Meditations on the Tarot: The Chariot

As I mentioned a couple of posts back, I've got behind on my blogging with Meditations on the Tarot; I've read up to partway through The Hermit. While my voice is out of commission for doing recordings (I've got a persistent dry cough, and it's turned my voice all husky), I thought I'd catch up a little.

The Chariot, says the Unknown Friend, represents both the person who has triumphed over the three temptations and remained faithful to the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, and also the fourth temptation: to act in one's own name, to consider oneself a master rather than a servant.

The Chariot represents the person who is not moved by the three temptations, but instead is able to set forces in motion. The UF says:

That which is above being as that which is below, renunciation below sets in motion forces of accomplishment above and the renunciation of that which is above sets in motion forces of accomplishment below.

(Which seems to have a contradiction in it, to me, but never mind.)

So this, he says, is one of the laws of sacred magic: If you desire something and then renounce it, in line with the three sacred vows, the result is what the Gospels call a "reward in heaven". This is why, when the Son of Man had faced the three temptations and triumphed, "angels came and ministered to him".

Because the Chariot is the seventh arcanum, the UF links it to the seven archetypal miracles of John's gospel (water to wine, the healing of the nobleman's son, the paralysed man at the pool of Bethesda, the feeding of the 5000, walking on the water, the man born blind, and the raising of Lazarus) and the seven aspects of the Master's Name: "I am the true vine," "I am the way, the truth and the life," "I am the door," "I am the bread of life," "I am the good shepherd," "I am the light of the world," and "I am the resurrection and the life." In these, he revealed the glory of God.

However, there is also a mastership which reveals one's own glory, in which one comes in one's own name, and this is a serious spiritual danger. It is a "mystical megalomania", says the UF. It's not only what John Cassian discussed (as per A Mind at Peace) as "pride" and "vainglory"; it's more serious than that. Jung called it "inflation": exaggerated importance attached to oneself (which gives one a task to work on oneself), exaggerated superiority over others (which is a trial to be overcome), tending to obsession and finally megalomania (which is a catastrophe).

Jung's individuation is characterized by the creation of a new centre of the personality, in which the unconscious is being transformed into consciousness (the true self, second body etc. which the theosophers and Jacob Needleman and Cynthia Bourgeault talk about). This occurs by establishing a collaboration between conscious and unconscious, which occurs in the realm of symbol and through the awakening of the archetypes. The danger is that one may come to identify one's consciousness or ego with the archetype, for example, with the hero. This leads to inflation (or to negative inflation, where one is always unable to measure up and thus is a suffering hero). In inflation, a consciousness of superiority masks an unconscious inferiority, and in negative inflation vice versa. The initiation known as individuation involves transcending this identification of the archetype and the ego and a shifting of the centre of personality from the ego to the self.

This is the danger that attends a person seeking depth, something that the monastic orders are well aware of (hence their focus on genuine humility, which is neither inflationary nor deflationary but a reminder of the monk's finitude before God). The UF considers this a far greater danger than black magic or madness in the pursuit of occult or esoteric practice. The three stages he has noted repeatedly in his acquaintances are, first, self-assurance and informality in speaking of "higher and sacred things"; then, "knowing better" and "knowing all", the attitude of a master towards everyone; and finally, considering oneself infallible.

The monastic solution, mentioned by Mary Margaret Funk in A Mind at Peace and recommended also by the UF as the only solution he is aware of, is "ora et labora" - prayer and work. He says:

It is necessary to worship what is above us and it is necessary to participate in human effort in the domain of objective facts in order to be able to hold in check the illusions concerning what one is and what one is capable of.

This is to hold it in check; to actually overcome it, he says, one must have the experience of "concretely meeting" a being higher than oneself. "Authentic experience of the Divine makes one humble; he who is not humble has not had authentic experience of the Divine."

So the Charioteer in the sense of a warning is the megalomaniac with his false triumph, and the canopy separates him from God; but in the sense of an ideal, the Charioteer is the one who has become his or her own master, who has mastered himself or herself, in the sense of overcoming the three temptations and also the fourth, which is pride. In this case, the canopy is his awareness of not being God.

