This summer’s exercise in the exploration of the Major Arcana of the Rider Waite Smith Tarot began with a different intention and expectation than what it ultimately ended up being. I don’t consider this a failure on my part, either from an editorial standpoint, or in terms of the material presented. This is exactly what working with the Tarot is about.
Tarot is a mnemonic device. At it’s heart, it’s a set of images that are supposed to remind us of a set of predetermined meanings. And, of course, it is is that. But if that is all that it is, then everyone could understand and use these cards. In fact, this process could be fully automated and presented as a handy phone app. And it has been. Yet much like the auto-horoscope apps, this recitation of rote meanings only appears inciteful through coincidence, and the wishful thinking of the user. That is, it’s ability to access the ethereal and the subconscious is an illusion.
To really reach beyond, we have to become a part of the process ourselves. The cards are reminders, certainly, but they are also stimuli. Yes, the Fool may indicate new beginnings, naivete, or poor decisions (depending on whose book you read). But perhaps that moment of stepping off the cliff is what sets our imagination on it’s journey. If we become too involved with the “accepted” meaning of the card, we are locking ourselves off from other paths it might set us on.
This is just as valid a consideration when looking upon the cards as the “hero’s journey” or some other hidden initiatory message. While I do not discount this idea, adherence to that as an absolute and total meaning of the cards is limiting in aspect.
The point is that one must remain open to where the card directs the mind, rather than rushing toward a conventional interpretation. It may not even be the Fool that starts that inspiration. It may be the scarlet color of the tunic, or the angle of staff used to carry the pack. Or it may be the little dog that follows him.
If you follow my Instagram account, you are acquainted with the clips from the cards I have used to announce each week’s installment. I have accumulated them in the photo below. In preparing these, my intent was to find some piece of Pamela Smith’s images that would be unique, possibly iconic, but also not necessarily the obvious emblem of each card. In doing so, I hoped to express that same idea that the card as it is generally experienced may be refreshed by approaching it from a different angle.
The Instagram clips from the article series. What do these snippets say to you? What do you think made me pick them?
The RWS have been around for over a century now. The fact that the designs are now in public domain mean that they are appearing everywhere from t-shirts to coffee mugs. The decks themselves are being reissued by multiple publishers who are recoloring and re-embellishing the old line work. They come in iridescent and hologram finishes, gilded or silvered on black and blue, and a wide range of color variations.
The result of this is that we are so inundated with the form of the images that we are becoming jaded. They are commonplace. Like the pentagram, the triple moon, and the Eye of Horus, our reaction to their sacred and special nature are growing weaker because of overexposure.
This is also a bane for the experienced reader, who, like myself, have been looking at these cards for years and years and almost immediately getting a one or two phrase “shorthand” meaning. I think this is one reason why we collect decks. Even though we go back to our favorites, the ability to access fresh and variant versions of the Tarot iconography can shake up our complacent reaction to the cards. It’s like hearing the same symphony played by a different orchestra, or arranged by a different conductor. Yes they are all Mozart, but perhaps in this version a passage ordinarily favoring strings has been given over to the woodwinds. The notes are the same notes, but played on a different instrument. This creates a different experience of the symphony, and evokes a different response in our minds.
So too is our experience of the RWS style deck interpreted by a different artist. And this gives us an opportunity to imagine and intuit different messages. It changes the nature of the narrative. By this process we may internalize some of these responses, and then when we return to that original deck, we have a different context for that card when it comes up.
There is inherent in this approach the potential stigma of the Unverifiable Personal Gnosis. This is the thing that you know you know, because you know. And frequently in modern discussions of magical practice, the “UPG” is somewhat frowned upon. I hope through the explorations of the cards these last several weeks, I have demonstrated that very much of the supposed “secret teachings” are the UPG of persons from the 18th and 19th century, frequently being legitimized as “ancient and forbidden knowledge” through spurious attributions to the Romani people and the Ancient Egyptians, among others.
The works I have cited in these articles are but a few of the many many texts on Tarot. They are in my personal library, and I am certain that they, along with some other texts I own on cartomancy, have an influence on my personal understanding of the cards. I will say that I agree in parts with these works, and I disagree on the whole. Many texts are in conflict, and this is not unique to the discipline of Tarot. The shelves of astrology texts I possess are at odds in terms of both interpretations and mechanisms.
Additionally, there has been and continues to be an impetus to merge other mantic arts like astrology and numerology, and other magical systems, like gematria, Kabbala, and angel magic with Tarot, and to establish some longstanding heritage for this fusion. If we pare away the legends and find a solid historical narrative for the Tarot – as I believe Paul Huson has done in his Mystical Origins of the Tarot, then we have to discard or at least degrade the majority of these pedigrees. Yet without a secret mystical tradition, the combination of the cards – as a visual magical tool – is still a valid method. There is, of course, some belief that the “true occult teaching” would be needed for such to work, but it truly depends on one’s approach.
There is some context that certain of the Tarot were used both for beneficent and baneful magic as early as the 17th century, and probably as soon as these cards were available. The basic doctrine of sympathies applied here, and of course still does. If you want to call the Devil, there’s the Devil card for that. If you dabble with love spells, the Lovers is an obvious choice, but there’s also the Two of Cups, or the Four of Wands. The imagery works regardless of “system” and truly needs no ancient occult connection to be effective. If we lock ourselves into such systems of thinking about the cards, we are also limiting our ability to access unexpected revelations from the cards themselves.
Shortly after finishing last week’s article I saw a posting by Psychic Witch author Mat Auryn. He suggested that on the Five of Wands, the staffs seem to just fail to make a pentagram. He further goes on to say that the persons wielding the staff’s then may be seen to represent the elements, where the one is the spotted tunic is Quintessence, or Spirit, and that he has purposely withdrawn his staff to “break” the natural shape of the pentagram. This is an intriguing insight. Generally speaking the usual meaning here is conflict or disorder. Yet with this approach, we can go further to express that when Spirit or Intelligence is extracted from its natural place within the elemental system, things tend to fall apart. We are presented with a metaphor of the world in chaos, or a person in chaos, rather than an external and literal conflict.
Expanding on this insight, I went back and looked at that card. It is also possible to contextualize as the five persons are about to form the pentagram We can here almost reverse the usual meaning of conflict and see the Five of Wands as an emblem of cooperation and common goals. Is this just wishful thinking? A complete personal rewrite of the meaning that for ages has been the same thing? Probably. But does that mean that either approach is wrong? No.
It is ultimately the impression of the card that we form as it gets turned over and laid down that is the meaning of the card. The key is to train ourselves to respond freshly to that impression rather than hammering the card into a pre-defined message, which completely ignores what our subconscious is trying to tell us.
I hope the last few weeks exercises have inspired you to look at the RWS and it’s related kin in a new light. Beyond that, an active awareness of all the images and impressions we are fed daily can expand our lives, our knowledge, and our ability to affect the world around us.
I’ll be back next week with new topics. As much as I have enjoyed this journey, I need now to step away from it and reset my thinking to write more extemporaneously as I was prior to April. We’ll see where it takes us.
Thank you for your continued patronage.
Featured image and Instagram pic clipped from the Blue Oyster Cult album Agents of Fortune. Artwork is by Lynn Curlee.
Before I leap into this week’s card completely, I want to mention a couple of points that didn’t make it into last week’s article, but are relevant to cover before going forward.
First, you may have noticed that I haven’t said anything about reverses, that is, the meanings I read when the card is drawn upside down. While these are considered traditional, not every historical source on Tarot has used them, so I think there’s probably a fair argument that “traditional” use is not absolute.
Thing is, several of the decks I own have a card back design that is clearly oriented to up or down, so when I read from those decks, I know whether the card I will draw is a reverse or not, before I draw it. To me, this seems a problem, it prejudices my opinion of what that card will mean even before I draw it. No, it ought not to, but in my own experience it does. Your mileage may vary.
But further, to get a reverse, one must intentionally shuffle the deck such that some cards are turned up and some down. The issue with that is that in a general randomization, you are going to get stacks of reverses coming together. Again, this may just be me, but I purposely re-sort my decks at the end of a reading, to the usual order that I use. From my years of using the cards, this is the Majors, then the Wands, Cups, Swords, and Pentacles, all going from Ace to King. So because of this practice, a whole lot of shuffling is required to get reversed cards that occur individually. While it’s certainly not impossible, it’s just not as likely to get that outcome, and so I am back to having a lot of reversed cards in a row.
In many of the little books that come in the card box, reverses are dealt with as simple opposites. If the Two of Cups is interpreted as romantic love, then the reverse is read as a break-up or divorce looming. But the whole point I have been making is that the cards are to be intuitively read in context, and eyeing the reverse as a simple negation is hardly adequate. As astrologers will tell you about retrograde motion, the interpretation is that the usual meaning may be reduce, impeded, or frustrated, again, depending on context.
In going forward I will probably not spend any more time on reverse meanings than I have previously. I think the astute person who chooses to utilize some of my interpretations in their own exploration can glean what opposites or limitations should apply if these cards come up upside down in their reading. It may also be instructive to consider the earlier, less lofty meanings of the card images in that. It is possible and certainly applicable to perceive the previous three cards as an Idiot, a Con Man, and a Heretic if reversed, or ill-aspected by other cards in the reading.
My second point is to re-emphasize that I tend to regard the first three cards as representative of cerebral or spiritual natures, which may be described in terms of the “That Which Is Above” of Hermetic tradition. As we begin with the Empress card, we are entering into “That Which Is Below”. This is the world of the physical, the manifest, and the incarnate. These cards are both the way the non-corporeal natures of the “Above” show themselves in the perceived reality, and the reflection of those natures.
This arrangement can be a reading in itself, or it can be used as a prototype spread. The Fool, The Magician, and Priestess represent the “Above” of Hermetic teachings, that which is supernatural, divine, astral, etc. The Empress, Emperor, and Hierophant are their Counterparts in the physical world “Below”. If you take the essences of these cards, as they are positioned and opposed/reflected in this context, as signifiers, then cards drawn and placed on these positions can be read in those contexts. For example, the card in the Fool’s place represents new beginnings, first purposes, raw talent, unmoderated energy, etc.
In the years I have been working I have often used the cards to determine how I read the cards. That is, I might deal out a certain number, read those and then deal out again but use the first round to determine how the second round should be seen. This is not the same as the “clarification” where a card is drawn and the next card is drawn to amplify or elaborate. In this case, the meaning of the first card and its position are seen as the modifier to how the meaning of the second card is read. The first card’s meaning is a context, rather than a meaning to be further defined. I don’t know if anyone else has used this method. I am constantly exploring new ways to look at the cards.
I’d like to tell you that I have puzzled out how each successive set of three cards in the Major Arcana work in this interrelationship, but I confess that such a solution still eludes me, if it exists at all. There is a curious little mathematical trick in the Major Arcana, in that the numbers assigned to each card, when they are viewed in successive sets of three, are numerologically resolvable to the number 3.
That is:
The Fool 0 + The Magician 1 + The Priestess 2 = 3
And
The Empress 3 + The Emperor 4 + The Hierophant 5 = 12 and 1+2 =3.
