Category: Perspectives

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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.

Hierophant_RWS_Tarot
“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).

crayon-cocoa
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 Gift of the Magi

Magician

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RWS_2P_Juggler
Can you find the Magician here? If you look carefully enough, and know the secret language that Smith was inventing for this deck, you can find the same pieces underlying the traditional reading of this card. I have gone to some depth in the text of the article on this, but I wanted to include the card for the reader to contemplate. All the Tarot should be viewed as having symbols hidden, or included, for interpretation or expansion beyond what Waite or any other authors have had to say about them. They are a visual tool, created by a truly gifted artist, that continues to find favor with new artist and Tarot artists alike.
Sorceror
I am frequently inspired by the Tarot, even if I am not attempting to make a Tarot image. I don’t recall if this was another attempt to find my “vision” of a new deck, or if it simply was using the Magician card as a jumping off point for an artistic experiment. This piece is somewhat unique in my work. I was trying to master the curvilinear styles of the Art Nouveau -inspired by the looping tableaus of Mucha, and also playing with the felt-marker as an art tool. In neither did I succeed well in this image, but it has grown on me over the years. If I were to consider it my Magician, I’d have to create a whole deck in the style, and then I’d probably come back to this liking it less. As it is, it serves as a blind alley, I stumbled into, that I might return to someday, but not with any intention of something so large and daunting in scope. The style, or a mature evolved version of it, still entertains me as an artist, but I have no intention of using it to interpret the cards.

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

Pay no attention to that man behind the current.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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The Old One

Saturn Sunrise

Yesterday, at just before 9 AM at my location, the planet Saturn returned to Pisces.

The significance of this is personal to me, because Saturn was in Pisces when I was born, though I have to wait another year for this plodding ancient god to reach that point.

But as Saturn is the outermost planet generally visible to the naked eye, and therefore the last of the great Wanderers known to the ancient astrologers of Mesopotamia, it’s entrance into the last sign of the zodiac carries a good deal of mystic import.

Yes, certainly, there are at least three more planets out there (Pluto is a planet, Degrasse-Tyson can bite me) that modern astrologers use in their horoscopes and calculations. Yet there are some significant considerations for perhaps demoting their importance.

First, they’ve only been known and applied to astrology for a couple of hundred years, so despite them being named after elder gods, they’re newcomers on the scene. Certainly, their invisible influences were there throughout our human history, but if no one took notice of them before they were discovered and their orbits tracked and added to the ephemeri then how much influence did they actually have, hmmm?

Additionally, because their orbits are very distant, and they move through them very slow, the changes in sign are very gradual, and aspects formed are usually more dependent on the travels of their speedier siblings.

Uranus, next in line after Saturn, has an orbit of around 84 years. This means that in many cases a person may not live long enough to have a Uranian return. It spends about 7 years in each sign, enough to be noticed, of course, but if we are waiting for the full cycle through signs and houses, well, it’s going to take a while.

Neptune and Pluto, who flip-flop for furthest planet have even longer cycles. Neptune’s is 165 years, and just under 14 years in each sign. Pluto at 248 years spends just a bit over two decades to get through a single sign. It’s not likely we’ll see a Neptune or Pluto return in our lifetime, so astrologers typicaly talk about their influence on nation states and institutions that outlive human beings.

An additional quirk of these terribly long orbits is that retrograde motion casts shadows that are almost constant. That is, Uranus, and definitely Neptune and Pluto, are either in retrograde, or in the shadow of retrograde, all the time. So essentially their influence is either more or less malefic, or more or less diminished. So let’s just give them the respect they’re due, but not worry overmuch about how that impacts us.

Saturn, on the other hand, has a period of 29 years, 166 days, 20 hours, 11 minutes, and 45 and two-thirds seconds. If we live the allotted three score and ten years, Saturn will come visit us at least twice. I personally am hoping that better habits and advances in medicine (which I pray will be more natural/herbal and less of big pharm) will get me to a third meeting, and a forth is not an absolute impossibility (I’d only be 117…but who knows how long I can last as a head in a jar?).

Now think about our ancestors, and the world they lived in for a bit. Life expectancy before the 19th century was dismal across the board.

Wealthier persons, who had better food and better medical care (such as it was- “Frau Gilda, more leeches!“) and less of the burden of physical labor, tended toward perhaps a four decade lifespan.

