Tarot – Page 3 – A Sacred Life

April 19, 2023April 18, 2023

Venus Enthroned

Before I leap into this week’s card completely, I want to mention a couple of points that didn’t make it into last week’s article, but are relevant to cover before going forward.

First, you may have noticed that I haven’t said anything about reverses, that is, the meanings I read when the card is drawn upside down. While these are considered traditional, not every historical source on Tarot has used them, so I think there’s probably a fair argument that “traditional” use is not absolute.

Thing is, several of the decks I own have a card back design that is clearly oriented to up or down, so when I read from those decks, I know whether the card I will draw is a reverse or not, before I draw it. To me, this seems a problem, it prejudices my opinion of what that card will mean even before I draw it. No, it ought not to, but in my own experience it does. Your mileage may vary.

But further, to get a reverse, one must intentionally shuffle the deck such that some cards are turned up and some down. The issue with that is that in a general randomization, you are going to get stacks of reverses coming together. Again, this may just be me, but I purposely re-sort my decks at the end of a reading, to the usual order that I use. From my years of using the cards, this is the Majors, then the Wands, Cups, Swords, and Pentacles, all going from Ace to King. So because of this practice, a whole lot of shuffling is required to get reversed cards that occur individually. While it’s certainly not impossible, it’s just not as likely to get that outcome, and so I am back to having a lot of reversed cards in a row.

In many of the little books that come in the card box, reverses are dealt with as simple opposites. If the Two of Cups is interpreted as romantic love, then the reverse is read as a break-up or divorce looming. But the whole point I have been making is that the cards are to be intuitively read in context, and eyeing the reverse as a simple negation is hardly adequate. As astrologers will tell you about retrograde motion, the interpretation is that the usual meaning may be reduce, impeded, or frustrated, again, depending on context.

In going forward I will probably not spend any more time on reverse meanings than I have previously. I think the astute person who chooses to utilize some of my interpretations in their own exploration can glean what opposites or limitations should apply if these cards come up upside down in their reading. It may also be instructive to consider the earlier, less lofty meanings of the card images in that. It is possible and certainly applicable to perceive the previous three cards as an Idiot, a Con Man, and a Heretic if reversed, or ill-aspected by other cards in the reading.

My second point is to re-emphasize that I tend to regard the first three cards as representative of cerebral or spiritual natures, which may be described in terms of the “That Which Is Above” of Hermetic tradition. As we begin with the Empress card, we are entering into “That Which Is Below”. This is the world of the physical, the manifest, and the incarnate. These cards are both the way the non-corporeal natures of the “Above” show themselves in the perceived reality, and the reflection of those natures.

tarot-as-above-so-below — This arrangement can be a reading in itself, or it can be used as a prototype spread. The Fool, The Magician, and Priestess represent the “Above” of Hermetic teachings, that which is supernatural, divine, astral, etc. The Empress, Emperor, and Hierophant are their Counterparts in the physical world “Below”. If you take the essences of these cards, as they are positioned and opposed/reflected in this context, as signifiers, then cards drawn and placed on these positions can be read in those contexts. For example, the card in the Fool’s place represents new beginnings, first purposes, raw talent, unmoderated energy, etc.

In the years I have been working I have often used the cards to determine how I read the cards. That is, I might deal out a certain number, read those and then deal out again but use the first round to determine how the second round should be seen. This is not the same as the “clarification” where a card is drawn and the next card is drawn to amplify or elaborate. In this case, the meaning of the first card and its position are seen as the modifier to how the meaning of the second card is read. The first card’s meaning is a context, rather than a meaning to be further defined. I don’t know if anyone else has used this method. I am constantly exploring new ways to look at the cards.

I’d like to tell you that I have puzzled out how each successive set of three cards in the Major Arcana work in this interrelationship, but I confess that such a solution still eludes me, if it exists at all. There is a curious little mathematical trick in the Major Arcana, in that the numbers assigned to each card, when they are viewed in successive sets of three, are numerologically resolvable to the number 3.

That is:

The Fool 0 + The Magician 1 + The Priestess 2 = 3

And

The Empress 3 + The Emperor 4 + The Hierophant 5 = 12 and 1+2 =3.

Likewise

The Lovers 6 + The Chariot 7 + Strength 8 = 21 and 2+1 =3

And

The Hermit 9 + The Wheel 10 + Justice 11 = 30 and 3+0 = 3

From here on it continues, though it takes a few more steps

The Hanged Man 12 + Death 13 + Temperance 14 = 39 and 3 +9 =12 and 1+2 = 3

The same applies for the next three

The Devil 15 + The Tower 16 + The Star 17 = 48 > 12 >3

And the next

The Moon 18 + The Sun 19 + Judgment 20 = 57 > 12 > 3

And the final card is

The World 21 and 2+1 = 3.

It’s a nifty trick. I wish I could tell you that there is some hidden meaning here, but I continue to look for it. Beyond looking at the first two sets and their more or less obvious relationship, I can’t use this power of three to logically connect the meanings of the cards split thusly, aside from perhaps ascribing that the World, by itself, holds the same value as each set, and that is rather tidy. Yet my awareness of this strange little numerical quirk always crops up when I contemplate the cards, so perhaps there is something to it after all. I do not ascribe any secret and intentional message lost in the sands of time, but just that like all synchronicities and patterns, meanings may be derived.

This pattern, of course, exists separate from Tarot. If you take the numbers 0 through 21, and split them at every three steps, you get this outcome. It is just that it works exactly on the number of Major Arcana cards that I find rather intriguing. Again, it may have no more real relation than Levi tying the 22 Hebrew characters to these cards. But people use that system daily, so please feel free to adapt or ignore as you see fit.

Alright, enough to the sidebar, let’s get to this week’s card, The Empress.

Empress_RWS_Tarot — Smith has given us a sensual feast for the eyes with this card. There is much to explore beyond what I have written about. Foremost is that the openness of the card’s character invite us to go wandering in the woods behind her, an activity I always heartily endorse.

In the RWS deck she is show reclining on a couch in the middle of a field of wheat. Behind her is a stand of trees, which may be an orchard. A stream flows from it to pool just behind the dais her couch is upon. She wears a white robe with pomegranates on it, She is crowned with a tiara of six pointed stars, and holds aloft in her right hand a scepter topped with a large golden orb. Beside her couch, and possibly part of its carving is a tilted heart with the symbol for Venus upon it. The circular part of the symbol is filled with green. A variation of the Venus symbol is worked into a motif at the back of the couch (it may be intended as wicker work or filigree) and there are opulent cushions and throws upon it that she lays upon. The sky in this image is yellow, like that of the Magician card.

The yellow sky is also shared with the Fool card, and appears on four other cards in the Major Arcana. To the extent that these are intentional selections and not just the choices made by the printer from available inks is hard to say. Yet the spaces in each of the cards can be read as symbolic, and there is therefore no reason to ignore the color choice. If it was made by Ms. Smith or the printing house, is irrelevant. If intended, then we can say perhaps a meaning was intended. If coincidental, then we can, like the number sequence and indeed the random draw of the cards themselves, consider it a means of working into the inscrutable mystery being revealed by an unseen force.

In this instance, I make note of the connection of this color with the Magician card, in his rose garden. This is a cue to my earlier statement about reflection and manifestation. The Magician is reflected in the Empress. She is the avatar of Venus, Aphrodite, and Demeter. She is fertility and fecundity, bringing forth abundance and ripeness from the earth and all those things which live and grow upon it. It is she who is the physical representation of the Fool’s divine force, channeled through the Magician’s directed will.

For those more technically included, consider the photographic negative (you younger folks may have to go look that one up. As a photographer whose career and training began with these now “retro” tools, it is a logical and apt metaphor). It is opposite, and potentially unrecognizable. Yet when placed into the enlarger, and light projected through it onto the photopaper below, it yields an opposite and clear image. So I am comfortable applying the reflection/opposition principle here when I connect the Above to the Below. Additionally, we can view the Empress as the feminine aspects of the Magician. In a way, her sensuous nature completes and mollifies the severe and somewhat barren nature of the symbol of willful action.

This of course, does not limit her to being simply the worldly emanation of the will. That would disregard the value of the physical manifest existence. This is often a trap of the spiritual path. Many “seekers” have adopted the philosophy of self-denial, asceticism, and celibacy as the appropriate path to the divine. The whole argument that we must shed our attachment to the mortal world and its pleasures is a tenet of many religions and teachings.

Yet this begs the question as to what the purpose of a physical experience is in the first place. If the spiritual is the only truth, and rising to being solely spiritual is the aim of existence, why is there a physicality at all. If spirit exists before and after mortality, as many faiths teach, then why are we making a side trip. If we are divinity descended into flesh so that we can ascend back to the divine, this seems a futile waste of time.

The answer is usually a pat “because we must learn X” by being incarnated. I think that’s a bit too simplistic, and it also is often used as an excuse for all manner of evil and suffering in the world. We have to be hurt and abused because we must learn X. We make war and destruction on our fellow humans because someone must learn X. Your mother or your sister had to die of cancer because you must learn X. It’s all so you can return to the nature of pure spirit as –what — a better spirit? Were you a bit of a daft spirit before, and spending three score and ten repeatedly having your heart broken and stubbing your toe is going to fix all that?

I don’t buy that one. Sorry. Probably why I don’t fit in with most of the regular philosophical circles.

Now, I am not here to say that the Hedonist philosophy is the one true way either, but I think one of the big lessons we can get from the Empress card is that we are supposed to enjoy the experience of being incarnate. For every time we stub our toe, there’s all those times where we got to eat birthday cake.

Potentially a non-corporeal spirit can’t experience that luscious chocolate frosting, or at least not in the same way that a messy meat suit with taste buds can. For all the limitations and fragilities inherent in life in the meat suit, there are just some things that our ghost selves don’t enjoy in the same way. If this were not the actual case then it would not be so hard to give it all up.

The Hindu and Buddhist beliefs tell us that our spirits suffer because we cannot dissolve that longing for the physical. I say that our spirits naturally have a physical existence. It’s not a larval stage. It’s not preparing us for “the next life”. Our meatiness is part of our life. We may even cycle between being meat and not-meat throughout eternity.

