Culture – Page 2 – A Sacred Life

August 16, 2023August 16, 2023

Renewal, Redemption, and Reincarnation

Ray, did it ever occur to you that the reason we’ve been so busy lately is that the dead really are rising from their graves?
Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Husdon) – Ghostbusters

As we reach the penultimate Major Arcana card, we are confronted once again with the blatantly Christian origin of the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot deck. The iconography on Card XX – Judgement has no other esoteric precedent. And yet, it’s possible to work around that if we spend a little time shifting the perspective.

judgement-rws — The card formerly known as The Last Judgement, or rather, the art theme it depicts.

The card shows an Archangel with flaming hair appearing over a cloud. The Archangel wears armor, and is sounding a trumpet, which bears a white banner marked with a red tau cross. On the ground below, with a white mountain range in the background, we see a six nude persons standing in boxes. The lids of the boxes are cast aside. Two of the figures are male, two are female, and two are children of undetermined gender. Between the male-child-female group in the foreground and the male-child-female group in the background is a river or other body of water. in the far background there are rolling hills and three trees may be seen. The colors in the lower part of the card are muted. The figures are the same grey as the boxes they inhabit. The landscape and river are a grey blue. Above the sky is a bright blue, but the strongest colors in the image are with the Archangel and its trumpet.

The majority of this imagery is derived from the Book Of The Revelation of John of Patmos. It is the last book in the official Christian Bible, King James Version, which was a dominant source of Protestant thinking for about 500 years. There are a number of other citations in the KJV regarding the physical resurrection of the dead at the end of the world. And there are similarly multiple references to angels with trumpets. But this idea of the judging of the dead alongside the apocalyptic imagery is primarily in Revelations.

As someone raised in a Christian community, Revelations was one of the more interesting texts. Aside from Genesis and Exodus, it contains most of the “special effects”. Yes, there are a number of miracles that occur to prophets and saints and Christ, but the big epic blockbuster stuff is saved for the last book.

Most modern thinking suggests that Revelations is at least partially a veiled political attack on the Roman state and its treatment of the nascent Christian church, particularly under Nero and his successors. The “Beast with Seven Heads” and the the “Whore of Babylon” are metaphors for Rome, and for it’s imperial influence in the world. They are, perhaps, wishful thinking on the part of John (if John of Patmos was a single author) that Rome would shortly fall and be punished and revenged upon for the persecution of Christians.

On the other hand, the earlier parts about the Book of Seven Seals and the Angels with the Seven Trumpets are a remarkably interesting description of either an asteroid impact, or a nuclear war. Stars falling as flaming hail and a great star plunging into the sea and causing massive death and destruction, followed by a period of global darkening, is exactly the kind of scenario scientists describe as the aftermath of an asteroid. Consequently, it also is a dead ringer for nuclear winter. To the extent this is legitimately prophecy, or a dramatic retelling of some actual event experienced by early humans and preserved through oral tradition – much as the Deluge appears to have been – is hard to say. Back in the seventies, when I was reading through this stuff, and consuming all the bits on alien astronauts, pyramid power, ESP, cryptids, and all those other things Annie Potts asks Ernie Hudson if he believes during the job interview in Ghostbusters, anything seemed possible. I hope to have become a bit more critical in my old age. But I don’t know if I would use the term skeptical.

Judgement-Journey-Into-Egypt-Ghosts-and-spirits — Two versions of the Egyptian Weighing of the Heart. The left is from the Journey Into Egypt Tarot and the other from the Ghosts and Spirits Tarot. For the Egyptian themed one this is an obvious choice for Card XX. In both, Osiris, the murdered god who was reassembled and reanimated by his wife Isis, and Thoth (Tehuti) god of writing, knowledge, medicine, and magic, presides over the final hurdle of the soul before they are able to enter the abode of the blessed dead. The illustration at top is a version of the Papyrus of Ani, the most famous version of the Book of the Dead, currently in the British Museum. This New Kingdom text is the basis for most published English translations. Anubis brings the dead Ani to the chamber. Thoth stands on the opposite side of the balance waiting to record his name for eternity. Behind Thoth, Horus presents a successful Ani to his father Osiris and Mother Isis. Egyptian art did not employ this “time-travel” as a shortcut to narrative, but as a magical proof that Ani’s heart would balance with Ma’at’s feather.

The idea of resurrection, or at least the afterlife, and the judgment of the soul, is an ancient thing. We know at least that in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, that if the heart of the dead person weighs more than the Feather of Ma’at – Cosmic Truth, then that heart was given to the Devourer of Souls and the person no longer existed.

From the earliest times, though, our remote ancestors seemed to regard the person as surviving the body. Grave goods are found even in Neanderthal sites. Whether these were made as offerings, the disposal of now taboo objects, or simply a human need to show affection for the dead, we cannot know. But that idea that there is something extra beyond the meat suit seems to be a realization of early peoples, and our sometimes neurotic obsession with it persists to the present day, in every culture. Even the atheist and rationalist who argue that our consciousness is a quirk of chemistry, and just as fragile and temporary, can only say so as a “matter of faith”. While they say that the existence of the soul cannot be proven scientifically, it also can’t be disproven. It’s all a matter of what we believe.

Card XX acknowledges our basic need to believe something, even if something is nothing. In other words. the message of this card is that there is more than we know going on. In that context, our actions may have consequences that we are not aware of. This is the very essence of the concept of karma.

I am not any expert on the teachings of the Hindu or Buddhist mystic. I have read various tracts in both religions, as I have read Hebrew, Christian, Mormon, and Islam works. The popular notion of karma seems to have evolved as a New Age oversimplification of the actual teachings, through a lens of Western dualism. The ideas of good and bad karma, are not necessarily coincident with “good” and “bad” as we tend to think of them in a post-Protestant first world way. That’s not to say there is not some overlap. But our tendency to equate “karma” with a kind of cosmic balancer is, as far as I can tell, not quite correct.

Karma comes from a society whose afterlife belief was reincarnation. We may suspect this is because of the caste system, which is apparently still very important in Indian society even in the 21st century, but the ideas are ancient, and may simply reflect a differing view of what happens when the meat suit stops working properly. Reincarnation is not exclusive to Hinduism, but it is one of the most widespread examples, and along with Buddhism, one of the belief systems that has explored it deeply both ritually and philosophically.

judgement -Shadowscapes - Legacy — In the Shadowscapes Tarot and the Legacy of the Divine Tarot, more emphasis is placed on the ecstatic state of awakening or transcendence that the judging of the spirits. While they both still use the name Judgement, and employ versions of the traditional iconography, they’ve divorced that iconography from the Christian teaching about the Last Judgement, the End Times, and the attendant punishment and torment of those found wanting after the Apocalypse. These are happy, spiritual, and comforting. They speak of the escape from both earthly cares and mortal trauma, while not tying the experience to a particular ethos. The angelic figures need not be from an Abrahamic religion.

In the West, in the New Age, the idea of reincarnation quickly became more involved with having been someone prominent in a past life, rather than about what one would become in a future incarnation. Apparently most people were Cleopatra at some point. No wonder the poor woman had such a tragic life given all the people in her head. But there’s an entire branch of occult practice based around past life regressions and finding out who you were before you were you.

Now that is not to say there’s not value in that practice, if you believe in the idea of karma and reincarnation. Ultimately the goal of reincarnation is not to come back anymore. We keep coming back because we have failed to learn some vital lesson that will allow us to release our consciousness from this endless cycle of birth-suffering-death-rebirth and go on back to the source, which, is perhaps unconsciousness, or even, non-existence. So the idea that perhaps we can look back upon previous lifetimes and pinpoint where we went wrong – in order to avoid making the same mistakes in this life, and maybe future ones, is not without merit. So, maybe don’t get involved with invading foreign generals who are really just interested in rape and plunder. It never ends well.

Concepts like karmic debt and good karma and bad karma (and maybe instant karma) seem from my research to be largely Western adaptations to our already dualistic view of the cosmos. (If any of my readers are practicing a karmic religion and wish to correct me, I welcome it. As I said, I only know from research that may be faulty. I try my best, but I always want to truly understand). Karma is purely an expression of the need to be aware that our actions have consequences.

In the Christian (and ancient Egyptian) view of the afterlife, those consequences had a two-fold purpose. First, it was to cow behaviors that might otherwise be difficult or expensive to police. “If you breaketh this Commandment, thou shalt go directly to Hell. Thou shalt not pass go. Thou shalt not collect thy 200 sheckels”. Secondarily, it acted as an explanation for how those individuals who flagrantly and frequently shattered the commandments got little comeuppance, and in fact, appeared to profit mightily from it. If you are familiar with the history of the Church, you are aware that one of the issues at the heart of the Reformation was the sale of indulgences. That is, if one who profited from their sins might give some portion of the ill-gotten gains to building a new baptistry or chapel; and thereby shorten the time spent in the afterlife in Purgatory, waiting for a table to open up in Heaven. This “Get Out of Hell Free Card” was a key source of revenue for the expanding church, but they didn’t invent the idea. Ancient art is resplendent with temples and statues and stelae and obelisks given by the mighty and powerful who not only pleased their respective gods, but got a really nifty public relations boost.

New Age Tarot explorations of this card have obviously downplayed the Christian iconography used by Smith and Waite on this card. In Paul Huson’s Mystical Origins of the Tarot, this Last Judgement derives from same series of mystery pageant floats or stages as the Tower and some of the other more non-pagan symbols. I think he has a good argument here because it ties very well with the earlier forms of the next and final trump, the World. While we will delve more deeply into that card and it’s variants when I wrap up next week, it’s fair to say the original imaginings of the World card were also found in Revelations, and pertain to the aftermath of the events which we find displayed on this card.

Judgement-arthurian-hidden-realm-wildwood-Tarot — Three overtly pagan takes on Card XX, all of whom have dispensed with the imagery and the name associated with this card. The Arthurian Tarot, based on Grail Lore and a kind of Celtic shamanism, alludes to the legend that Arthur is not dead, but sleeping, waiting to rise again in time of need. His presence is personified in the land itself. In the Hidden Realm Tarot, the theme of the Fae expresses “Life Renewed” through the simple, but profound image of a sprouting acorn. Finally, the Wildwood Tarot, another Celtic shamanism deck, gives us the Great Bear. The Bear is terrible, and we fear it. It stands over the mouth of a burial mound. So here is death, waiting for us to make the wrong choice in a cosmos that will respond swiftly and brutally. Many shamanistic faiths feature “death journeys” as a form of initiation to express the death of one identity and the birth of another one. This prepares the individual to face the fact that our inevitable physical death will be another such journey.

By the time it reaches Levi, that version has moved toward a neo-pagan “Mother Earth”, and thus embraced by quasi-neo-pagan-reconstructionist-mystic-spiritualist-ceremonial-magicians who would ultimately give form to the RWS. Unfortunately that left Judgement twisting in the wind here with the Archangel Gabriel trumpeting the End Times to a bunch of folks who -by mid century – were really more interested in a self-centered, semi-hedonist, and in some ways anti-social kind of spiritual awakening. The New Age simply equated the card with the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius, and ignored the symbolism entirely.

But we can see this card as emblematic of personal awakening to the divine. Though Gabriel is frequently associated with the trumpet, and in Islam is identified as the giver of the Recitation to the Prophet, there are other candidates. The being identified as Metatron, personified as the “Word of God” also shows up in the Revelations. Described as proceeding from heaven on a white horse with a sword coming from his mouth that is the Word, with a name known only to himself, this being causes much of the violence and retribution of the prophecy. I know a number of Christian teaching equate him with Christ, and possibly also with Michael who is also often considered synonymous with Christ. Revelation, more than many of the other books, has a number of euphemisms and symbolic descriptions that, frankly, seem to be added for the sake of effect. There are a lot of things with multiple eyes, and horns, and wings, and a variety of horrific creatures that modern folks try to equate to weapons of war.

I’m fairly certain that the person or persons writing it were experiencing some kind of altered state of consciousness. Revelation is a hallucination, an ancient acid trip, or it’s an amazingly vivid dream. But those portions that are “special effects” would seem to indicate that whatever caused the experience was outside of that which anyone would easily express to another person.

So when approaching Card XX, I ponder the kind of transformative experience that leaves one forever different. This is not the Death that causes us to look for a rational alchemy in Temperance to deal with the new situation, nor is it the collapse of the external structure of the Tower which affords the opportunity to build new orders under the light of the Star. This leaves all the previous experiences behind. It is a change so profound to seem that before it one was dead, that the person who was, is not real, or relevant.

Such an experience may be overwhelming. The portent of such an experience, in a reading which centers on the mundane, the corporeal, and the worldly is jarring and incongruous. To try and integrate the message into the narrative of the other cards is difficult. Doubtless it’s easier to suggest it has something to do with making the proper choice, of being aware of karma, or even to demote it to the status of a simple positive outcome to a court case. But, excluding the last possible meaning assigned to this trump, a profound spiritual awakening is entangled with the perception of karma and the consequences of our choices. So in context, perhaps the card should be read as growing awareness of our own role in our fate, and our own responsibility for whatever else is going on.

With that, I will wrap up this week’s article and thank you for your continued patronage. I hope this series has been of benefit to you as you explore Tarot yourself. Next week is the World, the final trump, and I intend one last article to look back through the Major Arcana as a whole, before returning to a more or less eclectic editorial calendar. I hope you will join me.

August 9, 2023August 9, 2023

Light Unchallenged

All Hail the Coming of The Sun King!

Well, not me, thank you. I am a Creature of the Winter Dark, and the exultation of the primary luminary in his sign of Leo is not a comfort here in Texas with another week of 100°+ temps. The Sun is one of my least favorite cards. It’s certainly in the bottom five. I frequently avoid incarnations and avatars of the Sun in various mythologies. Save for it’s placement in my natal chart (only a couple of hours before dipping peacefully below the horizon) I do my best to avoid it. But here we are, and I shall try to assay it as best I can, though I shan’t say it will be without bias. No reading ever is.

sun-rws-tarot — Bit over the top, this one. But that is in keeping with the reverence for the top luminary.

Card XIX The Sun is characterized by a large solar disk, with 12 straight rays (assuming one behind the Roman numeral as logical) and 12 wavy rays. Beneath it in the background is a row of sunflowers planted behind a garden wall. In front of the wall there is a white horse. On his back is a nude child, crowned with a ring of smaller sunflowers and a red feather in the center. The child holds a great red banner.

The imagery here appears to be the more straightforward of almost any Tarot card. The rays can be taken to represent the hours of the day and the wavy rays those of the night (of which the Sun still holds sway). Alternatively, the rays can represent the signs of the Zodiac and the wavy rays the Houses, which are dependent upon the Rising Line. This meridian, most important in astrological calculations, is essentially the horizon at the time of birth. Since this is also a factor of the hour and moment, the Sun may be said to also control where the Houses are laid out. Equal Houses in a perfect system are synonymous with the signs, but because the Sun travels sign to sign over the space of about 30 days, and house to house in a period of twenty-four hours, there is likely to always be some variation. If a latitude driven House system like Placidus is used, then there is even more to take into consideration, but it is the Sun as arbiter of the hour that determines the Ascendant, and the Ascendant that determines the Houses. Since it is the Houses that are used to express good or ill omen of planetary placement and aspect, the Sun’s influence here may be as important, if not more important, than the Sun sign alone.

Sun signs are what most people who look at the daily horoscope are aware of. The Sun, as the biggest brightest and fastest moving object in our skies, has taken the lion’s share of the astrological celebrity. And lion’s share is appropriately given to him, as he is ruler of the Sign of Leo, that brightest and hottest season, following just after the Summer Solstice. The Moon, as his opposite, second largest, and second fastest, was given dominion over neighboring Cancer, preceding the Solstice, and expressed as water. Water as opposite the Sun’s fire makes a more complete analogy.