Kings and princes, who didn’t get killed in warfare or jousting, might expect to get into their upper fifties even.

The poor, with the worst and least food, meager medicine, and a destiny of toil, hardship, and privation, could consider themselves blessed to make it to their 30s.

If we now overlay Saturn’s orbital frequency on that life map, we can begin to see why it is looked upon with such importance. Until a couple of hundred years ago, when Saturn came back, he was coming back for you. He was the Grim Reaper, telling you that your sands had run out and it was time to join the Choir Invisible.

True if your station in life was a fortunate one, you might be lucky enough to get a pass on the first one, but still, that was at best what we modern folk call “middle age”. You’d had your salad days and there were more aches and pains when you got up in the morning. Saturn over your shoulder just meant you were thankful to be getting up at all.

Saturn devouring his son
This is my all-time favorite painting by the artist Francisco Goya (and he had a lot of wild and witchy paintings). Saturn Devouring His Son captures to me, the subtlety of madness that I think may only be appreciated by those of us coming closer to the ends of our story. The mad titan is clearly appalled at his own act, but is so terrified that his failure to do it will destroy him. The drumbeat of passing time inspires that kind of feeling.

This painting is part of what are called the Black Paintings, made by Goya on the walls of his own house, during a period of isolation and possibly madness. between 1819 and 1823. His own second Saturn return would have occurred in 1804, with a repeat from retrograde in 1805. He died about six years short of a third one, at age 82 in 1828. Had he lived, Saturn would have greeted him in the fall of 1834, and doubtless would have appreciated this painting as much as I do.


The myths associated with this god don’t do him any favors, either. In Greece, he is the Titan Kronos, son of Uranus and Gaia, and so among the first beings to inhabit the world. In the complicated soap opera of Greek mythology, Gaia convinces Kronos to depose his father, by castrating him (the symbolism of virility being necessary to rulership is an ancient and widespread one). By maiming his own father, he invites the destiny of his own destruction at the hands of his children. Thus, to defeat the prophecy, he logically just eats them all at birth.

To muddy the waters even further, he is frequently confounded or merged with Khronos, the god of time. Khronos was the god that turned the zodiac wheel. As such, he was generally considered ancient, dour, and unsympathetic. Time shows no favorites, after all. Khronos was that old man in the sky, yelling at everyone to get off his lawn.

Anthropologically similarly named gods tend to originate as either local deities that get included in a wider myth structure as villages grow into city states; or they evolve as schisms within a particular myth, where aspects of the same deity develop their own sects and eventually become distinct beings. The Greeks have a number of these overlaps, where there are several gods associated with a particular power, place, event, or idea.

So it’s hard to say whether Kronos the titan and Khronos the time keeper were village gods that met up in the Agora and everyone thought they were related, or if Kronos the Reaper and Eater of Children came to be associated with the indifferent passage of time and the coming of iniquity and began to be worshipped also as Khronos the Unstoppable Wheel.

In either case, they end up frequently appearing together, and having aspects of either story show up in the mythology associated with the other. The Sickle that castrates Uranus becomes the Scythe of Time, until it gets lent to Death during the Great Plague, who pretty much kept it. In Greece, Death, Thanatos, is the sibling of Sleep, and goes about unarmed. It’s only the absolute horror of the Black Death of the Middle Ages that turns our passing, untimely or otherwise, into an object of horror.

So Kronos/Khronos wends his way into Roman culture as Saturn, though the association with the planet of that name has already stuck. Claudius Ptolemy in his Tetrabiblos is writing in Greek Alexandria, from ancient Greek, Mesopotamian, and possibly Egyptian manuscripts, when he lays out Saturn’s traditional astrological role.

Modern astrology says that Saturn represents the rigid, the ordered, and the structured. It’s influence in the chart is said to be that of established institutions, like government, religion, or academia. As a natural contrarian and iconoclast, I personally have a hard time equating this view of the staid old man with the violent mad titan, but I suppose I can stretch it.

In his attack on his father Uranus, he has ended the creative and generative reign of nature. Uranus is often considered by astrologers to be the planet of imagination and raw creativity, as the being was responsible, with Gaia, for the making of the world.

