Tarot – A Sacred Life

August 30, 2023August 29, 2023

The Fool That Follows Us

This summer’s exercise in the exploration of the Major Arcana of the Rider Waite Smith Tarot began with a different intention and expectation than what it ultimately ended up being. I don’t consider this a failure on my part, either from an editorial standpoint, or in terms of the material presented. This is exactly what working with the Tarot is about.

Tarot is a mnemonic device. At it’s heart, it’s a set of images that are supposed to remind us of a set of predetermined meanings. And, of course, it is is that. But if that is all that it is, then everyone could understand and use these cards. In fact, this process could be fully automated and presented as a handy phone app. And it has been. Yet much like the auto-horoscope apps, this recitation of rote meanings only appears inciteful through coincidence, and the wishful thinking of the user. That is, it’s ability to access the ethereal and the subconscious is an illusion.

To really reach beyond, we have to become a part of the process ourselves. The cards are reminders, certainly, but they are also stimuli. Yes, the Fool may indicate new beginnings, naivete, or poor decisions (depending on whose book you read). But perhaps that moment of stepping off the cliff is what sets our imagination on it’s journey. If we become too involved with the “accepted” meaning of the card, we are locking ourselves off from other paths it might set us on.

This is just as valid a consideration when looking upon the cards as the “hero’s journey” or some other hidden initiatory message. While I do not discount this idea, adherence to that as an absolute and total meaning of the cards is limiting in aspect.

The point is that one must remain open to where the card directs the mind, rather than rushing toward a conventional interpretation. It may not even be the Fool that starts that inspiration. It may be the scarlet color of the tunic, or the angle of staff used to carry the pack. Or it may be the little dog that follows him.

If you follow my Instagram account, you are acquainted with the clips from the cards I have used to announce each week’s installment. I have accumulated them in the photo below. In preparing these, my intent was to find some piece of Pamela Smith’s images that would be unique, possibly iconic, but also not necessarily the obvious emblem of each card. In doing so, I hoped to express that same idea that the card as it is generally experienced may be refreshed by approaching it from a different angle.

major-arcana-icons — The Instagram clips from the article series. What do these snippets say to you? What do you think made me pick them?

The RWS have been around for over a century now. The fact that the designs are now in public domain mean that they are appearing everywhere from t-shirts to coffee mugs. The decks themselves are being reissued by multiple publishers who are recoloring and re-embellishing the old line work. They come in iridescent and hologram finishes, gilded or silvered on black and blue, and a wide range of color variations.

The result of this is that we are so inundated with the form of the images that we are becoming jaded. They are commonplace. Like the pentagram, the triple moon, and the Eye of Horus, our reaction to their sacred and special nature are growing weaker because of overexposure.

This is also a bane for the experienced reader, who, like myself, have been looking at these cards for years and years and almost immediately getting a one or two phrase “shorthand” meaning. I think this is one reason why we collect decks. Even though we go back to our favorites, the ability to access fresh and variant versions of the Tarot iconography can shake up our complacent reaction to the cards. It’s like hearing the same symphony played by a different orchestra, or arranged by a different conductor. Yes they are all Mozart, but perhaps in this version a passage ordinarily favoring strings has been given over to the woodwinds. The notes are the same notes, but played on a different instrument. This creates a different experience of the symphony, and evokes a different response in our minds.

So too is our experience of the RWS style deck interpreted by a different artist. And this gives us an opportunity to imagine and intuit different messages. It changes the nature of the narrative. By this process we may internalize some of these responses, and then when we return to that original deck, we have a different context for that card when it comes up.

There is inherent in this approach the potential stigma of the Unverifiable Personal Gnosis. This is the thing that you know you know, because you know. And frequently in modern discussions of magical practice, the “UPG” is somewhat frowned upon. I hope through the explorations of the cards these last several weeks, I have demonstrated that very much of the supposed “secret teachings” are the UPG of persons from the 18th and 19th century, frequently being legitimized as “ancient and forbidden knowledge” through spurious attributions to the Romani people and the Ancient Egyptians, among others.

