THE TAROT OF THE APOCALYPSE INSTRUCTIONS TO THE DECK

Transcription

1 ŚWIATOSŁAW NOWICKI THE TAROT OF THE APOCALYPSE INSTRUCTIONS TO THE DECK Światosław Nowicki Warszawa 2013

2 Content Introduction... 3 The overall concept... 4 Major Arcana... 4 Court cards Pip cards Sacraments Commandments Dualism - the spiritual principle of the Christian world The fours as the great fulfilment The sixes as remedies other than sacraments Eights as an individualist assent over the herd thinking and feeling The two final tens heralding the new era Aces - symbols of the elements The colours of elements Card descriptions Major Arcana THE FOOL I. THE MAGICIAN II. THE HIGH PRIESTESS III. THE EMPRESS IV. THE EMPEROR V. THE POPE VI. THE LOVERS VII. THE CHARIOT VIII. JUSTICE IX. THE HERMIT X. THE WHEEL OF FORTUNE XI. STRENGTH XII. THE HANGED MAN XIII. DEATH XIV. TEMPERANCE XV. THE DEVIL

3 XVI. THE TOWER XVII. THE STAR XVIII. THE MOON XIX. THE SUN XX. THE JUDGMENT XXI. THE WORLD Court Cards The Page of Wands - Birth The Page of Cups Baptism The Page of Swords Temptation The Page of Pentacles The Crucifixion The Knight of Swords Healing The Knight of Pentacles Teaching The Knight of Wands - Transfiguration The Knight of Cups Resurrection The King of Pentacles Judas The King of Wands Saint Paul The King of Cups Saint Peter The King of Swords Martin Luther The Queen of Wands The Orthodox Church The Queen of Cups - Catholicism The Queen of Swords Protestantism The Queen of Pentacles Paganism Introduction The Tarot of the Apocalypse is a Polish tarot deck, created in , on the basis of an entirely new systemic understanding of all three groups of cards, and clear defining of their individual meaning and its implications within the whole they comprise. The Tarot of the Apocalypse presents a Christian idea from the esoteric point of view which is significantly removed from the Church orthodoxy, and so, in a way, heretic. This in-depth look at the collection of Christian religious imagery is underlined by the awareness that Christianity, in its current form, is already in serious decline and it will be either reborn in a new shape, or simply left behind. Of the three groups of cards that the deck is divided to, the major arcana represent the highest, eternal level and, with the transition to the minor arcana, we enter the level of historical concretization. The court cards depict the story of Jesus Christ, the circle of people particularly relevant to Christianity, along with Christianity s division into the main churches. The pip cards, on the other hand, present the life of a Catholic regulated by sacraments, commandments, etc. The esoteric perspective makes a lot of what constitutes a religious framework of life in the Christian community look rather caricatured. The deck is of a clear, consistently arranged structure rooted, to a large extent, in the astrological schema. The author of the whole concept, Swiatoslaw Florian Nowicki is a philosopher, expert in the esoteric thinking and an astrologist. The cards were sketched by Robert Sobota on the basis of the drafts and notes prepared by Swiatoslaw Florian Nowicki, and coloured with ink by Magdalena Walulik. 3

4 The overall concept Major Arcana The order of the major arcana of the tarot is such that the second card, the High Priestess, is followed by the third major arcanum the Empress. The Empress is Mother Nature. God reached outside of himself when, as spirit, he found his embodiment to live in the world of nature. But the embodied spirit is only part of the whole divine spirit. This part must be first born in the spiritual world as a specific spiritual individuality. Its birth is symbolically shown on the High Priestess card, as the appearance of an image in the mirror. And only when the image becomes flesh as the Evangelist John tells us, the spirit is born in nature, and God lives in it outside of himself, in the material, created world. The passage through the Gates of Birth marks the transition from the High Priestess to the Empress. And how does man find himself in front of the Gate of Judgment? First, man must leave the life on earth through the Gate of Death, which is the thirteenth card of the major arcana, then there is Judgment, after which man either makes it to New Jerusalem (the World) and ends his journey there, or he must join in the queue for rebirth. But before man finds himself embodied again, he needs a new spiritual shape to appear in the High Priestess mirror, which is the spiritual intent of his next incarnation. What does the result of Judgment depend on? What decides whether man is allowed to New Jerusalem or has to join in the ranks of those waiting to be reborn? It depends on whether he experienced enlightenment in the life which has just ended, whether he was born on earth again as a Son of God. The birth of a Son of God is represented by the eleventh card in the major arcana the Strength. Why doesn t man, as a Son of God, born on earth, die straight away, but has to pass through the twelfth card of the great arcana, the Hangman? Because as the enlightened he might be still useful on earth. In the story told in the gospels, God named Jesus his son at the time of the baptism on the Jordan River. This is also marking the beginning of Jesus public work, which lasted approximately three years. The length of this period is specified in the eleventh chapter of the Apocalypse as 1260 days or 42 months, which is approximately 3.5 years. This is how long the period of the enlightened passing through the stage of the Hangman should last; the period of serving humanity, giving it a helping hand - it is as if death is suspended for the time. How can we experience enlightenment in our earthly life? One needs to enter a spiritual path through the Gate of the Hermit, the ninth card of the major arcana. In other words, one has to turn away from the earthly matters towards the ultimate purpose. If a person is supposed to enter a spiritual path in the life they live, it usually happens more or less in the middle of their life. Jung calls this the middle life crisis which is about the disintegration of one s personality as it is known: involved in the self-realization of the earthly, social dimension, establishing family and pursuing a career. Why is there the tenth arcanum, the Wheel of Fortune, between the entering on the spiritual path (the Hermit) and becoming enlightened (Strenght)? 4

5 The Hermit s phase is one-sided, Luciferian. It stands for turning away from this world. Christianity does allow such Luciferian enclaves, for example monasteries, but, in principle, it recommends spiritual development through an actual living in the world, rather than leaving it behind. What we are dealt with by fate is not incidental, it serves a purpose. And so after the Hermit s phase, man s personality falls into the Wheel of Fortune, where it is supposed to re-integrate in order to accept everything that life brings with understanding, step by step, treating it as a spiritual challenge that he is forced to face because of his individual destiny. The main rationalising principle for the major arcana is taken from astrology, so let us spread all the cards of the major arcana in this way: 0 (The Fool) I (The Magician) II (High Priestess) XI (The World) XX (Judgment) III (The Empress) IV (The Emperor) V (The Pope) VI (The Lovers) VII (The Chariot) VIII (Justice) XIX (The Sun) XVIII (The Moon) XVII (The Star) XVI (The Tower) XV (The Devil) XIV (Temperance) IX (The Hermit) X (The Wheel of Fortune) XIII (Death) (XII) Hangman XI (Strength) The twelve cards in the middle, separated by lines, is all about the ordinary life in this world. Each of the cards is assigned a star sign, in a way which connects the first column from the Empress to Justice with the star signs from Taurus to Libra, and the second column from Temperance to the Sun with the signs from Scorpio to Aries. The signs in the first column are governed by the planets internal to the earth i.e. Mercury and Venus, assigned to the major arcana XX and XXI, and the Sun and the Moon, assigned to the major arcana I and II. The signs from the second column are governed by the external planets assigned to the major arcana from IX to XIII. The cards above this group correspond to the other worlds. They are linked to the Sun (the Magician) and the Moon (the High Priestess) on the left, and with the planets internal to the earth, i.e. Mercury (Judgment) and Venus (the World) on the right. The lower group represents the life in this world turned to the ultimate matters, guided by the phrase Memento mori remember that you shall die. They are assigned to the external planets: Jupiter (the 5

6 Hermit) and Pluto (Death). Saturn is coupled with the Wheel of Fortune; Uranus, the turning point of the entire journey through the major arcana, with Strength; and Neptune with the Hangman. Marked in bold are the four cards, immediately next to the middle rectangle these are the gate cards. The Gate of Death leads directly to the Gate of Judgement. The wanderer is the Fool, the major arcanum numbered 0, linked with the planet of Mars. It is the Fool who leaves the other worlds to be born, live and die on earth, and then he either goes to heaven or is reborn on earth. The other major arcana are a kind of a board game that the Fool moves through. 6

7 The twelve major arcana of the Tarot of the Apocalypse, assigned to the star signs, are divided into four groups, three arcana in each, and the cross that divides them corresponds to the classic system of the seven planetary realms, in which at one side of the axis of symmetry - running between the border of Aries and Taurus and the border of Libra and Scorpio - there are the realms of the sun, the moon and the inner planets, and on the other side - the realms of to the planets external to the earth. The outer planets correspond to the major arcana IX to XIII, the sun and the moon correspond to the major arcana I and II and the inner planets to the major arcana numbered XX and XXI. The second axis of symmetry runs between the border of Cancer and Leo, whose rulers represent the centre of the system (or in fact the centres the geocentric centre represented by the Moon revolving around 7

8 the Earth, as the Earth is absent from the astrological celestial sphere, and heliocentric which is the sun) and the border of Capricorn and Aquarius whose traditional ruler, Saturn, was thought by the ancients to be the outer border of the planetary cosmos. In such arrangement, the first three arcana: the Empress III (Taurus, Venus); the Emperor IX (Gemini, Mercury) and the Pope V (Cancer, the Moon) correspond to the three dimensions of the human world: natural, social and sacral. This means these arcana s indirect relation with the major arcana the World XXI, Judgement XX and the High Priestess II as their rulers of a kind. The Empress, Mother Nature seen from this perspective is the first embodied figure of the Beloved, whose ultimate shape is represented by the card of the World. The Pope, on the other hand, subordinate to the High Priestess, is supposed to show the ideal figure of the Beloved to man, just as it is represented as an image in the High Priestess mirror. It is the Emperor s task to manage human affairs in such a way that they gradually become like the image that the Pope s teaching is about. Hence the correlation between the Emperor and Judgment; what is on trial is man s compliance with the spiritual standards prevailing in New Jerusalem. The second triad of the major arcana consists of: The Lovers VI (Leo, the Sun), The Chariot VII (Virgo, Mercury) and Justice VIII (Libra, Venus). The Lovers VI represents man as God created him - a natural creature which belongs to the world of Mother Nature, the Empress, seen in the card as the central female figure. But man is also created in the likeness of the creator, the Magician, which is reflected in the self that man has been endowed with, and which is symbolically represented by the Sun. And so the card of the Lovers is associated with Leo, ruled by the Sun. Man as the free self, expelled from the Paradise takes the earth into his possession, which is what the Chariot stands for. This Earth is far from being the Paradise; it is hard and rocky, yielding only thorns and thistle. Yet man transforms it with his work, making it subordinate to its goals, and so the kingdom of nature is transformed into the kingdom of man. This is why the card of the Chariot belongs to the world of the Emperor and is associated with the second realm of Mercury, the star sign of Virgo associated with work. The next major arcanum, Justice, corresponds, in this arrangement, to the Pope of the first triad, and it represents the sphere of morality or ethics - a system of standards which should apply in the human social world - based on the principles different from the laws established by the secular power, the principles traditionally associated with religion, e.g. the Decalogue. In the second column of the major arcana assigned to star signs, the logical sequence is reversed. The first triad includes the major arcana of the Sun XIX, the Moon XVIII and the Star XVII, corresponding to the star signs of Aries, Pisces and Aquarius. The astronomic names themselves suggest that these should be treated as a separate group, following the pattern of the triad from the first column: the Empress, Emperor and the Pope. Also in this case there is a certain tri-division of the world that man lives in, involving the kingdom of the earth (the Sun), underground (the Moon) and overground (the Star) i.e. 1) the world of ordinary sensual consciousness, visible in the daylight 2) the world of the unconscious and subconscious as the nocturnal side of consciousness and 3) the world of transcendental superconsciousness (imagined as heavens), with its gate hidden in the underworld, in the unconscious as explained by the sense of the sequence: the Sun XIX the Moon XVIII the Star XVII. It is worth noting that when the elements of this sequence are paired with the elements of another sequence: the Empress III the Emperor IV the Pope V, the sum of the numbers of these arcana will always remain the same: XIX + III = XVIII + IV = XVII + V = 22. Mutual relationships between the arcana paired in this way become entirely clear in respect of the relationships: the Empress-the Sun and the Pope-the Star, as the natural world, which is the realm of the Empress, is the world of man s daily, sensual consciousness (the Sun) and the overground sphere symbolized by the Star is what the Pope teaches about. The relationship between the Emperor and the Moon manifests itself in man s belonging to the human world which has emerged from the 8

