religion – A Sacred Life

May 10, 2023May 10, 2023

Amor Vincit Omnia

The card called the Lovers is another one very problematic in terms of the imagery used in the RWS deck. The elder versions of this card depict three persons at the bottom, and the demi-god Cupid or Eros overhead with his bow. Much speculation has been made about the identity of the people on this version of the card, but from my view it tends to suggest a young man and woman being married. The other figure is probably his mother, who up to that point has been the “woman in his life”. Cupid/Eros, of course, is interested in the conjugal love, rather than the familial or maternal sort, and the arrow pointed between the pair that appear to be getting betrothed argues for that. So the Lovers is a fair name for the card as it was drawn up to the end of the 19th century, with the Marriage being a close runner-up.

There seems little logic then, in dumping this traditional structure for a wholly Judeo-Christian depiction straight out of the Book of Genesis, but that is what Waite apparently commissioned. The card number VI has only three figures, a female and male, both nude, and a flaming haired angel appearing out of a cloud above them. These figures are unquestionably Eve and Adam, for they stand in front of two trees. Eve is before a fruit tree with a green snake wrapped around it. This is undoubtedly the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the Biblical downfall of Man, tempted by Woman, who was tempted by the Serpent to eat of the tree. Behind Adam is a tree with flames instead of leaves. This is identified by Waite in his Pictorial Key to the Tarot as the Tree of Life, but it’s a clear reference to the Burning Bush of Exodus. Between the two, and below the angel, is a single pointed mountain. Above and behind the angel is a yellow radiance. Below the angel is a simple blue sky.

Like the Hierophant card that proceeds it, my initial reaction to this Biblical imagery was negative. Here again my inclination to reject the Christian world that I had been born into (for multiple reasons not entirely related to magic or the occult) made me feel like the Tarot cards that I had been fascinated by in textbook descriptions were somehow subverted back toward a Christian idea.

Lovers-Sforza-Marseille-Tarot — Earlier versions of the Lovers or Marriage card are very different from the RWS. The Sforza on the left is clearly depicting “Blind Love” between a couple. Later, a third figure was added, like that shown in the Tarot de Marseille at right. Various authors differ on the identity of the second woman. Some say she represents the mother of one of the others giving blessing to the union, The are others who suggest these two represent a chaste and pure virgin, versus a cortesan or woman of ill repute, allegorically showing a choice between virtue and vice. Still others say the figure on the left is an official or priest, performing a wedding ceremony. Waite tossed all of them out in favor of casting this card in a Protestant light.

I cannot say that this is not absolutely true at least in the mind of Arthur Waite, and many of his contemporaries, who were possibly trying to meld together their monotheism with pagan magic rites. While it’s clear that some of those involved in the magic lodges of the Victorian era and their 20th centuries inheritors were bored elites looking for sensation, a good number of them never really wanted to reject the “respectable C of E” religion.

And again, because Pamela Smith’s art is so ubiquitous, we are all of us still carrying the images around, even in many of the revisions and re-imaginings of modern Tarot, because this version has had such an impact on the 20th century occult in the West.

The Golden Dawn and other influencers on Waite were romanticists. That is, they tended to think in idealistic or utopian terms rather than the crude, and sometimes cruel realities of the time. Their motivations were informed by the ancient philosophers, seeking truth and beauty, and deifying these ideas separately from how they exist (or don’t exist) in the mundane world.

So the rather direct depiction of love and lovers in the physical carnal sense, was less than satisfactory. While certainly most of these folk were frequently involved in such sensual pursuits, many quite outside the socially accepted norms of the day, they made a public face of a much loftier ideal and that is what we find on the seventh card of the Major Arcana.

It may be helpful at this point to examine a painting by Titian usually titled “Sacred and Profane Love”. This painting itself has invited much controversy in the art historical circles, and presents us with a similar conundrum as the Smith version of the Lovers. Yet if we examine its symbolism, we may find some keys to unlock the Biblical facade of the Lovers card.

When I was in art history class, some many years ago, the conventional attribution of “sacred love” was actually the nude figure, and not the severely overdressed one. Conventions are now reversed, but I never pay much attention to trends, and still tend to think of it that way. I have some sound reasoning for that.

There’s a confusion in our modern language because we have come to use the term “profane” in the sense of “profanity”. In our post-Puritanical society profanity is in the same category with smut and pornography, and of course, “nekkid people” are associated with carnal desires.

Profane, originally, was only meant as the opposite of sacred. Sacred derives from old Latin and means basically “Holy”. Ergo, whatever was not holy, was, by extension, profane. It had nothing to do with the particular state of dress, it had to do with a state of being.