In devouring his children, Saturn has effectively stopped forward innovation and growth, so despite his own violent immoral actions, he is a poster child for the establishment status quo. He will stifle any attempts to deviate from the way things have always been, because they have always been that way. Saturn is the natural tendency of institutions to resist change.

Yet he carries within himself that constant of change. Time marches onward. His paranoia derives from the knowledge that he can’t stop change, no matter what kind of horrific act he must commit. The wheel keeps turning overhead.

Tempus fugit. Omnis gloria transit. Memento mori.

When Saturn sweeps through a sign of the zodiac, he is bringing that message. This too will pass away. At the same time, he will push forward those aspects of the sign in such an uncompromising manner because he is so very afraid of that passing. He fears Death but Death is inevitable.

Saturn is the Tower Struck By Lightning. The destruction of the status quo is already happening. It is always already happening.

hermit-time-and-tower
Although official tradition equates the Hermit card with Virgo (probably some idea about monastic celibacy) I have personally always felt a Saturnine connection. And here it is. In the Visconti-Sforza deck, one of the earliest, this card represents Father Time, the Khronos figure that is now almost entirely merged with the titan Kronos who becomes Saturn. Saturn as a time keeper is certainly evident in his regular circuits through our lives, and as his Greek predecessor was responsible for the unstoppable spinning of the heavens, his place as a herald of our passing years is well cemented.

It is precisely the inevitability of time of which Saturn reminds us. The Tower card is a frozen moment. The Tower represents the rigidity of old structures, established dominions, and conservative thinking. These are the province of Saturn. Yet the Tower is destroyed. It erupts into flames. Time itself will wear away all edifices, all will come to naught. Like the song says, all we are is dust in the wind.

The realization of our own fate is the mad prophecy of Saturn. We continue to devour our children, struggle against a future that will come no matter what we do. We fall as the Tower falls around us, and yet we cling to it’s burning form because to let go is to end.

His return tends to invite our own contemplations of such things. Though we live comparatively better lives today, barring serious accident, war, or illness, the inexorable march of time presses upon us all at points.

Saturn first hits us in our late twenties. We’ve had a decade to really grow up, and get serious, and stop staying out all night with friends at wild parties. Or at least that’s what we’re expected to think by the external social order. Time to settle down, get a mortgage, and worry about the crabgrass. These are the institutionalized structures that Saturn is in charge of; his way of eating the children of our youth, with all their silly little dreams and ideals, which clearly don’t fit into a mature lifestyle.

We start to look backward – not with nostalgia, but with a kind of vague dread. What have we accomplished? Why are we not where we thought we’d be by now? Are the things we do now going to be what we do forever?

We start to feel the walls closing in and understanding David Byrne lyrics, and not surprisingly we often make fundamental changes to career, relationships, locations, and other established parts of our lives. While Uranus may be considered the planet of revolutionary change, Saturn’s internal paranoia and violence can certainly shake us up,

If you don’t know about the Saturn return, you probably won’t recognize these things as anything other than approaching the big 3-0. In my lifetime that’s been the catchphrase for the personal reset that we all tend to do to some extent as we enter our third decade on the earth.

We’ve been clueless children. We’ve been wild teens. We’ve carried the hormonal madness, questionable behavior and poor judgement out through our twenties as we try to hang on to the freedom of being irresponsible pre-adults.

Now, Saturn has come around to tell us to get over it. We need to pay bills, get healthy, start saving for retirement, and stop doing things that could get us killed. Time to be boring and stiff and wondering what the hell those kids are doing on our lawn.

Coming up on Saturn return redux, as I am myself, is a whole different set of circumstances. By the time we reach our late 50s, many of us have become the establishment. Hopefully we kept enough of our wild and crazy to make some changes, so that my establishment doesn’t look like my parents establishment, but it’s a gradual thing, because, well, Saturn keeps eating the kids.

And in our late 50s we start wondering about these kids today and how do they expect they’ll ever amount to anything with all that and how in our day we had to walk two hundred miles in the snow uphill just to use a dial-up phone with a cord. We stop listening to new music (and frequently yell at them to turn that @#$@% down!) and become focused on whether the latest international crisis is going to sour the market and tank our 401k.

And we start to hear the approaching hoofbeats of the pale rider.

We have reached the point in life where most likely our grandparents are all gone, and now our parents and aunts and uncles are going. We watch their decline toward the waiting darkness and think far more frequently of the nearness of it, the realness of it.