9 natural world that causes the division within human consciousness into the conscious and the unconscious, and in consequence, also into superconscious level where this original division is surpassed. A clear explanation of the superconscious is the fact that the planet that rules Aquarius, associated with the Star, is Uranus, which in turn is associated with the card Strength XI representing enlightenment in the Tarot of the Apocalypse. The second triad in the column are the major arcana: the Tower XVI, the Devil XV and Temperance XIV corresponding respectively to Capricorn, Sagittarius and Scorpio. Similarly to the first column, the three should be treated as a certain reflection of the tri-division that the first triad is based on. It is even partially reflected in astrology i.e. Mars being the ruler of Aries (the Sun) is exalted in Capricorn (the Tower), and Uranus, which is the ruler of Aquarius (the Star) is exalted in Scorpio (Temperance). And so Temperance being a symbol of balance between yang and yin expresses the idea of the connection of that which is divided between the major arcana the Sun XIX and the Moon XVIII, which consists in the similarity of Temperance to the major arcanum number XVII, the Star. And what about the logic of the Tower XVI the Devil XV Temperance XIV sequence? Before one reaches the level of balanced temperance, a negative aspect of each of the two opposing principles has to be revealed in its one-sided form. The Tower represents negative effects of following only the Sun as the will subordinated to the earthly reason : what is built on such foundations, and such is the nature of Capricorn s world, suddenly crumbles. The Devil on the other hand stands for the unfortunate consequences of abandoning the earthly reason and the solid ground of the earth and exposing yourself to irrational influences: the bleak, hard reality of that world will quickly catch up with and punish anyone who disobeys its laws. Sagittarius in this context stands for the consciousness turned to the other world, imagined as something beyond this world the world in which it lives after all, and which ultimately turns out to be its devil. And so Temperance is supposed to stand for the balancing of the Sun and the Moon principles which is particularly evident in the alchemical interpretation of this card, only that those principles, within the triad discussed here, are represented by the Tower and the Devil respectively, in which they are shown entangled in the human world. This world however is subordinate to the other which means that on the one hand it serves as the arena of human endeavours, pursued in the name of man s own goals (defined by his earthly reason), and on the other, it is the place where man s destiny is to be fulfilled beyond his own postulates, at the higher and deeper level, which can be referred to as divine. In other words, the Tower stands for the operations of the divine, whereas with the Devil card, man is caught in the net of the Devil, the Prince of this World. This means that in his earthy life, man s position is to some extent somewhere between Scylla and Charybdis, between God and the Devil. The card of the Tower (Capricorn) is associated with the great arcanum the Wheel of Fortune X (Saturn), as it stands for man s destiny. The Devil (Sagittarius) is as assigned to the great arcanum the Hermit IX (Jupiter). This arrangement, reveals a double nature of the Devil, which in the card of Hermit distracts man from the earth as Lucifer, and in the card of the Devil brings him back as Ahriman. Back to the Earth man sells his soul to the Devil and works arduously for his purely earthly goals, money, power etc. This is when the hand of God (the Tower) interferes and destroys everything that has been achieved in the earthly dimension, depriving man of his wealth, position and honour. In this way the Devil works together with God, making sure that man goes through the spiritual lesson of Temperance. It is perhaps worth emphasizing that man enters the spiritual path thanks to inspiration, or Luciferian initiation (The Hermit), and so through the influence of the Devil. 9

10 The relation between the corresponding arcana of both zodiacal columns is, in respect of the triad we are discussing, clear particularly within the pair: Justice VIII (Libra) and Temperance XIV (Scorpio). In both cases we are dealing with balancing, but Temperance stands for balance achieved at a deeper level, beyond the sphere of the earthly justice. Justice VIII, on the other hand, will still have to enter a spiritual path through the Gate of the Hermit IX, whereas Temperance XIV leads straight to the Gate of Death XIII. Having worked through the lesson of Temperance man has done everything that can be done in his earthly life. This is why the major arcanum of Death XIII assigned to Pluto, the ruler of Scorpio, is in charge of Temperance (Scorpio). The pair: the Chariot VII and the Devil XV tells us that humanity expelled from the Paradise (the Chariot) will live in the Devil s, Ahriman s land, taking the earth into possession for realizing human goals. The next pair: the Lovers VI (Leo) and the Tower XVI (Capricorn) are connected, from a formal point of view, by a relationship similar to the one between the Sun and the Tower (which we have already discussed), as the creation of man is interpreted in the Tarot of the Apocalypse as God breathing life its sun i.e. human self into nature (major arcanum the Empress III); the star ruler of Leo is the Sun. The problem is that the human I is initially only a small I, and not the allembracing divine I. This is why the Lovers card presents not only Adam but also the second Adam, Christ as the true son of God. And the entire progress of the human world is aimed at transforming the first Adam into the second, the son of God. And God does it by destroying everything that is made by man against this purpose, by destroying everything that is aimed at freezing the human I in its small, finite form. This is what the Tower is all about, although the first act of this kind was Adam and Eve s expulsion from the paradise; as soon as God realized that man in its original form hardly met his expectations, in other words, the creation was not particularly successful. The entrance to the realm of zodiacal arcana is two-way. First, through a passage from the High Priestess II (the Moon) to the Empress III (Taurus) which corresponds to the creation of nature according to the virtual matrix which is the High Priestess as the Wisdom of God. The relationship between these two major arcana from the astrological perspective is about the Moon (the High Priestess as the Wisdom of God) being exalted in the sign of Taurus (the Empress as the Mother Nature). This means that there is Wisdom present in nature and it is deeper than the human wisdom represented by the Emperor with its Mercurian sign of Gemini. Second, the passage is made by the Fool (Mars) incarnating in it; the Fool who is born in the major arcanum the Sun (Aries), which is astrologically based on the fact that Mars rules the sign of Aries. It is also true that the Sun is exalted in Aries, which stands for the connection between the Sun and the Magician. It is the self emerging from nature and not nature without the self which is created in the image and likeness of God. The creation is then split at its very beginning into nature (the Empress, Taurus) and the self (the Sun, Aries), and it is this dualism that needs to be eventually surpassed. The exit from the sphere of the zodiacal major arcana is also two-way. First as the passage from the major arcanum VIII, Justice (Libra) to the major arcanum IX, the Hermit (Jupiter), so through entering a spiritual path, and second by the passage to the major arcanum XIV, Temperance (Scorpio) to the major arcanum XIII, Death (Pluto). Note that in the second passage Pluto (Death) rules Scorpio (Temperance), similarly to the way the Fool (Mars) rules Aries (the Sun), which means that the entrance into this sphere is through birth (Mars) and the exit out of it through death. There is a certain discontinuity of the scheme here, as the entire zodiac column could be written into the astrological scheme in two ways: Temperance XIV (Scorpio) Death XIII (Pluto) or the Fool 0 (Mars) 10

11 The Devil XV (Sagittarius) The Hermit IX (Jupiter) The Tower XVI (Capricorn) The Wheel of Fortune X (Saturn) The Star XVII (Aquarius) Strength XI (Uranus) The Moon XVIII (Pisces) The Hangman XII (Neptune) The Sun XIX (Aries) The Fool 0 (Mars) or Death XIII (Pluto). The second variant follows the natural sequence of the outer planets in relation to the earth: Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto yet it gives Aries away to the rule of Pluto while restoring the Mars traditional realm in Scorpio. Whereas the first variant interferes with the sequence of the planetary rulers, by placing Mars in charge of Aries after Neptune, the ruler of Pisces on the one hand, and Pluto the ruler of Scorpio before Jupiter in charge of Sagittarius. In fact, this astrological problem emerged after the discovery of trans-saturnian planets. Symbolically Pluto and Scorpio combine death and birth as the rebirth from ashes. This dual symbolism is also visible in the Tarot of Apocalypse s card the Sun, where the motif on the Death card, crucified Jesus, is written into the symbol of Mars, the ruler of Aries. We can also wonder about the exaltation of Pluto in the sign of Leo, which in the Tarot of the Apocalypse is assigned to the major arcanum VI, the Lovers, representing the creation of man, so birth rather than death. The composition of the Lovers and Death is purposefully analogous, and the major arcana card, Death, is entitled The cycle of birth and death. The issue of the division of the planets is even more complex. Leaving behind our earthly perspective and the split between the inner and outer planets, objectively the dividing line falls between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, not only because Mars is where the sequence of small earthlike planets ends and the kingdom of gas giants begins, but also because there is a visible gap between the orbits, mentioned earlier, which is rightly predicted by the Titius-Bode rule of rather unclear physical sense. Namely, the next planetary orbit after Mars should be approximately distanced from the Sun by 0.4AU + 0.3AU x 2 3 = 403.9m km, whereas in reality it is Jupiter s orbit (mean distance from the Sun m km), which is according to this pattern one position further, i.e. 0.4 AU AU x 2 4 = m km. The gap is filled by the orbits of thousands of planetoids, Ceres being the largest, circumnavigating the Sun at the mean distance of m km. It is likely that this cosmic trifle failed to form into a larger planet because of the strong gravitational influence of the giant Jupiter. And so if the two divisions of the planetary system are superimposed, Mars will constitute a separate subgroup as the only representative of the world of small outer planets. Although this is not entirely right as the world of the planetary gas giants ends with Neptune and the next object s, that is Pluto s, diameter is half of the size of Mercury which is small anyway. The truth is that Pluto has been stripped of the dignity of a planet but astrologists care little for it. What s even more interesting is that there is a certain anomaly from the point of view of the Titius- Bode rule at the end of the world of the planetary gas giants. The next place after Uranus should be occupied by an orbit of the mean distance from the Sun more or less 0.4AU + 0.3AU x 2 7 = m km, which fits the position of the orbit of Pluto (mean distance from the Sun m km), not of Neptune ( m km) which is rather defined as the sum of values anticipated for Saturn and Uranus, i.e. 0.4AU+ 0.3 AUx AU+ 0.3 AU x 2 6 = m km. And so the inconsistencies in the structure of the planetary system itself corresponds to a visible imperfection in the modern astrological system of the planetary realms, which is particularly complicated in the Neptune, Pluto, Mars arrangement. The difficulty could be solved if, against the 11

12 rules of space and logic, Pluto would be also Mars and Mars would be also Pluto. But as it happens the major arcanum 0, The Fool, which in the Tarot of the Apocalypse is assigned to Mars, is also poised in a strange way, because it might as well be the major arcana XXII or not have any definite place at all; in fact it is everywhere. Court cards The court cards represent the milestones in the story of Jesus Christ (knights and pages), the small circle of chosen people connected with Jesus and with Christianity (kings) and the main religious divisions (queens). Knights portray Jesus Christ in his active role, presenting the different areas of his work, and pages in his passive aspect, representing the major events that he was part of. The systemic interpretation of court cards is based on connecting them with the group of the twelve major zodiacal arcana, expanded with the sequence of four gate cards, which means that the points of reference for the court cards are the two sequences of the major arcana, i.e. II-IX and XIII-XX. In this case, the starting point was the natural, image-based connection between the High Priestess II, the Empress III and Justice VIII with the queens, and the Emperor IV, the Pope V and the Devil XVI with the kings. As far as their link with the major arcana is concerned the court cards create a sequence in which one alternately leaps over 11 major arcana or over 1 (downwards); the gate cards are the beginning and the end of the sequence: 1) Judgment XX King of Swords (Martin Luther) 2) Hermit IX Page of Swords (Temptation) 3) Justice VIII The Queen of Swords (Protestantism) 4) The Sun XIX The Knight of Wands (Transfiguration) 5) The Moon XVIII The Page of Cups (Baptism) 6) The Chariot VII The Knight of Pentacles (Teaching) 7) The Lovers VI The Page of Wands (Birth) 8) The Star XVII The Knight of Swords (Healing) 9) The Tower XVI The Page of Pentacles (Crucifixion) 10) Pope V The King of Cups (Saint Peter) 11) The Emperor IV The King of Wands (Saint Paul) 12) The Devil XV The King of Pentacles (Judas) 13) Temperance XIV The Queen of Cups (Catholicism) 14) The Empress III The Queen of Wands (Orthodox Church) 15) The High Priestess II The Queen of Pentacles (Paganism) 16) Death XIII The Knight of Cups (Resurrection). What is interesting in this sequence is that in each of the four group of figures (kings, queens etc.) there is always one card which is out of sequence in relation to others; and so the three kings take the subsequent positions in 10-12, the queens in positions and the knights occur alternately with the pages in positions 4-9. Also the four remaining cards are grouped in such a way that three follow each other at the beginning of the sequence (positions 1-3) and the fourth one is at the end (in position 16). One could say that the end is linked with the beginning, and in this sense the four cards are in sequence, but the move from the major arcanum Death XIII to the major arcanum Judgment XX does not comply with the sequence as defined above. Death XIII should be possibly followed by the Hangman XII, and Judgment XX should be preceded by The World XXII, but these arcana are not assigned to any court cards as there are only 16 of those, as opposed to the 22 major arcana cards 12

