Seven

REALM OF THE SAINTS

Cutting the Root of All Evil …

efore night and day, before the gods, before the cosmos, there was Eros. Eros for the ancient Greeks represented the emergence of all-compelling Beauty as a Principle of Creation. A feeling-concept degraded by any and all defilement of that Consciousness which is primordial Law, Eros is felt by the unenlightened simply as compelling desire. For philosophers of the Great Tradition, however, universal desire implies native longing for the Good – a Paradise and Purpose of Liberation (Eros’s other name: Eleutherios), at once both known and lost. Within this sentient feeling of loss beats the very heart of both spiritual yearning and ignorant delusion. In the former is found identity with the Beautiful and remembrance of the Good; Gaia as Goddess Nature and Original Mother – awesomely attractive, ecstatically engulfing all sensibility. Such is the knowledge of Truth as Conscious Logos. In the latter is found craving for “self” and forgetting of the Source. Such is the illusion of separation, dispelled only by an engulfing totality of Chaos – Gaia’s terrifying other side.

In this chapter on Eros, Immortals, and Satan we will examine the wisdom of erotic contemplation; the ecstatic madness of Dionysian immortality and heroism; and how divine functions of guardian Daimons were usurped by mundane fabrications of a politicized Satan. Throughout, we will unveil a cloak of invisibility – of That which cannot be seen except by eyes passing through the bones of Death.

The seventh stage of the Tarot’s cosmological system is represented by the Devil and Tower Arcana. This is the Underworld stage of Chaos and Generative Flux, which underlies all discriminated comings and goings of the cosmos. Purgatory for most, hell for some, and heaven for a few, the Seventh Stage is the Questor’s alpha and omega. It is the beginning of her immortal transfiguration (through dimensional encapsulation within the Overworld of Eros) and the end of her personal quest. Herein is discovered the true purpose of the Tarot’s twenty-two arcane stations: to assist humankind to transcend death by triumphantly empowering sincere Questors with the insight of transcendentally realized Eros. In this way, the Trionfi themselves serve as sacred agents, informing consciousness of the Principles of Immortality.

For Hesiod, author of the Theogony (the earliest compendium of extant Greek myths), Eros was the creative life-principle of the world. The demiurgical force of Eros formed a world-space through the gap of Chaos as Darkness and Night, out of which Gaia procreated Heaven and Day. Gaia as Earth-mother then begot children, on her own and through her son Ouranos (or Uranus, Greek for “Heaven”). Connecting Gaia with Chaos and Eros was Tartarus, the “dark womb” of Gaia. In Tartarus, Ouranos attempted to keep his children, including the Titans and their leader Kronos (“Time”), from being born. Both as a place of banishment akin to death (an otherwise non-sensible state for the Great Immortals) and a place of gestation, Tartarus was the very extremity of Earth, Space, and the Goddess. In the Tarot, Tartarus is represented by archetypes of extreme transition: the sixth-stage Hanged Man and Death bridging into immortality via the Tower.

Archaic creation myths such as this presumed a chicken-and-egg paradox concerning cosmic origination. Did Eros compel Chaos to create Gaia or did Gaia manifest Eros? The Principle at once needs its Manifestation. Ultimately, corporeal realization is the Law as all forms incorporate pure ideas. That realm, law, or process of consciousness that bridges the ideal with the real, and the mind with the body – known to Heraclitus as Logos – is of essential importance to tantra, alchemy, esotericism, and the Tarot. Enlightenment involves a view of that realm becoming all. Gaia, Tartarus, Chaos, and Eros all represent the Transcendental Otherworld becoming the manifested cosmic world.

Truly empowering Magic transfigures the mundane limitations of worldly circumstance into the awesome potentials of sacred occasion.

Eros as Universal Beauty is represented by the eighth-stage cards of the Star and Moon. The triumphant Star radiantly nourishes spiritual desire. It brims over with sacred eroticism. It is the pure land from which comes the potency of all creative energy. It is compassion simplifying all complexity. It is consideration (meaning “with the stars”) without confusion. The Moon is portal to the Sun and Timeless Radiance. It is the power of Creative Eros, generating dimensional space as Radiant Soul. The eighth-stage Triumphs represent the Egg of Soul in Union with the ninth-stage Triumphs’ Seed of Intellect. As Providence, the Star and Moon transcend yet care, ward, and direct all processes of our descending, i.e., manifesting, cosmos. From an ascending spiritual Questor’s point of view, this eighth stage of evolutionary development is the final goal: the stage of Saints and Bodhisattvas. For the ninth stage of Sun and Angel represents the non-returning realm of Angelic Buddhas.

Creating anew out of an infinite flux of possibility, the seventh-stage Triumphs deliver via their Soulful Potentate a new world, both initially gestating within and finally breaking out of the sixth-stage Womb of the Cosmos: Tartarus as the very depths of Gaia. Life and Death then work as one, cycling through five more stages of cosmic manifestation producing the evolution of Gaia and the Great Return back through her and her Womb, passing beyond the portal of Chaos into Immortal Reality. While the demiurgic Daimon guarding that portal limits all cosmic order via immeasurable and uncontainable flux, it also manifests the potential of immortality.

Shortly, we will follow historical development of the Devil’s progression through Judeo-Christian concepts of Satan. In chapter 5, we considered Greek understandings of Hades, brother of Zeus. We associated the Tower with the House of Hades. As we shall see, Tartarus’s companion place of the afterlife, Elysium, was marked by Zeus’s lightning bolt. The original name of the Tower card, the Arrow, referred to that Bolt, and the Triumph in many ways represents a remote place of both divine gestation and breakthrough attainment. The Tower is Death as Resurrection, transcending and transforming the sixth stage of the cosmos even while mirroring it in the Land of Immortals. It too embodies Tartarus in both its early and late symbolism of exiled origins and sacrificial renewal. It is Chaos generated and channeled into a Kosmic order through immortal principles of transcendental reality. Implicit to the afterworld placement of the Tarot’s Tower is the potential of trans-cosmic or transcendental realization of the personal Questor. The Tower represents universal transformation through a priori cosmic flux – of both mind and body. It transcends cyclic, cosmic existence, yet is bound by it, for it is the bridge principle reaching into the Pure Land of the Absolute One. The Tower holds a uniquely crucial position amid the Trionfi; integrating Death and Devil, it assures an outcome to Questors’ Triumphal procession that forever stands by the attraction of Eros.

Endless potential for Compassion is made evident by the Chaos beyond one’s own destiny; there need be no resistance.

That which is immortally outside of (ecstatically beyond, yet still involved with) the Wheel of Fortune and Death – and the holy men caught in-between (Hermit and Hanged Man) – is the Land of the Saints. Immortal saints ecstatically exist beyond the very Wheel of the cosmos and its chain of causation. Transcending all cycles of life and death, the land of saints is the divine realm of Unity-Consciousness. In Indian tradition the cosmic Wheel is called Samsara, the Indo-European root of which means “together,” “as one.” The Tarot instructs us that the five stages of cosmic process evolving into the Wheel of Fortune are inevitably ruled by the forever-looming impermanence of Death. The Tarot then affirms the Buddhist wisdom that Samsara Is Nirvana, for all six stages of cosmic process emanate from the Deathless.

The Questor’s soul, through mindfulness capable of viewing the complex depths of nature, envisions a realm beyond temporal rule.

In perennially affirmed understandings of classical Indo-European nondual wisdom traditions, a transcendent domain of light and space emanates the cosmos while still existing as pure essence unmodified by temporal manifestation. The earth was once part of a radiantly timeless center, which the sun continues to manifest. In fact, the whole cosmos was once part of a pure energy-space Center of Unity. That origin has never actually been lost, though to the human mind it can be obscured by the gross physicality of our material earth and selves. Regardless of limitations imposed by human projections of self-substance and dimensional objectivity, Principle and Manifestation – Center and Edge – always have been and will be wedded as One.

The seventh stage of consciousness – manifesting corporeal form from seemingly incorporeal Space – is an Otherworld domain called the Bardo Realm in Tantric Buddhism. Its closest correlative in Roman Catholicism is Purgatory. It is generally interpreted in the imagery of popular Christianity as a place of suffering, a kind of temporary hell; a realm in which the souls of those who have not been relegated to eternal hell must expiate their sins. However, it potentially contains the innate order underlying and outlasting all discontinuities of imperfection. To unenlightened or less than saintly minds, it is beyond the reach of living awareness, for it is the “twilight zone” whose ward is the Devil, even as its laws remain those of Heaven. To enlightened realizers, it is the creative, gestating Flux produced through the infinite radiance of transcendental Consciousness (Sun and Angel) emanating as and wedded to the fathomless Space of universal Eros.

Eros can be identified with the eighth stage of conscious realization; and Chaos and Tartarus with the seventh and sixth, manifesting transitional rebirth through the Otherworld. What is continuously re-birthed is Gaia, representing the cyclic six stages of consciousness that from a “cosmic descent” point of view form the whole cosmos itself. Gaia as manifested Myriad is the destiny of Eros, just as she is herself destined to re-create Eros. Gaia as Eros is Mater as both matter and dimensionality of space.

By sacrificing personal power, passion can intensely transform that which would be Abased to that which is Pure; the Emperor who does not realize this becomes the very definition of evil.

The Moon connects Gaia as Eros to the Bright One, the realm of the Sun and the purely Radiant Domain. Abetted by the Sun, the Moon station is powerfully felt by Questors yet remains mysteriously unknown until the realm of the Devil and its Tower is mindfully traversed. In tandem with the Star, the Moon influences the world as an often unseen, powerful, naturally creative force that demands respect. It is represented in Greek mythology by Artemis and the erotic influence of Aphrodite. Through it, the Devil draws his powers of invisibility and “three-pronged” control of the Churning Ocean; the latter symbolized by the trident of Poseidon, Hades’ Brother. The exemplar stations of Star and Moon transform the under-world power of Mother Nature – epitomized in ancient times as the erotic snake guardian Gorgon (Greek for “earth”) Medusa (feminine present participle of medein, meaning “to protect,” “rule over”) – and mirror the over-world knowledge of the Universal Man (Sun and Angel integrating Hero and Saint), allowing the two to consort.

Gaia, Tartarus, Chaos, and Eros: these four Immortal Origins formed for early Greeks a processional Kosmos. Chaos, though listed by Hesiod as the first to come into being, etymologically means “gap” along with “darkness.” It implies a change of state in an already existing substrate of reality. Thus, Chaos paradoxically is compelled by Eros, even while creating all depth and manifestation of reality – Tartarus and Gaia. If we imagine Eros as the un-manifested Kosmic Egg, Chaos can be envisioned as the Cosmic Crack through which the Immortal Kosmos becomes a manifested cosmos. Gaia and her Underworld are at once Kosmic Principles and Earth-Mother realities. Mother-Nature in turn embodies Eros as the material (etymologically from the universal world for mother: ma) world. Eros must have the manifestation of Mother Goddess and her Womb, for they are interdependently purposed. Via the immortally creative cycle of Eros and Gaia, including the primeval depths of Tartarus, Chaos is constantly transforming and being transformed.

In an ecstatic state of Craziness, material form is seen as already Ideal; change needn’t be hoped for, because the greatness of structure in flux karmically proves to be already impermanent.

Each of these four divine creators was anciently conceived as a codependant originator with the other three in a universal process of Becoming. The immortal gods fathered by Zeus and Poseidon (historically preceded by varying tribal demigods; nature-states embodied in the Titans and their offspring; and more universally, Demeter and Dionysus) stood apart from this genesis; yet through it, the Titans and Olympians were progressively generated. We have attempted to re-vision the ancient goddess cycle in a way that integrates later development of Kosmic hierarchy and male principles. It was not until the era of Heraclitus and Gautama that the concept of constant Becoming fully unified with that of a priori, absolute Being. In the Indo-European philosophical development that followed, emanationist wisdom dawned to humankind.

As we saw in chapter 5, Heraclitus posited Eros as the Love-Principle encapsulating Chaos; and Aether as the Bright-Principle emanating Eros. The One becomes Consciousness (Zeus), which becomes Soul (Eros). Heraclitus was critical of Hesiod’s myths, written two centuries earlier, which presented a chthonic, timeless world primarily marked by darkness, out of which lighted states were created. By sixth century B.C., Indo-European wise-men across the globe were acknowledging an Absolute and Radiant Principle as being First Born from an ineffable Unity beyond any and all Chaos.

The ancient Greek concept of Chaos-and-Eros was unique in the way it bridged an archaic always-present-realization of a mysterious, dark creator-Goddess with a pervasively extended and radiant, future-purposed God-principle. While later personifications of Eros would depict it with highly effeminate male aspects, Eros is more accurately identified with the primordial female draw to procreate – the Desire of all masculine energy. From the concept of Eros-Love (transcending temporal and spatial harmony and disharmony), Heraclitus redefined Hesiod’s pantheon of gods, wedding Aether as Bright Zeus to Eros and positing that there exists as Source to all of Chaos and Nature an undifferentiated “One Thing.” That Original Unity is not a priori marked by chaos, earth-nature, or nether-worldliness. It is marked by the consciousness of a Universal Transcendent – an a priori Absolute – emanating all of reality. Eros and essentially unifying Diké are identifiable as two primal aspects of the Goddess Principle that realize Divine Law through a Chaotic Flux of World Transformation. As the Incorporeal Source, Destiny, and Truth of Eros, the Infinite, Radiant, and Unitive Law of Zeus-Diké determines all fate and destiny beyond the powers of heaven – beyond Olympia and the gods of Sun, Moon, Stars, Planets, and Gaia herself.

