Four Four
t is premised in this book that environmental, societal, cultural, and psychological development occurs through cyclically evolving stages of growth. In psychosocial terms, humans evolve through magical, mythical, rational, and transpersonal or subtly psychic stages of development. While doing so, human consciousness at any level is purposed toward that which is always greater and more integral.
Tarot esotericism does not shy away from charged issues inherent to becoming greater, namely evolution and hierarchy. Dualistic, political beliefs have justified violations of human liberty, or the right to grow, by misconstruing psychophysical and sociocultural evolution. Belief systems marked by religious provincialism and scientific materialism have done this by refusing to acknowledge the universality of immortal and cosmic hierarchical principles. Spirituality associated with political hierarchies of control habitually arrests internal evolution; as does belief in scientific materialism that reductionistically ignores the principle of hierarchical emergence itself.
Exoteric theologians and mechanistic dogmatists do not perceive a unity of Eros and Intelligence, the Veiled and the Bright, Manifestation and Consciousness. They do not realize that form is empty and emptiness is form. For this reason, what the Tarot represents has been and will remain to be an antagonizing problem for scientific materialists, dictatorial rulers, analytic philosophers, and religious provincials.
The first half of this chapter addresses fundamental stages of hierarchy broadly recognized by metaphysical traditions thriving during medieval times and largely influenced by Neoplatonism. A six-stage template of personal and social growth or evolution outlining a natural path of spiritual realization was imaged by the original designers of the Tarot. Four Immortal states of realization were additionally depicted, facilitating conscious and corporeal identity with divine states and principles so that immortality could be known and realized. In this way, incorporeal law, such as it may be conceived, was applied to all corporeal realms within one model comprising ten nested spheres or principle-processes of reality.
In the second half of the chapter we consider historical, intellectual attempts to bridge dualistic presumptions of separate incorporeal (i.e., divine reality that is “above” and “outside” of manifested reality) and corporeal domains. These include great syntheses made by metaphysicians in late Pagan and early Eastern Christian communities. Insights regarding Neoplatonism and Greek Christian esotericism will serve to elucidate our previous brief introduction to Sufi metaphysics. We will attempt to dispel confusion about how an incorporeal God could possibly be directly contemplated and Triumphantly imaged by anyone other than the prophets Moses, Elijah, Jesus, or Mohammed.
This is a chapter dense in its coverage. It delineates core arguments regarding the meaning and development of the Tarot. The rest of this book clears ground more easily traversed. Readers finding the way too difficult might best be advanced by returning to this chapter later. In chapters 5 and 7 we will trace back the roots of mythical dualism. We will examine worldviews in which ideal law and transcendent deity were imagined to have existed before, outside of, and distinct from immanent reality, be that the First Cause or Current Infinitude. In chapter 6, we will correlate our studies with the practices of Hermetic and Taoist alchemy along with tantric yoga. By the end of our journey we will have an in-depth understanding of the Tarot’s true origins, the roots of Western esotericism, and how to realize the immortal beauty, goodness, and truth inherent to the Triumphs’ twenty-two stations of enlightenment.
Skills are finely honed, almost mastered; however, a world on the edge makes them seem so very insubstantial.
Medieval Latin Christians held to an ostensible conviction that history, both personal and worldly, was ruled by God’s timeline. It moved toward a predestined “omega point”: the end of the world as known by man. Individuals lived and died purposed toward that end, which was “cosmically” defined in terms of three domains. To Heaven would be returned those souls that chose to be saved through the agencies of Jesus the Christ and His Holy Roman Church. Delivered to Hell would be those who denied salvation, be that through immoral passion or unlawful knowledge. In Purgatory would abide the great many souls that needed time to cleanse their great many impurities. Punctuated by prophets, Jesus, Jesus’s Apostles, and saints or sectarian founders such as Paul, Kosmic history had been foretold by sacred scripture, largely in terms of a series of battles destined to end in a fiery eschatological drama. Man and Woman “fell” from heavenly Eden at the beginning of history. Confessed Roman Catholics would be “raised” back to their original home at the end of history.
In the above view, mankind evolved only in the ancient sense that human history “rolled out” through divine force manifesting God’s plan. Returning to the One through stations of psychophysical illumination was an esoteric reality far removed from most Latin Christians. As we shall see, Greek Christianity inherited knowledge of spiritual evolution from Neoplatonic teaching during the Roman Empire’s final centuries. Exoteric Christians east and west viewed growth largely in terms of physical size, particularly in the forms of material construction and political expansion. Roman Catholic bishops assumed a sociopolitical authority and necessity to expand the Catholic empire based upon concepts of Manifest Destiny; that is, belief in a God-given right and destiny to expand imperialistically. In the modern world, similar concepts are held by Christian fundamentalists, their Islamic jihadist counterparts, and atrociously misguided political leaders of both camps.
As if it had always been present, a fated path opens to the signally courageous and innocent drive of the Questor.
During most of its history, holding exclusive knowledge of God’s plan garnered through theological interpretation of Holy Scripture justified growth through war for the Holy Roman Empire ecclesia. Church leaders were sure that Christ’s vicars were destined to rule the world. Thus, the Crusades were defended as necessary and even benevolent, for they opened a door to salvation for all those souls lost in the false laws and prophecies of Islam. At the same time, the Islamic ulama championed knowledge of Allah’s plan for mankind as it was revealed to Muhammad, a Prophet beyond both Moses and Jesus. Muslim rulers felt equally justified claiming the inevitability of global dominion.
As introduced in the last chapter, the twelfth and thirteenth centuries also witnessed a profound emergence of virtue (Latin meaning, “manliness,” “excellence,” “goodness”; from vir, “man”) leading to Unity-consciousness. This is epitomized by the spiritual station Sufis call the Living: the Triumphant Hermit. Esoteric and mystical monks proceeding in lineages stemming from Eastern Christian desert hermits held much in common with their Sufi brethren. Living in the same territories and times as Christian hermits such as St. Francis, relatively powerless, poor, and often unknown Sufi mendicants understood growth not through exterior extent but through interior intent. Intention originally referred to a “directing of attention as felt consciousness.” Intentionality serves to align one’s whole life with either virtue or vice. Through intentional actualization, empirical knowledge can promote spiritual evolution and psychophysical growth. A spirit of scientific awareness and appropriate application of knowledge grew amongst premodern esoteric communities as they witnessed the universality of nature’s cycles within hierarchical contexts.
Allowed to be pure and true, the Priestess as representative of Grace on earth is naught but an advantage to the aspiring Questor.
Although powerfully propagated, Roman Catholic dogma was unable to displace the ancient and perennial observation that both nature and history are cyclic. Like the very first archaic tribes, medieval communities participated with seasonal cycles. Relative to our modern era, societal patterns were based upon short human life spans. Few were the old who had opportunity to witness the passing of more than two generations. Fantasies of securing material immortality in a sub-urban “castle” were practically unknown. Instead, cyclic nature served as the staging ground for the play of human history. From it, birth, work, family, growth, luck, catastrophe, and mystery emerged. To it, all of life was reclaimed. The soul might live eternally, in heaven or hell, but the process of life and death was felt by all as a composition of daily, lunar, seasonal, annual, and generational cycles.
It is not surprising therefore that few images were more popular in medieval art than the Wheel of Fortune. The four banners of the Wheel serve as signposts on a recursive path to Emptiness:
Sum sine regno, regnabo, regno, regnavi
I am without a kingdom, I shall reign, I reign, I have reigned
While fortunes may rise and sink, spirits move high and low, Fortune herself is blind to any of it. She is Empty, for all flow of life always revolves around her. Fortune serves to actualize Nature’s limits. In this way she essentially Curtails. She is the eye of the storm called impermanence but perhaps better known as delusion. As a principle that guides Fate herself, Dame Fortune bridges humankind with the unfathomable mystery of cosmic causation.
Medieval folk entrusted the end of the world to the book of Revelation, and the destiny of their souls to the sacraments of the Church. In everyday life, though, it was the old pagan (meaning “country-dweller”) reality of Goddess Fortune’s cycles that common folk understood determined the course of history. As in the modern world, those caught up in the Wheel of Fortune were not always happier for it. Many scientific studies have made clear that money, power, and status beyond simple necessities for one’s welfare do not increase subjectively perceived happiness and love.
In the domain of spirits, a perennial realm may be regulated and governed; no structure can be permanently maintained that is determined by personal passions, vested ideals, or controlling interests.
While the Wheel and Hermit represent fifth-stage virtue, emptiness, and gnosis, the fourth stage preceding it speaks of a psychologically integrating force that transcends the very polarity and system that produces it. The Chariot and Fortitude Trionfi tell us how to expand consciousness beyond self-and-other polarity. They represent the dominating charge that leads to a sublimely subtle and virtuous submission to Goddess Fortune and the guiding gnosis of the Hunchback as Old Man Hermit.
Man and woman, heaven and earth, transcendence and immanence, incorporeal law and corporeal reality, mind and body all represent essential and universal polarity. Paradoxically, the more a polar side is true to itself, the more it is constant in becoming the other. A pure pole must purely transmute into its complementary pole, for there is nowhere else to go and nothing else to become unless the polar identity loses itself into an other. The purer a woman is a woman, the more she has to become masculine through the force field of polar attraction. Such is the mature grace of womanhood. The purer a man is a man, the more he has to become feminine through that same field. Such is the mature grace of manhood. Thus do we always strive to become greater: first through our own polar identity, then through a full attraction to realize our other half.
All manifestation in the field-spectrum between poles is transmuting simultaneously as both poles; to an equal magnitude when in equilibrium. Life and growth, however, are marked by non-equilibrium dynamics, with any and all equilibrium being moment-to-moment impermanent. In any case, within the whole polar field’s process of becoming, essential unity of being is always everywhere maintained. This is the fundamental law of holistic causation.
By evolving through stages of inner becoming, growing into and integrating all polarity, Questors magnify their realizations of being wholly, integrally One. This is a matter of psychophysical-soulful development, which at all stages involves a Questor’s most basic polarity, whether woman or man: essential nature and vital life. Throughout the esoteric process of enlightenment, Questors realize that they and all others are already manifesting Principal Unity. Such understanding, such consciousness, serves to intensify, magnify, and illuminate blissful realization. Thus, even as the Triumphs evoke evolution and hierarchical realization, they are premised upon a metaphysical worldview of essential nonduality. Still, their unique gift to the play of consciousness is their sublime representation of evolutionary process: magical, mythical, rational, psychic, subtle, and causal stages of consciousness.
All forms contain impurities – however, purity is an inherent state of all forms; upon the dangerously narrow path of sublimated will, action teeters into an abyss of terrifying aggression or proceeds bearing the wound of devotion.
Throughout global history, in societies’ initial agricultural stage, magical cults led by shamans (the Prakrit root of which, samana, means “spiritual exercise”) discovered and magnified mana. Originally a Polynesian Maori word, mana here indicates that supernatural force which circulates throughout nature while also dwelling in a person or sacred object. Rites enabling shamans to connect and flow with mana emerged from all societies that cultivated life by seeding elemental earth. In this we find the beginnings of what might be termed alchemical awareness – insight into the life, nature, and union of polarities, starting with elements of water and fire. Unknown yet felt energy coursing through all of nature’s polarities (Sun/Earth, male/female, birth/death, hot/cold, etc.) held the secret to germination, nourishment, growth, and fruition. Mana and mind were effectively one and the same; shamans were thus civilization’s original geniuses.
Essential natures were observed by shamans to sympathetically align vital forces if alike, and dynamically catalyze them if opposed. Waters, for instance, flowed together as one upon touching, but evaporated when near fire. Attraction and repulsion were sensed as magical forces moving and guiding all parts of nature. Repulsion, for instance, could be felt as a necessary warning, a demand to hold and turn back; or it could be felt to meaningfully sustain separation between reactive states. Perceiving the world to be surrounded and permeated by magical life-force and animistic (from anima, or “spirit”) essence, beliefs gradually formed about the regenerative potency, creativity, and fecundity of earth, tribe, and individuals (fertile mothers, virgins, and shamans in particular).
The polemic that stems from disastrous opposition is surpassed by the continuous sharing from which flows a labor of love; this requires the devotion of a mare.
Magic comes from magus, a Persian Zoroastrian priest. But the term has widely come to connote society’s earliest forms of manipulation or self-conscious involvement with forces of nature. Thus does the Magician Triumph always come first in any spiritual quest. However, the two female Triumphs of Empress and Popess actually represent a society’s initial stage of growth, marked by an earthen, magical worldview.
Sensitivity to, belief in, and control of cyclic, transmutative forces served as fertile ground for the creation of myths. While first-stage rites of shamanism arose via sensory awareness of natural forces, in mature magic-based tribes a second-stage emotional cognizance of mythical archetypes emerged. Myth is a Greek word indicating a “story regarding archetypes.”
Communal processes of cognition expressed via mythmaking enabled urban societies to grow and stabilize. Through tools, artifice, and architecture empowering dance, chants, and rituals, complex levels of emotional expression were incorporated by ruling warrior and priesthood castes of every society that advanced into mythic cognition. This in turn led to forms of communication such as written signs and guiding invocations needed to quantify and qualify, measure and control communal exchanges of goods and services. Thus was urban infrastructure generated, tested, and regulated.
Historical overviews of language, art, technology, diplomacy, trade, and cultural assimilation in early civilizations elucidate the richness of societies in a mythos stage of development. The male Triumphs of Emperor and Pope represent societies’ second stage of evolution, marked by myth-making urban trade, governance, and structural development. (Pathological aspects of these stages, such as second-stage empire-building and war-making, will not be addressed here.)
Holding dear to that which is unveiled, the continuous will to Love proves to be a natural compulsion borne in freedom.
During the evolution of civilization, profound insights concerning laws of nature arose within and out of mythic mind-sets. At first, these were not cognized in terms of mathematical ratios or numerological principles (most certainly not abstract concepts such as zero and infinity). Instead, key to this development was observation of logical relationships within natural, elemental progressions, or what we will call “alchemical processes.” Priests promoting myths practiced ways of discerning essential and vital processes of relationship and change seen as manifesting and continuously influencing the courses of heaven, earth, and man.
Insight into nature’s processes of polarization and union, discord and harmony, dominance and submission produced wise revisions of complex myths. From this process emerged rational awareness. Holistic mythos then matured into coherent monistic or All-One-Spirit worldviews. Jewish tribes revealed the concept of a singular God. Chinese sages posited the unity of Tao. The Upanishads in India presented Brahman as being That One which was all-inclusive.
Once the concept of Oneness was fully formed, it was followed by ideal number-principles ultimately culminating in One-Zero, or the beginning of a new cycle. Arabian numbers and our abstract idea of zero (or cipher, from medieval Latin cifra, from Arabic sifr, from safira, “to be empty”; originally a translation of Sanskrit sunyam, the point of “Emptiness”) were integrated into late Greek philosophy, but even in early classical times a type of cosmic void-principle was imagined in terms of flux and chaos. Infinity and infinitesimal were merged in paradoxical conceptualizations of Mystery in Nature that bordered on philosophical positioning between nihilism and emptiness (the study of Diogenes and his school of Cynics sheds psychosocial light upon this).
Spirit-charge is a vertical conduit, the path of frontal descent and spinal ascent, the Chariot of the Goddess, the force of Fate.
Be that as it may, integral awareness compelled the wisest of classical sages to posit impermanence and change as constant and absolute. Their experiential consciousness of dialectical two-ness transmuted into a spiritual abstraction that had nothing to do with nihilism: awareness of unifying emptiness. As a world of Flux, the Way ultimately and naturally Rules Justly.
Aphorisms of Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, serve as an excellent example of this rational-intuitive monistic orientation. Heraclitus held that change is the eternal law of the world. Nothing remains static – all is in flux. It was Heraclitus who famously said, “one cannot step into the same river twice, for in the interval it has changed.” Heraclitus observed that the process of change results from Chaos or Strife, the conflict of oppositions within every holistic unity.
Strife is father of all things, king of all things; it has revealed some as gods and some as men; it has made some slaves, others free.
One must know that strife is common to all things and justice is strife; and all things come into being in accordance with strife and necessity.
However, Heraclitus also realized that all such striving in nature is integrated in a sublime harmony of Eros. That harmony is not apparent to the common man. It is spiritual in the way of invisible force, and is greater than the visible strivings obviously perceived. Heraclitus realized that the unity of striving oppositions is the Supreme Law – greater than either polar conflict or temporary equilibrium of such. The process of polar identity, struggle, harmony, dominance, and submission defines all change.
Heraclitus argued beyond the atomists and elemental dualists of his day. Conceptualization of separated, alienated entities (whether atoms or elements) did not generate the insight that came with recognition of the law of process. Primary to the process of polarity – dominance and submission, chaos and eros – was transmutation: the life of a substance comes from the death of another.
Heaven, earth, and man when united produce righteous Actuality realizing the brightening of beauty, the guarding of goodness, the turning of truth.
The life of fire is the death of earth, and the life of air is the death of fire. The life of water is the death of air, and the life of earth is the death of water.
For Heraclitus, as was the case for those sages preceding him, human mind was one and the same with spiritual reality. Rational dialectic and discursive dichotomies of the ego-mind did not wholly form the foundation of true insight for these early sages. Rather, a germinating yet brightly nondual consciousness arose within ancient contemplators submerged in an awareness of mythic alchemy. For these sages, a dualistic division between corporeal self and incorporeal spirit simply did not exist. An evolutionary jump from mythical cognizance, through rational intelligence, into transpersonal psychic and subtle insight was made. Sages realized that Conscious Self was both Naught and All at the same time. Rationally explaining this was the work of philosophy – the compelling “love of wisdom.”
