The Heretic's Tarot: Truth, Lies And Lost Teachings

Heresy (deriving from the Greek haireses meaning “choice” or “alternative”): an unauthorized belief, relating to a heathen religious perspective; a faith and rites which are contrary to those of orthodox doctrines.

Heretics: those who subscribe to alternative, nonconformist doctrines.

The Devil’s Book?

Just as the Chinese use coins or yarrow sticks in conjunction with the I Ching ("Book of Changes”), as a means of divination, Tarot cards are used in the West as a device to tell fortunes. Why then, does one system command so much reverence in the East, and now in the West, whereas the other, the Tarot, does not. Why not?

It is the “Book of Changes” that makes the difference; a book of definitive interpretations, accepted as containing deep spiritual insights, the wisdom of the Tao. Some five hundred years BC, the Chinese sage Confucius wrote, “If some years were added to my life…I would give fifty to the study of the I (Ching) and might then escape falling into great errors”. Interpretations of the Tarot are often conflicting; and, partly due to its primary function as a vehicle of prediction, not taken too seriously outside neo-pagan circles.

The cards were taken very seriously when they first became popular among the nobility of Europe in the fourteenth century. It was claimed that the heterodox sect of Gnostic Christians, the Cathars of southern France, used similar cards to teach their heretical doctrines. The clergy of the Middle Ages and Renaissance called them the Devil’s picture-books (which, they claimed, made a gross parody of the icons of the true faith), and ordered them to be burned in town marketplaces. Only later, when Tarot decks proved impossible to eradicate, did the twenty-two Major Arcana cards become associated with the Stations of the Cross, images of Christ’s life and Passion.

So it follows that, in many modern interpretations, the Tarot Pope is equated with the archetype of the "Wise Old Man," while The Devil signifies "base impulses" or "the shadow" of modern psychology. The figure of The Empress is said to denote passivity and lack of intellectual prowess, and the image of Judgement to relate to St. Michael's triumph over the Serpent of Darkness. There is nothing herein to offend the most misogynist and orthodox theologian.

So much for Tarot being the Devil’s book! The trouble is, as the nineteenth-century philosopher Samuel Butler observed, no-one hears the Devil’s side of the story when God writes all the books. Nearly all modern interpretations are influenced by the misinterpretations of the traditional enemies of the Tarot: Judeo-Christian clerics and scholars. The effect of this may be illustrated by the Christian fable of St. George – deriving from the pagan god Green George, whose symbol was a sacred Cauldron. Dissolved in the boiling Cauldron, the pagan god became enlightened and immortal, whereas in the Christian version of the tale, St. George makes the sign of the crucifix over the vessel, rendering its transformative waters lukewarm.

Were medieval clergy afraid of Tarot cards because they parodied the “true faith”, or because they exhibited all the symbols of an alternative, former faith, associated with the mysteries of the East, classical deities and gods and goddesses of Nature such as the Great God Pan (distorted into the figure of the Judeo-Christian Devil)? If orthodox factions wanted to bury the true teachings of Tarot beneath an edifice of falsehoods and inverted meanings - as churches were built over over pagan sacred sites - they have so far succeeded in their aim.

The Heretic’s Tarot aims to redress this erasure of Meaning and Magic. At the very least, since the Devil is traditionally credited with all the best dancing tunes and best lines in any drama, and since all true poets are reputed to belong to "the Devil's party," he surely deserves a better book than those that have hitherto passed as authentic interpretations and teachings of the Tarot.

Ancient History

Among magical societies of the early twentieth century, the hypothesis of an Egyptian origin was popular. Later, it was believed that Tarot packs were introduced into medieval Europe by Gypsy tribes, migrating West from their homeland in India, via Egypt. But the first references to Tarot in the fourteeenth century predate the arrival of Gypsies, according to some authorities.

The oldest known decks are Italian and thought to derive from the northern region of the River Taro. Tarot, incidentally, is the French abbreviation of the Italian name, Tarocchi. Another theory is that Tarot cards were imported from the East by Venetian traders to be developed by Italian artists who incorporated the common medieval images of popes, jugglers, knights and pages, seen in the Tarot pack today.

It has been suggested that the name “Tarot” might derive from that of the Indian and Tibetan Goddess Tara. Another Eastern equivalent of the Tarot, associated with this goddess, is the divinatory "Game of Rebirth" of Tibetan and Tantric Buddhist tradition. Two dice boards are used: one of fifty-six squares which relates to all the possible adventures of the goddess on the mundane and material plane, while a second board of twenty-one squares relates to successive stages of spiritual awakening. These same numbers, of twenty-one and fifty-six, correspond with the Tarot's Major Arcana and Minor Arcana, the “Greater Secrets” and “Lesser Secrets” respectively; and similarly, the Major Arcana archetypes represent the spiritual path of the querant, while the Minor Arcana cards pertain to aspects of the current worldly situation.