We feel the days passing faster and start understanding Dylan Thomas poetry.

This period now comes with the label “Middle Age Crazy” thanks to a 1980 Bruce Dern movie. This was about the time when a lot of the “Baby Boomers” would have been going through their first Saturn return. And I’d guess some of their parents would be hitting that second one, and lamenting the fact that they had to be responsible, practical, reasonable, and build taco stands instead of staying out, driving fast, and chasing young nubile things.

At the end of the movie, (spoiler alert) Dern basically figures out that he maybe didn’t have things so bad, and maybe his life was pretty cool after all. He was married to Ann Margaret after all (you’ll have to Google who that is, probably, I ‘ll wait). And so it is expected that we will ride out our second Saturn visit with a similar satiation, and prepare ourselves for the inevitable downhill run.

Or we can stop eating the children and embrace our inner Rodney Dangerfield (again, go ask Google, I’m old and have less time than you) and rage against the dying of the light.

Titan-Saturn-Chesley-Bonestell-1944
Saturn and I are old friends. I was a child of the Apollo era and so had a fascination with space from the time I was three or four. On the wall of my room was an old map of the solar system (probably from the 1950s) and in the corner was this painting by illustrator Chesley Bonestell. “Saturn Viewed From Titan” was either commissioned by Collier’s Magazine or was part of what became Werner Van Braun’s “The Conquest of Space”. This image is possibly subject to copyright, but as it was so important to me in my formative years, I am asserting fair use.

This picture drew me toward the stars. It created in me that sense of wonder that I still carry when I look up into the night sky. Of course, it’s a pure fiction. Our improved telescopes and satellites have virtually eliminated the possibility of any such view. Titan is wreathed entirely in a slushy methane fog, with little chance of a clear day like this to offer such an amazing sight. Still, somewhere out there in the endless vastness, there may be a world with a great ringed disk adorning it’s night sky.

Those rings. known only to be around Saturn until Voyager started sending back images of Jupiter in 1979. They are still the most spectacular in the solar system, though rings seem to be a feature of all our local gas giant planets. If we look at the gas giants as being miniature versions of the solar system -a not inaccurate comparison- then the rings are their asteroid belts.

The image below is another view of Saturn and his moons. Titan is that fuzzy brown dot in the upper right, covered perpetually in an icy smog. Life might still exist down there in the chilly organic soup, but it wouldn’t be “life as we know it”. But it might be able to appreciate a clearer view of what as been called the Queen of the Night Sky by some astronomers. Doubtless they didn’t know Saturn’s pronouns.
Saturn System Image


Saturn is not just returning to his place when I was born. He’s returning to the beginning. Pisces is the end and Saturn is at the end. He’ll wander across and hop into Aries near the end of May 2025, but until then he’s going to be bringing his personal psychosis to all the Piscean traits.

Saturn has also left his own realm and descended into that of his son and deposer Jupiter. Per the old Chaldean chart, with only seven planets (including Sun and Moon as planets), the signs ruled by Saturn were Capricorn and Aquarius. There’s a lot to look at here, too. Capricorn is the cardinal earth sign, and Aquarius is the fixed air sign. The parents of Saturn were Gaia (earth mother) and Uranus (sky father). So there’s more to his rulership of these two signs than just mathematical synchronicity. The fact that usually, in the Northern Hemisphere where our astrology originated, these signs are the coldest parts of winter is also not coincidental. Saturn is a god of the Outer Dark. Before the other planets were discovered, he was the guardian of the Outer Dark.

Pisces, on the other hand, is a mutable water sign, ruled in the ancient charts by Jupiter. Jupiter is the one child of Saturn who didn’t get eaten, or more accurately swallowed, and through a series of interesting circumstances rose up to defeat his father and cut the other gods whole out of Saturn’s stomach.

I doubt there’s much love lost between the two since then and well, I’d expect the fact that Saturn is now in Jupiter’s Spring Palace to be a bit. . . awkward.

Pisces natural tendency to be expansive, creative, and generous go well with the Jovian nature. As a mutable sign, Pisces represents the aspect of its element proceeding toward the next sign’s element. Pisces is water about to become fire.