The works I have cited in these articles are but a few of the many many texts on Tarot. They are in my personal library, and I am certain that they, along with some other texts I own on cartomancy, have an influence on my personal understanding of the cards. I will say that I agree in parts with these works, and I disagree on the whole. Many texts are in conflict, and this is not unique to the discipline of Tarot. The shelves of astrology texts I possess are at odds in terms of both interpretations and mechanisms.

Additionally, there has been and continues to be an impetus to merge other mantic arts like astrology and numerology, and other magical systems, like gematria, Kabbala, and angel magic with Tarot, and to establish some longstanding heritage for this fusion. If we pare away the legends and find a solid historical narrative for the Tarot – as I believe Paul Huson has done in his Mystical Origins of the Tarot, then we have to discard or at least degrade the majority of these pedigrees. Yet without a secret mystical tradition, the combination of the cards – as a visual magical tool – is still a valid method. There is, of course, some belief that the “true occult teaching” would be needed for such to work, but it truly depends on one’s approach.

There is some context that certain of the Tarot were used both for beneficent and baneful magic as early as the 17th century, and probably as soon as these cards were available. The basic doctrine of sympathies applied here, and of course still does. If you want to call the Devil, there’s the Devil card for that. If you dabble with love spells, the Lovers is an obvious choice, but there’s also the Two of Cups, or the Four of Wands. The imagery works regardless of “system” and truly needs no ancient occult connection to be effective. If we lock ourselves into such systems of thinking about the cards, we are also limiting our ability to access unexpected revelations from the cards themselves.

Shortly after finishing last week’s article I saw a posting by Psychic Witch author Mat Auryn. He suggested that on the Five of Wands, the staffs seem to just fail to make a pentagram. He further goes on to say that the persons wielding the staff’s then may be seen to represent the elements, where the one is the spotted tunic is Quintessence, or Spirit, and that he has purposely withdrawn his staff to “break” the natural shape of the pentagram. This is an intriguing insight. Generally speaking the usual meaning here is conflict or disorder. Yet with this approach, we can go further to express that when Spirit or Intelligence is extracted from its natural place within the elemental system, things tend to fall apart. We are presented with a metaphor of the world in chaos, or a person in chaos, rather than an external and literal conflict.

Expanding on this insight, I went back and looked at that card. It is also possible to contextualize as the five persons are about to form the pentagram We can here almost reverse the usual meaning of conflict and see the Five of Wands as an emblem of cooperation and common goals. Is this just wishful thinking? A complete personal rewrite of the meaning that for ages has been the same thing? Probably. But does that mean that either approach is wrong? No.

It is ultimately the impression of the card that we form as it gets turned over and laid down that is the meaning of the card. The key is to train ourselves to respond freshly to that impression rather than hammering the card into a pre-defined message, which completely ignores what our subconscious is trying to tell us.

I hope the last few weeks exercises have inspired you to look at the RWS and it’s related kin in a new light. Beyond that, an active awareness of all the images and impressions we are fed daily can expand our lives, our knowledge, and our ability to affect the world around us.

I’ll be back next week with new topics. As much as I have enjoyed this journey, I need now to step away from it and reset my thinking to write more extemporaneously as I was prior to April. We’ll see where it takes us.

Thank you for your continued patronage.

Featured image and Instagram pic clipped from the Blue Oyster Cult album Agents of Fortune. Artwork is by Lynn Curlee.

August 23, 2023August 23, 2023

Returning to the Earth

And I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away, and there was no more sea.
Revelations Chapter 21, Verse 1 – King James Bible

I’ll leave you a moment to contemplate the irony that the above quote is being used to introduce Card XXI. If you have read last week’s article, you no doubt picked up on my fascination with the last book in the Christian Bible. I am not Christian by any means, but I was raised in a community that was tacitly Christian, and even the non-church going folk were believers. It was also an insular community which did not place a great deal of value on scholarly pursuits, so outside of an old tattered copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, some Childcraft Encyclopedias my parents bought on payments, and a handful of comic books, the Bible was the only available reading material for much of my youth.

Revelations was also the most magical and mystical of the books, with things like dragons and monsters and beasts full of eyes with six wings and horses with peoples heads, scorpion’s tails, and lion’s teeth. Certain more interesting for a young person with a penchant for weird than all that begatting stuff.