Natural alchemy and the prototypical Laws of the World are discovered through a spark of inspiration that suddenly shows a course to true freedom; through intensification of Temperance, Enlightenment becomes familiar.

(While Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Earth, Venus, and Mercury may roughly be associated with the six stages of cosmic manifestation and conscious evolution, the ancient Zodiac – from Greek indicating a “circle of small-living-being” – may more meaningfully be so associated:

There are sufficient correlations with the Great Traditional stages and stations as clarified in these pages to have lent astrology its longevity as a study of heavenly principles ruling the spiraling integration of cosmic cycles. Most likely, however, this is the first time in print that the above identification of Zodiac Signs and Trionfi has been made. A new interpretation or school of astrology may reasonably be founded upon it.)

Only the Heart can be held dear if belief is to stay true; this requires tremendous patience, ruthless self-honesty, and interminably willful sublimation.

Very near to the Greek development of a universally present, constantly creating Source (as epitomized by Heraclitus’s concepts) was the development of an ancient Vedic myth of a primal fire-god. Agni, meaning “fire,” was an Indo-Aryan deity that represented a synthesis of ancient agricultural perceptions of immanent spirituality with concepts of transcendental dominion developed during later civilization. Agni embodied both a life-giving nature as Sun and a life-devouring nature as Death. A further designation of this First Principle was Kama, or Love as Eros, elucidated by Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy as:

prior to gods and men and beyond the apprehension of either; and it is well known to the Epic that this Kamadeva, Eros, is a form of Agni, and literally the “fire of Love.” Kamadeva is then a form of Agni, to whom the names of “Life” and “Universal Life” are commonly given in the Vedas; on the other hand all that is under the Sun is in the power of Death, Mrtyu, a name which is one of the most significant applied to Deity throughout the Brahmanas and Upanisads.

It was through the aspect of Death, meaning in Sanskrit “want” and “privation,” that Agni represented to Indo-Aryans that which Eros as compelling desire represented to the ancient Greeks. Agni embodied Death as a Good, in that death was always purposed toward the renewal of life – ultimately compelling the world to a fate of eternal liberation. Emphasis upon cyclic resurrection over tragic death would seem to have been a wise orientation for agrarian cultures. Sacrificial ways of chthonic spirituality such as found in the rites, myths, and rationales of Dionysus have been given a tragic interpretation by dramatists since classical times. However, it is through the living realization of resurrection that the mystery sects have continuously established their perennial wisdom. We need not seek occult secrets of terrible sacrifice in the ancient mystery rituals to credit them with an understanding of ecstatic wisdom.

Having looked Death in the face, transcend the temptation to charge, to set in motion, to act righteously without the guidance of that which is Deathless.

As an essential distillation of Hinduism, Buddhism maintains that the world issues forth in accordance to its Dharma, or fundamental Way. Properly viewed, the Law of Eros, Kama, Love, Agni, Zeus, or Dharma is naught but the way of all things fulfilling their purpose. Known through their aspects of separation, the relationships defined by such existence are marked by temporal and spatial manifestations and therefore temporal purposes with temporal significance and meaning. Such is forever arising under the rule of Death. Felt as a whole, the universe and every temporal being within it are purposed toward the Bliss of Nirvana. The wholeness of reality is known by feeling the wholeness of one’s sentient psychophysical nature. That unity-feeling is not an experience of “self” separate from “other.” The lawful way of vital life and essential nature is intuited as innately transcending physical and psychic limitations. Still, a feeling-knowledge of discreet internal degrees of transcendence developed through consciousness must be verified experimentally for the Quest of Bliss to proceed. Such produces a science of consciousness.

In India’s storytelling tradition, Siddhartha (Buddha’s original name, meaning “Purpose Accomplished”) and Agni are constantly supplicated by devas (deities, spirit-beings, ancestors along the way of immortal realization as Brahman or Universal Self) to “turn the Wheel of Law.” Only through such cycling of death and life can the world proceed into and as Nirvana. Only through the procession of becoming-being is the Way of Right Liberation or Absolute Truth realized. This enlightened worldview is most paradoxical: transcendental realization requires immanent manifestation. Realization of absolute radiance requires a myriad of manifestations – a real flux in real emptiness. Spiraling through infinite deaths and births, the Original Soul of the World cycles toward an Ultimate Purpose, that is Liberation from all effort of cosmic creation, sustenance, and destruction. Such a Great Release comes by evolving through manifestation. That Liberation entails an Outshining of Soul as Buddha Mind Consciousness – the Translation of Compassionate Bodhisattva into Pulverized Buddha.

Electrified by a storm of opposition, peace is ignored; progressive conquests succeed only in agitating further opposition – such is the power of destruction that fails to enforce any way whatsoever.

In the Vedas, the Unity-state of Agni was often identified with the Great Yaksha. Yaksha was a pre-Vedic term (akin to the Greek concept of Daimon) that originally referred to:

the notions of sudden luminosity, wonderful or awe-inspiring manifestation of something normally invisible, and mysterious power properly to be worshipped.

Yaksha was synonymous with Deva as Spirit-presence, whether referring to deity in its highest sense or to a phantom or ghost. Images of Yakshis (the feminine form of the concept) in Indian iconography depict voluptuous women in erotic poses with the Tree of Life. A Yakshi’s body appears purely sensuous while conveying the demeanor, posture, and gestures of essential grace and enlightened awareness. Indo-European people have historically imaged such a witnessing-realization of alchemical union. This is evidenced in the fantastic spiraling motifs of ancient Celtic menhirs, incorporating elements of both phallus and vulva; and in the sensuously noble metalwork of early Northern Europe. Development of materially sensual beauty in a context of sacred and natural regeneration is found throughout agrarian Indo-European culture. Later empires (Greek, Persian, Indian, Roman, etc.) added mythological and civil attributes to the beauty of such art. In the great traditions of Indo-European spirituality, the artful process of envisioning multitudinous spirits in primordial and natural form progressively wove together an imagined tapestry of One Universal Spirit. In an essential way, this describes the Tarot itself.

The Vedas convey a conscious realization of Divine Unity in terms that include the ancient concept of primordial Yaksha. To witness and feel embodiment of that One Psyche-Spirit-Soul was to see, hear, and indeed become the Glorious. Readers may note a fundamental difference between this consideration of immanently realized transcendence and that of dualistic Gnostic theology as summarized in chapter 5. This chapter finishes the task of delineating the difference between nondual esoteric gnosis and dualistic occult beliefs.

Cosmic hell cannot possibly be the destiny of the world, for the very Plenitude that defines this World assures the Oneness of souls; even so, deluded self believes ego may outsmart the Devil.

Later Brahminical religious structure reinterpreted Indo-spirituality via a socialized caste-based system so as to justify and regulate political control. This included a division of the spirit world into “good gods” and “bad demons,” the latter inappropriately relegated to Dravidian-speaking communities. Within a dualistic, authoritarian priesthood defined by “Aryan” (distorted to mean a glorified, original, superior, and “pure” Vedic race) domination, yaksha and yakshi were reduced to indicating male and female makers of Chaos, demon-enemies of angelic devas. This provincial, political reduction had become widely propagated throughout monastic Buddhist politics within the Indian subcontinent by the time of Alexander the Great’s conquest. Arising with this attitude was a conceit of superiority claimed by fair-skinned, male-dominated Northerners over dark-skinned, female-influenced Southerners. Buddhist and Hindu sects demonized opposing deities of societies within their own lands and their own mythological systems.

So it was that followers of Vishnu were pitted against those of Shiva, Theravada Buddhists conflicted with emerging Mahayana sects, and Hindus warred against Buddhists. Modern-day Sri Lanka unfortunately serves as an ongoing case study regarding such religious provincialism. Ironically, Hinduism and Buddhism have also evinced immense toleration for religious sects of all persuasions. Hinduism generally places Buddha within its divine pantheon as an incarnation of Vishnu. Buddhism established advanced lineages of Tantra through its Vajrayana (Diamond or Lightning Vehicle) path, which emerged via integration of the ancient Shiva-Shakti complex of devotions, rituals, sutras, yogas, and arts.

As an Avatar (incarnated divinity), Buddha is understood in a Hindu context to be the Supremely Divine One in human form. As it was with the ancient cult of Dionysus and the later cult of Jesus, recognition of Buddha as an incarnation of the transcendental reality beyond Death created for his devotees a worldview involving a completely divine teaching and transmission immanently permeating and transforming the world. Buddha taught that the world itself, ruled by Mara or Death, is inevitably always becoming – for it already is – Nirvana – the neither-being-nor-not-being realm of the Deathless. His and his acknowledged successors’ radical teachings – as conveyed via the earliest Pali texts right through to the Tantra sutras recorded a millennium later – posit that by Divine Grace, every human, angel, and demon can open his eyes to a Right View of the World. Such spirit-vision reveals that Nirvana is even now always the Truth of Reality. It was to this that Jesus pointed when he said: The Kingdom of God is at hand.

Hearing the hierarchical harmony of the spheres requires dispelling the charms of social pleasantries, distancing the prejudices of collective moods, and mindfully letting be the conceits of common beliefs.

South Indian traditions migrated from the cultural milieu of the Indus Valley and northern Dravidian communities. Third-millennium phallus worship, dolmens, and fertility rites became well established in South India at the same time that they penetrated Indo-European territories stretching from Ireland to China. Shamanic deities that emerged during this evidently peaceable epoch were incorporated into what we now call Hinduism (originally derived from Old Persian Hindu, meaning the Indus River, indicating the linguistic and cultural community of that territory). Agni and Shiva became representatives of a very earthy, sensual, erotically transcendental way of becoming One with Nature.

Coomaraswamy’s corpus remains preeminent in the consideration of how this process occurred. Although, like the present text, much of his work may fall under the old-fashioned academic rubric of speculation, that term must be viewed through a prism of rigorously studied intuition and spiritual practice if it is to be properly understood. In the great Pandit’s case, that prism needs to include an astounding mastery of Indo-European linguistic and artistic analysis, matched in history by few, if any, others.

Obedient to the way of the Deathless, the Hanged Man submits to a seemingly unending process whose successful outcome is impossibly beyond his own will.

In our previous chapter’s considerations of Shiva we did not speculate upon the likelihood of his historical development having commenced with a real, consciously evolved shaman existing in a settled, primeval Sarasvati–Indus River society. Also, much will have to be left unsaid regarding the possibility that a historical Shiva, his lineage, and his legacy influenced the myths of Dionysus, who may well have been a historical shaman teaching an ecstatic type of sexual yoga, dance, and wild communion. Evidence points to Dionysus as having been worshiped in Crete during the Indus Valley era. It was continuously held, from Minoan times onward, that he came “from Eastern lands.” Stories that have come down to us about him largely regard his global adventures, with popular myths telling of his wanderings over many years in India. From the time of latter Indo-European migrations out of Anatolia, Crete remained in close contact with the Cyclades and the mainland (Turkey), which in turn maintained active trade routes into Indus territory. The cults of Dionysus and Shiva share many symbols: the adorned phallus; the horned man-god; worship of the snake, panther, ram, and bull; wild female devotees of mountain forests, etc. Outside of the Sarasvati-Indus region, evidence of this culture complex is also found in prehistoric Crete and Anatolia, home of Proto-Indo-Europeans.

Actual, living humans ecstatically empowered through realization of the Great Self or Bright One served as the crucial foundation for centrally primary myths regarding Indo-European deities. Buddha drew upon the summary teachings of maha (meaning “great”) rishis (meaning “sages”) and yogis embodied in the stories of the golden and most noble Indus Age as they were rationally and intuitively elaborated in the Upanishads. Throughout South Asian history, Tantric Shaivism and monastic Buddhism have either integrated in true, good, and beautiful ways, or conflicted through craven, deluded, and malicious claims. Both streams of cultural, evolutionary consciousness have had far-reaching ramifications for the development of Western knowledge, spirituality, and science.

Immersion in daimonic essence can draw the mind into natural psychosis – the Death of self through loss of sensibility, sociability, and phantasy.

It is due time that the developmental myths of Indo-European spirituality are understood in a context of Self-Realization of Noble Wisdom, and that Right View of Ecstatic Life becomes popularly instilled. Consciousness studies are critical to modern-day understanding of cultural evolution, social governance, and natural wellness. Interactive and integrated media being implemented by global transcultural communities are allowing a new era to dawn whereby essential patterns of the great traditions may re-merge and harmonize. The age of mythologized historical avatars may well be over, even as the principles of immortality become incorporated in twenty-first-century virtual avatar fantasy worlds. In any case, quite beyond any individual incarnations of Transcendental Reality, our world itself is avataric. Indeed, Spiritual Rule Is at Hand. This is beyond doubt; as is the fact that fear, greed, and slaughter will neither arrest nor quicken such realization. Fate remains Empty, as shall the naturally ruling community of successful Questors.

It was at one time supposed that Greek and other “Aryan” Indo-European people worshipped sky deities, while pre-Greek, non-Aryan people worshipped chthonic, ancestral deities of the netherworld. However, just as Greek culture had its chthonic gods and Celts had their ancestral cults, Minoan, Mesopotamian, and Dravidian traditions had their heavenly gods. Classical Greeks were unique, however, in radically opposing the two realms of sky-born gods and earthy, ancestral daimons – for in a dualistic worldview, immortal gods abhorred being close to Death.

