Gnosticism and Tarot
by Christine Payne-Towler
View PDF
The subject of Gnosticism is entirely too
large to be dealt with in an essay such as this one. This spiritual
path has a history longer than that of Christianity and covers a
territory that includes most of western and eastern Europe, the
Middle East, North Africa, India, China and the Russian territories.
In the remarkable history of this faith, an extensive chapter could
be written just on the interactions of Gnosticism and the Catholic
Church. The establishment of the Church of Rome in the fourth century
AD allowed for three centuries of Christian development before the
regulating authority of Rome arose to assert the "party line." Initially,
each bishop was free to study, teach and write what he believed,
and many were deeply influenced by Gnostic thought. But once the
canonical standard for Christianity was set, the Church felt it
necessary to posthumously excommunicate several of its most well-respected
and influential early bishops for being Gnostic heretics! With an
identity crisis like that defining its birth, it is no wonder the
Church remained on guard and actively hostile to any traces of Gnostic
thought appearing in "Christian Europe."
For those Gnostics who considered themselves followers of the Master
Jesus, this exercise in internal censorship illuminated the true
character of this new institution called Roman Catholicism. The
paramilitary approach of the corporate Church toward its "irregular"
members never softened, even though both Christians and Gnostics
sometimes used the same scriptures and could be found worshipping
together at the same altar.
The difference between Gnostic Christians (only a small group within
the larger Gnostic field) and formal Catholics was in some ways
a matter of interpretation of the meaning of a human life, the spiritual
forces at work in this world, and the place of the feminine in the
panoply of Higher Powers. Suffice it to say that this essay only
touches a corner of the extensive mosaic that is Gnosticism.
In order to be clear about the relationship
between Gnosticism and Tarot, it should be stated at the outset
that there are no specifically "Gnostic" Tarots. It would be equally
true to say, however, that every Tarot is a Gnostic Tarot. This
paradox exists because, as with the difference between the Gnostic
reading of Genesis and the Catholic reading of Genesis, the difference
lies in interpretation. Tarot artists used this ambiguity to their
advantage in the early centuries of Tarot. So, for example, the
High Priestess image could be seen as an allegory for "Mother Church"
in the eyes of a believing Christian, while a Gnostic might see
in the very same image the female pope, a truly heretical concept!
In this manner, the Gnosticism of Tarot is "hidden in plain sight,"
like much of the esoteric content implied in the art of the earliest
handmade Tarots.
The situation gets a bit easier to untangle in modern Tarots because
through the centuries, the tensions between the Church and its heretics
took on more of the character of a stalemate: the Church came to
understand that--it could not kill every heretic in Europe and still
have a constituency to call its own. As a result less anonymity
was required on the part of the philosophers and artists who were
working with Tarot, so we are more easily able to learn about the
Secret Society affiliations of those who have contributed most to
the development of the Tarot.
Therefore, for purposes of this CD, we will assume that there is
a Gnostic undertone to every Tarot deck to which we refer. Certainly
since the time of Etteilla in the mid-1700s, almost every luminary
in the field of Tarot has belonged to either the Rosicrucians, Masons,
Martinists or some other Secret Society group.
Among the older Tarots, a good indicator of Gnostic affiliation,
aside from subtle clues hidden in the artwork, would be the relative
vigor of the Church¹s reaction to that deck, or to its artist, the
person who commissioned it or to the region in which it was produced.
We must remember that great variety existed in Gnostic thought.
There were Arabic, pre-Islamic Gnostics, Gnostics who remained culturally
Jewish, Egyptian Gnostics, Zoroas-trian Gnostics and Hermetic Gnostics.
They didn¹t all believe the same things, although all these ancient
cultures based their collective histories upon these first five
books of Moses. These were not merely Hebrew scriptures. All of
Western civilization believed in this as history. Many of the stories
that Moses codified can be traced back to Babylonian, Akkadian and
Sumerian oral tradition. Yet, not every spiritual seeker using the
Mosaic texts agreed with his slant on the story. So from the time
of Alexander right up to the French Revolution, the Gnostic "underground"
has been preserving competing origin stories rejected by "orthodox"
Judaism, Islam and Christianity, keeping alive an alternative vision
of human nature and destiny.