And as noted in last week’s article, the World is not what it started out to be.

world-RWS-tarot — The last of the Major Arcana, at least according to the order that Mr, Arthur Edward Waite puts them in.

The World is represented as a nude woman, with a sash winding around her. She holds a wand or scepter or baton in either hand. She appears inside an oval or ellipse that may be made of laurel leaves, like the traditional Roman crown of honor and victory. In the corners of the card, inside clouds, are the heads of a person, and eagle, a bull, and a lion. The background of the card is blue. There is no visible land or water.

Typically this card is seen as attainment, completion, or totality. Lately it has also come to be associated with Mother Nature, or Mother Earth, as the New Age, pagan, witchcraft and occult communities become more aware and concerned with the conditions on the planet, and the impact our tenancy is having on it. Yet neither of these associations is in keeping with the original images to be found on the earlier versions of these cards.

In the Visconti Sforza deck, we find this card represented by two cherubs or children (such as the missing twins from the Marseilles version of the Sun card) who hold up an orb containing a castle. This castle represents the City of Holy Jerusalem, which is said in verse 2 of Revelation 21 to descend from out of heaven to signal the new Utopian world following the trials of the End Times. Holy Jerusalem, and it’s measurements, worked out by mystics and bible scholars in the early Christian centuries, serves as the basis for the Gothic cathedral, and the numerous mystic, magical, and masonic rituals and traditions associated with those buildings. It’s also where we get the gold-paved streets and gates of pearl that are frequently assigned to heaven itself by modern evangelicals.

heavenly jerusalem — The “New Heaven and New Earth” as envisioned in early Renaissance Tarot. This pair of cherubs may have been the source for some Marseilles decks that have two children below the Sun. On those cards the glory of the “New Jerusalem” is replaced by the face of the solar deity. That this is not a Sun card is evidenced by the fact that the Visconti-Sforza Sun is a single cloud-mounted cherub holding aloft the red head of Helios. This card then must be the World, since no other trump is missed. It actually makes a good deal of sense that this follows the Last Judgement scenario, since this is the timeline of the Revelations narrative.

As a sequel to the Judgement Card this makes far more sense than a more or less pagan lady in the altogether. This is especially so if Huson’s theories about some of the Tarot imagery coming from the early Christian mystery plays. These were designed to teach biblical truth to a largely illiterate population. As such, many of them were made much more elaborate so as to be engaging and memorable. Even then, the movie was often much flashier than the book.

Huson also relates a version of the World where it is not our Gaia-esque figure here, but Christ himself. In fact, the image he offers I recall from my art history class as Christ Pantocrator, which is “Christ, King of the World”. This also would seem to be a more apt follower to the apocalyptic Judgement card.

Pantocrator is very frequently shown inside a mandorla, which is the official term for the elliptical or oval shape represented in RWS as a laurel wreath. The mandorla is an artistic convention, used to express a sacred or otherworldly space. It is frequently occupied by Christ, or the Mother Mary, or God Almighty, and often includes a company of angels, holy personages, and other important people, like the heads of the local church, nobles and chieftains, and particularly people who paid the painter.

mandorla-triptych — A trio of holy personages emerging from that rather odd looking shape called a mandorla. The leftmost is obviously not Christian, but it is not certain whether this usage came from exposure to the Christian model or vice-versa. 6

The center piece is Christ Pantocrator, from a Byzantine gospel book. You’ll no doubt recognize the sacred animals that appear in the Wheel and the World cards. Here they represent the four authors of the Gospel, but their origin is in the Old Testament, and in Revelations. The attribution of this specific meaning is part of the writing of the early church fathers, who struggled with a need to define what these strange images were. Later occultists would give them astrological attachments, or perhaps they rediscovered those that had been purloined by the church.

In any case the four beings of the corners are common to both the Asia image on the left, and that of the Virgin on the right. In the case of the Virgin and Child the mandorla itself is made of circling angelic beings identified as either cherubim or seraphim. These also stem from the vision of Ezekiel.