In the Far-East, games with cards or dice, or the yarrow sticks or coins used in conjunction with the I Ching, are recognised as teaching subtle and sophisticated religious doctrines, even while the conscious mind is pre-occupied by playing a game or the idea of foretelling future events. However, whereas the complete Tarot comprises seventy-eight cards (twenty-one numbered Major Arcana trumps, plus the un-numbered Fool, #O, and fifty-six Minor Arcana cards), the modern playing pack consists of only fifty-two cards. The four Knights have disappeared, along with all the “Greater Secret” images but for The Fool (Joker). In Tarot tradition The Fool represents a child born into the world who must now learn the teachings of each following Major Arcana archetype to reach illumination - images that have been excluded from popular consciousness for centuries.

Symbols Of The Tarot

In ancient cosmology, the solar gods were said to live in glowing palaces at the summit of sacred mountains, in "seventh heaven," that is, on top of the seven terraces of the magic mound or ziggurat, known as the "Seven Spheres of the World". Directly below were the seven corresponding levels of the lunar Otherworld or Underworld, seen as a mirror image of the celestial realms, just as the roots of the World Tree were imagined to be an inverted reflection of its solar branches.

In early Greek myth, the great canopy of Heaven and great Cauldron of the Underworld were created from the two cracked hemispheres of the Cosmic Egg, containing the primal sea of Chaos, an undifferentiated flux of the infinite potential for all forms of creation.

Likewise, in the symbolism of sacred mushroom cults from ancient Mesopotamia to modern Mexico, while the upper shell of the magic plant's volva or egg was conceived as ascending skywards to represent the created world of mankind, its lower shell was thought to remain beneath the earth like a great Cauldron or Cup, still containing the residue of the Egg's uterine fluid, known in mystery tradition as the Aqua Vitae ("Waters of Life"), sometimes conceived as a lake of Divine Fire, the Ignis Vitae.

In fact, the study of oriental religious imagery reveals a general reversal of the western theological perspective. In Buddhism, Samsara, known as the sphere of Time and Suffering, shares many traits with the upperworld of Greek and Celtic symbolism, whereas the paradise of Nirvana corresponds to the timeless Greek and Celtic Otherworld or Underworld.

This same heresy is implied by one of the Tarot's primary magical symbols, the lemniscate sign, also known as the symbol for infinity. The upper circle, with its associated cards in their assigned places, is drawn clockwise, following the right-hand rotation of the sun to signify the mundane sphere of humankind, whereas the lower circle, drawn counterclockwise, denotes the lunar sphere, the spiritual.

On this same design the figure of The Magician, whose card denotes knowledge and all the skills of human culture, can be seen climbing up and out from the lunar sphere of Being and around the solar Wheel of Becoming, images related to that of Jack (The Fool) climbing the Beanstalk, that great archetypal motif of man's ascent of the World Tree towards rational, personal consciousness.

In this world-view there is no such thing as a "fall" of mankind at all. Conversely, the teaching is of a rise from a State of Grace, when humans were expelled from the primal garden of their own evolutionary impulse. "We prefer to think of ourselves as fallen angels but in reality we are risen apes."

The Four Elements

At the base of the World Tree and moving up its trunk, the philosophers of antiquity saw the soul of man as being at-one with the universe and all its creatures. Then, moving up further along the branches, it was conceived as splitting itself off from other beings and identifying only with its own individual organism.

Finally, at the highest reaches of the World Tree, man is seen as being "out on a limb", feeling alienated from all the other leaves and branches and even his own roots.

On the Eastern symbol of the Spinal Tree, related to that of the World Tree and incorporating the four signs of the ancient elements and four Minor Arcana suits, the Stone (or Pentacle), representing the Great Mother's earth-womb, is placed at the base of the spine, and the symbol of the Wand, representing the fire of intuition, is placed at the "gut" level. The symbol of the Cup, representing the watery tides of emotion, is placed at the heart and the Sword, representing the air element and human intellect, refers to the head.

While the Tarot presents us with four levels of development culminating in personal consciousness, many traditions posit seven levels, as demonstrated by the seven chakras of Tantric tradition (situated at ascending locations on the spinal column) and Jacob's ladder, like that of Egyptian Set, with seven rungs leading to heaven. But in all  cases the significance remains the same: the rising to each successive level entails the forgetting of one's real Self at the base of the World Tree. Our sense of universal identity and infinite awareness is limited and finally lost - for the prize of a mortal and finite personality.

God’s Books

Historians agree that the world’s first religious rites were shamanic in structure, that they descended into the sacred mushroom cults of ancient Mesopotamia, which influenced all later religions of the Middle-East. These rites are known to have involved the tribal leader’s psychic descent down the World Tree - often in the guise of a serpent - to repair the rift between human-beings and all other branches of creation; rising again from the Underworld to bear the glad tidings of its mysteries to all mortals. Essentially, they taught the gospel of the one World Soul, animating all creation; the unity of all creatures, attained by the mortal self experiencing a “fall”, or some other type of descent into the divine dimensions, to discover its immortal Self.

Numerous shamanic traits survive in classical Graeco-Roman cults of deities who descend into Hades to retrieve a lost Soul; in the Dryads, associated with the journey to the roots of their sacred trees; and in Egypt, where a race of giants, semi-divine ancestors are said to have lived during the Golden Age, the Neterit who could "shape-shift," appearing as serpents, birds or plants. They are said to have been succeeded by a priesthood known as Urshu, "The Watchers," who were intermediaries between humans and the Divine, charged with preserving and transmitting the teachings of the Neterit.