The breastplate is there to keep the Charioteer sane in the intoxicating mystical experience of union with Nature; the crown is to keep him sane in the sober mystical experience of union with the transcendental Self; and the canopy is to keep him sane in the third mystical experience, both intoxicating and sobering, of union with God. He does not lose himself in nature, does not lose God in experiencing his higher Self, and does not lose nature or the world in experiencing the love of God. He is a master not because he is "over" all the forces of the world but because in him all the forces are in balance and equilibrium (or health). In particular, he has the astral body, composed of the forces of the seven planets, in balance - he has broken what the theosophers refer to as the "astral shell", where one's planetary influences dominate one. To put it another way, he has transcended his own personality and balanced its powerful tendencies by gaining integration within the Self.

And the following arcanum, Justice, is specifically the arcanum of this balance.

Meditations on the Tarot: The Lover

Although I haven't been reading Meditations on the Tarot lately, I am one chapter behind on my blogging, so this is me catching up.

The card which the Unknown Friend calls The Lover is usually referred to as The Lovers. In the Marseilles Tarot (though not in Rider-Waite), there is a third figure of a temptress besides the male and female couple and the Cupid figure, and the UF refers this to the temptress of Proverbs chapter 7, while the pure bride is Wisdom of Proverbs 8.

"The central theme of the sixth Arcanum is therefore that of the vow of chastity", and it summarizes the three vows in opposition to the three temptations, those of Christ in the wilderness. The vows and temptations total six, the number of the card, linked to the symbol of the hexagram or Solomon's Seal.

The three vows hark back to Paradise, where man was united with God in obedience, with the world in poverty (that is, possession of everything while laying hold of nothing in particular), and with his companion in chastity, total communion and wholeness in love, living unity.

The problem of love of one's neighbour is this: "Rather than knowing that they really exist and that they are as much alive as we ourselves, it nevertheless appears to us that they have a less real existence and that they are less living than we ourselves... Our thoughts tell us that this is an illusion... all the same we feel ourselves at the centre of reality, and we feel other beings to be removed from this centre... Now, to feel something as real in the measure of its full reality is to love."

The UF identifies two approaches to overcoming the illusion that "I am living while you are a shadow". The first, the Eastern method, is to extend indifference, shadowness, also to oneself. But the other method is to extend the love that one has for oneself to other beings, so that one regards both as equally living. To begin, one must love the closest person, one's neighbour.

This is the reverse of Freudianism (as Needleman also points out). Freud sees sexual desire as the basis of all human psychological activity, but sexual desire is only one, separated portion of the totality of love. It is the wholeness of love that is chastity.

Where Needleman goes with this is that problems develop when self-knowledge becomes less interesting than sexual fulfilment. And indeed, the UF next talks about self-knowledge. He sees the biblical account of Eden as describing the essential foundation of our human being, in symbolic language. Through "enstasy", descent into one's own foundational depths, one experiences the image and likeness of God spoken of in Genesis, by the means of "the sense of spiritual touch". This is the first initiatory experience.

The second is through the sense of spiritual hearing, and is by ecstasy - with reference to Pythagoras and his ideas of religious ecstasy, the music of the spheres, and cosmology. He concludes, "Ecstasy to the heights beyond oneself and enstasy into the depths within oneself lead to knowledge of the same fundamental truth. Christian esotericism unites these two methods of initiation." He gives the Gospel of John as an example of this combination of height and depth, the macrocosmic solar sphere and the microcosmic solar layer, the cosmic heart and the human heart. And Paradise is a name for both of these, the realm of beginnings and principles and initiation.

Now, the three temptations. The first is that of power, listening to the voice of the Serpent who says "You shall be like God"; the autonomy of consciousness which now knows good and evil for itself, instead of knowing all things through God; which now knows itself naked (separate from God). It is a refusal of obedience because it puts the voice of the serpent (or the self) on the same level as the voice of God, which said not to eat of the tree, and obedience is based on submission to what is highest. It is doubt, the entry of an alternative to listening to God.

