fear – A Sacred Life

September 27, 2023September 27, 2023

Time Traveling

Owing to my Good Lady Wife’s completing certification last week at the National Fire Academy, we found ourselves in the vicinity of Gettysburg for the weekend.

For the record, we are history nerds. We have the shirts and the hats that say that. And we enjoy a bit of time travel now and again, as a break from the multifarious pressures that come with the responsibilities of our day jobs. So we had booked ourselves a lodging at an antebellum bed and breakfast for a couple of days wandering about the various historical landscapes.

I know when I was a student in school, the battle that took place in this area on the first few days of July 1863 was taught as a very significant event. That was some time ago, and our schools keep adjusting what is historically important. Perhaps that’s as it should be.

I am a great believer that history should not be presented with blinders on. Nor should it be controlled and coerced into serving any particular agenda.

Things happen. We all experience things happening. We are all traveling through time at the pace of now becoming next, and now became then, in exactly the same unrelenting instant.

And what we experience, and how we react to it, and how we remember it is an absolutely personal thing. So it is safe to say that we may view any event we directly experience very differently than another person who experienced it with us.

This is part of the otherness that defines our human existence. It’s a consequence of being part of a universe that wants to know itself and all it’s potential selves. We can only hold that passing moment in memory, and memory is purely internal.

The American Civil War, and the slice of it that is the Battle of Gettysburg, is one of those things that has so much impact that it’s still being “contextualized” over 160 years later.

As a proper history nerd I try to follow two basic tenets.

Firstly, information should be analyzed to the extent that any bias that is likely to exist can be excised from the data itself.

That is, if you know one account was written by a Northern Abolitionist and another by a Southern Slave Holder, the information needs to get pared down to times, quantities, etc. Certainly the perspective can and should be accessed, to give us all some idea of the human experiences and ideas involved, but it’s not history, it’s the way the author viewed history at the time.

Which brings us to the second rule, people in history cannot, and should not, be judged or understood by the modern views we now hold.

Our present sensibilities are vastly different from the combatants of the American Civil War, from the Spanish Conquistadors, from the Roman Centurions, or any other person that has lived in a different period of time. Social media is rife with commentary about the differences between “Boomers”, “Gen X”, “Millennials”, and “Gen Z” and this is just among generations that we’re born since the Second World War. How then do we have the hubris to presume we “understand” the motivation of an Antebellum population?

This is why I prefer time travel to historical research. As the Doctor has said, we time travelers point and laugh at archaeologists.

Time travel is not an easy thing to do, of course. Absent a flux capacitor, temporal rotor, or warp drive, you really are tasked with finding someplace where the forces that perpetuate the illusion of linear time are relatively weak. These are becoming harder and harder to find in a modern global world interconnected with telecommunications equipment. But you can find them. And you can learn to ignore the distractions that can remind one of calendar dates and modern tech.

Find the ghosts can help.

I’m still not sure personally if ghosts aren’t simply other time travelers. Certainly we have the stories of ghosts that echo the horrible circumstances of their deaths. To the spiritualist and medium these sad beings remain because of the trauma they experienced, leaving a permanent imprint, or the presence of an unquiet spirit.

But there are lot of ghosts who simply are seen engaged in the normal activities of their life, or perhaps engaged in an emotionally intense event, like a pitched battle. In these cases, it is not impossible that we are simply peering past the walls of linear time and viewing the events that are happening just over there in the cosmic everpresent.

Several of the ghosts I have run into in my life look just like regular people. They don’t look “dead”, still have their heads and hands and aren’t bleeding profusely. As they walk past, some of them nod and smile, just as we would if we met in the hallway or on the street inside the same space-time.

They’re just slightly outside that space-time, and as such these moments can be brief and end abruptly. Almost as soon as one perceives the true nature of the encounter, one turns to look again and they’re gone.

We understand about as little of the true nature of time and space as we do the nature our own spirits. The tangibility of the meat suit, and the apparently “real” material world it inhabits, is, even to modern physics, not an entirely absolute thing. Physicality as we experience it may simply be another illusion, a limitation our our perception of the universe around us.

Time and space in our dreams is nothing like what we live in daily. It is non-linear, it is certainly non-physical, and frequently defies logical causality. Imagination is as ephemeral, so it’s a very difficult proposition to prove that the existence of the mind is bounded by the physical world and the apparent flow of linear time.

If you’re not a history nerd, it may surprise you to learn that the Spiritualist movement has it’s roots in the period following the American Civil War and in Europe following the Crimean War a couple of decades later. In both cases, there was an horrific loss of life on a scale not experienced before. Many of the dead were lost far from home, sometimes interred in mass graves with few markers. And still others were listed as “missing” which means the bodies were never identified.

In the era before modern embalming had become viable, there simply was no way to ever bring these dead men home. Such methods as existed (and they were largely experimental) were open only to the rich, who had not lost their wealth to the fortunes of war.

This left loved ones with no sense of closure. Spiritualism, with the trappings of the séance, table turning, spirit trumpets and talking boards offered mourning survivors a solace that they did not find in traditional religion. With the belief that the dead could be contacted, a wider acceptance that they remained in semi-tangible form as visible ghosts became more and more prevalent. Soon, spirits and ghosts began to expand beyond the shades of those passed on to include the shades of things that had never been alive.

