Turning Things Around: The Inner Tarot Revolution Week 15
Ouch, buddy!
Guess what, buddy?
Shit. Happens.
When it comes to Heiros Gamos, to the Union of Opposites, it’s certainly not all sunshine and roses. Where we see beauty, we know its opposite, absolute, stark ugliness, also exists. It is part of the very nature of opposites, of course, that we will generally prefer one side of a given pairing over the other; given the choice between light and darkness, for example, some people will state a strong preference one way or the other. And generally speaking, we don’t like the ugly parts. The painful parts. The frightening parts.
However, we must reckon with them, which means we must embrace such energies. This also means that while we might endeavor, as individuals, to integrate all of the opposites within us as fully as possible, some of us will nonetheless find ourselves embodying more of some given pairs of opposites than others.
It’s hard to argue with the energies of Venus; who doesn’t appreciate beauty? Pleasure? Decadence? Jubilation? Connection with others? Many of the things that consensus deems to be good and desirable are Venusian, including Friday nights, bay-bee!
How ‘bout that opposite now? Mars. Pain. Loss. Destruction. Separation. War. These are things most people probably spend a lot of their time working to avoid; however, they are facts of life.
We like to think that we live in a world of plenty, and in some sense, we do; especially now, there is technically more than enough to go around, materially speaking. There’s your Venus energy. However, part of the problem is that we live in a world of many nations, each with its own economy, its own laws, its own way of relating to and connecting with other cultures and the rest of the world. Every one of them is different. And some of them have a lot more of that material wealth than others. There’s a gap, a distance, between the “haves” and the “have-nots.” They are cut off from one another, at times most mercilessly, and humanity has yet to figure out a way of reconciling that.
We’ve had two World Wars, and some say that another, more subtle one is going on as we speak. Like it or not, this is the way of the world.
This is why alchemical work, the true Heiros Gamos, is not for the faint of heart. To complete it means pulling off a feat just about on par with feeding the world, except doing so within the domain of the Self. It means coming to terms with the energies of Mars, of destruction, of swords and separation and war, within us. And getting it right generally means doing so without, at the same time, allowing those energies to completely overtake one. That’s the real challenge. Can we hold these energies within us and use them with wisdom? Can we discern when is the proper time to treat and when is the proper time to take up arms? It’s never pretty, and while most of us set the bar somewhere different, most of us do agree that there does come a point when it’s time to stop talking, and it’s time to pick up a sword. This is particularly true when faced by circumstances or other people who pose a similar threat to us whether we like it or not.
Then it’s do or die. It’s that simple. Nature’s fuckin’ cruel. This world gets dark and goddamn ugly sometimes. In some ways, ironically enough, though we enjoy such technological advancement that holds such promise for abundance and security, there are ways in which the world is a much more dangerous place today than ever before. People with a historical inclination might want to argue with me and bring up how miserable all of us would have been in, say, the Middle Ages; but in the Middle Ages, humanity didn’t have the power and the tools to literally vaporize the planet about a hundred times over.
Now we do.
Still, it would have been more painful to live in the Middle Ages. Our modern nukes might be able to more thoroughly destroy the planet, but that wouldn’t technically hurt. We wouldn’t feel it at all. So we’re splitting hairs here, I guess.
All that Mars energy, sorry.
Yeah, there’s been a nice, cute little symmetry pervasive thus far in this series where my cards really tend to complement one another, but this week that’s not the case. This week, it’s Mars up the yin-yang (oh fuck me, baby…) and both the Sun Card and the Shadow Card are bad, bad news. Last week, we had the Lovers, the “Gemini” card of the Major Arcana. This week, we have the “Mars” card of the Major Arcana, and we also have the “Mars in Gemini” card of the Minor Arcana. So there’s still cute symmetry, but it’s scary cute.
Look. The fuck. Out.
Top Sun Card
Lon Milo DuQuette opens up his brief chapter on this card with the line, “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!,” and that’s a good description of the state of mind represented by the card.
Gotta love the timing here. The Top/Sun Card this week is 9 of Swords, which Crowley titled “Cruelty,” which is very different from the key word I’d apply to the classic version of the card: “Anxiety.” The image on the card is a pretty good depiction of cruelty: 9 swords hanging over a grimy, sooty background, dripping with blood. This is the essence of Mars in Gemini as Lady Frieda Harris envisioned it. The original title is even more grim: “Lord of Despair and Cruelty.”
From DuQuette’s observations in Understanding Aleister Crowley's Thoth Tarot:
It is kind of a surprise to find this horrible mess in middle-pillar Yesod. After all, the other nines are perfectly lovely fellows. But even the balance and stability of Yesod can’t come to the rescue of all-action-Mars—in all-talk Gemini—in the lowest burned-out region of Yetzirah, the world of thought. Watch out! It is, Crowley warns, ‘agony of mind.’
It works out that this card comes up today, just as I have posted Chapter 4 of The Slaughter of the Goat, [This series has been removed, but in Chapter 4, I wrote about a magic(k)al war between myself and my ex.] because the above is a very good description of the condition in which I’ve largely been living since falling in with The Priestess. Especially that “all-action-Mars—in all-talk Gemini,” because I’ve basically been bouncing back and forth between the two modalities myself rather than finding the balance between the two that is most becoming of a disciplined magician. If all you’re doing is talking, you aren’t backing anything up; if all you’re doing is acting, you’re probably not thinking very clearly and you’re probably kicking up a lot of dust.