Humanity has needed several millennia to mature into rational stages of societal development. Rational societies encapsulate complexities of magic and myth in structures of communicative logic (from Greek logos, meaning “speech,” “reason”), distilling essential attributes of natural processes into formulas and patterns. These objectified, ratio-based designs can be conceptually manipulated and then materially engineered with astounding effects upon environments, societies, and individuals.
The first three stages of social development – magical, mythical, and rational – are similar to humans’ psychological stages during their first twenty-four years of life. In psychology East and West it is commonly held that humans pass through distinct stages of physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual growth every seven or eight years. Each stage emerges from the fullness of the one preceding it. An adult between sixteen and twenty-four naturally matures her mental/rational processes. However, this is contingent upon healthy emotional/sexual development between the ages of eight and sixteen. This in turn is dependent upon the formation of sound physical growth in the first eight years of life.
Do not resist the adaptations of natural selection, the processes of worldly evolution, the thresholds of organic enfoldment, for transcendence does not arise from avoidance.
Taoists hold that after the age of twenty-four, humans lose an integral amount of life-energy every eight years until death. However, that process can be reversed, whereby humans evolve in spiritual growth every eight years. Attaining immortality is thought possible through such root-conversion of attentive consciousness. By converting or reversing the energetic process of aging, all the stages represented by the Triumphs are promoted. The conversion process itself is represented by the sixth-stage Trionfi of Hanged Man and Death. Immortality can be realized only through consciously knowing and transcending death.
Indo-European civilization at the time of Buddha and Heraclitus, twenty-five hundred years ago, began instituting schools of reason that incorporated and then evolved beyond communal myths. These schools served as vehicles for philosophic and humanistic exploration. Readers may be familiar with the great age of Socratic and Platonic philosophy. The era encompassing classical elaboration of India’s Vedic philosophy and spirituality found in the Upanishads is less widely known. Buddhist teachings rigorously distilled and advanced the Logos found within the Upanishads. Crucial to these advancements were new concepts of Emptiness, Infinity, and Unity.
For two millennia before this dawn of reasoned enlightenment, priestly castes of urban empires gradually wove rational constructs into fabrics of collective mythology. It is perhaps accurate to say that a new type of emotional sense was made of profoundly experienced and intentionally promoted myths – a type we now call mental-rational.
Natural renunciation is instilled through love of truth, beauty, and goodness; modern cynicism denies virtue while announcing nihilism in an endlessly banal loop.
The idea that rationality emerged from a cognitive process of emotionally complex mythmaking and interpretation is provocative for many analytical thinkers. It is often thought that rigorous logical mentation must by necessity lack any sense of emotionality. However, the cold calculations of logic epitomized by computers are not comparable to the impassioned rationality naturally generated by human reasoning. Understood through concepts of hierarchical emergence, the age of reason emerged from the age of myth not by rejecting myths, but by encapsulating and transforming them in a deeply original way.
Archaic, emotional objectification of magic-mythic archetypes in agricultural societies created a preponderance of Underworld conceptualization. As we will explore in the next chapter, Mother Gaia was defined by Eros, Chaos, and Tartarus, the latter being her Underworld Womb. These original Principles created an archetypal sense of Nature, Death, and Birth as wedded to veiled Mystery. This sensibility then came to be literally overwhelmed and outshined (meaning “to be more beautiful and splendid than”; “to surpass in obvious excellence”) by an ecstatic awareness of transparent Brightness. This universal dialectic naturally merged into consciousness of the One, later to be realized as Universal Unity.
In a posthumous work published in 1952, F. M. Cornford convincingly put forth a groundbreaking study entitled Principium Sapientiae: The Origins of Greek Philosophical Thought. In it, magical and mythical origins of Ionian (old Mycenaean Greek tribes, stretching from the peninsula through the Cyclades to what is now the Turkish coast) physics and Greek philosophy were made clear. Ionians, like mythic believers before them, pondered the question of how an ordered world could emerge from primal chaos. Ionians posited the existence of natural elements or principles, which though shed of any aspect of personified godliness, remained divine, immortal, animated, and powerfully active in the world.
Aware of psychic manipulations, you forestall the Quest from being stopped by any power other than that of the Transcendental; nor will it be arrested by any effort attempting to override your true Tao.
Mythic cosmology and rational cosmology merged through the following model:
1. At first, nothing was distinct or apparent. Perhaps this was Chaos; perhaps it was One.
2. There then emerged, through a process of separation, pairs of opposites. These differentiated four domains: the sky of fire, the cold air, the dry earth, and the wet sea.
3. Opposites then interacted through cyclic reunion and division. From this emerged
4. Dominance and
5. Submission; a
6. Process that is forever continuous as witnessed in birth and death, in the seasons and in the stars. Through this processional alchemy, all things are manifested, changed, and sacrificed.
This dialectic was dualistically fixed and expounded upon by Empedocles, a follower of Pythagoras. His magical rationalism influenced later Gnostics. In modern times, cosmic, philosophical dualism was renewed by Hegel. The above cosmic dialectic was also posited in a nondual, integrated manner by Heraclitus, who witnessed the continuous cycling and struggle of the world as a flux of harmonious Unity.
Heraclitus posited a cosmic model that expanded the dialectical process via concepts of Chaos, Love, the Bright, and the Way. Neoplatonists later elaborated on these absolute and transmutative aspects of the cosmos, apparent in a holistic view of dialectical alchemy and union. We examine pre-Platonic cosmology, including the contrasting worldviews of Empedocles and Heraclitus, in the next chapter.
The above model of early Greek thought served as a foundation for the basic structure of a cyclic, six-stage cosmology. Being the most elegant way to describe a cosmic dialectic holistically, similar six-stage cosmological models can be found at the core of every esoteric school in the great traditions. Variants of it are introduced throughout this book. It was incorporated in the medieval Tarot up to the card of Death. However, metaphysical hierarchy as portrayed in the Trionfi reaches beyond this cyclic model. It fully includes absolute domains beyond all cosmic cycles. Thus, the Tarot presents a worldview akin to that of great nondual sages such as Heraclitus, Gautama, Jesus, and Ibn 
rabi.
The crystallization of electromagnetic current promises eternal control powered by networked energy; such, however, will prove to be naught but a hungry ghost, maniacally recursive in a program of singularity.
Our study will make clear that those epochal metaphysicians spanned in time and place a truly great East-West tradition of nondual philosophy in which a fundamental ten-stage model of reality developed. This was most notably championed by Buddhists, Neoplatonists, Hermetic Christians, and Sufis. It was graphically relayed into the modern world via the Tarot.
Understood properly, every Triumph symbolizes a distinct level of spiritual realization while being inextricably woven into a unified whole. In its nondual worldview, the Tarot represents evolutionary stages of natural manifestation even as it portrays evolutionary levels of spiritual realization. The Triumphant series is both cyclic and linear in its addressing of material “descent” and spiritual “ascent.” Evolution’s linear process or arrow of time involves never-ending cycles of transmutation manifesting out of the Principle of Chaos. Even more importantly, the post-Death Trionfi inform us that Chaos and the changing world essentially exist to realize the Beauty of Goodness and the Goodness of Truth. In modern terms, Chaos and the world emerging from it are naught but a realization of the Transcendental Principles of Space, Time, and Law.
In previous chapters, we discovered fascinating linkage between Italian merchant-cities, Christian monastic military orders, and the mystical Islamic world of Sufis. Very few men were actually involved with the conduit of goods and ideas between Europe and the East. Mingled with an elite mix of royalty, knights, bankers, and merchants were artisans, poets, monks, mendicants, and scholars. From a second-to-third-stage perspective of diplomats, merchants, and factors, social and professional advancement occurred through multicultural associations sustained by the lifeblood of rational exchange. Artisans and poets magnified that exchange through Temperance and Love. This created a culture of high romance (though having little to do directly with Rome). We have seen that out of international, rationally communicative networks emerged relatively universal (the literal meaning of “catholic”) esoteric philosophies and spiritual associations.
Evolution is a natural outcome of potent attraction and bifurcating catastrophe; do not be petrified by the Devil, for he is naught but an agent of fluctuating reality, a continuous spiral emerging constantly as form and emptiness.
It was through this fourth-stage, network-actualized process of psychic emergence that the Tarot was created. The Tarot was unveiled as a game of named and imaged principles embodying psychic, archetypal presence. The Trionfi were viewed by their originators as reflections of universal and conscious evolutionary stages. Intuitive psyche and archetypal symbols integrated via contemplation upon and play with these twenty-two Image-Exemplars. This created a resonant mind-medium for what has been termed fourth-stage vision-logic consciousness. Modern interaction with stories, media, art, games, and harmonious design of all types continues to promote evolving psychic awareness; notwithstanding, of course, pathological aspects of this stage, such as usurpations of liberty through mind-control and addictive dependency.
In our current age, habit patterns involving critical reasoning have become relatively pervasive. This has allowed a networked mind-set to emerge, which is immersed continuously in an ocean of rich imagery, sound, symbols, and communicative exchange. Constant steams of information are broadcast into every modern community and household through multiple, highly efficient media channels. We live in an age when the one-day quantity of an urban dweller’s information input may well be comparable to the one-year quantity of a fifteenth-century villager’s. Of course, environmental awareness, human emotion, common sense, and conscious intimacy create and sustain a quality of life, innateness of meaning, and naturalness of relationship that cannot be compared with or replaced by media information, no matter how virtually immersive it might be. It is of import, however, that a daily reality of streaming concepts, images, symbols, and interpretations is now perceived and cognized by a massive number of modern adults and children.
Confusion is an energetic state that builds in friction and intensity; not content with simple clarity, it aspires to raise the roof of self-centeredness to superstructural, Towering heights.
Cleverly fragmented streams of postmodern media have little basis in nature or family. Streaming flows of sensory input disconnected from immediate patterns of one’s organic environment and intimate household might seriously disturb a premodern peasant. Without emotional and mental tools of practiced reason and objective frameworks, the plethora of non-ratified audio-visual-conceptual symbols that arise when immersed into a foreign world can produce an alienation of identity akin to psychosis. Originally, a need for travelers to cope with sudden immersion into foreign cultures was spurred by the use of seafaring vessels. This provided compelling motivation for individual minds and collective guilds to develop faculties of reason and communicative logic. From those faculties emerged symbols of universal significance – beyond weights and measurements. These were based upon communal psychophysical experiences that were transpersonal and transcultural, whether founded upon myth or technology.
Social networks marked by civility and rationality can be effectively analyzed with the aid of general system and game theories. However, patterns of feedback and nonlinear resonance that arise in civilized communities can generate wholly new holarchical (holistic-hierarchical) system-states. This is particularly so as familiar networks allow attention to freely concentrate upon psychic and subtle, transpersonal communication. Emerging from the subtle resonance of otherwise structured systems, newly generated spheres of realization cannot be causally explained or defined solely by the specific interactions of those systems. Organic social systems essentially tend toward evolved levels of subtly interdependent causality. Control of those systems is often seen as the work of politicians and marketers. However, neither environmental nor social systems can be systematically analyzed, tracked, and manipulated in a context of securing them from creative disruption, and thereby unknown influences, via a centrally controlled “total awareness program” without catastrophic consequence, much to the chagrin of pathological political and corporate strategists.
In the garden of beauty, goodness, and truth, the sap of vital essence flows up the spine of discipline, service, and meditation to egress from the crown as fruitful wisdom and compassion – the pure land of Spirit.
National military/security and international corporate logistics technically control a significant portion of the political and financial systems upon which modern consumption and production cycles are dependent. To the extent possible, all communication – including fundamental forms of goods, data, and monetary exchange – and communicators are located, tracked, and analyzed by centralized authorities so as to enable global executives to manipulate system parameters in a manner conducive to systemic growth without disruption or threat to authoritative command structures and executive control.
Systematic tracking and mining of logistical patterns coherent in twenty-first–century social activity are inherently encapsulated by the organic, developmental hierarchy of Logos itself. Logos refers to a process of “reckoning, reasoning, collecting, then speaking.” Originally denoting the principle governing the cosmos, it came to mean all human reasoning about the cosmos. Logos is a spectrum of consciousness that includes phases of dialectical tempering necessary for psychosocial welfare. We can reasonably say that humanism in general is guided by logos as principled intelligence. Common folk are familiar with logos through personal visions and exchanges of love. Such does not require “higher education,” but does necessitate growth through family and community responsibility. Third-stage logical rationality naturally transmutes into fourth-stage psychic-logical reckoning that addresses the serious issues of human relationship and societal development; including ethics, holistic responsibility, and the fate of relationships should they remain active.
Fate comes from Latin farito, also meaning “to speak,” but in the serious demeanor of Fatum or “prophecy.” The fourth-stage psychic awareness and driving charge of the Chariot is about moving third-stage rationality and logistics into a broader current of intuitive reasoning, Reckoning the Forces of nature. Here, Fate Rules, for reckon and rule both at their root mean “to direct and lead in a straight line.” The concept of hierarchy is wedded to this.
Higher dimensions of space actualize the way of immortality; do not think that energy is reduced to instances of matter via the agency of space, for what is dimensionality if not the duration of absolute Light?
Archetypal, psychological communication naturally emerges out of evolved social interaction. Such represents and transmits universal processes of growth and transcendence. Primary to this intuitively intelligent communication are transpersonal conveyance, alignment, and understanding of actualizing hierarchies.
Depicting an honorable holding of the reigns of power and psychic charge (Shakti as yogic activation or holy mission), Chariot and Fortitude in particular represent the dominant force of hierarchical emergence and awareness of such. Medieval Tarot cards are an epitomized portrayal of communicative action in the context of this awareness. Psychic charge initiates and prepares for a more advanced and potent psycho-cultural process, that of submissive and selfless Virtue.
Leading occultists of the nineteenth century, such as Éliphas Lévi, realized that the true order of the Arcana was their supreme secret. Lévi believed that the Tarot’s hierarchical meaning was understandable only by “true masters.” However, modern Tarot decks are often not recognized as representing hierarchical stages. Now viewed as being similar to astrological signs, Tarot Arcana are commonly interpreted as a network of relative personality traits and temporary circumstances.
Differing systems of “divining” derived from interpreting widely varied modern Tarot decks are readily deconstructible; as are most forms of fortune-reading. Analyzed via deconstructionist methods, consistently similar semiotic patterns are discovered in popular techniques of fortune-telling. The shell game of words exhibited in psychotherapy software (i.e., ask a question, parse the answer, repeat more questions by semantically reiterating the answers) uses comparable methods of “divining” solutions for problems. These methods do not engage concepts that reference processes involving hierarchical depth and genuine psychological growth. They certainly do not involve noble wisdom.
Venerate a Transcendental realizer through respect, gratitude, and love – the sympathetic channel thereby opened will attract the radiant serenity of that one’s presence; through continuous, devoted conduction you fully meet, then become Unified.
Tarot reading delivered as occult fortune-telling will most probably not be founded upon a fourth-stage process of conveying hierarchical insight. Essentially differing, esoteric spirituality is rooted in understanding processes that are transformative through vertical or, more spatially accurate, nested and in-depth modalities between hierarchical levels of both internal and external, psychological and environmental, cultural and social holistic evolution. The Trionfi are not merely translatable in a horizontal manner. They lose their true and important significance when their hierarchy is flattened to a single level of relationship. Astrological houses or modern fortune-telling cards are all interpreted on the same level of archetypal signification. “Being a Cancer” is no more evolved than “being a Virgo.” Similarly, the Justice card in a modern Tarot deck is not normally viewed as signifying a more evolved state of spiritual realization than, say, the Lovers card.
The esoteric importance of spiritual hierarchy – the fundamental basis of Tarot didactics – has become largely obscured. Occult interpretations of esoteric teachings have progressively degraded in the last century, although some Christian Hermetic interpretation remains exceptional. Mature rationality has been largely abandoned by Tarot interpreters in favor of syncretic mythologies. Dualistic “histories” of the Triumphs’ meanings are commonly composed from practically random selections of symbols and mythic beliefs skimmed from bastardizations of popularized traditions.
This is not to degrade the value of studying and artistically reworking archetypes, whether in postmodern forms or traditional styles. It is simply hoped that this book will awaken the reader to a world of perennial wisdom and spiritual insight that has continuously maintained a position of far more import to humanity’s health and happiness than have modern trivializations of that great tradition.
A call to charge into the Deathless is heeded in stillness, for it is sounded as a blast of indifference, a brightness of roaring fierceness proclaiming the communion of Angelic ecstasy.
True and integral psychic insight requires and then advances beyond rationalized identification with archetypal mythic entities. Throughout history, gifted individuals have transformed their states of consciousness by encompassing discriminative mind with an intuitive awareness that transcends the vision-spectrum of cognitive ego. Evolving a subtly intelligent and integrated state of awareness, such people have not simply regressed back into mythic consciousness.
One of the earliest and most influential understandings of reality to fully include a hierarchical fourth-stage worldview was taught by Gautama the Buddha (meaning “make aware”). Similar to Heraclitus’s philosophy, it was expounded in Northern India during the latter’s lifetime. According to fundamental Buddhist tenets, life – in fact, all of manifestation – comprises seemingly endless cycles of struggle experienced as suffering. The sensations, emotions, and mentations of suffering arise from a root perception of and belief in a “separate self.” The very perceptions, feelings, or thoughts that give the “self” definition simultaneously manifest an awareness of its temporality. Struggling to maintain its apparent existence, while always fundamentally knowing it will lose in its struggle, causes the “self” to suffer. There is no way to avoid this conundrum.