In pre-Greek times, a way of ecstatic spirituality centered upon the goddess Demeter and her grandson Dionysus emerged from archaic, agriculture-based, shamanic practices. This mystery religion was radically reinterpreted through Chaldean-influenced communities and carried into Pythagorean, Platonic, and Stoic circles through the rites of Orpheus. Like Persian and Greek histories, Orphic and Dionysian rites represented both complementary and opposed paths.

Beauty, truth, and goodness are Deathless states transcending dualities; the mindfulness required to transit the River of Death is totally awesome – the intensity of the Boatman’s attention freezes the very marrow of one’s bones.

Greek mysticism during classical times bifurcated into two very different movements. One direction evolved into a Dionysian way of psychophysical whole-body sacrifice and regeneration realized as internal transformation instead of corporeal death. Death subsumed by Gaia, Chaos, Eros, and Immortality while in corporeal form was a very real option for those Questors willing to surrender into a dance of wild and noble Ecstasy. This was not a process of re-incarnation or the “rebirthing” of one’s personal psyche. Rather, it was a process of utter death of self-identity and conscious regeneration of one’s original, essentially divine nature. Thus, every maenad (ecstatic female celebrant) actually became Dionysus himself, who was none other than Zeus the Bright One in human form. The Godman partook of raw flesh, and those who consorted with him partook of His flesh in return. Through this rite, the domain of ancestral spirits, the world of nature, the consciousness of true self, and universal divinity became one.

A second branch of Greek mysticism was believed by its adherents to be a superior reformation of chthonic Dionysus’s sacrificial way. The rites of Orpheus were intended to be ecstatic, but in a way which progressively attempted to avoid the necessity of bodily form. Thus, a dichotomy was made between ascetic pleasures of the psyche, mind, or soul – mathematical, poetic, and musical – and carnal pleasures of the body – earthy, sexual, and rhythmic. Orphism glorified the former, believing that one’s psychic/subtle self on its own defined the sacred. It idealized an abstracted self as a psyche-soul separate from the manifest world. It ultimately attempted to escape the inevitability of Tartarus and Hades, along with Gaia and the world of chthonic daimons, which earthly life and physical form were naturally wedded to. Orphism posited a different home for the psyche. Amidst this attitude, Eros became progressively associated with male homosexual love.

Developing out of, yet in some ways opposed to, ancient understandings of Tartarus, Hesiod spoke of a paradisiacal land in the time of Kronos, before the era of Zeus and Kronos’s other children. The Garden of Hesperides was home to the Golden Race during a time that went down in history as the Golden Age. Here it was that streams flowed with ambrosia. It was in this timeless land that Hercules fulfilled his eleventh labor before entering Hades’ realm of Death.

The higher the Questor’s goal, the graver the danger that humble seed will no longer be sown, that the Tree of Essential Nature and Vital Life will be displaced by a Tower of technological sufficiency; still, material science will never succeed spiritual knowledge.

In order to be with the woman of his dreams, Hercules had to succeed with twelve labors involving adventures to lands of, and encounters with, the Titans and Titanic beasts. To fetch the golden apples of the Hesperides, ruled by a triad of beautiful Nymphs of the same name, he had to travel to the end of the earth. This was a location he could not find, for mortal seeking would only keep one lost. Hercules had to enlist the help of shape-shifting Nereus (like Proteus, representing the Old Man of the Sea before the age of Zeus/Hades/Poseidon). Even after vanquishing Ladon – Hera’s hundred-headed snake-demon wound around the tree of immortality, reflecting ancient Minoan and tantric traditions – Hercules could not acquire the apples directly, for they could be picked only by one who was already immortal. He thereby turned to Atlas, the Hesperides’ father.

Atlas was a primordial Titan – Ruler of the Moon and brother of Prometheus, Giver of Fire. As Greek culture and consciousness conceived a new psychosocial complex of deities and spiritual realms (likely driven by Dorian or earlier Mycenaean invasions), myths arose regarding the banishment of Atlas and his conquered Titanic companions. Much of Hercules’ tasks tell of this transition, with the Hero succeeding through assistance from the Old Ones. Zeus gave Atlas the work of holding up the celestial sky, to keep Ouranus from ever again becoming unified with Gaia – the Moon-god became an instrument propping up a new, dualistic worldview separating Heaven from Earth. Once relieved of his imposed dualistic function, as Hercules held up the sky for him, Atlas obtained the golden apples of immortality. Hercules would have been forever engaged in his own dualistic entrapment had he not tricked Atlas into resuming his old position. In this way, Hercules was ultimately resurrected beyond the Moon station, into the Sun’s eternal realm of heroes.

Intuition is that state of mind wholly continuous with the living body; such is the initial stage of true enlightenment, for it involves complexity beyond the self-constrictive fear or suspicion of discursive analysis.

In the golden paradise of Hesperides, Orphic devotees and Platonic idealists imagined themselves capable of formally being without suffering a temporal and changing, earthly nature. Salvation in such a paradise was pictured as a timeless time of pleasurable fantasy. Into the present day, occultists have psychically conjured phantasms identifying this long-lost mythical land, along with its immortal fruit, nymphal innocents, and dragon warden. Readers may also note resemblance to the Bible’s Babylonian and dualistically inspired Garden of Eden.

Chaos and Eros are inevitably experienced in reality as being immanently more present than the land of Hesiod’s mythical age. Chaos, Eros, the Bright, and the Way are immortal principles directly represented by the Tarot. They are day-to-day consciously realized by awakened Questors. The Tarot addresses reality as it is, not as one might desire or imagine it to be. That is, it empirically refers to an always-already-present reality and the universal principles by which it abides. The praxis of the Trionfi put into play uniting internal theosophy with external cosmology acts as a crux of esoteric transmission and knowledge. Marked by the visionary logos of essential and universal hierarchy, the Triumphs summarize millennia of wisdom for our modern age; what are perhaps best called the wisdom principles of immortality.

Feeling the currency of Eros in their moment-to-moment lives is what transforms Questors’ vitality into energy and energy into spirit, as addressed in chapter 6. Felt and understood in this way, it becomes evident that the alchemical elixir of life, the divine ambrosia, is none other than Eros itself. In Buddhist terms, the Eightfold Noble Path culminates in Right Concentration. Such is the completely sublimated alchemical agent first tasted in Right View. Such is Beauty dwelling in the very marrow of one’s naked soul.

Contemplation is concentration of the Profound – inclusive of intellectual clarity and self-analysis – the Eros of non-self, the nectar of the Great Other, the sympathetic current springing from the Righteous Heart-space of unfathomable mystery.

Ambrosia (literally “immortal,” but referring to that which bestows immortality) is that which all sentient life desires. It is the milk, honey, and seed of Eros; the very nectar from which the world is created and sustained. It is wished for even by Death. It is the source of the Gods’ immortality, the secret of their vital essence. The elixir of life upon which a Questor’s alchemy is reliant, Ambrosia is sought by those who would return to the paradise of golden bliss. Since classical Greek times, European beliefs have held that obtaining the Ambrosia of Heaven, whether through a heroic or demonic effort, makes the attainment of immortality possible. However, attempting such divine transgression usually fails, bringing a Questor damnation in the worst of hellish suffering. Divine Ambrosia was stolen, in one way or another (including through attempted sex with a goddess), by the famous exiles of Tartarus: Sisyphus, Tantalus, Tityus, and Ixion. Appropriately, Ambrosia was also the name of Dionysus’s first Maenad-devotee.

From the era of Aryan Mycenaean domination of Greece into modern times, Tartarus has been associated with the taboo of sensual ecstasy and immortal empowerment. It has served as a direct channel to, and concomitantly as an underground domain separated from, the sustaining body of the Goddess and creative love of Eros. The Titans were said to have been banished to Tartarus, here interpreted as a realm of deathless Death. Prometheus, adversary to Zeus, was a Titan’s son (just as Zeus was son of Kronos, brother to the Titans; all being fathered by Gaia and her son-husband Ouranus). After creating men, Prometheus gave them fire he stole from heaven. He then informed them how to compel divine assistance through conscious sacrifice. As an archetype, much of what Prometheus represented was to be later identified by dualistic Jews and Christians with Satan. The Tarot’s Devil and Tower evoke the empowering transgression of Prometheus. Zeus (and later Judeo-Christian versions of God) punished men for their existential audacity by introducing woman: Pandora manifested with a container of seductively attractive but seemingly unlimited troubles.

The Subtle Observer blazes with a mindful intensity incomparable to any earthbound immortal, psychic daimon, or astral entity; do not be deceived by the Devil’s advocate, rather be finely transfigured.

Prometheus was chained to the Caucasus Mountains to have his liver eternally devoured by an eagle – a type of punishment common to the exiles of Tartarus. However, Hercules was able to release him from this Olympic punishment. We can see the myth of Prometheus reflected in Gnostic dualism. The myth of Hercules, however, embodies a distinctly nondual worldview; it transcends the separation of living reality from the afterlife. Furthermore, it recognizes and honors the role of pre-warrior, agrarian heroes who advanced human development as inventors, educators, shamans, healers, and Keepers of the Fire.

The Titans appear to have represented an early, perhaps pre-Mycenaean form of spiritual personification. When Zeus acquired lightning from the Cyclops – one of three preeminent brothers to the Titans who dwelled on the island of Sicily – and his brother Poseidon (the undersea god) received the trident (both symbols of Kosmic, immortal force and virility) from the One-eyed Giant, his brother Hades was given a cap of invisibility. The realm of Tartarus, we recall from chapter 5, became associated with Hades. Hades was called in Greek literature subterranean Zeus and Zeus of the dead.

The Cyclops’s mythic forehead eye symbolizes awesome transformative power. Forger of magical tools empowering the next generation of deities, Cyclops lived in Gaia’s primordial world of Erotic Paradise, Titanic Powers (symbolized so intensely by that most dangerously seductive of demigod daughters, Medusa), and Golden Immortals. The Metropolitan Moon card, representing Eros warding and empowering Gaia’s realm, appears to portray this magical Third Eye. (The Budapest Triumph shown in these pages has been processed to unveil this image.) We find most interesting parallels with the Third Eye of Shiva. Jane Ellen Harrison, in her brilliantly speculative corpus written a century ago (which includes the beautiful and insightful treatise on Demeter and Dionysus, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion), pointed out that Titan originally came from the Greek word meaning “white earth,” “clay,” or “gypsum.” The Titans may have been shamans who covered themselves with white clay or gypsum dust during their magical rituals in the same manner that stories tell of Shiva and his initiating yogi-lineage of animistic shamans.

Embrace the selfless work of salvaging innocence in the face of psychosis, resuscitating living tradition encapsulated by scientific materialism, uniting immortal ways regardless of religious intolerance.

There is cause to suggest that an original pre-Vedic/pre-Olympic way of spirituality was directly associated with a proto-Shiva/Dionysus shamanic culture originating traditions later known as Tantra. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars who believed that primary aspects of European mythology must trace back to an earlier Egyptian civilization suggested Dionysian myths were derived from the cult of Osiris, a god who annually died and resurrected as manifested in the seasons. However, as the Indus Valley culture complex was progressively uncovered, it became apparent that a Dravidian-Aryan mergence was crucial to the evolution of ancient Indo-European civilization, influencing its development more fundamentally than Egyptian or Mesopotamian societies did.

The way of natural history is such that cultural identities established as cyclic polar symmetries organically radiate in fields of relationship from which synchronistically emerge new holistic complexities of cultural, societal, and psychological consciousness. This may occur simultaneously in societies separated in space, but likely will occur in significant synchronicity less so for societies separated in ancestry.

Precursory Western Asian sages and initiators of Greek religion arose from Indo-Aryan shamanic culture that was epitomized and largely developed in the Indus Valley during pre- and early-Vedic times. (As mentioned, Indus culture bridged with Cycladic and Minoan culture of third millennium B.C. via what is now Iran and Turkey.) Notwithstanding tribal genetics, the mystical and psychological power embodied by shamanic “daimon-men” (i.e., our civilization’s original geniuses) likely became associated with physical size through generations of storytelling; thus, an identification of Titan with Giant.

Be liberated by the Lionsword, the double-edged realization of transcendent unity, the asymmetrical way of crazy wisdom, the core-release of universally spiritual Justice.

Notably, it was the Titans who jealous Hera sent to rend Dionysus (meaning “the deity from Nysa”) in his original boy-form as Zagreus (meaning “Zeus-like”) into pieces. After a great deal of animalistic shape-shifting (perhaps representing historic transformations that his shamanic cult underwent), he was finally sacrificed as a bull. The Titans ate all of his parts except for his Heart, which was saved by Athena (a classical personification of Diké). From this he was born again, resurrecting as a godman through the care of the Nymphs of Nysa. The Titans were destroyed by Zeus’s lightning. This finds parallels with the power of the Vedic king of gods, Indra, who destroyed or transformed the pre-Vedic, Titan-like Asuras. From the ashes of the Titans’ primeval society arose new, more civilized (originally indicating a settlement of households) social patterns.

The Nymphs of Nysa were so-called minor nature deities that cavorted within sacred and immortal realms, expressing their spiritual nature through erotic sexuality and tantric powers. Pliny observed in his Natural History:

Most people assign to India the city of Nysa and Mount Meru which is sacred to father Liber (Dionysus), this being the place from which originated the myth of the birth of Liber from the thigh of Jove (Zeus).

