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Meditations on the Tarot 5: The Pope

(This post is fifth in a series on the book Meditations on the Tarot. See the first for explanation.)

5. The Pope

• The number 5: The number 5 stands, according to Eliphas Levi, for "the domination of the mind over the (four) elements" (106). For the author of Meditations on the Tarot, the number also represents the five wounds of Christ, and the five senses "though which the objective world, withot regard to our will, imposes itself on us." The author continues, "But the senses are organs of perception, not of action. Imagine that the five organs of action--the limbs, including the head in its function as a limb--were to have analogous wounds, i.e. that the five currents of will of which they are an expression were to give access to an objective will which would be to personal desires what sense perceptions are to play of fantasy" (110).

• The Pope: The Pope is performing a blessing, a benediction: "the putting into action of divine power transcending the individual thought and will of the one who is blessed as well as the one who is pronouncing the blessing" (100).

• The two columns (and the two acolytes): "The Cabbala compares the role of prayer and benediction to the double movement, ascending and descending, similar to the circulation of the blood. The prayers of humanity rise toward God and, after having been divinely 'oxidised', are transformed into benedictions which descend below from above. . . . The two blue columns behind the Pope symbolise in the first place this twofold current." They also symbolize "the two columns of the Sephiroth Tree [of the Kabbalah], the pillar of Mercy and that of Severity, and similarly the two pillars of the Temple of Solomon, Jachin and Boaz" (100).Just as prayer and benediction are analogous to the circulation of the blood, they are also analogous to respiration, breathing out and breathing in. Respiration, says the author, can be "horizontal" (taking place between "outside" and "inside") or "vertical" (taking place between "above" and "below"). "The 'sting of death' . . . is the abrupt passage from horizontal to vertical respiration. Yet he who has learnt vertical respiration whilst living will be spared from this 'sting of death'" (100). "The law of horizontal respiration is: 'Love your neighbour as yourself'"; that of vertical respiration is "'Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind'" (101). 

• The Pope's triple cross: The three-level cross represents the "three levels of horizontal respiration . . . : love of Nature; love of one's neighbour; love of the beings of the spiritual hierarchies," and "the three stages of vertical respiration . . . : purification (by divine breath); illumination (by divine light); mystical union (in divine fire)" (101). Two other sets of three are also featured in this chapter. One set comprises the traditional monastic vows of obedience, poverty, and chastity (112-114). The other set comprises the journey "from the natural state ('limbo') and from the state of human suffering ('purgatory') to that of the blessedness of the divine state ('paradise')" (115-16).  [This journey parallels Dante's journey, as well as Joseph Campbell's monomyth, the journey of the hero. It is also the pattern of open systems, moving from a relatively organized status quo, through the threat of disorganization, to a new level of organization.]

Meditations on the Tarot 1: The Magician

Meditations on the Tarot is widely regarded as one of the past century's spiritual classics. The author, who published the work anonymously, presents a Hermetic Christian theology in the form of meditations on the twenty-two major arcana of the Tarot, using the Marseilles deck. (For more on the book, including identification of its author, see its Wikipedia entry.)

I'm restarting my reading of the book; this time I hope to finish it. As a self-discipline, I'm planning to summarize, briefly, its chapters, and add some commentary of my own, especially from a systems perspective.

Text in quotation marks is quoted directly from Meditations; other unbracketed text is summary or paraphrase of the book. Text in brackets is my own commentary.

1. The Magician

• The number 1: This number reminds us of "the unity of all worlds" (in the words of the Emerald Tablet, "as above, so below") and the goal of individuation, Jung's term for the "synthesis of the self." [This goal is, paradoxically, where we start from; see the last section of Eliot's Four Quartets.]
• The Magician himself: The Magician's manner demonstrates "concentration without effort," the ability to "transform work into play," and to make "every yoke . . . easy and every burden . . . light" (8).
• The Magician's hat: The hat, in the form of the infinity symbol, reminds us of the eternal rhythm of the breath as the center of consciousness.
• The Magician as the first arcanum: The Magician, standing at the beginning of our journey, both invites us and warns us. [The Magician is Hermes, a trickster figure, and meets us as we enter the unpredictable and unknown. When we go to seek deep knowledge, just as when we go to see a stage magician, we must bring a willingness to be surprised.]