From these, then, the ancient Chaldees put the remaining five visible “wanderers” in charge of the chart in opposing pairs, starting with Mercury holding Gemini and Virgo, Venus with Taurus and Libra, Mars ruling the notorious Aries and Scorpio, Jupiter the burgeoning Pisces and Sagittarius, and finally old dark Saturn having sway over the cold winter signs of Capricorn and Aquarius. Comparatively recent discoveries of additional planets have necessitated given them rulership of signs in ways that seem most suitable, so the dark deep waters of Scorpio have been assigned to Pluto surrounded by his river Styx, Neptune rules the seas that Pisces swims in, and dreaming Uranus presides over Aquarian skies.

It is however the annual solar visit into each sign that gave us that popular Seventies singles scene question: “Hey, baby, what’s your sign?”. The Sun being biggest and brightest and fastest was given greatest influence in determining which characteristics would most mark an individual’s personality, or at least, their Leo-ness. The big and bold and egocentric and externalized aspects of ourselves are, like the bright Sun, and the charging Lion, what we see in ourselves and in others. The Moon, by contrast, governing the nightly tides, is equated to our tendency for emotional passions, thus our Moon Sign, is more frequently associated with our subconscious selves. Rounding out the top three is the Rising Sign, which is that sign where the Ascendant is placed, the sign on our “dawn” horizon at the hour of our birth. This is influential, in that it defines the First House, and the First House is the house of our ego, our self-image, and often our selfishness. Awareness of Sun, Moon, and Rising is becoming more common in the casual astrology follower these days, and are at least helpful if one doesn’t grasp the complex webs of planets, houses, aspects, rulerships, exaltations, detriments, falls, decans, parts, etc, that go into a full chart workup.

But what does all this astrology have to do with the Tarot card? Well, again, my approach to the Sun as a card is somewhat ambivalent. I think it’s a showy one-note card that just comes in bringing cheery good fortune and positive vibes and is very much often read like the Sun sign in a natal chart. That is, much more importance is given to its appearance than to the rest of the chart, or the rest of the Tarot spread itself.

sun-tarot-Marseille — This sample from the Tarot of Marseilles shows a French preference for two children playing in the sunlight. This variation is not unique, though there are a number of interpretations to it’s meaning. Some say it represents a young couple – or marriage – one of the potential inferences of this card. Alternatively the pair are the offspring of a successful domestic life, which is by extension the same thing. Others may see them as the denizens of the Tower, reborn in the full light of the New Dawn. I can find some other potential sources for them, though perhaps not so likely ones. Levi acknowledges them, as does Waite, but both elect for the version with a single child, and Waite goes further to prefer the single child on the spotless white horse. Through this we may be meant to associate the radiant Sun with the Christ Child.

The “arrival of Baby New Year” artwork smacks of the Baroque style of France’s Sun King Louis XIV. Now don’t get me wrong. I love Baroque art, but I am also conscious of the egotism involved. This is, after all, the man who, when told his plans for the palace at Versailles would bankrupt the state, replied “L’etat c’est moi.” – “I am the state.” While his great-great-great-grandson would lose it all (including his head) late, Louis XIV influence on the world and history was certainly worthy of the title he bestowed upon himself. Part of his propaganda was indulging a neo-pagan cult of Apollo, with him as the dutifully Catholic, but also fully mythical embodiment of the solar deity. The art and decoration of his palaces are resplendent with scenes of Greek myth, frequently erotic (and even pornographic) depictions of the Sun- centered sagas.

Which is why it’s curious to find that on the quintessential French Tarot decks, there are two children on this card. Most obviously when we find two of anything we expect an allusion to Gemini. Yet Gemini and the Sun are hardly related, as we’ve already expressed. The Sun rules Leo, little Mercury is charged with authority over Gemini. So who are these two, who often show up as cherubs in the iconography of other decks? There are perhaps a couple of candidates.

Let’s go with a French intrigue first. During the reign of the Sun King, a warrant was issued for one Eustache Dauger. Dauger was held in prison for the rest of his life, dying in the infamous Bastille. In this time he was the responsibility of a single jailer. This unusual arrangement has lead to much speculation, and expounded upon by the misreporting by the salacious minded Voltaire, that Dauger had been sentenced to wear an iron mask, forever obscuring his identity. It was also Voltaire who suggested that this person was an older bastard son of the previous king, and thus a longshot contender for the throne. Alexander Dumas, who penned The Man in the Iron Mask based on Dauger, makes him a moments older legitimate twin, whose existence must be kept secret by the usurper Louis. So perhaps these two children are a bit of naughty French parody that came at a later time (since during the reign of Louis XIV and indeed his successors, such a comment would send one to the Bastille or the guillotine.).

Another possible origin for the two children is an artistic theme quite common in Renaissance and later art associating the infant John the Baptist and the Christ Child. John, as the predecessor and prophet of Jesus, is a significant figure in the Gospels. John was an older cousin, according to the lore. When he was executed by Herod for preaching against him and the Roman occupation, Jesus moved up in prominence. It was fashionable in many works of religious art to show the two children together, often in the company of their mothers. Leonardo painted at least two such works, and the dual children on the Marseilles card always get me thinking of them.

The-Virgin-of-the-Rocks — Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks. This is the version that is in the National Gallery in London. There’s another one in the Louvre that is somewhat different. It is generally acknowledged that this version may have been finished by apprentices, or later altered. In the Louvre version, the angel is pointing toward the Christ Child, here signified by the cross on his shoulder. The other infant is John the Baptist, his cousin and predecessor. The pointed finger as a symbol of the presence of the Divine is a common feature in Leonardo’s works. The French version is missing the cross, and the halos on the children, and the “modesty cloth” on the Christ Child. These alterations to the London version suggest a later “correction” by the church rather than a contemporary alteration to the painting by Leonardo’s helpers. The two children may be a possible source for the dual infants in some versions of the Sun Tarot.

The single child on the white horse is almost certainly a metaphor for the Christ, with his far too large red banner symbolizing the blood sacrifice that is reputed to save all of humanity. Confuting the Sun and the Son was useful in converting early pagans, and adopting some of the heliocal energies and attributions with the growing Christian cult. It’s important to remember that early Roman versions of Christ were not the bearded dark man we tend to view as Jesus today. Roman Jesus was Roman, often depicted as the Shepherd, clean-shaven, and light-haired or sometimes blonde. The infant in the Sun card is much more a remnant of that tradition, which is quasi-pagan, than of the later Gothic faith. This may be why I tend to bridle at the imagery of this card, which -at least artistically- doesn’t fit well with the style of the rest of the deck. I have no doubt that it was executed by Smith. Her definitive squiggle is buried down in the stones of the wall on the right. But it’s depiction is anachronistic in an otherwise congruous deck. It looks more like a Tiffany window than a Gothic icon. To me it just seems all too showy.

That is the nature of the Sun though. In hottest August, when all the summer’s growth has ripened and the true bounty of the earth has burst forth, we are perhaps able to appreciate this boisterous celebrant trump. If we are able to divorce it from the rather ham-handed Christian symbolism, and look at it rather as a pagan Sun that is part of the pagan celestial triad of Star-Moon-Sun, then it’s munificence and fertility might be felt as meant, and the traditional associations of fruition allowed to radiate out into the cards of the surrounding reading.

Two cards remain in the Major Arcana, styled XX-Judgement (sic) and XXI, The World. For many these last two complete the Tarot Journey begun with our ambling Fool about to walk off the cliff. Within them are the bones of their ancestors, and both artistically and oracularly they present a number of problems for the modern non-Christian reader. But I hope I am able to provide some incite into how I have worked around these shortcomings when using the traditional Rider-Waite-Smith deck.

As for this week’s trump, my best effort was to take it as astrologically as possible, because again, I just don’t like it.

We all have our favorites, and our non-favorites. We must be aware how that colors the story we tell to the client, or to ourselves, when either of those come up in the reading.

Until next week, thank you for your continued interest.

July 26, 2023July 26, 2023

Seven Sisters Light

Starlight
Star Bright
First Star
I see tonight
Wish I may
Wish I might
Have the wish
I wish tonight.
Traditional

This old rhyming spell came to my dream soaked brain in the wee hours this morning as I started thinking about my approach to this week’s card. While the interwebs call it a “19th Century American nursery rhyme” it is undoubtedly a rhyming spell, as many nursery rhymes are. It may as easily be phrased “O, Great Inanna, I beseech thee grant me this boon!”, because that is essentially what it says. It is calling upon the Evening Star to grant a wish, and the Evening Star is Venus, whom the Sumerians called Inanna. Venus is her Roman name, but among others she goes by Aphrodite, Ishtar, Astarte, and possibly even Freya. Venus is both the Evening Star and the Morning Star, depending on the time of the year. She is that “first star I see tonight” in the winter months in the Northern Hemisphere, where the ancients proclaimed her “The Queen of Heaven”. Inanna was part of a triumvirate of sky deities for the Sumerians, which are frequently represented together on various cylinder seals and other relics. They are the Sun, the Moon, and the Star, which are not perhaps entirely coincidentally the “celestial” cards we find as we approach the end of the Major Arcana.

The imagery of Card XVII – The Star poses several conundrums to the seeker of it’s origins. My various interpretations here are derived largely from my own speculation and not the traditional meanings. The internet offers a number of readings of these same symbols which, to my mind, are equally speculative, and potentially easily dismissed.

star-rws-tarot — The enigma of the Star.

The card shows a naked woman kneeling next to pool or inlet. Her right foot rests on the surface of the water. Her left leg is bent beneath her and rests on the land. She has a pitcher in each hand from which she pours water. From the right, the water is poured into the pool. From the left the water is poured onto the ground, where it runs away in five rivulets, one of which appears to touch the edge of the pool. There are seventeen small budding plants in the landscape (ten around the perimeter of the pool, and another seven clustered behind her left foot); the same as the numeral assigned to this trump. A small hill arises just behind her left arm, on which grows a small tree. On the tree sets a red bird. There is a mountain range in the far distance. In the blue sky behind her are seven small white stars, surrounding a large yellow central star. All the stars have eight points.

The parallels between this card and XIV – Temperance have not been lost on generations of Tarot readers and scholars. Rachel Pollack in her Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, says that the energies of Temperance are those released by the transformative experience of the preceding Death card, and are still structured and managed. With the Star, the more complete destruction present in the Tower leads to a more complete, untamed, and freely expressed energy. This, she says, can be seen by the need of Temperance to remain closed, and to control the flow of the water between the vessels. The Star, in her natural state, pours the water out freely, aware now that there is an infinite source.

I don’t fully agree with those interpretations, but I can see them as avenues to explore when a more obvious read is not forthcoming. It does get me thinking about the combinations of The Hanged Man – Death – Temperance and The Devil – The Tower – The Star in terms of how those sequences represent the process of overcoming a restrictive situation. Both the Hanged Man and the Devil signal imprisonment, a stifling, or enslavement to the wrong choices. Death and the Tower represent catastrophic events, sea changes in our lives or at very least our ways of thinking. And then Temperance and the Star can symbolize the resulting actions that are possible following those changes.

But that wasn’t my first intention when I went to Pollack. I was looking for a possible meaning for the seven stars.

Seven is a sacred number. Well, all numbers can be sacred depending on context, but “Lucky 7” is a frequently recurring motif in many cultures. We have sevens all around. We have seven days in a week. While the names in English derive from Norse Gods, the equivalent Latin precedents (that you run across in French and some of the other Romance tongues) refer to the ancient Chaldean “planets” that figure in astrology. These are, the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.

Prior to the advent of the optical telescope during the Renaissance, these bodies were the ones that could be seen “wandering” in the night skies over ancient Mesopotamia. While it’s possible that maybe, on very clear nights with no light pollution at all, the two larger gas giants of Uranus and Neptune might be visible, their extremely long periods probably prevented them from being recognized as moving objects against the background stars.

Modern astrology recognized (and retroactively connects) Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, along with a number of dwarfs, asteroids, and other bodies in calculating natal charts and casting horoscopes. But up to the Middle Ages, seven was the limit, and so seven became an important number.

plaiedes and crab nebula — A deep space image from NASA’s Hubble Telescope showing the Crab Nebula at left of the Plaiedes Star Cluster. The nebula is the remnant of the 1054 supernova that might have inspired a design similar to what we find later on the Star card. Although the stellar event was only visible for a couple of years, it was certainly unusual, and given a public mindset inclined to omens and portents, there is little doubt that at the time it would have been seen as a harbinger of some sort.

Now, the easiest thing to do here would be to say that the seven stars of the Star card represent the seven planets. It’s neat, ties us back to ancient astrology and tradition and puts us into a stream of Medieval thinking that seems to influence much of the early Tarot imagery.

But the problem then is to determine exactly what the big star in the middle is supposed to be. Why is it so special that it gets it’s own card? It can’t be the Sun, since the sun is just another Chaldean planet, and like the Moon get’s its own trump. So I went back to the old texts and find that The Sun, the Moon, and Venus are all revered in ancient Sumeria because they all were the brightest objects visible in the sky, If you’ve ever been lucky enough to see Venus rising before the dawn or just after sunset, you know this planet deserves their epithet of “Queen of Heaven”.

But of course, Venus is another planet, and so having it brightly at center of seven other possible planets just doesn’t work. If the smaller stars are supposed to be the ancient astrological planets, then the big one has to be something other than Venus. It has to be an exceptional phenomenon.

Now if we go looking about in the Medieval mind, there’s a ready made solution for that, and it’s the Star of Bethlehem. This is the great star that supposedly appeared over the birthplace of Jesus and foretold his coming to the Wise Men, and shown for several days and nights as a beacon to all who would come see the Christ Child.

Well, fair story, and considering the established Judeo-Christian bent that we know Waite put on the deck, it’s not too far-fetched to consider. But I tend to find it a bit dissatisfying with the naked water bearer, and the connection Star-Moon-Sun here in the trumps. I think these “celestial” cards are just that, aimed at expressing an astrological metaphor, possibly tied to the idea of cosmic order or cosmic control by a divine being. And I am looking at them in the context of their original use as playing cards, not any later assigned esoteric value. From a purely decorative sense, I don’t think we can look at this as the Star of Bethlehem, or as expressing any Chaldean oracle,

Melishipak-stella — Another possible candidate for the Star. This stella in the Louvre shows the ancient King Melishipak presenting his daughter to a goddess. Above are the three primary stellar deities, the Sun, the Moon, and the Morning or Evening Star, which we know today is Venus. The ancient astrologers would certainly have known this was also Venus, but attached a great significance to it’s brightness in comparison to all the other “wanderers” they observed in the heavens. The eight points are almost identical to the octagram on the Star card, but as we often see elsewhere, they show two sets of four rays, with one apparently on top of the other. This symbolism can perhaps also be connected to the four corners of the year, the two solstices and the two equinoxes, with the subordinate rays signifying the cross quarter days. The dates on the modern Wiccan “Wheel of the Year” derive from ancient festivals, and it is possible that some meaning was attached to this by the Mesopotamian astrologers as well.

But there’s another very interesting possibility. In the year 1054, there was a supernova in Taurus in the region of the Plaiedes star cluster. It is supposed to have been bright enough to be observed in the daytime, and was visible for approximately two years.

One of the names give to the Plaiedes is the Seven Sisters. It’s seven brightest stars can be seen with the naked eye, absent modern light pollution, and a supernova visible in the daytime would certainly be spectacular at night. 1054 was just after the First Millennium. Then, as now, there was a lot of apocalyptic thinking, interpreting of prophecies, political and social unrest, and general fear in the popular imagination. Then – BOOM – a great bright star appears in the sky – much as the legendary Star of Bethlehem had been described. Surely this was a port of the Second Coming.