The “ghost” of Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train is a widespread story across the parts of the country where his final journey passed on the way from Washington, D.C. to Illinois. Even for the animist, it’s hard to expect that the locomotive and cars that made that journey are spending eternity repeating the trip, particularly since the ghost of Lincoln himself rarely features in the stories.

We can accept that this is a mass delusion, of course. We can say that the trauma of the war and the culmination of that in the assassination of the President created a national myth that caused people to see that ghost train.

Or we can suggest that this same trauma has weakened the walls of space-time in some locales, and that we are still seeing the train as it passed on that fateful trek.

The same may be said for the phantom patrols and the ghost battles and other hauntings reported at Gettysburg and other battlegrounds of the American Civil War. It is not an exclusive experience to that event, either. I had a friend tell me they had a similar response to the battlefield of Culloden, in Scotland.

When we spill that much blood and pain and hate, it may not be possible to close the wounds for a very long time.

Culloden was the end of the Jacobite Rebellion. Gettysburg, though the war would continue for almost another two years, would signal the ultimate defeat of the Confederacy. In fact, there is one moment that historians will point to as the turning point in the war. That is what is known as Pickett’s Charge.

On July 3rd, after two days of battle with territory changing hands several times, it looked as though the Army of Northern Virginia under Robert E. Lee had the upper hand. There were still a handful of entrenched positions held by the Federal troops, but if they were broken, and put to retreat, Lee would command the supply lines that fed into Washington, D.C. and capturing the United States capital would have been much more likley.

If that had happened, the Confederate States of America might have continued to exist for some time, been recognized as a legitimate entity by other world governments, and institutionalized African slavery continued for some time, financed by the desire to feed cotton into the burgeoning mills of the awakening Industrial Revolution.

Alternatively, the area of North America between Mexico and Canada might have splintered into a number of small nations similar to Europe. The Westward Expansion that followed the Civil War would not have occurred as it did, and the vast wealth of natural resources would not be harnessed under a single banner, but squandered and fought over for decades. Alliances and pacts like those that precipitated World War I in Europe would surely have similarly volatile results in the Western Hemisphere, and the Twentieth Century could easily have been marked by constant international warfare with very little progress.

I’m sure some of us could argue that the Twentieth Century was marked by constant international warfare, and frankly we don’t seem to be making much headway in the Twenty-first, but we sew the seeds and see what will sprout in the future. Time travel doesn’t always help us see what’s coming. Because it’s complicated.

On July 3rd, 1863, General Pickett ordered his men forward against the enemy line, to “take the Yankee position” at a place called the Angle. To get there, they had to run down a rise across open territory, cross over a fence, a ditch, a road, and a stone wall, before reaching the enemy position.

If you stand on that terrain today, you wonder at what possessed them to attempt something like this. It’s clearly suicidal. It was a really bad idea. The commanding officers should have known that. They may have known it, but they chose to ignore it.

picketts-charge — This low spot on the battlefield is where Pickett’s men met the Northern line, sword to throat and bayonet to belly, while minié balls and grapeshot whizzed around them like buzzing flies.

The din of battle is long gone, and as one descends into this shallow depression, it becomes eerily quiet. The birds stop singing. The crickets don’t chirp. There is nothing but the whisper of a lonely wind. The walls of time grow thin here. The land still weeps, despite more than a century and a half is past.

When Lincoln said those gathered to dedicate the cemetery located nearby had not the power to consecrate this land as deeply as those who died upon it, he may have peered behind the veil of time, and felt this long lasting scar. The Lincolns were early believers in Spiritualism, having lost a child at an early age. In 1865 the President related a dream where the boy took him through the White House to show Lincoln himself lying in a casket. He would be dead within a few weeks from a bullet to the brain.

We can analyze this and say it was the bravado of a Southern Empire drunk on it’s success and resting against the wealth brought to it by the subjugation of other human beings. We can assign a reliance on military training referencing the Napoleonic Wars as recent to Lee and his generals as we are to Viet Nam. Pickett, who survived the slaughter, responded when asked about why it failed said “I believe the Yankees had something to do with it.”

Not far from this site is a farm owned by former U.S. President Eisenhower. The period of the Eisenhower presidency is a source of much nostalgia in this country. During this time the more or less intact U.S. industrial complex was tasked with rebuilding both Allied and defeated nations. The economic growth was unparalleled, and propelled the U. S. A. to the top of the world scene, challenged only by an injured but pragmatic Soviet Union.

Eisenhower, before becoming president, was Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in the European Theater of Operations. He is widely considered to be the primary architect of the June 6, 1944 invasion of Europe commonly called D-Day.

I did not have the opportunity to see the beaches when I was in Normandy back in the 1990s. I was there on business, and never got that far west. But I am familiar with what was called the Atlantic Wall.

I can only imagine Eisenhower and his advisors looking at the obstacles they faced. They had to land on an open beach, covered by machine gun and artillery placements, a vast trench and tunnel network, barbed wire, land mines, and heavy concrete obstacles. Should they survive that they had to get up cliffs in some cases, and then take those fortified positions.