It is probable that the expulsion of the Moslems, Gypsies and Jews
from Spain helped bring Tarot into form as a deck of cards in other
parts of Europe. Those expelled minorities flooded Europe with literate,
spiritually inclined seekers. The European Secret Societies were
providing a place for a meeting of the minds among those who were
being marginalized and forced underground by the controversies of
the times. I am convinced, and the evidence implies, that the Secret
Societies participated in enabling the Hebrew/ Hermetic/Gnostic
synthesis to see the light of day, albeit in card form.
One of the things Gnosticism represents is
a rebellion within the Old Testament-based (Mosaic) religions against
those who used the myth of Genesis to stamp out the ancient Goddess-based
mysteries of antiquity. Even as early as the second century BC there
were those who felt Moses had distorted the ancient creation stories
to eliminate the participation of the feminine side of Deity. The
Goddess as co-creator had in earliest times been revered by all
Semitic peoples and those memories have never been entirely wiped
out despite the Hebrew focus on Jehova (JHVH) as the One True God.
As just one example of the preservation of the Goddess in Gnostic
thought, let us look back to the Hebrew tradition about the "daughter
of God," called the Matronit of the Kabbalah. Her roots were planted
in Talmudic times in the first through fifth centuries AD. They
called her by several names in their mystical literature: the Shekhina,
Malkuth, the Supernal Woman and the Discarded Cornerstone, among
other titles.
In this ancient conception, the FatherGod and his consort exist
in such a rarified state compared to humanity that there is no way
human consciousness can reach to them and experience their reality.
The son and daughter of the Holy Pair, however, extend like shadows
of their parents into this fallen world, linking humanity and the
"fallen" creation to higher realities. (As this mythic theme came
forward in time from Judaism, through Gnosticism and into Christianity,
this pair would be renamed Christ and the Sophia.)
In The Hebrew Goddess (p. 135), Raphael Patai says "there is a detailed
similarity between the life history, character, deeds and feelings
attributed by Jewish mysticism to the Matronit, and what ancient
Near Eastern mythologies have to say about their goddesses who occupy
positions in their pantheons" (for example Solomon¹s Asherah or
Ashtoreth, Ishtar in Addad and most ancient, Astarte in Byblos).
Her cardinal attributes, according to Patai, are chastity, promiscuity,
motherliness and bloodthirstiness. She is the archetype of ancient
women¹s four roles in traditional relationship to men: sister, lover,
mother, mercy killer. He goes on to equate the Matronit who "at
times tastes the other, bitter side, and then her face is dark"
with the Hindu Kali, who is also black and also feasts upon the
dead.
If one were looking for clues to this ancient Hebrew form of the
goddess on the Tarot, one could look for images that show qualities
of the Matronit on the cards. Taking up the list of her qualities,
we could easily see the four Queens having the attributes of virginity
(Wands, sister), promiscuity (Coins, lover), motherliness (cups,
nursemaid) and blood-thirstiness (Swords, the mercy killer). We
could also look for the quality of blackness, which appears on the
Queen of Cups in the Alexandrian/Hermetic imagery of the Ibis Tarot
and others that follow the old Falconnier model from the Fratres
Lucis document (see "The Continental Tarots"). In these Tarots,
her cup is covered with pomegranate seeds, another reference to
the combined Hebrew Goddess mysteries and the Egyptian Isis cult.
We would also notice those Tarots that crown the coin on the Ace
of Coins, a detail in the Tarot by Augustus Knapp and Manly P. Hall.
This crowned coin is representative of Malkuth, one of the titles
of Shekhina/ Matronit, and a symbol for the Goddess in the World
among the Merkabah Mystics who were practicing Jewish Gnosticism
before the Kabbalists. For that matter, the World card itself represents
the Goddess enthroned in matter, with the four elements doing her
bidding and the earth turning under her feet. I might add that the
Knapp-Hall Tarot is an especially interesting deck in this context.
Hall was an occult scholar of the 1920s and 1930s who in the process
of cataloging the world¹s great Mystery Schools and their teachings,
assembled a wonderful library of images from which to draw when
making his own Tarot. Upon close analysis, it is obvious that he
is, like the Ibis Tarot and all the others in this stream, reproducing
the Falconnier or Fratres Lucis model. The only deviation of the
Knapp-Hall from these older, Egyptian-style Tarots is that Knapp-Hall
shows the characters in European clothing and situations.