Four hundred or five hundred years on, the event would most likely have been relegated to a notation in ancient chronicles that probably were not read by the common person. Yet the impact of such an event might have led to an image of a bright giant star, in the vicinity of seven smaller stars, becoming something of a motif. Seven, after all was a lucky number. And that motif might then have been copied down into the early Tarocchi trumps without any realization of it’s origin.

star-journey-egypt-tarot — The Journey Into Egypt Tarot gives us an alternative star cluster to site against. Here the seven brightest stars of Orion serve as marker to the rising of Sirius, which foretold in elder times the coming of the Nile flood. This annual event, and the ability to prepare for it, insured continuation of the stability of Egyptian culture. As another expression of Ma’at or Cosmic Order, the cycle is recorded by Tehuti, here symbolized in his form as the Ibis. A small red ibis may be the bird in the tree of Pamela Smith’s Star card, or it may be a more fanciful representation of the Phoenix, another symbol of rebirth following the cataclysm of the Tower.

Or not, of course. This is the issue when working with symbolic oracles. Do they mean what they appear to mean, or are they a stand-in for something else?

One online definition says the seven stars represent the seven chakras. While knowledge of the ideas of chakras had certainly made it to Victorian England via the Raj, and these concepts were probably known to Waite and Smith when composing the cards, it doesn’t adequately address the presence of the seven stars surrounding the larger central one that we see on earlier decks like the Marseilles, which certainly were composed without that awareness. As moderns we have the opportunity to see them as chakric symbols, and like the potential reading of the Star as emblem of Inanna and her descendant goddesses, seek meanings that go beyond those revealed in Waite, and other sources.

As reading is an intuitive, rather than extuitive process, it is our impressions of the images, and how our own minds associate them, that gives rise to the wide range of possible outcomes. And in the case of my sometimes overthinking brain, seeing significances in number, pattern, shape, etc. – even if unintended by the creator of the image – sends me in search of possible meanings. These deep rabbit holes span the interwebs and my own library of occult, history, mythology, and science texts. The amalgam of these researches lay in my subconscious as well as unconscious mind, so when a given card – say The Star, turns up in my reading, the triggers will pull at that special red thread, and drop all these possible options.

That has been the purpose of this exercise, to explore how my mind, after 50 years of working with the cards, and numerous decks, and a number of books (good and bad) on the subject, has arrived at what meaning I see when a card pops up. I hope that you continue to find value in these explorations, and that it leads you to “go off book” and seek your own answers. All are equally valid as they represent our subconscious arising in reaction to the visual image.

When next I write, we will see that next of the Chaldean luminaries, the Moon. As a natural contrary and creature of the night, I hold great respect and great affection for our lunar neighbor. As such, my take on the meanings and significance of this card are likely to vary greatly from the usual, but again, that is the whole point.

I hope you will join me next week and thank you for your continued attention.

June 28, 2023June 27, 2023

The End of All Songs

For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings:
How some have been depos’d, some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed,
Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping kill’d,
All murthered—for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court, and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear’d, and kill with looks;
Infusing him with self and vain conceit
As if this flesh which walls about our life
Were brass impregnable; and, humour’d thus
Comes at the last, and with a little pin
Bores thorough his castle wall, and farewell king!
Richard II – Act 3, Scene 2 – William Shakespeare

Card XIII is one of the most dreaded cards to see in any reading. It is simply called Death, and carries with it all the foreboding baggage we attach to that word in our communal culture. Death is without doubt one of the most feared parts of the human experience. It is an inexplicable enigma that haunts our steps from the day we enter into the world. Yet it’s place in Tarot is very much open to discussion.

death-rws-tarot — I took this scan from my own RWS deck, which is approaching 40 years old now. The reproductions are not nearly so clear as the digital versions I have been using, but I had the deck handy and thought I’d use it.

The Rider-Waite-Smith version departs from previous imagery of the Reaper mowing down humans indiscriminately. Instead, Pamela Colman Smith chooses to show the figure of Death as the Black Knight, mounted on horseback, with his black banner dominant over all. The banner is marked by a five-lobed white Tudor rose. That this may be seen as an inverted pentagram is not without intention. His horse is white, its red eyes mark it as an albino. The bridle barding is a sequence of skulls and crossed bones. The horse and rider are taken from the Apocalypse of St. John, in the book of Revelations. “And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.” This figure of Death on horseback is something we begin to find in the Renaissance, particularly in the work of Northern painters like Albrecht Durer. He is perhaps not so nobly depicted as he is on the 14th trump card, but the figure clearly is the Pale Rider. Much of the rest of the tableau depicted here comes from older memento mori imagery. Before the horse stands a bishop or other prelate, praying for Death to spare him. On her knees next to him is a swooning woman, and a child. They are both crowned with roses, and the child holds a bouquet of these flowers. Just in front of the child is the bishop’s crozier. The front right hoof of the horse is poised above it, ready to stamp down and smash it. Underneath the horse is the body of a king, his crown upside down in the dirt behind the horse’s other foreleg. In the background is a landscape, at the rear of which is a river. A single boat is in the middle of the river. Behind the bishop we see the suggestion of a waterfall, and above the waterfall the river leads toward two towers, with the sun setting between them. The sky is a uniform gray, and the part of the landscape from the river’s edge backward, is covered in the shadow of evening, as the light is dying.

This card is positively ripe with symbolism, probably because we have been working with visual metaphors for death since our earliest human consciousness. Death, as a thing, is both easily expressed and yet completely unexplainable. It is a cessation of a number of biological processes that we use to determine if something is “alive”. Although when we get down to the level of something like a virus, these processes are much simpler, for human beings we think of things like breathing, having a heartbeat, walking, talking, eating, excreting, making babies and similar things that we all have in common. When we stop doing that, we are considered dead. The body ceases to operate. The meat suit is no longer inhabited by us, and begins a number of other biological processes which are the result of other life now regarding the meat suit as just meat.

death-pulp-tarot — This rendition is from the Pulp Tarot by graphic designer Todd Alcott. The deck is a novelty theme based on the old paperback book covers from the late 20s into the 1950s. Some of the designs are more successful than others. One thing I will say for them is that in most cases they are keeping the key pieces of the RWS deck while playing with the format. Although the king is still living here, and the knight is trying to defend against the looming giant figure of Death, the pieces are there to look at, and the message is the same, even to the novice reader.

The thing that makes Death such a mystery is that it is inherently and almost always a permanent state. It is, in fact, the only permanent state that human beings experience. Everything else about us is changeable. We grow, we age, we move, we hunger, we sleep, we reproduce. Nothing is ever exactly the same way twice. But when all that stops, well, it stops forever. So in our modern culture we tend to consider that forever as Death, when really what we mean is loosely termed the “afterlife”.

Afterlife as an idea has been around a long time. It’s hard to say whether our near neighbors the chimps and bonobos have some concept of loss when a member of their community stops functioning. In my personal experience, though, I believe that animals do experience a sense of death, and of loss, both for other animals and for their humans. My grandfather’s dog died the day he did, even though my grandfather died in a hospital several hundred miles away. We found the little dog, who had been healthy and really should have lived for several more years, quietly passed in his pen. I have heard numerous such stories from friends and family.

But as humans, we seem to have become aware of something significant occurring as far back as the Neanderthal times. It is in this culture that we start to see what archaeologists call “grave goods”. That is, there are things buried along with the bodies of the people. Let’s examine what that may tell us about those early humans.

The reason to bury the dead is actually fairly basic. It’s sanitary, and keeps the decomposition from attracting big scavenger/predators to the rest of the tribe. But when it comes to a reason for burying things with the dead person, it becomes a bit more complicated.

Firstly , it may simply be that those things belonging to the dead might have been related to the death. That is, there was some fear of contagion. This potentially grew from folklore passed down when someone did get sick and die when they kept poor old Ugg’s mammoth hide cape. Now to a culture that doesn’t have sophisticated bacteriology, this idea of quarantine is as much about spiritual causes as it is about the bug. True, it may have been a nasty bacillus that brought down Ugg and sadly young Groont picked it up from the fleas in that mammoth hide. But to the people of the tribe, this was the work of an evil spirit, or an angry god, or something like that, because they didn’t have any idea about the bacillus. Hence for the future, all mammoth hides would be buried with their owners when the time came.

Secondarily, such a culture might determine that it was Ugg himself that had caused the harm to Groont, because he had really liked that mammoth hide, and he didn’t feel like Groont was going to take proper care of it. This idea that the spirit of the dead, once out of the meat suit, could still affect the affairs of the living folks, is something that evolves throughout our history. There is some point in time where the giving of grave goods served the dual purpose of appeasing the spirits of the dead, and providing them with access to their stuff once they’d shuffled off the ol’ mortal coil. If there was no more Ugg, why would he care if Groont got his cape or not. But, if Ugg was still hanging around, even though the Ugg meat suit was taking the long dirt nap, it might be very important to keep him pleased. Who knows what sort of mischief an irritated invisible Ugg could get up to? And, well, how do you get rid of him if you can’t kill him?

death-shadowscapes-tarot — Of all the Tarot decks I own (somewhere around 50 now) this is the only one that presented the concept of Death as transformation in a more pleasant light. The Shadowscapes Tarot of Stephanie Law is so unusual that you will only know this is Death by looking at the label. This is the benu bird of Egypt, the Phoenix, hatching from the egg found in the ashes of its former self,. The gentle spirals, expanding in the natural expression of what is called the Golden Section, express the endless magical order of this cycle of birth-death-birth.

So offerings get made, stuff gets buried, and the dead become the Venerated Ancestors because somewhere in our early caveman days we began to conceive of this concept of afterlife. Afterlife is heaven and hell and ghosts and zombies and vampires and the numerous other incarnations of the unquiet dead. It’s also reincarnation and karma and past lives and the search for Nirvana.

But it’s not Death. Death is a moment. Death is the moment where the meat suit goes from being us to being meat.

And as with many moments that exact point is still sort of nebulous and mysterious. And scary. As people progressing through our living years, we all create or internalize some sort of belief about afterlife that gives us a shield against the inevitability of Death itself. But no matter how assured we are of inhabiting the spiritual Disneyworld promised by many religions and beliefs, that actual moment of Death still shakes us down to our very cores.

So when that card marches out in a reading, you still hear the sudden intake of breath. The pupils dilate. Sweat forms on the upper lip. No, surely, it is not my time. No!

Oh, no. It’s just symbolic. A sign of transition. Of changing from one state to another. That’s the usual response. Please don’t panic, Death isn’t really Death.

Except, of course, when it is.

The origin of the images on this card is the Middle Ages, and the Black Death. The Grim Reaper, who is more plainly drawn on the Tarot de Marseilles, is another emblem of this terrifying time in European history, when at least one quarter of the local humanity died. The great Bubonic Plague coincided with widespread belief that the time of Christ’s return was at hand, as it had been about a thousand years since the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. As an invisible Angel of Death swept whole villages from the earth, it was very easy to believe that the end times had come.

death-deviantmoon-tarot — At the other end of the spectrum in the Death card from the Deviant Moon Tarot. This deck has a darkness about it, possibly even a madness about it. I recently got a copy of the artist’s companion book that not only contains the Tarot meanings/prompts, but also discussed his personal journey in arriving at the images. It affirms my impression that these are at least loosely inspired by the Venetian Carnival masks, though there are clearly layers beyond such a simple attribution. Death here, is Death. There’s no hopeful light on the horizon, no glorious or great beyond awaiting. It is just brutal, and bleak, and final. But perhaps we may look upon Her swollen belly as being a presage of new life. I have a hard time not seeing it as the distention of the corpse as it decays.

Ironically the mass extinction event changed the economic structure of Europe. Feudalism, based on a large population of people to work the land, was no longer sustainable. Labor and skills were in short supply, and in basic economic fashion, when supply is less than demand, the price goes up. People were able to rise in personal property and social status, by contracting themselves to the highest bidder. This brought about the flowering of art and culture we call the Renaissance.

So in it’s way, even the big bad Black Death on that XIII card was a transitionary force. The old society died with it, but the new one grew from the ashes.

The plague killed without distinction. Young, old, rich, poor, noble, slave, pious, and sinful. The figures surrounding the Black Rider represent this idea that Death was the great equalizer. No amount of money, or power, or faith, could protect you.

The catchphrase of the time was “Memento mori” – “Remember you will die”.

While this may have begun as church propaganda to convert the heathen, it could certainly have been a bumper sticker on the daily death wains that roamed many Medieval towns and cities calling for people to bring out their dead.

The injunction, of course, was aimed at cajoling the populace into proper Christian behavior, since, at any moment, they too, could make that final journey. In the climate of the day, real fear was attached to dying with sin on your heart, unable to make final confession and atonement, before facing the final judgement.

But consider this message in a different light.

Let’s say you’ve been told you have a fatal incurable disease and your have that proverbial six months to live. Assuming this illness doesn’t impair your abilities terribly, and is not contagious, what choice would you make to do with that six months?

Some people, sadly, would spend the entire time in fear, depression, and anger, bemoaning whatever mad fate put upon them this horrible doom. They would be miserable, and they would make everyone around them miserable, and when they were gone, their loved ones would carry that misery around forever as their last memory of the person.

Some people will pull out that bucket list, crack open the bank accounts, and live life to the fullest seeing and doing all those things they dreamed about until the very end when the dark comes upon them. That leaves behind a better legacy with their families and friends, unless, of course, they were hoping to inherit what got spent on that last blast of gusto.

But there is the third option, to do something that lasts. Maybe they make a painting, or write a novel, or go spend six months feeding the poor in the some wretched forgotten corner of the earth. But they give up that last measure of their days to leave something behind, so that when the meat suit is fully consumed, and the material nature of the life they lived is gone, something remains in the world that is a mark of their having been in it.

death-journey-into-egypt-tarot — I don’t want to leave you with such a hopeless version of the card, so consider this offering from the Journey Into Egypt. The subject is the Pharaoh Hatsheptsut, one of the few female pharaohs, and certainly the most powerful. Her funeral temple is the structure shown in the background at the base of the cliff at Dier El Bahri. It is lit internally by torchlight, as our own bodies possess an internal light. In the foreground her body lies inside a splendid golden coffin, but her own inner light, the Ka, looks back at us. She is beginning her journey into the realm of Osiris, where she will live a life of ease and playfulness for millions of millions of years. The Death of the Ancient Egyptians is drawn on the column, leading her to the court of the Lord of the Dead. His name is Anpu, rendered via the Greeks into Anubis. As noted with last weeks image, there is an astronomical notation to these cards. This one references the full moon in Scorpio, which occurs when the sun is in Taurus, roughly the month of May, or the full flowering of the spring time. Scorpio is connected to Pluto and thus the underworld, but the Full Moon is when the moon is opposite the sun, thus in this we have both Death, and Birth.

The Renaissance, for all the secular humanism and often hedonism, is this bright shining of life and light as compared to the long dark fear of Death that marked the world of the Middle Ages. In many ways, our modern world still has not fully come to terms with that phobia that rose from the Plague Years. Nor do we always live up to that promise of using the time we are given to best effect.

The sun is always setting somewhere. And always rising somewhere. While the funeral ship is sailing into the lands of shadow, there is another ship setting off to meet the dawn.

Our entire existence is a world that is dying or dead. The majority of the stars we see above burned out a long time before our earth even spun in space. It is the merest memory of their life that makes up our reality. It is fair to say that we are constantly in that moment of Death, moving from the things that were to the things that will be. The past lies lost behind us, and the future is never quite reached. The now is what we have, and we better make use of it.

The Death card is not simply a marker of transition or change. It is the proof of the inevitability of change. Nothing that is, remains. It is a goad to get up and go out and live while we can, to not wait for the moment when we are asked to hop up on that horse, and only then beg and lament our wasted days.

I do not fear Death. Even the pain that may accompany it, if that be my fate, is transitory. It ends. Death is over quickly, and what is beyond Death, I cannot say. What is on this side of Death though, lies within my willingness to act. And act I will.

