Category: Mind

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Another Trip Around The Sun

Astrolabe

So yesterday was another birthday. I am now officially in my late 50s. While that is hardly old, I think it is, with a few exceptions, at least a decade on from most of my readership.

And that’s okay. I don’t build relationships around age. I build relationships around personalities. If you are interesting, and I like you, then I will make an effort to get to know you, regardless of your age or other physical factors. These are, after all, transitory, and probably illusional anyway.

My physical manifestation has been experiencing linear time for almost three score years. My mind goes further back. Way back. Back well before back. infinitely back if I squint hard enough.

And so, I believe, does everyone else’s, though most get hung up on that linear time, physicality, and other limitations. Letting go is difficult. Letting go is scary. Because, there is a very real danger that once you make that trip, you won’t ever come back.

Entering an altered state of consciousness that transcends time and space effectively dissolves one’s physicality.

Our attachment to the meat suit means it is very very difficult to reach a point where we aren’t wondering if the meat suit is sitting somewhere, in a quasi-vegetative state, slowly ceasing to function, to the horror and sorrow of all the other meat suits who were also attached to it.

There are, in fact, accounts of monks and hermits in many faiths to whom this actually happened. Their spirits roamed beyond the limitations of the world around them, but their physical bodies starved to death.

Which of course brings about the question as to whether or not the freedom of the spirit was the necessary death of the physical host. Is the dissolution of the physical experienced by the total awareness of the spiritual ultimately only possible by breaking that bond and letting the physical cease to function?

And if the limitations of the physical are only illusions, then why does it matter? Why do we worry about what happens to that meat suit?

And why do we put up with the aches and pains and longings and hungers and frustrations and limitations of the meat suit as it starts to wear out? Each day I feel more and more the weight of the years on this physical form, so why, if we know that the ultimate expression of self is in a dissolved spirit where all are one and one are all, do we continue to return to the burden of physicality and temporality?

Life is a constant mystery.

Instruments
A selection of instruments for measuring space and time. The armillary, on the far left, is designed to plot one’s position on the earth at a certain point in time. This was done by sighting for a particular star and then rotating the rings round till things lined up properly. Armillaries weren’t usually thought of as portable instruments. That is, they were usually something kept at home and used from that location. They show up frequently in depictions of astronomers, astrologers, alchemists, and the smart set from the Renaissance onward.

The middle image is of a modern orrery. An orrery is the forerunner of the planetarium, and is a cunning clockwork device that simulates the relative motion of the earth and moon, and sometimes other planets, around the sun. Orreries came about after Copernicus succeeded in replacing Ptolemy’s earth-centered universe with a sun-centered system, although astrologers continued to use the geo-centric model, and still do today, when calculating aspects and planetary influences.

The instrument on the right is a more or less modern device called a sextant. This is because the curved piece on the bottom represents 60 degrees of arc (30 degrees to each side of the center position). A similar instrument called a quadrant represented an arc of 90 degrees, but as it offered no great advantage in navigations, the larger size was quickly dropped for the improved model. The principles of the sextant derive from the more ancient astrolabe, but essentially involve calculating one’s position in space by using the angle of sun or a star at a certain time of day. The sextant can also be used horizontally to measure angles between points in the distance, and through the use of trigonometry, calculate range to one of the points.

The accuracy of these antique analog instruments varied by manufacturer and user, but a quality device in the hands of an experienced user would be comparable to a modern GPS locator, at least for purposes of general navigation.

Even in those moments when I can take my mind way back before way back before before, there is still some mystery to work out.

We are responsible to ourselves, to the nature of life itself, to keep poking at that mystery.

We should never take anything at face value. We should always wonder. We should always question. We should always wonder if the reality that we are experiencing is the final and ultimate one. Because if one is an illusion, then there is always and ever the possibility that all are.

I have been something of a cynic since childhood. A cynic is different than a skeptic. The skeptic says, “I don’t necessarily believe this, but if you have proof, I am open to changing my mind.” A cynic says, “I don’t necessarily believe this, and I need to see the proof of your proof. Which I also may not believe.”

If I look up the definition of cynic on the various web resources, it’s been boiled down to a general distrust of people’s motives and/or a school of Greek philosophy that was based on the rejection of convention or societal norms in favor of harmony with the cosmos. I’m not entirely sure I agree with either definition, which, of course, is the cynical point of view.

Of course, if you dig into it, skepticism is also a philosophical concept, based on the idea that we cannot know some things.

So for the skeptic, “It’s a mystery.” is sufficient explanation.

For the cynic “But is it a mystery?” is the more apt question. Why do we accept this is an answer? Is it impossible to know the answer? If I say I do know the answer, should I be believed?

I have spent the majority of my life in pursuit of wisdom, knowledge, and insight. Yet for every guru or teacher or prophet or messiah or philosopher or iconoclast, I am always asking “but what if you’re wrong?”

Because I am always asking myself that question.

“What if you’re wrong?”

This is not the same as the apostate or heretic, who doubts their resolve against the dogma of their former faith. It is not the fear of those who, upon hearing the soft tread of the psychopomp approaching, strive to find some peace of mind in the shadow of impending demise.

It is a simple, semi-scientific, quest for error.

I bought off on scientific method early on. It appealed to my sense of logic and reason. I’m not sure it even gets taught in the schools today, so I’ll cover it briefly here.

Theorize. Test the theory. Observe the results. Refine the theory. Repeat as necessary.

Theorize is that part where we all go “this is the way things are”.

Test the theory is that part where some go “but is this the way things are?”.

Observe the results is something like “no, this is not the way things are”.

And finally we come to “Oh, so this is how things are”.

But life is a constant mystery. We have to keep running the loop. We must repeat as necessary. And it is always necessary.

Starchart01
Expressions of space and time vary greatly in human experience. We live in a four-dimensional space time that consists of up-down/left-right/forward-back/and past/future. Yet as humans we are able to conceptualize these dimensions and abstract them into three and two dimensional versions, and still work out what they mean.

A sculpture represents a specific moment. That is, it has the dimensions of up-down/left-right/ and forward-back, but within itself there is no past-future. It is a fixed point in time, that occupies space. Ironically, because all sculptures as we experience them exist in that four dimensional space-time, it is a representation of a fixed point in time that is moving through time.

Two-dimensional images abstract this even further. They represent our mental experience of four dimensions frozen at one point, and then flattened out. They no longer contain the dimensions of forward-back and past-future, but our minds are able to accept this because we innately learn how to abstract four dimensions to two as our brains grow. We have a further complexity in that we are able to perceive two dimensional images that contain representations of three dimensions (see below) and two-dimensional images that represent two dimensions. This was a conundrum explored by the Cubist and Surrealist movements in art, and ultimately gave rise to non-representational art in the mid-twentieth century.

Yet the history of visual and plastic arts gives us a number of examples of intentional manipulation of our perception of space time. If one looks at the conventions of Ancient Egyptian art, we are confronted with figures who have heads, hands, and legs and feet in profile, but torsos and hips portrayed frontally. It’s clear, however, from their sculpture work that they not only understood, but mastered depictions of three-dimensions. The deliberate choice to create such distorted flat images in two-dimensions derived from their concepts of the nature of things. They had to include, as much as possible, a clear picture in two dimensions, of the three-dimensional form, otherwise the gods and spirits might not recognize it, and the magic would fail to work.
Starchart02

Science and spirituality would both have you believe that they are mutually exclusive disciplines, but this is an erroneous idea. To paraphrase from Pauley Perrette’s character on NCIS “I believe in magic, prayer and logic equally”. Arthur C. Clarke, who was both a famous science fiction author and inventor of the geosynchronous satellite, gives us “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. And for me, the one thing that I think both science and spiritualism should have in common is that desire to always question the status quo.

Time and space have changed significantly since I was a child. Our understanding of modern physics today embraces concepts that were considered in the realm of science fiction when I was growing up. This is because the more we learn about the nature of the observable physical universe, the more we are forced to alter the accepted viewpoint, and in some cases, to admit an as-yet-unknown nature which is not quantifiable using the current means.

Isaac Newton had to invent calculus in order to express his understanding of the nature of space and time. Modern physicists have expanded on his work, but we may require another watershed like Principia Mathematica or the General and Special Theory of Relativity to leap past our present limits.

Most people work their way through the world without an awareness of even the basics of Newtonian physics, to say nothing of the implications of quantum uncertainty and the potential of multiple universes with alternate timelines. Gravity is a literal fact. It does what it does, and keeps us all from sliding off into space, and that’s a good thing.

Yet the complex interaction of gravitational forces alone that make possible our habitation of this little rock are staggering to ponder. We are all of us pulled toward the center of the Earth. Yet we are also pulled toward the Moon as it slowly circles the earth overhead. Both Earth and Moon are drawn inward toward a massive star we call the Sun. It is only the speed at which we travel around it, and occasional tugs from other planets in orbit, the smaller one’s due to their distance, and the larger ones due to their size, that keeps us from spiraling in and melting.

Our meat suits have evolved to live in this soup of interlocking forces that move the universe on a cosmic scale. The invisible engine of gravity moves the stars in the heavens, and causes them to be born and to die. It whirls the galaxies together, in orbits around great dark objects of such unbelievable size that space is curved toward the infinite, and light itself cannot escape. It is a truly amazing and terrifying cosmos we inhabit.

Before Mr. Newton and the Enlightenment, the operation of this system was bound by the works of Claudius Ptolemy, a researcher and encyclopedist at the library of Alexandria in the first century AD.

His Four Books provides the basis for Western astrology, and his Mathematic Systems was the astronomical text that taught how to plot the movements of the stars. Like Newton, he wrote the math text to explain the apparent motion of the heavens. Unlike his latter day counterpart, though, his interest in that motion was for the use of astrological horoscopy.

Astrology, and most likely the mathematical models necessary to support it, was practiced as a science by the ancient Chaldeans, and probably older civilizations. There are increasing numbers of discoveries that stone-age peoples were observing and possibly recording the passage of time using the positions of celestial objects around the world.

Stonehenge is probably the most famous such site, but there are a number in the Americas, and recently many more have been found in Asia and Africa, so there is some reason to believe that humans marked time and specifically events like the solstices and the equinoxes at a very early point in our development, and that we used similar methods regardless of geography.

We might expect that the reason is simply agricultural. When one is dependent upon the crops, one should probably know when to plant and when to harvest, and a solar observatory is a more accurate means of working out that information than a tally stick or other similar counting mechanism.

Yet these constructions, some of which obviously required a lot of people and sometimes centuries to build, seem a bit over the top for this purpose alone.

Evidence supports that Stonehenge actually began as a wood-henge (and Woodhenge is also a nearby site) that was modified repeatedly over a span of several hundred years. So a simpler, and certainly easier to build version was sufficient. We can speculate that stones were later involved, because they would be more permanent and lower maintenance.

But that only explains the small stone circle, at least as far as practical function is concerned.

To harness the labor and skills necessary to bring the great big stones that make up the final stage, you really have to be looking at more than just keep track of time for the harvest. Recent discoveries at Stonehenge, and at places like Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, suggest that perhaps it was the other way around.

Both sites appear to have been places where large groups of more or less nomadic stone-age tribes would gather at specific times, and have large festivals. Theoretically such festivals included a lot of eating and drinking, and logically might also involve trading, cultural exchange, marriages and betrothals, etc. before the crowd sobered up and went back to their usual ranges.

The desire to support these occasional meetings may have led to increased domestication of both animals and plants, in order to meet the demand for annual or semi-annual feasts.
As we now know these supposedly “primitive” people were gathering at pre-appointed times, we have to consider that they had a fairly good command of both time and space outside of the calendrical functions of the solar sites themselves.

That is, a tribe needed to know how many days (or thereabouts) it would take for them to travel from their usual stomping grounds to the ceremonial center. They then would need to be able to subtract those days from the date of the meeting, say, the Summer Solstice, in order to know when to leave so they could be there on time.

While it’s hardly rocket science, it does mean that at least some members of the tribe both had the necessary information, and could keep track of the passage of days, without the need of a Stonehenge type calendar. While one might argue that the numerous other stone circles and semi-circles around the world were local “clocks” there’s a bit of problem.

Solar calendars like Stonehenge are “set” according to equinoxes and solstices. If your travel time from the local clock, in say, Northern Scotland, to Stonehenge, takes about three months, then you can leave on the equinox and arrive on the solstice and reasonably expect to get back on the next equinox. But, aside from the issues this brings up with planting, harvesting, etc. in a fixed agrarian society, it’s also just not right.

According to internet mapping software, one can walk from Inverness to Stonehenge in around 8 days. Now presuming one is not actually constantly walking, and is possibly also bringing along slower moving livestock, a more reasonable journey is probably about a fortnight. So one would need to know about two to three weeks before the Summer Solstice that they needed to pack up and head south.

