Category: History

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Wolf and Hound

Moon

I went looking for a good Shakespearean quote to open this week’s article. He has quite a few that are moon-centric, but none of them really fit with the theme of the Tarot, or my take on this card, so I suppose I shall forego the poesy in favor of just getting to it. But the Moon is oftime mistress of our inner tides, so it seems a shame not to wax a bit poetic.

This will post just after the Full Moon in Aquarius. I didn’t plan it that way, though I do have a nifty app for the moon phases so I guess I could have. Next week the Sun will post just after the apex of the Lion’s gate, so it might seem that I am far more astrologically savvy than I really am. Truth be told, I wanted to start with the Fool nearest to April Fool’s Day, and this is the way they all laid out. If there’s a correspondence to it, well, I’ve already covered that apparent coincidences may not be coincidences, but sometimes a cigar….

moon-rws-tarot
Pamela Smith’s Moon card is hardly different from the Marseilles version that was extant since the Renaissance. I am forced to wonder if this was a concession to deadlines.

Without further ado, then, shall we begin our discussion of the XVIII Card- The Moon. This second of the “celestial” cards is marked by a large disk, with a number of large rays, and an equal number of small rays. Assuming that the position of the Roman numeral overlays the top rays, we have a total of sixteen of each. Within the disk is a faced crescent, and I am inclined to say this is a female face. Outside of Egypt and Mesopotamia, the Moon has almost exclusively been cast as feminine (and we have more of that gender baggage to deal with here). Below the disk are the little shapes that are identified as flame in the Tower card, so I am comfortable regarding them as flames here. Flanking the image are two flat topped towers with a single high window. Behind them, in the distance, are mountains with a single winding road going over them. The road rises in the foreground of the card, from the edge of the water. To the left side of this road or path is a baying hound. On the right is a howling wolf. In the center appearing to be about to walk onto the path is a lobster. At the water’s edge are a variety of shapes which may be meant as aquatic plants, stones, or possibly mushrooms.

We have seen this scene before. In the Death card (XIII) we can clearly see these towers at the far right of the horse’s head, atop the waterfall. The luminous body between them is most likely, in that card, meant to represent the setting sun, so we can interpolate that we are looking west into the Moon card, and that the Moon herself is lowering.

As in the Temperance card at XIV we see a winding path coming from mountains on the left, we may also infer that we are looking at the mountains from the Eastern side, and so behind the environs of the Moon card, or rather on the opposite side of the mountains where the path goes. So in a sense, this card fits between Death and Temperance, between the transformation and the alchemy. It is a gateway, a passage, and not a place in itself. This is in keeping with the constantly changing state of the Moon itself. From Full to New to Full, the lunar cycle never stands still. The sun rises and sets each day, but it is always that same round bright disk. The journey may be cyclic but the traveler is unchanged.

But the Moon alters her face with each day, as she passes through each sign of the Zodiac in rapid fashion, arising to her greatest prominence in her opposition to the sign that the sun occupies. She is moody and mysterious. She makes the tides to ebb and flow, and by popular account, causes our human tides to also run, giving rise to madness. The terms lunacy and lunatic are derived specifically from lunar, and indicate a most ancient belief that our local satellite is responsible for the ungoverned passions.

This association is highlighted by the howling wolf. The howling of the pack when it raced through the brightly lit night in pursuit of prey was terrifying to our ancestors. The wolf was a real threat to human life in many parts of Europe and American up into the late 19th Century, before hunting dropped the wild populations. But before that, the threat of the wolf, likely combined with the incidence of rabies in survivors of wolf attacks, gave rise to the legend of the werewolf. Werewolves and lunatics were not easily separated in the minds of earlier people. Violent insanity, which could have many causes, would certainly have been terrifying, and mental illness was poorly understood (some would say it still is). When we are faced even today with serial killers and cannibals whose motivations defy any reasonable or logical pattern, it’s easy to see how less educated populations, living in remote isolation, might attribute such horrors to “moon sickness”.

moon-deviantmoon-tarot
I really couldn’t have the moon article without using the Moon card from the Deviant Moon deck. These dreamlike impressions of a dark Venetian Carnavale seem tailor made to express the subconsciousness associated with this card. The artist has here dispensed with many of the cards typical hallmarks. Gone is the crescent, the hound and wolf, the crustacean, and the water and towers are merely suggested. But instead, we see a full and stern-faced Moon pulling puppet strings on a pair or royals or nobles. This card is almost more like the Devil with his chains around the symbolic pair representative of the governance by passions. But that is also inherent in the message of the Moon card. Our emotions and moods can drive us to distraction.

There are less horrible versions of “moon madness” of course. The phrases “mooning over” someone, or being “moon-eyed” over a desired suitor are examples of this more benevolent version of our belief in the lunar influence over our rational mind. Thus the Moon has come to symbolize our unconscious mind, the deep dark waters of our dreamlands, which stirs both the untamed beast, and his gentler, more domesticated cousin, the humble hound. The Moon governs the passions, whether they be a lust for the carnal or the martial . Since very often our drive for romance and intimacy are much interlaced with envy, jealously, and territorialism, the two are inextricably linked.

Sitting between that sunset of Death and the Resurrection of Temperance, The Moon gives us access to Hamlet’s undiscovered country. It is within sleep, that death-like state that remains a mystery, that we walk in the world of the Moon card. Are the experiences of our dreams the illusions of reality, foisted upon us by this fickle perpetually shifting orb? Or is that landscape a real place, visited again and again, as a rehearsal for the journey beyond this gateway?

It is doubtless a gateway. The two flanking towers in Smith’s version are reminiscent of the defensive architecture of a Medieval feuding Italian town. These structures we meant to survey the surrounding streets to spot an approaching gang, and to provide an easily defensible refuge for the family who built it. One wonders then, what they may be looking for upon the path between them?

moon-thoth-tarot
The Moon from the Book of Thoth by Aleister Crowley, and artistically executed by Lady Frieda Harris. Like many of the Thoth cards, the images are formed by a synthesis of shapes whose negative spaces describe objects, rather than defining them linearly as is traditional. This is due in part to trends in art at the time, but also due to trends in metaphysical and physical theory. The various wave shapes here are, to my thinking, inspired by the idea of the waveform of light, and early quantum theory. Things are because we see them to be. If we don’t see them, then they are not. This is something quantum mechanics calls the collapse of the waveform, and ties into things like the uncertainty principal and the famous example of Schroedinger’s cat. Because the energy of the universe sometimes acts as a wave and sometimes as a particle, it really depends on how we are perceiving it. It is a wave, until it becomes a fixed thing in space time, at which point it behaves as a particle. This point is our observation of the event itself.

This highlights one of the characteristics of the Moon card, that it is a symbol of illusion. It is about what things appear to be rather than what they are. Witness that the beetle (which is closer to the scarab than the lobster or crab) holds a solar disk, opposite to the Moon which occupies the top of the card. The Moon appears to be the dominant source of light here, but that is because it is above the horizon. It is really only the reflection of the Sun’s light, which here has not risen yet. It is the unfortunate connection of this “lesser light” with the supposed “femininity” of the Moon that gives us the troubling gender bias inherent in much occult practice. It is not a lesser light, it is the light formed by opposite, just as the pairs in other parts o the deck must be seen as opposites but equals. The Moon is the mirror of the Sun. Therefore it reflects back the Sun in equal measure in it’s realm of influence. But because the Moons mirror is not always facing directly toward our little world, that influence is sometimes diminished.

It is not the lobster, which, by the way, is a bad Medieval rendering of a crab. The crab and lobster or crayfish interchangeably represent the Zodiac sign of Cancer, which is ruled by the Moon. The Sun rules the adjacent sign of Leo, although it is the transit of the Sun into Cancer that marks the Summer Solstice, and thus it’s greatest dominance. The Solstice is the point where the Sun appears to rise and set furthest north of the equator, due to the tilt of our planet’s axis and it’s wobble as we go about our orbit. This is thus named the Tropic of Cancer, and lies about 23.5 north latitude. From the first degree of the sign of Cancer, the planet starts to wobble back in the other direction, resulting in the Sun appearing to rise and set further and further south, until the first degree of the sign of Capricorn, which is recorded as Yule in the Wiccan Wheel of the Year.

I personally don’t think that Cancer is a lobster or a crab, originally. I think it’s a scarab beetle, and representing the Egyptian deity Khepera, The scarab was seen early on as a sign of resurrection, because of it’s curious habit of making balls of animal dung, to lay it’s eggs in. The resulting larvae were thought to miraculously appear in the balls, and thus the scarab’s process of rolling the ball became symbolic for the path of both sun and moon.

Egyptian religion is most likely a synthesis of various local pre-historic beliefs. Like the Greek myths that amalgamated gods introduced by trade, migrations, and conquest, there were multiple versions of why things happened in the universe. So the movement of the sun and moon was boats on a celestial Nile, orbs being pushed by beetles, and the eyes of a giant hawk (or hawks). These were all perfectly compatible to the Ancient Egyptians, because, the gods could be and do anything they wanted. And in a particular case, or for a particular temple, or holiday, or magic spell, one explanation might work better than another.

Crowley in his Book of Thoth makes the towers of the Moon card into the ceremonial gateway to a sacred district. In place of the hound and wolf he has given us two jackals, who most would assume to be Anubis, but to initiates are Anubis and Wapuet. Anubis guards the cemetery, the west bank of the Nile. Wapuet is called the Opener of the Way, and is probably a counterpart of the eastern shore. It’s a fair argument that these distinct beings were possibly personifications of the sunrise and the sunset, and that, by extension over the centuries, came to be metaphors for life and death. Since “Opener of the Way” sometimes occurs with a figure that is distinctly Anubis, and is involved in various rituals of the Book of the Dead, it’s also likely that over time the two beings became confounded, even to the educated priesthood. If they represent dawn and dusk, however, their position on either pylon placing the moon in center is appropriate.

Lady Frieda in designing the Thoth Moon card also gives us a beetle instead of a lobster, though it is of a rather different variety that the scarab. I can only surmise that it was a design consideration, or a miscommunication. The history of this deck is rife with spats between the author and the artist, going up to and following Crowley’s death and the subsequent publication of the cards. In any case, the arthropod in the Moon card is most definitely the astrological symbol of Cancer. and significator of the Moon as ruler of that sign. It ties also then to Water, and the other lunar affiliations. Cancer and water are both deeply interconnected with our emotional life, our moods, and our passions. This is potential one of the most astrological of the Major Arcana for this reason.

moon-legacy-of-the-divine-tarot
The Moon card from the Legacy of the Divine Tarot deck by Ciro Marchetti. This rendition, like many of the cards in the deck is an imaginative and insightful expression of the traditional symbolic language. Here the crab of Cancer is more fully realized. Water is clearly present and also noted by the traditional elemental glyph. Crowley’s jackals have been supplanted by greyhounds, a perhaps not too distant cousin. That they are related is expressed by the golden chain between them, holding the more modern lunar triglyph.

The moon is here also personified thrice. In the middle is a nude woman, reminiscent of the figure of the star. But on either side is a statue of the god Thoth. Thoth is one incarnation of the Egyptian moon god (Khons, or Khonsu is another, and there is a version where the moon is the left eye of Ra, or Horus. It’s complicated). One might argue that this is a priestess, or witch, worshipping the moon, rather than the Moon itself. That is precisely why Tarot gives us so much opportunity for expansion of the intuition. It can be all things we see, or none of them. Like the quantum wave, it is what we perceive it, and when we don’t perceive it, it isn’t.

The “flames” that come down from the Moon are a curiosity. They are a remnant of the earlier versions of the card using this symbol as metaphor for energy, or “Moon power” in the same way that the fire dropping in the Tower represents the power of the lighting bolt, and not the actual fire that is destroying the building. In the Marseilles cards, these are both represented as multi-color dots, so when Smith assayed the task of re-interpreting the cards to Waite’s instruction, the energy flows became flames, because in the early samples the same artistic convention was used. Of the Major Arcana, this only occurs here and on the Tower. In the Minor Arcana, we can find these “flames” about the hilt of the sword on the Ace of Swords, and we can find the same shapes, albeit painted blue, in the air around the Ace of Cups. In all cases we are meant to understand these as energies or emanances that come forth from a powerful dynamic source. They are the invisible energies of that source, the secret rays, that impact and alter, but are perhaps not observed save by their effect.

As I mentioned at the beginning, we are in and approaching the apex of what is called the Lion’s Gate portal by many practicioners. This is marked by the rising of the star Sirius above the horizon just prior to sunrise, and event which occurs while the Sun is in the sign of Leo. It begins a few days after the Sun departs Cancer, and a few days after the Sun reaches the midpoint of Leo. On August 8, (8/8) the sun is a the 15th degree of Leo, or about halfway. So all these layered coincidences are seen by astrologers to be significant.

Yet it is the ancient importance of this occurrence that probably is most interesting, and that is that rising of Sirius was what the Egyptians used to predict the annual Nile flood, from which the entire ceremonial, economic, and social cycle of the kingdom depended. And it is the Moon here, taking us back to Egypt and the sign of water, that links into that exaltation of the Sun next week, just before the article on the Sun card is posted.

I hope you’ll join me for that. We are now but three cards from the end of the Major Arcana.

Thank you for your continued interest.

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Seven Sisters Light

Star

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.

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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,

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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.

Please Share and Enjoy !

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In Darkness Undone

Tower

Come, let us build us a tower whose top may reach unto the stars! And on the top of the tower we will write the words: Great is the world and its Creator! And great is Man!

Metropolis – Thea Von Harbo

Card XVI has evolved in recent times to become a surrogate for the Death card. Death, being dreaded by both readers and clients, has been mollified to mean “the transition from one state to another”. The cards, not accepting that the portent of doom should be wholly removed from the deck, have shifted this cloud of darkness and destruction over a few spaces, and now place it on the lightning struck Tower.

tower-rws-tarot
Does this card always mean bad news? And if so, bad news for whom?

This card is marked by a high three windowed Tower atop a mountain. The Tower was topped by a crown, which has been blasted away by the oddly shaped lightning bolt. fire and smoke issue out from it now, and rain down on the earth below. Along either side are falling figures, plummeting to their doom. One is a king in a blue robe with red shoes. Kings do not fair well in the middle of the Major Arcana. The other has a blue tunic and a red cape. The sky behind them is black.

