Meditations on the tarot

• [[ #1. The Magician|1. The Magician ]]
• [[ #2. The High Priestess|2. The High Priestess ]]

This text as part of a living tradition, alive in France, as well as an initiatory text.

1. The Magician

Tarot images are authentic symbols as opposed to “allegories “or “secrets.” symbols are “magic, mental, psychic and moral operations which “conceal and reveal their sense at one and the same time,” and cause” fermentation” and creative fertility.

Esotericism as the art of listening to and serving “the beating heart of humanity,” but without pretense of leading like a head. Strong implication that estorecism will (and should) always exist in the background.

First arcanum is “the rapport of personal effort and spiritual reality.” This card reveals the method of relating to tarot. This method is “active relaxation” or “effort without effort.”

Concentration is achieved by learning to transcend the will through discipline (mentions practice of the yamas and niyamas).

A state of relaxed concentration represented by the Magician and lemniscate involves consciousness descending from the mind to the “rhythmic system.”

A “zone of silence” is permanently established in the body. “Silence is the sign of real contact with the spiritual world and this contact, in turn, always engenders the influx of forces.”

“We declare that the world is not a mosaic, where a plurality of worlds which are essentially strangers to each other are fitted together, but that it is an organism.”

*“The open recognition of the relationship of all things and all beings has engendered an exactly corresponding method of knowledge. It is the method generally known under the title THE METHOD OF ANALOGY… the first and principle method… whose use facilitates the advance of knowledge.” (Papus - Traite elementaire de science occulte) Things are neither identical nor unrelated, but analogous. *

“Science ought to resign itself to being only a symbolism
conscious of itself… But the symbolic has quite another significance: the ‘science of sciences’ as it was called by the ancients.” - Marc Haven, Le Tarot, 1937

Zohar takes the vision of Ezekiel as the central symbol of cosmic knowledge.

*“The use of analogy is not limited, however, to the’ accursed sciences’ - magic, astrology and alchemy - and to speculative mysticism. It is, truth to tell, universal. For neither philosophy, nor theology, nor science can do without it.” *

Signatura rerum, visible world as a symbol of the invisible world. “The entire world is like a single mirror full of lights.” - Bonaventura

State of mind of the magician is between conscious and unconscious, both serious and at play like a child.

spiel trieb - the urge to play

*“But the first arcanum, the arcanum of practical and theoretical fruitfulness, whilst proclaiming the effectiveness of serious play (which is the complete tarot) contains at the same time a serious warning; this is why anyone who confuses lack of concentration with concentration without effort, and streams of simple mental associations with the vision without effort of correspondences by analogy, will necessarily become a charlatan.” *

Many occult teachers teach both genius and charlatanism.

Magician as guardian of the threshold.

Notes on the history and translation of the [[ Emerald Tablet|emerald tablet ]].

2. The High Priestess

“The pure act itself cannot be grasped; it is only its reflection which renders it perceptible, comparable and understandable or, in other words, it is by virtue of the reflection that we become conscious of it. The reflection of the pure act produces an inner representation, which becomes retained by the memory; memory becomes the source of commumnication by means of the spoken word; and the communicated word becomes fixed by means of sriting, by producing a “book”.”

“To begin with, a nerve stimulus is transferred into an image: first metaphor. The image, in turn, is imitated in a sound: second metaphor. And each time there is a complete overleaping of one sphere, right into the middle of an entirely new and different one.” - Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense