Prospero's Books

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.]

A twenty-first-century Shakespeare?

Scott Malia, at The Shakespeare Blog, writes:

While Shakespeare appreciation might be near universal among writers, it begs the question of comparison. Who among today’s writers is what might be considered the twenty first century answer to him?

His initial suggestion: TV and film writer Aaron Sorkin--a great candidate. Over at The Shakespeare Teacher, Bill and his readers suggest others.

In my Conversations with Shakespeare course, I lead students through half a dozen of Shakespeare's plays, as well as later works in explicit "conversation" with them: Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Smiley's A Thousand Acres, Cesaire's A Tempest, Gaiman's Sandman treatment of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and others. The course ends with a play that I find the most "Shakespearean" of recent dramas: Tony Kushner's Angels in America. My students always find lots of ways that Angels is in implicit, if not explicit, conversation with the Bard.

So Kushner's my candidate--not in the quantity of his output, but in his almost unique ability (among many others) to give his subjects both cosmic and fractal dimensions. If you haven't read or seen the play, do so (especially the amazing HBO film of it), and see if you agree.

A myth before the myth

I'm reading Wallace Stevens's long poem "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction" with one of my grad students. Here's a passage that has stood out for me:

The clouds preceded us.

There was a muddy centre before we breathed.
There was a myth before the myth began,
Venerable and articulate and complete.

From this the poem springs: that we live in a place
That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves
And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.

We are the mimics. Clouds are pedagogues.

(Among the categories into which I've put this blog posting are Signs, Systems, and Spirit, but also Emergence. Those tags may help you see some of the things Stevens is saying to me.)

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.

The only eternal bridge

Patricia, at BookLust, quotes from The World To Come by Dara Horn:

"Remember the story you learned as a child: When the hour arrives for us to proceed to the next world, there will be two bridges to it, one made of iron and one made of paper," Peretz intoned. His words were heavy, but his voice floated on rings of smoke, a breath of fire and ash waiting to descend and consume them. Der Nister swallowed, breathing in the master's air. "The wicked will run to the iron bridge, but it will collapse under their weight. The righteous will cross the paper bridge, and it will support them all. Paper is the only eternal bridge. Your purpose as a writer is to achieve one task, and one task only: to build a paper bridge to the world to come."

(Thanks to Changing Places for the link.)

Myth

"Myth is all about what never happened and what always is."

--Sallustius, 4th century C.E., quoted in Strange Attractors, by Harriett Hawkins (xiii)

Until something sets them off

From Harriet Hawkins's Strange Attractors: Literature, Culture, and Chaos Theory:

The long-term behaviour of nonlinear systems is humanly unpredictable because tiny differences in input can very soon result in enormous differences in output, and systems fraught with a variety of positive feedback will often undergo sudden and revolutionary changes in behaviour. Very like certain characters in mythic literature, nonlinear systems tend to behave in a regular, orderly way until something sets them off, a critical point is passed, and they suddenly become chaotic (x).

What Hawkins is describing in her second sentence is the separation stage of Joseph Campbell's "monomyth." Here are more of my monomyth-tagged posts.

The Hoop of Life

At Changing Places, Donna Woodka reprints a poem attributed to Dave Chief, an Oglala Lakota. It's interesting that the Judeo-Christian tradition tends to see the unity of all living things vertically, in a "tree of life" or a "great chain of being," while this Native American writer envisions . . .

The Circle

The Circle has healing power. In the Circle we are all equal.
When in the Circle, no one is in front of you. No one is behind you.
No one is above you. No one is below you.
The Sacred Circle is designed to create unity.
The Hoop of Life is also a circle.
On this hoop there is a place for every species,
every race, every tree, and every plant.
It is this completeness of Life that must be respected
in order to bring about health on this planet.
To understand each other,
as the ripples when a stone is tossed into the waters,
the Circle starts small and grows…
until it fills the whole lake.

A message in the formless flow of things

In tonight's Joyce seminar, I read my students a passage from No Souvenirs, a twelve-year journal by religious historian Mircea Eliade. The passage describes well the day-long journey of Leopold Bloom in the novel Ulysses, but it also describes the well-lived life:

1 January 1960
    Every exile is a Ulysses traveling toward Ithaca. Every real existence reproduces the Odyssey. The path toward Ithaca, toward the center. I had known all that for a long time. What I have just discovered is that the chance to become a new Ulysses is given to any exile whatsoever (precisely because he has been condemned by the gods, that is, by the "powers" which decide historical, earthly destinies). But to realize this, the exile must be capable of penetrating the hidden meaning of his wanderings, and of understanding them as a long series of initiation trials (willed by the gods) and as so many obstacles on the path which brings him back to the hearth (toward the center). That means: seeing signs, hidden meanings, symbols, in the sufferings, the depressions, the dry periods of everyday life. Seeing them and reading them even if they aren't there; if one sees them, one can build a structure and read a message in the formless flow of things and the monotonous flux of historical facts (84-85).

In this life we are all exiles. Knowing that, and reading the signs, can help us find our way home.