Empress-triptych — A Triple Empress, if you will, and purposefully drawing on the Maiden-Mother-Crone architype. Three different artists give related, but not entirely similar treatments to the physical attributes of this card’s natural realm.

The leftmost from Stephanie Law’s Shadowscapes Tarot gives us all the joy and exuberance of Springtime with it’s potential for life and growth. Law cleverly paints it in the colors of autumn though, reminding us that these abundances are as mortal as our ability to enjoy them, and yet, they are part of a never ending cycle.

The middle piece I have drawn from Cirro Marchetti’s Legacy of the Divine deck. Here the Empress’s belly swells with the new life witihin, and she is attended by many emblems of fruitfulness and fertility. In one of my own attempts at this card, I also chose to depict the Empress with child, and yet still she is sensuous to us.

The final image is drawn from the Tarot of the Hidden Realm, which as you may guess from the title, is very Faery-forward. The artist is Julie Jeffrey, and has given us a copper-haired harvest queen the equal of Demeter or Ceres. The fruits of the Empress’s impressive garden are wasted if we do not pick them. That is their purpose and that is our purpose.

The Empress is the embrace of that physical world. She is warmth and sunshine on our face. She is the smell of the flowers in the field. She is the hum of the bees, and the chirping of the birds, and the babbling of the brook. She is the touch of a lover’s hand, the look in the lover’s eyes. While it may be true that when we return to the spirit form, we become one with that lover in a way that our bodies may not ever be able to, it is the delicate separation of those bodies, the appreciation of Other, that cannot be felt when the soul merges on a higher plane. That itself is worth something. That itself is why we physically incarnate.

While the emblem on the Empress’s couch (or throne, as it could be such in an Etrurian or Graeco-Roman style) is commonly that used astrologically for the planet Venus, and more modernly for the female, it is also an Egyptian Ankh. The ankh is supposed to have derived from the a stylization of a sandal strap, but it’s meaning is Life Itself. It is universally carried by the gods. It is showered down upon people in painting after painting. It is given by the gods to the deceased in the afterlife, so that they may enjoy an eternity of sensual pleasures in the Field of Reeds as the the Boat of Ra passes by. To me this further enforces the view of the Empress as that principle of Life Itself growing, renewing, and everlasting in the world around us.

Her spring brings forth life giving waters for the forests and fields. The wheat is perpetually golden, ripe and ready to harvest, there is no famine here. Yet this is not Eden. This garden she resides in is far more practical. It is the province of the Gatherer in our most ancient “Hunter-Gatherer” ecology. These plants growing in abundance are yet to be tamed and tilled in even rows. There is an antiquity here, almost as old as the caves, before the structure inherent in domestic horticulture caused her to fade into the background. She is here in the center of it all, to be marveled at, adored, and loved for all these gifts.

On her crown are twelve stars, and I think this is clearly the “stars” of the zodiac. The great gold orb on her scepter is the Sun, showing how it travels across these as the year passes. It is through this that all seasons, Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter are realized in the physical world. In her garden there is something she does in each of them, to prepare for the next. She is not passing time, but the eternal cycle of life, the eternal promise of abundance, the never ending presence of manifestation. She is the embodiment of continuance.

Her left hand rests upon her knee, and we can see here the echo of the Magician’s stance, even to including the scepter. By this she fully claims her dominion of the physical world of the senses. She ordains what is to be through her will. We are subject to that will, we are dependent upon it, and therefore must pay obeisance to her. By contrast though, her manner is relaxed and open. She does not stand proudly by the Table of the Elements, but greets us languidly from her couch. She does not interpose herself in front of us in challenge, but invites us to come join her in this wonderful place she has built around her. The pomegranates are not an abstracted decoration on the banner behind her, but part of her personal garb. She bids us welcome, and insists that we should walk through her garden.

In this she is a stark contrast to the next card we will explore, that of the Emperor. I’ll be back in a week with that one. I sincerely hope you are enjoying these articles on the Major Arcana, their histories, and my own take on the cards. Your patronage is always appreciated. If you find them enjoyable, please share with a friend who may be likewise entertained.

April 12, 2023April 12, 2023

The Lady Behind The Veil

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

April 5, 2023April 5, 2023

The Gift of the Magi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RWS_2P_Juggler — Can you find the Magician here? If you look carefully enough, and know the secret language that Smith was inventing for this deck, you can find the same pieces underlying the traditional reading of this card. I have gone to some depth in the text of the article on this, but I wanted to include the card for the reader to contemplate. All the Tarot should be viewed as having symbols hidden, or included, for interpretation or expansion beyond what Waite or any other authors have had to say about them. They are a visual tool, created by a truly gifted artist, that continues to find favor with new artist and Tarot artists alike.

Sorceror — I am frequently inspired by the Tarot, even if I am not attempting to make a Tarot image. I don’t recall if this was another attempt to find my “vision” of a new deck, or if it simply was using the Magician card as a jumping off point for an artistic experiment. This piece is somewhat unique in my work. I was trying to master the curvilinear styles of the Art Nouveau -inspired by the looping tableaus of Mucha, and also playing with the felt-marker as an art tool. In neither did I succeed well in this image, but it has grown on me over the years. If I were to consider it my Magician, I’d have to create a whole deck in the style, and then I’d probably come back to this liking it less. As it is, it serves as a blind alley, I stumbled into, that I might return to someday, but not with any intention of something so large and daunting in scope. The style, or a mature evolved version of it, still entertains me as an artist, but I have no intention of using it to interpret the cards.

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

Pay no attention to that man behind the current.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

March 29, 2023March 28, 2023

The Fool Who Follows Him

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, I am still talking about the Fool card.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

March 22, 2023March 22, 2023

In The Cards

Next week, and for the 22 weeks after that, I will be taking one of the Major Arcana of the Tarot and going deep, through my personal perspectives, techniques, and methods for the use of the card in divination, meditation and magic.

In preparation for that, I am going to spend this week’s article going over some things about Tarot in general, so that we don’t have to refer to it every week and can just work with the individual cards.

It’s safe to say that there are hundreds of books about Tarot. Maybe thousands. And that’s just considering the modern stuff that you might be able to order from B&N and the ‘Zon. Going back after works by Eliphas Levi, Court de Gebelin, and Atelier, or the various Golden Dawn texts, may be more illuminating, but are much harder to lay hands on.

You can find Levi in the original French and in Waite’s English translation on archive.org, if you want to dig into it. As I have noted there are a good many warts associated with the work of the Victorian occultists, not least of which are the misogyny and racism characteristic of European 19th century culture.

Yet it is from these tainted roots that the tree of modern Tarot practice has grown, and it is worth exploring that, if for no other reason than to cut away the diseased branches.

I have done considerable research on Tarot in the last several years, and what I put forth here is based on several sources, both in orthodox scholarship and occult studies. In addition to those texts I mentioned as being in the public domain online, I also draw from the works of the recently deceased Rachel Pollack, and occultist and Tarot scholar Paul Huson. I highly recommend their books on the subject.

Firstly, and most importantly, let’s be clear that Tarot are not, and never have been, a secret magical teaching from out of Ancient Egypt, or the legacy of any other lost civilization.

It would be great to believe that. It would make us all feel warm and tingly inside when we shuffle our cards. But unlike astrology and probably numerology, there is no such ancient pedigree for Tarot. The best we can garner for it is an origin sometime in the 1400s in certain parts of Italy.

tarot-problems — A Tarot problem – not nearly enough shelves. As you can see they are stacked and stowed, and this is not even all the shelves that are full. There’s at least a couple more, and then there are some that are on other altars and places of power throughout my house. I would guess there are over 45 sets of true Tarot cards, if not more, and probably another dozen or so oracle card sets, and at least one Lenormand style deck.

There are about eight more in my Amazon wishlist right now, and doubtless I will run across some more that tickle my fancy when I next make the rounds of the witchy shops on my travels. In the grocery the other day, i saw a set of cards for some sort of matching game that were or Hispanic origin, and I was intrigued with the idea of making an oracle with those.

And yes, I do actually use all of them, from time to time, as they call to me. I am moved by the art. I have none that I don’t like, I have several that I like more than the others (and don’t tell them that), but I am connected to every deck that I own. I do not think I am obsessed. As an artist first, expressing my occult leanings through the most visual of mediums seems obvious. As an artist trained, I am fully aware of the number of subjects that are repeatedly addressed and expressed by artists from the beginning of our human experience to the present day. The Tarot are a microcosm of that experience.

The cards were created for a game, called Tarochi. The game included special cards called Triomphi or Triumphs, which had additional point values. These later called “trump” cards were added to the values of cards in a deck of 56 (4 suits of 1-10, plus 4 face cards). The winning hand had the highest point value.

Sometime in the succeeding century, these extra trumps started to be used for the predictive art of sortilege. Sortilege selects something at random and then attempts to determine a meaning. Originally done by randomly picking a line from a book, usually the Bible, it appears that in the 16th century the cards became an additional method of randomizing, before ultimately having meanings associated with them directly.

Huson makes a compelling argument for these meanings to originate from certain philosophical texts that were prominent in Renaissance Italy. The images, he contends, are a remainder of iconography to be found in the Medieval Morality plays. The threads he pulls seem to connect very logically, particularly with images that are unquestionably Judeo-Christian.

To the extent that these potential sources can offer some insight into the intuitive use of the cards in divination, I may touch upon them from time to time, but my methods are very much driven by a visual experience of the cards. Certainly there are traditionally assigned meanings that I, as well as most other readers, will have learned over time, but I use those as jumping off point.

digital-cards — Tarot in the 21st Century. These photos of my tablet show daily card widgets that I also have on my phone (which are much more the size of actual cards). Thanks to the idiosyncracies of random number generation algorithms, the daily cards are different for every deck, and different for the same decks on the phone. In this way I get a kind of multi-card spread, without drawing out a deck. It comes in handy when I am on the road or busy at the office, because I can generally work in a moment or two to flip through the offerings.

My “reading” method is to countenance identical cards most importantly – say, if I get the Knight of Cups on two or more cards, then I expect news of a young friend’s wedding, for example. Next I weight the message of multiple cards of the same suit, and then the Trumps and finally any individual minors.

