I’ve been meaning to write this article since Memorial Day weekend, and it appears later than I am writing because the shop I discovered during my mini-holiday is having an event this weekend, which I won’t be able to attend as I am presently in New Orleans at another event.
My good lady wife and I have a little hideaway over in Central Texas that we escape to when time permits. It’s situated in New Braunfels, Texas, which used to be a sleepier little town on the freeway between San Antonio and Austin. Like much of Texas, the urban areas are sprawling outward, and people anxious to “get out of the city” are dragging the city along with them. When we first moved to San Antonio after getting married in 1990, the gap between that city’s virtually rural outer loop and the edge of New Braunfels was significant. Now, it’s not all that noticeable, as the bedroom burgs between have all grown together.
Still, if you manage to get down into the old heart of this German settlement on the Guadalupe river, you can find eateries, antique shops, a surprisingly good night life, and a weekly farmer’s market. And not too far down Castell Avenue from Krause’s Biergarten (I highly recommend if you are into German food, and that’s also where we found the farmer’s market on Saturday) is the Empress, a unique little crystal, card, and book shop situated in an old house.
I have a penchant for local witch shops, and I believe in supporting them as much and as often as I can. I’m lucky enough to discover them almost everywhere I travel, but I have to say I didn’t expect to find one in New Braunfels.
Central Texas, outside of Austin, tends toward the conservative, and smaller towns typically have a number of active Catholic and Protestant congregations. So I have to confess to not expecting much when I saw the banner during a visit last year (the shop had closed for the day and we were already heading back to the big city). I was somewhat surprised to see that they were still a going concern this spring.
Now New Braunfels is a tourist town, and summers on the Guadalupe bring a wide range of people to engage in tubing and other water sports to escape the oppressive Texas heat. And I guess the influx into Texas from other areas has had an impact on the interest in all things witchy, so I am happy to report that the Empress is alive and well, and seems to be doing good business.
And that is well deserved, because it is one of the friendliest and most interesting shops I have visited in a long time. My readers will know that I am heavily vested in Tarot, and one of the metrics for a new shop is what kind and how many decks they have available. Imagine my surprise to not only see a large number of decks (though I already owned a lot of them) but that each deck had an open set of cards in front of them so that potential buyers could pick them up, look at the images, and get a feel for the cards.
I have said before that I respond first and foremost to the images on a set of cards. Reading the accompanying book comes later (if at all) so the ability to go through and see every…single…card in every deck was tremendous. I don’t recall ever being in a shop that had done that with more than maybe one or two decks at most, and here they have all the cards, for all the decks.
From a business perspective, that’s not a big deal, really. They can use the cards as demos for the various readers that work the store, and eventually sell the open pack at a discount. But the willingness to put that out there shows an understanding of the audience; of the community of strange folks like me who will appreciate it, that I have found in few other stores. It is the impression of openness and support for the community that inspired me to write this entry, and I hope to be able to develop a long standing relationship with the Empress and her business.
I did find two decks that I was drawn to, not already in my collection. One was the Runic Tarot, which reimagines the standard RWS style images through the lens of Norse mythology and the Rune tradition. So these can be read as standard Tarot, or the Runes to be found on the cards can be read as a Rune casting, or both. As I am only superficially aware of the Rune system, I can’t speak to how well this works, but I did run across an old text on Runecasting while booking that weekend, so I hope to have a better handle on it.
The other deck was the Magickal Botanical Oracle by Maxine Miller and well known occult writer Christopher Penczak (whose book Instant Magick I also found in the used book store that weekend; do not discount such coincidences, my friends, they point you where you need to go). Although my collection of cards is substantial (50+ decks now I think) most of them are traditional Tarot with only a few oracle decks. The majority of those tend toward things like the Ogham tree alphabet, or related Celtic topics typically from sources I am already familiar with elsewhere like John and Caitlin Matthews. So to get a new oracle set for me is a high bar (especially when I have an upcoming trip to New Orleans and am notorious for splurging on cards in the many shops to be found there).
But these cards, well. I cannot speak too highly of them. If you have any bent toward green witchcraft, they are worth every penny. I just found myself getting lost in the images for hours. Though the pallet is quite limited they are so ripe with symbol and layered with an almost living line work that they fascinate, inspire, and captivate.
I’d initially walked past these, as they were in a different area than the Tarot, and the wall of books in the next room had already caught my eye. But my wife called me back in and asked me if I had them. A brief shuffle through the open deck and I immediately added them to the deck in my hand. My good lady wife doesn’t see herself as particularly witchy, mind you. But she has a gift for finding things that resonate with me. That’s probably from having had me around for most of her life (and most of mine). If she tells me to take another look, I take another look. I was well rewarded.
The very impressive thing I found about this deck was that it stimulated ideas that were later to be found when I went back into Penczak’s accompanying text, which is by no means a “little white book”. That is an extraordinary thing for oracle cards. I might expect, given my many years of working with Tarot, to parse out meanings similar to those I experience with other Tarot decks, and that those meanings would jibe with the book. Here these cards handled fresh from the wrapping were giving me the same messages that Penczak had obviously gotten from them. There is definitely something in there looking back at us.
The gist of the deck is that it’s 33 cards give us insight into both beneficial and baneful plants in the Witches Garden. The dynamic drawings capture the spirit, literally, of each plant, and the 224 page text is about working with the plant spirits as spirits, not only for their herbaceous qualities. In this manner, the soul of the plant becomes accessible to those who may, for many reasons, not be able to work with actual mandrake or belladonna or others in this variety. The selection includes some I would not have expected, but there were no omissions that I felt of consequence. As an herbalist since my teen years, and very familiar with many of these plants, I nonetheless found the deck to be a powerfully refreshing approach and very useful tool, both in divination and magical workings.
So this unexpected side trip to the unexpected little shop in a small town in Texas netted unexpected fruit.
I’ve set this post up to drop, while I am participating in Heather Graham’s Writer for New Orleans. Unfortunately that means I won’t be able to return to the Empress for their celebration of the Summer Solstice which is happening on Saturday June 24th at the store located at 451 S Castell Avenue in New Braunfels, Texas from 11 am to 4 pm.
In addition to the store itself they will have a number of guest vendors, Tarot and card readers, and artists in attendance.
If you find yourself in the area I strongly encourage you to take to the time to go experience this very friendly community focused shop and all the people it has brought together. I think you will be rewarded.
Support your local witch shop, because they support you!
I used the term “betwixt and between” as the title of an earlier article, but it is applicable here. The terms “heaven” and “hell” can also be somewhat accurate, in a context I will get to at a later point, but despite the seeming obviousness, “As Above, So Below” is not an apt rendition to deal with this thirteenth card of the Major Arcana, styled XII in a line after the O of the Fool. Behold, the Hanged Man. (I’m pronouncing that mentally as “hang-ed” in the Shakespearean fashion. I think it better suits it and sounds less like a kid’s paper game).
Smith’s version of this is more generous to the figure than the older models, where in addition to being hanged, the man is also being burned alive.
The Hanged Man is suspended by his right ankle, which is tied to the horizontal beam of a rough cross. His other leg drops down behind it and the bent knee causes it to mirror the cross beam above. His arms are bound behind him, possible around the upright of the cross. The wood of the cross appears newly hewn and has drooping leaves still attached, The figure wears humble soft shoes, red leggings, and a blue tunic. Behind the head is a halo of light. The background of this card is an empty drab grey.
This card’s meaning per Waite is emblematic of the Martyr God, Christ on the Cross, Odin on the Tree, and carries with it the context of secret wisdom gained at a sacrifice. By extension we can connect the murdered Osiris, and we are back in Ancient Egypt again, with the promise of resurrection and afterlife. From this springs the card as a symbol of transformation, of a change from one state into the next (though this is frequently assigned to the following card Death). This is therefore metamorphosis, a pupa in the cocoon. The past is gone, but the future is not yet written.
Originally this card depicted and was called the Traitor, and in place of his hallow was simple fire. He was being burned at the stake, or the gallows, upside down, for a crime against the state. While we can draw allusion to this being the fate of prominent martyrs such as Jesus and St. Peter, who was crucified upside down, there was not that original context. In the first flowering of Tarot, this was a bad man, who met a bad end. It was justification for the power of the state, to mete justice, and execute prisoners, which was shifting from a Divine Right and ecclesiastical authority, to a secular humanist one. Ironically this symbolized the shifting between two points that I frequently find the Hanged Man represents.
As noted, St. Peter is reputed to have required the Romans to hang him upside down on the cross, since he felt he had failed Christ and was unworthy to have the same death as his master. The inverted cross is nowadays associated with the idea of Anti-Christ and Satanism, though these distinctions I believe are more the result of the popular film culture of the sixties and seventies than any legitimate tradition. Inverting a cross, might have been a ritual of the so-called Black Mass, which included saying the Lord’s prayer and other holy texts backward, in a mockery of the Catholic rite. The Black Mass is possibly a whole creation of the Inquisition and Witchfinders. If it was practiced by witches in the 17th century and later, they may simply have been aping the alleged process, rather than following any specific tradition or teaching. The story of Peter may be apocryphal as well. One of his distinctions in the Biblical story is that he denied Christ three times during the trial and crucifixion. This idea of him inverting the Cross might indicate some esoteric tradition where he was a final time, disassociating himself with the faith he was considered guardian to. Bear in mind that the inconstancy of Peter is symbolic of the difficulty of following a philosophical discipline when faced with the temptation and privations of worldliness. In such an instance, one might find themselves “hanging in the balance” between doing what is good for their soul, and what is pleasurable to their body. It is not a coincidence that this idea stems from contemplation of this card.
Three versions of the Hanged Man. These are from my Shadowscapes, Ghosts and Spirits, and Cosmic Tarot decks. I have combined them here because they all are full of tree imagery. While the RWS version does show greenery on the gallows, it is fair to say that it’s a tree that has been cut and converted into a means of torture or execution. This probably ties back to the undercurrent of Christian symbolism that I find troubling with Waite’s version, even though it does seem to agree with much earlier images. The two images on the side show living trees here, and the figure seems more or less suspended of their own free will. This can connote one of the possible readings of the card, that we need to alter our perspective of things.
In the Shadowscapes version, the figure reminds me of Peter Pan, at play with the faeries in the forests of Neverland. If we look upon the Hanged Man as symbolic of this transitory moment, of being neither one thing or another, then perhaps the perpetual child from Barrie’s classic is as apt a metaphor as any. There is, however, a possibly darker meaning here. The Egyptian ankh hangs on an upper branch. We find the ankh prominently figured in the Thoth Tarot of Aleister Crowley. The Hanged Man is suspended from it. Yet here he is separated. indicating, perhaps, that he falls, or hangs between, this life and the next.
Certainly this is more evident in the central card. The Ghosts and Spirits deck can be a disturbing read at times. The imagery is powerful, complex, and often horrific. We might see here a Tree of Death, instead of the Tree of Life. Yet many of the cards in this deck need to be interpreted as expressing the journey of the spirit outside the flesh, so in this case, like the Shadowscapes, we are possibly witness to a soul in between incarnations.
The Cosmic Tarot has a lot of Hindu and Buddhist overtones, in addition to other magic systems. If we view the Hanged Man similarly here, we might be looking through the Barod Thodol, commonly called the Tibetan Book of the Dead, where the spirit is trying to free itself of the entanglement of desire, so to break the endless cycle of reincarnation and merge back in the the Nothing That Is Everything (i.e. the Fool Card). If he let’s go, he is bound to fall to earth, and into another fleshly incarnation. The balance between is a means of avoiding incarnation, but it cannot be maintained. Only by eliminating the I, can the illusion be shattered.
There are several other possible connections that we can make when dealing with the Hanged Man. A notable one that often springs to my mind is that of the infant Zeus, taken by his mother Rhea and given to the nymphs. In one version of the story, he is kept suspended from a tree, touching neither the earth nor the heavens, and is thus kept invisible to Chronos, his father, who wants to kill him to avoid the prophecy that Kronos will die by the hands of his children. This idea that the Hanged Man occupies a kind of non-space is interesting.
The idea of Limbo is a Catholic expression of the place between places, which in “Neither in Heaven, nor Hell, nor upon the Earth”. Its place in the Catholic dogma is utilitarian. It resolves certain questions regarding the fate of those who, though they led just and noble lives, were not born under the covenant of the Christian Baptism. Per this doctrine, Christ when passing through death at the crucifixion comes first to Limbo, and redeems the souls there, such as Adam and Eve, Moses, and the other Hebrew chosen.
In theory, this would mean Limbo ceased to exist with the Resurrection, but there is an unofficial doctrine that says it now contains the souls of unchristened children, who, innocent of all but the original sin of humanity (i.e. they were born after Adam and Eve ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil). Since they did not receive the initial tabula rasa by the Rite of Baptism, they technically weren’t going to get into Heaven, but as they didn’t live long enough to actually give into that sinful nature, it wasn’t proper to send them into the torments of Hell. According to variations on this theme, during the Final Judgment foretold in Revelation, these lost children will be redeemed and allowed to ascend into Paradise.
Some Protestant offshoots also believe that Limbo is where all souls are waiting for the Judgment Day, when the physical resurrection will occur and the world will become an earthly paradise. We’re getting a bit ahead of ourselves here, as all that happens with Cards XIX and XX in a few weeks.
Getting back to our Hanged Man, I want to delve into one of those personal epiphanies that I have had over the years of working with these cards. Now, I will here caveat that the Unverifiable Personal Gnosis is just that. This is something that came from inside my head, possibly from a source I know not where, and there is little to no external verification of it as legitimate, or useful. That said, Tarot is an intuitive experience. Imagination is the key to using the toolkit, and this series of articles is about taking the cards beyond the face value, beyond potential connections and inferences, and letting the images on the cards inform your mind. So, onward.
At some point in recent years, not longer ago that a decade or so, but not so recently that i can readily remember. I started forming the impression that the Hanged Man is falling. Like the figures from the Tower, he has not hit the ground, nor is he on a firm point where he started from. I don’t know if there is a version of this card in one of my decks that started me thinking this way (I will endeavor to look before publication, but there’s a lot of decks to go through, and so far it’s not one of my usual ones).
Secondary to this, I also got the distinct impression that this person falling was the Morningstar, That is, Lucifer the Fallen Angel, who would later become synonymous with Satan, the Devil, etc. Obviously the Devil has his own card a few steps hence, but here again is that card between one state and the other. This is the Fall from Grace. It dovetails quite nicely with the idea that this card was originally a symbol of betrayal and treason to the established order, and that this was the punishment.
I confess to a bit of Luciferianism, in the sense that many depictions of the Fall and the Rebellious Angel are metaphor for the development of our own human psyche from the animal one we used to inhabit. Like his Greek counterpart Prometheus, Morningstar is being punished for bringing to man the Fire of the Gods. The gods feared what man might do with it, and justly so. We’ve really managed to foul things up with the exothermic reaction, and it’s numerous toxic by-products. Yet once the deed was done, the extreme punishment seems overkill given the nature of the crime.
Prometheus has his liver plucked out daily. Satan is cast into the pit of Hell. Adam and Eve are barred from the Garden “lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever”.
Seems awfully vindictive to me. So the question here with the Hanged Man, is, was Justice served? Coming as it does on the heels of that card, I am forced to wonder if we are meant to perceive this as righteous punishment. Again, I am not typically one adherent to the idea of a linear “Tarot journey” but I think there’s a relationship inherent in the order of the cards here. And that brings us back to the question of the placement of the Justice card as XI rather than Strength, which occupies that slot in some versions of Tarot.
Two very different takes on this card. The left is from the Wildwood Tarot and the right from the Journey Into Egypt. I selected them both because they involve water and because they address the same subject in a totally untraditional way.