13 in the deck. Yet the sequence of the major arcana itself, as defined above, makes sense: XIII, (XII, I, 0, XI, X, XXI), XX. The sequence of colours within the groups of figures remains the same: Swords, Cups, Wands and Pentacles. Kings occupy positions 1, 10, 11, 12, the queens take 3, 13, 14, 15, the pages 2,5,7,9 and the knights 8, 16, 4, 6. In the last case, as we reach the end of the sequence (16), we move right back to its beginning. This sequence complies with the sequence of astrological elements defined by the movement of the Sun in the subsequent star signs, e.g. Gemini (air, pentacles) Cancer (water, cups) Leo (fire, wands) Virgo (earth, pentacles). And so the sequence of court cards in which the four figures in each colour are grouped according to the 3+1 model, and moreover one of these fours, the knights, differs from others with the position of the odd fourth card, and also in that its colours are cups and not pentacles, which could be interpreted as the workings of the undercurrent influences of the spiritual archetype, classically conceptualized by Jung as 3+1. Otherwise it is the court cards that have been assigned to the four gate cards that differ from others, i.e. The Knight of Cups (Resurrections) as it no longer represents Jesus Christ the living man in an ordinary sense; The Queen of Pentacles (Paganism) as it does not represent a major Christian church like the other queens but an enclave of paganism in the Christian world; the King of Swords (Martin Luther) as in opposition to the other three kings his is not Jesus contemporary but belongs to the world fifteen hundred years later; and finally the Page of Wands (Temptation) as it is not only represented passively as is the case in birth, crucifixion and baptism but it actively resists the devil and so he is almost a half-knight. In many cases a similarity between a court card and the major arcanum it is assigned to is easily noticeable. On the other hand, a comparison between a court card and the major arcanum, as its archetype, represents the deviation that actually happens in the real lived Christianity, e.g. The Queen of Cups (Catholicism) is represented as the harlot on the beast. Just as Jesus in the card of Temperance, she is also seated on a lion-like beast, but there is no exchange of energies of the lioneagle type. The eagle is flying high above and has nothing to do with the queen, who is turned to the earthly business, especially to those that hold the earthly power. Similarly the card of the Queen of Swords (Protestantism) is composed in a way similar to the great arcanum Justice, but whereas Justice represents a balance between a male and female principle, the Queen of Swords totally negates the female principle and the middle way runs only between the Father and the Son. Pip cards In the Tarot of the Apocalypse the ten pip cards in each of the four colours are connected with the ten planets and the four astrological elements. As the planets are also assigned to the ten of the major arcana, ultimately a pip card also refers to a specific planet and a major arcanum, as follows: Aces The Sun The Magician I Twos The Moon The High Priestess II Threes Mercury Judgment XX Fours Venus The World XXI Fives Mars The Fool 0 Sixes Jupiter Hermit IX 13

14 Sevens Saturn The Wheel of Fortune X Eights Uranus Strength XI Nines Neptune The Hangman XII Tens Pluto Death XIII Initially in the tarot pip cards had no definite meanings, being just a composition of symbols specific to each element in the amount corresponding to their actual numbers, which seemed to suggest that their meaning should be determined by numbers themselves in connection with a specific element. It was only later that the images appeared on them (Rider-Waite deck) along with words and astrological symbols (Crowley). In fact Crowley s deck is an attempt to systematize pip cards by placing within a given element i.e. wands fire, cups water, swords air, pentacles earth, numbers 2-4 in the cardinal signs (Aries, Cancer, Libra, Capricorn), numbers 5-7 in the fixed signs (Leo, Scorpio, Aquarius, Taurus) and numbers 8-10 in mutable signs (Sagittarius, Pisces, Gemini, Virgo). In this way, there are three pips in each of the twelve signs and because Crowley can only use three out of the seven planets (the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn) to differentiate between them astrologically, it is clear that the system only takes advantage of 36 out of 84 possible combinations (12x7) which means that it is incomplete. In Crowley s deck, the astrological symbols are also seen on the major arcana cards but the sequence of the star signs is interrupted in relation to the arcana s numbers: it reverses in one place, and the number of 22 arcana is the result of adding 12 star signs, 7 planets and 3 (instead of 4) elements. Altogether the meaning of pip cards has emerged more from a fortune-telling practice than from systemic reflection, and so the variations in the card interpretations are vast. The systemic approach proposed in the Tarot of the Apocalypse goes together with the astrological tradition of interpreting two of the planets as bringing good fortune: Venus as Fortuna Minor, the lesser luck, and Jupiter as Fortuna Major, the major luck, and two planets as brining misfortune i.e. Mars as Infortuna Minor, lesser misfortune, and Saturn as Infortuna Major, major misfortune. This corresponds to the positive interpretation of Venusian fours and Jupiterian sixes and negative meaning of Marsian fives and Saturnian sevens. Besides, aces are regarded to be strong because they are ruled by the Sun and the declining character of tens fits well with their ruler, Pluto. Since, in the Tarot of the Apocalypse the planets are assigned to the 10 out of the 22 major arcana and so the division is into two, or more precisely, three groups the pip cards are also divided into the same groups. The first group comprises aces, twos, threes and fours corresponding to the first two (Magician I, the High Priestess II) and last two major arcana (Judgment XX, the World XXI). The second group is made of sixes, sevens, eights, nines and tens corresponding to the middle major arcana, from the Hermit IX to Death XIII, and the third includes the fives assigned to the Fool 0. The major arcanum XXI, the World is crowning the entire sequence of major arcana, and therefore the fours should also represent some kind of ending. They are composed differently from the other pip cards, based on a pattern of ordinary play cards i.e. they are divided into a lower and upper part, being a reversal of each other, with the symbol of an element in each corner, similarly to the four corner figures in the World. Fours express the highest fulfilment, a perfect state within a given element or a fully realized idea. So what happens next? Everything begins all over again, so that it can be brought to an ultimate result, and so on, without the end. 14

15 This starting all over again is expressed by the major arcanum, the Full 0 and the corresponding Mars-ruled fives. The Fool is an embodied living spirit, and life, just like everything else on earth, ends in death or fall, which is expressed in the major arcanum XIII, Death and the corresponding tens. And so the tens also stand for the ending but in a different sense to the fours. They might mean the ending as a sudden interruption before something is brought to its natural end, which means that it will have to be restarted. Death XIII is followed in a logical, not numerical, sequence by the major arcanum Judgment XX, in which the next step is determined. Tens as the second ending of the sequence, joined via a shortcut with the first ending, have been also formally distinguished by an added symbol of Pythagorean tetractys, a tetrad set into motion, which becomes a decade, a ten. In the Pythagorean system this happens by adding up the figures from 1 to 4, i.e =10. But if we wish to see more conceptual sense in this passage from four to ten, we need to continue with Pythagorean numerical speculations (which they continued uninterrupted from a monad, through dyad and triad only to a tetrad) on subsequent levels, in such a way that five is the new beginning, i.e. a tetrad in defining monad; six is a tetrad in defining a dyad; seven is a tetrad in defining a triad; eight is a tetrad square i.e. again in defining a tetrad as an ogdoad. Owing to this the eights become the crowning of the second cycle, which is most appropriate in the context of their assignment to the major arcanum, Strength XI and Uranus. Nine is where the next cycle begins, as they are an ogdoad in defining a monad. In consequence tens are an ogdoad in defining a dyad, and then the continuity is interrupted as the major arcanum Death XIII, assigned to the Plutonian tens, always leads us to Judgment XX. The division of major arcana assigned to planets into tetrads demonstrates that the gate cards are, with one exception, the variations of the High Priestess (as a dyad): Monad Dyad Triad Tetrad The Magician (The Sun) The High Priestess (The Moon) Judgment (Mercury) The World (Venus) The Fool (Mars) The Hermit (Jupiter) The Wheel of Fortune (Saturn) Strength (Uranus) The Hangman (Neptune) Death (Pluto) Judgment (Mercury) The World (Venus) The gate cards are like portals through which a transition to other dimensions takes place. The Hermit experiences it for a moment in his meditation. Death, however, is an irreversible transition into another dimension. In the Tarot of the Apocalypse, the relationship of this card with the High Priestess is manifested in the image of Black Madonna. Next is the gate of Judgment, through which one abandons the wheel of birth and death and reaches for the highest dimension accessible to man, symbolized by New Jerusalem. As you can see on the World card, this sacred place is accessed by the gate. The Apocalypse (21:12-13) tells us that there are twelve of these gates. The High Priestess is a gate through which one enters the material world (The Empress) from the spiritual one. 15

16 The evaluation of one s earthly life is made from the otherworldly perspective (Judgment). In this world, the otherworldly power of judgment is manifested as the workings of the Wheel of Fortune, which sends us events that we have not arranged ourselves. It is the goal of our life on earth to become enlightened, to become Sons of God, as shown on the card of Strength, and then as the enlightened we can enter New Jerusalem represented on the World card. Unless of course one chooses to act according to the commandment thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself, in which case one would want to help others in reaching the same goal and become embodied again as the Fool. The Fools is the Magician thrown into this world where he starts from learning the most primitive lessons represented on the fives. The Hangman, another manifestation of the Magician in the world, is no longer the Fool; he is a bodhisattva. In the table above, the upper row presents the sequence of the four arcana in a purely otherworldly interpretation, as the beginning and the end, with those who do not make it to heaven, left behind. The middle row shows the way of the earth, from the Fool to Enlightenment, and the lowest, the return from the earth to heaven, which is partly realized on earth but essentially continued on the other side. This is a deeper, esoteric understanding of the structure that the pip cards are based on, corresponding to the level of major arcana. Pip cards as such do not have the esoteric depth and merely describe matters linked with life in the Christian world, just as it is seen from the outside; sometimes quite nonsensical if you look at it critically. Still the framework of human life, worked out by the Church, does constitute a certain whole, the elements of which are represented on the pip cards, inclusive of the first sacraments. Sacraments Sacraments are linked with specific circumstances in life. For the newly-born there is the religious practice of baptism. For the dying the last rights. In order to live you have to eat, so there is the communion, and since you are bound to want to procreate you better do it within a marriage, and so there is also the sacrament of marriage. This is how, from religion, we learn what human life is all about: man is born, dies and in the meantime procreates. The thing is that animals do so as well. What distinguishes man from animals is that he is a thinking, rational being. This aspect of human life is embedded in the sacrament of confirmation which is often regarded as less important and few people really understand what it is all about. What else does the system of sacraments tell us about man? That man is not exactly what he should be, and here religion also comes in aid, giving it a name a sin. Sinfulness, just as rationality, is something that distinguishes man from animals, and here there is also a sacrament ready confession, repentance and penance. The system of sacraments is genius in its simplicity as it produces a summary of human life; a sixpoint summary precisely. And what about the seventh sacrament? Priesthood how else would the other sacraments be administered? Sacraments are represented on the threes. Threes are the pip cards subordinate to Mercury and the card of Judgment, which is the gate card that might eventually let you into heaven. The sacraments that threes tell us about are also such gates. Without them there would be no entry to heaven. Why? Who knows? These matters are decided in the otherworldly, not the earthly plane. Esoterically speaking, the principle is right, yet its applications are grotesque and absurd. The four sacraments represented on the threes are Baptism (Three of Wands), marriage (Three of Cups), Confirmation (Three of Swords), Holy Communion (Three of Pentacles). 16