I’ve evolved this practice over the last few years of having these decks on my mobile devices. I haven’t run across it in any texts, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not out there. I know a number of friends on the ‘Gram post options using one or two decks for daily draw messages. I’m just a bit more ADD about it.

Having digital versions of all these cards shows the diversity that exists in interpretation. If I look up the meaning (the digital decks come with a data version of the little book) they vary incredibly for the same card in different decks. So the journey we are about to undertake into my own interpretive method is by no means simply ego. There are as many interpretations as there are readers.

All these apps are from The Fool’s Dog on Android. I don’t know if they make IOS apps, but I am sure someone does. The available decks are all licensed from the publishers, are generally under 5 dollars US (some are a little more) and come with several spreads and a built-in journal function. They can also be enlarged to see detail, and it’s a nice way to try out a deck you may be interested in. I have paper copies of several of these, but some, like *Journey Into Egypt* are out of print or cost-prohibitive.

Various occultists have added and subtracted from these meanings. If you pick up a deck today, and read through the little white book the meanings you get will likely be abbreviated from Waite’s Pictorial Key to the Tarot. If you want something deeper, Pollack’s Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom gives additional connections, and is one of the better analyses I have seen.

I don’t agree with all of it, nor do I agree with Huson, or Waite, or Crowley, or anyone entirely. I have found, that in the writing of this series of articles, very many of my interpretations of the cards have evolved away from the generally accepted meanings. I can only attribute this to how memory and perception change over time.

In 1972, with my first deck, I had a thin booklet that gave a few words on each card, it’s reverse, and I think about three layouts. Additionally I had the Tarot as described in The Encyclopedia of Ancient and Forbidden Knowledge – or at least how the Major Arcana were described. So much was presented in that book that Tarot was limited, but until 1987, when I received my second deck as a gift, these were the only resource.

During that decade and a half I learned to read the cards like almost everyone does. I laid the cards out, and I went to the book. Eventually I started to remember some of the meanings, and then I remembered a lot more of the meanings.

And then, of course, I started to forget some of the meanings, or at least they weren’t quite as clear to me. So, rather than being embarrassed in front of a client, I looked to the card, and tried to fill in the blanks.

I think that every experienced reader has probably gone through this process. It’s part of the mental alchemy that transforms it from being rote recitation into an interpretative and intuitive art form.

Imagine that a card layout is something like a jigsaw puzzle. The pieces do fit together to give us a complete picture, and like any jigsaw, they fit one way. The difference is that the shapes of the little connecting bits may change each time we consult the cards. That is, what the seven of cups means may alter depending on whether it is next to the six of pentacles or the three of wands. Or if it shows up in a particular place in a particular spread.

The books can only go so far, even when there are hundreds of books. Sometimes they can hint at these combinations and connotations, but the number of possible layouts prevents any absolute.

In the end, the reader is the one who has to find the key in the seven of cups that tells how it connects to that six of pentacles. And that is a synthesis of what the reader has been taught, and what the reader sees. Seeing in this case applies both to a mundane visual assessment of the contents of the image, and to that broader and murkier “gift” that really great artists have.

Over the years, the pecking of Odin’s ravens has altered some of those keys in my head. They’re not out and out wrong (at least I don’ think so) but my understanding of the mnemonic nature of the images on the cards has changed. Also, with the large number of decks I have in my collection, the varying ways those keys have gotten interpreted by different artists has had an impact on how I see the card in general.

Again, I think this is more or less true of most Tarot workers who have been at it a while. We’ve formed our own opinions after year upon year of seeing how these cards play out. Yes, there is the “book definition”, and all of us learned it (or tried to learn it), but that’s not the end of it. If it were, there’d only be one Tarot book, and not hundreds.

amber-turmps-gray-morrow — In my teens I read Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber. This epic fantasy series poses many intriguing questions about the nature of existence, archetypes, magic, and even quantum physics. One of the things that drew me most, though, was the particular implementation of Tarot in the series.

In the magic systems described in the books, there are a set of tarot cards belonging to the family of protagonists. In it the Trumps are replaced by portraits of the members of that royal house. Some of them are shown in the upper left of this image by Gray Morrow from the “Illustrated Zelazny” section on the Amber milieu. The truly intriguing property of these cards, though, were that in the hands of the royals, they could be used to communicate with their opposite members, and even as gateways to where those persons were. Part of the plot revolves around the use of the cards in sympathetic attacks as well.

I won’t drop anymore spoilers. The books are generally easy to find in used stores, thanks to their being a “free gift” for new members of the Science Fiction Book Club back in the 80s. But they had an influence on my own thinking about Tarot and taking it beyond the explicit use as divinatory oracles. Like much of the fantasy and science fiction I read in those days, side by side with occult books, Zelazny’s works had a profound impact on my world view, the experiments I conducted, and the mental language I used to quantity those results.

Tarot derives it’s power from our mind’s eyes. It is a conduit to that penultimate chakra, where we open up our perceptions to the infinitudes of the tiny and the cosmic. It can lift your soul to stand above the universe, and walk over to the next one if you want.

Time to dispel big Tarot Myth Number Two – that the Tarot are in any way connected to the Kabbalah or Judaic tradition. This was almost entirely the assertion of Eliphas Levi, based on a few intimations from previous occultists, but most notably because there are twenty-two trumps and twenty-two Hebrew letters. The Golden Dawn took this and ran with it, and so by the time we get to present day, it’s considered canon, but there’s not any real evidence for it.

That said, there is an Instagram account theorizing that an early version of the Tarot of Marseilles includes secreted Hebrew symbols as part of an attempt to preserve certain Jewish teachings during a time of rampant anti-Semitism in Europe. It’s a fascinating theory, and some of the evidence is compelling, but even the author doesn’t suggest that Tarot itself is a secret Hebrew code. The images cited were, he asserts, added to traditional versions of the cards in this one printing, in order to give covert Jews a means of teaching their heritage. But this is not Kabbalah, nor is it presented as existing in previous Tarot decks, and by his own admission, it does not occur in other Marseilles versions.

The other typical myth associated with these cards is their connection with the nomadic Romany people, called in previous times “gypsies”. The tradition is most commonly propounded by a contemporary and countryman of Levi’s who used the pseudonym Papus. Papus is the author of a text that was retitled in English “Tarot of the Bohemians”, but in the original French would have used the term gypsy.

Atelier also suggested that he learned some of the multiple card layouts from readers who may have been part of the Romany culture. However, the Romany are just another group of people who used these Italian cards for fortune telling. Cards were generally cheap, easily transported, and could be used for games of chance as well as cartomancy. So any group of people who lived a transitory lifestyle might employ them. Sailors, peddlers and merchants, even traveling priests have figured in the spread of Tarot and Tarot lore. No one has a particular monopoly, which adds to the mystery surrounding it’s origins as a mantic tool.

Fortune telling was a good business – as it still is – and a set of cards with possible inscrutable meanings was both more immediate and simpler than complex astrological analysis (prior to computer software, I have spent up to a week calculating the positions and aspects on a single person’s birth chart). Of course, the more exotic the process was, the more the client was enthralled, believing in the supernatural power of the cards, and the reader, and willing to part with their cash.

If you’ve read more than a few of my articles, you know I tend to tear back the curtain on a lot of the occult practices. I have always been, and remain, skeptical of claims which fly in the face of verifiable facts.

Yet I use the Tarot and find it to be useful. I find that in the hands of a good reader, the information it provides is well worth the coin it demands.

I have had my cards read by good readers and bad readers. Bad readers are of several kinds. There are the unskilled, the unpracticed, and the unimaginative. And there are outright frauds.

The frauds are easy to spot. I know what the cards usually mean, if they feed me a line of bovine excrement, I smell it immediately.

The unskilled are those folks who still chase back to the book to look it up. Perchance that’s the novice, the new reader in unfamiliar territory. But it’s as often not a matter of not knowing as much as not believing that they know. This is one of the advantages of Tarot. It’s a shorthand that gives us hints. Given enough time and exposure we stop thinking about what the book is saying in dry and hard to remember text, and start seeing what the card shows us.

Seven of pentacles. The gardener. resting on his hoe, satisfied with the fruits of his labor.

“A job well done. Work rewarded. Plans coming together. Pride in one’s craft.”

Of course, this is much harder to do with a pip-based deck like the Tarot de Marseilles. My brain always switches the pips to the pictures and then I just do that. But honestly, I don’t use a lot of decks without pictures. Had I encountered those decks first, I might have learned them and eschewed the more pictorial.

The unpracticed readers have the skill, but they don’t use it often enough to make the magic happen. While this dulls the memory of the meanings, it also blunts the intuition, the very faculty of taking those memories and making a narrative or context that can’t be derived from the individual cards. If that seven of pentacles shows up next to a three of cups, does that mean it’s a good year for burgundy, or that next week is the harvest festival?

Saddest are the unimaginative. They see the cards right there in front of them and just parrot the same answers every time. The meanings are the meanings and the cards are the cards. So what if the three of cups and the seven of pentacles show up on either side of the Tower. They still mean celebration and reward.

Well, no. No they don’t.

But a good reader can pull one card from the deck and give you a reading that will make your hair stand up.

pixie-smith — If there is one person that is responsible for the popularity of Tarot at the dawn of the 21st Century it is Pamela Colman Smith. Pixie Smith was barely recognized in the misogynistic world of the 19th and early 20th Century occultists, and her contributions to this artform largely swept under the rug until recently.

The Tarot deck she is responsible for is one of the most popular, if not *the* most popular, in the world. Prior to her work, the majority of Tarot decks had only pips, or arrays of the suit symbols, for the minor cards.

Like modern “playing cards” also used for divination, the meanings associated with the individual values had to be rote memorized and parroted back. This skill may have limited the number of active readers, but it also narrowed the space for those readers to engage their imaginations and intuition in explaining the message of the cards.

Smith’s work changed all that. With possibly little to no instruction from Arthur Waite, who commissioned her creation of the card artworks, she came up with 78 distinctive representations of the essential nature of each of these meanings (which were not always clear even at the time).

Any artist working with these themes can tell you what a daunting prospect that is. To accomplish not just the quantity, but to create images that resonate so profoundly that even today “new” decks use her images as archetypes, is a wonder.

And despite the number of folks who use the word psychic hand in hand with Tarot reader, I don’t actually believe that is required.