The second temptation is to look at the tree and prepare to have experience, to experiment and act for oneself in order to dispel the doubt, which is the beginning of greed and the loss of poverty.

Finally, Eve took of the fruit (plunging into experience) and ate, and gave some to her husband (involving the other), thus losing chastity. Rather than waiting for the gracious revelation from God, she took. (I have to admit I don't totally follow the connection to chastity, and I think he's just completing the pattern as best he can here.)

The UF then has a long digression on grace, which I won't go into here. Likewise his long digression on egregores, which are phantoms, emergent forces or artificial beings engendered by collective consciousness (such as political ideologies), rather than realities revealed from God on high. He resumes on page 140 with a description of the law of God as grace and the law of the serpent as "the triad of the will to power, the 'groping trial' and the transformation of that which is gross into that which is subtle."

He then speaks of the three temptations of Christ. Hunger is the experience of poverty, and the temptation to transform the lower (stones) into the higher (bread), rather than taking life from on high. The temptation to throw himself down from the temple is the temptation of the "groping trial", whereupon he expresses some peculiar views on biological evolution (he sees it as authored and directed by the serpent, which seems odd). This is the temptation of chastity (again, I don't totally follow this).

The temptation of the kingdoms of the world is, of course, the temptation of power and directed against obedience.

Basically, what the UF seems to be getting at here is that there are two ways: we can begin with the lower, with ourselves, with what is emergent, and attempt to build it up to something great (the modern ideas of evolution and progress), or we can ask and allow God to send grace down to us.

I remember after reading part of this over breakfast being struck by the consonance with my little daily liturgy which I say in the shower:

I want to listen, to what is highest and best, to all people, to everything that exists, to my own body and my true self, that I may understand and love more deeply.

I think this was because of the themes of enstasy and self-understanding under God as a basis for love.

I feel like I've kind of lost the thread of the UF's argument now. When I finish Needleman I'm planning to go back to Meditations on the Tarot in the hope that I can recapture it.

Meditations on the Tarot: The Emperor

The Emperor, says the Unknown Friend, is a symbol of authority - which he distinguishes from force or power. The Emperor doesn't bear a sword, but a sceptre; he has renounced compulsion and violence. In fact, his authority is shown by what he has actively renounced. "He has renounced ease, being not seated. He has renounced walking, being in a leaning position and having his legs crossed. He may neither advance in order to take the offensive, nor move back in order to retreat... he is a guardian bound to his post." He has renounced movement and action, by the position of his legs and arms. His belt restrains his instinctive nature, and his heavy crown painfully restrains his thought and arbitrary imagination, for it is a crown of thorns, the sign not only of his legitimacy but of a mission from above. It is not a personal mission; it is a mission symbolized by the throne, against which the shield rests.

These four renunciations establish a fourfold emptiness, into which the fourfold divine name YHWH, source of authority, can enter. His personal intellectual initiative is renounced in favour of divine initiative; his action and movement are renounced and replaced by the action of divine revelation and the movement of divine magic; his personal mission, his name, is renounced and replaced with authority, law and order. This leads the UF to a long digression on free will and divine power which I won't go into as there's nothing that strikes me as particularly new about it, until he gets to the idea of tzimtzum, the withdrawal of God, taught by Lurianic Kabbala.

God, according to this idea, had to withdraw in order to make a void within himself where creation - and hence freedom - could come into existence, and the Emperor imitates this action. In doing so, he enables the complete divine name to manifest through him, the complete authority of God, the post of the Emperor, "the state of consciousness of the complete synthesis of mysticism, gnosis and sacred magic", initiation. That is, the state of consciousness in which the temporal and eternal are one and are simultaneously visible. This sanctification of the Divine Name in humanity is the deeper meaning of the first petition of the Lord's Prayer, "hallowed be thy name".