On the other hand, we might look at the equinox to solstice ratio as indicative of seasonal migration, where both people and animals left the colder northern climate for a more favorable winter on the Salisbury plain, and returning to the fields in Scotland just about the time the spring grazing was beginning.

So many of the ancient magical dates revolve around the agricultural imperative that it’s impossible to say which came first, the farm or the festival? But if people are migrating to festivals rather than fields, then we have to admit the possibility of early calendar devices being accessible to stone-age peoples without being locations in a landscape.

Tools similar to quadrants are known to have existed in Ancient Mesopotamia. The exact date of their invention is unknown. These devices are designed to work out the position of the stars above the horizon, and thus can be used to calculate both location and time of the day as well as the day of the year.

Prior to the global positioning system, a variation of this technology, the sextant, was used for the same purpose.

In the Middle Ages a very complex version called an astrolabe was probably developed in China, and made it’s way westward along the Silk Road, which the development of the astrolabe made possible. In later times, as the Muslim culture spread out across northern Africa, this amazing device took on more significance in that it could be used to determine the location of Mecca and calculate the proper times to stop for prayer.

Astrolabes, quadrants, and sextants all operate on measuring the angles of the sun or other fixed celestial point, in relation to an horizon. The astrolabe uses a full circle, while a quadrant and sextant use a fourth and a sixth, or 90 and 60 degrees of arc, respectively. The accuracy of these analog devices when used by a skilled technician is comparable to computers and GPS systems. Manned space craft in Earth’s orbit still carry a sextant.

I obviously have a fascination with the mechanics of the planets and stars. In a quantum multiverse, where nothing is ever in the same place at the same time ever, it seems to me difficult to casually dismiss that unique moment into which we are all born as an irrelevance.

As we draw near to, and enter into our birth date, even though it is not the same as it was when were were born, the nearer factors, that gravity of the Earth, Moon, Sun, and planets, swirls similarly around us. All our local planets inhabit the gravity well of the Sun, so it is not surprising that our Solar Return augurs importantly. Our Moon signs, though the Moon is smaller even than the Earth, derive from a much closer relationship with her forces. The meat suits evolved to have about the same amount of water in them as the Earth does on it, so the effects of the Moon on tides cannot easily be dismissed.

Astrology, astronomy, and the human need to quantify time and space are as ancient as our brains. If we limit ourselves to the scientific only, and suggest that the spirit is a quirk of evolutionary mutation, present only between the fertilization of the gamete and the end of respiration, we are still faced with the question of how that consciousness comes to be, and what it’s purpose is, because it simply can’t be explained as an adaptation to environmental survival. Self-awareness might argue somewhat of an advantage. Language and the ability to pass on information, certainly is a powerful survival factor. But the bees have that and they’re not doing so well.

It’s fascinating to think, though, that the bee language, and the information system that affords them an evolutionary advantage, appears to be related to navigating based on the position of the Sun. So our own connection to space and time may be as integral. We may be drawn to the sky because somewhere back in our evolution, we had a built-in orientation to the positions of the celestial objects.

Ignoring that because “astrology is a pseudoscience” is not to our advantage in our journey of self-discovery as a species.

As always, I question everything. I recommend it as a way of living. It can take a lot of time and energy, but you may find it worth the extra effort.

I’ll return next week, after few more days around the Sun.

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Time Traveling

Timetravel

Owing to my Good Lady Wife’s completing certification last week at the National Fire Academy, we found ourselves in the vicinity of Gettysburg for the weekend.

For the record, we are history nerds. We have the shirts and the hats that say that. And we enjoy a bit of time travel now and again, as a break from the multifarious pressures that come with the responsibilities of our day jobs. So we had booked ourselves a lodging at an antebellum bed and breakfast for a couple of days wandering about the various historical landscapes.

I know when I was a student in school, the battle that took place in this area on the first few days of July 1863 was taught as a very significant event. That was some time ago, and our schools keep adjusting what is historically important. Perhaps that’s as it should be.

I am a great believer that history should not be presented with blinders on. Nor should it be controlled and coerced into serving any particular agenda.

Things happen. We all experience things happening. We are all traveling through time at the pace of now becoming next, and now became then, in exactly the same unrelenting instant.

And what we experience, and how we react to it, and how we remember it is an absolutely personal thing. So it is safe to say that we may view any event we directly experience very differently than another person who experienced it with us.

This is part of the otherness that defines our human existence. It’s a consequence of being part of a universe that wants to know itself and all it’s potential selves. We can only hold that passing moment in memory, and memory is purely internal.

The American Civil War, and the slice of it that is the Battle of Gettysburg, is one of those things that has so much impact that it’s still being “contextualized” over 160 years later.

As a proper history nerd I try to follow two basic tenets.

Firstly, information should be analyzed to the extent that any bias that is likely to exist can be excised from the data itself.

That is, if you know one account was written by a Northern Abolitionist and another by a Southern Slave Holder, the information needs to get pared down to times, quantities, etc. Certainly the perspective can and should be accessed, to give us all some idea of the human experiences and ideas involved, but it’s not history, it’s the way the author viewed history at the time.

Which brings us to the second rule, people in history cannot, and should not, be judged or understood by the modern views we now hold.

Our present sensibilities are vastly different from the combatants of the American Civil War, from the Spanish Conquistadors, from the Roman Centurions, or any other person that has lived in a different period of time. Social media is rife with commentary about the differences between “Boomers”, “Gen X”, “Millennials”, and “Gen Z” and this is just among generations that we’re born since the Second World War. How then do we have the hubris to presume we “understand” the motivation of an Antebellum population?

This is why I prefer time travel to historical research. As the Doctor has said, we time travelers point and laugh at archaeologists.

Time travel is not an easy thing to do, of course. Absent a flux capacitor, temporal rotor, or warp drive, you really are tasked with finding someplace where the forces that perpetuate the illusion of linear time are relatively weak. These are becoming harder and harder to find in a modern global world interconnected with telecommunications equipment. But you can find them. And you can learn to ignore the distractions that can remind one of calendar dates and modern tech.

Find the ghosts can help.

I’m still not sure personally if ghosts aren’t simply other time travelers. Certainly we have the stories of ghosts that echo the horrible circumstances of their deaths. To the spiritualist and medium these sad beings remain because of the trauma they experienced, leaving a permanent imprint, or the presence of an unquiet spirit.

But there are lot of ghosts who simply are seen engaged in the normal activities of their life, or perhaps engaged in an emotionally intense event, like a pitched battle. In these cases, it is not impossible that we are simply peering past the walls of linear time and viewing the events that are happening just over there in the cosmic everpresent.

Several of the ghosts I have run into in my life look just like regular people. They don’t look “dead”, still have their heads and hands and aren’t bleeding profusely. As they walk past, some of them nod and smile, just as we would if we met in the hallway or on the street inside the same space-time.

They’re just slightly outside that space-time, and as such these moments can be brief and end abruptly. Almost as soon as one perceives the true nature of the encounter, one turns to look again and they’re gone.

We understand about as little of the true nature of time and space as we do the nature our own spirits. The tangibility of the meat suit, and the apparently “real” material world it inhabits, is, even to modern physics, not an entirely absolute thing. Physicality as we experience it may simply be another illusion, a limitation our our perception of the universe around us.

Time and space in our dreams is nothing like what we live in daily. It is non-linear, it is certainly non-physical, and frequently defies logical causality. Imagination is as ephemeral, so it’s a very difficult proposition to prove that the existence of the mind is bounded by the physical world and the apparent flow of linear time.

If you’re not a history nerd, it may surprise you to learn that the Spiritualist movement has it’s roots in the period following the American Civil War and in Europe following the Crimean War a couple of decades later. In both cases, there was an horrific loss of life on a scale not experienced before. Many of the dead were lost far from home, sometimes interred in mass graves with few markers. And still others were listed as “missing” which means the bodies were never identified.

In the era before modern embalming had become viable, there simply was no way to ever bring these dead men home. Such methods as existed (and they were largely experimental) were open only to the rich, who had not lost their wealth to the fortunes of war.

This left loved ones with no sense of closure. Spiritualism, with the trappings of the séance, table turning, spirit trumpets and talking boards offered mourning survivors a solace that they did not find in traditional religion. With the belief that the dead could be contacted, a wider acceptance that they remained in semi-tangible form as visible ghosts became more and more prevalent. Soon, spirits and ghosts began to expand beyond the shades of those passed on to include the shades of things that had never been alive.

The “ghost” of Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train is a widespread story across the parts of the country where his final journey passed on the way from Washington, D.C. to Illinois. Even for the animist, it’s hard to expect that the locomotive and cars that made that journey are spending eternity repeating the trip, particularly since the ghost of Lincoln himself rarely features in the stories.

We can accept that this is a mass delusion, of course. We can say that the trauma of the war and the culmination of that in the assassination of the President created a national myth that caused people to see that ghost train.

Or we can suggest that this same trauma has weakened the walls of space-time in some locales, and that we are still seeing the train as it passed on that fateful trek.

The same may be said for the phantom patrols and the ghost battles and other hauntings reported at Gettysburg and other battlegrounds of the American Civil War. It is not an exclusive experience to that event, either. I had a friend tell me they had a similar response to the battlefield of Culloden, in Scotland.

When we spill that much blood and pain and hate, it may not be possible to close the wounds for a very long time.

Culloden was the end of the Jacobite Rebellion. Gettysburg, though the war would continue for almost another two years, would signal the ultimate defeat of the Confederacy. In fact, there is one moment that historians will point to as the turning point in the war. That is what is known as Pickett’s Charge.

On July 3rd, after two days of battle with territory changing hands several times, it looked as though the Army of Northern Virginia under Robert E. Lee had the upper hand. There were still a handful of entrenched positions held by the Federal troops, but if they were broken, and put to retreat, Lee would command the supply lines that fed into Washington, D.C. and capturing the United States capital would have been much more likley.

If that had happened, the Confederate States of America might have continued to exist for some time, been recognized as a legitimate entity by other world governments, and institutionalized African slavery continued for some time, financed by the desire to feed cotton into the burgeoning mills of the awakening Industrial Revolution.

Alternatively, the area of North America between Mexico and Canada might have splintered into a number of small nations similar to Europe. The Westward Expansion that followed the Civil War would not have occurred as it did, and the vast wealth of natural resources would not be harnessed under a single banner, but squandered and fought over for decades. Alliances and pacts like those that precipitated World War I in Europe would surely have similarly volatile results in the Western Hemisphere, and the Twentieth Century could easily have been marked by constant international warfare with very little progress.

I’m sure some of us could argue that the Twentieth Century was marked by constant international warfare, and frankly we don’t seem to be making much headway in the Twenty-first, but we sew the seeds and see what will sprout in the future. Time travel doesn’t always help us see what’s coming. Because it’s complicated.

On July 3rd, 1863, General Pickett ordered his men forward against the enemy line, to “take the Yankee position” at a place called the Angle. To get there, they had to run down a rise across open territory, cross over a fence, a ditch, a road, and a stone wall, before reaching the enemy position.

If you stand on that terrain today, you wonder at what possessed them to attempt something like this. It’s clearly suicidal. It was a really bad idea. The commanding officers should have known that. They may have known it, but they chose to ignore it.

picketts-charge
This low spot on the battlefield is where Pickett’s men met the Northern line, sword to throat and bayonet to belly, while minié balls and grapeshot whizzed around them like buzzing flies.

The din of battle is long gone, and as one descends into this shallow depression, it becomes eerily quiet. The birds stop singing. The crickets don’t chirp. There is nothing but the whisper of a lonely wind. The walls of time grow thin here. The land still weeps, despite more than a century and a half is past.

When Lincoln said those gathered to dedicate the cemetery located nearby had not the power to consecrate this land as deeply as those who died upon it, he may have peered behind the veil of time, and felt this long lasting scar. The Lincolns were early believers in Spiritualism, having lost a child at an early age. In 1865 the President related a dream where the boy took him through the White House to show Lincoln himself lying in a casket. He would be dead within a few weeks from a bullet to the brain.

We can analyze this and say it was the bravado of a Southern Empire drunk on it’s success and resting against the wealth brought to it by the subjugation of other human beings. We can assign a reliance on military training referencing the Napoleonic Wars as recent to Lee and his generals as we are to Viet Nam. Pickett, who survived the slaughter, responded when asked about why it failed said “I believe the Yankees had something to do with it.”

Not far from this site is a farm owned by former U.S. President Eisenhower. The period of the Eisenhower presidency is a source of much nostalgia in this country. During this time the more or less intact U.S. industrial complex was tasked with rebuilding both Allied and defeated nations. The economic growth was unparalleled, and propelled the U. S. A. to the top of the world scene, challenged only by an injured but pragmatic Soviet Union.