However, according to the Book of Enoch, (transcribed in the first century BC but excluded from the Old Testament collection of texts compiled around the same time), the Watchers were the children of Satan’s fallen angels who mated with mortal women and taught them the arts of the occult, cosmetics and herbalism (Enoch 7). Their children were the Rephaim, meaning "Fallen Ones," who God intended to drown in the Flood. He clearly failed for, in a work called Jubilees, discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls, Noah asks God to keep the Rephaim imprisoned, only letting a few out now and then to test the righteousness of men. God is said to have given Noah knowledge of all their rites and arts so that he might protect himself against them; instructions that were passed down through all the biblical patriarchs, notably Enoch, in whose visions the Rephaim are chained down in the Underworld.

What had happened? How did the shaman’s psychological sacrifice become confounded with human sacrifice (see #3, The Empress)? What made patriarchal tribes, votaries of the father-gods who conquered the matriarchal clans, rape their priestesses, cut down their World Trees, kill their sacred serpents, and suppress their religious rites, inverting all their paradigms?

Whereas devotees of the matriarchal mysteries believed the supreme Source of life to dwell at the base of the magic mountain or roots of the World Tree, and saw the base of the internal Spinal Tree as the seat of spiritual power and Soul within the human frame, later patriarchal religions identified the lower reaches of the spinal column with vice and base impulses and the Underworld as a pit of eternal torment – associating the thinking mind (ego) in the male human head with Soul and Spirit (see #4, The Emperor).

God’s Priests

Numerous scholars have argued that the Judeo-Christian Devil was created by the triumph of Judeo-Christian monotheism. The strongest light casts the deepest shadow. A wholly good God has, by necessity, to be balanced by a principle of evil. No-where is this better demonstrated than by the Tarot's Wheel of Fortune, cognate with the Bhavachakra, the great Eastern symbol of the Solar Wheel, sometimes known as the sphere of birth-and-death, light and dark, all the various pairs of opposites. Here, good and evil, pleasure and pain, yin and yang, are not independent but inseparable.

When the ego equates itself with right and light, all its unacceptable aspects become known as the shadow, the "unconscious" or "subconscious," modern psychological terms for the dark and denied record of experience, repressed complexes, irrational impulses and perversions, threatening the conscious mind like the bad old devils and demons.

According to their critics, orthodox religion and psychiatry, the confessional and couch, both constitute a shallow evasion of experience at deeper levels by limiting attention to the dynamics of the ego and its shadow. Both stop short of the transcendance of the opposites, and therefore offer no entry into the lunar sphere of the real mysteries.

As a result, the ultimate in daring in many contemporary texts is to posit the shadow as constituting our real Soul or Spirit, and it is to guard against this error that teachers of the East often use the example of a pocket watch which correlates with the Tarot's lemniscate symbol.

The watch face, with its numbers, hands, and movement, corresponds to our life in space-time, the plane of all the pairs of opposites in mutual dependence and ceaseless change; while the watch case, which is blank, corresponds with the concept of Soul, the timeless and changeless, the Great Unconscious of Zen Buddhism which should never be confused with any superficial categories of psychology.

Most ritualistic acts derive from the dualism of light and dark, the solar ego and its need for control over uncertain natural circumstances. A large part of the ritual, characteristic of the later pagan priesthoods, is thought to derive from Egypt, where the most potent religious rites were subsumed under the Bronze Age cult of solar Ra. Ra’s priests used magical spells to subdue the Serpent Apep - and almost everything else in manifestation - influencing scripts such as the Book of Enoch, in which St. Michael's good angels use verbal formulae subdue Satan's dark angels.

Medieval magicians copied their charms from Catholic ecclessiastical liturgies which the church inherited from a corrupt and degenerate pagan precedent. Magicians and Catholic priests all consecrated crosses, water and chalices, followed elaborate ritualistic rules and ceremonies employing bell, book and candle, tracing signs and sigils with swords or wands while invoking angels and demons. The church and sorcerers alike sold talismans and amulets, charms to summon good forces and banish bad ones, spells for protection against mortal enemies, disease, mad dogs and the Devil.

Exactly how far the popular magic of the Renaissance had shaken off its shamanic roots becomes apparent in some of its key texts. While in early religious rites, the object was a union with Nature, lost due to man's ascent of the World Tree, in Hermetic philosophy it was supposed possible for man to regain the domination over Nature, lost due to his Fall!

Another favourite was the Jewish mystical system called Kabbalah, Cabbala or Qabbala, usually attributed to Moses, Solomon or Enoch, but dating from no earlier than the sixth century AD. Kabbalah means "received doctrine,” which is to say, as received from the prophets of orthodoxy and relating to a conformist ideology, designed to bind and deflect the enthusiasmos and ecstasy of the old gods.

