Larry's Notes: Meditations on the Tarot - The Pope

In this installment of my notes about Meditations on the Tarot, I'll be talking about the Pope, more commonly known as the Hierophant. The key concept given by the book for this card is benediction, or blessing, which takes place in response to prayer on our part. Both are necessary because of what I wrote in the last posting about free will. Just to recap, the theory given in the book is that God influences the world in response to our willingness for him to do so, because only in that way can free will be preserved.

There are a couple of prerequisites, according to the book, to aligning our will with the Divine will so that Divine Magic can take place. The first is closing what the book calls the "five wounds," which correspond to the five wounds suffered by Our Lord on the cross. These five wounds are wounds in our soul, the desires "for personal greatness, to take, to keep, to advance, and to hold on at the expense of others." The book talks about acquiring five wounds corresponding to giving up those desires. My contention is that the desires themselves are wounds and need to be closed. But that's just a difference in terminology as I agree with the basic concept.

So how do we close the five wounds? The answer given in the book is "the practice of the three traditional vows, namely obedience, poverty and chastity." (Didn't expect to see that in a book about Tarot, did you?) Obedience in this context means what you think it would. Poverty and chastity require more explanation. Poverty is explained in the book as "the practice of inner emptiness." I prefer to think of it as "emptying your cup" as in the story of the man who went to see a sage, but was so full of his own opinions that he didn't have room for the knowledge he was seeking. Chastity is explained as living "without covetousness and without indifference." It sounds like a tall order, but it's really about purity of will; about the quest you're on being more important than anything else.

The best thing about the three vows is that you don't need to join a monastery to practice them. You can (and should) lead what seems to others to be a normal life. Stay tuned for the next installment about the Lover (not what you think).

Book Review: Real Magic

In my last post about the Emperor card from Meditations on the Tarot, I mentioned the necessity of living what we've learned. Real Magic by Dr. Wayne W. Dyer is about how to do that. It's marketed as a self-help book, so you won't see it in the "New Age" section of the bookstore, but there's plenty here for us recovering materialists. In fact, you'll be surprised to learn that I don't recommend this book for beginners. It's not that beginners won't understand it; the concepts are presented in a very clear and accessible manner. The danger is that beginners won't understand fully. I'll explain.

The key concept given in the book is that matter follows mind. If you're a beginner, or still in denial as a materialist, this will just seem like another silly New Age book. And if you get the idea that it's just something like repeating an affirmation to yourself until you believe it, you'll totally miss the point. On the other hand, if you've spent some time studying qabalah, especially the Tree of Life and the Four Worlds, you'll recognize the principle as self-evident. And you'll not only know it works, you'll know why it works.

So what exactly can we learn from this book? First, you can expect to have your mind changed about what is possible. Next, a new spiritual approach is given. This approach is surprisingly similar to what's said in Meditations about the Magician. At this point you'll be prepared to start doing divine magic (the Empress in Meditations) in your own life and the lives of those close to you.

The second half of the book goes into more details about real-life applications of the principles given. Relationships, finances, recovery from addictions, and health are all covered. The last part of the book is a call to action, inviting you to join "The Evolution."

This book definitely belongs on your shelf, and should be read at least twice.

Larry's Notes: Meditations on the Tarot - The Emperor

Today I'll be covering the Emperor card and some of what Meditations has to say about it. The Emperor is naturally associated with authority, and that's the first thing the book talks about. The key concept given in the book is that authority is based on the consent of those governed. The Emperor never actually forces anyone to do anything himself, but the people who work for him do. This implies that free will is essential to authority, that without free will, there can only be power, of the type that you might have over your car. You press the gas pedal and it has to go faster if it can. In fact, according to the book, free will is so important that God sent his Son down here and put Him at our disposal, to do with him as we will, up to and including suffering physical death at our hands.

Now we as recovering materialists don't have the concept as God as being "the Old Man in the Sky," or in other words a more powerful version of ourselves as we know ourselves. Those who do have this concepts are really materialists in denial. So we don't necessarily need the Crucifixion story to be literal truth. The important thing is that we are in general left to our own devices here, and divine intervention isn't given to us unless we ask for it, or at least be open to receiving it. Being open to divine intervention is just another way of saying that our will is aligned to the divine will, which as you may remember from my last post is the essence of divine magic.

That brings me to the fourth step in the sequence: after mysticism (experience of essential unity), gnosis (setting up a model of that unity with ourselves) and divine magic (aligning our will with that of unity) comes what the book calls "Hermetic philosophy," or integrating the experience of the first three steps within ourselves. The book says that this kind of integration also can and should be done with the Gospels, by reading them as if you're living inside of them as an observer.

I'll go even farther than that and say that the technique can also be used with profit on certain fantasy novels. These novels have either explicit or implied references to mythology, qabalah and alchemy. The Great Book of Amber: The Complete Amber Chronicles, 1-10 (Chronicles of Amber) would be a good place to start, as would On a Pale Horse (Incarnations of Immortality, Bk. 1). Try American Gods: A Novel if you'd like to get in touch with your shadow side. The point is that at some point we have to start living what we've learned, and these books provide examples (albeit fictional) of how to do that.

Larry's Notes: Meditations on the Tarot - The Empress

If you've been following along with this series, you will remember that we stepped out of conventional belief systems, saw the Big Picture, and got a copy for ourselves. So what's the next step, according to Meditations on the Tarot? Doing something with what we've experienced so far by what the book calls "divine magic", more commonly referred to as "miracles."

