Turning Things Around: The Inner Tarot Revolution Week 10
Making it work...somehow.
Ten weeks in, and this is the first post in this series that I don’t want to fucking write. Given the cards and given my circumstances, I just don’t want to deal with these energies this week. There is a disconnect here between how I feel today and what I know in my heart. And I am terrified because, as much difficulty as I am having seeing this week’s cards as applicable to myself, I can also feel in my bones that, regardless, I am just going to have to find a way to make it work. It’s a tall order, but I have to make it work.
What’s the “theme” uniting the two cards this week? It feels ineffable. There’s not a word for it. However, I am reminded, now, of the motto that served as Hermekate’s battle cry every time I rebooted the blog:
“Eff the ineffable,” simultaneously capturing the mutually-exclusive attitudes of telling The Mysterious to officially Go Fuck Itself, and also doing the impossible and capturing its lightning in a bottle. It’s the kind of phrase that is only uttered by someone crazy, and determined enough, to somehow make it work. I knew as soon as I coined it that it came directly from the deepest part of my soul. It embodies the magic(k)al injunction, one of four: To Dare.
Dare the impossible; why else am I here?
And those who have read and who understand the post, Song of Hermekate, know that that is essentially what I’ve done by even thinking to publish such statements as it contains. That is about the scope of what the Word-Song Hermekate seeks to accomplish and manifest on this planet. I don’t know anyone else personally who would even try it. But what’s done is done: I’ve Uttered the Word. There is no turning back. I’ve walked the plank and I’m in waters patrolled by Great White Sharks.
It’s sink or swim now, buddy.
Top Sun Card
I read Lon Milo DuQuette’s entry on this card from Understanding Aleister Crowley's Thoth Tarot (of which, it would appear, there is a new edition) and felt my face go flush. This is not a card I would ever have imagined showing up in my Sun Stack. The fact that it did caused me to call this entire tarot operation into question. The only reason I am sitting here, writing this post anyway, is going to be hard for me to admit out loud; it’s hard for me to confess that it’s not in my Shadow Stack because any denial of its truth that I might harbor is either conditioned by the way I have been treated by other people in life, or it’s performative. For me to deny what I know about the truth of this card’s placement here would be to bullshit you. It’s true.
DuQuette provides two apparently separate interpretations for this card, neither of which particularly “feel” like me on this of all days. Anyway, here’s one of the interpretations:
A devil indeed! But what a devil! I don’t think it’s a good idea to put too many Princes of Disks in the same room. These fellows change the world with their “great energy brought to bear upon the most solid of practical matters.” Consider this short roster of Princes of Disks: Marcus Aurelius, William Shakespeare, Catherine the Great, Thomas Jefferson, Robespierre, Ulysses S. Grant, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Nikolai Lenin, Adolf Hitler, Emperor Hirohito, Robert Oppenheimer, Harry Truman, Golda Meir, and Saddam Hussein.
There’s “Group A.” Okay?
“Group B” is a group that DuQuette describes as the “garden variety” Princes of Disks that most people are likely to meet. And of course, I would be more apt to place myself in this category, except the person he goes on to describe is definitely not me.
He describes this person as, “a very cool character. His eyes are closed in meditation, as if he were mentally directing the brooding fecundity of the entire universe.” Nope. Not me!
“He is the picture of someone who is in control on the material plane.” Yeah, right!
He “doesn’t bother with things he considers impractical.” Well. I am not a practical person, but suddenly I am blushingly remembering my outspoken stance on trigger warnings and thinking to myself, “Okay, well, he might be right on that front.” But I am not a practical person. Almost everything I do is eminently impractical.
So if I honestly had to pick a side, here? You know where I am going to land; especially if you understand the terrain of such things as Aeons and Words, you will know that what I’ve done on this Substack thus far has been tantamount to claiming something like a “Group A” status, as far as the fabric of such things is woven. Although I have also made plenty of statements denying that it’s what I’m stabbing at, I can’t avoid admitting that I’ve made claims that would play out on that sort of level, esoterically speaking. I’ve dared to claim that I came to this world with The Word to End Words.
That took some serious stones. That took some chutzpah. Cojones.
Somehow, given the next card, I think it just could be a situation of “both/and,” which would actually make sense given the bipolar, paradoxical nature of this flaming mess I have dubbed my “Word-Song.” It is what it is, and there’s no turning back.
So even though I’m totally unsure now of how things will end up proceeding, all I can say is, onward and upward.
Harris’s Prince is seated in a chariot filled with globular seeds that seem to be ready to burst into plants at any moment.
Well, my writings here have been peppered with little references to such things as seeds, saplings, plants, and such…and my very moniker here, Dan de Lyons, takes its name from a common flowering garden denizen.
So here we are, my friends.
As much as I hate to admit it out loud, this is who the fuck I am.