Likewise
The Lovers 6 + The Chariot 7 + Strength 8 = 21 and 2+1 =3
And
The Hermit 9 + The Wheel 10 + Justice 11 = 30 and 3+0 = 3
From here on it continues, though it takes a few more steps
The Hanged Man 12 + Death 13 + Temperance 14 = 39 and 3 +9 =12 and 1+2 = 3
The same applies for the next three
The Devil 15 + The Tower 16 + The Star 17 = 48 > 12 >3
And the next
The Moon 18 + The Sun 19 + Judgment 20 = 57 > 12 > 3
And the final card is
The World 21 and 2+1 = 3.
It’s a nifty trick. I wish I could tell you that there is some hidden meaning here, but I continue to look for it. Beyond looking at the first two sets and their more or less obvious relationship, I can’t use this power of three to logically connect the meanings of the cards split thusly, aside from perhaps ascribing that the World, by itself, holds the same value as each set, and that is rather tidy. Yet my awareness of this strange little numerical quirk always crops up when I contemplate the cards, so perhaps there is something to it after all. I do not ascribe any secret and intentional message lost in the sands of time, but just that like all synchronicities and patterns, meanings may be derived.
This pattern, of course, exists separate from Tarot. If you take the numbers 0 through 21, and split them at every three steps, you get this outcome. It is just that it works exactly on the number of Major Arcana cards that I find rather intriguing. Again, it may have no more real relation than Levi tying the 22 Hebrew characters to these cards. But people use that system daily, so please feel free to adapt or ignore as you see fit.
Alright, enough to the sidebar, let’s get to this week’s card, The Empress.
Smith has given us a sensual feast for the eyes with this card. There is much to explore beyond what I have written about. Foremost is that the openness of the card’s character invite us to go wandering in the woods behind her, an activity I always heartily endorse.
In the RWS deck she is show reclining on a couch in the middle of a field of wheat. Behind her is a stand of trees, which may be an orchard. A stream flows from it to pool just behind the dais her couch is upon. She wears a white robe with pomegranates on it, She is crowned with a tiara of six pointed stars, and holds aloft in her right hand a scepter topped with a large golden orb. Beside her couch, and possibly part of its carving is a tilted heart with the symbol for Venus upon it. The circular part of the symbol is filled with green. A variation of the Venus symbol is worked into a motif at the back of the couch (it may be intended as wicker work or filigree) and there are opulent cushions and throws upon it that she lays upon. The sky in this image is yellow, like that of the Magician card.
The yellow sky is also shared with the Fool card, and appears on four other cards in the Major Arcana. To the extent that these are intentional selections and not just the choices made by the printer from available inks is hard to say. Yet the spaces in each of the cards can be read as symbolic, and there is therefore no reason to ignore the color choice. If it was made by Ms. Smith or the printing house, is irrelevant. If intended, then we can say perhaps a meaning was intended. If coincidental, then we can, like the number sequence and indeed the random draw of the cards themselves, consider it a means of working into the inscrutable mystery being revealed by an unseen force.
In this instance, I make note of the connection of this color with the Magician card, in his rose garden. This is a cue to my earlier statement about reflection and manifestation. The Magician is reflected in the Empress. She is the avatar of Venus, Aphrodite, and Demeter. She is fertility and fecundity, bringing forth abundance and ripeness from the earth and all those things which live and grow upon it. It is she who is the physical representation of the Fool’s divine force, channeled through the Magician’s directed will.
For those more technically included, consider the photographic negative (you younger folks may have to go look that one up. As a photographer whose career and training began with these now “retro” tools, it is a logical and apt metaphor). It is opposite, and potentially unrecognizable. Yet when placed into the enlarger, and light projected through it onto the photopaper below, it yields an opposite and clear image. So I am comfortable applying the reflection/opposition principle here when I connect the Above to the Below. Additionally, we can view the Empress as the feminine aspects of the Magician. In a way, her sensuous nature completes and mollifies the severe and somewhat barren nature of the symbol of willful action.
This of course, does not limit her to being simply the worldly emanation of the will. That would disregard the value of the physical manifest existence. This is often a trap of the spiritual path. Many “seekers” have adopted the philosophy of self-denial, asceticism, and celibacy as the appropriate path to the divine. The whole argument that we must shed our attachment to the mortal world and its pleasures is a tenet of many religions and teachings.
Yet this begs the question as to what the purpose of a physical experience is in the first place. If the spiritual is the only truth, and rising to being solely spiritual is the aim of existence, why is there a physicality at all. If spirit exists before and after mortality, as many faiths teach, then why are we making a side trip. If we are divinity descended into flesh so that we can ascend back to the divine, this seems a futile waste of time.
The answer is usually a pat “because we must learn X” by being incarnated. I think that’s a bit too simplistic, and it also is often used as an excuse for all manner of evil and suffering in the world. We have to be hurt and abused because we must learn X. We make war and destruction on our fellow humans because someone must learn X. Your mother or your sister had to die of cancer because you must learn X. It’s all so you can return to the nature of pure spirit as –what — a better spirit? Were you a bit of a daft spirit before, and spending three score and ten repeatedly having your heart broken and stubbing your toe is going to fix all that?
I don’t buy that one. Sorry. Probably why I don’t fit in with most of the regular philosophical circles.
Now, I am not here to say that the Hedonist philosophy is the one true way either, but I think one of the big lessons we can get from the Empress card is that we are supposed to enjoy the experience of being incarnate. For every time we stub our toe, there’s all those times where we got to eat birthday cake.
Potentially a non-corporeal spirit can’t experience that luscious chocolate frosting, or at least not in the same way that a messy meat suit with taste buds can. For all the limitations and fragilities inherent in life in the meat suit, there are just some things that our ghost selves don’t enjoy in the same way. If this were not the actual case then it would not be so hard to give it all up.
The Hindu and Buddhist beliefs tell us that our spirits suffer because we cannot dissolve that longing for the physical. I say that our spirits naturally have a physical existence. It’s not a larval stage. It’s not preparing us for “the next life”. Our meatiness is part of our life. We may even cycle between being meat and not-meat throughout eternity.
A Triple Empress, if you will, and purposefully drawing on the Maiden-Mother-Crone architype. Three different artists give related, but not entirely similar treatments to the physical attributes of this card’s natural realm.
The leftmost from Stephanie Law’s Shadowscapes Tarot gives us all the joy and exuberance of Springtime with it’s potential for life and growth. Law cleverly paints it in the colors of autumn though, reminding us that these abundances are as mortal as our ability to enjoy them, and yet, they are part of a never ending cycle.
The middle piece I have drawn from Cirro Marchetti’s Legacy of the Divine deck. Here the Empress’s belly swells with the new life witihin, and she is attended by many emblems of fruitfulness and fertility. In one of my own attempts at this card, I also chose to depict the Empress with child, and yet still she is sensuous to us.
The final image is drawn from the Tarot of the Hidden Realm, which as you may guess from the title, is very Faery-forward. The artist is Julie Jeffrey, and has given us a copper-haired harvest queen the equal of Demeter or Ceres. The fruits of the Empress’s impressive garden are wasted if we do not pick them. That is their purpose and that is our purpose.
The Empress is the embrace of that physical world. She is warmth and sunshine on our face. She is the smell of the flowers in the field. She is the hum of the bees, and the chirping of the birds, and the babbling of the brook. She is the touch of a lover’s hand, the look in the lover’s eyes. While it may be true that when we return to the spirit form, we become one with that lover in a way that our bodies may not ever be able to, it is the delicate separation of those bodies, the appreciation of Other, that cannot be felt when the soul merges on a higher plane. That itself is worth something. That itself is why we physically incarnate.
While the emblem on the Empress’s couch (or throne, as it could be such in an Etrurian or Graeco-Roman style) is commonly that used astrologically for the planet Venus, and more modernly for the female, it is also an Egyptian Ankh. The ankh is supposed to have derived from the a stylization of a sandal strap, but it’s meaning is Life Itself. It is universally carried by the gods. It is showered down upon people in painting after painting. It is given by the gods to the deceased in the afterlife, so that they may enjoy an eternity of sensual pleasures in the Field of Reeds as the the Boat of Ra passes by. To me this further enforces the view of the Empress as that principle of Life Itself growing, renewing, and everlasting in the world around us.
Her spring brings forth life giving waters for the forests and fields. The wheat is perpetually golden, ripe and ready to harvest, there is no famine here. Yet this is not Eden. This garden she resides in is far more practical. It is the province of the Gatherer in our most ancient “Hunter-Gatherer” ecology. These plants growing in abundance are yet to be tamed and tilled in even rows. There is an antiquity here, almost as old as the caves, before the structure inherent in domestic horticulture caused her to fade into the background. She is here in the center of it all, to be marveled at, adored, and loved for all these gifts.
On her crown are twelve stars, and I think this is clearly the “stars” of the zodiac. The great gold orb on her scepter is the Sun, showing how it travels across these as the year passes. It is through this that all seasons, Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter are realized in the physical world. In her garden there is something she does in each of them, to prepare for the next. She is not passing time, but the eternal cycle of life, the eternal promise of abundance, the never ending presence of manifestation. She is the embodiment of continuance.
Her left hand rests upon her knee, and we can see here the echo of the Magician’s stance, even to including the scepter. By this she fully claims her dominion of the physical world of the senses. She ordains what is to be through her will. We are subject to that will, we are dependent upon it, and therefore must pay obeisance to her. By contrast though, her manner is relaxed and open. She does not stand proudly by the Table of the Elements, but greets us languidly from her couch. She does not interpose herself in front of us in challenge, but invites us to come join her in this wonderful place she has built around her. The pomegranates are not an abstracted decoration on the banner behind her, but part of her personal garb. She bids us welcome, and insists that we should walk through her garden.
In this she is a stark contrast to the next card we will explore, that of the Emperor. I’ll be back in a week with that one. I sincerely hope you are enjoying these articles on the Major Arcana, their histories, and my own take on the cards. Your patronage is always appreciated. If you find them enjoyable, please share with a friend who may be likewise entertained.
When it comes to the origins of the third of the Major Arcana, we are clouted soundly across the face by a great patriarchal misogyny. The High Priestess as she is styled today in the RWS deck and it’s derivatives, was a symbol of derision and sacrilege. Her former title, that of “Papess” or “Popess” carries a complex history interwoven with the Medieval Church and its politics.
Though sources differ, the most likely source for this character is the story of Pope Joan. Supposedly, in the early days of the church, a woman (gasp) disguised as a man entered the priesthood, and was so successful that she ultimately was elected to it’s highest office, that of the Holy Father, or rather Mother. And mothering, according to the story, was ultimately her downfall, because in addition to committing the great sins of cross-dressing, impersonating a man, and becoming a priest (which is still not legal in the Catholic Church) she also fornicated and got with child. Going into labor during a long procession through the streets of Rome, she gave birth to a son (and some say it was AntiChrist) at which point the crowds tore her to pieces.
It’s hard to say where the story actually came from. Some believe it was created by the Church itself in order to show just how terrible an idea it was to give women rights. Other sources consider it to have risen during Protestant times as an example of the wickedness and corruption of the old order.