On the Knapp-Hall suit of Cups, Hall shows the royalty in possession
of a magical cup, the Holy Grail. The Queen is not black, and the
cup is now in European form, but it boils and bubbles with potency
in the King and Queen¹s hands, referring, I am sure, to the theme
of the excellent book Holy Blood, Holy Grail. This blockbuster details
the Gnostic heresy that Jesus of Nazareth was the husband of Mary
Magdalen, from which union there were children (see also "The Esoteric
Origins of Tarot"). After the crucifixion, she and the family were
smuggled across the Mediterra-nean to Marseilles, and she lived
out her last thirty years in Europe. Susan Haskins¹s encyclopedic
Mary Magdalen fleshes out the details drawn from scripture, myth
and legend. But it is clearly a traditional theme or else Hall would
not so explicitly reference this Gnostic heresy on his Tarot. Nor
is his slant a part of the modern rewriting of Tarot's history,
since his deck was published in 1929, while all of the above-cited
scholarly tomes have only appeared in the last thirty years!
As Gnostic artists and mystics retrieved and revived the feminine
aspects of Deity in the imagery of Tarot, we see glimpses again
of her many variations coming to us through the ages. It would not
be amiss to say that any historical Tarot that has a preponderance
of female images in the Major Arcana, and/or adds female images
where one would more usually find a male image, could qualify as
having a Gnostic slant. Later in this essay I will make direct reference
to examples in various Tarot decks.
Likewise, according to the Old Testament-based
religions, direct mystical or spiritual experience was not accessible
to ordinary humans. The Gnostics' credo was to achieve direct experience
of the Mystery whenever possible; each group was looking for intimate,
personal experiences with godhead, much like those available through
the traditional older Mystery Schools.
Drawing upon ancient Hermetic and Jewish gospels rejected by the
canonizers of the Old and New Testaments, they challenged the official
Judeo-Christian explanations of a monotheistic FatherGod, human
origins, and the destiny of the soul. They felt that a straighter
route could be found to reunite humanity and godhead without the
interference of clergy or priestly heirarchies. In particular they
worshipped and championed Sophia, the Wisdom of God (as mentioned
in Genesis) who in the beginning co-created the world with the Father.
In their societies, women's roles reflected this greater respect
for the feminine. As Dr. Lewis Keizer and Stuart Kaplan remind us,
the earliest Tarots show a woman dressed in ecclesiastical garb
and named "The Popess." In the Mantegna tarocchi, this image is
the person at the top of their "stations of man" series, the person
who is closest to God, representative of humanity's highest development,
and clearly a woman! In the mid-1400s, that is a powerful statement.
Another of Gnosticism's basic beliefs was
internally disputed for centuries and is an ongoing philosophical
and spiritual debate to this day. This split is well defined in
the following quote from In Search of the Primordial Tradition and
the Cosmic Christ by Father John Rossner, Ph.D., beginning on page
112:
"There is an essential distinction which must be made between 'optimistic'
and 'pessimistic' forms of pre-Christian esotericism. The 'optimistic'
gnosis views the whole world as good, as a divine and living world
because it is animated by the divine effluvia, and capable of being
activated by man as a co-Creator with God and as a priest of Nature.
In this world, man's function is not to 'escape the world' but to
awaken and activate persons, places, and things in Nature to become
'temples of the Divine Spirit.' Man himself develops gnosis in order
to 'become or re-become a god,' in order to 'know God' in the existential
sense. Like the 'magician' or 'theurgist' in the iconography of
the Egyptian tarot card, man is to 'bring down' the divine power
and light in order to impregnate and fill the objects of the physical
world with their appropriate form of divinity.
The 'optimistic' form of gnosis may be identified with the ancient
Egyptian 'religion of the world,' according to Frances Yates [see
her book Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition pp. 20-38]. It
was such a positive 'Hermetic' conception of a good, God-given creation
(which is to be redeemed and divinized rather than discarded) which
indeed may have provided the Egyptian background of both the Hebraic
and Mosaic concepts of the creation in Genesis, and a source for
the classical Greek metaphysics of Pythagoras and Plato. This earlier
Egyptian understanding of gnosis pre-dated the later Hellenistic,
world-denying 'religion of Gnosticism' in the early Christian era."