There are variant descriptions of Titian’s painting as Earthly and Heavenly Love, or as the Earthly and Heavenly Venus, and this may clear it up a little for people struggling with the changes in the language. The nude is the rarified pure spirit, with none of the trappings we attach to bring it down to earth. While it may represent a carnal satisfaction, it also symbolizes that expansion of mind and being that results from the merging of two souls.

The Earthly Venus has her charms, and these are of course symbolized by her fancy robes and complicated hairstyle and rich jewels. These are the things of the mundane, however. They shift with fashion, whim, and time, whereas the Heavenly Sacred Love is immortal, untouched and timeless.

Lovers-ViceVersa-Tarot — Images from a recent acquisition. This is the Lovers card from the Vice Versa Tarot by Massimiliano Filadoro. The back of each card gives us the view from behind, which is often intriguing. It also gives us a new perspective on the idea of reversed readings. I have only had this deck for a few days, so I am still working out the ideas on how to read with it. I will say that it reinvigorates the thinking.

It is this notion of Sacred Love which later generations have tried to apply to Waite’s ham-handed vision of Eden. This is Man and Woman, before the Fall, perfect, immortal, without sin or the knowledge of sin, and therefore without the need for carnal connection, long identified in Puritanical teaching as the “original sin”. The angel between them can be seen as symbolic of this perfected state of innocence, a bliss that requires no physicality, but is that highest form of love.

But, well, I think there may be a worm or two in that apple.

The Genesis story is one of those things that started to break any bond I might have formed with the Christian faith at an early age. The presence here of the Serpent in the tree shows us that the Fall (per the Bible) is imminent. It is inevitable. It is all part of the Divine Plan, after all, that an all-seeing and all-knowing being saw and knew about before any of it happened but it was allowed to happen anyway because that was the Divine Plan.

Honestly I have a much easier time reconciling Shroedinger’s cat than I do the sales pitch for these religions.

“Look, Adam, Eve, here’s this absolutely beautiful Garden I made for you. You have total control over everything in it. And you can eat everything, except for the fruit on this tree.”

“Why?”

“Because you can’t.”

“Why?”

“Look, I know you are going to eat the fruit, but don’t eat the fruit.”

“Why?”

“Because there’s this skeezy dude who is going to come around later and tell you to eat the fruit, and I know you’re going to eat the fruit, but don’t eat the fruit.”

“Why?”

“JUST DON”T EAT THE FRUIT ( even though I know you’re gonna) DON’T EAT IT!”

And then the next day:

“YOU ATE THE FRUIT! I mean, I knew – I KNEW – you were gonna eat the fruit, but you actually ate the fruit! I am so disappointed and angry and so now you have to leave the Garden and spend your days in war and pestilence and famine and death.”

“Why?”

“Divine Plan!”

This is essentially what Waite tells us this card means in his Pictorial Guide to the Tarot. The Lovers, in his “remediation” is symbolic of the Lord God Jehovah allowing (if not causing) the Fall, so that eons later mankind can be redeemed by the Messiah,

So Lovers may be more accurately rendered Love, and by that the love of the deity toward “his” creation, which manifests itself as predestined suffering and torment.

But Lovers was kept because only through that perfect love of the deity, could humanity transcend the carnal sin inherent in sexual relationships that they were going to get into in order to “be fruitful and multiply” as that deity keeps telling them to do (usually after destroying vast swathes of humanity in a fit of pique).

Even at age seven I saw the holes in that, although I can’t say as I fully articulated the whole divine love thing (and had not even a vague notion of carnal sin). So I tried to find other ways to interpret this card.

Lovers-RWS-Black-Tarot — The Devil may be truly in the details in this card. Tarot books often speculate that the similarities between the two are because the Devil is mocking the purity of the Holy Union on the Lovers card. The fact is, though, that the Devil card’s design predates the one on the Lovers, so it’s more accurate to say that the Lovers are mocking the Devil. This is more in line with Waite’s pseudo-Christian rationale for the the cards.

A lot of the Major Arcana (and some of the Minors) have a capacity to be overlapped. The relationship between the Lovers and the Devil is fairly obvious, but the positioning of the humans (assuming the people on XV are fallen humans) can also be overlain with the Pillars which the Priestess sits between. This again gives us the doctrine of opposite points, with a mediator or medium between, which leads us to a more complex view of the whole.

Here we can connect up Eve and the Tree of Knowledge with Boaz, which we’ve rendered as “that which is mutable”. Adam and the Tree of Life comes under the dominion of Jachin or “that which is established”. This gives us the opportunity to look at the central portion of the card as a portal.