Now A Course in Miracles says that miracles are natural, and that if we don't experience them on a regular basis, something is wrong. The Course has a slightly more expansive definition of miracle than the rest of us; a sudden change in how a situation is seen is just as much of a miracle as curing disease. So what's wrong if you don't see any miracles? As Maryanne Williamson puts it in Everyday Grace, "thoughts of judgement block the light." This is really saying the same thing as Meditations, which says that divine magic requires the union of divine will and human will. More on that later.

Meditations distinguishes divine magic, which has its source in the Divine, from personal magic, which uses the magician's own power, or sorcery, which uses elemental or unconscious sources. Naturally divine magic is superior. Just so it's clear exactly what is meant by divine magic, the book gives an example (Acts 9:32-34):

Now as Peter went here and there among them all, he came down also to the saints that lived at Lydda. There he found a man named Aeneas, who had been bedridden for eight years and was paralyzed. And Peter said to him: Aeneas, Jesus Christ heals you; rise and make your bed. And immediately he rose.

The book goes on to say that the power behind the cure came from the Divine Will, but was enabled to act through the will of Peter. In other words, God works through us to the extent that we let Him. More on this next time.

So what does this mean for us? The New Testament is also meant in my opinion to serve as an example. Meditations puts divine magic forth as just another part of the program. We're supposed to be doing this too, at least on the small scale of enabling changes in how situations are perceived. But that's only the beginning.

Larry's Notes: Meditations on the Tarot - The High Priestess

Next in the series of Tarot meditations is the High Priestess. The High Priestess is number two in the series, and a key concept associated with the number two in the book is reflection. In the discussion of the Magician, the essential unity of all things was given as a key concept, and it was implied that the experience was only the first step. The next step is to hold a mirror up to the first. The mirror is you, and the result is called gnosis in the book. This also allows for the experience of love, which inherently requires two parties.

Christ-consciousness allows for this experience of love, which is why the book says it is superior to the Nirvana experience. The book quotes Jesus as saying "All those who came before me are as robbers and thieves," and this is because, according to the book, the prior esoteric philosophies all aimed at the experience of unity, which did not allow for love because there was only the one thing. And that's the problem with non-duality.

On the other hand, if we retain our individuality, we will be able to make this experience part of our daily lives, which allows us to progress further along the path. Christ-consciousness is what I think is meant when Jesus said: "If a man believes in me, then the things that I have done, he will also do, and greater things than these will he do." I think it's better translated as: "If a man believes with me," meaning that he shares the same level of consciousness, but that's for the next installment in the series.

Book Review: Paths of Wisdom

The Mystical Qabalah is the canonical textbook for anyone on the Hermetic Path. Unfortunately, the book isn't very accessible to newbies. To be honest, Paths of Light: A Guide to the Magical Cabala by John Michael Greer, isn't much more accessible, but it's more modern, and could make a nice stepping stone after reading something like The Chicken Qabalah of Rabbi Lamed Ben Clifford: Dilettante's Guide to What You Do and Do Not Need to Know to Become a Qabalist.

As you may expect, the book focuses on the Tree of Life. (If all you know about the Tree of Life is that it was in the Garden of Eden, read The Chicken Qabalah first.) One difference in the treatment of the Tree of Life is the use of the Hebrew letters that spell the name of God associated with each sphere. Each letter is explained in terms of the associated Tarot card, but this isn't a Tarot book, so the associations aren't made explicit. There's also a nice explanation of the Veil of Paroketh, which separates our mundane life from the higher levels of the Tree. The key concept is that the Veil is at least partially composed of our belief systems.

The treatment of the Tree is quite thorough, including even the four color scales and magical images. An instructive exercise for the artistically inclined would be to paint or draw the magical images. The Yeziratic Texts (an obscure description for each of the spheres and paths) are covered, and these can be hard to make sense of, but the book provides good explanations. The Golden Dawn models of the Garden of Eden before and after the fall are also included and explained.

So what's the bottom line? I recommend this book for serious Hermeticists who have read at least one (preferably three or more) books on the subject already. But you still need The Mystical Qabalah.

Larry's Notes: Meditations on the Tarot: The Fool

Continuing my series about the chapters of Meditations on the Tarot, tonight I want to talk about the Fool. Meditations has the Fool as next-to-last in the series, so why is he the second installment in my series? Because he should have been first, but I wasn't really sure about it until I finished reading the book for the second time. And it's not just because the Fool is numbered zero.

To really understand why the Fool should be first, let's look at two literary figures Meditations refers to in its discussion of the fool: Don Quixote and Dr. Faust. I started reading Don Quixote again a couple of months ago, and stopped about halfway through because it was like watching the Detroit Lions play football. Now if Don Quixote's problem is self-deception, Dr. Faust suffered from deception at the hands of the demon he summoned, which really amounts to the same thing.

I apologize in advance because this will sound trite, but these two literary figures are important because they are metaphors for the human condition. We deceive ourselves and have been deceived by others, and deceive them in turn. The road to recovery involves recognizing the deception and stopping it. This brings me to a third literary figure discussed in this chapter of the Meditations: Arjuna from the Bhagavad-Gita. For those of you who don't know the story, it's set in ancient India on a battleground. Arjuna is about to lead his army into battle, but is somewhat reluctant. Krishna, a god who for some reason is acting as Arjuna's chariot driver, explains to Arjuna why he must fight, along with a bunch of other things. My take on the story is this: Arjuna represents the ego, Krishna the higher self, and the assembled soldiers are the components of Arjuna's belief systems. All of the belief system must be slain for Arjuna to be left with his higher self.

So how does this all relate to the Fool? Remember what I said above about deception, and in the prior paragraph about destroying our belief systems. The word "our" is key, because these belief systems are shared. Stepping outside of them will make us appear to be fools to those not on the journey. And that's exactly why being willing to do so must be the first step.