While a mythical Mount Nysa has been ascribed to Thrace (area of Bulgaria, Northern Greece, and Western Turkey), and followers of Osiris locate one of the same name in Ethiopia, it is of import to note that Shiva’s sacred mountain was also called Nysa, located near modern-day Peshawar, Pakistan. Greek nymphs had beautiful “cousins” in eastern lands. Apsaras spirits served as nymphs and muses in the entourages of the gods and divine realizers such as Shiva and Buddha. They were gorgeously depicted on cave walls in Sri Lanka, India, Central Asia, and China during the developmental and high years of Tantra. We find their remarkable presence reflected in the earliest of Pali scriptures, which detail the spirit realms of the cosmos in tandem with the conscious evolution of Buddha Mind.

The modern World is challenged to integrally incorporate a rich, historical body of magic, myth, and rationality without letting delusions of tribe, nation, or network convict consciousness to a state of alienated stagnation or the lull of jaded banality.

Worship of Dionysus likely extended back to the age of Titanic gods. It continued unabated into the age of Olympians. His shamanic rituals of death and resurrection informed the merging of Chaos, Eros, and Tartarus with a new era of gods. Tartarus was then intimately connected to Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades; for male potency must, at the end of the day, find regeneration within the female sphere. What could be more potently regenerative than penetrating and remaining hidden in the womb of Earth Mother Gaia? By dwelling within Gaia’s deepest recess, the male principle could emerge beyond the female’s concentrated domain, releasing as the Brightness of the Heavenly Observant Sun. Thus did the principle of Radiance include yet transcend the principle of Space.

Only the great Heroes such as Dionysus and Hercules could cross into the Underworld, enter a domain of the Olympics (in the latter’s case, using the River Styx to enter the realm of Hades), and still live. As we shall see, the Greek concept of a hero found its mature definition through identification with afterworld existence. The three magical devices mentioned previously represented an immortal extension of male potency. Of them, the Cap of Invisibility became accessible to Questing heroes.

Hades’ formal name, Aides, meant “the Unseen one.” It was through the agency of Hades’ cap that Perseus was able to decapitate the terribly beautiful and mortal Gorgon Medusa and escape her two immortal sisters. Medusa was portrayed in ancient Greek times with symbolism remarkably similar to that of the Yakshis in India. Representing an archaic, Gaian aspect of Eros, this Indo-European goddess was daughter of Proteus (the primal sea god who could change his shape at will), brother of Kronos; she and her ancestors may well have preceded their cousins the Titans. Medusa was aligned to two sisters; the three composing, when placed in a wilderness context of matriarchal community, integral aspects of empowered womanhood. She was at once terrifying and beautiful. She attracted men to her through an awesome sublimation of Shakti into her hair, eyes, mouth, and tongue. Once caught in her hypnotic snake-ecstasy spell, men were eternally bound to her. She drew out of them all independent life, petrifying their minds in a state of unmoving devotion to her. Here we see the art of tantra at its extreme, and perhaps in its source-state, sublimating sexuality into an upper coil draw of seduction that forms as a sacred hood and nimbus of spiritual empowerment while containing the deepest of daimonic, chthonic potencies and dangers. This Snake-Fire Trident and archetypal Threesome, realized as an epitome of feminine seduction, can serve as a touchstone of immortality even while simultaneously acting as an all-arresting demonic guard to such.

The Fool is the Sage of Eros, the Mage of Amour, the hypostatic inscrutability of Ecstasy.

Perseus, born in the Cyclades, was a son of Zeus and a mortal woman (as were Dionysus and Hercules). He was Founder and King of Mycenae, and great-grandfather of Hercules (whose Dorian Dynasty came much later than three human life spans would indicate). As an early avatar of Zeus-Dionysus, Perseus mythologically bridged ancient Minoan and Cycladic worlds with Mycenaean civilization. While much archeological knowledge has been discovered regarding Mycenaean culture, our core understanding of this city-based Greek warrior society comes through Homer, the ninth century B.C. author of The Iliad and The Odyssey. These were Greece’s original mythic-historic stories detailing the Trojan War (ca. twelfth century B.C.) and heroic adventures of King Odysseus (known to the Romans as Ulysses) of Ithaca, the demigod warrior Achilles, and King Agamemnon of Mycenae (who inherited Perseus’s city and was a descendent of Hercules).

The history of Perseus begins with him being cleverly sent off in his youth by a king who desired the woman Perseus warded – his mother. He was given a guaranteed mission-of-no-return: to capture Medusa’s head (symbolizing first-stage shamanic, archaic-magical power). As an avatar of Zeus, he was helped by Hermes and Athena (who, like Dionysus, was thrice-born), in part by being given winged sandals that enabled him to traverse Titanic realms. The Graeae, a triad of crones who shared a single eye, also helped him find what he needed to succeed in his shamanic quest. As a most ancient version of Fate, the Graeae formed a female entity of visionary power integrating and perhaps matching the titanic potencies of both Medusa and Cyclops. Perseus used Hermes’ cap’s power of invisibility and his Athena-empowered mirror-like shield to reflect Medusa, entrancing her through her own irresistible attraction. This allowed him to become so close to the goddess that he was able to behead her with Hermes’ sickle – archaic Death’s tool of sacred sacrifice.

Medusa, containing the power of a unified Triad (and from that, the continuously arising Myriad) as the foundation of her base identity, then transformed into a new Threesome. As Woman (even if only in the embodiment of a living head), she remained a Snake Witch, fully aligned to Perseus while psychically assisting him, petrifying men intending to thwart his missions. As Animal, she became Pegasus the Winged Horse – a pure, white vehicle allowing the Hero to traverse realms bridging into the Otherworld. Pegasus created a sacred spring for the Muses, became a favorite ally of heroes, and was known for assisting in conquering the fire-breathing, dragon-like Chimaera. (From this perhaps comes the source of dragon-killing unicorns common in popular mythology.) As Man, Medusa became Chrysaor, the Giant Warrior with a Golden Sword who wedded the daughter of the Ocean and raised Geryon, a fearsome three-headed, three-bodied Titan who dwelt on the island Erytheia in the Hesperides. (Reflecting the history of Medusa/Perseus, Geryon too was slain by Hercules during one of his trials upon the path of immortality.)

The Gorgons embodied strong, male attributes. Gorgon itself meant “the staring one.” Both Medusa’s beauty and power were derived from her consuming and thus embodying male potency. In many ways, she was a wild and essential precursor to the sexually armored goddesses Artemis and Athena. As Goddess of Wisdom and Strategic Defense (Eros as ward of procreative Gaia), Athena oversaw a domain of empowered and just women. As the preeminent warrior Goddess, she incorporated Medusa’s Shakti powers into her invincible shield, upon which one finds the snake goddess’ head in Greek iconography. As dispenser of Justice (developed from the original concept of Diké as Zeus’s primary female offspring), Athena had assisted Perseus in taming Medusa. Classically, Athena was viewed as a female counterpart to godman Dionysus, in whose lineage Perseus held a key position. However, because the archetype of Medusa includes the wildly potent aspects of Artemis, we may with considerable insight view that more fundamental development of goddess realization in all of its multiplicity (including the Giant Warrior with a Golden Sword – wielding a phallic symbol of immortal male potency) as the ultimate female reflection of a wildly triadic, highly eroticized Dionysus. Neither Demeter nor Persephone (who arguably represented one in the same womanhood) compares, regarding archaic female archetypes of spiritual realization.

Myths regarding the Dionysus-Perseus-Hercules-Hermes lineage formed a coherent, interchanging storyline that told of a heroic and spiritual quest for immortality. The Goddess was a cause of, at all times present in, and indeed utterly indispensable to that Quest. Broadly, the Quest was for Immortal realization in a context of Goddess resurrection, commonly symbolized by Persephone, Dionysus’s mother. Dionysus (and in India, Shiva) was the first historically recorded incarnation of that perennial Indo-European shaman who was able to bridge Eros with Gaia via sacrificial Death and an otherworld renewal (Tartarus) of transformational consciousness (Chaos), and then share his knowledge of evolution with a community of initiates via spiritual rituals. In that Way is found the Tarot Triumphs’ original procession of immortal realization.

In an earlier chapter, a connection was made between the Knights Templar – who popularly defined medieval romantic, chivalrous tradition and the Quest for the Grail that bestows immortality – and a belted girdle bearing a bearded head as depicted in the Metropolitan Tarot’s Devil. Worship of the Bearded Head along with apparently associated secret sexual practices, were the primary acts of heresy for which the Templar were condemned. (It is telling that even after a great deal of expertly applied torture, the Church apparently never did figure out what the Templar rituals were about.) The Head represented a generative power associated with the afterworld and chthonic rituals ancient in their origins. Here we meet again with Perseus and Medusa’s Head, the latter to be wedded to chaste Athena’s empowered shield.

Tantric practices were massively honored throughout the East (i.e., the Near East, Central Asia, India, Indochina, and China) and amongst Sufi-influenced cultures in which the Templars lived during the age of the Crusades. Concepts of Shakti-Kundalini ecstasy and militant power were well known and deeply practiced. It is likely that the Assassin/Hashish sects that the Templar Knights were accused of aligning with were practitioners of a so-called “black tantric” way. In accordance to their law, Templars were ideally both strictly celibate and boldly tantric (less idealistically, according to many accounts they were frequently possessed by attitudes of unrestrained lust and violence). Their engagement with psychic power was directly linked to their glorification of Eros. Templars ran roughshod over the earth, yet in courtly fields played a highly dangerous game involving devotion and potent attention to the “princesses and priestesses” of the ruling elite. Genuine commitment to this first stage of alchemical psychosocial process played no small part in their successful gains of earthly power, wealth, and fame.

Accusations of extreme heresy leveled at the Templars (and similarly the Cathars of France before them and Kabbalists of Spain after them) were purposed toward arresting and appropriating their power and wealth. Political and religious authorities were gravely threatened by esoteric communities able to access physical gold along with metaphysical knowledge, the former being sourced largely in the East and the latter being wholly outside of exoteric reach. Such circles embodied both temporal power and spiritual authority, usurping the governance of parties (characterized by second-stage Emperor and Pope) that were unable to integrate the two. Exposed to the study and cultivation of tantric Greek, Sufi, Buddhist, and Taoist alchemy, awakened Templars had won from the East a Holy Grail of spiritual evolution: Temperance, Lovers, Chariot, Fortitude, and Fortune; ultimately culminating in the Hermit, Hanged Man, and Death – stations of realization whose golden rewards could bring ancestral immortality and a legacy of nobility (perhaps as evidenced in their continued fame). The Tarot Triumphs were designed in the century following the breakup of the Templars and the triumph of Sufi Ottomans over Christian Greeks.

Hermes, patron god of alchemy, was the last popular god of the Greek pantheon to come into being (although a classicized version of Dionysus was last to be promoted as one of the twelve Great Olympians, replacing Hestia of the Hearth). Hermes originally indicated a herm or phallic-like pile of stones or simply a carved phallus used as a boundary marker. Although his attributes were often reduced in popular storytelling to an orientation toward cunning and thievery, Hermes served to progressively divinize the magical, shamanic, virile roles embodied by Dionysus, Perseus, and Hercules. He represented in many ways urban-man-made-god, with all the rational attributes (e.g., cunning intelligence, diplomacy, and ironic justice) of a man who through familiarity with urban civilization has acquired what might be called in modern parlance “street smarts.”

Hermes was a son of Zeus whose mercurial aspects (again, associated with sexual potency) enabled him to move between Zeus’s domain and that of his brother Hades. He inherited the cap of invisibility from Hades himself. In tantric yoga and Taoist alchemy, the top of the head is where Shakti-power finds full egress, enabling a practitioner to mirror others in such a way as to become invisible. In the previous chapter, we saw that Shakti – the Goddess Charge – can be tapped only through a Questor’s sublimation of sexual potency. In a phrase, that is the might of Eros. All of our great heroes exceeded at traversing that Just Way of the Goddess.

Along with his cap of invisibility, Hermes wielded a Staff of Great Magic. He was often depicted with either a winged cap or winged heels (an area that Taoist medicine associates with the sexual organs). Hermes was not only, for the West, father of alchemy (in part associated with the avataric alchemist Hermes Trismegistos), but also of yogic contemplation and healing. His caduceus or wand-staff was entwined by two snakes, and was portrayed occasionally with wings at its head. It was originally borne by Isis, the messenger of Hera, who was in later centuries superseded by Zeus’s son. A version of the caduceus, the rod of Apollo’s son Asclepius, became Western medicine’s insignia. It is easily identified with the central nervous system and its two channels, the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. These are called ida and pingala in tantric tradition. They are known to wind up the spine, releasing Shakti through the seven chakras (literally “wheels,” broadly equivalent to the major nerve plexuses along the spine) culminating at the top of the head in an area called the sushumna – a sacred opening located where a baby has its soft spot. Traditional Indo-European wisdom places great value in enlivening the central nervous system channel as a foundational practice of fortitude, health, and spiritual awakening.

In modern times, psychotropic chemicals and medicinals are popularly used to open the mind/body’s central neurology. However, breath, kundalini, and devotional Shakti have been the primary methods effectively utilized over the millennia to raise consciousness and unify the body, mind, and heart in a state of holistic health, longevity, and ultimately immortality. Kundalini (translating as “myriad steps of earth-force”) yoga involves the raising and integrating of one’s prana, qi, or energy, building up a superhuman quality to a practitioner’s life-force; the experience of which may be felt as both heroic and saintly. Although heroism and saintliness are often viewed as being mutually exclusive, such has never been the case for nondual Questors, whose stories will always find resonance with those sisters and brothers preeminently represented in Greek tradition by the Immortals introduced herein.

