The Empress Fulfilled

Here we have The Empress. The High Priestess has matured. It is no accident that the first clearly gendered forms of the Major Arcana are Female. The pansexual Fool and Magus energies must either manifest in Form or dissipate into Abyss. A vessel is required for Life to occur.

I am extremely busy this week. As you've probably noticed, my opinion is that the Thoth Tarot is the only deck that matters. As my time is scarce and The Empress card is a representation of balance between ideas we've already discussed, a cursory examination of Aleister Crowley's design will suffice.

The High Priestess' Secret

In examining The Fool and The Magus, we've introduced the concept of three Paths simultaneously emanating from Kether's appearance. One of these is The High Priestess, which is the first Path on the Tree of Life to connect the Supernal Triad (Kether, Chockmah, Binah) to the Sephiroth below and the only direct Path between Kether and the lower Tree. This journey traverses The Abyss that separates Modes of Consciousness accessible to humans from those purely theoretical; the Veil of Maya.

The High Priestess is also the first Trump to depict a gendered form. Here is Divine Feminine Intuition. The Hebrew letter assigned to the card, Gimel, translates to "Camel," the pack animal capable of traveling the desert with cargo intact. Here, more than anywhere on The Tree, lie The Great Mysteries of Life and Death; here is where The Seeker of Knowledge meets She Who Knows That Which Never Is Known.

The Magus Speaks

The Fool of Tarot has been introduced as the Main Player upon the stage of The World, the One (or None) beneath the disguise that is every other human form of the Major Arcana. Travelling through the cards "in order," the first of these Masqueraders we meet is The Magus (or Magician, or Juggler.)

To properly understand this Trump, we will first need to investigate The Tree of Life (or Otz Chim) of Qabalah, which fully incorporates and organizes the subsets of symbols necessary to our aims. Next, language itself must be considered. Many occultists regard the spoken/written Word as one of only two forms of true magick available to human beings, the other being sexual energy, of course.

The Fool of the Abyss

When I walk by neon PSYCHIC READINGS signs, I think, "If the person opens the door and motions like they've been expecting me, then I'll go inside."

So, I've never seen a fortune teller.

Divination in general seems rather silly, whether derived from so-called astrology, numerology, palm reading, Tarot or whatever-else-have-you. Mind you, this isn't to say that these organizational systems are without merit, because some of them are quite useful when not profaned by cold reading con artists in the role of spiritual guide to the lonely and gullible of Earth.

Whether you believe Consciousness to be the primum mobile of existence or the culmination to-date of Evolutionary process, the inherent link between Mind and Matter seems stupefyingly obvious. Therefore, the notion of a Secret Language of Consciousness, or Logos, behind the veil of Maya, or buried in the genetic code of the species, is not so outrageous.

Adepts of Hermetic Qabalah and its countless bastard children propose to have stumbled upon The Lexicon of such a pictorial language in Tarot: that pre-Jungian blueprint of the House of Consciousness which incorporates the symbology of The Zodiac, numerology and the Tree of Life, built by a hand seemingly extraterrestrial/superhuman in skill, ostensibly with no greater purpose than to play a little game...

The Horror of Twin Peaks: Re-Visited

This photograph is capable of destroying me. It's of Laura Palmer, a character, played by actress Sheryl Lee, on the television show Twin Peaks. 

Perhaps you need to know the story of that show to be moved by that image or be interested in anything I'm going to say here. I'm not writing this for those of you unfamiliar with the show. This one is for everyone who already knows, or tried and couldn't make it through the first episode because you didn't know what to look for, or maybe this one's just for me. Let's call it posterity.

Laura Palmer is a tragic character. You can see it in the eyes, red-rimmed and a bump too glassy. Her life isn't her own, due to her age, the problems of her parents, drugs, sex and forces beyond her own, or anyone's, control. (There's a little bit of Laura Palmer in all of us, I always say.) Things definitely did not end well for Laura, 25 years ago today, but there probably wasn't ever much of a chance that they would, once she was born the daughter of a man named Leland... Or, Le Land...  Or, The World. And, when Leland was just a boy, he had this neighbor...