This is the largest part of the image anyway and it’s dominated by the figure of the Angel. In fact, there’s an axis defined through the Angel from the peak of the mountain, through to the center of the radiance above it’s head. The Angel holds a hand over either figure, partaking of both natures. The dual colors used in the hair of the Angel reflect the green of the Tree of Knowledge and the flaming orange of the Tree of Life. The Angel is our pathway between the mundane world (even if it’s Eden) and that’s which is beyond.

Lovers-DruidCraft-Egypt-Spellcaster-Hermetic-Tarot — If you’re searching for a non-Judaic rendition there are a number of modern decks that offer alternatives to the RWS image. Clockwise from top left:

The Druid Craft Tarot by Phillip Carr-Gorm and illustrated by Will Worthington offer us a pagan variant that celebrates the human experience. The spirit is there, still, in the form of the doe and the Green Man.

The Journey Into Egypt Tarot by Julie Cuccia-Watts depicts the love of Isis for the Dead Osiris. While embracing the Egyptian myth, it manages to incorporate many of the elements of Pixie Smith’s version, and presents us with another layer of mysteries to explore.

The Hermetic Tarot by Godfrey Dowson is based on the teachings of the Order of the Golden Dawn. It is not, however, the Golden Dawn Tarot. In this rendition the serpent story is remade as that of Perseus rescuing Andromeda.

The Modern SpellCasters Tarot by Melanie Marquis with art by Scott Murphy offers something more along the lines of a modern pagan hand-fasting. The references from Genesis have completely disappeared and in their place is symbolism and paraphernalia from Wicca or a similar practice.

The layout here is similar to many depictions in alchemical texts of the “Chymical Wedding”. This Hermetic rebus is supposed to provide the adept with multiple formulae for creating the Elixir of Life and/or Philosopher’s stone. The allegories typically include hermaphrodites, or merged male/female figures, often connected with the sun and moon. Numerous other symbols adorn the landscapes they inhabit. All of these form a secret code known to students of alchemy.

This card then can give us an insight into transcendence and infinity, not through a Judeo-Christian “Divine Plan” but through our own transmutation, Love, both spiritual and corporeal, is a key to our self-awareness. We are spirits in a physical body. Denial of either nature will ultimately lead to our being “expelled from the garden”. If we limit our perspectives, we stall our spiritual growth. We are, after all, given the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Lovers and Priestess-Wizards Tarot — The Wizards Tarot, by Barbara Moore with images by Mieke Janssens clearly connects the figures of the Lovers with the sacred columns on either side of the High Priestess. The intriguing thing is that the two are joined on the other side of the columns, indicating that only by combining opposites can one hope to pass through.

I have always personally felt that the tale of the Fall in Genesis was an allegory of the evolution of man. While this seems fairly straightforward in today’s scientifically leaning world, consider what an idea this is in the 16th century, before Darwin.

The story says that human beings, prior to eating of the Tree of Knowledge, lived in a paradise, running naked among the other animals. When they ate the fruit of the Tree, they became aware of their nakedness and covered themselves. This is not merely an expression of late Renaissance modesty. It’s establishing why we humans feel the need to cover up, when our kin among the chimps and bonobos continue to run around in the altogether.

In reality, of course, the “nakedness” of humanity is an expression of our self-awareness. As “dumb animals” we aren’t separate from the rest of nature, but when we evolved to self-awareness, we gained the knowledge of our otherness. We divorce ourselves from that nature. We left the garden.

So in this set of images, we have reinforcement of the idea of transmutation, or evolution, or our own spiritual growth and expression. When we find it in a reading or use it in meditation or magic, these meanings can be employed to route around the overt or at least apparent, Judeo-Christian iconography that Waite “corrected” from the original images of the Middle Ages.

Once we free ourselves from these conventions, we can proceed to the rest of the Major Arcana with a wider perspective and a fresh eye. We’ll assay the Chariot next week, though the interelatedness of many of these cards means we’ll probably refer back to the Lovers again, sooner and later.

I hope you have found this exercise to be revealing. I have found this card to be difficult over the years because of it’s baggage. If you want to consider it, as many do, just on the basis of the name, it can signify romance, relationships, and sex. But it also carries a link to Gemini, and can be read with regard to contracts, mergers, and legal pleadings, as well as relationships with zero romantic or sexual aspects.

Until next week, I thank you for your continued patronage.

May 3, 2023May 3, 2023

Keeper of the Keys

The sixth card which is numbered V, has one of the most overtly Christian iconographies in a set of cards that has a lot of them. This card was originally the Pope. It is named that in European decks that precede the RWS, and despite Waite’s changing the name to a more exotic Greek one, the design preserves both the traditional image, and amplifies it in that same Gothic Medieval style. The Hierophant may just as well be taken from a stained glass window in a cathedral, as it offers us little in the visual sense to merit divorcing it from its original Catholic nominative.