Another digression, this time on Hermetic philosophy, concludes: "its teaching... consists of spiritual exercises and all its arcana (including the Arcana of the Tarot) are practical spiritual exercises, whose aim is to awaken from sleep ever-deeper layers of consciousness." The Gospels are also spiritual exercises, for participation, not just scrutiny. "The aim of spiritual exercises is depth. It is necessary to become deep in order to be able to attain experience and knowledge of profound things. And it is symbolism which is the language of depth - thus arcana, expressed by symbols, are both the means and the aim of the spiritual exercises of which the living tradition of Hermetic philosophy is composed." After a digression on reincarnation - which he sees as God giving multiple opportunities to begin again - he states, "An arcanum practised as a spiritual exercise for a sufficient length of time becomes an aptitude. It does not give the pupil knowledge of new facts, but makes him suited to acquire such knowledge when he has need of it... The initiate is one who knows how to attain knowledge, i.e. who knows how to ask, seek and put into practice the appropriate means in order to succeed... Spiritual exercises alone have taught him." He calls this the arcanum of the three united endeavours (ask, seek, knock), which lead to receiving, finding and gaining access.

The Emperor is thus the one who has authority because he represents humanity before God. He is not superhuman, but more human than anyone else and so is worthy to guard the Throne of David. In becoming fully human, he is also being transformed into the image and likeness of God; in renouncing the four arbitrary liberties of humanity, he is crucified, wounded with four wounds.

This is a complicated and digression-filled letter with multiple points which, ironically, don't appear fully integrated (given that the Emperor is the fully integrated man). The most immediately valuable to me are the side points about spiritual exercises as preparation for knowledge, making you the kind of person who can know. A spiritual exercise in which we renounce intellectual initiative, movement, action and personal missions - in which we sit silent and still and listen - is therefore preparation for us to be filled with knowledge of God, to become truly ourselves, truly human and in the image of God. This, then, is the purpose of Centering Prayer.

Meditations on the Tarot: The Empress

Now, you'd think that The Magician would be the symbol of magic, wouldn't you? Not according to the Unknown Friend.

The Empress is the arcanum of sacred magic. There are three kinds of magic: sacred magic, where the power is divine; personal magic, where the power comes from the operator; and sorcery, where the power comes from elemental or other "unconscious forces". All of these are about the principle that "the subtle rules the dense": force rules matter, consciousness rules force, and the superconscious or divine rules consciousness. These three rulerships are symbolized in the card of the Empress by, respectively, the eagle shield, the orbed sceptre, and the crown.

The crown, the divine authorization of magic, renders it legitimate. The sceptre is magical power, and the shield is its aim: "Liberation in order to ascend". The throne is the role of magic in the world.

Miracles and redemption require the union of the divine and the human - the incarnation, in some form (which is why the UF begins this letter with the words of Mary: "Behold the handmaiden of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word"). The double crown of the Empress symbolizes this union, when what is above and what is below are united, and the sacred magician happily serves both what is above (in uniting with the divine will) and what is below (in the act of magic for the sake of "liberation in order to ascend"). This is the result of contact with the divine (mysticism), followed by understanding of the divine purpose (gnosis), put into practice.

The union of wills is potential in the crown, but is actual in the sceptre, which is a union of two cups - one, topped with a cross, pointed downwards, and the other, supported by the staff, pointed upwards. The power of the cross, the Holy Blood, descends downwards and enters the human Grail; the divine presence enters the Eucharist.

The Empress's throne is the realm of Nature, longing for the liberation symbolized by the eagle shield. The back of it resembles wings; they are petrified and immobilized, but the promise is that they will again be liberated.

The verse John 16:6, "I am the way, the truth and the life", summarizes the first three Arcana: the true way or mystical spontaneity, the revealed truth or gnosis, and the transforming life or sacred magic.