In this occult model, the image of the Sephirothic Tree predominates, the World Tree turned upside down, rooted in God's heaven and descending from refined spirit into evil and base matter. The scheme reflects that of orthodox Catholicism, descending into modern occultism, in which the positions of the divine and profane on the World Tree and internal Spinal Tree have been inverted: the levels of awareness within man are perceived as ascending from soul-less dust, through gross unconscious and animal instincts, through personal consciousness to the “higher mental” level and up to the highest planes of intuition, cosmic consciousness and the numinous. In the neo-cortex, of course; where else?

Modern Tarot

Notwithstanding the Inquisition, Tarot packs remained popular throughout Italy and Germany, but were not widely recognised in France until the late eighteenth century. A Protestant theologian from the Languedoc region of southern France - a soil steeped in the blood of Gnostic heretics - a certain Count de Grebelin began to publish works on the Tarot (circa 1781). His ideas were adopted by a Parisian wigmaker and fortune-teller named Alliete who published some books on ritual magic and a few Tarot packs.

Next came Eliphas Levi who brought the Tarot into the fold of modern occultism. Born in 1810, he was a Catholic, ordained a deacon 1855, and published works on the rituals of "High Magik," using ideas from the Kabbalah. Levi’s ideas were adopted by Dr. Gerard Encausse who published Le Tarot des Bohemians in 1889.

In 1887, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, based primarily on the philosophy of the Kaballah, was founded in London by three Freemasons, one of whom, Samuel Liddell Mathers, is credited with the assignment of Tarot cards to various positions and paths on the Kabbalistic Tree. On the plus side, a member of the Order named Arthur Waite designed a Tarot pack, with paintings by Pamela Colman Smith, which was published in 1909 by the Rider company of England. For the very first time, the pip cards of the Minor Arcana carried pictorial images instead of the traditional multiple motifs of each suit, doubtless contributing to the increasing popularity of the Tarot throughout the twentieth century.

Then, on the down side, the self-styled occult master and magician, Aleister Crowley, known as the "Wickedest Man in the World," published the "Thoth" deck in 1944, which did nothing to promote the reputation of the Tarot outside occult and neo-pagan groups, despite a series of stunning images painted by Lady Frieda Harris.

Incidentally, Crowley believed that Hitler had studied his "Book of the Law", and his biographer notes significant similarities in doctrine.5 It is true that the Nazi elite studied the racial theories as propounded in "The Secret Doctrine" by H.P. Blavaksky (founder of the Theosophical Society in the late nineteenth century); and Crowley's definition of magic as "the art and science of causing change in conformity with will" certainly coincides with the Nazi ideal of the "Triumph of the Will." All evidence, according to the orthodox and sceptic alike, that occultism and modern witchraft pertain to the "dark side" of human experience, as manifest in demon worship and Nazi ideology.

Even today, Catholic scholars still insist that all crime and aberrations proceed from our dark, irrational and animal aspects. Only far from being a cult of the irrational as frequently proposed, Nazism was an ultra-rational solar cult, symbolized by a solar wheel (swastika) topped by a solar eagle; and its ideologies confirm the observations of psychologists that, pursued to their limit, control and order lead to their self-destructive inversions of disorder, violence and mental instability. So whereas Chaos was once thought to undermine Order, the extreme will to shape reality to conform with personal objectives, as recommended by the magician Bombast Paracelsus in the sixteenth century and Crowley in the twentieth, now starts to look like the culprit.

It is said that the neo-pagan personal magik which betrays the will to control all things is the very antithesis of religious mystery in which the controlling persona dissolves into the universal power informing all things; and that, founded on Hermeticism, right-wing Theosophy and orthodox occult theory, the doctrines and rites of many forms of modern Wicce - and of the New Age generally - remain as shallow, profane, conventional and conservative as those of the orthodox churches, providing the very obstacles to cosmic consciousness. Those now entrusted to transmit our true metaphysical heritage are indicted as “bind guides’ and sheep in wolves clothing. Although the Tarot has been adopted as the sacred book of neo-paganism, it has been subjected to “revisioning” wherever the original vision has not been fully understood. Confounded with Kabbalism, Christianity and Crowleyanity, a plethora of modern packs contain elaborations on fundamental errors, having the reverse effect of the alchmists aim, turning pure gold into base metal.

Lest we forget: the term "witch" is thought to derive from the Anglo-Saxon wicca (masc.) or wicce (fem.), a corruption of witga meaning "a seer". It refers to a wise-woman or man with direct experience of the deepest mysteries. Related to the Anglo-Saxon witan meaning "to see" or "to know," it correlates with the knowledge called gnosis among early Christians heretics, an exact translation of the Sanskrit word bodhi, meaning the "wisdom-knowledge" from which the term Buddhism derives.

The Heretic’s Tarot

Certainly, the zodiac and "twelve houses," all the giants and heroes projected by humans into the heavens, are now acknowledged as having no reality in nature, as mere poetic fictions; and the same might be said of the Tarot images. "Off with her head," shouts the Queen of Hearts in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. "Who cares for YOU," replies Alice (having by now grown to her full size). "You' re nothing but a pack of cards." In one sense, yes. But these cards remind us of timeless themes, as told in the old sagas: of Ishtar and Tammuz, Isis and Osiris, Demeter and Persephone, Adonis and Aphrodite, Merlin, Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot.

