War of the Gods. (Part One: The Devils Tarots. Book 1)

Join Kobo & start eReading today

---

We can no longer abdicate or delegate this responsibility. Each one of us has to learn to decipher what is happening to us now, in a way that helps us to detect those silent underground symptoms that indicate the inappropriateness of our present postures, and the alternatives, which might hasten our assumption of a more authentic humanity. The twentieth century was a blundering between ideologies. Ideologies are false futures drawn in big pictures by those who take it upon themselves to shape our destiny. These are inventions of some human mind rather than humble acceptanceof what we really are.

History as we have known it is mostly a concatenation of disasters, resulting from such attempts to impose a strait-jacket. The truth requires that we inch our way forward with constant reference to the subtler music of who and what we are. The future can be skewed. Mission statements, ten-year plans, vision documents, can be a way of imposing our own myopic architecture, of obliterating the splendour of what might have been: There are a number of ways to gain access to the dark of our unconscious. The first is by being attentive to our dreams.

We dream every night but we may not be conscious of it. It takes time and attention to let ourselves become aware of these dreams. They are the language of our unconscious telling us what we refuse to tell ourselves during our daylight hours. Nor are they easy to interpret. We have to learn to crack the code. This is not a luxury, an optional extra. Whatever is not made conscious is likely to be repeated.

One of the major obstacles to dealing with this reality in an effective way is the refusal to admit that it exists at all, or the conviction that it is unnecessary to find out about it and integrate it into our psychological, our social, our educated selves. Apart from our own dreamtime, there is also the great reminder of this reality contained in the stories of our ancestors.

What dreams are to individuals, myths and legends are to peoples. Such a storehouse exists for all of us as peoples of the Western world, and these coded keys to our unconscious are mostly Greek in origin, or at least the version of it that has reached us was fashioned in that other, older aspect of Greek culture, their myths and legends. Apart from the language of dreams and the storehouse of mythology, there is the phenomenon of art. You hear it so often: Art means nothing to me. However, in this battle-scarred and war-weary twenty-first century planet, we have begun to crack the code of such dreamlike indications.

We have understood that gods and goddesses placed by antiquity in the heavens above or in the depths of the ocean below are to be discovered inside ourselves, deep in our own intestinal labyrinths. A valid question might be why we had to wait through twenty centuries before we woke up to this reality? The development of these tools was made possible by concentrating our energies in the direction of conscious thought and not being distracted by less calculable concerns. In other words, it was only because we refused to acknowledge the existence of the unconscious that we were able to concentrate on making scientific consciousness the powerful weapon that it has become today.

Science, as well as providing methods and equipment, also developed attitudes of mind: And now this has come full circle, with the conscious mind turning its attention to the unconscious. Towards the end of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, resistance to entry and discovery of the unconscious was particularly trenchant and totalitarian.

Most fundamentalist movements in society were versions of religious thought systems, all of which waged war against art, for instance, as a kind of idolatry, whose purposes were presumed to be hedonist if not evil The discovery of the unconscious by scientists and doctors was condemned as immoral, and all attempts to understand the reality of humanity as a bodily phenomenon were resisted as degradation of our true nobility as spiritual creatures of God. One significant symptom of such a mind-set is the attitude to that most primal and expressive form of art which is dancing.

After three years in Africa I am aware of how irretrievably impoverished most of us Westerners have become in this essentially human way of being.

Navigation menu

Dance is the manifestation of the spirituality of matter, demonstrating the most elegant and spiritual poise of our nature in its bodily aspect. It is both the accomplishment and the expression of well-being and the most fundamental and artistic way of attuning ourselves to the rhythm of the universe.

It has been part of religious self-expression in most cultures the world over. It is the most natural way to participate in the liturgy, for instance. But in our religious education there is an endemic prejudice against it. Africans who have been trained in our religious ceremonies have in a few years not only lost their natural aptitude for it but have learned to despise it as an irreligious activity. The Bible itself is aware of such attitudes:. Thus David and all the House of Israel brought up the ark of the Lord with acclaim and the sound of the horn.

Now as the ark entered the Citadel of David, Michal the daughter of Saul was watching from the window and saw King David leaping and dancing before Yahweh; and she despised him in her heart. As David was coming back to bless his household Michal, the daughter of Saul, went out to meet him. In your eyes I may be base, but by the maids you speak of I shall be held in honour. The attitude of Michal summarises our patrimony in Western European culture.

It is part of the Greek and Roman inheritance. Most of the Fathers of the Latin Church, for instance, were opposed to dancing, having learnt their prejudices from the Greeks. Sallust, Plutarch, Lucian and Cicero condemn it explicitly, although the last mentioned is recorded as having varicose veins and swollen legs so, according to Renaissance writers, may have been condemning what was impossible for himself. It was not for this that God gave us feet that we might jump around like camels.