The UF now goes into something of a digression on miracle ("the visible effect of an invisible cause, or the effect on a lower plane due to a cause on a higher plane"). In comparison with science, which aims ultimately to mechanize the intellect "in such a manner that it calculates the world instead of understanding it", and which in its practical aspect is the domination of nature by the principle of destruction and death, miracle is concerned with understanding, construction and life, "conscious participation with the constructive forces of the world on the basis of an alliance and a cordial communion with them".

The angel with the flaming sword, guarding the Tree of Life, is preventing humanity from "putting forth the hand and taking", the way of science. The sword is "a weapon of divine magic... a yes and not a no", for the fruit of the Tree of Life is destined for the worthy, but not for thieves. "The Tree of Life is the unity or synthesis of consciousness, force and matter... of mysticism, gnosis and magic." Separating out a part - magic - and making that a humanistic study is ultimately the course of death, and is the ancestor of science, because it concentrates only on visible nature and makes it mechanistic. "One has to demechanize in order to become a mage".

The UF's theme is coming out clearly: In unity, in union, in the understanding of and participation in the whole, in relationship and experience rather than intellectual understanding and analysis, is found life and redemption and divine magic.

Meditations on the Tarot: The High Priestess

The High Priestess (or Papesse) in the view of the Unknown Friend is concerned with initiation, with "two-ness", and with wisdom. He contrasts the idea of an initiation which is depersonalizing (as taught by the masters before Jesus) with an initiation which, while leaving the personality in existence, fills it with God. If the first Arcanum, the Magician, is concerned with spontaneous action, this second Arcanum is concerned with reflection: "the transformation of the pure act into representation, of representation into memory pictures, of memory pictures into the word, and of the word into written characters or the book" (p. 40; emphasis in the original).

The Magician is standing; he has the practical method of mysticism, for he dares to do. The High Priestess knows, and so she is seated, so that she can project outward, horizontally (through the book) the descending vertical revelation.

The revelation descends in three steps, symbolized by the three levels of the High Priestess's tiara in the Marseilles Tarot. Mystical experience, of the God who is beyond names and forms, is the highest level. From this comes gnosis - mystical experience which is conscious of itself. This descends to magic, gnosis put into practice (of which he has more to say later), and finally to Hermetic philosophy - the book.

"Mysticism", says the UF on p.41, "is the source and the root of all religion. Without it religion and the entire spiritual life of humanity would be only a code of laws regulating human thought and action." Does that sound at all familiar as a description of religion? A tradition, he says, is only living when it is complete, when it is a union of mysticism (direct consciousness of God), gnosis (reflection on and some understanding of the experience of God), magic (putting into practice one's understanding, projecting it into the world), and Hermetic philosophy (making all of this to some degree communicable to others). A philosophical system by itself enslaves: a person who falls victim to the spell of a philosophical system "can no longer see the world, or people, or historic events as they are; he sees everything only through the distorting prism of the system by which he is possessed." He has similar harsh things to say about separated magic, separated gnosis and separated mystical experience.

He relates the four levels to the four worlds of Kabbala, and has an interesting thing to say about reconciling the various views of creation that are around. In the highest world, the world of emanations, pantheism is true; there is only God, and everything is within him. However, in the world of creation - once we leave uncreated eternity - theism is true. Further, in the world of formation, demiurgism - the idea of the Gnostics that physical creation was not the work of the true God but of lesser beings - is true. Finally, in the lowest world, the world of facts, naturalism is true. He uses this to illustrate the difference between the gnostic sense, which is a sense of wholeness or synthesis preceding analysis, with the Hermetic-philosophical sense, which is a sense of a differentiated whole, a synthesis after analysis.

And my reaction to this is what?

Well, I like his emphasis on the necessity to work at all the levels in order to avoid the problems that partial understanding brings. "Creation science", for example, arises from a confusion of levels: a gnostic description is taken as factual. Inevitably it is mocked by those who reject the gnostic level entirely and live only at the level of facts, because it doesn't fit the facts. However, it's a mistake to conclude that this means that the biblical account of creation isn't true. It isn't true at the factual level, but at another level, it and not the factual explanation is the true one.