A few paragraphs later, on page 113, Rossner writes that "during
the Renaissance, Ficino and Giordano Bruno believed that this 'optimistic'
variety of an earlier Egyptian 'proto-gnosticism' had found its
way into original Mosaic tradition, and into the works of the New
Testament, in the positive metaphysical philosophies of Jesus, John
(the author of the 4th Gospel) and Paul. It also found its way into
the Neo-Platonic Hermeticists of the early Christian centuries."
When we remember that the Tarots of Etteilla are designed to represent
this very same strain of optimistic Hermetic Gnosis expressed in
The Divine Pymander, we have to again give respect where it is due
and return to studying this amazing Tarot in a new and deeper light.
In contrast to the optimist Gnostics of various stripes, a spectrum
of negative thinkers felt that this world of matter and time/space
is a prison instead of an Eden. Those Gnostics viewed incarnation
as "the fall," believing it to be a punishment. Others saw our immersion
in matter as the result of a war between good and evil in heaven.
Some of these groups refused to reproduce, believing that in being
fertile they would be playing into the hands of our captors, the
fallen angels. The practice of sexual union has the effect of enticing
other souls to leave heaven for this captivity below, an undesirable
outcome for these world-denying Gnostics. Among the groups of pessimist
Gnostics there were some who were entirely ascetic, choosing to
stay maximally detached from the Fallen God's temptations, which
would include the entire roster of earthly delights. Other strains
of Gnostics believed the soul would not be allowed to leave this
plane of existence until it had been through every experience available
to humans. This belief encouraged all forms of license and excess,
the unhealthy effects of which get this group more often classed
with the pessimists than the optimists. Their motto was "eat, drink
and be merry, for tomorrow you may die."
Prior to examining the visual evidence of
three significant Gnostic themes embedded in European imagery and
the Tarot, let us first investigate how these ideas managed to penetrate
and indeed eventually saturate pagan Europe and become so popular
that they survived the turbulent transition to Roman Christianity,
the Crusades and the fires of the Inquisition.
Astrological and magical teachings were first carried west by the
Jews liberated from slavery by the fall of Babylon. We have to give
most of the credit to the Hebrew people for the saving of much of
this early knowledge, because they were the one ancient nation who
encouraged the literacy of every adult male in their tribe. The
Jews carried their knowledge into Europe around the 900s AD. The
Moors from North Africa moving into Spain and France around 650
AD increased the redistribution of Alexandrian scholarship into
Europe and led to the building of libraries and universities in
Madrid, Toledo, Seville and Aragon. They brought thousands of manuscripts,
reflecting nearly a thousand years of scholarship, out of Egypt
and onto the European continent.
As the Roman Church was plunging Europe into the Dark Ages with
its book burnings and prohibitions against reading and writing for
all but the clergy, most of Europe's cultural memory was either
destroyed or collected in the clergy's secret libraries. Pagan,
Egyptian, Jewish and Arabic families who had found niches for themselves
in Christian Europe were hounded from pillar to post as the Christians
destroyed the Mystery sites and practices. The Jews, and later the
Arabs, translated and studied the manuscripts, diagrams and technologies
bequeathed to them by history. In them, they rediscovered their
own esoteric roots. The discipline of alchemy, originally explored
by the Egyptians to satisfy humanity's need for medicines of a physical,
emotional and spiritual nature, became a repository of proto-scientific
experimentation. In the process, the imagery and symbolism of the
ancient Mysteries formed the vocabulary and graphics for the alchemists'
journals. The Arabic scholars omnivorously assimilated Egyptian,
Hebrew, Hermetic, Gnostic and pre-Nicean Christian gospels, including
it all in their experiments and theories.
This helps explain the enthusiasm that gripped the Roman Church
to mount the Crusades and try to recapture the Holy Land for Christianity.
An educated clergy that had either sequestered or destroyed the
cream of European Classical civilization was getting restless and
inquisitive. The Arabs had become famous for their revival of the
secret knowledge, and the Hebrews had never left it behind in the
first place. Both civilizations co-occupied the Holy Land. How could
the pope resist the urge to seize it all, if it could be done?