17 The next two sacraments are the last rites (Ten of Wands) and confession with penance (Ten of Cups). They differ from others in that unlike other cards which initiate things and these two end them. Once a child is born, it is baptized and born as a new Christian and member of a congregation. And when death is near, the last rites are administered as a ticket for the ongoing journey. The last rites being the ten is also assigned to the gate card, the major arcanum XIII, Death (and Pluto). Confession and penance also mark the ending of something, namely a period of life in a venial or deadly sin. Once you are absolved you can start living with your account temporarily settled. The last sacrament is Priesthood, the Two of Pentacles, which is also assigned to the gate card the High Priestess (the Moon). In this case, the sacrament does not serve the purpose of reaching heaven but to represent sacrum on earth. A person is ordained as a priest by the High Priestess; she as the major arcanum II, is the entrance gate from the spiritual world to the earth and not the other way round. Commandments There are 12 commandments represented on the pip cards, with two added to the traditional ten, i.e. Thou shalt love thy lord with all thy heart 2) Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. However, within the Decalogue, the commandment thou shalt not covet thy neighbour s wife is combined with thou shalt not covet any of thy neighbour s goods, with the added commandment I am the Lord thy God. The commandments are divided into three groups with four cards in each. The fives (assigned to Mars and the Fool) represent the four simplest commandments regarding the elementary rules of social life 1) Thou shalt not kill (Five of Wands) 2)Thou shalt not commit adultery (Five of Cups) 3) Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour (Five of Swords) 4) Thou shalt not steal (Five of Pentacles). The sevens (ruled by Saturn and the Wheel of Fortune) represent the three commandments that refer to God: 1) I am the Lord thy God (Seven of Wands), 2) Thou shalt have no other gods before me 3) Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain, and the commandment Thou shalt not covet your neighbour s wife or any of his goods (Seven of Pentacles) which is linked with the others as they all concern what happens in man s inner life rather than external, social behaviour as such is the nature of man s attitude towards God, his wish to desire others wives or goods. The nines (assigned to Neptune and the Hangman) represent the commandments which appeal to man s higher feelings. Unlike the commandments represented in the sevens, they are not just prohibitive: 1) Honour they father and thy mother (Nine of Pentacles), 2) Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself (Nine of Swords) 3) Thou shalt love thy God with all thy heart 4) Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. These commandments recommend what man should involve in his higher feelings: parents, humanity, God and finally himself in his unity with God, which is what the holy day is about. Dualism - the spiritual principle of the Christian world Sacraments and commandments are what they are, and they could probably be different. Still we are aware of the existence of the spiritual foundations of our world; of something which, at a deeper level, defines its shape. This is represented in the twos, assigned to the High Priestess and the Moon, representing the different forms of a certain fundamental dualism, which is a result of some kind of a split at the border between the High Priestess and the Empress, i.e. the spiritual and natural world. 17

18 The Two of Wands (Pride) tells us that man in his natural state is not what he should be. He is a pagan who should be converted. This situation is redeemed by the Three of Swords (Baptism) which converts man born as a pagan into a Christian, which makes it all right for a while. The Two of Cups (Sin) shows that although baptized, man is naturally sinful because, for some reason, everything that his biological nature makes him do (especially his sexual urges) is sinful. But there is also a remedy for that, which is the sacrament of marriage, represented in the Three of Cups. What is sinful before marriage is no longer sinful after. The Two of Swords (Truth) shows the cognitive schizophrenia of our world, the split between the way of the faith and the way of science the two different truths which wish to know nothing of each other. It seems that a remedy should be in the sacrament of confirmation (Three of Swords), in which a young person receives the gifts of the Holy Spirit to be able to deal with this difficult cognitive situation. And indeed it makes man cope, in a way that makes this sacrament be often called the sacrament of the farewell to the Church. The Two of Pentacles (Priesthood), already mentioned in the sacraments section, represents the gap between man and the spiritual realm, which means that a priest is needed to mediate, although in reality, he makes the chasm even deeper. The fours as the great fulfilment As man s situation represented by the twos and threes (sacraments as remedies) appears rather dramatic, the fours assigned to the World (and Venus) represent the state of affairs as it should be. It is enough to look at the images and read their names: Health (Four of Wands), Love (Four of Cups), Immortality (Four of Swords) and Wealth (Four of Pentacles). The love is the true love of Christ and Immortality is the eternal life in the memory of those who come after us, owing to the goods that we leave them. The sixes as remedies other than sacraments After the fours, as described above, the Fool (Mars) re-enters the stage with the fives: killing, committing adultery, giving false witness and stealing. Sacraments are hardly successful in remedying the situation because human nature is clearly more powerful, and so the society tries to channel these evil tendencies to let man find release in a socially harmless way. This is represented by the sixes, assigned to the Hermit (and Jupiter). Just as the Hermit levitating in meditation, an ordinary person must learn to function in a different dimension, not so literal and material but a little arbitrary or even made up. In other words, primitive instincts can be sublimed. Instead of killing (Five of Wands) you can release your energy through sporting rivalry (Six of Wands - Fight). Instead of committing adultery (Five of Cups) you can sublimate your urges in the artistic pursuits (Six of Cups Art). Instead of giving false testimony against your neighbour (Five of Swords) you can practice demagogy within many general points of view while pursuing your own interest (Six of Wands Dispute), and instead of stealing (Five of Pentacles), you can win things from people without violating the criminal code (Six of Pentacles Game). Eights as an individualist assent over the herd thinking and feeling The Christian world, although always guided by the principle there shall be one fold and one shepherd (John 10:16) has led here and there, on the basis of a peculiar dialectic of history, to the rise of rampant individualism, represented on the eights, subordinate to the great arcanum Strength (and Uranus). This is the second, after the fours, finale the ending of the second tetrad, 18

19 individualist in character as an Aquarian enclave in the Era of Pisces, dominated by a herd model. The Uranian eights are exactly opposite to the Saturnian sevens. Instead of following the commandment I am the Lord thy God, an Eccentric (Eight of Wands) is God to himself. Instead of adhering to Thou shalt have no other gods before me (Seven of Cups), a Heretic (Eight of Cups) follows any god he likes. A genius (Eight of Wands) has the courage to think differently, becoming a revolutionary scientists, breaking through the old paradigms, while an Outsider (Eight of Pentacles) dismisses the system and leaves behind everything it could tempt him with. The two final tens heralding the new era The Aquarian enclave, shown in the eights, which exists in the Christian world should in the near future develop to the extent that will allow it to change the face of the world. And so the Ten of Swords (Decline) represents the end of the world as we know it, whereas the Ten of Pentacles (Heritage) is a vision of building the new world on the ruins of the old one, just as the great arcanum, Death and Pluto that rules tens, symbolizes not only death but also rebirth from the ashes. Aces - symbols of the elements The four aces represent the four elements. Aces are assigned to the Magician and the Sun. The Magician as the creator of the world uses the four elements whose symbols occur in various Tarot decks as the Magician s attributes. In the Tarot of the Apocalypse, four live creatures from the Apocalypse are shown as the icons of the elements. They have been already used in various decks, placed in the corners of the great arcanum the World XXI. And so the Ace of Wands represents a lion with a wand in his mouth (symbol of the element of fire) and the Ace of Cups, an eagle on the cup (symbol of the element of water), the Ace of Swords an angel with a sword in his hand (symbol of the element of the air) and the Ace of Pentacles a bull on a large pentacle (a symbol of the element of the earth). The colours of elements Traditional colours in the Tarot are of symbolic significance. Each element has a different colour based on the old natural systems. When the spirit enters mineral world, the first form it takes is plant, then animal and finally man, hence the division into: 1. The kingdom of minerals. The state of being of minerals is static and unchangeable. Minerals are the elements of the earth, represented by Pentacles. The cards of Pentacles are painted in the colours of the earth and gold - the metal that coins are made of. 2. The kingdom of plants. Plants exist as a cyclical process from seed to fruit. Plants live, grow and multiply. Plants are related to the element of fire Wands. Plants are the form of life, which live on the fiery energy of the Sun, transforming it into a living substance. This is why the cards of the element of fire are green, like chlorophyll. 3. The kingdom of animals. Animals can feel; animal life is permeated by feeling, which is associated with Cups - the element of water. Animals produce fire internally in the process of digesting the food they ingest, thanks to the oxygen delivered to their cells by blood. Therefore the Cups are red like haemoglobin. 4. The kingdom of people. And in the case of people reason is also thrown into the mix. The element is air the Swords. Blue is the colour of Swords, just as it is the atmosphere of the earth, visible to us as the sky. 19

20 Card descriptions 20

21 Major Arcana 21

22 0. THE FOOL We can remember who we are The Spirit exists in this world locked in a human body, having altogether little awareness: it has no idea why it s embodied, where it comes from or where it really is. It is the Fool. When God creates man in his own image (see The Lovers), the situation becomes slightly clearer, but only for God: it is as if he creates himself within his creation. The Fool, however, is unaware that he is a fraction of the God who created this world; he does not know that his task is to unravel himself in the world, and the world in himself. He does not walk through the world alongside God the Creator, also his Creator, who is the source of all of his knowledge. Perhaps he used to know in Paradise, but then man left Paradise long ago. As things are, all he has left is religion. Still, if the human heart is the source of all religion then what kind of religion is it, if man does not feel at home in the world? Perhaps the kind that tells us that good God is somewhere far away and the world, as we experience it, is the creation of the evil God, who imprisoned the good God in his cosmos, made him a slave to planets and now plays a cruel game? If so, it would be most reasonable to abandon this world, leave the prison of the body. But the body has the spirit under its control, and commands it to hold on to life, as if there was no other life, or death was something both painful and horrid, so it is better after all to continue living, and bear life as it is. The body holds onto the spirit like a troublesome dog holds on to one s trousers, and it forces it to stay on earth. Yet somewhere deep inside the spirit, there lives the memory of a different life. When on a dark and starry night the Fool gazes into the sky, the feeling arises in him that he is looking at where his home is; that the Sun, around which our world revolves, and which darkens the light of his own star, is some kind of intimidating and hostile force that lured him to earth and keeps him trapped here. Everyone who lives on earth came here from another world, from the spiritual world. We all live in our bodies, not for the first time and probably not for the last. While we live here, we know nothing about where we come from and how many times we have already lived in the material world. We know nothing clearly or distinctly, but somewhere there, at the depths of our memory, there lie all our memories of this other world and our former lives, as if they were thrown into a sack into which cannot peep, yet has to be carried around. If the Fool gets used to the earthly life, gets to enjoy the delights it has on offer, and feels at home here, he is under the rule of Mammon. If he is never rid of the longing for home, if he feels on earth as if in exile and, instead of living a serious life, thinks only about the end of it, it is Lucifer who is his master. But if man is aware of why he is here, if he understands that life on earth is truly meaningful, even if for reasons other than the short life itself, he shall enter the right path, the path of Christ. 22

