The Lovers

THE LOVERS 6.

Divinatory Meanings: Love, romance, being in love, a lover, lovers, loving someone, being loved by someone, marriage, compromise, union, sex.

Yes or No: Yes.

Numerical Value: 6

I wanted to include non-human representatives in this tarot, and I was trying to find the right card to express the fact that the evolution of the soul is common to all living beings. But animals are not like humans, they have a simpler, more basic nature, which, when stripped of all it’s complications, boils down to the biological needs that are common to all of us.

My reason for choosing these swans was simple: I wanted to show that animals also have souls. And the proof of this soul is the love they can have for one-another. It is a known fact in zoology that certain birds mate for life. We can call this instinct, we can call it a biological need.. But why not call it what it is? Why not call it love? Humans in Kali Yuga are almost not worthy of the Lover’s card. Our capacity of empathy, especially for our animal brothers and sister has decreased considerable during the age of Kali. This is a sad state of affairs, but if there is something we can learn about it is that animals, in their simple ways, can show back to us what is most noble in humanity: love.

Without love there would be no life. Without kids who fall in love and have sex and make babies, there would be no movies, no cars, no airplanes, no hot-dogs and certainly, no Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. We owe it all to love. Love can also be a powerfully destructive force. Just ask Romeo and Juliet. Besides death, Love is the greatest mystery of all. The Creator has placed us here with the ability to love eachother. That alone should be undeniable reason to believe in an “intelligent” designer. There is nothing better, nothing more elegant, nothing more wonderful, more terrifying than love. In order to really understand reality, we first need to feel this intense, insane thing that we go through. The pain of love lost is like nothing else. It shatters the very foundations of our being. It makes physical pain seem like a pleasure.

We can only experience true loss when we know love. And of all the forms of love, the most poignant, the most raw is that love irreversibly tied to our deepest lust: romantic love. The lovers card is a little taste of the infinite story of love, but it focuses on romance, and thus it allows for the mystery to be zeroed in. Why is it that we love one and not all?

I can’t really tell you the answer to the mystery, but I at least I know to ask the right question!

The High Priest

Divinatory Meanings: A holy man. Success. Doing the right thing. Blessings. Good choices. A blessed event or a good situation. Spiritual insight. Knowing the answer from a spiritual place. Teacher. Mentor.

Yes or No: Yes.

Numerical Value: 5

I specifically didn’t choose Pope Benedict for this card because I feel that the Catholic Church has lost almost all it’s moral authority. The Dalai Lama, on the other hand, by sticking to non-violence and exile instead of violent confrontation against the Chinese managed to capture the heart of the entire western world. This moral authority is the key of the High Priest.

The High Priest is our bridge between divinity and humanity because the moral choices he makes make sense for the entire society and somehow keep us all unified and strong.

The High Priest is much more personal than that though. He is Obi Wan Kenobi and Yoda. He is Dumbeldorf, he is Gandalf. He is the guru who helps us to reach the next level in our spiritual evolution. When our father fails to answer our questions, he is our second father. Maybe even more than that, he is our Spiritual Father, the father we choose to have.

Unlike our father who gives us orders, the High Priest can only suggest ideas to us. His role is subtle. When we get married, we need his permission. He is there at our birth and our death. The Parish Priest who has, like mother Goose, so many children that he doesn’t know what to do.

Arcane lore is his greatest attribute. Teacher is one of his favorite names. He might take the role of a particularly frazzled chemistry professor, or a beefy football coach. But he might not be a teacher at all, but just a friend who really understands what we are feeling and he knows how to listen. Usually he comes as a man, but occasionally, he might come as a woman. He is interchangeable with the High Priestess, but his domain is not as earthly as hers. He is a creature of light and the sun and truth. There is nothing hidden with him. Eventually, we must also leave him behind, but his lessons are never forgotten. He is a key which we use to open our own hearts to greater truths.

The Empress

The Empress IV

Divinatory Meanings: Mother. Grandmother. Matron. Matronly Woman. Wife. Marriage.

Yes or No: Yes.

Numerical Value: 4

The mother of all mothers is the Empress. She is representative of motherhood as a way of life. Her place is always at the right hand of the Emperor and she is the educator, the nurturer, the one who cleans the diapers. The traditional role of women is that of mother. It is a God-given job opportunity for women seeking financial security and job security. Once a mother, always a mother. Mothering takes all other jobs a woman might have and turns them into hobbies. The truth is that there is nothing more important for a woman to do in her life than to raise kids. If women gave up on this, the entire species would come to a screeching halt and the end of humanity would come.