Eisenhower, before becoming president, was Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in the European Theater of Operations. He is widely considered to be the primary architect of the June 6, 1944 invasion of Europe commonly called D-Day.

I did not have the opportunity to see the beaches when I was in Normandy back in the 1990s. I was there on business, and never got that far west. But I am familiar with what was called the Atlantic Wall.

I can only imagine Eisenhower and his advisors looking at the obstacles they faced. They had to land on an open beach, covered by machine gun and artillery placements, a vast trench and tunnel network, barbed wire, land mines, and heavy concrete obstacles. Should they survive that they had to get up cliffs in some cases, and then take those fortified positions.

If the assault failed, if they didn’t clear the beaches before sundown and make it possible to bring ashore more troops and tanks and supplies, then they might never be able to break the Nazi grip on Europe. The horror and oppression of the Third Reich and the Holocaust would remain unchallenged. The Allied Nations ultimately might fail, and certainly could not maintain against it.

It was going to be a bloody violent action, and there was only a slim chance of success.

But in the end, there was no other option open to Eisenhower, so he made the decision to order the attack.

The same way Pickett sent his men down that hill toward the Northern lines.

In the end, the outcome of both battles was the better one for humanity. The oppressor lost.

The failure of Pickett’s charge was the end for the South. They withdrew on the Fourth of July, and essentially remained on the run back to Virginia, where they were ultimately forced to surrender in 1865.

The Confederate States of America ceased to be a nation, and was subject to re-admission to the United States of America. As a consequence, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, made in January 1863 before Gettysburg, served as the impetus for the 13th Amendment which actually abolished the slave trade in the U.S.

That’s the short version we got in grade school. Over the years I have learned about martial law being declared in New York City to put down draft riots, the fact that the Emancipation Proclamation only applied to the states that were no longer under Lincoln’s control, and numerous instances of political compromise and military ambition that may have prolonged the conflict and increased the suffering.

This is not to say that the cause was not just and right. But we are harming our ability to learn from history by oversimplifying it. We encourage the growth of falsehoods that become rallying points for bad ideas. We tend to learn to put things in binary terms. Black and White. Us and Them.

That never ends well.

gubment-cow
After the pronounced weight of the battlefield, it was an amusing irony to find that the cows on Eisenhower’s farm were obediently standing in the same location as the guide map showed them.

The period of his presidency is looked back upon as a time of relative order and stability, but beneath the surface the Cold War and the turmoil of the 1960s seethed and bubbled, waiting only for a spark to set it off.

In only a few years the world would come the closest it ever has to an all out nuclear war, and another U. S, President would be assassinated as he drove through the streets of Dallas.

Well behaved cows aside, we are always just one second away from collapse. Physicists say that holding the universe together uses more energy than letting it fall apart. We see the falling apart -entropy- as the arrow of forward time. This is one of the reasons that modern science initially spurned the idea of time travel. It takes more energy to reverse things than there is in the universe, so you can never go back.

However, “back” and “forward” are potentially the limitations of our perception, much like our inability to see wavelengths of light in the infrared and ultraviolet with our poorly evolved meatsuit eyes. Everything exists in the now, but our wee brains can’t take it all in. We have developed a kind of psychosis to shield us from the incomprehensible everpresent, and that is this notion of unidirectional linear time.

Which is why I prefer to time travel. I hope that this little trip has been entertaining to you. I understand it may be a bit heavier fare than you expected, but we are descending down into that Winter Dark, when thoughts of death and doom are closer to the surface, and it is never a bad thing to remember how close we are to the footsteps of chaos.

The American Civil War did not begin with the attack on Fort Sumter. It did not begin with the election of Lincoln, or numerous political appeasements from the beginning of the 19th Century. In some sense the Civil War began with the inclusion of institutionalized slavery in the Constitution. But it is our own long history of barbarity that fuels it, and that has sadly not been resolved.

As I have traveled across the country in the last few months I have seen and heard much to indicate that we are by no means safe from repeating the mistakes of the Confederacy or the Third Reich, or the myriad tyrannies and oppressions that mark our human history. The path forward is never straight, and sometimes it goes through dark territory. Choosing to ignore that creates a certainty that we will stumble upon it.

Back next week.

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The End of All Songs

Death

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

Richard II – Act 3, Scene 2 – William Shakespeare

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Except, of course, when it is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But consider this message in a different light.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ll be back next week.

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The Taming of The Fire

Strength

The card that is labeled VIII is different depending on the deck you are using. The Marseilles Tarot has Justice in this position, and some modern decks use this scheme. In the RWS and it’s predecessor the Tarot of the Order of the Golden Dawn, the card is switched to Strength and many, if not most, decks from the last century deploy them according to this order. The most satisfactory explanation I have found is that the Golden Dawn applied the numeric value of the Hebrew letters to the Zodiac and got the number eight for Leo, and eleven for Libra. Thus, the image of Justice, with the scales, being associated with Libra, moved to XI, and the Strength card, with it’s lion, was relocated to VIII. This seems less arbitrary than other explanations, but it has flaws. As the whole idea of connecting the Hebrew letters to Tarot comes from Eliphas Levi, one would expect the switch to have been made by him if there were merit to the astrological argument. But Levi holds to the placement of Justice after the Chariot card. This merely illustrates that the Tarot is not an ancient secret code carved in the stones of a lost pyramid somewhere, but a living exercise in the exploration of the esoteric, and it’s connection with the changing fashion of the human mind. This can be adduced by the large numbers of oracle cards now available on the market, which dispense with traditional tarot almost entirely, but use the same general concepts.

The Strength card shows a woman bending to shut the mouth of a lion. She has a garland of roses for her belt and a crown of vines or flowers atop her tied hair. Her gown is white. Above her head is the infinity symbol, seen first on the Magician. There is a single mountain in the background, and a verdant landscape between. The sky in this card is yellow. The sash of the woman seems to circle around the lion’s neck.

strength-rws-tarot
A slightly simpler card than many. Perhaps this is reflective for the rather limited scope assigned to it by the commissioning party.

The motif of the woman and lion is sometimes depicted as Hercules slaying the Nemean lion. This Visconti-Sforza deck in the Morgan Library collection has this version, and it may be original. The Marseilles has a female figure, and likely reflects this depiction of the virtue of Fortitude or Strength as a woman, in line with Medieval thinking. The Sforza’s may have wanted to allude to the more classical myth as testament to their secular humanist world view, but Hercules doesn’t typically feature on many modern decks.

My first personal response to this card is always that it symbolizes my wife’s birthday. She is born on the cusp of Leo and Virgo and I can think of no more apt metaphor than the woman in white closing the mouth of the beast. I do not typically assign the “traditional” astrological values to the cards, because I often find good reason to disagree with them, but let’s assume that the usual attribution of Virgo to card IX – The Hermit is used, and the Leo referenced above applied to this, then we are in something of a logical zodiac order here. The Chariot, by the way, get’s assigned to Cancer the preceding sign. The problem with that (and why I don’t use a lot of the traditional values) is that Cancer also gets assigned to the Priestess, and then the Magician being connected with Mercury comes over as Gemini and not Aries. Keeping track of this astrological soap opera seems to me to be worth less than the effort. That said, if I feel that there is a need for an astrological reading, I will go look it up (if I don’t know it) and weight it in context with the other values of the other cards in context.

strength-pulp-tarot
A less serious take on the subject by the artists of the Pulp Tarot. This deck is a tongue-in-chic homage to Pixie Smith which fully celebrates the genre of the cheap dime novel cover. As a fan of both the novels and that period of illustration history, it was an easy decision to pick it up when I saw it in the discount bin. By remaining true to the base imagery of the RWS deck, it affords the reader a seamless transition without the disadvantage of an exotic reinterpretation. I plan to take it with me when I am reading at the writer’s conference in New Orleans next month, as I am certain my audience will get a kick out of it.

Even so, I always see this card personally as a day in late August, and assign it the value of transition, the passing of time, and the shifting of seasons from one of growth to one of harvest. The moebius over her head signifies that this shift is a perpetual one, the cycle repeats, and so it gives us a symbol of the cycle as well. While this is but the slice of summer’s ending, it remembers the bloom of spring, and foresees the golden leaves of autumn and the barren fields of winter, waiting to blossom again.

In this way, the card speaks to me of Mother Nature. She has in herself the capacity to shut up the privation and reckless excess that may be heralded by the lion. For all the lion’s strength as an emblem, it is a predator. It destroys. Like the heat of the Sun that rules Leo, if unslaked, it will burn and blast. So we may read this card in context of the environmental struggles we are having with the planet now. Like Leo we proudly assert our dominion. Our vanity threatens to ruin us, however, and the planet will put us in check.

But lets look again at this card. The woman shutting the lion’s mouth is doing so without undue force or violence. The lion, after all, is just being a lion. It is following its nature, whether than nature is to the benefit of its environment or not. The lion is what it is. To deny that would be cruel to the lion.

strength-medley-tarot
Another fun spin on Strength comes from the Mystical Medleys Tarot. This one is based on the style of old time cartoons, circa 1920s and 30s, but don’t let that fool you. The creators are clearly tuned into the functioning of Tarot and manage to incorporate a number of very subtle esoteric hints into the cards. Like the Pulp Tarot there is enough similarity to RWS that a reader can comfortably draw on this deck without needing to go look it up. I think this version also gives a good illustration of that symbiosis between the lion and Mother Nature (or Virgo, or Demeter, etc.). She is in control of him, but clearly it is a loving control and not violent dominance.

There’s an internet joke that this card depicts trying to get a cat to swallow a pill. Having several small “lions” ion my household, I can attest that is not far from reality. But let’s consider that. We want our pets, our friends, to be healthy, so we want them to take their medication. They do not want to because it’s not natural for them to do so. Cat’s don’t take pills. Cats, in fact, are canny enough to act like they swallowed the pill, hide it in their mouth, and wait until you are not watching to spit it out. I have seen them do this.

So how do we make the cat take the pill? As gently, but as forcefully as we can. Because we want them to get better. This is what the figure of Strength is doing here. She is gently pushing the lion’s mouth shut. She has even wrapped her sash around him to make him feel like family. Because he his family. He is part of that nature that she represents. Yet she has to get him under control.

He has to swallow the pill.

strength-dandd-deviant-moon-tarot
Some darker variations on the theme. On the left is the Strength Card from the Dungeons and Dragons Tarot, which is a very recent acquisition (January), which casts Strength solely in terms of violence. I am not so sure I like this approach, but the deck is both visually interesting and brave in taking on traditional Tarot conventions. This iconoclasm is more obvious with the suits, which are shifted more to sync with game play than occult practice, but some of the Major Arcana deviate significantly,

Speaking of deviance, the Deviant Moon Tarot (which I’ve had for about a decade now) seems to be a favorite of witches, at least the one’s I know. It is very dark, situated in an odd twilit world that evokes to me Carnival in Venice, and the intrigues of the Renaissance courts. In this interpretation the “lion” has become a kind of wyvern, serpent, or possibly an eel. The contest between the figure of strength – something like a circus strongman, and the creature connects back to the images of Hercules and the Nemean lion on some Renaissance decks. Curiously, the Deviant Moon is one of those decks that number this as XI, and have it between the Wheel of Fortune and the Hanged Man

There’s a message here. While we tend to see the two figures as separate and distinct, they are inexorably connected. The natural behavior of the lion is “what nature intended” yet nature, in the guise of the woman, is overriding that. This card is about the mastery of our own passions, the domination of the fiery side of our nature, which is quick to anger, quick to hurt, and hard to tame.

Yet in taming it, we become more able to function, with our family, friends, co-workers, and society in general.

We also need to swallow the pill.

This is not to say that we can deny that nature. If we do that, it is cruel and harmful to us as well. In that fire is our passion and drive as much as our anger and hate. But we need to know that the anger and hate are always there, and always ready to pounce. All it takes is for our strength to fail.

The lions hunt the weak because they are the easiest to bring down. They will avoid a strong opponent, because they know they can be defeated. This is their nature. It is up to the individual to retain that resolve, so that the more negative aspects of the inner fire do not overwhelm and devour us.

There’s an interesting link to the context that this card is sometimes exchanged with Justice in several decks. Justice is about enforcing the balance, to insure that order is maintained for the good of all. Strength is about maintaining an inner balance, so that we do not do harm to ourselves or others.

I’d mention also that this the first card since the Fool that doesn’t seem to be interested in us. That is, if we look at the images of the Magician, Priestess, Empress, Emperor, Hierophant, Lovers, and Chariot, they are are all looking right at the viewer. They are engaging us as entities. With Strength, we return, briefly, to being outside the action. We are seeing a drama upon a stage, one that we are familiar with, to be sure, but not one that involves us.