Of course, the Church didn't succeed. Not only were the Crusades
a disaster, but by the time it was over, Europe had been reinflamed
with the very Gnostic, Kabbalistic and Hermetic heresies that Rome
had been trying to squelch the entire previous millennium! Among
other things, the Crusades awakened Christians to an alternative
reading of their cherished gospels, restimulated suppressed heresies
about the life, family, and travels of Jesus and the nature of the
Grail Mysteries, and provided the impetus for the reawakening of
the Gnosis in the underground Secret Societies.
1. Evolution: The Path and the Journey of the World Soul
Reincarnation was part of the belief system of the ancient world.
In a very general sense, the Gnostic gospels assert that when the
Creator fashioned the material plane, it was set up in solar system
form with seven planets. At that time people thought the planets
all revolved around Earth and that Earth was protected and guarded
by the rings of the other planets.
What you see illustrated here is Earth and the World Soul surrounded
by the circles of the four elements (earth, water, air, fire), in
turn encircled by the planetary rings, embraced in their turn by
the octaves of angels who make it all go round. This is the exact
same concept illustrated by Mantegna's Prima Causa card (No. 50).
The two cards that precede it in sequence, called the Eighth and
Ninth Spheres, represent the Milky Way (No. 48) and the Vault of
the Heavens (No. 49) invisibly turning all the inner wheels like
a cosmic perpetual-motion machine. All this wheels-within- wheels
creation makes up the Body of God. This conception is not exclusive
to Gnostic beliefs. Earliest Kabbalists used the image of a circular
reation before they devel-oped the Tree format (see "Kabbalah/ Cabbalah").
Those who agreed that humanity is "made in the image of God" would
then see this cosmic map as the Gnostic model of the soul's chal
lenge to "grow into" its full potential as a spark of the Divine.
A soul that wanted to take incarnation in this world had to cross
each planet's orbit and make an agreement with that planet's "soul"
or intelligent principle (its genius). Each soul would pick up some
of the qualities pertaining to that planet, forming its personality
for this incarnation out of these different "planetary metals" in
their raw state. And that soul's assignment in the course of a lifetime
was to extract the pure metal from the raw materials of planetary
qualities, purifying these elements so they could be minted into
the "coinage" of each planetary realm. When it was time to leave
the body and cross those planets' orbits again on the way back off
this "mortal coil," one paid the toll owed to each planet and became
liberated from further incarnations. This is the source of the original
idea of the planetary alchemical metals. Each planet provides a
certain amount of its fundamental substance out of which to build
a personality. It is humanity's job to evolve and purify those qualities
in the course of a lifetime.
Mantegna card No. 39, Astrologia, illustrates the governing intelligence
of this spiritual map of the cosmos. She teaches us the math and
science of time and orbital motion, leading us into the understanding
of our "cosmic clock" and the process of preparing the soul in this
life for the adventure of the next. Remember, the ultimate goal
of the soul on this journey up the "Ladder of Lights" is to grow
in consciousness and comprehension until it can fully identify and
join with the great World Soul, the Sophia or Shekhina, who bridges
the gap between humanity and Divinity (revealed so well in the Fabricius
illustration). We are to become conscious, individuated cells in
the body of the primordial Goddess, spouse of God and mother of
this world.
2. The Female and Unfallen Creation: The Gnostics brought
the ancient, pre-monotheistic Hebrew idea of the Shekhina, the feminine
consort of God, into Gentile vocabulary, although among the Gnostics
she was called Sophia, the Wisdom principle. Gnostics fostered the
belief that Sophia, the Wisdom element of God, was feminine and
represented the mind, meaning the actual conscious thinking that
was vested in the making of Creation by the Creator. It is she who
takes the creative juices of God and ferments them into the tangible
world, the ecology of life. She creates what is actual out of the
infinity of creative possibilities inherent in God, the undifferentiated
Power.