If the assault failed, if they didn’t clear the beaches before sundown and make it possible to bring ashore more troops and tanks and supplies, then they might never be able to break the Nazi grip on Europe. The horror and oppression of the Third Reich and the Holocaust would remain unchallenged. The Allied Nations ultimately might fail, and certainly could not maintain against it.

It was going to be a bloody violent action, and there was only a slim chance of success.

But in the end, there was no other option open to Eisenhower, so he made the decision to order the attack.

The same way Pickett sent his men down that hill toward the Northern lines.

In the end, the outcome of both battles was the better one for humanity. The oppressor lost.

The failure of Pickett’s charge was the end for the South. They withdrew on the Fourth of July, and essentially remained on the run back to Virginia, where they were ultimately forced to surrender in 1865.

The Confederate States of America ceased to be a nation, and was subject to re-admission to the United States of America. As a consequence, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, made in January 1863 before Gettysburg, served as the impetus for the 13th Amendment which actually abolished the slave trade in the U.S.

That’s the short version we got in grade school. Over the years I have learned about martial law being declared in New York City to put down draft riots, the fact that the Emancipation Proclamation only applied to the states that were no longer under Lincoln’s control, and numerous instances of political compromise and military ambition that may have prolonged the conflict and increased the suffering.

This is not to say that the cause was not just and right. But we are harming our ability to learn from history by oversimplifying it. We encourage the growth of falsehoods that become rallying points for bad ideas. We tend to learn to put things in binary terms. Black and White. Us and Them.

That never ends well.

gubment-cow — After the pronounced weight of the battlefield, it was an amusing irony to find that the cows on Eisenhower’s farm were obediently standing in the same location as the guide map showed them.

The period of his presidency is looked back upon as a time of relative order and stability, but beneath the surface the Cold War and the turmoil of the 1960s seethed and bubbled, waiting only for a spark to set it off.

In only a few years the world would come the closest it ever has to an all out nuclear war, and another U. S, President would be assassinated as he drove through the streets of Dallas.

Well behaved cows aside, we are always just one second away from collapse. Physicists say that holding the universe together uses more energy than letting it fall apart. We see the falling apart -entropy- as the arrow of forward time. This is one of the reasons that modern science initially spurned the idea of time travel. It takes more energy to reverse things than there is in the universe, so you can never go back.

However, “back” and “forward” are potentially the limitations of our perception, much like our inability to see wavelengths of light in the infrared and ultraviolet with our poorly evolved meatsuit eyes. Everything exists in the now, but our wee brains can’t take it all in. We have developed a kind of psychosis to shield us from the incomprehensible everpresent, and that is this notion of unidirectional linear time.

Which is why I prefer to time travel. I hope that this little trip has been entertaining to you. I understand it may be a bit heavier fare than you expected, but we are descending down into that Winter Dark, when thoughts of death and doom are closer to the surface, and it is never a bad thing to remember how close we are to the footsteps of chaos.

The American Civil War did not begin with the attack on Fort Sumter. It did not begin with the election of Lincoln, or numerous political appeasements from the beginning of the 19th Century. In some sense the Civil War began with the inclusion of institutionalized slavery in the Constitution. But it is our own long history of barbarity that fuels it, and that has sadly not been resolved.

As I have traveled across the country in the last few months I have seen and heard much to indicate that we are by no means safe from repeating the mistakes of the Confederacy or the Third Reich, or the myriad tyrannies and oppressions that mark our human history. The path forward is never straight, and sometimes it goes through dark territory. Choosing to ignore that creates a certainty that we will stumble upon it.

Back next week.

June 28, 2023June 27, 2023

The End of All Songs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Except, of course, when it is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But consider this message in a different light.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ll be back next week.

September 7, 2022September 7, 2022

The Taste of Ashes

Fear is the mind-killer.
—Dune – Frank Herbert

I grew up in a temperate climate, and by this first week of September the signs of arriving autumn were well and truly underway. The family garden had largely been harvested. Dry brown cornstalks rattled in the morning breezes, waiting my scythe to fell them. The trees were already starting to color, and soon would burst forth in a final glory before dropping their leaves in advance of the coming winter.

Despite having lived longer in semi-arid and semi-tropical parts of Texas, where no such natural alchemies occur, my brain has not rewired the calendar of childhood. When August ends, my mind turns to thoughts of fall, dimming days, longer nights, and the inevitable grip of the Winter Dark.

September is also a frequent metaphor for those of us looking at our later years. Careers are winding down; children are raised and gone. A few pleasant years of retirement ahead, and then that inevitable long slumber, our own encounter with final darkness of the human experience. Hence this time of year my thoughts turn toward contemplation on endings, and the melancholia that attends such.

You’ve been warned.

When one is younger, the fact that we are all marching toward that same destiny is hardly noticed by most. As teenagers we are invincible and immortal, and even into our 40s and early 50s we may still occupy our minds with the daily grind. What is being ground away is pushed deep down from our consciousness. When we start seeing 60 on the horizon, though, the ticking of that clock becomes much louder. Despite encouragement from Blue Oyster Cult, we all still fear the Reaper.