I take from this that we are dealing with undercurrents and unconscious tendencies. Certainly the battle with the beast is one that happens within, and in many cases at a level beneath or beyond that of ordinary rational thought and analysis. While the Fool’s detachment speaks of a cosmic unconscious, a Universe yet to know Itself, Strength is working internally within our own hearts and minds. We have in passing through all the confrontational faces on the cards between, come into an awareness of self, and now we hear the stirrings on the forgotten or suppressed parts of that self. The mountain in the background bears a similarity to the one at the center of the Lovers card. We have left the garden.

strength-robin-wood-celtic-tarot
To end on a less dire note, I offer two more pleasant versions. The left side is the Robin Wood Tarot, by the late fantasy illustrator whose name it bears. In this one, both the woman and the lion appear to be smiling, The creature is tamed because it wants to be, and because it acknowledges the internal strength of the woman. There is no need to force on her part, as this is simply the order of things.

The righthand card is from one of the numerous “Celtic” Tarot. This one is created by the artist Courtney Davis with accompanying text by Helena Paterson. I bought it because it reminds me of the Book of Kells and other illuminated manuscripts in that style. It is very faithful to the RWS iconography otherwise, so it makes a good second deck if you’re into the Celtic type of artwork.


There’s not much else to say about this card. I have to say that in many years of reading it doesn’t seem to show up often for me, though that’s statistically aberrant. I take no secret meaning from that, I only make the observation. It tends to be a one-note type of message usually, so I have striven to use it’s imagery to take us a bit deeper. My efforts here are not meant to change the traditional reading of the card. My approach, after all these years, is to read each card like it’s an ink blot in a Rorschach test. What do I see, and what do I think when I see it. The inherent meanings will always be integrated in that, because like almost everyone else who reads Tarot, I started by memorizing (more or less) those meanings. As with my previous ramblings, you are free to take or leave them. My intention is that you begin to look for your own inroads to these images, and the myriad variations that are out there.

Next week I will be dealing with the Hermit. If you are long time reader, you may assume that my previous several articles mentioning this character has exhausted my perspective on it. I hope you will join me to see whether or not that is the case. Thank you for taking the time to read this week’s offering.

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Keeper of the Keys

Hierophant

The sixth card which is numbered V, has one of the most overtly Christian iconographies in a set of cards that has a lot of them. This card was originally the Pope. It is named that in European decks that precede the RWS, and despite Waite’s changing the name to a more exotic Greek one, the design preserves both the traditional image, and amplifies it in that same Gothic Medieval style. The Hierophant may just as well be taken from a stained glass window in a cathedral, as it offers us little in the visual sense to merit divorcing it from its original Catholic nominative.

That image is one of the King of the Church, with his three crowns, on his throne, in full raiment, holding a triple cross in his left hand and making the sign of blessing with his right. The high-back throne is situated between two Norman style pillars on a raised dais, covered with an embroidered red carpet. Affixed to the front of the dais are a pair of crossed keys, traditional part of the Papal arms. To either side are tonsured supplicants. The one on the left wears a robe decorated with roses, the other with lilies. The dominant color on this card is grey, forming the background, the throne, and the columns. The priest of the rose has a grey robe, the one of the lily is a grey blue. Both priest have yellow vestments. The Hierophant himself is draped in red with white trim, and the bottom of his robe is blue. These are traditional colors associated with Christian depictions of Christ and the Virgin in Renaissance art.

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“Ladies and gentlemen, HIs Holiness, the Pope”

When I got my Hoi Polloi Tarot in the early 1970s, I admit to feeling cheated that what I expected were going to be “occult” cards had such obvious Christian images, and this one was perhaps the most “offensive” to my young sensibilities. I was not, at this point, educated on the entanglement between magic and occult practices and the traditions of the Abrahamic religions. Now, of course, we should all be at least acquainted with the influence that monotheistic orthodoxy has had on so-called “pagan belief”.

We live in an age where the perceived taint of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is very hard to remove from our ritual and belief. Reconstruction of pagan or pre-Christian belief in the late 19th and early 20th century was hardly scientifically approached. The Victorian magic lodges were actively calling on angels and powers in the secret name of the old Hebrew sky god, and that with many of the liturgies and rituals of the Church. “Folk” pagan movements borrowed from stories that had clearly been altered by centuries of enforced Catholicism, and synthesized based on rejecting or inverting the Christian teachings.

I personally think that much of that early monotheism itself has been redacted and retro-actively continued to match more modern perspectives, as well. Certainly Judaism offers us Kabbalah and a rich magical tradition in parallel with the sacred and practical teachings of the Torah and Talmud. First century Christianity contains more things that were deemed heretical, blasphemous, and even satanic than what eventually made it into the dogma, and early Islam has a similar history of dissent, disagreement, and disinformation.

The result is that what has passed down to us today is not clear, not original, and not perhaps accurate. When we step on the path of working with the secrets of the universe, we should be aware that some of those secrets are just plain lies.

The word Hierophant per the dictionary is most generally rendered “priest of the mysteries of the religion”. He is the arbiter between the mundane world that all may observe, experience and understand, and the world of sacred and divine that only the initiated may experience. He echoes both the Priestess and The Emperor in his pose and his situation.

Whereas the Priestess offers us the means to bridge the ideation of opposites, and the Emperor forces us to encounter the “I”, the Hierophant provides specific methods of instruction. These are the keys at his feet.

In the Christian iconography, and the Papal arms, these keys are the ones given by Christ to Simon Peter that open the gates of the Kingdom of Heaven. Peter is probably not actually his name, but derives from the Greek “petra” or stone. Peter is the disciple, who despite several issues detailed in the gospels, Jesus calls the “Rock on which I will build my church”. As Peter is officially the first Pope, this description is rather fortuitous.

The keys were conferred to Peter in the same passage (Matthew 16:17 if you’re interested) along with the curious authority of being able to cause things that he bound upon the earth to be bound in heaven and that he loosed upon the earth to be loosed in heaven.

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If you find yourself as put off by the depiction of a Christian pontiff as I sometimes do, there are several other decks that give us broader interpretations of the Keeper of Secrets. Clockwise from top left,

The Shadowscapes Tarot -Stephanie Law’s lyrical watercolor work presents a being related to Treebeard himself, and more at harmony with the mysteries of the natural world than a cultist in a cathedral.

The Tarot of the Hidden Realm – This deck is very Celtic/Faerie oriented and the illustration here by artist Julia Jeffrey of a personable druid is certainly more approachable.

On a different tack, Norbert Losche’s Cosmic Tarot combines what at first appear to be traditional religions with symbolism from occult and Oriental sources to hint that perhaps what is behind the temple doors is bigger than any one path.

Finally the WildWood Tarot shows us something called The Ancestor. This very Celtic/Shamanic deck presents a number of the traditional cards under new names and vastly alters their interpretation. In the shamanism of the Celts, the spirits of the ancestors have the authority to pass us through the mysteries. The artist is Will Worthington.

This sounds very much like the “As Above, So Below” of the Emerald Tablet of Hermes the Thrice Great, which may have been well known to the Greeks and Romans at the time the Book of Matthew was being compiled, possibly around 60-70 years after the events they were describing. Now that, of course, is the earliest version, and as noted above, many edits may have been made between then and later doctrines. These early Greek texts are supposedly the original source material, but given the history of religious thought that we have from modern times, it’s impossible to say with certainty that they represent an actual historical account, and have not, themselves, been “corrected” even at that early stage.

The Hermetic documents end up in Western European circles by way of Islam. These were perhaps preserved among other documents from the Library of Alexandria because they were not directly heretical to Islam whereas Christian authorities might have destroyed or suppressed them. While most public schools teach of the burning of that library by the Romans during Caesar’s time in Egypt, fewer mention that succeeding intentional purges were committed by both Christians and Moslems in later periods that resulted in many things being lost to humanity forever. Yet copies that had been made by Jews and Moslems at earlier times survived, and re-emerged as the vice grip of the Catholic church started slipping in the 15th century.

So perhaps the secrets being kept by the Hierophant are not those the Papacy and the mysteries of the Church, but of a secret Hermetic magical tradition. Perhaps Peter’s keys were an esoteric expression of the elevation of all humanity through the transformations of the Philosopher’s Stone and the Elixir of Life. The powers ascribed to these long-sought solutions are eternal health, eternal youth, and eternal life, not so far from the immortality promised in the kingdom of Heaven. Whether or not Medieval alchemy was a confusion from a Papal esotericism, or if it was the other way around, is hard to tell, but it is one way we can break ourselves from of that initial reaction that we are looking at a Catholic pontiff.

We can also disconnect the red robe from the Holy Blood and recast it as the Elixir of Life. The blue of the robes beneath the Hierophant’s mantle can connect us to the Water Element, and the distillation or “liquefaction” of the process where the elements dissolve into “water” before reforming into the Philosopher’s Stone. We can assign the tripartite crown and triple cross to Hermes Trismegestus – The Thrice Great, and the entire scene magically dissolves into a pre-Christian pagan symbol for the pursuit of the Alchemical Ideal, the Great Hidden Secret of The Universe

As Above, So Below.

This ties well into my own perspective on the first six cards of the Major Arcana, and their interrelationship. The Hierophant sits at the bottom point of the “Below” triangle. He is that reflection and manifestation of the wild naked formlessness of the Fool. The Fool is the Universe as it is, as it is Becoming. The Hierophant is the Universe as it must be masked, to prevent us from being dissolved back into it. The secrets kept are wonderful and terrible, and cannot be experienced all at once. They must be meted out, building one upon another, so that the foundation is solid and the structure sound.

The building we find the Hierophant in may appear heavy and close, but it is certainly sturdy. The Romanesque style of columns used here don’t allow for wide spans and open spaces. The churches of this period were typically lit by only a few small windows, and candles or torches. Consequently, the surface decorations in most of them were evolved from Roman mosaic, using gold or other metal foils underneath the glass of the tessare, in order to achieve a shimmering and otherworldly sensation for the viewer.

This reflected upon the emphasis that the early church put on the Inward Life- the focus of the Soul, rather than on external material comforts. While one can argue that this is an effective method of maintaining social control during the privations of the post-Imperial days of Europe, it also has a good deal in common with many of the spiritual movements that have come up recently in response to an ineffectual and worldly orthodoxy.

This card most often reminds me of the mosaic of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian from that period. The mosaic in the Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy establishes the Emperor as the central authority between the Church and the on one side and the civil and military authorities on the other. It echoes an adjacent mage where Christ is shown between the orders of the angels. This early depiction, even though Justinian is a Christian emperor with a sitting Pope, gives one an indication of the mindset of the authorities during the time of the early church. Justinian commissioned this piece around the mid 500s, or a little over 150 years after the Nicean Crede formalized Christianity in the Roman Empire.

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Mosaic of Justinian in the Basilica de San Vitale – This is one of those images that either really impressed me or was just so important to get right on the art history exam that it has stuck with me for all the years since. The style that Pixie Smith uses for the Tarot, particularly the Major Arcana, always reminds me of this period. This is technically not the Middle Ages, yet, but it is a Christian Rome and clearly things are changing. The Pope had not yet risen to the prominence that he would have after the last Emperor was deposed by Aluric the Goth some three hundred years later. The “Gothic” style only differs a little from that scene here. The figures are linear, the space they inhabit is flat. Yet there are keys to understanding the rank and role of each person here, and Justinian is in the front. His smugness is evident. I see that in the Hierophant card, but maybe that’s a personal thing.

This is always one of the problems I have with the Hierophant card. While it purports to be giving us access to a secret teaching, that access involves a hierarchy (derived from the same root word) which implies that some individuals are intrinsically better than others, and that the goal of learning the secrets is to move up to the next level. The word hierarchy was originally used to denote the orders of the Angels (the Hidden Order) but was then adapted to refer to the levels of the officials of the Church (sin of pride anyone?) , before it came to mean any stratified group with upper members having authority over the lower ranks.

I have mentioned in earlier articles that I am by nature a non-joiner. There’s something ingrained in my personality that naturally rejects the idea of hierarchy. Whether the Hierophant is keeping the keys of Heaven or the secrets of the coven makes no matter to me. While I understand (and have expressed) that there may be a need to meter information in order to safeguard the person seeking it, I have that basic desire to kick open the gates.

I see a great deal of discussion in the online occult communities about the concept of the “Gatekeeper”. The term is almost universally seen as bad, generally applied to a selfish, and perhaps self-serving, individual that responds to aspirant seekers with vitriol and insult. Yet I imagine that some persons being labeled as gatekeepers are, in fact, trying to teach, and possibly to warn and protect, the neophyte who may be leaping onto the path without proper awareness of what they are doing. Some of these people are members of organized hierarchical orders, and some are wild witches. In either case, the perception of the community seems overwhelmingly negative toward anyone who might suggest that there is some need for “rules”.