A great cycle of beingness exists through which we and all other phenomena constantly undergo change. Nothing is permanent; everything transmutes through phase states, whether water or fire, wood or metal, body or mind, atom or star, earth or cosmos. Every “link” in the closed “chain” of cosmic manifestation is causally interdependent with the others. Thereby, no “self” can possibly exist independent of this endlessly cycling, existential procession.
The phenomenal world is infinitely marked by temporality. In other words, time itself rules all spatial existence. Only that state of trans-existent Emptiness marked by Radiant Time – past, present, and future – or Immortal Timelessness directly realizes Nirvana or the Way of True Liberation. Such became known in Buddhist history as the Pure Land – domain of Radiant Heart. Bright Emptiness is the Way of all-pervasive Unity, which underlies the cosmic chain of causal dependency.
At the heart of Perennial Wisdom is liberating Justice, the force that causes all emergence because her Law fundamentally Is reality arising; the Purpose of Fate, she is simultaneously creator, destroyer, and sustainer.
Essential Heart-Mind is beyond all personal dependency, the root meaning of which indicates a type of hanging via a drawn, stretched, and spun thread. The Magician as Independent Questor becomes the Hanged Man who must pass Death and then face destructive abasement by the Devil. At that point, all illusion and sensibility of independence will be dispelled. If successful, the ecstatically inter-dependent Fool will then wander between mortal and immortal realms, even while remaining dangerously in bliss. Tantra as a way of “extension and stretching in a weaving on a loom” merges all strands of dependency.
To witness the Heart of this is to be Converted through Enlightened Initiation. When that witnessing-state is consciously sacrificed via a true wisdom-realized alchemy beyond all self-objective witnessing, it permanently transmutes the soul of a Questor into initial phase-states of a Golden Immortal. The Hanged Man represents the fixated witnessing state that initializes such enlightenment.
Gautama taught Self-Realization of Noble Wisdom that was paradoxically empty of any “self” other than wisdom-emptiness. His teachings make clear a way of Unity-awareness by which Questors can transcend all sense of suffering or separative self. Through awareness of past, present, and future Unity, a Questor is consciously able to become attentive to That which is beyond suffering: the Deathless. In concentrating her attention in and as Emptiness, the Questor loses her-“self” in the Mindfulness of absolute Flux from which all impermanence arises. In this way, she begins identifying with the liberated domain called Nirvana, also known as Buddha Mind. She will simultaneously embody the Beauty and Truth of Shakti Siddhi (subtle power of Goddess manifestation).
The One emanates as the Myriad and the Myriad apprehends in every moment the One – it is so simple: the World is continuous beyond all discrimination.
This process naturally begins in every human being’s first stage of growth. It is experienced by every infant, but is most often forgotten by adulthood. A knowing awareness of this first stage of enlightenment is appropriately called Right View. Once that is established, a hierarchical and noble tenfold path is embarked on. By the fourth stage of spiritual, psychophysical development – Right Action – the process of surrendering attention to Transcendental Change, Emptiness, Radiance, and Unity becomes greatly magnified. In technical terms, it intensifies via conduction of True Mind – called in various traditions Psyche, Holy Spirit, Shakti, or Shen – through one’s central nervous system.
Esoteric iconography and symbolism at its best refers to spinalbrain anatomy (along with body organs and field-channels of neural organization) in order to accurately image the development of consciousness, compassion, and wisdom. Over the course of human history, many forms of spiritual exercise have been discovered and practiced, producing varied states of consciousness as evidenced in the cornucopia of sacred world art and integrative design.
In modern times, means of opening and concentrating the current or flux of the central nervous system have included psychotropic drugs, rapid vehicular propulsion, electronic stimulation, media saturation, and sensory deprivation. Although the effects of such experiences can simulate a fourth-stage state of psychic body-mind central-nervous circuitry, they can only do so superficially, for they cannot be consciously sustained. They will not continuously permeate the complex whole-body system. They will not permanently integrate with patterns of organic growth in the human system unless such is cultivated through a great deal of practice. Although externally caused stimulation of the central nervous system may promote psychic and subtle development, it often stunts the human system from actually evolving, which requires devotion to a long-term, environmentally and communally integrated process.
Turn your back on the discriminative intellect, but know that you will plummet from Heart’s cliff – be sure you are prepared for the overwhelming recompense of Divine Accident.
Although glorified in technological warfare and in certain sports (e.g., car racing), electrochemically and mechanically stimulated experiences of daring and dangerous missions (including drug trips) are insufficient to create real heroism. Rarely does such tap and transform the root of human nature. Concentrated and continuous presence of spiritual awareness requires a phase transition of the whole body. Such transfiguring mindfulness goes beyond “initiation” experiences potentially produced by psychotropic drugs and technologies of sensory stimulation, unless they involve actual yogic cultivation.
Modern rituals of stimulating the central nervous system might be compared with primitive initiations of confronting wild beasts, ingesting powerful herbs, and fasting in isolation. Psychophysical signs of concentrated and continuous central nervous system release, such as belly-breathing with a plumb-straight lower back, evinced for example by Aborigines of Australia and Papua New Guinea, are recognized by masters of yoga. Through cultural patterns involving an immersive relationship with nature, it is possible for natives to sustain a type of fourth-stage psychophysical state, regardless of the archaic stage of their society. Such people, however, historically have lived short lives, required isolation from other tribes, and lacked rational faculties required to cope with the world outside of their provincial experience. Predators, tribal enemies, natural disasters, and diseases continue to force archaic societies to evolve through magical, mythical, and rational stages of consciousness to sustain their spiritual culture and ancestry.
Unlike the natural and “unconscious” spirituality of archaic natives, most technologically induced central nervous system activity occurs in humans maturing in the stage of rational development. Furthermore, it occurs in humans surrounded by environments explicitly designed through rational processes. This makes possible a sustainable societal emergence of fourth-stage consciousness. However, such will require traditional patterns of spirituality involving devotion, virtue, yoga, and contemplation to intensify within the mainstreams of cosmopolitan societies and esoteric circles, including those of Tarot practitioners and enthusiasts. Consciousness altered and expanded through modern techniques needs these traditional practices in order to sustain and deepen its evolving transformations. Social history shows that, always starting with individual cultivators, small communities of spiritual practitioners keep synchronistically regenerating as spiritual traditions continually transform and adapt to modern patterns and circumstances. It is therefore unavoidable that these spiritual practices will be integrated with the technological experiences unique to our scientific era.
A universal religion or way of spirituality rooted in recognition and celebration of Gaia and Eros as sentient organism and always transcendentally present creative spirit is bound to arise sooner than later. Sacraments and rites of such a Way may well in part be administered by twenty-first–century techno-shamans.
Although few in number, truly great realizers of human potential advance beyond fourth-stage intuitive intellect into the realm of aware equanimity addressed as selfless purity in mystical traditions. It is through and beyond this stage of virtue that the great religious founders moved. Such virtue has been realized by rare individuals since the inception of human rationality. Jesus and Plotinus, for example, emerged from societies still enmeshed with magic and myth, yet advanced into stages of rational consciousness. As has been defined so far, in the Tarot’s ten-stage hierarchy of spiritual realization, levels of consciousness marked by magic, myth, rationality, and intuition compose the first four stages of psychosocial evolution. Virtue signifies the fifth stage.
The fourth stage of self-actualizing, transpersonal psyche (being “beyond limits of egoic persona”) bridges the stages of rationality and virtue. Discriminative mind revealing the Way through tolerant yet impassioned reason (third-stage Temperance and Love) evolves into transpersonal psyche (fourth-stage Chariot and Fortitude). This, in turn evolves into subtle grace sublimating spiritual force and charged communion through compassionate insight into the impermanence of self, society, and nature.
The fifth stage of psychological and sociocultural development is represented in the Tarot by the Wheel of Fortune and the Hermit. The manly virtue of Dame (from Latin domina, feminine of dominus, meaning “lord,” “master”) Fortune comes into play only when the Wheel of polar striving is transcended. Fortune’s virtue then becomes a taste of direct, spontaneous realization of naturally essential presence – the bliss of divine providence. Such is felt completely, of course, only through the Deathless states culminating in Justice and Kosmic Unity, the nondual realization of the World. In any case, the Wheel at its radical core issues forth a subtly ineffable mystery. The seemingly random but actually synchronistic contingencies of Fortune arise beyond the grasp of magical, mythical, rational, or psychic faculties.
Subtle virtues are consciously promoted in maturely formed communities that base their rule of law upon rationally discerned, spiritually intuited ancestors (meaning “those which precede”). An immanent and present experience of this ancestral domain intrinsically motivates a community to be virtuous. Here, we are referring to an awareness that includes fully functioning faculties of logic and intuitive intelligence. Ancestral awareness at an archaic level of development is of a different quality.
Magical, mythical, rational, and psychological maturation magnifies the inclusiveness of ancestral awareness. Fifth-stage virtue acknowledges universal ancestry through a worldview essentially purified of gross definitions, limitations, and boundaries. Universal is indeed the key word. Militant claims of hierarchical superiority based upon exclusive ancestry have fueled the worst atrocities in history. The reduction of fifth-stage communal ancestry into second-stage dramas, be those of tribes or empires, practically defines the “fall of man.” The next chapter addresses this in detail.
Evolution of consciousness is marked by phases of ancestral awareness. It is a fallacy to equate a perennial wisdom Zen master’s awareness of ancestral presence with an aboriginal hunter-gatherer shaman’s. It must be pointed out that this does not constitute a morally judgmental statement. Nor does it represent a position purposed toward the domination of one religion, culture, or race over another. Within his lifetime, that same shaman could literally move through stages of development to emerge in a more enlightened state than the Zen master’s. This most likely would require, however, passing through mature periods of intentional rationality, integral psychology, and universal virtue. It is certain that great shamans have moved through these stages to emerge in sagacious awareness of enlightened realization – Tibetan Buddhism and Taoism, early and late, attest such realization.
The view that all cultural states are equally valid does not have to be abandoned to understand that there is a developmental hierarchy inherent to all cultures. Whether external or internal, nested levels of integral processes always exist in hierarchical relationship. Transformative development is the primary process of holarchical manifestation, hierarchical principles, and life in the cosmos. Levels of hierarchical organization inform and integrate our living world.
There is no sense in trying to “flatten” evolutionary hierarchy or arrest the inevitable continuation of evolution in the future. It is crucial to comprehend that evolution occurs via the irreversibility of time. Both cosmos and human consciousness have evolved through an arrow of time. It is not possible to reverse or stop this. Chapter 8 considers the importance of time and hierarchy in terms of scientific principles and twenty-first-century cosmology.
Further to the above example, consciousness of universal ancestry in Zen Buddhism has grown over time. During the East-West movement of the twentieth century, Zen Masters emerged with an awareness that utterly transcended Japanese provinciality, including aspects of island ancestry. This will continue to have a profound impact on the development of Buddhism in the twenty-first century.
Buddhist lineages, of course, all stem from Indian realizers. But Gautama himself stated that he stood in a lineage of previous Awakened Adepts that reached back into the very beginnings of civilization. Indo-European ancestry stretching back to Neolithic times is a particular focus within these pages. In this context, the work of Carl Schuster, extending the study of ancient spiritual culture and universality back to the very dawn of tribal humanity (100,000 B.C.), is recommended reading. In all cases, regardless of cultural divisions over ages and continents, the whole of humanity shares the organic and primary ancestry of living animals, fecund earth, radiant sun, and cosmic galaxy.
We may call that most essential state from which everything continuously evolves the Kosmic Domain. As Law, Time, Space, and Flux, it pervades an implicate order that becomes the very spirit, system, structure, and identity of the present world. That is ultimately the root of all ancestry. We must respect that upon which we are fundamentally based, and there is nothing more fundamental than That. While unity awareness is nascent even in infantile consciousness, deeper and higher levels of life realize greater intensities and resonant levels of harmony. Such is the realization of hierarchical consciousness. It is not necessary for individuals or societies to obtain top-down authoritative permission to evolve. Conscious evolution does, however, require center-out respect for the source from which one comes and the destiny to which one goes.
Rapid quickening of conscious evolution is dependent not only upon individual Questors, but also upon those Questors’ cultures, teachings, and communities. Traditions universally agree that “presto” enlightenment is not real. Wisdom that spontaneously arises does so after developmental cultivation (even if that is largely induced circumstantially during childhood). During which the advancement of discriminative faculties cannot be ignored. Nor can the intense practice of transcending the discriminative mind, once developed, be foregone. Because it is not possible to transcend that which is avoided, naive attempts to mature in spiritual realization by regressing into myth and magic while avoiding rational discernment are inevitably doomed. This is true whether attempts at avoidance are made under the rubric of Zen, Wicca, New Age, Fundamentalism, or whatever. A Questor’s success will be founded upon respect, not avoidance.
Ancestral awareness and the way of subtle communion arising from such appears simultaneously pure, essential, simply empty, and highly complex. Transpersonal, archetypal gestalts intuited via fields of vision-logic can become so deeply subtle in resonant relatedness as to appear indescribable. At communal junctures of such awareness, patterns of identity, feeling, and knowledge are spontaneously communicated via virtuous subtleties. Relating in this way is marked by selflessness and a reflective, non-manipulative disposition found at the humble (meaning “ground of Earth”) center of Jesus’s spiritual method of “loving one’s neighbor as oneself.” Transcendence of definitions normally accompanying domestic families, political parties, intellectual schools, and psychic networks is an important feature of fifth-stage consciousness.
Recondite scholasticism and symbolism, with which the present work may unfortunately be labeled, needs somehow to be sparked to life within the commons so as to preserve traditional aspects of spiritual brilliance and mystery without putting them away from public view and consideration. In the final chapter of this book, a new version of the Tarot is introduced, one that will lend itself to an advanced and highly innovative game system and method of interactive readings and cooperative play. We hope this will be able to extend the principles of immortality to new generations of Questors and game players sure to arise in the twenty-first century.
A modern example of communal virtue may be found in Mother Theresa’s order of nuns, serving the poor in India. By surrendering their self-centeredness, the sisters are compassionately able to include the most unfortunately impoverished in their work of healing. Compulsion to dominate via hierarchy is replaced with a powerful flow of forgiveness. Comfortable, self-reflecting networks of friends, workers, and caste are transcended through self-sacrifice. Virtues of forgiveness and self-sacrifice become important features of Right Livelihood. The way of subtle virtuosity contradicts all rationale of “putting oneself first” in order to “succeed in life.” Paradoxically, this is how the caste system can rightfully function. Thus is the sacerdotal (“vowed to sanctity”) caste wealthiest in terms of communal gnosis and poorest in terms of self-interest. Once more, however, let us note that actualized development of the rational mind (egoic but not egotistical) must occur before it can be transcended and sacrificed. In India, that sociocultural process largely remains in initial stages.
Unlimited by physical, emotional, mental, and psychological boundaries, subtle virtue opens a vista to the space of primordial Heart, which holistically transforms human consciousness via the Transcendental. We have referred to the transcendentally Immortal Domain in terms of Chaos, Space, Time, and Law; and Change, Being, Consciousness, and Bliss; and Strife, Eros, the Bright, and the Way. Western esotericism has also traditionally viewed spiritual transformation as emanating from divine agents: Saints, Muses, Angels, and World Adepts who all at once realize First, Last, and Really True Immortality.
Fourth-stage transpersonal self, emerging from a self-actualizing conduction of psychic fields, bridges third-stage intentional self with fifth-stage renunciative self. To be renunciative is to re-announce in one’s daily rhythms a Life of Gnosis. This is precisely what the Hermit with his light of essence and staff of vitality does. Fifth-stage livelihood is dedicated toward the curtailment of illusion and conceited charms. It is the Magician transforming as the Hermit and Hanged Man.
The empty equanimity of the Wheel’s center allows a Questor conscious dispassion regarding highs and lows of control, status, and possession. Polarities experienced in physical, emotional, mental, and psychic domains are seemingly dissolved through this empty center. A continuous charge of spiritual fate will be actively conducted by Questors psychically matching the dominant forces playing in, with, and as their life-courses. Doing so allows them to spontaneously submit to the direction of the Goddess and ancestral presence communicating and appearing through significant phantasms (about which more will shortly be said). Through Grace, Questors are afforded dispassion by the spiritual culture, teaching, and community that bless them on their way. Fifth-stage awareness is marked by peaceful equanimity. Embodied by the Hermit, with his sublimated staff of spinal virility, it initiates a Right Life of Bright Mystery.
The Wheel marks a stage of Virtue apprehended by the Hermit directly, via empty yet radiant insight or gnosis. The Hermit transforms, via soulful conversion realized in the Hanged Man and conscious Death – the sixth-stage Triumphs – into a dweller of the Deathless state. The Quickened Questor’s attention must mindfully and ecstatically engage sacrificial rites vis-à-vis a regenerative, surging Tower guarded by the Devil and his inexhaustibly heated Trident of Root, Shaft, and Head. These are the seventh-stage Trionfi exemplifying transformative flux.
The Questor’s alchemy becomes golden as it is concentrated and magnified through celestial nourishment of the Star and erotic might of the Moon, effusing above and around the head as a pearly white nimbus, and then a golden glow of transmutative energy. These two Triumphs compose the eighth stage of conscious evolution: Eros – creative enlightenment of the Muses, the Dance of the Goddess.
Finally, the Questor will realize an inscrutable, compassionately empty and enduring stage of indifferent intervention represented by the ninth-stage Exemplars of Sun and Angel. This ninth sphere of Radiance brings us once again to the primacy of Time, intrinsically transcending all spatial differentiation, and thereby any and all sense of historical self. The Arrow of Time Is Verily Just That.