One can see from this imagery why the Tower made such a ready herald of impending disaster and loss. I have, in a previous article, offered an alternative message, and it is one that I give to my clients when this card shows up. But as this series of articles is about the intuitive expression of the visual card, I will explore that first, before going into additional rabbit holes.

There are two possible origins for the ideas on this card. The first, alluded to in the quote from Fritz Lang’s silent 1927 masterpiece, is the Tower of Babel from Genesis. Babel is an expression of human vanity and ambition, as well as a convenient “just-so” story to account for the different languages of humanity.

If you aren’t familiar with it, basically after Adam and Eve left the Garden, there was a great deal of begetting until there were a lot of people wandering around the Earth. They all spoke a common language because they had all descended from the same couple (let’s not even begin to consider the DNA implications of that). So they decided to get together and build a city, and in the middle of the city they would build a great Tower that would reach “unto Heaven”.

metropolis tower
Frames from the famous “Babel” sequence in the film Metropolis. The message in the movie was that the visionaries of society saw only the wonder of their conception, while the workers who built it came to regard it as a symbol of oppression and misery. Ultimately, the workers rebelled and destroyed the Tower. Lang, working from a script by his then wife, Thea Von Harbo, was exploring the flaws in Utopian thinking as a reflection of some of the political movements of the time.

While the film might be viewed as a Communist anthem extoling the virtues of the worker’s loosing their chains, the overall message is that the problem in such societies is the disconnect between the elites who envision with high ideals, and the people who are tasked with practically carrying them out.

The early Soviet and Nazi states were presented with glowing accolades of a new world order that did away with the failures of the old. Turns out that autocracy is harder to uproot than it appears on paper, and power corrupts.

Lang would ultimately flee the Nazis and make films in Hollywood, though it’s hard to say he ever made another film that is as influential to the cinema as Metropolis. It echoes through science fiction to the present day, and gives us our earliest version of a future dystopia.

God, not interested in having any uninvited visitors popping in, promptly “confounded their language” so that they couldn’t understand each other, and so affected a work stoppage. This is the third time in Genesis that the deity moves to limit human potential. The first is when they are forbidden to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The second, is when they are cast out of the Garden, to keep them from the fruit of the Tree of Life which could make them immortal. And then he intervenes to prevent them from reaching the heavens. It’s always interesting to me that there is this idea of “things Man should not know” included in the Judeo-Christian teachings. The very term “forbidden fruit” comes from the Genesis story. While certainly some parts of Mosaic law are practical and helpful for a civilized society, this doctrine of Divine Secrecy makes very little sense outside of it limiting such knowledge to an elite priest class.

The Hebrews didn’t invent that, of course. They borrowed it from their neighbors (or conquerors) in Egypt and Mesopotamia. The priest class and the priest-king class rose from less structured tribal roles as human populations moved from nomadic hunter-gatherers to settled farmers and builders. The impetus for building such structures is also not practical. If we look to the earliest of human settlement, we find that, while there are clearly scared spaces, the majority of the architecture is centered around utility and defense. The ancient villages of Catal Hyuk and Mohenjo Daro are ramshackle mudbrick tenements, with entrances on the roofs. They resemble more the pueblo dwellings of the American Southwest than the Ziggurat of Ur or the Great Pyramid. But these latter structures were built to honor god-kings. These persons were so powerful within their own city-states that they were considered to be corporeal with the sun god or the sky god. Like Jesus Christ who would come centuries later, and a few of the wackier Roman emperors who demanded such treatment, their followers actually believed they were in the presence of a living god. Outside of certain cult experiences, we have a hard time getting our heads around that in the modern world. And unfortunately these cult experiences frequently end in horrific tragedy.

In some versions of the Tarot de Marseilles and some of the Thelemic and Hermitic offshoots of the earlier 20th century, this card is called the House of God. There is much speculation as to whether this notation is a sarcastic comment on the worldliness of the Medieval church, or some more esoteric message about the impermanence of all created things. Paul Huson suggests that this trump, like many of those around it, are derived from scenes in early morality plays. The segment he believes is covered here is the razing of Hell.

towering inferno
The blazing tower was a powerful metaphor for the folly of man’s hubris up into the 1970s. As part of a spate of all-star disaster spectaculars, The Towering Inferno carried on the theme that modern ambition and aspiration all to often was brought low by greed, incompetence, and human frailty. In some ways it continues the themes in Metropolis, that we need to respect our limitations, and not allow our grand vision to cloud our awareness of the realities necessary to carry them out.

Unlike a number of the 70s disaster pics, this one typically doesn’t re-run anymore. The events of September 11, 2001 brought the reality of a skyscraper fire too close to the public consciousness. Ironically, the film was supposedly inspired by the World Trade Center towers that were under construction at the time.

In certain early Christian writings, there is a a tradition that between the Crucifixion on Friday and the Resurrection on Sunday, Jesus Christ had to proceed through the same afterlife as any human would. This, according to doctrine, was necessary because he was truly human, and that was a requirement for him being able to provide salvation to the rest of the human race. During this afterlife journey, he transforms death into life and brings the message of redemption to all the souls in Limbo, Purgatory, and finally Hell, where he overthrows the Devil and basically tears the place down. Per Huson this drama is played out in the Hanged Man (or Crucifixion), Death, Temperance (the Alchemy of Immortality/Resurrection), The Devil, and The Tower. So in this context, the “House of God” represents the Scourging of Hell, and the expected redemption of the damned who were then taken into Heaven.

Curiously the Tower, like the Devil before it, is also missing from the Visconti-Sforza originals, and we can only accept that the later replacement is a faithful copy of that older design. As it matches more closely the stylings of later decks like the Marseilles, it is hard to say if this Tower image is not part of that later visual tradition. While it’s easy to understand how the Devil card might be employed by magicians and monsignors for malefic or beneficial outcome, the Tower card doesn’t offer such an obvious reason for it’s being lost. It might also have been utilized as an omen of bad luck, or a harbinger of doom, in casting curses. Or it may simply have been lost at random. As giving meaning to the apparent randomness of the draw of a card is at the heart of the Tarot, it can sometimes be our habit to attach meaning where none exists.

There are meanings aplenty in the iconography Pamela Smith gives us in this card. Over the years they’ve come to be universally associated with doom and gloom, but I will offer some other potential ways of looking at this.

kabbalah lightning
One of the concepts in Kabbalah is that energy travels through the various nodes of the Tree of Life (Sephiroth) in a zig-zag path likened to a bolt of lightning. In this way the energy is shaped by, or partakes of, the nature of each of the nodes, finally arriving in the sphere of manifestation. Depending on what source you read, Malkuth is either the realm we inhabit, or the spiritual realm which is directly above it- a more perfect reality of which this is a material copy. The similarity between this flash and the shape of the lightning bolt in Card XVI seems too close to consider coincidence.

As I discussed in an earlier article, the simplest way to transform our experience of the Tower card is to identify with the bolt of lightning rather than the ruined building. This means that we are the catalyst for change. We are the divine force shattering the edifice of vanity and folly. I think there’s some justification for this interpretation, other than just its pragmatic usefulness.

That lightning bolt doesn’t look like the sort we expect to see. It’s not the zig-zag “zap” from cartoons and comic books. Nor is it the tree shaped fan of a real lightning strike. This very stylized bolt reminds me more than anything of the “lightning path” inherent in Kabbalistic teaches about the transmission of the Crown energy of Kether down to the world of manifestation Malkuth. No, it’s not exact, but it is close enough in my mind to think that Pixie was intending to get us thinking in that vein. And why not, as this Lightning Flash down the Tree of Life is an expression of the Divine Energy becoming apparent and affecting the mundane world of the flesh. And that is precisely what is happening in the Tower card.

That this Tower is topped with a now displaced crown, rather than conventional turret or roof is also an unusual message. The crown rising in the background of Temperance is similar to this one, but if we want to find one that is closest, we need to go back to the Emperor. This is, in fact, an Imperial Crown, and may be an iconographic left-over from Medieval times. Going back to the name “House of God” we can read this as metaphor for the collapse of the Roman Empire and subsequent replacement with a more or less Christian state. Oddly though, this type of crown, as well as that on the Emperor is more in keeping with that successor state, called the Holy Roman Empire (which as historians frequently point out, was not any of the three). So we are again left wondering why such a structure would be blasted off the top of this ruined building. The Marseilles equivalent has an actual crenelated turret and it is being blasted off by a breath of heavenly fire. So I think perhaps we need to read the crown as being connected to the lightning. It is the presence of Kether – the Crown – the Divine appearing as an apparition, much as the crown dawning in the Temperance card. It’s location and angle are the same as the blasted top of the Marseilles Tower, but there the similarities in depiction end, so we are playing with secret language here.

The Tower in flames, the falling bodies (one with his earthly crown, the same style that lays at the feet of Death’s pale horse) and the rain of fire are fairly consistent with earlier models of the card. If we begin to dissect them in terms of traditional symbolism, we find that the left figure in the blue and red garb may be seen as connecting with Christ. The red representing the blood of sacrifice and redemption, and the blue representing the purity of sinlessness. The Virgin is frequently depicted in these colors as well, signaling our understanding that we are looking at, at least in an iconographic sense, the Catholic dogma regarding the resurrection. The opposite figure, of the fallen king, ironically has bloody shoes. This perhaps alludes to the role of civil authorities in the martyrdom and oppression of the early church.

But again both the institutions of the church and the state are being cast down from this disaster. This might signal a more modern rejection that occurs at the beginning of the past century, because the earlier versions make no such distinction. But from the esoteric perspective, we can look upon it as the rejection of a worldly belief structure, in the face of Divine Revelation. Neither the established religious ideology or the established political authority is real. Both are a surface only, and when the bolt of Absolute Truth is shown, their falseness is betrayed and dissolved.

tower-pulp-tarot
This lovely rendering from the Pulp Tarot might easily be a cover for the paperback novelization of The Towering Inferno film above. Aside from it’s 40s era artistic sensibilities, it has most of the necessary cues that we find in other versions of the card. That includes the two figures falling past the upper stories, though they may be a bit hard to pic out in this scan.

If we look at the Tower as an impending doom to our own interests it conveys aught but fear and dread. If we determine that this represents the destruction of an established order, which we regard ourselves (rightly or wrongly) as separate from, then the news is slightly better, assuming we have no moral compunction to watching other humans suffer.

But there is a third way to look at it, and that is as an incentive to examine the staid and perhaps too rigid parts of our own thinking, and accept the possibility that change is a positive, even if the process is temporarily horrifying. What does not survive the Tower’s fall was not strong enough to be relied upon. Even if it appeared to be useful, and beautiful, and important, if it cannot withstand such a shock, it would ultimately fail us at a critical point, doing even greater damage.

This theme is a powerful one for our present day. Byron Ballard has spoken on multiple occasions that we are in, or have just passed through Tower time. By her definition, this is a time when the old order of things is being blown apart and transformed. What has functioned -for good or ill- in the past has ceased to provide what the world requires, and so the world is shattering it.

It is tempting to subscribe to this metaphor, but I try to view things from the broader perspective of human society. The experience of Tower time is not unique to our present circumstance, nor are we the first society to verbalize a similar idea, even if that label was not applied. The changes to the established order of things was going on when Smith designed these cards. One might argue that the shift would culminate in World War I, because human civilization was significantly transformed by that event, and society was irrevocably altered.

Yet I can cite the same circumstances in the middle of the 19th century with the American Civil War, and the outcomes of the various Revolutions of the 18th century, coming as they did in the wake of the Enlightenment.

My point is that these transformations are a constant. The old order is frequently being blown apart and rebuilt in a new form. The Tower has strong foundations. While it is comforting to believe that we will jettison all the negative aspects and “get it right this time”, history teaches that it is harder to abandon certain forms than we expect. The Tower is burning, but it is not burned. The pinnacle upon which it sits is a high one. Doubtless other kings and prelates will rise to scale that height.

If it is your house that is burning, then you will see this as a disaster.

If it is your enemy’s house that burns, you will see this as a miracle and a wonder.

Two bodies fall from the Tower.

It is therefore important to remember that we all share the same world that is burning. Wishing for it’s destruction and collapse does not leave us without impact. We are not immune to the consequences of it’s collapse.

We need to be mindful of Old Kronos devouring his children lest one destroy him. Had he not that habit, Zeus would not have been motivated to seek his destruction.

Regardless of whether “Tower time” is present, past, or future, it is without argument life-altering. It signifies a change so profound that nothing that comes afterward will ever be quite the same again.

Because we see it as a lightning flash, we assume that it is an instant: explosive, cataclysmic, shocking. But such change can be quiet, subtle, and potentially hard to pinpoint.

We can look to the fall of the Berlin Wall as a profound event that marked the collapse of the corrupt Soviet system and the end of the Cold War. Yet the series of events leading up to that moment were varied, and their connection only visible in hindsight. The lightning bolt meandered its way over the world for almost a century before it struck on that night in 1989.

And sadly, it’s clear that particular Tower has not completely toppled.

The lightning is still striking, slowly, inexorably, in ways that will perhaps only be perceived by our descendants, should the world survive for them to exist.

In the meantime, I next turn my attention to the first of three cards expressing what I call “celestial” ideation. Next week we will discuss the Star. We are only five cards from the end of this particular exercise.

By summer’s end I will have to go back to thinking up new topics in a more organic fashion, as I have not the energy (at present) to do this with the remaining 56 cards of the Minor Arcana. Perhaps it’s time I turn that energy toward putting such information in a book. The world can surely use another Tarot book, right?

Thank you for continuing to find something here worth your time. I look forward to welcoming you in again next week.

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To Darkness Returned

Devil

The Devil hath power to assume a pleasing shape.

Hamlet: Act II, Scene 2 – William Shakespeare

Starting with the Hanged Man at XII we have been delving into cards that, at face value, purport ill-tidings. Even last week’s Temperance is couched in the same gloomy sky that Death shares, and that tells us that we are in places where mortals fear to tread.