Because of this important role of the Shekinah in Gnosticism, Gnostic
Tarot decks place an especially strong emphasis on female figures,
with goddesses appearing where the Christian patriarchy would use
male images. My main exemplar of a Gnostic Tarot is a fairly recent
deck, the Etteila Tarot, which actually was published in the years
just before the French Revolution. As mentioned above, recent scholarship
has determined that Eteilla was using as his creation model the
Hermetic document called The Divine Pymander, one of the Hebrew-inflected
Hermetic gospels preserved by the Arabs through the Dark Ages to
re-emerge in the late 1400s.
Etteilla's illustrated Major Arcana make it clear that this is a
Gnostic revelation being illustrated in Tarot cards. The High Priestess
whom you see in the Etteila Tarot (called the Lady Consultant, No.
8), is the Snake and Bird Goddess, the Great Mother of all the Middle
Eastern Goddess traditions including the Hebrew and Gnostic Shekhina/Sophia.
The Goddess is portrayed as Eve in Eden, with the serpent depicted
as a vortex, a circular coil of energy, like a strong tellurgic
aura around her. The tree she stands next to is another symbol of
bridging Earth and heaven to draw down consciousness into creation.
This goddess figure is psychologically and spiritually attuned with
every molecule of creation, and all the creatures in Nature are
her children. Although few images of The Priestess as Eve survived
the shift of the Arcana from verbal descriptions in ancient documents
to European cards, the El Gran Tarot Esoterico uses this same Eve
image, this time holding a pomegranate and highlighted by the moon.
There is also another Renaissance card game from 1616 (not a Tarot)
called Labyrinth, devised by Andrea Ghisi, that shows Adam and Eve
in the Garden of Eden with the snake climbing the Tree of Life between
them.
Only in Gnostic thought do we find a positive interpretation of
the snake in the garden. The card that substitutes for the Hanged
Man in the Eteilla deck has left behind the Judeo-Christian idea
of human guilt for the "fall of man" and its expiation in sacrifice.
The replacement card is called Prudence, No. 12, and pictured is
the Goddess again, holding a wand in the shape of a "T" with a snake
at her feet. In this image, she is lifting her skirts to the snake
as if in invitation, with an enigmatic smile on her lips. The "T"
cross refers to the last letter of the Greek or Hebrew alphabet,
assigned to the path leading to Malkuth, bottom station of the Kabbalah
Tree, and another name for the Hebrew "Earthly Goddess." Manly P.
Hall, in his tome The Secret Teachings, links the Tav, the Tetractys,
the caduceus and the Kabbalah! We know from the history of symbolism
that the snake is a longtime symbol of lifeforce, vitality or what
the Chinese call "chi." It has not always been used as a symbol
of evil or deception. The Gnostics held that the snake in the garden
was a teacher of humanity, educating Eve and opening her eyes to
the sexual mysteries. This same theme was explored in the older
Mantegna Tarot image of Prudence, but in this one the snake is wrapping
itself around the mirror into which Prudence gazes. The mirror is
another symbol for Wisdom as are the two faces looking forward and
back ward, so we are back with the Gnostic idea of Eve/Shekhina/Sophia
as the initiator of humanity into the Mysteries, the Wisdom tradition,
through her curiosity, mental reflection and natural magnetism.
Another clue to Gnostic influences in Tarot is the use of a female
figure on the Pope card. This would be considered heretical in any
Christian context, yet we see it from the earliest Tarots, the Mantegna
tarocchi and the Visconti-Sforza pack, right up to that of modern
scholar Manly P. Hall. In more modern Tarots, we have diluted her
name down to the non-threatening "High Priestess," but her original
title and form is that of the Female Pope. It is safe to say that
a female Heirophant or Popess is a glaring clue to the spiritual
beliefs of a Renaissance Tarot deck's author!
We also find female Chariot cards in three or four deeply Gnostic-influenced
Tarots, suggesting that this is the ancient "Triumphant Chariot
of Venus," an old mythological and alchemical theme highlighted
by the fourteenth century poet Petrarch in his poem I Triumphi.
The power of Venus lies in harmony, magnetism and the art of raising
consciousness through the power of attraction and pleasure. Left
alone, Nature rewards right action with joy and fulfillment, implying
a trust in instinct and intuition which the Judeo-Christian tradition
has rejected.