I hope this has helped you understand a little more about this complicated and often dreaded card. Next week we shall explore Temperance, which is not only a rather odd card to work through, but also sits in a strange place in the sequence of trumps. I hope you will join me again.

As a footnote, I would like to thank all those brave souls who asked me to read the cards for them at the Writers for New Orleans event this past weekend. I know there were some that time did not permit me to visit with, and I hope we will have a future opportunity to explore the Tarot together.

I’ll be back next week.

June 22, 2023June 27, 2023

New Friends, New Cards, New Braunfels

I’ve been meaning to write this article since Memorial Day weekend, and it appears later than I am writing because the shop I discovered during my mini-holiday is having an event this weekend, which I won’t be able to attend as I am presently in New Orleans at another event.

My good lady wife and I have a little hideaway over in Central Texas that we escape to when time permits. It’s situated in New Braunfels, Texas, which used to be a sleepier little town on the freeway between San Antonio and Austin. Like much of Texas, the urban areas are sprawling outward, and people anxious to “get out of the city” are dragging the city along with them. When we first moved to San Antonio after getting married in 1990, the gap between that city’s virtually rural outer loop and the edge of New Braunfels was significant. Now, it’s not all that noticeable, as the bedroom burgs between have all grown together.

Still, if you manage to get down into the old heart of this German settlement on the Guadalupe river, you can find eateries, antique shops, a surprisingly good night life, and a weekly farmer’s market. And not too far down Castell Avenue from Krause’s Biergarten (I highly recommend if you are into German food, and that’s also where we found the farmer’s market on Saturday) is the Empress, a unique little crystal, card, and book shop situated in an old house.

I have a penchant for local witch shops, and I believe in supporting them as much and as often as I can. I’m lucky enough to discover them almost everywhere I travel, but I have to say I didn’t expect to find one in New Braunfels.

Central Texas, outside of Austin, tends toward the conservative, and smaller towns typically have a number of active Catholic and Protestant congregations. So I have to confess to not expecting much when I saw the banner during a visit last year (the shop had closed for the day and we were already heading back to the big city). I was somewhat surprised to see that they were still a going concern this spring.

Now New Braunfels is a tourist town, and summers on the Guadalupe bring a wide range of people to engage in tubing and other water sports to escape the oppressive Texas heat. And I guess the influx into Texas from other areas has had an impact on the interest in all things witchy, so I am happy to report that the Empress is alive and well, and seems to be doing good business.

And that is well deserved, because it is one of the friendliest and most interesting shops I have visited in a long time. My readers will know that I am heavily vested in Tarot, and one of the metrics for a new shop is what kind and how many decks they have available. Imagine my surprise to not only see a large number of decks (though I already owned a lot of them) but that each deck had an open set of cards in front of them so that potential buyers could pick them up, look at the images, and get a feel for the cards.

I have said before that I respond first and foremost to the images on a set of cards. Reading the accompanying book comes later (if at all) so the ability to go through and see every…single…card in every deck was tremendous. I don’t recall ever being in a shop that had done that with more than maybe one or two decks at most, and here they have all the cards, for all the decks.

From a business perspective, that’s not a big deal, really. They can use the cards as demos for the various readers that work the store, and eventually sell the open pack at a discount. But the willingness to put that out there shows an understanding of the audience; of the community of strange folks like me who will appreciate it, that I have found in few other stores. It is the impression of openness and support for the community that inspired me to write this entry, and I hope to be able to develop a long standing relationship with the Empress and her business.

I did find two decks that I was drawn to, not already in my collection. One was the Runic Tarot, which reimagines the standard RWS style images through the lens of Norse mythology and the Rune tradition. So these can be read as standard Tarot, or the Runes to be found on the cards can be read as a Rune casting, or both. As I am only superficially aware of the Rune system, I can’t speak to how well this works, but I did run across an old text on Runecasting while booking that weekend, so I hope to have a better handle on it.

The other deck was the Magickal Botanical Oracle by Maxine Miller and well known occult writer Christopher Penczak (whose book Instant Magick I also found in the used book store that weekend; do not discount such coincidences, my friends, they point you where you need to go). Although my collection of cards is substantial (50+ decks now I think) most of them are traditional Tarot with only a few oracle decks. The majority of those tend toward things like the Ogham tree alphabet, or related Celtic topics typically from sources I am already familiar with elsewhere like John and Caitlin Matthews. So to get a new oracle set for me is a high bar (especially when I have an upcoming trip to New Orleans and am notorious for splurging on cards in the many shops to be found there).

But these cards, well. I cannot speak too highly of them. If you have any bent toward green witchcraft, they are worth every penny. I just found myself getting lost in the images for hours. Though the pallet is quite limited they are so ripe with symbol and layered with an almost living line work that they fascinate, inspire, and captivate.

I’d initially walked past these, as they were in a different area than the Tarot, and the wall of books in the next room had already caught my eye. But my wife called me back in and asked me if I had them. A brief shuffle through the open deck and I immediately added them to the deck in my hand. My good lady wife doesn’t see herself as particularly witchy, mind you. But she has a gift for finding things that resonate with me. That’s probably from having had me around for most of her life (and most of mine). If she tells me to take another look, I take another look. I was well rewarded.

The very impressive thing I found about this deck was that it stimulated ideas that were later to be found when I went back into Penczak’s accompanying text, which is by no means a “little white book”. That is an extraordinary thing for oracle cards. I might expect, given my many years of working with Tarot, to parse out meanings similar to those I experience with other Tarot decks, and that those meanings would jibe with the book. Here these cards handled fresh from the wrapping were giving me the same messages that Penczak had obviously gotten from them. There is definitely something in there looking back at us.

The gist of the deck is that it’s 33 cards give us insight into both beneficial and baneful plants in the Witches Garden. The dynamic drawings capture the spirit, literally, of each plant, and the 224 page text is about working with the plant spirits as spirits, not only for their herbaceous qualities. In this manner, the soul of the plant becomes accessible to those who may, for many reasons, not be able to work with actual mandrake or belladonna or others in this variety. The selection includes some I would not have expected, but there were no omissions that I felt of consequence. As an herbalist since my teen years, and very familiar with many of these plants, I nonetheless found the deck to be a powerfully refreshing approach and very useful tool, both in divination and magical workings.

So this unexpected side trip to the unexpected little shop in a small town in Texas netted unexpected fruit.

I’ve set this post up to drop, while I am participating in Heather Graham’s Writer for New Orleans. Unfortunately that means I won’t be able to return to the Empress for their celebration of the Summer Solstice which is happening on Saturday June 24th at the store located at 451 S Castell Avenue in New Braunfels, Texas from 11 am to 4 pm.

In addition to the store itself they will have a number of guest vendors, Tarot and card readers, and artists in attendance.

If you find yourself in the area I strongly encourage you to take to the time to go experience this very friendly community focused shop and all the people it has brought together. I think you will be rewarded.

Support your local witch shop, because they support you!

June 21, 2023June 19, 2023

Not Heaven Or Hell

I used the term “betwixt and between” as the title of an earlier article, but it is applicable here. The terms “heaven” and “hell” can also be somewhat accurate, in a context I will get to at a later point, but despite the seeming obviousness, “As Above, So Below” is not an apt rendition to deal with this thirteenth card of the Major Arcana, styled XII in a line after the O of the Fool. Behold, the Hanged Man. (I’m pronouncing that mentally as “hang-ed” in the Shakespearean fashion. I think it better suits it and sounds less like a kid’s paper game).

hanged-man-rws-tarot — Smith’s version of this is more generous to the figure than the older models, where in addition to being hanged, the man is also being burned alive.

The Hanged Man is suspended by his right ankle, which is tied to the horizontal beam of a rough cross. His other leg drops down behind it and the bent knee causes it to mirror the cross beam above. His arms are bound behind him, possible around the upright of the cross. The wood of the cross appears newly hewn and has drooping leaves still attached, The figure wears humble soft shoes, red leggings, and a blue tunic. Behind the head is a halo of light. The background of this card is an empty drab grey.

This card’s meaning per Waite is emblematic of the Martyr God, Christ on the Cross, Odin on the Tree, and carries with it the context of secret wisdom gained at a sacrifice. By extension we can connect the murdered Osiris, and we are back in Ancient Egypt again, with the promise of resurrection and afterlife. From this springs the card as a symbol of transformation, of a change from one state into the next (though this is frequently assigned to the following card Death). This is therefore metamorphosis, a pupa in the cocoon. The past is gone, but the future is not yet written.

Originally this card depicted and was called the Traitor, and in place of his hallow was simple fire. He was being burned at the stake, or the gallows, upside down, for a crime against the state. While we can draw allusion to this being the fate of prominent martyrs such as Jesus and St. Peter, who was crucified upside down, there was not that original context. In the first flowering of Tarot, this was a bad man, who met a bad end. It was justification for the power of the state, to mete justice, and execute prisoners, which was shifting from a Divine Right and ecclesiastical authority, to a secular humanist one. Ironically this symbolized the shifting between two points that I frequently find the Hanged Man represents.

As noted, St. Peter is reputed to have required the Romans to hang him upside down on the cross, since he felt he had failed Christ and was unworthy to have the same death as his master. The inverted cross is nowadays associated with the idea of Anti-Christ and Satanism, though these distinctions I believe are more the result of the popular film culture of the sixties and seventies than any legitimate tradition. Inverting a cross, might have been a ritual of the so-called Black Mass, which included saying the Lord’s prayer and other holy texts backward, in a mockery of the Catholic rite. The Black Mass is possibly a whole creation of the Inquisition and Witchfinders. If it was practiced by witches in the 17th century and later, they may simply have been aping the alleged process, rather than following any specific tradition or teaching. The story of Peter may be apocryphal as well. One of his distinctions in the Biblical story is that he denied Christ three times during the trial and crucifixion. This idea of him inverting the Cross might indicate some esoteric tradition where he was a final time, disassociating himself with the faith he was considered guardian to. Bear in mind that the inconstancy of Peter is symbolic of the difficulty of following a philosophical discipline when faced with the temptation and privations of worldliness. In such an instance, one might find themselves “hanging in the balance” between doing what is good for their soul, and what is pleasurable to their body. It is not a coincidence that this idea stems from contemplation of this card.

shadowscapes-ghosts-and-spirits-cosmic-tarot — Three versions of the Hanged Man. These are from my Shadowscapes, Ghosts and Spirits, and Cosmic Tarot decks. I have combined them here because they all are full of tree imagery. While the RWS version does show greenery on the gallows, it is fair to say that it’s a tree that has been cut and converted into a means of torture or execution. This probably ties back to the undercurrent of Christian symbolism that I find troubling with Waite’s version, even though it does seem to agree with much earlier images. The two images on the side show living trees here, and the figure seems more or less suspended of their own free will. This can connote one of the possible readings of the card, that we need to alter our perspective of things.

In the Shadowscapes version, the figure reminds me of Peter Pan, at play with the faeries in the forests of Neverland. If we look upon the Hanged Man as symbolic of this transitory moment, of being neither one thing or another, then perhaps the perpetual child from Barrie’s classic is as apt a metaphor as any. There is, however, a possibly darker meaning here. The Egyptian ankh hangs on an upper branch. We find the ankh prominently figured in the Thoth Tarot of Aleister Crowley. The Hanged Man is suspended from it. Yet here he is separated. indicating, perhaps, that he falls, or hangs between, this life and the next.

Certainly this is more evident in the central card. The Ghosts and Spirits deck can be a disturbing read at times. The imagery is powerful, complex, and often horrific. We might see here a Tree of Death, instead of the Tree of Life. Yet many of the cards in this deck need to be interpreted as expressing the journey of the spirit outside the flesh, so in this case, like the Shadowscapes, we are possibly witness to a soul in between incarnations.

The Cosmic Tarot has a lot of Hindu and Buddhist overtones, in addition to other magic systems. If we view the Hanged Man similarly here, we might be looking through the Barod Thodol, commonly called the Tibetan Book of the Dead, where the spirit is trying to free itself of the entanglement of desire, so to break the endless cycle of reincarnation and merge back in the the Nothing That Is Everything (i.e. the Fool Card). If he let’s go, he is bound to fall to earth, and into another fleshly incarnation. The balance between is a means of avoiding incarnation, but it cannot be maintained. Only by eliminating the I, can the illusion be shattered.

There are several other possible connections that we can make when dealing with the Hanged Man. A notable one that often springs to my mind is that of the infant Zeus, taken by his mother Rhea and given to the nymphs. In one version of the story, he is kept suspended from a tree, touching neither the earth nor the heavens, and is thus kept invisible to Chronos, his father, who wants to kill him to avoid the prophecy that Kronos will die by the hands of his children. This idea that the Hanged Man occupies a kind of non-space is interesting.

The idea of Limbo is a Catholic expression of the place between places, which in “Neither in Heaven, nor Hell, nor upon the Earth”. Its place in the Catholic dogma is utilitarian. It resolves certain questions regarding the fate of those who, though they led just and noble lives, were not born under the covenant of the Christian Baptism. Per this doctrine, Christ when passing through death at the crucifixion comes first to Limbo, and redeems the souls there, such as Adam and Eve, Moses, and the other Hebrew chosen.

In theory, this would mean Limbo ceased to exist with the Resurrection, but there is an unofficial doctrine that says it now contains the souls of unchristened children, who, innocent of all but the original sin of humanity (i.e. they were born after Adam and Eve ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil). Since they did not receive the initial tabula rasa by the Rite of Baptism, they technically weren’t going to get into Heaven, but as they didn’t live long enough to actually give into that sinful nature, it wasn’t proper to send them into the torments of Hell. According to variations on this theme, during the Final Judgment foretold in Revelation, these lost children will be redeemed and allowed to ascend into Paradise.

Some Protestant offshoots also believe that Limbo is where all souls are waiting for the Judgment Day, when the physical resurrection will occur and the world will become an earthly paradise. We’re getting a bit ahead of ourselves here, as all that happens with Cards XIX and XX in a few weeks.

Getting back to our Hanged Man, I want to delve into one of those personal epiphanies that I have had over the years of working with these cards. Now, I will here caveat that the Unverifiable Personal Gnosis is just that. This is something that came from inside my head, possibly from a source I know not where, and there is little to no external verification of it as legitimate, or useful. That said, Tarot is an intuitive experience. Imagination is the key to using the toolkit, and this series of articles is about taking the cards beyond the face value, beyond potential connections and inferences, and letting the images on the cards inform your mind. So, onward.

At some point in recent years, not longer ago that a decade or so, but not so recently that i can readily remember. I started forming the impression that the Hanged Man is falling. Like the figures from the Tower, he has not hit the ground, nor is he on a firm point where he started from. I don’t know if there is a version of this card in one of my decks that started me thinking this way (I will endeavor to look before publication, but there’s a lot of decks to go through, and so far it’s not one of my usual ones).

Secondary to this, I also got the distinct impression that this person falling was the Morningstar, That is, Lucifer the Fallen Angel, who would later become synonymous with Satan, the Devil, etc. Obviously the Devil has his own card a few steps hence, but here again is that card between one state and the other. This is the Fall from Grace. It dovetails quite nicely with the idea that this card was originally a symbol of betrayal and treason to the established order, and that this was the punishment.

I confess to a bit of Luciferianism, in the sense that many depictions of the Fall and the Rebellious Angel are metaphor for the development of our own human psyche from the animal one we used to inhabit. Like his Greek counterpart Prometheus, Morningstar is being punished for bringing to man the Fire of the Gods. The gods feared what man might do with it, and justly so. We’ve really managed to foul things up with the exothermic reaction, and it’s numerous toxic by-products. Yet once the deed was done, the extreme punishment seems overkill given the nature of the crime.