Number XV is called the Devil. As noted in some of the earlier articles, this card’s layout seems a parody of the Lovers card at VI, and there is a good reason for that. As depicted in the Rider-Waite-Smith Deck, the Devil is a red and orange demon, with a feline head, large bat-like ears, gray ram’s horns, great bat wings, and a shaggy lower torso and legs ending in taloned feet. In his left hand he hold inverted a large torch. His right hand is lifted and is positioned with the thumb out, and the two fingers on either side together, forming a v-shape in the middle. The Devil is perched on a black block to which is affixed a large iron ring. On either side of the this ring a chain is attached, and the chains are secured to an iron collar around the neck of a male and female being. These are very similar to the male and female depicted in Eden in the Lovers, but on closer view, the woman has horns and a tail that ends in a bunch of grapes, while the man has pointed ears and a tail that ends in a flame shape. The entire background of this card is black. Between the Devil’s horns is an inverted pentagram.

devil-rws-tarot
The RWS Infernal One says hello and wishes you’d drop by. He might even put on a shirt.

There are a number of intentional symbols included in this version of the card that derive from various sources. We can start with the basic design of the being Baphomet from Eliphas Levi. Here is a strange goat-headed god, with a center horn that blazes, an upright (by traditional reckoning) pentagram on it’s brow, with female breasts and eagle wings. From out of the robes that cover it’s lower part rises a fully erect caduceus (to prevent Victorian gentlemen from having to observe a wang other than their own, I’m sure) backed by a scaled shield (possibly the Aegis of Athena). The arms are in similar position to the one we find on the XV card, but the hand gestures are those of the common Christian blessing, on both hands. The raised right arm is inscribed “Solve” and lowered left arm “Coagula”. There are hooves at the end of the beings legs, and it sits cross-legged on a block on top of a sphere (the world?) Two crescent moons are at the tips of the fingers, a light one on the right and a darker on the left.

Baphomet was later borrowed by the Church of Satan under Anton Le Vey and has become an enduring symbol of Satanic and anti-Christian Black Magic in the popular culture. This composite being is, however, much like the alchemical chimera that we see in various depictions of the Temperance card, and represents that union of opposites, the joining of the aspects of things, to create the true shape of the thing. Despite the rather obvious societal restraints placed on displaying any sort of masculine sexuality (because that would be upsetting), Baphomet is an hermaphrodite. It is so in the same sense that the hermaphrodite appears in alchemy, not as a sexual fetish but as an allegory for the fusion of opposing powers.

The name Baphomet is borrowed from the confessions of tortured Templars who, under duress, confessed to worshiping a “head” with that name. Scholars have theorized that the word is a corruption of Mahomet, or Muhammed, the chief prophet of Islam, and that these strange crusaders had become secret Muslims during their sojourn in the Holy Land. So much is written about the Templars, and so much of it is modern fiction, that it is difficult to say one way or the other. Certainly the Templars adopted a good number of Islamic conventions, particularly regarding the handling and exchange of money. The legends suggest that this was some great fortune that has yet to be discovered (sorry, Ben Gates) but it may simply have been the use of the financial methods of their temporarily conquered enemies that made it appear so.

Levi was not the first to use the name, but he has perhaps conjured the most enduring image of it. Wikipedia would have you believe he took the Tarot devil as inspiration, and perhaps Waite thought the same, but if we glance at the Devil in the Tarot de Marseilles we see there is very little in common with either Levi’s chimera or Waite’s Devil, where there is much resemblance of those two to each other. The Marseilles Devil, and his minions are strangely attired. While the Devil itself is shown with breasts and a penis, the horns, wings and other “demonic” trappings look to be a costume. The crescent moon shaped objects on the breast might even be a kind of “wonder bra” indicating that this figure derives more from the theater than the pit. Paul Huson suggests that many of the Tarot trumps were based upon scenes depicted in the early passion plays of Medieval times, and that there origin has been obscured by history. If he is correct, and this seems reasonable, then the Devil here is meant to be mocked and ridiculed. It’s outrageous appearance is a Medieval fantasy of the church, and popular superstition.

Baphomet
Almost every twentieth century image of demons and devils in popular culture owe some part of themselves to this original. Aside from the goateed and debonair Mephistopheles, who tempted old Dr. Faust, Levi’s Baphomet is our prototype for denizens of the Fiery Pit.

Prior to his invention, devils more usually resembled the composite nightmare creatures that were neither fish nor fowl. Splendid examples are to be found in the painting of Hell by Heironymus Bosch, and works by his contemporaries in Northern Europe. The sensibility here was that since the Fallen Angel, lacked the power of true creation, he was forced to create his minions out of the pieces of things that God had already made.

Further south, Michelangelo’s hellish hoards are less imaginative, consisting of grey and green brutes with long ears and snouts. This may not be so much of a cultural difference as a need to complete a large number of large figures in a short time. Bosch’s demonic world is all part of a small altarpiece, whereas the Last Judgment figures are larger than life. The composite beast version of his Satanic Majesty won out in the designs of the early Tarocchi.

Levi was creating a metaphor, in the good old alchemical tradition, for what he considered to be an ancient pagan ideology. The figure of Baphomet, along with the other diabolical names he cites in his works, was representative of a more ancient deity or deities that were secretly worshipped by closet polytheists. He was Pan, the great goat, the old fertility god. And of course, he is also Khmnu the creator god symbolized by the ram, and confounded with Amun in the Egyptian myths. But the Devil of the Tarot is, historically speaking, that Christian principle of the infernal, the Fallen Angel, the King of Hell, and therefore can’t really be seen as either ancient pagan avatar or modern magical symbolism.

The Visconti Sforza deck doesn’t assist us in unraveling this puzzle, because the Devil card is one of those replaced later by another artist. It is therefore difficult to say what form the original had, if any. There is speculation that many early Devil cards were used as a surrogate for the being itself, either by sorcerers seeking to curry it’s favor, or churchmen looking for a whipping boy in various rituals. So the number of such cards from the earlier decks are rare, and the best we may expect is what is depicted with Marseilles, an actor in a kind of Halloween costume, whose role was to meet and be defeated by the slain Christ in one of the apocryphal resurrection stories. This tale becomes more relevant to the history of the Tower card, so I will only mention it here, but it is derived from the musings of the early Christian fathers and seems to connect up a number of these middle Major Arcana Cards.

Baphomet would appear to have suffered a major railway accident on his way to the RWS deck. His nethers have now been tastefully covered with fur, preventing any homoerotic suggestions from polluting the practitioners’ minds. One might, if one looked at the swirling hairs, glean just perhaps a suggestion of an erect member, but of course that might simply be a Freudian illusion. The breasts are gone now, too. There’s no fusion of genders going on here. Old Scratch is unquestionably male.

The central flaming horn equated with Lucifer – the Light Bringer is now turned downward. This signifies the perversion of the Light of Truth, that the Devil brings only deceit and illusion. Curiously I have seen Hekate’s torch similarly depicted in art, though I believe these are all modern glosses and may have been influenced by Card XV in this deck. Likewise we have inverted the pentagram. The original is Aristotelean. That is, it derives from the writings of Aristotle, in describing the five elements – Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and Quintessence, which in modern terms is called Spirit. Spirit was what we might determine as anima in Aristotle’s mind. It was that substance that made something alive, which could not be accomplished by combinations of the other four elements alone. Thus pentagram then, is an emblem of this, with Spirit at the apex, the most sublime and dominant of the other elements. By inversion on the Devil’s brow, we connote his overturning of the natural order. The Devil was antithesis of God, and in all ways then opposite and backward. Dante’s Inferno has him turned upside down, where he plunged into the Earth at the time of the Fall. Spirit is now at the bottom, with the material components of the world arrayed above it. This signifies an obsession with the material, with the worldly, over the spiritual, that is connected to the idea of sin and punishment.

We find bat wings on the Marseilles Devil, and on many many depictions of demons and devils in art. Bats are creatures of the night. They shun the light. They are not birds but they fly. Thus these easily become contrary symbols and are more suitable to an infernal and oppositional being than Baphomet’s feathered pinions. The other alterations in his visage are in keeping with the Gothic style that Pamela Smith mimics in her designs for the Tarot.

devil-black-tarot
A thing of darkest nightmares peers out at us from Card XV of the Black Tarot. This deck is a recent acquisition and I have not had much opportunity to explore it. It dispenses with all the imagery of the RWS and other preceding traditional decks like the Marseilles. The imagery is totally original and as you might expect, dark in nature.

This image kept reminding me of something else, and I couldn’t quite place it until this morning. It brings to mind the Devil card of H. R. Giger, or at least the image was presented as the Devil card. Unfortunately I did not have time to scan that card before press time. There is some similarity in the single eye and the horn, but I can’t say with any certainty that this Devil was inspired by the Giger one. Giger’s version is very socially critical, as was much of his work outside the popularly known, and merits discussion on it’s own at some later point.

Something must be said of the upraised hand’s similarity to the gesture of a famous character in an old science fiction franchise. The so-called “Vulcan salute” associated with Star Trek’s Mr. Spock, is, in fact, the same as that being made by this character. They both derive from the same source. Leonard Nimoy, the actor who created much of the Spock character, was the child of immigrant Russian Jews. He based the gesture on something he saw as a child in the synagogue, when the rabbis were blessing the congregation. They put forth their hands in the shape of the letter Shin, which forms the start of the word Shem HaMeforash, a term denoting the all mighty, or the sacred name of Adonai/Elohim/Yawveh.

So while Baphomet is using the “proper” Catholic hand gesture for blessing (never mind that it’s also a Hindu mudra), in an astonishingly blatant display of anti-Semitism, the Devil is pronouncing a Hebrew blessing. It’s very hard to reconcile this with the fascination that many of the lodge magicians (Waite included) had with Hebrew “secrets” and Kabbala, but there seems to be no other good explanation for this. The lodge magicians, despite their “rediscovered” paganism, were still essentially enmired in that long Christian attitude that the Jews, in denying the divinity of Jesus, were a sinful people, worthy of scorn, and deserving of the various persecutions and disasters visited upon them. We have hopefully moved away from such horrendous ideas, but it is necessary to understand this atmosphere was very different during the construction of the RWS Tarot. Since this deck has had such a strong influence, it is important to look at the negative ideas that are part of it’s baggage, and perhaps, evolve a kinder and more enlightened awareness of the messages we are receiving through it. Particularly when writers, including Waite, expound upon the “moral lesson” inherent in this card.

The moral lesson is the need to reject that material obsession in favor of our spiritual freedom. That this is a mockery of the scene in Eden before the Fall is intentional. Rather than exulting in the beautiful garden under the protection of the Bright Angel, here humanity is chained to the slave block, owned by their bad habits, symbolized by the drunkenness of the body (Eve’s tail) and the lustfulness of the passions (Adam’s tail). The minions of the Dark One live by the motto “If it feels good, do it!” never realizing that all they are experiencing is the mere illusion of temporary pleasure. Pursuing lives of sensation and emotion, they are never free to explore the higher mind that dwells within.

There’s obviously a Judeo-Christian bent to this idea, but we can find the same idea in the Eastern beliefs. Suffering is the result of longing for that which is temporary. It is not the real world, but an illusion. The real world is permanent, inviolable, and without division. The illusionary world is one of constant loss, change, and desire. Only by denying the desire can are we able to see past the illusion.

There are several flavors of Satanism in the world today. One of the variants is that what people call “God” is actually the creator and ruler of this illusionary world. Satan, then, in opposing that “God” is trying to free humankind from the illusion, and show them the way things really are. I don’t ascribe to this personally, but I think it’s an interesting area to explore, especially in relation to resolving the Devil card. The old Hebrew word Shaitan whence comes the modern Satan simply means “adversary” In some contexts, it is more correct to view Shaitan as an externalization of the divine mind, created for the purpose of presenting an alternate, or opposing view. That is, the Rebel Angel fulfills the need for God to have someone tell him he’s wrong.

devil-pulp-tarot
I had to include this version of the trump from the Pulp Tarot. Its homage to the old EC horror comics is delightful and so well executed. At the same time, it keeps all the necessary context for us to use it in a standard reading. This, of course, is the Faustian demon, with his more or less handsome visage and that de rigeuer goatee. We would never spot the evil twin without it.

Is is just me or does he look like Nicolas Cage?

So when the Infernal Prince hops up in a card reading, the message may not be a super spiritual one, or warning about the wages of sin. It may simply mean that you need to stop believing your own press. Everything one this card is about the reversal of what is “true, just and correct”. So it stands to reason that it portends situations that are illusory, particularly those which involve self-deception, and the tendency to believe what we hope is true, despite much evidence to the contrary. It is an emblem of our willful desire to decide the world is the way we want it to be, even when it isn’t. In this respect, we are rebelling against what the universe is trying to tell us, and will reap the unpleasant result of this self-delusion. The Devil is not a creature within tempting us to this fate, it is an externalization of what we know better, but would rather not have to accept.

When next I write, we’ll be looking at the last of the dark and dreary cards, the Tower, and examine both its traditional meanings and how we may re-interpret those as a means of controlling our own destinies.

Thank you for continuing to support this series of articles. I’ll be back next week.

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Alkahest and Elixir

Temperance

Temperance makes its way into the Tarot deck as one of the old Catholic virtues. It’s place between Death and the Devil may be a bit more complicated.

temperance-rws-tarot
The scan here is from my RWS deck and the colors are a bit off from other’s I have seen. I was gifted these, so I don’t know the provenance of the print, but they are from the middle 1980s. Presumably they are a US Games deck, as the copyright was still in force in those days. I don’t have another RWS deck of that vintage, so I can’t compare the printing to it. The digital versions I usually use are from the Fool’s Dog app, and appear to either have a different set of cards or have been improved after scanning. I happened to have these out and thought I’d use one of the original paper cards.

Card XIV as it appears in the Rider-Waite-Smith deck is an image of an angel, with large red wings, pouring what appears to be water, from one chalice to another. The path of the water is physically improbable, if not impossible, in that it flows diagonally rather than downward. The upper chalice is in the left hand of the angel, the lower receiving chalice in the right. The angel stands with the left foot on the land, and the right foot in the water. Behind the left leg is a field of flowers which have been identified by some as irises. To the right, it appears that there is a path rising up out of the water and passing backward to a gap between two mountains, above which a luminous crown rises. The angels own halo is defined simply by rays emitted from it’s head (the gender is not specific) On it’s brow is the solar symbol, that goes back to the name of Ra in hieroglyph, and on the breast is a square with an orange triangle in it. The sky is the same gray as the previous Death card. The distant mountains are a light blue (the same color as the water, actually). The water contains ripples that indicate it is a small pond, or an inlet, rather than a flowing stream.