There sort of was actually a female pope, who is connected by extension to the Tarot’s rich tapestry of tales. In the 13th Century, Guglielma of Bohemia proclaimed herself to be an incarnation of the Christ and thus equal to the Pope in Rome. Among her other prophecies was the idea of a female papacy. She was quickly executed for heresy, but her followers elected another woman named Manfreda as her successor, thus claiming an apostolic succession of their own. The sect was ultimately suppressed, but this Manfreda was apparently a relation or ancestor of the Duchess of Sforza, whose family commissioned the Visconti-Sforza Tarot now in the collection of the Morgan Library.
For whatever reason, the Popess is historically depicted as a female version of the Catholic Pontiff. Remember that these trumps were originally for playing a card game, and not intended to have any deep esoteric meaning that we know of. So incorporating Pope Joan may have been a slap at the clergy in an era of emerging secular humanism, or it may simply have been a case of “Hey, Luigi, we need to come up with another card. Whadda ya think? We already got a Pope, how about She-Pope?”
Fast forward to the late 19th and early 20th centuries when these cards are transitioning from Catholic France and Italy into Protestant England, which had at the time a female head of the Church in Queen Victoria, and the figure perforce needed to take on a different character. We can find some of that character’s evolution in Smith’s depiction.
Smith’s depiction of the third card of the Major Arcana evokes mystery and antiquity. The symbols and exoticism were part of the zeitgeist of the time in which she worked.
The High Priestess sits between a black column and a white column. inscribed with the letters B and J respectively, and capped with a lotus flower. Between them is draped a curtain adorned with what may be pomegranates. She wears a white crown or headdress with a sphere in the middle and horns or half crescents to either side, from which extends a veil. On her chest hovers a Tau cross. She holds in her hands a scroll with the word “TORA” written on it. A loose blue cloak covers her shoulders and is drawn across her lap. Her dress is of some thin material, that pools about her. At her right foot is a crescent moon shape. Behind her, visible only slightly through gaps between the curtain and the columns, may be seen a vast sea and the intimations of a distant shore across it.
I think it is very likely that Smith had access to a copy of the Sforza Popess card when she designed this. If we look at the Marseilles, which were the common predecessors in circulation, and we look to the Sforza, we can find closer visual structure with this earlier Italian version. While the Priestess no longer sports the triple crown, the distinctive shape of her head gear may be seen as exaggerating the lowest of those crowns. The central jewel becomes the “moon globe” and the side crenulations – already curving a bit in the Sforza painting, become the “horns”. Very frequently this crown is called a “Crown of Isis” or the “Crown of Hathor”, referring to the horned disk often depicted on those deities in the artwork of Egypt. This always draws the connection between Isis and the High Priestess, and, fair enough, it’s a connection I make as well, but I don’t stop there. There are a lot of other clues to be found.
Predecessors as female popes. The depiction from Tarot de Marseilles renders the figure very similarly to the Pope card (V-The Hierophant in modern decks) with full alb and regalia. The older Visconti-Sforza depiction maintains the Trinity crown but she is clad here in an ascetic nun’s habit, holding a simple prayer book, rather than what might be a ceremonial gospel in the later version. It is this humility that leads some Tarot scholars to inscribe the artist’s work on the card as inspired by the later Sforza relation Manfreda rather than the apocryphal Pope Joan. Documentation for any such argument is scarce, and there is very little we can glean from the time as to what view the players held about the Popess card.
Those are Egyptian columns, after all, so why not just accept the Hathor Crown as canon and move on. Except, though they are Egyptian in style, the columns are labeled with B for Boaz, and J for Joachim, or Jachin. These columns come to the Tarot by way of Freemasonry, where they are used both symbolically and as part of initiation ritual. The origin in both cases is in biblical accounts the Temple built by Solomon to house the Ark of the Covenant when Israel had been established as a nation and the capital was in Jerusalem.
In the biblical versions, the two columns were made of bronze and their decorations included pomegranates, lilies (lotuses), and “mesh-work” or some kind of screen. If we accept their existence as historical fact, their purpose was likely ritualistic, or totemic. They constituted a magical threshold between the ordinary space of the world, and the sacred space of the Temple within. We can find the antecedents of such magical structures in the Pylons guarding the openings to Egyptian holy sites, or things like the Ishtar Gate of Babylon and the Lion Gate in Nineveh, and the the symbolism continues down to the Arch de’ Triumphe and the Gateway Arch in St. Louis.
The names have no good provenance, but they are generally said to mean “Strength” and “Establishment”. Since Hebrew is read right to left, we are looking at the phrase as Jachin Boaz which is usually rendered as “He will establish in strength”. Yet esoterically, and this is symbolized by the black and white colors of the columns – rather than the bronze they are made of, the two columns represent all opposing or dualistic forces in the cosmos. In this case “Establishment” may be read as “Structure”, or “That Which Is” or “Matter” and “Strength” then becomes “Force”, or “That Which Changes” or “Energy”.
We may find here a parallel to the attribution of Saturn and Jupiter to the Magician. The universe is a dualistic existence (or at least may be expressed this way) where everything is the result of the tension (or balance) between opposite points. It is not correct to see either point in terms of good or evil, because they are simply the nodes that make possible the spectra between them.
Approaching the Priestess card from a non-traditional depiction, yet maintaining some of the key symbols, these two versions are a study in similarity and contrast.
On the left is the card from the Cosmic Tarot by artist and esotericist Norbert Lösche. His aesthetic reflects his studies in Tibetan Buddhism as much as a deep understanding of Western Tarot iconography. He keeps her veil, the moon, the waters, and the book. expressing them in a surrealist everyspace that transcends time itself. The Alpha and Omega, though derived from Christian biblical text, effectively communicate the same extremes as the black and white columns, which are in this case show very accurately as Tao.
The right side is from the Legacy of the Divine Tarot by Italian artist Cirro Marchetti. I have two of his decks, and will probably be adding the others. His art is deliciously sensual and innovative. Like Lösche he preserves key pieces of the symbol language, while introducing or interpreting others. He has her holding the pomegranate, traditionally associated with Persephone. According to legend, Hades agreed to release her from the underworld provided she had eaten no food that was there. But she swallowed one aral from this fruit, and thus would only be allowed to visit her mother for a short span. During this time, Demeter her mother in happiness would make the world verdant and fertile, but when she returned to the darkness of her husband, Demeter would morn and the world would be bleak and barren. This ancient tale of the spinning of the seasons is tied up in the cycles of fertility in the female as well, and connects to pre-historic knowledge and mysteries. The White Owl, a symbol both of Wisdom and Death, give us a glimpse at what lies across the deep waters behind the threshold she guards.
And the High Priestess is the nexus of that spectra. She sits between these points. She appears to block the threshold. Through her we must pass if we are to enter into the Sacred Space. But it is as accurate to say that she is that Sacred Space herself.
I tend to view the first three cards of the Major Arcana as representing cosmic forces. They are the powers, the energies, the potentials. They are those things which are eternal, and though they are seen through many different masks, they are themselves immutable. In the old Hermetic and alchemical sense, they represent “That Which Is Above”. This will become more apparent in the coming weeks when I delve into the second set of three cards, as I see in them “That Which Is Below”; the forces as they manifest in our physical world.
Just as Aristotle ventured that all things partake of all elements, there is an intermingling in all the forces of aspects of the other, depending on time, space, and context. I have said that I view the Fool as the undifferentiated Chaos, the inscrutable Nothing That Is Everything And Everything That Is Nothing that defies our general senses. It is, and will be, and always was, but we cannot interact with it, because in order to do so, we have to bind it in ways our selves can understand. We, in fact, have to separate ourselves out of it. This is the Magician, seeking to clarify, direct, and form. What then does this leave?
The Light was divided from the Darkness and the Dry Land was divided from the Waters.
The vast sea behind the Priestesses vale clearly signifies that these are Waters of Darkness. They are the remaining part of the Nothing to be acted upon, once the Actor has become conscious and separated itself. Within this dark-eyed beauty is the potential for all that might be. It is the Womb of the Universe, the Sacred Egg, It is Bliss and Creation, but it also is Terror and Oblivion. The Priestess gives us access to that potential through her innate humanity. She is the compassion that allows safe entry to the Darkness, tethered to her inner Light.
Whereas the Magician represents the Consciousness and Active Will, the Priestess is the embodiment of the Subconscious and Intuition. Both are necessary for the fruition of the Big Bang creative power unleashed in the Fool card. The painter is worthless without the canvas, but the canvas is wasted without the painter.
Again, the gendered language traditionally used to work with these cards is problematic for some persons for whom gender is not as clear cut as it was perceived to be at the inception of the meanings of the cards. I hope here to demonstrate that because both “genders” and the concepts attached to them are necessary for the culmination of the full spectrum of existence that fixation on such polarity is not the object. Within the infinite possibilities that exist along those spectra, one can usually find an expression of their own identity that provides power in the self. The place of the Priestess is a place of Power. It contains mystery and illumination. It contains love and acceptance. Yet these are to be earned rather than expected.
This is the only Tarot image that I made with the intent to create a Tarot deck that I am actually satisfied with. The original sketch, though I felt it was “right” languished in my sketchpad until some years later when I digitized much of my traditional art from my younger years. Once in the computer, and with the benefit of the intervening years using tools like Photoshop and Painter, I realized it in the manner that, I hope eventually, it will appear on the Priestess Card.
You can see my homages to the symbolic vocabulary of Pixie Smith, but also the connection I make between this card and pre-historic and ancient artworks that, as far was we know, have nothing to do with Tarot. It is through the contemplation of the card in context with my art history and archaeological backgrounds that I have come to derive my own meanings and contexts for the cards, that I am sharing through this series of articles. To what extent these are “correct” is irrelevant. They are as correct and accurate as any that any reader can intuit or be inspired to by similar contemplation and research, and that is undoubtedly the method our predecessors used to invent the “traditional” meanings that we now evolve.
She is the equal to the He of the Magician card. They are the children of the Fool. They are Action and Reception. They are Will and Fruition. To Separate the I from the Fool, we perforce create the Not I. The Priestess is that Other. But we know that deep within the I is the Other, so again, the forces are never truly separated, and never truly different. This ability to understand that we are both ourselves and all others is the Empathy necessary to overcome that negative aspects of pure willfulness and desire, which are the barren and truly dead legacy of the Dry Land. For the Land to bring forth Life, we must have the Water also.
The blue robe of the RWS Priestess seems to flow and become water itself at the bottom of the image. I am certain this is intentional, as is it flowing across the crescent moon at her feet. The connection between the moon and the female principle is an ancient one, and I believe prehistoric. I have mentioned a number of times the Venus of Laussel, with her horn marked with thirteen notches. I make a very strong connection with Laussel and the High Priestess, to the extent that I would almost consider the ancient stone inscription as a prototype, were it not for the documented history of the preceding cards. But it certainly is a spiritual prototype in my mind. I equate the Sorceror image from the cave of Tres Freres with the Magician in a similar way. I think these distinctions have been with us for a very long time before they became manifest in the ideations of the Tarot deck. Our journeys into these cards must acknowledge how deeply the roots go down.
