, and then be able to expand upon them. And then you can go back and find all those other meanings that may or may not have been intended or even connected to the cards.

Or not. If you and your clientele are served well by a basic understanding, don’t you dare feel intimidated by others who claim you should know more to be a “real” Tarot reader.

I have a passion for Tarot, both as art and method. I have spent many years working with it, reading about it, collecting it, and writing about it. At some point in time I am likely to make one or more decks, and possible write a book or two. But you should not look at my example as what is normal or required.

Everyone can benefit from the mental exercises of meditative observation. If you never pick up another card, or have never picked up one, you can still get more out of your life by looking around, paying attention, and trying to puzzle out what meaning it has.

Thank you for coming all the way to the end, here. I know this one was ponderously long, but it is something that needs explanation and example, so I do appreciate your making the effort. Join me next week for another descent into the maelstrom.

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