Much of the imagery here is echoed in the Star just a few cards later. There is that same symbolism of two vessels, and also the connection between the dry land and the water. The difference is that the Star is pouring out the contents of her pitchers onto the land and the water, whereas Temperance is pouring from one to the other, or possibly mixing the two. Yet the Temperance angel is linking the earth and the water in its stance.

Temperance taken at face value signals that balance one strives for, in order to have some general control over one’s fate. Of course, we’ve looked at the balance idea with Justice, so there seems some redundancy here. Justice also derives out of those ideas of the cardinal Catholic virtues, and forms a tetrad with Strength, and supposedly the Hermit, representing Prudence. If read as a Catholic virtue (and this is probably the likely origin of the name) then the mixing of materials here likely represents the dilution of the wine with water that takes place as part of the Eucharist ritual . This practice is, according to dogma, symbolic of the dual nature of Christ. The water represents his humanity, the wine his divinity. Thus it may be seen as a metaphor for the spirit of the divine that incarnates in all humans.

If this is a symbol of the Eucharist, then the angel is most likely identified as Michael, who is most often confounded with Christ in much of the mystical literature. It is Michael who is chief of the armies of heaven, and who makes the final war against the rebel angels and the Great Dragon in the Book of Revelations. This has led many church writers to consider him identical with the risen and ascended Christ, who will come at the end of days (more about that later).

Paul Huson, in his seminal text Mystical Origins of the Tarot, suggests that this figure may have originally been meant as Ganymede, the cup bearer of Zeus. But this is also the source for claiming that Temperance derives from the Catholic virtues, so there may be a bit of conflicting information there. Not that this is unusual at all for mystic thought. And I am certainly not criticizing this text or Mr. Huson’s long work on the subject. I include it here merely to illustrate that the figure of the angel may represent a number of things. There is another reading that has the figure represent the goddess Iris (hence the flowers) who was emblematic of the rainbow and another messenger from the gods. There would seem to be a common theme that the card offers us some sort of insight, or perhaps indicates that maybe we should pay more attention to what is going on.

In my thinking this card’s symbolism is very much drawn from the practice of alchemy. If one is familiar with the fantastic and surreal rebuses used in the alchemical manuals, they’ll no doubt spot some of the similarities. Admixture of fluids is the most obvious one, but the symbolism of “betwixt and between” shown in the figure standing on both earth and water, is a frequent theme. The triangle on the chest of the angel gives us the element of fire, so we are only lacking air in this combination. Or perhaps we are supposed to leave out air. In alchemy there were often procedures that needed to be cooking in a sealed vessel, or allowed to “swelter” over time.

temperance-star-Cosmic-Tarot
These two renditions from the Cosmic Tarot show just how similar the ideography of Temperance and the Star can be drawn. The artist here has chosen to share more elements than are perhaps seen in the Smith versions, but there is certainly a visual connection among the symbols. If Temperance represents our own internal transmutation, which occurs before the next two dark cards – the Devil and the Tower – then the Star on the opposite of those cards may signal a promised reward for the effort.

We may also see in this the dual nature of the Philosopher’s Stone and the Elixir of Life. These were the ultimate goal of alchemy, and though apparently two things, they were frequently interchangeable. They granted eternal life, youth, health, and wisdom, and possessed the power of transmutation. Not only could they turn base metals into gold, they were capable of elevating, or refining, anything to which they came in contact with. They drove out all corruption, and made the thing pure. One was the watery form of the earthy form of the other. Depending on the text, the silvery white powder of the Stone would dissolve into water (or wine) and make the Elixir, or the Elixir could be evaporated to precipitate the Stone. Essentially if one had the one, they could obtain the other.

This curious property echoes the idea of transmutation itself, and I think we can apply these insights when reading the Temperance card. We are not, here, bound by this idea of limitation. Once might basically presume the inference of this card is that of stopping before things get out of hand. But rather, we can look at it terms of controlling our choices, not merely just holding back. Consider the alchemical idea of refinement, of incorruption, of the removal of impurities. Alchemy used the processes of improving an ore or an alloy as metaphor for spiritual growth. In fact, the adept had to attain a certain purity of spirit before they would be able to create the key chemical combinations that would result in the Philosopher’s Stone. Some mystics suggest that the true adept was able to perform the miraculous feats of changing lead to gold and living a prolonged life because they had completed this internal alchemy, and that the external Stone or Elixir were merely metaphor. The adept became capable in their own power, much as we see things like reiki today, of making these astounding changes.

That crown rising in the distance, is, to my thinking, a symbol of the personal power that can come from self-control, self-discipline, and self-knowledge. We can make the water defy gravity if we have sufficient control of our own will, and sufficient awareness of the world around us. We have to stand on the land and the water. To understand both the mundane and the sublime we need to be as at home in that watery world of the unseen, as we are on the dry land of objective reality. The “crown” is a common term in alchemy texts, and representing stages of the refinement practice which result in purer or purest material.

I admit that much of my thinking probably was influenced by exposure to Crowley’s Book of Thoth version of this card in my early twenties. That card is call “Art” and very directly expounds on the alchemical ideology. In the Thoth version, two conjoined figures pour fire and water into a common cauldron, presided over by a white lion and a red eagle. The figure may be considered hermaphrodite, as it shows a union of opposites, a very common depiction in alchemical art.

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The “Art” card as it appears in the position of Temperance in the Thoth deck as imagined by Aleister Crowley. It borrows much from alchemical art and a number of the more obscure symbols should be understood in that context. Crowley in the text clearly says this is about the internal alchemy of the magician, the transformation or transmutation, of our rough “human” selves into something more rare and sublime, and capable of making wonders in the world. Space here does not permit a lengthy analysis of all the little hidden messages, but it is worth spending some time contemplating this card and determining what meanings you personally assign to the various pieces.

This is the culmination of those aspects we see in the gendered metaphors of the earlier trumps of the Major Arcana. The figures are an equal union. There is therefore none in dominance, but a true blending of the properties of both, that is necessary for the creation of the Elixir. It is an awareness that all things are but aspects of one thing, that the outward forms are only meant as a means of understanding the inward truths, that is required to refine the Stone. And the Stone and the Elixir are the same thing. One within the other, one giving birth to the other, in an endless cycle. This is also the structure of the second riddle of the Sphinx, the answer to which is “day and night” but may more generically be termed “time”. And remember that the most astounding power of the Stone/Elixir is eternal life.

We can spin this right around to the Christian iconography we talked about at the beginning. If we are seeing the angelic figure as the risen Christ, performing the sacrament from the Last Supper that supposedly absolves the sinner and makes them worthy to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, then this cards connection to immortality is rather obvious. We can see that crown over the horizon at the end of the long road as the promise of Paradise.

Alchemy, despite it’s well established connections to magic, or at least magic results., was essentially cooked up in a Christian context. While it may have been inspired, or even educated on pagan texts, medieval grimoires, and possibly dicey translations of ancient Hebrew and Islamic works, any underlying spiritual transformation was clearly cast in the Catholic mold. While it’s true some alchemists, and the associated seers and necromancers of the Renaissance and early Enlightenment were prosecuted by varying authorities on crimes of witchcraft, most often it was their failure to produce results, in the form of eternal life, health, and wealth, that led to their ultimate demise. Alchemy as a practice survived well into the 18th Century, where it was practiced by no less a personage than Sir Isaac Newton. Newton’s laws, which formed the basis for physics for centuries and still apply to certain large massive operations of gravity, are prefaced with his understanding of a “spiritual architect” that derives from alchemical ideas.

temperance-pulp-tarot
A bit more tongue in cheek approach to the odd character of this card can be had in the Pulp Tarot, based upon the artwork of tawdry novels, magazines, and comics from the 30s to the 50s. Compare this to Crowley’s version of the hermaphrodite, and to Smith’s angel. It walks a line between the two, taking neither very seriously, you still providing the reader with plenty of opportunity to image and expand on the images.

One of these contexts is that Jesus Christ transforms the wine and water into the Elixir of Life. It is through his personal divinity that this transmutation occurs, and it is through this power, passed down the ages from the disciples to the various popes to their bishops and priests, that the Holy Eucharist conveys this eternal life in the ritual of the mass.

Yet the idea of the alchemist is that this is a natural process, which may be discovered, attained, and passed on, without necessarily having intervention of deity. Or rather, that it did not require the involvement of an established church and the Apostolic Succession. There is no coincidence that the flowering of alchemy and the Reformation are closely aligned in history. While much of the material theories predate Christianity, it is during that period when the pre-Christian knowledge of the Graeco-Roman world was re-emerging to challenge the dogma of Catholicism that sees it blossom.

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A pair of non-traditional Temperance cards, curious because they are both derived from Celtic myth, and share at least one author, John Matthews, in common.

The left image is from the Wildwood Tarot, and features the Red and White dragons from the child Merlin’s vision. In the story, King Vortigern is trying to build his new fortress, but it keeps falling down. The augers say a child must be sacrificed, and the young Merlin is selected. He tells Vortigern that he must dig down into the foundations of the hill to release the two dragons, so that the ground will stop trembling. He does and the castle gets built. This legend is later embellished with Merlin’s half-human or non-human ancestry, and attached to the Red and White Wells of Glastonbury, on whose hill the bones of Arthur and Guinevere are supposed to have been found. Vortigern is considered to have been an historical personage, and the account places him some time before Ambrosius and Artorius, who may have been the historical source for Arthur. Merlin or rather Myrdwn in Welsh, if the same person in both stories, would still have been well over two centuries old.

The Image on the right is from the Arthurian Tarot, which is an amalgam of old Celtic myth, Grail lore, Arthurian fiction, and a handful of Saxon/Norse referents, as well as some later glosses from the English witchcraft revival. Her we see three women tending a cauldron. They represent the more modern ideas of Maiden/Mother/Crone that may not have good evidence of existing in antiquity. There are a number of magic cauldrons in Celtic myth. There is the Cauldron of Bran, which the Irish High King used to raise his slain warriors to fight again another day. The Cauldron had a number of other magical powers, such as providing an endless supply of food and drink, and being able to determine if someone spoke the truth. Much of these powers were confuted with the Grail in later chivalric tales, but they originate in the Mabinogian.

The other famous Celtic cauldron is that of Ceridwen, who made up a mystic brew to give her son (who was no great shakes) a fair form and powerful wit. She hired a man named Gwion Bach to stir it, and at the appropriate hour, when the charm was complete, the cauldron burst and three drops of the contents landed on Bach. He immediately became a powerful sorcerer, and there follows the tale of a wizards duel where Bach flees Ceridwen and they each go through a variety of transformations. In the end, Bach becomes a grain of barley, and Ceridwen transformed into a hen, eats him. She becomes magically pregnant at this point with Gwion. When he is born, the magic power has made him beautiful, so instead of killing him, she puts the baby in a boat and sends it down the river. He is discovered by a poor salmon fisherman who names him “the Shining Brow”, which is Talesin in Welsh. Thus the celebrated bard Talesin was born.

Even in these tales we can find the doctrine of sacred transformation, and the power inherent in it. The cauldrons in Celtic practice can often be seen as metaphors for the womb, and in some ways their practical use as a cooking pot was “life-giving” in its own way.

The patrons of the alchemists were undoubtedly interested in the prospect of adding to their treasuries, and fighting off those thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, but we find that a good number of them were also heads of states that had taken a publicly Protestant stance, such as Queen Elizabeth I. Her patronage of Dr. John Dee, and his subsequent experiments in alchemy and necromancy, indicates a broadening of thought that was perhaps less available in those lands still holding to Papal fealty. When Dee left England for the continent, a number of the courts that entertaining him had the same political and religious bent.

So when we come to this card, we can perhaps now have a better understanding of why it has been placed here, between Death and the Devil. If we look at it only in terms of a Sunday school lesson about curbing our appetites, it seems perhaps a trifle late for that. But if this is a message about the transformation of our spirit itself, something we find in Eastern as well as Western philosophy, then it makes much more sense.

The Devil still lies ahead. Next week we will explore that card’s origins and meanings, and how it fits between the idea of personal transformation into a more sublime being, and the remainder of the Major Arcana. There are only seven cards left and then I will have to figure out something else to write about. In the meantime, thank you for continuing to support these efforts and I hope you will join me in a week.

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In All Things – Balance

Justice

The card we find in the Rider Waite Smith deck marked with the XI is named Justice. In other decks this card is found as VIII, placing it between the force of the Chariot and the contemplation of the Hermit. In this now typical position, however, it stands between the unending circuit of Fortune and the unresolved fate of the Hanging Man. While I am not personally an adherent of the so-called “Tarot journey” the arbitrary positioning of these cards, and the numbers that are then assigned to them, can impact how that journey is taken, and perhaps give insight into how the cards speak to each other in their “proper” place. This card, fundamentally, is about that order of things. The symbols here are ancient, and modern meanings have lent interpretations to them that are not what they started as, and such interpretations are not always easily interchangeable.

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A rather simple card from the hands of Pixie Smith. Or is it?

The Justice card returns us to the frontally oriented figure on a throne, flanked by columns or vertical elements, that we have not seen since the Chariot. The positioning links this card with that, as well as with the Hierophant, the Emperor, and the Priestess. The figure here is generally interpreted as female, though in the demi-gothic style Smith is employing that is by no means an absolute. The bobbed hairstyle could certainly indicate a prince or young king, and the robe gives us no tell-tale swellings to determine the true gender of its wearer. The robe is topped with a mantle and tippet, indicative of some official capacity, though not necessarily a religious one. The decoration on the tippet might be laurel leaves. The figure wears a simple open crown with a single blue square gem in the front. A square brooch with a round red gem holds the mantle together. The robe itself is red. Mantle, tippet and undergarment appear to be gold or yellow. The throne is largely obscured, but may be a simple stone bench. The two columns are likewise unadorned, with their capitals are out of view about the top of the card. Between them hangs a purple curtain completely blocking the area behind the figure. Above the figure and to either side of the columns the sky is yellow. From the figure’s left hand depends a simple balance. The right hand wields a sword. The toe of one white boot shows out from under the robe on that side.