Wildwood works from a kind of Pre-Celtic or Proto-Celtic shamanic perspective, but often ties to the later Arthurian myth and Grail stories. The authors would appear to believe that the Arthur stories are a folklore from this more ancient time, and are simply retold in the wake of the fall of Roman Britain as the chivalric romances. In this case, we are confronted by a water spirit, which could as well be called a kelpie or similar name, holding a bronze mirror and a seeing stone, In the foreground is one of the heron’s we see in the Wheel image from a couple of weeks back, with a small sack around its neck. Behind them is a boat, which appears to hold a corpse. The boat is anchored or tethered. Behind the boat is an island with three trees. The text accompanying this card has a good number of esoteric ideas. It says also that many aspects of the traditional Hanged Man have been moved onto the Blasted Oak, which is this deck’s version of the Tower. I personally see the falling man from the Tower card having something in common with the Hanged Man, but here he is the figure in the boat, neither on this shore or the next. While the death metaphor seems very obvious, the text says this is about initiation, about reaching a point of injury or pain, that allows one to being open to the voyage to the island and healing. It is, according to the authors, not a journey that may be sought, but one that comes to us.
The Journey To Egypt deck is an amazing artistic expression. It diverts from the traditional take on the cards and yet manages to still impart much of that message. The figure here in isolation in the background, does not appear to be drowned. He is on the shore and apparently high and dry. Look again. His reflected self in the water is our Hanged Man, upside down, the world wrong side up. The man on the shore is bound to the man in the water. Neither of them are going anywhere. On facet of this deck is that it associated each card with astronomical events. I think it rather interesting that this one represents the Summer Solstice, which is the day this article is being released.
Remember that all of the cards are unnumbered in the original versions. The respective values of these cards in the Tarocchi game would seem to be more or less equal, so the ordering and numbering seems to have occurred when they began to be used by the adepts for purposes of divination. Levi gives us an order based on Kabbalah and the Hebrew Letters. He potentially inherits that from earlier sources, and later creators keep it roughly the same with the exception of cards VIII and XI. Justice might logically precede execution and death. But then justice might also fit between the force of an established state symbolized by the Chariot, and the isolate contemplation of the individual in the Hermit. It’s a question as to whether Strength fits better between the random chaos of the Wheel and the uncertain suspension of the Hanged Man. If Strength is the assertion of the Will over Nature- even individual nature, then a possible reading of the Hanged Man is equilibrium in the space of Chaos. He is not punished for having done wrong, he is simply unable to find a firm footing in an unstable universe. He cannot cling to the dogma he knows to be false, nor can he firmly embrace the totality of free will and personal responsibility because there is no assurance of accuracy or correctness. He lives in a quantum reality where the actual nature of things is only known by probability, potentiality, and only known too late. There’s no wonder that he is in torment.
There’s always some context where the seeker has to identify with the Rebel Angel. There is a point in our exploration of the universe and our own minds where we will question the truth of everything. We are not venerating in this sense, only stating that we can, in some way, feel empathy with Prometheus chained to that rock, waiting for the vulture to come again with the dawn. For Prometheus is aware of that eternal agony that what we believe to be true is always under threat from our own spiritual growth. We can either be content to remain ignorant, celebrating blind faith in something that we ourselves doubt, or risk the eternal damnation of never really being sure of anything ever again.
So we hang there on the tree, neither in Heaven or in Hell, unable to free ourselves to fall to the ground, or to climb back up to where we started from. In many ways this is a very pessimistic card, and they tend to get less cheerful from here.
I can only offer that there is a quiet to living in Limbo that can be very freeing, or at least restful. You know that change is coming. Change is inevitable. Yet now, you have the satisfaction of having endured change, and perhaps the confidence that you can endure the change to come, so being betwixt and between is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s hard to take any calls there.
I thank you for reading this week’s article. I am attending Heather Graham’s Writers for New Orleans later this week, where I will be part of a panel on occult subject matter. I will be reading Tarot for some of the folks in attendance, for the first time in many years. I am looking forward to seeing how the experience of articulating my views of these cards here will impact my readings, and I am wondering how the experience of cold reading will impact the remaining articles in this series. Since next week we face down Card XIII, with all the baggage it carries along, it should be informative. I hope you will join me then.
The card we find in the Rider Waite Smith deck marked with the XI is named Justice. In other decks this card is found as VIII, placing it between the force of the Chariot and the contemplation of the Hermit. In this now typical position, however, it stands between the unending circuit of Fortune and the unresolved fate of the Hanging Man. While I am not personally an adherent of the so-called “Tarot journey” the arbitrary positioning of these cards, and the numbers that are then assigned to them, can impact how that journey is taken, and perhaps give insight into how the cards speak to each other in their “proper” place. This card, fundamentally, is about that order of things. The symbols here are ancient, and modern meanings have lent interpretations to them that are not what they started as, and such interpretations are not always easily interchangeable.
A rather simple card from the hands of Pixie Smith. Or is it?
The Justice card returns us to the frontally oriented figure on a throne, flanked by columns or vertical elements, that we have not seen since the Chariot. The positioning links this card with that, as well as with the Hierophant, the Emperor, and the Priestess. The figure here is generally interpreted as female, though in the demi-gothic style Smith is employing that is by no means an absolute. The bobbed hairstyle could certainly indicate a prince or young king, and the robe gives us no tell-tale swellings to determine the true gender of its wearer. The robe is topped with a mantle and tippet, indicative of some official capacity, though not necessarily a religious one. The decoration on the tippet might be laurel leaves. The figure wears a simple open crown with a single blue square gem in the front. A square brooch with a round red gem holds the mantle together. The robe itself is red. Mantle, tippet and undergarment appear to be gold or yellow. The throne is largely obscured, but may be a simple stone bench. The two columns are likewise unadorned, with their capitals are out of view about the top of the card. Between them hangs a purple curtain completely blocking the area behind the figure. Above the figure and to either side of the columns the sky is yellow. From the figure’s left hand depends a simple balance. The right hand wields a sword. The toe of one white boot shows out from under the robe on that side.
I would say that in virtually all of my decks, this card immediately calls to mind the original source image from whence this concept of Justice derives. It is the Weighing of the Heart from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, shown below in the most famous version from the Papyrus of Ani in the British Museum.
This is the chapter of the weighing of the heart. This is where all notions of a heavenly reward in a blissful afterlife originate. The complex myth of Osiris and it’s connection to the mysterious mummy cult influenced Egyptian thinking for millennia. I personally have little doubt that it was during the so-called “bondage” of the Hebrew people in the Egyptian delta that this idea of resurrection for the chosen transmuted itself into that faith. Further, I think it likely that during the childhood of the person Jesus in the Hebrew community in Alexandria that these beliefs worked their way into the teachings that he would later communicate to his followers. Much of the New Testament bears the mark of that community, and the influence of both ancient Egyptian and Classical Greek thought.
This core tenet of the Egyptian resurrection belief is rather simple. The heart, wherein the Egyptians believe the soul of a person resided, was placed on one side of the balance. On the other was single feather, an incarnation of the goddess Maat, which is variously styled truth, but that is a limiting rendition. If the feather and the heart were balanced, then the soul of the dead was considered to have lived a right and proper life, and was allowed to go on to dwell with Osiris in the Field of Reeds or take their place in the Boat of Ra or both (the Egyptian afterlife is multidimensional in an almost quantum-like nature).
On the other hand, if it weighed heavier than Maat, then it was burdened with evil deeds that were an affront to the gods, and was tossed by Anubis into the waiting maw of Ameet, the Eater of the Dead. This person was now irrevocably and totally gone. Unlike later religions with lakes of fire and brimstone (though you’ll find those in the Book of the Dead) the wages of sin in the Egyptian faith was immediate oblivion. No one would repeat your name down the millions of years. You would be forgotten.
For the ancient Egyptians there was no more terrible or more terrifying fate. The Book of the Dead is compiled from spells and rubrics that were deemed necessary to get the soul to this point, and then insure that his heart did not “lie” about him. I include here the spell in the old form as translated by Budge. There’s a shorter version on Wikipedia, but I prefer the more formal language myself.
My heart, my mother; my heart, my mother! My heart whereby I came into being! May nought stand up to oppose me at [my] judgment, may there be no opposition to me in the presence of the Chiefs (Tchatchau); may there be no parting of thee from me in the presence of him that keepeth the Balance! Thou art my KA, which dwelleth in my body; the god Khnemu who knitteth together and strengtheneth my limbs. Mayest thou come forth into the place of happiness whither we go. May the Sheniu officials, who make the conditions of the lives of men, not cause my name to stink, and may no lies be spoken against me in the presence of the God. [Let it be satisfactory unto us, and let the Listener god be favourable unto us, and let there be joy of heart (to us) at the weighing of words. Let not that which is false be uttered against me before the Great God, the Lord of Amentet. Verily, how great shalt thou be when thou risest in triumph.]
E.A. Wallis Budge – Translation – The Papyrus of Ani; The Egyptian Book of the Dead
The name spellings here are variable depending on the sources. There’s a list of the company of gods in attendance, but generally it’s at least a top ten. 1The Sheniu officials likely refers to the corporeal authorities that had dominion over the living world, so the government, police, and priesthood, all of which were a single entity in Ancient Egypt, with Pharoah at the center. Osiris is chairman of the board and officiates as the Judge. He is accompanied by Isis, of course, and sometimes Horus. He is the one referred to as the Lord of Amentet (the afterlife). Khemnu is the old goat god, part of the Egyptian creation, and will reappear in magic and witchcraft up to the present day. Tehuti/Thoth is the Keeper of the Balance, and in many depictions stands by with a papyrus and reed, waiting to record the name of the Blessed Dead for all eternity. Maat was his consort. He represents the knowledge of the Cosmos, the structure that is written, similarly to the Greek Logos. She represents the Cosmic Order -that which is as it should be. Saying hers is the feather of Truth is connoting a modern meaning that word has, which is not entirely synonymous with the Egyptian idea.
Though translations of the Prayer to the heart talk about the kinds of “sins” we’ve come to equate with evil in a post-monotheist world, it’s an over simplification to put Maat simply as being a good person. Certainly such things as were forbade in some of the Mosaic laws (which probably were borrowed from Egypt and perhaps Mesopotamia) regarding violent crime, theft and deceit, would have been as unacceptable in their civilization as it is ours, because they have an impact on the practical operation of that civilization. But Maat extends to things that would offend the gods, and cause the universe to become unbalanced, which could have catastrophic consequences like famine, plague, earthquakes, sandstorms, and other dangers. Living on a thin strip of green on either side of the Nile, the ancient Egyptians were keenly aware of the need to respect and live harmoniously with their environment. Even today, with modern irrigation, and technological advances, the stark contrast between the viable green of the river valley, and the bleak dust that lies beyond is inescapable. Maat is a lesson for us all, to live life in balance with our world, and to understand our world is the whole of the great Cosmos we inhabit. We must look to the land, to the spirits, to the ancestors, and to the stars, and pay attention.
I absolutely love this version of Maat from the Journey Into Egypt Tarot. The sheer delight and lightness of being of the goddess expresses so much more than words. The right and proper order of things should bring us such joy. This feather, when weighed against the true heart, cannot but be a source of ecstatic celebration and persistent elan.
It is this long litany that springs to my mind when the Justice Card comes up in a reading. I include this as preface to my visual exploration of the RWS version, as it is really impossible for me with my background to separate it when trying to interpret the meaning of the card. That said, there are a number of highly useful symbols in Waite that may take us in other directions, and offer access to your imagination and understanding of the idea of Justice.
The word “Justice” itself is loaded with baggage, and more comes with it every day as we make our way through the rubble of the fallen Tower trying to construct our next world atop the ruins of the old. Conflated with it are words like Truth, Fairness, Equity, and Law and Order.
We’ve already examined Truth, but if you’ve ever sat on a jury in the United States, you have been told that “truth” is not the same as “fact”, and your job in the process is to determine if the evidence as presented is a finding of fact. Recent language has introduced the idea of “alternate facts” which Orwell would tell us is double speak. An alternate fact is a lie. Truth, on the other hand, as Obi-Wan tells us, may depend on our point of view.
Fairness is not Justice. Nor is the related word Equity. Both fairness and equity relate to a parity, a sameness to both sides of any dispute. The parable of Solomon and the two woman claiming to be the mother of the same child illustrates this splendidly. Fairness is cutting the baby in half.
A selection of Justice cards taking a more Euro-Celtic bent than either the Egyptian original or the RWS Gothic archetype. From left, the Wildwood Tarot gives us the Stag, a composite creature bearing the axe and shield emblazoned with the tree of life. The dimensions of the treetop and the root system are in equilibrium, as are all the things of the world. In this milieu, human beings are just another one of those things, subject to not a philosophical justice, but a natural one.
The middle piece is from the Arthurian Tarot by John and Caitlin Matthews and illustrated by Miranda Gray. I have this as a digital deck from The Fool’s Dog, because I have a great interest and respect for the Celtic/Grail Shamanism that the Matthews have brought to us. I have never gotten the hardcopy, though, because I don’t always find the images satisfying. This is an exception, where Justice is styled as Soveriegnty, Per the text, this figure is the goddess of the land, who symbolically is wed to the king and thus endows him the right to rule, and as the old oath goes “to mete justice and dispense mercy”. The stream here runs black, red, and white. I am immediately reminded of the White Well and the Red Well of Glastonbury, long associated with Arthurian myth.
The final card comes from the Tarot of the Hidden Realm, which is a Celtic Faerie deck in general description. Much of the imagery dispenses entirely with the forms of the Rider Waite Smith, and has more similarity to Brian Froud’s Faerie Oracle Decks, though this is by the artist Julia Jeffrey. As you can see, the prominent feature here is the sword, readied but still sheathed. Curiously, the little white Feather of Maat still manages to make an appearance.
While certainly a half a baby would balance against another half a baby in Ye Olde Scale of Ye Olde Justice, we all of us can tell that is not the right solution. We chafe from an early age against having to miss recess because Little Johnny couldn’t behave in math class, even though the rest of us were perfect angels. We seem to have an inherent sense that there is a proper solution, where things are made right, and sometimes that is that things are made fair, and sometimes they are not.
In reality, if we take a big fluffy ostrich plume and place it on a balance with a fairly desicated human heart, we will see that the heart handily outweighs the feather. What makes it work is that both are allegorical. They are symbolic. The feather perhaps has more weight than its nature belies, but again, the heart free from trouble and sin is light.
You will note here that the figure of Justice is not “blind” as she is often depicted in Roman and derived works. The blindness is an allegory for fairness, or equity under law, which I think we all know is also a fallacy. Equity under law is a concept, originating in the Graeco-Roman world but not applying then any moreso than it does today. The patrician, plutarch, and senator stood before a justice who peeked out from under her blindfold, and distinguished them easily from the poor, the plebian, and the slave. So perhaps this Justice is at least being more honest to look us straight in the eye.
The square on the crown and the square brooch hearken to the ideas in Freemasonry that bled over into many of the magical lodges of the idea of Square, Level, and True (or Plumb). Part of the Masonic cornerstone ceremony is the testing of the stone by three officiators, with ceremonial instruments to determine if the corner are square, the top is level horizontally and the sides are straight vertically (true or plumb). These characteristics are essential for the cornerstone, since all the other stones will inherit their alignment from it.
I find it rather fascinating that the Egyptian architects of pyramids and temples had a single simple device that performed all of these functions. Oh, and if you’re an initiate, you can also use it to calculate your position according the stars, the circumference of the earth, and a lot of other nifty things. And the creation of this magic device is based on a deft use of light and shadow.
A string, with a weight on one end, will always point straight down. It will cast a shadow at a right angle to the string. Now I know that seems counter intuitive, because sundials work due to shadows apparently having different angle, but if I have a straight line, the shadow of that line is going to form a right angle at the point where the line reaches the ground. So I take my straight string. I put a straight stick in the ground that lines up with it. The shadow of that stick is at a right angle, and so I take a second stick and align it with the shadow and now I have a square. Then I take that square, and tie my weighted string to the point in the middle where the two sticks join. I go find a pond or a bucket of water. I take the ends of the sticks and dip them into the water until the down pointing string is exactly in the middle. I mark where the water is, and cut the ends of the sticks off. Because water always seeks level, the ends are now a device to mark our level blocks. I can use the corner to determine square, and the weighted string to determine plumb.
And I have accomplished this using the fire of the sun, the shadow cast on the earth by a string suspended in the air and leveled against a pool of water.