Mythology (the study of myth), is said to enlighten us as to the forces of life in operation in society and within the human psyche throughout the ages. Myths are the creations of our ancestors, endowing their mundane and often perilous circumstances with mystical significance; revealing their politics and passions, their heroic perceptions and responses to love, conflict and religious longing. Their gods and goddesses, chieftans and great queens, walk and talk again as we relate their sacred dramas to our own lives.

Contrary to the concept, still prevalent in places, that contact with Tarot cards may attract dark forces and misfortune, absorbing the images of the Major Arcana will at least awaken the querant to the grander, mythic overview of events, and very much more. When the cards are known as trumps, deriving from "triumph", this is to say that they demonstrate the way towards the ultimate triumph of spiritual liberation.

While The Fool, (#0), and Magician, (#1), are male figures, and imply a young man’s progress through all the lessons signified by each archetype, the meaning of the cards remains the same for male and female querants. Every person’s journey through life includes the experiences of mother and father, indoctrination into religion, love and marriage, (The Empress (#3), Emperor (#4), The Pope (#5), and The Lovers (#6). The card of The Chariot, (#7), pertains to career and self assertion, while the card of Justice (#8) denotes the consequences of egocentric action, as implied by the preceding image.

Whereas the first ten Major Arcana cards generally denote milestones and persons appearing in the external world, all the Tarot trumps following on from The Wheel of Fortune (#10) pertain to the querants inner life, and signify the deepest spiritual revelations.

Early shamanic practices are probably the closest we can come to any authentic, antique folk or wiccan tradition. Otherwise, the exponents of the heterdox Ways are the poets, dissenters, heretics and satirists of all ages and cultures: the early Christian Gnostics and Islamic sect of Sufis; the Ch'an and Zen adepts of China and Japan. The teachings of the old pagan gods and their priests and priestesses, custodians of the true secrets of mystery and magic: all are remembered in The Heretic’s Tarot.

Those Major Arcana images designated as the most dreadful, in fact, refer to the most sacred and potent religious secrets. For example, the inverted figure of the Tarot’s Hanged Man evokes the legendary inverted crucifixion of St. Peter; which, as you might expect, does not mean the same to the heretic as it does to the orthodox. In the Gnostic Acts of Peter, Peter chooses the inverted cross as his symbol in order to teach that man's entire cosmological order must be reversed in order to attain knowledge of the mysteries. And in this context, the enigmatic saying of Christ that "the last shall be first and the first shall be last" can be better understood, along with the famous witch’s dictum "Fair is foul and foul is fair", and the motif of the pact with the Devil being written backwards.

Neither does Death mean to the heretic what it does to the Christian. Pagans objected to the cross of Hermes, once a symbol of spiritual ecstasy, being adopted as a Chistian symbol of suffering. In the true mysteries of all cultures, Death and Resurrection signify a psychological surrender and rebirth. To believe that someone else can die to remove our sins is to miss the point and deny most people any chance of transformation. The Cross and Cauldron (assimilated into Christianity as the Holy Grail), should be seen as internal images. This was heresy; and those early Christian sectarians for whom it constituted the truth were murdered before their doctrines could spread.

Possibly the Gnostics did use a design similar to that of the lemniscate symbol and related images of the East in teaching their heresies. In Tarot tradition, the two numbers from each sphere of the lemniscate which add up to twenty are related (see p.10); and thus the figure of The Pope in the outer, profane world, the world of human culture and consciousness, is seen to correspond to The Devil in the inner, spiritual world, the realm of Nature and the Great Unconscious.

Far from being the archetype of the "Wise Old Man," to the early Gnostic and medieval heretic, the Pope was the "Father of Lies" and the Devil was the True Teacher and Liberator. The Tarot Pope points to the skies while the Devil directs his torch down towards the Underworld, the innerworld where the treasures of the old gods might be found.

While some neo-pagan rites incorporate a practice known as "Drawing down the Moon" (which involves invoking the lunar spirit to descend from above and take possession of the practitioner), in Buddhist and mystery school doctrines it is rather a case of the lunar power existing eternally within oneself and being drawn up from the inner depths. There is no need to reach out and invoke what is already within you; no need to seek what you have never lost. When authentic witchcraft, the “Craft of the Wise”, is reputed to be bestowed by the Moon, this signifies the deepest realization, and worst heresy, that the very thing we have been looking for - god/dess, peace, dharma, divinity - is what is looking.

From the Latin occultus, meaning "concealed," the term occult (like the term heathen, deriving from the Germanic heiden, meaning "hidden"), refers to this silent and secret divinity buried in the depths of the believer; as in the core of an apple where, if the fruit is cut horizonally and parted, a pentacle formed of apple pips appears.