Hermes was not the only being able to move in and out of Hades. Hades’ wife, Persephone – daughter of Demeter and mother of Dionysus (both via the forced intercourse of Zeus, as per a recurring theme of Zeus as progenitor via divine imposition) – also bridged the Underworld with Earth. Indeed, all of the chthonic mystery sects of ancient times were based upon establishing a living connection between the land of the dead and the land of the fertile. These primeval rites of immortal regeneration were taught by spiritual realizers epitomizing Indo-European agrarian traditions, some more ancient than others; great Otherworld-traversing shamans represented by the myths and icons of Medusa, Persephone, Dionysus, and Shiva, all of whom integrated female and male personas along with chthonic and entrancing rites.

In accordance with this tradition, Homer explained to priests how this world could be spanned with the next:

At the moment of death, a breath called psyche exits man and enters the house of Aides, or Hades. Although this psyche does not bear sensations, perceptions, or thoughts, it reflects its previous state by becoming a phantom image called an eidolon. Such a spirit-entity is fundamentally all essence and no vitality. However, if given sacrificial blood, or some other form of intense, sacred vitality, the spirit is temporarily able to revive, enough to speak or otherwise affect the living world.

Sojourning to the House of Aides (again, meaning “invisibility”), takes a Questor beyond the Great Ocean and beyond the Gates of the Sun to the meadow at the edge of the world. According to the Odyssey, in this way Hermes carries over souls to the Otherworld. Portrayed differently in the earlier Iliad, the Land of the Dead is found just beneath the flat span of the earth; marked by sounds of wailing and woe, the rivers of Hades form its boundary. Crossing them frees the psyche to join the world of the dead. A psyche needs proper burial rites involving fire and lamentation, lest it be kept from fulfilling its desire to be at rest in the Indifference of the Afterlife. Vedic doctrines in India hold to similar beliefs regarding the state of a soul in the weeks following physical death.

The above are two contrasting fundamental views of the realms beyond Death. Images of a chthonic, watery darkness warded by Death were superseded in Homer’s writings by a revelation of that domain beyond primordial waters, watched over by the Sun. Indo-Aryan religious myths shift between Afterworld visions imaging Moon-Water-Tartarus and Sun-Fire-Elysium spheres. Found in the former, after a life-long, wandering Quest, is Immortal Eros; found in the latter is that ultimate of attainments won through allegiance with the Goddess: Blissful Wisdom.

Homer’s Odyssey comes down to us as the world’s first written portrayal of a Quest into immortal domains serving to convey an esoteric understanding of universal stages of consciousness. Clearly, his tales reflect a long history of such mythic storytelling, just as the Vedas had been passed down orally for many centuries before being recorded in written form. Arguably, an edited composition of the Vedas could also be framed in terms of a Quest, but it would take a genius such as Coomaraswamy to unpack the collection and justifiably reconstruct it in such a manner. The Upanishads are not in and of themselves this type of summarization; and the heroically spiritual quests contained in the popular Ramayana and Mahabharata are of a later date. Homeric and Vedic stories were preceded in written form by Mesopotamian myths of Gilgamesh; a seminal epic of heroic adventures that never reaches the height of immortal realization, though it does come close and makes for a remarkable study regarding the social psychology of empire-oriented civilization contemporary with Indus and Minoan cultures.

Greek conceptions of the afterlife varied immensely during the broad period that this chapter addresses. Originally, the psyche was considered to be without consciousness and the netherworld was imagined to be a totally gray, senseless, and unknowable place. Such a vision was similar to Babylonian ideas of an underworld found in Gilgamesh. This rather neutral image of the domain beyond death was to polarize radically before the dawn of the classical epoch marked by the great sages of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. By the time of Pythagoras, a doctrine of metempsychosis had developed. This theory of reincarnation posited the psyche as a soul with conscious identity, able to leave and reenter the physical world. As covered in chapter 4, this grew into the concept of a non-physical, psychic soul from which all decisive feeling and thinking arises. That view, championed by the Sophists, was elaborated by Plato into myths of the Afterlife, which set a stage for Chaldean-influenced Hellenic dualistic religious movements regarding heavens, hells, and apocalyptic destinies.

Notions of eternal punishment in Tartarus for inappropriate acts involving the Goddess or the appropriation of ambrosia and divinely regenerative powers were graphically elaborated in Orphic doctrines written under the influence of Egyptian dualistic worldviews. Chapter 5 examined the progression of Chaldean beliefs as they advanced through Pythagorean sects into Platonic philosophy and Judeo-Hellenic Gnosticism. Key to that development was a dualistic projection of the Deathless into “bad” and “good” domains. A division between dark and bright afterworlds was unique to neither Judaic nor Greek culture. Indo-European–influenced Taoist tradition held, for instance, that humans had two souls, one native to a veiled earth and one to a bright heaven. However, as we will observe through examining the development of Judeo-Christian dogma regarding Satan, a moral divisiveness between these domains was extremely – even violently – intensified in the cultures and centuries leading to and initiating the Christian era.

In Homer’s Odyssey, Afterlife was described significantly in terms beyond those of hellish punishments. A primary immortal domain was portrayed: the Elysian Fields, a realm at the edge of the earth where eternal pleasures were to be found. Etymologically, Elysium designated an elected place blessed as a result of being struck by Zeus’s lightning – Heavenly Fire brought Immortally Down to Earth. It marked the domain given to Kronos after being defeated by his son Zeus. Kronos was the divine ruler of the First Age, and will perhaps be so of the last; in any case, as Time itself, all reversibility comes under his power. (Resurrection as represented in the Angel Triumph, seemingly manifesting a reversal of Time’s arrow, is the realization of Immortal Rule par excellence.) Neither time nor space limits the quality of immortal existence in Elysium. The climate is forever perfect, people are forever beautiful, and life is forever good. It is the destination of human heroes as immortal realizers. Supernatural and spontaneous transportation is associated with it; for the heroic Questor, personal effort does not suffice to get there. Transiting stages of human consciousness into the Divine Domain requires spiritual assistance and Enlightened Grace. Elysium lies beyond the reaches of Death or Chaos. Few are the humans elected to be blessed with a sight of its brightly transcendent, essentially natural, and always vital realm.

A worldview emerged across Greek societies wherein the realm after death is destined for most people to be a sorry if not punishing place. Given that, what soul would not wish to return to earth in the form of another body? There would then be a possibility, even if only remote, of entering a transformed, most blissful land after death. Rebirth affords every soul a new, however slim, chance of following in the footsteps of the Heroes. However, even for the saintly good at heart, reaching the Elysian Fields requires embarking upon a heroically spirited quest. Miraculous powers are needed, as well as immense virtue. Death has to be faced in bone-chilling intimacy and a portal to the afterlife then found and entered. Insight into the totally awesome forces of Chaos has to be mindfully accrued. Moreover, through it all, conscious sacrifice to the Desire of the Goddess through Compassionate Love of Eros has to be progressively engaged. Dionysus’s rites and Hercules’ adventures tell of the way.

In the centuries following Plato, the concept of soul gathered progressively greater psychological identity. Greek religious sects basically demarked humankind via three divisions:

1. Those who were privy to the secret mysteries of the afterlife; who were initiated into the path which opened a portal to eternal bliss, knowledge, and being; who adhered to the immortal laws of beauty and goodness; who rigorously practiced purifications conducive to the virtuous way that ofttimes proved to be a narrow and treacherous road.

2. Those who respected the heaven-influenced fates of mortals and held in awe the demigod heroes; who learned rituals of magic in the process of aligning themselves to mage-like teachers; who attended the philosophers and served the priests; who perhaps could hope in a future life to quest on the path toward immortality.

3. Those who were ignorant of the Mystery Rites; who were blessed with neither the purity of true beauty nor the intellect of true goodness; who had little control of their lives, serving as tokens in a game of the gods; who were destined to join the teeming masses in Hades or be reborn in an earthbound life of suffering, for they were fated neither to discover nor partake in the Quest of Heroes.

In the latter group could be found the masses of humankind. Tricking the gods into bestowing magical powers that would assure fame and fortune if not immortality was a primary occupation of the middle group. In the first group dwelled an elite few, sworn to secrecy while channeling, quickening, and even reversing the forces of Fate. This was done by surrendering to the agency of a Godman such as Dionysus or through psychically renewing the successful deeds of a Hero such as Hercules. Sensually ecstatic maenads and power-wielding mages reflected those who had been most successful in sacrificing temporal self in order to realize immortal consciousness.

The conception of hero as half-god was largely unique to Greek culture, though again we find parallels in India, such as the dual identity of Arjuna-Krishna found in the Bhagavad-Gita. With Fortitude founded upon fantastically potent virility, a hero was never thwarted from his or her Quest. Every masculine hero also embodied major elements of femininity, madness, and servitude. It might be said that these contributed saintly potential to a hero’s nature. This polar being had the power to avert most evil. Like the demons they had to fight, heroes were often popularly associated with the guarding of sacred portals. In later times, heroes became largely identified with glorified life in the afterworld. Like Hades himself, a hero could invisibly steer human destinies; and could be invoked by the non-heroic to do so. Being Immortal, heroes were capable of influencing earthly matters through the ages. They warranted sincere rites of honor, regardless of their lack of physical presence on earth.

Hercules was an archetypal hero. He was said to have been the original ancestor of the Dorian kings (invaders of Greece at the end of the Mycenaean period, 1100 B.C., and founders of the era in which classical Greek culture arose) and a mortal son of Zeus. As the avataric embodiment of Zeus-Dionysus for a dawning age of mythic-rational signification, Hercules had to overcome unconscious demons, psychophysical poisons, and subhuman beasts, ultimately sacrificing himself in the presence of women he loved. The jealousy of Hera, attempting to bind the Shining One solely to her, drove Hercules mad (as it had Dionysus). Consequently he killed his first wife, children, and nephews. As a prototypical ruler who in his Quest to rectify his karma realizes immortality for himself and hierarchical evolution for his people (respecting and integrating previous levels of consciousness and tradition), Hercules became a model for the commons. As a man-god, his corporeal reality broke structural limitations imposed by civilized domination of mythic-based laws.

Over centuries of Dorian dominance, a hierarchy of prevailing deities was progressively constructed via the formalization of Greek religion and its temple system. This extensively politicized system imprinted upon the commons those beliefs upheld and enforced by the ruling class. Hercules undermined that domination hierarchy. Because of this, he acted as a disruptive agent in the human world, even while perpetuating continuity in the evolutionary growth and empowerment of humankind. Hercules not only freed Prometheus, he continued the Titan’s work of transferring divine power and immortal realization to the realm of humans. Through his adventures, the educated were informed of a way to enter spiritual domains by capturing, taming, and making themselves integrally conscious of primal, daemonic states. It is not surprising that he was as popular with the Romans (who named him Hercules) and Etruscans as he was with the Greeks (whose actual name for him was Herakles, literally meaning “he who is heard”).

Hercules blazed a universal path into and beyond (for it returned back home) the Afterworld. He did so not only with his strength and Fortitude (derived from the impenetrable spiritual charge of his magical lion cloak – a feminine power reflected in the Fortitude Triumph and comparable to the warding force of Medusa contained within the shield of Athena, with whom Hercules was intimate and reliant upon at key times in his quest for immortality), but also with his precious Arrows, analogous to Zeus’s Lightning-bolts. We again observe that such Striking Light and invocation of divine presence that it represents is symbolized in the Tower Triumph. Of course, traversing such a way through such means demands an extraordinary effort that inevitably meets with Daemonic catastrophe. Thus, even Hercules first needed to be initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries in order to gain protection from the chaotic forces churning out of nature’s dark side. At Eleusis – home to mysteries of the Great Goddess Demeter, her daughter Persephone, and Persephone’s son Dionysus – Hercules was initiated into the secrets of the Underworld. Eleusis was an ancient center of goddess and phallus worship. Here, age-old fertility rites became focused on the ecstatic and destined abduction of the Virgin Daughter by Hades. Released from her underworld duties for half of each year, Persephone represented purity and nourishment appearing out of the darkness like a Star bestowing the grace of Immortal Providence. (Accordingly, it was reasonable for Ibn rabi to place the Degrader higher than the Nourisher, and the latter directly after Death.)

Preceding the age of Olympian gods, Perseus and other Mycenaean Kings, and Hercules and Dorian ancestors after him, Dionysus with his tantric thyrsus (an ivy-wrapped staff with a pinecone tip, paralleling the mark or lingam of Shiva) was the male focus of Eleusis’s priestesses and their mysterious rituals. While some myths make Persephone to be his mother, other stories tell of a human mother Semele, who was pulverized when Zeus’s wife Hera tricked her into compelling Zeus to expose himself in his full glory, which no mortal could bear to witness. Dionysus represented the fruit of the tree and vine just as Demeter represented the fruit of the field. He was often called the Boy-god and paradoxically maintained innocence in the midst of dramatic madness. Whereas Hercules was a human made god (after his death he was resurrected in Olympia) Dionysus was twice born (or more accurately, thrice born, for he also resurrected in spirit-form like the vines of the Earth) and thus effectively a god made half-man. As such an Avatar (literally “he who crosses Down”), he was unique in the Greek pantheon of divine beings; later heroes such as Perseus and Hercules merely resembled him.

