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One of the grand metaphors of Tarot – though it is a fairly recent innovation – is the that that Major Arcana is The Fool’s Journey with three levels or kinds of work for our Hero Fool to do: Cards 1 – 7 represent the development of self and the ego; Cards 8 – 14 represent a turning inward to seek a new kind of wisdom; and Cards 15-21 represent fulfillment of the Fool’s seeking and spiritual attainment. In 78 Degrees of Wisdom, Rachel Pollack names the levels as Consciousness, Subconsciousness, and Superconsciousness.
The Fool’s Journey has guided me for a long time but now it’s sparked a new metaphor as I’ve worked through the Journey into the Tarot. I’ve been playing with a vision of the Major Arcana as three circles of healing with three points of transition. This post spins out that thread of thought and continues the play.
Both the nature and the shape of the journey changed with the shift in metaphor to circles of healing rather than a progressive journey.
The first spark for this new view of the Major Arcana came from working with and re-assessing the relationships between the male and female wisdom figures of the first six cards of the Major Arcana (which I blogged about in more detail here). I saw the obvious dance between the Emperor and the Empress, but also how the Hierophant needs the High Priestess’ inner / lunar wisdom to refresh the outer / solar traditions he upholds. They danced between the Magician and the Lovers.
Using the circle of healing metaphor, The Magician represents the circles highest potential and what exists before a split of masculine and feminine. He exuberantly uses the male elements of fire and air and the female elements of water and earth to make his magic. The Lovers shows the joyful connection of masculine and feminine and is the main healing work of this circle of integration. The connection is possible both within a person and through greater cooperation of men and women in the world.
The Charioteer moves forward from this triumph of integration led by a team of dark and light creatures into the next circle of healing.
Using the attributions of the English School, Strength opens the second circle of healing seeming to continue a theme of triumph and most commonly the image of a woman taming a lion. But the gentleness of the woman is so different from the boldness of the Charioteer. Some kind of transformation has taken place.
Paradox now makes its appearance as the trickster teacher because the triumph of the first line is following by the seeming contradiction of dissolution and surrender as the achievements of second line of cards.
The work of this line starts with The Hermit who leaves behind the everyday world for the lonely mountaintop. He goes inward removing himself from the attention and praise of the world. This allows him to come to know his inner wisdom. Rather than being isolating, the work here connects to the Hermit to ever changing movement of the Wheel. From his wide perspective on the mountain top, he comes to a deep understanding of change internally, in the everyday world, and even in the unseen realms and the widest cosmos. He no longer fights change but aligns himself with its energies.
This alignment with change brings a greater understanding of the patterns of cause and effect embodied in Justice. Reaching Justice brings us half way round this circle of healing with Strength and Justice across from each other. The connection is apt as it takes strength to look at our lives and take responsibility for how we’ve triumphed and failed and to pluck the lessons of self knowledge from its roses and thorns.
The deep self knowledge gained from this encounter with Justice may spark a re-assessment that can be quite destabilizing. And in this second circle of healing the destabilization needs to be embraced. The Hanged One meets the challenge by turning every thing upside down and being with the uncertainty created by this new perspective. Action seems impossible. A new understanding of what is important is in process of being formed.
The old self faces Death and this is the great work of this circle of healing. The transition into a new way of being requires releasing what is known, both the negative and the positive aspects. We are called to let them go without knowing what will next emerge. There is the phase of the Death process where we enter the void. If we have prepared well enough in the work of the Hanged One, we may even welcome this place of absence.
We are called forth from the void by the rising of the sun. The new invites us. We emerge as stronger because of a greater connection to the whole of creation that is in a constant cycle of birth, death, and re-birth. The boundaries between self and other have worn away. We have the skills to commune with our lions (who represent both our fears and our power). While we appear to have control over these beasts, those who have traveled the healing circle of dissolution know that it is through surrender and death that this deeper kind of power flows.
We’ll need that power when we face the Devil, but that’s a subject for another post.
[Notes: Images from the Gaian Tarot are used with permission. It’s interesting to note that some people see the Gaian Magician as a man while others see the figure as a woman. The ability to be both speaks to the Magician as an already perfect balance of male and female.]
My Journey into the Tarot has me looking with new eyes at the relationships between the wisdom figures of the Major Arcana. Before this journey, I would pair up the Magician and The High Priestess, but as I wrote about in last week’s post, it is actually the Hierophant and the High Priestess who offer each other necessary balance and when their cooperate a healthy wholeness.