This device is the ancestor of the quadrant, the sextant, the astrolabe, the surveyor’s theodolite, and a plethora of instruments used for navigation, construction, and even space travel. That seems pretty powerful magic to me.
A second set of alternative Justice cards. On left is the beautiful piece from Stephanie Law’s Shadowscapes Tarot. The mythical faerieland that these cards arise from is an absolute wonderment in itself. I find myself getting lost in all the swirling shapes and tiny hidden features that she manages to put in almost every space. It is an apt reminder that there is always far more to the world that is at first apparent, and that is a good admonishment for those seeking justice at point of sword. Here the lady holds the balance and the feather, which in this image is sufficient warning.
The middle image is taken from the Cosmic Tarot and reflects that decks combination of Eastern esotericism, Buddhist mysticism, alchemy, and the traditions of the lodge magicians. Maat shines forth as the balance here, of the universe as a whole, not just the human realm with its ideologies and self-imposed strictures. Truth and Justice are cosmic concepts, not perhaps easily, or correctly, comprehended by the mind of humankind.
The righthand image is from Cirro Marchetti’s Legacy of the Divine Tarot. This might best be characterized as the Tarot one might expect from the Cirque de Soliel. Indeed, it features acrobats on draperies among other such images. However, the context here is that it is an imaginary deck composed in a post-apocalyptic world of our future, where the ancient wisdoms are being rediscovered, and a new Tarot devised. From that intriguing perspective, the symbols, already delicious, take on many additional significances. The journey through these cards is warm and wonderful.
What has it to do with Justice? Well only that it’s hidden in that little gem on the forehead, and the brooch with the red center tells us that we live in an ordered universe, where such things are not only possible but within our own understanding. It is our obligation to perceive and respond to that order, to keep it, both in the physical sense, and the spiritual one. The Masonic cornerstone is an allegory of the perfecting of the human spirit.
We should contrast here how Justice holds the sword versus how the Sphinx on top of the Wheel holds the sword. The Sphinx has it. It’s there. It’s waiting. But it’s not ready to strike. This tells us that the nature of Fortune is to be enigmatic. We know that some doom awaits (and doom in that old sense of destiny) but we won’t know it until it arrives.
Justice on the other hand wields the sword. The hand firmly grips the hilt and the blade is poised to swing down. The red of the robe is the lifeblood. The sword, like the axe in the center of the Roman fasces, is symbolic that ultimate penalty, death. The purple curtain behind Justice is emblem of the State, the Authority or whatever Entity, corporeal or cosmic, that renders judgment of the tipping of the balance and demands such an awful penalty.
The card is severe. Unlike Fortune’s Wheel, where we don’t see the end coming, and may blithely ride around sampling the rewards and retributions or random luck, when we are before Justice’s unflinching gaze, we must hope that our heart not bear false witness against us.
Yet that small bit of white at the bottom where the right foot peeks out, can only mean that mercy is available. It is not automatic, of course, and it has to overcome all the much larger forces going on in that card, but it is present. Without the possibility of mercy, there is no true Justice. There always has to be some chance, that even when all things weigh against us, the balance may yet tip in our favor.
We can have then some hope, that the radiance of that yellow sky behind the purple banner of Authority will shine down upon us, as it does the Fool, the Magician, the Empress, the Lovers, the Chariot and Strength. Consequently, this is the last we see of that brilliant sky in the Major Arcana. The succeeding five cards go from grey to black, and take us through the heart of darkness. We’ll start that descent next week with the Hanged Man.
Until then, thank you for reading to the end. I hope you have found it beneficial.
What goes up must come down Spinning Wheel got to go ’round
-Spinning Wheel – David Clayton-Thomas – Blood, Sweat, and Tears
This week we delve into the mysterious symbolism of the card marked X, actually the eleventh card in the Major Arcana. This card is labeled Wheel Of Fortune, and the term both precedes and succeeds it’s use here. Most commonly this card is rendered as luck, or in reverse, the absence of it, yet the history of its symbols give use other avenues to peer down in search of meanings and contexts.
The Rider Waite Smith deck gives us a mixed bag of religious and mythical iconography to work with, not much of it consistent.
The card shows a triple circle set in the clouds. Within the outer circle are letters in English that may be read in a number of ways, between which four characters in Hebrew. Inside the second circle are eight rays that divide the inner two circles into eight segments. The completely horizontal and completely vertical rays cross over the alchemical symbols for Mercury, Sulfur, Water, and Salt, symbolic of the Aristotelian elements Air, Fire, Water, and Earth. These are not quite the right symbols, but the inference is there. The center circle contains the point where all the rays meet, and is thus the hub of the Wheel. At the Wheel’s top sits a blue female sphinx wearing an Egyptian nemes headress, and holding a sword, by the blade just inside the hilt. On the lower right side of the Wheel is suspended a red figure with what appears to be the head of Anubis. On the left side is the spiral of a yellow snake. On the clouds at each of the four corners are winged figures with books. From the top left clockwise it is a human (or angel) an eagle, a lion, and finally a bull. The sky appearing through the clouds is blue. The Wheel is rendered in orange. T
his is only one of two cards in the entire Tarot deck that has writing as part of the image. The other is the Priestess card, which carries the word TORA on her scroll. If the English letters here are read right to left, as they would be in Hebrew, it also spells TORA. On the other hand, if it is read left to right, as would be normal for English, it reads TARO. This equivalency of Torah, the Hebrew holy book to Tarot the deck of cards is a direct nod to Eliphas Levi’s obsession with the cards as emblematic and revelatory of the teachings of the Kabbalah, and his influence on the Golden Dawn and other magic lodge movements. It is almost certainly where Waite got it.
There’s a kind of triple pun going on here as well, though, because if we begin at the bottom and read clockwise we get ROTA, or “wheel” in Latin. ROTAS, of course, is one of the lines in the well known SATOR AREPO TENET magic amulet, so there’s something of a link to that.
Further permutations give us OTAR, which in archaic Spanish denotes “to see” or “to see from a distance”. By sheer coincidence (if you believe in coincidence) it’s also the anagram for Over The Air Rekeying – a method for updating encryptions codes in modern data cryptography.
The next word around is then AROT, which has connotation in Finnish, Latvian, Sudanese, and a number of other languages. In Finnish it refers to a swamp or marsh (and possibly also has similar meaning in Hebrew). In Latvian, with variations in Spanish and Italian bespeaking of a Latinesque origin, it refers to ploughing. Curiously one of the words in the SATOR AREPO is frequently translated as Plough. One source on the interwebs gives additional Hebrew options that include both vigilance and nakedness. There’s also a Filipino dialect where it means “to speak well”.
If we proceed back the other way from it’s read as TORA, we first come to ORAT, which in the Romance languages seems to harken to “pray”, or “beseech”. Next is RATO, which comes from the Latin for “to judge”, and finally ATOR which can be rendered as “actor” in Latin derived languages, and “poison” in Germanic ones.
While I don’t say with authority that Waite, Smith, or any of there contemporaries played these word games with the letters in the Wheel, they clearly may be played, and are a legitimate method of exploring magically such linguistic symbolism in the various schools and lodges of the time this card was authored.
Medieval versions of the card typically show the wheel that was used for punishment and torture. That may be less a commentary about the fickle nature of fate than simply the need to make something largely recognizable as a turning wheel. Atop this version from the Marseilles deck is what becomes the serene Egyptian Sphinx in Pamela Smith’s version. Here it reminds me more of an angry harpy or one of the Erinyes or Furies, not too far out of line with the ill turn of Fortune’s Wheel. The crown it wears harkens to the “I Rule, I Will Rule, I Have Ruled” mottos on some other early versions of the card.
The Hebrew letters are the Tetragrammaton, made up of Yod, He, Vau, and He, which are pronounced variably Yawveh, or Jehovah. This is the mystic name of the Old Testament God, the Creator of all things in the Hebrew teachings. Jehovah is the Latinization, based probably more on the sound of the spoken Hebrew than any clear connection of the letters between the two. In any case, the implication here is that the apparent randomness of the universe is actually a manifestation of God’s Plan. There is an alternative option, though, in that the Wheel may be viewed as a magic circle, and the inscription here is a protective measure. In this case, the other letters and symbols also function differently.
The alchemical symbols and their elemental attributions seem a bit ham-fisted to me. Firstly, the water symbol at the bottom is really Aquarius, as alchemical notations for water are usually the downward pointing triangle we use when symbolizing those elements directly. Aside from that, the two wavy lines are also a form of the old Egyptian hieroglyph for water, and can have multiple meanings in the contexts of that language. Whereas Mercury and Sulfur are rendered as though they were on the rays, that is, the orientation of the glyph is such that it would appear correctly if one were looking along the ray from the center. Mercury, therefore is rendered upright, but Sulfur has been oriented 90 degrees clockwise. Opposite Sulfur though, the glyph for Salt is rendered upright so that the ray crossing it draws the symbol. Salt is typically rendered as a circle with a line across the center horizontally. This is what is shown here. But to orient it “properly, or in keeping with the way Sulfur is rendered as though it were on a clock’s hand, Salt’s cross line should be vertical, perpendicular to the ray, and thus forming a crossed circle the way this is drawn. The obvious reason not to do this is that a crossed circle is another alchemical symbol, that of Earth. But as Salt here is the stand-in for the element of Earth anyway, the choice seems only confusing, and certainly not in keeping with what would be expected of an initiated magician using these symbols in the creation of a sacred, or at least secret space.
This unusual take on the subject is from the Wildwood Tarot. There are a number of rich Celtic/Nordic symbols here, but the Wheel itself is a design woven into the fabric of a tunic or garment. The image hearkens to numerous references to the “thread of our lives” being spun and paid out by hidden Fates until, without warning, that thread is cut. The Norse call these Fates the Norns, the Greeks named them the Moirai. They are present in this image as the three cranes, quietly posed in the background. Their weaving done, the garment whole, the ultimate fate of the wearer is decided, and there is no altering it. Like the spinning wheel that is Perpetual Change, one cannot see what will be, only that it will be. The land across the water awaits us all.
The choice of eight rays and eight divisions, rather than twelve which would give us a number of astrological and temporal associations, seems to be the desire to have them point at the letters on the wheel, which are four in English (or Latin) and four in Hebrew. One can, of course, equate this with the Dharmachakra, or Dharma Wheel that depicts the Eightfold Path. While certainly many in Waite’s circle were influenced by teachings from the subcontinent, I am not sure he had any intention to make the connection here. Crowley’s Book of Thoth borrows more specifically from Eastern teachings, but his Wheel has ten spokes and ten divisions. This version of the Dharma wheel is called “Ten Directions” and is synonymous with “everywhere” or the “universe”. There’s a potential reading of the eight spokes of the RWS Wheel as a kind of compass rose, so that we can ascribe the same meaning. Finally, any chaos magicians out there immediately seized upon the Eight Rayed Symbol Of Chaos from Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion series, which has from time to time been adopted to the practice of chaos magic. The significance of the symbol is randomness, and that also fits nicely with the idea of the Wheel of Fortune. We cannot know what is coming.
His Mind is Not For Rent To any god or government Always hopeful yet discontent Knows changes aren’t permanent But Change is.
Tom Sawyer – Peart, Lee, Lifeson – Rush
The perpetual turning of the Wheel here is the meaning that comes down to us from the earlier versions. The Marseilles deck adorn it with animals (a monkey, an ass or dog, and the sphinx) but in the Sforza and other early decks the figures were men, or kings. There is a version where speech banners are attached to the figures with the mottos “I will rule”; “I rule”; “I have ruled”. The meaning here is quite clear, Time itself is ongoing, and there are no guarantees. Even the king at the bottom, in tatters and rags, may be picked back up by the wheel, and the one at top can easily be thrown down.
The replacement of these figures with ones clearly symbolic is obviously derived from a ritual use associated with the card, or at least deriving from a ritual practice and the symbols used within it. It is no longer about kings or people whom Fortuna has placed highly or displaced, but about the creatures that are attached to the Wheel.
The sphinx here, though undoubtedly supposed to be Egyptian, is more likely to be the one in the tale of Oedipus Rex. According to the story, Oedipus must resolve a riddle posed by this composite creature or be killed. In succeeding, he becomes king and opens up a whole other kettle of fish, but the Sphinx’s riddle is this:
“What is four-legged in the morning, two-legged at noon, and three-legged at end of day?”
The answer is a human, because it first crawls, then walks, and finally leans on a staff-thus three-legged. According to some versions of the story, the riddle game goes on and the Sphinx asks:
“There are two sisters. One gives birth to the second, who in turn gives birth to the first. What are they?”
This is one is equally esoteric, being an allegory of Day and Night, one constantly “giving birth” to the next in an endless cycle.
So here again that Sphinx on the Wheel is a metaphor for the passing of the days. the counting down of our own mortal ones to the point, at the end, when that sword she holds will end them. Yet she holds it not to menace, or even to wield, but only to let us know she has it. Like the threat of being killed, or devoured, or otherwise dealt with facing Oedipus, our Sphinx is telling us that there is no getting off the ride, and there is no one stopping the wheel.
The artist of the Cosmic Tarot gives us a six spoked Wheel upon which may be place the Seven Chaldean Planets. The Sun is in the center. Yet this unusual clockwork also adds Neptune, Uranus, and Pluto at the top, and at the bottom is the Earth. If we step back, we can see these are all arranged on the Sephiroth – The Tree of Life from Kabbalistic practice. In the four quarters are the symbols of the Four Elements, Water, Air, Earth, and Fire. The outer golden rim of this Wheel is our Zodiac. There is a double hexagram in the center, and many spinning arcs that seem to describe a portion of some very complex larger astrolabe. That there are unseen portions is in keeping with the idea of this card. The Hebrew characters read as Kether at the top (KTR) and Malkuth (MLKVT) at the bottom. These are the end points of the Sephiroth in the background, and denote the Crown or the point of pure spirit, and our world of essentially pure manifestation. I like this card particularly as it gives one of the better integrations of the various ideas, while still maintaining an aesthetic quality that allows for exploration of those unseen quarters.
Most writers I have read on the subject suggest this Wheel turns counterclockwise. I am not sure why that would be, but it is the way ROTA reads as well as YHVH so perhaps that is the logic. In this case then Anubis (or whoever that is) represents the rising king. Anubis as a psychopomp is responsible for shepherding the souls of the blessed dead past the perils awaiting them in the underworld, so that they may reach the Chamber of the Weighing of the Heart and be judged as to whether they received eternal happiness or are eaten and face eternal oblivion. In all the versions of the Book of the Dead, the heart always comes through, and one wonders how Anubis ever keeps his pet Devourer fed. But in that context, we can see Anubis as emblematic of a kind of resurrection into the second life of the Field of Reeds, so perhaps that is why he is showing coming up from the bottom of the Wheel, rather than being on the right side completely.
I don’t know if the choice of color here is arbitrary or if Pixie Smith and Mr. Waite simply did not understand the significance of color in Egyptian religion. Red was the color of Set, the murderer of Osiris and god of storms, chaos, and the nearest thing to Satan in the Egyptian pantheon. Anubis is always depicted in black, the color associated with rebirth and the afterlife, probably because of the rich black soil left by the Nile flood. In comparison to the reddish or yellowish sands of the surrounding desert, which was the dominion of Set, this makes a lot of sense. So either they didn’t know, or understand, or they have some double meaning intended.
It’s one of those chicken and egg things. If Set had not killed Osiris, the chain of events that ensued would not have come to be. Anubis himself was born as a consequence of the resurrected but amnesiac Osiris sleeping with Isis twin sister Nephthys (who was the wife of Set, by the way). Isis takes him in and he becomes her protector while her son Horus goes out to do battle with Set to avenge his father. This set of myths informed the mummification and funerary rituals for thousands of years, so they are at the heart of the Egyptian belief in the afterlife. Without the initial evil act of Set, there would not be possible all the good things promised in the Eternal Paradise. While that may have been a bit too esoteric for the ancients (or perhaps not) it may have been in consideration for post Victorians exploring magic and the role of the Christian litany in the face of a Darwinian revolution. Or maybe it’s just me. That’s the beauty of going deep with these cards. You never know which way the rabbit hole turns.
