transformation – A Sacred Life

June 28, 2023June 27, 2023

The End of All Songs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Except, of course, when it is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But consider this message in a different light.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ll be back next week.

June 15, 2022June 15, 2022

Not to Fear the Lightning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There’s more going on here than simple parody.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Please Share and Enjoy !

Please Share and Enjoy !