Prometheus has his liver plucked out daily. Satan is cast into the pit of Hell. Adam and Eve are barred from the Garden “lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever”.

Seems awfully vindictive to me. So the question here with the Hanged Man, is, was Justice served? Coming as it does on the heels of that card, I am forced to wonder if we are meant to perceive this as righteous punishment. Again, I am not typically one adherent to the idea of a linear “Tarot journey” but I think there’s a relationship inherent in the order of the cards here. And that brings us back to the question of the placement of the Justice card as XI rather than Strength, which occupies that slot in some versions of Tarot.

hanged-man-wildwood-journey-into-egypt-tarot — Two very different takes on this card. The left is from the Wildwood Tarot and the right from the Journey Into Egypt. I selected them both because they involve water and because they address the same subject in a totally untraditional way.

Wildwood works from a kind of Pre-Celtic or Proto-Celtic shamanic perspective, but often ties to the later Arthurian myth and Grail stories. The authors would appear to believe that the Arthur stories are a folklore from this more ancient time, and are simply retold in the wake of the fall of Roman Britain as the chivalric romances. In this case, we are confronted by a water spirit, which could as well be called a kelpie or similar name, holding a bronze mirror and a seeing stone, In the foreground is one of the heron’s we see in the Wheel image from a couple of weeks back, with a small sack around its neck. Behind them is a boat, which appears to hold a corpse. The boat is anchored or tethered. Behind the boat is an island with three trees. The text accompanying this card has a good number of esoteric ideas. It says also that many aspects of the traditional Hanged Man have been moved onto the Blasted Oak, which is this deck’s version of the Tower. I personally see the falling man from the Tower card having something in common with the Hanged Man, but here he is the figure in the boat, neither on this shore or the next. While the death metaphor seems very obvious, the text says this is about initiation, about reaching a point of injury or pain, that allows one to being open to the voyage to the island and healing. It is, according to the authors, not a journey that may be sought, but one that comes to us.

The Journey To Egypt deck is an amazing artistic expression. It diverts from the traditional take on the cards and yet manages to still impart much of that message. The figure here in isolation in the background, does not appear to be drowned. He is on the shore and apparently high and dry. Look again. His reflected self in the water is our Hanged Man, upside down, the world wrong side up. The man on the shore is bound to the man in the water. Neither of them are going anywhere. On facet of this deck is that it associated each card with astronomical events. I think it rather interesting that this one represents the Summer Solstice, which is the day this article is being released.

Remember that all of the cards are unnumbered in the original versions. The respective values of these cards in the Tarocchi game would seem to be more or less equal, so the ordering and numbering seems to have occurred when they began to be used by the adepts for purposes of divination. Levi gives us an order based on Kabbalah and the Hebrew Letters. He potentially inherits that from earlier sources, and later creators keep it roughly the same with the exception of cards VIII and XI. Justice might logically precede execution and death. But then justice might also fit between the force of an established state symbolized by the Chariot, and the isolate contemplation of the individual in the Hermit. It’s a question as to whether Strength fits better between the random chaos of the Wheel and the uncertain suspension of the Hanged Man. If Strength is the assertion of the Will over Nature- even individual nature, then a possible reading of the Hanged Man is equilibrium in the space of Chaos. He is not punished for having done wrong, he is simply unable to find a firm footing in an unstable universe. He cannot cling to the dogma he knows to be false, nor can he firmly embrace the totality of free will and personal responsibility because there is no assurance of accuracy or correctness. He lives in a quantum reality where the actual nature of things is only known by probability, potentiality, and only known too late. There’s no wonder that he is in torment.

There’s always some context where the seeker has to identify with the Rebel Angel. There is a point in our exploration of the universe and our own minds where we will question the truth of everything. We are not venerating in this sense, only stating that we can, in some way, feel empathy with Prometheus chained to that rock, waiting for the vulture to come again with the dawn. For Prometheus is aware of that eternal agony that what we believe to be true is always under threat from our own spiritual growth. We can either be content to remain ignorant, celebrating blind faith in something that we ourselves doubt, or risk the eternal damnation of never really being sure of anything ever again.

So we hang there on the tree, neither in Heaven or in Hell, unable to free ourselves to fall to the ground, or to climb back up to where we started from. In many ways this is a very pessimistic card, and they tend to get less cheerful from here.

I can only offer that there is a quiet to living in Limbo that can be very freeing, or at least restful. You know that change is coming. Change is inevitable. Yet now, you have the satisfaction of having endured change, and perhaps the confidence that you can endure the change to come, so being betwixt and between is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s hard to take any calls there.

I thank you for reading this week’s article. I am attending Heather Graham’s Writers for New Orleans later this week, where I will be part of a panel on occult subject matter. I will be reading Tarot for some of the folks in attendance, for the first time in many years. I am looking forward to seeing how the experience of articulating my views of these cards here will impact my readings, and I am wondering how the experience of cold reading will impact the remaining articles in this series. Since next week we face down Card XIII, with all the baggage it carries along, it should be informative. I hope you will join me then.

May 31, 2023May 31, 2023

Light Unto The Path

Card IX of the Major Arcana is one that I find myself drawn more and more to as I get older. This is, to my thinking, something of a natural progression, and we’ll look into that. For those who have not read my earlier articles where the Hermit is discussed in various contexts, this will likely all be new territory. For those who have followed me for a while, I trust you will forgive any repetition of concepts mentioned in those earlier articles as we delve into this week’s topic.

The Hermit card shows a lone figure standing on a snowy mountain summit against a blue sky. He wears a hooded grey robe, and has long white hair and beard. In his left hand he holds a simple staff, and in his right he holds a lantern. In the midst of the lantern is a hexagram star, giving off rays that travel only a short distance. There are the tops of other mountains seen in the distance. His gaze is cast downward.

hermit-rws-tarot — In keeping with austerity of a life in isolation, this is one of the most minimalist designs Pamela Smith offers us.

The design here is one of the simplest of all the Major Arcana. That is appropriately in keeping with the subject as an ascetic engaged in isolated contemplation. Because, as we have discussed, Waite’s charge for this deck was intimately connected with Christianity, the figure is portrayed more or less as a lone monk.

Monasticism in origin was not the movement that it later became. The practice began with individuals withdrawing from the word and living completely alone, often in caves in the desert. There were no orders, and there certainly were no monasteries. The “mon” in monastic, and indeed in monk, is derived from monos- one, or lone. Supposedly Benedict was the first of these early monks to put forth the idea that they could all be alone together, and thus formed a monastic order. Later such orders would be approved as official by the church, and charged with specific duties and obligations. I imagine similar developments occurred within Buddhism, but there are still hermit monks in many traditions, who seek personal wisdom and enlightenment by a quiet withdrawing from the world.

This context is central to a number of the meanings and associations ascribed to this card. In a Christian scenario, the withdrawal is to place oneself away from sin, or at least, from the temptation to sin. In this way the Hermit purifies himself from the flesh, and thereby encourages the spirit. The wisdom imparted here, of course, is the absolute truth and rightness of the Christian teaching, and thereby the hermit monk has his soul saved, while his body suffers.

Mortification is practiced in multiple cultures for purification, but also for the creation of trance states and the getting of visions. Living in a cave in isolation, subsisting on a diet of “locusts and wild honey” could certainly induce psychologically altered states of consciousness. If one is bent to be looking for signs from God, those altered states can take on the character of a profound religious experience. Ironically, of course, these experiences are frequently depicted as ecstasy, general of the physical kind that the hermit has moved out into the wilderness to avoid.

The Hermit is traditionally given the Sign of Virgo astrologically. I find this a rather simplistic reading, equating virginity to the avowed celibacy of the monk. The two are not identical, nor are they interchangeable. It’s simply convenient to make the attribution if you are looking for some place in the Tarot to attach Virgo. The fact is, as I have mentioned before, that the Hermit in earlier decks is a personification of passing Time, and this Chronos being confounded in ancient days with Kronos the Titan, makes Saturn a more apt connection than Virgo.

hermit-Wildwood-tarot — This Hermit Card from the Wildwood Tarot is one of my favorites. The figure is reminiscent of Dicken’s Spirit of Christmas Yet To Come. It is faceless, and the robe is worn. The wreath and the faded adornments on the lower part of the robe identify this figure as the Holly King, the spirit of winter, and a potent symbol of the fate that awaits us all at the end of the path. Yet it carries a bright light in that Winter Dark, and shines it upon a lone little bird. The bird, along with the blades of grass piercing the snow, remind us that the future holds the promise of rebirth, and even when death awaits, it is a transition to

I have personally always seen the Hermit as analogous with both Father Time and some Saturnine aspect, and as I age, this is even more apparent. My own second Saturn return is now less than a year away, and astrologers suggest that this brings with it contemplation of deeper meanings, the path that we have taken, and the potentially shorter path that lies ahead. Old Saturn with his 29 year cycle, was rarely met more than twice by our ancestors, and sometimes no more than once. Thus associating him as I do with the aged figure on the mountain top, perhaps looking back along the trail he has climbed, is not so arbitrary as the monkish renunciation of carnal activities.

I personally identify greatly with the Hermit card. It is not that I am anti-social, at least in the sense that I live in a cave in the desert and eat bugs. But I have for more of my life than not, been very insular and private. My world has almost always been more of the inward one than the outer one. The cave I inhabit is internal. As a precocious and odd child, my social isolation was very common. I had few friends and most of them were similarly odd. I cannot with any accuracy say if the experience of being an outsider or loner led to my inclination toward silence and self-contemplation, or if I had a bent for quiet meditation that limited the ability of other more outgoing types to bond with me. Whether it was the chicken or the egg, the result is that I generally prefer pursuits of a personal nature rather than a collaborative one.

That is not to say that I am incapable of interacting with others, but it does require a great deal of energy and focus, even with persons whose company I enjoy sharing. This, I believe, is what they are defining as introversion these days. There is possibly also some overshadows of the autistic spectrum that may be applicable. The difficulty inherent in expressing oneself, combined with the discomfort, or even fear, of being misunderstood, and a compulsion to pre-run the outcomes of any and all scenarios, creates a synergy where communication is a complex and stress inducing task. The result is frequently exhausting, and therefore the appeal of the quite moments alone. The obligations of my life as I have lived it, and as the result of the choices I have made along it, require me to adapt and develop coping mechanisms to address these stresses. I have been doing so for the better part of half a century, but as I get older, I am becoming more selective as to when I need to employ those mechanisms, and when the outcome is equal or even better if I simply make the choice to be that Hermit.

Of course, my life would probably be much simpler if I had not self-imposed the need to author a weekly article on various subjects to an audience who may or may not be out there.

But that brings us to the Hermit’s Lantern.

hermit-lantern — My “genuine official” Hermit’s Lantern, or a reasonably close facsimile. Like many of the odd things in my collection of odd things, it is both a prop and a magical object. This is not unusual in the history of occult practice. The knife and cookpot and the hearthstone and walking stick are all mundane objects, with mundane uses, that the village witch of yore would have employed both for practical and more esoteric purpose. The idea that we have to have a sacred set of special tools that can’t ever ever be used for what they actually are would have been ludicrous to our ancestors. Certainly, owning a “magic wand” or “witch’s cauldron” would have brought considerable risk in the days of the persecutions, but most houses would have had staffs, clubs, switches, and other sticks, and of course there was a big black iron pot over the fire. My lantern can be used symbolically, and in spell craft. But it can also be used to light my way in the dark.

I have one of those, you know. Found it at one of the discount stores that deal in leftover merchandise originally offered in the high-end department stores. I also have a staff and the monks cassock. Sometimes things just click like that.

But the Hermit’s lamp first and foremost is the analogue for the wisdom he has gained, the secrets that he has teased out of the dark bosom of the universe during the nigh endless hours of lonely seeking. Because, frankly, the point of wisdom is to pass it on. We are potentially alone on this planet in our ability to communicate our experiences to others in a fashion that expands and extends their value.

While there are a good many creatures that exhibit the ability to pass data instinctively, there are, at least as far as we know, none that can record that data in perpetuity. The monasteries of all faiths seem to affirm the need to chronicle what comes from contemplation, meditation, and isolation. They maintain libraries as a part of their function, and through that we have preserved the collected musings of the ages. It is a sad fact of history that many such libraries were lost to war, disaster, and accident, yet what remains, though meager, is wonderful.

The purpose of the Hermit is therefore not to leave this world, but to know it. This ties card IX to card 0, the Fool. As I stated early, the symbolism of the Fool is that state of Unknowing, that exists in the Unformed. It is that moment of Becoming, that is precipitation by the I withdrawing from the Not I , that is the creation of all. The edge of the cliff the Fool strides toward is where the Universe divides from itself in order to know itself. The death presaged by the card is real. The Universe as it was before will die, and never be again, because as the full plunges over the edge a new Universe begins that has the capacity to be experienced.

hermit-Shadowscapes-tarot — Stephanie Law gives us an ethereal and elfin Hermit in her Shadowscapes Tarot. Her mastery of watercolor and deep knowledge of anatomical forms results in unique and wonderful depictions that preserve the spirit of the card, while giving us a gateway into a whole new kind of world. The symbols seem derived from Celtic myth, but walk far closer to the walls of Faerie than something like Wildwood, which is more directly a restatement of Celtic Shamanism. I work frequently with both decks, depending on mood. The Shadowscapes have a kind of music about them, and are far easier to travel into and through.

And here is the Hermit withdrawing from the world, to know himself, and in doing so, to know the greater truth that lies beyond that edge, to return, perhaps to the Unknowing, beyond that event horizon where the original Idea was made form. It is a parallel intention.

While the Fool simply does, and the result becomes the intention, the Hermit intends. I made a distinction earlier between virginity and celibacy. This is exemplified in the relationship between these two cards. Virginity is an initial state of the origin of things, that once lost, may never be again. Innocence cannot be regained. Celibacy or chastity is the result of an intended act of restraint that may be constant or practiced in intervals. While the two can exist together, that is, one can be virginal and also chaste, it is not necessarily required for the chaste to be a virgin.

Virginity is the condition of our beginning. The Fool is the first card. When we reach the Hermit, we are presented with an old man, who we hope is wiser, but is likely no longer innocent. He chooses to be apart from the world because he has known it. Yet this choice makes it all the more present in his mind.

Anyone who has gone on a diet has experienced the stronger craving for something they are forbidden, even though they were not so desirous of it when they could have it. This is what makes the changing of habits difficult.

The Buddhists say that this is why we can’t free ourselves from the desire to be, and return to the nothingness that is. We are no longer the Fool, the Unknowing, and while our objective as the Hermit is to deny it, that denial makes the desire for it even stronger. We can be as celibate as we want, but it doesn’t ever make us a virgin.

So faced with this contradiction, the Hermit re-enlists in the world, at least to the extent that those rays will reach. The light from the Hermit’s Lantern is dim, not because it does not burn brightly, but because, as a consequence of the experience only known to the Hermit, is incredibly difficult to communicate with others who lack his frame of reference.

hermit-Ghosts-and-Spirits-tarot — A final variation on our theme, this from the Ghosts and Spirits Tarot by Lisa Hunt. This deck is certainly one of the most unique ones I have, and not for the faint of heart. The imagery is frequently dark and disturbing, even when expressing images that typically are considered positive in the Tarot literature. It departs significantly from conventional designs. Like Shadowscapes, it offers complex swirling tableaus where faces seem to peer from everywhere. This reflects an animist perspective, but it also signals that we are looking into a world behind the mask of simple mundane reality. The Hermit from the usual card stands here at the rear right of the image, The lantern aloft, the eyes closed in some internal reverie. But the spirit of the Hermit is a sparkling whirlwind in the middle of the wilderness of hidden realm. It is also a realm we can step into, if we are willing to take the risk.