The yellow snake in some rendering is supposed to be two headed. This creature, called an amphisbaena had a head on either end, and thus was capable of going either way at will, like a reptilian pushme-pullyou. The snake as rendered on the card is a normal one, and the looping winding are clearly reminiscent of the Egyptian snake demon Apep or Apophis. This being, often considered an embodiment of Set, attacked the Boat of Ra nightly as it sailed through the underworld, and parts of the Book of the Dead involved the slaying of the beast, and its subsequent dismemberment and burning and the “bones separated by red hot knives”. Apep is both death and nightfall, and in the mind of the Egyptians these were synonymous. If the Wheel turns right to left, then the figure of Apep is descending toward the underworld that Anubis is rising from, and the whole can be seen as a metaphor for spiritual resurrection. This is why I mentioned the symbolism as ritualistic earlier, because ritual death and rebirth is a frequent theme for initiation ceremonies, ranging from the Masonic lodge to the Christian “Born-Again” baptism. It is certainly apt to topics of time passing, fortunes changes, and potential for elevation to a higher plane.
A final alternative, here again is the Deviant Moon deck, one I see is a favorite of many professional readers and occultists in my circle. It is visually such a unique deck. There is an anger about it, that gets right in your face. That’s not Vanna White up there. This unbalancing can assist the mind in letting go of literal meaning and accessing the subconscious. As we reel back from the open aggression of the style, we find ourselves drifting past dream images and broken pieces of memory that the encounter has dredged up.
Waite tops off his pseudo-Christian diagrams here with the four symbols in the corners. They are the icons of the four authors of the Gospels, who take the form of the heads of the “living beings” described in the vision of Ezekiel. These creatures, styled in the Middle Ages as Cherubim, an order of non-human angels, were adapted by early embellishers of the Gospel Book to represent Matthew, John, Mark, and Luke. These have been extended by astrologers to represent Aquarius, Scorpio, Leo, and Taurus. These are the fixed signs of Air, Water, Fire, and Earth respectively, signs which are neither initiating the element, nor leaving it, but firmly established within it. As such, they may be taken astrologically as a permanent background against which the Wheel is turning. However, the presence of the book in the hands (or limbs) of each figure is an absolute artistic key that says these are the Gospel authors, and any other allusions we make are secondhand to their presence. One might logically extend our magic circle metaphor to consider these figures as connected with, or representing the four Archangels of the directions typically called during the various consecration rituals. There would seem to be some connection, but I am, as of this writing, unable to find a definitive, one to one attribution of the Archangels to the Gospels and their symbols. They will appear again on the last trump, the World, so hopefully by then my research will have found some authoritative link.
At this point, I have exhausted my current store of information on this symbol rich card, and will close with my thanks for your continued interest, and my hope that you will return in a week to seek Justice, or at least, what that card may offer us by way of imagery and idea.
Card IX of the Major Arcana is one that I find myself drawn more and more to as I get older. This is, to my thinking, something of a natural progression, and we’ll look into that. For those who have not read my earlier articles where the Hermit is discussed in various contexts, this will likely all be new territory. For those who have followed me for a while, I trust you will forgive any repetition of concepts mentioned in those earlier articles as we delve into this week’s topic.
The Hermit card shows a lone figure standing on a snowy mountain summit against a blue sky. He wears a hooded grey robe, and has long white hair and beard. In his left hand he holds a simple staff, and in his right he holds a lantern. In the midst of the lantern is a hexagram star, giving off rays that travel only a short distance. There are the tops of other mountains seen in the distance. His gaze is cast downward.
In keeping with austerity of a life in isolation, this is one of the most minimalist designs Pamela Smith offers us.
The design here is one of the simplest of all the Major Arcana. That is appropriately in keeping with the subject as an ascetic engaged in isolated contemplation. Because, as we have discussed, Waite’s charge for this deck was intimately connected with Christianity, the figure is portrayed more or less as a lone monk.
Monasticism in origin was not the movement that it later became. The practice began with individuals withdrawing from the word and living completely alone, often in caves in the desert. There were no orders, and there certainly were no monasteries. The “mon” in monastic, and indeed in monk, is derived from monos- one, or lone. Supposedly Benedict was the first of these early monks to put forth the idea that they could all be alone together, and thus formed a monastic order. Later such orders would be approved as official by the church, and charged with specific duties and obligations. I imagine similar developments occurred within Buddhism, but there are still hermit monks in many traditions, who seek personal wisdom and enlightenment by a quiet withdrawing from the world.
This context is central to a number of the meanings and associations ascribed to this card. In a Christian scenario, the withdrawal is to place oneself away from sin, or at least, from the temptation to sin. In this way the Hermit purifies himself from the flesh, and thereby encourages the spirit. The wisdom imparted here, of course, is the absolute truth and rightness of the Christian teaching, and thereby the hermit monk has his soul saved, while his body suffers.
Mortification is practiced in multiple cultures for purification, but also for the creation of trance states and the getting of visions. Living in a cave in isolation, subsisting on a diet of “locusts and wild honey” could certainly induce psychologically altered states of consciousness. If one is bent to be looking for signs from God, those altered states can take on the character of a profound religious experience. Ironically, of course, these experiences are frequently depicted as ecstasy, general of the physical kind that the hermit has moved out into the wilderness to avoid.
The Hermit is traditionally given the Sign of Virgo astrologically. I find this a rather simplistic reading, equating virginity to the avowed celibacy of the monk. The two are not identical, nor are they interchangeable. It’s simply convenient to make the attribution if you are looking for some place in the Tarot to attach Virgo. The fact is, as I have mentioned before, that the Hermit in earlier decks is a personification of passing Time, and this Chronos being confounded in ancient days with Kronos the Titan, makes Saturn a more apt connection than Virgo.
This Hermit Card from the Wildwood Tarot is one of my favorites. The figure is reminiscent of Dicken’s Spirit of Christmas Yet To Come. It is faceless, and the robe is worn. The wreath and the faded adornments on the lower part of the robe identify this figure as the Holly King, the spirit of winter, and a potent symbol of the fate that awaits us all at the end of the path. Yet it carries a bright light in that Winter Dark, and shines it upon a lone little bird. The bird, along with the blades of grass piercing the snow, remind us that the future holds the promise of rebirth, and even when death awaits, it is a transition to
I have personally always seen the Hermit as analogous with both Father Time and some Saturnine aspect, and as I age, this is even more apparent. My own second Saturn return is now less than a year away, and astrologers suggest that this brings with it contemplation of deeper meanings, the path that we have taken, and the potentially shorter path that lies ahead. Old Saturn with his 29 year cycle, was rarely met more than twice by our ancestors, and sometimes no more than once. Thus associating him as I do with the aged figure on the mountain top, perhaps looking back along the trail he has climbed, is not so arbitrary as the monkish renunciation of carnal activities.
I personally identify greatly with the Hermit card. It is not that I am anti-social, at least in the sense that I live in a cave in the desert and eat bugs. But I have for more of my life than not, been very insular and private. My world has almost always been more of the inward one than the outer one. The cave I inhabit is internal. As a precocious and odd child, my social isolation was very common. I had few friends and most of them were similarly odd. I cannot with any accuracy say if the experience of being an outsider or loner led to my inclination toward silence and self-contemplation, or if I had a bent for quiet meditation that limited the ability of other more outgoing types to bond with me. Whether it was the chicken or the egg, the result is that I generally prefer pursuits of a personal nature rather than a collaborative one.
That is not to say that I am incapable of interacting with others, but it does require a great deal of energy and focus, even with persons whose company I enjoy sharing. This, I believe, is what they are defining as introversion these days. There is possibly also some overshadows of the autistic spectrum that may be applicable. The difficulty inherent in expressing oneself, combined with the discomfort, or even fear, of being misunderstood, and a compulsion to pre-run the outcomes of any and all scenarios, creates a synergy where communication is a complex and stress inducing task. The result is frequently exhausting, and therefore the appeal of the quite moments alone. The obligations of my life as I have lived it, and as the result of the choices I have made along it, require me to adapt and develop coping mechanisms to address these stresses. I have been doing so for the better part of half a century, but as I get older, I am becoming more selective as to when I need to employ those mechanisms, and when the outcome is equal or even better if I simply make the choice to be that Hermit.
Of course, my life would probably be much simpler if I had not self-imposed the need to author a weekly article on various subjects to an audience who may or may not be out there.
But that brings us to the Hermit’s Lantern.
My “genuine official” Hermit’s Lantern, or a reasonably close facsimile. Like many of the odd things in my collection of odd things, it is both a prop and a magical object. This is not unusual in the history of occult practice. The knife and cookpot and the hearthstone and walking stick are all mundane objects, with mundane uses, that the village witch of yore would have employed both for practical and more esoteric purpose. The idea that we have to have a sacred set of special tools that can’t ever ever be used for what they actually are would have been ludicrous to our ancestors. Certainly, owning a “magic wand” or “witch’s cauldron” would have brought considerable risk in the days of the persecutions, but most houses would have had staffs, clubs, switches, and other sticks, and of course there was a big black iron pot over the fire. My lantern can be used symbolically, and in spell craft. But it can also be used to light my way in the dark.
I have one of those, you know. Found it at one of the discount stores that deal in leftover merchandise originally offered in the high-end department stores. I also have a staff and the monks cassock. Sometimes things just click like that.
But the Hermit’s lamp first and foremost is the analogue for the wisdom he has gained, the secrets that he has teased out of the dark bosom of the universe during the nigh endless hours of lonely seeking. Because, frankly, the point of wisdom is to pass it on. We are potentially alone on this planet in our ability to communicate our experiences to others in a fashion that expands and extends their value.
While there are a good many creatures that exhibit the ability to pass data instinctively, there are, at least as far as we know, none that can record that data in perpetuity. The monasteries of all faiths seem to affirm the need to chronicle what comes from contemplation, meditation, and isolation. They maintain libraries as a part of their function, and through that we have preserved the collected musings of the ages. It is a sad fact of history that many such libraries were lost to war, disaster, and accident, yet what remains, though meager, is wonderful.
The purpose of the Hermit is therefore not to leave this world, but to know it. This ties card IX to card 0, the Fool. As I stated early, the symbolism of the Fool is that state of Unknowing, that exists in the Unformed. It is that moment of Becoming, that is precipitation by the I withdrawing from the Not I , that is the creation of all. The edge of the cliff the Fool strides toward is where the Universe divides from itself in order to know itself. The death presaged by the card is real. The Universe as it was before will die, and never be again, because as the full plunges over the edge a new Universe begins that has the capacity to be experienced.
Stephanie Law gives us an ethereal and elfin Hermit in her Shadowscapes Tarot. Her mastery of watercolor and deep knowledge of anatomical forms results in unique and wonderful depictions that preserve the spirit of the card, while giving us a gateway into a whole new kind of world. The symbols seem derived from Celtic myth, but walk far closer to the walls of Faerie than something like Wildwood, which is more directly a restatement of Celtic Shamanism. I work frequently with both decks, depending on mood. The Shadowscapes have a kind of music about them, and are far easier to travel into and through.
And here is the Hermit withdrawing from the world, to know himself, and in doing so, to know the greater truth that lies beyond that edge, to return, perhaps to the Unknowing, beyond that event horizon where the original Idea was made form. It is a parallel intention.
While the Fool simply does, and the result becomes the intention, the Hermit intends. I made a distinction earlier between virginity and celibacy. This is exemplified in the relationship between these two cards. Virginity is an initial state of the origin of things, that once lost, may never be again. Innocence cannot be regained. Celibacy or chastity is the result of an intended act of restraint that may be constant or practiced in intervals. While the two can exist together, that is, one can be virginal and also chaste, it is not necessarily required for the chaste to be a virgin.
Virginity is the condition of our beginning. The Fool is the first card. When we reach the Hermit, we are presented with an old man, who we hope is wiser, but is likely no longer innocent. He chooses to be apart from the world because he has known it. Yet this choice makes it all the more present in his mind.
Anyone who has gone on a diet has experienced the stronger craving for something they are forbidden, even though they were not so desirous of it when they could have it. This is what makes the changing of habits difficult.
The Buddhists say that this is why we can’t free ourselves from the desire to be, and return to the nothingness that is. We are no longer the Fool, the Unknowing, and while our objective as the Hermit is to deny it, that denial makes the desire for it even stronger. We can be as celibate as we want, but it doesn’t ever make us a virgin.
So faced with this contradiction, the Hermit re-enlists in the world, at least to the extent that those rays will reach. The light from the Hermit’s Lantern is dim, not because it does not burn brightly, but because, as a consequence of the experience only known to the Hermit, is incredibly difficult to communicate with others who lack his frame of reference.
A final variation on our theme, this from the Ghosts and Spirits Tarot by Lisa Hunt. This deck is certainly one of the most unique ones I have, and not for the faint of heart. The imagery is frequently dark and disturbing, even when expressing images that typically are considered positive in the Tarot literature. It departs significantly from conventional designs. Like Shadowscapes, it offers complex swirling tableaus where faces seem to peer from everywhere. This reflects an animist perspective, but it also signals that we are looking into a world behind the mask of simple mundane reality. The Hermit from the usual card stands here at the rear right of the image, The lantern aloft, the eyes closed in some internal reverie. But the spirit of the Hermit is a sparkling whirlwind in the middle of the wilderness of hidden realm. It is also a realm we can step into, if we are willing to take the risk.
This is why scholars and writers on esoterism and philosophy make a distinction between intelligence and wisdom. We can easily impart facts to one another. We can express that two and two are equal to four, and that four and four are equal to eight. We can explain how to properly conjugate verbs in all the languages of the human race. But when it comes to sharing our insights into the sublime wonders of the Divine our mouths fall silent. Our tongues are still. The words are simply not enough.
The Hermit’s Staff is his knowledge. He leans upon it. It is firm. It is strong. He can hand that Staff to another and it will be unchanged. It will be firm and strong and equally useful, but it is not the Light of the Lantern, with the shape barely visible within it, the simple, but also phenomenal “As above, so below”.
And as without, so within. He lives in the internal world, his eyes downcast. What does he see? What does he not see?
He may be looking toward the path he has climbed. He may be looking at the deepening road before him.
But one thing is certain. He does not, at least, look at the Lantern.
Is it because he has already seen the Light, or is it because the Light is too bright to bear. It stands out from him. It is separated from him, unlike the staff which he holds close to the body. Is this to make it a beacon unto others, or is it because he cannot stand it being too close, because the brightness is a pain and a distraction? Does it light his path, or does it obscure it to his aging gaze?
I can only say that walking along that path myself, there are times when the light is too dim to make anything out, and times when it is too bright to make anything out, and in the end both results are same. You have to put your next foot forward carefully, and hope for the best.
If you are lucky, you won’t step off that cliff.
Join me next week for Fortune’s Wheel and the inexorable turning of the days from spring toward summer. Thank you for your continued patronage.
The card that is labeled VIII is different depending on the deck you are using. The Marseilles Tarot has Justice in this position, and some modern decks use this scheme. In the RWS and it’s predecessor the Tarot of the Order of the Golden Dawn, the card is switched to Strength and many, if not most, decks from the last century deploy them according to this order. The most satisfactory explanation I have found is that the Golden Dawn applied the numeric value of the Hebrew letters to the Zodiac and got the number eight for Leo, and eleven for Libra. Thus, the image of Justice, with the scales, being associated with Libra, moved to XI, and the Strength card, with it’s lion, was relocated to VIII. This seems less arbitrary than other explanations, but it has flaws. As the whole idea of connecting the Hebrew letters to Tarot comes from Eliphas Levi, one would expect the switch to have been made by him if there were merit to the astrological argument. But Levi holds to the placement of Justice after the Chariot card. This merely illustrates that the Tarot is not an ancient secret code carved in the stones of a lost pyramid somewhere, but a living exercise in the exploration of the esoteric, and it’s connection with the changing fashion of the human mind. This can be adduced by the large numbers of oracle cards now available on the market, which dispense with traditional tarot almost entirely, but use the same general concepts.