Women’s lib adherents say that a woman is not a child-bearing factory. They tell us that women have lives beyond the family and they can play whatever role in society they might desire. They are full of shit. A woman who is barren has left out something sacred form herself. A vagina is just a black hole unless life comes out of it. Women know this instinctively but they like to play the fool. This is evident by the fact that they can’t go out in public unless they paint their faces like circus clowns.

I am profoundly jealous of women’s vaginas. Call it vagina envy. There is nothing more wonderful in the human race than a pregnant woman. To have life somehow grow inside you and suddenly, after a while of being a two legged taxi for some fetal creature, POP! Out comes a real living human being.. From inside your guts! Only the power of a vagina can do that. The mojo of the vagina is unparalleled. Men might make cars and airplanes and guns… But they can’t make babies. All men can really do to create a baby is donate some white piss. Women on the other hand are the factory. They are the black box out of which magic comes out. They are much closer to God and they don’t even understand it.

So I laugh at these macho women who want to be warriors and fishermen and cops. Go on, you stupid barren creatures! Leave behind the most wonderful magic of all: making life. Go on! Make your carrers. Make your fortunes. Go kill Arabs. See if we care! See if your seed is missed!

Gay people at least have an excuse. They are in the wrong body. So called “liberated” women have no excuse. They are simply too self-centered. They are jealous of men. But hey, who would take their freedom to do all that?

It is no coincidence that in the so called “civilized” west populations are declining. Germany, France, Denmark.. They stopped making babies a while back. Women turned out too masculine in these places, so they must import Arabs and Africans to keep their populations intact. How telling! Divine Justice.

So.. Now you hate me for being a misogynist? Then you have totally misunderstood my point of view. I love women! I adore them! But I also recognize the role of the Empress for what it really is: The role of MOTHER. How can we expect our society to work when men leave women to do all the work? The Emperor is there to provide for the Empress. She does not need to go out and fight wars or hunt. That’s what men are for.

The Emperor

THE EMPEROR III


Divinatory Meanings: Father. Grandfather. Boss. Chief. King. One who has authority. One who is just, stern, kind. A wise man. A good man. Usually it refers to somebody’s father or father-like figure such as coach, teacher, or even a president. Affluence. Material success and wealth.

Yes or No: Yes.

Numerical Value: 3

Without a doubt Barak Hussein Obama has captured the imagination of the world and given us all a newfound sense of hope in the democratic political process. The first black man in the white house, something that during the times of slavery in the south would have been unthinkable, is now a reality. Obama is a perfect representative of “The Emperor”, the Philosopher King who brings justice and well-being to his Kingdom.

The Emperor is the principal father figure. He is the good shepherd, making sure that all his flock are not lost or injured by the many wolves who abound in the world. But this shepherd is not one who nurtures the spiritual and psychological needs of his people: he simply the enabler, provider. The meal-ticket. Father might not always know best when it comes to feelings and what is needed inside by his children, but he will make sure that the refrigerator is full and that there is enough money for new shoes.

He is the master of matter. He brings to his family affluence and success. He takes the raw matter of a person and transforms it into surplus. He gives work. He makes sure that children are fed and that they have warm beds to sleep in.

He is also the justice-giver. His word is the Law. He can make and break whoever he likes or dislikes. He is not bound to any Law but himself because he is the ruler of the physical realm. This makes him also protector of the innocent. And of course, executioner of the guilty.

The Emperor is a peaceful but stern man. He will not have his authority questioned by anybody, but he will give generously to all. His needs are the needs of his people and his welfare is the welfare of his people. He has a divine duty to the land, and thus his element is earth. His empire is always expanding. He is especially fond of large homes and castles.

Around him are a court of aides and service-men. His authority is principally a military authority because he is the Lord of Hosts, commanding men to defend the realm. But his nature is peaceful. He has no desire for fighting, no lust for destruction.
As the primordial father, he is also the Grandfather, the leader of the clan, the elder, the statesman. His power is over the cities and towns and he must always be accompanied by many who do his will. But his pleasure comes from the service he provides for his children. Children are his primary attribute because he is the one who “brings home the bacon”.

He is also always accompanied by “The Empress” his eternal wife. Together, they form the dual aspect of God known as “The Lord” and “The Lady”. Their unity in duality appears also in The Lovers, The Devil, The High Priest and the High Priestess, The Tower…In fact, they are represented in all the cards to a lesser degree. It is the balance between them that makes reality possible. Their Ying and Yang is delicious in the fact that they live the one for the other. Love is their principal glue. But their union goes beyond simple love and touches on the divine duty of each one of us.

The High Priestess

The High Priestess II

Divinatory Meanings: A wise woman. Mother. Woman. Sister. Wisdom. Good choices. Making something good out of something bad. Choosing correctly. Triumph. Love. Compassion. The earth. Wholeness. Health.

Yes or No: Yes.