I would say that in virtually all of my decks, this card immediately calls to mind the original source image from whence this concept of Justice derives. It is the Weighing of the Heart from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, shown below in the most famous version from the Papyrus of Ani in the British Museum.

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This is the chapter of the weighing of the heart. This is where all notions of a heavenly reward in a blissful afterlife originate. The complex myth of Osiris and it’s connection to the mysterious mummy cult influenced Egyptian thinking for millennia. I personally have little doubt that it was during the so-called “bondage” of the Hebrew people in the Egyptian delta that this idea of resurrection for the chosen transmuted itself into that faith. Further, I think it likely that during the childhood of the person Jesus in the Hebrew community in Alexandria that these beliefs worked their way into the teachings that he would later communicate to his followers. Much of the New Testament bears the mark of that community, and the influence of both ancient Egyptian and Classical Greek thought.

This core tenet of the Egyptian resurrection belief is rather simple. The heart, wherein the Egyptians believe the soul of a person resided, was placed on one side of the balance. On the other was single feather, an incarnation of the goddess Maat, which is variously styled truth, but that is a limiting rendition. If the feather and the heart were balanced, then the soul of the dead was considered to have lived a right and proper life, and was allowed to go on to dwell with Osiris in the Field of Reeds or take their place in the Boat of Ra or both (the Egyptian afterlife is multidimensional in an almost quantum-like nature).

On the other hand, if it weighed heavier than Maat, then it was burdened with evil deeds that were an affront to the gods, and was tossed by Anubis into the waiting maw of Ameet, the Eater of the Dead. This person was now irrevocably and totally gone. Unlike later religions with lakes of fire and brimstone (though you’ll find those in the Book of the Dead) the wages of sin in the Egyptian faith was immediate oblivion. No one would repeat your name down the millions of years. You would be forgotten.

For the ancient Egyptians there was no more terrible or more terrifying fate. The Book of the Dead is compiled from spells and rubrics that were deemed necessary to get the soul to this point, and then insure that his heart did not “lie” about him. I include here the spell in the old form as translated by Budge. There’s a shorter version on Wikipedia, but I prefer the more formal language myself.

My heart, my mother; my heart, my mother! My heart whereby I came into being! May nought stand up to oppose me at [my] judgment, may there be no opposition to me in the presence of the Chiefs (Tchatchau); may there be no parting of thee from me in the presence of him that keepeth the Balance! Thou art my KA, which dwelleth in my body; the god Khnemu who knitteth together and strengtheneth my limbs. Mayest thou come forth into the place of happiness whither we go. May the Sheniu officials, who make the conditions of the lives of men, not cause my name to stink, and may no lies be spoken against me in the presence of the God. [Let it be satisfactory unto us, and let the Listener god be favourable unto us, and let there be joy of heart (to us) at the weighing of words. Let not that which is false be uttered against me before the Great God, the Lord of Amentet. Verily, how great shalt thou be when thou risest in triumph.]

E.A. Wallis Budge – Translation – The Papyrus of Ani; The Egyptian Book of the Dead

The name spellings here are variable depending on the sources. There’s a list of the company of gods in attendance, but generally it’s at least a top ten. 1The Sheniu officials likely refers to the corporeal authorities that had dominion over the living world, so the government, police, and priesthood, all of which were a single entity in Ancient Egypt, with Pharoah at the center. Osiris is chairman of the board and officiates as the Judge. He is accompanied by Isis, of course, and sometimes Horus. He is the one referred to as the Lord of Amentet (the afterlife). Khemnu is the old goat god, part of the Egyptian creation, and will reappear in magic and witchcraft up to the present day. Tehuti/Thoth is the Keeper of the Balance, and in many depictions stands by with a papyrus and reed, waiting to record the name of the Blessed Dead for all eternity. Maat was his consort. He represents the knowledge of the Cosmos, the structure that is written, similarly to the Greek Logos. She represents the Cosmic Order -that which is as it should be. Saying hers is the feather of Truth is connoting a modern meaning that word has, which is not entirely synonymous with the Egyptian idea.

Though translations of the Prayer to the heart talk about the kinds of “sins” we’ve come to equate with evil in a post-monotheist world, it’s an over simplification to put Maat simply as being a good person. Certainly such things as were forbade in some of the Mosaic laws (which probably were borrowed from Egypt and perhaps Mesopotamia) regarding violent crime, theft and deceit, would have been as unacceptable in their civilization as it is ours, because they have an impact on the practical operation of that civilization. But Maat extends to things that would offend the gods, and cause the universe to become unbalanced, which could have catastrophic consequences like famine, plague, earthquakes, sandstorms, and other dangers. Living on a thin strip of green on either side of the Nile, the ancient Egyptians were keenly aware of the need to respect and live harmoniously with their environment. Even today, with modern irrigation, and technological advances, the stark contrast between the viable green of the river valley, and the bleak dust that lies beyond is inescapable. Maat is a lesson for us all, to live life in balance with our world, and to understand our world is the whole of the great Cosmos we inhabit. We must look to the land, to the spirits, to the ancestors, and to the stars, and pay attention.

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I absolutely love this version of Maat from the Journey Into Egypt Tarot. The sheer delight and lightness of being of the goddess expresses so much more than words. The right and proper order of things should bring us such joy. This feather, when weighed against the true heart, cannot but be a source of ecstatic celebration and persistent elan.

It is this long litany that springs to my mind when the Justice Card comes up in a reading. I include this as preface to my visual exploration of the RWS version, as it is really impossible for me with my background to separate it when trying to interpret the meaning of the card. That said, there are a number of highly useful symbols in Waite that may take us in other directions, and offer access to your imagination and understanding of the idea of Justice.

The word “Justice” itself is loaded with baggage, and more comes with it every day as we make our way through the rubble of the fallen Tower trying to construct our next world atop the ruins of the old. Conflated with it are words like Truth, Fairness, Equity, and Law and Order.

We’ve already examined Truth, but if you’ve ever sat on a jury in the United States, you have been told that “truth” is not the same as “fact”, and your job in the process is to determine if the evidence as presented is a finding of fact. Recent language has introduced the idea of “alternate facts” which Orwell would tell us is double speak. An alternate fact is a lie. Truth, on the other hand, as Obi-Wan tells us, may depend on our point of view.

Fairness is not Justice. Nor is the related word Equity. Both fairness and equity relate to a parity, a sameness to both sides of any dispute. The parable of Solomon and the two woman claiming to be the mother of the same child illustrates this splendidly. Fairness is cutting the baby in half.

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A selection of Justice cards taking a more Euro-Celtic bent than either the Egyptian original or the RWS Gothic archetype. From left, the Wildwood Tarot gives us the Stag, a composite creature bearing the axe and shield emblazoned with the tree of life. The dimensions of the treetop and the root system are in equilibrium, as are all the things of the world. In this milieu, human beings are just another one of those things, subject to not a philosophical justice, but a natural one.

The middle piece is from the Arthurian Tarot by John and Caitlin Matthews and illustrated by Miranda Gray. I have this as a digital deck from The Fool’s Dog, because I have a great interest and respect for the Celtic/Grail Shamanism that the Matthews have brought to us. I have never gotten the hardcopy, though, because I don’t always find the images satisfying. This is an exception, where Justice is styled as Soveriegnty, Per the text, this figure is the goddess of the land, who symbolically is wed to the king and thus endows him the right to rule, and as the old oath goes “to mete justice and dispense mercy”. The stream here runs black, red, and white. I am immediately reminded of the White Well and the Red Well of Glastonbury, long associated with Arthurian myth.

The final card comes from the Tarot of the Hidden Realm, which is a Celtic Faerie deck in general description. Much of the imagery dispenses entirely with the forms of the Rider Waite Smith, and has more similarity to Brian Froud’s Faerie Oracle Decks, though this is by the artist Julia Jeffrey. As you can see, the prominent feature here is the sword, readied but still sheathed. Curiously, the little white Feather of Maat still manages to make an appearance.

While certainly a half a baby would balance against another half a baby in Ye Olde Scale of Ye Olde Justice, we all of us can tell that is not the right solution. We chafe from an early age against having to miss recess because Little Johnny couldn’t behave in math class, even though the rest of us were perfect angels. We seem to have an inherent sense that there is a proper solution, where things are made right, and sometimes that is that things are made fair, and sometimes they are not.

In reality, if we take a big fluffy ostrich plume and place it on a balance with a fairly desicated human heart, we will see that the heart handily outweighs the feather. What makes it work is that both are allegorical. They are symbolic. The feather perhaps has more weight than its nature belies, but again, the heart free from trouble and sin is light.

You will note here that the figure of Justice is not “blind” as she is often depicted in Roman and derived works. The blindness is an allegory for fairness, or equity under law, which I think we all know is also a fallacy. Equity under law is a concept, originating in the Graeco-Roman world but not applying then any moreso than it does today. The patrician, plutarch, and senator stood before a justice who peeked out from under her blindfold, and distinguished them easily from the poor, the plebian, and the slave. So perhaps this Justice is at least being more honest to look us straight in the eye.

The square on the crown and the square brooch hearken to the ideas in Freemasonry that bled over into many of the magical lodges of the idea of Square, Level, and True (or Plumb). Part of the Masonic cornerstone ceremony is the testing of the stone by three officiators, with ceremonial instruments to determine if the corner are square, the top is level horizontally and the sides are straight vertically (true or plumb). These characteristics are essential for the cornerstone, since all the other stones will inherit their alignment from it.

I find it rather fascinating that the Egyptian architects of pyramids and temples had a single simple device that performed all of these functions. Oh, and if you’re an initiate, you can also use it to calculate your position according the stars, the circumference of the earth, and a lot of other nifty things. And the creation of this magic device is based on a deft use of light and shadow.

A string, with a weight on one end, will always point straight down. It will cast a shadow at a right angle to the string. Now I know that seems counter intuitive, because sundials work due to shadows apparently having different angle, but if I have a straight line, the shadow of that line is going to form a right angle at the point where the line reaches the ground. So I take my straight string. I put a straight stick in the ground that lines up with it. The shadow of that stick is at a right angle, and so I take a second stick and align it with the shadow and now I have a square. Then I take that square, and tie my weighted string to the point in the middle where the two sticks join. I go find a pond or a bucket of water. I take the ends of the sticks and dip them into the water until the down pointing string is exactly in the middle. I mark where the water is, and cut the ends of the sticks off. Because water always seeks level, the ends are now a device to mark our level blocks. I can use the corner to determine square, and the weighted string to determine plumb.

And I have accomplished this using the fire of the sun, the shadow cast on the earth by a string suspended in the air and leveled against a pool of water.

This device is the ancestor of the quadrant, the sextant, the astrolabe, the surveyor’s theodolite, and a plethora of instruments used for navigation, construction, and even space travel. That seems pretty powerful magic to me.

justice-shadowscapes-cosmic-legacy-of-divine-tarot
A second set of alternative Justice cards. On left is the beautiful piece from Stephanie Law’s Shadowscapes Tarot. The mythical faerieland that these cards arise from is an absolute wonderment in itself. I find myself getting lost in all the swirling shapes and tiny hidden features that she manages to put in almost every space. It is an apt reminder that there is always far more to the world that is at first apparent, and that is a good admonishment for those seeking justice at point of sword. Here the lady holds the balance and the feather, which in this image is sufficient warning.

The middle image is taken from the Cosmic Tarot and reflects that decks combination of Eastern esotericism, Buddhist mysticism, alchemy, and the traditions of the lodge magicians. Maat shines forth as the balance here, of the universe as a whole, not just the human realm with its ideologies and self-imposed strictures. Truth and Justice are cosmic concepts, not perhaps easily, or correctly, comprehended by the mind of humankind.

The righthand image is from Cirro Marchetti’s Legacy of the Divine Tarot. This might best be characterized as the Tarot one might expect from the Cirque de Soliel. Indeed, it features acrobats on draperies among other such images. However, the context here is that it is an imaginary deck composed in a post-apocalyptic world of our future, where the ancient wisdoms are being rediscovered, and a new Tarot devised. From that intriguing perspective, the symbols, already delicious, take on many additional significances. The journey through these cards is warm and wonderful.

What has it to do with Justice? Well only that it’s hidden in that little gem on the forehead, and the brooch with the red center tells us that we live in an ordered universe, where such things are not only possible but within our own understanding. It is our obligation to perceive and respond to that order, to keep it, both in the physical sense, and the spiritual one. The Masonic cornerstone is an allegory of the perfecting of the human spirit.

We should contrast here how Justice holds the sword versus how the Sphinx on top of the Wheel holds the sword. The Sphinx has it. It’s there. It’s waiting. But it’s not ready to strike. This tells us that the nature of Fortune is to be enigmatic. We know that some doom awaits (and doom in that old sense of destiny) but we won’t know it until it arrives.

Justice on the other hand wields the sword. The hand firmly grips the hilt and the blade is poised to swing down. The red of the robe is the lifeblood. The sword, like the axe in the center of the Roman fasces, is symbolic that ultimate penalty, death. The purple curtain behind Justice is emblem of the State, the Authority or whatever Entity, corporeal or cosmic, that renders judgment of the tipping of the balance and demands such an awful penalty.

The card is severe. Unlike Fortune’s Wheel, where we don’t see the end coming, and may blithely ride around sampling the rewards and retributions or random luck, when we are before Justice’s unflinching gaze, we must hope that our heart not bear false witness against us.

Yet that small bit of white at the bottom where the right foot peeks out, can only mean that mercy is available. It is not automatic, of course, and it has to overcome all the much larger forces going on in that card, but it is present. Without the possibility of mercy, there is no true Justice. There always has to be some chance, that even when all things weigh against us, the balance may yet tip in our favor.

We can have then some hope, that the radiance of that yellow sky behind the purple banner of Authority will shine down upon us, as it does the Fool, the Magician, the Empress, the Lovers, the Chariot and Strength. Consequently, this is the last we see of that brilliant sky in the Major Arcana. The succeeding five cards go from grey to black, and take us through the heart of darkness. We’ll start that descent next week with the Hanged Man.