The Strength card shows a woman bending to shut the mouth of a lion. She has a garland of roses for her belt and a crown of vines or flowers atop her tied hair. Her gown is white. Above her head is the infinity symbol, seen first on the Magician. There is a single mountain in the background, and a verdant landscape between. The sky in this card is yellow. The sash of the woman seems to circle around the lion’s neck.
A slightly simpler card than many. Perhaps this is reflective for the rather limited scope assigned to it by the commissioning party.
The motif of the woman and lion is sometimes depicted as Hercules slaying the Nemean lion. This Visconti-Sforza deck in the Morgan Library collection has this version, and it may be original. The Marseilles has a female figure, and likely reflects this depiction of the virtue of Fortitude or Strength as a woman, in line with Medieval thinking. The Sforza’s may have wanted to allude to the more classical myth as testament to their secular humanist world view, but Hercules doesn’t typically feature on many modern decks.
My first personal response to this card is always that it symbolizes my wife’s birthday. She is born on the cusp of Leo and Virgo and I can think of no more apt metaphor than the woman in white closing the mouth of the beast. I do not typically assign the “traditional” astrological values to the cards, because I often find good reason to disagree with them, but let’s assume that the usual attribution of Virgo to card IX – The Hermit is used, and the Leo referenced above applied to this, then we are in something of a logical zodiac order here. The Chariot, by the way, get’s assigned to Cancer the preceding sign. The problem with that (and why I don’t use a lot of the traditional values) is that Cancer also gets assigned to the Priestess, and then the Magician being connected with Mercury comes over as Gemini and not Aries. Keeping track of this astrological soap opera seems to me to be worth less than the effort. That said, if I feel that there is a need for an astrological reading, I will go look it up (if I don’t know it) and weight it in context with the other values of the other cards in context.
A less serious take on the subject by the artists of the Pulp Tarot. This deck is a tongue-in-chic homage to Pixie Smith which fully celebrates the genre of the cheap dime novel cover. As a fan of both the novels and that period of illustration history, it was an easy decision to pick it up when I saw it in the discount bin. By remaining true to the base imagery of the RWS deck, it affords the reader a seamless transition without the disadvantage of an exotic reinterpretation. I plan to take it with me when I am reading at the writer’s conference in New Orleans next month, as I am certain my audience will get a kick out of it.
Even so, I always see this card personally as a day in late August, and assign it the value of transition, the passing of time, and the shifting of seasons from one of growth to one of harvest. The moebius over her head signifies that this shift is a perpetual one, the cycle repeats, and so it gives us a symbol of the cycle as well. While this is but the slice of summer’s ending, it remembers the bloom of spring, and foresees the golden leaves of autumn and the barren fields of winter, waiting to blossom again.
In this way, the card speaks to me of Mother Nature. She has in herself the capacity to shut up the privation and reckless excess that may be heralded by the lion. For all the lion’s strength as an emblem, it is a predator. It destroys. Like the heat of the Sun that rules Leo, if unslaked, it will burn and blast. So we may read this card in context of the environmental struggles we are having with the planet now. Like Leo we proudly assert our dominion. Our vanity threatens to ruin us, however, and the planet will put us in check.
But lets look again at this card. The woman shutting the lion’s mouth is doing so without undue force or violence. The lion, after all, is just being a lion. It is following its nature, whether than nature is to the benefit of its environment or not. The lion is what it is. To deny that would be cruel to the lion.
Another fun spin on Strength comes from the Mystical Medleys Tarot. This one is based on the style of old time cartoons, circa 1920s and 30s, but don’t let that fool you. The creators are clearly tuned into the functioning of Tarot and manage to incorporate a number of very subtle esoteric hints into the cards. Like the Pulp Tarot there is enough similarity to RWS that a reader can comfortably draw on this deck without needing to go look it up. I think this version also gives a good illustration of that symbiosis between the lion and Mother Nature (or Virgo, or Demeter, etc.). She is in control of him, but clearly it is a loving control and not violent dominance.
There’s an internet joke that this card depicts trying to get a cat to swallow a pill. Having several small “lions” ion my household, I can attest that is not far from reality. But let’s consider that. We want our pets, our friends, to be healthy, so we want them to take their medication. They do not want to because it’s not natural for them to do so. Cat’s don’t take pills. Cats, in fact, are canny enough to act like they swallowed the pill, hide it in their mouth, and wait until you are not watching to spit it out. I have seen them do this.
So how do we make the cat take the pill? As gently, but as forcefully as we can. Because we want them to get better. This is what the figure of Strength is doing here. She is gently pushing the lion’s mouth shut. She has even wrapped her sash around him to make him feel like family. Because he his family. He is part of that nature that she represents. Yet she has to get him under control.
He has to swallow the pill.
Some darker variations on the theme. On the left is the Strength Card from the Dungeons and Dragons Tarot, which is a very recent acquisition (January), which casts Strength solely in terms of violence. I am not so sure I like this approach, but the deck is both visually interesting and brave in taking on traditional Tarot conventions. This iconoclasm is more obvious with the suits, which are shifted more to sync with game play than occult practice, but some of the Major Arcana deviate significantly,
Speaking of deviance, the Deviant Moon Tarot (which I’ve had for about a decade now) seems to be a favorite of witches, at least the one’s I know. It is very dark, situated in an odd twilit world that evokes to me Carnival in Venice, and the intrigues of the Renaissance courts. In this interpretation the “lion” has become a kind of wyvern, serpent, or possibly an eel. The contest between the figure of strength – something like a circus strongman, and the creature connects back to the images of Hercules and the Nemean lion on some Renaissance decks. Curiously, the Deviant Moon is one of those decks that number this as XI, and have it between the Wheel of Fortune and the Hanged Man
There’s a message here. While we tend to see the two figures as separate and distinct, they are inexorably connected. The natural behavior of the lion is “what nature intended” yet nature, in the guise of the woman, is overriding that. This card is about the mastery of our own passions, the domination of the fiery side of our nature, which is quick to anger, quick to hurt, and hard to tame.
Yet in taming it, we become more able to function, with our family, friends, co-workers, and society in general.
We also need to swallow the pill.
This is not to say that we can deny that nature. If we do that, it is cruel and harmful to us as well. In that fire is our passion and drive as much as our anger and hate. But we need to know that the anger and hate are always there, and always ready to pounce. All it takes is for our strength to fail.
The lions hunt the weak because they are the easiest to bring down. They will avoid a strong opponent, because they know they can be defeated. This is their nature. It is up to the individual to retain that resolve, so that the more negative aspects of the inner fire do not overwhelm and devour us.
There’s an interesting link to the context that this card is sometimes exchanged with Justice in several decks. Justice is about enforcing the balance, to insure that order is maintained for the good of all. Strength is about maintaining an inner balance, so that we do not do harm to ourselves or others.
I’d mention also that this the first card since the Fool that doesn’t seem to be interested in us. That is, if we look at the images of the Magician, Priestess, Empress, Emperor, Hierophant, Lovers, and Chariot, they are are all looking right at the viewer. They are engaging us as entities. With Strength, we return, briefly, to being outside the action. We are seeing a drama upon a stage, one that we are familiar with, to be sure, but not one that involves us.
I take from this that we are dealing with undercurrents and unconscious tendencies. Certainly the battle with the beast is one that happens within, and in many cases at a level beneath or beyond that of ordinary rational thought and analysis. While the Fool’s detachment speaks of a cosmic unconscious, a Universe yet to know Itself, Strength is working internally within our own hearts and minds. We have in passing through all the confrontational faces on the cards between, come into an awareness of self, and now we hear the stirrings on the forgotten or suppressed parts of that self. The mountain in the background bears a similarity to the one at the center of the Lovers card. We have left the garden.
To end on a less dire note, I offer two more pleasant versions. The left side is the Robin Wood Tarot, by the late fantasy illustrator whose name it bears. In this one, both the woman and the lion appear to be smiling, The creature is tamed because it wants to be, and because it acknowledges the internal strength of the woman. There is no need to force on her part, as this is simply the order of things.
The righthand card is from one of the numerous “Celtic” Tarot. This one is created by the artist Courtney Davis with accompanying text by Helena Paterson. I bought it because it reminds me of the Book of Kells and other illuminated manuscripts in that style. It is very faithful to the RWS iconography otherwise, so it makes a good second deck if you’re into the Celtic type of artwork.
There’s not much else to say about this card. I have to say that in many years of reading it doesn’t seem to show up often for me, though that’s statistically aberrant. I take no secret meaning from that, I only make the observation. It tends to be a one-note type of message usually, so I have striven to use it’s imagery to take us a bit deeper. My efforts here are not meant to change the traditional reading of the card. My approach, after all these years, is to read each card like it’s an ink blot in a Rorschach test. What do I see, and what do I think when I see it. The inherent meanings will always be integrated in that, because like almost everyone else who reads Tarot, I started by memorizing (more or less) those meanings. As with my previous ramblings, you are free to take or leave them. My intention is that you begin to look for your own inroads to these images, and the myriad variations that are out there.
Next week I will be dealing with the Hermit. If you are long time reader, you may assume that my previous several articles mentioning this character has exhausted my perspective on it. I hope you will join me to see whether or not that is the case. Thank you for taking the time to read this week’s offering.
This week brings us to the card numbered VII, in the eight position in the deck, the Chariot. Happily this image seems to be as overtly pagan as it’s immediate predecessor is Judaic in iconography. The card is literally dripping with esoteric symbols which can lead us down any number of rabbit holes in interpretation.
The eighth card in the deck, with the designation VII.
The card depicts an armored figure in a canopied chariot, apparently pulled by a black and a white sphinx. The figure has a crown and scepter. The crown is topped with an eight-pointed star. The canopy above his head is blue with five, six, and eight pointed stars on it. Beneath the crown he wears the laurel of victory. The pauldrons (shoulder plates) on his armor are lunar faces, his vambraces (lower arms) look like the shells of a marine creature. On his breastplate is a white square. He wears a belt with numerous symbols engraved on it, and his tasset (kilt) is likewise covered with symbols or glyphs. On the front of the chariot is a winged disk, overtopping a shield with a spindle or top. Two yellow or gold wheels are at the side. Behind the chariot is a river or moat, and behind that a stand of trees, behind which is a walled city. The sky here is yellow.
The conventional read on this card is triumph or victory, and control. This meaning is echoed in the Minor Arcana six of wands, just as the Lovers may be echoed by the two of cups. In these instances, I often read the minors as involving real world occurrences, such as winning a legal suit, or passing a test, or in the literal sense, victory in battle. The Major Arcana I tend to regard as symbolic of the grander cosmic forces that pervade the universe, whose influences are far more subtle and long reaching. And for the Chariot, I divine Cosmic Force itself.
Let me explore that a bit. Gravity is a force. Electromagnetism is a force. There are strong and weak nuclear forces that bind together the tiniest of things, just as the other forces bind together the massive and cosmic. Gravity either shapes space and time, or is the consequence of that shape. These forces are the wheels upon which the whole of existence turns. So in the Chariot I find some parallels to read it in terms of “Force of Nature” rather than simple personal victory in conflict.
It is true that the Chariot is an engine of war. It is among the first, if not the first. In its day it was the equivalent of a fighter jet, and as such, equally had no other use. These were multi-terrain high speed weapons platforms. They had no seats, no place to carry cargo. Their payload was a driver and possibly an archer or lancer. On the battlefield they were a terror, but they tended to fall out of use towards the middle of Roman empire. Mounted cavalry was typically more mobile, particularly away from roads and open planes, and warfare had moved to a paradigm of siege and counter-siege.
Ironically the man in the Chariot stands before the very thing that contributed to the end of chariot warfare, the walled city. Castles, fortifications, and barriers such as moats and trenches meant that troops primarily clashed face to face after a long series of bombardments from a distance had destroyed both defenses and the resolve of the defenders. The Chariot visually represents an anachronism. Its military value is minimal in the environs it occupies, therefore it may only be viewed as symbolic. It is an emblem of victory, of dominion, rather than the thing itself.
When I look at this card I am always reminded of the Fortune Teller Booth so prevalent in old arcades and carnivals. The man is inside a box with the roof. He looks suitably exotic, but if we observe closely he’s not whole. His body ends on top if the box. His hand rests upon it. There is no interior where a person stands, this is all for show, all to entice us to believe in the promise and wonder it appears to represent. This chariot in fact, looks to me like a block of stone, on top of which a mannequin of the rider has been bolted. And, in fact, the wheels don’t really touch the ground (see image below), so what are we to make of that? The sphinxes are not engaged in pulling the Chariot forward either, so that just adds to the idea that this is some sort of display rather than a working mechanism. Perhaps the Unstoppable Force is actually the Immovable Object?
i’ve always sort of suspected that there was something wrong with the wheels. As an artist and graphics designer for around 40 years, I have developed an intuitive sense of space and shape so when I look at something and feel it’s a bit off, I trust that. But before I went and based an entire article on it, I had to be sure, so I did a screen grab of the Chariot card, and dropped it into Adobe Illustrator.
I positioned a guide line in the center of the wheel hubs. (That’s the light blue line running across just over the sphinxes brows). I created a rectangle that ran from that line up to the top of the wheel. I then copied that rectangle and moved it below the line, and then slid it over to where the bottom of the Chariot is visible between the sphinxes. As you can see, the rectangle, which represents accurately the size of the bottom half of the wheel, is not long enough to reach below the bottom of the car. At best, this Chariot is going to be dragging.
This may have been an accidental consequence of covering up the wheels with the sphinxes. On the earlier Marseille Tarot the wheels are shown jutting out to the sides, rather than frontal. That Chariot also would not move in that configuration, though I think that is more a medieval convention to show them as wheels, much like the shedu of Babylon have five legs, if viewed from a particular point.
It should not be surprising that we are confronted with this contradiction in yet another Tarot trump. The presence of the black and white and male and female sphinxes inform us that we are again needing to think in terms of the Doctrine of Opposite Extremes. They share the same esoteric DNA as the Lovers and the captive souls on XV, and they embody the two pillars of the Priestess. We are dealing again with that which is fixed and that which is changeable, and the Chariot sits between them – both an Unstoppable Force and an Immovable Object.
It is that dominion over the opposing factors that is invested in the person of the charioteer. Yet the card is not named the Charioteer. The person who is in that position is immaterial. They could be anyone. Waite’s description references a “king” and a “princely figure” but goes on to describe the rider as one not hereditarily royal and not part of the priesthood. His interpretation paints the occupant of the Chariot as one who achieves by conquest – Julius Caesar not Augustus. and further confines him to an almost sterile intellectualism. He cannot, according to Waite, understand the spiritual or sacred within himself, nor leap beyond the purely rational view of the world.
But a Chariot with wheels that don’t touch the ground is itself irrational. We may suppose that this is an artistic mistake (though an unlikely one) and the hidden bottom half of the wheels should be correct. We don’t know the timetable Smith was operating within, and some cards may have been executed under tighter deadlines. But the fact is that they don’t touch the ground, making the Chariot a rather elaborate Kiosk. Whether this was intentional or not it gives the reader a means to access that other part of the image, that which flows from our imagination and speculation, and gives us the electricity of insight when the card is dropped between others that do not make rational sense.
I mentioned earlier cosmic forces like gravity and electromagnetism as being connected with the Chariot. Consider that the effect of gravity does not have to move. It is everywhere and always, and yet still exerts itself in the same fashion. By this means we can begin to comprehend how the Chariot can represent force and energy, while at the same time, being fixed in its place. If its place is everywhere, then it doesn’t matter where the center is. The center is, in fact, everywhere and no where. Like the spinning top on the shield in the center of the cart, it moves within its own defined perspectives. The edges go round and round and round, even if the spindle is in a different place.
We can apply this idea to the dominion over forces in a much broader sense than Waite has. The Chariot can represent that Nothing that is Everything that is a feature of some Buddhist thinking, The Chariot establishes it’s own frame of reference, and imposes that frame of reference on what it comes into contact with. Looking at it from outside that frame of reference results in an incomplete, or skewed vision of what the thing actually is.
This obsidian merkaba object is related to the Chariot, perhaps in name only. Yet it’s unusual shape and multiple faces are perhaps indicative of the enigma of the Chariot’s nature to be form and change simultaneously.