Okay, so let’s talk about making cookies.

If I have never made cookies, I can just decide that cookies are made with flour and sugar and butter and milk and put them all in a big bowl and mix it up and bake it and get cookies.

That’s assuming I have a general idea that are made of flour and sugar and butter and milk and not from crushed brown chalk and library paste (I’m going for Oreos here, obviously).

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One of my favorite comic strips from childhood, from a series that was far deeper than many kids and adults really perceived.

It’s important to remember that we are all born knowing nothing, and what we end up knowing is a direct consequence of what we encounter up to that point. If you’ve never tasted chicken, having someone tell you that alligator tastes like chicken is hardly useful.

The grandeur of our age is that all the information that has been collected and preserved up to this point in time is at our fingertips.

The great folly of our age is the assumption that having some small view of a tiny piece of that is sufficient to make one an authority over anyone else who may be looking at a different piece.

One cannot presume that we are even speaking the same language, let alone that we are all at the same point on the same path, and have come from the same direction. It is arrogant and cruel to judge anyone’s perspective based on our own, even if we believe we are helping that person avoid something that befell us. We should be generous when our opinion is sought, but in all cases, we should end the dialog with “that’s just my opinion”.

Of course, that is just my opinion.

Now, I think many of us will acknowledge that neither of these are going to give us tasty cookies. We are missing some fundamental understanding of how cookies are made.

Let’s take it a step further and suggest that we went and found a cook-book and took out the cookie-recipe of our choice. We sort of followed it, because we don’t really have any experience in how to measure ingredients, or prepare the pan, or check the doneness, and the cook-book assumes that we do.

Also bad cookies.

So I think most people in the room will start to see how there might be a need for the “gatekeeper” in certain circumstances. Someone to help us out getting things started and not burning our cookies, our fingers, or the house. The thing is that not everyone is particularly good at doing that, and not everyone is good at doing it for everyone who needs it. Good teachers are rare. Good teachers that can teach a variety of students are even rarer. And sadly, I think we have all of us at least once in our life experienced the “teacher” who, for whatever reason, just seemed to be focused on crushing any imagination or individual spirit the student had.

This is the reverse of the Hierophant that we encounter. It is that desire to so restrict interest and innovation to the point that it is creating mere parrots. Dogma is all that matters. There can be no questioning, that which is written is that which is written. To attempt to look beyond is forbidden. It is wrong.

Now as I equate that kind of rigid single-mindedness with the orthodoxy of established mainstream religions, the blatant imagery here of a Medieval Catholic Pope has always caused a bit of a twinge when reading with the RWS deck. I find that I have to consciously do a bit of mental alchemy to see that person as anything other than restrictive and oppressive, and I think that basic rebellion impacts the intuitiveness of any reading.

If I read based on my impressions, and the impression is off-putting, well, even if I tell myself “no…this means something else” I’m going to feel something is off. As readers we need to be aware of our bias when approaching the cards. I have my favorites (as you may have noticed) and I have those I would rather just not look at. And that will color how my senses respond to the cards as they are drawn.

In later years I’ve gotten a bit better at perhaps internally flashing a friendlier figure from one of my other decks that is not so overtly Judeo-Christian in many of the designs. But again, this deck is almost the de-facto Tarot for most people starting out, and it doesn’t divert from other older decks in this issue anyway. You have to go to decks from the later half of the 20th century to start seeing a visual expression that substantially deviates from this. Fortunately, there are a lot of them.

Next week I will endeavor to perform a similar exorcism with the seventh card, the Lovers, which rides straight at us out of the Book of Genesis, with only a minor detour through secular humanism and maybe a touch of Pre-Raphaelite romanticism. I hope you are finding these deep dives into the cards useful, or at least, stimulating to your own thoughts on the subject. Please join me again next week.

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The Lady Behind The Veil

High Priestess

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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The Fool Who Follows Him

The Fool

It’s been about a year since I started this column. The first of April is right around the corner and I am thinking about beginnings and endings. I felt it time to delve deeper into one of the more enigmatic symbols of Tarot, that of the Fool.

The Fool is interpreted simply in many dissertations on the subject. However, there is much more beneath the surface. I have teased this particular trip down the rabbit hole before, but now it is time to grab our pinafore and go after that púca with the pocket watch.

In most interpretations of this card, it is read more or less literally. It represents idiocy, poor judgement, ignorance, and cupidity. Some variations talk about it as a sign of new beginnings and innocence, but this is a more modern, “New Age” take.

The RWS depiction shows a youth, oblivious to the world around them, about to walk off a cliff. A small dog yaps at their heel. They wear a richly decorated tunic similar to the French Medieval style, a feathered cap, hose and boots, and they carry a leather purse or satchel on the end of a staff. In their left hand they hold a rose. The sun shows wanly in the background, and there are high mountains, indicating that the cliff overlooks a deep ravine and that the drop is most assuredly fatal.

Since this deck, or rather the license infringing Hoi Polloi deck that derives from it, was my first, all later impressions from other decks mentally point back to it. That is, the currents and eddies of the brain invariably take any new (or old) image of the card and compare it to the image as created by Pamela Colman Smith. Therefore the description above identifies the key pieces of that image, and those points for comparison and contrast in other interpretations of the theme. It is those points that I use when contemplating the cards, and teasing the secrets out of them in a reading.

RWS_Tarot_00_Fool
The Fool as drawn by Pamela Colman Smith supposedly at the direction Arthur Edward Waite. Her distinctive “PCS” monogram might be barely detectable under the Fool’s left foot, but it might be missing altogether, making this the only unsigned card. Of course, it’s also possible that the signature was simply cropped from the artwork by the printer without any realization of its purpose.

For this reason, the next twenty-one articles in this theme will begin similarly. While I can’t imagine anyone interested in Tarot does not already own some version of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, it’s also a means of getting everyone on the same page. For good measure I have included a screenshot of each card, which are now in the public domain.

The Fool is also given the number zero, but this has not always been the case. Initially the trumps were not numbered, and then later, only this card was unnumbered, so that in later conventions, it was assumed to have a zero value, when it actually has none. That sounds confusing, I know, but there is a subtle difference between something being given a quantifier, even if that quantity is zero, and something that has no quantifier at all. This is actually a point worth contemplating at length, because in both cases it gives us access to some of the more esoteric messages available to this card.

The somewhat related Eastern ideas of nirvana (quenching), anatta (non-self), and sunyata (emptiness) can be instructive in respect to this subtlety. In many Eastern teachings the ultimate goal of the human spirit is to rise past the need for it’s own identity. Suffering, so it goes, comes from longing, which comes from fear, which comes from the individual ego. When all are one and one are all, there is no need for fear or longing or suffering, and thus the soul is freed from the cycle of reincarnation, because it no longer requires it.

But beyond that, there is a point where none are all and all are none. This is a state where the awareness of the state itself is gone, there is no longer any awareness. This, for lack of a better word, is the void.

Depending on whose philosophy you are reading the void is end or the beginning, the void is a final and immutable state, or it is an intermittent state between cosmological incarnations, because it is inherently unstable, and prone to reasserting its diversity.

In quantum mechanics, physicists talk about things like the Big Bang and the Big Crunch. These represent the opposites ends of all space and time as we perceive it, when everything there is and may be gets pushed into a point so small that no scientifically accurate description can be made of it. The scientists call these points singularities, but because they exist outside the realm of the physics that describe them, they are essentially nothing.

The universe, as the story goes, was without form and void.

visconti-fool
A Fifteenth Century Fool. This one comes for the well-known Visconti-Sforza Deck the majority of which is held at the J.P. Morgan Library in New York City. This poor sot bears little resemblance to Smith’s bright medieval fantasy, or to most of the other fool figures that appear in the Tarot. He is missing the pack, the cap, and the dog, in addition to his pants. While there is the suggestion of mountains at his feet, this is more of a Renaissance convention than any significator. The figure still has more in common with the flat spaces of Gothic iconography than the fully dimensional depth that Leonardo and Michelangelo would bring to the world shortly afterward. He is painted against a gilded screen (as are most of the Visconti-Sforza cards) that likely would have been prepared by a separate craftsman as a blank.

Paul Huson suggests that the images we encounter on the Major Arcana derive from the Medieval mystery pageants that gave rise to our modern theater. If he is correct, the pitiable condition of the Fool in this image may be a metaphor for the bleak condition of the human soul in need of salvation. This attribution of the images resolves a number of questions regarding the inherently Christian content of the trump cards, even though they have been re-interpreted in more secular and pagan ways in the intervening centuries. It is important still to remember that the “book” meaning of Tarot in modern times stems significantly from the works of the occultists Eliphas Levi and Papus, both of whom studied for the priesthood before pursuing their esoteric careers.


There’s a permutation of these theories that says instead of the universe contracting back to a singularity at some point in the distant future, it will continue to expand to the extent that none of the forces of gravity, electromagnetism, or nuclear attraction will hold anything together, and eventually it all just becomes cold and dark and empty. Since none of the physical laws that describe the universe function, the universe itself may be seen to become nothing.

And then there’s the theory that after the universe collapses down to the Big Crunch, it explodes again into another Big Bang in a never ending cycle of time ending and beginning again. Because time and space end at the singularity, the new universe beyond can also be seen to not exist, even though it does.

So he we are, standing on the edge of that cliff, trying to define what the difference is between something that has nothing in it, and nothingness.

Yes, I am still talking about the Fool card.

And the zero which is also a circle. So it is nothing, that has no beginning or ending, completely surrounds nothing within it, and completely excludes everything outside it. It does not exist, yet there is no other.

But from this nothingness all other things must arise. The only way to get something is to have nothing to compare it to. Our numbers all exist as a reference against the value of zero, and zero exists against the value of other.

The light was separated from the darkness. The seas were separated from the dry land.

Things begin. On the edge of a cliff, with a dog yapping at our heels.

That little dog is entropy. It’s the natural tendency of things to fall apart. Stephen Hawking says entropy results in a less organized universe, where the structure and form of matter and energy become more chaotic. The tea cup, he says, always falls off the table and breaks into many pieces. It never reassembles and comes back up because it takes less energy to break it than it does to put it together.

At first glance, that means that our universe is heading for that Big Nothing. But physics also says that after the universe had the Big Bang, things were all sort of the same thing, and it was only because that didn’t stay that way that we got to where we are now. Particles formed as energy transferred from point to point. Forces acted upon the “uneveness” of the particles, and caused them to clump up into bosons and mesons and quarks and atoms and molecules and stars and galaxies. And those got really really big and they fell apart, and then the dust left over and the forces at play swept those clumps together and the process repeated.

We’re basically a second-hand cosmos. Maybe even third-hand.

But apparently that dog keeps chasing us right toward the edge of nothing. Even though it’s going to go over with us. Makes one wonder which one is the Fool here, doesn’t it.

In other versions of the card, the dog (and sometimes tiger or lion) is shown biting the Fool, traditionally read as another sign of their obliviousness to reality. But there’s a second option, and that is the dog is actually trying to stop him from going off the cliff. Like Lassie telling us Little Timmy is in the well, the loyal companion here is looking out for it’s master’s best interests, even if the effort is not wholly appreciated.

thoth-deck-fool
Aleister Crowley’s “Book of Thoth” version of the Fool Card. In my late teens and early 20s I was very much drawn to the Thelema system of magick and the imagery and interpretation of these cards had a major influence on my thinking about Tarot. I had the book before I ever got a deck of the cards, so I probably have read more deeply these meanings than many of the others. Crowley, in an effort to synthesize a bigger better magickal system, sought to bring together ideas from witchcraft, alchemy, Hinduism and Buddhism, and Esoteric Kabbalah – along with the Golden Dawn magic systems, into a unified theory. The idea still intrigues me, but this card, along with a number of the others, just comes off as busy, over-complicated, and inaccessible. While there is symbolism aplenty, it doesn’t lend itself to the imaginative voyage of the reader. I love to contemplate the Crowley Deck, but I hardly ever do a reading with one.

In Medieval symbolism, the dog is frequently portrayed as an emblem of faith. The name often associated with family dogs is “Fido”, from the Latin “fidelis” – Faith. Compare that to the other common epithet of Rover and you can see how the two contrast. It’s a common feature of tomb effigies to show the little dog at the feet of the night or lady. This wasn’t a love of the pet, but a symbol of both marital fidelity and religious piety. Basically, if you showed up at the Pearly Gates with a Fido under your arm you got a pass. Rover, on the other hand, might have to do a turn or two in Purgatory for his indiscretions and philandering nature.