This fear is hard wired in us. It’s deep down in our anatomy in a place fittingly at the bottom of our brain called the amygdala. These nerve clusters are considered to be essential for our experience of the emotions of fear, anxiety, and aggression. It is the center of the “fight or flight” response. Fear and hatred are interlinked at a cellular level.

The amygdala and it’s connected processes are sometimes referred to as our “reptile brain”. These are the parts of the brain that respond instinctually, to carry out the primary purpose of the organism, survival. There are few commands in this primitive part of our brain.

Eat. Mate. Repeat if necessary.

Presumably this is the wiring of all those nifty Cretaceous critters that you see when you go to Jurassic Park (because Cretaceous Park wouldn’t fit on the sign, I guess). They’re Eaters who want to make baby Eaters. They do that and keep doing it until a bigger Eater swoops in and eats them.

This is the whole reason for fight or flight. The Eater had to determine (and very quickly) whether or not the thing confronting it was predator, prey, or mate, and consequently whether to try it’s luck or run away like a bunch of English knights from a vicious rabbit.

Since there were only three options, the wiring didn’t need to be too complex. A basic pattern of friendly, not friendly, and edible was put together, probably based on the pheromones in scent, and things went merrily onward until an asteroid hit the planet.

With most of the Eaters now extinct, evolution filled the gap with mammals. Mammals are also Eaters, but they are a bit more sophisticated about it. What existed of the amygdala in the reptile brain, started wiring into other areas of the mammalian brain. It formed more complicated relationships that included support for nurturing, community, and hierarchy. These structures were necessary for insuring the safety and survival of the young, which were born largely unfinished. The weeks, months, and sometimes years needed for a mammal offspring to reach adulthood and begin it’s role eating and mating compelled this adaptation.

Fast forward a few million years and one uppity group of mammals started doing things like using tools, and maybe even fire, and we got the primate brain. I don’t make a distinction between primate brain and human brain. There’s ample evidence that while we have some significant increase in size and capacity, we aren’t always using it any better, and sometimes not nearly as well.

But primate brain seems to have one major distinction over the basic mammal brain, and that is an awareness of death. That is, when comparing something like a pride of lions, and a colony of chimpanzees, a death in the group is responded to in very different ways.

Chimps are known to mourn, or at least appear to mourn the loss of one of their members. They experience grief in a way at least similar to our own.

Lions, while the Discovery Channel might narrate otherwise, seem less attached. A couple of nose nudges, and then the pride moves on. Sorry, Disney.

Velociraptors, of course, would just eat the dead one. There’s no code for friendly but dead. The default is edible.

The cults of death are as diverse as they are common. Ritual and taboo have evolved around the basic necessity of insuring that the decomposition of our mortal remains occurs in a safe manner for our food supply and watershed. In elder days it was also handy to keep predators from sniffing around the cave or village. From this the physical and metaphysical lands of the dead were born, and remain with us tens of millennia later.

We start to see “human” behavior regarding death in the species called Neanderthals. These homonids are the first indications we have of intentional burial. The finds also often include personal artifacts.

While it is tempting to believe that early humans included these as tribute or memento, it is more likely they were simply taboo. The resources required to fashion a stone axe or arrowhead tend to preclude it being buried as an offering to the ancestor, at least at this point in our pre-history.

But if it were the possession of someone who suddenly stopped walking, talking, and breathing, that might not be something you wanted to keep around. It could potentially be the thing that stopped them walking, talking, and breathing, so best to leave it behind in the grave.

Burial originally might simply have been a means of keeping predators from being attracted to the rest of the group. Of equal value would be insuring that the process of decomposition occurred out of sight, and any possible contamination (physical or spiritual) was contained. We dispose of our dead today for similar reasons, so it’s not hard to imagine that being how it started.

The awareness of death, and the absolute inevitability of death, sends all kinds of messages down to that reptile brain. After all, it’s purpose is to survive.

Eat or be eaten.

So far, however, nobody has been able to get away from that biggest Eater of all.

The Grim Reaper.

Our rational primate brain would rather just avoid the subject, and engage in things like small talk, online gaming, and whatever the hell reality TV is about.

The mammal brain admits that apparently death happens, but there’s a really nice cool water hole over there.

Meanwhile the reptile brain sits down there at the bottom of our consciousness screaming day and night, “YOU FOOLS! WHY DON’T YOU DO SOMETHING? FIGHT! RUN! SOMETHING?”

It’s that downstairs neighbor tapping on the ceiling with a broom while the mammals and primates are having a loud party upstairs.

It’s the Serpent in Eden, and it’s terrifyingly real.

We have no control over the situation. We may live to well over 100 years in peaceful health, and harmony. We could step in front of a bus in the morning.

From the moment that we first experience the loss of another’s life, we are unable to ever go back. We know now.

We have left the Garden.

The terror and pain are real and immediate. Grief and mourning are the process whereby we convince ourselves that despite what just happened, the rest of the world is spinning onward with general indifference.

As cold as that may sound, it’s what we need to be able to get up and go out in the morning, without spending every moment wondering and waiting who will be next to go. And whether it might be us.