The shiny blackness of the stone makes photographing the object effectively difficult, so demonstrating its odd character in two-dimensions may be a futile attempt. I encourage you to look for these at your favorite stone or crystal shop. They seem to be becoming more prevalent.
It’s intriguing that the shape of the merkaba is frequently associated with the Chariot. A merkaba, as I have discussed earlier, is a three-dimensional representation of the two joined triangles of the hexagram. It consists of two pyramid objects – each pyramid having four three sided faces, that are merged into each other such that the points of each pyramid pierce the sides of the other. Drawing it in two dimensions is generally easy, but it’s difficult to conceptualize how that translates into actual space. I recently obtained one in my favorite black Mayan obsidian to better understand how something so theoretically simple can yield such a complex object.
If one turns the merkaba this way and that, the external shape changes. The outline remains a six pointed star, but the surfaces presented to the viewer are very different. Merkaba is supposed to derive from ancient Egyptian or Hebrew for Chariot, and this fascinating little shape with its many changing surfaces could certainly remind one of a tumbling or turning wheel. Perhaps it brought to mind the actions of the chariots as they wheeled and spun on the field of battle. But this is a good way of expressing my statement about the Chariot being a thing unto itself, defining it’s space and dimension in it’s own way, fluidly, depending upon where the observer encounters it.
This is the principle that Einstein called relativity, and that later was elaborated on to give us a quantum universe where the actual nature of things is entirely dependent upon when and how they are observed. In the quantum universe a thing is only what it is, once what it might be becomes fixed by the act of observing or recording it. We are again dealing with That Which is Fixed, and That Which is Changeable. The Chariot can be both a thing that moves forward constantly and a thing that doesn’t move at all. It truly depends on where we see it from.
If quantum mechanics is not your bag, I fully understand. It sounds far more like magic than it does science, and frankly I think it’s on the path to where it intersects with magic and we can finally get substantive things done without arguing over definitions. It’s not about how it works, because it works. The scribbled glyphs in a grimoire differ very little in appearance from the complex calculus of a physics equation, and to the outsider both are equally arcane and inscrutable.
Such glyphs are incorporated into the armor of the charioteer. The scribbles might easily have been added for texture, like the various glued-one model bits that adorn a science-fiction spacecraft. But if you look closely, these are known magical and alchemical symbols. I do not say that they give us the secret to the Philosopher’s Stone, but that their intentionally being included is to remind us that such formulae are part of our approach to the dominion over the forces of the cosmos. The armor of the charioteer is full of symbolism, but it is a surface only. The method and the means are not the meat.
Waite’s description in his very thin little booklet describes a character that is different from what Pamela Colman Smith has executed. It is likely he worked this from his notes or notes given to her that didn’t find full fruition, but the lunar symbols on his shoulders were, according to Waite, meant to be Odin’s ravens, or rather the Thought and Memory they symbolize. His scepter was meant to be a drawn sword, making the whole more martial, and possibly more active than this rather sedate hero is his box with the resting sphinxes.
Three Chariots by the same hand but with different intents. These are all by Italian artist and illustrator Fabio Listrani. The center one is his Night Sun Tarot, which I have had for many years. The left and right cards are the Goetia and Notoria Tarot, which are based upon the demons and angels listed in the Keys of Solomon, a Medieval grimoire for summoning such beings.
These latter decks although beautifully drawn from Fabio’s imagination, are bound by very strict adherence to the Kabbala and the hierarchies of demons and angels described in that manual. They include the seal of each being, the Kabbalistic number associated with it, it’s name, the Tarot number and name so that the deck may be used in the traditional sense, and then planetary and elemental signs, as well as an associated minor arcana card.
Keeping with tradition, the demon is on the left and the angel on the right. Note that they share the same element and minor card. In magical work they would be considered to naturally oppose one another.
Bear in mind that in addition to the use of these cards for divination, folk spell craft, and the complex Solomonic magic here, the Italian publisher Lo Scarabeo is also printing these exquistie decks for people who still simply play tarocchi with them.
It’s impossible to really know the dynamic between illustrator and author on these cards. Since the art has been the de-facto imagery, at least in the West, for Tarot for almost a century, comparison to what appears to be a pamphlet of text will always seem a bit inadequate. More has been written by many hands interpreting the images than analyzing Waite’s text. His Pictorial Key is written in that typical Victorian method of critical dismissal, where he spends more time discrediting or disallowing, the theories of his predecessors than to establish a legitimate basis for his own theories. I hope that I am not doing that, but it becomes inevitable if one is working on anything other than a parroting of previous interpretations.
I have tried to focus on my own impressions of the cards, drawn from my reactions to their visual content over fifty years of working with them. Of course, that reaction changes with my own age and experience, exposure to the ideas and theories of others, and the awareness of interpretations of the ideas and the artwork by the hands of other artists, sometimes including myself. In doing that, one can run afoul of the tendency to gainsay what other sources may have held. I hope that my approach has been fair, and used these sources as a comparison against which my own view may be measured, rather than as an outright disagreement.
Well, in some cases I do disagree. It is up to the individual reader to make of this what they will. If you find my observations have merit, then by all means employ them. I am not charging a royalty. On the other hand, if you find them of no value at all, there is nothing I can do to force you to use them. Unfortunately, I can’t give you back the time you spent reading this article, so I hope you find at least some value in it.
I will return next week with Card VIII, which in the RWS is Strength. Other decks have this card as Justice, and depending on which deck they switch between VIII and XI. As we have been using the RWS artwork as the basis for our little esoteric safari, we’ll preserve that order. I hope you will join me next week. Thank you again for your continued support.
The card called the Lovers is another one very problematic in terms of the imagery used in the RWS deck. The elder versions of this card depict three persons at the bottom, and the demi-god Cupid or Eros overhead with his bow. Much speculation has been made about the identity of the people on this version of the card, but from my view it tends to suggest a young man and woman being married. The other figure is probably his mother, who up to that point has been the “woman in his life”. Cupid/Eros, of course, is interested in the conjugal love, rather than the familial or maternal sort, and the arrow pointed between the pair that appear to be getting betrothed argues for that. So the Lovers is a fair name for the card as it was drawn up to the end of the 19th century, with the Marriage being a close runner-up.
There seems little logic then, in dumping this traditional structure for a wholly Judeo-Christian depiction straight out of the Book of Genesis, but that is what Waite apparently commissioned. The card number VI has only three figures, a female and male, both nude, and a flaming haired angel appearing out of a cloud above them. These figures are unquestionably Eve and Adam, for they stand in front of two trees. Eve is before a fruit tree with a green snake wrapped around it. This is undoubtedly the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the Biblical downfall of Man, tempted by Woman, who was tempted by the Serpent to eat of the tree. Behind Adam is a tree with flames instead of leaves. This is identified by Waite in his Pictorial Key to the Tarot as the Tree of Life, but it’s a clear reference to the Burning Bush of Exodus. Between the two, and below the angel, is a single pointed mountain. Above and behind the angel is a yellow radiance. Below the angel is a simple blue sky.
Like the Hierophant card that proceeds it, my initial reaction to this Biblical imagery was negative. Here again my inclination to reject the Christian world that I had been born into (for multiple reasons not entirely related to magic or the occult) made me feel like the Tarot cards that I had been fascinated by in textbook descriptions were somehow subverted back toward a Christian idea.
Earlier versions of the Lovers or Marriage card are very different from the RWS. The Sforza on the left is clearly depicting “Blind Love” between a couple. Later, a third figure was added, like that shown in the Tarot de Marseille at right. Various authors differ on the identity of the second woman. Some say she represents the mother of one of the others giving blessing to the union, The are others who suggest these two represent a chaste and pure virgin, versus a cortesan or woman of ill repute, allegorically showing a choice between virtue and vice. Still others say the figure on the left is an official or priest, performing a wedding ceremony. Waite tossed all of them out in favor of casting this card in a Protestant light.
I cannot say that this is not absolutely true at least in the mind of Arthur Waite, and many of his contemporaries, who were possibly trying to meld together their monotheism with pagan magic rites. While it’s clear that some of those involved in the magic lodges of the Victorian era and their 20th centuries inheritors were bored elites looking for sensation, a good number of them never really wanted to reject the “respectable C of E” religion.
And again, because Pamela Smith’s art is so ubiquitous, we are all of us still carrying the images around, even in many of the revisions and re-imaginings of modern Tarot, because this version has had such an impact on the 20th century occult in the West.
The Golden Dawn and other influencers on Waite were romanticists. That is, they tended to think in idealistic or utopian terms rather than the crude, and sometimes cruel realities of the time. Their motivations were informed by the ancient philosophers, seeking truth and beauty, and deifying these ideas separately from how they exist (or don’t exist) in the mundane world.
So the rather direct depiction of love and lovers in the physical carnal sense, was less than satisfactory. While certainly most of these folk were frequently involved in such sensual pursuits, many quite outside the socially accepted norms of the day, they made a public face of a much loftier ideal and that is what we find on the seventh card of the Major Arcana.
Titian’s masterpiece has been a source of controversy since it was painted. It was first supposed that this was a marriage portrait, similar to that of the Arnolfini painting by Jan Van Eyck I discussed in an earlier article. However, it shows two women, or rather, what appears to be the same women in a clothed and unclothed state. The only thing that relates this to a wedding is the inclusion of the coat of arms of the groom on the fountain relief.
That the painting is allegorical is unquestionable. What exactly the allegory is supposed to be is up to interpretation. Over the years it has come to be called “Sacred and Profane Love”. When I was a student the sacred one was on the right, because the one fully dressed may be considered to be “of the material world” and thus “profane” in the older sense of the word.
It may be helpful at this point to examine a painting by Titian usually titled “Sacred and Profane Love”. This painting itself has invited much controversy in the art historical circles, and presents us with a similar conundrum as the Smith version of the Lovers. Yet if we examine its symbolism, we may find some keys to unlock the Biblical facade of the Lovers card.
When I was in art history class, some many years ago, the conventional attribution of “sacred love” was actually the nude figure, and not the severely overdressed one. Conventions are now reversed, but I never pay much attention to trends, and still tend to think of it that way. I have some sound reasoning for that.
There’s a confusion in our modern language because we have come to use the term “profane” in the sense of “profanity”. In our post-Puritanical society profanity is in the same category with smut and pornography, and of course, “nekkid people” are associated with carnal desires.
Profane, originally, was only meant as the opposite of sacred. Sacred derives from old Latin and means basically “Holy”. Ergo, whatever was not holy, was, by extension, profane. It had nothing to do with the particular state of dress, it had to do with a state of being.
There are variant descriptions of Titian’s painting as Earthly and Heavenly Love, or as the Earthly and Heavenly Venus, and this may clear it up a little for people struggling with the changes in the language. The nude is the rarified pure spirit, with none of the trappings we attach to bring it down to earth. While it may represent a carnal satisfaction, it also symbolizes that expansion of mind and being that results from the merging of two souls.
The Earthly Venus has her charms, and these are of course symbolized by her fancy robes and complicated hairstyle and rich jewels. These are the things of the mundane, however. They shift with fashion, whim, and time, whereas the Heavenly Sacred Love is immortal, untouched and timeless.
Images from a recent acquisition. This is the Lovers card from the Vice Versa Tarot by Massimiliano Filadoro. The back of each card gives us the view from behind, which is often intriguing. It also gives us a new perspective on the idea of reversed readings. I have only had this deck for a few days, so I am still working out the ideas on how to read with it. I will say that it reinvigorates the thinking.
It is this notion of Sacred Love which later generations have tried to apply to Waite’s ham-handed vision of Eden. This is Man and Woman, before the Fall, perfect, immortal, without sin or the knowledge of sin, and therefore without the need for carnal connection, long identified in Puritanical teaching as the “original sin”. The angel between them can be seen as symbolic of this perfected state of innocence, a bliss that requires no physicality, but is that highest form of love.
But, well, I think there may be a worm or two in that apple.
The Genesis story is one of those things that started to break any bond I might have formed with the Christian faith at an early age. The presence here of the Serpent in the tree shows us that the Fall (per the Bible) is imminent. It is inevitable. It is all part of the Divine Plan, after all, that an all-seeing and all-knowing being saw and knew about before any of it happened but it was allowed to happen anyway because that was the Divine Plan.
Honestly I have a much easier time reconciling Shroedinger’s cat than I do the sales pitch for these religions.
“Look, Adam, Eve, here’s this absolutely beautiful Garden I made for you. You have total control over everything in it. And you can eat everything, except for the fruit on this tree.”
“Why?”
“Because you can’t.”
“Why?”
“Look, I know you are going to eat the fruit, but don’t eat the fruit.”
“Why?”
“Because there’s this skeezy dude who is going to come around later and tell you to eat the fruit, and I know you’re going to eat the fruit, but don’t eat the fruit.”
“Why?”
“JUST DON”T EAT THE FRUIT ( even though I know you’re gonna) DON’T EAT IT!”
And then the next day:
“YOU ATE THE FRUIT! I mean, I knew – I KNEW – you were gonna eat the fruit, but you actually ate the fruit! I am so disappointed and angry and so now you have to leave the Garden and spend your days in war and pestilence and famine and death.”
“Why?”
“Divine Plan!”
This is essentially what Waite tells us this card means in his Pictorial Guide to the Tarot. The Lovers, in his “remediation” is symbolic of the Lord God Jehovah allowing (if not causing) the Fall, so that eons later mankind can be redeemed by the Messiah,
So Lovers may be more accurately rendered Love, and by that the love of the deity toward “his” creation, which manifests itself as predestined suffering and torment.
But Lovers was kept because only through that perfect love of the deity, could humanity transcend the carnal sin inherent in sexual relationships that they were going to get into in order to “be fruitful and multiply” as that deity keeps telling them to do (usually after destroying vast swathes of humanity in a fit of pique).
Even at age seven I saw the holes in that, although I can’t say as I fully articulated the whole divine love thing (and had not even a vague notion of carnal sin). So I tried to find other ways to interpret this card.
The Devil may be truly in the details in this card. Tarot books often speculate that the similarities between the two are because the Devil is mocking the purity of the Holy Union on the Lovers card. The fact is, though, that the Devil card’s design predates the one on the Lovers, so it’s more accurate to say that the Lovers are mocking the Devil. This is more in line with Waite’s pseudo-Christian rationale for the the cards.
A lot of the Major Arcana (and some of the Minors) have a capacity to be overlapped. The relationship between the Lovers and the Devil is fairly obvious, but the positioning of the humans (assuming the people on XV are fallen humans) can also be overlain with the Pillars which the Priestess sits between. This again gives us the doctrine of opposite points, with a mediator or medium between, which leads us to a more complex view of the whole.
Here we can connect up Eve and the Tree of Knowledge with Boaz, which we’ve rendered as “that which is mutable”. Adam and the Tree of Life comes under the dominion of Jachin or “that which is established”. This gives us the opportunity to look at the central portion of the card as a portal.
This is the largest part of the image anyway and it’s dominated by the figure of the Angel. In fact, there’s an axis defined through the Angel from the peak of the mountain, through to the center of the radiance above it’s head. The Angel holds a hand over either figure, partaking of both natures. The dual colors used in the hair of the Angel reflect the green of the Tree of Knowledge and the flaming orange of the Tree of Life. The Angel is our pathway between the mundane world (even if it’s Eden) and that’s which is beyond.
If you’re searching for a non-Judaic rendition there are a number of modern decks that offer alternatives to the RWS image. Clockwise from top left:
The Druid Craft Tarot by Phillip Carr-Gorm and illustrated by Will Worthington offer us a pagan variant that celebrates the human experience. The spirit is there, still, in the form of the doe and the Green Man.
The Journey Into Egypt Tarot by Julie Cuccia-Watts depicts the love of Isis for the Dead Osiris. While embracing the Egyptian myth, it manages to incorporate many of the elements of Pixie Smith’s version, and presents us with another layer of mysteries to explore.
The Hermetic Tarot by Godfrey Dowson is based on the teachings of the Order of the Golden Dawn. It is not, however, the Golden Dawn Tarot. In this rendition the serpent story is remade as that of Perseus rescuing Andromeda.