Water itself is emblematic of some aspects of chaos. It has not set form, it changes to embrace it’s circumstance. In mythology, water is often the symbol of the unformed void. We find it in Genesis, and in the Egyptian creation myth. Water is the boundary in many stories between worlds, often the boundary between the living world and the world of the dead. Water is the mirror in the scryer’s cauldron and the Norn’s well. Water quenches fire and drowns air and washes away earth.

Pair this with ancient angry, psychotic, ultra-conservative Saturn, and touch that off with the motility and quixotic nature of Pisces mutability into the coming fire of Aries, and slather it all with some cosmic 12th house overtones, and it’s time to cue Bette Davis.

Well, at least we have the Equinox coming up this month, and in next week’s article.

Until then, keep your seatbelt’s fastened and your hands and arms inside the cart at all times. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

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ALIENS!

Aliens

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

–Arthur C. Clarke, Author of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Inventor of the Geosynchronous Satellite.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The typical measurement is a light year.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes. Music.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until, of course, something breaks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You might just be using magic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The truth is out there.

I’ll be back next week.

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The Sacred Life

Brass Eyes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

mary-spirit_3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Graveyard Dirt

Looted Sarcophagus Side View

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

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

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

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

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

These are big questions.

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

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

There’s shaky ground here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See you next week.

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

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So It Is Written

Tarot Shelf Three

I was pleased this year that a big part of my holiday haul were several new Tarot and Oracle decks. I possibly have suggested that I might have a bit of a Tarot problem (not enough shelving to begin with) , but if a deck presents me with attractive artwork that resonates with my personal tastes, I will likely eventually add it to my collection.

On the other hand, if the artwork doesn’t speak to me, then I will leave it, regardless of how popular it is. For example, my only version of the Tarot of Marseilles is a digital one on my phone and tablet, because frankly I think these cards are butt ugly. I realize that they are the final form of many copies of copies made from woodcut blocks, to meet the demands of Tarot players from the Renaissance onward, and that there ancillary use for divination was not considered of prime importance to the printer.

tarot-shelf-one
tarot-shelf-two
I may have mentioned before I have a Tarot problem. Chiefly, the problem is not nearly enough shelf space. In addition to the header image on the page, these represent my displayed Tarot and oracle card collection, though there are lot hidden in the back and some that I have lost the boxes long ago that reside in other less graphicly blandished containers in other parts of the library. And over the holiday I added at least 11 more. Well, there was a full moon and a year end discount at the used bookstore and I was more or less unsupervised.

Yet because this deck forms a very important link between the elaborate Italian decks like the Visconti-Sforza Tarot and the modern ones which were typified by the Rider-Waite-Smith, I reluctantly got the Android version from the Fool’s Dog. I cannot warm up to these cards so they will not serve me to read. A paper copy might be something I should have, but so far they are priced highly (to my mind) for something that was never in copyright, and should be available in discount versions. For now, the scanned images suffice for my research work.

For me personally reading the Tarot, or using it for meditation or inspiration or spellcraft, is unequivocally tied to my experience of the images. I am an artist. I experience the universe through the visual faculty foremost. This may mean that with a particular deck, my mental impression of the card does not match the usual and customary interpretation. As I looked through a number of the new decks, and looked for the familiar signposts that I admit to having learned in my early days, I got to pondering that whole proposition.

That is, here we have an image, more than likely only about a century old, that has been presented as a definite indicator of a particular idea.

Because Waite said it did. Because he read it from Levi. Levi read Etteilla who probably was extrapolating from Court de Gebelin. Each of these scholars added their own esoteric bent to the tradition, which has no exact reliable origin.

Levi-hierophant
Levi the Heirophant – The Keeper of the Keys to the Secrets. While his magnum opus Dogma et Rituel de la Huate Magie, gives us his interpretations of the Major Arcana. One has to delve into his History of Magic to find reference to the lesser cards, and it is buried among a broadly racist discussion of the use of Tarot by the Romani.

As I haven’t a French edition of the latter tome, I can’t say to what extent this coloring of the Bohemian Nomads, as they are called, comes from Waite as translator, but sadly misogyny, racism, and classism permeate the writings of the 19th and early 20th century occult authors.

This has made the grains of wisdom in such works hard to access, and put off many more modern readers entirely. It’s important to remember to cast such figures and their respective works in the context of their age, and not our own. In a hundred years, we may be seen as utter barbarians.