Nearly always mistakenly described as a “protective perimeter”, the magic pentacle is said to symbolize the Devil and his disciple’s ability to "shapeshift" into five species of animal, but really points beyond this literal interpretation to their empathy with all names and shapes, the shift in identity from the personal to the Universal. Likewise, when the Devil is shown as a composite creature, cognate with the Greek Chimaera, Egyptian Sphinx and oriental Chaos Dragon, this is to symbolize the mystery adept’s assimilation to the almighty power informing all creation. Enlightenment, states D. T. Suzuki, the leading exponent of Zen in the West, is the "totality of things becoming conscious of itself as such." From whom or what, then, would the practitioner need protection?

Another image of liberation can be found on the last card of the Major Arcana series, that of the Anima Mundi or World Soul, related to the famous symbol of “Cosmic Man".

Deriving from the androgynous oriental giant Purusha ("Person") the figure is presented with arms and legs extending out to the circumference of a circle (denoting the far reaches of the cosmos), signifying the one Self animating all forms. "THOU ART THAT!" The first principle of Hindu Vedanta, the summation of all the sacred books called the Vedas, applies to the last trump of the Devil's Book of Tarot.

#16, The Tower

Images

LIGHTNING strikes a CRUMBLING TOWER on a hill-top in a barren landscape. In some images of this archetype a CROWN topples from the Tower and the two human figures shown falling to the ground are commonly said to represent The Pope (#5) and The Emperor (#4).

A similar tower can be seen today on top of the pagan mound of Glastonbury Tor, upon which a Christian church dedicated to St. Michael was erected, only to be destroyed by an earthquake in 1275. The church was reconstructed, and shaken down again by an earth tremor in the seventeeth century, leaving only its fourteeth century tower standing.

To medieval heretics the image described the destruction of the Holy Roman Empire, the established order of the church-state forged for conquest and oppression of the common people.1

The image of a Tower also evokes the fairy-tale motif of the PRINCESS IN THE TOWER, as found in the story of Rapunzel, imprisoned there by a wicked demon until a prince arrives to effect her release.

The Number 16

The Tower, #16, shares a numerical correspondance with #4, The Emperor who, in Tarot tradition, is identified with the wounded "Fisher King" of Arthurian legend, ruling over a barren WASTELAND.

Common Interpretations

For divination, the card is generally acknowledged to signify REPRESSED FORCES RISING, loss of stability and security, unexpected challenges and the disruption of existing circumstances.

The Lightning

As shown in the pages of the The Emperor, ancient gods and goddesses were perceived as revolving trinites, with lunar, stellar and solar aspects, as illustrated by the Devil's title of "Prince of Darkness," his identity with the Morning Star and as "Prince of the Power of the Air" (Ephesians 2:2). Reflecting the cyclic alternation of sacred kings of the matriarchal era, the symbol of the magic mountain, shows the route of the hero’s journey, rising from the lunar depths as star deities, attaining to the heights of the solar mountain to win the queen, only to be "cast down" into the lunar pit in their turn for rest and regeneration.

The Devil’s Latin title of Lucifer, "Light-bringer," aligns him with the ancient Greco-Roman deities Hephaestus and Prometheus, gods of volcanic fire and smithcraft (who, like Lucifer, were later punished by the patriarchal sky-fathers for bringing the light of enlightenment to mankind); and his talent for striking church towers with bolts of lightening testifies to his aspect as a star-god, to whom the weapon of lightening is most commonly attributed.

Church towers, mountain peaks and the sacred oaks of northern Europe all stood as emblems of the ruling solar gods. In Nordic myth, Balder the Beautiful was slain by a spear of mistletoe thrown by Blind Hod, Balder's Underworld twin and ascendant challenger.

Oaks are reputed to be struck by lightening more than any other trees in European forests and therefore King Balder's death by mistletoe (which, when hurled at the tree, was thought to cause its fall), is sometimes interpreted as death by a stroke of lightning.2

The personification of the Morning Star, the solar god/king’s challenger, was more often than not the queen's lover - as shown in the myth of Guinevere and Lancelot (formerly Lance-or, meaning "He of the Golden Lance," that is, the lightening bolt).

At one stage in their relationship, the queen is driven to the brink of dementia when she suspects the knight of infidelity, evoking myths of the sun-goddess of many cultures, Surya, Sol, Sel, Saule, later erased by scribes of the patriarchal solar deities. The passion between the solar-goddess and star-deity is usually tempestuous, since he is also a storm-deity and the bright sun and dark rain clouds always contend.3 But it is the storm-god who strikes the proud and corrupt with bolts of lightening, bringing the moisture that restores the parched earth to fertility.

The Crumbling Tower

Just as solar queens connived in the displacement of their senescent kings, so did the fierce prophets of the Old Testament and Druids of Britain, subjecting the king to magical satire which could cause his face to erupt in blotches (perhaps the blushes of confusion), or worse, his death. If the ruler could not give a spontaneous and wise response to any challenge; if he had lost the inspiration of Truth, welling up from the depths of his being, like the divine fire issuing from the depths of the magic mountain, he could be deposed.