The Modern SpellCasters Tarot by Melanie Marquis with art by Scott Murphy offers something more along the lines of a modern pagan hand-fasting. The references from Genesis have completely disappeared and in their place is symbolism and paraphernalia from Wicca or a similar practice.
The layout here is similar to many depictions in alchemical texts of the “Chymical Wedding”. This Hermetic rebus is supposed to provide the adept with multiple formulae for creating the Elixir of Life and/or Philosopher’s stone. The allegories typically include hermaphrodites, or merged male/female figures, often connected with the sun and moon. Numerous other symbols adorn the landscapes they inhabit. All of these form a secret code known to students of alchemy.
This card then can give us an insight into transcendence and infinity, not through a Judeo-Christian “Divine Plan” but through our own transmutation, Love, both spiritual and corporeal, is a key to our self-awareness. We are spirits in a physical body. Denial of either nature will ultimately lead to our being “expelled from the garden”. If we limit our perspectives, we stall our spiritual growth. We are, after all, given the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
The Wizards Tarot, by Barbara Moore with images by Mieke Janssens clearly connects the figures of the Lovers with the sacred columns on either side of the High Priestess. The intriguing thing is that the two are joined on the other side of the columns, indicating that only by combining opposites can one hope to pass through.
I have always personally felt that the tale of the Fall in Genesis was an allegory of the evolution of man. While this seems fairly straightforward in today’s scientifically leaning world, consider what an idea this is in the 16th century, before Darwin.
The story says that human beings, prior to eating of the Tree of Knowledge, lived in a paradise, running naked among the other animals. When they ate the fruit of the Tree, they became aware of their nakedness and covered themselves. This is not merely an expression of late Renaissance modesty. It’s establishing why we humans feel the need to cover up, when our kin among the chimps and bonobos continue to run around in the altogether.
In reality, of course, the “nakedness” of humanity is an expression of our self-awareness. As “dumb animals” we aren’t separate from the rest of nature, but when we evolved to self-awareness, we gained the knowledge of our otherness. We divorce ourselves from that nature. We left the garden.
So in this set of images, we have reinforcement of the idea of transmutation, or evolution, or our own spiritual growth and expression. When we find it in a reading or use it in meditation or magic, these meanings can be employed to route around the overt or at least apparent, Judeo-Christian iconography that Waite “corrected” from the original images of the Middle Ages.
Once we free ourselves from these conventions, we can proceed to the rest of the Major Arcana with a wider perspective and a fresh eye. We’ll assay the Chariot next week, though the interelatedness of many of these cards means we’ll probably refer back to the Lovers again, sooner and later.
I hope you have found this exercise to be revealing. I have found this card to be difficult over the years because of it’s baggage. If you want to consider it, as many do, just on the basis of the name, it can signify romance, relationships, and sex. But it also carries a link to Gemini, and can be read with regard to contracts, mergers, and legal pleadings, as well as relationships with zero romantic or sexual aspects.
Until next week, I thank you for your continued patronage.
The sixth card which is numbered V, has one of the most overtly Christian iconographies in a set of cards that has a lot of them. This card was originally the Pope. It is named that in European decks that precede the RWS, and despite Waite’s changing the name to a more exotic Greek one, the design preserves both the traditional image, and amplifies it in that same Gothic Medieval style. The Hierophant may just as well be taken from a stained glass window in a cathedral, as it offers us little in the visual sense to merit divorcing it from its original Catholic nominative.
That image is one of the King of the Church, with his three crowns, on his throne, in full raiment, holding a triple cross in his left hand and making the sign of blessing with his right. The high-back throne is situated between two Norman style pillars on a raised dais, covered with an embroidered red carpet. Affixed to the front of the dais are a pair of crossed keys, traditional part of the Papal arms. To either side are tonsured supplicants. The one on the left wears a robe decorated with roses, the other with lilies. The dominant color on this card is grey, forming the background, the throne, and the columns. The priest of the rose has a grey robe, the one of the lily is a grey blue. Both priest have yellow vestments. The Hierophant himself is draped in red with white trim, and the bottom of his robe is blue. These are traditional colors associated with Christian depictions of Christ and the Virgin in Renaissance art.
“Ladies and gentlemen, HIs Holiness, the Pope”
When I got my Hoi Polloi Tarot in the early 1970s, I admit to feeling cheated that what I expected were going to be “occult” cards had such obvious Christian images, and this one was perhaps the most “offensive” to my young sensibilities. I was not, at this point, educated on the entanglement between magic and occult practices and the traditions of the Abrahamic religions. Now, of course, we should all be at least acquainted with the influence that monotheistic orthodoxy has had on so-called “pagan belief”.
We live in an age where the perceived taint of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is very hard to remove from our ritual and belief. Reconstruction of pagan or pre-Christian belief in the late 19th and early 20th century was hardly scientifically approached. The Victorian magic lodges were actively calling on angels and powers in the secret name of the old Hebrew sky god, and that with many of the liturgies and rituals of the Church. “Folk” pagan movements borrowed from stories that had clearly been altered by centuries of enforced Catholicism, and synthesized based on rejecting or inverting the Christian teachings.
I personally think that much of that early monotheism itself has been redacted and retro-actively continued to match more modern perspectives, as well. Certainly Judaism offers us Kabbalah and a rich magical tradition in parallel with the sacred and practical teachings of the Torah and Talmud. First century Christianity contains more things that were deemed heretical, blasphemous, and even satanic than what eventually made it into the dogma, and early Islam has a similar history of dissent, disagreement, and disinformation.
The result is that what has passed down to us today is not clear, not original, and not perhaps accurate. When we step on the path of working with the secrets of the universe, we should be aware that some of those secrets are just plain lies.
The word Hierophant per the dictionary is most generally rendered “priest of the mysteries of the religion”. He is the arbiter between the mundane world that all may observe, experience and understand, and the world of sacred and divine that only the initiated may experience. He echoes both the Priestess and The Emperor in his pose and his situation.
Whereas the Priestess offers us the means to bridge the ideation of opposites, and the Emperor forces us to encounter the “I”, the Hierophant provides specific methods of instruction. These are the keys at his feet.
In the Christian iconography, and the Papal arms, these keys are the ones given by Christ to Simon Peter that open the gates of the Kingdom of Heaven. Peter is probably not actually his name, but derives from the Greek “petra” or stone. Peter is the disciple, who despite several issues detailed in the gospels, Jesus calls the “Rock on which I will build my church”. As Peter is officially the first Pope, this description is rather fortuitous.
The keys were conferred to Peter in the same passage (Matthew 16:17 if you’re interested) along with the curious authority of being able to cause things that he bound upon the earth to be bound in heaven and that he loosed upon the earth to be loosed in heaven.
If you find yourself as put off by the depiction of a Christian pontiff as I sometimes do, there are several other decks that give us broader interpretations of the Keeper of Secrets. Clockwise from top left,
The Shadowscapes Tarot -Stephanie Law’s lyrical watercolor work presents a being related to Treebeard himself, and more at harmony with the mysteries of the natural world than a cultist in a cathedral.
The Tarot of the Hidden Realm – This deck is very Celtic/Faerie oriented and the illustration here by artist Julia Jeffrey of a personable druid is certainly more approachable.
On a different tack, Norbert Losche’s Cosmic Tarot combines what at first appear to be traditional religions with symbolism from occult and Oriental sources to hint that perhaps what is behind the temple doors is bigger than any one path.
Finally the WildWood Tarot shows us something called The Ancestor. This very Celtic/Shamanic deck presents a number of the traditional cards under new names and vastly alters their interpretation. In the shamanism of the Celts, the spirits of the ancestors have the authority to pass us through the mysteries. The artist is Will Worthington.
This sounds very much like the “As Above, So Below” of the Emerald Tablet of Hermes the Thrice Great, which may have been well known to the Greeks and Romans at the time the Book of Matthew was being compiled, possibly around 60-70 years after the events they were describing. Now that, of course, is the earliest version, and as noted above, many edits may have been made between then and later doctrines. These early Greek texts are supposedly the original source material, but given the history of religious thought that we have from modern times, it’s impossible to say with certainty that they represent an actual historical account, and have not, themselves, been “corrected” even at that early stage.
The Hermetic documents end up in Western European circles by way of Islam. These were perhaps preserved among other documents from the Library of Alexandria because they were not directly heretical to Islam whereas Christian authorities might have destroyed or suppressed them. While most public schools teach of the burning of that library by the Romans during Caesar’s time in Egypt, fewer mention that succeeding intentional purges were committed by both Christians and Moslems in later periods that resulted in many things being lost to humanity forever. Yet copies that had been made by Jews and Moslems at earlier times survived, and re-emerged as the vice grip of the Catholic church started slipping in the 15th century.
So perhaps the secrets being kept by the Hierophant are not those the Papacy and the mysteries of the Church, but of a secret Hermetic magical tradition. Perhaps Peter’s keys were an esoteric expression of the elevation of all humanity through the transformations of the Philosopher’s Stone and the Elixir of Life. The powers ascribed to these long-sought solutions are eternal health, eternal youth, and eternal life, not so far from the immortality promised in the kingdom of Heaven. Whether or not Medieval alchemy was a confusion from a Papal esotericism, or if it was the other way around, is hard to tell, but it is one way we can break ourselves from of that initial reaction that we are looking at a Catholic pontiff.
We can also disconnect the red robe from the Holy Blood and recast it as the Elixir of Life. The blue of the robes beneath the Hierophant’s mantle can connect us to the Water Element, and the distillation or “liquefaction” of the process where the elements dissolve into “water” before reforming into the Philosopher’s Stone. We can assign the tripartite crown and triple cross to Hermes Trismegestus – The Thrice Great, and the entire scene magically dissolves into a pre-Christian pagan symbol for the pursuit of the Alchemical Ideal, the Great Hidden Secret of The Universe
As Above, So Below.
This ties well into my own perspective on the first six cards of the Major Arcana, and their interrelationship. The Hierophant sits at the bottom point of the “Below” triangle. He is that reflection and manifestation of the wild naked formlessness of the Fool. The Fool is the Universe as it is, as it is Becoming. The Hierophant is the Universe as it must be masked, to prevent us from being dissolved back into it. The secrets kept are wonderful and terrible, and cannot be experienced all at once. They must be meted out, building one upon another, so that the foundation is solid and the structure sound.
The building we find the Hierophant in may appear heavy and close, but it is certainly sturdy. The Romanesque style of columns used here don’t allow for wide spans and open spaces. The churches of this period were typically lit by only a few small windows, and candles or torches. Consequently, the surface decorations in most of them were evolved from Roman mosaic, using gold or other metal foils underneath the glass of the tessare, in order to achieve a shimmering and otherworldly sensation for the viewer.
This reflected upon the emphasis that the early church put on the Inward Life- the focus of the Soul, rather than on external material comforts. While one can argue that this is an effective method of maintaining social control during the privations of the post-Imperial days of Europe, it also has a good deal in common with many of the spiritual movements that have come up recently in response to an ineffectual and worldly orthodoxy.
This card most often reminds me of the mosaic of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian from that period. The mosaic in the Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy establishes the Emperor as the central authority between the Church and the on one side and the civil and military authorities on the other. It echoes an adjacent mage where Christ is shown between the orders of the angels. This early depiction, even though Justinian is a Christian emperor with a sitting Pope, gives one an indication of the mindset of the authorities during the time of the early church. Justinian commissioned this piece around the mid 500s, or a little over 150 years after the Nicean Crede formalized Christianity in the Roman Empire.
Mosaic of Justinian in the Basilica de San Vitale – This is one of those images that either really impressed me or was just so important to get right on the art history exam that it has stuck with me for all the years since. The style that Pixie Smith uses for the Tarot, particularly the Major Arcana, always reminds me of this period. This is technically not the Middle Ages, yet, but it is a Christian Rome and clearly things are changing. The Pope had not yet risen to the prominence that he would have after the last Emperor was deposed by Aluric the Goth some three hundred years later. The “Gothic” style only differs a little from that scene here. The figures are linear, the space they inhabit is flat. Yet there are keys to understanding the rank and role of each person here, and Justinian is in the front. His smugness is evident. I see that in the Hierophant card, but maybe that’s a personal thing.
This is always one of the problems I have with the Hierophant card. While it purports to be giving us access to a secret teaching, that access involves a hierarchy (derived from the same root word) which implies that some individuals are intrinsically better than others, and that the goal of learning the secrets is to move up to the next level. The word hierarchy was originally used to denote the orders of the Angels (the Hidden Order) but was then adapted to refer to the levels of the officials of the Church (sin of pride anyone?) , before it came to mean any stratified group with upper members having authority over the lower ranks.
I have mentioned in earlier articles that I am by nature a non-joiner. There’s something ingrained in my personality that naturally rejects the idea of hierarchy. Whether the Hierophant is keeping the keys of Heaven or the secrets of the coven makes no matter to me. While I understand (and have expressed) that there may be a need to meter information in order to safeguard the person seeking it, I have that basic desire to kick open the gates.
I see a great deal of discussion in the online occult communities about the concept of the “Gatekeeper”. The term is almost universally seen as bad, generally applied to a selfish, and perhaps self-serving, individual that responds to aspirant seekers with vitriol and insult. Yet I imagine that some persons being labeled as gatekeepers are, in fact, trying to teach, and possibly to warn and protect, the neophyte who may be leaping onto the path without proper awareness of what they are doing. Some of these people are members of organized hierarchical orders, and some are wild witches. In either case, the perception of the community seems overwhelmingly negative toward anyone who might suggest that there is some need for “rules”.
Okay, so let’s talk about making cookies.
If I have never made cookies, I can just decide that cookies are made with flour and sugar and butter and milk and put them all in a big bowl and mix it up and bake it and get cookies.
That’s assuming I have a general idea that are made of flour and sugar and butter and milk and not from crushed brown chalk and library paste (I’m going for Oreos here, obviously).
One of my favorite comic strips from childhood, from a series that was far deeper than many kids and adults really perceived.
It’s important to remember that we are all born knowing nothing, and what we end up knowing is a direct consequence of what we encounter up to that point. If you’ve never tasted chicken, having someone tell you that alligator tastes like chicken is hardly useful.
The grandeur of our age is that all the information that has been collected and preserved up to this point in time is at our fingertips.
The great folly of our age is the assumption that having some small view of a tiny piece of that is sufficient to make one an authority over anyone else who may be looking at a different piece.
One cannot presume that we are even speaking the same language, let alone that we are all at the same point on the same path, and have come from the same direction. It is arrogant and cruel to judge anyone’s perspective based on our own, even if we believe we are helping that person avoid something that befell us. We should be generous when our opinion is sought, but in all cases, we should end the dialog with “that’s just my opinion”.
Of course, that is just my opinion.
Now, I think many of us will acknowledge that neither of these are going to give us tasty cookies. We are missing some fundamental understanding of how cookies are made.
Let’s take it a step further and suggest that we went and found a cook-book and took out the cookie-recipe of our choice. We sort of followed it, because we don’t really have any experience in how to measure ingredients, or prepare the pan, or check the doneness, and the cook-book assumes that we do.
Also bad cookies.
So I think most people in the room will start to see how there might be a need for the “gatekeeper” in certain circumstances. Someone to help us out getting things started and not burning our cookies, our fingers, or the house. The thing is that not everyone is particularly good at doing that, and not everyone is good at doing it for everyone who needs it. Good teachers are rare. Good teachers that can teach a variety of students are even rarer. And sadly, I think we have all of us at least once in our life experienced the “teacher” who, for whatever reason, just seemed to be focused on crushing any imagination or individual spirit the student had.
This is the reverse of the Hierophant that we encounter. It is that desire to so restrict interest and innovation to the point that it is creating mere parrots. Dogma is all that matters. There can be no questioning, that which is written is that which is written. To attempt to look beyond is forbidden. It is wrong.
Now as I equate that kind of rigid single-mindedness with the orthodoxy of established mainstream religions, the blatant imagery here of a Medieval Catholic Pope has always caused a bit of a twinge when reading with the RWS deck. I find that I have to consciously do a bit of mental alchemy to see that person as anything other than restrictive and oppressive, and I think that basic rebellion impacts the intuitiveness of any reading.