Through impoverishment of the soul, spiritual evolution naturally produces Heart-realization. Such is the te (virtue-power) of the Tao Te Ching. Such is the middle way merging into Nargarjuna’s sunyata (the great Buddhist teaching of Emptiness). Such is the way of selfless merit or right life that enables the creative soul’s history-making right effort. Such is the respect for ancestral presence that merges one’s sentient storehouse (all memory, organization, patterns, and states, conscious or not) of sensation, feeling, imagery, intuition, and deeply trusted self-authentication of spiritual awareness into a flux of past-present-future continuum.
Completion of cognitive awareness occurs in the sixth stage of conscious evolution, the stage of apparent Death. Death of self vitally and essentially transforms and utterly converts attention into a vehicle for the conscious Heart, causally generating realization of the Deathless. This is the esoteric understanding of how the Immortal Kosmic Domain enters, becomes, and outshines (for in reality it already-always-is) the manifest world. This sixth stage is appropriately referred to as that of the causal-heart. The reader may find a most thorough consideration of it in the corpus associated with Ramana Maharshi, the widely regarded great sage of twentieth-century India.
We have but touched upon essential sociocultural, psychological, and esoteric stages found in wisdom ways perennially arising in all great spiritual traditions. Summarizing the attributes of stages one through six gives us:
1. Magical Sensation
2. Mythical Emotion
3. Rational Thought
4. Psychological Intuition
6. Causal Heart
In these stages, the Questor’s mind:
1. Settles
2. Regresses
3. Recognizes
4. Affirms
5. Surrenders
6. Sacrifices
This is the fourth chapter of nine (we leave the greater works of others to represent the tenth chapter) delving into the roots and fruits of Western esotericism. It is fitting that we explore deeper into realms of rationality and processional emergence of fourth-stage logos, composing a history of intuitive, visionary psychology.
This chapter began with a now-familiar affirmation of the Tarot’s nondual foundation. Evolutionary, actualizing hierarchy in the context of a priori Unity is the premise behind the Trionfi. The perennial wisdom of nondual emanation posits that our world is immanently transcendental. Insight into this paradox lies at the root of all great esoteric traditions. Occult schools of cosmic dualism, along with most exoteric religions, presume a fundamental separation between corporeal and incorporeal existence. The schism between mundane and spiritual worlds is explained via primordial mythologies, which are then extensively elaborated through rational theology or analytical rhetoric based upon epistemologies that cannot be verified experientially. In any case, there exists an intellectual contradiction inherent to cosmic dualism. The remainder of this chapter examines this, and introduces Greek metaphysicians whose life-works countered dualistic perspectives.
The previous chapter suggested how Sufis resolved the dilemma of mind being seemingly separate from body yet manifested through it. Ibn rabi’s encompassing cosmological spirituality integrated Allah’s incorporeal and corporeal essences by envisioning divine attributes as a unified, spiraling process of world emanation. From this highest of Sufi perspectives, the incorporeal becomes the corporeal, which returns to the incorporeal. Reality is an immortal and indivisible process of concomitant descent and ascent between Heaven and Earth. Most essentially, beyond all temporal and spatial definition, a priori Unity of Being marks the Way of Allah. Such is an esoteric spiritual worldview wherein innately one’s human life is Divine. The exoteric material worldview prevalent in Western history has tended to be far more dualistic and far less positive.
For most people, third-stage mentation defines one’s identity as a thinking self. This self is generally presumed to possess an independent, seemingly uncaused existence. At times it is thought of as a transient ego. Other times, it is thought of as an immortal soul. There exists a critical philosophical problem to this third-stage view of self and others. Discursive thought posits an existence to itself, separate from its body, environment, or even subtle psychology. This “soul-mind” then seems to stand potentially independent of all corporeal existence. It appears to itself as having incorporeal origins. Questions then arise: Where does my incorporeal soul come from? How was it trapped “inside” my corporeal form? As two different realities with fundamentally different laws, how is it possible that the incorporeal and corporeal coincide with me? Which is the real me: the mind or the body? Does the mind exist prior to the body? Will it exist after the body disappears?
Scientific materialists reasonably suggest that the thinking self can be explained via neurological and chemical functions of the body. There is no need to posit a separate soul. However, the organic complexity of the human system does not lend itself to mechanically reducible equations of cause and effect. Thus, scientific materialists have not been able to reduce mind to a series of algorithms and physical functions. Furthermore, it remains a mystery to scientific thought how stages of emergent organization, most certainly including all levels of consciousness, are actually generated. This is because complexity develops through a flux of chaos, with life emerging inexplicably – at least in linear logistical terms. In chapter 8, we will review the state of scientific thought regarding this. The Tarot represents, as does esotericism in general, a worldview beyond and greater than that afforded by discursive rationality.
Interior development of human psyche is as significantly evolutionary as external development of human physique. Psyche primarily denoted individual life to the early Greeks. It was what distinguished a living body from a corpse. Psyche later became a reference for the thinking self and all forms of reason that manifested as thought. The now-common tendency to separate thinking-self from sensing-self, and both from feeling-self, is a recent human development. Certainly, that separation was not commonly perceived by early Greeks for whom we have evidence regarding patterns of visual and verbal thought.
One detects with Pythagoras an intellectually formalized commencement within Greek society of a mind/body split. Pythagoreans developed a principal of psyche imbued with significant independence. To them, psyche was a governing and unifying soul controlling one’s otherwise chaotic body. This mind/body dualism was carried forward by Plato and set in stone by Aristotle, permanently and profoundly affecting Western thought. A post-Aristotelian overemphasis upon the superiority of mental worlds created a pathological attitude opposed to mythically emotive, bodily felt worldviews. Manichaeism and Gnosticism in general may be viewed as a reaction to this, several centuries later. Equally, self-obsessed rationality as manifested in socially legitimized group mind-sets became anxious to deny or control emerging psychic and subtle states of social consciousness and worldviews. That struggle continues, pushed to its limits by twentieth-century analytic philosophers or rhetoricians (few proponents of this clever school actually identify with a “love of wisdom”) in what has amounted to a millennial attempt at arresting the very heart of Indo-European wisdom-teaching.
It is of interest to compare the Greek concept of psyche with the three forms of life-energy in Taoist thought. Like the early Greeks, Taoists bridged mystery and mythos with empirical experience. From that shamanic convergence, rationality arose. Spiritual insight was derived from each stage of development. Physical, emotional, mental, psychic, and subtle worlds were viewed as one in the Tao.
Vitality, energy, and spirit (ching, ch’i, shen) are all living aspects of the Tao. Nowhere in Taoist psychophysiology is discriminative mind viewed as existing separate from the sensing-feeling realization of vital life and essential nature. In the process of circulating energy (ch’i kung), mental faculties are supremely awakened; as are subtle-psychic powers, once internal cauldrons have sufficiently sublimated energy into spirit. Psychophysical cauldrons as concentrated neuro-chemical-breath centers of ch’i and the generation of vitality, energy, and spirit as experienced and understood through Taoist yoga are addressed in chapter 6.
Western schools of philosophy and theology still wrestle with the dualistic problem of mind separate from body, heaven separate from earth. The root of Descartes’ belief, I think therefore I am, can be found in Plato’s dualistic rationality. Plato’s Ideal Forms existed in a realm quite distinct from the corporeal world. Plato did not imagine anthropomorphic gods hanging high on Mount Olympus. Nor did he posit divine elements defining and forming cosmic space. Instead, to Plato there existed a corporeal world of vital manifestation presumably separate and distinct from an incorporeal domain of essential ideas. It was problematically left to Aristotle to bridge these worlds.
Much later, Neoplatonists led by Plotinus and Proclus transcended dualistic presumptions by positing a Universal One emanating as the Myriad or World as we sense and feel it to be. In that manner, they may also appropriately be called Neo-Heracliteans. Given that the currently assumed Big Bang scientific cosmological theory suggests a model of the universe that is remarkably similar to this, it is somewhat surprising that Neoplatonism is so unknown amongst the general populace. As its corpus was progressively dropped from European and American academies of higher learning during the past century, its underlying themes of unity and emanation were popularly embraced by educated Westerners in terms of Buddhist and Taoist philosophy. As indicated below, Neoplatonism and Taoist Buddhism (integrating Tao with Buddha Mind as Storehouse Consciousness, and Tantra with nondual Vedanta) have transculturally resonated and interpenetrated since Neoplatonism took form.
Greece’s first philosophical sect was founded not by Socrates and his successor Plato, but by Pythagoras. (Apparently, Heraclitus’s philosophy did not lend itself to a sectarian movement. Plato said, “There is no such thing as a master or pupil among the Heracliteans, but they spring up of their own accord.”) Pythagoras’s life is legendary. Marked by ecstatic visions and powerful practices of purification, magi such as he clarified the magical-mystery rites of Indo-European civilization via ritually abetted processes of rationality.
In sects like that of the Pythagoreans, philosophers would embark on mystical quests for spiritual insight, knowledge, power, and immortality. The Questor’s way has perennially been witnessed as sixfold. Anyone who has read (or seen) J. R. R. Tolkien’s well-known trilogy will recognize these stages, for they are embedded in the six books of The Lord of the Rings. Briefly:
1. Questors settle their minds and celebrate life at home, taking refuge in a circle that elects to truly view Mystery.
2. A journey is then undertaken into the unknown. Danger and freedom are experienced, bringing Questors into a state demanding resolve.
3. A need and responsibility to inquire grows to maturity. This is reinforced through expanding and stabilizing associations and spoken allegiances.
4. An active charge, given to each Questor by spiritual elders, drives the Questors’ Fates. Unique and personal, a Questor’s mission involves a continuous, concentrated conduction of supranatural, psychic presence.
5. Advanced Questors cross into a land of total, freakish control, wherein authoritarian structures and possessions exist solely for their own sake as futile attempts to avoid death. Apparently dark, morbid, infinitely repetitive, stagnant, and meaningless, this realm must be lit by the seemingly inconsequential light of each Questor’s soul and mission. Here, Questors see their life works. Through ancestral destiny, each Questor is subtly, accidentally, and synchronistically directed.
6. Finally, every Questor must meet Death. After a seemingly unending effort, Death takes its rightful toll, transforming the now fully initiated into they who know, who have seen, who are truly insightful. From this will come a blessed reign of Noble Wisdom and resurrection into an ecstatic kingdom.
Each member of a Questor’s Order is marked by her or his stage of advancement in this hierarchical quest. Through nondual realization, the post-quest stages of Resurrection, commencing with the Tower and culminating with the Angel, become the most important of esoteric realizations. Cultivation of Immortal Principles is the discerning mark of spiritual enlightenment; it guides all communal history of transfiguring Beauty, transforming Goodness, and translating Truth. Tolkien spent much of his life considering this in terms of angelic avatars such as Gandalf, mythic races such as the Elvenkind, and cosmological domains that were essentially deathless.
The dualistic path, in contrast, believes ultimately that only through physical death can the world be transcended. Thus, resurrection is defined solely through negative concepts such as reincarnation or, in our modern day, cloning. These are “negative” because the world is what the soul supposedly wishes to permanently escape, not be reborn into. The mystical quest of the Pythagoreans was purposed toward immortality in a nonmaterial realm of perfection. Pythagoreans did not view heavenly domains as being unified with earthly realms.
We will examine Pythagoras’s unique and creative blend of mythic-rationalism through the teachings of his successor Empedocles in the next chapter. Pythagoras’s philosophical dualism was advanced in numerous ways by Plato. Plato’s corpus highlights a maturation of Greek rationality. However, Plato was neither unaware of nor dissociated from the mythic mind-set of early Greek society. Nor was he unable to intuit the vision-logic states that were to be championed by Neoplatonists centuries later. Nevertheless, his habits of mind, as exemplified in his Socratic dialogues, were rooted in discursive thought. Through Plato, an original paragon of speculative logic, European civilization was initiated into the elegance of rational cultivation and study.
Plato was ultimately succeeded by the Neoplatonists, foremost of who was Plotinus. Put very briefly, by integrating the logos and theurgy of Pythagoras with the wisdom of Heraclitus, Plotinus rectified Plato’s dualistic tendencies through an intuitive awareness of Unity. In the many centuries separating these men, Jewish, Christian, and Gnostic beliefs in mind/body dualism were codified. (These too will be treated in the next chapter.) Sectarian differences produced a logical set of dualistic propositions, the bulk of which have been lucidly deconstructed by Ioan Couliano in The Tree of Gnosis, his treatise on Gnosticism.
The present book argues that fathoming nondual emanationist theory is essential to a true understanding of the Tarot’s origins. This theory is well documented in philosophical schools both East and West. However, university philosophy departments no longer commonly teach it, even though for centuries Neoplatonism served as a bedrock foundation for Western philosophy. In North America, nondual philosophy went underground, in part because it became politically unacceptable in conservative Christian-influenced academic circles to posit cosmic unity.
More broadly, secular analytic philosophy departments of the late twentieth century adhered to a position of wisdom-denial. They apparently preferred rationalized ignorance to intelligent intuition regarding any field of knowledge or reality that was not definable by materially reducible, linearly measurable, and randomly determined interactions. Relatively existent event-objects were defined by egorational manipulations and logistics. That strongly limited set of logistics was arrogantly presumed to apply to every aspect and domain of the Universe, including the very essence of Time and Space; as if “scientific mind” from that point on “knew” all that there would ever be to know. Yet, materialistically dogmatic observers affecting the observed did not consider what happens when the methodology of observation is applied to the analytic observers themselves. Succinctly put, strictly analytic logicians have always feared genuine contemplation. By observing itself, mind inevitably transforms its own state of consciousness and realization of universal principles.
Many “hard” scientists became locked into a course of linear and mechanical theories that were inadequate to address necessarily holistic scientific fields of study such as ecology, anthropology, sociology, psychology, et al. That course is on its final leg to an inescapable termination. Fortunately, a new science has been progressively updating the philosophical underpinnings of modern scientific thought. Twentieth-century physics and emergent fields regarding chaos and evolution, for instance, have been slowly awakening philosophers of science to a new dawn of interdependent and holistic complexity.
Regarding earlier theories of science, we must turn to Aristotle, tutor of Alexander the Great, to discern the source of Christian theology’s primary rationale behind its dualistic solution to the body/soul dilemma. Aristotle posited a psychophysical apparatus so subtle that it almost touches the ineffable nature of the soul, and yet remains associated with the subtle physiology of the human body. Located in the heart, this organ of the psyche, called the proton organon, translates physical sensations and thoughts arising from them into phantasms (meaning “something apparently seen but having no physical reality”; originally from the Greek concept of “making visible”). In modern physiology, we may identify this proto-organ with a hormonal gland connected to the right side of the heart that essentially influences all of the endocrine system, beginning with the pineal and associated midbrain glands. This gland was only recently scientifically verified.
Discriminated linearly as a series of causes, it was for ages posited that through the psyche the soul transmits vitality to the body, which disintegrates once it quits doing so. According to Aristotle, the soul transmits vital activity to the body solely by means of the proton organon. On the other hand, the body’s five sensory organs can also communicate to the soul via the same cardiac apparatus, which codifies sensory data so as to make it psychically comprehensible. Called phantasia or “inner sense,” sidereal (meaning “of the stars,” “celestial,” “divine”) mind transforms sensorial data via phantasms so as to be perceptible to the soul. This traditional understanding lends reason and cause to the fantastic imagery used in Tarot decks.
Throughout medieval times, it remained the Roman Catholic Church’s stance that the soul could only apprehend what was first converted into a series of phantasms. This position was strongly reinforced by St. Thomas Aquinas’s affirmation of it in his Summa Theologica, a late-thirteenth-century Latin “theological summary” targeting educated laymen of all religions. Drawing upon Aristotle, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, and ecumenical Islamic and Jewish scholars of Thomas’s time, Summa Theologica became the primary authoritative source for Roman Catholic theological law after the Bible.
Extending these beliefs, in esoteric Christianity it was deemed crucial that stations of Divine realization be converted into a series of phantasmic images. Jesus’s Passion, portrayed in the Stations of the Cross, is a well-known depiction of a sacred journey culminating in ultimate immortality. Evidence of the great traditional sacrificial quest is found in the Catholic Stations’ culminating fifth, sixth, and seventh stages: Ninth Station – Jesus Falls the Third Time (the inevitable turn of the Wheel); Tenth Station – Jesus Is Stripped (the naked truth of the Hermit); Eleventh Station – Jesus Is Nailed to the Cross (the witnessing of the Hanged Man); Twelfth Station – Jesus Dies on the Cross (the destiny of Death); Thirteenth Station – Jesus Is Taken Down from the Cross (the material-bound otherworld of the Devil); Fourteenth Station – Jesus Is Laid in the Tomb (the resurrecting portal of the Tower).
Tarot readers often do not realize that the hierarchical Trionfi also portray stations of the Sacrificial Way Beyond Death, composing in transpersonal images the perennial Quest of Immortals. They do this in a context that more closely resembles original Dionysian Greek and Eastern Mystery processions than a Western Christian interpretation of them.
This positive importance placed upon sacred imagery in the context of an Immortal Journey or Mission into Death’s Domain and the Deathless Beyond contradicted Judaic and Islamic laws that were opposed to any anthropomorphic visualization of divine reality beyond that which the Prophets themselves had revealed. Elijah’s and Mohammed’s Angelic Chariot rides into Heaven served as the primary mystical images of divine ascension for Judaism and Islam respectively. At the height of medieval scholarship, Jewish and Islamic metaphysics converged through a more abstracted understanding of spiritual stations, taking form as a series of archetypal names. These were epitomized by Ibn rabi’s processional chain of divine attributes, which this book suggests was imaged by way of Eastern Christian influence in the first half of the fifteenth century as twenty-two Image-Exemplars.