My answer would be, no one — for what need is there of dancing? Such an example of how wrong we can be about one fundamental aspect of our lives shows us the possibility that we have been getting it all wrong at other more universal and all embracing levels, listening too carefully to wrongheaded prescriptions about ourselves and our way of life. Many such prejudices have been splashed into the gene pool by our most intelligent ancestors. Let us, I say, take from the Greeks the extraordinary richness of their heritage but let us be fearful also lest they teach us to despise what is essentially our own.

This is one of the important roles of the artist: Science teaches us about human nature; art reveals to us the uniqueness of what it can mean to be human. I fear the Greeks, especially when they are bearing such gifts as rejection of the body, disregard for the unconscious, disdain for art, disapproval of dancing.

The tarot cards, as well as teaching us to dance mentally, also provide us with an easier route to the unconscious. This alternative route uses some of the materials, shapes, signs and symbols used by artists and our dreams. Playing with the cards in a certain way helps us to cover the same area, using similar symbols and shapes, but in a more accessible and less daunting way.

The tarot cards introduce us to a new kind of space and another kind of time. The space involved requires from us a kind of lateral vision; the time involved is experienced as coincidence, more professionally labelled synchronicity, another Greek word. The major arcana of the tarot are visual aids to the unconscious.

They are vivid shorthand portraits, something akin to the Chinese ideograph or picture writing. These latter do not try to represent a sound, as other alphabets or musical annotations do; they abbreviate a person or a thing. In a similar way, the pictures on the tarot cards are recognisable to all of us; they can be used as a visual slide-rule on which we can play out our own particular psychological equations.

Like the stained glass windows in Chartres, the tarot cards bring us back to a time before what we call the modern way of thinking started. They provide a window to an alternative world, another way of thinking. They are relics of a religious sensibility. Between the mystery and the structures we have received as Church, Scripture, Tradition, there is an abiding testimony to the time before these were set in place.

Such testimony was, of necessity, oral or visual, pre-literal stimuli. The tarot trump cards are 22 spiritual exercises through which we can immerse ourselves in the spirit of that living tradition. This requires an activity different from and deeper than academic study or intellectual explanation. Deep and intimate layers of the soul become active and bear fruit when we meditate on the arcana of the tarot. The cards are something like a ferment or an enzyme Greek: What they reveal are not secrets things hidden deliberately by some human will but arcana, which means what is necessary to know in order to be fruitful in the domain of spiritual life.

In Latin, arca is the word for a chest; arcere the verb means to close or to shut. It means something secret or mysterious. So, we can visit the 22 cards as if they were an art gallery. These trump cards also act as projection holders, hooks to catch the imagination. They represent symbolically those instinctual forces operating autonomously in the depths of the human psyche which Jung called the archetypes. It is from this unconscious part of ourselves that our relationship with the spiritual and the divine emanates, as does every other aspect of our relational being.

The cards can be useful to us in either our vertical or our horizontal relationships. They can help to negotiate our passage through the world of the spirit as well as the world of other people. Projection is an unconscious, autonomous process whereby we see in persons, objects and happenings in our environment those tendencies, characteristics, potentials, and shortcomings that really belong to ourselves. Every child is born with these hereditary projectiles; there is nothing we can do about it. But we can become aware of what we are doing at all times, and we can sketch out for ourselves the wardrobe or the cast that we are continuously projecting.

These major arcana of the tarot present us with a billboard of this star-studded cast. Hollywood has used them shamelessly and relentlessly: All these are paid to be our archetypes of the silver screen. The tarot cards are a more basic and less romantic quiver of projectiles. Although the specific form of these images may vary from culture to culture and from person to person, their essential character is universal.

Once you become aware this energy is at work, you can begin to free ourselves. Many depictions of the Devil show a goat, or Baphomet. The first insinuation of goats being associated with the Devil comes from the bible: And before him shall be gathered all nations; and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats. But then in the Middle Ages things really got heated up when the collective folkloric vision of the Devil began to get mis-mashed with various beast-like pagan gods including Pan, depicted as part man, part goat.

Levi had a more all encompassing vision of Baphomet, not as a figure of pure evil but more of a unity of radical opposites such as good and evil. In the s, the Church of Satan was founded and used Baphomet in their iconography. Thusly the image of Devil-as-goat has been firmly embedded in our cultural associations.