Regardless of it’s origins the mandorla represents a gap between our cosmos and the divine one. It is worth considering this when looking upon the visage of the World in the final Tarot trump.

Mandorlas seem to make their way into religious art from icons found in the Eastern Church, which were inspired by Byzantine mosaics. But we can also find mandorlas in the arts of Arabia, India, and China, so it is entirely possible they made their way to Europe on the Silk Road from Asia roots.

They might best be described a visual depiction of a rift in space. The inference is universally that we are seeing something not in this world.

Our idea of the “aura” may stem from these depictions. They are sometimes multi-hued or rainbow colored. That this spectral effect is the product of the spatial separation versus and emanation from the beings inside it is not certain. Persons having such encounters even today are not clear on the experience, but the descriptions seem to be close to this phenomenon.

This shouldn’t be confused with the idea of the mandala, although, as another mystical visualization, there is some common ground. The purpose of the mandala is to serve as an aid to meditation and understanding by depicting a spiritual realm as a sacred space. The space is typically centered on the deity or deities to whom the mandala is dedicated. Moving outward from that center we may find subordinate deities, associated deities, avatars, aspects, even depictions of demons and enemy beings trampled or defeated. The space is frequently divided into quarters, and there are things like gates and guard houses, populated by protective spirits, the whole making up a personal microcosm for the deity that is his or her place of power. In the making of the mandala the artist is meditating on the various principles involved in each depiction, and when finished, if permanent, then others can make this same mystical journey.

Let’s consider the more elaborate of the Christian mandorlas in a similar vein, with depictions of the various orders of angels, then a ring of saints and martyrs, then important personages perhaps living at the time of the creation of the piece. There are striking similarities, and while the idea of meditation is very different in East and West, it may be said that the Christian image does evoke a similar inward journey.

I’ll digress a bit further here and look at the similarity between these art objects and the sacred sand paintings of the American Southwest indigenous peoples. These share much in common with the mandala. They use a very symbolic language to represent gods and demi-gods and sacred narrative. Like some the Buddhist mandalas, these are also meant to be temporary constructions, destroyed once the magic is made, to prevent contamination by malevolent spirits.

We might further include the various Meso-American “calendar wheels” in this discussion, though their abstraction makes them a bit less directly so. Yet they do express a means of defining the cosmos, and that is in keeping with the ideology in the World card. And it underscores the importance we ought to ascribe to it, whether we come to it from a neo-pagan ecological perspective or an antique Judeo-Christian one.

Those four critters in the corners we’ve seen before. They are in the corners of the Wheel Of Fortune. As noted in the article for that card, they come from biblical sources, firstly the “living beings” in Ezekiel’s vision. In John’s Revelation they are referred to as the four beasts that surround the heavenly throne (though he gives them a lot more eyes). This is further testament to their origin as surrounding an image of a male Christ rather than a female Gaia.

In church dogma they are representative of the authors of the Four Gospels. But they are also astrologically Aquarius (human), Scorpio (eagle), Taurus (bull) and Leo (lion). Thus they are also then equal to Air, Water, Earth, and Fire, and subsequently to the suits of Swords, Cups, Pentacles, and Wands. They can also be seen as the Four Winds, Four Directions, Four Archangels, etc. depending on which system you want to employ them in. Very versatile these critters.

world-cosmic-tarot — In the Cosmic Tarot we are presented with an image very similar to the one Pamela Colman Smith has created. Yet there is an exoticism, and possibly also an eroticism, in how the figure of the earth is represented. This seems certainly more accessible than the woman in the RWS version.

world-hidden-realm-tarot — The Tarot of the Hidden Realm gives us Mother Earth in a verdant green with all her bounty exploding forth from her. The Gospel animals are gone, as they were never part of Faerie, and we are left with lushness and perhaps even lustiness.

world-shadowscapes-tarot — Stephanie Law’s magnificent Shadowscapes Tarot echoes the Hidden Realm in a number of ways. Her World though, is a regal queen, garbed in mystery, and keeping her own counsels.

world-wildwood-tarot — Finally, the Wildwood Tarot, with it’s Celtic shamanism, gives us the World Tree. I’m a tad concerned about calling this a “Celtic” ideation. Yggdrasil is a Norse concept. It seems a bit clumsily borrowed here to present an idea of the universal ideal, or knowledge, or spirit, when perhaps there are better more truly Celtic symbols that might be used.