That image is one of the King of the Church, with his three crowns, on his throne, in full raiment, holding a triple cross in his left hand and making the sign of blessing with his right. The high-back throne is situated between two Norman style pillars on a raised dais, covered with an embroidered red carpet. Affixed to the front of the dais are a pair of crossed keys, traditional part of the Papal arms. To either side are tonsured supplicants. The one on the left wears a robe decorated with roses, the other with lilies. The dominant color on this card is grey, forming the background, the throne, and the columns. The priest of the rose has a grey robe, the one of the lily is a grey blue. Both priest have yellow vestments. The Hierophant himself is draped in red with white trim, and the bottom of his robe is blue. These are traditional colors associated with Christian depictions of Christ and the Virgin in Renaissance art.

Hierophant_RWS_Tarot — “Ladies and gentlemen, HIs Holiness, the Pope”

When I got my Hoi Polloi Tarot in the early 1970s, I admit to feeling cheated that what I expected were going to be “occult” cards had such obvious Christian images, and this one was perhaps the most “offensive” to my young sensibilities. I was not, at this point, educated on the entanglement between magic and occult practices and the traditions of the Abrahamic religions. Now, of course, we should all be at least acquainted with the influence that monotheistic orthodoxy has had on so-called “pagan belief”.

We live in an age where the perceived taint of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is very hard to remove from our ritual and belief. Reconstruction of pagan or pre-Christian belief in the late 19th and early 20th century was hardly scientifically approached. The Victorian magic lodges were actively calling on angels and powers in the secret name of the old Hebrew sky god, and that with many of the liturgies and rituals of the Church. “Folk” pagan movements borrowed from stories that had clearly been altered by centuries of enforced Catholicism, and synthesized based on rejecting or inverting the Christian teachings.

I personally think that much of that early monotheism itself has been redacted and retro-actively continued to match more modern perspectives, as well. Certainly Judaism offers us Kabbalah and a rich magical tradition in parallel with the sacred and practical teachings of the Torah and Talmud. First century Christianity contains more things that were deemed heretical, blasphemous, and even satanic than what eventually made it into the dogma, and early Islam has a similar history of dissent, disagreement, and disinformation.

The result is that what has passed down to us today is not clear, not original, and not perhaps accurate. When we step on the path of working with the secrets of the universe, we should be aware that some of those secrets are just plain lies.

The word Hierophant per the dictionary is most generally rendered “priest of the mysteries of the religion”. He is the arbiter between the mundane world that all may observe, experience and understand, and the world of sacred and divine that only the initiated may experience. He echoes both the Priestess and The Emperor in his pose and his situation.

Whereas the Priestess offers us the means to bridge the ideation of opposites, and the Emperor forces us to encounter the “I”, the Hierophant provides specific methods of instruction. These are the keys at his feet.

In the Christian iconography, and the Papal arms, these keys are the ones given by Christ to Simon Peter that open the gates of the Kingdom of Heaven. Peter is probably not actually his name, but derives from the Greek “petra” or stone. Peter is the disciple, who despite several issues detailed in the gospels, Jesus calls the “Rock on which I will build my church”. As Peter is officially the first Pope, this description is rather fortuitous.

The keys were conferred to Peter in the same passage (Matthew 16:17 if you’re interested) along with the curious authority of being able to cause things that he bound upon the earth to be bound in heaven and that he loosed upon the earth to be loosed in heaven.

FourHierophants — If you find yourself as put off by the depiction of a Christian pontiff as I sometimes do, there are several other decks that give us broader interpretations of the Keeper of Secrets. Clockwise from top left,

*The Shadowscapes Tarot* -Stephanie Law’s lyrical watercolor work presents a being related to Treebeard himself, and more at harmony with the mysteries of the natural world than a cultist in a cathedral.

*The Tarot of the Hidden Realm* – This deck is very Celtic/Faerie oriented and the illustration here by artist Julia Jeffrey of a personable druid is certainly more approachable.

On a different tack, Norbert Losche’s *Cosmic Tarot* combines what at first appear to be traditional religions with symbolism from occult and Oriental sources to hint that perhaps what is behind the temple doors is bigger than any one path.

Finally the *WildWood Tarot* shows us something called The Ancestor. This very Celtic/Shamanic deck presents a number of the traditional cards under new names and vastly alters their interpretation. In the shamanism of the Celts, the spirits of the ancestors have the authority to pass us through the mysteries. The artist is Will Worthington.