And you run, and you run to catch up with the sun but it’s sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way but you’re older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death
—Time – Roger Waters / David Gilmour / Nick Mason / Richard Wright

Some people seem more attuned to dealing with the idea of mortality than others. I place myself in that group. I surround myself with emblems of death. Skulls and skeletons decorate my home and my wardrobe. I visit cemeteries and battlefields and charnel grounds. I listen to the unquiet dead whispering on that autumn breeze. ” Come away. Come away…”

Yes, of course, I’m a fan of Poe. Even named one of my children Raven.

But there are lot of writers and artists and musicians and entertainers that seem to enjoy this spiraling dance with death and things macabre. Horror and fear are big industries in the part of the world where it can be purchased as entertainment. I think perhaps that the numbers of people who are comfortable, if not chummy, with human mortality is less in the parts of the world where sudden horrible death is a daily occurrence, I can’t believe that there are not some who still walk that path with Thanatos.

anubis — Anubis and I are old friends. In some ways meeting him, in a photo in an old library book, started me on the path I now walk. We were finally able to connect “in person” when I visited the Cairo Museum in the mid 1990s. I have seen many cult images of the deity, and have a few myself, but for some reason I feel this one from the celebrated treasury of Tutankhamen is the one he lives in.

I don’t have any idea why I am that way. We lived next to a large cemetery that started out as just family, but had expanded through marriages and kinships to a broader community. My grandmother oversaw the maintenance. In my teens and twenties, I was hired as caretaker, but I often accompanied her and my great-grandmother (when she was still able) down to the graveyard. My grandmother knew who all the dead people were. Even if she had not met them, she knew them because they had been the mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters of people she did know. It was a small community, and everyone knew everyone. Even the dead.

I did not get the chance to visit it when I was last there, and it would be about 20 years since, but I wager I could still tell you who was who, and how they were “kin” to one another, and maybe where they lived and what they did for a living. The oldest resident I know was corporal in George Washington’s army. My grandmother and great-grandmother have since moved in. They may be the last generation of my family to take up residence. My own parents have decided on cremation, and I doubt my brother’s line will be much different. As noted, I live in a far away world now.

I suppose they will miss me. The dead, I mean.

Cemeteries can be beautiful peaceful places for reflection and contemplation, as well as warehouse for human remains. But in a world bursting at the seams with living humans demanding resources, the real estate can be a little wasteful. And filling the ground with metal and plastic boxes holding chemically preserved bodies is not really green.

nebkhet — Like the jackal associated with Anubis, the vulture of Nebkhet is something we associate with death and dying in our modern world. The Ancient Egyptians saw these creatures as protective. Since they were so closely associated with death, surely evil spirits and the like would be frightened away by them.
Some cultures practice “sky burial” where the vulture and other carrion birds do what they do to the remains of the deceased, thus taking their mortal coil on to the heavens. The process is both natural and sanitary, if horrifying to modern Western eyes.

The most interesting final disposition I have heard about is a company that will mix your cremated remains with potting soil, and then plant you with a seedling. You get to go back to the earth and come back as the tree of your choice.

I’m not sure what the regulatory agencies (and you would not believe the number of government agencies at multiple levels that have their fingers in the death pie) have determined regarding the potential “public health issues” of this kind of thing. To my mind if your ashes can be dumped in a field, scattered in the ocean or thrown to the wind off a tall building, you can damned well be a shade tree in suburbia.

Now, if I go that route, I know I am going to be that gnarled ancient oak way back in the forest that the animals avoid and nothing grows near. That would be so cool.

The hard thing about being comfortable with death, dying, and the post-death experience is deciding which way to go. I mean, if I’m honest, I want a pyramid. However, looking into the costs of even a small one is discouraging. Maybe I can donate myself to science and pick one of those teams that is always trying to recreate how the Egyptians did it for the History Channel.

Being intimately connected with the family plots, I had sort of just assumed that someday I would have a little piece of the field there. But time passes and things change, and you start thinking odd thoughts as you get older.

Part of the cemetery thing means having perpetual ownership. In other words, when the subdivision moves in, they best not be moving my final resting place. And woe be unto you if you do that Poltergeist thing and just move the headstones, cause I am definitely going to haunt those people. Honestly I will haunt anyone there anyway. I’m just that petty.

But, my kids have no real connection to that place. And if I were in the ground there, they’d either feel obliged to visit a place they hate, or they’d never show up at all. Just like I don’t.

I have deep love and appreciation for my grandmother, but I never visit her grave. I just don’t feel that it matters. The paths I have walked in my life cause me to wonder whether it matters where or what is done with your mortal coil once you have shuffled it off. Spoiler alert – it doesn’t.

If we believe that we are spirits or souls or energy forms that are driving around in our meat puppets for three score and ten, then what becomes of those meat puppets is entirely irrelevant.

Excluding true atheists, everyone has some belief in life after death, and if you don’t, then you aren’t really going to be upset much.

How that life after death turns out is not known. It’s fair to say that someone will have gotten it wrong. Maybe everyone.

That’s an exciting thought.

owlsong — **Owlsong**

Dawn rises.
Cool mists cling to the forest floor
A lone voice proclaims
It is not quite through with the night.