So where is the Magician’s partner? The Magician’s partner is within. As the number One, the Magician represents the unity of all things and thus is neither masculine nor feminine (sorry to any Pythagoreans out there who classify this as a male number!) but a blending of both. The prominence of the 4 elemental tools or emblems of the suits contains this hidden nugget of truth because the Magician uses with equal facility the feminine elements of water and earth and the masculine elements of fire and air.
Perhaps this is why my current favorite reading decks all have androgynous Magicians: Rachel Pollack’s Shining Tribe, Tarot Roots of Asia, and Joanna Powell Colbert’s Gaian Tarot. In the Gaian Tarot Circle, although it is more automatic to see the Magician as man, were certain the figure is a woman and were surprised that others even conceived of it as a man.
The High Priestess then becomes the Major Arcana to have a gendered identity as the essence of feminine being. She brings forth the Empress, the physical, life-giving, creative force of the feminine. The cosmos springs from the feminine receptive to all life.
If we take the first flaring forth as an example, here is a wonderful description of its beginnings from Thomas Berry’s and Brian Swimme’s The Universe Story:
In the beginning was a flaring forth of evanescent beings. In every instant the universe was fresh, just as a flickering flame’s shape is fresh, nearly created. In the beginning, the universe was a sparkling. Nothing endured the beginning except the flickering creativity bringing forth each new billowing. The intensity, the concentration, the shimmering of the beginning was so extreme that no single being in the entire universe endured it, but each thing disappeared almost as suddenly as it entered into existence. (p. 20)
But to endure this great creativity needed form, the first photons and neutrons partnered and a foundation for a stable on-going creation of matter is made. We have entered the realm of the Emperor who brings structure to creation. At its best his structuring supports on-going creativity and his leadership leads to harmonious relations. This is possible when the Emperor and Empress partner just as the first proton and neutrons.
The High Priestess and Hierophant show this partnership within institutions and especially within the institutions that transmit religion and tradition. Their partnership, too, needs a dynamic dance of the feminine and masculine energies and inclinations.
The dance of these two couples played out in our society has been imperfect. We are emerging from a time when the masculine has led to too much and partnered too little, but in our times the Goddess and earth/green movements have been bringing the feminine back to center from the margins. We need to reclaim her wisdom.
And we need to make a leap.
We need to leap into The Lovers as an expression of the masculine and feminine integrated within us as individuals and within our societies and institutions. They need to embrace each others as equals.
The first six cards of the Major Arcana now show me a journey of healing. From the original unity of the Magician, we have passed through a perhaps necessary separation of the masculine and feminine, but in our times we have been damaged by the false belief that one is superior to the other. The Lovers invites us back to a dance of equality and joy.
May it be so!
Preparing for a recent Tarot meditation, I delightedly explored a new aspect of the High Priestess. I am constantly amazed how the meaning of the cards is revealed afresh to me despite the fifteen or so years that I have studied the Tarot. This time my attention was drawn to the High Priestess’ connection to deep memory through Rachel Pollack’s writing in her book on the Haindl Tarot about the High Priestess’ correspondence to the Hebrew letter Gimel:
“The Hebrew letter for this card, Gimel, means “Camel,” the animal we see crouched at the the woman’s legs (in the Handel High Priestess card). A symbol for timelessness and patience, the camel, which carries its own liquid as it crosses the dessert, links the elements Water and Earth. But the camel (on the card) is filled with light, radiating upward, reminding us of truth found in animal instincts. The camel looks away into the past. The images and myths implied in this card belong to humanity’s most ancient memories” (p. 31).
The High Priestess is the conveyor of deep memory along with deep mystery. But what does this really mean? Certainly this includes wisdom passed by our ancestors through books and scrolls like the High Priestess holds in so many pictures as well as through the oral tradition. But I have also been reading lots of material on the new cosmology which weaves together science and spirituality. In Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry’s The Universe Story, they move through time from the Big Bang to the present day. They describe the birth of the earth and tell the story of the first living cell, who they name Aries. Aries is our first ancestor and we’ve been drawing on his life generating forces since his birth from a lightening strike. As Swimme and Barry write, memory is what connects Aries to us:
artofchangetarot.wordpress.com 