This sounds very much like the “As Above, So Below” of the Emerald Tablet of Hermes the Thrice Great, which may have been well known to the Greeks and Romans at the time the Book of Matthew was being compiled, possibly around 60-70 years after the events they were describing. Now that, of course, is the earliest version, and as noted above, many edits may have been made between then and later doctrines. These early Greek texts are supposedly the original source material, but given the history of religious thought that we have from modern times, it’s impossible to say with certainty that they represent an actual historical account, and have not, themselves, been “corrected” even at that early stage.

The Hermetic documents end up in Western European circles by way of Islam. These were perhaps preserved among other documents from the Library of Alexandria because they were not directly heretical to Islam whereas Christian authorities might have destroyed or suppressed them. While most public schools teach of the burning of that library by the Romans during Caesar’s time in Egypt, fewer mention that succeeding intentional purges were committed by both Christians and Moslems in later periods that resulted in many things being lost to humanity forever. Yet copies that had been made by Jews and Moslems at earlier times survived, and re-emerged as the vice grip of the Catholic church started slipping in the 15th century.

So perhaps the secrets being kept by the Hierophant are not those the Papacy and the mysteries of the Church, but of a secret Hermetic magical tradition. Perhaps Peter’s keys were an esoteric expression of the elevation of all humanity through the transformations of the Philosopher’s Stone and the Elixir of Life. The powers ascribed to these long-sought solutions are eternal health, eternal youth, and eternal life, not so far from the immortality promised in the kingdom of Heaven. Whether or not Medieval alchemy was a confusion from a Papal esotericism, or if it was the other way around, is hard to tell, but it is one way we can break ourselves from of that initial reaction that we are looking at a Catholic pontiff.

We can also disconnect the red robe from the Holy Blood and recast it as the Elixir of Life. The blue of the robes beneath the Hierophant’s mantle can connect us to the Water Element, and the distillation or “liquefaction” of the process where the elements dissolve into “water” before reforming into the Philosopher’s Stone. We can assign the tripartite crown and triple cross to Hermes Trismegestus – The Thrice Great, and the entire scene magically dissolves into a pre-Christian pagan symbol for the pursuit of the Alchemical Ideal, the Great Hidden Secret of The Universe

As Above, So Below.

This ties well into my own perspective on the first six cards of the Major Arcana, and their interrelationship. The Hierophant sits at the bottom point of the “Below” triangle. He is that reflection and manifestation of the wild naked formlessness of the Fool. The Fool is the Universe as it is, as it is Becoming. The Hierophant is the Universe as it must be masked, to prevent us from being dissolved back into it. The secrets kept are wonderful and terrible, and cannot be experienced all at once. They must be meted out, building one upon another, so that the foundation is solid and the structure sound.

The building we find the Hierophant in may appear heavy and close, but it is certainly sturdy. The Romanesque style of columns used here don’t allow for wide spans and open spaces. The churches of this period were typically lit by only a few small windows, and candles or torches. Consequently, the surface decorations in most of them were evolved from Roman mosaic, using gold or other metal foils underneath the glass of the tessare, in order to achieve a shimmering and otherworldly sensation for the viewer.

This reflected upon the emphasis that the early church put on the Inward Life- the focus of the Soul, rather than on external material comforts. While one can argue that this is an effective method of maintaining social control during the privations of the post-Imperial days of Europe, it also has a good deal in common with many of the spiritual movements that have come up recently in response to an ineffectual and worldly orthodoxy.

This card most often reminds me of the mosaic of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian from that period. The mosaic in the Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy establishes the Emperor as the central authority between the Church and the on one side and the civil and military authorities on the other. It echoes an adjacent mage where Christ is shown between the orders of the angels. This early depiction, even though Justinian is a Christian emperor with a sitting Pope, gives one an indication of the mindset of the authorities during the time of the early church. Justinian commissioned this piece around the mid 500s, or a little over 150 years after the Nicean Crede formalized Christianity in the Roman Empire.

This is always one of the problems I have with the Hierophant card. While it purports to be giving us access to a secret teaching, that access involves a hierarchy (derived from the same root word) which implies that some individuals are intrinsically better than others, and that the goal of learning the secrets is to move up to the next level. The word hierarchy was originally used to denote the orders of the Angels (the Hidden Order) but was then adapted to refer to the levels of the officials of the Church (sin of pride anyone?) , before it came to mean any stratified group with upper members having authority over the lower ranks.

I have mentioned in earlier articles that I am by nature a non-joiner. There’s something ingrained in my personality that naturally rejects the idea of hierarchy. Whether the Hierophant is keeping the keys of Heaven or the secrets of the coven makes no matter to me. While I understand (and have expressed) that there may be a need to meter information in order to safeguard the person seeking it, I have that basic desire to kick open the gates.