Until then, thank you for reading to the end. I hope you have found it beneficial.

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Fortuna – Mistress of Destiny

Wheel

What goes up must come down
Spinning Wheel got to go ’round

-Spinning Wheel – David Clayton-Thomas – Blood, Sweat, and Tears

This week we delve into the mysterious symbolism of the card marked X, actually the eleventh card in the Major Arcana. This card is labeled Wheel Of Fortune, and the term both precedes and succeeds it’s use here. Most commonly this card is rendered as luck, or in reverse, the absence of it, yet the history of its symbols give use other avenues to peer down in search of meanings and contexts.

Wheel-RWS-Tarot
The Rider Waite Smith deck gives us a mixed bag of religious and mythical iconography to work with, not much of it consistent.

The card shows a triple circle set in the clouds. Within the outer circle are letters in English that may be read in a number of ways, between which four characters in Hebrew. Inside the second circle are eight rays that divide the inner two circles into eight segments. The completely horizontal and completely vertical rays cross over the alchemical symbols for Mercury, Sulfur, Water, and Salt, symbolic of the Aristotelian elements Air, Fire, Water, and Earth. These are not quite the right symbols, but the inference is there. The center circle contains the point where all the rays meet, and is thus the hub of the Wheel. At the Wheel’s top sits a blue female sphinx wearing an Egyptian nemes headress, and holding a sword, by the blade just inside the hilt. On the lower right side of the Wheel is suspended a red figure with what appears to be the head of Anubis. On the left side is the spiral of a yellow snake. On the clouds at each of the four corners are winged figures with books. From the top left clockwise it is a human (or angel) an eagle, a lion, and finally a bull. The sky appearing through the clouds is blue. The Wheel is rendered in orange. T

his is only one of two cards in the entire Tarot deck that has writing as part of the image. The other is the Priestess card, which carries the word TORA on her scroll. If the English letters here are read right to left, as they would be in Hebrew, it also spells TORA. On the other hand, if it is read left to right, as would be normal for English, it reads TARO. This equivalency of Torah, the Hebrew holy book to Tarot the deck of cards is a direct nod to Eliphas Levi’s obsession with the cards as emblematic and revelatory of the teachings of the Kabbalah, and his influence on the Golden Dawn and other magic lodge movements. It is almost certainly where Waite got it.

There’s a kind of triple pun going on here as well, though, because if we begin at the bottom and read clockwise we get ROTA, or “wheel” in Latin. ROTAS, of course, is one of the lines in the well known SATOR AREPO TENET magic amulet, so there’s something of a link to that.

Further permutations give us OTAR, which in archaic Spanish denotes “to see” or “to see from a distance”. By sheer coincidence (if you believe in coincidence) it’s also the anagram for Over The Air Rekeying – a method for updating encryptions codes in modern data cryptography.

The next word around is then AROT, which has connotation in Finnish, Latvian, Sudanese, and a number of other languages. In Finnish it refers to a swamp or marsh (and possibly also has similar meaning in Hebrew). In Latvian, with variations in Spanish and Italian bespeaking of a Latinesque origin, it refers to ploughing. Curiously one of the words in the SATOR AREPO is frequently translated as Plough. One source on the interwebs gives additional Hebrew options that include both vigilance and nakedness. There’s also a Filipino dialect where it means “to speak well”.

If we proceed back the other way from it’s read as TORA, we first come to ORAT, which in the Romance languages seems to harken to “pray”, or “beseech”. Next is RATO, which comes from the Latin for “to judge”, and finally ATOR which can be rendered as “actor” in Latin derived languages, and “poison” in Germanic ones.

While I don’t say with authority that Waite, Smith, or any of there contemporaries played these word games with the letters in the Wheel, they clearly may be played, and are a legitimate method of exploring magically such linguistic symbolism in the various schools and lodges of the time this card was authored.

wheel-Marseille-tarot
Medieval versions of the card typically show the wheel that was used for punishment and torture. That may be less a commentary about the fickle nature of fate than simply the need to make something largely recognizable as a turning wheel. Atop this version from the Marseilles deck is what becomes the serene Egyptian Sphinx in Pamela Smith’s version. Here it reminds me more of an angry harpy or one of the Erinyes or Furies, not too far out of line with the ill turn of Fortune’s Wheel. The crown it wears harkens to the “I Rule, I Will Rule, I Have Ruled” mottos on some other early versions of the card.

The Hebrew letters are the Tetragrammaton, made up of Yod, He, Vau, and He, which are pronounced variably Yawveh, or Jehovah. This is the mystic name of the Old Testament God, the Creator of all things in the Hebrew teachings. Jehovah is the Latinization, based probably more on the sound of the spoken Hebrew than any clear connection of the letters between the two. In any case, the implication here is that the apparent randomness of the universe is actually a manifestation of God’s Plan. There is an alternative option, though, in that the Wheel may be viewed as a magic circle, and the inscription here is a protective measure. In this case, the other letters and symbols also function differently.

The alchemical symbols and their elemental attributions seem a bit ham-fisted to me. Firstly, the water symbol at the bottom is really Aquarius, as alchemical notations for water are usually the downward pointing triangle we use when symbolizing those elements directly. Aside from that, the two wavy lines are also a form of the old Egyptian hieroglyph for water, and can have multiple meanings in the contexts of that language. Whereas Mercury and Sulfur are rendered as though they were on the rays, that is, the orientation of the glyph is such that it would appear correctly if one were looking along the ray from the center. Mercury, therefore is rendered upright, but Sulfur has been oriented 90 degrees clockwise. Opposite Sulfur though, the glyph for Salt is rendered upright so that the ray crossing it draws the symbol. Salt is typically rendered as a circle with a line across the center horizontally. This is what is shown here. But to orient it “properly, or in keeping with the way Sulfur is rendered as though it were on a clock’s hand, Salt’s cross line should be vertical, perpendicular to the ray, and thus forming a crossed circle the way this is drawn. The obvious reason not to do this is that a crossed circle is another alchemical symbol, that of Earth. But as Salt here is the stand-in for the element of Earth anyway, the choice seems only confusing, and certainly not in keeping with what would be expected of an initiated magician using these symbols in the creation of a sacred, or at least secret space.

wheel-Wildwood-Tarot
This unusual take on the subject is from the Wildwood Tarot. There are a number of rich Celtic/Nordic symbols here, but the Wheel itself is a design woven into the fabric of a tunic or garment. The image hearkens to numerous references to the “thread of our lives” being spun and paid out by hidden Fates until, without warning, that thread is cut. The Norse call these Fates the Norns, the Greeks named them the Moirai. They are present in this image as the three cranes, quietly posed in the background. Their weaving done, the garment whole, the ultimate fate of the wearer is decided, and there is no altering it. Like the spinning wheel that is Perpetual Change, one cannot see what will be, only that it will be. The land across the water awaits us all.

The choice of eight rays and eight divisions, rather than twelve which would give us a number of astrological and temporal associations, seems to be the desire to have them point at the letters on the wheel, which are four in English (or Latin) and four in Hebrew. One can, of course, equate this with the Dharmachakra, or Dharma Wheel that depicts the Eightfold Path. While certainly many in Waite’s circle were influenced by teachings from the subcontinent, I am not sure he had any intention to make the connection here. Crowley’s Book of Thoth borrows more specifically from Eastern teachings, but his Wheel has ten spokes and ten divisions. This version of the Dharma wheel is called “Ten Directions” and is synonymous with “everywhere” or the “universe”. There’s a potential reading of the eight spokes of the RWS Wheel as a kind of compass rose, so that we can ascribe the same meaning. Finally, any chaos magicians out there immediately seized upon the Eight Rayed Symbol Of Chaos from Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion series, which has from time to time been adopted to the practice of chaos magic. The significance of the symbol is randomness, and that also fits nicely with the idea of the Wheel of Fortune. We cannot know what is coming.

His Mind is Not For Rent
To any god or government
Always hopeful yet discontent
Knows changes aren’t permanent
But Change is.

Tom Sawyer – Peart, Lee, Lifeson – Rush

The perpetual turning of the Wheel here is the meaning that comes down to us from the earlier versions. The Marseilles deck adorn it with animals (a monkey, an ass or dog, and the sphinx) but in the Sforza and other early decks the figures were men, or kings. There is a version where speech banners are attached to the figures with the mottos “I will rule”; “I rule”; “I have ruled”. The meaning here is quite clear, Time itself is ongoing, and there are no guarantees. Even the king at the bottom, in tatters and rags, may be picked back up by the wheel, and the one at top can easily be thrown down.

The replacement of these figures with ones clearly symbolic is obviously derived from a ritual use associated with the card, or at least deriving from a ritual practice and the symbols used within it. It is no longer about kings or people whom Fortuna has placed highly or displaced, but about the creatures that are attached to the Wheel.

The sphinx here, though undoubtedly supposed to be Egyptian, is more likely to be the one in the tale of Oedipus Rex. According to the story, Oedipus must resolve a riddle posed by this composite creature or be killed. In succeeding, he becomes king and opens up a whole other kettle of fish, but the Sphinx’s riddle is this:

“What is four-legged in the morning, two-legged at noon, and three-legged at end of day?”

The answer is a human, because it first crawls, then walks, and finally leans on a staff-thus three-legged. According to some versions of the story, the riddle game goes on and the Sphinx asks:

“There are two sisters. One gives birth to the second, who in turn gives birth to the first. What are they?”

This is one is equally esoteric, being an allegory of Day and Night, one constantly “giving birth” to the next in an endless cycle.

So here again that Sphinx on the Wheel is a metaphor for the passing of the days. the counting down of our own mortal ones to the point, at the end, when that sword she holds will end them. Yet she holds it not to menace, or even to wield, but only to let us know she has it. Like the threat of being killed, or devoured, or otherwise dealt with facing Oedipus, our Sphinx is telling us that there is no getting off the ride, and there is no one stopping the wheel.

wheel-Cosmic-Tarot
The artist of the Cosmic Tarot gives us a six spoked Wheel upon which may be place the Seven Chaldean Planets. The Sun is in the center. Yet this unusual clockwork also adds Neptune, Uranus, and Pluto at the top, and at the bottom is the Earth. If we step back, we can see these are all arranged on the Sephiroth – The Tree of Life from Kabbalistic practice. In the four quarters are the symbols of the Four Elements, Water, Air, Earth, and Fire. The outer golden rim of this Wheel is our Zodiac. There is a double hexagram in the center, and many spinning arcs that seem to describe a portion of some very complex larger astrolabe. That there are unseen portions is in keeping with the idea of this card. The Hebrew characters read as Kether at the top (KTR) and Malkuth (MLKVT) at the bottom. These are the end points of the Sephiroth in the background, and denote the Crown or the point of pure spirit, and our world of essentially pure manifestation. I like this card particularly as it gives one of the better integrations of the various ideas, while still maintaining an aesthetic quality that allows for exploration of those unseen quarters.

Most writers I have read on the subject suggest this Wheel turns counterclockwise. I am not sure why that would be, but it is the way ROTA reads as well as YHVH so perhaps that is the logic. In this case then Anubis (or whoever that is) represents the rising king. Anubis as a psychopomp is responsible for shepherding the souls of the blessed dead past the perils awaiting them in the underworld, so that they may reach the Chamber of the Weighing of the Heart and be judged as to whether they received eternal happiness or are eaten and face eternal oblivion. In all the versions of the Book of the Dead, the heart always comes through, and one wonders how Anubis ever keeps his pet Devourer fed. But in that context, we can see Anubis as emblematic of a kind of resurrection into the second life of the Field of Reeds, so perhaps that is why he is showing coming up from the bottom of the Wheel, rather than being on the right side completely.

I don’t know if the choice of color here is arbitrary or if Pixie Smith and Mr. Waite simply did not understand the significance of color in Egyptian religion. Red was the color of Set, the murderer of Osiris and god of storms, chaos, and the nearest thing to Satan in the Egyptian pantheon. Anubis is always depicted in black, the color associated with rebirth and the afterlife, probably because of the rich black soil left by the Nile flood. In comparison to the reddish or yellowish sands of the surrounding desert, which was the dominion of Set, this makes a lot of sense. So either they didn’t know, or understand, or they have some double meaning intended.

It’s one of those chicken and egg things. If Set had not killed Osiris, the chain of events that ensued would not have come to be. Anubis himself was born as a consequence of the resurrected but amnesiac Osiris sleeping with Isis twin sister Nephthys (who was the wife of Set, by the way). Isis takes him in and he becomes her protector while her son Horus goes out to do battle with Set to avenge his father. This set of myths informed the mummification and funerary rituals for thousands of years, so they are at the heart of the Egyptian belief in the afterlife. Without the initial evil act of Set, there would not be possible all the good things promised in the Eternal Paradise. While that may have been a bit too esoteric for the ancients (or perhaps not) it may have been in consideration for post Victorians exploring magic and the role of the Christian litany in the face of a Darwinian revolution. Or maybe it’s just me. That’s the beauty of going deep with these cards. You never know which way the rabbit hole turns.

The yellow snake in some rendering is supposed to be two headed. This creature, called an amphisbaena had a head on either end, and thus was capable of going either way at will, like a reptilian pushme-pullyou. The snake as rendered on the card is a normal one, and the looping winding are clearly reminiscent of the Egyptian snake demon Apep or Apophis. This being, often considered an embodiment of Set, attacked the Boat of Ra nightly as it sailed through the underworld, and parts of the Book of the Dead involved the slaying of the beast, and its subsequent dismemberment and burning and the “bones separated by red hot knives”. Apep is both death and nightfall, and in the mind of the Egyptians these were synonymous. If the Wheel turns right to left, then the figure of Apep is descending toward the underworld that Anubis is rising from, and the whole can be seen as a metaphor for spiritual resurrection. This is why I mentioned the symbolism as ritualistic earlier, because ritual death and rebirth is a frequent theme for initiation ceremonies, ranging from the Masonic lodge to the Christian “Born-Again” baptism. It is certainly apt to topics of time passing, fortunes changes, and potential for elevation to a higher plane.

wheel-deviant-moon-tarot
A final alternative, here again is the Deviant Moon deck, one I see is a favorite of many professional readers and occultists in my circle. It is visually such a unique deck. There is an anger about it, that gets right in your face. That’s not Vanna White up there. This unbalancing can assist the mind in letting go of literal meaning and accessing the subconscious. As we reel back from the open aggression of the style, we find ourselves drifting past dream images and broken pieces of memory that the encounter has dredged up.

