subconscious – A Sacred Life

August 2, 2023August 2, 2023

Wolf and Hound

I went looking for a good Shakespearean quote to open this week’s article. He has quite a few that are moon-centric, but none of them really fit with the theme of the Tarot, or my take on this card, so I suppose I shall forego the poesy in favor of just getting to it. But the Moon is oftime mistress of our inner tides, so it seems a shame not to wax a bit poetic.

This will post just after the Full Moon in Aquarius. I didn’t plan it that way, though I do have a nifty app for the moon phases so I guess I could have. Next week the Sun will post just after the apex of the Lion’s gate, so it might seem that I am far more astrologically savvy than I really am. Truth be told, I wanted to start with the Fool nearest to April Fool’s Day, and this is the way they all laid out. If there’s a correspondence to it, well, I’ve already covered that apparent coincidences may not be coincidences, but sometimes a cigar….

moon-rws-tarot — Pamela Smith’s Moon card is hardly different from the Marseilles version that was extant since the Renaissance. I am forced to wonder if this was a concession to deadlines.

Without further ado, then, shall we begin our discussion of the XVIII Card- The Moon. This second of the “celestial” cards is marked by a large disk, with a number of large rays, and an equal number of small rays. Assuming that the position of the Roman numeral overlays the top rays, we have a total of sixteen of each. Within the disk is a faced crescent, and I am inclined to say this is a female face. Outside of Egypt and Mesopotamia, the Moon has almost exclusively been cast as feminine (and we have more of that gender baggage to deal with here). Below the disk are the little shapes that are identified as flame in the Tower card, so I am comfortable regarding them as flames here. Flanking the image are two flat topped towers with a single high window. Behind them, in the distance, are mountains with a single winding road going over them. The road rises in the foreground of the card, from the edge of the water. To the left side of this road or path is a baying hound. On the right is a howling wolf. In the center appearing to be about to walk onto the path is a lobster. At the water’s edge are a variety of shapes which may be meant as aquatic plants, stones, or possibly mushrooms.

We have seen this scene before. In the Death card (XIII) we can clearly see these towers at the far right of the horse’s head, atop the waterfall. The luminous body between them is most likely, in that card, meant to represent the setting sun, so we can interpolate that we are looking west into the Moon card, and that the Moon herself is lowering.

As in the Temperance card at XIV we see a winding path coming from mountains on the left, we may also infer that we are looking at the mountains from the Eastern side, and so behind the environs of the Moon card, or rather on the opposite side of the mountains where the path goes. So in a sense, this card fits between Death and Temperance, between the transformation and the alchemy. It is a gateway, a passage, and not a place in itself. This is in keeping with the constantly changing state of the Moon itself. From Full to New to Full, the lunar cycle never stands still. The sun rises and sets each day, but it is always that same round bright disk. The journey may be cyclic but the traveler is unchanged.

But the Moon alters her face with each day, as she passes through each sign of the Zodiac in rapid fashion, arising to her greatest prominence in her opposition to the sign that the sun occupies. She is moody and mysterious. She makes the tides to ebb and flow, and by popular account, causes our human tides to also run, giving rise to madness. The terms lunacy and lunatic are derived specifically from lunar, and indicate a most ancient belief that our local satellite is responsible for the ungoverned passions.

This association is highlighted by the howling wolf. The howling of the pack when it raced through the brightly lit night in pursuit of prey was terrifying to our ancestors. The wolf was a real threat to human life in many parts of Europe and American up into the late 19th Century, before hunting dropped the wild populations. But before that, the threat of the wolf, likely combined with the incidence of rabies in survivors of wolf attacks, gave rise to the legend of the werewolf. Werewolves and lunatics were not easily separated in the minds of earlier people. Violent insanity, which could have many causes, would certainly have been terrifying, and mental illness was poorly understood (some would say it still is). When we are faced even today with serial killers and cannibals whose motivations defy any reasonable or logical pattern, it’s easy to see how less educated populations, living in remote isolation, might attribute such horrors to “moon sickness”.

moon-deviantmoon-tarot — I really couldn’t have the moon article without using the Moon card from the Deviant Moon deck. These dreamlike impressions of a dark Venetian Carnavale seem tailor made to express the subconsciousness associated with this card. The artist has here dispensed with many of the cards typical hallmarks. Gone is the crescent, the hound and wolf, the crustacean, and the water and towers are merely suggested. But instead, we see a full and stern-faced Moon pulling puppet strings on a pair or royals or nobles. This card is almost more like the Devil with his chains around the symbolic pair representative of the governance by passions. But that is also inherent in the message of the Moon card. Our emotions and moods can drive us to distraction.