I see a great deal of discussion in the online occult communities about the concept of the “Gatekeeper”. The term is almost universally seen as bad, generally applied to a selfish, and perhaps self-serving, individual that responds to aspirant seekers with vitriol and insult. Yet I imagine that some persons being labeled as gatekeepers are, in fact, trying to teach, and possibly to warn and protect, the neophyte who may be leaping onto the path without proper awareness of what they are doing. Some of these people are members of organized hierarchical orders, and some are wild witches. In either case, the perception of the community seems overwhelmingly negative toward anyone who might suggest that there is some need for “rules”.

Okay, so let’s talk about making cookies.

If I have never made cookies, I can just decide that cookies are made with flour and sugar and butter and milk and put them all in a big bowl and mix it up and bake it and get cookies.

That’s assuming I have a general idea that are made of flour and sugar and butter and milk and not from crushed brown chalk and library paste (I’m going for Oreos here, obviously).

crayon-cocoa — One of my favorite comic strips from childhood, from a series that was far deeper than many kids and adults really perceived.

It’s important to remember that we are all born knowing nothing, and what we end up knowing is a direct consequence of what we encounter up to that point. If you’ve never tasted chicken, having someone tell you that alligator tastes like chicken is hardly useful.

The grandeur of our age is that all the information that has been collected and preserved up to this point in time is at our fingertips.

The great folly of our age is the assumption that having some small view of a tiny piece of that is sufficient to make one an authority over anyone else who may be looking at a different piece.

One cannot presume that we are even speaking the same language, let alone that we are all at the same point on the same path, and have come from the same direction. It is arrogant and cruel to judge anyone’s perspective based on our own, even if we believe we are helping that person avoid something that befell us. We should be generous when our opinion is sought, but in all cases, we should end the dialog with “that’s just my opinion”.

Of course, that is just my opinion.

Now, I think many of us will acknowledge that neither of these are going to give us tasty cookies. We are missing some fundamental understanding of how cookies are made.

Let’s take it a step further and suggest that we went and found a cook-book and took out the cookie-recipe of our choice. We sort of followed it, because we don’t really have any experience in how to measure ingredients, or prepare the pan, or check the doneness, and the cook-book assumes that we do.

Also bad cookies.

So I think most people in the room will start to see how there might be a need for the “gatekeeper” in certain circumstances. Someone to help us out getting things started and not burning our cookies, our fingers, or the house. The thing is that not everyone is particularly good at doing that, and not everyone is good at doing it for everyone who needs it. Good teachers are rare. Good teachers that can teach a variety of students are even rarer. And sadly, I think we have all of us at least once in our life experienced the “teacher” who, for whatever reason, just seemed to be focused on crushing any imagination or individual spirit the student had.

This is the reverse of the Hierophant that we encounter. It is that desire to so restrict interest and innovation to the point that it is creating mere parrots. Dogma is all that matters. There can be no questioning, that which is written is that which is written. To attempt to look beyond is forbidden. It is wrong.

Now as I equate that kind of rigid single-mindedness with the orthodoxy of established mainstream religions, the blatant imagery here of a Medieval Catholic Pope has always caused a bit of a twinge when reading with the RWS deck. I find that I have to consciously do a bit of mental alchemy to see that person as anything other than restrictive and oppressive, and I think that basic rebellion impacts the intuitiveness of any reading.

If I read based on my impressions, and the impression is off-putting, well, even if I tell myself “no…this means something else” I’m going to feel something is off. As readers we need to be aware of our bias when approaching the cards. I have my favorites (as you may have noticed) and I have those I would rather just not look at. And that will color how my senses respond to the cards as they are drawn.

In later years I’ve gotten a bit better at perhaps internally flashing a friendlier figure from one of my other decks that is not so overtly Judeo-Christian in many of the designs. But again, this deck is almost the de-facto Tarot for most people starting out, and it doesn’t divert from other older decks in this issue anyway. You have to go to decks from the later half of the 20th century to start seeing a visual expression that substantially deviates from this. Fortunately, there are a lot of them.

Next week I will endeavor to perform a similar exorcism with the seventh card, the Lovers, which rides straight at us out of the Book of Genesis, with only a minor detour through secular humanism and maybe a touch of Pre-Raphaelite romanticism. I hope you are finding these deep dives into the cards useful, or at least, stimulating to your own thoughts on the subject. Please join me again next week.

February 22, 2023February 22, 2023

The Sacred Life

On Friday last I attended the Ordination to the Diaconate at the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart. We had been invited to witness the investiture of a friend. I am not Catholic and clearly not Christian, but I respect individuals who live their faith through tolerance, generosity and humanity, even if the “official” policies of the faith are problematic.