The broad, yet common patterns of human life

"Living in a society with increasingly complex patterns can be quite difficult," writes scientist/artist Karmen Franklin, of Chaotic Utopia, in an article, "The Empath Meets the Skeptic: Tarot in the 21st Century." She continues:

Many inventions have been tools to ease the necessary adaptations to such a pace. Humans need a way to sort out the puzzles. The broad, yet common patterns of human life all appear in the Tarot, reflected as repeating cycles and symbolic representations. Indeed, what better tool could there be for reading the patterns of events so complex no single science or discipline can cover their whole?"

And later:

Storytelling, not occultist devil-worship, is the purpose of the Tarot. Like the veiled lessons in fairy tales or bedtime stories, the Tarot contains warnings and cautions. Unlike these children's tales, however, the listener is the character in the stories described by the cards. This is true storytelling. The Tarot and the stories it tells are offering pure reflections of our perceptions, which are simply reflections in themselves. Certainly, the message of the tarot is strange, obscure, and veiled, but so are all lessons in the best stories... or in the best moments and most cherished memories of real life. In either case, one simply interprets what they see by associating events with familiar symbols, and then forming those symbols into patterns.

Thanks, Karmen. Nothing I've read recently captures so well the big-picture thinking--from signs, stories, systems, spirit--that I try to note in Prospero's Books.

An organism with a life history of its own

A new addition to the Sacred Text library is the 1908 book The Grateful Dead, by Gordon Hall Gerould, from which Jerry Garcia may have taken the name for his band.

Deadheads (fans of the band) will doubtless agree with one of Gerould's conclusions:

The Grateful Dead is an organism with a life history of its own.

Rest in peace, Jerry.

If any story is structured into our unconsciousness . . .

Another passage (with minor corrections) from my 1974 Earthrise article, a precursor to this blog:

Consider the activity of any natural system, from atom to Earth: The system is in a status quo, a steady state in which internal and external forces are balanced. When, from time to time, new external forces disrupt the system, it quickly "corrects" and settles back into the status quo. Sometimes, however, greater external forces—forces ultimately directed toward disorganization and death—threaten the very existence of the system. The system is unable to "correct" itself, and so, at first, succumbs to those forces. But, in doing so, it uses them as a means toward reorganization. If this reorganization is successful, the system emerges into a new steady state, one more organized and resistant.

And we've just heard Campbell's monomyth. It's the only story there is.

If the monomyth is a Jungian archetype, a pattern inherited as part of one's collective unconsciousness, it's a small wonder. Humanity is the result (although, it is to be hoped, not the final result) of the precise process the monomyth recounts, over and over since the universe began. If any story is structured into our unconsciousness, it must surely be this one.

Now, in 2006, this passage seems to me somewhat simplistic. But I have to acknowledge it as one of the first statements of an idea that I've often returned to for the thirty-two years since I wrote it.

Portals to the sacred

On her site, Portals to the Sacred, artist and therapist Emily Meek offers a striking collection of images, on such themes as the labyrinth, the mandala, and dreams. As the site says, "her dreamlike images capture visions of our relationship to the sacred, offering us an opportunity to reconnect with Soul and to remember who we are."

The appropriate image in this post, reproduced with the artist's permission, is "Tempest in the Soul." As always, you may click on it for a larger version.

God's dog: more than a palindrome

Fred Alan Wolf, in his book The Spiritual Universe (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), writes that the trickster "comes to us as the shadow, that strange and complex set of traits we all have but hate to admit to" (220). He continues:

Since the soul within each individual often appears as the trickster, does anything like this occur to a society or perhaps to the world as a whole? In Native American traditions, such as the Navaho Nation's, the trickster appears during particular tribal rituals. The trickster/shaman dances and often acts the fool to remind the tribe to take an appropriate social action, usually one the tribe has been ignoring out of fear. Once the trickster has appeared, the people laugh and realize their collective folly.

. . . . The Coyote, although it weighs only about thirty pounds, is feared and distrusted by sheep ranchers in the United States and other countries. Yet it is considered to be God's dog by the native American peoples. They believe that to kill and skin the coyote releases its spirit and further upsets the balance of nature. To them it is as if we are killing a messenger from God. Perhaps we are.

