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Tuesday 24 October 2017

Eight of Swords

The Swords of Tarot. Often described as 'a difficult suite'; 'challenging'. It's a bit funny, really, when the Swords are what so much of modern western culture and civilisation is based upon.

The Swords are air. They are intellect, logic, reason; 'mentality'. Since the Enlightenment, so-called, these are the faculties that have been raised above all others as the way upwards and onwards. Science, the great religion of modern times, is sword stuff. Measuring is the sacred act; if something can't be measured on a funny device, it doesn't exist. Mentality is raised to the heavens, while the other faculties that Tarot and Jung alike present as aspects of our being - intuition, feeling, sensation - are relegated to the scrapheap of primitivism and animal nature.

You see, we are reflective, self-aware creatures. Our superiority, our distinctiveness, our personal and collective identities, all depend on our subservience to the Sword. To reason, our higher faculty. A serious rummage around the deeper, hidden layers of who we are reveals this all to be complete nonsense.

It is to his great credit that Jung, when portraying the four faculties which he considered went to make up the complete human being, did not arrange them in a hierarchy. 'Thinking' is not proposed as superior to the other functions of feeling, intuition, and sensation. He does not commit the heinous crime that much modern culture does, which sets out to cut off the human being from its 'totality', for us to identify with our mind, our reason, at the expense of all else. It is actually a thought control device, which effectively alienates folk from their own sacredness, their way towards  and connection with the divine. The 'scientific mind', the 'scientific world view', is a mind-f**k. Nothing but darkness will result.

There have been times during my own life when the cultural devotion to the sharp cutting blade of reason has done me in. Not all Buddhism is like this; but much of the way that it has migrated to the west has been characterised by a certain devotion to reason, to logic, to the brain sword. Unlike Christianity, which seems a bit based on blind faith and therefore a bit stupid, much modern Buddhism prides itself on its rational soundness, its conceptual efficacy. This was indeed one element which I initially found appealing, but which returned to haunt me in later years.

When I became a chairman of a Buddhist centre in west London, I would attend meetings of chairfolk from across the globe. These gatherings were populated by people with thinking faculty uppermost; people who would be at home with the cut-and-thrust of political debate, maybe, in interview on Newsnight. This is not, in general, the way that my mind works. I need to go away, allow something to digest for a week or a year, before coming up with a personal view. Time after time, the swordspeople would come up with an idea, a plan. I would sense there was something not quite right about it, but couldn't put my finger on it. As a result, I kept mum, only to find out much later that my doubts were indeed justified.

Buddhism in the modern west tends to appeal to thinking types, at home with concepts, at sea in feeling and instinct. So it was with great relief that I began to discover a few basics of Kabbala. Here, mentality is put in its place. It does indeed have its place, but alongside the other aspects of our being. Kabbala recognises, in particular, the vitality of feeling and of instinct. In this respect at least, I find it to be a kindred spirit. You cannot think your way to enlightenment, however much you may wish to. On this, Kabbala and Pale Green Vortex are in accord.

To return to Tarot. It is in the Eight and the Nine of Swords that the perils and tortures of identifying with mentality really come home to roost. Too much thinking, trying to work it all out. Trying to understand with logic and reason alone what cannot be comprehended in this way at all. The result: insanity......

"The tendency for analysing and considering everything, digging out a counter-argument for any argument there is....." "Empty thoughts and shallow sentences....." "The Prisons of the Mind....." "Only blessed stupidity can be self-secure enough to believe that thought is the only truth...." "Agony of Mind....." These are a few notes and comments on the Eight and Nine of Swords that I have rapidly compiled from a number of my sources. The 'much-maligned on Pale Green Vortex' Waite-Smith Tarot does a pretty good job of redeeming itself by communicating something of the mental trials evinced by the Swords. But there is even better......

The Eight of Swords from the Royo Dark Tarot I find a marvellous evocation of the pain and torture that we can inflict upon ourselves through overmuch misplaced sword activity, and where this can lead. A young woman in self-inflicted mental torture. Harsh judgement of our own thoughts and behaviour, no self-love, no self-humour. See where it can lead. Depend upon mentality to the exclusion of the other aspects of our being, and this is how we may end up. The self-wrought chains and manacles, the self-inflicted metal sunk deep into the head. This is a painting of deep compassion, I feel.

And I have said enough......  

Images: Nine of Swords from the Waite-Smith Tarot
             Eight of Swords from Royo Dark Tarot.

Sunday 1 October 2017

The Daughter of God

Imagine. Just imagine. What if....... what if......... instead of sending his only begotten son, God had instead had a daughter. Instead of Jesus, Son of God, we had Jezza, Daughter of God. Just imagine how different things might have been.

For sure, the past two thousand years would have seen fewer decimating large-scale international wars. Rather than inquisitions and conquistadores, hellbent on removing the opposition whatever the cost, the followers of Jezza might have found a little more kinship with the pagan, shamanic, and other indigenous peoples inhabiting planet Earth.

Nature would have had a little less of a hard time at the hands of an exploitative human mentality. Philosophers and theologians would have had less need to worry their silly little heads over artificial dichotomies such as body/mind, and spirit/matter. Life would be structured less in such a rigid, viciously hierarchical pattern of power. Instead of being menaces on the world stage, the likes of Trump and Merkel would be smalltown chiefs.

Scientific materialism, and the scientific revolution, so-called, would not have taken place - at least not in the form that they did. The internet and windfarms would not exist. Cancer therapies beyond surgery, chemo and radiotherapy would not be illegal to promote, as they currently are in Britain. We would be better friends with plants.

The thinking faculty would be less exalted, other aspects of personality happily given their rightful place at the table of human existence. We would be less afraid of the dark.

In truth, I sometimes give Jesus, Son of God, an unjustifiably hard time. The 'son of god' imperative was in place centuries before Jesus was purported to have walked the face of the Earth, with the relentless march of patriarchal ways of thinking. The offspring of God was to be male: it could be no other way.

We might fruitlessly surmise what Jezza, Daughter of God, might have looked like. For sure, unlike her solar sibling, she possesses an underworld, cthonic, aspect. I fancy her in this particular guise to resemble the Ace of Pentacles in the Royo Dark Tarot.

Pentacles: earth, matter, flesh. The word made flesh. Senses, physical, material beauty. And the Ace: the essence, the quintessence. The first tiny fall from the Oneness of creation, the Undivided God.

She comes naked, and is proud in her nakedness. Her body, ineffably beautiful yet fragile and mortal, is the vehicle through which the divine expresses itself, radiating in the splendour of God-given senses. The darkness is not her adversary, her martial enemy, as is the case with the Son of Light, Jesus. She embraces, takes it all in. On her way Jezza, daughter of God, is accompanied by the sacred serpents: not to be demonised, vanquished, overcome, as the great enemy, but to be honoured as the carriers of wisdom and power that they are. The serpentine secret key to direct communication with the divine, the intercession of a corrupt, power-greedy priesthood no more necessary. Jezza, Daughter of God, protector of the Kundalini.

She walks up the stony steps of the Underworld towards the Creator of all, dark through his unknownness. They stare in mutual love and awe.
 
Actually, Jezza is around, in the back streets of the city at night, or prowling the forest tracks at twilight. It's just that people ignore her lovely, threatening presence.

Image: Ace of Pentacles, Royo Dark Tarot