The “Tora” scroll on her lap is another pointer that Waite subscribed to the belief as did many of his contemporaries, that the Tarot were linked with the Hebrew alphabet. “Tora” is meant to be seen as “Torah” the Jewish Holy Scriptures – specifically the first five “Books of Moses” also called the Pentateuch in Greek. These were believed to have been written by Moses himself, and also sometimes are called, the Books of the Law, as Moses is styled the Lawgiver.
To thus claim for the Tarot a pedigree that they are in some way Universal Law is most likely a complete invention of Alphonse Louis Constant, who reinvents himself with the quasi-Hebraic epithet of Eliphas Levi. The Levites, that is the Hebrew tribe of Levi, were signified as the priestly lineage descended from Aaron (or Aharon) the brother of Moses. Moses was then also of the tribe of Levi. In Tarot, the wands suit, though probably something else in the earlier versions, are typically depicted as wooden branch with leaves. This alludes to the Staff of Aaron, which is said to have budded and brought forth flower and fruit (almonds) even though it was essentially a piece of dead wood. This miracle was claimed as a signifier that the priesthood was forever the role of the tribe of Levi, and the rod is one of the items that supposedly was kept in the Ark of the Covenant. Since Eliphas Levi these complicated ideas have been interwoven into Tarot symbology, many of them without the modern reader even suspecting it.
My favorite Hoi Polloi Tarot alters the inscription on her scroll to TARO, severing the arcane ties in the earlier deck. I don’t know that this was any sort of anti-Semitic thing, I suspect that they just thought it made more sense for a tarot deck to read “taro”. Smith herself performs that same permutation on the Wheel of Fortune. On the wheel, of course, it’s a gematric pun. The letters T A R O can be moved again to form R O T A, or Wheel. We can take this game a step further and link it to the famous magic square of SATOR-AREP0-TENET-OPERA-ROTAS. If one is inclined to play the letter scramble games (as many Kabbalists are) the connection to this enigma is an obvious one, and provides much to contemplate and explore.
The book image itself is important. In the earlier decks the book may be seen as a Medieval Book of Hours or book of prayer. The Book of Hours was called this because it delineated those prayers to be said by the faithful at particular parts of the day. These rituals are echoed in the Muslim call to prayer, though they have effectively vanished from modern Christianity. It may also be seen as a Gospel book, which would have been the first four books of the New Testament, a Christian equivalent to the Mosaic Law, and symbol of the New Covenant. The Gospel book is used as a part of the Catholic Mass, both as a functional text and a potent physical symbol in the ritual.
The Hermeticists can divorce themselves of the Abrahamic religions and see within the scroll a metaphor for the Emerald Tablet or the whole Corpus Hermeticum – those texts from the semi-mythical Hermes the Thrice Great, possibly a sage in the Alexandrian Library, and possibly an Egyptian priest, doctor, and architect named Im-Ho-Tep. Still others would simply write across the scroll Sophia – Wisdom.
The Priestess Card from the Ghosts and Spirits Tarot immediately reminded me of the so-called Snake Goddess of ancient Minoan civilization. The artist is Lisa Hunt, and the imagery of this deck is unique. It can be startling, disturbing, and at the same time mesmerizing. The whole is dreamlike, the figures ethereal. The woman stands in the center, between the fertile world of life on the one hand, and the inevitable world of death on the other. Yet in the death there is not oblivion, and in life there is no permanence. The flow back and forth between the gate is metered by the figure of the Priestess.
The Minoan figures are the feminine cult object of that culture, just as the bulls (or minotaurs) are the masculine cult object. Whether she represents a priestess of deity is uncertain. She is depicted in frescos as well as in the various sculptures. The bare breasts and aproned layered gown is as ubiquitous as the snakes, but we don’t really know if this was a ceremonial garb or if it reflects the actual daily dress of the women of that civilization. Much is still unknown about Crete. We believe now that the culture may have inhabited multiple islands in the Eastern Mediterranean including Thera, now Santorini. The cataclysmic volcanic eruption that destroyed that island may have caused a tsunami that overtopped the great Palace at Knossos, or at least impacted life on that island to the extent that it was abandoned not long after. The people settled on the coasts of Africa and the Eastern Levant where they founded Carthage and Phoenicia respectively. The intricacies of the priestess cults were lost in that disaster, possibly because the people felt those gods may have forsaken them.
It is fair to say that the Priestess is Sophia, but she is also Isis, and Astarte, and Ishtar, and Lilith. She represents a pre-Hellenic concept of the divine feminine that merges both love and war, fecundity and famine, and birth and death. The Greeks would split this nature into Aphrodite and Athena and Demeter and Persephone and Hecate. The Celts would call her the Morrigan, and the Vikings Freja. The dual nature of femininity to be kind and cruel, nurturing and aggressive, and both fruitful and barren, and how this expresses the cyclic nature of the seasons, is all wrapped up in this enigmatic woman on the threshold.
She holds the key to what is beyond, but, like Mona Lisa under her veil, one cannot ever say that they certainly know why she smiles. Even though ancient sages and modern scientists can say they know the process whereby life is kindled in the womb, no one can truly explain the alchemy that results when two sets of genes are united. Separately neither egg or sperm will produce anything, yet when combined they result in a conscious entity that never was before. That’s extraordinary. It is what lies behind the curtain of pomegranates, that we can only know once we have been allowed to enter in. Her mysteries are profound and plentiful, and can be treacherous and terrifying. We must tread carefully upon her doorstep and approach her majesty with the utmost respect.
When I return next week we will look at another aspect of the feminine idea, that of Card IV, The Empress. We will see how the next cards form a reflection and a manifestation of the forces released in these first three. I hope you will join me. I thank you for your time and attention.
It’s been about a year since I started this column. The first of April is right around the corner and I am thinking about beginnings and endings. I felt it time to delve deeper into one of the more enigmatic symbols of Tarot, that of the Fool.
The Fool is interpreted simply in many dissertations on the subject. However, there is much more beneath the surface. I have teased this particular trip down the rabbit hole before, but now it is time to grab our pinafore and go after that púca with the pocket watch.
In most interpretations of this card, it is read more or less literally. It represents idiocy, poor judgement, ignorance, and cupidity. Some variations talk about it as a sign of new beginnings and innocence, but this is a more modern, “New Age” take.
The RWS depiction shows a youth, oblivious to the world around them, about to walk off a cliff. A small dog yaps at their heel. They wear a richly decorated tunic similar to the French Medieval style, a feathered cap, hose and boots, and they carry a leather purse or satchel on the end of a staff. In their left hand they hold a rose. The sun shows wanly in the background, and there are high mountains, indicating that the cliff overlooks a deep ravine and that the drop is most assuredly fatal.
Since this deck, or rather the license infringing Hoi Polloi deck that derives from it, was my first, all later impressions from other decks mentally point back to it. That is, the currents and eddies of the brain invariably take any new (or old) image of the card and compare it to the image as created by Pamela Colman Smith. Therefore the description above identifies the key pieces of that image, and those points for comparison and contrast in other interpretations of the theme. It is those points that I use when contemplating the cards, and teasing the secrets out of them in a reading.
The Fool as drawn by Pamela Colman Smith supposedly at the direction Arthur Edward Waite. Her distinctive “PCS” monogram might be barely detectable under the Fool’s left foot, but it might be missing altogether, making this the only unsigned card. Of course, it’s also possible that the signature was simply cropped from the artwork by the printer without any realization of its purpose.
For this reason, the next twenty-one articles in this theme will begin similarly. While I can’t imagine anyone interested in Tarot does not already own some version of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, it’s also a means of getting everyone on the same page. For good measure I have included a screenshot of each card, which are now in the public domain.
The Fool is also given the number zero, but this has not always been the case. Initially the trumps were not numbered, and then later, only this card was unnumbered, so that in later conventions, it was assumed to have a zero value, when it actually has none. That sounds confusing, I know, but there is a subtle difference between something being given a quantifier, even if that quantity is zero, and something that has no quantifier at all. This is actually a point worth contemplating at length, because in both cases it gives us access to some of the more esoteric messages available to this card.
The somewhat related Eastern ideas of nirvana (quenching), anatta (non-self), and sunyata (emptiness) can be instructive in respect to this subtlety. In many Eastern teachings the ultimate goal of the human spirit is to rise past the need for it’s own identity. Suffering, so it goes, comes from longing, which comes from fear, which comes from the individual ego. When all are one and one are all, there is no need for fear or longing or suffering, and thus the soul is freed from the cycle of reincarnation, because it no longer requires it.
But beyond that, there is a point where none are all and all are none. This is a state where the awareness of the state itself is gone, there is no longer any awareness. This, for lack of a better word, is the void.
Depending on whose philosophy you are reading the void is end or the beginning, the void is a final and immutable state, or it is an intermittent state between cosmological incarnations, because it is inherently unstable, and prone to reasserting its diversity.
In quantum mechanics, physicists talk about things like the Big Bang and the Big Crunch. These represent the opposites ends of all space and time as we perceive it, when everything there is and may be gets pushed into a point so small that no scientifically accurate description can be made of it. The scientists call these points singularities, but because they exist outside the realm of the physics that describe them, they are essentially nothing.
The universe, as the story goes, was without form and void.
A Fifteenth Century Fool. This one comes for the well-known Visconti-Sforza Deck the majority of which is held at the J.P. Morgan Library in New York City. This poor sot bears little resemblance to Smith’s bright medieval fantasy, or to most of the other fool figures that appear in the Tarot. He is missing the pack, the cap, and the dog, in addition to his pants. While there is the suggestion of mountains at his feet, this is more of a Renaissance convention than any significator. The figure still has more in common with the flat spaces of Gothic iconography than the fully dimensional depth that Leonardo and Michelangelo would bring to the world shortly afterward. He is painted against a gilded screen (as are most of the Visconti-Sforza cards) that likely would have been prepared by a separate craftsman as a blank.
Paul Huson suggests that the images we encounter on the Major Arcana derive from the Medieval mystery pageants that gave rise to our modern theater. If he is correct, the pitiable condition of the Fool in this image may be a metaphor for the bleak condition of the human soul in need of salvation. This attribution of the images resolves a number of questions regarding the inherently Christian content of the trump cards, even though they have been re-interpreted in more secular and pagan ways in the intervening centuries. It is important still to remember that the “book” meaning of Tarot in modern times stems significantly from the works of the occultists Eliphas Levi and Papus, both of whom studied for the priesthood before pursuing their esoteric careers.
There’s a permutation of these theories that says instead of the universe contracting back to a singularity at some point in the distant future, it will continue to expand to the extent that none of the forces of gravity, electromagnetism, or nuclear attraction will hold anything together, and eventually it all just becomes cold and dark and empty. Since none of the physical laws that describe the universe function, the universe itself may be seen to become nothing.
And then there’s the theory that after the universe collapses down to the Big Crunch, it explodes again into another Big Bang in a never ending cycle of time ending and beginning again. Because time and space end at the singularity, the new universe beyond can also be seen to not exist, even though it does.