The coyote is the trickster—the wolf we don't fear and the dog we can't trust—but has elements of both dog and wolf. The animal is bold and foolish, cautious and fearless, blending chaos and harmony. To some the coyote-trickster, existing in reality and myth, plays it both ways—calling both heads and tails when the coin is flipped. The coyote teaches us it is a mature elder and a reckless child. It is a clown, a force of nature, and a messenger (229-30).

Jung's cosmic perspective

Anthony Stevens continues the passage quoted in my preceding post:

This cosmic perspective gave him [Jung] his reverence for the unconscious and the unknown, for the numinosity of symbols, for the magical power of the imagination and the reconciling genius of the transcendent function, for the meaning we attribute to everything about us, for the primacy of the individual psyche as the link between our own lives and the inscrutable intentions of the great universe itself. His emphasis on the priceless value of the individual, his insistence on the supremacy of gnosis (knowledge through experience, not through book-learning or belief), his openness to the irrational, the spontaneous, the synchronistic, his celebration of the richly creative purposes of life, his realization of individuation as the goal to which all other goals are subservient, his recognition of dreams and myths as speaking the timeless language of the soul—all were expressions of the cosmogonic inspiration that filled his life (157-58).

The universe within

Anthony Stevens continues the passage from Jung I began in my preceding post:

Being passionately on the side of individuation, the Self seeks growth and development in our lives. Affirmation of the Self liberates its creative energies and brings certain knowledge that the best life is the life lived sub specie aeternitatis: "The decisive question for a man is this: is he related to something infinite or not?" This, the ultimate question for mankind, has given rise to all the myths and religions ever created, each one being a brave attempt on the part of some human group to relate to the infinite, the eternal. The quest for the cosmic connection, the experience of the Sacred and Holy, is a fundamental requirement of the Self. To deny it brings spiritual decay; to embrace it illuminates the soul with meaning. [Jung writes,] "I can only gaze with wonder and awe at the depths and heights of our psychic nature. Its non-spatial universe conceals an untold abundance of images which have accumulated over millions of years of development." It is comparable in magnificence to the starry heavens at night, "for the only equivalent of the universe within is the universe without" (157)

Instinct seen from inside

Anthony Stevens's Jung: A Very Short Introduction (see What I've Been Reading) has given me a new way of thinking about archetypes and the collective unconscious.

Many people who might dismiss the concept of a collective unconscious as unscientific and "mystical" would have no problem accepting the concept of instinctive behavior in animals, including homo sapiens.

Stevens writes:

Very similar ideas to Jung's have become current in the last forty years in the relatively new science of ethology (that branch of behavioural biology which studies animals in their natural habitats). Every animal species possesses a repertoire of behaviours. This behavioural repertoire is dependent on structures which evolution has built into the the central nervous system of the species. Ethologists call these structures innate releasing mechanisms, or IRMs. Each IRM is primed to become active when an appropriate stimulus—called a sign stimulus—is encountered in the environment. When such a stimulus appears, the innate mechanism is released, and the animal responds with a characteristic pattern of behaviour which is adapted, through evolution, to the situation. Thus a mallard duck becomes amorous at the sight of the handsome green head of a mallard drake, the green head being the sign stimulus which releases in the duck's central nervous system the innate mechanism responsible for the characteristic patterns of behaviour associated with courtship in the duck.

This is very much how Jung conceived of archetypes operating in human beings, and he was aware of the comparison. An archetype, he said, is not 'an inherited idea' but rather 'an inherited mode of functioning, corresponding to the inborn way in which the chick emerges from the egg, the bird builds its nest, a certain kind of wasp stings the motor ganglion of the caterpillar, and eels find their way to the Bermudas. . . . In a sense, ethology and Jungian psychology can be viewed as two sides of the same coin: it is as if ethologists have been engaged in an extraverted exploration of the archetype and Jungians in an introverted examination of the IRM (51-52).

Or to put it another way, the collective unconscious is instinct seen from inside. And archetypes are the instinctive meanings we attach to certain signs.