Waite tops off his pseudo-Christian diagrams here with the four symbols in the corners. They are the icons of the four authors of the Gospels, who take the form of the heads of the “living beings” described in the vision of Ezekiel. These creatures, styled in the Middle Ages as Cherubim, an order of non-human angels, were adapted by early embellishers of the Gospel Book to represent Matthew, John, Mark, and Luke. These have been extended by astrologers to represent Aquarius, Scorpio, Leo, and Taurus. These are the fixed signs of Air, Water, Fire, and Earth respectively, signs which are neither initiating the element, nor leaving it, but firmly established within it. As such, they may be taken astrologically as a permanent background against which the Wheel is turning. However, the presence of the book in the hands (or limbs) of each figure is an absolute artistic key that says these are the Gospel authors, and any other allusions we make are secondhand to their presence. One might logically extend our magic circle metaphor to consider these figures as connected with, or representing the four Archangels of the directions typically called during the various consecration rituals. There would seem to be some connection, but I am, as of this writing, unable to find a definitive, one to one attribution of the Archangels to the Gospels and their symbols. They will appear again on the last trump, the World, so hopefully by then my research will have found some authoritative link.

At this point, I have exhausted my current store of information on this symbol rich card, and will close with my thanks for your continued interest, and my hope that you will return in a week to seek Justice, or at least, what that card may offer us by way of imagery and idea.

I look forward to it.

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Light Unto The Path

Hermit

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.

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Unstoppable Force

Chariot

This week brings us to the card numbered VII, in the eight position in the deck, the Chariot. Happily this image seems to be as overtly pagan as it’s immediate predecessor is Judaic in iconography. The card is literally dripping with esoteric symbols which can lead us down any number of rabbit holes in interpretation.

chariot-rws-tarot
The eighth card in the deck, with the designation VII.


The card depicts an armored figure in a canopied chariot, apparently pulled by a black and a white sphinx. The figure has a crown and scepter. The crown is topped with an eight-pointed star. The canopy above his head is blue with five, six, and eight pointed stars on it. Beneath the crown he wears the laurel of victory. The pauldrons (shoulder plates) on his armor are lunar faces, his vambraces (lower arms) look like the shells of a marine creature. On his breastplate is a white square. He wears a belt with numerous symbols engraved on it, and his tasset (kilt) is likewise covered with symbols or glyphs. On the front of the chariot is a winged disk, overtopping a shield with a spindle or top. Two yellow or gold wheels are at the side. Behind the chariot is a river or moat, and behind that a stand of trees, behind which is a walled city. The sky here is yellow.

The conventional read on this card is triumph or victory, and control. This meaning is echoed in the Minor Arcana six of wands, just as the Lovers may be echoed by the two of cups. In these instances, I often read the minors as involving real world occurrences, such as winning a legal suit, or passing a test, or in the literal sense, victory in battle. The Major Arcana I tend to regard as symbolic of the grander cosmic forces that pervade the universe, whose influences are far more subtle and long reaching. And for the Chariot, I divine Cosmic Force itself.

Let me explore that a bit. Gravity is a force. Electromagnetism is a force. There are strong and weak nuclear forces that bind together the tiniest of things, just as the other forces bind together the massive and cosmic. Gravity either shapes space and time, or is the consequence of that shape. These forces are the wheels upon which the whole of existence turns. So in the Chariot I find some parallels to read it in terms of “Force of Nature” rather than simple personal victory in conflict.

It is true that the Chariot is an engine of war. It is among the first, if not the first. In its day it was the equivalent of a fighter jet, and as such, equally had no other use. These were multi-terrain high speed weapons platforms. They had no seats, no place to carry cargo. Their payload was a driver and possibly an archer or lancer. On the battlefield they were a terror, but they tended to fall out of use towards the middle of Roman empire. Mounted cavalry was typically more mobile, particularly away from roads and open planes, and warfare had moved to a paradigm of siege and counter-siege.

Ironically the man in the Chariot stands before the very thing that contributed to the end of chariot warfare, the walled city. Castles, fortifications, and barriers such as moats and trenches meant that troops primarily clashed face to face after a long series of bombardments from a distance had destroyed both defenses and the resolve of the defenders. The Chariot visually represents an anachronism. Its military value is minimal in the environs it occupies, therefore it may only be viewed as symbolic. It is an emblem of victory, of dominion, rather than the thing itself.

When I look at this card I am always reminded of the Fortune Teller Booth so prevalent in old arcades and carnivals. The man is inside a box with the roof. He looks suitably exotic, but if we observe closely he’s not whole. His body ends on top if the box. His hand rests upon it. There is no interior where a person stands, this is all for show, all to entice us to believe in the promise and wonder it appears to represent. This chariot in fact, looks to me like a block of stone, on top of which a mannequin of the rider has been bolted. And, in fact, the wheels don’t really touch the ground (see image below), so what are we to make of that? The sphinxes are not engaged in pulling the Chariot forward either, so that just adds to the idea that this is some sort of display rather than a working mechanism. Perhaps the Unstoppable Force is actually the Immovable Object?

chariot wheel size
i’ve always sort of suspected that there was something wrong with the wheels. As an artist and graphics designer for around 40 years, I have developed an intuitive sense of space and shape so when I look at something and feel it’s a bit off, I trust that. But before I went and based an entire article on it, I had to be sure, so I did a screen grab of the Chariot card, and dropped it into Adobe Illustrator.

I positioned a guide line in the center of the wheel hubs. (That’s the light blue line running across just over the sphinxes brows). I created a rectangle that ran from that line up to the top of the wheel. I then copied that rectangle and moved it below the line, and then slid it over to where the bottom of the Chariot is visible between the sphinxes. As you can see, the rectangle, which represents accurately the size of the bottom half of the wheel, is not long enough to reach below the bottom of the car. At best, this Chariot is going to be dragging.

This may have been an accidental consequence of covering up the wheels with the sphinxes. On the earlier Marseille Tarot the wheels are shown jutting out to the sides, rather than frontal. That Chariot also would not move in that configuration, though I think that is more a medieval convention to show them as wheels, much like the shedu of Babylon have five legs, if viewed from a particular point.

It should not be surprising that we are confronted with this contradiction in yet another Tarot trump. The presence of the black and white and male and female sphinxes inform us that we are again needing to think in terms of the Doctrine of Opposite Extremes. They share the same esoteric DNA as the Lovers and the captive souls on XV, and they embody the two pillars of the Priestess. We are dealing again with that which is fixed and that which is changeable, and the Chariot sits between them – both an Unstoppable Force and an Immovable Object.

It is that dominion over the opposing factors that is invested in the person of the charioteer. Yet the card is not named the Charioteer. The person who is in that position is immaterial. They could be anyone. Waite’s description references a “king” and a “princely figure” but goes on to describe the rider as one not hereditarily royal and not part of the priesthood. His interpretation paints the occupant of the Chariot as one who achieves by conquest – Julius Caesar not Augustus. and further confines him to an almost sterile intellectualism. He cannot, according to Waite, understand the spiritual or sacred within himself, nor leap beyond the purely rational view of the world.

But a Chariot with wheels that don’t touch the ground is itself irrational. We may suppose that this is an artistic mistake (though an unlikely one) and the hidden bottom half of the wheels should be correct. We don’t know the timetable Smith was operating within, and some cards may have been executed under tighter deadlines. But the fact is that they don’t touch the ground, making the Chariot a rather elaborate Kiosk. Whether this was intentional or not it gives the reader a means to access that other part of the image, that which flows from our imagination and speculation, and gives us the electricity of insight when the card is dropped between others that do not make rational sense.

I mentioned earlier cosmic forces like gravity and electromagnetism as being connected with the Chariot. Consider that the effect of gravity does not have to move. It is everywhere and always, and yet still exerts itself in the same fashion. By this means we can begin to comprehend how the Chariot can represent force and energy, while at the same time, being fixed in its place. If its place is everywhere, then it doesn’t matter where the center is. The center is, in fact, everywhere and no where. Like the spinning top on the shield in the center of the cart, it moves within its own defined perspectives. The edges go round and round and round, even if the spindle is in a different place.

We can apply this idea to the dominion over forces in a much broader sense than Waite has. The Chariot can represent that Nothing that is Everything that is a feature of some Buddhist thinking, The Chariot establishes it’s own frame of reference, and imposes that frame of reference on what it comes into contact with. Looking at it from outside that frame of reference results in an incomplete, or skewed vision of what the thing actually is.

chariot-merkaba
This obsidian merkaba object is related to the Chariot, perhaps in name only. Yet it’s unusual shape and multiple faces are perhaps indicative of the enigma of the Chariot’s nature to be form and change simultaneously.

The shiny blackness of the stone makes photographing the object effectively difficult, so demonstrating its odd character in two-dimensions may be a futile attempt. I encourage you to look for these at your favorite stone or crystal shop. They seem to be becoming more prevalent.

It’s intriguing that the shape of the merkaba is frequently associated with the Chariot. A merkaba, as I have discussed earlier, is a three-dimensional representation of the two joined triangles of the hexagram. It consists of two pyramid objects – each pyramid having four three sided faces, that are merged into each other such that the points of each pyramid pierce the sides of the other. Drawing it in two dimensions is generally easy, but it’s difficult to conceptualize how that translates into actual space. I recently obtained one in my favorite black Mayan obsidian to better understand how something so theoretically simple can yield such a complex object.

If one turns the merkaba this way and that, the external shape changes. The outline remains a six pointed star, but the surfaces presented to the viewer are very different. Merkaba is supposed to derive from ancient Egyptian or Hebrew for Chariot, and this fascinating little shape with its many changing surfaces could certainly remind one of a tumbling or turning wheel. Perhaps it brought to mind the actions of the chariots as they wheeled and spun on the field of battle. But this is a good way of expressing my statement about the Chariot being a thing unto itself, defining it’s space and dimension in it’s own way, fluidly, depending upon where the observer encounters it.

This is the principle that Einstein called relativity, and that later was elaborated on to give us a quantum universe where the actual nature of things is entirely dependent upon when and how they are observed. In the quantum universe a thing is only what it is, once what it might be becomes fixed by the act of observing or recording it. We are again dealing with That Which is Fixed, and That Which is Changeable. The Chariot can be both a thing that moves forward constantly and a thing that doesn’t move at all. It truly depends on where we see it from.

If quantum mechanics is not your bag, I fully understand. It sounds far more like magic than it does science, and frankly I think it’s on the path to where it intersects with magic and we can finally get substantive things done without arguing over definitions. It’s not about how it works, because it works. The scribbled glyphs in a grimoire differ very little in appearance from the complex calculus of a physics equation, and to the outsider both are equally arcane and inscrutable.

Such glyphs are incorporated into the armor of the charioteer. The scribbles might easily have been added for texture, like the various glued-one model bits that adorn a science-fiction spacecraft. But if you look closely, these are known magical and alchemical symbols. I do not say that they give us the secret to the Philosopher’s Stone, but that their intentionally being included is to remind us that such formulae are part of our approach to the dominion over the forces of the cosmos. The armor of the charioteer is full of symbolism, but it is a surface only. The method and the means are not the meat.

Waite’s description in his very thin little booklet describes a character that is different from what Pamela Colman Smith has executed. It is likely he worked this from his notes or notes given to her that didn’t find full fruition, but the lunar symbols on his shoulders were, according to Waite, meant to be Odin’s ravens, or rather the Thought and Memory they symbolize. His scepter was meant to be a drawn sword, making the whole more martial, and possibly more active than this rather sedate hero is his box with the resting sphinxes.

chariot-fabio-listrani-triptych-tarot
Three Chariots by the same hand but with different intents. These are all by Italian artist and illustrator Fabio Listrani. The center one is his Night Sun Tarot, which I have had for many years. The left and right cards are the Goetia and Notoria Tarot, which are based upon the demons and angels listed in the Keys of Solomon, a Medieval grimoire for summoning such beings.

These latter decks although beautifully drawn from Fabio’s imagination, are bound by very strict adherence to the Kabbala and the hierarchies of demons and angels described in that manual. They include the seal of each being, the Kabbalistic number associated with it, it’s name, the Tarot number and name so that the deck may be used in the traditional sense, and then planetary and elemental signs, as well as an associated minor arcana card.

Keeping with tradition, the demon is on the left and the angel on the right. Note that they share the same element and minor card. In magical work they would be considered to naturally oppose one another.

Bear in mind that in addition to the use of these cards for divination, folk spell craft, and the complex Solomonic magic here, the Italian publisher Lo Scarabeo is also printing these exquistie decks for people who still simply play tarocchi with them.

It’s impossible to really know the dynamic between illustrator and author on these cards. Since the art has been the de-facto imagery, at least in the West, for Tarot for almost a century, comparison to what appears to be a pamphlet of text will always seem a bit inadequate. More has been written by many hands interpreting the images than analyzing Waite’s text. His Pictorial Key is written in that typical Victorian method of critical dismissal, where he spends more time discrediting or disallowing, the theories of his predecessors than to establish a legitimate basis for his own theories. I hope that I am not doing that, but it becomes inevitable if one is working on anything other than a parroting of previous interpretations.

I have tried to focus on my own impressions of the cards, drawn from my reactions to their visual content over fifty years of working with them. Of course, that reaction changes with my own age and experience, exposure to the ideas and theories of others, and the awareness of interpretations of the ideas and the artwork by the hands of other artists, sometimes including myself. In doing that, one can run afoul of the tendency to gainsay what other sources may have held. I hope that my approach has been fair, and used these sources as a comparison against which my own view may be measured, rather than as an outright disagreement.

Well, in some cases I do disagree. It is up to the individual reader to make of this what they will. If you find my observations have merit, then by all means employ them. I am not charging a royalty. On the other hand, if you find them of no value at all, there is nothing I can do to force you to use them. Unfortunately, I can’t give you back the time you spent reading this article, so I hope you find at least some value in it.