23 I. THE MAGICIAN The creation of the world Nothing - in itself - is a good beginning. There is no need to ask where it came from, and its nature is such that when we think about it, it turns into something, the very something we are thinking about. Making something out of nothing is called magic, and the person who does it is a Magician. Where did the Magician come from? He came out of something, though to begin with we know nothing about it. He is a Nothing, which is no longer Nothing once the Magician came out of it: it becomes Something the Magician s Mother. We must assume that in the Mother there was some kind of intention for Something: where would the Magician come from otherwise? We can only start with the Magician; we can t go back any further, we only know that he has his Mother, whom we will call a Black Hole. The Magician emerged from the Absolute as a small bright point in the middle of a large Black Hole. This is how the Magician immediately acquired his task. He had to get to know his Mother - the Black Hole, and to change it from a dark hole into a brilliant, brightly lit temple, in which he himself would sit on the throne as God (see The World). In the task defined in this way, the relationship between the Son and his Mother changes into the relationship between a Lover and his Beloved: in the Old Testament the world to know refers to sexual contact between a man and a woman. Does the Magician really have to know his Mother? Perhaps he does not, but he should and he wants to. He is the Will, the Free Will and he had to emerge from his Mother, the Black Hole, since his Mother has no free will; She is a blind urge. She is a dynamic force, a movement, an urge, selfrealization, bringing to light what is hidden in the dark depths. When the Magician emerges, he should continue her work, but already as self-conscious Free Will. The Magician is God the Creator. בראשית The Book of Genesis starts with the word bereshit at the beginning. At the beginning, God created Nothing, which he himself emerged from. He created it as Something, in order to get to know it. In fact he was creating it gradually, watching and judging his work. He started with the simplest things, the differentiation between heaven and earth, which was merely a barren chaos and darkness hanging above the abyss; the distinction between light and darkness was only another, more solid form of the abstract distinction between him and his Mother. His thinking was abstract. He saw himself and his Mother as two joined circles in the sign of infinity: light and dark, which become a whole but only together; at first separate they slowly merge into one. Appropriately, at the beginning this process, prior to the creation of the world, he called himself alpha and at the end of its history omega. He also saw himself as the centre of the circle, and his Mother as its circumference. And therefore he based his creation of her on the number pi, in rational proximity 22/7 = He divided the whole between the 22 Hebrew letters, and these were in turn divided between seven helpers, Elohims, known from the Apocalypse (which has 22 chapters), as seven spirits of God, the seven torches burning in front of his throne. 23

24 II. THE HIGH PRIESTESS The vision of creation prior to the creation of the world The Priestess here is Sophia, the Divine Wisdom. She has been represented in many different ways, usually as a female virgin. In Greek mythology she is Athena, who jumped in shining armour out of the head of Zeus, becoming her daddy s favourite girl, but with no mother she was cold and unapproachable, disinterested in love or marriage. In the Proverbs of Salomon she is also a woman. God created her before the creation of the world. She played around for his amusement as his delightful companion, who accompanied him in the creation of the world as his mistress. In Christianity, she is a mysterious figure. Officially she represents Christ, the Son of God, but in Orthodox Christianity she is portrayed in icons as a winged woman, who sits on the throne in the middle of the triangle, with the Mother of God, John the Baptist and Christ at its angles. So who is she really? She is the mirror of eternity. She is a virgin and bears no fruit; she merely shows the images reflected in her mirror. In fact she does not exist at all until there is someone to look at the images reflecting in her mirror. If someone appears then she, the virgin, becomes his beloved as she exists and she is alive only in him. Thanks to the fact that Sophia is, but at the same time is not, there is no need to add a new figure to the Holy Trinity. Where do the images in the Priestess mirror come from? Nothing can be seen in the light itself and nothing can be seen in the darkness alone. Yet, if you send light into darkness something begins to emerge, lighter and darker patches appear, and different tones of grey become clearly distinguishable, followed by contours, colours God the Creator (see The Magician) emerged from the Absolute as a bright, shining point in the Black Abyss. Before the reflection in the mirror of eternity appeared, there was already the dark in the Black Abyss and the bright light of the Magician. When the sun-bright light of the Magician was sent into the darkness it returned to him as reflected moonlight, in which an image appeared. Did the image appear out of the light or out of the darkness? The Magician has seen the object of his desire reflected in the mirror. The desire was in him, but its object was seen reflected on the other side. The object was beautiful but it was only an image But the Magician was after all a magician, so he said May the image become flesh!, and this is how visible nature appeared (see The Empress). Let those who have eyes look at it. Commonly, nature is looked at with two eyes and then everyone can see for themselves what it is like. But to see it as it truly is in the High Priestess mirror, one needs to see it with the eyes of the seven-eyed Lamb (see The Wheel of Fortune); and only then does she become God s Beloved (see The World) the end of all wandering through time by way of the 22 major arcana, the 22 stages of the way to the wedding of the Lover and his Beloved. With seven eyes, you can see straight away that the end is eternity, shining throughout time. 24

25 III. THE EMPRESS Mother Nature Mother Nature is a woman, because God created her as an embodiment of the image of his Beloved, as he saw it in the mirror held by the High Priestess. In contrast to the virgin Priestess, the Empress is a mother, the life-bearing Mother Nature. She feeds on her visible god, the sunlight, and transforms the light into green plants. These make food for herbivorous animals which, in turn, become food for their predators. She loves all her children regardless, nourishing them all on her motherly bosom. Nature is where the light of the godly Sun does not disperse in the dark abyss of the cosmos but allows life to develop. Life, which by emanating in increasingly organised forms gives the beginning to the process of the return of creation to God, especially when it is finally embodied by a human spirit, is symbolized by a bird. Nature s carnality begins to dig into the infinite spirit with its cutting thorns of finitude, to the point where the spirit is at last forced to turn against its Earthly Mother, and release itself from her constraints. Mother Earth lies between the two poles: overground and underground. The spirit, which like a bird flies to it from heaven, represents the overground dimension. But the Earth also has its own depths, symbolized by a snake that creeps out from its dreary pit. And it is in the snake where the key to breaking the barriers of finitude - this crown of thorns for the spirit - lies. The spirit incarnated in nature meets the snake twice. Firstly, it receives its initiation from him, already well known as the tasting of the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. This is when the spirit becomes man and leaves the animalistic Paradise (see The Chariot). Secondly, it experiences the snake as the fiery, seven-headed dragon Kundalini (see The Strength), which gives it a higher, enlightening power a fulfilment of the promise: you shall be like gods. This is how, already at the stage of the Empress, the three spheres begin to emerge: 1) what is natural (and this is the primary meaning of the bull, wolf, tree, grass); 2) what is human (see The Emperor), represented by a bird in its nest; and 3) what is divine (see the High Priest). The divine sphere is marked in two ways: first of all as the sad face of God the Creator, seen against the face of the sun and expressing his discontent with his creation; his Beloved has turned away from him and knows nothing of him. It only cares for itself, steered by the recurrent natural rhythm of days and nights, seasons of the year, birth and death. Secondly, the divine is expressed in the snake - God-Lucifer - who gives enlightenment that transforms an ordinary man into the Son of God, represented on the card as Christ the child, cutting with his sword through the Luciferic depths of Mother Nature. This is only an announcement; the Son of God is still a baby 25

26 IV. THE EMPEROR The man-made order The Emperor stands for the human social world, built in the world of nature as an enclave governed by human laws and regulations. The earthly ruler takes into his possession a certain area of the earth, just as the lover takes his beloved, and marks out its boundaries. The order of nature was expressed by a woman (see The Empress). The social order is symbolized by a man. In this world built by man, a stone tower grows instead of a green tree. The Empress bull is swapped for a pair of harnessed, plough-pulling oxen and a wolf is tamed as a dog. The natural order between a herbivore and a predator is in the social world transformed into a relation between a ruler and his subjects. Sitting on the throne, the Emperor s nature is that of the wolf, though milder, hidden behind the social graces. He does not kill another man but commands him as subject to his will. The ruler himself is prepared to follow the rules he has made for the social order to be maintained. Thanks to his subjects work, the ruler does not have to make any physical effort, as he experiences his will as a causative agent: everything he decides simply happens, without any effort on his part at all. Just like God the Creator, the Emperor creates the world by expressing his will. The Emperor s sword symbolises rule based on force (military force). With this very sword, and fear, the ruler governs his subjects, who work not only for themselves but also for him. But the sword also represents the mind; decisions as sharp as the cut of sword and the clear-cut way in which they are communicated to others. Human order is based on the sword, so different from the natural order. It is created by the human mind and forced by human will. Human order is also symbolized by the sealed roll of the Emperor s regulation; the seal being the sign, something different from directly natural reality. The same stands for the ink-well and feather: after all, the Emperor acts with one stroke of a pen. The Emperor s regulations are carried out by his subjects. Without them, the regulations on paper remain useless. The figure of the Emperor expresses man in his duality, in his division into ruler and subject. An analogous dualism in the natural world is expressed by the division into the two sexes. The yokel, who is closer to nature, struggling with reluctant earthly matter, is the equivalent of a woman, tied to nature and the flesh by motherhood. Whereas the Emperor, freed from any material struggle, is the social equivalent of a man. These social differences are as irreversible as the biological ones. In the subjects, the seeds of a rebellious spirit dwell. In contrast to the Emperor they are not happy with their lot. Perhaps one day they will push their ploughs away, take their swords into their hands and, just as Christ the child pierces the belly of Mother Nature with his sword, pierce the side of the ruler. 26

27 V. THE POPE The sacred sphere Just as in the world of nature (see the Empress), man creates his own world, the social world. (see the Emperor). But there is also another sphere of the human existence. Although established by people, it is treated by them as something belonging to a higher, divine order. It is the sphere of sacrum religion, the realm of priests, ministers and spiritual masters. Various religions coexist, follow or influence one another, converge in some parts, vary in many others; but in every society there is always some form of religion. And here in the card of the Pope a new religion is born. The Christian religion comes to the world, in which other religious traditions are alive. The little Christ is the Pope and a new spiritual authority. Three magicians of the East followed the star to Bethlehem to pay their respects to baby Jesus. These are the Initiated who like the Tibetan monks set out to search for the incarnation of a great spiritual being. At the time, they were the only ones to realize the significance of what had actually happened, to comprehend that the creator of a new religion had appeared; a religion whose principle was higher than that of their own spiritual traditions. But the new religion took over many other familiar threads. The three magicians are the symbols of the three religions whose motifs are encountered in Christianity. These are: Mithraism, Greek mythology and Hinduism. They are Mithra, Heracles and the Śiwa -Śiakti couple. Mithra s companion is a bull with a sword stabbed into its neck (See Justice). Heracles body is protected by the skin of a lion he killed (See Strength). Śiwa and Śakti came on the eagle (see Temperance). Little Christ s guardian is an angel representing Judaism - the mother soil of Christianity - similarly to the Bethlehem and the star in the shape of David s Star. The three magicians hand over their gifts they brought for Christ: the smoke from Mithra s incense is a product of the creations of the finite world burnt in the fire of the sacrificial pile, and rising to heaven for God s greater glory; the gold brought by Heracles stands for the alchemical transformation of an ordinary man into the Olympian god, undergone through earthly hardships; the myrrh presented by Śiwa and Śakti is a symbol of the love relationship between the Lover and his Beloved, as the exchange of yin and yang. These are the symbols of great mysteries, which the Pope is to communicate to the faithful, to transform them from ordinary men from the world of the Emperor to the Sons of God in the image of Christ. The tiara on the handle of the sword pushed into the bull s neck signifies the fact that the sphere of priesthood rises above the natural world, represented by the bull that is symbolically killed here. In the Empress card the bull lives in the natural world, in the Emperor he has been harnessed into the role of a working ox, thus belonging to the human order of things. In the Pope he is sacrificed and therefore belongs to the sacrificial order. The tiara, as opposed to an ordinary royal crown, is the crown of Christ the King of the Universe. 27