In classical times, Dionysus was widely identified with the divine latecomer Hermes. It can be difficult for scholars to discern between the two in Greek iconography. His cult also bore similarities to that of Artemis. They were the only divine figures surrounded by a retinue of wild, sexually potent females. Phallic components were part of the celebratory garb for both cults, as was a sort of sexual madness. Themes of nature, militancy, seduction, danger, and intuitive intelligence were integrated in both god and goddess.

Artemis was the Queen of Nymphs and Huntress of the Wilds. Her cult was pre-Olympian, and as such was mostly oriented toward intense fecundity. While she and Athena are commonly thought of as militantly virgin goddesses, the original meaning of virgin in Greek was unmarried and unbound, representing the goddesses’ feminine Liberation rather than a stricture of celibacy.

In archaic art, Artemis can be found riding next to Athena, sharing a Chariot warded by Fate (the Moirai who were originally One but became Three). The Moirai and their golden chariot were the oldest incarnation of the stern, warrior demeanor of womanhood that extends Justice into the World, including the gods’ immortal spheres. The ancientness and primacy of this female goddess aspect is reflected in its association with the Titan Themis, Goddess of Divine Law and Oracles. Themis was Zeus’s primal wife and prime counsellor. She effectively represented both mother Gaia and daughter Diké. Zeus the new Heaven God was brought together with Themis the old Gaian Goddess by Moirai, the Fate of the World. Pindar tells us:

First did the Moirai in their golden chariot bring heavenly Themis, wise in counsel, by a gleaming pathway from the springs of Okeanos [the Titan we call Ocean] to the sacred stair of Olympos, there to be the primal bride of Zeus Soter [Saviour].

As with Medusa, any male who actually witnesses Artemis becomes frozen by her bewitching sensuality. Although ecstatically pleasurable, such psychic connection brings with it the fate of a Sacrificial Stag, representing sexual domination by the female. When shot by the Goddess, the arrow of Eros is both blinding and binding. Her potent male aspect is represented by her gift from the Cyclops: a silver bow with golden shafts (paralleling Medusa-Chrysaor’s golden sword).

Artemis was the goddess of midwives (literally meaning in Old English “with woman”; the Greek word for midwife is maia, indicating “she who brings increase” – Maia as daughter of Atlas was Hermes’ mother). She drove a chariot and protected children and young mothers. Like the Issy-sur-Moulineaux Chariot, the Metropolitan’s Chariot shows children behind what one imagines to be a woman holding the reigns. Empowered by Fate herself, Artemis’s Moon-power could steer the Force of Nature-determined courses. As twin sister of Apollo (chariot driver of the Sun), Artemis conjoined with Athena (especially in Athena’s original Minoan personification as Sun-goddess associated with Demeter and attributes of bird, snake, sacred tree, weaving, and wisdom) to symbolize the two sides of liberated Womanhood (compare to Persephone and Demeter), just as Dionysus and Apollo merged to symbolize the same for Manhood. Artemis can be found in the spirit-charge of the Tarot’s fourth-stage Chariot and Fortitude (holding back the Lion’s roar); Athena is found in both common and royal stations of judgment: Temperance and Justice. Both goddesses combine with the Eros of Aphrodite in Love and the Hermetic androgyny of Mystery-Light represented by the Star and Moon Triumphs.

Female militancy was an important aspect of Dionysian Maenads. Women who armored themselves against feeling Dionysus’s ecstatic impulses inevitably regretted doing so. Rejecting his Presence led only to a web of dementia. The godman was raised opposed by those who could not stand that he was so realized. Persecuted by his stepmother Hera (sister and later wife of Zeus and whose domains included marriage, housewives, and jealousy), he learned to cope with madness brought upon him by her pathologically controlling female ego. That madness arose when Dionysus was denied for being That which he was; and extended to those who inflicted upon him projections of self-centered fear. Equally, the madness could transform as ecstasy in both the Boy-god and his companions. Such was the salvational praxis of He who pulverized sensible hatred and greed through crazy Beauty and Truth.

Dionysus’s untouchable heavenly brother Apollo was championed in modern philosophy by Friedrich Nietzsche as an ideally pure opposite to the chthonic god’s way of apparently destructive intoxication. In Greek religion, though, the two were always positioned in a relationship of positive polarity. Nowhere more than in the famous Delphic sanctuary of Apollo was this evident. There, Dionysus was formally incorporated as the chthonic counterpart to the Sun God. Nietzsche’s Gnostic-like nihilism spurred an interpretation of cultural history that had little to do with wisdom-based esoteric cosmology or metaphysics. Nietzsche’s worldview did, however, reflect dualistic, Orphic beliefs. Orpheus, a musical poet and singer who worshipped Dionysus, became famous prophesizing in his master’s name. However, he purportedly denied Dionysus’s reality, proclaiming to the heavens that only Apollo steered the true course. For this, Dionysus sent a raving band of maenads who tragically rent Orpheus into unspeakable pieces, leaving Apollo’s muses to bury him.

Dismemberment of the child Dionysus by the hands of Titans sent by Hera was perhaps the most closely held secret of initiates in the old mystery sects; that his prophet Orpheus should befall the same fate but not be resurrected is telling. Orpheus, like most prophets, denied the possibility of immortal realization in this life. God-realization implies unconquerable power – “total control” -in the eyes of mortal men wielding authority through domination of others. Prophecy connotes the will of God. Subjecting men to the projected will of an objectified god is the work of politicized priests and prophets. This role can be enacted only when the living presence, teaching, and culture of the Divine One is not self-evident, or not able to be self-authenticated by the commons. In esoteric streams of the Great Tradition, the natural wisdom of Deathless realized Saints and Sages has inevitably taken precedence over the revelations of prophets. Influential as he was, Orpheus could not replace Dionysus as an authentic exemplar of the ancient Mystery Rites. In contrast, Jesus’s wisdom-teachings have been recognized by billions as transcending the laws of Judaic prophets preceding him. Similarly, many Sufis have regarded Rumi’s and Ibn rabi’s ecstatic proclamations of divine realization as more brilliant than the Koran’s prophecies of social law. (Such a view, of course, remains heretical in the exoteric establishments of Islam.)

Although wielding shamanistic and mage-like powers, the charismatic, singing prophet known as Orpheus had not realized the Principles of Immortality. He nevertheless claimed to have inherited the secrets of ancient goddess mysteries. Upon these, he founded a loosely bound religion based upon reincarnation and cosmic dualism. Devotees of Orpheus maintained that ascetic purity in this world was the best that any man could aspire to. Practiced assiduously for several lifetimes, such asceticism could enable a man to finally traverse the realms of cosmic existence and enter that domain of the afterlife that was eternally bright and easy. Comparable positions were adhered to by Theravada Buddhist monks during this period in India, opposing the ancient roots of Tantra and disbelieving Gautama Buddha’s proclamation of Enlightenment In and As This Very Lifetime.

Orpheus’s cosmic visions were made in the name of an Immortal whose teaching was radically different from his own. For Dionysus, self was to be surrendered and ecstasy was to be lived in the afterworld that becomes this world. The physical world is a vehicle for spiritual realization, not a block to it. Through communion with the afterlife via nakedly natural and ritualistic celebration, mundane life is transcended and, in fact, literally transformed. The kingdom of immortal happiness must be realized to be at hand. How this can be enacted is what Dionysian rites were all about. Orphism correlated with later Gnosticism. They both believed it possible to escape cosmic cycles and chaotic transformations by negating them. For Orphic-Pythagoreans and Christians influenced by Gnosticism (including the Pauline religion now generally known as Christianity) Dionysus-Jesus became the divine savior who died for mankind; whose body and blood were symbolically consumed in the Eucharist of celibate devotees. That magical act was essential to purifying mankind’s soul of its innate, earthbound sin.

Dionysian initiates called mystai walked the long, sacred way, the path of Zeus the Immortal One, destined to a blessed, blissful realm in the Afterworld – home of the Heroes. That path is portrayed in the stages of the Tarot. It embraces an intense fourth-stage conduction of Spiritual Force. It surrenders self-separation in a subtle, fifth-stage emptiness of Mystical Awareness (Wheel of Fortune and Hermit). It proceeds through a sixth stage of totally Sacrificial Death (involving the Witnessing Hanged Man). It delivers the Questor’s very consciousness to the feet of the Guardian with the Threefold Challenge. The seventh stage’s Devil represents the chaotically emergent, trans-cosmic state of immortality realized by the Titanic denizens of Tartarus.

From the Titans’ domain, the Golden Immortals of Elysium and later immortals such as Hercules were transported to the purely erotic space nourished by the ambrosia of Star and Moon. In modern terms, transformation of the mundane into the sacred occurs through deeply complex releases of potential energy, fundamentally affecting a Questor’s identity and causal reality. A trans-cosmic flux causing existential transformation can be realized through mindful consciousness. This both returns and evolves the Questor to a yet-greater, prior, and destined state of transfigured whole-body soul. For Dionysian mystai, returning to Eros paradoxically means evolving in union with the Goddess. This requires completely insightful Remembrance and radical transformation of sensuality through sacrificial, Transcendental Intercourse.

At the gates from which a Questor is transported to Hades, to ordinary rebirth, or to liberation from suffering, recollection of Truth is tantamount to enlightened passage. Forgetfulness of Beauty, Goodness, and Truth is ever a Questor’s primary bane. To become one with Eros, a Questor must continuously remember Eros. This has always been the Secret of Secrets, the Key to the Tower. There is no doubt – lightning will strike every Questor aspiring to immortal realization, to the ambrosia of the gods. Moreover, through a stroke of Justice, that lightning may well destroy Questors’ long-built advantage, Abasing their karma for lifetimes to come. Then again, it may simply deflate Questors’ dreams, returning them to mere mediocrity and ponderous doubt for the bulk of their lives. Or it may indeed Provide for Questors, Justly electing them for divine protection and thus enabling them to realize states of consciousness beyond mortal self.

It bears repeating for any and all Questors: Remember Eros. Identify not with the obsession of “self,” but rather with the Soul of the World as Radiant Goodness – the Goddess as Fathomless Beauty. Is this not in Truth what you have always been and will eternally Be? Then you have only to simply remember it continuously. With as much concentration as your heart will bear. This is the realization of Dionysus. Through his Sacrifice, the Goddess lifts her veil, granting truly devoted initiates union with and as her sacrifice. Therefore, mystai are encouraged to become the Goddess by meditating, remembering, and even consuming Dionysus.

It might be said that Dionysian ravers who surrender into the extreme nature of their initiation look at Death and willingly give themselves to it. All the while, a mysteriously erotic siren call, beyond the song of an artist’s muse, beckons them to a world beyond. At the point of mind-less surrender, consciousness would be totally lost and bodies crashed if not for the awesome presence of the transcendental One. That presence mind-fully Outshines all. It is known and felt even when Dionysus is not manifestly obvious in human form. Historically, Dionysian realization has been cultivated through communal celebratory rituals including sexual fire dancing and drug taking, with his Heart-Soul consciously taking form in the witnessing awareness of celebrants. Poetry, theater, music, and rhetoric can merge with philosophy in further rational and intuitive developments of such essential ritualistic and initiatory celebration.

Proud in their urbane worldviews, Orphic and related Pythagorean sects laid claim to a secret knowledge “higher than” the perennial wisdom of Indo-European tradition. For both sects, worldly life was viewed as naught but trouble; and sexuality was intimately tied to such trouble. Sectarian rules held in common included renouncing all possessions, undergoing years of silence, and abstaining from many foods, including intoxicants. Correlatives can once again be found within certain schools of monastic Buddhism present in Asia Minor and the Near East during this era, which were challenged by the rise of nondual Mahayana realizations. Championing Orphic dualism, the occult orientations of Neopythagoreans and Gnostics denied nondual reality. In contrast, the ecstatic Unity-procession revealed by Dionysus catalyzed among his celebrants conscious and present identification of the natural world with the Living Principles of Immortality.

Jesus proclaimed a similarly bold truth, as did Plotinus. Jesus’s message, according to Q and the Gospel of Thomas, emphasized an immediate and very real presence of the One God and his Wisdom-World. On the other hand, all of the various Acts of the Apostles, including Paul’s (though his to a lesser extent), stake out claims in the territory of Gnostic-oriented dualism. Paul, who lived after Jesus’s generation, started a new religion in line with Orphic sensibilities. Strictly anti-sexual, glorifying a spirit world separate from the manifested world, Paul’s religion grew over two centuries to become the one that people refer to when they speak of Christianity.

In twenty-first-century societies obsessed with idealizing modern materialism, traditional spiritual cultures have been declared obsolete if not unlawful. Organic patterns of communication and communion that cannot be reduced to objectified strategies purposed toward production and consumption of material goods are declared superstitious and backwards. While superstitions are of course held to by many folk, uneducated or not, it is a grave mistake to ignorantly apply such a label to understandings of esotericism, spiritual alchemy, tantra, and much of what has been addressed in this book.

Pythagoreans deified mathematics without acknowledging the One. Modern-day scientific materialists practically follow suit. However, authentic wisdom does not arise from materialistically reductive worldviews. Universal laws of consciousness can be modeled in the mathematical terms of physics and chemistry only to a profoundly limited degree. Environmental, anthropological, sociological, psychological, and other schools of knowledge will continue developing verifiable models of greater import and significance to nature, culture, society, and individual happiness than models of atomic and molecular reality. Solutions to disease and environmental problems become relatively straightforward when studied by minds practiced in compassionate and wise spirituality and educated in the modern sense of the word. Appropriate technology can be applied with clear-headed insight and innovativeness. Displacing perennial wisdom with materialistic scientism is simply dumb. We will soon finish our treatise with an in-depth look at how our modern world can rectify this.