I’m old school. I tend to reserve “psychic” for things like you see Professor Xavier and Mr. Spock doing.

No offense to my friends who use that term, but I simply don’t consider my own powers of intuition, observation, and imagination to be psychic. I can’t tell you whether the card you are holding up is a star or wavy lines. I am not good at “getting a signal” from someone a hundred miles away.

But give me a deck of Tarot cards, and I will chill you down to your immortal soul. Or at least I used to, which is one big reason I stopped reading for people. But I may be coming out of retirement.

In any case, I thought I would take my readers on a tour through the black morass of my unconscious and show you the Majors through my eyes, with the lore of fifty years of working with and researching these odd bits of pasteboard.

As a basis I will be using the cards of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, which is probably the most well known deck in the world. It has recently passed into the public domain, which is why the images are showing up everywhere. It is an unofficial standard. The meanings attributed to most of the cards in various versions largely derive from it, and certainly the hundreds of alternate Tarot decks most frequently interpret the images of Pamela Smith, the illustrator who designed it. In case you didn’t already know, Rider was the original English publishing company, and Waite, is Arthur Edward Waite, poet, occultist, and author of the text giving the meanings for the cards.

My first deck was a modified version of the RWS, one that apparently was not modified enough to avoid a copyright infringement in the early 70s when it was produced. My RWS deck was that second one I received as a birthday gift in the mid-80s.

Since then my collection has expanded significantly. I acquire decks purely based on the art. While a few of them have come with expanded and innovative texts, it is the images that I must relate to, and the images that I ultimately use to inform my reading and response.

I will most likely also include the Thoth/Crowley/Thelema images, as they constitute one of the more influential variants. These were created by Lady Freida Harris at the behest of Aleister Crowley, some decades after Smith made her deck, but they weren’t published until much later.

As the muse strikes, I will share other cards from my own collection, bits of my own artwork, and where appropriate, external references you may find useful.

I hope that by the time we reach the end of the summer you will have been challenged to revisit your own cards and look into the symbolism and meaning from your own perspective.

And then maybe I’ll right that book. There’s room for another book on Tarot surely…

Join me next for the Fool.

January 25, 2023February 2, 2023

Hidden Figures

A black draped figure seemingly glided to the front of the classroom and began scribbling on the chalkboard.

Professor Snide spoke without turning.

“Turn to page twelve-thousand, six hundred, and seventy-four and begin reading the rubric at the end of the third paragraph; subsection two, heading four, chapter eight hundred eighty-two. . .” Pausing he added “. . . aloud. . . in four part harmony. “

Wes Rongley peeped his bright orange tufted head above the antique leathern tome on the desk in front of him and peered at the board. He squinted.

To his growing horror, he could clearly make out in the ever-growing scrawl that flowed unceasingly onto the slate from the chalk in Snide’s hand integers, operators, exponents, and not a few letters of Greek.

He shuddered. He had inexplicably stumbled into a maths class.

Wes slunk back down behind the ponderous mouldering volume and wracked his hazy brain for some memory of how this could have happened. The first few days here at Hogwash’s had been a heady blur, but surely he could not have made such a colossal blunder.

There was nothing for it but to try and escape.

He slid further down in the seat, as if he could melt into liquid form and seep quietly out under the classroom’s big oaken door. He tested the floor board with the slightest pressure of his left toe.

It creaked.

“Going somewhere, Mr. Rongley?”

Caught in the act, betrayed by the ancient timber, he had little choice but to respond to Snide’s withering gaze.

“I. . .uh. . .I’m in the wrong room, sir. I don’t think I’m supposed to be in this class.”

Snide inspected the desktop and at length drew out a square of browning parchment.

“You are Wes Rongley, First Year?”

“Yes sir.”

“Then you are on my list and you are in the right room.”

The room seemed to dim when Snide had said ‘my list’. Wes felt every follicle of his flaming shock of hair contract. Perspiration formed on his upper lip. On his tightening scalp. beads of sweat began to coalesce into rivulets that ran down the nape of his neck. He ventured.

“But . . .sir . . . that looks like maths. . .”

Snide turned, his expression softening . . .which for some reason was more disturbing.

“Hmmm. . .really? Are you sure?”

Wes nodded meekly. Professor Snide leaned a bit back and regarded the unfinished equation he’d been scribbling.

“By, Jove, Mr. Rongley, you’re right! It is maths! Seen them before, have you?”

“Yes. . .yes, sir!”

“Well, now you’ve seen them again. Turn to page twelve thousa-“

“I was told there’d be no maths, sir.”

“What?”

“I was told there wouldn’t be any maths. When I signed up, sir. That old chap, Humblebore was it? He said that maths weren’t required for my programme.”

“Headmaster Mumblesnore,” Snide corrected, “may have been a tad vague on this point. Let me assure you, Mr. Rongley, maths are indeed required.”

Wes felt Snide’s dark presence swirling toward him down the aisle but couldn’t move. He was a mouse transfixed by a great black cobra, knowing doom was coming but powerless to escape.

“How else do you expect to tease out the subtler courses of the orbs on their wanderings through the heavens, or divine the sublime secrets of the Gematria, or calculate allowed deductions for consumable spell components and the depreciation of cauldrons of more than a hogshead’s capacity when filing with the Inland Revenue?

‘Let there be no doubt in your mind, Mr. Rongley. Maths. Are. Required.”

Satisfied, Snide turned and had made it halfway back toward the front when Wes exploded:

“But I don’t like maths!”

Snide whirled. There was a flash and puff of sulfurous vapor.

There, atop the vast ancient folio, in the middle of an unwholesome looking greasy spot, sat a rather confused looking amphibian with a shock of flaming orange hair.

-Excerpted Unabridged from Hairy Plodder and the Half-Done Script

Like young Mr. Rongley, I too, did not care for ‘maths’ as it is commonly styled in Britain. Seeking a similar avoidance of all things mathematical, I pursued a career in the creative arts.

It is one of life’s little ironies, that when my own term at the Hogwash School of Wizardry, Witchcraft, and Computer Repair was over, that I entered a field where mathematical calculations are both necessary and intensive.

In further evidence of the universe’s perverse sense of humor, my personal occult studies are repleat with examples of the necessity of mathematics, algebra, geometry and trigonometry, and yes, calculus.

Having avoided many of these courses in school it fell upon me to educate myself over the years as required. The result is that I perhaps have not approached the topics in the same staid way that they are typically taught, and though I do get the needed accuracy of result, my methods are more in tune with the way my left-handed right-brained operations work.

I feel confident that, insofar as I am not building a nuclear reactor in close proximity to inhabited areas, said methods are sufficient for my goals. I’m sharing a bit of them this week in order to acquaint you with the delight I often find now in working with purity of numbers and the permutations thereof.

In a previous article I have spoken about the absolute reality of number itself. That is, number is a real immutable infinite and eternal thing, which remains fixed regardless of time, space, velocity, or dimension. One is always one. Two is always two. One and two are and have been and will always be three. Whether we call that three or tre or trois or drei is irrelevant, the actual thing that it is never changes.

There’s a comfort to that. It’s nice to know that regardless of how much chaos swirls around us there’s still something that remains unchanged. It is the Anchor in the Sea of the Night. It is a Fulcrum in the Void. It is a Beacon on the Shores of Infinity.

Of course, sometimes, it’s fun just to play around and see what comes up. My subject for today is the hexagon, a regular geometric shape having six equal sides.

While the word hexagon doesn’t have a connection with our use of the word hex in occult circles, the doctrines of sympathy and correspondence would argue otherwise. Hex in witchcraft comes at us out of Old German and Old Norse, and probably shortens and corrupts from hagatesse – a word used to refer to the Norns, the old women who sat at the base of the World Ash Ygdrassil and pronounced the fates of man. The connection between Norn and witch is an easy one, and the term haxa and haxxen have been used to apply to witches since early times in various north and central European dialects. Thus it crossed the Channel with Hengst and entered into the Anglo-Saxon tree.

The hex in hexagon, though, is ancient Greek for six, and merely means it’s six sided, or six angled, and there’s no magical connotation at all.

Except that there is. And frequently this confutation between the witchy hex and the mathematical hex is expressed in the darnedest of places.

For instance, among the “hex signs” of the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch. The Dutch are more accurately Deutsch – Germans, who settled in Penn’s Woods along with other emigrees seeking arable land and the ability to worship openly. They are noted – among other things, for the curious geometric designs that grace barns and some houses, which are said to drive away the “devil” and other malicious spirits. In this case the “hex” is the old German haxxan – a specifically magic application. Yet many of these geometries are based on six sided figures, though perhaps as many, if not more are eight-sided.

The hexagon is the natural regular shape that is formed if you outline from point to point on a hexagram. Now the hexagram is an established magical and talismanic shape, known as the Star of David, Solomon’s Seal, and other specific names. It is the figure below, which is composed of two overlapping triangles, and as you can see, it fits neatly into the hexagon.

In the parlance of the occult, this image has many meanings. The following image comes from Eliphas Levi’s Histoire de la magie and demonstrates the maxim supposedly extracted from the Emerald Tablet penned by no less a personage than Hermes Trismegistus himself. It is “As Above, So Below”

The actual text,

That which is above is from that which is below, and that which is below is from that which is above

translated into English from Latin or Arabic, which was probably translated from Greek, essentially says that all things in nature are aspects of a single cohesive whole.

From the standpoint of Greek philosophers laboring in Alexandria, this might be a convenient expression for the atomos proposed by Democritus in 400 B.C.E. and a forerunner of our idea of the atom.

Thrown into the rather more fanciful environs of medieval Europe, accompanied on it’s way with tales of djinns and efrits and the glorious magics of Solomon the Wise, the idea became a binder between the heavens and the earth, and justification for the correspondences of metals, stones, plants, and the like with the natures and virtues of the planetary wanderers.

And yet in this aspect was the roots of modern medicine, metallurgy, and chemistry, as well as enduring metaphor for the expansion of the consciousness. Alchemists revered this phrase and it’s interlocking trines throughout their search for the Elixir of Life and Philosopher’s Stone. It carries within it even more secrets, hinted at in the texts of the Emerald Tablet.