So he we are, standing on the edge of that cliff, trying to define what the difference is between something that has nothing in it, and nothingness.
Yes, I am still talking about the Fool card.
And the zero which is also a circle. So it is nothing, that has no beginning or ending, completely surrounds nothing within it, and completely excludes everything outside it. It does not exist, yet there is no other.
But from this nothingness all other things must arise. The only way to get something is to have nothing to compare it to. Our numbers all exist as a reference against the value of zero, and zero exists against the value of other.
The light was separated from the darkness. The seas were separated from the dry land.
Things begin. On the edge of a cliff, with a dog yapping at our heels.
That little dog is entropy. It’s the natural tendency of things to fall apart. Stephen Hawking says entropy results in a less organized universe, where the structure and form of matter and energy become more chaotic. The tea cup, he says, always falls off the table and breaks into many pieces. It never reassembles and comes back up because it takes less energy to break it than it does to put it together.
At first glance, that means that our universe is heading for that Big Nothing. But physics also says that after the universe had the Big Bang, things were all sort of the same thing, and it was only because that didn’t stay that way that we got to where we are now. Particles formed as energy transferred from point to point. Forces acted upon the “uneveness” of the particles, and caused them to clump up into bosons and mesons and quarks and atoms and molecules and stars and galaxies. And those got really really big and they fell apart, and then the dust left over and the forces at play swept those clumps together and the process repeated.
We’re basically a second-hand cosmos. Maybe even third-hand.
But apparently that dog keeps chasing us right toward the edge of nothing. Even though it’s going to go over with us. Makes one wonder which one is the Fool here, doesn’t it.
In other versions of the card, the dog (and sometimes tiger or lion) is shown biting the Fool, traditionally read as another sign of their obliviousness to reality. But there’s a second option, and that is the dog is actually trying to stop him from going off the cliff. Like Lassie telling us Little Timmy is in the well, the loyal companion here is looking out for it’s master’s best interests, even if the effort is not wholly appreciated.
Aleister Crowley’s “Book of Thoth” version of the Fool Card. In my late teens and early 20s I was very much drawn to the Thelema system of magick and the imagery and interpretation of these cards had a major influence on my thinking about Tarot. I had the book before I ever got a deck of the cards, so I probably have read more deeply these meanings than many of the others. Crowley, in an effort to synthesize a bigger better magickal system, sought to bring together ideas from witchcraft, alchemy, Hinduism and Buddhism, and Esoteric Kabbalah – along with the Golden Dawn magic systems, into a unified theory. The idea still intrigues me, but this card, along with a number of the others, just comes off as busy, over-complicated, and inaccessible. While there is symbolism aplenty, it doesn’t lend itself to the imaginative voyage of the reader. I love to contemplate the Crowley Deck, but I hardly ever do a reading with one.
In Medieval symbolism, the dog is frequently portrayed as an emblem of faith. The name often associated with family dogs is “Fido”, from the Latin “fidelis” – Faith. Compare that to the other common epithet of Rover and you can see how the two contrast. It’s a common feature of tomb effigies to show the little dog at the feet of the night or lady. This wasn’t a love of the pet, but a symbol of both marital fidelity and religious piety. Basically, if you showed up at the Pearly Gates with a Fido under your arm you got a pass. Rover, on the other hand, might have to do a turn or two in Purgatory for his indiscretions and philandering nature.
So we can take that and read the Fool’s dog a number of ways. It may be seen as just emblematic of our instincts trying to avert our mistakes. That’s for anything atheists out there, who just dig the pictures on the cards and don’t believe in the spooky weirdness. We can take it up a notch and consider that dog as the presence of higher forces, guardian angels or a divine power, depending on what works for you, that is guiding our forward steps. To the extent that we believe in and rely on such forces comes back to that faith part. Though, finally, we can just consider it a faith in ourselves, the nature of the universe, and the always rushing-forward power that somehow seems to keep all the plates spinning and all the balls in the air. The universe pushes onward because that is what the universe does. It’s part of the mechanism. What it pushes to, and where it pushes from, are completely irrelevant.
That cliff is usually a metaphor for the unknown, whether it be the future, the secrets of the universe, or this week’s winning Lotto numbers. It is the unformed void, the nothing that will become something. It is thus the potential inherent in all beginnings, and in fact all motion, because when we move we are inherently leaving what was and entering what wasn’t. It’s the zero just before it becomes one. It is also the assurance that zero is always going to become one.
Simplicity need not be bereft of depth. This jolly little card from Gary Hall’s Mystical Medleys deck not only manages to incorporate the symbols we find in the RWS, but gives us other insights into the nature of this card. Most notable of the differences (except of course the use of the old-time cartoony style) is that the Fool’s head is a cyclopean pyramid. This has been a symbol for the presence of Divine Intelligence, or a Divine Plan for many centuries. It is frequently identified with the Illuminati, that mythical secret society directing all the worlds politics and commerce, and holding secret mystical knowledge that would make Dan Brown’s knees quiver. But it also may be read as simply the Divine in all, the secret sacred nature of humanity as it rolls inexorably toward the future. Anyway you spin it, there’s a lot going on here.
I love this little deck, as both an artist and animator, and a Tarot enthusiast. When I bought it I assumed it would be a very basic pastiche of the RWS cards, but they have incorporated a lot of deep secret stuff in each image. you can find it on the Zon, at B&N, and other Tarot resellers. It may be my favorite of the “new” Tarot decks.
Yet the Fool never steps on the cliff. Yes, I know with a piece of printed cardstock that defies our basic understanding of physics (and that as a metaphor is also worth some contemplation). But it never happens because the future never happens. We simply are in the next moment, and then the next and the next. We experience existence through an eternal present where the past is only a memory, and the future is only a thought. Neither state is really real, only the eternal present, which can be sliced down past minutes to seconds to microseconds and nanoseconds and ad infinitum. has any validity to our senses. We never reach the future. We cannot reach the past either.
This is the ignorance the Fool represents. They cannot know the future because when they get there it is always the present. They are not able to break that pattern. Forward movement is constant, but they never arrive.
These are very troubling ideas. It’s easy to get lost and distracted and give up on understanding any of it. That’s why the sun is behind them. Setting out on the journey here the comfort of the ordinary and the established is put to the side. Once the step is taken onto the path, what was once “true” may not be so ever again.
And very close to the sun in the image is the purse or satchel that the Fool carries with them. We’re familiar with this bag on a stick from numerous illustrations of hobos and vagabonds. It is the sum total of worldly goods that the poor creature owns, bound up in a tiny little bundle. That is, it’s the personal baggage we all carry.
The bundle represents all those things we drag along with us into the future, our identity, our upbringing, our social and cultural suppositions, stereotypes, bigotries, and other limiting factors. It is a small thing, after all, in comparison to the wide potential of all possible futures, but we can’t seem to leave it behind, and it will characterize and color anything that we come across.
The Fool is not “innocence” but “ignorance”. They are blissfully unaware that they carry the package, instead preferring to regard the rose in the other hand, that smells sweeter. This tiny white rose can be seen as a potential for enlightenment and improvement, in balancing the baggage of the past life and poor decisions. As we approach that unknown landscape of the yet to be, we have the choice to rise above the past.
Interpreting the Fool is not as easy as it seems. In pursuing Tarot, I have used the images and ideas associated with the cards as inspiration for artworks (sometimes unconsciously) and also have attempted to define my own deck. The above show two different attempts at the Fool, neither of which are satisfactory. The need to not only incorporate the “standard” features of Tarot – in order to make it a Tarot card that other readers will recognize, but also to include my own take on the card’s message from 50 plus years of working with the decks is frequently very frustrating. These images were made many years apart, and reflect changes in both my understanding of the cards and the symbolic language that I use. I see bits and pieces in both that I might employ today if I sat down to design a new card. And ultimately I intend to do so, but because the meanings and the messages change over time. I don’t know that i will ever be satisfied with it. If I made one this year, I would probably look at it in ten years and tell you it was horribly wrong.
Which is why we find the Fool up in the mountains. Every card in Smith’s designs takes place in a very specific locale. They are, I believe, all happening in a particular land which is as much a part of the Tarot as the key symbols themselves. Like the map just inside a Tolkien book this internal landscape gives us insights into the overall “story” the cards are presenting. It’s not a straightforward, consistent narrative, to be sure, but there are connections to be made. Within the Major Arcana, on the Hermit card is found in similar surroundings. While the Fool represents that raw charge at life with no regard for its dangers, the Hermit is a world weary soul who seeks the true experience of the unknown through a journey of internal contemplation. They are the extrovert and the introvert. The sensualist and the ascetic, yet both inhabit the same rarified air, an air which cannot be occupied constantly or for long periods, without some kind of detriment.
The use of Tarot for non-divinational magic is possibly as old as its more usual role. There are accounts of certain trumps being used in the Renaissance for magic. Often this was limited to the Devil or Tower cards and their aspect to lay malevolent powers upon others. Some speculation has been made that the number of Devils missing from extant decks was because they were used for clandestine veneration by secret witches, but these may be fantastical anecdotes manufactured by the Church, whose relationship with Tarot has always been ambivalent. There are some records indicating that Devil cards were equally employed by parish priests to perform exorcism rites, or otherwise drive the evil out of a place or personage.
Certainly they are potent symbols and their use in sympathetic magic should be obvious to all but the greenest novice. Tarot have been marked, attacked, bundled, buried, and burned. The purpose of the spell governs selection of the card, and method of application. This varies from system to system and tradition to tradition, of course, as do the meanings ascribed to each card, and therefore, its likely efficacy.
The longer one reads with the cards, the more meanings and subtleties may be perceived. The ones I have offered here for the Fool are from my own musings. Doubtless other experienced readers will have differing views. But that green novice may experience a brilliant flash of insight that shocks and amazes us all, because they come to it with fresh eyes.
That is the moment of the Fool. It is the energy of the Big Bang, before it cools to become predictable, quantifiable, and exploitable. It is the fire of pure creativity before it becomes entwined with the conscious control of the artist, who must meld the inspiration with the tool and technique that limits it. It is the raw fury of the Universe, pouring out in a constant roar, before it is tempered and directed by the Magician. It carries within it all that delight and terror that unrestrained chaos offers us.
I personally rarely see the Fool as an emblem of folly and recklessness. There are plenty of other cards in the deck to tell us when we are being idiots. When I see this rise in a reading, I look to how it embraces the future, the possibility of unknown and unknowable factors, and the shaky ground that represents. Cards near to the Fool may be blessed with sudden intuition and brilliance in equal (or unequal) measure with heartache and loss. For creation always carries destruction in her belly. To make a new thing is to destroy the old thing that was before the new thing became.
In this wise, the Fool can also be a death card. They may plummet over the cliff into the abyss. There is nothing to say that the unknown is not Hamlet’s undiscovered country. That is a part of the journey we eventually all experience. The future for all of us is a mortal one, at least in regard to the meat-puppets we pilot merrily along. Beyond that there is only speculation, faith, and myth. If we turn back, and drag our feet, and shy away from the next step, there are consequences. The Fool does rush blindly on, as we all do in a way. Time gives us no respite. Our experience of the universe is a constant forward motion. The little dog is always yapping at our heels.