The optimist Gnostics believed that Eve was supposed to bite the
apple. This strain of Gnostics (and there were others who disagreed)
felt that without the biting of the apple, literal time and space
would not have precipitated out of eternity. Hence, in the Eteilla
Arcana, we see the Great Mother on the Eve card and then we have
her whole creation on the Empress card, teeming with life and creative
possibilities. There is no hint that this creation is flawed or
less than an expression of Divine Will.
Yet in both the Jewish and the Christian concept, without the approval
of God, the whole creation is fallen, in need of redemption, a problem
waiting to be solved (see "Kabbalah/Cabbalah"). It's only the optimist
Gnostics who felt that the spontaneous creation had virtue of its
own because it is an expression of the Sophia force.
3. Sexuality's Place in the Creation: The theme of the androgyne
or double-sexed magical entity is a subset of Gnostic speculation
which harks back to the old Greek idea that before the soul's "fall
from heaven" into a physical body, it had to split into halves,
one male and one female, to accommodate the duality of the material
plane. These two halves of the same soul then have to search for
each other through the rounds of time, to complete each other before
they can reascend into the divine realms as one.
Within this story is hidden a teaching about the power of sexuality,
the attraction of the male hidden within the female to the female
hidden within the male, and the state of divine union which can
transform animal sexuality into a source of magical and spiritual
power. Given that the ancient Middle Eastern nations considered
human intercourse as a microcosmic expression of the Great Union
on high of God and his Consort, it would be remiss for a Gnostic
Tarot to fail to cite the sexual mysteries in at least one Arcanum.
But different schools of Gnosticism had different opinions about
this idea of opposites uniting. Some thought of the sexual urges
as part of the conspiracy of the elements to bind human souls to
Earth and the limitations of the flesh, therefore something to be
avoided. Some felt that as long as the cycle of reproduction is
being carried on, drawing more souls to this planet for reincarnation
and polarizing human souls, fixating them on their gender differences,
the creation would not return to its original innocence and divine
order.
Others felt that only through the sex act could the opposites be
united and the soul prepared for growth and evolution. The style
apparent on any given Devil card of the Gnostic type will show whether
the author was of the "sex is the problem" crowd or the "sex is
the solution" crowd. In either case, the Esoteric Devil (called
Typhon in the 1700s, Baphomet by the time of Eliphas Levi in the
late 1800s) has a body with womanly characteristics from shoulders
to hips, although the head and legs are those of a goat. The goat-like
characteristics make a reference to the Gnostic Demiurge, a figure
cited by some Gnostics as the force in opposition to the ascension
of humanity, whose influence on the world's conception spoiled the
intended perfection of the creation and enforced the dualities riddling
this world‹ good/evil, rich/poor, dominant/ submissive, and so forth.
In this sense, when there is an emphasis on masculine characteristics
in the Devil card, it highlights how the unified feminine is divided,
split, parted, made from one into two upon the emergence of the
Demiurge, also known as the Satan, the "tester," by the Jews. His
job is to tempt souls to sin by creating chaos and disorder, then
just sit back and see how we behave under stress.
Meanwhile, the Shekhina, whose female breasts the Typhon/Baphomet
exposes, is here being assimilated to the seductive force which
attracts us into incarnation and makes it so devilishly hard to
leave this plane. Not just the violated Bride of the Underworld,
dragged down by her immersion in the elements, she is shown as fully
merged with the Demiurge, animal and Divine fused together. The
Venus Triumphant ideal of the Gnostic Chariot card is now showing
its flip side, as a dangerous sensuality which steals immortality
even as the soul aspires to sacred union. This is an idea from the
pessimistic Gnosis, a sex-negative teaching that infiltrated Judaism
and Christianity in the Alexandrian centuries, encouraging all the
Old Testament believers to reject pleasure and sensual expressions
from their spiritual practices. And by thus demonizing the sensuality
associated with the Goddess, which is one of the forces bringing
the creation from unconsciousness to consciousness, the entire material
world is demonized as well!
The Tarots that are more optimistically Gnostic emphasize the sensuous
breasts and wasp waist, sometimes giving her angel wings rather
than bat wings, and referencing her body parts to the elements of
Nature (fire in the head, air in the breast, water in the bowels,
and earth in the legs). Any Tarot that places a caduceus upon the
belly of an obviously female Devil card, whether the caduceus is
pointed upward or downward, is revealing the sex-positive Gnostic
beliefs of its maker (as in the Esoterico, Papus, Tavaglione group).