Its father is the Sun and its mother the Moon.
The Earth carried it in her belly, and the Wind nourished it in her belly,
as Earth which shall become Fire.
Feed the Earth from that which is subtle

Here then are references to at least three of the four classical elements – Earth, Wind, and Fire. This kind of phrase, along with the most imaginative of illustrations, form the rhebus instructions of the alchemical manuals. But I think the really neat trick is how we find the elements with our hexagon/hexagram.

First, of course, we just have to separate the “Above” from the “Below” and we get Fire and Water. But look more closely at the joined triangles. If you take the upward pointing triangle and the bottom line from the downward pointing triangle, you get the sign for Air. Flipping that to the downward pointing triangle gives us Earth. So the four elements are hidden figures within the As Above, So Below hexagram.

But, like any good late night infomercial pitch, that’s not all. The hexagon/hexagram combination does that same nifty trick that the pentagon/pentagram does. Within the hexagram inside the hexagon is another hexagon. You can then create another hexagram in that, which creates another hexagon inside it, ad infinitum.

Welcome, my friends, to the concept of fractals. And also the basic ideas that lead us into the murky waters of quantum theory – no matter how small something is, it’s always made up of something smaller. And, well, no matter how big something is, there’s probably something even bigger outside it, that maybe you don’t see until you get outside that, and outside that, and outside that…

So again, turtles all the way down. Most of which have no connection to Renaissance artists or togakure-ryu. But if it helps, you can think of all those repeating hexagon/hexagrams as being diagrams of turtle shells.

If infinity has you’re head spinning, let’s jump back onto a more solid ground. Platonically solid ground, in this case, as a few choice lines from the angles in the hex give us a nice diagram for the first two platonic solids, the pyramid, and the cube. From two dimensions we have moved into three, or at least we are representing three dimensions in a two dimensional space, and that’s nifty in itself. The cube is more elegantly expressed of course, because in addition to just looking better, we have the added symbolic link of a six-sided object being used to represent a six-faced object. I’ve tried to find some sacred number related to the four faces and six sides, but it’s not there, so it’s just that you can draw it if you need to, though again it’s not as isometrically clean.

On the other hand, if you wanted to get a four faced pyramid (which is actually five sided; four triangles and a square) you just have to modify that upward pointing triangle and the square of the cube. It’s not exact to the one’s that the Egyptians built, mind you, and I make no claim that it has any relation to them. I think I will probably due a future article on the legend, myth, and symbology associated with pyramid structures in human history, but that’s not for today. In the meantime, it’s a satisfying exercise.

Of course, one of the most basic ideagrams that we can render from the hexagon shape is the “hex” itself, as six-rayed assembly of lines. This equivocates to the “grove” symbol in the Ogham script. Again, I can’t say there’s any evidence of a connection, but that doesn’t prevent you making one, and drawing on the power of that symbol. In some permutations of the Ogham grove I have found it also flexes to represent the transits of the luminaries on the equinoxes and solstices. That is, if you take an aerial view of Stonehenge – or the Great Pyramid of Giza for that matter – and plot the sunrise and sunset positions of the sun and moon on the equinoxes and solstices, you get a hex line shape. In this case, the angles are much more shallow, as the Tropic are around 23.7 degrees north and south of the equinoctal line, and in a regular hexagon, the angles are 60 degrees.

Which is to say, they are sextile for the purposes of astrology. Which we can also derive from the hexagon shape. For instance, if we take one of our inner triangles, and draw a line from each corner to the middle (instead of all the way across) we get a three rayed shape with angles of 120 degrees. This is a trine. you can also achieve the same design by erasing half of the rays in the hex. Have of six is three. Half of sextile is trine, even though the angle measurements double. I always had trouble understanding that relationship until I started playing with these hex diagrams. Maybe this will help you.

You can find the 90 degrees of a square aspect with a hair more work. Put the hexagram back in and draw a line from the top of the upper triangle to the bottom of the bottom triangle. Now draw a line across the point where the two triangles join in the middle. Erase the extra lines and viola – a four rayed shape with 90 degree angles.

You have now derived the three major aspects used in astrology. Of course, you’re going to need a chart.

So take the hexagram, and draw lines through each point of the triangle, like we do to get the hex, and then draw lines through each of the intersecting angles, like we did to get the square. You end up with 12 rays, and the cusps of 12 signs. In the diagram I’ve reduced the size of the hexagram, so the relationship is clearer, but you can see it does indeed contain the keys to a zodiac.

Overlaid in color here are two of the trine diagrams, one in blue, which shows you the relationships of the water signs. You can rotate this to locate the air, earth, and fire signs, respectively. The red one also shows the locations of the cardinal, fixed, and mutable triplicity, in this case for the signs of fire, but just rotate it around and the others fall into place.

Is this all that we can tease out of the humble hexagon? No. Fiddling around in my art software I was able to come across a few more totally unrelated, but poignant connections using just the geometry and some imagination.

Taking our hex lines again, you can look to them as Cartesian coordinates. They are the X, Y and Z axes of three dimensional space. Anyone who struggles with that train leaving Chicago problem may remember some of these exercises from algebra classes. I do a lot of 3-D animation work, and the 3-D grid is almost second nature to me. Essentially the center where the three line cross is 0, and any point in space can be plotted using positive or negative values along those lines, so X is left and right, Y is up and down, and Z is forward or back. In order to see clearly the values of all three lines, the diagram is usually tilted in almost exactly the same way as our hex. So you can use a hex to put anything anywhere.

Now, I have mentioned before that we all live in a four-dimensional space-time. If I want to diagram it on my hexagon, I can just drop it in at a right angle to Y axis, and get the following figure.

So any point in space and time can be reached by virtue of the hex. That might explain why the capacious interior of a certain blue phone box has had hexagon wall decorations for several decades. Or not. Still, it’s an intriguing expression of the concept.

Moving back into more esoteric spaces, I was also able to take the basic hex, add a few curves, and arrive at the Xi-Rho symbol, usually with Alpha and Omega, this is supposedly the vision of Constantine at the Malvern Bridge, with motto “in hoc signio vincis” – In this Sign, you will Conquer. While historians generally believe that Constantine took it as a message from Sol Invictus, later Christian records give it as the Xi-Rho, a short hand for Cristos, and the basis for what became Christian Rome. While his mother was a devout Christian, and Constantine did order the Council of Nicea which firmed up the Nicean Creed and laid the foundations of modern orthodoxy, the Emperor himself didn’t convert until his deathbed.

Another imaginative permutation is the zig-zag “lightning bolt” that is said to travel down the Quabbalistic Tree of Life bringing Divine Wisdom (Ain Soph) into existence in the material world. You need to stack a couple of hexagons for the full diagram, and add a tail at the bottom, but you can get there from here. Those claiming that abracadabra derives from the Hebrew “what I speak I manifest” might want to play with this idea a little further.

Am equally interesting object from the hexagon and As Above/So Below angles is a three dimensional construct known as a merkaba. The word merkaba comes from the Hebrew as “Chariot” and so we have an immediate link with the seventh card of the Tarot major arcana. As many others have posted, 2023 is considered a “Chariot” year as it numerologicaly resolves to seven. Seven is a sacred number all on it’s own, so if a merkaba is a chariot, then we’ve managed to find seven hidden in six. That’s an alchemical spontaneous generation worthy of old Bombastis himself.

The merkaba is the three dimensional extension of As Above, So Below. It is the two triangles, expressed as interlocking three-faced pyramids (see there was a reason I talked about the platonic pyramid) such that each face of each pyramid is pierced by the the point of another one. The diagram here is derived from the hexagon. I have mocked up one in Lightwave 3-D to show how interesting this thing becomes as an object. Pretty nifty trick for an old Hebrew chariot I think.

Some also say the word merkaba is derived from the ancient Egyptian root words mer-ka-ba. Several online sources style this as “light, spirit, and body” or “love, spirit, body”, It may be more accurately translated “Pyramid of the Soul and the Shadow” or “Food of the Blessed Dead” since “mer” can be either pyramid or cake. The Greek “pyramid” derives from “pyramis” -wheat cake. The Egyptian wheat cake was called ben-ben, which is the word for the top of the pyramid or the obelisk, which had a similar shape. These shapes were also symbolic of the sun’s rays, and the primordial mound of earth rising from the flood of the celestial Nile where the Lotus that Ra emerges from grew. Mer, then, is not the cake, but the ritual use of the cake, either in feeding a god or a deceased relative, both rituals we know of. It’s not fair to say the Greeks got it wrong, because over the long age of Egypt mer came to mean “love” and “pyramid” as well as the ritual use of the cake.

Those are fascinating concepts to explore. Relating them onward to a Hebrew chariot that is visually complex and symbolically loaded, draws to my mind some of the Old Testament angels connected with the prophet Ezekiel. Plenty of places to go with this one if one is interested.

Speaking of going, in my own explorations, I have used the hexagon/hexagram as basis to develop this symbol, which I will eventually put on an amulet or an altar stone. To my mind it connects with symbols of Hekate, and well, Hekate, Heka, Hex, Haxxan, Hagatesse and Hexagon can all blur lines in rhyme, alliteration, and the verbal games we play in spell work. And now you can see that there are mathematical and geometric games you can play as well, so if you are looking for right angle (pun meaningfully intended) to approach a particular magical operation, I hope I have given you some new tools to work with. If nothing else, I hope it encourages you to spend time looking past the surface of things as presented.

Before departing this week’s article I fully admit to lifting the title from a very much more important work. Even though you can’t copyright titles, and the words fit my little exercise, equally well, I clearly acknowledge, respect and admire the work of the pioneering African-American women the book and film Hidden Figures is about. Their contribution to the advancement of both the space program, and cause of racial justice in this country, cannot be minimized. If you are unaware of it, I strongly encourage you make yourself familiar.

Thank you again for reading all the way to the end of this week’s piece. It is longer and potentially more complicated that what I have offered in the past. More like this is forthcoming, so I hope you find it useful. I’ll be back again in a week.

January 11, 2023January 16, 2023

So It Is Written

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just like the meanings of the Tarot cards.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

December 14, 2022December 13, 2022

Looking Ahead…

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Dylan Thomas

I thought to close last week’s article with this snippet of poetry as it reflected my personal response toward the relatively crappy year that was 2022. Following the Plague Years, we none of us expected too much, and yet, we all of us hoped for a final dawning of the day.