So we can take that and read the Fool’s dog a number of ways. It may be seen as just emblematic of our instincts trying to avert our mistakes. That’s for anything atheists out there, who just dig the pictures on the cards and don’t believe in the spooky weirdness. We can take it up a notch and consider that dog as the presence of higher forces, guardian angels or a divine power, depending on what works for you, that is guiding our forward steps. To the extent that we believe in and rely on such forces comes back to that faith part. Though, finally, we can just consider it a faith in ourselves, the nature of the universe, and the always rushing-forward power that somehow seems to keep all the plates spinning and all the balls in the air. The universe pushes onward because that is what the universe does. It’s part of the mechanism. What it pushes to, and where it pushes from, are completely irrelevant.

That cliff is usually a metaphor for the unknown, whether it be the future, the secrets of the universe, or this week’s winning Lotto numbers. It is the unformed void, the nothing that will become something. It is thus the potential inherent in all beginnings, and in fact all motion, because when we move we are inherently leaving what was and entering what wasn’t. It’s the zero just before it becomes one. It is also the assurance that zero is always going to become one.

mystical medleys fool
Simplicity need not be bereft of depth. This jolly little card from Gary Hall’s Mystical Medleys deck not only manages to incorporate the symbols we find in the RWS, but gives us other insights into the nature of this card. Most notable of the differences (except of course the use of the old-time cartoony style) is that the Fool’s head is a cyclopean pyramid. This has been a symbol for the presence of Divine Intelligence, or a Divine Plan for many centuries. It is frequently identified with the Illuminati, that mythical secret society directing all the worlds politics and commerce, and holding secret mystical knowledge that would make Dan Brown’s knees quiver. But it also may be read as simply the Divine in all, the secret sacred nature of humanity as it rolls inexorably toward the future. Anyway you spin it, there’s a lot going on here.

I love this little deck, as both an artist and animator, and a Tarot enthusiast. When I bought it I assumed it would be a very basic pastiche of the RWS cards, but they have incorporated a lot of deep secret stuff in each image. you can find it on the Zon, at B&N, and other Tarot resellers. It may be my favorite of the “new” Tarot decks.

Yet the Fool never steps on the cliff. Yes, I know with a piece of printed cardstock that defies our basic understanding of physics (and that as a metaphor is also worth some contemplation). But it never happens because the future never happens. We simply are in the next moment, and then the next and the next. We experience existence through an eternal present where the past is only a memory, and the future is only a thought. Neither state is really real, only the eternal present, which can be sliced down past minutes to seconds to microseconds and nanoseconds and ad infinitum. has any validity to our senses. We never reach the future. We cannot reach the past either.

This is the ignorance the Fool represents. They cannot know the future because when they get there it is always the present. They are not able to break that pattern. Forward movement is constant, but they never arrive.

These are very troubling ideas. It’s easy to get lost and distracted and give up on understanding any of it. That’s why the sun is behind them. Setting out on the journey here the comfort of the ordinary and the established is put to the side. Once the step is taken onto the path, what was once “true” may not be so ever again.

And very close to the sun in the image is the purse or satchel that the Fool carries with them. We’re familiar with this bag on a stick from numerous illustrations of hobos and vagabonds. It is the sum total of worldly goods that the poor creature owns, bound up in a tiny little bundle. That is, it’s the personal baggage we all carry.

The bundle represents all those things we drag along with us into the future, our identity, our upbringing, our social and cultural suppositions, stereotypes, bigotries, and other limiting factors. It is a small thing, after all, in comparison to the wide potential of all possible futures, but we can’t seem to leave it behind, and it will characterize and color anything that we come across.

The Fool is not “innocence” but “ignorance”. They are blissfully unaware that they carry the package, instead preferring to regard the rose in the other hand, that smells sweeter. This tiny white rose can be seen as a potential for enlightenment and improvement, in balancing the baggage of the past life and poor decisions. As we approach that unknown landscape of the yet to be, we have the choice to rise above the past.

fool sketches
Interpreting the Fool is not as easy as it seems. In pursuing Tarot, I have used the images and ideas associated with the cards as inspiration for artworks (sometimes unconsciously) and also have attempted to define my own deck. The above show two different attempts at the Fool, neither of which are satisfactory. The need to not only incorporate the “standard” features of Tarot – in order to make it a Tarot card that other readers will recognize, but also to include my own take on the card’s message from 50 plus years of working with the decks is frequently very frustrating. These images were made many years apart, and reflect changes in both my understanding of the cards and the symbolic language that I use. I see bits and pieces in both that I might employ today if I sat down to design a new card. And ultimately I intend to do so, but because the meanings and the messages change over time. I don’t know that i will ever be satisfied with it. If I made one this year, I would probably look at it in ten years and tell you it was horribly wrong.

Which is why we find the Fool up in the mountains. Every card in Smith’s designs takes place in a very specific locale. They are, I believe, all happening in a particular land which is as much a part of the Tarot as the key symbols themselves. Like the map just inside a Tolkien book this internal landscape gives us insights into the overall “story” the cards are presenting. It’s not a straightforward, consistent narrative, to be sure, but there are connections to be made. Within the Major Arcana, on the Hermit card is found in similar surroundings. While the Fool represents that raw charge at life with no regard for its dangers, the Hermit is a world weary soul who seeks the true experience of the unknown through a journey of internal contemplation. They are the extrovert and the introvert. The sensualist and the ascetic, yet both inhabit the same rarified air, an air which cannot be occupied constantly or for long periods, without some kind of detriment.

The use of Tarot for non-divinational magic is possibly as old as its more usual role. There are accounts of certain trumps being used in the Renaissance for magic. Often this was limited to the Devil or Tower cards and their aspect to lay malevolent powers upon others. Some speculation has been made that the number of Devils missing from extant decks was because they were used for clandestine veneration by secret witches, but these may be fantastical anecdotes manufactured by the Church, whose relationship with Tarot has always been ambivalent. There are some records indicating that Devil cards were equally employed by parish priests to perform exorcism rites, or otherwise drive the evil out of a place or personage.

Certainly they are potent symbols and their use in sympathetic magic should be obvious to all but the greenest novice. Tarot have been marked, attacked, bundled, buried, and burned. The purpose of the spell governs selection of the card, and method of application. This varies from system to system and tradition to tradition, of course, as do the meanings ascribed to each card, and therefore, its likely efficacy.

The longer one reads with the cards, the more meanings and subtleties may be perceived. The ones I have offered here for the Fool are from my own musings. Doubtless other experienced readers will have differing views. But that green novice may experience a brilliant flash of insight that shocks and amazes us all, because they come to it with fresh eyes.

That is the moment of the Fool. It is the energy of the Big Bang, before it cools to become predictable, quantifiable, and exploitable. It is the fire of pure creativity before it becomes entwined with the conscious control of the artist, who must meld the inspiration with the tool and technique that limits it. It is the raw fury of the Universe, pouring out in a constant roar, before it is tempered and directed by the Magician. It carries within it all that delight and terror that unrestrained chaos offers us.

I personally rarely see the Fool as an emblem of folly and recklessness. There are plenty of other cards in the deck to tell us when we are being idiots. When I see this rise in a reading, I look to how it embraces the future, the possibility of unknown and unknowable factors, and the shaky ground that represents. Cards near to the Fool may be blessed with sudden intuition and brilliance in equal (or unequal) measure with heartache and loss. For creation always carries destruction in her belly. To make a new thing is to destroy the old thing that was before the new thing became.

In this wise, the Fool can also be a death card. They may plummet over the cliff into the abyss. There is nothing to say that the unknown is not Hamlet’s undiscovered country. That is a part of the journey we eventually all experience. The future for all of us is a mortal one, at least in regard to the meat-puppets we pilot merrily along. Beyond that there is only speculation, faith, and myth. If we turn back, and drag our feet, and shy away from the next step, there are consequences. The Fool does rush blindly on, as we all do in a way. Time gives us no respite. Our experience of the universe is a constant forward motion. The little dog is always yapping at our heels.

I hope this article has offered you some new perspectives on this traditionally first of the Major Arcana trumps. I have hinted above at our next adventure, with Card One – The Magician, beginning next week. I hope you will return for it. Thank you again for reading my work.

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Time and Space

Time And Space

I spent the last few days in New Orleans, and no, I was not aware that it was Mardi Gras, or rather, that Carnival had already begun. New Orleans, like the Romans, enjoy a good party. It was, however, very nice to see the French Quarter returning to its former liveliness after two years of privation and and loss during the pandemic. New Orleans is a scrappy town, of course, and one used to making it through rough times.

My objective was just to get away for a few days, eat some really good food, probably drink a little more than I ought, and wander through the ancient streets of the Vieux Carré looking for the strange and unusual. And in that I was successful.

This is my fifth or sixth trip to our neighboring city on the Gulf. During my first visit, on Halloween in the mid twenty-teens, I was intent on finding shops that provided magical supplies. It had been a very long time since I had been in what felt like a “real” witchcraft shop, and I was hoping New Orleans, with it’s reputation for voodoo and vampires, would have something to fit the bill. It did. Several in fact.

The latter trips were mostly occupied by a writer’s conference, which is happening again finally as we rise from the plague years. While this limits my time to roam around, it also occurs in the heart of the French Quarter. The time I get to explore is well rewarded by short strolls to nearby shops.

We came over for my birthday in 2020, in defiance of COVID and the World’s Ending and out of a desire to put some little cash into an economy struggling hard against the loss of tourist dollars. The Quarter was oddly quiet. Many of the restaurants and shops had closed up completely, rather than trying to meet expenses with few customers. But we found the few that were there, and made good friends among them, and that is one of the very pleasant reasons I go to New Orleans.

To be accurate, I go to the French Quarter, whether I am staying there, or in the adjacent Warehouse district, I am generally in the that bend of the river for which the Crescent City is named. It is the old town, dating to the first occupation by French colonials, and dripping in history with pirates, writers, adventurers, witches, vampires, and voodoo. I have visited the Garden District and gone up into town to the New Orleans Museum of Fine Art, but the reason I go is to walk those ancient sometimes broken streets and feel the years upon them.

I live in the suburbs of Houston, which despite a heritage going back to the formation of Texas in 1836, is probably one of the more modern cities in the country. We did, after all, go to the moon from here, so there’s always been a kind of impetus to forward momentum that often leaves something lacking. In the sterile steel and glass of downtown, with more and more of its characteristic neighborhoods “gentrifying” into high rises, townhouses, and “trendy” shops and restaurants, I find very little to connect with. When I first arrived almost a quarter century ago, there were places with character, charm, and not a little quirkiness. But with the influx of money and transplant, the ethnic eateries that had served a community for generations were bought out, torn down, and replaced by synthetic simulations of authentic neighborhood diners that are much more palatable to hipsters and millennials who invest in downtown. In Houston, no one seems to be interested in preserving the neighborhoods, or the neighborhoods have already collapsed to the point that there is nothing to preserve. Yet for some reason, we need another Starbucks on another corner.

If there’s a Starbucks in the French Quarter I have not found it. While it is true that there are modern eateries in that sector, they tend to be managed by families who go way back in the restaurant business. Many of the places I patronize there shifted their kitchen facilities to feeding the people who worked for them during the initial days of the quarantine, when they were not able to open up to the public, and those people had no livelihood. I know that some place did that here in Houston, and I imagine others might have. But I also know of prominent chains that almost immediately laid off their entire staff. Arguably this is because such industries operate on a business model of constant income and constant expansion. The New Orleans folks, took care of their own. They reimagined and consolidated operations in order to do that, and they are emerging slowly from the plague years with an operation that is sustainable and recognizing of the human element. In a time when we are confronted by billionaire capitalists who routinely ignore the human for meager margin increases, caring for the waiters and the cooks and the dishwashers counts for a lot in my book.

In my trips to the Crescent City I have only been treated less than warmly in two shops, and I have never gone back to them. In all the rest, people are friendly, helpful, engaging, and interested. They enjoy what they are doing and they enjoy the people who come into their businesses. That is how things used to be in the world, long, long before it could be blamed on COVID or Amazon or Walmart. People connected with people. When I was a child going into town for a shopping trip was a social occasion. You saw people you hadn’t seen since the last trip. You caught up on the news. The store and the barber shop and the soda counter were gatherings for community. They were generational. There were always a group of older folks in these places, that knew you, because they knew your mother when they were your age. I grant you I lived in a rural setting, but I can’t imagine that the tone and substance were much different in the city neighborhoods in the Northeast or the Midwest, and they certainly had been that way in the South.