The Devil image from the Alchemical Tarot reconciles the opposites
in a novel way, using an image of a two-headed, two-sided man/ woman
balancing upon the winged eye of the Mystery. This image is an adaptation
from a German alchemical manuscript by Basil Valentinus, published
in 1604, and is cleansed entirely of any pejorative overlay from
either Jewish or Christian sources. This image managed to escape
the notice of the Church censors only because it was buried in an
esoteric tome which never came into mass circulation.
The Tarot, by the 1600s being printed in "catchpenny" versions for
mass consumption, had to be more energetically veiled to survive
the burning times. Artists became adept at creating ambiguous images
which on their surface expressed the evils of fleshly pleasures,
while revealing for initiates the inner teachings of the Primordial
Goddess, not sacrificed or eliminated, but veiled to protect her
essential purity from the misunderstandings of the uninitiated.
One very interesting clue to the complexity of this tricky imagery,
wherein ancient mythologems are distorted in their historical transmission
and made to serve entirely other meanings, can be found on page
143 of Raphael Patai's exceptionally detailed The Hebrew Goddess,
in the chapter on the Matronit, an early understanding of the Consort
of the King. In this ancient conception, the happiness of the whole
creation depends upon the blissful sexual union between God and
the Matronit, and each week every He brew couple was required to
replicate this happy union in their own home in honor of the Sacred
Marriage, and to restore happiness to the creation.
In Patai's own words: "Yet another version, still preoccupied with
the times of divine copulation, speaks not of a weekly, but of an
annual cycle. Every year, we are told, the people of Israel sin
with tragic inevitability which enables Samael, the satan (or Azazal)
[our sex-negative Devil], to bend the Matronit to his will. Samael,
in the form of a serpent, or riding a serpent, lurks at all times
near the privy parts of the Matronit, in the hope of being able
to penetrate her. Whether or not he succeeds in thus gratifying
his desire depends on the conduct of Israel. As long as Israel remains
virtuous, Samael's lustful design is frustrated. But as soon as
Israel sins, as they, alas, are bound to do year after year, their
sins add to Samael's power, he glues himself to the Matronit's body
'with the adhesive force of resin,' and defiles her.
Once this happens, the Matronit's husband, the King, departs from
her and withdraws into the solitude of his heavenly abode. This
unhappy state of affairs continues until, on the Day of Atonement,
the scapegoat, which is destined to Azazal, is hurled to its death
down a cliff in the Judaean desert. Samael, attracted by the animal
offered to him, lets go of the Matronit, who thereupon can ascend
to heaven and reunite with her husband, the King." What happens
to this myth if we recognize that the Serpent is not evil or a tempter,
but the educator of the optimist Gnostics? As a symbol of the life
force, the Kundalini or serpent-fire of primal vitality, we might
be looking at a perversion of the old Snake and Bird Goddess, who
takes great joy in her creation teeming with rich possibilities.
The King comes off as punitive and abandoning, discarding his wife
just as she is getting initiated into the wild, passionate, uninhibited
expression of her natural vitality. The snake heads for the bull's-eye,
the sacred site of the original Blood Mysteries, which later degenerated
into animal sacrifice and a distorted understanding of the Eucharistic
Mysteries.
I suspect that Eteilla is showing us a positive interpretation of
the Matronit's experience in his "Prudence" image, with her shy
smile and skirts lifted for the serpent! Perhaps he is trying to
communicate to us through imagery that it is prudent to study this
serpent-force in its various manifestations, to be receptive to
these wild, earthy, untamed and vitalizing forces usually demonized
in the Judeo-Chris-tian paradigm.
This essay merely hints at the great Gnostic riches which lie hidden in the deeper layers of Tarot imagery and philosophy. It is my hope that scholars of the future will begin to take the Tarot seriously as a spiritual and initiatory testament, equal to any of our written Gospels, and embark upon the work of reconnecting the Holy Word to these pictures worth a thousand. For those who are interested in following these Gnostic themes further in their Tarot studies, there will soon be a book version of these Tarot Magic essays, complete with extra chapters further illuminating the mysticism of the esoteric Magi whose ruminations produced Tarot.
