change for five minutes and then things go back to where they were before.
The whole of life is movement and that movement has shaped the web of life in such a way that it can hold all the possibilities or potential. The psychic space of the planet is more polluted at the moment than the physical body of the planet. The mental and emo tional levels are equally or more polluted, this is demonstrated in the way that we treat life and each other. This is what the Bateleur, or baton holder comes back into, so we may wonder why he’s got a big smile on his face! He is happy because he’s going for truth and love, for without those there is no way he would be able to escape the weight of the illusionary world. This world is not just heavy, it is very thick and sticky and also very appealing, like honey. So he’s coming back into all the ties and karmic webbing that humanity has surrounded itself with. The average person is bound and tied in their own glamour and illusion. The cutting of these ties is the work that the initiate has to achieve within himself, using the very same tools of the everyday life experience in the world of matter. He has to inspire himself before he can inspire others to do the same.
The Magician sees himself as completely part of the world and therefore can use the world to recognise what is still true or untrue within him. He knows about ‘as above, so below’, therefore what is in front of him can have a strong reflection within him. He knows that for the unreal to be wiped out he needs to feel his human side intimately, so as not to go into the illusion that he is different. The elements are in him, humanity is in him and he has to recognise and accept that, if he wants the clarity and the purification of the mirror. He’s smiling because he hasn’t realised all of that yet!
Each card in the Major Arcana represents part of a whole, so in order to understand the place our Magician holds, looking at some of the other cards is helpful.
The first three cards, The Magician, The High Priestess and The Empress, represent the three major aspects of the unity of the God we live in, so in these three we see a depiction of the divine Trinity. It is through encountering The High Priestess in Number 2, that The Magician looks for pure mind or intuition through reflection, and then with The Empress in Number 3, he finds a way to apply these attributes to the world. Basically he’s come back to search for and find, the truth of the divine light in a world that is dominated by illusion and glamour.
The Magician is the son in the Trinity. Son is a lovely word, because in the Anglo-Saxon language it is so close to the word ‘sun’, which also has a link with ‘Soul’. In French the word for son is ‘fils’, which looks the same as the French word for thread, so this reminds us of the thread of Ariadne that Theseus carried with him into the under world to enable him to find his way out again. This is the ‘son’ that is ready to go into the darkness of earthly life. That golden thread of inspiration from the Soul means he can come back and synthesise the receptive and active qualities of the God we live in, becoming the result of the union of the first two – the son.
So these first three cards depict the higher Trinity and then Number 4 is The Emperor; this is the concept of that Trinity that has to be crystallised. Through the vigilant guidance of the wise men and women of humanity, he is an active, masculine principle and this gives him authority. It is important to see the figures in the cards not as male and female, but rather as active and receptive. Some times some of the active figures are quite passive as well and vice versa, because a complete balance has been achieved.
It is interesting to see that Number 6 is called The Lovers, but in fact it is ‘The Lover’ and it could be masculine or feminine. This is an example of how words can influence and get in the way of true understanding. Eventually, as we work more with the symbols, the deeper level of interpretation will not come from the intellectual, but from somewhere more profound and subtle. So rather than try ing to make sense of them via the intellect, we can allow them to speak to us from that deeper place. It is out of survival and despair that we’ve said that there must be more than what we find in ordi nary life, so it is necessity that pushes the nature in us up to her lover. Then the intellect in man has to give up and look for another answer to the question, “Is this all there is?”
Number 12, The Hanged Man, represents the state that any initiate aspires to. He is depicted upside down, with his hands tied behind his back and he is in hell. All he can remember is how to be the wind and the fire and so he gives his life for the greater life. He is upside down because spiritually the world is actually the wrong way up, the true life being the inner not the outer. He can’t actually do anything, because all he can do is serve and what he is doing doesn’t even appear to be service to the world. In The Hanged Man we can see an upside down Number 4 made with the shape of his legs, which shows us that the Number 4 has reached the breaking point; here even the idea of pride has to be given up. Pride makes us think that we are special and that we can actually ‘become God’. Then in Number 13 we remove the intellectual head to stop nam ing anything that may keep us tied to self appreciation. This is a Number 4 that has uplifted itself towards the Trinity; every notion of self has got to disappear so that the mind, free of the intellect, can see situations from a transpersonal point of view.
The Magician has a lovely happy face, but the face of the Fool is his other side. The Fool is the end result of the journey, where any self-protection has been removed. When we consider that, we can see why we have to be a Fool to come back again!
We’re looking here at the exoteric way of grounding ideas in order to guide or frustrate the world, so that men can start asking questions and desire another way of life. When we are guiding oth ers, we may say “Go for it!” even if everyone else says the opposite. A little bit of foolishness can get people a bit frustrated, but then they start to think for themselves. That is the way to be a Fool of God, which is our last card, The Fool. The fool in the court, the jester, or comedian, is the one that is doing all types of silly things, but in fact he is the one that is wise. In the past the jester would guide the king or the emperor, because he had one or two bits of wisdom in his little bag. This is the role of the initiate; it is not so much having a long face and telling the world the dread, or beauty of things to come, it is about saying ‘go for it’ and teaching people to laugh at themselves, because from the point of view of Soul we are only wit nessing, so to want to be better than anyone else is a joke.
Basically, the problem is with all of us. We can perceive, some times we can even apply the higher pattern to the lower dimension and hopefully we are as honest, aware and awake as we can be with our reaction to the world. The world is us and it is within us. We know intellectually that we mustn’t suffer disappointment, because that would mean that we are not there yet, or not ‘it’ yet. If we are honest with ourselves and if we recognise the world in us we cannot be disappointed, because if we stand from a point of where the world is at, where is the disappointment? We can’t go lower than where we already are. That is where we all have to start and there’s no way we are above anybody else. If we do get disappointed by the result of our actions, it only means that we think we are better than we are. We can tell others they did their best, but we do not apply the same rules for ourselves. So stop trying, keep going and keep doing!
There is a point of wisdom where we have to learn when some thing is not viable any more. We persevere and then there is a point where we have to ask, ‘what is the pattern that I keep repeating? Has the karmic lesson been learnt? Is it a bad habit left behind, or should I persevere because I have not seen it yet? We all are very fragile and young and maybe we send our arrows in completely the wrong direction, but as long as we keep sending them, one day the goal becomes internalised. The characteristic of the action of the profane world is action for the sake of reaction and this will never exhaust its possibilities, or achieve a goal.
In the sacred world of the Magician, the actions are above all symbolic and so have the value of true ritual. From this point of view an action is not about learning to do a ritual, it is doing it with the knowledge and understanding of why we are doing it; that is what makes the magic. An action is performed with elegant poise. The vision of the mind is held with love, as in transpersonal har mony with the Soul, rather