Numerical Value: 2

She is known by many names: Gaia, Mother Earth, Yasoda, Isis, Maria, Tonantzin… She is our mother, our protector, the source of our life and joy and happiness. She is also the terrible devourer of life: Kali, Astarte, Quoatlicue. But we prefer to remember her in her benign form, and we think of her as our divine mother.

She nurtures us, giving freely of herself to us and expecting nothing in return. She is the feminine mysteries personified and her role is to teach us how to love all sentient beings. She is the ground that sustains us. The water that gives us life. She is the beauty of a young woman. The smile of a young child.

She is nature, pure, uncorrupted. She is also the terrible power of nature: volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis. Our earth mother reminds us now and then that we are very small and insignificant. She gives us the opportunity to love and to eat her flesh that are the plants and animals that live on her, and we can also drink her blood, that is the pure water in rivers and lakes. But then surely when our own end is at hand, she reclaims our substance, gluttonous woman that she is! Nothing escapes her terrible mouth, which, once opened, swallows up every atom of our being to nurture the most humble of beings with our essence. Nothing goes to waste. Everything old and sick is recycled into new consciousness.

The magic of the High Priestess is everywhere we go. The very gravity that holds us in place from floating into oblivion is nothing more than her weight. She is incomplete, however, without her male counterpart. For her womb not to be barren, it must be fertilized with the Sun. Then, when the supreme act of galactic lovemaking occurs, we sprout from her limbs and reach for the stars.
As her favored children, we mostly take her for granted, not really understanding the enormous sacrifice she makes every moment for us. Even if one day we are able to leave her and take our place amongst the stars, she is bound to remain in place, with her husband the Sun, waiting for the eventual demise of time itself.

Whatever we have learned from her, we must take with us wherever we go, and make certain that the lessons of life are seeded throughout the universe.

The Magician

1. THE MAGICIAN

Divinatory Meanings: Success. Triumph. Control of the environment. Somebody who has either triumph or success or control of the environment.

Yes or No: Yes.

Numerical Value: 1

Undoubtedly, of all the significant accomplishments in science and technology, none is more important in our lives than the computer. And nobody knows computers better than Bill Gates. Even as I tried to write this, I had to update my Microsoft word program and spend at least thirty minutes of my life dealing with Mr. Gate’s extremely astute marketing skills. So it is beyond any doubt that Bill Gates has somehow managed to recreate the world in his own image. This is entirely the point of the card of the Magician: using the tools given to us to create a reality to our liking.

The Magician does not need to be a philanthropist. He is simply a function of the raw power of intelligence, divinely guided to create new things. He represents overcoming obstacles and doing whatever he desires. The fulfillment of desire need not be good or evil. It is simply powerful.

To be the Magician means not to worry about the result of one’s actions insomuch as they accomplish an inner desire or create something new. Innovation cannot exist without the Magician. The greatest Magicians in history, Pythagoras, Copernicus, Michelangelo, Newton, Einstein and many others, changed our world forever. They became a function of time insomuch that the changes they made were irreversible. We can never go back to a world without laws of gravity. We can’t forget how to make the atom bomb.

The Magician’s moral ambiguity is answerable only to God, and God likes to play dice. Do we really need to know that the atom can be split? Do we really want to discover the secrets of Gasoline? Why invent flying machines if you are going to use them for murdering people from the air?

The Magician in our age is the scientist. Mostly amoral, the modern scientists are driven by desire of profit and wealth. Spiritual Science, the most important of all the schools of science, is mostly a forgotten thing of the past. The Natural Sciences are now motivated primarily by greed. Soon it will be survival. It is a cyclic problem. Kali Yuga is an age of despair, so it is logical that the Magicians in Kali Yuga have abandoned us and put on the black robes.

Dark Magic has a way of devouring her children. It is more or less inevitable that we are consumed by our magic unless we use that magic to gain wisdom about ourselves. Bill Gates, with all his wealth and power, is still a mortal man who has to sleep and eat like all of us. His benevolence is what will be most remembered about him after he passes. His accomplishments in the world of computers have propelled us to a world where the Akashic Records are available to us all. He has opened the doors to world without borders thanks to the internet. But will we have the wisdom to take advantage of this technology to really ascend into a higher level of consciousness collectively? Or will the market forces make us even more and more enslaved to our petty desires?

The Fool

Zero – The fool

Divinatory meanings: Insanity, Creativeness, Something New. Going blindly into something. Acting crazy.

Yes or No Question: No.

Numerical Value: Try again.

Why did I choose Heath Ledger’s Joker for this card? Well, besides the fact that the Fool IS the Joker in the ordinary playing deck, I wanted to go back to the roots of the nature of the person that is portrayed in the film. In “The Dark Knight”, Heath Ledger’s joker is a total anarchist, a person who has no ties or desires other than anarchy itself.