There are less horrible versions of “moon madness” of course. The phrases “mooning over” someone, or being “moon-eyed” over a desired suitor are examples of this more benevolent version of our belief in the lunar influence over our rational mind. Thus the Moon has come to symbolize our unconscious mind, the deep dark waters of our dreamlands, which stirs both the untamed beast, and his gentler, more domesticated cousin, the humble hound. The Moon governs the passions, whether they be a lust for the carnal or the martial . Since very often our drive for romance and intimacy are much interlaced with envy, jealously, and territorialism, the two are inextricably linked.

Sitting between that sunset of Death and the Resurrection of Temperance, The Moon gives us access to Hamlet’s undiscovered country. It is within sleep, that death-like state that remains a mystery, that we walk in the world of the Moon card. Are the experiences of our dreams the illusions of reality, foisted upon us by this fickle perpetually shifting orb? Or is that landscape a real place, visited again and again, as a rehearsal for the journey beyond this gateway?

It is doubtless a gateway. The two flanking towers in Smith’s version are reminiscent of the defensive architecture of a Medieval feuding Italian town. These structures we meant to survey the surrounding streets to spot an approaching gang, and to provide an easily defensible refuge for the family who built it. One wonders then, what they may be looking for upon the path between them?

moon-thoth-tarot — The Moon from the Book of Thoth by Aleister Crowley, and artistically executed by Lady Frieda Harris. Like many of the Thoth cards, the images are formed by a synthesis of shapes whose negative spaces describe objects, rather than defining them linearly as is traditional. This is due in part to trends in art at the time, but also due to trends in metaphysical and physical theory. The various wave shapes here are, to my thinking, inspired by the idea of the waveform of light, and early quantum theory. Things are because we see them to be. If we don’t see them, then they are not. This is something quantum mechanics calls the collapse of the waveform, and ties into things like the uncertainty principal and the famous example of Schroedinger’s cat. Because the energy of the universe sometimes acts as a wave and sometimes as a particle, it really depends on how we are perceiving it. It is a wave, until it becomes a fixed thing in space time, at which point it behaves as a particle. This point is our observation of the event itself.

This highlights one of the characteristics of the Moon card, that it is a symbol of illusion. It is about what things appear to be rather than what they are. Witness that the beetle (which is closer to the scarab than the lobster or crab) holds a solar disk, opposite to the Moon which occupies the top of the card. The Moon appears to be the dominant source of light here, but that is because it is above the horizon. It is really only the reflection of the Sun’s light, which here has not risen yet. It is the unfortunate connection of this “lesser light” with the supposed “femininity” of the Moon that gives us the troubling gender bias inherent in much occult practice. It is not a lesser light, it is the light formed by opposite, just as the pairs in other parts o the deck must be seen as opposites but equals. The Moon is the mirror of the Sun. Therefore it reflects back the Sun in equal measure in it’s realm of influence. But because the Moons mirror is not always facing directly toward our little world, that influence is sometimes diminished.

It is not the lobster, which, by the way, is a bad Medieval rendering of a crab. The crab and lobster or crayfish interchangeably represent the Zodiac sign of Cancer, which is ruled by the Moon. The Sun rules the adjacent sign of Leo, although it is the transit of the Sun into Cancer that marks the Summer Solstice, and thus it’s greatest dominance. The Solstice is the point where the Sun appears to rise and set furthest north of the equator, due to the tilt of our planet’s axis and it’s wobble as we go about our orbit. This is thus named the Tropic of Cancer, and lies about 23.5 north latitude. From the first degree of the sign of Cancer, the planet starts to wobble back in the other direction, resulting in the Sun appearing to rise and set further and further south, until the first degree of the sign of Capricorn, which is recorded as Yule in the Wiccan Wheel of the Year.

I personally don’t think that Cancer is a lobster or a crab, originally. I think it’s a scarab beetle, and representing the Egyptian deity Khepera, The scarab was seen early on as a sign of resurrection, because of it’s curious habit of making balls of animal dung, to lay it’s eggs in. The resulting larvae were thought to miraculously appear in the balls, and thus the scarab’s process of rolling the ball became symbolic for the path of both sun and moon.

Egyptian religion is most likely a synthesis of various local pre-historic beliefs. Like the Greek myths that amalgamated gods introduced by trade, migrations, and conquest, there were multiple versions of why things happened in the universe. So the movement of the sun and moon was boats on a celestial Nile, orbs being pushed by beetles, and the eyes of a giant hawk (or hawks). These were all perfectly compatible to the Ancient Egyptians, because, the gods could be and do anything they wanted. And in a particular case, or for a particular temple, or holiday, or magic spell, one explanation might work better than another.