Only by being, understanding, acting and thinking are we complete in any of those four.

Potentially, you could also relate these to the four Jungian functions: mysticism is sensing, gnosis intuition, magic is feeling (connecting the self and the world), and Hermetic philosophy is thinking. Roughly.

Meditations on the Tarot: The Magician

This is the start of a series of reflections, containing my personal responses to the book Meditations on the Tarot by the "Unknown Friend". Some of it will simply be summaries of the points in the book I find memorable; other parts will be new insights that the meditations have led me to.

Since I turn 40 today, I now fulfill at least two of the traditional conditions for studying Kabbalah (I'm also male), which makes this a good day to begin this series.

The Magician, in the Unknown Friend's view, represents the key to all of the Major Arcana. He acts with effortless concentration and transforms work into play. He knows the underlying unity of the world, and experiences that unity in the silence of his soul. "Truth", says the UF, "has no other meaning than that of the reduction of the plurality of phenomena to an essential unity", recognising that everything is connected.

Because everything is connected, it is possible to reason by analogy. Analogy is found in the realm of symbolism; this is the vertical analogy: things below are as things above, their prototypes. Analogy is found also in the realm of myth; this is the horizontal analogy: things present are as things past, their archetypes.

The Magician has achieved balance between spontaneity and the unconscious, and deliberate action and the conscious. His practical lesson is concentration without effort, and his theoretical lesson is intellectual vision without effort, but these are based - the UF warns - on prior practice and discipline, without which we become charlatans.

Idea: Tarot of Kells

Someone, and I'm probably not allowed to say who, but anyone who knows us both will be able to guess, put me on to the book Meditations on the Tarot recently. It's a remarkable book, by a devout Catholic who's also a very knowledgeable Christian esotericist and hermeticist. He uses the symbolism of the Marseilles version of the Tarot cards as a jumping-off point for all kinds of fascinating philosophical, theological and spiritual discussion. There's a lot of practical mysticism in it. I'm planning to write up a summary of his main points in each chapter (or "letter"; they are "letters to an Unknown Friend", one for each of the Major Trumps).

Unfortunately, the Marseilles is far from being a beautiful Tarot deck, and the beautiful decks that are out there (like the Gilded Tarot, which I will probably buy) have imagery that doesn't always reflect the points the Unknown Friend makes. For example, the High Priestess in the Marseilles Tarot wears a triple tiara (which is why she's the Papesse in French) and carries a book; the UF uses these as a symbol of four levels of spiritual thought and understanding. The Gilded Tarot's High Priestess (image here) has no headgear and no book. The Rider-Waite-Smith, which most people think of when they think of Tarot cards, has a three-part headdress, but the three parts are horizontal rather than vertical.

So, inevitably, I return to an idea I've had before and probably will never act on: making my own Tarot. But if I did do it, I'd do it like this:

• Base the imagery on the Book of Kells, since that's an artistic style I've done before and like.
• Probably call it the Tarot of Kells.
• Make sure that I incorporated the symbolism that Meditations on the Tarot uses, so that it could be used with that book; almost certainly add other symbolism as well.
• Add two more cards (probably the Celtic Tree of Life and the Great Serpent as ourouboros and labyrinth) to make 80, since that's an easier number to divide into sheets for printing than 78.
• For the "pip" cards (1-10 of each suit), make an illustration of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, scan it, and insert the appropriate number of suit pips at the appropriate Sephira.
  
• That would mean I would only need to do the 22 Greater Trumps, the 16 Court cards, the two extra Trumps, one image of the (Kabbalistic) Tree of Life and one fairly simple one for each of the suits, a total of 45. Plus a "carpet-page" to use for the backs, 46. (That's still a lot of images.)
• For the Court cards, use the Four Archangels (Kings), the Four Seasons (Queens), the Four Living Creatures (Knights) and the Four Elements/Directions (Pages), or something of that kind, as per the associations of each rank.

As I say, I probably will never do this. But if I do, I've now recorded my ideas.