With Tarot, one is always walking a balance between the work of the artist and interpreter, and what the actual images on the cards bring to mind. This quasi-intuitive approach provides for an infinite number of narratives when we lay the cards out. But we must remember how much our reactions, conscious or otherwise, may color that narrative. It is the fine line between, what are the cards telling us, and what are we telling the cards.

Let’s drop back and look at them elementally though. As in the Four Elements of Air, Water, Earth, and Fire. In the center then, our figure of “the World” becomes by extension Quintessence – The Fifth Element. This element is styled as “Spirit” and this then tells us that the World, inside its sacred space is Spirit. It is not the mundane. It is not the physical, but it is that which transcends the physical. It is infinite, and eternal. It is everything and the nothing by which everything comes into existence. It is time and it is timeless.

This idea is hardly diminished if we look backward to the depiction of this as a Utopian paradise that comes after “the first heaven and the first earth were passed away” or even if it comes to us as a patriarchal and somewhat authoritarian depiction of the “King of the World”. We may still find here Ma’at, that cosmic truth and order that is nature itself.

As I noted in the discussion of the visionary portions of Revelations, the descriptions of things speak of a person’s struggling to share a deeply changed perception of the nature of reality with someone who has not had that experience, using the limitations of our linguistic structure. And further these may be couched in the concepts of the time they were written. Yet within them is a kind of ecstasy that they deeply want to share, but are frustrated in doing so. We are left with the imperfect version, with wild symbols, and tyrannical avatars, disturbingly violent depictions, and in some cases overt pornography. When these broken shadows are encountered by the less enlightened, misinterpretation is inevitable, and fear and hatred may be the result. It is the lack of the complete understanding of the experience, of the true nature of the cosmos we inhabit, of it’s existence beyond the physical corporeal and provable, that engenders otherness, and from otherness stems iniquity, envy, and apprehension.

The physical world, with it’s greed and privation, it’s war, famine, pestilence, and death, are the result of its own incomplete state. Where the spirit prevails, peace and harmony are possible. Where a greater vision is encompassed, happiness naturally ensues. Yet the limitation of the physical, the dependence upon finite resources, on structure and ego, continue to create such otherness, and disturb such natural order.

The physicists call this entropy. It is the tendency of the universe to fall apart. In a physical world, more energy is required to keep order. Chaos is easier. The End of Time is marked by everything becoming so broken and so far apart that there is simply not enough energy left to put it back together into any sort of ordered form. Like Humpty Dumpty, our universe has taken a great fall.

Yet physics also says energy can neither be created or destroyed, only moved from point to point. So in that end, at the Great Dark Silence that awaits, there must still be that same energy that was there.

That energy is the Quintessence. It is the Spirit. The actual living thing that brought about the Cosmos in order to know itself. And that cannot be destroyed. The World is, and was, and will be.

Next week I will have one more article in respect to the Major Arcana. I have enjoyed this exploration. I must admit it has led me down some rabbit holes that even I did not expect. I hope they were not too obscure. And if they were, well, we occultists are by definition in the obscurity busy.

Please join me next time.

August 16, 2023August 16, 2023

Renewal, Redemption, and Reincarnation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 9, 2023August 9, 2023

Light Unchallenged

All Hail the Coming of The Sun King!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until next week, thank you for your continued interest.

August 2, 2023August 2, 2023

Wolf and Hound

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you for your continued interest.

July 26, 2023July 26, 2023

Seven Sisters Light

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 19, 2023July 18, 2023

In Darkness Undone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two bodies fall from the Tower.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 12, 2023July 12, 2023

To Darkness Returned

The Devil hath power to assume a pleasing shape.
Hamlet: Act II, Scene 2 – William Shakespeare

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 5, 2023July 5, 2023

Alkahest and Elixir

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

June 28, 2023June 27, 2023

The End of All Songs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Except, of course, when it is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But consider this message in a different light.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ll be back next week.

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