In ancient Irish lore it is said that, "Through the ruler's truth there is abundance of corn," and there are tales in which an Act or Word of Truth in itself works wonders. When the Irish hero Cormac visited the King's court in Tara as a child, he heard King Lugiad MacCon give a false judgement, proclaiming that the sheep which had strayed onto the queen's garden should be taken as forfeit for the damage to the vegetation. As a result, the courthouse began to slide downhill. " No," shouted Cormac "The woad will grow again in the garden. Only the sheep's wool, which will also grow again, should be forfeit for the woad!" The crowd cried out, "This is the truth!” The courtyard returned to its former place; Lugaid MacCon was forced to leave Tara and, when Cormac attained to manhood, he became King.

In a later Celtic myth, when the new palace of King Vortigern kept falling down, the king's Druids told him that a fatherless child must be sacrificed and his blood poured into the foundations to appease the Underworld gods. But the child chosen was Merlin who denounced these corrupt Druids for recommending his sacrifice in their ignorance as to why the king's palace kept crumbling. In a vision, Merlin saw two dragons, red and white, fighting in a pool in a pit beneath the castle; and he interpreted the image to mean that King Vortigern, the Welsh Red Dragon, would be vanquished by Uther Pen-Dragon, the English, White "Head of the Dragon," father of King Arthur 

The Crown

As described in the pages of The Chariot, as the average human being grows to maturity, she or he abandons the faculties of instinct at the base of the spinal tree, becoming suspicious of emotions assigned to the level of the heart. Consciousness narrows and limits itself still further, until it retreats as if into a central citadel, peering out through its windows which are festooned with the accumulated grime and cobwebs of centuries.

In Tarot tradition the solar Emperor in his castle, and solar god in his heaven, represent the conscious mind or dominant attitudes in command which, like kings, may become rigid and reactionary over the course of time, inviting critical dissent and displacement.

Having attained to the crown at the apex of the solar pyramid, however, gods and kings of the Bronze Age refused to cede their place and make the descent into darkness for renewal, refusing internal and external opposition. The gods of solar order, created as instruments of the divine, began to posit themselves as sole masters.

As heretics and seers down the centuries have pointed out, in orthodox patriarchal ideology the relative and finite mind, the human ego, has been mistaken for the Absolute or Buddha-Mind, and the lower, lunar reaches of the Spinal Tree and World Tree confounded with base impulses and evil - a complete inversion of the ancient pagan religious paradigm.

Mesopotamian Marduk, Hebrew Yahweh and other Bronze Age deities all command the felling of World Trees in sacred groves from the Middle-East to Northern Europe, and claim to have separated the heavens and earth, making a barrier so that the Waters of Chaos (synonymous with the Waters of Life) and Serpent of Darkness will not arise. Consequently, the image of a lamed and impotent king, imprisoned in a lifeless castle in an infertile landscape, waiting for a worthy champion to defeat and release him, appears in romantic and mystical literature. 

Repressed Forces Rising

All the elder gods of earlier, conquered cultures are cast down and imprisoned in the Underworld, often by the building of churches on top of pagan sites like Glastonbury Tor, where St Collen is alleged to have exorcised Gwynn ap Nudd and sealed up the door to his Underworld, and where a truncated relief of St. Michael, in combat with the Great Serpent, can be seen carved into the old church Tower.

All the custodians of the real secrets of magic are said to be chained down in the lunar reaches beneath the magic mountain. Giants like the pre-Hellenic Titans and Irish Tuatha de Danaan, Satan's "fallen angels" and the divine race of Djinn of ancient Arabia all live there; as do the gods Pan, Dionysus, Prometheus and pre-Hellenic Hephaestus - who sometimes manages to throw a few of his lightening bolts forged for Father Zeus, at Father Zeus; for the old gods are seen more as being manacled or subdued by the rites of solar priests rather than entirely annihilated.

The Wasteland

One prominent theme in the Arthurian corpus, that of La Terre Gast, (describing an arid outer landscape reflecting an inner spiritual malais), may be of Arabian origin. In orthodox Islamic lore, the desert was formed when Allah wanted a place to walk without humans or vegetation; but Crusaders brought home the Sufi heretic's explanation: that Islam had denied the Great Mother Allat, bringing a curse on the land. Among the Grail texts is a similar tale concerning a ruthless chieftan called Amargon who violated the damsel of a well, attempting to steal her golden cup. Once, Britain is said to have had numerous magic wells but, as a result of their sister’s violation, the well-maidens no longer rise up with their cups of life-giving waters to refresh the weary pilgrim and nourish the land.

Sufi's waited for the Mahdi, the Arabic-Muslim version of the Jewish Messiah, who would rescue the world from tyranny and establish an enlightened rule; and, in the twelfth century Roman de Perceval, 7 the Welsh hero Perceval is transformed into the synonymous "Desired Knight," sent to heal the lame Fisher King and restore the Waste-land to fertility by discovery of the lost Holy Grail.

Pursuing his Quest, the knight encounters a man fishing in a stream, the "Fisher King," who invites Perceval to stay in his lifeless castle in a barren terrain. There, the king is next seen lying on a couch, suffering from a magical wound to the "thighs," – a condition afflecting all spent solar gods (see #20, The Universe).

His broken sword cannot be mended, his wound will not heal, nor dare he succumb to it and gain release in death, having denied any power beyond self-consciousness, until a worthy knight arrives to ask him a ritual question.