I hope this article has offered you some new perspectives on this traditionally first of the Major Arcana trumps. I have hinted above at our next adventure, with Card One – The Magician, beginning next week. I hope you will return for it. Thank you again for reading my work.
Next week, and for the 22 weeks after that, I will be taking one of the Major Arcana of the Tarot and going deep, through my personal perspectives, techniques, and methods for the use of the card in divination, meditation and magic.
In preparation for that, I am going to spend this week’s article going over some things about Tarot in general, so that we don’t have to refer to it every week and can just work with the individual cards.
It’s safe to say that there are hundreds of books about Tarot. Maybe thousands. And that’s just considering the modern stuff that you might be able to order from B&N and the ‘Zon. Going back after works by Eliphas Levi, Court de Gebelin, and Atelier, or the various Golden Dawn texts, may be more illuminating, but are much harder to lay hands on.
You can find Levi in the original French and in Waite’s English translation on archive.org, if you want to dig into it. As I have noted there are a good many warts associated with the work of the Victorian occultists, not least of which are the misogyny and racism characteristic of European 19th century culture.
Yet it is from these tainted roots that the tree of modern Tarot practice has grown, and it is worth exploring that, if for no other reason than to cut away the diseased branches.
I have done considerable research on Tarot in the last several years, and what I put forth here is based on several sources, both in orthodox scholarship and occult studies. In addition to those texts I mentioned as being in the public domain online, I also draw from the works of the recently deceased Rachel Pollack, and occultist and Tarot scholar Paul Huson. I highly recommend their books on the subject.
Firstly, and most importantly, let’s be clear that Tarot are not, and never have been, a secret magical teaching from out of Ancient Egypt, or the legacy of any other lost civilization.
It would be great to believe that. It would make us all feel warm and tingly inside when we shuffle our cards. But unlike astrology and probably numerology, there is no such ancient pedigree for Tarot. The best we can garner for it is an origin sometime in the 1400s in certain parts of Italy.
A Tarot problem – not nearly enough shelves. As you can see they are stacked and stowed, and this is not even all the shelves that are full. There’s at least a couple more, and then there are some that are on other altars and places of power throughout my house. I would guess there are over 45 sets of true Tarot cards, if not more, and probably another dozen or so oracle card sets, and at least one Lenormand style deck.
There are about eight more in my Amazon wishlist right now, and doubtless I will run across some more that tickle my fancy when I next make the rounds of the witchy shops on my travels. In the grocery the other day, i saw a set of cards for some sort of matching game that were or Hispanic origin, and I was intrigued with the idea of making an oracle with those.
And yes, I do actually use all of them, from time to time, as they call to me. I am moved by the art. I have none that I don’t like, I have several that I like more than the others (and don’t tell them that), but I am connected to every deck that I own. I do not think I am obsessed. As an artist first, expressing my occult leanings through the most visual of mediums seems obvious. As an artist trained, I am fully aware of the number of subjects that are repeatedly addressed and expressed by artists from the beginning of our human experience to the present day. The Tarot are a microcosm of that experience.
The cards were created for a game, called Tarochi. The game included special cards called Triomphi or Triumphs, which had additional point values. These later called “trump” cards were added to the values of cards in a deck of 56 (4 suits of 1-10, plus 4 face cards). The winning hand had the highest point value.
Sometime in the succeeding century, these extra trumps started to be used for the predictive art of sortilege. Sortilege selects something at random and then attempts to determine a meaning. Originally done by randomly picking a line from a book, usually the Bible, it appears that in the 16th century the cards became an additional method of randomizing, before ultimately having meanings associated with them directly.
Huson makes a compelling argument for these meanings to originate from certain philosophical texts that were prominent in Renaissance Italy. The images, he contends, are a remainder of iconography to be found in the Medieval Morality plays. The threads he pulls seem to connect very logically, particularly with images that are unquestionably Judeo-Christian.
To the extent that these potential sources can offer some insight into the intuitive use of the cards in divination, I may touch upon them from time to time, but my methods are very much driven by a visual experience of the cards. Certainly there are traditionally assigned meanings that I, as well as most other readers, will have learned over time, but I use those as jumping off point.
Tarot in the 21st Century. These photos of my tablet show daily card widgets that I also have on my phone (which are much more the size of actual cards). Thanks to the idiosyncracies of random number generation algorithms, the daily cards are different for every deck, and different for the same decks on the phone. In this way I get a kind of multi-card spread, without drawing out a deck. It comes in handy when I am on the road or busy at the office, because I can generally work in a moment or two to flip through the offerings.
My “reading” method is to countenance identical cards most importantly – say, if I get the Knight of Cups on two or more cards, then I expect news of a young friend’s wedding, for example. Next I weight the message of multiple cards of the same suit, and then the Trumps and finally any individual minors.
I’ve evolved this practice over the last few years of having these decks on my mobile devices. I haven’t run across it in any texts, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not out there. I know a number of friends on the ‘Gram post options using one or two decks for daily draw messages. I’m just a bit more ADD about it.
Having digital versions of all these cards shows the diversity that exists in interpretation. If I look up the meaning (the digital decks come with a data version of the little book) they vary incredibly for the same card in different decks. So the journey we are about to undertake into my own interpretive method is by no means simply ego. There are as many interpretations as there are readers.
All these apps are from The Fool’s Dog on Android. I don’t know if they make IOS apps, but I am sure someone does. The available decks are all licensed from the publishers, are generally under 5 dollars US (some are a little more) and come with several spreads and a built-in journal function. They can also be enlarged to see detail, and it’s a nice way to try out a deck you may be interested in. I have paper copies of several of these, but some, like Journey Into Egypt are out of print or cost-prohibitive.
Various occultists have added and subtracted from these meanings. If you pick up a deck today, and read through the little white book the meanings you get will likely be abbreviated from Waite’s Pictorial Key to the Tarot. If you want something deeper, Pollack’s Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom gives additional connections, and is one of the better analyses I have seen.
I don’t agree with all of it, nor do I agree with Huson, or Waite, or Crowley, or anyone entirely. I have found, that in the writing of this series of articles, very many of my interpretations of the cards have evolved away from the generally accepted meanings. I can only attribute this to how memory and perception change over time.
In 1972, with my first deck, I had a thin booklet that gave a few words on each card, it’s reverse, and I think about three layouts. Additionally I had the Tarot as described in The Encyclopedia of Ancient and Forbidden Knowledge – or at least how the Major Arcana were described. So much was presented in that book that Tarot was limited, but until 1987, when I received my second deck as a gift, these were the only resource.
During that decade and a half I learned to read the cards like almost everyone does. I laid the cards out, and I went to the book. Eventually I started to remember some of the meanings, and then I remembered a lot more of the meanings.
And then, of course, I started to forget some of the meanings, or at least they weren’t quite as clear to me. So, rather than being embarrassed in front of a client, I looked to the card, and tried to fill in the blanks.
I think that every experienced reader has probably gone through this process. It’s part of the mental alchemy that transforms it from being rote recitation into an interpretative and intuitive art form.
Imagine that a card layout is something like a jigsaw puzzle. The pieces do fit together to give us a complete picture, and like any jigsaw, they fit one way. The difference is that the shapes of the little connecting bits may change each time we consult the cards. That is, what the seven of cups means may alter depending on whether it is next to the six of pentacles or the three of wands. Or if it shows up in a particular place in a particular spread.
The books can only go so far, even when there are hundreds of books. Sometimes they can hint at these combinations and connotations, but the number of possible layouts prevents any absolute.
In the end, the reader is the one who has to find the key in the seven of cups that tells how it connects to that six of pentacles. And that is a synthesis of what the reader has been taught, and what the reader sees. Seeing in this case applies both to a mundane visual assessment of the contents of the image, and to that broader and murkier “gift” that really great artists have.
Over the years, the pecking of Odin’s ravens has altered some of those keys in my head. They’re not out and out wrong (at least I don’ think so) but my understanding of the mnemonic nature of the images on the cards has changed. Also, with the large number of decks I have in my collection, the varying ways those keys have gotten interpreted by different artists has had an impact on how I see the card in general.
Again, I think this is more or less true of most Tarot workers who have been at it a while. We’ve formed our own opinions after year upon year of seeing how these cards play out. Yes, there is the “book definition”, and all of us learned it (or tried to learn it), but that’s not the end of it. If it were, there’d only be one Tarot book, and not hundreds.
In my teens I read Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber. This epic fantasy series poses many intriguing questions about the nature of existence, archetypes, magic, and even quantum physics. One of the things that drew me most, though, was the particular implementation of Tarot in the series.
In the magic systems described in the books, there are a set of tarot cards belonging to the family of protagonists. In it the Trumps are replaced by portraits of the members of that royal house. Some of them are shown in the upper left of this image by Gray Morrow from the “Illustrated Zelazny” section on the Amber milieu. The truly intriguing property of these cards, though, were that in the hands of the royals, they could be used to communicate with their opposite members, and even as gateways to where those persons were. Part of the plot revolves around the use of the cards in sympathetic attacks as well.
I won’t drop anymore spoilers. The books are generally easy to find in used stores, thanks to their being a “free gift” for new members of the Science Fiction Book Club back in the 80s. But they had an influence on my own thinking about Tarot and taking it beyond the explicit use as divinatory oracles. Like much of the fantasy and science fiction I read in those days, side by side with occult books, Zelazny’s works had a profound impact on my world view, the experiments I conducted, and the mental language I used to quantity those results.
Tarot derives it’s power from our mind’s eyes. It is a conduit to that penultimate chakra, where we open up our perceptions to the infinitudes of the tiny and the cosmic. It can lift your soul to stand above the universe, and walk over to the next one if you want.
Time to dispel big Tarot Myth Number Two – that the Tarot are in any way connected to the Kabbalah or Judaic tradition. This was almost entirely the assertion of Eliphas Levi, based on a few intimations from previous occultists, but most notably because there are twenty-two trumps and twenty-two Hebrew letters. The Golden Dawn took this and ran with it, and so by the time we get to present day, it’s considered canon, but there’s not any real evidence for it.
That said, there is an Instagram account theorizing that an early version of the Tarot of Marseilles includes secreted Hebrew symbols as part of an attempt to preserve certain Jewish teachings during a time of rampant anti-Semitism in Europe. It’s a fascinating theory, and some of the evidence is compelling, but even the author doesn’t suggest that Tarot itself is a secret Hebrew code. The images cited were, he asserts, added to traditional versions of the cards in this one printing, in order to give covert Jews a means of teaching their heritage. But this is not Kabbalah, nor is it presented as existing in previous Tarot decks, and by his own admission, it does not occur in other Marseilles versions.
The other typical myth associated with these cards is their connection with the nomadic Romany people, called in previous times “gypsies”. The tradition is most commonly propounded by a contemporary and countryman of Levi’s who used the pseudonym Papus. Papus is the author of a text that was retitled in English “Tarot of the Bohemians”, but in the original French would have used the term gypsy.