Many attribute it toward Egypt, but even this is massively miscast (aside from being plain wrong). Crowley’s “Book of Thoth” is more connected with Levi’s “Book of Hermes” and both thereby associate the “Divine Wisdom” with Hermes Trismegistus and the so-called “Emerald Tablet” of the alchemists.

The Emerald Tablet entered European thinking in the Middle Ages through Moorish Spain, and is more than likely a grimoire based upon Greek texts surviving in the Islamic world. So in such a way it does come from Egypt, but not in the way most suppose.

Nor does the confutation of the racial slur “gypsy” with both cartomancy and that ancient land have any basis in fact. The Romani people, we now know, descend from the Indus River valley rather than the Nile one.

But still such stories persist. I trace that to the invention of Curtis Siodmak and the iconic performance of Maria Ouspenskaya in 1941’s The Wolf Man. This one film gives us the archtype of the wizened kerchiefed Fortune Teller with her crystal ball, pronouncing doom to the hero. She was so powerful in the part that she returned for the sequel Frankenstein Meets The Wolfman in 1943.

Whether Ouspenksaya’s character derives from an actual tradition is hard to say. The Wolf Man series were at the tail end of Universal’s golden age of monster movies. Her purpose in the film is expository.

In previous movies the actor Edward Von Sloan would have given us the dire warnings in the guise of Dr. Van Helsing (Dracula) , Dr. Waldman (Frankenstein) , or Dr. Muller (The Mummy). But in 1941 and 1943 the character of “Herr Doktor” was not a type American audiences found comfortable anymore, so the pseudo-Slavic Madame Maleva took up the reins of the person “in the know”.

By the way, the Wolf Man is where we first hear popularly about the Pentagram being a “mark of the devil”. But fundamental Christianity firmly latched onto it as such. Especially since Anton LeVey uses an “inverted” pentagram as the symbol on the Satanic bible. The evil Satanic he-goat fits right into it.

Except it’s not the Satanic he-goat. It’s something called Baphomet, which was imagined by Eliphas Levi. The same Levi who gave us the roots of our modern Tarot meanings. Baphomet is a composite creature, similar to many in alchemical artwork, that incorporates symbols to express certain esoteric teachings. It has been confused with Kernnunos, and Pan, and of course the “Black Goat” in medieval witch-hunting texts. If it has a real progenitor it’s the old Egyptian generative god Khnum.

But the name Baphomet is murky too. It comes from the trials (under torture) of the Knights Templar, to describe a “head” they supposedly worshipped in secret conclaves when they had denounced Christ and trampled upon the cross. The actuality of this Head of Baphomet is by no means an established fact either. Some researchers have put forth that the head is either the folded up Shroud of Turin or a similar sacred cloth called the Mandilion or the Veronica. There is as much proof for that as for the theory that the Templars were secret converts to Islam, and that Baphomet was a mis-recording of Mohamet. Ultimately, like many “confessions” brought about by the insidious methods of the Inquisition, we don’t even really know if Baphomet was simply made up by ecclesiastical authorities who needed a convenient heresy.

In any case, it’s not the Devil, nor does it have any real connection to any devil, demon, or malefic spirit the Christian establishment has seen as persecutorial throughout it’s multiple millennia. But the impression persists. Because somewhere at some time some one wrote it down, and then it became “truth”.

Just like the meanings of the Tarot cards.

Prior to our Good Lady Pixie’s renditions, the 40 pip cards of the Minor Arcana were simply counters, much as any modern deck of “playing cards”.

two-tarot-chests
two-tarot-cups
two-tarot-swords
A Tale of Two Tarots. On the left is my 50 year old Hoi Poloi variation of the RWS deck, and on the right, the delightfully dark Deviant Moon Tarot. I’ve picked a few cards from each deck as an example of why the images are -to me at least- as important, if not more important, than the text of accepted meanings.

In the first instance our Four of Cups seems to share a common theme – that of satiation, sufficiency, and the need to reject excess. Yet in the Deviant Moon, there’s a touch of deviltry, or at least pique, as the figure casually flicks away the fourth chalice. Or does she drop it in a daydream. Her face (so like a Venetian carnival mask) seems to stare far away, unconcerned, or even unaware, that she has lost one of the cups.

