Tag: Deep Tarot

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Seven Sisters Light

Star

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

Traditional

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

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

star-rws-tarot
The enigma of the Star.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Taming of The Fire

Strength

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He has to swallow the pill.

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

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

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

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

We also need to swallow the pill.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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The Gift of the Magi

Magician

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pay no attention to that man behind the current.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Fool Who Follows Him

The Fool

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

Yes, I am still talking about the Fool card.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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