If I read based on my impressions, and the impression is off-putting, well, even if I tell myself “no…this means something else” I’m going to feel something is off. As readers we need to be aware of our bias when approaching the cards. I have my favorites (as you may have noticed) and I have those I would rather just not look at. And that will color how my senses respond to the cards as they are drawn.
In later years I’ve gotten a bit better at perhaps internally flashing a friendlier figure from one of my other decks that is not so overtly Judeo-Christian in many of the designs. But again, this deck is almost the de-facto Tarot for most people starting out, and it doesn’t divert from other older decks in this issue anyway. You have to go to decks from the later half of the 20th century to start seeing a visual expression that substantially deviates from this. Fortunately, there are a lot of them.
Next week I will endeavor to perform a similar exorcism with the seventh card, the Lovers, which rides straight at us out of the Book of Genesis, with only a minor detour through secular humanism and maybe a touch of Pre-Raphaelite romanticism. I hope you are finding these deep dives into the cards useful, or at least, stimulating to your own thoughts on the subject. Please join me again next week.
As last week was a card I associate with Venus, it is logical that this week we explore a card that is certainly the embodiment of Mars. The Emperor, as nominally the mate of the Empress, should occupy the role traditionally ascribed in the Venus-Mars relationship. Again we are tied to antiquated gender dynamics, but again, we are free to turn them on their head, or ignore them completely, if we choose. But because the cards carry this baggage, it is instructive to remember it may be used as tool to interpreting them in context.
The card as imagined by Pamela Colman Smith shows us an armored bearded man sitting on a carved stone throne. The throne and his mantle are decorated with ram’s heads, connecting us to the symbol for Aries, who is the Greek Mars. In his right hand he holds a scepter that is similar to the Venus symbol (we’ll return to this later) and in his left an orb. These traditional Medieval symbols of royal power are affirmed by the Imperial crown he wears. His garb is red. The sky behind him, unique in the entire Tarot deck, is a fiery orange. The landscape is a sere mountainous desert, with only the hint of a stream running through at the base of those mountains. Nothing grows along it’s banks, indicating that the land itself is barren.
In this card we find a full on commitment to a kind of Medieval Gothic iconography that dominates the rest of the deck. It’s a reductive style, almost architectural in many ways, particularly when used for the Trumps of the deck, who have little motion in them. Yet it gives us an insight into the mindset of the person who commissioned them, if not the artist.
The figure of the Emperor is confrontational. His throne echoes the perch of the Priestess between the two columns. Rather than promising a gateway, he seems determined to block our path and require us to acknowledge him. His expression, might at best be considered dour, but often it seems as angry as the red sky behind him. He seems frozen in this pose, a perfect rendition of a Gothic decoration, down to the clunky arrangement of his armored feet. He might as well be a funeral brass as a person.
As the Empress is the mirrored manifestation of the Magician’s desire for structure and form, the Emperor offers a dry rigidity to the fluid mysteries of the Priestess. She is the Balance between Opposites, the bridge to contemplation of the depths of Sea of Darkness. He is the Monolith that marks the border to the Wasteland. Both of these figures lie between us and extremes that without mediation (and meditation) would destroy us utterly. So even though the Emperor appears to offer nothing but rage and rigidity, we can still be instructed here.
I don’t care for this card much myself, because it always feels like woe and misery. Most of the traditional readings of the card make it almost a symbol of hypermasculinity. In an age where “hexing the patriarchy” is in vogue, it’s easy to regard this card as representative of the tired old men too long in charge of things. That’s a perfectly fair interpretation, and one frequently associated with the Emperor reversed in earlier times. I do feel it presages conflict, if not outright war. It is so Aries/Mars intensive as to be emblematic for toxic masculinity.
We could easily replace his Medieval accoutrements with a beer and a hotdog, and he’d look at home cheering on his favorite sports team. He strikes me as an armchair quarterback, or the armchair general, sending out other people to die on his behalf. This would have been the role of the Emperor in elder days. It is believed that the card character was meant to be Charlemagne, who certainly was responsible for significant bloodshed on his way to becoming “Charles the Great”.
The Emperor is an autocrat. He is a dictator. This we can see from the great stone chair he sits upon. It is designed to be unchangeable with the ages. It is a monument to the war gods. Even though he garbs himself in the royal robe, underneath he still wears his armor. This may indicate subterfuge and hidden aggression when it turns up in a reading. Certainly the presence of this card adds a layer of severity or restrictiveness to the meanings of the cards around it.
I went perusing my decks to find alternative views of the Emperor that still carried enough of the vocabulary of images without being a direct copy. This one in the Golden Tarot of Gustav Klimt offers a perhaps more human version of the figure, though it potentially seems that way when juxtaposed against the abstract patterns around it. This, of course, was a hallmark of Klimt’s art, and I think that the artist A. A. Atanassov has captured it very well. I have seen a number of “artist-style” decks deriving from the works of popular masters, but this is the only one I have ever purchased, as it comes closest to the proper homage and undertsanding of Klimt’s work, and also of the Tarot itself. Both elements are necessary for a successful variant deck.
The mountains and the desert are gone, replace by abstract borders that might suggest windblown wastes. The triangles of the Emperor’s kilt against the orange background echo those mountains against the fiery sky. While the figure no longer stares straight at us, there is still a suggestion that he is blocking a doorway. The curious orb design is mirrored on the Empress card of this deck, and essentially uses the human form as a stand-in for a cross or crucifix.
There is guilding on the card that does not reproduce in the scan. It adds a glimmer to all the cards in the deck, and makes them more visually interesting. Klimt used gold leaf on many of his paintings and then painted over it, mimicking the methods of a Medieval illuminator.
In the role of rigidity or restriction, there is perhaps another message to be found. It is this card which firmly declares that the style inspiring Smith with this deck is that of the Gothic or Medieval manuscript. The figures, to this point, might be construed as coming out a more romantic interpretation of that period, similar to that pursued by the Pre-Raphaelites. Certainly there is something of a romantic air about them, but that they are truly Medieval comes out strongly in this fifth card. And it is that Medievalism that we must consider in looking at the iconography of many of the coming cards. It is that period which precedes the Reformation, with a single Christian church dominant, that informs much of the imagery in the rest of the Major Arcana. And that itself is ironic, in that the invention of the cards seems to come from a secular humanist Renaissance.
It is thus a conundrum, if not a contradiction, as to why Smith and Waite chose to make some many of the cards even more Christian than they were traditionally. And at the same time, they plant classical and oriental paganism inside them. It’s possible that Smith, working from a simple brief, let her imagination roam, once the general style was established. Waite clearly was influenced by Levi and the Golden Dawn, and these sources are closet Christian in many aspects, or at best quasi-mystic Judeo-Christian. The dichotomy between maintaining that link to a Kabbalist, Gnostic, or esoteric Christianity, while at the same time trying to divorce from it’s symbols, is why many of the crosses are not crucifixes, and have been altered, to push back against an orthodox Christian theme.
Let us return to the example of the Emperor’s scepter. A scepter is an ancient symbol of royal authority. It is essentially a stylized stand in for the mace or war-club of the old tribal chieftains. As the “rod of rulership” it is metaphor for the potentates ability to physically punish those who disobey him. In Roman iconography this is part of the fasces, an axe – representing the right of the state to execute its enemies, tied inside a bundle of rods – representing the right of the state to beat transgressors. It evolves into the royal scepter as Rome evolves in the Holy Roman Empire. In the Visconti Sforza deck the Emperor carries a simple golden rod, much like that born by the Magician, and in his other hand the Orb. In the Marseilles decks that intercede between that and the modern Tarot, the orb and scepter are combined (as they are in many post-Renaissance regalia) exemplified by a rod with an orb, jewel, or other more or less round object on top. These are sometimes styled maces rather than scepters, harkening back to their origins in battle gear.
Going further in search of a different Emperor, I selected this one from the Mary-El Tarot. The Mary-El is one of the strangest and most unique decks I own. It came to me by way of serendipity, and continues to excite and inspire my exploration.
As you can see the card disposes of all the structures of preceding and traditional decks and gives us a space that is both intimate and intimidating. The artist Marie White took 11 years to create. They employ styles and motifs from many world cultures and historical periods. This one, for example, seems to portray an ancient Asian monarch. His various accoutrements however, range in style from 17th century Europe to 20th century Art Deco.
The scepter and orb are gone, replaced by this strange sword, whose scabbard is decorated with the ichthus fish of early Roman Christians. He bears magical sigils on his hand, including the pentagram, and his crown is festooned with dragonflies that would be the envy of a Tiffany or Lalique. A lone flame snakes it’s way up his sleeve, reminding us that behind all this pomp and splendor is still a warlord capable of unchecked destruction. While we don’t see the desert, there is very little living in this image, save the birds that fly in the gray smoky sky. My impression is that they are carrion birds hovering over the aftermath of a battle,.
You can view the entire deck on Mary-El.com. Printed copies were somewhat scarce when I obtained mine. Second editions (or later reprints) are available now on Amazon.
But the RWS scepter is different from these European prototypes. Waite in his documentation calls it a “crux ansata” which essentially is the Egyptian ankh. We’ve seen the ankh before on the Empress card, and one reason that it may be here is that on earlier versions of the royal couple, both were shown with an Imperial Eagle. So when the Eagle is replaced on the Empress card with the Venus symbol, there may have been a conscious choice to add it to the Emperor as the shape of the scepter. Now, perhaps logically this scepter should have been more Martian, given the Mars/Aries heraldry on the throne and mantle, and the context of the Mars-Venus relationship between the two. But changing the Imperial Eagle to the Imperial Ram, is not as random or arbitrary as one might think, especially with other images in the Tarot.
In two later Major Arcana we find the Eagle in company with three other figures, a Bull, a Lion, and an Angel. This figures in Christian symbology are supposed to refer to the Four Gospel authors, and that derives from the four faces or heads of the “living beings” in the Old Testament vision of the prophet Ezekiel.
But these are also seen as being astrological symbols, namely Taurus, Leo, Aquarius, with the Eagle representing Scorpio. Scorpio, in the old Chaldean, was ruled by Mars, as was Aries. So there is a connection between the Eagle and Mars and Mars and the Ram.
On the other hand, the ankh would seem ill suited here, beyond Waite simply wanting to use it. But the fact that it is very stylized away from most depictions of the ankh that I wonder if there is something else to it. It looks to be a circlet of gold balanced atop a T-shape. If we take away the circle, it looks more like a hammer or axe than any kind of cross, and it seems very odd to separate the loop of the ankh from the crosspieces. It’s position atop a long shaft is never shown in Egyptian illustrations.
To imply that somehow this Emperor, who has so many other emblems of war, anger, and sterility, should somehow hold the Key of Life argues for a mystery we have few clues to decipher. Yet even Set, the Egyptian god associated with evil, carried an ankh. Set also was associated with wrath, the Wasteland, and the color red. In ancient Egypt, the scepters have Set’s head, and are said to represent both Set and Khnum, the old Ram god of creation. These are all associations that may be connected to the Emperor’s scepter when exploring this card.
The orb in the other hand is a late Roman convention denoting the sovereignty of the royal personage over the physical world. It probably derives from images of Christ Pantocrator (Christ King of the World) that developed at the end of the pagan Roman period and are a common feature of Byzantine mosaics and Eastern Orthodox icons. Frequently these royal orbs were banded with cross-straps and topped with a cross or crucifix, symbolizing the authority of the monarch through Christ himself, the so-called Divine Right of Kings.
The cross is missing from the top of the RWS orb, leaving us with something that more resembles ah old-fashioned cartoon bomb. The bomb or grenade did come about during the Renaissance, and it certainly would be in keeping with the overall martial character of the card to interpret this as such, though I doubt it was ever intended. Another way to see this ball in his hand is to cast it as a stoppered flask, similar to that used for holy water. In that context, perhaps we have another secreted instance of “water in the desert”.
There’s no oasis here, of course. As noted the rivulet that flows past the foot of the mountains behind his throne brings no green blossoms. It, or the land it flows through, is poisoned. Depending on the version of the deck, I have seen this stream go from blue to grey or from blue to nothing as it goes from left to right. The coloring on this card is unusual too, in that the mountain on our left is yellow, as is the glove of the Emperor, and the mountain on the right is orange, as is his glove.
I can see this as depicting the setting of the sun, or the ending the day or that “dying of the light” Thomas writes about. Taken in context with the change in the coloring of the water, there seems definitely to be a movement from the left side to the right that indicates a worsening condition. If this card were to come up between two others in a reading, it might indicate that the right side card is a deterioration of the situation shown by the left hand card.
A final look at a different Emperor, this time in company of the preceding card. These are from the Voyager Tarot, and I show them together as I find it may be more instructive as to my approach to card reading. These photocollages are the work of James Wanless, a life-coach and motivational speaker. They function in a way like a Rorshach inkblot, where the rather disconnected images serve to stimulate the imagination and drive the mind to an inner reverie. And yet, they also respect the traditional RWS cards they evolved from.
The Empress here expresses the Edenic nature of the garden and orchard, with the waterfall in the background. She also, by standing in from of the orb of the Earth, let’s us know that this is a material garden – a real physical experience that stimulates our senses and sates our pleasure.
The Emperor card in contrast shows us works of handicraft and edifice, the machinery of the modern world, imposed over nature without permission, asserting a dominance. Yes, the earth is still there, but it is smaller and less important in the image. There is a small tree growing, but notice that it grows contained by the hands of the Emperor. It is not nature as it is, but nature as He would control it. That old whale in the bottom right I cannot but think is a rough phallic symbol. Or perhaps it is Leviathan, the great monster of the deep spoken of in the Book of Job to express the dominance and power of the Hebrew Man-God. The Eagle and the Ram are here, and as importantly the Dove is with the Empress.
The Emperor image is chaotic and unsettling. The Empress harmonious and well-composed. These are the kind of visual cues I take from any Tarot deck to go beyond what gets written in the book. With the Voyager the mixed images make this a bit easier, but after a bit of practice, any cards will yield similar results.
Try as I might I can find little to nothing to redeem this card. While others may shudder at the appearance of Death or the Tower, I argue that the Emperor is as much an omen of hard times and bad things as either of those two. As the Priestess, in the stars, is hope and reconciliation, the Emperor is, on earth, privation, meanness, and greed.
He is power celebrated for its own sake, and sought for its own sake, and respected only because power demands it.
It’s even sadder, in that there is a suggestion that these woes and worries are inevitable. At the top of the crown, much smaller than we find it on the Magician or Strength cards, is another infinity symbol. We are perhaps doomed to contending with these negative attributes of our society and ourselves in perpetuity. This is the warning of the Emperor.
Rather than ending this week’s article with such a down vibe, though, I offer that the Wasteland of which I speak above is, like the Sea of Darkness it reflects, a path open to the spirit in search of enlightenment.
If you have ever experienced a time alone in the desert, even if you were within a safe distance of “civilization” you may have found yourself contemplating profound and vast concepts. There is something about the emptiness of such expanses that invite our minds to soar. Like an external isolation tank, when we are stripped of the artificial world that most of us find ourselves in, we start seeking some meaning that is not part of that world.
So if the Emperor troubles you, consider him a boundary marker between the strictures and authorities of that artificial world, which he most certainly represents, and the vast untamed unknown. Like the modern manufactured world, the Emperor ties us up with contradictions and prejudices, with things we are told we should believe and things which we are told not to question.
The Wasteland holds mysteries and terrors and wonders and secrets. Beyond the desert and behind the mountains you may find the source of that stream. You may find something else entirely.
On that boundary, the Emperor, impotent, is forever bound to that stone chair.
You have the freedom to walk around him.
Next week we will address another difficult authority figure, who much like the Emperor seems well out of place if we only look at the richly decorated surface Smith has given us. The original name of that next card, the sixth of the Major Arcana, was simply, the Pope. It was seen in that very Catholic Christian context throughout most of Tarot’s history.
In the post-Victorian revision, he has been restyled the Hierophant, a word which means more interestingly Keeper of the Secrets.