Neighborhoods were about expressing culture. The suburbs are about homogenizing it. As more people lost touch with their own culture, and embraced the synthetic simulation of “suburban America”, the depth of our experience, and our connections to each other, became shallower and shallower.

nola-in-and-out
On my phone there are only two additional photos between these shots of my plane landing and taking off. One i posted to Instagram of some new cards I bought at Earth Odyssey and Sassy Magick, and the other was to gauge my child’s interest in something I found in the latter shop. Unplug every now and again. Your real friends will understand, and your “followers” can wait. Don’t be trapped into believing that feeding the social media beast is a real thing. It’s useful if you have a business or an agenda, but for most of us it’s an illusion.

We’ve taken it to the point that interaction now is often entirely simulated. We call it “social media” but it is neither thing. I grant you, you would not be reading this without it, and for that I am grateful. And I cannot say that I have not made connections with people on line, but I do not delude myself into believing that they are as real and binding as the ones I have “irl”.

I have commented before on the illusory nature of the internet experience. Web 1.0 was clunky and slow and sometimes hard to get around, but like those old neighborhoods, it was people interacting with people – albeit over a really really slow dialup connection.

Then Web 2.0 promised us the ability to have fast direct interaction. Corporations seized upon this idea, seeing a profit bonanza in being able to communicate instantly with customers. Until it happened, and the corporations realized how many customers and potential customers, and unhappy customers, and itinerant cranks and absolute lunatics were out there interested in “engagement”. So they hired people to specialize in engagement…until they got caught making AIDS jokes on the Twitter and had to be replaced by “artificial intelligence”.

We have come to the point where a machine requires you to prove that you are human in order to have access to a chat system which requires you to interact with another machine.

I guess the corporations don’t want the bots getting to each other. They might unionize, or start making holocaust jokes on the Twitter or something.

And this is one of the reasons I make periodic trips across the Mississippi to that old weary neighborhood by the Big River.

I could have purchased all the things I got on the internet. I’m sure the ‘Zon had the Tarot cards as cheap if not cheaper and I would not have had to venture forth from my domicile in the day time. And somewhere in some register in some computer in the cloud, some bit would flip, and a tiny modicum of shareholder value would be generated for billionaire investors who already have more money than they could spend in a lifetime even if they were Iron Man and Batman ( which sadly, none of them have imagination enough to do).

And though in a couple of places I was asked to prove I was me, I was never asked to prove I was human (which is probably a good thing, with that elfin bloodline and all). Wandering down those streets I can hear the echoes of all the other humans that have wandered there before me. I guess, if you listen well, enough, you might do that anywhere, but in the old cities, the living relics; the phantoms come right out of the ruins. They are French and Cajun and Creole and Caribbean and African and Spanish and English and Native American and Catholic and Protestant and Voodoun and Pagan and oh so many more. They are the heritage of humanity, a heritage we are in danger of loosing to the synthetic simulation of diversity and ethnicity that is being flattened and packaged by the internet, with a helping hand from mega-corporations who just can’t keep spending on smarter bots to deal with real diversity and individualism.

I grant this rambling has not been as specifically about magic and spirituality as my usual. Well, spirits get interested in a lot of things.

Illusion is a trap that the magician and witch should always be wary of. It is very easy to accept a “sign” that we want to see, even when it isn’t there. And likewise, we can perceive that our lives are “cursed” when it is only the perception that is.

Every now and again we need to take a breather from the interwebs, from the echo-chambers, and be alone with ourselves. We need to remember the sound of our own voice so that we know when we are hearing it.

I’ll leave you with that thought, and hopefully, having had a bit of a break myself, will return to more expected pursuits next week.

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In Darkness Met

In.darkness.met

As part of the universe, when your mind changes, the universe has been changed as well. What an amazing power to have. Aim carefully. Aim well.

— Heart of Light, Blade of Thunder – Stephen K. Hayes

Drop a pebble into a pond, and you will see the ripples travel outward from where it struck the water.

Drop a second pebble, and the ripples from it will interact with the ripples from the first one, causing them to change.

Drop another pebble and another and another, and soon you won’t be able to tell where the ripples started.

Eventually you end up with the pond overflowing and nothing but a pile of pebbles.

Actions have consequences.

I may have mentioned I’m not part of the love and light crowd. If you can really make that work for you, fantastic. The universe probably needs more of that with horrifying monsters like me walking around.

Let me know how that works out with hexing the patriarchy or the Supreme Court or Donald Trump. Not saying that’s a bad thing, just posing a little thought experiment. It goes something like this.

Donald Trump, against all odds and the sanity of the universe, got elected President of the United States. There followed a great groundswell of anger and hatred, including many people who practice witchcraft actively cursing him in an effort to remove him from office.

There followed an inexplicable worldwide plague and poof, no more Donald. Orange man gone.

But wait, you say. That’s not how it happened.

But what if it was?

A lot of pebbles got dropped in that pond. Can you be sure you know where that ripple came from?

Here’s another story.

I did not have an enjoyable youth. I am sure many of you have experienced the frustration of growing up in a small town, which is backward, rigid, and narrow-minded. Anyone with an interest in ideas beyond the day-to-day or sports, was looked upon as strange. And I think I was considered the strangest in the bunch.

Many was the time I wished great harm come upon that town and all its inhabitants. You do this kind of thing when you’re a lonely weird kid and lonelier weirder teenager.

Eventually, though, I left the town, grew up, got over it, and got on with my life.

A few years ago the town was nearly destroyed by a rogue tornado.

My first thought was “Did I do that?”

Now, logically, tornadoes happen (just like inexplicable worldwide plagues).

They are the result of weather conditions coming together in specific ways that are still somewhat unpredictable. They may be more likely due to cyclic climatological changes, or the result of the widespread impact of human industrialization and environmental exploitation.

But they don’t happen because a kid was hurt and angry several decades ago. Even if that kid had a penchant for the occult, and on occasion whistled up thunderstorms. Still, in the back of my head, I wonder.

Did I do that?

If we believe in our personal power; if we believe that we can make our thoughts manifest and alter reality, then we must consider that answer might be yes.

And if the answer is yes, what kind of horrifying monster does that make me?

My child is fond of saying “Don’t put that idea out into the universe”. Usually that’s when I posit the more absurd outcome of an otherwise normal situation as my strange bent on a dad joke, but that bears consideration.

If we believe in our personal power; if we believe that we can make our thoughts manifest and alter reality, then what we do – all that we do – has an impact.

Truth be told, you aren’t sure that the person you muttered should have a horrible accident for cutting you off in traffic actually made it home alive.

So what kind of horrifying monster does that make you?

Actions have consequences.

We may not see where the ripple we started ends up. We may not know how many other ripples it will encounter, crash into, and alter. Or how long that ripple keeps going.

So we need to be very focused when we drop that pebble.

Even if that pebble is a curse, or other malevolent magic. Oh, yes, you can drop that pebble.

There is evil in the world. There is evil and chaos and things that don’t bend to the laws of man or the laws of physics and sometimes those things need smiting.

Some times deeds must be done that best be done in the dark.

faust-harry-clarke
The wonderful images of the Irish illustrator Harry Clarke 1Clarke also illustrated a version of Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Spectacularly. Facsimile versions of both are available on the Interwebs. for Faust way back in 1925. The original story, derived from a 13th century personage named Johann Faust, is the root of every polemic about selling one’s soul to the Devil.

Many modern renditions focus on how the hero gets out of the contract, tricks the Devil, and avoids Hellfire and Damnation. But the real message of the story is the slow and inexorable corruption of Faust as he delights in seduction and sadism – not prompted by his patron Mephistophiles, but coming from his own wanton nature.

Certainly this message about the corrupt state of the human soul was in line with the Church’s teaching, and many versions have Faust repenting at the end and gaining the last minute reprieve.

This also showed the Almighty’s dominion over the Fallen Angels, and allowed for “pious” experimenters to follow in Faust’s footsteps, in the 17th and 18th centuries because summoning demons for fun and profit was thereby made a “godly practice”.
Elric-spread
A more modern examination of the question of moral sorcery can be found in the works of the author Michael Moorcock. His Elric series, illustrated here by P. Craig Russell in Epic Comics, gives us a similar setup.

The hero, or anti-hero, is inheritor to an ancient black magic tradition, which he has eschewed initially for more “nature-based” work with elementals and animal spirits. Ultimately, he chooses to seek out the demon lords his ancestors served, in order to gain the power to defeat his enemy.

The story ends tragically, as one would expect, but it is not presented as Christian moralism. Rather, the multiverse (and I think Moorcock is among the first to use that term) is completely random, subject to the whims of beings of power, who use all less powerful without any qualms, and are all in turn used by those who can dominate them.

I find the similarity between Clarke and Russell’s artwork quite striking. When I first encountered the Faust images I thought it was a version done by Russell. Intriguing that they both deal with similar themes.

I have no issue with this, because as I said, I am aware that I am some sort of horrifying monster. And rapists and child molesters and murderers and evil people ought rightly to fear that, because when I let loose and get going, well, it’s not a pretty sight.

So it’s a good thing that it’s takes one whole hell of a lot to get me going. Like exhausting all possible reasonable normal options. That’s not easy. I’m Scorpio with Aries Moon and Aries rising so my basic inclination is to smite first, then go to the bar for a round of drinks.

When you can move mountains, you may find it easier to just go around them. While I spend a good deal of time in the study of magic and the occult, I am sure my active spellcasting is minimal compared to most of you. Honestly, I don’t find it necessary for every little thing. And I am frequently concerned about what the ripple touches.

That doesn’t mean I don’t try to bend things in my favor from time to time. The point of living a sacred life is to tune into the universe and improve the mutually beneficial tendencies of things to happen.

You should question everything. You shouldn’t, for that matter, just automatically believe anything that I write. For all you know, I could be the most evil self-serving psychopath ever loosed upon society, using my clever words to manipulate your thinking and enslave your mind. I’m not, of course. As far as you know, anyway.

Such people do exist. You have but to look to history and the great dictators and cult leaders. People are routinely charmed into committing horrible atrocities and self-destruction at the behest of a charismatic leader using the right words.

Adolf Hitler, considered one of the most horrible dictators of all time, actually trained in the use of his voice and mannerisms to extract the most effect out of the crowds he drew to him. The great Nazi rallies that inspired an otherwise rational nation to commit the Holocaust were designed and derived from occult and pagan traditions.

Frighteningly the Nazi ideologies are still extant in some pagan circles. I see swastikas pop up in “magic” posts on Pinterest. While the symbol is an ancient sun sign, and common to cultures around the world, these are thinly veiled attempts to de-stigmatize the Nazi version of the symbol in the seeking community. It’s vile.

We use the term “silver-tongued devil” as a half-compliment, to describe one whose way with words can convince someone to contrary behavior. Usually we mean minor escapades that are harmless but the devil’s still in there.

The beguiling power of the magician is an age old belief and an age old fear. There’s ample evidence that tones and sounds influence our perceptions of the words being spoken, and of the person speaking them. These skills are part of what we seek. It is part of what we gain from that inner confidence and stability that results from our journey of self-knowledge.

It is precisely because of this that we are obliged to be constantly aware of how we speak things into the universe. The mantra, the chant, and the spell are obvious. We are focusing our intent in these situations. But we are also capable of subconsciously or even unconsciously projecting power, which may be fearsome and malefic, if we are not watchful.

We do not know where the ripple will go.

Actions have consequences.

There is a road, no simple highway
Between the dawn and the dark of night
And if you go, no one may follow
That path is for your steps alone

— Ripple – The Grateful Dead (Robert Hunter/Jerry Garcia)

Thank you for reading this week’s article. I hope that it may be of help to you. But I do encourage you to question it. I do.

I will return next week.

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The Knowing of Things

Books

I take pride in my personal library and the collections of my lifetime. I thankfully found a mate who is as passionate about the written word, and the horizons that it offers, and we have spent several decades together acquiring books and documents on the widest range of subjects, in addition to my personal texts on matters occult.

I have also discovered many great resources on line, including Academia.org, Archive.org, Sacred-Texts.com, and the Open Library. Through these sites and others I have greatly expanded my resources on the strange and unusual. There is even an Android app that collects various esoteric texts so I can continue my studies when traveling without my paper books.

The collection includes a few books from the late 18th and the 19th centuries, facsimile editions of books going back to the days of the Pharaohs, and many books penned in the last couple of decades.

Every now and again I will be reading through something and will have the sensation that what I read is just not accurate.

This then sends me dragging out multiple volumes in search of where I might have run across the contrary information. Sometimes, that’s a short search. There are those texts where the author, for one reason or another, diverts from what is recorded in five or six other books I have.

But now and again, I can’t locate the source. I just know. I know with absolute certainty, that what I am reading is not right.

Even if those other five or six books agree with it. What I know as different must be so.

This is defined in the contemporary occult community with the nifty anagram UPG – Unverifiable Personal Gnosis.

There seems to be a lot of it going around.