Atelier also suggested that he learned some of the multiple card layouts from readers who may have been part of the Romany culture. However, the Romany are just another group of people who used these Italian cards for fortune telling. Cards were generally cheap, easily transported, and could be used for games of chance as well as cartomancy. So any group of people who lived a transitory lifestyle might employ them. Sailors, peddlers and merchants, even traveling priests have figured in the spread of Tarot and Tarot lore. No one has a particular monopoly, which adds to the mystery surrounding it’s origins as a mantic tool.
Fortune telling was a good business – as it still is – and a set of cards with possible inscrutable meanings was both more immediate and simpler than complex astrological analysis (prior to computer software, I have spent up to a week calculating the positions and aspects on a single person’s birth chart). Of course, the more exotic the process was, the more the client was enthralled, believing in the supernatural power of the cards, and the reader, and willing to part with their cash.
If you’ve read more than a few of my articles, you know I tend to tear back the curtain on a lot of the occult practices. I have always been, and remain, skeptical of claims which fly in the face of verifiable facts.
Yet I use the Tarot and find it to be useful. I find that in the hands of a good reader, the information it provides is well worth the coin it demands.
I have had my cards read by good readers and bad readers. Bad readers are of several kinds. There are the unskilled, the unpracticed, and the unimaginative. And there are outright frauds.
The frauds are easy to spot. I know what the cards usually mean, if they feed me a line of bovine excrement, I smell it immediately.
The unskilled are those folks who still chase back to the book to look it up. Perchance that’s the novice, the new reader in unfamiliar territory. But it’s as often not a matter of not knowing as much as not believing that they know. This is one of the advantages of Tarot. It’s a shorthand that gives us hints. Given enough time and exposure we stop thinking about what the book is saying in dry and hard to remember text, and start seeing what the card shows us.
Seven of pentacles. The gardener. resting on his hoe, satisfied with the fruits of his labor.
“A job well done. Work rewarded. Plans coming together. Pride in one’s craft.”
Of course, this is much harder to do with a pip-based deck like the Tarot de Marseilles. My brain always switches the pips to the pictures and then I just do that. But honestly, I don’t use a lot of decks without pictures. Had I encountered those decks first, I might have learned them and eschewed the more pictorial.
The unpracticed readers have the skill, but they don’t use it often enough to make the magic happen. While this dulls the memory of the meanings, it also blunts the intuition, the very faculty of taking those memories and making a narrative or context that can’t be derived from the individual cards. If that seven of pentacles shows up next to a three of cups, does that mean it’s a good year for burgundy, or that next week is the harvest festival?
Saddest are the unimaginative. They see the cards right there in front of them and just parrot the same answers every time. The meanings are the meanings and the cards are the cards. So what if the three of cups and the seven of pentacles show up on either side of the Tower. They still mean celebration and reward.
Well, no. No they don’t.
But a good reader can pull one card from the deck and give you a reading that will make your hair stand up.
If there is one person that is responsible for the popularity of Tarot at the dawn of the 21st Century it is Pamela Colman Smith. Pixie Smith was barely recognized in the misogynistic world of the 19th and early 20th Century occultists, and her contributions to this artform largely swept under the rug until recently.
The Tarot deck she is responsible for is one of the most popular, if not the most popular, in the world. Prior to her work, the majority of Tarot decks had only pips, or arrays of the suit symbols, for the minor cards.
Like modern “playing cards” also used for divination, the meanings associated with the individual values had to be rote memorized and parroted back. This skill may have limited the number of active readers, but it also narrowed the space for those readers to engage their imaginations and intuition in explaining the message of the cards.
Smith’s work changed all that. With possibly little to no instruction from Arthur Waite, who commissioned her creation of the card artworks, she came up with 78 distinctive representations of the essential nature of each of these meanings (which were not always clear even at the time).
Any artist working with these themes can tell you what a daunting prospect that is. To accomplish not just the quantity, but to create images that resonate so profoundly that even today “new” decks use her images as archetypes, is a wonder.
And despite the number of folks who use the word psychic hand in hand with Tarot reader, I don’t actually believe that is required.
I’m old school. I tend to reserve “psychic” for things like you see Professor Xavier and Mr. Spock doing.
No offense to my friends who use that term, but I simply don’t consider my own powers of intuition, observation, and imagination to be psychic. I can’t tell you whether the card you are holding up is a star or wavy lines. I am not good at “getting a signal” from someone a hundred miles away.
But give me a deck of Tarot cards, and I will chill you down to your immortal soul. Or at least I used to, which is one big reason I stopped reading for people. But I may be coming out of retirement.
In any case, I thought I would take my readers on a tour through the black morass of my unconscious and show you the Majors through my eyes, with the lore of fifty years of working with and researching these odd bits of pasteboard.
As a basis I will be using the cards of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, which is probably the most well known deck in the world. It has recently passed into the public domain, which is why the images are showing up everywhere. It is an unofficial standard. The meanings attributed to most of the cards in various versions largely derive from it, and certainly the hundreds of alternate Tarot decks most frequently interpret the images of Pamela Smith, the illustrator who designed it. In case you didn’t already know, Rider was the original English publishing company, and Waite, is Arthur Edward Waite, poet, occultist, and author of the text giving the meanings for the cards.
My first deck was a modified version of the RWS, one that apparently was not modified enough to avoid a copyright infringement in the early 70s when it was produced. My RWS deck was that second one I received as a birthday gift in the mid-80s.
Since then my collection has expanded significantly. I acquire decks purely based on the art. While a few of them have come with expanded and innovative texts, it is the images that I must relate to, and the images that I ultimately use to inform my reading and response.
I will most likely also include the Thoth/Crowley/Thelema images, as they constitute one of the more influential variants. These were created by Lady Freida Harris at the behest of Aleister Crowley, some decades after Smith made her deck, but they weren’t published until much later.
As the muse strikes, I will share other cards from my own collection, bits of my own artwork, and where appropriate, external references you may find useful.
I hope that by the time we reach the end of the summer you will have been challenged to revisit your own cards and look into the symbolism and meaning from your own perspective.
And then maybe I’ll right that book. There’s room for another book on Tarot surely…
In addition to my penchant for Shakespeare, I spent a good deal of my youthful free time engaged in the adventures of a certain consulting detective residing at 221B Baker Street. Like the works of the Bard, many of Conan Doyle’s stories have been adapted and revised for film, but it is the written word I first encountered, and still connect with.
Latter day incarnations of the Great Detective portray him as an anti-social know-it-all with no people skills. I suppose that’s one way of looking at it. To my semi-adolescent self, this person was, if not a kindred spirit, at least a similar one. His command of vast regions of abstruse information and the ability to rationally synthesize viable patterns from the mundane was a great inspiration to me. I never saw him as cold, rude, or brutal. But then I also may have been an anti-social know-it-all with no people skills.
Imagine you are playing a group guessing game. I’m not sure how many people would remember charades, though it pops up in modern commercials. Now suppose that you have figured out the clues. You know the answer, but you have to wait there while everyone else makes ridiculous guesses.
Sherlock Holmes lived that 24/7. It’s a wonder he didn’t kill anyone. His choice to turn his faculties toward the solution of crimes is showing wonderful restraint.
Modern interpretations make the same mistake universally, and that is seeing Holmes’ best friend and sidekick as being ill treated by the genius detective. The problem with that is that John Watson is not Holmes’ friend. He’s not even a character. He’s a literary device. His sole purpose is to be a mask over Holmes’ thought so that when the why and how is revealed at the end, it’s a wonderment.
Watson is there to give us a version of the story without all the details and clues and trivial tidbits that Holmes sees as valuable. Or rather his job is to make them seem like trivial tidbits. His job is misdirection.
Conan Doyle didn’t invent Watson. He stole him from Edgar Allen Poe. Poe wrote about a genius detective and his thick friend in the first half of the 19th century. The Parisian sleuth C. Auguste Dupin astounds his unnamed narrator by deducing who committed the murders in the Rue Morgue (which sadly about a street and not a morgue).
Poe only wrote two other stories about the amateur investigator before his passing, but it’s enough to credit him with the creation of the detective story, and why the Mystery Writers of America give out an Edgar instead of an Artie for exceptional work.
It evens out, of course. Agatha Christie stole the same device from Doyle to use for Hercule Poirot. Without the dunderheaded sidekick, the Great Detective can’t appear great. You would see how the sausage is made.
Doyle, I will say, shows us how Holmes does it, if only after poor Watson scratches his head and looks dumbfounded at the clues. He spells it out very well in A Scandal in Bohemia. Watson visiting for the first time in a while since he married and moved out, is told by Holmes that he has gained weight, been out in the rain, hired a lazy servant girl, and has returned to his work as a doctor. Watson’s incredulous response is the usual jaw dropped.
“My dear Holmes” said I, “this is too much. You certainly would have been burned had you lived a few centuries ago.”
Holmes and Watson per illustrator Sidney Paget in the Strand Magazine on their way to decipher the odd goings-on at Baskerville Hall. The pair would be transformed into House and Wilson in the Fox Networks House M.D series. British actor Hugh Laurie gave us the first modern reworking of Holmes as self-absorbed and brutal monomaniac. This take was further refined by Benedict Cumberbatch in the BBC series Sherlock and Robert Downey, Jr. in the film versions. Keen observers will notice that the four actors in the last two photos have migrated from Baker Street to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Strange isn’t it?
Holmes then patiently lays out all the little signs that make up the bigger picture. The weight, well he looks heavier, obviously. The servant girl is marked by a cut on the inside of Watson’s boot, made, while scraping off mud; hence the rain. As to his medical practice well he smells of antiseptic, and has dented his hat with the earpiece of a stethoscope. All easily seen and connected dots according to the master.
Watson’s jaw remains dropped. To which Holmes adds:
“You see. You do not observe. The distinction is clear.”
This was a fundamental idea for me. As with any young person who is impressed by a fictional character, I strove to emulate that hero. I endeavored to learn to truly observe.
Humans think they see a lot of things.
Science says that our brains aren’t capable of processing all the visual information our eyes take in, so we fill in the gaps. This is sort of how digital video compression works. A frame shows everything, and the next frame only shows what changes.
Our brain fills in the gaps so that we can function in a visual world without walking off a cliff or driving into a tree because if we had to process all the pixels, we’d never respond in time.
That seems a bit unreal to me, but it’s one of those widely held theories.
We’re really much better at just making things up.
This faculty of imagination would seem to lay at cross-purposes with Holmes’ rationalist approach. But it requires a certain degree of imagination to take all those little bits and pieces and concoct a working theory. Yes, it does have to be strained through the sieve of logic and reality.
“Eliminate the impossible. Whatever remains, however improbable, must be true.”
So the capacity to leap beyond logic and experience a world that cannot be wholly explained rationally can still work in concert with that rational critical world. It’s a matter of knowing when to apply each.
If you’ve gotten to this point and are starting to wonder when I’ll start talking about the usual weird stuff, just hold on. It’s coming.
A reliable and effective use of the mantic arts is based upon knowing when to apply imagination and when to refine that information with critical reasoning.