Besides, it gave me an opportunity to anthropologically observe a high ritual for comparison and contrast with my research on the nature of human belief. I had attended Catholic weddings and funerals before where an abbreviated mass and Eucharist had been performed along with the other rites, but this was the big show, conducted by a full Prince of the Church, and something I was very much interested in seeing.

Contrary to what you may expect, neither I nor the cathedral burst into flames when I crossed the threshold. And while I respected the requests to stand and sit (kneeling I don’t do, aside from the hypocrisy that would involve, my arthritic knees simply won’t accommodate that), I did not partake of the Communion. I will not profane another’s sacred rite by participating in it if I am not a believer. I was not alone, in that respect. Whether because they were not of the faith, or were, but did not feel the need to partake, I can’t say, but fortunately I was not the only person attending that skipped that part. Within that context, I found the whole experience immensely interesting and enlightening.

I’ve been fascinated by the symbolic toolkit of the Mother Church since art history class, and was actually a bit let down by the more modern and rather bland cathedral. I suppose it’s hard to be wowed after you’ve experienced the great Gothic edifices of Europe. This building had more in common with their predecessors in the medieval times. The space, though sufficiently massive to impress, was limited in decoration, and lacking the great glimmering mosaics or stained glass of the traditional churches.

In fairness, with the congregation much more literate, and with audio-visual tech for reaching those less so, the need for the great surface decorations as means of visual instruction in the mysteries no longer exists. To me, that is rather sad. The aesthetic experience of art, and the elevation of spirit and alteration of consciousness that art alone can provide, was missing here, or at very least subdued. Beneath the great dome of the crossing was a porphyry high altar, supported by twelve columns emblematic of the Twelve Apostles (and just perhaps the twelves zodiac signs). To the right of the dais was a matching lectern as microphones have supplanted the requirement of the raised pulpit. On the left a simple wooden podium was provided for non-ecclesiastical personnel, such as those leading the hymns and oratorios.

On the other hand this spartan space did focus more attention on the pageantry of the ritual itself, with the robed nobles of the church arrayed behind the high altar, the great gold and silver clad Gospel book poised upon it, the thurible and the incense wafting out over the crowd. With the aforementioned standing and sitting and kneeling and the calls and responses, hymns, the litanies of the saints, and other parts of the three-hour ordination ceremony, there was certainly a creation of a focused ritual space.

I believe I spotted a number of symbolic performances and structures, which I will not enumerate here, that seemed familiar. Having not attended a ceremony like this, and not having a Catholic background, these observations are perhaps inaccurate. That’s something we should all keep in mind when reading anthropology, or when sussing out a ritual from some old texts that may have been written by the outsider. As an outsider, though, I found that I could appreciate the sacredness of the acts, whether or not they personally were sacral to me.

Within this time and space, there was a clear feeling that something happened that non-Abrahamic monothesists would term magical. There was a belief, from the cardinal down to the congregants, that a power was moving through him into the supplicants for ordination, and that they were transformed into something different than they were beforehand.

As human beings we engage in ritual for both selfless and selfish reasons. Our need to feel there is something beyond that which simply happens to us daily drives a desire for communion with the Holy. Often this takes place in a public setting, where we share our experience with others.

Yet we can and do engage in very small individual rituals. It may simply be flipping our eggs the same way each time, while muttering some incantation to make our day “sunny side up”. This participation elevates the mundane experience and gives meaning to our actions. All our actions.

In sanctifying our every movement, we teach ourselves about the sanctity of all other things as well. In this way we learn how to relate to the world as sacred space, where each thing is a sacred act.

This, of course, is the idea behind any form of initiation, even those that are not wholly magical or spiritual in nature. That is perhaps why we encounter commonalities between many such rituals, and why some people believe that one group or another is stealing something that predated that group’s origin. I have heard much about how the church has appropriated rituals from Rome, Greece, and Egypt, and this is doubtless true. The Romans, of course, amalgamated Greek and Egyptian and Hebrew and Persian and Celtic and Gothic and Hunic and Punic and whatever else they encountered, so a nascent Roman church can hardly be castigated for following this model.

It’s fairly obvious given the similarities between the roles of the various deities in ancient cultures that they either had a common origin in some unknown past, or they represent a basic human tendency to explain our experience through animism. Or it can be both.

Recent discoveries at places like Gobekli Tepe and the region around Stonehenge indicate that our propensity for sacred ritual predates our agricultural civilization. That is, we were not holding a festival to celebrate the harvest, we learned to harvest to celebrate the festival. Sacred megalithic sites seem to have been built up over generations, because there was some local reason for people gathering there, and when they gathered they celebrated with feasting and drinking. To these stone-age peoples, the experience of drunkeness, or other altered states of consciousness, was not simply the result of eating the white berries, it was transportation to the realm of the spirits.