Well, the world more or less went back to business as usual, which is a sad thing in itself.

But I hope as Byron Ballard said on a recent episode the Your Average Witch Podcast, we have passed through the Tower Time, and are now just cleaning up the mess. Star Time awaits us, with all the potential of celestial level rebirth.

I have become acquainted with the wit and wisdom of this wonderful witch who hails from the North Carolina mountains on the other side of the Appalachians from where I grew up. Naturally being both native Appalachainians (a word made up by my sixth grade math teacher, as something of a joke, and yet it fits) we have many things in common.

I look forward to a time Mrs. Ballard’s path crosses my own and I get to speak with her face to face. In meantime, I recommend you locate her on your favorite podcast and her own. She is a delightful, funny, and brilliant woman who I hope will continue to lead in the larger community toward Star Time.

For my own part, I have plans for 2023 to expand my horizons just a bit, to see if I can support the additional load of some new ventures while honoring the responsibilities of my day job and giving right and proper focus to my family.

This blog was actually supposed to be something of a sideline to my primary intention of opening a webstore to sell my art, craft, and jewelry work. My artwork has never been mainstream, and those who will appreciate are also not likely mainstream, so the blog was supposed to be about my methods, meanings, and merchandise. As you can doubtless tell it evolved. I am pleased with that, and I don’t intend on making any great changes. T

hat said, I am committed to returning to my art as the year progresses, and so there may also be articles, short posts, and announcements popping up here from time to time that are not “on subject” in the usual manner. My art is, and always has been, informed by and imbued with, my occult sensibilities, so maybe it won’t be too far off the beam. Just don’t get upset if I do a bit more “active selling”. At some point this has to generate a profit.

I also have a plan to add perhaps a biweekly article where I go deep on a particular Tarot card. Tarot is my core discipline, having been drawn (pun intended) to it early in life because of my visual nature. I have begun several times to write a book on Tarot. Every time I do, I get to a point where I realize I need to go deeper or go back to the cards or just don’t think what I started with is anything not already out there in the world. So to some extent this is an experiment in Tarot analysis designed to clarify my own understanding, as much as expand that of the reader. Don’t expect this too soon, though. I have The Fool on the calendar for around April 1, as appropriate, and since we’ll start there, well, it gives me some time to really figure out how I want to do this, and how I can sustain it with previously mentioned responsibilities and obligations.

I am preparing for another Tarot related activity as well. For several years, my good lady wife and I have owned the domain bookmark-this.com. In previous lifetimes we used it for book review and author interviews adjacent to other media ventures, but it’s been dormant for quite some time. We plan to reinvigorate that this year, and I aim to expand it to include review of Tarot and Oracle decks. I am beginning with my own sizable collection, but if anyone out there is a publisher or has an in with one, I am happy to accept review copies, and feature pre-release news articles. I have been a journalist (in one of my lifetimes) and Bookmark This will grow as we can grow it.

My focus with the Sacred Life has been to share my personal perspectives. It is not and will not become a Magic 101 or similar site. There are so many sites, books, podcasts, and other resources that are available and better equipped to provide that kind of information. My objective has always been to spark that most fundamental of questions – Why?

Understanding the how of something is powerful. It’s necessary. But as we are all experiencing magic from the human perspective, I think it’s important to explore how that human experience has evolved, and is evolving. I am frequently a cynic and an iconoclast. I am clearly sarcastic and irreverent. I think such qualities are a good way to approach life in general. Question everything, my friends. Including me. Including you. We are none of us so enlightened or elevated that we cannot look further up the path and still wonder.

I thank you all for your patronage since I began earlier this year. Had I any idea of the things that would change in my life, I don’t know that I would have committed to this. But that can be said of any and all changes that come. If we don’t choose to act, we will be acted upon.

I hope this last season of the calendar year is a good one for you and yours, and if it isn’t, I hope you find the energy to get through to brighter days. Change is a constant.

See you next week.

November 16, 2022November 16, 2022

A Brief Correspondence Course

It occurs to me that the pun in the title of this week’s article is completely lost on a couple of generations accustomed to Google, Wikipedia, and Youtube as the source of all knowledge. By way of explanation, back in Ye Olden Days, ere the Internet was a one-lane goat track, and the Elves still appeared right out there in broad daylight, one might pursue educational endeavors by means of the postal mail service. The back and forth epistles between student and teacher made up said correspondence,

That’s okay, I’m sure nobody gets all of Gandalf’s jokes either.

However, it is the backing and forthing that are important, particularly in the art of spell casting. This is the root of sympathetic magic, which is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, of magical practices.

There are three important tentpoles to remember in sympathetic magic.

The image of the thing is the thing.

The name of the thing is the thing.

The thing that is like the thing is the thing.

Number three is the Doctrine of Sympathies or Correspondences.

If a stone is deep red it connects to blood. If a flower looks like an eye it’s connected to the vision (both spiritual and mundane). If the leaves are dark we consider it saturnine. Pick up any spell book from the Greek Magical Papyri to the latest Witchcraft for Real Idiots on the ‘Zon and you’ll likely find at least one table of correspondences. There are even magic texts that are nothing but correspondences.

There are astronomical correspondences that match the planets to metals, stones, plants, parts of the body, colors of the spectrum, and hours of the day. Astrology is perhaps an early archetype of the use of correspondences. The nature of the animal applied to the constellation is used to express how those born with the sun in that sign are inclined. The facets of a person’s life are divided into houses, which “naturally” align with the nature of these signs, Then the nature of the planets may be interpreted as to how they react with the sign and the house, and in aspect with other planets.

Much work has been done with astrological correspondences to the Tarot, so that reading the cards can incorporate the heavenly influences as well as the imagery on the cards themselves. Of course the Tarot are also intimately connected with the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and with numbers, and the four elements, and the core tools of the witch’s practice- wand/staff/broom/torch; cup/cauldron/well; sword/knife/pin/needle; and stone/coin/hearth/tomb. It is probably because Tarot has become so ubiquitous, due to it’s simple operation and portability, that all these additional connections are grafted on. They are not, perhaps, inherent to the Tarot itself.

Tarot and Astrology are interlinked in most modern magical systems. There are traditional associations of the cards with specific planets, signs, and houses that allow the interpretation of the cards as astrological and vice versa. In the use of cards as symbols in spellcraft, these traditional correspondences may be called upon.

For example, Gemini is most usually connected with The Lovers, the seventh card in the RWS deck. This sees the two figures, as Gemini.

There are however, four other serviceable cards in the deck. The Deuce of Cups is seen as a “Lover type” card, and we have the inclusion of the serpent staff of Hermes/Mercury, ruler of Gemini.

The Deuce of Swords might be more beneficial to break up a romance. or perhaps break a contract or get out of a legal problem. These are the purview of Gemini /Mercury, and this Sword card always reminds me of Blind Justice (especially since in RWS, the Justice card is not blind).

Gemini also covers short travel, and the Deuce of Wands and of Pentacles have travel motifs. Although the long journey typically associated with sea-borne imagery is usually Sagittarius, Gemini/Mercury is involved with commercial ventures. Balancing your checkbook whilst your freight is on stormy seas applies.

While the idea of correspondence is nothing new, there are new correspondences. Much of the attachment to Tarot is perhaps a century and a half old or less. There’s good evidence that they were used for “fortune telling” back in the 1400s but the layers of esoteric synthesis started in France with Eliphas Levi. The same can be said for other correspondences you might find in all those spellbooks.

In pre-historic times, the use of herbal medication was a necessity. If something looked like a particular part of the body, then it could be used to treat ailments of that part. However, as Freud pointed out, sometimes a cigar was just a cigar. If the medicine worked, it was used again and again. If it didn’t it was likely forgotten, ignored, or left out of the oral tradition. This would not preclude it from being “rediscovered” by successive generations who might add it back to the pharmacopeia for a while. This methodology was followed up until relatively modern times.

The same practice was used for the medicinal/magical use of stones, jewels, crystals, and the like. The ancient Romans dissolved pearls in vinegar and chugged it down to give them a pearlescent complexion. Whether it worked or not is questionable. Pearls being largely calcium carbonate with trace compounds, it was probably equivalent to quaffing chalk, and may have made their bones and teeth stronger. But being wealthy enough to drink a pearl milkshake on a regular basis may have been more of an attraction than milky smooth skin. The apothecaries of the ancient and Medieval times were no less mercenary than their modern counterparts.

Mandrake has long been a witch herb. These images from a Medieval Herbal show lore that has been unchanged for ages.

The mandrake was supposed to cry out when pulled from the earth, and it’s scream would either cause madness or death. So the enterprising apothecary simply tied a dog to the plant, and then called the dog from out of earshot. It’s not clear whether the dog went mad or died, but in the Middle Ages dogs were not accorded the value they are now.

Mandrake roots came in male and female versions, and were selected for a specific purpose accordingly. Most texts considered the undivided root as male, and a root with a fork as female. The drawing here is probably wrong, as it appears to depict two different plant species. It was copied to several herbals of the time.

And certainly this contributed to adding to the lists of exotic, rare, and hard to come by ingredients that fleshed out correspondence tables throughout history. Chinese herbals call for bits of dragons, unicorns, and other mythical creatures. Sadly these were – and still are – often substituted by parts from rare and endangered terrestrial animals like the rhinoceros, whale, and condor.

In fact, the idea of correspondences makes substitution an “ethical” option for the harried apothecary. If this rock looks like that rock, or this bone looks like that bone, then they are, for most intents and purposes – the same. This obviously can – and did – have tragic consequences, as many herbs and plants are not only not interchangeable, but can be outright deadly.

Because medical/recreational use of certain compounds is hardly a new thing, it’s important to recognize that the use of something in witchcraft might be the same as it was in folk medicine. In so many societies magic and medicine were interchangeable, and this has only changed in the last 150 years or so. At the height of the Enlightenment, when the scientific method was about to burst onto the scene, people were still being bled and purged to remove “ill humours” that were the cause of their diseases. Opium, cannabis, and coca were used as anesthetics and soporifics into the early 20th century, and their chemically synthesized children are still with us today.