Pure intuition, while it may have the cachet of a psychic experience, is not always useful in the absence of the reasoned context. I’d like to believe that my “gut instincts” will serve me effectively in every situation, but it has been my experience that it doesn’t. And this is following five decades spent honing that instinct and learning how to listen to it.
Sometimes, you’re wrong.
Ordinarily we filter these kinds of things automatically. We experience an input from the beyond, and assay it’s relative chance of being real and useful. But this process can be improved, and the controlled application cultivated.
You may know that Conan Doyle was deeply involved in the Spiritualist Movement. It is surprising to a lot of people that the creator of a character so attached to reason and logic would hold such a powerful belief in the existence of spirits.
He’s also known for his staunch defense of the photographs known as the Cottingley Faerie Hoax, and continued to persist in the reality of the Bright Folk. Some would suggest that had he applied Holmes’ methods he could have discovered the hoax. It seems obvious he didn’t want to. Belief can override our senses. We see what we think we see.
We may be doubly damned if we’re used to hearing these kinds of revelations from our own “inner voice”. Some of the meditative practices I have been working with lately involve going deep down into one’s own mind, and then bringing up that consciousness to the everyday. My experiences with this have been startling in the results. I have received “signs and portents” relating to what I am studying at a much higher frequency than before.
Or perhaps I am imagining it. Perhaps it is a trick my mind is playing, or rather replaying. My tricksy brain is externalizing the material I am working with to “create” correspondences in the real world. It is possible that because I am engaged in heavy study of the subject matter than I am subconsciously identifying that material in the world around me. As they say, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
But what if it’s both?
What if my brain is projecting the work I am doing through meditation into the world, as a means of improving my perception? In other words, yes, I am seeing signs and portents because my brain is subconsciously engaged in signs and portents. But also, the signs and portents are there, and this process has me noticing them more. It’s really not possible to say objectively if my “heightened powers” are a quirk of neurochemistry or a “real” external phenomena.
And it actually doesn’t matter.
A person with schizophrenia can perceive things that aren’t there. We consider that mental illness in our modern society. In other times and cultures these people were considered touched by the gods, and sacred oracles. And other times and cultures they were considered possessed by demons and burned as witches.
The degree to which our perceived world is a detriment to how we function in society varies from person to person and culture to culture.
Persons on the autism spectrum connect to that “exterior” world very differently than neurotypical people do. Sometimes this can manifest in a preternatural eye for detail, much like the fictional Mr. Holmes. Complex patterns may be observed that are only otherwise discoverable with cutting edge search algorithms. This can be attended by obsessive behaviors, difficulty or inability to communicate emotions properly, and a host of other challenges. These are not the result of impairment, but of a brain that moves differently from idea to idea, linking them in non-standard ways; at least by the “standard” of the general populace.
For a short time Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini were friends. Houdini spent a good deal of time debunking “psychic phenomena” including divination. Houdini had been a stage performer since a young age and had witnessed hundreds of “mind-reading” acts. The trick with mind reading on stage is to start with something general, which is likely to be true for most of the people in the audience. Then you circle in with some details, the letter of a name, a piece of clothing. This is still quite vague, but you start to get a reaction. “My Uncle Henry” someone will shout, and then you keep drawing the circle closer, looking for the mark to give you more clues.
It’s part trick, part observation, and part suggestion. People want to believe, so they’ll let their brains be led, especially if you lead them in a way that can be a kind of hypnosis.
Now if you think this is disingenuous, I invite you to go find an old recording of a TV preacher faith healing in the 1980s. This is exactly the process they are using. 1Obviously I personally believe that the televangelists were as aware of this being a show as the stage magician, but your mileage may vary. Watching the observable practice of both, the similarities are obvious. Were there preachers who believed that their schtick was doing the Lord’s work? I don’t know. Most of them got paid as well as a headliner in Vegas. The extent to which someone who is anxious, or depressed, or suffering from a psychosomatic illness being “healed” by such a practice is equivalent to the audience member believing he received a message from his Uncle Henry. But I am extremely skeptical about the lame walking, the blind seeing, and cancer going into spontaneous remission.
To be fair, and openly honest, when I was reading Tarot for clients, I also employed this technique to some extent. I very closely observed the client as I drew cards and performed the interpretation. You can pick up things from body language, vocal tone, etc. that indicate when what you are saying is hitting a nerve. The setting for a reading is almost universally made intimate, and often dramatic, to encourage a receptive mood in the client. It has the added effect of eliminating distractions so that I can concentrate on what I am picking up from them.
Now some people call this a psychic connection, and I am not about to argue that. I personally don’t consider myself any more psychic than Sherlock Holmes. I know his methods and I apply them. When I get a “vibe” from a client it is because I have spent many years honing my perceptions to pick up those cues. And these cues are vital.
A modern incarnation of the Great Detective was the television series House, M.D. An anti-social iconoclastic diagnostician whose genius was such that it mystified all his associates, Greg House flaunted convention at every turn until he was able to ferret out the mystery disease (spoiler alert: it’s not lupus). House had a maxim that was proven out in almost every episode.
“Everybody lies.”
The Tarot client comes to you either skeptical, or timid. They either don’t believe you or they don’t trust you and in either case you will not get the full story from them unless you employ these deep observational skills.
This is not a trick. It’s not a con. It’s a method to get inside the head of the client and really truly help them, which is why they came to you in the first place. If I had an M.D. I could call it psychiatry and charge $150 an hour. But my parents couldn’t afford medical school, so here I am with a deck of cards, and a spooky knack for reading people.
My cards are not mere props, nor is the reading just a fun mask for psychoanalytic counseling. The client and I, in our little purple draped space, are participating in a ritual that is hundreds, if not thousands, of years old.
Ritual is in itself an altered state of consciousness. The roles we both play are not what we are outside the curtain, this event is special, the space sacred, the time suspended. Both reader and client are engaging in a semi-hypnotic symbiosis.
In this state, the interaction of keen observation, willing responsiveness, and the mnemonic and evocative imagery of the cards produce a result that is more than the sum of the parts. The skilled reader will already have a deep understanding of the codified meanings of the cards, but in the moment, they may see something beyond.
This is also the result of heightened observation. For example, a few weeks ago I did an article on the Tower card, and used an example from my set of the Via Tarot. One of the messages is, in general, the fall forecast in the Tower is redeemed in the Star card that follows it.
Now as I was mixing decks for the article (because I have about 50 and I like showing them off) I didn’t immediately notice an artistic conceit in Via’s Tower and Star combination. The temple shown on the Star card (XVII) is the same as the “House of God” (XVI-the Tower in most decks). On XVI, when the tower is falling, all is in chaos, and the wolf is literally at the door, the viewpoint is close. In XVII, the viewpoint is more distant, the perspective relaxed, and overall feeling much light. Yet this is the same building architecturally.
The Tower and The Star from the Via Tarot. This deck derived from Thelema doctrines and influenced by the Thoth Tarot was produced around 2005 in the UK. As Thoth took inspiration from the modern art movements of the time, Via has several images that remind me of the artist Michael Whelan. Whether that is homage or coincidence I can’t say.
The dome behind the star is a cleansed and renewed version of the House of God in card XVI. If we step back from the central arch of the Tower edifice, we can see that it is a much bigger building, able to accommodate more entrances. The piercing Eye of Omega has become a gentle nourishing afterglow. Isis approaches us, no longer wearing her veil. The Light that burned and broke is now refracted through the stellar heptagram, and cast as the steps of the rainbow she descends.
The 7 points of the Heptagram are the old Chaldean planets, – Sun, Moon, and Mercury through Saturn. The twelve pillars of the temple roof are the Zodiac. The Pentagram in center is the Microcosm and Macrocosm, Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and Spirit.
Tarot is a journey through symbols. It’s equivalent to a waking dream. While the images recur, the meaning changes.
So what meaning does that give us? Is this even an intended meaning, or did the artist do it unconsciously? Is my connection a “trick of the mind”? It doesn’t matter if the idea gives me a new avenue to explore when these cards show up in a reading.
I’ve had this deck for the better part of two decades, and I never saw this until I was writing that article. The additional study, contemplation, and multiple exposures to the various cards stimulated a number of new observations.
Some times, even when we observe we do not observe.
And sometimes we take in a massive amount of seemingly trivial data until some trigger causes it all to coalesce into a meaningful pattern. 2Meaningfulness is a relative term. When we are talking about the landscapes of the mind, symbolism has as much weight as literalism We may have symbolic connections that are ours alone and not even fully understood, consciously.
Dream interpretation is a mantic skill going back to the Stone Age. If we don’t know what the flying hot dog going into the train tunnel means, we’ll often just accept someone else’s explanation. It relieves us of the responsibility of uncovering it.
I wonder about the damage done to our psyche when we overwrite the subconscious source code with the wrong answer.
This is aim of the Tarot. It exists to be that one electron spark that starts the lightning strike. But for lightning to strike the conditions must be right. The mind must be receptive, alert, and observant.
The skilled reader will develop a rhythm that achieves these conditions naturally, without stopping to think about “Am I watching their body language?”; “Does this card in this position mean something differently than normal?”; “Am I listening to my intuition?”
For the novice this can be terribly frustrating, and made even moreso by the myriad decks and books on the subject. Even if you have a “talent” for the cards, for reading people, and observing their reactions, getting comfortable with the basic and reverse meanings is a process. It goes beyond just not having to check the book (and sometimes even old hats still have to). It’s about knowing them well enough to see where they sit in context of the a reading. And then once you get that working, you can start to see where they sit in context of your client and how they are responding that day.
It can help to just start with the Major Arcana. If you really go deep into a standard Waite Deck that alone can keep you busy for weeks. Once you’re happy with that, pick a suit and work through them the same way, until you get all 78 more or less.
Don’t expect to recite the full pages of the text. Get it down a to a few sentences at most, so when that card comes up you know immediately what you are dealing with. That’s actually on Pixie Smith’s cards, which is why the deck became so popular, and why it’s the best “starter”.
Don’t worry about esoteric meanings, numerological, astrological, qabbalistic, or alchemical meanings. Just learn that this card means this, and if it’s upside down, it either means the opposite, or that the meaning is lessened.
When you get past that point, you will start to make those connections naturally, and then be able to expand upon them. And then you can go back and find all those other meanings that may or may not have been intended or even connected to the cards.
Or not. If you and your clientele are served well by a basic understanding, don’t you dare feel intimidated by others who claim you should know more to be a “real” Tarot reader.
I have a passion for Tarot, both as art and method. I have spent many years working with it, reading about it, collecting it, and writing about it. At some point in time I am likely to make one or more decks, and possible write a book or two. But you should not look at my example as what is normal or required.
Everyone can benefit from the mental exercises of meditative observation. If you never pick up another card, or have never picked up one, you can still get more out of your life by looking around, paying attention, and trying to puzzle out what meaning it has.
Thank you for coming all the way to the end, here. I know this one was ponderously long, but it is something that needs explanation and example, so I do appreciate your making the effort. Join me next week for another descent into the maelstrom.