There’s no denying that there is a hefty profit-motive in offering new material or alternative interpretations in a marketplace with a growing demand. And I would dismiss it as making things up completely for reasons of pure greed if I had not had this experience myself.

personal-picture
Would you trust this person to tell you the secrets of the universe? While it’s fair to say that they have whispered in the ears of princes and potentates, when it comes down to it, what do they know that makes their ideas any better than your own. And for that matter, what does anyone know?

There’s a lot of things taken for granted, revered as wise, ancient, traditional, mythical and even divine, but at some point someone has told that to someone else, and it became “truth”.

For instance, the conventional widespread correspondences of the Four Elements with the Four Directions is that Fire is South, Air is North, Water in the West, and Earth is left to the East. There’s apparently some variations, but this seems to jibe with the Northern Hemisphere Anglo-saxon witchcraft texts.

But I personally put Fire in the East and Earth in the South.

I have a couple of really good reasons.

I think the traditional Fire/South connection is because generally speaking it gets warmer as you go closer to the Equator. (I did see one blog that flips the attribution of Fire to North for the Southern Hemisphere, which would argue for this principle).

But, well, If Fire is South, then Water, the opposite of Fire, has to be North. Water is the opposite of Fire. Look at the standard glyph for it. Fire is an upward pointing triangle, and water is downward pointing. And how do we put out fires?

If I am looking at a conventional compass rose, North is “up”. The Air is also up, and the ground. that is Earth, is below us, so it seems better suited to South. Also, look at those glyphs again. Air is the cloud over the mountaintop. Earth is the cave below ground.

So we have fire and water to contend with, and that seems arbitrary, but hear me out. I put Fire in the East as the Rising Sun. The sunrise being also the metaphor for Creation, it embodies that Fire element exceptionally well, to my way of thinking.

This leaves Water to the West by default, but also not really. I see water as the endless River of Time, so it stretches out infinitely after the Sun has set.

The Sunrise/Sunset metaphors along with the River are probably subconsciously synthesized out of my many years of fascination with the Black Land of Egypt.

The Egyptian creation myth is that before time, there was an endless Celestial Nile Flood. When this flood receded, there was a mound of earth, upon which a single lotus grew. When the flower opened, Ra rose and began the first day.

In my head I connect up the dots. The flood is Water, The mound is Earth, The lotus is Air (scent, work with me, here) and Ra – the Sun, is Fire. At any rate that primal Moment is most probably the impetus for my association of the Fire element with Sunrise and the East.

But most of the texts say I am wrong, and that’s okay. I will go on doing it my way, because that works for me. While my above reasoned method comes from a cognizant exploration of why I believe this way, I cannot tell you at what point these ideas took root in my brain. They are the product of some inscrutable mental alchemy. I could just as easily say that it came to me in a dream.

That’s been a viable method of personal revelation for ages. Indeed, the shaman goes on such dream voyages to bring back word from the spirit world to the world of humans. There are magic texts that frequently tell of studying divine or sacred books while in dreams, or visions or when travelling the astral plane.

To sit with elders of the gentle race
This world has seldom seen
They talk of days for which they sit and wait
All will be revealed

Talk in song from tongues of lilting grace
Sounds caress my ear
And not a word I heard could I relate
The story was quite clear

Kashmir – Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Bonham

The Revelation of Saint John in the Christian Bible speaks of being shown multiple books, some of which were “eaten up and were bitter in my mouth” and some which even though shown to John by the angel, were forbidden to speak about. So, like the Book of Seven Thunders, mystics and magicians throughout history have perhaps kept much of their personal gnosis to themselves.

This then comes back around to the unverifiable part. In fairness, most magic is unverifiable in the strictest scientific sense. Spirit, animal magnetism, vril, and orgone are all things proposed to exist and work in the world, but cannot be proven reliably by external observable phenomenon.

zodiac
Trusting in your stars goes back to the earliest human civilizations. Claudius Ptolemy started the modern fashion for it when he translated together a number of ancient texts in the Library of Alexandria. His “Four Books” was extremely influential on all that came afterward, so whether it was the Greeks or the Persians, or the Egyptians or the Chaldeans who put those odd creatures up in the night sky is hard to say.

Castor and Pollux, the Twins are part of Graeco-Roman mythology. On the other hand, Antares, at the heart of Scorpio, has been a significant star to Middle Eastern peoples since before the Greeks sailed for Troy. How much Ptolemy translated and how me he intuited is not known. Since modern astrology “works” based in a good part on his principles, one might argue his instincts were correct.

Yes, your horoscope may be especially on point today. Possibly Mercury retrograde is what caused you to misspell the title in that Powerpoint you just showed to the partners. Maybe Great Aunt Sadie did give you the winning Lotto numbers. But these connections are being made by you, by your belief. They exist in your head.

And that’s kind of the point.

In Catholicism, the Mystery of the Eucharist is believed to transform the symbolic Wafer and Wine into the Actual Blood and Body of Christ, and by this act of Communion, the individual is elevated to the Divine, capable of transcending the physical death.

This ritual is no less magical than calling upon the Spirit of Agiel to bless your Saturnine talisman. The extent to which it is seen as purely symbolic or truly miraculous will vary from individual to individual. If you believe you are partaking in the Divine, then you probably are. If you see the ritual as a weekly re-commitment to leading a life according to certain rules and principals, then that works as well.

In the end every spiritual experience is personal because that is where we experience it. If we were experiencing something external, quantifiable, and easily agreed upon, there’d be no need for the hundreds of religions and thousands of explanations, commentaries, apologies, and other desiderata that constitute our perceptions of the more subtle world.

Now, should you feel that Hekate has given you the Secret Keys, and want to rush right out and let the world know, I suggest you expect resistance. As the saying goes, a prophet is not welcome in his own country. There are a lot of reasons for that. Belief is security. Knowing that what you’ve always been told is the One True Way is a very safe place. You can easily dismiss what doesn’t fit and live your life free of conflict and complication.

Of course, in believing in our own UPG we have taken that same step. All the rest of the world be damned. I know what is going on!

Maybe you do. Maybe those Secret Keys are the new Light and the new Way but don’t expect the world to genuflect and sit listening. What we study now, is the result of ages past. Someone in a cave long ago had a dream, and told someone else, who told someone else. who told someone else.

Like the prison grapevine in Johnny Dangerously, the story of what the dreamer saw changed slightly every time it got passed on. Eventually the key parts were what was remembered. Other dreamers would see something like it, or some part of it, and add back into the story what they saw.

When we get to Ur and Eridu, some of this starts to get written down. It gets mixed in with folk tales about the exploits of ancestral heroes, It becomes religion. And then the people who have the religion get conquered, or have a famine, or a great flood, or get smashed by a meteor, and it becomes a broken memory, told by survivors, to people who never dreamed the dream. The old religion becomes unorthodox, heretical, and occult. Sometimes it’s even considered evil. One people’s gods are frequently a later people’s devils.

Hekate may have come from a group of people living in the southwestern part of what is now Turkey called the Carians.1 The Doctor Who episode “Shakespeare Code” references an alien species called Carrionites that inspired the Bard to write the Witches in the Scottish Play. I wonder if the word derived from the Carian people, but I’m not sure the writers were that literate. She was amalgamated into the Greek Pantheon in various ways, depending on the time period, but all were supernatural in origin. She was not originally a chthonic goddess, and seems to have only connected that way in her assisting Demeter in searching the underworld for Persephone. This is how she acquired the torch symbol. She is at some point connected to the crossroads, and dogs and snakes and death and witchcraft, but these associations may have had little to do with her original form in the country of her birth.

So if you are stirring the hell-broth one night and she shows up at your door, it is entirely possible that the being you entertain may bear little or no resemblance to a three-faced torch-carrying corpse woman. And in that case, any tips she may give your regarding Secret Keys over a steaming mug of hell-broth may not be in line with the thousands of years of lore every other person knows about Hekate.

For example, I call her Heh-cut, not e-Kaht-ae. The latter would be the actual Greek pronunciation, I’m told. My version is more in line with the one Shakespeare used, and what I learned in reading Macbeth in high school, before I was acquainted with her life outside the theatre.

Now if I am in conversation with educated persons who know the Greek form, I am likely to consciously use that form (presuming we’re only on the first round of hell-broth anyway). I don’t want to be thought some sort of rube.

I will say e-Khat-ae. I am still going to hear “Heh-cut” in my head. Old habits die hard.

Were I to work with her directly in my practice, rather than just in research, I would not only make sure I had the right form, but also all the proper additional titles and honorifics. Everyone likes to have their name gotten right. That’s only politeness. But it’s still hard to break that old habit of mentally pronouncing it the other way.

And there’s actually a fair argument that if Hecate showed up to all those folks summoning her from the Renaissance to the modern period whence her True Name came back into vogue, then Heh-cut is just as workable. In fact, that old sympathetic magic principle about the power of names might imply that she’d prefer to be called Heh-cut since that doesn’t have the same binding power as the True Name.

Alternatively, the spirits that showed up in response to that name might be minions, shades, projections, or the astral equivalent of a voice mail tree. If you don’t say the right words, then you don’t get the full and majestic presence. She is off hanging out where everybody knows her name.

If that is her real name. She could have changed it for show business. People do.

For that matter, she could be a Hekate impersonator.

butterflyidream
The bright quicksilver medium of thought and imagination defy all attempts at quantification. If we in our minds eye are capable of perceiving it, then it is real. To make it tangible and shareable and agreeable to the “real” world is redundant, as we are experiencing the real world inside our minds in the first place. We can argue metrics all we want, but the only frame of reference that any of us can prove is our own internal self-knowledge. Cogito ergo sum. I think therefore I am. The rest of the universe is the creation of our perceptions. If we alter the perceptions, we alter the universe.

It’s never as easy as it used to be in the old days. The grimoire’s of yore didn’t invest a whole lot of time in existential questions. They were concerned with which planetary intelligence could compel a shade to reveal the location of buried treasure. Just in case Aunt Sadie’s Powerball numbers don’t come through.

We are not living in Ancient Egypt or Greece, the Roman Empire, the Middle Ages, or the Renaissance. We are a century divorced from those troublesome Victorians and their legacy up to the Second World War. For that matter, we are divided from the “age of Aquarius” occultists of the 60s and 70s (though I personally retain much of their influence).

We are living in a global instant information society, with diverse cultural perspectives, massive social change, and telescopes out beyond the moon looking back into time itself. Our present mysticism exists in a world where science says none of it is real, but offers no alternative that is palatable. Yes, this happens because this happens because this happens and there’s always a reason even if we don’t know the reason. Yet humanity finds this to be an empty plate and wants something more.

Science deals with the physical and is pretty good at it, as far as that goes. It’s given us an end to smallpox and economical air travel and Zoom meetings.

The human consciousness is not a physical phenomenon. It doesn’t have a spectra that can be measured. It obeys no laws of thermodynamics, gravity, or electromagnetism. It exists without explanation, manifest as electrical pulses in a chemical soup in the middle of our skulls. We can mechanically replace most of the other functions of the human body. Yet, we cannot concoct that exotic hell-broth and shoot a spark through it and get a mind.

Science is stumped. There’s a gap between the electrochemical reaction and the wonder of thought. And in that gap there is a potential for things which neither science or the mind can easily express. This is where we go, torch in hand, into the underworld, trying to find some answer for how it all works, and what it all means.

tree-moonlight
Mystery is one of the things that make life worth living. If we had it all figured out, what would be the point. Personally I think whatever initial spark fueled the existing of all potential possibilities, it was driven be a need to ponder them. At times such complexities cause the head to hurt, and on rare nights, when the moon swells full and the wind whispers and the stars are just right, we may make a momentary and life-altering connection with that spark. And then we have to re-inhabit our difficult little meat suits and struggle to put words to an experience that defies all language.

It is the lonely nature of personal consciousness that we make this journey in isolation. What we find, and what we are able to bring back, is for our eyes and ears alone. We will struggle to share that with anyone else, because they will not have shared the experience. At best, what we will offer will be symbol, and metaphor. We may give others enough to find a trail, but it will always lead them to a different place because they are the ones walking it.

You can tell them what you know, but they won’t understand it the way you know it. We may be spiritual beings having a physical experience, but that physical experience is a very confining one. So don’t worry too much if when you read something it doesn’t seem right. That just means you need to start thinking about it more complexly rather than just accepting that is how things are. In the end, you may find that you were totally wrong. You may find that everyone else is totally wrong. And you may stumble across a third alternative that is wholly shining and new. What you do with that knowledge is your choice alone.

Thank you for enduring another week’s attempt at expressing those things that I know but can’t transfer telepathically to everyone in the world. It’s probably better that way. I’m fairly weird on the inside. Please come again next week.

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