The Devil card often draws your attention to where you feel trapped, restricted or blocked. In some cases, this bondage is caused by an external situation a negative work environment, a toxic relationship and so on. But more often, these energies are manifesting internally. This can seem quite heavy, but the truth is that simply acknowledging what is enslaving you is a hugely powerful step in finding liberation. Once you are able to clearly identify your demons, you can get to know them better and find appropriate ways to free yourself. This card can also serve as a reminder to look for satisfaction beyond the material trappings of your life.

These attributions are in one sense a conventional, symbolic map; such could be invented by some person or persons of great artistic imagination and ingenuity combined with almost unthinkably great scholarship and philosophical clarity.

War of the Gods: Part One: The Devils Tarots.

Such persons, however eminent we may suppose them to have been, are not quite capable of making a system so abstruse in its entirety without the assistance of superiors whose mental processes were or are, pertaining to a higher Dimension. One might take, by way of an analogy, the game of chess. Chess has developed from very simple beginnings. It is quite possible to argue that the game of chess is merely one of a number of games which has developed while other games died out, because of some accident.

One can argue that it is merely by chance that modern chess was latent in the original game.

The theory of inspiration is really very much simpler, and it accounts for the facts without violation of the law of parsimony. This is a very simple subject, and presents no difficulties to the ordinary intelligent mind. There are ten numbers in the decimal system; and there is a genuine reason why there should be ten numbers, and only ten, in a numerical system which is not merely mathematical, but philosophical. But first of all, one must understand the pictorial representation of the Universe given by the Holy Qabalah. This picture represents the Tree of Life , which is a map of the Universe.

This idea seems not unlike that of Space. By this they seem to have meant very much what the late Victorian men of science meant, or thought that they meant, by the Luminiferous Ether. All this is evidently without form and void; these are abstract conditions, not positive ideas. The next step must be the idea of Position. One must formulate this thesis: If there is anything except Nothing, it must exist within this Boundless Light; within this Space; within this inconceivable Nothingness , which cannot exist as Nothing-ness, but has to be conceived of as a Nothingness composed of the annihilation of two imaginary opposites.

But position does not mean anything at all unless there is something else, some other position with which it can be compared. One has to describe it. The only way to do this is to have another Point, and that means that one must invent the number Two, making possible The Line. But this Line does not really mean very much, because there is yet no measure of length.

The limit of knowledge at this stage is that there are two things, in order to be able to talk about them at all. But one cannot say that they are near each other, or that they are far apart; one can only say that they are distant.

In order to discriminate between them at all, there must be a third thing. We must have another point. One must invent The Surface ; one must invent The Triangle. In doing this, incidentally, appears the whole of Plane Geometry. But, so far, there is no substance in any of these ideas. In fact there are no ideas at all except the idea of Distance and perhaps the idea of Between-ness, and of Angular Measurement; so that plane Geometry, which now exists in theory, is after all completely inchoate and incoherent.

There has been no approach at all to the conception of a really existing thing. No more has been done than to make definitions, all in a purely ideal and imaginary world. Now then comes The Abyss. One cannot go any further into the ideal. The next step must be the Actualat least, an approach to the Actual. There are three points, but there is no idea of where any one of them is.

A fourth point is essential, and this formulates the idea of matter. The Point, the Line, the Plane. The fourth point , unless it should happen to lie in the plane, gives The Solid. If one wants to know the position of any point, one must define it by the use of three co-ordinate axes. It is so many feet from the North wall, and so many feet from the East wall, and so many feet from the floor. Thus there has been developed from Nothingness a Something which can be said to exist.

One has arrived at the idea of Matter. But this existence is exceedingly tenuous, for the only property of any given point is its position in relation to certain other points; no change is possible; nothing can happen. One is therefore compelled, in the analysis of known Reality , to postulate a fifth positive idea, which is that of Motion. This implies the idea of Time , for only through Motion , and in Time , can any event happen. Without this change and sequence, nothing can be the object of sense. It is to be noticed that this No. This is the letter traditionally consecrated to the Great Mother.

It is the womb in which the Great Father , who is represented by the letter Yod which is pictorially the representation of an ultimate Point, moves and begets active existence. There is now possible a concrete idea of the Point ; and, at last it is a point which can be self-conscious, because it can have a Past, Present and Future. It is able to define itself in terms of the previous ideas.

What is Kobo Super Points?

Here is the number Six, the centre of the system: At this stage it is convenient to turn away for a moment from the strictly Qabalistic symbolism. The doctrine of the next three numbers to some minds at least is not very clearly expressed. One must look to the Vedanta system for a more lucid interpretation of the numbers 7, 8 and 9 although they correspond very closely with the Qabalistic ideas. In the Hindu analysis of existence the Rishis sages postulate three qualities: Sat, the Essence of Being itself; Chit, Thought, or Intellection; and Ananda usually translated Bliss , the pleasure experienced by Being in the course of events.