Death and witches seem to go hand in hand. The stories are universally grim (and Grimm). Witches were purveyors of poisons, casters of curses, and throwers of bones. The spirits that attended them could just as well be your departed Aunt Fannie as Buen or Baelzebuth. Witches routinely caused the death of livestock, villagers, and crops. They were a living harbinger of death in whatever community they inhabited.

I often wonder if Baba Yaga was just an old woman who had the same fascination with mortality that I have had all my life. The accumulation of bones and apparent indifference to death may have led to tales of cannibalism that feature in her story as well as others. I’ve never eaten anyone, but I’d be perfectly okay with the loud neighbor kids thinking I might. Keeps them off the lawn.

Other people, of course, can’t help but hear that screaming amygdala and yelling back “shutupshutupshutup!” Death is never discussed, never thought of, and avoided whenever possible. Grieving for them is harder and longer, because the event is shattering. The screaming reptile brain is shouting “I told you so!” and that is never productive.

If you are a person upset by this article, I expect that you may have already hit the back button and ducked out. I really would have liked for you to have read it. On the other hand, if you are part of that group of crazy kids who hang out with Anubis, can’t wait for Halloween, and really understand that the profound truth is that the mystery beyond death is where we’re all headed, then thank you for reading this. I know it’s not as directly witchy as the usual, but when you reach my age, you may find that it’s important to face this kind of thing, and realize that the clock will run out.

Addendum — I try to write my blog several weeks ahead. This was originally penned in late June or early July, because in truth, I think “Autumn thoughts” all year round.

A week ago, my father died.

I am fairly sure at the time that I wrote this, I was thinking about this inevitability, even though at that point he had not been diagnosed as terminal. The timing is neither ironic nor really unexpected. Part of being strange and unusual is living a bit out of sync with linear time, and accepting the insights that this brings.

I am confident that he is no longer in pain. I feel that he is both at peace, and has achieved some manner of perspective that will aid his spiritual path in the future.

My view of the cosmos assumes that future, for him and for all of us, so I don’t mourn in the fashion of my ancestors or my immediate family.

I add this epilogue as an observation and affirmation of the rest of the article. To borrow from Gandalf, Death is just another journey, one that we all must take.

June 15, 2022June 15, 2022

Not to Fear the Lightning

This week I’m back home and back in my Tarot decks working with the dreaded and feared Tower card.

People seem to have become more apprehensive regarding this card than the Devil or even Death. In modern times, when Death is almost universally presented as “not really death”,¹the Tower now represents the introduction of catastrophe and loss in our lives. Yet this interpretation is a surface reading only.

While the card is dynamic, even chaotic, it need not be cataclysmic. It all depends on one’s perspective. We need to go back beyond Waite and even Eliphas Levi, and look at how this card emerges from history.

I recently added a reproduction of the Visconti-Sforza Tarocchi deck to my collection. This set is the best preserved of the Renaissance cards created in Italy. A large part is kept in the collection of the J. Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City, where I purchased my copy.

Magus and Tower - Sforza Deck — The Magus/Juggler/Red Man from the Visconti Sforza deck, contrasted with the Tower card. The painting on the two cards is identifiably the work of different artists, The styling of the figures is a dead giveaway, but more subtly the color palettes are dissimilar and the more lineal structure indicates perhaps a less skilled artisan.

Curiously, though, the background leafing work seems to have been done by the same person, so this argues that a number of blanks were commissioned at one time, in consideration of lost or damaged cards.

One of the many curious things about this deck is that both the Tower and Devil were executed by a different artist, presumably at a later date.

In fact extant versions of either card are missing from many early decks, which has lead some people to speculate that they didn’t form a part of the game until later.

While on the surface this might sound odd, the fact is that multiple Tarocchi decks with greater or fewer numbers of trionfi cards do exist. Variations are regional and potentially socio-political in some cases and some had as many as 40 special cards, and as few as 16.

By the time the cards start being mass produced across the border in France, the game of Tarot has pared down to the extant 22 major arcana that include a Devil and what Waite introduced into modern occultism as the Tower.

But in the Tarot of Marseilles, which Eliphas Levi based his Tarot work upon, this card is called La Maison Dieu – The House of God.

Maison Deiu Marseille - Thoth - Via — A transformation of triumphs – The Tarot de Marseilles, a more or less standardized form that was mass produced from woodcuts or engravings shows rather furry “lightning” blasting the top off the Medieval tower, while figures on the ground may be doing cartwheels.

Crowley’s Thoth deck borrows from Cubism and Abstract movements to display greater chaos and destruction. Yet in the background Lady Freida has added Noah’s dove and the Kundalani Serpent, indicating a spiritual liberation is taking place, despite the yawning hellmouth at the bottom of the image.

The Via Tarot, conceived a little less than two decades ago, but based upon Thelemic ideology, restores the name House of God to this card, It retains the All Seeing Eye from the Thoth deck, and the dove and serpents are reflected, flanking a wolf at the door. The imagery is more ordered than other Tarot depictions, speaking of a transformation through structure.

This is at least a curious appellation for a card connected with destruction and chaos. Or maybe not.

I’ve scoured the webs for historical support for this naming. Most of what comes up is opinion or dogma.