Transcending … Right Mindfulness

A major point brought home by the Tarot is that the transcendental is naturally wedded to the world just as it is: physically complex, organic and earthy, constantly developing through natural cycles of growth. Historically, denial that divine presence inherently exists in our common-day world has been accompanied by dualistic movements purposed toward involvement of an obscurely occulted afterworld with mundane life. In medieval Christian society, sorcerers were accused of reaching into realms beyond, accessible only through the Devil’s domain. Even a relatively benign art such as divination was associated with necromancy; the power to see into the future was attributed to raising demons and the dead. The use of that power was not associated with mature intuition, intentional healing, or compassionate wisdom, but rather with the Devil. The power of Eros, interpreted in terms of degenerative eroticism and psychic manipulation, implied a pact with Satan.

Within Chaldean, Judeo-Hellenic, and Christian milieus, perceived gaps between human, natural, and immortal domains grew to be immense. Although this was balanced by developmental teachings of emanation founded upon fully discerning, nondual awareness, all sight of the Sacred was periodically lost in the worldviews of social leaders. Governing policies of urban societies were then stamped with a seal of violently righteous domination bound to decadent greed, from which there existed little chance of liberation. All too readily, dualism slid into nihilistic solipsism and the excesses of debauchery.

During the procession of dualism from the time of Jesus into our modern era, apocalyptic cults have repeatedly woven together strands of spiritualism and nihilism. The essential wisdom found in Jesus’s original sayings are hardly to be found in apocalyptic Christianity. Similarly, the Love discovered in Rumi’s interpretation of Muhammad’s revelation differs wholly from the legalistic justifications (frequently based upon maliciously mistranslated Arabic, a language of many meanings) of brutal violence construed by Islamic “fundamentalists.”

Although we find in modern times schools of pathologically rational thought that deny spiritual reality altogether, so also do we find traditions allied in their rational and integrative championing of nondual philosophy. Holding to the view of nonduality in a fragmented, postmodern age has compelled teachers to elaborate a way of Crazy Wisdom. This integral foundation of world teaching, cultivation, and communion employs methods of ecstatic liberation which work in an otherwise jaded, unethical, self-obsessed age. Of course, extreme methods of awakening can also produce extreme reactions of denial. In a Western, secularized society, “crazy wisdom” easily promotes misunderstandings that cynically throw craziness into the limelight while avoiding the challenge of actual wisdom. Jesus was evidently a Crazy Wisdom teacher to some degree; the Gospel of Thomas has numerous sayings that are as provocative now as they must have been in Jesus’s own time. Let us take off the mantle and encourage tolerantly critical dialogue between crazy wisdom adepts and traditional middle way teachers. What may appear to be madness or otherwise extreme behavior to an objective outsider may be a liberating dynamic dispelling negative habit patterns and instilling true goodness to a subjective insider. In any case, unusual yet effective means of demonstrating wisdom and love need to be appreciated, understood, and kept from harming the unprepared.

We may interpret four types of madness delineated in Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus thusly: surrendering one’s will to the gods is a madness of prophecy; surrendering one’s feelings to perfect order is a madness of music; surrendering one’s imagination to the intelligently erotic is a madness of philosophy; and surrendering one’s consciousness to Dionysus is a madness of initiation. These forms of crazy wisdom may be respectively represented by the Devil, Tower, Star, and Moon Trionfi, composing a procession that we might call a madness of immortality. Modern citizens rationally justify the madness of war and rampant greed with dualistic concepts founded upon manifest destiny, apocalyptic retribution, materialistic freedom, etc. But cultivation of compassion and ultimately self-sacrificial wisdom promotes a superior nondual form of rational, intuitively intelligent madness that steers consciousness toward freedom through peace and virtue, not security through subjugation and violence.

From within the Hellenistic culture of rationality emerged a new phase of Dionysus’s ecstatic procession. The mystery way of immortals continued to be intelligently learned and practiced via currents of esoteric spiritual and cultural transmission with which the reader may now feel some familiarity. The Tarot portrays rational responsibility as a cyclic and communicative process tolerating Vision. It then speaks of spiritual hierarchy in terms of governing Mission, conceiving Life, witnessing Death, transfiguring Self, and transforming Soul. The Dionysian way of spiritual realization is an ecstatically sensual quest purposed toward being the Sun – Apollo made man, Heaven made earth, Ideal Law made practical method. Shining with a reflection of what the Sun ultimately emanates – radiant order in the universal domain of Eternity – the Trionfi humbly convey Wisdom as the World in its naturally lawful, Just Way. Given that, there is an aspect of scientific erudition that may be seriously abetted through this study of the Tarot and its origins. Before we examine that, we will put to rest all unsettled confusion that Questors may have regarding the rightful place of Chaos in the World.

The Quest hinges upon Death and the Devil. These are not hateful signs of one’s most intimate enemy; rather, they are living principles informing the way of immortality. Jesus pointed to the difficult virtue of verily loving a friend (let alone an enemy) as oneself. Transcending the risk that inheres in such compassion continues to be the most immediate way for a genuine Teacher to test the truth of any Questor who would approach the portal to heaven and its grail of ambrosia.

From the earliest of times, Judaic tradition posited a spiritual dichotomy between the people of Israel and those of other nations, the latter broadly characterized in the books of Genesis and Exodus as evil enemies. In old Judaic thought, non-Jewish tribes were culturally demonized. The prophet Isaiah identified these enemies with the odious dragon of ancient Canaanite mythology, the twisting serpent Leviathan. However, Jews characterized enemies of their own blood as Satanic. The root of satan means “one who opposes, acts as an adversary.” In Judaic mythology, a satan was an angel of high standing in the court of God. Angelos is the Greek translation of Hebrew mal’ak, meaning “messenger.” Early in the Hebrew Bible, a satan was not portrayed as being in opposition to God. On the contrary, it was viewed as one of God’s trusted messengers; an obedient servant sent by God to obstruct human activity and then create catastrophe and chaos for reasons often only known to God.

Jews who obstructed other Jews were viewed with a degree of tolerance insofar as it could be imagined they were doing so for divine reason. In the book of Job, Job’s story tells of a satan who roams (derived from a Hebrew pun on the word satan) on earth keeping a watch on humankind. God authorizes him to test Job, who at the time was God’s favored human servant. The pain inflicted upon Job was devastating. In the end, though, having passed God’s tests (applied by his servant, the satan) Job gained twice his previous fortune.

Job was written around 550 B.C., during that critical age of transition in which lived Pythagoras, Heraclitus, and Gautama. In the following century, Jewish ecclesiastical concepts of a satan began to appear with more malevolent aspects. Written during this era, the story of King David as told in 1 Chronicles speaks of a satan who impelled David to introduce census-taking for the purpose of taxation. In the story, the satan becomes a scapegoat – a supernatural enemy within the Jewish camp who is blamed for inciting division and conflict. King David was punished for his act although it was provoked by an angelic power. God sent another angel to avenge the king’s actions by spreading a plague across Israel, killing seventy thousand Jews.

The book of Zechariah tells of exiles that upon returning to Jerusalem from Babylon during this era (released by King Cyrus of Persia, who had conquered the Babylonian empire, along with territories reaching into India) conflicted with the city’s residents. The exiles had brought funds from Cyrus to rebuild Jerusalem’s central Temple. This, along with the fact that they were cosmopolitan and well-educated, set them at odds with the Jerusalem priests then in power. The prophet Zechariah, siding with the returning exiles, tells of a satan taking the side of the local country folk of Israel. God rebuked the satan for acting in a way apparently opposed to the Lord. Throughout history, Devil as Satan has tended to represent the Old Way, a challenge to deeply disruptive and transformative change that often proves inevitable regardless of the challenge.

In the era following Alexander the Great, Judaic politics favored anti-Greek attitudes. Hellenistic Jews became an internal enemy to families of the “old way” looking to take back control of Israel. By the time of Jesus, Pharisees (a sect succeeding the Hasidim or Pious, and now identified with Rabbinic Judaism) were at the forefront of a movement attempting to renew the austere practices of traditional Judaic law. Essenes and other radical groups of Jews, evidently including the community surrounding Jesus’s blood family, felt that the high priest who controlled the Temple of Jerusalem had become their worst of enemies. He and his compatriots had betrayed the law of the faithful. These enemies had “walked the way of the nations;” they no longer were true to Israel and its God. This was, perhaps, a second-stage mythic denial of third-stage rational civilization. Those who cultivated a cosmopolitan, integrated, and worldly way of life were progressively identified as being satanic.

Satan became the antithesis of God; a most powerful being in the court of the Jewish Lord, but traitor of that hierarchical level and position. This identification of insider enemy with malevolent demigod was magnified and exploited by both Judaic and Christian Gnostics. Mark, author of the earliest canonical gospel, inherited this concept of Satan as God’s rival and passed it into mainstream Christianity. There is no evidence in The Gospel of Thomas indicating that Jesus believed in or dueled with a satanic figure. Indeed, one could argue that certain dualistic Judaic camps would have likely viewed the authentic Jesus as just such an adversary.

Many apocryphal accounts circulated amongst Jewish and Christian circles of the first century that purported to reveal Satan’s origins. The most influential of these was a body of stories that blamed lust for drawing the angelic sons of God (an oft-used Hebrew designation for angels) into unlawful sexual relations with human women. Their offspring spawned earthly demons who gained control of mankind’s fallen world. This story served as an effective analogy for varying enemies of Israel. The Greeks with their ancestral claims of heroic half-gods such as Herakles and Dionysus along with Titanic progeny such as Cyclops, Medusa, and Prometheus were made out to be demon-spawn. The Jerusalem priesthood, which condoned marrying Gentile (i.e., non-Jewish) women, was accused of atrocious, satanic violations of Judaic Law.

Jewish sects progressively rewrote Israel’s history using dualistic terms referring to a cosmic war between “sons of light” and “sons of darkness.” Christianity inherited a large part of this cosmology through Gnostic beliefs. By the time of Paul (who preached a personal interpretation and revelation of the Judaic Jesus cult with little reference to Jesus’s own teachings), Israel as an integrated religious community was too fractured to hold itself together. It was felt among many that the God of the Jews no longer supported the Temple priesthood, for the Jewish rites had become irretrievably tainted. Paul proclaimed this as a divinely destined development; society forevermore was split into two groups of people: those who belonged to the Kingdom of Heaven and those who were ruled by Satan. Paul’s congregation staked a historically usurping claim to the Shining One, the God in Heaven, which was proclaimed eternally final. Worshippers of old pagan, goddess-abetted heroic rites were deemed heretics fallen under spells of obsolete initiations. A new, divinely created network of urban tribes announced its manifested destiny: it became known as the Christian Nation.

Within a few hundred years, Christianity spread across the world. In the process, Pagan views of spirituality were radically demonized. Consciousness of psychic and subtle beingness defined in traditional Indo-European contexts via awareness of daimons (spirit forces of immortal realms and principles that manifest worldly influences) inherent to every genius (thus identifying one’s genius with one’s own daimon), was declared by Justin Martyr, the grandfather of Christian theology, as foul. Greek daimon as divine power translated into Late Latin daemon or spirit, which passed into Middle English as demon with all of the hellish undertones that we ascribe to it today.

A new spiritual vision was given miraculously to those who underwent baptism in the Christian rite. It was a vision of Heaven free from Satan’s taint. Free from Nature and the base world of Gaia. Free from the desire, death, fate, and creation of Eros. Free from the Goddess. All other spiritual views were identified with the Devil’s mind purposefully blocking souls from the path of salvation.

The Greek word for devil, diabolos, literally means “one who throws something across one’s path.” Early Church fathers believed that Satan and his fellow demons could drive humans to evil acts without their knowing it. This was done through deviously subtle methods of mind control. In fact, Fate itself was thought to be naught but a game played by the Devil and his minions. Christians held that pagan believers of natural destiny were actually being manipulated in accordance with Satan’s plan. The art of divination, it was nefariously posited, consisted of mindfully watching a demonic game of psychic manipulation. Through this, a sorcerer gained insight into the moves of Satan’s demons and could foresee how ignorant humans would be compelled to act. Such work was considered to be the most dangerous imaginable. Special priests in the Church had to fight not only malevolent spirits, but also otherwise educated, well-bred metaphysicians (such as Hermetic alchemists) deemed tainted by the power of Satan. In the eyes of the Church, only a saint could perceive into the demonic manipulations of the afterworld and retain his soul. Few were those with such ironclad faith, and all were by definition under the law and rule of the Church, supporting its sociocultural policies.

Neoplatonic philosophers could not understand the Christian drive to posit a significant adversary to the greatest of gods. It seemed sacrilegious and dangerously impious. By establishing opposing factions in heaven, Christians were suspected of promoting and justifying fundamental divisiveness on earth. By equating Satan with the realm of daimons Christians took the step of apparently declaring all forces of genesis and genius, i.e., generative spirit, to be evil. This was viewed as simpleminded and hypocritical of Christians, for did they not enjoy good food, wine, air, cloth, baths, and perfumes – all derived from subtle elements of nature? Christian theologians attempted to mitigate their position by declaring nature “spiritually neutral,” inherently lacking hierarchical power or divine significance.