Shadow Card
Now this card, and its placement in my Shadow Stack, I get.
Atu II: The Priestess is the Thoth deck’s answer to Colman’s High Priestess; and if there is one figure in the Tarot aside from the predictable Magus who might carry the weight of a Word-Song, it’s the Priestess. In fact, if the Magus is emblematic of all the other figures in history to whom Words have been attributed (and frankly, it is), then, given the nature of Hermekate and of the Word-Song, this actually makes a whole lot of sense.
There’s a concept promoted by Gurdjieff called “Food for the Moon.” It’s not the most politically correct concept in the world, but then again, this isn’t politics we’re talking about. We’re talking about the occult, and that means we’re talking about terrain that, when surveyed by the eyes of an occultist, transcends and informs politics, and not the other way around. Though you would be hard-pressed to find a professional scientist these days who would agree, occultists operate as and regard themselves as scientists who make the most accurate models of the universe that they can; who, to the best of their ability, are trying to understand the actual ways of the Universe on levels that material science will never touch, and would never claim to. In that regard, it is absolutely asinine to put the cart before the horse and have one’s esoteric ideas dictated by politics. That’s just not the way the real world works. At best, what we have in the realm of politics is human beings instead imposing their own intellectual vision on the world. Occultists, on the other hand, work not only in the intellectual realm, but in the pragmatic realm, the emotional realm, and the spiritual realm, all of which which we regard as real; and by and large, our models of the universe reveal a world in which all that occurs on the material plane is first informed by the realm of spirit. If you want to make the occult serve politics instead, you’re not an occultist. You’re a political activist who employs occult means, and that’s just a totally different ballgame.
Anyway, I digress. This idea basically says that the Moon, governing the ebb and flow not only of water, but of our emotional natures which are symbolized thereby, will try to lull us, spiritually, to remain at that level and in that realm. Another name that I think might be suitable for that same realm is the Sea of Nun, which was depicted recently in the Marvel series Moon Knight: It’s a vast astral sea in which people who get caught there simply dissolve. If you get lost in the Sea of Nun, you eventually lose your soul once this life is over with, it’s that simple. In other words, you become Food for the Moon, and most people want to avoid that.
As part of this process—and this is even more pronounced for esoteric workers who are attempting to traverse and cross the Sea of Nun, which seems to be aware of those who dare such things—life puts obstacles in our way. And while I’ve done a lot of complaining in my life on the level of matter and of ideology, I also recognize many of the dynamics playing out of late between my mother and I, between my other abusers and I, as the Moon trying like hell to eat me. As it would, especially if I really do have a “Word-Song.”
My mother happens to be a Cancer, a Moon sign, so the resonance here will be very strong. It fits.
On the Qabbalistic Tree of Life, the Sea of Nun sits in the Sephirah of Yesod, numbered 9, “Foundation,” which corresponds with the astral plane and, indeed, the Moon. Symmetrically, if you were to “flip” the Tree over, this gulf is reflected by Da’ath, the “Sephirah” that isn’t really a Sephirah, but is rather the Abyss, or a big gaping hole in Creation that separates the totally Unmanifest and Most Holy Supernal Triad—the Sephiroth of Kether, Binah, and Chokmah—from the created universe.
The Sephiroth are connected by paths—22 of them, the same number as there are Major Arcana—and the Priestess is the card corresponding with the only Middle Pillar path that crosses the Abyss.
In other words, she’s the only one who’d actually have what it takes to pull off what a Word-Song proposes to pull off, because given the nature of the Song, it would, of necessity, have to arise directly from the Unmanifest. The bottom 7 Sephiroth are all characterized and informed by Logos. And this would suggest that if a Song defies such forms, it, too, must issue forth from the Abyss.
And that actually makes sense too, when we consider that the Tree of Life is often superimposed over the physical body and, when this is done, Da’ath corresponds with the area of the throat, or the place from which we vocalize. The Song of Hermekate is sung in Da’ath, and this would also suggest that those who hear and carry Songs are all Babes of The Abyss.
There are three main Major Arcana trumps that are tied to the Moon, and the Priestess is one of them. The other two are the Chariot (have I mentioned that card at all here? I think I have…) and the Moon. Of the three, DuQuette refers to the Moon as “something else,” which is also another catch phrase I have dropped meaningfully here and there in these writings. And of the three, that is the one that will try to eat you if the theory of “Food for the Moon” holds true. As I have recently published, the Moon is also built into the symbology of Hermekate via the VSigil (I cover that in Ten Years Gone).
The Chariot would be the one running interference, pressing and trying those who proceed past the Moon.
The Priestess would be the one associated with the higher aspect of the Moon, the one beyond the Sea of Nun. It is only through Her that anyone enters into the Supernal realm.
And if I connect all these dots, the suggestion is that I adopt the mantle of Priestex of Hermekate.