Tarot Made Difficult (1)
Or Everything you never wanted to know about the Tarot
Introduction—Lampado Trado
Over on Mercurial Minutes, my brilliant friend Karin has issued a call for Tarot inspired works. So I figured what better way to inaugurate my own Substack then by answering that call, no matter how furtively.
As a prompt Karin has produced three cards: The Hermit as topic, Temperance as mood, and Death as conclusion. Hmmm, okay. So I pour an iced coffee, press play on a video of a performance by the Jocelyn Pook ensemble from 2002, and pensively tap my left forefinger against my chin, pondering.
The Hermit, eh? So what is there to say about this old fellow?
Well, what isn’t there to say? Despite the apparent simplicity of the famous Rider deck design by A.E. Waite and Pamela Colman Smith, it is, like much of the Tarot, a rich, complex and nuanced symbol. Resonances with the card include (but aren’t limited to) Father Time, as well as the Kabbalistic and Blakean notion of the Ancient of Days. Further associations are with Kronos/Saturn1, as well as Odin in his wandering. In the Gnostic heresy he could be thought of as Ialdaboath, the demiurge, while in Masonry he aligns with the GAOTU. In Hinduism we find him with Lord Vishwakarma and in mainstream Abrahamic religions he can be thought of as that ultimate recluse, the monotheistic God. We may also consider him representing the father yod of the Tetragrammaton. Indeed, understand yod and you’ll have a firm grasp in hand of the hermit’s emissions.
Before we begin unpacking all that, however, I’m going to kick this off with a bang by asserting something heretical that may get me burned on the Internet stake, but which ultimately may just be a semantical quibble. So here goes. If anyone asks what the Hermit card means, I’m here to answer that it means nothing. Contrary to the casual parlance with which most of us speak, Tarot cards have interpretations, they have correspondences, they have themes and motifs, but they do not have inherent meanings in and of themselves.
Imagine you hold the Hermit card in your hand. It is most likely a mass-produced rectangular piece of laminated card stock covered in colored ink and squiggles that one might possibly interpret as being an old bearded white man in a cloak holding a staff and a lantern. Or you might interpret it as something else. You might look at it and think, “Reminds me of Diogenes.” Or you might think, “Looks kinda like Gandalf.” Or you might think, “What am I going to have for dinner? I should look for something.” Who knows. In any case, few but the most advanced adepts will be overly concerned with what the Hermit card sounds like, how it smells and tastes, or how its airspeed velocity when thrown compares with that of an unladen sparrow. The point isn’t what the Tarot is, but what it it could be. So that what one seeks is not the meaningless word meaning, but rather a creative context in which one finds/creates significance.
To think of the Tarot (and many other things) this way isn’t just some kind of cheap nihilism. It helps in freeing one, especially a beginner student, from the yoke of having to memorize a bunch of definitions from a little white book. So instead of wondering what a card means when you pull it, you investigate instead how it makes you feel—what images, associations and sensations arise in you? You are the authority, not the card or a bunch of dead occultists. If you pull the Hermit and say, “It reminds me of that summer in Seville. Do you remember, darling? When we were sitting in that corner cafe, and it was so hot we couldn’t stand it, but we were together and so in love that it didn’t matter. But then we saw that old beggar walking down the street and he looked in the window straight at us, and I thought he must be hungry and I felt suddenly so sad,” no one can reasonably screech, “Wrong!” or “Prove it!” to you in the comments section.
But, for the more analytical among us, don’t worry, there’s still lots of other stuff to memorize! Kabbalah and hermeticism is often like an onion or artichoke, with dense layers and leaves to be laboriously peeled away until one is left with with a plate full of nothing.
But to be clear, I’m not advocating a loosey-goosey, anything goes approach to the Tarot. So that while we aren’t building clocks, practicing rocket science or music theory here, and have no need for robust rationalism or, Goddess forbid, scientific materialism, we must bear in mind that synchrony is impossible without precise calibration. A coherent, elegant and congruent system of correspondences and alignments is instrumental in understanding and using the Tarot, especially if one is using it to travel in the spirit vision or communicate with other intelligences. This is partly why it was so important to Waite and all these other Occult Revival cats to ascribe exact correspondences to the cards. They were, in effect, writing and debugging the code.2
A couple more caveats before we begin. To look at a Tarot card in an associative, intuitive way isn’t necessarily to advance some sort of Campbellian monomyth, and in the hodge-podge of Gods, archetypes and symbols we may encounter here is no intent to promote the idea of a so-called “Perennial Philosophy,” which in my view is just a sort of syncretic colonialism
Nor will we be advancing conspiracy theories either. The conspiracists (those who are sincere and not propagandists on somebody’s payroll at any rate) have been terminally infected with the mind virus (well, probably more of a mind parasite) of causality. We shall not venture into the world of the ‘because’ here, or at least only rarely. We are dealing instead with correspondence theory. Again, not ‘that is that,’ but “this is as like to that.” We deal here with analogy, allegory, syllogism, metonym, synecdoche, nonsense, myth, fable, little white lies, balderdash and complete and utter bullshit. We speak of signs, signals, signifiers, hints, suggestions, associations and triggers, not “if…thens” or “why…becauses….”