Anyway, I can say that’s how it’s been for me.
The Key Words assigned to this card by Zeigler in Tarot: Mirror of the Soul back this up:
Key Words: Mars in Gemini; cruelty to yourself; self-accusation, punishing yourself; heartless passion, fanaticism; revenge; passive resistance; martyrdom.
This is what narcissists do to their victims, what they reduce them to. It’s the main way most of them manage to get away with what they do: They completely debilitate the person and turn them against themselves.
The Priestess lured me in with her charismatic talk about Hekate and Shadow work, wooing the Pagan world with her workshops on Dark Goddesses; then she turned around, took every bit of my own darkness, magnified it and projected it out to the world as though it were the entirety of my being and I needed to be exiled. She painted me as a dangerously unstable, violent predator, good for nothing but hurting her and getting shitfaced. Then, after getting away from her, I could not help but to prove her right no matter how hard I tried. It was the exact opposite of what I would have liked to do. Extremely counter-productive.
But also, pretty much the natural consequence of being so completely destroyed at the level of the self, which gives us our segue to this week’s Shadow Card.
Shadow Card
Break down the fortress of thine Individual Self, that thy Truth may spring free from the ruins!
The Book of Thoth, pp. 253-260
Ahhhhhhhhh, The Tower. I can hear the sighs already. Most people really don’t like turning this card over.
I’m not most people.
My entry on this card was always bound to include a link to my post, Be The Bolt, in which I extol the virtues of this card.
I think it was during a separation from The Priestess that I originally wrote that post: It was after she had invaded my email and before we “reconciled” for a few months, although I still refused to live with her. I was living at the Niles YMCA at the time and the post was inspired by the Leaning Tower of Niles right outside my window. It was pretty boastful, and this is where I level about this card’s placement in the Shadow slot this week: I talked a big game in the post, and then spent the past several years swirling around in a whirlpool being challenged to live up to my words.
Be careful what you brag about.
I said it all in the post, how much I understood the process of ego destruction represented by the card, while not yet having actually had the full-on spiritual experience I was describing. I thought I had, but I didn’t know shit about fuck when I was popping off about it initially.
It’s okay. I learned. And you best believe that although it got real dark and difficult and I squirmed and writhed and begged the Gods for mercy, in the end I was forced to take my medicine. It’s okay, I’m glad of it now.
Which makes it neat to read the following from DuQuette’s book:
The House of God appears to me as a vortex not a mouth, or is it yours which can’t be filled by mortal effort try as you may.
-Harris to Crowley, date uncertain.
Be careful fooling around with Towers while you’re watching your mouth. Here’s another appearance of symmetry: I got what I wanted out of my work with Vine and the towers of Chicago, but I paid a nearly equal price.
It was part of the deal, honestly. But again, different to actually put my money where my mouth was (incidentally, the Hebrew letter associated with this card is Peh, meaning “mouth.” Ta-da!)
And yet, it all worked out for me somehow.
Put up or shut up, right?
I feel like I’m pretty close to comprehension of a Mystery of this card that is not quite spelled out by DuQuette, but closely alluded to, and it connects with observations I have made about “the apocalypse” in my post Dialectics of Transformation in an Apocalyptic Age. In that post, I forged a contrast between the understanding of the “apocalypse” as the “end of the world” and its more literal meaning of “revelation” or “uncovering.” Here, we instead explore how those two meanings are one and the same thing, which is a little tweak to our literal understanding of Apocalypticism. It has to do with the giant eye at the top of the card, which, in The Book of Thoth, Crowley alternately refers to as “the Eye of Shiva” (gee, have I discussed that at all?) and “the Eye of Horus.” This turns out to have a few different meanings, including sex magic(k) ones pertaining to the Eleventh degree of the O.T.O. However, here it means something else:
The Hindu Trinity of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva respectively create, sustain and destroy the universe. Shiva is the God of Destruction and, to destroy the universe, Crowley warns, he need only open his eye.
Three main concepts converge here:
The destruction of the universe.
The destruction of the ego.
Revelation about the nature of reality.
They are one and the same thing. This is another thing I have “known” intellectually (in other words, merely “believed”), but have now confirmed for myself from personal experience. It’s one thing to read about and contemplate this idea.
It’s another, harrowing, terrifying, but awesomely liberating thing to experience it.
Last week we introduced the concept of Heiros Gamos, or “sacred marriage,” via the Lovers card. Love and marriage seem to make good bedfellows, and as I look back, it’s clear that The Priestess had her ideas about this. However, Nuit seemed to have a slightly different way of understanding this:
The traditional title of the Tower is “The House of God,” or “Destruction of the House of God.” In chapter I, verse 57 of The Book of the Law, the goddess Nuit makes a direct reference:
Invoke me under my stars! Love is the law, love under will. Nor let the fools mistake love; for there are love and love. There is the dove, and there is the serpent. Choose ye well! He, my prophet, hath chosen, knowing the law of the fortress, and the great mystery of the House of God.
This refers to the dove and the serpent visible at the top of the card, on either side of the Eye. In terms of my Personal Myth, this lines up with the description I linked to above of the “Eye” of Shiva and the two “Glyphs.” One represents life, one death; one the masculine, one the feminine.
Choose ye well.