This position was strongly countered by Neoplatonic and Sufi schools of science and philosophy, as it is by the Tarot. Secular scientists raised within Christian societies have often confessed confusion regarding how to lend proper respect to regenerative and evolutionary aspects of natural environments, sentient beings, and human consciousness. Nondual Christian ethics regarding the special, spiritual values of love, life, and self-sacrifice are considered extraneous to “the scientific process.” The universe as a flattened hierarchy is readily deemed equivalent in all of its physical constituent parts; everything is reducible to the mechanics of atomic particles and an organizational chart of a hundred or so molecular elements. Love is reduced to chemistry, and human life is reduced to random contingencies on a planet where life comes and goes according to nothing more than accidents and a blind, purposeless drive to survive. All life, evolution, and consciousness are deterministically reduced to nothing greater than coldly rationalized mathematical formulas that blatantly avoid interior or feeling-mind worlds of psychological and cultural reality. Life, humanity, nature, mystery, happiness, love, wisdom – these may have place and function in objectified contexts of physically defined systems, but they certainly have no purpose within a solar system that is proclaimed to have zero existential meaning demarcating it within a cosmos of billions of galaxies. In contrast, the Triumphs circumscribe our sentient world through meaningful levels of ontological Law purposed to cosmic realization of Immortal Unity. Contrary to the dogma of both religious fundamentalists and scientific materialists, metaphysical wisdom principles carry profound veracity in the context of twenty-first-century scientific philosophy and knowledge.

In the centuries after Jesus, Christian theologians essentially removed the Devil from the surroundings of Nature and placed him in Hell (a Frankish word whose concept spread alongside Germanic rule of Western Christendom commencing with the Fall of Rome and fifth-century conquest of Italy), from which it was imagined he contacted humans via their psyches. It was man’s mind and genius – his imagination, psyche, and even soul – that served as the Devil’s nefarious staging ground. After Augustine (d. 430), however, it was accepted as Catholic dogma that beings from the underworld could indeed be sensed in the air. Augustine held to a theory of spiritual vision in which demons and dead people took on “aerial bodies.” Such bodies moved through the air just above the ground. Because a spirit body could move very rapidly, it could anticipate human thoughts and actions, affecting the progressions and outcomes of both. (A Berber who was considered one of the most intelligent men in the Roman Empire, one can only imagine what registered in Augustine’s mind as he watched, engaged, and interpreted behaviors of the enormous cultural mix of empire courtiers and urban dwellers that he attempted to convert over the course of several decades.)

By the era of the Tarot, a thousand years later, ghosts and demons had gained considerable substantiality. Bodies were imagined as arising from their graves with flesh and bones, which were felt to be soft and hollow. Communicating with the dead was no longer perceived to be a purely psychic matter. Necromancy, it was believed, partly involved bringing the dead physically back to some semblance of life. In a new and generally macabre manner, ancient Pagan interpretations of spiritual vision were once again active throughout European communities. A zombie-like version of the nondual observation that “the dead are alive and the alive are dead” remains popular to this day.

In the fourteenth century, Death was immortalized as the Grim Reaper – a skeletal spirit with scythe in hand riding a horse seemingly carried by the wind. After a century of Black Plague, during which the afterworld had apparently manifested throughout Europe in the most terrible of ways, a new worldview was desperately needed. When the natural world was so clearly ruled by Death and the Devil, how was it possible to see Jesus’s beautiful vision of a Kingdom of God? What Tower could re-bridge earth with heaven? Eastern Christian sages and their Sufi and Neoplatonic brothers brought to Italy, Spain, and France the answer. It has come down to us in popular form as a procession of Triumphant stations of Enlightenment.

Throughout its history, the Catholic Church barely resisted demonizing Nature itself. By adhering to a position that the natural world did not primordially belong to Satan, the Roman Church avoided extreme forms of dualism so affecting early Gnostic Christianity. However, during its first thousand years, the Church established a dogmatic attitude blocking or otherwise discouraging the use of images, symbols, and rituals that portrayed natural, hierarchical principles as championed by Neoplatonists and Hermeticists.

For esotericists, the spiritual development of mankind mirrors psychic, subtle, and causal aspects of the cosmos. Spiritual realization and immortal-angelic stations of being can be depicted through words, art, and architecture. European sacred art gradually incorporated archetypal symbols originating from Pagan Hellenic culture. Stonemason guilds, constructors of Gothic cathedrals during the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, made extensive and exquisite use of these symbols. During the Renaissance, Tarot imagery became a primary vehicle for portraying spiritual and cosmological hierarchy. This spiritual vision remains embedded throughout Indo-European cultures.

While Christianity’s iconoclastic attitude changed over time, use of playing cards as an instrument purposed toward insightful envisioning of the afterlife and divination of the present world was tantamount to grave heresy in fifteenth-century Italy. Many Christian sects still view the Tarot as an instrument of Devil worship. It is time to allay such fear. Mythological dogma separating Human, Natural, and Immortal realms – excluding earthly existence from Deathless Freedom, Happiness, and Justice – must be abandoned.

We conclude our historical overview of Satan with a brief examination of Iblis – the Devil as known in Islam. Between the seventh and fifteenth centuries, concepts of Iblis took several forms. Islamic tradition portrayed him as both evil enemy and tragic scapegoat. The Koran revealed that Iblis refused God’s request that he bow to Adam. But if there was only one true God, how could he, the most loyal and finest of Angels, view Man as above him? Not only did he not bow, he went on to seduce Eve.

Sufis in the influential school of Ibn rabi adhered to a nondualistic view that polarities actually represent wholes. Angel and Man – Radiance and Manifestation – is not their unity that very state of the Divine One itself? Moreover, whereas Man remained separate from Woman in Genesis, did not Iblis’s intercourse with Woman unite these opposites? Was not this inevitably meant to be, following the most basic laws of nature? How could God not have foreseen such likelihood?

By highlighting the polar symmetry of spiritual life, the Mystic’s Way may be revealed and cultivated even through Iblis himself. Peter Awn summarizes the paradoxical position of the Devil as Divine and Cursed Guardian in Satan’s Tragedy and Redemption:

Because of the intensity of his contemplative love, Iblis became the model of monotheistic devotion. This dedication to the monotheistic ideal, however, forced Iblis to disobey the command to bow. God cursed him for his refusal and separated him from the Divine Presence. Yet because the Beloved had deigned to look upon him – even if the look was one of curse – Iblis accepted his destruction like a martyr’s crown.

The reward the condemned Iblis earned from God for his loving self-sacrifice was the office of chamberlain at the door of the Divine Presence, where he separates the wheat from the chaff by testing the mettle of man’s faith with the sword of God’s own power. No one is permitted to advance from la ilah to the realm of divine light, illa ’llah, without passing through the black light of Iblis.

Iblis freely chose the pain of distance, conscious that separation was preferable because it was the fulfillment of the Beloved’s desire and not of his own selfish wish. Separation and the curse, some Sufis caution, are prizes not easily won; they are attained only after years of strict obedience and worship.

We now can understand how it is that the Devil card obtained its exalted Tarot position after Death and before the Tower that reaches to the Stars. We recall that Ibn rabi’s placement of the Degrader was under the Powerful, represented in the Tarot by the Moon. The Moon was understood to be the portal to the Sun by Plato’s academy. As the nearest of heavenly bodies surrounding the Earth, the Moon channeled and potentiated the influences of all other divine forces. The Devil in one form or another guarded access to that creative Power of Eros. Divine stations of the Preciously Valued and Nourisher (Tower and Star) became symbols of the Questor’s original Garden, the Promised Land between Immortal Heaven and Human Earth. In this version of sacred cosmology, the Devil as Highest Angel remained warden and protector of the Garden, its Tower and Tree of Knowledge, and its immortal denizens. As exemplified by the nymphs of Nysa and Hesperides, that garden included harems of spiritually erotic, unmarried, and unbound women, i.e., “virgins.”

In Greek tradition, predating Christian and Islamic concepts of a heaven totally removed from earth (let alone a psychic heaven as reward for a physical jihad in the form of bloody decimation), Original Paradise remained a grounded realm of Gaia, retaining aspects of pre-Olympian, earthy Eros. The surrounding Celestial Firmament served as a communicative bridge between mortal and immortal realms. Wisdom through integral consideration (again, literally meaning with the stars) could bring divine assistance and blessings into the human domain. Stars embodied the immortal presences of minor deities and ancestral heroes. From the vantage of ancient wisdom, the Kosmic world of Gaia and Uranus integrates human reality with Aethereal space; as it does Hades’ chthonic dominion with Zeus’s rarefied Sky-realm.

Contained within the immortal levels of the World, made accessible by heroes and various entities such as nymphs, are the Tower and Star’s sacred knowledge, golden gifts, and ambrosia of life warded by the Moon and Sun (classically represented by Artemis and Apollo). Returning to the wildly beautiful and innocently harmonious garden of spiritual birth, Questors once again have to be tested by the Devil. That is, Questors have to match and transcend the level of angelic hierarchy presented by the Supreme Daemon. That seventh-stage level is an echelon transfusing the genius essential to transiting into immortal consciousness. Thus comes down to us the story of Eden’s One Tree and its Apples of Eros warded by an Angelic Snake who knows all; and the Hesperides’ Golden Apples given by Gaia as a wedding present to Zeus and warded by a multi-headed Titanic Snake speaking the world’s languages.

Through the Devil, woman and man were removed from their Paradise. Through the Devil once more, humankind can be returned to the Garden of Ambrosia. Successful passage beyond the Abaser – after paying awestruck homage to and consciously transcending the tremendously Valuable seductive treasure he guards – will bestow upon Questors the Moon’s mighty attribute of sacred Power. In the process, Questors will receive an endowment from the Devil’s Precious Treasure. This will be delivered by genii (as the Devil himself may be interpreted) and enlightened magi (from magus, meaning “able to wield power”) from an ages-old Tower of Alchemy (serving as a lightning rod in its capacity of being crucible and conduit for fire of the Sun and catalyst of the Moon). Magi and their genii assistants will unerringly find successful Questors by following the Flow (the root meaning of Nourish) of Grace emanated by Angelic Immortals who radiate as Stars. In the Tarot, passage beyond the Devil begins the masterful way of saintly Magehood. A Questor’s own Tower and sublimation of a Star’s Elixir (offering succor in its flow of regenerative life beyond mortal Fortune and Death) are primary to the alchemical attainment of immortality.

Any true understanding of the seventh-stage Devil and Tower requires a foundation of insight regarding the hierarchical stages binding creatively chaotic processes of Eros with internal, intimate impulses of spirituality and responsibility. Realization of immortal wisdom begins with the holistic Right View and Resolve represented by matriarchal Empress/Popess and patriarchal Emperor/Pope. It then depends upon cultivation of responsibility by not avoiding relationship; this is symbolized by the Right Speech of Temperance and Love. Chariot and Fortitude denote Right Action through a mature advancement of psycho-spiritual self emerging from initiation into a lifelong spiritual mission. Wheel of Fortune, Hermit, Hanged Man, and Death represent the Right Life and Effort of Questors realizing their abilities to channel the subtle, pervasive flux connecting immortal soul and spiritual grace with temporal psychophysical existence. Mindfully generating this effort at times may seem like an impossible task. Supplicating the Goddess as Eros makes all the difference in the world. Only through that does Right Concentration realize the compassion and wisdom of Original Mind.

Twentieth-century Roshis (broadly speaking, Zen Masters) such as Richard Baker embarked upon this true way of Bodhisattva realization, even as their societies and communities remained dogmatically confused regarding it. Questors must learn to release their attention from the whole spectrum of manifestation and conception, thereby completely engulfing body-mind-soul with the pulverizing vision of Light, Allah, Buddha Mind, or Transcendental Ecstasy. All of the above is innately compelled in stages while dealing with the Devil and feeling-remembering Eros. This requires twenty-four-hour-a-day dedicated and devoted identification with the Bright. Such is the Purpose of the Quest.

Death is part of evolution; evolution by its very nature does not end with Death. The Universe is continuously evolving in stages. So is every environment and body within it. In number, those stages can be elegantly reduced to ten. (More precisely, six principles or stages of cosmic evolution emerge from three primary principles that are in truth One. Those Three exist in a prior hierarchy, but do not evolve one into another. Rather, they emanate as a Triune All-At-Once.)

The Ten Principles of Immortality can be discerned by human consciousness. Rationality, in and of itself, can only partially cognize these principle-stages. To be fully understood, they must be realized interiorly through psychophysical-heartful stations of life. Those stations of consciousness bear direct resemblance to the great principles of cosmological evolution. Once these principles are intelligently, intuitively cognized and authenticated via psychophysical transformation (or what is commonly called spiritual realization), esoteric archetypes may be naturally envisioned that beautifully convey the logos of each hierarchical stage. Greek mythology, religious iconography, and Tarot Trionfi are based upon such yogic and contemplative imagination and, essentially stated, evolution of consciousness or enlightenment.

If all of reality exists within a spectrum of spiritual hierarchy, then everyday mundane life is not separate from immortal spheres of Kosmic Truth. In the early centuries of Christianity, an attempt was made to vanquish Satan and spiritual daimons to Hell. Attempting to mitigate that dualism, Christian theology determined that the natural world was neither divine nor demonic. This ultimately led to a pathological rationalization of the cosmos as a totally mechanical, material construct knowable solely through mathematical formulas. In the next chapter, we explore the boundaries demarcating scientific materialism and perennial knowledge or science native to the way of tenfold enlightenment. In the process, we look to attain the means by which science and spirituality – two seemingly exclusive modes of understanding universal law – may at long last be integrated.