So called “flying ointments” often partake of a number of herbs which create euphoria or somatic states, and many of the ingredients are those old Saturnine herbs, the nightshades. Containing potent alkaloids, plants like Atropa Belladonna, Hyoscyamus Niger, Datura Stramonium, and of course, Mandragora Officanarum have been the companions of witches since time immemorial. These are highly dangerous toxic plants that have a real potential to kill. Yet they are closely related to other nightshade plants like the potato, tomato, bell and chili peppers, which we consume as part of an ordinary diet.

Tobacco is also part of this family, and has long had sacred use among Indigenous Peoples of the Western Hemisphere. It was readily adapted by witchcraft and voodoo in the aftermath of the discovery of the New World by European colonials. Like many magical herbs, it’s sacred use in moderate amounts might be deemed safe, but in mundane and constant consumption leads to a pernicious addiction and a plethora of health problems (I am a former smoker – I know of which I speak).

candle-color — Color is a common feature of correspondence, and one usually easy to work out. Red is associated with the blood, the heart, and love. Purple, the color of royalty, often connects with Jupiter, King of the Gods. Yellow represents the Sun and is used in solar magic. Black is color of death, the deep night, and in post Christian Europe, evil spirits that dwell there.

Color magic often employs candles, and much has been made of having the proper color of candle for the spell. Given that coloring candles is a fairly modern technique, and that witches historically would not only have made do with the tallow and beeswax they had, and would not have usually advertised a spell by showy ingredients, you are probably safe with plain old white candles. Personally, I have a number of faux candles in various colors that I use interchangeably with actual ones. The LED candles are safe for my cats, vegan friendly, and reusable.

So were the ancient sorcerors just bombed out of their gourd all the time? It’s possible. There is some good evidence to that theory. Also, if your job is to have visions for the tribe, and eating the little white berries gives you visions, you’re likely to be eating a lot of the little white berries. If your job is to hunt the mastadon, it’s probably not the greatest idea. (Seriously, though. Don’t eat the little white berries. They’re very bad for you.)

The sacred nature of altered states of consciousness is fairly accepted in some cultures, as are things like mental illness, and even what we used to call mental retardation. People who were “different” in the way they spoke and acted were assumed to be in touch with the spirit world, and cared for and respected. Other cultures, of course, see such things as evil. Joan of Arc was probably schizophrenic or suffering from a brain lesion. She was sent by God to the French, and burned by the English as a witch.

Correspondences change similarly from culture to culture and place to place. If you are perusing that Chinese herbal you’ll find a lot of dragon bones (possibly ground fossils, or crocodile or snake bones), ginseng, and mushrooms. A European grimoire might place greater emphasis on precious stones or metals, and the Arabs would favor much incense and spices that were native or common in their lands. These were all compiled as part of an industrial mechanism that fed both the magic and medical practices of the culture. While there is probably some folklore to a lot of it, there was clearly money to be made by padding the lists.

I personally don’t make much of correspondences. I’ll consider astrological metals if I am working on an amulet, but given the price of gold and silver these days, I’m not likely to be petitioning the Sun and the Moon. Since petitioning the Sun and the Moon might be beneficial, though, maybe I ought to consider a way to get around that pesky high-dollar metal thing.

magic-stones — We all love the shiny rocks, don’t we? Crystal and stone correspondences are some of the most common we hear about. They are regarded as “birthstones” so can be astrologically attached. They have associations with the Chakras (usually based on color), planets, and various “vibrations” that may be traditional folklore or modern myth.
The pieces in the image above are (Clockwise from top) amethyst- quartz contaminated with iron, rutilated quartz with bits of a greenish tourmaline crystal, fluorite, amethyst again, and iron pyrite, or Fool’s gold.

This is a crystalline formation of iron and sulfur, bonded at the molecular level. It doesn’t have the malleability and ductility of true gold, so it probably didn’t substitute for it in all those solar amulets. On the other hand, being made of iron and sulfur, it can serve as well for Mars and Ares, or Vulcan, lord of the forge, or even Infernal association.

How about aluminum instead of silver? It’s a shiny white metal. It’s relatively cheap (compared to silver) easier to get, and – hey – it was actually used to go to the moon. There’s aluminum that we left behind on the moon right now, in fact. Would the Angel of the Moon accept aluminum instead of silver in my mystic moon amulet? Well, probably not if one goes with the strictest rules of the grimoire. But I am fairly sure that gold and silver were just as hard to come by in the days before alchemy, so I’m not at all sure that the Angel of the Moon didn’t accept the equivalent of a wooden nickel.

Alchemy, of course, changed everything because you could make all the gold you wanted. I hear you snickering in the back there. There actually is a chemical trick, doable with the technology of the time, which has the appearance of turning a piece of metal into gold. It’s a kind of simple electroplating, and for a short period of time (perhaps time to pass it off to an irate landlord) it would pass most Medieval tests for being gold.

So again, how many of the spells in the old grimoires actually used gold and silver and rubies and emeralds is open to question. I think potentially a lot of them employed early synthetics made by the alchemists. And if it was good enough for the Angel of the Moon in 1278, it’s good enough now. Scribing the spell with a shiny metallic marker might horrify some working in “high magic” and I can’t guarantee your results, but it has worked for me on occasion.

Substitutions can be made. Instead of silver you might use a silver coin, like a nickel or a quarter (if you’re in the US). These were originally struck from silver, but now operate as symbolically so. There’s no reason the correspondence between a modern silver colored coin and an antique silver coin can’t extend to the correspondence between that silver coin and the Angel of the Moon.

The working witches of yore didn’t have access to all the shiny stuff you can get shipped from the ‘Zon. They were frequently on the down low to begin with, so having a bunch of shiny stuff around the hut probably alarmed the local populace who sent out the torch and pitchfork memo. To the extent that an herb or a stone or a piece of red thread worked, they kept it, maybe in secret. But I don’t believe any of them looked up a table of correspondences and said “Well, we can’t fly to the Sabbat, tonight, we’re out of eye of newt.”

Because any fool knows you need wool of bat for a flying potion. Duh.

I hope you found this diversion diverting. I will be back again next week with more windmills to tilt at.

August 10, 2022August 1, 2022

Those Troublesome Victorians

One of the programs I listen to habitually is Your Average Witch Podcast. The format used by host Kim is somewhat unique (at least with regard to podcasts I follow). She poses to each guest a series of the same questions. Aside from getting to hear the guests’ answers, I find it often sets me wondering as to how I would respond as well.

One of the questions always asked of guests who (or what) are the top three influences in their magical practice. This question got me thinking.

You probably have ascertained that many of my influences are not the authors and personalities of the 90s and later decades. Most come from over 100 years ago. Chief among these is not an occultist in the strictest sense, but a scholar and translator from the British Museum named E. A. Wallis Budge.

If you’re not into Egyptology you may never have heard of him. His reputation is much abused in the modern Egyptological community. The general consensus is that his work is subject to significant error, and in particular his translations are flawed and poorly referenced.

I have read the newer translations of the Book of the Dead and find them substantially similar. Perhaps some of the pronunciations of the symbols have changed, but considering the language had not been spoken for say, a millennium, before anyone tried to decipher the written texts, it’s hard to say what it sounded like.

There are a number of people who practice a form of Ancient Egyptian religion today. I am not one of those. Nor do I work with the pseudo-Egyptian rituals out of the Golden Dawn and other ceremonial magic lodges. But my view of the cosmos is definitely shaped by the many books that Budge wrote, translated (if poorly), and preserved for our modern era.

While there are some good arguments that his translations don’t meet current standards, I find it more concerning that they are deeply tainted by Victorian Imperialism and Church of England Christianity. Yet, if you can find any text from that period that isn’t, it would be indeed rare. That is simply how things were.

The people who had the money and resources to research other cultures were inevitably going to put their slant on what they found. The myth that we do not do so today is ridiculous. We are, after all, evaluating those troublesome Victorians in the context of our current culture that is striving to overcome imperialism and monolithic patriarchal ideologies.

While there is no question that from the 16th through the 20th century, Europeans plundered the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Central and South America for their ancient artifacts and cultural heritage, the collection of these things into museums has preserved them, and made them accessible to people who could never have visited them in their original location. Some of them were unknown even to their own people until an ambitious conqueror arrived with spade and shovel.

2048px-British_Museum_from_NE_2_(cropped) — The venerable British Museum, repository of the treasures of ancient civilizations from around the world. Under criticism in modern times for acquisitions plundered from fallen empires and less powerful states during the 19th century, it remains probably the greatest public collection of human artifacts in the world. I have spent days roaming its halls and galleries, which are still accessible via free admission. During my last visit I was able to view the great Winged Bulls of Nineveh that had been evacuated from the museums of Baghdad to prevent destruction and plundering during the first Gulf War. Many of this museum’s treasures, as well as those in other museum in Europe and the America’s, might not have survived in the political instabilities of their native lands. But there is a moral question as to whether these pieces should remain where they are, are be re-patriated. Do we risk the destruction of our history by sending it back to where it came from?

Ham, CC BY-SA 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/, via Wikimedia Commons

Someday, it may even make possible the return of these artifacts to the lands of their creation and the custodianship of the descendants of those who made them. It is all well and good to support this principle, yet in my own lifetime great atrocities have been committed against art and artifacts in times of war. Plundered objects go to private collections of the uber-rich and never benefit anyone but a single person’s vanity.

So I have no problem with the large number of Budge’s books in my collection. After several decades of my own personal growth and experience, I am able to read past the taint and still find the magic and wonder of the original documents he has compiled from Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon. These texts, in the form that Budge wrote them, have been used by occultists and magicians from his time down to our own. They were the authority on the subject, and once inculcated into the magical tradition, their authenticity or interpretation was not again questioned.

And it is in the occult sense that I reference these works. I have books by Peter Tompkins, Howard Carter, Bob Brier, Kent Weeks, Zahi Hawass, Kara Coonie, and Peter Weller that offer very different views of ancient Egyptian history and culture. Archaeology is an evolving science, and new evidence can change what we have held as true for decades.

But the occult is much more forgiving when it comes to “facts”. If there are hundreds or thousands of occultists who have used Budges glyphs for the last century or so to write spells and inscribe objects of power, then those versions are the one’s being put out into the universe to manifest.