This is why scholars and writers on esoterism and philosophy make a distinction between intelligence and wisdom. We can easily impart facts to one another. We can express that two and two are equal to four, and that four and four are equal to eight. We can explain how to properly conjugate verbs in all the languages of the human race. But when it comes to sharing our insights into the sublime wonders of the Divine our mouths fall silent. Our tongues are still. The words are simply not enough.

The Hermit’s Staff is his knowledge. He leans upon it. It is firm. It is strong. He can hand that Staff to another and it will be unchanged. It will be firm and strong and equally useful, but it is not the Light of the Lantern, with the shape barely visible within it, the simple, but also phenomenal “As above, so below”.

And as without, so within. He lives in the internal world, his eyes downcast. What does he see? What does he not see?

He may be looking toward the path he has climbed. He may be looking at the deepening road before him.

But one thing is certain. He does not, at least, look at the Lantern.

Is it because he has already seen the Light, or is it because the Light is too bright to bear. It stands out from him. It is separated from him, unlike the staff which he holds close to the body. Is this to make it a beacon unto others, or is it because he cannot stand it being too close, because the brightness is a pain and a distraction? Does it light his path, or does it obscure it to his aging gaze?

I can only say that walking along that path myself, there are times when the light is too dim to make anything out, and times when it is too bright to make anything out, and in the end both results are same. You have to put your next foot forward carefully, and hope for the best.

If you are lucky, you won’t step off that cliff.

Join me next week for Fortune’s Wheel and the inexorable turning of the days from spring toward summer. Thank you for your continued patronage.

March 1, 2023February 28, 2023

ALIENS!

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
–Arthur C. Clarke, Author of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Inventor of the Geosynchronous Satellite.

Since I stepped into the Wayback Machine and dropped into the wild and wacky 1970s with the article on Pyramid Power, I thought I needed to address that other peripherally persistent paranormal phenomenon.

I don’t believe that space aliens (or even ALIENS!) were responsible for the pyramids, Stonehenge, Easter Island, the Nazca Plateau, Teotihuacan, or the Ziggurat of Ur. As I said earlier, human beings, even without modern technology, had technology and it worked.

They also had motivations that we don’t share, because we live in a different culture, in a different time. So what to our modern eyes appears to be a wasteful dedication of tremendous labor and resources to a strange obsession would seem the most normal of things to them.

The human brain physiologically is fairly the same now as it has been since Cro-Magnon times. To suggest that this brain simply couldn’t accomplish any of these things without the intervention of an advanced alien species is really just unfair to our ancestors.

That said, I fully believe that there are extraterrestrial species, probably extradimensional and extratemporal ones (and some that might qualify as all three) and that they have visited this world in our past and likely still do.

So lets look at this a little less sensationally than the cable channels do for bit. Lets talk about the physical realities of time, space, and dimension, and just exactly how those realities can give us some insight into the nature of our visitors.

Firstly, as we know, space is really really big. Enormous in fact, and possibly infinite. Since Einstein and his contemporaries and successors have established that we exist within a time-space continuum, that bigness may be both infinite and eternal.

So given that, the denial by any person or group that there is certainly the potential for alien life is truly against all odds. To insist that only this tiny little gravel in the whole vastness of vastness alone contains not only the spark of life, but the sole intelligence, and spiritual monopoly over all that is, was, or will be is ludicrous.

Carl Sagan, in the original Cosmos book and series popularized something called Drake’s equation. This was formulated by astronomer Frank Drake to address the potential for communicating with an alien species.

In general terms, it says there are a certain number of stars in the galaxy, and of those, a certain number that have planets, and of those planets a certain number that could sustain life, and of the life-sustaining planets, a certain number that have civilizations that arise capable of sending signals into space, and of those civilizations, a certain number that don’t end up nuking or polluting themselves out of existence before they can send a signal. And finally, of these, they have to be sending the signal at the time that we are able to receive it (which in our case has only been a little less than a century) and be close enough that receiving that signal is within the lifespan of the civilization sending it.

This last couple of points is where things get really tricky.

The speed of light is a constant (the” “c” in E=mc²) throughout the known universe. This constant speed means that the light from a distant star will travel a certain distance in a certain time, and we use this to measure how big space is.

The typical measurement is a light year.

For reference, a light second is a bit over 186,000 miles (a bit under 300,000 km). So there are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours per day and 365 days in a year. It’s about six quadrillion miles.

To put that in perspective, the sun at a scant 93 million miles away is 8 light minutes. The planet Mars is around 2 light minutes, but even when we fly there in the most direct path, our conventional spacecraft still take several months.

Six quadrillion miles is huge. And that is one light year. Just one. Outside our solar system, there’s nothing that is that close.

The nearest star is about five light years away. Thirty quadrillion miles. That’s almost across the street compared to most of the stars we see in the sky at night.

So going back to Drake’s equation, let’s say some brilliant alien physicist on Alpha Centauri sends a radio message out in the general direction of our boring little blue dot. It would take about five years for that message to reach us, and another five years for any reply we sent to get back to them. So a round trip text takes roughly a decade. Since we have only really been able to receive radio messages since the early 1900s, in the entire 40 millennia lifespan of humanity, we’d have only been able to send and receive maybe a dozen messages.

Now assume that the physicist on Alpha Centauri lived over 100 years ago. He sent the message out, then they had an atomic war and the technology was lost. That message sailed right past Earth before Tesla and Marconi were experimenting with variable oscillation of electrical waves, and we never even knew about it.

That’s just the guy next door. Let’s talk about someone sending a message out from somewhere like Antares, the big red giant in Scorpio. That’s 554.5 light years. If we got a message from them now, it would have been sent almost forty years before Columbus began the colonization of the Western Hemisphere.

If the message got sent from the other side of our own Milky Way galaxy, it would have started it’s journey to our tiny speck a bit less than 106,000 years ago. So the civilization on that planet developed technology before the coming of the modern homo sapien, a mere 43,000 years ago.

Now suppose they lived a long time ago in a galaxy far far away?

The Great Spiral Galaxy in Andromeda is our closest intergalactic neighbor, and that is just over 2.5 million lightyears away. On Earth, 2.5 million years ago, the first homonids that would eventually give rise to the human race were just evolving in what is now Central Africa, and the Ice Ages were about to begin. Any intelligent signal we’d get from Andromeda now would have been beamed out that long ago.

These vast distances in time and space are one of the many reasons that contact with “space aliens” would seem so very unlikely as to be nigh impossible. Even if there had been a message sent out (intentionally or not) might the great gulf of years not simply have ended the species that sent it?

On our own planet, we have evidence of several mass extinctions due to planetary upheavals, environmental disasters, and bombardment by interstellar debris. Within our recorded history the precarious grasp our own species has on planetary dominance has been significantly threatened by war, famine, pestilence, and death. Our advancement to the stage where we can send and receive such signals has gone hand-in-hand with the discovery of technologies that could effectively destroy us, and possibly make the planet unlivable for any succeeding species.

In two and half million years, could any species survive all these factors? And if it did, what might it have evolved into in that time?

In 2.5 million years we moved from being just another animal in the ancient jungle to sending probes into interstellar space. How would another couple of million years change us? Would we even be recognizable as the species that sent that probe? And would we even want to still communicate with whoever, or whatever it reached?

The fact is that the Andromeda galaxy we see today was what it looked like that long ago. For all we know, the entire galaxy may no longer be there, or it may be vastly changed. Stars will have died and been born in the ongoing pattern of entropy that characterizes our experience of passing time. And our perception of this is currently limited by that speed of light, beyond which nothing can be observed.

The reality of this has lead authors of science fiction, futurism, and space fantasy to develop several tropes for Faster-Than-Light (FTL) travel. Whether it be warp drive, wormholes, or hyperspace, these stories all rely upon some means of getting us out there in the thick of it all, meeting with the aliens, making love and war, and doing all those human things we do that apparently all the aliens do just enough like we do so that we understand it.

spacewahle — The chances that our alien visitors will look or act anything like our concept of “life forms” are actually pretty remote. If they are carbon based, we might be able to recognize that they are alive. Whether or not they are sentient and advanced enough to travel the stars might actually elude us.

Numerous science fiction stories talk about alien spores that form a hive mind when they “infect” the fauna of the planet onto which they drift. Compare this to the “zombie ant” phenomenon, where a fungus invades an ant, takes control of it’s behavior, and uses it to spread the fungus.

There are theories that it is not just the ants that are part of some fungal consciousness. Much has been made lately of the size and interconnectivity of mushroom mycelia underlying forests and fields. There are theories that some kind of plant telepathy is going on across the fungal network, and that we may be dealing with some sort of intelligence that is so different from our own that we don’t even realize it is intelligence. Whether it’s origin is terrestrial or otherwise is an open topic.

There are even a few texts I’ve encountered asserting that the psychotropic effects of psilocybin are a means of this fungal consciousness communicating with humans, and elevating us to a higher order of being.

And that’s just one bizarre possibility for carbon-based life like ourselves that depends on things like amino acids and liquid water. If we get into critters made from silicon and methane, all bets are off. They certainly wouldn’t register as living by our standards, and we might not even be able to determine they were communicating with us, or even with each other. In that context the whole “magic crystal” branch of occultism takes on a completely different character.

Which is the other great trope of science fiction, that the majority of the aliens look and act and communicate just like us. This, of course, is where things can also go awry.

Even if an alien species can get to Earth from so very very very far away, we might not even recognize them. Douglas Adams pointed out this in So Long And Thanks For All The Fish. Roger Zelazny takes it a step further in the story ‘Kjwalll’kje’k’koothai’lll’kje’k featured in his My Name Is Legion anthology. Leonard Nimoy was influenced by Adams when he made the fourth Star Trek film, so this idea that we have an intelligent alien species living among us, but that they are so alien in how they respond and interact with their environment is not new.

The evolutionary history of cetaceans is about as well documented as that of our own homonid ancestry, so calling dolphins and whales “aliens” may be a bit of a stretch. The cephalopods in our oceans also demonstrate what we would consider “intelligence”. There are several internet videos of the octopus at the aquarium that would leave it’s own tank, crawl across the floor, and help itself to a tasty snack from one of the other tanks, before returning home. This sort of behavior is on par with chimpanzees and gorillas.

Yet the chimpanzees and gorillas inhabit our terrestrial environment with gravity (or at least without buoyancy) limited vertical depth (without supporting structures), and they have bilateral symmetry and binocular vision. Sound and scent do not travel as far through the medium of air, and changes in pressure are less intense. And rarely do we find that food just floats by.

So our ability to understand and possibly communicate with chimpanzees and gorillas is ultimately aided by our shared experience of the world. We have far less in common with the dolphin and even less with the octopus.

How then do we expect to understand and communicate with the little green man from Alpha Centauri? In fact, would we even recognize him? Has he been sending us messages for ages and we just think it’s noise, part of that “cosmic background radiation” that used to show up on old TVs when the broadcast day had ended (yes, boys and girls, that actually was a thing when I grew up).

Well, the scientists argue that the aliens will also have thought of that. They’ll have realized that “life, but not as we know it” is probably more the norm for the universe than “life as we know it” and looked for something that does seem to be truly universal. Which brings us back to math.

Numbers are universal, they are immutable, the idea of number is endemic to the nature of reality. There are things and other things and because of this number exists without question in all times, spaces, and dimensions. And the permutations that can be applied to number, which we call mathematics, is also a finite, established, and absolute. So we can send signals using numbers and have these signals interpreted by another vastly more alien species.

There are some other things we have in common with the aliens. Things like frequency and wavelength, which along with mathematics, can be used to express more complicated concepts like atomic structure, chemical makeup, interstellar distances, and music.

Yes. Music.

Music is the result of intervals of waves. At varying frequencies, you get higher or lower tones, but the basic set of tones in human hearing tend toward 7 discreet whole notes and another 5 half notes. Every piece of music ever written is made of just 12 notes. Ergo this sort of thing might give us a simple basis for a shared language, like an interplanetary esperanto, when we meet the aliens.

If any of my readers are familiar with the classic film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, you have seen this theory in action. Benevolent little grey aliens visit the earth in the late 70s, imprinting psychic messages to those humans who are receptive. Some of them interpret the messages as five specific tones, which are translated by the scientists into the latitude and longitude of a location. Others express the message as paintings or drawings or sculptures. I always found it fascinating that the aliens spoke to us through art, which I believe is a marker for highly intelligent self-aware life.

In the end they bring everyone together at the Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, where the mothership arrives and returns people who were “abducted” through history from places like the Bermuda Triangle.

In writing the movie, director Steven Spielberg drew upon many of the popular themes of the UFO subculture of the 1970s. The alien abductions, the little grey men with big heads and big almond-shaped eyes, suspension of passing time aboard alien ships, and even the government cover-up were a part of the modern zeitgeist following Chariots of the Gods. It is little wonder that the immensely popular film, and the more kid-friendly ET, has perpetuated these impressions of the alien encounter to the present.

But for a number of reasons such as I just mentioned, it is very very very unlikely that visiting aliens from a distant planet would look anything at all like humans, or humanoids. We are more likely to encounter the “Old Ones” from Lovecraft’s At The Mountains of Madness than smaller, taller, greyer, greener, furrier, scalier, multiple-limbed and eyed versions of ourselves. So where were these guys coming from?

Well, the UFOlogists and sci-fi writers have postulated on more than one occasion that they look like us because they made us in their image. That is, according to several different theories and popular fictions, at some point in the remote past, maybe around 2.5 million years ago, the aliens beamed down to the jungle in Central Africa, beamed up some monkeys, and started tinkering with the DNA, splicing in genes from their own, in order to create what would become the human race.

This is an intriguing and potentially comforting theory, but I don’t put a lot of credence in it. Namely because, aside from a certain Dr. Moreau, we humans don’t seem to have any interest in gene splicing monkeys into proto-humans (and that is a good thing). While we’re happy to mix DNA from jelly-fish into a tomato, that’s in the interest of increasing shelf-life. There’s not a profit motive to making monkey-people…at least not yet.

Permutations of the original story in the novel Planet of the Apes suggests at some point in our future, intelligent simians may be substituted for menial labor, essentially bred as a slave race. Well, we’ve done that for horses, and we have done it for so many other species for the pure purpose of food, so it’s not an impossibility.

But why overcome the extreme problems of interstellar travel just to drop in on a little rock and play havoc with monkey DNA? Speculative fiction gives us every option from said slave labor to preserving something of a dying alien species. It’s a kind of terraforming or colonization, by way that the colonists don’t know they are colonists.

But then why come back a couple of million years later, looking just the same as you appeared to the monkey-men, and start that whole probing business? Did they not evolve at all during that period of time? Shouldn’t they have even bigger heads and be even less human like?

Well, there’s an obvious answer for that, too (except for the whole probing thing). They’re time travelers.

Time travel solves a lot of those pesky problems about the universe being too big and the aliens being too far away and them dropping in to check up on us every now and then.

treks files_ — At the forefront of physics are assertions that parallel universes not only do exist, but are likely. The extent to which these diverge from our own, and whether or not travel in time, or through things like wormholes, give us access to a multiverse, and it to us, is still in the realm of fiction.

In quantum reality, potential exists for multiple outcomes until one outcome is fixed by observation. Multiverse theories say that all those other outcomes got fixed by other observers observing them, and so they went on to the next potential outcome and the next, until all other possible universes exist. Since this would tend to become quite crowded, other quantum universes are separated from us by membranes that prevent our being aware of them. They may, and probably do, exist in the same space and time that we do, but don’t experience them and they don’t experience us.

Until, of course, something breaks.

Perception of other planes of existence, even our own altered states of consciousness, could very well be traversing the boundaries between these quantum states. Our dreams, scientifically, are internal illusions created by our brains to process experiences into memory. But that same science can’t fully explain how a few ounces of soggy meat can do that, or any of the other things we experience as living thinking creatures. So who can say whether when I dream I walk on the sands of Mars an aeon ago and listen to the strange harps that play in the shadows of two moons.