Curiouser still is that with this title, it comes on the heels of the Devil. Surely something called the House of God might be better placed up around card XX – Judgment, with it’s apocalyptic angel calling the dead from their graves.

The World - Sforza-and-Marseille — The Visconti-Sforza version of Card XXI shows the city of Heavenly Jerusalem described in the Revelation of St. John. This can be seen as a “House of God” more logically than Card XVI, and following Judgment Day makes more sense. By the time the cards are being mass produced, however, the Biblical imagery has been replaced by an allegorical “Mother Earth” in a mandorla and the puti have mutated into the four Apostolic animals.

It’s rather ironic that the world of the Visconti-Sforza was Biblical supported by more or less pagan sprites, whereas the Marseille (and most later decks) have a pagan World surrounded by Christian iconography.

Yet neither the image or location make much sense with this title. So perhaps we should delve into possible sources for the image. The most obvious, to my thinking, is the story of the Tower of Babel.

This is one of the “Just So” stories found in the Old Testament book of Genesis, which explains why all the people who were descended from the survivors of the Flood ended up speaking different languages.

After departing the ark and doing a lot of begatting, humanity was more or less a big happy family. So they got together to build a mighty city with a “tower that would reach up to heaven”.

God, not being disposed to uninvited visitors at the time, causes them to all start speaking in tongues. Unable to understand each other, they are forced to abandon the building project and wander off in multiple directions.

The moral of this story is one of humility and submission to a higher will. But what does that have to do with the Tower card?

Well, we can draw a fair parallel to the destruction of this medieval tower, by fire or lightning or some other “heavenly force” as God asserting dominion over all the works of humankind. That’s a very basic tenet of the faith. God is a lot bigger than us, and consequently he will tell us what to do and we’ll like it.

The Visconti-Sforza Tarot were a luxury item. They were commissioned by a wealthy semi-noble merchant family, to wile away the hours that only wealthy semi-noble merchant families could afford. One way of wiling away the hours in the Renaissance was cultivating secular humanism. That is, the stranglehold of the Holy Mother Church on philosophical thought was loosening, thanks to the importation of old Greek and Latin works from the Islamic Empires via the Silk Road and Moorish Spain.

In fact, playing cards most likely came via Islam (potentially adapted from China). The familiar suits of Wands, Cups, Swords, and Coins exist on decks from Northern Africa at this time. There’s not a lot of history of the early games played with these cards, which were all pips. Islamic belief forbids the depiction of people. Since only Allah has the power to create a human being, to show them in art (or even photography) is considered to be mocking the divine.

So it’s likely the face cards were added in Italy. along with the trionfi². This made possible complex games where the special cards counted for points.

I’ve read a version of Tarocchi rules (and my head hurts now) but essentially the different designs on the cards allowed for varying point values, and like bridge, the ones with the most points at the end were the winning team. I don’t understand bridge, either, nor most card games, so if this is grossly misstated, sorry.

Which takes us back to secular humanism. The imagery on the oldest trionfi are an odd mix. We have the Juggler, who later becomes the Magician. But in the Visconti-Sforza he is neither juggling nor being particularly magical.

He does have, on his table, a glass, two coins, a knife, and is resting the bottom of a staff. Hence we characterize these in the modern decks as representative of the four suits. But that fuzzy thing on the end of the table is identified by the Morgan collection as a hat form.

Whilst I can imagine a juggler using the objects of the suits in performance, I cannot fathom what a hat form has to do with juggling or magic…unless, of course, a rabbit is involved. In the Marseilles Tarot it’s become a kit bag or purse, which perhaps makes more sense, and in Pixie Smith’s version, it’s gone entirely.

I think perhaps the images here participate in certain “in-jokes” or metaphors that we don’t fully comprehend in the present world, but that were well understood by the wealthy semi-noble card sharps.

Pope and Papess - Sforza Deck — In the Renaissance version these two were probably paired, but modern decks rename them Hierophant and High Priestess. The split occurred as far back as the Marseille, but they were still called Pope and Popess until Waite. In the Middle Ages this would have been heresy and subject to imprisonment, torture, and potentially death.

Yet these figures depicted in Visconti Sforza show equal rank, as proven by both wearing the triple crown of the Holy Trinity. The Pope is arrayed in guilded finery with velvet lining. The Popess, on the other hand, aside from crown and kid gloves, adopts the habit of a monastic. Some have cast her as a symbol of “Mother Church” but perhaps we can see her plain and poor mantle as emblematic of the inner faith, bereft of worldly adornment. Whilst the Pope raises his right hand in benediction, the Popess clutches a closed book in her left hand.

There’s more going on here than simple parody.

For example, we have both Pope and Popess³, which in Medieval times could have gotten you handed over to the Inquisition.

Not so with secular humanism. You can parody the Church (or rather the church without capitalization). It’s just another part of the human experience, no more divine or sacred than your breakfast or the daily trip to the garderobe. It’s hard to imagine that cheery corpse on the Death card in light of a friendly game of cards, unless the social context is that we’re not taking it at all seriously, After all, we are the wealthy semi-noble merchant families and the rest of the world can just kiss it.