One thing that is relatively unchallenged about Ancient Egyptian culture is the emphasis on the power of these glyphs. Cecil B. DeMille in the 1956 The Ten Commandments gives the line to Yul Brenner as Ramses the Great :”So let it be written. So let it be done.” This underscores the value placed on the written word, and the hieroglyphic texts even moreso.

Most ancient Egyptians were not literate, so the glyphs covering every object and artifice were lost on them. But they knew it was magic. It was power. The glyphs were there to record for all time the works and deeds of Pharaoh, thus making him immortal. His named carved in stone would last, he hoped, for all eternity. This belief was so strong that many Pharaohs were cursed by having their names removed from temples, tombs, and sarchophagi, thus dooming them to oblivion. Some notable personages consigned to this fate were Hatshepsut, the Female Pharaoh, Akenaten, the Heretic, and his short-lived successor Tutankhamen.¹ The redaction of the latter king was a lucky break for him and for history, because his tomb was lost to obscurity, and thus remained unplundered until Carter’s discovery in 1927.

Rosetta_Stone — The Rosetta Stone is supposedly the most visited object in the British Museum. It is considered to be the key that unlocked the mystery of the hieroglyphic language, though it was not so immediate or so simple. It is probably better to say that it provided translators with a clue that these signs were sometimes phonetic, rather than being alphabetic or purely symbolic. This was adduced by Francois Champollion who was working from a rubbing made during the Napoleonic Expedition. Napoleon’s army had captured the stone, along with many other artifacts, but had to leave them when the British forced them out of Egypt. They came into possession of the British Empire as spoils of war from the French Empire.

Ironically, the clue that allowed Champollion to break the code, was the need to write the Greek names Ptolemy and Cleopatra in ancient hieroglyphics. Determining that the glyphs surrounded by the loop of the cartouche were the names written in Greek and Demotic on the lower portions of the stone, he worked out which symbols were standing for sounds, and then went to find them on other artifacts. This would never have happened if Egypt hadn’t been part of Alexander’s Empire, and subject to the rule of invading foreigners.

By © Hans Hillewaert, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3153928

If we are to seek validation for using Budges bad conversions of the glyphs, and the potentially errant interpretations of gods, goddesses, and their veneration, we need look no further than that most troublesome of the Victorian magicians, Aleister Crowley. More specifically, we can hold up his Book of Thoth, as he calls the “Egyptian” Tarot. The word “Thoth” is a Graeco-Roman gloss of the ancient Egyptian name, Tehuti/Djheuty/dhwtj which refers to the ibis headed god of writing, magic, and sometimes the moon. It is this god who writes the names of the beloved of Osiris after they have passed the test of the Balance and confirmed that their heart is as light as the feather of truth. Thus written, they are eternal. Thoth’s book is the prototype from which all others descend.

We can see this idea of emanations in Qabalah, and it’s not surprising that Eliphas Levi made the connections between the Hebrew alphabet, the root of Qabalistic revelation, and the 22 cards of the Major Arcana. Levi’s confutation, without any real external facts, descends down into Waite and Crowley, and virtually every other Tarot system extant today. Tarot cards are a 15th or 16th century invention, which may have been used from the beginning as an oracle by many people, including the Romani, who were wrongly believed to be from Egypt. Hence this “ancient oracle” held the secret wisdom of the Book of Thoth, from which everything in the universe is made.

The Crowley Tarot is still in widespread use by Thelemites and non-Thelemites. I have at least a couple of decks, and a few derivatives. The designs by Lady Freida Harris are iconic, and offer a more modernist appeal than the sometimes quaint renditions of Pixie Smith or the woodcut Medieval harshness of the Tarot de Marseilles. But they are not, and never have been, Egyptian, or linked in any verifiable historical way with the god Tehuti/Djehuty/dhwtj.

This in no way makes them less useful as Tarot, or the alleged connection, any less useful in magic and spellwork. The gods still like hearing their names spoken, even when mispronounced. People have been calling to Thoth from Hellenistic times, and that has built a bridge the rest of us can cross.

levi-waite-crowley — A triptych of Tarotists. Eliphas Levi (left) connected his deep belief in the Hebrew Qabalah with the Major Arcana of the popularly published Tarot de Marseille and referenced it in multiple works. This connection is based on their being 22 characters in Hebrew and 22 cards in the Arcana. There is no real basis for this at all. It was merely Levi’s *unverifiable personal gnosis*.

In the middle we find Arthur Edward Waite, member of the Golden Dawn, translator and publisher of the works of Eliphas Levi, and writer of the Pictorial Key to the Tarot. His cards, executed by Pamela Colman Smith, are the most widely published, and will be moreso now that the designs have entered the public domain. Waite dismissed the myths that Tarot were an ancient oracle, but kept much of the interpretations of his predecessors.

Aleister Crowley was, like many Victorians, fascinated with Ancient Egypt and the discoveries being made there. He didn’t invent the idea that the Tarot are Egyptian, or represent an ancient occult Book of Thoth. That comes from a late 18th century writer named Alliette, who was elaborating on a “history” by Court de Gebelin with no factual basis. The interest in his theory was fueled by the importation of Egyptian antiquities by the European empires during that period. Crowley returned to the concept, layered on Levi’s Qabalah inferences, and married it to esoteric concepts he encountered in India and Asia (if not outright copied from Blavatsky).

We use their systems and interpretations today, though the meanings of the cards are gradually evolving to meet modern needs, and modern sensitivities. In a hundred years, the myriad decks published now may be more well known, and some industrious 22nd century chronicler will talk about how they were all derived from sources without any historical or cultural antecedent.

The important thing we need to understand is that when we cross that bridge, we don’t need to carry all that Victorian baggage. It’s not an expedition into the darkest jungles replete with racist stereotypes of native African bearers, submissive Punjabi manservants pouring Afternoon Tea and enforcing our White Imperialist Christian Righteous Rightness at the point of Sahib’s big elephant gun. So when we approach these texts, we need to learn to read past the inherent arrogance that sometimes works hand in hand with the ritual.

This arrogance is one of the problems I have always had with the compulsion of spirits -usually reckoned as demons, using the power of the Christian god. This practice is not exclusively Victorian, of course. They were parroting Medieval beliefs that derive from the Holy Mother Church’s dogma suppressing all other beliefs. There’s some evidence that Abrahamic religions supported this kind of thing, but it’s hard to say whether that was an original doctrine or some contamination from later influences. Certainly pre-Christian traditions used compulsion and exorcism rites to drive away unwanted spirits that were not pacified by more placative means. But this seems to have been more of a utilitarian approach, than assertion of a Divine Right.

The Victorians were the product of their time. India had been under British dominion for several hundred years by that point, and the boundaries of Nepal and Tibet were loosely defined. Egypt and Arabia had been in their control, more or less, since Napoleon was defeated. The Chinese Emperor had been declawed in the Opium Wars, and the ancient Silk Road had to pass through British Hong Kong. Aside from those uppity Americans, the people of the British Empire could consider themselves masters (and it was masters, despite Her Majesty the Queen) of the world of the 19th century.

When one sits in the center of that world, it’s an unfortunate tendency of human nature to believe in one’s own importance. People talk about Manifest Destiny and the White Man’s Burden and other foolish justifications for oppressing less technologically advanced cultures. They begin to believe that the ideas they may have pilfered from these cultures are their own invention, and rightfully theirs, because of who they are. It is only with the benefit of looking back from 100 years on, with a gentler perspective and wider awareness, that we can perceive their errors.

Or maybe not. When I started writing this article I was thinking about this massive blooming of occultism and spirituality at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, spurred by the horrors of the American Civil War and Crimean War in Europe, fueled further by World War I and the toppling of several European kingdoms, and the extreme social change wrought by the massive numbers of deaths during the Spanish Flu epidemic.

And then I look at the parallels of the later 20th century and early 21st, wars and rumors of wars, social upheaval, global pandemic, and a corresponding rise in new spirituality and occultism.

I am not here to claim that history is repeating itself. You can make your own choice there.

It’s fair to say that the ends of centuries seem to mess with our collective heads, as the end of the 18th included the American and French Revolutions, and sad stories about the deaths of kings. Our millennial event in 1999/2000 amplified this tendency that we as a species have to connect importance to dates on a calendar and then act as though something should be happening.

We are now in the unenviable position of becoming the next century’s troublesome Victorians.

There is an unpleasant undercurrent of extremist rightwing viewpoints pervading some pagan groups. Discussions of pure blood are creeping into ancestor veneration in places.

While giving lip service to making the new spirituality open and welcoming to persons of color, the economically disadvantaged, members of the LBGTQ+ community, and differently abled individuals, the core remains largely white, middle class, and neurotypical, using rituals and symbolism that connects to a binary heterosexual duality, frequently where one or the other partner is dominant.

These are the echoes of that 19th century arrogance. We are hopefully engaged in changing that, to make a better brighter world for all. But the Victorians believed they were making a better brighter world for all. That is the trap of arrogance, of sitting in the middle of the crumbling empire, and saying, oh, look how we can fix this.

I am as guilty as anyone of this arrogance. This little publishing enterprise is evidence of my confidence that my voice has value and should be heard. It’s not very different from the plethora of self-published magazines and books that we have from the late 19th and early 20th century on magic, spirituality, art, literature, and social change.

Nor am I saying that any of us should stop trying to achieve this change. It is vital that we make these changes.

But we have the advantage of well-documented hindsight. We know that in a hundred years, what we write and record and say today will be reviewed, dissected, appraised, interpreted and judged by whoever is leading the vanguard on spiritual transformation in the 22nd century. So we are able to consider how we want that posterity to remember us.

Are we going to be the carriers of the fire of a New Enlightenment, or are we going to be troublesome?

Thank you for reading to the end. I know my style of writing is more in common with those troublesome Victorians; the result of reading so much of their work, no doubt. I hope you will join me again next week for another trip down the rabbit hole. Peace and long life.

Instagram poster image edited from a photo by Alvesgaspar – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3259988

Please Share and Enjoy !

Please Share and Enjoy !

Please Share and Enjoy !

Please Share and Enjoy !

Please Share and Enjoy !

Please Share and Enjoy !

Please Share and Enjoy !

Please Share and Enjoy !

Please Share and Enjoy !

Please Share and Enjoy !