If they have mastered time travel, then they can land here before they even leave Rigel VII, park the DeLorean next to the police call box for as long as they want, and still be home in time for dinner. The FTL trope almost always involves some kind of time travel, because our measurement of time is tied to our experience of the universe, and that is tied to the speed of light.

So I got to thinking, that maybe the aliens didn’t create human beings in the distant past. Maybe they simply were human beings from the distant future, after we’d evolved the big heads and grey skin and the weird probing fetish.

Maybe we were coming back at points along our timeline to fix ourselves, and keep us from wiping out the future. Maybe we’re trying to stop nuclear war or environmental collapse or Trump from getting that sports almanac and other worthwhile endeavors.

At least that all seems a tad more likely to me than that millions of years ago an unbelievably advanced alien civilization decided to propagate itself using Earth’s monkeys. Or that the same civilization needed them for slave labor or even food.

Let’s be real, if you can cross time, space, and dimension at that scale, breeding a bunch of metachimps to tend bar (or mine ore) is not a requirement of your culture. Exploiting the local primitives is a fairly exclusively human point of view.

In solving the secrets of the cosmos necessary to make it your local park, you will have elevated yourself as a species beyond that. You may, in fact have elevated yourself beyond the need to work with time, space, and dimension in the way our current terrestrial understanding of physics allows.

You might just be using magic.

angels-spaceship — I’ve clearly been having a bit of fun here with the pictures for this article, but they still illustrate my points. We are conditioned to think of modern “alien encounters” as a science-fiction style experience, and separate from the ancient experiences of similar phenomenon.

The descriptions of “fiery chariots” pervade many early accounts of extraterrestrial interaction, though the people of the time considered them to be gods and angels. The seraphim and cherubim of the Bible (left) with their wheels within wheels, and many faces turning in all directions are not terribly dissimilar from the spinning towers of the Hindu vimana (right) or “Celestial Chariot”.

The Chariot is a powerful symbol. In ancient times, the chariot was the jet fighter of the battlefield. . It provided a mobile platform for striking at an enemy, breaking ranks, and delivering grievous harm to foot soldiers. Invariably the nations that possessed this technology rose to being feared powers in their regions.

It’s natural association with the solar deity can be found in almost every culture where it existed. In Egypt, where it was a later import, it gives way to the Boat of Ra, but otherwise it is ubiquitous from the Asian steppe to the Hibernian shores.

It comes down to us as an emblem of force, of active energy working upon the face of the void. As such it is an apt metaphor for a process transcending space time. Some older versions of this Tarot show wheels all around the central platform, denoting “impossible” motion, and the capacity to operate outside of normal dimensions.

In Smith’s version this is carried in the gyro, or spinning top on the emblazon of the front. It’s intriguing that our own spacecraft carry such gyros as a means of finding their way where normal conventions like up/down and east/west/north/south don’t function. This inertial navigation system was developed by people who worked in places like Area 51, and things like the USAF Project: Bluebook investigating UFOs.

But, of course, that’s only a coincidence. Or maybe it’s ….

Our word “astral” comes from the Greek meaning star. Astral travel is basically space travel. Those who first coined the term in ancient times were experiencing, or believed that they were experiencing, arriving on other worlds, inhabited by strange and wonderous beings.

These worlds they equated with the “planets” they saw in the night sky, and perhaps the further stars. Humans have been traveling through interstellar space before the Voyager mission, and long before the Montgolfier brothers even floated above Paris in their balloon. We just called it something else.

And by the same token, it’s highly likely that alien beings of greatly evolved intellect may have found a means of visiting this world, or this dimension, or even this universe, using methods that we wouldn’t recognize as space craft. These aliens may have been perceived as spirits and gods, though not in the sense that Von Däniken describes them. His theories are of physical spacemen arriving in physical machines that were mistaken by “primitive” people for other things, and described in less technological terms.

By his telling, our ancestors could not conceive of a flying machine, so they had to speak of great birds. I’m not sure I buy that. Early humans may have ascribed mystical properties to stones and metals, but they knew what they were. I don’t think they could have mistaken a glass and metal craft for a living animal. Indeed, in India, the stories of the Vimana are distinctly about such machines, used by the “gods” in battle.

On the other hand, experiences of “wheels within wheels”, “wheels full of eyes”, and “beings of coals of fire” found in various Biblical accounts of angels are certainly more in keeping with the idea of an advanced life-form that is being experienced in an extra-dimensional or extra-physical way.

There are at least a half dozen episodes of Star Trek where the aliens are just glowing balls of light. These are intelligences that have grown beyond the need for the physical body. The ability of such a being to manifest or appear to manifest in a physical form is also postulated -so that we can communicate with it.

To excerpt from the episode Errand of Mercy one such alien, having created the illusion of an entire human-like culture offers the following:

“. . .please leave us. The mere presence of beings like yourselves is intensely painful to us. . . .Millions of years ago . . . we were humanoid like yourselves, but we have developed beyond the need of physical bodies. That of us which you see is mere appearance for your sake.”

I find these ideas echoed well in Jason Miller’s Consorting with Spirits. He offers that the purpose of meditation, ritual, and incantation is needful to bridging the gap between the world we inhabit and the world that such rarified beings inhabit. Instead of using hypergolic rockets or warp drive to reach them, we are bending the nature of reality using the intrinsic energy of the universe itself.

This is a kind of technology. It operates according to certain rules, and produces certain results repeatedly, provided that all required factors are met. We simply call it magic, like many of our ancestors did.

Two hundred years ago, the electricity being used to make these words appear before you, some time and distance from where they were written, would have been considered a work of pure sorcery, and probably a tool of the devil.

In my own lifetime, we have taken machines that once filled entire buildings and made them fit in one’s pocket.

We can now see each other from across the globe, in real time, without even batting an eye.

How much harder is it to believe that an older race, a different kind of race, can do the same thing across millions of light years of space or thousands of years in time or myriad dimensions beyond our reckoning?

Up until the last 150 years or so, this belief would have been held by most of the people in the world. As science has moved to the forefront, and catalogued and quantified much of our natural world’s processes, the ability of people to accept a spirit behind every tree and under every rock has waned. This is a sad loss.

Science has told us that there are no angels, so we’ve started calling them aliens.

The truth is out there.

I’ll be back next week.

February 22, 2023February 22, 2023

The Sacred Life

On Friday last I attended the Ordination to the Diaconate at the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart. We had been invited to witness the investiture of a friend. I am not Catholic and clearly not Christian, but I respect individuals who live their faith through tolerance, generosity and humanity, even if the “official” policies of the faith are problematic.

Besides, it gave me an opportunity to anthropologically observe a high ritual for comparison and contrast with my research on the nature of human belief. I had attended Catholic weddings and funerals before where an abbreviated mass and Eucharist had been performed along with the other rites, but this was the big show, conducted by a full Prince of the Church, and something I was very much interested in seeing.

Contrary to what you may expect, neither I nor the cathedral burst into flames when I crossed the threshold. And while I respected the requests to stand and sit (kneeling I don’t do, aside from the hypocrisy that would involve, my arthritic knees simply won’t accommodate that), I did not partake of the Communion. I will not profane another’s sacred rite by participating in it if I am not a believer. I was not alone, in that respect. Whether because they were not of the faith, or were, but did not feel the need to partake, I can’t say, but fortunately I was not the only person attending that skipped that part. Within that context, I found the whole experience immensely interesting and enlightening.

I’ve been fascinated by the symbolic toolkit of the Mother Church since art history class, and was actually a bit let down by the more modern and rather bland cathedral. I suppose it’s hard to be wowed after you’ve experienced the great Gothic edifices of Europe. This building had more in common with their predecessors in the medieval times. The space, though sufficiently massive to impress, was limited in decoration, and lacking the great glimmering mosaics or stained glass of the traditional churches.

In fairness, with the congregation much more literate, and with audio-visual tech for reaching those less so, the need for the great surface decorations as means of visual instruction in the mysteries no longer exists. To me, that is rather sad. The aesthetic experience of art, and the elevation of spirit and alteration of consciousness that art alone can provide, was missing here, or at very least subdued. Beneath the great dome of the crossing was a porphyry high altar, supported by twelve columns emblematic of the Twelve Apostles (and just perhaps the twelves zodiac signs). To the right of the dais was a matching lectern as microphones have supplanted the requirement of the raised pulpit. On the left a simple wooden podium was provided for non-ecclesiastical personnel, such as those leading the hymns and oratorios.

On the other hand this spartan space did focus more attention on the pageantry of the ritual itself, with the robed nobles of the church arrayed behind the high altar, the great gold and silver clad Gospel book poised upon it, the thurible and the incense wafting out over the crowd. With the aforementioned standing and sitting and kneeling and the calls and responses, hymns, the litanies of the saints, and other parts of the three-hour ordination ceremony, there was certainly a creation of a focused ritual space.

I believe I spotted a number of symbolic performances and structures, which I will not enumerate here, that seemed familiar. Having not attended a ceremony like this, and not having a Catholic background, these observations are perhaps inaccurate. That’s something we should all keep in mind when reading anthropology, or when sussing out a ritual from some old texts that may have been written by the outsider. As an outsider, though, I found that I could appreciate the sacredness of the acts, whether or not they personally were sacral to me.

Within this time and space, there was a clear feeling that something happened that non-Abrahamic monothesists would term magical. There was a belief, from the cardinal down to the congregants, that a power was moving through him into the supplicants for ordination, and that they were transformed into something different than they were beforehand.

As human beings we engage in ritual for both selfless and selfish reasons. Our need to feel there is something beyond that which simply happens to us daily drives a desire for communion with the Holy. Often this takes place in a public setting, where we share our experience with others.

Yet we can and do engage in very small individual rituals. It may simply be flipping our eggs the same way each time, while muttering some incantation to make our day “sunny side up”. This participation elevates the mundane experience and gives meaning to our actions. All our actions.

In sanctifying our every movement, we teach ourselves about the sanctity of all other things as well. In this way we learn how to relate to the world as sacred space, where each thing is a sacred act.

This, of course, is the idea behind any form of initiation, even those that are not wholly magical or spiritual in nature. That is perhaps why we encounter commonalities between many such rituals, and why some people believe that one group or another is stealing something that predated that group’s origin. I have heard much about how the church has appropriated rituals from Rome, Greece, and Egypt, and this is doubtless true. The Romans, of course, amalgamated Greek and Egyptian and Hebrew and Persian and Celtic and Gothic and Hunic and Punic and whatever else they encountered, so a nascent Roman church can hardly be castigated for following this model.

It’s fairly obvious given the similarities between the roles of the various deities in ancient cultures that they either had a common origin in some unknown past, or they represent a basic human tendency to explain our experience through animism. Or it can be both.

Recent discoveries at places like Gobekli Tepe and the region around Stonehenge indicate that our propensity for sacred ritual predates our agricultural civilization. That is, we were not holding a festival to celebrate the harvest, we learned to harvest to celebrate the festival. Sacred megalithic sites seem to have been built up over generations, because there was some local reason for people gathering there, and when they gathered they celebrated with feasting and drinking. To these stone-age peoples, the experience of drunkeness, or other altered states of consciousness, was not simply the result of eating the white berries, it was transportation to the realm of the spirits.

In the case of Stonehenge, the draw appears to have initially been a rich source of flint. In the Neolithic, flint’s role was the equivalent of petrochemicals to modern industrial society. It was used for hunting, of course, but it was also used for the preparation of food, the construction of housing, the production of hides, leather, and clothing, and, perhaps most importantly, the kindling of fire. Wandering tribes of hunter-gatherers would follow the food animals during the seasons, but at some point in each year they would return to the lands around Stonehenge to replenish their supply of this all important natural resource.

Such mining and refining probably took place at times when the food animals were going into dormancy, and the wild crops were dying down. So with the larders full against the coming winter, the tribes would head toward the mines, and when meeting with each other, appeared to join in communal feasting and ritual.

To insure full larders, the food animals and crops gradually became domesticated. One theory emerging from work at Gobekli Tepe is that grain crops were initially being cultivated to make beer. Considering that these beers could very well have been contaminated with things like rye ergot, or various other fungi and molds during the fermentation process, prehistoric brews may have been far more hallucinogenic than your average can of Bud Light today. Consider also that ancient humans had certainly discovered more powerful intoxicants than simple alcohol, and were possibly adding these, or using them in conjunction with, the ritual beverages. We find significant evidence of the sacred use of intoxicants and hallucinogens in the historical accounts of “stone-age” cultures that survived in isolation to modern times. Indeed, some of these practices remain extant among indigenous peoples despite the attempts of colonizers and modern legal restrictions.

When Christianity began to take hold over Europe in the fifth century, the elation and abandon of chemically augmented spiritual ecstasy became associated with the “old religions” and ultimately stigmatized and criminalized. The ritual pageants remained, and became central to the practice (if they were not already, let’s not assume that every pre-Christian rite was a Roman orgy) and spread out, in one form or another, as the One True Catholic Church split and splintered and rolled across the world.

And yet the chanted prayers, the sacred spaces, the processions of symbolic items and artifacts, can be found right through Islam, Judaism, and non-Abrahamic Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and the various fragmented children of those faiths. We can locate a version of it in indigenous religions, in the Victorian magical lodges, the modern fraternal societies, and the graduation ceremonies in schools and colleges.

We as human beings have an inborn need for this sacredness. We, alone on the planet (as far as we know anyway) yearn to experience something greater than our mundane daily grind, to connect with that which is beyond and experience that which is other. Whether we attain to such states via all the pomp and splendor of a choreographed religious ceremony, or we approach it by contemplating the bubbles in our morning tea is irrelevant. The result is our internal elevation, that epiphany of self that leaves us transformed, and returned to the mundane world a bit different, and perhaps a bit better.

My eldest and I were perusing the occult shelves at a local used book store recently when she commented “These all seem largely… self-helpy…” I have had the same observation with many of the texts being offered in the last couple of decades. To be clear, it is not the idea of self-improvement that we find disagreeable, but the thought that it can be achieved by reading a few chapters of the latest hastily published thin paperback on magic, witchcraft, astrology, chakras, herbalism, crystals, or tarot. Much like the myriad diet and exercise books, and those psychology and pseudo-psychology books that are actual defined as “self-help”, many of the hundreds of texts under the broad label of “new age” appear to offer a quick fix for all that is wrong in the world.

And to be fair, like most of these books, there is probably a paragraph or two that mentions to be effective such changes and practices are a long-term commitment. Self-transformation is not a goal, it is a process. It is the result of small steps taken all the time, and over and over, and doesn’t ever stop. The road is long and winding, if one gets the opportunity to walk it. In time the little changes open up our minds and our hearts and gift us with the true realization that it is not all about us.

“Self-care” as a buzzword and marketing strategy has emerged to dominate a number of quasi-esoteric topics since the beginning of the plague years. This is an expected result of the kind of emotional trauma that this world wide epidemic, and the social changes it brought. But as we hopefully emerge from the Valley of the Shadow of Death, we have to be more than self-absorbed and self-contemplative islands. At the same time, we need to realize that we will feel isolated and alone in the cosmos, as we make the journey outward.

I have said before that the Hermit and the Hierophant both hold the secrets of the universe. At one time or another, we will seek revelation through either pathway, and there is no reason to choose one over the other, or to exclude one or the other for once and for all.

The Sacred Life is one that keeps us constantly moving forward.

And on that thought I will move forward to next week’s article, and thank you as always for your time and attention.

February 15, 2023February 15, 2023

Pyramids Then

Taking a poll here.

The fact that we have pyramids or pyramid like structures around the world among different cultures that never were connected with each other proves that:

A. ALIENS!
B. ATLANTIS!
C. If you want to build something really big out of bricks or blocks, the easiest thing to do is just make a big pile.

