The reading came overflowing with the feeling and watery world of the suit of cups or chalices. Thisin itself is very unusual in Tarot readings that I do. Entering the world of emotion. As 'overall intent' for the forthcoming period came up Seven of Chalices. This is about the area of appearance, illusion. The 'classic' Waite - Smith Tarot shows a conjuror-type guy standing in front of seven cups brimming with phantasmagoria. The Dark Tarot shows a young girl, a newly-wed bride. Her face is painted in youthful pensiveness, disconcerted yet knowing. 'In the realm of imagination....., the bride has learnt the language of death' we are told. There she is, just before or after the day she's been told is the happiest of her life, and she has been confronted with Death. In short, the card is an invitation to investigate the entire world of appearance, maya, reality and unreality. And, it being a chalice card, especially on the level of feeling. What precisely is going on when we 'feel'? Precisely the question I was compelled by circumstance to look straight in the eye halfway through Act One of Cosi fan Tutte.
'What to Release'? - waning moon phase is the time for banishing, releasing, throwing out: Five of Chalices. There is a loss, though something remains. In the Dark Tarot, a young woman of elegance reclines. She has claws for fingernails, and a raven looks on. 'Fingers that do not feel sensations. The fire has gone out, but the raven has not forgotten beauty.' There I am, unable to feel, back at the opera.....
So what's with the Tarot for me? I am certainly not an 'expert'; my knowledge, ability, experience are all very modest. The popular conception of Tarot concerns prediction, particularly, it seems, with regard to career and romance. However, I'm not looking for a job or a girlfriend, so that's not it. More fascinating is the way that the structure of Tarot reflects something of that of the universe. The twenty-two Trumps, major arcana, are really like archetypes, and can be read as such. From Jungians to Michael Tsarion, people will read them as illustrating the journey of the Soul from the beginning to the end of the path, the spiritual path, of life. The minor arcana, on the other hand, the four suits of wands/clubs, chalices/cups, swords, and pentacles/disks, are more descriptions of process. Precisely, they can be mapped onto the Tree of Life of the Kabbalah, and communicate the different phases of coming into being of phenomena, from the initial spark in the Aces, to final fixing, total stabilisation, in the Tens. It's a form of emanation theory, of describing how things come to be. As such, I have been fascinated, my life enriched, by this aspect of Tarot. But still that's not the clincher......
Though a wealth of material about Tarot has been produced by Jungian types since the great man's passing, he was more of an I Ching man himself, In the 'Appendix' section of 'Memories, Dreams, and Reflections' he says the following: "I would sit for hours beneath the hundred-year-old pear tree , the I Ching beside me, practicing the technique by referring the resultant oracles to one another in an interplay of questions and answers. All sorts of undeniably remarkable results emerged - meaningful connections with my own thought processes which I could not explain to myself." During this period, Jung often threw the I Ching as part of his therapy with patients.
Jung puts pretty well what my own attitude to Tarot is. What he says about the I Ching is relevant to my experience with Tarot: "Time and again I encountered amazing coincidences which seemed to suggest the idea of an acausal parallelism (a synchronicity, as I later called it)."This is what Tarot is first and foremost to me. An exercise - experiment if you like - in synchronicity. Or, to use less fancy words: in the joined-up nature of everything. The universe as a magical kaleidoscope rather than as a cosmic pinball machine. It is a way out, to haul yourself out of a purely linear experience of reality - an experience that is partial - and into a more whole, true breathing-in and breathing-out of the totality of life. By setting up conditions where acausal connections, to use Jung's expression, are more likely to arise, you seem to ramp up synchronicity in everyday experience. This is purely logical: use it or lose it, as the saying goes.
To move consciousness beyond exclusively linear time-and-space awareness. This seems part of moving out of 'petty self', into Big Self, Higher Self, the Divine Presence, that Something Bigger with an overarching organising principle, that magnificent multidimensional polyverse, of which we are simultaneously an infinitessimally tiny part and absolutely everything. The error of perception generated by those following Jung was that synchronicity is an occasional event, normally spectacular and soaked in mystery and significance. Whereas the trick is to realise that it is there all the time, and to experience it as such.
More and more people seem to have cottoned on to this of late - at least this is what my reading and personal contacts suggest - and this has to be a good thing. Maybe a shift in general consciousness is actually happening, at least among those who are making the effort to become multidimensionally aware.
Images: Seven of Cups or Chalices:
Waite - Smith Tarot (top)
Mystic Dreamer Tarot (bottom)