In the case of Stonehenge, the draw appears to have initially been a rich source of flint. In the Neolithic, flint’s role was the equivalent of petrochemicals to modern industrial society. It was used for hunting, of course, but it was also used for the preparation of food, the construction of housing, the production of hides, leather, and clothing, and, perhaps most importantly, the kindling of fire. Wandering tribes of hunter-gatherers would follow the food animals during the seasons, but at some point in each year they would return to the lands around Stonehenge to replenish their supply of this all important natural resource.

Such mining and refining probably took place at times when the food animals were going into dormancy, and the wild crops were dying down. So with the larders full against the coming winter, the tribes would head toward the mines, and when meeting with each other, appeared to join in communal feasting and ritual.

To insure full larders, the food animals and crops gradually became domesticated. One theory emerging from work at Gobekli Tepe is that grain crops were initially being cultivated to make beer. Considering that these beers could very well have been contaminated with things like rye ergot, or various other fungi and molds during the fermentation process, prehistoric brews may have been far more hallucinogenic than your average can of Bud Light today. Consider also that ancient humans had certainly discovered more powerful intoxicants than simple alcohol, and were possibly adding these, or using them in conjunction with, the ritual beverages. We find significant evidence of the sacred use of intoxicants and hallucinogens in the historical accounts of “stone-age” cultures that survived in isolation to modern times. Indeed, some of these practices remain extant among indigenous peoples despite the attempts of colonizers and modern legal restrictions.

When Christianity began to take hold over Europe in the fifth century, the elation and abandon of chemically augmented spiritual ecstasy became associated with the “old religions” and ultimately stigmatized and criminalized. The ritual pageants remained, and became central to the practice (if they were not already, let’s not assume that every pre-Christian rite was a Roman orgy) and spread out, in one form or another, as the One True Catholic Church split and splintered and rolled across the world.

And yet the chanted prayers, the sacred spaces, the processions of symbolic items and artifacts, can be found right through Islam, Judaism, and non-Abrahamic Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and the various fragmented children of those faiths. We can locate a version of it in indigenous religions, in the Victorian magical lodges, the modern fraternal societies, and the graduation ceremonies in schools and colleges.

We as human beings have an inborn need for this sacredness. We, alone on the planet (as far as we know anyway) yearn to experience something greater than our mundane daily grind, to connect with that which is beyond and experience that which is other. Whether we attain to such states via all the pomp and splendor of a choreographed religious ceremony, or we approach it by contemplating the bubbles in our morning tea is irrelevant. The result is our internal elevation, that epiphany of self that leaves us transformed, and returned to the mundane world a bit different, and perhaps a bit better.

My eldest and I were perusing the occult shelves at a local used book store recently when she commented “These all seem largely… self-helpy…” I have had the same observation with many of the texts being offered in the last couple of decades. To be clear, it is not the idea of self-improvement that we find disagreeable, but the thought that it can be achieved by reading a few chapters of the latest hastily published thin paperback on magic, witchcraft, astrology, chakras, herbalism, crystals, or tarot. Much like the myriad diet and exercise books, and those psychology and pseudo-psychology books that are actual defined as “self-help”, many of the hundreds of texts under the broad label of “new age” appear to offer a quick fix for all that is wrong in the world.

And to be fair, like most of these books, there is probably a paragraph or two that mentions to be effective such changes and practices are a long-term commitment. Self-transformation is not a goal, it is a process. It is the result of small steps taken all the time, and over and over, and doesn’t ever stop. The road is long and winding, if one gets the opportunity to walk it. In time the little changes open up our minds and our hearts and gift us with the true realization that it is not all about us.

“Self-care” as a buzzword and marketing strategy has emerged to dominate a number of quasi-esoteric topics since the beginning of the plague years. This is an expected result of the kind of emotional trauma that this world wide epidemic, and the social changes it brought. But as we hopefully emerge from the Valley of the Shadow of Death, we have to be more than self-absorbed and self-contemplative islands. At the same time, we need to realize that we will feel isolated and alone in the cosmos, as we make the journey outward.

I have said before that the Hermit and the Hierophant both hold the secrets of the universe. At one time or another, we will seek revelation through either pathway, and there is no reason to choose one over the other, or to exclude one or the other for once and for all.

The Sacred Life is one that keeps us constantly moving forward.

And on that thought I will move forward to next week’s article, and thank you as always for your time and attention.

Please Share and Enjoy !

Please Share and Enjoy !

Please Share and Enjoy !