We examine now the crux of exoteric Western philosophy’s primary attempt to resolve the body/soul dilemma. Originating with Aristotle, it was codified in Gnostic and Christian theology. Aristotle needed to derive a rational, effective structure that could coherently define the causal links between a human’s divine nature (soul) and mundane life (body). Furthering his concept of a subtle proto-organ, he resorted not to unifying the two (Heraclitus’s and Plotinus’s solution), but rather to positing a “third self”: a psyche distinct from both body and soul.
In Christianity, this triad was translated as the hypostatic Trinity of Jesus (body), Holy Spirit (psyche), and God the Father (soul). As ideal souls that had fallen into sinful forms of physicality, humans were reduced to acquiring knowledge of the Truth (i.e., of God and his Angelic realms), beyond what is revealed in scripture, at best through identification with psychic phantasms. These were seen as messages of the Holy Spirit; however, they were also frequently interpreted by authorities as communications of Satan.
Although Aristotelian metaphysics was incorporated into Catholic doctrine, Christian theology departed from it by necessity. Christians held that the physical world’s estrangement from the spiritual domain could only be mitigated by God through Jesus, the singular earthly form or body capable of fully permeating the fallen world with Holy Spirit. Through the agency of Jesus, or God-made-Man, the Church was founded to continue the effort of infusing, if not all of the material world including mankind, then at least a chosen few with God’s Spirit. Thus did Heaven come down to Earth.
Quite differently, Aristotle appears to have viewed Intellect itself as being wedded to, if not identifiable with, the essence of phantasm. (Perhaps this attitude affected his role as educator of Alexander the Great, an unusually intelligent ruler whose missionary fantasies drove him into madness and death even as it changed the course of East-West history.) Regarding that view, Søren Kierkegaard (early-nineteenth-century Dane, father of religious existentialism) sarcastically remarked that pure thought must then be a phantasm. One might argue that Plato at times appears to have believed just that.
For Plotinus, pure thought, or contemplation of contemplation itself, was the living root and essential seed of the world. Radiant Intellect is not divorced from physical reality; it emanates as Wisdom-Soul, which in turn emanates as the World Soul and Flux of the Kosmos.
Neoplatonism was a major catalyst for Renaissance arts, humanities, and sciences (including Newtonian physics), but it was constantly reinterpreted and then co-opted by clever dualists of an Aristotelian ilk. Innate to fourth-stage archetypal, psychic awareness is intuition of an inherently unified, hierarchically ordered, transmuting world. That awareness emerges from mature, discriminative intelligence. When psychic identifications lose their universal, hierarchical, and archetypal essentiality, they are reduced to random and relatively meaningless fantasies. These all too often become purposed toward de-structuring ethical responsibilities.
As the Renaissance dawned in Italy, intellectual and popular focus turned to phantasmic masques (from Italian maschera, from Late Latin masca, referring to “specter” or “witch”) and Dionysian processions; Venice’s triumphant pageants and pre-Lenten carnevale, for instance, were renowned. It has been speculated that the Triumphs emerged from these. Neoplatonic imagery and symbols began to effuse into Venetian culture during the thirteenth century, when Venice and France ruled the shrunken Byzantine Empire. As was highlighted in chapter 2, Venice maintained close relationships with the Greek world right up to the fall of Constantinople, the Council of Churches in Ferrara, and the Tarot’s emergence.
Greek esoteric iconography had been incorporated by Gothic artisans into both Northern and Southern European architecture during Crusading centuries of interaction with the East. The Trionfi as a set of images was not, however, composed of popular Italian icons, even though a few of its subjects were well known (e.g., the Wheel, Love, Death, Emperor, and Pope). Greek mythology, metaphysics, and Sufi symbolism contained in the early Triumphant images, as seen in this book, more clearly reflect a contemplative knowledge of the perennial wisdom traditions of eastern lands. That knowledge was largely imported to Italy and France during the fifteenth century.
During the late medieval period and throughout the Renaissance, vision-logic explorations psychologically enabled cross-culturally educated men to dominate philosophical and religious circles. In Muslim spheres, Sufis and scholars learned in Persian and Greek arts and technologies became a substantially dominant influence, strongly affecting the development of Western science that was to occur after Europe’s Renaissance.
In Christian Europe, mass identification with and masterful humanization of the phantasmic led to wealthy patronage and societal appreciation of transcultural, interdisciplinary Renaissance men such as Leonardo da Vinci. Building upon this, visionary scientists like Nicolaus Copernicus began transforming whole societal worldviews that had been fully established by Roman Church authorities. This allowed for a Christian reformation to charge forward, most famously led by Martin Luther, a man endowed with forceful psychic faculties. Scientific speculation then exploded in what has been called the Copernican Revolution, as worldviews were literally transformed, initially via Galileo’s telescoping technology and Muslim navigational techniques. Leading into a newly enlightened era, exploratory societies formed, including London’s Royal Society for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge, which was brought into prominence by the famous alchemist Sir Isaac Newton (whose lack of Eastern studies and misunderstanding of internal alchemy caused him great harm).
Less known, but as important, mass embarkation upon phantasmic exploration fostered a highly risky, trailblazing movement comprising educated, pantheistic women. It was originally through such women, via the safe (and highly militarized) enclaves of Italian courts, that the Tarot was intuitively played and promoted. We may imagine witty bards serving as game-masters and “psychic mirrors,” magicians and fools, to courtly ladies’ creative imaginations and questing fantasies. Those courtly games grew to become serious and substantial in the following centuries, creating dramatic alchemies that defined sociocultural advancement as much as generals’ war games did.
During this developmental era of phantasmic re-visioning and transpersonal psychology, there were those who embraced radically dualistic beliefs akin to Gnosticism. In modern parlance, these spiritualists tended toward a schizophrenic split of self-identity. All physical involvement of psyche was viewed as being false, and thereby inherently spiritually decadent. In such a state, fantasy was secretly held to be of a higher reality. Through a twist of logic, this then justified breaking all types of sexual and social mores. We will revisit this in the next chapter, but reference to the ill-fated Giordano Bruno is here apropos.
Giordano Bruno was adept at the art of memory, based on intricate control of phantasmic imagery. In the sixteenth century, he introduced Renaissance intellectuals to a psychic technique purporting to bridge the mind directly with Eros without intermediary images and bypassing the use of an Aristotelian organ of phantasm. He astutely intuited that identification of one’s personal soul with Eros, being the Intellect’s true soul, would be the most direct path of divine realization. This might be compared to yogic exercises that transpersonally dissolve mental activity or limited senses of self into Shakti activity that opens mindful awareness to realization of Universal Self.
Bruno’s method refined the mind’s creation and use of imagery via intricate subtleties to facilitate complex memory processes. He then claimed a mysterious ability to remember the Spiritual Domain by progressively transcending any use of intermediate images. Effectively, he identified Eros with emptiness as cessation of all fantasy. His concentrated psychic process of imagination and fantasy, followed by transcendence of that very process, was unusually intense and subtle in its practice. Techniques of Buddhist meditative concentration (dhyana, ch’an, or zen in India, China, and Japan, respectively) purposed toward cessation of mind-activity might be seen as comparable. India has a long history of rigorous memory training, originally based on oral transmission of the Vedas. In Europe, however, it appears that no one during Bruno’s time was able to succeed in duplicating his methods.
Bruno was a rational genius with a type of photographic memory. By all accounts, he was enormously egoic and rude. (Ego and rational thinking initially develop together, often making pathological egotism unusually “smart.”) He felt that upon transcending his thinking self, which he apparently experienced through concentrating all of his attention via efforts involving photographically detailed fantasies and erotic engagement with women, he could effectively accomplish god-realization. His conflation of psychic and subtle stages of realization with that of divine perfection cost him his life. He was burned at the stake for his mastery of psychic powers, belief in infinite worlds, and excessive social-sexual-political hubris.
Bruno’s phantasmic techniques of visualization and subtle association have been periodically re-engineered by spell-casting occultists and occasional psychotherapists. In the modern era a number of influential cults have derived their power from similar systems, which are often used as subtle forms of mind-control based upon erotic suggestion.
Mass identification with the phantasmic also renewed communities convinced that transcendent soul, spirit, domains, or principles did not actually exist. Etheric experiences of invisible spirits were thought by uneducated pagans to be caused solely by natural essences of earth. Psychic impressions and projections were associated with temporal, localized phenomena with neither universal binding nor hierarchical order. While perhaps sounding familiar to readers interested in Wicca, this mind-set did not include modern psychophysiological interpretations of subtle experiences, natural fields, and altered states of consciousness. Crude rationalization of animistic beliefs wove an anti-rational cloth of superstition and ritualistic magic that shrouded a confused body of archaic, pre-mythic paganism.
Modern, educated readers, by virtue of their agreement with known and undeniable aspects of nature, generally find simpleminded pagan ways of thinking to be obviously ignorant, even if valid in their sociocultural contexts. There are, of course, hundreds of millions of people today who have yet to advance in their psychosocial development to a mythical level of consciousness. India supplies us with a good example; a great many tribal people have almost no knowledge or awareness of Hinduism’s mythical pantheon of deities. They instead remain in an aboriginal state of mind and culture that preceded development of the Vedas and its subsequent mythic culture. Upon immersion into their primitive environments and daily rituals, Westerners with romantic notions regarding animistic tribalism readily come to appreciate the importance of mythos as an integral step toward rational education and psychosocial development.
Though ofttimes called pantheistic (as previously mentioned, meaning literally “all gods,” a spiritual worldview identifying Deity with the Universe and all of its phenomena), magic-based worldviews do not hold to the unity of all being, which is necessarily an integral part of pantheism. Historically, Wicca and other forms of paganism lacked maturation of third-stage rationality; they thereby did not develop a metaphysics involving principles of universal law, energetic alchemy, causal creation, or present unity.
Female spirituality emphasizing the myriad evolves through integration with male spirituality emphasizing the one. In the process of understanding unity through diversity, the world is effectively rationalized. The Tarot evinces such integration. Although a nondual Goddess tradition emerged in India, there is scant evidence of it developing in European cultures with the possible exception of the Virgin Mary cult in its advanced stages of devotion. Many modern-day neo-Wicca followers are unaware of this, adhering to a generalized Eastern understanding of Yin-Yang/Tao unity without delving into the multicultural history of East-West spirituality and philosophy (early or late).
In transpersonal and integral psychology it is understood that we are inherently by nature an integrated, unified psychophysical-mindful self. Psychophysical Self from a Trionfi perspective is not deemed inherently lacking in beauty, goodness, or truth, for it is understood to really be the Whole World by virtue of its source and destiny. The Universe emanates (as in its original Latin meaning “to flow out”) as Time-Space-Flux. That then emerged through developmental formation as a Sun-Earth microcosm evolving into biological identities and Heart-minds of sentient, intelligent organization manifesting as psychophysical bodies.
We note here that the technical term emanation does not universally apply to all philosophical schools East and West that base their understandings on cosmic unity and emergent developmental processes. Taoism, it certainly can be argued, logically derived its causal worldview in a way that cannot be identified analytically with Neoplatonism. Fundamental differences in language and semiotics produce significantly distinct approaches to mythic and rational cosmologies of Unity. Over differing generations and cultures, Neoplatonic teachings themselves varied greatly.
In any case, both Taoist and Tarot Adepts opposed conceits that the physical is impure, the soulful is ideally incorporeal, and the human psyche is the only cosmic bridge between the two. Nondual understanding does not condemn sensual sexuality (or feminine power), does not deny militant passion (or male sovereignty), and does not fear natural fantasy (or creative communion). Such a view embraces Immortal Logos as already embodied – right here, right now. The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. Love your neighbor as yourself.
Successful Questors value the art of seeing and identifying that which is beyond them and within them. Like archaic natives assimilating the natural world of their environments, modern-day Questors become what they meditate upon. The best practice is initially one of not this, not that – concentrating on the emptiness or temporality of all sensation and thereby the Emptiness of Self. Once such insight meditation (or vipassana) is established, that which intuitively embodies an integrated identifiable, transcendental, and attractive wholeness will serve as the best focus for a Questor’s meditation.
That most often may be a living being in a spiritual environment, but history affirms that sacred art, sanctuaries, media (books and beyond), and other agencies of spiritual realization can also serve to coherently align and integrate a Questor’s psychophysical consciousness. Lives have been transformed through contact with sacred icons. Fantastic images of cosmological forces have been formed and energetically utilized throughout human history: shamanistic masks, phallic dolmens, yogic deities, stone temples, primal hieroglyphics, magical talismans, microcosmic mandalas, etc. Even still, ultimately it is only the Spontaneous Ecstasy of no-self, no-other that liberates beyond objects of meditation.
Wisdom reflected in the Tarot holds to the essence of Hermeticism: as it is above, so it is below. The psyche in its identification with phantasmic imagery not only “connects” the divine with the mundane, as Aristotelian or Christian theology would have it. It actually realizes the likeness between the two. Understood in this way, conceptualization of distinct psychic spheres or stages is rectified and integrated with Hermetic and Neoplatonic nondualism. Let us consider this further.
During the period of the Tarot’s creation, European artisans advanced beyond depicting the sacred themes to which they had been traditionally limited. Humanistic portrayals of psychic identity were revealed via idealistic iconographical visions. Late medieval artisans drew prominently upon pagan Greek iconography. Byzantine Christians were by far the preeminent masters of this art. Humanization of spiritual knowledge then continued into the European Renaissance, with psychological representations of human identity becoming progressively more realistic and mundane.
Psychosocial transformation of identity brought about by phantasmic art is a germane topic concerning the Tarot. Western Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant, has traditionally relegated arts involving magical and mythical fantasy to the sphere of sacrilege (from Latin sacrilegus, “one who steals sacred things”) unless created specifically to serve church functions. Control of image-making in terms of societal influence can indeed readily place power into the hands of corrupt men. The twentieth century was witness to a dark, propagandistic side of manipulative imagery. Media control and fascism make for a nefarious combination.
More recently, promoted by profit-maximizing commercial centers of image-making, attentive viewing of psychic and subtle visions of essential nature and vital life has been largely displaced by mindless consumption of sexual and violent fantasies propagated through many global media spaces. In varying forms, banal conceits involving egoic projection and possessive control appear far more prominently than do insights into culture, intelligence, or beauty.
Investigation into the manipulative social and political uses through which psychically catalytic images may be abused will be left to the reader. It is important to state simply: Neither the origins nor the use of Tarot symbols were associated with a debased manipulation of mass or personal psychology.
Leading up to Renaissance humanism and the Tarot Trionfi, a rich tradition of pagan sculpture developed during the Gothic period (twelfth to fifteenth centuries) of European cathedral building and spiritual design. Mythic gods, angels, gargoyles, and fantastic environments were crafted into the most sacred spaces of Europe. These forms were purposed toward an edifying, actualizing transformation of a worshipper’s psyche. Stained glass windows when suffused with light represented the pinnacle of Western Christian iconographical art.
Neo-pagan iconography advanced beyond secret crafts of stonemason guilds during the period directly preceding the Tarot’s emergence. Byzantine craftsmen and esoteric designers were at the forefront of this movement. In the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, the Eastern Christian art of miniature, card-size icons (from Greek eikinai, meaning “to be like”) reached its peak in terms of technical excellence and spiritual grace.
Enlightened late Byzantine embrace and open portrayal of spiritual iconography had not been the Christian norm. In the centuries following the life of Jesus, Christian leaders had vehemently rejected association with divine images. They felt that God could not be viewed with shape and thus any image of Him would be an image of a false god. In this, they followed transcendental Judaic tradition. It was deemed that spiritual images served as homes for evil demons, no longer viewed as the creative daimonic forces found in Hellenic culture. Knowledge of such images could only contribute to the construction of profane artifices, epitomized in Judaic stories by the Tower of Babel.
Judaic and Islamic iconoclasts maintain that imaging the Divine in human form is heretical, for only the Prophets have been ecstatically raised to the heights of angelic vision. Under iconoclastic doctrine, familiar representations of Heaven, God, Angels, Saints, Prophets, etc. are replaced by geometric symbols (e.g., crosses, stars, domes, lattices, mosaics, branches, etc.) that are thought to resemble aspects of universal perfection and thereby to indicate Divine presence. In Christian history, a Greek Orthodox period in seventh- and eighth-century Byzantium was famous for its iconoclastic dogma.
The medieval Latin climate regarding sacred imagery was not iconoclastic, per se. Images of Jesus, his Passion, and his Resurrection were thought to be truly reflective of Divine Nature. Nonetheless, concrete representation of spiritual realms was an intensely regulated business.
To Church believers, divine law revealed in the Bible had been written in stone by the Prophets and Apostles. Beyond the Bible, it was thought that discernment of Truth was best left to the ecclesiastical hierarchy ruled by the Pope and fellow Bishops – Jesus’s spokesmen on earth. It was largely feared by Western Church hierarchy that direct mediation with spiritual realms through refined use of the psyche would inevitably and quite possibly unknowingly be affected by Satan, archenemy of the Church. Psychosocial domination by Church hierarchy (who justified their psychic and mental dogmatic enforcement and restrictions as necessary guidance) might then be disrupted. Religious icons were thus limited in design and usage, primarily to churches, approved placements within family homes, and special environs such as cemeteries.