28 VI. THE LOVERS The creation of man God the Creator created man in Mother Nature (see the Empress), whom he has long watched with much longing and with the eyes of a Lover, but she has not noticed at all. The life that developed in her bosom was busying itself only with surviving, finding food and procreating. This sensuously beautiful world did not return the fascination that it was inspiring in God. It did not notice him, watch out for him, or open its eyes to the invisible or its ears to hear the word of God. God therefore took on a visible form. He created man in his own image. He shaped him out of dust and earth and breathed life, his spirit, into him. Since then, as man living in the natural world, as Adam, he could speak with human lips to nature - his Beloved - giving name to everything he saw in its abundance. But nature was deaf to his words, it did not respond. God remained lonely. In order to change this situation, God made a woman out of the man s rib and brought her to him. Now Mother Nature could look at the Divine Lover, personified in Adam with Eve s eyes, and God the Creator as Adam could look at his Beloved, personified in Eve. The Lover and his Beloved could finally look into each other s eyes, and they began to talk, accepting everything as it simply was. But when God looked at everything from high above he knew straight away that it was TOO LITTLE. When he created Adam, God did what he could; he could not do any better but, even so, many cracks occurred in the process of pouring the divine energy into nature. It could be improved but only from the other end, by creation itself. It was man alone that had to do the improving. To do this, man s awareness had to be changed. He had to realize what he should be like, and that he needed to do something about it. And so man came to know the difference between good and evil and he received his task - to become the next, improved, Adam; to become Christ the Lover, on the God-Creator s scale. What we see here is the sequence of three Lovers: God-Creator, the first Adam and the second Adam Christ. Corresponding to them there are also three figures of the Beloved: Mother Nature, Eve and New Jerusalem (see the World). Man was initially an unsuccessful creation, as the created natural world was unable to accommodate for the divine energy which wished to embody in it, and so a crack occurred (compare this with the cabbalistic myth of broken vessels). Lucifer assists man in repairing the world. First as the Serpent in Paradise, initiating man into the knowledge of good and evil, and then as Kundalini, the fiery dragon that allows the birth of the second Adam Christ (see the Strength). Christ is indeed a Snake-holder who, thanks to the energy of snake fire, puts the whole cracked world together again (see the World), granting it the form of Ouroboros, a tail- devouring-snake. 28

29 VII. THE CHARIOT The expulsion from Paradise The expulsion from Paradise means leaving the state of harmony with nature, and the beginnings of humanity. Man is no longer in simple and carefree harmony with the surrounding world; to live he must act, take nature into his possession and adapt it to his needs. The earth seen in the card is barren, as commanded by God: Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you The chariot that features in the title of this card is not an ordinary vehicle. It is similar to Ezekiel s chariot the main subject of Jewish esoterica. Expelled from Paradise, Adam and Eve drive the chariot, symbolizing the self-created God within the created world. The chariot descends from heaven to the lower material world. It will soon land on earth. It is drawn by two winged beasts: a bull and a lion. Thus a crack occurs in nature. Man, who has emerged out of nature, now stands at its opposite; nature is now external to him, as it is to God the Creator. This distinction is reflected in the two animals drawing the chariot: the bull is a symbol of carnal nature and the lion is a symbol of the human self - the embodied spirit who wants to rule his body and impose his will upon external nature. Similarly, man himself is divided into a woman, who is in closer relation to nature, and a man, who is turned towards his own self. The chariot is driven by both of them: Adam controls the lion and Eve is in charge of the bull, although her reins are slack. She, rather, allows the bull to lead her. The split of man into the two sexes shows that man is not just the spirit imprisoned in the body, nor is he only the body whose impulses have authority over the human spirit. Adam, the male spirit, is attracted to bodily Eve as his second half. She, in turn, feels attraction towards Adam as the male spirit. This mutual attraction of the two halves is represented by the two scorpions at the edge of the chariot. The situation is dynamic. Man could not remain in the animalistic Paradise but neither can he remain in dualism. The eagle at the back of the chariot, with his wings spread above Adam and Eve s heads, symbolizes the reunion of both aspects of man female and male (see Temperance). First of all, however, some external transformations must occur in both parties: naturalness (the bull) must be sacrificed (see Justice) and the human self (the lion) must expand to the size of the absolute self (see Strength). Only then will the return from exile to heaven be possible, and man will take the form of an Angel. The Angel who expels Adam and Eve from Paradise is at the same time the figure that man shall eventually be transformed into (see the World). The chariot shows the dynamics of the passage between the state of Alpha to the state of Omega. The letter Ὼ may be recognized as the outline of the chariot with its shafts. In the Apocalypse this dynamic is expressed by four beings: bull, lion, eagle and an angel. 29

30 VIII. JUSTICE The middle way Justice must consider both male and female points of view. The natural order represented by a woman is beyond good and evil, which only appear in the human social world, based on a male principle. Is it just to violate nature, especially one s own nature? Or, conversely, perhaps it is just to choose life in harmony with Godcreated nature? If man lived in harmony with nature, he would have no history, he would fail to develop. God wanted for man to leave his natural Paradise (see the Chariot) and go on to build a higher, human level of creation. But man s free actions sometimes happen to be arbitrary, willful and contrary to God s intention. This is where God interferes, and provides man with new laws, which are different from the laws of nature. At the same time these laws restrict man s competence as a sovereign lawmaker. God says to man: You shall not become God to yourself, I am your God! You shall not be act according to your will if it is not in accord with mine! He also forbids man to yield to his animalistic nature, to kill etc. God gives man two stone tablets with Ten Commandments. And so God adds another division to the already existing spirit-body dualism: he doubles man s consciousness into the consciousness of this and another world. This is not to make man give up on himself and turn to God entirely. After all, when God expelled man to the world, he told him to strive for himself, to be independent, though obviously not to the extent that man builds his own world within nature, if it is a world without God. Justice means balance, hence the scales are its symbol. There are two Luciferic demons on earth, represented in the card by the beautiful she-devil. The demons are supposed to distract man from the earth and turn him to heaven (see the Hermit), and the demons serving Mammon, represented in the card by the old devil, whose task is exactly opposite (see the Devil). The middle way is shown by Christ on the cross between the two rascals the good one corresponding to the Luciferic she-devil, and the evil one reflected in the old man worshipping Mammon. Both Lucifer and Christ offer man heaven, but Lucifer distracts him from the earth and Christ, to the contrary, tells man to go through his earthly life to the end, to death. Mammon does not offer heaven. He persuades man that the only real things are the material goods of this world. The enclosed space is a symbol of the human world built within nature. The sword of Justice stabbed into the bull s neck signifies the human world being based on laws other than the laws of nature. The bright space deep inside exemplifies the heavens, into which the only path leads through a just life on earth, and death. The outline of a keyhole to the left corresponds to the Luciferic proposal of ascension without having to go through this arduous earthly exercise in justice. 30

31 IX. THE HERMIT Lucifer s playground My kingdom is not from this world said Lucifer pointing his finger ahead. So where is your kingdom, in which world? replied the people. Lucifer closed his eyes, pointed at the place right between them and said: there! And the people understood right away that everyone has two worlds: one right in front of them and this is this world, but also a different world - another world - inside of themselves. Lucifer spoke beautifully about his kingdom beyond this world, and the more appalling this world became to his audiences the more beautiful Lucifer s words appeared to them. The matter seemed fairly simple: it is enough not to look outside, turn all one s attention to one s interior, and this world will not only disappear but we will find ourselves in another world, where lies the beautiful kingdom that Lucifer spoke of. In practice, the matter turned out much more difficult. So what that I close my eyes if the whole hustle and bustle of this world comes to me through my ears and my thoughts persistently run around everyday things? So let us leave this world and all everyday things, go to a deserted place where things will be easier for us thought some of them. Yet this world did find them even there, because they had it with them as their own bodies, which wanted something all the time: be it food, drink or a woman. And when they closed their eyes everything was still there, in front of their soul s eyes. So perhaps it is better to die? they asked themselves and others. But those who knew a thing or two told them that dying is useless: if they die with the full awareness of their desire for the things of this world, they will immediately find themselves again in the world full of these things. It is not enough to turn into yourself, you need to change your consciousness, become indifferent to the matters of this world, and become immersed in the emptiness of the mind, where nothing is left of them. There are those who succeed, and then the emptiness yields the enormous energy of pure worldcreating thought, the internal spiritual light. Such a man has an entirely different perspective than he had when he was imprisoned in his body in this world, the only light in which is the light of the sun. The question is does God like this? It depends. Gods have different spheres of influence and whereas they might be alright in their own realm, they are not very well received elsewhere. The Hindu God Śiwa is, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, no longer considered to be god but becomes the devil, Lucifer. Yahweh does not want people to close their eyes and escape inside of themselves when they live in his world. He has plans for this world (see the Wheel of Fortune). Christ supports him in these plans, and is far from approving of the way proposed by Lucifer. What is good in the East does not work in the West. Has anyone in our times heard of a Westerner who gained enlightenment by meditating for forty years sitting in a lotus position? 31

32 X. THE WHEEL OF FORTUNE A sealed book Fate, destiny, doom what is it? For ancient Greeks it was a power that even the gods could not interfere with. In the Apocalypse, God on the throne holds The Book of Destiny, and all he can do is to get to know its contents and make sure that what is to happen will happen. We people also have our fate written down; we plan it ourselves before we are born, but when we live on earth we are unaware of it, we have forgotten about it. Whatever should happen will happen, but the way we will behave in the face of our fate and what we are going to learn depends on us. If we knew it beforehand, life on earth would be unnecessary. The Wheel of Fortune turns and we ourselves turn the wheel and stand in confrontation with the changing paths of fate. The greatest wisdom is to welcome one s fate. God expelled man from Paradise (see the Chariot) so that man coped in exile as best as he could, but then he also gave him the Ten Commandments (see Justice) to set boundaries to man s freedom. It was difficult to know what would come out of it. Will man follow God s commandments? What will God do if man disobeys him? What will God gain if man is in fact obedient? God started a game with man, which really means a game with a separated part of himself. He can change the rules at random, depending on how the game develops; depending on whether his own moves are going to bring the desired effects, and if so, on whether he will be satisfied, or will conclude that this was not exactly what he wanted. And it is only during the game that God will slowly realize his real intention towards the creation of man But on the other hand, all that is to happen has been set out, and what is to happen will happen. This is what is written in the book sealed with seven seals. Until, finally, someone who had gained enlightenment and could unravel the mystery of the world s fate tore the seals from the book. It was the seven-horned Lamb, the Son of God, Jesus Christ. Once he tore the first seal away, he saw himself on a white horse, embarking on a journey into the world, to join the realization of God s plan which was now known. At the same time, he saw the beginning of the new era in history the Christian era (see the Sun). The powers acting throughout man s history are represented by four figures, well-known to us by now: bull, lion, eagle and angel. They turn events round just like the Wheel of Fortune, divided into seven sectors that correspond to the seals of the book. Each one of the figures sends out one of the four riders of Apocalypse to fight. God has not created the world and man in it for man to turn away from the world, and fly to heaven (see the Hermit). God s aim is realized through earth s history, so it cannot happen at random. This is why the seven-horned Lamb finally enters the scene. 32

33 XI. STRENGTH Enlightenment Enlightenment is being born again. In this card, a woman is standing on the moon, representing a symbol of the accumulated experiences of the previous incarnations; all that happened prior to this life, which is finalized in the Enlightenment (see Death). The Enlightenment is expressed by the Sun around the child s head - the child being the enlightened one - and by the child opening the lion s mouth, which stands for the expansion of the ordinary, finite human self into the infinite enlightened self. The twelve stars above the woman s head are her new offspring, the New Jerusalem, the collective Beloved of God (see the World). Each of these stars is, in itself and for itself, the same as the sun. Each one is the Lover. Man is born, comes into the world, dies and is born again... until finally he is born into another life, but this time as the Son of God. The Apocalypse defines someone like this as a winner. The winners are called saints, the saved. In the Orthodox Church, on the other hand, the process itself is called the divinization of man. Moreover, the synonym of the enlightened in Christianity is the Son of God, although this term is usually used only in reference to Jesus Christ. In The Apocalypse, however, there are many winners. The truth is that all people will sooner or later win, by being born again out of Spirit. In the Gospel of St. John, Jesus is talking to Nicodemus, a Pharisee, about the need to be born again, but Nicodemus does not know what Jesus means. He thinks that he will need to go back to his mother s womb and be reborn from her body again. Jesus, in his life, was born again as Christ, and only then could he be called the Son by God the Father. In Eastern spiritual doctrines the winners, all those who are born again, are called the enlightened. The enlightenment process is linked in these doctrines with the rising of Kundalini, the fire snake. This is how the birth of the enlightened is described in the Apocalypse. The fiery seven-headed dragon is a fire snake which, by rising, activates in women the seven chakras the centers of a new, higher consciousness. When these are unsealed and unburdened they become the seven eyes of the Lamb, the seven spirits of God, awakened here, on earth. The winner is needed by God, because God also experiences enlightenment and is also saved through the winner. God needs the winner, as someone with higher consciousness, to help lead the others to their final destiny (see The Wheel of Fortune). Therefore the newly born Christ is taken to heaven, as the enlightenment is not only his individual business, as is the case in Eastern spiritual systems (see the Hermit) patronized by the fiery dragon Lucifer. The war in the heavens between the individualist Lucifer and the hosts of God who, lead by the Archangel Michael, fought for the higher good and the realization of God s plan, was precisely about who owns the enlightened. 33