Below is the well known Two of Swords, which often indicates an approaching danger to which the figure is blind to. It speaks of ill preparedness, isolation, and disengagement. Yet the Deviant Moon variant shows us an ettin-like creature, two heads, opposite each other, able to see, but locking in a perpetual struggle for dominance. The design plays off of the Gemini nature of the Deuce. Here the twins are merged. It speaks more to us of inner conflict, indecision, and stagnation. In a way it is not entirely different than the other card’s usual meaning, but yet the journey we take is a fresh one.

Joseph Campbell argues that the suits were symbols of the four estates of the Medieval world. The Wands were the Peasantry, the people working the land. The Swords, were the Nobility, deriving from their historical roles as professional soldiers. The Cups were the Clergy, symbolized by the Holy Cup of the Eucharist, and finally the Merchants were associated with the Coin of the realm.

It’s a pretty picture that would seem to fit, and as Campbell is such a revered source on so many ideas about our human mythology it can be difficult to question. But the connection of the suits with the Elements is equally as strong, and the origin of these cards in Islam, which was not arranged in exactly the same social order, calls it into suspicion. Many sources see the playing card as coming from China, where paper and printing were more extant than in Europe, and traveling with spice, cloth, and secret wisdom, along the Silk Road.

In any case they hit Venice in the 1200s and evolved into the more elaborate trick-taking game of Tarrochi. At this point the simple pips were joined by face cards, and a variable group of special point cards that we now call the Major Arcana.

It is the Major Arcana that Levi gives us values for, connecting it with the Mystic Qabbalah through the ability to give each card a corresponding Hebrew letter. This may be entirely arbitrary. It may be just another attempt to find “ancient wisdom” in something that was never meant to contain it. So there’s something of a good argument that the divinatory cards are only the Major Arcana, and the rest were just along for the ride.

tarot-books
The actual number of Tarot books I own is small and recent in comparison to the card decks (excluding the books that came with the decks).

The Connolly and Crowley are among the first. The Connolly was a gift with my RWS deck that didn’t have a book. Though well regarded it is a bit Judeo-Christian oriented for my tastes. Such were the times. The Crowley is a recent replacement of a stolen copy, though it is the same late 70s edition.

Wedged between in the dark there is a copy of Waite’s Pictorial Key to the Tarot, now available cheaply as a public domain reprint.

The rest are some recommended by other writers on the occult, and with the Encyclopedia of Ancient and Forbidden Knowledge, and the Tarot Volume of the Taschen Library of Esoterica, make up the total texts I have on the subject.

I may add one or two more in future,; Dion Fortune, most likely. But a vast majority of texts out there are parroting each other, or one of these, or worse are making bad renditions of Levi’s problematic texts.

On the other hand, there’s a good tradition for using general pip and face playing cards for divinatory purpose, completely separate from the Tarot. Folklorist and podcaster Corey Hutcheson in his book 54 Devils gives us a glimpse into these practices, as well as touching briefly on the Lenormand Oracle, a strange hybrid of playing card and image reading supposedly developed by Marie Adelaide Lenormand, a cartomancer during the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

But because the images in the RWS deck give us mnemonic clues to the meanings associated with the Minor Arcana – meanings which may have been a general oral tradition prior to Waite – they’ve become one of the more successful versions of Tarot, and probably the most used for inspiration and elaboration by 20th and 21st century artists and cartomancers.

Which begs the question, if the images and the interpretations are exact from Levi and Waite – why on earth are there so many Tarot decks out there. I have a collection topping 50 and it’s only a fraction of what is available in the mass market. With the RWS falling into public domain a few years ago, Pamela Smith’s icons are showing up everywhere, and clones of her deck can be found on discount store shelves for under $10.

And I strongly feel it is her deck. Like many people today, I fully recognize that the expansion of Tarot as an art form and divinatory practice is largely due to the artwork she created, rather than the interpreted writings of Levi and Waite.

Those writings may not fully hold up to close scrutiny. Through the artwork – which though more than a century old still fascinates and inspires, we can find new vistas, insights, and interlinking interpretations that makes the cartomancer’s art and skill paramount to any dusty old tome.

Because, to borrow from Doc Brown, your future isn’t written yet. No one’s is.

And on that thought I will ask you to come back next week and be a part of my future. As always, thank you for reading to the end.

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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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