In general, the material world was dualistically equated with the “dark”; demons were regarded as merely mirror images of matter and evil. Emanationist views of the Kosmos as a spiritual continuum that included all manifestation of material embodiment and earthly nature were condemned as pantheistic. Dualistic Christian positions strongly influenced by Gnosticism conflicted with nondual pantheistic positions roundly influenced by Neoplatonism. The latter pointed to inherent contradictions in supposedly mono-theistic Christian theology imbuing a demiurgic Satan with control of the world.
In Christianity, God has historically revealed himself only to a select few. This has been a matter of grave political importance for those few claiming exclusive revelation. An artisan who can create images in the likeness of Divine states can potentially become a source of significant authority. Many ecclesiastics have had a personal stake in not recognizing such authority. Powers inhering in humans’ abilities to define and reflect cosmological processes used to be terribly feared. Church rituals attempted to stake total claim to such powers; including all powers of the pagan Heroes, Wizards, and great Eastern Mages of old.
However, the Might of history’s saints and sages who transcended themselves to unify Mysterious Eros and Radiant Intellect has not depended upon Pauline salvation or Roman Catholic sacramental rites. Similarly, self-realized powers have been developed by those who have mastered the psychic arts of spiritual iconography, epitomized in a mobile, mass vernacular form by the Tarot Exemplars.
Renaissance fascination with phantasmic identities and processions opened a Pandora’s Box of psychological states and social personas that previously had been taboo. This had an impact upon Roman Catholic hierarchical control over social stations and mobility. The Church’s exclusive hold on intermediation between man, soul, and divine spirit was broken. Identification with psychic experiences of all types expanded into a socially complex profusion of psychological realities.
Those who spoke of their phantasmic visions were susceptible to being branded as witches (from Old English wicca or wizard, meaning “to make awake,” as in Germanic wikkjaz, necromancer or “one who wakes the dead”; the Angel Triumph may accurately be identified with Wizardry, as Tolkien realized in his immortal fantasies) and Satan worshippers. They were threatened, tortured, or killed by controllers of pathologically dominating hierarchies whose structures and strictures attempted to arrest all subtle communion and spiritual awakening not sanctioned by Church officials.
Magic and mythic rituals and beliefs of the pre-rational mind were broadly viewed by Christian authorities as demonic. Exceptions, of course, were made for specifically Christian rites of magic (such as saintly miracles or the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus) and doctrines of mythos (such as can be found in the book of Genesis). Intellectual, psychic, and subtle intuitions of the trans-rational mind that did not deny the “fundamental truths” of Christian magic and mythos were officially legitimized as Holy Spirit informing man of the Divine. It was (and remains to be) in the midst of confusing pre-rational and transrational worldviews (termed the “pre/trans fallacy” by Ken Wilber) that battlegrounds were drawn and intellectual and spiritual geniuses were shackled to the services of warring factions.
The fourth-stage Chariot charge of authentic spiritual energy and psychic Fortitude can either be restricted by domineering second-stage politicians and merchants or itself dominate forces of delusion, craving, and malice, and thus naturally develop into virtuous Fortune and subtle Life – the Wheel and Hermit Triumphs. Submission can either actualize spiritual life or arrest it. It actualizes when harmonious synchronicities are made apparent through awareness of natural ancestors, spirits, and karmic interdependency. When bound to a code of “no harm, no evil,” this moves way beyond submission defined and enforced by controlling egos and threats of violence.
Religion, from Latin religare, fundamentally means “to tie fast” or “re-bind,” as in “returning to the Source.” If that Source is the Ground of Being from which a worshipper psychophysically/soulfully arises, then there are no policies that can innately stop a worshipper from being authentically religious, with or without ministers and churches facilitating the process.
We here broach the political subject of psychic domination by religious authorities. Neither this book nor the Tarot can avoid addressing often-provocative issues of dominance and submission as they arise in a context of authentic spiritual practice as opposed to politically or egoically motivated religious or psychic control.
Genuine spiritual adepts do not make claims to hierarchies of dominance and subsequent rights to command and control through manipulative utilization of communication. Non-pathological fourth-stage dominion naturally releases into fifth-stage submission. The drive toward enlightenment leads into equanimity, simply letting it all be.
Even the initial archetypes of the Tarot’s hierarchical Triumphs are spiritual; even its culminating principles are realizable. The supreme way to realize Noble Wisdom is through complete coherence with that Way already so realized, beyond Chaos, as Radiant Mystery. The Way of Unity and its emanation through universal hierarchy and complete diversity is a radically difficult vision for many people to maintain. It can take enormous effort and forgiveness to imagine the interpenetration of transcendent spirit and ancestral presence with immanent matter, particularly when the material world is experienced as stagnant, repugnant, or unnatural. However, submission to Truth makes such an effort effortless.
Psychic activity that is actually spiritual relinquishes ego-control to the Charge of the Goddess, and that to the living Fate of Ancestors or spirits of the pervasive and eternal now. Thus do Chariot and Fortitude become Wheel and Hermit. Charismatic power filled with its own import tends toward pathological subversion of communal intuition into programs of procedural mind control, if not physical domination.
For most of its history, the Eastern Church evinced an understanding regarding how esoteric development proceeds from dominant charge to submissive surrendering. Like their Sufi brethren, Eastern sages arose from a Hermit-wisdom tradition rarefied in its contemplative sublimation of psycho-spiritual vitality and essence.
Although Mohammed the Prophet was a general and political leader, Islam itself means “submission,” quite beyond the violence of corporeal conquest and subjugation. Wise Sufis understand that only through a state of virtuous and insightful devotion to the Unity of Being is Allah’s Spirit truly realized. Hermits of all traditions have clearly intuited that actualizing growth through spiritual emergence and integral mission does not involve warfare or pyramidal domination hierarchies (elite few controlling the commons) of any type, including ecclesiastical.
Universal spirituality is based upon tolerant, cooperative, and fortified fourth-stage psychosocial dynamics that raise self-awareness into subtle virtue, ancestral union, and awareness of Transcendental Self as Universal Other. This marks a critical point of departure from political and egoic second-stage domination structures, be they secular, occult, Christian, Islamic, Hindu, New Age, or any other. While religious political leaders may believe that the latter defines the gross boundaries of God’s Kingdom on earth, it is actually the former that marks the psychic and subtle realization of God’s Kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. This is the primary message that Mystics have attempted to convey to all religious leaders.
Current Roman Catholic Bishops have challenged Islamic Sheiks (Arabic for “elders”) to advance beyond domination (the Latin root of which originally indicated “lord of the house”) defined by political control and warfare. Eastern Patriarchs also challenged Islam about its degradation of spiritual lordship and hierarchical rule in the century before Constantinople fell and the Tarot was developed. On the other hand, for many centuries prior, intelligent Sufis challenged not only their own mullahs (Arabic for “masters”) but all of the political and exoteric religious leaders regarding this, most certainly including Crusading Christian monks and court theologians. Corrupt, militarized leaders of today need to hear this message. Communication using contemporary and effective global technology needs to be utilized in a concerted effort by modern wisdom-realizers to educate secular and religious leaders about beautiful, good, and truthful power, wealth, and status.
Perhaps primary to the process of political enlightenment will be a rectification of the concept of lordship in terms of responsibility and transcendence that includes active involvement by female leaders, community, and culture. The Chariot and Fortitude Triumphs speak to us of this, as they represent feminine force dominating communal conduction of spiritual mission and advancing it into the submissive synchronicities of Fortune and her Wheel. On a civil level, this involves bringing dignified democracy as a social process into the local home and township levels of regulatory governance.
Advancing societal health and general welfare, local communities around the world are integrating new forms of mind/body therapy. A transformative spa-sanctuary movement initiated by Esalen Institute and popularized across the planet through a cooperative effort between wellness therapists, holistic teachers, and hospitality executives remains at the forefront of this. (Esalen is the Big Sur, California, transformational spa and institute that was instrumental in the original mainstreaming of humanistic and transpersonal fields of psychology, East-West body/mind therapies, shamanic journeying and healing, perennial mythology, etc. Gia-fu Feng, to whom this book is dedicated, was a co-founder and Taoist sage of Esalen during the 1960s, going on to direct his own Stillpoint Foundation.) Interconnected, transcultural sanctuaries for regenerative alchemy (both internal and external) are required to deepen and advance the popular health and beauty spa industry.
As techno-shamans, new-millennium mages are manifesting the Hermit station phasing into that of the Hanged Man as the world shifts into an emerging new age quite beyond any cliché or pop commercialization. There is little room for corruption in intelligent and responsible lordship; and it is this that the Hermit so astutely peers into. Often taking a postmodern form of a privately investigating, freely networking loner, the Hermit archetype naturally facilitates technology (from Greek tekhnologia, indicating “systematic treatment of an art or craft” – the logos or “knowledge” of tekhne, “skill”) to enable fantasies of liberation.
Appropriate use of technology – particularly technologies of energy, money, and media – must be enabled worldwide at household levels by becoming freely networked, decentralized, and secured from corruption. Until that occurs, fourth-stage actualization hierarchies will be regressively arrested by second-stage domination hierarchies that are marked by fear-mongering, terrorism, and brutal war. The turning of this tide or shift of these historical phases will define the twenty-first century. It is likely that in their absolutely crucial roles, postmodern mages will be unable to avoid confronting grimly grinning, global Death before the Towers of their Arts are built.
Exoteric religious tradition has always tended toward a dualistic view of the manifested world: so many lost souls need to be saved. Esoteric spiritual tradition has always tended toward a nondual view: with the Kingdom at hand, the world is already saved. Throughout much of Christian history, esoteric Saints have been martyred like pawns in political and military battles promoted by exoteric religious leaders. A similar history has played out in Islam between Muslim caliphs and associated legalistic ulama and peaceably wise, technically creative Sufis.
One can only pray that the twenty-first century will witness recognition and affirmation of integral nonduality. It certainly is possible that catastrophe of apocalyptic magnitude will serve as part of that process. It appears that, should this regrettably occur, esoteric practitioners from the Hermit stage onward will no longer serve as sacrificial lambs or scapegoats (a Hebrew concept by which people attempt to escape all sins or avoidance of responsibility via transference to a goat sent into the wilderness, standing for Azazel, “devil of the desert”). Uneducated, misled masses and deluded, greedy, and harmful leaders cannot count on violence, coercion, and intolerance to relieve them of their suffering.
Confusion between egoic and spiritual ways of dominance and submission defined a long Dark Age for Western Christian spirituality and culture. Eastern Christian forefathers marked quite a different history of esoteric realization and social development. Jesus’s apostle Thomas and his Syrian community of hermits who moved eastward into India via the Sinai Peninsula and Red Sea were the original Eastern Christian contemplatives. In the first century after Jesus lived, Thomas’s branch of Jesus’s wisdom-way was embraced by Christianity’s original Desert Fathers. They combined visions and practices of purity with mystery rites involving insightful meditation and Indo-Grecian therapeutics. More will be said about Jesus and Thomas in the next chapter.
Advancements were quickly made in Eastern Christian philosophy regarding Aristotelian attempts to rationalize dualistic theology and Neoplatonic attempts to move beyond it altogether. Origen, perhaps the most complex of early Christian metaphysicians, proclaimed that in the concept and reality of Splendor – specifically the splendor (from Latin, “to shine”) of light – one could find a bridge between sacred and mundane qualities. For Origen, Splendor showed how a sacred image could be effective. An abyss separating divine and material worlds nevertheless remained in his Gnostic mind. Splendor could be viewed fully only through the personage of Jesus, the solely manifested resemblance of Holy Spirit and complete bridge between God and materially bound soul. Although Origen attempted to create an orthodox, Jesus-centric theology, he was nevertheless condemned as a heretic.
A generation later, Plotinus compassionately disclosed a bridge that did not limit passage to a privileged class of Christians. Plotinus’s inclusive medium comprised hierarchical emanations or spheres of the One: Intelligence, Light Soul, World Soul, and Cosmos. He presented a psychophysical cosmos of light and universalized Goodness consciously realized through Ecstasy. Plotinus felt that the world, even in its darkest form of matter, emanates from the One in the likeness of radiance. Modern physics and cosmology would seem to support this view. Plotinus did not believe that a “higher soul” descended into a “lower body”; but that through contemplation the innate Brightness of corporeal existence could be magnified and made apparent.
After the Fall of Rome, the sixth century saw a renewal of the Greek world, centered in Constantinople. Neoplatonic cosmology and theosophy was integrated into Christian theology through the genius of one man, who wrote under the name of a first-century Christian convert, Dionysius the Areopagite. Dionysius permanently reformed Christian metaphysics via the original and Eastern Church. Two of his most famous treatises were entitled The Celestial Hierarchy and The Divine Names.
Living in Syria at the turn of the sixth century, Dionysius (often referred to as Pseudo-Dionysius) was one of three influential Eastern Christian theosophists who wove essential understandings of divine emanation and universal esotericism into Christian theology. Succeeding Dionysius were John Climacus and John of Damascus.
“Johannes” Scotus Eriugena (the Scotsman – or, more accurately, Gael – who called himself “Eriugena,” but was referred to later as “John” and was actually a French Irishman) translated Eastern Christian treatises and wrote the Corpus Dionysii during the ninth century, an extensive commentary on the works of Dionysius. He was the first scholar to introduce into Western Europe the ideas of Neoplatonism created and developed by the Greek academy. No Catholic scholar afterwards evinced as much dedication to the oft-termed pantheistic Neoplatonism of Dionysius as Eriugena.
Scotus Eriugena’s effort was widely condemned by Latin Church councils in his lifetime and every few hundred years afterward. In summary, he was accused of identifying God with His Creation, the Cosmos. Nevertheless, his work was read by and deeply influenced the great Western Christian mystics of medieval times. Even though his translations were hidden from European intelligentsia, buried in the heretical sections of severely restricted monastic libraries until the seventeenth century, through Scotus Eriugena Dionysius’s corpus was made known to a few select scholars, who infiltrated Roman theology with Dionysius’s Neoplatonic worldview, largely based upon the writings of Proclus.
It was through Dionysius that Christian society began positing knowledge of hierarchical, angelic spheres. According to Dionysius, Angels are bodiless yet visible beings (the word coming from Late Greek angelos, meaning “messenger”). They are seen subtly, in the form of radiance. Angelic reality is known by way of divine light-realms radiating divine principles. Dionysius’s nine spheres of angelic emanation, divided into three triads, roughly coincide with nine stages of the Tarot:
First Hierarchy:
| Seraphim | Angel & Sun |
| Cherubim | Moon & Star |
| Thrones | Tower & Devil |
Second Hierarchy:
| Dominions | Death & Hanged Man |
| Virtues | Hermit & Wheel |
| Powers | Fortitude & Chariot |
Third Hierarchy:
| Archangels | Love & Temperance |
| Principalities | Pope & Emperor |
| Angels | Popess & Empress |
Through all of these realms, the Divine One creates and influences human reality via the flowing process of angelic emanation. (Dionysius was careful not to say that God emanated the angels, as orthodoxy prohibited any view other than that of a separate creator God.) We can see in this early model of the Tarot system, elaborated by Eastern Greek Patriarchs and Sufi Saints in the seven centuries after Dionysius, that all Triumphant stations are Beautiful, Good, and True Archetypes, blessed and mirrored by Angelic company.
The highest of light domains is that of the brilliant, apollonian Seraphim. Having three pairs of wings, they represent the Intellect of pure Brightness. Uriel, Metatron, and Lucifer are names of three famous Seraphim.
The Cherubim are rulers of divine light that reaches down to earth, particularly that of the stars and moon. They are scarcely less awesome and powerful than the Seraphim. They represent the Light-Soul Love-Wisdom of mighty Eros-Sophia.
The Cherub as a chubby faced baby-boy was a degradation of Roman Cupid, the boy-god of Love and son of Venus, who was originally Greece’s Aphrodite. Both stemmed from the ancient god-boy Dionysus who was re-imaged to reflect a rarified heavenly ideal in later Greek civilization.
Eros was originally a pre-cosmic force of creativity transforming Chaos to generate the worlds of Gaia and Tartarus. Later classical Greeks considered Eros to be a male God. However, archaic Greek cosmogony was deeply Goddess- and Earth-based. Eros was sensibly an extension of Gaia, her womb Tartarus, and her birthing process Chaos. Although Eros was later viewed as a male force of love, often focused upon the love of other males, this appears to have been a masculine projection upon the feminine Mystery Rites that Gaian wisdom arose from.
Truer to that tradition which Pythagoreans and Neoplatonists upheld is an understanding of Eros as the Goddess bringing Primordial, Kosmic Light into the material cosmos. From this worldview emerged a Space within which male God as Light could be conceived. In this book, Eros is generally used in reference to the Goddess as Gaia creating the cosmos via Chaos and Tartarus. In Platonic, Gnostic, and Neoplatonic eras, the Goddess as such was transformed into Sophia or Wisdom with Chaos the Demiurge as her son either ruling over the lower world or guarding the higher.
All of the heavenly rulers in the first three angelic spheres were thought to be of similar status. The Seraphim were imagined as surrounding God’s Throne, directing all emanation of the World through radiance, sound, and universal vibration. The Throne, representing Whole Oneness of incorporeal and corporeal reality, is imaged by the Triumphs of Justice and World. The Angel and Sun Triumphs represent the spectrum of Angelic presence, combining Archangel Gabriel, Messenger of God in Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, with the fiery, resurrecting blast of a Seraph; whose brilliance is so intense – like a Great Sun – that no other divine being may look at it.