Crowley in his Book of Thoth makes the towers of the Moon card into the ceremonial gateway to a sacred district. In place of the hound and wolf he has given us two jackals, who most would assume to be Anubis, but to initiates are Anubis and Wapuet. Anubis guards the cemetery, the west bank of the Nile. Wapuet is called the Opener of the Way, and is probably a counterpart of the eastern shore. It’s a fair argument that these distinct beings were possibly personifications of the sunrise and the sunset, and that, by extension over the centuries, came to be metaphors for life and death. Since “Opener of the Way” sometimes occurs with a figure that is distinctly Anubis, and is involved in various rituals of the Book of the Dead, it’s also likely that over time the two beings became confounded, even to the educated priesthood. If they represent dawn and dusk, however, their position on either pylon placing the moon in center is appropriate.

Lady Frieda in designing the Thoth Moon card also gives us a beetle instead of a lobster, though it is of a rather different variety that the scarab. I can only surmise that it was a design consideration, or a miscommunication. The history of this deck is rife with spats between the author and the artist, going up to and following Crowley’s death and the subsequent publication of the cards. In any case, the arthropod in the Moon card is most definitely the astrological symbol of Cancer. and significator of the Moon as ruler of that sign. It ties also then to Water, and the other lunar affiliations. Cancer and water are both deeply interconnected with our emotional life, our moods, and our passions. This is potential one of the most astrological of the Major Arcana for this reason.

moon-legacy-of-the-divine-tarot — The Moon card from the Legacy of the Divine Tarot deck by Ciro Marchetti. This rendition, like many of the cards in the deck is an imaginative and insightful expression of the traditional symbolic language. Here the crab of Cancer is more fully realized. Water is clearly present and also noted by the traditional elemental glyph. Crowley’s jackals have been supplanted by greyhounds, a perhaps not too distant cousin. That they are related is expressed by the golden chain between them, holding the more modern lunar triglyph.

The moon is here also personified thrice. In the middle is a nude woman, reminiscent of the figure of the star. But on either side is a statue of the god Thoth. Thoth is one incarnation of the Egyptian moon god (Khons, or Khonsu is another, and there is a version where the moon is the left eye of Ra, or Horus. It’s complicated). One might argue that this is a priestess, or witch, worshipping the moon, rather than the Moon itself. That is precisely why Tarot gives us so much opportunity for expansion of the intuition. It can be all things we see, or none of them. Like the quantum wave, it is what we perceive it, and when we don’t perceive it, it isn’t.

The “flames” that come down from the Moon are a curiosity. They are a remnant of the earlier versions of the card using this symbol as metaphor for energy, or “Moon power” in the same way that the fire dropping in the Tower represents the power of the lighting bolt, and not the actual fire that is destroying the building. In the Marseilles cards, these are both represented as multi-color dots, so when Smith assayed the task of re-interpreting the cards to Waite’s instruction, the energy flows became flames, because in the early samples the same artistic convention was used. Of the Major Arcana, this only occurs here and on the Tower. In the Minor Arcana, we can find these “flames” about the hilt of the sword on the Ace of Swords, and we can find the same shapes, albeit painted blue, in the air around the Ace of Cups. In all cases we are meant to understand these as energies or emanances that come forth from a powerful dynamic source. They are the invisible energies of that source, the secret rays, that impact and alter, but are perhaps not observed save by their effect.

As I mentioned at the beginning, we are in and approaching the apex of what is called the Lion’s Gate portal by many practicioners. This is marked by the rising of the star Sirius above the horizon just prior to sunrise, and event which occurs while the Sun is in the sign of Leo. It begins a few days after the Sun departs Cancer, and a few days after the Sun reaches the midpoint of Leo. On August 8, (8/8) the sun is a the 15th degree of Leo, or about halfway. So all these layered coincidences are seen by astrologers to be significant.

Yet it is the ancient importance of this occurrence that probably is most interesting, and that is that rising of Sirius was what the Egyptians used to predict the annual Nile flood, from which the entire ceremonial, economic, and social cycle of the kingdom depended. And it is the Moon here, taking us back to Egypt and the sign of water, that links into that exaltation of the Sun next week, just before the article on the Sun card is posted.

I hope you’ll join me for that. We are now but three cards from the end of the Major Arcana.

Thank you for your continued interest.

July 26, 2023July 26, 2023

Seven Sisters Light

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

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

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

star-rws-tarot — The enigma of the Star.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Please Share and Enjoy !

Please Share and Enjoy !