My answer today is C.

I was a firm believer and did much research into both A and B (and of the variant A1. ALIENS! FROM ATLANTIS!).

But it was the 70s. If you think paranormal is big now, you should have been around for the Golden Age.

I’m talking Pyramid Power.

I haven’t heard the term used in a while, but back in the 70s and early 80s it was the cat’s pajamas (also a term I haven’t heard in a while).

When Uri Geller was on Merv Griffin bending spoons with his mind, the rest of us were sharpening razor blades, treating migraines, and curing erectile disfunction with the awesome power inherent in that magical shape.

You could buy cardboard Pyramid Power kits from the backs of magazines, or go for the super deluxe model that you sat inside in your living room. Pyramid Power was the panacea. It cured what ailed us. It kept us young and vital and was fueling the Sexual Revolution, or at least the one-night stand.

The origins of this mania started as a concept about keeping meat fresh.Iin the 1930s a French dowser named Antoine Bovis theorized that the pyramid shape would inherently “mummify” organic materials. The basis of his thinking is a bit fuzzy, I am not up on the idea of dowsing enough to work out quite how he deduced pyramid shapes had this power. He extrapolates in his theory that since his cardboard shape worked with a small fish and a piece of meat, the bigger Egyptian pyramid must contain the same magnetic energies.

There is an apocryphal account that he observed mummified cats that had supposedly been created by the Egyptian pyramid itself. Of course, the interior of the pyramid is relatively warm and dry and works fairly good as a giant dehydrator. But we know that couldn’t be what was doing it. Had to be some mystic force.

After the Second World War, an enterprising Czech inventor took Bovis’s ideas of concentrated magnetism and started marketing his own line of patented cardboard pyramid “sharpeners” to prolong the life of razor blades during the bleak Soviet bloc economy. They were apparently successful enough to draw the attention of a couple of authors who included these ideas in the book Psychic Discoveries Behind The Iron Curtain in 1970.

In an American generation that was deeply embracing counterculture, ideas of supernatural and paranormal were frequently the topic of general conversation. People were experimenting with altered states of consciousness, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and other non-abrahamic religions, including Wicca and other occult practices. “Secret” practices that had been suppressed by the Soviets (and probably the CIA) just had to be looked into. Von Däniken had just had tremendous public success with Chariots of the Gods, and the idea of an ancient alien spiritual techno-medicine just hit the right chord.

Generally if there’s not a satisfying rational explanation for something, people are willing to accept a much more enticing irrational one. Thus the pyramid business took off, initially with dueling books both entitled Pyramid Power. As you might imagine, theories that the pyramid shape might augment or reflect or collect earth’s natural magnetic field in such a way as to deter degeneration, got intertwined with any wild occult paranormal pseudoscientific idea that caught public attention.

And we all did our pyramid things. I think I built one or two. I watched every show that mentioned it. I read all the books I could find (and without the ‘Zon, they were few). And like Agent Mulder I wanted to believe. There had to be a secret power. There must have been some kind of ancient civilization. Aliens had to have helped them cut the stones.

pyramidsinwands! — Pyramid mania isn’t a new thing. The fascination with Egypt in the Victorian Era doubtless inspired Pamela Coleman Smith to hide the Giza pyramids in these “hills” behind a couple of Wand Court cards. And understandably so, since the pyramid was confuted with “pyro” or fire and the outline shape of the triangle is the alchemical rune for same. Like the salamanders on their tunics, the pyramids in the background are fire symbol, both of common terrestrial fire, and of the cosmic celestial fire of the cosmos.

Although many designers choose to show the wands more literally as torches, Smith has elected to portray them as simple branches, with a few leaves here and there. This is also symbolic, as it refers to the Rod of Aharon. Moses half-brother wields his staff significantly during the 10 plagues, and later in Exodus, it is said to have budded, showing the power of the Almighty to bring life from the dry wood. It is one of the relics kept in the Ark of the Covenant, and in the RWS Tarot symbolizes the present of hidden fire within.

And then I went there. I went to the pyramid. I climbed the passage and scrambled across the rock into the King’s Chamber and I stood in the heart of the Great Pyramid of Giza and expected my Great Epiphany. And possibly also alien teleportation and super powers.

And then I realized, sliding my hands across those glassy smooth stone walls with the perfectly fitted seams, how it had been done.

Lots and lots of people, with lots and lots of sand, and lots and lots of time.

No aliens. No laser beams. No antigravs.

Just people, sand, and time.

But the Great Epiphany was something even better.

Now, mind you, I do understand why everyone wants to believe. Aside from it just being a lot cooler to think it was space aliens with laser guns posing as ancient gods, the Pyramid itself evokes a sense of massive awe that is hardly paralleled. I have only experienced the same kind of mental and spiritual transport a few other times. Once was the Chartres Cathedral in France, and once was the Saturn V rocket here in Houston.

Now all of these things are firstly very very big. They’re bigger than many things we encounter in our lives. The Pyramid was the tallest building on Earth until the Eiffel Tower was built. But the Eiffel Tower, though admittedly cool, and really big, doesn’t impose itself upon you like the Pyramid does.

There’s the old saying that all men fear time, but time fears the pyramids. That’s a palpable feeling when you are standing near it.

My first experience of Chartres was much like my first experience of the Pyramid. You are driving along and then suddenly there is this massive thing rising out of the horizon. Chartres is situated on a natural hill, and at the time (late 1990s) was surrounded by large wheat fields, so it’s massivity was augmented by this isolation. Of course, it sits in the middle of the modern city, but it’s hugeness is still unique for the locale. So both with Chartres and the Pyramid you can approach them and get the same sense of how they appeared at the time of their builders. They are effectively timeless.

Gothic-Chartres — Notre Dame des Chartres as it appears today. It’s really hard to get a sense of the scale of these things until you are next them and yet it’s daunting. The great Gothic cathedrals, many dedicated to the Virgin Mary, sprang up between the end of the first Millennium and the Black Death. They strove to portray the heavenly Jerusalem described in the Book of Revelations, by a complex series of symbolic and mathematical inclusions in the architecture. Many Christians believed that the promised return of Christ was going to follow the year 1000, and these grand churches were a plea for mercy, as well as a kind of working penance. The towers above are different because they took so long to build that the artistic style had changed when the second one was started. It was almost 100 years before it was completed. For comparison, from the beginning to the apex of the Pyramid age in Egypt was about that long.

The Three of Pentacles shows the fine detail work inherent in the Gothic style. The pointed arches are all parts of full circles, that push into each other. The geometry defining them could be done with a simple divider (what we sometimes call a compass in math class). The trefoils – here holding the pentacles, and quatrefoils were circles arranged on circles, and the great rose windows that pierce the walls of the apse and transept are circles holding up circles holding up circles, all of them pushing together in a magic dance that allowed such massive structures to be made with thin walls and glass windows.

Chartres photo from Wikipedia by Olvr – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16331210

We know more or less how Chartres was constructed. It took hundreds of years, and lots of people, and lots of stone and other resources. It uses sophisticated and ingenious technologies to lift massive weights high above the ground, and keep them there, without benefit of an internal steel skeleton. Chartres, like all Gothic Cathedrals, is held up by gravity. This oxymoronic statement may seem absurd at first, but the basic engineering principle goes back to the Romans.

The Romans worked out the true arch. The arch is half of a circle. Gravity is causing every stone in the circle to fall toward the center, but every stone in the circle is caught between two other stones also trying to fall so that the whole thing stays up.

If you put a row of arches in line after each other you get a vault. If you put two of them in perpendicular, you get what is called a groin vault, which gives you a square room underneath with openings on all four sides. Large Roman buildings employed these techniques to create very large interior spaces. They also used the same principle to create the dome, where instead of going in a single direction the arches pivot around a central point. And because the stones near the top were pushing into each other all around the circle, they could even leave an opening – called an oculus or “eye”- in the middle of the dome and it would still stay up.

The only difficulty in such structures was that the weight of the downward pushing stones tends to press outward at the bottom, so initially Roman buildings had to have walls with equal or great mass than the weight of the stones in the arches.

The Gothic innovation, was in utilizing arches upon arches upon arches, to make thinner lighter walls, which they filled with brilliant stained glass, and flying buttresses, which pressed inward against the vaults but carried the weight out and down to a set of descending piers. The whole effect results in a kind of wedding cake extravaganza of a building.

The Pyramid, by contrast, comes from a time where post and lintel construction is necessary. If you are using stone, you can only make your openings as wide as the stone you are using for the lintel – the piece that goes across the top – will bear before it breaks. Or you have to use a bigger stone. Which means you have to have bigger posts. And a lot of them. This is why the Hypostyle Hall in the Temple of Amen Ra at Karnak has the forest of massive pillars. Think Stonehenge, but one a bigger scale.

Even with that though, the chambers inside the Great Pyramid can’t bear the weight of the structure above it without some pretty amazing tricks. The passage that goes up into the pyramid is only a few feet wide, so it is constructed of limestone and using basic post and lintel method. But the burial chambers would need to be much bigger, and for whatever reason, Cheops wanted them inside the stone mass of the Pyramid. This is generally believed to have been to deter robbers, but Peter Tomkins, in his Secrets of the Great Pyramid Revealed offers some other plausible ideas -ideas that are as nifty as space aliens and still don’t involve Atlantis.

In any case, the middle parts of the Pyramid use heavy granite, a stone much stronger and capable of spanning a chamber 20 or 30 feet wide without snapping. Of course, it’s incredibly heavy, is almost impossible to carve with copper chisels (even if you were sharpening them in a pyramid) and was quarried hundreds of miles up the Nile at Aswan.

And yet there it was smooth as glass, with the faintest hint of a joint between the massive blocks. And above me the great weight of about another third of the Pyramid over my head was pressing down on those granite roof beams. As they had been for thousands of years.

So clearly, Pharoah’s overseer of works just phoned over to where they were building Stonehenge and got Merlin to come move them. No aliens at all.

Thing is, we know now that they rough cut the granite stone using fire cracking. They moved the great slabs from the quarry using various ramps, sledges, mud “lubricant” and a whole lot of people pulling on ropes. They barged them down the Nile to the job site, where the docks were a lot closer than they are today, and using more ramps, sledges, and people drug them up to where they belonged.

And then some dude sat there with sand, and a jug of water, and maybe a reed or papyrus matte, and sanded them glassy smooth. Okay, fine. It was several dudes. But it’s the same thing they did at Chartres 3000 years later and nobody claims that was aliens or mermaids or the Loch Ness Monster.

And in both cases, they were building a monument to God.

It’s just, that in the case of the Pyramid, God came to look over the building site from time to time.

Even though in the last couple of decades all that I have just explained has become widely known, we still have a fascination with this curious shape. I personally have several pyramids made from semiprecious stones and crystals. And for all of them I probably also have an obelisk, a sphere, and probably a skull carved from the same rocks.

And I am not alone, judging from the numbers of rock and crystal pyramids that I find wherever fine rocks and crystals are sold. Clearly we still believe in Pyramid Power, if not exactly in how it was perceived in the 1970s. The physical shape of the pyramid is a touchstone to our psyche in a way that few things are. Even when we see simple the two dimensional outline of it as a triangle, our minds evoke exotic locales, ancient civilizations, and mysteries. The pyramid is sacred geometry. And was meant to be.

The Great Pyramid in Egypt and all it’s little brothers and sisters up and down the Nile were meant to be magic engines that transported the soul of the Pharaoh (and later lesser personages) to the sky where they would ride in the Boat of Ra for all eternity. The shape was derived from both the “god rays” we sometimes experience when the sun shines down through clouds, and also from a stone emblematic of the Primordial Mound of Earth that formed in the beginning of time, and from which grew the Lotus that Ra emerges from.

In the Mesopotamian cultures great ziggurats were built that were capped with temples, bringing the priesthood and the kings closer to the gods that lived in the sky. In Mesoamerica, pyramid structures fulfilled a similar purpose, though we have some that were also used as tombs. It’s probable that burying the dead king in the pyramid temple was seen to give an additional power and sacredness to it, but as far as we know Mesoamerican pyramids were not conceived as tombs.

There is a parallel here to the numerous famous personages who are buried in modern cathedrals. The church is holy ground. The holier the church, the more important the community of it’s dead become. Tompkins puts forth that assuming the only purpose of the Egyptian pyramid was a tomb, would be the same as asserting that the only purpose of Westminster Abbey was to bury the royals of Britain. While it is done there, there are a number of other purposes.

The orientation of various pyramids to astronomical phenomenon cannot be denied. We tend today to separate sacred and scientific, but this has never been the case until recently. Building anything required consultation of the spirits, the stars, and the omens, and building something as important as a pyramid or temple complex even moreso. It’s telling that in China some pyramid like structures were created for the purpose of improving the flow of chi in accordance with Feng Shui principles. They were human made mountains because natural mountains were not in the proper place.

Much has been made of secret numbers and ratios and measurements inherent in the Pyramid. And they are. This is because they were intended to be there, just as they were intended to be in Chartres and it’s sister cathedrals. We “discover” the correspondences to our modern measurements because our modern metrics (not the metric system, but the old ones – foot, yard, fathom, etc.) are derived from scales used to create the Pyramid.

All these things only seem wild and crazy and beyond belief if we assume that our ancestors were all a bunch of idiots, walking around with knuckles dragging.

The splendor of Pax Romana brought along with it the propaganda that the Roman way was the best way. A certain amount of this arrogance was inherited from the Hellenic Greeks who wrote up standards of truth and beauty and morality and ethics and just about everything. When the broken bones of these civilizations were resurrected in the Renaissance, they were idealized by the secular humanists over the cultish, insular, and dogmatic church of the Middle Ages.

So the secrets handed down from master to apprentice mason were divorced from their sacred meanings, and ultimately became purely mechanical operations. In this transition, the idea that pre-Alexandrian cultures could have possessed any such understanding was scoffed at. And so we reached the 1970s comfortably assured that the pyramids had to be built by aliens because human brains just couldn’t do that.

AstroVette-Saturn-5 — The state of the art in 1969 technology. The big rocket now is housed in a specially built hangar following a major restoration. If you are ever down Houston way, I highly recommend visiting it. Despite this being the product of modern engineering, you can see a number of structures within it that are derived from universal mathematical principles that the builders of Chartres and the Pyramid would have seen and understood.

If we underestimate the human capacity to imagine, to dream, and to dare, we do a great disservice to ourselves and our ancestors. The pyramid builders may not have understood mathematics and engineering as we do, but they had a technology and it worked. Despite the stories told by Greeks centuries afterward, the majority of the work on the monuments of Egypt were done by free people, in exchange for food and other needs, during the time of the Nile flood. Like the workers on the grand Gothic monuments, they were assured that their efforts would guarantee them a life everlasting.

In 1903, the first heavier that air machine took off at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and flew a third of the length of the Saturn V rocket. Sixty-five years later human beings landed on the surface of the moon. We generally have been brought up believing that this accelerated leap in technology is a purely modern thing.

The Step Pyramid of Djoser was devised and executed by the vizier and sage Im-Ho-Tep around 2600 BCE. The Great Pyramid of Cheops was completed about 100 years later, and assuming the current figure of 20 years to build, that’s only a little longer than it took us to get from Kitty Hawk to the moon.

We did not have any help from the aliens. We didn’t even have electronic computers until the very end of the process, and we were checking those with mechanical sextants and slide rules because these 18th and 19th century devices were more accurate than the roomfuls of tubes and wires.

I would like to think, that should humanity survive it’s comparative infancy and follow those first explorers out into the void, that our progeny will someday look back at that weird collection of cylinders in the museum down at Clear Lake, with the same kind of awe and admiration and wonder that we feel about that old pyramid.

Until next time, remember that humans with their mind and their will can build mountains. Aliens not required.

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