Lucifer, it was traditionally held, had twelve wings instead of six. As the Devil positioned in the thirteenth station of the Tarot (not counting the Magician) we may see him as uniquely holding the Tower as Throne of Mater Earth, through which he seductively reveals psychophysical immortality and challenges all those who would “know” the Goddess. Gnostic belief, which permanently affected Christian theology, held that he was the fallen son of Sophia, Wisdom Goddess; and that he literally recreated God’s Throne on the edge of the material cosmos, effectively blocking human and lower angelic access to Heaven.
Islam, however, advanced a view of Lucifer as a “specially demoted” Seraph whose rank was established to degrade any and all who would attempt to cross the threshold into immortally ecstatic Heaven without having first passed the trials warded over by guardian Principalities and Powers (akin to the Genies of pre-Islamic belief and lesser gods, Titans, and demigods of Greek belief). It could be said in accordance to this view that Lucifer is Allah’s Guardian Angel of Last Resort.
In following chapters we identify the Devil and Tower stations with Hades and Tartarus, closely associated with Mother Gaia, bridging earthly reality with Zeus’s Immortal domain. Gaia as Eros as Sophia was a primary spiritual concept demarcating esoteric nondual understandings of the Goddess and Her Presence as the material World. Gnostic myths perverted this understanding of the Goddess and thereby of the natural world and seductive challenges engaged and celebrated through the ages by Ecstatics.
Christians envisioned most angels as having human-like appearance, but Thrones were pictured as myriad-eyed wheels roaming between the realm of God’s Throne and that of angelic spirit-beings associated with regulation of the natural cosmos and humankind. Later Roman Catholicism imagined the Thrones as tremendous, peaceable “demon” beings (daimonic in terms of their strangely powerful and practically chaotic forms) composing God’s Throne and tracking all movement of the Cherubim (compare with the iconographic position pre-Vedic Yakshas came to hold as literal supporters of Hindu Deities, as well as Buddhist Celestials and their vehicles).
The final three angelic domains are those of the Archangels and their wards, the myriad personal Angels, along with the Principalities who are anti-God and anti-Human, serving as something akin to fierce guardian spirits of cities, states, and rulers. (In our list, Principalities have been placed between Archangels and Angels because they so closely represent second-stage patriarchal urban powers.)
It needs to be noted that accounts of varying types of angelic beings in canonical Old and New Testaments are scarce and often conflicting. Positions and principles of angel-spirits and spheres are ofttimes confusedly crossed over in Biblical stories. Michael, for instance, is at times deemed an Archangel and at other times the greatest of the Seraphim after defeating Lucifer, who at times is defined as a lower Power.
Most religious sects maintain some kind of interpretation regarding angelic realms, beings, and their hierarchies. Dionysius and later visionaries relied on their own imaginations and revelations – abetted by Neoplatonic, Greek, and Chaldean mythology – regarding their descriptions, hierarchical arrangements, and comparisons of these Kosmic forces and principles of divine consciousness.
Ancient Greeks had also experienced visions of bodiless beings. Psyches or souls manifested with visible shapes called eidola. Furthermore, early Greeks had envisioned a ladder of soul-stations connecting heaven and earth. Homer’s “Golden Chain” (Iliad 8.18–20) was described by Dionysius in terms of a ten-stage, descending series of Spirit-images, with each having two sides, one mirroring the image above it and the other below it. These Image-spheres and Angel-realms represented incorporeal, yet realized spiritual planes of existence.
Plotinus’s nondual view of cosmology was made acceptable to Christian dualistic monism by Dionysius’s use of this metaphysical device incorporating twenty rungs of a divine ladder. He revealed that the world of Matter is an isomorphic reflection of the Spirit world. Angels serve as the agency through which earth and the cosmos are connected to their immortal nature.
Every human, from this point of view, has an angelic presence – whether seen and felt or not. That presence can be imagined in essential ways by psyches sufficiently subtle and virtuous. Indeed, it is the very purpose of psyche to do just that, channeling divine Intelligence into human awareness and veneration. This is compelled by an actual love of wisdom. Drawing upon Neoplatonic sages preceding him, Dionysius fused Aristotelian and Christian Triads into a singular, psychophysically realizable theosophical world of spiritual presence.
In his treatise on Divine Names, Dionysius introduced to future theosophists, including Ibn rabi, a nascent system of Divine Attributes that lent themselves to the concept of descending and ascending stages of archetypal presence. Listed in his chapter headings are these Names:
God, Light, Beautiful, Love, Ecstasy, Zeal, Being, Life, Wisdom, Mind, Truth, Faith, Power, Righteousness, Salvation, Redemption, Omnipotent, Ancient of Days, Eternity, Time, Peace, Holy of Holies, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, God of Gods, Perfect, One.
A hierarchical ladder of visionary Spirit-states connecting Earth and Heaven was elaborated by John Climacus at the turn of the seventh century. Heraclitus had once said: “The way down is the same as the way up.” John Climacus took this to heart. The spiritual hierarchy of psychic, fourth-stage image-realms delineated by Dionysius was reworked in a personal treatise by John, who was abbot of the Sinai Peninsula’s central monastery. Built upon the spot where Moses was said to have ascended to Heaven, this was perhaps the perfect place for John to have contemplated and put into words The Ladder of Divine Ascent.
Upon this patriarchal hermit’s lineage in the Sinai, Hermetic Christian, Sufi, and Kabbalist contemplative tradition was essentially founded. His treatise became Eastern Christendom’s most popular non-biblical book. A compelling Christian case was made by John Climacus that human existence could be transformed by consciously ascending through states of spiritual cultivation. Those states were associated with archetypal images by the third of our Eastern Christian exemplars.
John of Damascus (ca. 655–750) was born into the family of Sargum Mansur. Mansur, meaning victorious, was a well-known Muslim name common among Syrian Christians of Arab descent. During John’s lifetime, Damascus became the capital of the Muslim Empire, which had won Syria from Byzantium. John’s grandfather, Ibn Mansur, had negotiated the capitulation of Damascus to conquering Islamic forces. Syrians were known for their independent thinking. They had never been fully indoctrinated by Greek Christianity, and had become accustomed to the presence of North Arabian settlers. Syria’s intercultural climate served as an excellent environment for esoteric exchange and alignment between spiritual traditions, East and West, old and new.
The multicultural climate of Damascus significantly influenced John’s studies and teachings. As a child, he received an Arabic education. As a young man, he studied with a Catholic monk who had been captured in Sicily by Muslims and acquired in Damascus by his father. John, beatified as a Saint in both Roman and Greek Churches, was unusual in his knowledge of the Koran and other religious literature of Islam. He was a respected Christian theologian under the Greek Church of Byzantium when he became head advisor to the Caliph of Damascus.
In his famous treatise, Fount of Knowledge, John compiled, elucidated, and reformulated from numerous traditions the great many teachings of saints and sages with which he was familiar. He is considered the father of systematic theology in the Eastern Church. Through fearless minds such as his, perennial wisdom was integrated with exoteric worldviews, inexorably promoting higher and deeper states of consciousness in the process.
When iconoclastic controversy erupted in the Greek Church, John resigned from the court and became a contemplative. His disagreements with Emperor Leo of Byzantium regarding theology and Church politics were legendary. John championed the value of icons, associating images with stations of spirituality.
Little will be mentioned in this book about the iconoclastic period of Christian history. It paralleled the rise of Islam and its anti-iconographic laws. Unlike the Eastern Christians, Sufis were never officially released from this stricture. However, through the beautiful intricacies of Arabian and Persian languages, Sufis nonetheless managed to reveal visions of the Divine Attributes and Essences. Although as a famous Christian theologian, John of Damascus argued against the “Islamic heresy,” his teachings and transcultural appreciation for universal stations of spiritual development were studied, respected, and emulated by later Sufis.
Authorship of Barlaam and Ioasaph, a popular Christian novel during the Middle Ages, was traditionally ascribed to John. Throughout the book, he alludes to the life of Buddha in an intelligent, respectful way. The tenfold Noble Path that formed the basis of Buddhism was foreign neither to the contemplatives of Eastern Christianity nor to the Sufis of Islam. Sufism, Buddhism, and Eastern Christianity met and merged throughout Central Asia and within cosmopolitan Near Eastern cities of John’s time. Damascus played an important role in this process. Given an integral will to do so, Syria remains geopolitically situated to serve the Greater Cause once more.
The above Greek metaphysicians were key teachers in an esoteric school that thrived for a millennium in Constantinople and Alexandria. That school was broadened and enriched by the venerable Sufis previously introduced. Sufi metaphysicians “grounded” Dionysius’s angelic realms. They universalized spiritual hierarchy by addressing the realms in terms of immortal attributes, which defined the purposes and principles of human realization. They progressively identified stations of the Path – and Questors’ psychophysical evolution when embarking upon that Path – with a hierarchy of Immortal Principles. Sufis made clear the role that psyche and its essential phases played in the realization of ecstatic being, consciousness, and bliss. In doing so, they expanded and spiritually fortified the Neoplatonic foundation upon which Dionysius the Areopagite, John Climacus, and John of Damascus had constructed an Eastern Christian Tower of perennial wisdom.
Room restricts us from examining the history of Eastern Christian metaphysics beyond this short introduction. Both the Tarot and this book serve to summarize the enormous wealth of nondual wisdom that has been consistently renewed in a Great Traditional Way. It is apparent that the Tarot empowers its readers to psychically imagine archetypal gestalts denoting universal states of spiritual hierarchy. By viewing universal hierarchy with true insight, a reader of the Triumphs can consciously transcend limitations of self, relationships, environs, and circumstances. The Tarot arose from Sufi and Eastern Christian metaphysics as a symbolic, phantasmic, edifying agency of spiritual enlightenment.
Greek Christian and Persian Sufi contemplatives were guided in their considerations of psyche, spiritual imagery, and corporeal realization of ecstasy by the founding fathers of Neoplatonism: Plotinus, Porphyry, and Proclus.
[B]y drawing images and inscribing them in their temples, one beautiful image for each particular thing, they manifested the non-discursiveness of the intelligible world.
This comes from Plotinus, describing Egyptian temples. He suggested that human thought began in the form of image making.
Every image is a kind of knowledge and wisdom and is a subject of statements, all together in one, and not discourse and deliberation.
This passage was much drawn upon by Renaissance intellectuals. Intuition was recognized as knowledge “all together in one.” Discursive thought, in contrast, views the parts of a whole in a consecutive, rationalized manner. Deliberations regarding an image differ from the instant comprehension to which representational and symbolic images lend themselves. Although Egyptian hieroglyphs were created in a largely pre-rational society, Plotinus understood that mature vision-logic processes advance beyond analytical thinking. Fourth-stage intuition encapsulates third-stage rationality not to produce rudimentarily logical symbols, but to establish hierarchical, universal gestalts. Such archetypes inherently transcend and unite provincial second-stage myths and discursive (indicating “rambling reason,” from Latin discursus, “running about”) third-stage systems. Any study involving metaphysical history is bound to be intricately discursive, along with essentially intuitive.
In our postmodern world, we have become accustomed to fractured images, which purposefully do not lend themselves to singular gestalts of intuited meaning. It has at times been academically faddish to claim that no image can possibly hold universal meaning; that all meaning is a contextual interpretation relative to the observer; that all cognition can be discursively broken into a series of unique and separated contextual projections; that every context finds definition only through differences with other contexts; and that all hierarchy collapses when contextual definition is realized to be always already relative. Such so-called “postmodern” thinking became caught in a contradictory circle of logic as it reduced all intelligent epistemology (from Greek epistasthai, meaning “to understand”) to a singular, meaningless presupposition: all that can be known for sure is that nothing can be known for sure.
However, Truth in Beauty and Goodness has been universally affirmed in all societies during all ages. It is the goal of every Tarot deck designer to convey a remarkable appearance of beauty that reflects innate truth as much as possible. The essential truth of the medieval Trionfi is that their hierarchical stages resemble stages of our own hierarchical, potential psychophysical realization. Humans innately respond to and somehow recognize images that resemble holistic phases essentially realizable by human nature. This is true even for phase-states that are far advanced, beyond what is subjectively felt to be personally familiar or culturally normal. Such forms the basis of all esoteric design.
Plotinus recognized that the sensory experience of seeing an image translates smoothly into the cognition of a mental image resembling the physical one. The continuum then expands to include an intuited gestalt (broadly defined as “a configuration or pattern of elements so unified as a whole that its properties cannot be derived from a simple summation of its parts”) of the mind’s image. This gestalt is based upon both a knowing and feeling intuition. Consequent to this, an educated person can reasonably discuss that intuitive feeling with another in a knowing manner.
An image, or icon, if formed in the likeness of a spiritual whole, contains or emanates attributes of that ideal state which it resembles. Through such resemblance it remains essentially related to its spiritual source. Likewise, the mind’s psychic intuition of that spiritual state, attained via sensation of the icon and both emotional and mental cognition of its image (indeed, even physical cognition), is translated into a subtle identity with the state. This can potentially engulf a contemplator, causing a conversion of one’s whole self-identity, which transcends the dualistic process of subject/object. This process is reflected in the statement, “You become what you meditate upon.”
Plotinus’s conceptions of natural law and realizations of spiritual growth were based upon reasoned and intuitively subtle contemplation (from Latin templum, indicating a “space for observing auguries”). In the first century after Jesus, as imparted to us by Philo of Alexandria, Greek educated contemplatives formed Egyptian communities that occasionally engaged in monastic practices. The Sinai Peninsula became a melting pot for serious transcultural spiritual dialog and practice. A community of transpersonal wisdom-hermits emerged from this.
In these intimate, radical communities, meditation and spiritual discussion ensued without dogmatic or political constraints. Beliefs were not limited to Hellenistic traditions that typically included teachings regarding Stoical practices (pantheistic Stoics held to a remarkably similar worldview as contemporary Vedantins in India), theistic influences, demiurgic powers, and geometric ideals. Their way of contemplation also distanced itself from Judaic-Apocalyptic and Chaldean-Pythagorean dualism as examined in the next chapter.
Plotinus stood in this lineage of contemplatives that paid little attention to religious rituals or exoteric sacraments. By making oneself subject to pure knowledge, Plotinus stated that contemplation of contemplation itself transformed consciousness into the One. Such was the way to realize the supreme principles posited by Plato as Good and Just. Such was the means to understanding Plato’s proclamation in his Timaeus that the “earthy world itself is a beautiful manifestation of the Divine.”
Vipassana meditation succinctly defined in Plotinus’s milieu, as it continues to do in our present era, this way of insight. Indian yoga tradition, classically summarized at this time by Patanjali in his Yoga Sutras, affirmed such a way of meditative samadhi or bliss as a direct means to realizing that Atman is Brahman – True Self is Universal Other. Patanjali, heavily influenced by dominant Buddhist and Shaivite teachings, framed tantric energy (prana, comparable to Taoist ch’i) and yoga practices as an eightfold way, literally transforming one’s body-mind into Bliss. However, like the Gnostics of his time, Patanjali’s ascetically dualistic metaphysics and mythos were not widely enjoyed; they remain unpopular today.
Plotinus’s contemplative practice can be identified with the sixth-stage cards of the Hanged Man and Death. This is the causal-heart stage of interior development, which involves the witnessing position of attention: awareness of the root, or moment to moment temporality, of self. The open-eyed, upside-down, asymmetrical Hanged Man yogically represents such self-conversion. Sages established in this stage of realization keep themselves from falling into the sort of egoic delusions and pathologies of psychic grandeur that affected Giordano Bruno.
Plotinus’s concentration upon the state of Witnessing Self transcended dualistic, otherworldly mind-sets seemingly propagated by Platonic philosophy (and certainly Pythagorean; Neopythagoreanism ended up being effectively co-opted into Neoplatonic schools). Direct intuition of immortal realization occluded psychic channels of self-projection that imagined a totally separate creator-sustainer-destroyer god and his incorporeal realm. If ideal forms or immortals were realizably present through direct insight, then they could not be eternally separate from the corporeal world.
Even still, there appeared to be a need for a psychic bridge spanning the chasm between the sacred and the mundane. Plato had posited the role of Intelligence. As logical rationality, Plato’s intelligence authenticated a world understood through polar dialectics (from Greek dialektik, “art of debate,” from dialektos, or “speech, conversation”), acknowledging Heraclitus’s cycling process of Strife and Love as being inherent to all systems, be they sociopolitical or metaphysical. Both third- and fourth-stage intelligence authenticate philosophical laws that include and transcend provincial structures of dualistic, mythic belief.
Advancing upon this, Neoplatonists posited that contemplation involves all forms of psychic, subtle, and causal intelligence – integrating rationality with the fourth, fifth, and sixth stages of psychophysical mindful development. The Tarot as a universal template serves to remind us that contemplative mindfulness of the forces at play in our daily life authenticates knowledge of our unity with the universe’s lawful principles of immortality.
Contemplation of contemplation is indeed a most advanced spiritual practice. For most people, meditation and concentration upon sacred images or forms naturally comes first. If one becomes what one meditates upon, a very important question arises: How can one be sure that a spiritual icon will indeed carry with it a positively divine presence? Plotinus stated that if through wisdom and compassion an artisan could craft an icon particularly sympathetic to the soul then of all things it would most easily receive the soul. However, how can one be sure what state of psyche or aspect of soul is embodied by an icon? What if an artisan shapes an icon with “all of his soul,” imbibing the object with an attraction sympathetic to his soul, and against his best intentions, the quality of spirit or psyche so attracted turns out to be hellishly demonic? In this regard, one may empathize with otherwise disturbing, angst-ridden modern art.