34 XII. THE HANGED MAN The Saviour Jesus Christ, a man, reached the state enlightenment (see the Strength) and ascended to heaven to sit on the throne of God. Through him, God also attained his own divine absolute consciousness, which he did not have as Adam, the first man (see the Lovers). God the Lover is ready. Yet, what about Eve? What about Adam s Beloved? Is it not her turn to be transformed into the second Eve? The Beloved needs to be assisted in her preparations before her marriage to the Lover (see the World). In Buddhism, the enlightened who wants to help un-enlightened humankind is known as Bodhisattva, in Christianity he is hailed as the Saviour. In Greek mythology Prometheus, one of the titans, also wanted to help man but only by making his life in the hostile natural world more bearable by means that belong to the sphere known as civilization. The Christ the Lover is already in heaven whereas the rest of mankind remains on earth as the unprepared Beloved. The image of a ladder linking heavens and earth is a well known mythological motif. In Judaism it occurs as Jacob s ladder. Jacob dreamt of a ladder placed on earth that reached all the way to heaven, and was used by God s angels to descend from heaven and return to it, whereas God stood and watched from above. In Christianity Jacob s ladder is transformed into Christ s cross, which enables people to reach heaven. Still, what kind of idea is it? Does the cross in itself save others or does everyone become saved only through their own cross? And if everyone must save themselves, what is the help of Christ-bodhisattva needed for? Isn t then the idea of the Saviour a big hindrance in the act of selfsaving? Isn t it that Christ the Saviour intended to do good but it turned out wrong, exactly the opposite of what happened to the Devil? The matter became complicated: the law was given by Moses (see Justice) and grace happened through Jesus Christ. But isn t Christ s grace an additional difficulty?: after all, instead of doing what he should man forever counts, without any certainty that he does so rightly, on somebody else s help? The hangman s legs appear in the sign of Saturn, a wrong-doing planet, which makes things difficult. The eagle pulls at the liver of Christ-Prometheus, because God does not know anyone to help man in what he should be doing by himself. The angel distracts man by showing him the star. He calls for man to follow his own star rather than follow anyone else, especially anyone who wishes to be like the sun to him. But man, blinded by the brilliance of the sun, cannot see the star or the angel s gesture. The bull and the lion do what they do, they want to keep the man within the boundaries of finitude, and hence they attack the ladder that leads to heaven. What about Christ the Saviour he seems to be an unwanted guest here, and the ladder? Well, it could be a little longer - so that man could climb it on his own, without the helpful hand of the Saviour. 34

35 XIII. DEATH The cycle of life and death Death is a passage into another state of existence. In the moment of death, the spirit leaves the body and begins a new, immaterial life; it is born in the other world. And again when it is born in this world in a baby s body, it dies in the other world, forgetting who and where it was. And so, time after time, we die and are born again. Yet whoever dies as the enlightened, the perfect, does not have to be born and die again. He attains eternal life as the fruit from the tree of life. This is the end of the road which began by tasting the fruit from the tree of knowledge. When man s eyes opened, he began to be ashamed of himself, which gave impulse to the great process of making amendments and self-improvement. Ultimately, man must stand equal to God and must achieve this on earth, the place of his exile from Paradise. To begin with, man was given a very long life, but God shortened it in return for the possibility of many lives. When Jesus dies on the cross, accompanied by the three Marys, he dies for the last time and thus wins over death. His former lives and deaths are symbolized by the six skulls around the cross. The seventh skull, wearing the crown of thorns, completes the deed. It is held by Mary, his biological mother. The second Mary is Mary Magdalene, the mother of his children. Eros shoots the arrows of love for men and women to be attracted to one another and bear children, with the set of genes adequate to the intention of the spirits that are to embody them in order to replace those who are gone. Reincarnation needs a mechanism for the accumulation and transformation of the spiritual experiences of our ancestors. The unconscious collective mind gave it the shape of a mysterious goddess the Black Madonna. She is the symbol of the night of the spirit, in which the memories of other lives are deeply immersed, but she is also the Mother Goddess, as from the experience of many previous incarnations, the intention of a new one is born. The Black Madonna, as the third Mary, is the equivalent of the moon under the feet of the woman in the Strength card. She overshadows the sun of the earthly self of Jesus, reabsorbing it into her womb as the last part of his experience. After three and a half days it will be transformed into the Resurrected Christ (see the Knight of Cups), in whom the memory of all previous lives will become alive within one superior self. Everyone has two genealogies. The bodily genealogy of Jesus, which starts with Adam, is encountered in Luke s gospel (the bull ascribed to him represents carnality) and the spiritual genealogy beginning with Abraham is presented in Matthew s (the man or angel ascribed to him is a spirit). It is somewhat indicative that when he heard of his biological mother Jesus pointed her out to his pupils and said: This is my mother. It seems that the apostles have also symbolized the spiritual mother, the collection of Jesus former incarnations which, completed by the current one, enabled his transformation into Christ. 35

36 XIV. TEMPERANCE Divine Lovers The self, an individual spirit, is of divine origins, but through incarnating on earth it travels through the sea of unconsciousness, forgets about its divine origins and closes itself in. When the self is bound to the earth its divine roots are severed. Its symbol is the lion, which lost its wings and desperately wants to recover them. This desire is coded in the human heart (see The Book of Daniel). The human heart has the power to break the barriers that enclose the self in itself and has the capacity to open it for another creature. Such an opening is known as love. Love as the act of the self that crosses its own boundaries is therefore similar to the state of enlightenment, in which the self breaks through the barriers of finitude. The finite self, as something structurally like a point is of the male character, yang. It is a point in a spiritual space continuum represented by the female yin. The spirit incarnated on earth is a point, an atomic self. Heaven is the symbol of a spiritual space continuum. The finite earthly spirit unconsciously longs for its mother in heaven but in love, by breaking its own closing in itself, the spirit turns upwards, towards heaven. Here on earth, the longing for heaven takes the form of the sexual drive, which attracts a man towards a woman. On the surface of things a man is attracted to a female body, but what he really wants is his eagle wings back, which he lost when closed in his finite self. He feels that there is a chance of recovering his wings, thanks to a woman and his love for her. A surge of the spirit towards heaven Luciferic in its essence is realized as the exchange of energy, the pouring of energy from one cup to another. This is an alchemic wedding, which leads to a balancing of the male and female elements. True love raises the ordinary, sexual attraction between man and woman to a higher realm. They are no longer a couple of ordinary lovers, but a divine couple: Śiwa and Śakti. They are no longer Adam and Eve but a higher form of Adam-Christ and a higher form of Eve, which will have to be, by supposition, Mary Magdalene. The division of man into two parts - man and woman - makes them attracted to one another like the two ends of a magnet. Scorpio is the symbol of this magnetic attraction (see the Chariot); the attraction of the type that does not lead to a permanent melting of the two halves into one. The satiated desire pulls them apart again. The idea of two in one is an esoteric idea, the idea of an androgen, the creature that represents the completeness of man through bi-sexuality. The eagle is a symbol of aiming for such completeness (see the Chariot) and the realization of it is found in the bi-sexual winged Christ (see the Star and the World). Internally, the different points of view of the two sexes are balanced by Justice. Temperance is merely the expression their alchemic equilibrium the Opus Magnum. 36

37 XV. THE DEVIL Mammon The Prince of this world Where does the image of a hairy devil with hooves, horns and pitchfork come from? Is this what metaphysical, pure evil is supposed to look like? Is this evil personified at all? Besides, is evil truly evil or perhaps something serving a greater purpose for the benefit of good? Perhaps, even, there would be no good without evil? The truth is that evil is a separate being, who opposes the whole, and thinks only of itself. Evil exists only as personified in man; embodied in a person, in which even God attains his own existence for himself. And so it would appear that evil is necessary: even God has to go through the stage of being evil. After all, the Yahweh of the Old Testament is far from being an angel. Man s body is made of the dust of the earth, but it is in this earthly body that God s spirit finds its dwelling place. God, as spirit in each man, wants to permeate fully his own existence, bit by bit. Every man being a part of creation is supposed to fully experience his own particular part, concentrate all his attentions on it, and let it be tested in action. God, however, does not want these parts to be independent; he does not want them to abandon themselves to their own depths or to the world. In order to communicate with his spirit in every man, God allows man to do as he wants and go about his earthly business six days a week, but he has reserved the seventh day for himself. This regards his priestly people that he continually communicates with. Other nations may or may not care about him. Their history must, however, intertwine with the history of Israel. These other pagan imperia - Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome - have conquered Israel (see The Book of Daniel), and God has dispersed the Jews so that they live in the pagan world according to his principles, yet still remain his people. Other nations were given to the Devil, to Mammon The Prince of this World - as his share. He is not the only Devil of course; there is also his reverse Lucifer (see the Hermit). Mammon seems to be more powerful than God. After all the nations ruled by him oppress God s people, and even the number of the days of the week devoted to him is six times the number of days spent worshipping God. When the Son of God, Christ, lived on earth, he was also crushed by Mammon s power. In defence of God s power we can say, however, that the godless rule of Mammon has originated with God and so he can abolish it any time he wants (see the Tower). The number of Mammon is six, which is both the number of weekdays and the number to which the Devil s number in the great arcana adds up to. But since the Devil is an Anti-God, he also must be part of the trinity, even if it is unholy, so the number was trebled to 666. Mammon is the spiritual life turned away from God, and directed into the darkness of matter. Therefore Mammon is the Prince of Darkness. Earthly science and its technical applications, that give man power over matter, are one of his visible creations. No wonder that people follow and worship Mammon. After all, the things he gives are wonderful, although only of this world. Mammon is a symbol of dependency, dark urges and blocked energies. 37

38 XVI. THE TOWER A ruin of human achievement Man has ambitions to create, leave something behind, and achieve things in this world, so he builds his life to satisfy these goals. He puts a lot of effort into them, but often everything that he has built through such hard work falls apart. This is when man asks himself: why? Is it because living in the world man usually does not know why he has chosen to incarnate, what he has to do in this life? Perhaps he has surrendered too early and given up his development? He might have become involved in something that is contrary to his pre-incarnation intention, yet it is still not too late to change his direction into the right one. In such a situation man needs to be shaken, has to be forced to think deeply about the meaning of his own life. His fate is involved in this process (see the Wheel of Fortune), so eventually the truth is that man himself destroys what is in his way. Man creates his own world within nature (see the Emperor) as the extension of God s creation. This is precisely what he has been expelled from Paradise for (see the Chariot). Still, not everything that man creates is in tune with God s way of thinking. This is why, to restrict man s freedom, God gave him the Ten Commandments (see Justice). Entire empires and civilizations were built on earth without any reference to I am the Lord your God (see the Devil). God allows it when these serve his purposes, for instance to punish the chosen people for their infidelity. He allowed Israel to fall into Babylonian slavery, which means that pagan empires are sometimes tools in the hands of God s justice. All of the great rulers of this world imagine that they have achieved everything by their own wits and devices and gained everlasting fame, but in fact they are just simple pawns in God s hands; they are merely used in God s game (see the Wheel of Fortune). When God s intention is realized, everything else will perish. When God interferes in human affairs (see the Hangman) he does so by the hands of the Beast (see the Devil). But what was instrumental in the destruction of a godless empire, in its falling into ruin? It was hit by the head of the seven-horned Lamb, symbolizing God s intention. The Lamb s head is the stone from the Book of Daniel, which hit the statue and became a large mountain that the kingdom of Christ will be built on. The demolished structure releases fire the energy of the fiery Luciferic dragon from the Apocalypse lent to the Beast the Antichrist. Out of the dust and smoke a fire is rising above its ruins and an outline of a new edifice arises, of the true House of God, which is also another name of this great arcana card, commonly known as the Tower. What happens to the old house of God? It is a harlot, Great Babylon, whose fall is seen at the bottom of the card. 38