So maybe that Tower card wasn’t missing from the older decks. Maybe it wasn’t there at all. Maybe it got put back in, along with Ye Aulde Divel card, to remind these prideful secular humanists of the error of their ways. There are a number of Tarocchi decks that contain trionfi of the traditional virtues and vices, so there seems to have been some effort by the princes of the church to regain control of their flocks (and the attendant tithes). The Tower of Babel is a pretty good metaphor for “pride goeth before a fall”.

There’s an alternate theory that “House of God” is something of a parody against a corrupt church, much the same as the Popess can be seen as mocking a traditionally patriarchal organization. But I have a problem with that.

The images of the Tower are showing secular buildings. Churches have a very distinctive architectural style, and that isn’t it. These are symbolic of Medieval fortifications, and in some versions one of the falling figures wears a crown. So it does argue for this being more a convention of the church attempting to show the collapse of the secular humanist state.

But what if perhaps this is referring to the Apocalypse of the Revelation of St. John? Perhaps here we have a portrayal of the human world being swept away to make way for the “Heavenly Jerusalem” that will descend upon earth after the sinful are cast down into Hell. Crowley seems to ascribe to this interpretation somewhat. He had Lady Frieda Harris include the Mouth of Dis at the bottom of his card. This is a variation of the opening of the Pit shown in the Medieval Das Buch Belial and copied to many others.

It can be a confusing mess, because regardless of our post modern New Age mentality, we have to reckon with works that came out of rigid Catholic cultures, overlain with Hebrew, Hindu, Taoist, and Buddhist mysticism (perhaps incorrectly) and re-reinterpreted through the lens of Victorian Christianity. It’s not unfair to say that the occultists of the late 19th century were motivated to “discover” ancient hidden traditions whether they were there or not. The field was fiercely competitive, and wide open to the cult of personality.

Despite this, esoteric interpretations almost uniformly ascribe this card to the failure and ultimate removal of old established orders. On an individual level, the Tower describes a trauma so profound that the only way to recover is discarding most of the old preconceptions and rebuilding from scratch.

But like most Tarot, there’s other possible interpretations. The cards never exist in a vacuum. They are always influenced and augmented by the others around them.

The Tower and Tower Reversed - Waite — There’s just not a good way to read this card. Either we are experiencing the destruction from on high, sending us crashing to the ground in flames, or we are falling into a pit of fire and pain.

The only way to escape the doom of the Tower card is to change our place in the narrative. We can either be the Tower, or we can be the Lightning.

We have been trained to view the Tower as though we are the one’s falling from it’s height, or being crushed under the collapse. Waite’s Victorian pessimism sought to insure readers never ran short of ill omens. And bad cards could come up reversed, so in that binary thinking the upside down Tower was a good thing.

But we don’t have to be the victims. That’s part of the last throes of heavy Christian thinking that still informed the occultists of the 19th and early 20th Centuries. In this context the lightning is an external force beyond our control that brings down all that we see as divine retribution for our hubris. It’s the same crime and sentence resulting in the confusion of Babel or Lucifer being cast into the Pit. We should recognize the source of that and move on.

It is possible to see oneself as the active principle initiating profound change. In this scenario, we lead our own transformation, and the transformation of the world around us, rather than being pummeled by the debris of the falling tower. We can choose to be the Lightning.

Depending on how it falls in a reading, the Tower card can speak of manifestation. It can signal that we are changing bad habits and rising above failed choices. As pointed out by H.Byron Ballard on a recent New World Witchery podcast, the Tower is predecesory to the Star. The question is whether we emerge into the Star, or the Star Reversed.

I hope for the Star. If one looks at the Tower Reversed, it’s usual meaning is more compatible with the Star Reversed, a continuation of narrow-mindedness, parsimony, and general self-doubt, brought about by oppression and unjustness. This also applies if we are the dynamic force of Celestial Fire in the Tower. The reversal has that energy trapped at the bottom of a great pit, with darkness all around, and the figures are still falling.

The Star - Waite - Thoth - Via — Another transformation of triumphs. No disrespect to Pamela Coleman Smith, but her celestial cards seem separated from the other major arcana. The trine of the Star, Moon, and Sun feel like they exist as their own microcosm. Of course, they are.

While not perhaps obvious, there is a subtle connection between the Thoth Tower and Star Cards. The lightning bolt that fills the Tower’s background is mirrored in the composition of figure, water and Star. The bright orange tones that dominate the Tower are transmuted here into complimentary blues and purples. The Star is an opposite that emerges serene from the fiery madness of the Tower.

In the Via deck, we also have echoes of the preceding imagery. The rays of light from the All Seeing Eye remain, only as an afterglow, illuminating the double Star in the dome of a newly minted structure, occupied by a single pacific spirit treading the light of the rainbow. The anger has been washed away. Only the rainbow remains to remind us the storm has passed.

Next week I’ll be back with more fresh weirdness after the Solstice (Summer or Winter depending on your latitude). In the meantime, please feel free to read (or re-read) my previous articles on my recent experience in Salem, Massachusetts, and on the effects of Mercury retrograde (which thankfully will be completely over by then). As always, thank you for the taking the time to read this.

Please Share and Enjoy !

Please Share and Enjoy !

Please Share and Enjoy !

Please Share and Enjoy !