I will return next week with Card VIII, which in the RWS is Strength. Other decks have this card as Justice, and depending on which deck they switch between VIII and XI. As we have been using the RWS artwork as the basis for our little esoteric safari, we’ll preserve that order. I hope you will join me next week. Thank you again for your continued support.

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Amor Vincit Omnia

Lovers

The card called the Lovers is another one very problematic in terms of the imagery used in the RWS deck. The elder versions of this card depict three persons at the bottom, and the demi-god Cupid or Eros overhead with his bow. Much speculation has been made about the identity of the people on this version of the card, but from my view it tends to suggest a young man and woman being married. The other figure is probably his mother, who up to that point has been the “woman in his life”. Cupid/Eros, of course, is interested in the conjugal love, rather than the familial or maternal sort, and the arrow pointed between the pair that appear to be getting betrothed argues for that. So the Lovers is a fair name for the card as it was drawn up to the end of the 19th century, with the Marriage being a close runner-up.

Lovers-RWS-Tarot


There seems little logic then, in dumping this traditional structure for a wholly Judeo-Christian depiction straight out of the Book of Genesis, but that is what Waite apparently commissioned. The card number VI has only three figures, a female and male, both nude, and a flaming haired angel appearing out of a cloud above them. These figures are unquestionably Eve and Adam, for they stand in front of two trees. Eve is before a fruit tree with a green snake wrapped around it. This is undoubtedly the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the Biblical downfall of Man, tempted by Woman, who was tempted by the Serpent to eat of the tree. Behind Adam is a tree with flames instead of leaves. This is identified by Waite in his Pictorial Key to the Tarot as the Tree of Life, but it’s a clear reference to the Burning Bush of Exodus. Between the two, and below the angel, is a single pointed mountain. Above and behind the angel is a yellow radiance. Below the angel is a simple blue sky.

Like the Hierophant card that proceeds it, my initial reaction to this Biblical imagery was negative. Here again my inclination to reject the Christian world that I had been born into (for multiple reasons not entirely related to magic or the occult) made me feel like the Tarot cards that I had been fascinated by in textbook descriptions were somehow subverted back toward a Christian idea.

Lovers-Sforza-Marseille-Tarot
Earlier versions of the Lovers or Marriage card are very different from the RWS. The Sforza on the left is clearly depicting “Blind Love” between a couple. Later, a third figure was added, like that shown in the Tarot de Marseille at right. Various authors differ on the identity of the second woman. Some say she represents the mother of one of the others giving blessing to the union, The are others who suggest these two represent a chaste and pure virgin, versus a cortesan or woman of ill repute, allegorically showing a choice between virtue and vice. Still others say the figure on the left is an official or priest, performing a wedding ceremony. Waite tossed all of them out in favor of casting this card in a Protestant light.


I cannot say that this is not absolutely true at least in the mind of Arthur Waite, and many of his contemporaries, who were possibly trying to meld together their monotheism with pagan magic rites. While it’s clear that some of those involved in the magic lodges of the Victorian era and their 20th centuries inheritors were bored elites looking for sensation, a good number of them never really wanted to reject the “respectable C of E” religion.

And again, because Pamela Smith’s art is so ubiquitous, we are all of us still carrying the images around, even in many of the revisions and re-imaginings of modern Tarot, because this version has had such an impact on the 20th century occult in the West.

The Golden Dawn and other influencers on Waite were romanticists. That is, they tended to think in idealistic or utopian terms rather than the crude, and sometimes cruel realities of the time. Their motivations were informed by the ancient philosophers, seeking truth and beauty, and deifying these ideas separately from how they exist (or don’t exist) in the mundane world.

So the rather direct depiction of love and lovers in the physical carnal sense, was less than satisfactory. While certainly most of these folk were frequently involved in such sensual pursuits, many quite outside the socially accepted norms of the day, they made a public face of a much loftier ideal and that is what we find on the seventh card of the Major Arcana.

Sacred-and-Profane-Love
Titian’s masterpiece has been a source of controversy since it was painted. It was first supposed that this was a marriage portrait, similar to that of the Arnolfini painting by Jan Van Eyck I discussed in an earlier article. However, it shows two women, or rather, what appears to be the same women in a clothed and unclothed state. The only thing that relates this to a wedding is the inclusion of the coat of arms of the groom on the fountain relief.

That the painting is allegorical is unquestionable. What exactly the allegory is supposed to be is up to interpretation. Over the years it has come to be called “Sacred and Profane Love”. When I was a student the sacred one was on the right, because the one fully dressed may be considered to be “of the material world” and thus “profane” in the older sense of the word.

It may be helpful at this point to examine a painting by Titian usually titled “Sacred and Profane Love”. This painting itself has invited much controversy in the art historical circles, and presents us with a similar conundrum as the Smith version of the Lovers. Yet if we examine its symbolism, we may find some keys to unlock the Biblical facade of the Lovers card.

When I was in art history class, some many years ago, the conventional attribution of “sacred love” was actually the nude figure, and not the severely overdressed one. Conventions are now reversed, but I never pay much attention to trends, and still tend to think of it that way. I have some sound reasoning for that.

There’s a confusion in our modern language because we have come to use the term “profane” in the sense of “profanity”. In our post-Puritanical society profanity is in the same category with smut and pornography, and of course, “nekkid people” are associated with carnal desires.

Profane, originally, was only meant as the opposite of sacred. Sacred derives from old Latin and means basically “Holy”. Ergo, whatever was not holy, was, by extension, profane. It had nothing to do with the particular state of dress, it had to do with a state of being.

There are variant descriptions of Titian’s painting as Earthly and Heavenly Love, or as the Earthly and Heavenly Venus, and this may clear it up a little for people struggling with the changes in the language. The nude is the rarified pure spirit, with none of the trappings we attach to bring it down to earth. While it may represent a carnal satisfaction, it also symbolizes that expansion of mind and being that results from the merging of two souls.

The Earthly Venus has her charms, and these are of course symbolized by her fancy robes and complicated hairstyle and rich jewels. These are the things of the mundane, however. They shift with fashion, whim, and time, whereas the Heavenly Sacred Love is immortal, untouched and timeless.

Lovers-ViceVersa-Tarot
Images from a recent acquisition. This is the Lovers card from the Vice Versa Tarot by Massimiliano Filadoro. The back of each card gives us the view from behind, which is often intriguing. It also gives us a new perspective on the idea of reversed readings. I have only had this deck for a few days, so I am still working out the ideas on how to read with it. I will say that it reinvigorates the thinking.

It is this notion of Sacred Love which later generations have tried to apply to Waite’s ham-handed vision of Eden. This is Man and Woman, before the Fall, perfect, immortal, without sin or the knowledge of sin, and therefore without the need for carnal connection, long identified in Puritanical teaching as the “original sin”. The angel between them can be seen as symbolic of this perfected state of innocence, a bliss that requires no physicality, but is that highest form of love.

But, well, I think there may be a worm or two in that apple.

The Genesis story is one of those things that started to break any bond I might have formed with the Christian faith at an early age. The presence here of the Serpent in the tree shows us that the Fall (per the Bible) is imminent. It is inevitable. It is all part of the Divine Plan, after all, that an all-seeing and all-knowing being saw and knew about before any of it happened but it was allowed to happen anyway because that was the Divine Plan.

Honestly I have a much easier time reconciling Shroedinger’s cat than I do the sales pitch for these religions.

“Look, Adam, Eve, here’s this absolutely beautiful Garden I made for you. You have total control over everything in it. And you can eat everything, except for the fruit on this tree.”

“Why?”

“Because you can’t.”

“Why?”

“Look, I know you are going to eat the fruit, but don’t eat the fruit.”

“Why?”

“Because there’s this skeezy dude who is going to come around later and tell you to eat the fruit, and I know you’re going to eat the fruit, but don’t eat the fruit.”

“Why?”

“JUST DON”T EAT THE FRUIT ( even though I know you’re gonna) DON’T EAT IT!”

And then the next day:

“YOU ATE THE FRUIT! I mean, I knew – I KNEW – you were gonna eat the fruit, but you actually ate the fruit! I am so disappointed and angry and so now you have to leave the Garden and spend your days in war and pestilence and famine and death.”

“Why?”

“Divine Plan!”

This is essentially what Waite tells us this card means in his Pictorial Guide to the Tarot. The Lovers, in his “remediation” is symbolic of the Lord God Jehovah allowing (if not causing) the Fall, so that eons later mankind can be redeemed by the Messiah,

So Lovers may be more accurately rendered Love, and by that the love of the deity toward “his” creation, which manifests itself as predestined suffering and torment.

But Lovers was kept because only through that perfect love of the deity, could humanity transcend the carnal sin inherent in sexual relationships that they were going to get into in order to “be fruitful and multiply” as that deity keeps telling them to do (usually after destroying vast swathes of humanity in a fit of pique).

Even at age seven I saw the holes in that, although I can’t say as I fully articulated the whole divine love thing (and had not even a vague notion of carnal sin). So I tried to find other ways to interpret this card.

Lovers-RWS-Black-Tarot
The Devil may be truly in the details in this card. Tarot books often speculate that the similarities between the two are because the Devil is mocking the purity of the Holy Union on the Lovers card. The fact is, though, that the Devil card’s design predates the one on the Lovers, so it’s more accurate to say that the Lovers are mocking the Devil. This is more in line with Waite’s pseudo-Christian rationale for the the cards.

A lot of the Major Arcana (and some of the Minors) have a capacity to be overlapped. The relationship between the Lovers and the Devil is fairly obvious, but the positioning of the humans (assuming the people on XV are fallen humans) can also be overlain with the Pillars which the Priestess sits between. This again gives us the doctrine of opposite points, with a mediator or medium between, which leads us to a more complex view of the whole.

Here we can connect up Eve and the Tree of Knowledge with Boaz, which we’ve rendered as “that which is mutable”. Adam and the Tree of Life comes under the dominion of Jachin or “that which is established”. This gives us the opportunity to look at the central portion of the card as a portal.

This is the largest part of the image anyway and it’s dominated by the figure of the Angel. In fact, there’s an axis defined through the Angel from the peak of the mountain, through to the center of the radiance above it’s head. The Angel holds a hand over either figure, partaking of both natures. The dual colors used in the hair of the Angel reflect the green of the Tree of Knowledge and the flaming orange of the Tree of Life. The Angel is our pathway between the mundane world (even if it’s Eden) and that’s which is beyond.

Lovers-DruidCraft-Egypt-Spellcaster-Hermetic-Tarot
If you’re searching for a non-Judaic rendition there are a number of modern decks that offer alternatives to the RWS image. Clockwise from top left:

The Druid Craft Tarot by Phillip Carr-Gorm and illustrated by Will Worthington offer us a pagan variant that celebrates the human experience. The spirit is there, still, in the form of the doe and the Green Man.

The Journey Into Egypt Tarot by Julie Cuccia-Watts depicts the love of Isis for the Dead Osiris. While embracing the Egyptian myth, it manages to incorporate many of the elements of Pixie Smith’s version, and presents us with another layer of mysteries to explore.

The Hermetic Tarot by Godfrey Dowson is based on the teachings of the Order of the Golden Dawn. It is not, however, the Golden Dawn Tarot. In this rendition the serpent story is remade as that of Perseus rescuing Andromeda.

The Modern SpellCasters Tarot by Melanie Marquis with art by Scott Murphy offers something more along the lines of a modern pagan hand-fasting. The references from Genesis have completely disappeared and in their place is symbolism and paraphernalia from Wicca or a similar practice.


The layout here is similar to many depictions in alchemical texts of the “Chymical Wedding”. This Hermetic rebus is supposed to provide the adept with multiple formulae for creating the Elixir of Life and/or Philosopher’s stone. The allegories typically include hermaphrodites, or merged male/female figures, often connected with the sun and moon. Numerous other symbols adorn the landscapes they inhabit. All of these form a secret code known to students of alchemy.

This card then can give us an insight into transcendence and infinity, not through a Judeo-Christian “Divine Plan” but through our own transmutation, Love, both spiritual and corporeal, is a key to our self-awareness. We are spirits in a physical body. Denial of either nature will ultimately lead to our being “expelled from the garden”. If we limit our perspectives, we stall our spiritual growth. We are, after all, given the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Lovers and Priestess-Wizards Tarot
The Wizards Tarot, by Barbara Moore with images by Mieke Janssens clearly connects the figures of the Lovers with the sacred columns on either side of the High Priestess. The intriguing thing is that the two are joined on the other side of the columns, indicating that only by combining opposites can one hope to pass through.


I have always personally felt that the tale of the Fall in Genesis was an allegory of the evolution of man. While this seems fairly straightforward in today’s scientifically leaning world, consider what an idea this is in the 16th century, before Darwin.

The story says that human beings, prior to eating of the Tree of Knowledge, lived in a paradise, running naked among the other animals. When they ate the fruit of the Tree, they became aware of their nakedness and covered themselves. This is not merely an expression of late Renaissance modesty. It’s establishing why we humans feel the need to cover up, when our kin among the chimps and bonobos continue to run around in the altogether.

In reality, of course, the “nakedness” of humanity is an expression of our self-awareness. As “dumb animals” we aren’t separate from the rest of nature, but when we evolved to self-awareness, we gained the knowledge of our otherness. We divorce ourselves from that nature. We left the garden.

So in this set of images, we have reinforcement of the idea of transmutation, or evolution, or our own spiritual growth and expression. When we find it in a reading or use it in meditation or magic, these meanings can be employed to route around the overt or at least apparent, Judeo-Christian iconography that Waite “corrected” from the original images of the Middle Ages.

Once we free ourselves from these conventions, we can proceed to the rest of the Major Arcana with a wider perspective and a fresh eye. We’ll assay the Chariot next week, though the interelatedness of many of these cards means we’ll probably refer back to the Lovers again, sooner and later.

I hope you have found this exercise to be revealing. I have found this card to be difficult over the years because of it’s baggage. If you want to consider it, as many do, just on the basis of the name, it can signify romance, relationships, and sex. But it also carries a link to Gemini, and can be read with regard to contracts, mergers, and legal pleadings, as well as relationships with zero romantic or sexual aspects.

Until next week, I thank you for your continued patronage.

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