But let’s take a breath and circle back to our old pal The Hermit. And consider him, in toto, as consisting of All and Everything, Alpha and Omega, the ever-present and eternal creation and apocalypse in one package. The ultimate union of opposites but never the opposite of unions. Furthermore please consider the six-pointed star Ms. Colman-Smith depicts within the lantern he holds as comprising the union of Om and Hrim—both the generator of phenomenon and the liberator from it. Because, make no mistake, his lamp is not the light of the seeker—rather it is the beacon toward that which is sought. For that lantern, you see, is illumined by the light of the Tradition, and if he deigns to hand it off to you, then by cracky you better be ready for it!3
Note, however, that the Saturnian aspect of the Hermit’s symbology relates to his manifestation as it corresponds to time, not as an aspect of the planet Saturn. The planet corresponding to the Hermit Card is generally regarded as Mercury, whereas the planet Saturn corresponds with the World.
More on this later. Another reason to develop a rigid system of correspondences is that it can act as a shibboleth to mark who is “one of us” and who isn’t. The method behind all this madness will be discussed in subsequent parts. Ultimately, the motivation behind speaking and working with these matters in an associative and cryptic manner isn’t just to be cryptic for the sake of it, nor is it intended to be exclusionary or deceptive—But it is a much different thing to discover certain truths through the spirit vision, or in direct transmission from an initiation than it is to read about it in a blog post or facebook meme. Discovering wisdom in an imaginal and/or initiatory way renders it as a direct lived, felt sense experience, whereas merely reading about it or being lectured about it renders it as a fact, a rationality—a dusty old memento to be guarded, possessed and displayed. It’s the difference between being a virtuoso pianist playing Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes or being a drone constructing Baby Grands in the Steinway Factory. Both may be considered experts in the piano, but only one plays. Or, to put it differently, an Initiate will hide the Pearl of Great Price from you, but then give it to you free for the asking, whereas the Huckster will put an ersatz pearl on display in a glass case, for sale to the highest bidder….
“Teaching by word of mouth and implication rather than assertion was the rule [of the mystic tradition]. The numerous allusions found in this field of literature such as ‘I cannot say more,’ ‘I have already explained to you by word of mouth’, ‘this is only for those familiar with the “secret wisdom”’ are not mere flights of rhetoric. This vagueness indeed is the reason why many passages have remained obscure to the present day. In many cases, whispers, and that in esoteric hints, were only the medium of transmission. It is therefore not surprising that such methods should lead to innovations, sometimes startling, and that differentiation arose between the various schools. Even the devout pupil who leaned heavily on the tradition of his master, found before him a wide field for interpretation and amplification if he were so inclined. Nor should it be forgotten that the primary source was not always a mere mortal. Supernatural illumination also plays its part in the history of Kabbalism and innovations are made not only on the basis of new interpretations of ancient lore but as a result of fresh inspiration or revelation, or even a dream. A sentence from Isaac Hacohen of Soria (about 1270) illustrates the twin sources recognized by the Kabbalists as authoritative. ‘In our generation there are but a few, here and there, who have received tradition from the ancients … or have been vouchsafed the grace of divine inspiration.’ Tradition and intuition are bound together and this would explain why Kabbalism could be deeply conservative and intensely revolutionary. Even ‘traditionalists’ do not shrink from innovations, sometimes far-reaching, which are confidently set forth as interpretations of the ancients or as revelation of a mystery which Providence had seen fit to conceal from previous generations.”
Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Fourth Lecture “Abraham Abulafia and the Doctrine of Prophetic Kabbalism.” (1941). Retrieved 29 April 2022, from https://ia800908.us.archive.org/31/items/AbrahamAbulafiaAStarterKit/Gershom-Scholem-Abraham-Abulafia-and-the-Doctrine-of-Prophetic-Kabbalism.pdf
Bear in mind that the creation of the world, of life, is also the creation of loss, of death. Or consider this quote: “…the fact that the limit of death is interposed between life and annihilation: that the physical world is solid and permanent and orderly enough for the imagination to get a grip on it, that, in short, the Creation, though part of the Fall, was the solid bottom of the Fall, and thus ‘an act of Mercy.’ Left to itself, matter would disappear into nonexistence, for nature does not abhor a vacuum but longs for it with all her being: but it is held where it is until Man rises in the full power of his Godhead and rolls it away from his tomb.” —Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Beacon Press, Third Edition, 1967, p. 225-226.