The Fool is the Trickster of all Pantheons. His names are many: Native Americans call him Raven. Vikings call him Loki. Mexhicas call him Tescatlipoca. There is a dark side to this fool, a kind of ‘devil may care’ that allows him to go into uncharted territory without maps. He is unbound, incapable of being told what to do by anybody, even God.

The fool does not care about the reactions to his actions. He is free in the greatest possible sense of the word, even free of his own desire-nature, because the desires of the fool come from above, not really a part of the personality of a being who has not really formed a personality. Perhaps a better way to understand the fool is to think of him as a new-born. A soul, upon entering the human body, is fascinated simply by the amazing wonder of being alive. The fool does not fear death and dying because he has not really lived yet. And within the fool, every possibility is real. Neither truly good, not truly evil, the fool will do whatever strikes his fancy. This utter lack of care for the consequences of one’s actions, is of course, the greatest kind of madness. The fool is thus, the craziest of all of us. There is no point of reference for the fool. No place to call home. No resting place. Is this wicked? Not at all! It simply allows for whatever is present in the zeitgeist to happen without thought or prejudgment.

In our present day and age, the Fool has taken the form of “The Joker” a kind of nihilistic anarchist mass murderer. Why? Because we are at the end of an age, where murder, war.. Seems so utterly outdated and primitive that it should be banned by all governments. And yet, here we are, fighting a “war on terror”, when war is the principal cause of terror. One can sympathize with this white-faced devil who wants nothing more to burn and blast everybody out of their complacency and insanity.

Perhaps in another age, the Fool will return to a more playful form, tricking us into re-thinking our most basic ideas about truth. But in Kali-Yug, the Fool is also the destroyer. We have gone too far into knowledge to allow for mistakes of judgment. Either we allow for these destructive forces of the evolution of consciousness to rein free, or they will escape from us and blow our cities apart.

We envy the Fool’s valor. We wish we could be like him, giving a damn about anything so long as he is having a good time. And yet, to live as he does would terrify any reasonable man or woman. To boldly go into the precipice without concern for the fall… Is that not the ultimate form of madness? Was Christopher Columbus not insane to allow his ships to sail so far? Or the Astronauts? Or even Oppenheimer, who built the bomb, not knowing if he would be setting off a chain reaction that would not be stopped and which would literally destroy the world?

In a gentler world, the fool makes us laugh. In this world.. He terrifies us.

Chapter Two: The Major Arcana

When I first began to read cards, I used the Major Arcana Exclusively. The reason was simple: the Major Arcana are easy to read. Anybody can answer questions with the Major Arcana without prior knowledge of the Tarot. In fact, using the Major Arcana to answer questions is generally a more profound use of the cards. Leaving the Minor Arcana out of the equation can really focus a reading and make the whole experience much more powerful.

Without all the details, of course, and as we all know, the devil is always in the details.

If you want to know where these cards come from or what they really mean, I suggest Wikipedia. All I can tell you is that the power of these images is transcendent in every way. The mystery of the Tarot is encased in riddles and like a dramatic jigsaw puzzle, it waits to be deciphered by the right person.

My Meditation on Each Card

Before I had the guts to read the cards to anyone, I took one card per month in the major arcana and studied it in depth by putting it up in a small altar with candles, incense and all the rudimentary elements that go into stuff one needs to observe carefully.

This exercise was suggested by my dad. Basically, the meditation was simply to sit quietly for one hour in the morning and one hour at night and observe the card. I used the Visconti deck for this exercise. It was my dad’s gift to me on one of my many birthdays.

I started with the fool. Went right through the major arcana in numerical order. What I can say is that soon the images took a life of their own and before long, I was able to see the little people inside the cards moving wildly. This is particularly disturbing when checking out “The Devil”, “The Tower” and “Death”. But essentially, what I got was that each card has a spirit within. It is these spirits we call when we read them to people.

Demons and Spirits

Now, some Christians and Muslims believe that these spirits are demons. To them, I will share what my Zen Master, Richard Baker Roshi told me regarding demons in dreams: “They are the daimos”, the diamond in the soul. And the idea is to make them your allies, not your adversaries.

Final Word about the Major Arcana

If you are going to read the cards, and do so well, you must put your fear aside. First your fear of demons, spirits and the occult. Then, ultimately, your fear of God. If you are willing to risk trying to puzzle out the truth from these few pages of hard cardboard, be ready for a wild ride that will put your sanity and your most terrifying dreams smack into your face. This path is not for the faint of heart. The Devil card will remind us of that every time. Thankfully, the Hanged Man is always there to balance the equation.