Tarot: talisman or taboo? reading the world as symbol

This ecstasy is evidently the exciting cause of the mobility of existence. It explains the assumption of imperfection on the part of Perfection. The Absolute would be Nothing, would remain in the condition of Nothingness; therefore, in order to be conscious of its possibilities and to enjoy them, it must explore these possibilities. One may here insert a parallel statement of this doctrine from the document called The Book of the Great Auk to enable the student to consider the position from the standpoint of two different minds.

Imagine that each atom of each element possesses the memory of all his adventures in combination. By the way, that atom, fortified with memory, would not be the same atom; yet it is, because it has gained nothing from anywhere except this memory. Therefore, by the lapse of time and by virtue of memory, a thing could become something more than itself; thus, a real development is possible. One can then see a reason for any element deciding to go through this series of incarnations, because so, and only so, can he go; and he suffers the lapse of memory which he has during these incarnations, because he knows he will come through unchanged.

This is also the only explanation of how a Being could create a world in which War, Evil, etc. This is something the same as Mystic Monotheism; but the objection to that theory is that God has to create things which are all parts of himself, so that their interplay is false. If we presuppose many elements, their interplay is natural. These ideas of Being , Thought and Bliss constitute the minimum possible qualities which a Point must possess if it is to have a real sensible experience of itself. These correspond to the numbers 9, 8 and 7. The first idea of reality, as known by the mind, is therefore to conceive of the Point as built up of these previous nine successive developments from Zero.

Here then at last is the number Ten. In other words, to describe Reality in the form of Knowledge, one must postulate these ten successive ideas. As will be seen later, each number has a significance of its own; each corresponds with all phenomena in such a way that their arrangement in the Tree of Life, as shown in the diagrams pp. These ten numbers are represented in the Tarot by the forty small cards.

This question involves another aspect of the system of development. What was the first mental process? Obliged to describe Nothing, the only way to do so without destroying its integrity was to represent it as the union of a Plus Something with an equivalent Minus Something. One may call these two ideas, the Active and Passive , the Father and Mother. But although the Father and Mother can make a perfect union, thereby returning to Zero, which is a retrogression, they can also go forward into Matter, so that their union produces a Son and a Daughter.

The idea works out in practice as a method of describing how the union of any two things produces a third thing which is neither of them. The simplest illustration is in Chemistry. If we take hydrogen gas and chlorine gas, and pass an electric spark through them, an explosion takes place, and hydrochloric acid is produced. Here we have a positive substance, which may be called the Son of the marriage of these elements, and is an advance into Matter. But also, in the ecstasy of the union, Light and Heat are disengaged; these phenomena are not material in the same sense as the hydrochloric acid is material; this product of the union is therefore of a spiritual nature, and corresponds to the Daughter.

Fire , the purest and most active, corresponds to the Father. Water , still pure but passive, is the Mother. One must constantly remember that the terms used by ancient and medieval philosophers do not mean at all what they mean nowadays. The ductability of iron is a watery quality. It seems hardly possible to define these terms in such a way as to make their meaning clear to the student.

He must discover for himself by constant practice what they mean to him. It does not even follow that he will arrive at the same ideas. The moon that A. In this case, the difference is so infinitesimal that it does not exist in practice; yet there is a difference.

Their experience will coincide only in the matter of a few well-known pictures. Besides this, their minds are essentially different in many other ways. There is no right or wrong about any matter whatsoever. This is true, even in matters of the strictest science. The scientific description of an object is universally true; and yet it is not completely true for any single observer. The phenomenon called the Daughter is ambiguous. It has been explained above as the spiritual ingredient in the result of the marriage of the Father and the Mother ; but this is only one interpretation.

They were connected with the three qualities of Being, Knowledge and Bliss, previously mentioned. The alchemists had three similar principles of energy, of which all existing phenomena are composed: Sulphur, Mercury and Salt. This Sulphur is Activity, Energy, Desire; Mercury is Fluidity, Intelligence, the power of Transmission; Salt is the vehicle of these two forms of energy, but itself possesses qualities which react on them.

The student must keep in his mind all these tripartite classifications. In some cases, one set will be more useful than others. For the moment, concentrate on the Fire, Water, Air series. These elements are represented in the Hebrew alphabet by the letters Shin, Mem and Aleph.

• Bob Dylan au-delà du mythe (French Edition)
• Sweet Passage (Silent Prophet Book 1)
• Love of My Heart
• Lost... Found [Love Unexpected] (BookStrand Publishing Romance)
• Teaching and Learning in the Digital Age
• Dead Living
• Finding Michael Callaway