The Roman Catholic Church did not condemn the Trionfi as an art form or didactic medium, though it did denounce Tarocchi as a game of chance or medium for gambling. However, the Church was not free to embrace and utilize the genius and beauty inherent to the Triumphant set of images. We may contrast this to its sponsorship and celebration of neo-Grecian paintings, tapestries, and sculptures. The Trionfi as personal and portable psychic icons were sympathetic to self-realization of distinct soul-realms that resembled archetypal stations along the way of immortality. That self-realization in its own time and space did not come under ecclesiastical oversight and legal jurisdiction.
For an icon to attract one’s spirit to Fortune, Plotinus stated that it must truly resemble Fortune. He did not believe, however, that the icon actually became animated. That is, the icon did not actually embody the anima of Dame Fortune. Resemblance was sufficient to connect consciously produced imagery with intuition, and through that with actual psychophysical identification or a witnessing awareness of, in our example, Fortune.
This reflective philosophy is different from occult beliefs involving actual animation. Direction of anima or spirit into and out of objects presumes definitions of “psychic flows” based upon a dualistic separation of spiritual and material worlds. Many magicians have attempted to invent systematic techniques purposed toward manipulation of anima, psyche, or spirit (Harry Houdini famously spent many years debunking such, though his wife and friends, such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, were convinced he had paranormal powers). Throughout the great traditions, such manipulation has been considered unwise, for it obscures the natural law of nondual unity inherent to the World and its Soul. One might say it disrupts the complex matrix of ancestral presence. Biotechnology is advancing to the point where this will become an imminently real concern in the not-so-distant future.
Plotinus consciously observed that the world’s soulful continuum was not contingent upon exoteric or occult rituals of phantasmic manipulation. Plotinus radically integrated and transcended problematic and divisive interpretations of Universal Triunes and their Conscious Union. These had been introduced by Aristotelian, Gnostic, and Christian theologians whose mixed-up dogma regarding Jesus and his Father’s spiritual realizations and the impossibility of a human evolving to the same sphere of conscious psychophysical heartfulness as Jesus remains strictly enforced today.
In Neoplatonic understanding, there is no need for a spiritual artisan to draw into or out of the physical an otherwise wholly separate state of spirit-presence. Spiritual icons, whether crafted by nature or by man, are spiritual only because they have been directly imbued with the soul of their makers. This sympathetically imparts to them discreet states of spiritual realization, whether their soul-source is earth, man, or cosmos. Thus, an icon resembles a state of spirit through its essential beingness. One might say that the integral whole or soul of the icon, beyond its physical substance and psychological design, represents directly the soul of its source.
How this works is through the Mystery of Holistic Causation. Artisans of truly sacred icons exercised a knowledgeable awareness regarding archetypal stages of spiritual development, if not ecstasy. Identification of the artistic with the psychic and both with post-rational vision-logic processes imbued medieval creators of icons such as the Trionfi with priest-like powers. But the key point to be understood by both artisans and their patrons has always been that the Heart-Soul of Intelligence realizes Truth in Unification to a greater degree than does psychic intellect, regardless of how subtle the latter may be.
Only sixth-stage causal-heart realization brings Questors to the Towering Gate of Immortality, to be tested by the great Guardian Daimon. An icon that facilitates such is truly mighty in its sanctity. This is why Death as originally symbolized in the Tarot was such a powerful and neutral icon. Nature as death and impermanence will always rule the mundane world. However, when consciously engaged, Death is the door to Immortality. As we shall later see, the sublimely jaw-dropping, eye-popping transformative process of resembling Eros is primary to realizing ecstatic and immortal states of conscious being.
Porphyry, successor to Plotinus, recorded that his teacher entered into states of Eros as Wisdom-Love that were truly ecstatic. Much of what we know about Plotinus comes down to us from Porphyry, who was studied in the numerous metaphysical schools of third-century cosmopolitan Egypt. Hermeticism and alchemy arose during this period in Alexandria. Hermetic, isomorphic concepts regarding the natural symmetry and unification of all polarities, including micro- and macrocosms, lent a very Eastern and yogic flavor to Hellenistic philosophy.
Similar to Buddhist cosmological models, in the Neoplatonism of Porphyry the visible world is posited as being a direct and identical manifestation of the invisible world. Porphyry combined a hierarchical view of the cosmos with a consideration of visibility. He contemplated which spheres of spiritual reality were visible and which were not. Materialistic skeptics thought it obvious that an icon as a material object is totally distanced from the god it represents, for that god is an invisible spiritual being without visible material substance. Porphyry pointed out that this is as ignorant as an illiterate claiming that a book is totally distanced from the mind, for a book is naught but woven threads of papyrus. In Porphyry and Plotinus’s way of contemplation, immanence and transcendence are bridged and ultimately realized to be one and the same.
Many of the world’s greatest minds have emphatically posited that the roots of words themselves are like whole images, resembling their meaning directly. Vedic priests certainly maintain that such holds true for Sanskrit. The statement at the beginning of the Gospel of John that God first made the Word exactly refers to such sympathetic resemblance.
In many religious traditions, it is believed that naming a demon gives one power over it. In the scientific world, naming entities or functions (particularly via mathematical symbols) objectifies them so that they might be “known,” “related,” and thereby technically manipulated (even if, like disruptive demons, their objectification or classification does not lend an ability to totally “control” them).
Beyond magical and rational manipulations, the Tarot presents imagery, relationship, and nomenclature as a whole gestalt. Tarot Arcana are capable of resembling the whole microcosmic evolution of human consciousness and culture from the Empress’s spiritual birth or Right View to the World’s spiritual consummation or Right Liberation.
With Proclus, Neoplatonism received a two-hundred-year wrap-up. Proclus was born in Constantinople, educated in Alexandria, and taught in Athens, where he succeeded Plutarch as head of Plato’s famous Academy. He died in A.D. 485 at the age of seventy-three. He was notable for his initiation into many of the world’s esoteric spiritual traditions of the time, including Buddhism.
Proclus’s cosmological views were clearly Buddhistic in their emphasis on causal interdependency. By the fourth and fifth centuries, Mahayana Buddhism had spread west to Egypt and east to China. Like Mahayana philosophers, Proclus envisioned a world systemically unified through relationship. No self could exist apart from relationship with others. No known could exist apart from a knower. Manifestation and consciousness, like space and time, were inseparable.
Moving the cosmological procession of Becoming was a force called Likeness. This is perhaps comparable to what is referred to in scientific terminology as morphogenetic memory. Proclus’s Neoplatonism posited that the Tenth or Highest Sphere or Principle of Reality produced the Ninth, which produced the Eighth, on down to the First. Any transforming being was free to revert to its previous level of being simply by becoming conscious of it.
For that which reverts endeavors to be conjoined in every part with every part of its cause, and desires to have communion in it and to be bound to it. But all things are bound together by likeness, as by unlikeness they are distinguished and severed. If, then reversion is a communion and conjunction, and all communion and conjunction is through likeness, it follows that all reversion must be accomplished through likeness.
The emanationist explanation of Tarot hierarchy is that the world proceeds to produce that which is most like itself; thereby, it is regenerated and sustained moment by moment, day by day. Yet, catastrophe, chaos, and organization teetering on the non-equilibrium edge of complexity are always present. Through them, the world does more than regenerate that which is most alike in the same phase of realization. It also produces that which is most alike in a fundamentally different phase of manifestation, purposed in Time to consciously realize Unity. Time itself becomes, or simply already always is, Consciousness.
Resemblance, according to the Neoplatonists, is a universal property. Resemblance is the Kosmic implementation of Unitive Law and as such is inherently Just. Time resembles Unity; Light resembles Time; Energy resembles Light; Movement resembles Energy; Chaos resembles Movement; Nature resembles Chaos; etc.
Ultimately, similarity exists as a continuum binding all entities at all stages through all processes of transformation. This is true for the horizontal span within every phase of evolutionary existence, as well as for the vertical nest of spheres defining otherwise discontinuous phases of realization.
Of primary importance to our study of the Tarot is the Neoplatonic concept of hierarchically nested, discreet stages, phases, or principles of the All One. This formed the basis of Christian Hermetic, Islamic Sufi, and Jewish Kabbalist theogonies of cosmological emanation. An understanding that everything is of the Tao need not negate realization of discreet evolutionary phases. If an icon resembles one of those phase transitions or stages, then it is empowered to serve the attentive mind as a bridge to that stage of realization. Clearly, the most powerful icons are those that resemble the most essential processes of evolution or phases of consciousness. This is what designers of Tarot Trionfi must aim for if they are to truly hit the mark intended by the Tarot’s sagacious creators.
Portraying and communicating those phase-processes and their bindings has been the work of mages and sages throughout history. The Fool and Magician’s infinite-zero-stage represents this principle of Universal Resemblance. East-West teachers of spiritual hierarchy have progressively nurtured a global understanding of such emanationist wisdom. The ten-stage, universal model elaborated in this book was developed and perennially confirmed over the course of millennia. This treatise continues to evolve that tradition, in part by translating the ten stages as great principles of integral hierarchy found in cosmic, conscious, and sociocultural development. These principles are completely capable of informing modern-day philosophy, esthetics, ethics, and science.
After the period of Tarot development, humanistic artisans tended to portray hierarchical awareness through styles exhibiting rational naturalism. This then developed into romantic revivals of hierarchy that played on fantastic depictions of reality, appearing naturalistic in form while illuminating imagined states sensorially greater than those empirically or materially observed. Modern movements of art then lent validity to depictions of highly abstract reflections of mind, obscure in their hierarchical significance, yet subtly meaningful in their conveyance of beauty, knowledge, or essences of truth.
After a period of denying any import to hierarchical signification, contemporary art globally came under the influence once more of traditional techniques, symbols, patterns, and compositions, largely derived from non-European cultures. This promoted a type of “post-postmodern” revision and appreciation of hierarchical relationships and emergent characteristics. These may resemble higher modalities of blissful being and thereby abet movement of human consciousness into such. For example, in the theater of dance, Butoh is an exemplary art form that has emerged from this movement.
The Tarot, with its traditional Indo-European conveyance of spiritual hierarchy, remains pertinent to modern and postmodern artistic development. Awareness of essential hierarchy imparts subtle guidance to creative processes and compositional expressions.
Great art is produced through integral and subtle skills of crafting. This can be measured using a variant of the Tarot’s Ten Universal Principles:
Coherence
Symmetry
Harmony
Recursion
Abstraction
Integration
Complexity
Dimensionality
Frequency
Universality
Without some combination of or focus upon these attributes or qualities, artisans readily tend toward emotionally reactive projections of confusion, egoically sentimental reflections of mediocrity, and technically manipulative performances that leave the soul craving. Flashes of genius and tensional release may periodically charge those art forms, but representations of true beauty felt by the commons as being good for all will not be reliably created.
Conceptual abstraction need not usurp – and natural humanistic realism need not restrict – the way and power of essential resemblance. Psychic and subtle archetypal imagery differs fundamentally from fantasy simulacra. Resemblance of the real is not taken to be a substitution for the real by those who truly appreciate good art. Simulation of real environments and experiences is not required in order to identify with holistic spheres or principles through integral symbols and designs that shift consciousness into a relational likeness of those spheres. Classical traditions of art and design, including architecture and urban planning, serve as crucial foundations upholding creative permutations and organic diversities of cultural and societal patterns that need to be explored anew by every generation.
Not all sacred art, of course, is as sophisticatedly subtle as the great works of classical traditions. Folk art involved with personal and communal rites of passage, for instance, can also evince awareness of spiritual hierarchy via resemblance. The folk prints of the woodblock Trionfi seen in these pages’ sidebars (which are reworked versions of the Budapest Trionfi) arguably resemble the Tarot’s spiritual stations more astutely than the classical court paintings produced in Bembo’s studio. When viewed with a materialistic attitude, many would deem the woodblock prints as lacking in spiritual wealth and power; they are not leafed in gold, elaborated in intense and fantastic imagery, or packed with arcane symbols. Yet in sacred art, a singular circular brushstroke may well epitomize that which is most valuable and true.
For instance, the six stages of cosmic development may be visualized quite simply:
The Neoplatonic Law of Resemblance assumes cosmological processes of subtle ancestry or memory; of inheritance stemming from causal, soulfully holistic genesis. Eros as Creative Wisdom encapsulating the World Soul of Flux is the unifying force underlying all resemblance in the Cosmos. Understanding the Tarot’s hierarchical representation of World Unity requires right view, or nascent unity-through-diversity awareness, from the very start. The Quest is defined by a progressively magnified and concentrated right view of Eros.
Because of this, successful Questors will find themselves immersed in a way of Tantra (in the universal and broad meaning of the word, not limited by sexual connotations or defined by provincial rituals), regardless of subjective preferences, politics, or agendas. Alchemy is the way of Triumphant realization and Tantra is the how of Alchemy. Both require individually and socially appropriate cultivation of Qi (Ch’i) and Yoga. Chapters 6 and 7 address this.
Contemplation of contemplation is an advanced form of alchemical, tantric yoga. It is notably oriented toward natural celibacy. It would seem obvious that this has little to do with familiar dependency, let alone “coital dependency,” however modern media might portray ecstatic love and energetic happiness. Kissing and touching must be engaged with supreme mindfulness and yogic breath in sexual relations to deliver alchemical benefit beyond common pleasure. In general, sexual romance either disperses alchemical processes of sublimation and transmutation or, more positively, channels such processes into the production and raising of family.
Be that as it may, every Questor on the Path of the Trionfi will come to realize that sacred eroticism is the most essential modality of right concentration – the eighth stage of the Tarot, the Light Soul cards of Star and Moon. To resemble the Star and Moon is to ecstatically realize the likeness of Eros. Full initiation into the Triumphant Way of Immortality concentrates upon a Bodhisattva-like vow to never lose sight of that light guiding the Quest into the eternal enlightenment of Eros.
Why is eroticism rarely realized to be sacred? Psychic and subtle techniques of projection and transference are commonly associated with the erotic. When not consciously cultivated, these tend toward dependency and possessiveness, creating “needy, jealous, and controlling” dispositions. They romantically or manipulatively collapse the longing for communion that otherwise keeps cultivating extensive regeneration of vital life and essential nature. That regeneration is needed daily, in rhythmic cycles, to uphold polar union and sustain ecstatic outcome.
Co-dependency and familiar possession catalyze addictive habits, stagnant stasis, and destructive dramas, with acts and plays of eroticism not being regulated through rituals of conscious yoga, qi cultivation, and natural alchemy. Processes of alchemy and tantra portrayed by the Triumphs are meant to be played with on many levels, all of which are nurtured by innocence. However, the Tarot is an adult game. It needs to be respectfully, ritualistically, and spiritually played on an adult level of psychic and subtle intimacy. All of this involves sensorially intuitive identification with the potential of immortality via engagement of Eros through likeness and resemblance.
Ecological health is found in bodies and environments free of inherited mechanisms or acquired habits that resist the innate tendency to holistically proceed in manifestation while reverting in transcendence. Procession and reversion: the Tarot represents a cyclic cosmology. Everything in the cosmos emerges from, is embedded in, reverts to, and transforms as the principle-processes represented by the Trionfi. Paradoxically, evolution and involution occur together via the arrow of time. For any given body, system, field, or environment, this occurs through a complex, spiraling, emergent order that uniquely includes and identifies all contingency, causality, and chaos.
Enlightenment involves consciously realizing manifestation and transcendence simultaneously. The whole ten-stage cycle – that is, reality everywhere – both manifests itself and transcends itself moment to moment. Thus is it possible for enlightened consciousness to transparently radiate states of the Deathless while practically embodying limited states of temporal behavior.
Emanationists historically supposed that spiritual resemblance appeared to diminish in the process of manifestation. Some philosophers suggested that pure concepts, names, and psyches were closer to spiritual reality than corporeal entities. Neoplatonists varied in their opinions of just how diminished spiritual reality ever really becomes. In any case, the more Questors see with nondual eyes, the less they will view differences between manifested and spiritual domains. Wise, compassionate indifference is neither reductionistic nor nihilistic. Rather, it is blissfully, sublimely forgiving.
Gautama the Buddha was perhaps the greatest of Emanationists. He stated unequivocally that once the last stage of cosmic manifestation (the myriad of earthly nature) is truthfully envisioned as the first stage of spiritual transcendence, the rest of the stages retracing Original Nature can be progressively reverted to quite rapidly – in truth, paradoxically, “all at once.” Essentially, Gautama realized that mankind’s original garden or paradise, eternal and immortal Nirvana, was never actually lost. Buddhist Nikayas (earliest of Buddhist texts, written in the Pali language) repeatedly proclaim that for many of Gautama’s personal devotees, the process of consciously reclaiming the Sixth or Seventh Stage of Immanent Transcendence had occurred within a week. Perhaps this was due to Gautama’s miraculously awakening Grace or to the nature of his culture and era. Perhaps proclamations of rapid mass enlightenment were simply due to the mythical and fantastical nature of the Buddha-stories found in the Nikayas.
Statements by modern spiritual adepts indicate that three years is as quick as such integral evolution may happen in a sustainable way; and that timeframe appears rare indeed. It cannot be overly emphasized that any such realization within one’s lifetime requires surrendering one’s self (mindfully, not mindlessly) to the cultural and communal agencies of Ecstatic Bliss that most resemble the Questor’s True Heart. Those agencies often do not appear as Questors may have imagined early in their Quests. They do, however, often appear in human form, which is how come the twenty-two Triumphs portray the Principles of Immortality through spiritually dignified, transpersonal men and women.