After dinner, a procession appears: a damsel bearing a cup, followed by a maid with a severed head on a carving platter and a squire bearing a bleeding lance. In order to release the king, the hero should ask him the question, "Whom does it serve?" But Perceval is struck dumb by the strange vision. The members of the procession might have told him that they are on their way to feed the Fisher King's ancient father, kept locked in a secret chamber, mortally wounded but likewise unable to die, being kept in a semblance of life by one Christian mass wafer per day carried in the damsel's dish.

The Princess In The Tower

Other folk and fairy tales bear the theme of a damsel, incarcerated in a hill-top Tower behind barriers of thorns by a despotic ruler, waiting for a champion to enter in and effect her liberation. In Irish myth, Birog the Druidess tells Balor, the evil Fomorii ruler, that he will be killed by his daughter Ethlinn's son. Balor locks Ethlinn in a crystal tower on Tory Island to keep her from consorting with any man, but the same Druidess helps the hero Cian gain access to Ethlinn and the prophecy is eventually fulfilled. There are numerous Eastern and European myths of the ancient sun-goddess's imprisonment in a Tower and her release by a blow from a giant hammer or magic sword forged in the Underworld, a blast on a trumpet or bolt of lightening.

Alongside the tales of lame kings, lanquishing in ghostly castles, are those of princesses, similarly bound by the spells of evil guardians, wizards or malicious hags, as in the tales of the Lady of Shallot, and Rapunzel, who lets down her long hair to allow her knight to climb up her prison tower and release her.

In each case, while the Tower may be seen as a symbol of security, it is also acknowledged as containing within itself the most pernicious of demons, operating unseen within secret chambers of the castle; and it is this force upon which the Grail hero has to cast light. The imp known as Rumplestiltskin can no longer work his evil magic after the hero has pronounced his name - a common motif in the tradition of all medicine men, from the tribal shaman to Perceval.

While defining the biblical god as a solar deity and the personification of human consciousness in some texts, Gnostics also presented him as its subconsious or “shadow” aspect.

When human beings identify with the conscious controlling ego, all unacceptable memories and material become known as the shadow, the unconscious or subconscious, sabotaging the efforts of the conscious mind, sowing "weeds among the wheat," and it is to this confict that the biblical concepts of the "War in Heaven" and "divided kingdom which cannot stand" perhaps originally applied.

In modern therapeutic practice, the Devouring Father, Wicked Stepmother, or Sinister Guardian archetypes represent negative aspects of our cultural and religious conditioning; the “inner saboteur,” casting us down and disabling us, holding us captive in a limited self-image and experience of existence.

Sudden Realization

Among the processional items on display before Perceval within the castle of the Fisher King are the bleeding lance (signifying the king’s mortal wound), a severed head on a platter (indicating his disassociation from his own deeper Self), and the damsel's vessel containing a Christian mass wafer. The male symbol of the Sword, representing the rational mind, completes the signs of the four elements; the Sword which should be returned to the female elements of Earth or Water. Another ritual question which the ghostly procession should prompt the Grail Knight to ask is: "What ails thee?" The challenge to be issued to the king concerns the nature of his suffering, which appears to be due to a false cultural and religious indoctrination, the identity of gods and men with the instrument of intellect.

"Whom does it serve?" All healers, ancient to modern, agree that in order to free the captive king or princess, light must be cast on the denied content of memory, symbolized by the hidden figure of the Fisher King’s father. However, while modern therapies generally aim for a reconciliation between ego and shadow, for the ego to assimilate (or annihilate) the shadow, significantly, and in alignment with heterodox religious teaching, both Emperor and Pope, symbols of the dominant mind and its demons, fall simultaneously from the Tarot Tower.

Solar light and solar shadow, positive and negative, are mutually sustaining, arising and subsiding with the mind. But the mind and its machinations, consciousness and its conditioning, both cease suddenly in a state of shock, wonder or extreme confusion; and it is for this reason that Zen teachers often throw a koan, an "impossible question" or conundrum which has no logical solution, in the student's path – as the old gods and shamans were reputed to throw lightning bolts.

When a space is thus created in the conscious mind, it may be filled with an altogether radical and inspired response from the depths of the Unconscious, symbolized in the West by the old gods rising from their enchanted sleep in their crystal caves or centuries of imprisonment underground, and in the East by the divine Kundalini Serpent mounting the spine to illuminate consciousness.

Summary For Divination

Loss of stability and security, the disruption of current circumstances, unexpected challenges. A sudden revelation or realization. The querant's fortress may have become a prison; but to become aware that you are a prisoner of your circumstances, your mind and its conditioning, is said to be the dawn of wisdom.

Challenges may come from outside, or from within the walls of the psyche, in the form of flashes of intuition and deep insights which challenge the querant’s current attitudes; and in this case it should be remembered that the realization of deeper resources often occurs in a crisis. What may appear to be a breakdown is actually a breakthrough of new potential and power. In shamanic tradition, to be stuck by lightning indicates an initiation; in magical tradition it is said to awaken latent psychic faculties, while in the Gospel of Matthew the casting out of devils is a sign of the coming reign of Spirit as discussed in the following pages of The Star.