39 XVII. THE STAR The Spirit of the Earth The Apocalypse portrays the process of the destruction of the old earth and the old heaven and presents a vision of the new earth and the new heaven. The old forms have become too small for the new spirit, so they need to be torn away and replaced by new ones. After all, no one pours young wine into old skins; it would certainly burst out and flow away. Juts as the finite human self must expand to become the absolute self (see Strength), the earth s vibrations have to increase, if humanity on a global scale is to rise into a qualitatively higher level of spiritual development. But this process never happens without an upheaval, earthquakes, erupted volcanoes, cyclones and other apocalyptic events. What the Tower stands for with reference to the human world (see the Emperor), the Star represents with reference to the natural world (see the Empress). When the fifth angel blew his trumpet the prophet John of Patmos, the author of the Apocalypse, saw a Star, which fell from the sky to earth. The Star held the key to the abyss of hell in the depths of Earth. When the gate to hell was open smoke rose up, as if from a large furnace; the sun was overshadowed and the air became thick with smoke. Out of the smoke came locusts. The Star is Christ, as he is the one to have the key to the abyss, and he is the bright morning star. Jesus took female energy into his cup from Mary Magdalene, carried on the wings of the eagle (see the Temperance), and this is how he became complete, turning into a winged hermaphrodite, an angel. Now the situation is reversed and takes on a global dimension: the Beloved is the planet Earth, and the Lover is Christ as the spirit of the Earth. The smoke, thick with locusts, which was released from the abyss in the earth, corresponds on a planetary scale to the seven demons that Jesus expelled from Mary Magdalene (see the Knight of Swords), to pour a new pure energy, the seven chakras, into her. Once the Earth is cleansed of dirt, Christ pours a new spirit into it - the new wine, the water of life - and in this very place the old, cracked earthly shell begins to sprout with greenery and seven beautiful star-shaped flowers grow around it. Behind Christ s - the Spirit of the Earth s - head, a large star is visible and behind it, in the sky, seven smaller stars, with each one of them taking another colour of the rainbow. The earth is not an isolated system. It takes energy from the stars in heaven through its spirit, which mixes various rays of star radiation into a potion, just right for the Beloved, and pours it into her body. Christ is represented here as the Star; it may be one of the many stars in our galaxy but the one connected with the Earth with the ties of love. In fact Christ, in the role of the Earth Spirit, is the Holy Ghost sent onto the Earth as his much more powerful incarnation than the one in the human body of Jesus. 39

40 XVIII. THE MOON Nothing is as it seems Only a few understand the true esoteric meaning of Christianity, as it is shining through the ordinary, exoteric sense, which is usually exactly its reverse sense. Similarly, only the seven eyes of the enlightened can see the images truly reflected in Sophia s mirror (see the High Priestess). When we look at the world with the two eyes that we have, we see something entirely different. Jesus said to people: I am the way the truth and the life, no one comes to the Father, except through me. Some thought: Thanks God that I don t have to be the truth myself and I will be saved anyway by Him being the truth. Others could not understand why someone would want to save them, telling them to reject who they were and follow HIM? Finally there were those who repeated what Jesus said: I am the way, the truth and the life. And what about Jesus? Well, who knows, it all happened such a long time ago anyway, only somewhere there, in Jerusalem, those who repeated his words understood their true esoteric sense. Others are still incapable of doing it. Jesus knew of these different thoughts that people had when they heard his words, and since many of his apostles were fishermen, he once said to Peter after a particularly successful day of fishing: From now on you fish for people. You have to make many people believe in me. You have to tell them things that they can comprehend but you must tell them the truth. Even though they are not able to understand, they will get some sense out of it in their own way. It is better that they understand me this way than if they don t understand at all. There will be time for them to get the real sense. Meantime let them believe in what they can understand. To explain what real faith is, Jesus told Peter, who stood in the boat, to walk on water. Peter walked but became fearful and started drowning. Then Jesus said to him: You of little faith, why did you doubt me? And this is how Peter, the fisher of men and the shepherd of lambs, found out what to say when others are in doubt. The way to the Father through the exoteric Christ of Christianity is like the moonlight on the water s surface. Can you walk through it without actually becoming immersed in water? It is merely an illusion, distracting one from the real way, which leads directly through water. Finally, Jesus himself, before his heavenly Father called him his Son, immersed himself in the waters of the Jordan. The truth is that if you follow your star, you must enter water - the element which expresses the deeper, more archaic layers of the human psyche, hidden under the surface of the social veil. The trident of Neptune, the God of the depths of the sea, was however transformed in exoteric Christianity into a devil s fork. Hence a Christian who wants to follow his own star keeps hearing a warning: do not enter the water! But those who follow the beaten tracks of religion will not be initiated. They will be finally told what to do by the esoteric Christ, but only when they leave behind the worn-out clothes of the religion of the small-minded, and shed their dog-like attachment to their master, they will return to their real, free nature. 40

41 XIX. THE SUN God the Sun The Sun is at the centre of the solar system, with the Earth and other planets revolving around it. It is the great source from which energy spreads to everything around it; the energy without which life would cease to exist. The Sun is also a source of light, making everything visible and being the substance of everything that exists. The rest of the solar system seems insignificant in comparison to the powers of the Sun, and so the Sun has become the symbol of a majestic ruler, a king and a Caesar, and for the purposes of religions it has become the highest God. In Christianity, Christ is the sun for people, surrounded by the twelve apostles, like the twelve months into which the solar year is divided. The Sun the symbol of Christ is an all-embracing love that radiates from his heart the spiritual Sun. Jesus was born on earth, where he became enlightened (see Strength). Then he ascended to heaven, where he was welcomed in triumph as the seven-horned Lamb, the winner lion of Juda s generation. What is said about the Lamb is that he was killed by crucifixion at the end of his brief, three and a half year long public career, which he began after he had attained enlightenment. Enlightenment was without a doubt a victory, but the crucifixion did not look like one. It allowed him, however, to reach heaven where, with his seven eyes, he was able to read the secret book, sealed with the seven seals (see the Wheel of Fortune) After he tore away the first seal a white horse appeared, and the rider who sat upon it wore a crown, held a bow and departed to continue the triumph. This was the Lamb, though transformed into a religious symbol, into the victorious Sun the Monstrance. And it is only when he appeared in the human world as the live myth that his true victory on earth began; the victory of a religion based on his learning and on his cult. The myth of God who dies and is resurrected was linked with the death of Jesus and his resurrection on the third day, which acquired the meaning of the Birth of God, celebrated on 25 December, three days after the winter solstice and the death of the old Sun. As bow-holding rider, Christ looks like the image of the centaur Sagittarius. This constellation has just ahead of it a gigantic black hole, which is at the center of our galaxy, and near it, on the other side of the Milky Way, there is the constellation of Ophichus, the snake-holder also signifying Christ (see the Lovers). Seizing power through these nebular symbols from a place of enormous energy, Christ is no longer only a solar hero, like Heracles or Mithra (The Invincible Sun), but he acquires a galactic dimension. In our times, the vision of Jesus as a centaur is increasingly frequent. But the sun is also a symbol of someone who stands above others and overshadows them, deprives them of their independence. In opposition to the monopolist sun, the Esoterics suggest that everyone should be their own star. 41

42 XX. THE JUDGMENT The judgment over God s creation The vision of the Last Judgment is terrifying to man, who knows only too well that he is imperfect, and that he can never be sure how he will be judged by the High Judge, when his virtues and merits are placed on the one plate of the scales and his faults and sins on the other. The vision is particularly fearsome when man hears that by divine justice he may be only condemned, and all that he can count on is God s mercy; or when he reads that the names of those to be saved have been written down since the beginning of the world, and all was foregone even before he was born. Will the judgment really take place? And who will judge whom and for what? In fact, it is the judgment on God the Creator, through the judgment of his creation. What is judged over and over again, until the final round, is man (see the Fool). Christ, the Son of God, is the judge. He is the truth and the example for man to follow, so he allows into heaven, into the spiritual world, into New Jerusalem only those who are like him. This only means that, in real terms, man is the judge of himself and the last judgment takes place only when man achieves his final form, when he becomes the Son of God. Until this happens, each time after death man will assess the balance of the life just completed, looking at it from another perspective, being aware of what this particular life was all about, and how much was actually achieved. Nothing is perfect straightaway. What is being created needs to be corrected, and only once the correction is done can the re-evaluation follow. And this is how God creates his reality, his world. The creation of its material nature (see the Empress) is only the beginning. The spiritual world will be his final achievement. Its materiality, its externality will finally disappear, turning out to be just a layer of dirt covering the truth enclosed in the creation, something like information noise, the muddy veil called into existence, the rough edge of the creative thought, and the ignorance of the truth. The creation requires cleansing, alchemic distillation, the separation of clear essence from marc, the wheat from the chaff. Man Spirit will never be thrown in to the fires of hell; what will be burned is only the remains of the cleansing. Man is a particle of divine spirit, which God lets into the world slowly, for it to be tried out, tested and distilled. Christ is the Judge who leads the trial, which is also attended by Mammon, the Prosecution, Lucifer, and the Defence. If it were up to Lucifer he would take all the people to his spiritual heaven and save them all from the nightmare of earthly existence. Mammon, on the other hand, would like to keep everyone on earth (see Justice). What it is all about, however, is to be shaped and sanded through the hardships of life on earth like a diamond, finally to find heaven, only in the perfected form. 42

43 XXI. THE WORLD God and His Beloved Religion commands man to turn his spirit to God (see the Pope) and rise above worldly affairs. All hopes that man s efforts will be rewarded are based on the fact that, after all, the Infinite Absolute himself descended into the finite world, became man, and began the process of breaking through the barriers of finitude, to finally become God as man divinized. This is the sense of the fundamental Christian dogma of the union of the divine and human nature in Jesus Christ. In the esoteric, philosophical sense the dogma becomes generally true, not the only in the singular case of Jesus. God the Creator (see the Magician) created heaven and earth, and then he created nature (see the Empress) and himself as man in nature (see the Lovers). As man, he became God in exile, especially when he expelled man from Paradise (see the Chariot). But at the end of time, when the old earth and the old heaven come to their end and the harlot Great Babylon will be replaced by the New Jerusalem, God will return home from exile, and man will dwell in the house of God, which will become his home. This shared house of God and man, the heavenly city of Jerusalem, will have its gates facing the four parts of the world, and through them all those who come from all corners of the world will be welcome. In the New Jerusalem, Christ celebrates wedding his Beloved, with the divinized part of mankind, God s people. The Lover is one, and the Beloved comprises a limitless crowd of spirits. Everyone who Christ, the High Judge, lets into the New Jerusalem (see Judgment) is the Truth and Eternal Life. How different are these spirits from Christ? They are not different at all. From his point of view, he is the Husband and everyone else is his Wife. But at the same time, every spirit is a unique individuality and, as such, must reach eternal life. The whole abundance of the Absolute, embodied in the creation, is to return to God as the multiplicity of spiritual beings; each of them expressing some specific, unique aspect of the whole to the extent that, without it, the whole would be incomplete. The New Jerusalem is a fractal each of its elements is of a similar structure to the whole. The self of the enlightened as the Lover spreads over all the individualities that he used to be in previous incarnations, being his Beloved (see Death). The New Jerusalem is a final product of man s history. The driving forces of man s history, symbolized by the bull, lion, eagle and angel, have nothing else to accomplish. God has his tent here, in which he meets his Beloved, descending from his heights, as she flies to him giving him a helping hand as his Beloved (see the Hangman), and leaving the superfluous earth behind. The Beloved is the female snake-holder, just as the Lover is the male snake-holder (see the Lovers). 43

44 Court Cards 44