World Server's Spread - August, 2006

A 3-Card Reading for the Now
By Christine Payne-Towler
For an introduction to the World Servers' Spread, see Arkletter 5
August 23, 2006

This ArkLetter's lead article has brought home to me the transformative power of a shared idea.  Whether the idea refers to a literal or a merely metaphorical truth doesn't seem to be as important as the charisma the idea generates in the minds of its holders...

...Many ideas that are known to be based on insufficient evidence continue to capture the attention of millions of people -- witness the pervasiveness of belief in God or Deity, even against the curious phenomenon that every tradition seems to characterize Deity in a different way.  It doesn't seem to matter whether an attractive idea relates to the "real world" or not, and even the construct “real world” begs the question “real to whom?” What matters is that people ~feel~ that their idea, their perception, is real. Having that feeling adds coherence to their world and helps to explain things that are otherwise outside of common comprehension.

My question for this NewMoon is:  What is the pivotal idea, thought form, or concept that my readers need to encounter on this day? What can be expressed through the images of this deck (The Masonic Tarot) and the words I write about it, which will highlight a central concept necessary for World Servers to gain orientation and undertake their labors during the month of Virgo? As I'm shuffling, I am challenging the cards (and myself), to say something timely, relevant, and revealing for all of those who find their way to this site.

World position: Justice

What are some concepts related to Justice?  Adjustment. Adjudication. Justification. Yes, it's about balancing out energies, but it's also about "truing" as well, bringing circumstances back into right alignment and healthy relationship. 

The illustration for this card is intriguing to me, not only because it is an unusual flaming red. Additionally, the symbol of the Scales is superimposed upon a face whose starry blue eyes look out from behind an upright sword, upon which is balanced the traditional scale that is the classic symbol for this Trump.  The two pillars on either side of the central image let us know that the scene is playing out "in the Temple", as does the array of abstracted people at the foot of the card. Yet the blood-read background, as well as the human face, gives the indication that this adjudication is also being constantly enacted in the temple of our bodies and minds, as our own vital forces swing back and forth between the left hand and right hand aspects of our own thoughts, words, and deeds.

Ranging through Aryeh Kaplan's Sefir Yetzirah, to adapt this month's Continental Tarot article, I ran across the exact same ancient form of a scale with two balancing pans, illustrating the way the Mother Letters (Aleph, Mem and Shin) represent thesis, antithesis, and synthesis (p. 96). Now that I’m looking at these cards, my mind runs again to those paragraphs.

According to Kaplan,

"The Hebrew word for 'pan' here is Kaf.  This word can denote the pan of a scale, but it also denotes the palm of the hand. Likewise, the word Lashon can be used for the tongue of a balance, the pointer that indicates when the two pans are in equilibrium. Its usual meaning, however, is the tongue in the mouth. Therefore, on the one hand, the letters Aleph Mem Shin represent the two pans and tongue of a balance. On the other hand, they represent the two hands, and the 'covenant between them', which is the tongue....  There is a pan of merit and a pan of liability. This is very much like the scale used to weigh one's merits and sins, which is mentioned in the Talmud. In the center is the fulcrum and pointer... which is the 'tongue of decree'."

This presentation, these words, and the sensation I get when I project myself into this blood-red image and occupy the face behind the scales, let me know that an important implication of this card is Conscience. Only oneself knows the full story of what has been given versus what has been withheld, when one has been merciful and when one has been severe, when one has given truthful (balanced) testimony and when one has offered false testimony via exaggeration or elimination of the details.  One's Higher Self, the God-within, witnesses every thought, word and deed of our human incarnation, and constantly weighs the impact of our actions in the world against our inner knowledge of what's right, true, and divinely inspired.

Note that the sword is not used to attack or cut away the pan of liability.  There is no denial here of evil, whether personal or collective.  It is assumed that some actions will be less than perfect, that the state of a human soul in incarnation is a constant balancing-act between appropriate and in appropriate impulses.   This image includes the possibility of a situation of mixed influences, where a lesser evil might have to be endured so that a greater good might ultimately prevail.  Nor does this image judge the human condition for being mired in conflicting values, in constant struggle to balance the scales. Mostly, the face behind the scales "looks us in the eyes" and challenges us -- are we weighing our thoughts, words, and deeds in the scale of Conscience before we set them lose in the world?  Each soul has to answer this question for itself, and we each will be allowed to live out the consequences in the flesh.  There is no greater Justice than this.

In practical terms, with the Justice card in the World position, it is time to ask oneself the essential questions:  What would change in my life if my Conscience turned up the volume in my head, and pushed itself more firmly forward in my affairs? Where would I need to cut back, and where would I need to concentrate my efforts, to balance the pans?   Perhaps it is a subtle shift rather than a blatant one that is being called for, but in any case, try to look with the eye of the Divine at the swing of the scales hanging between you and "the people", and make your choices based on that.


Fool position:  6 of Wands

This pack of cards, being Masonic in its symbolism, gives us an illustration that combines the traditional compass-and-square symbol, the Star of David, and the Club of Prometheus, which was hollowed out down the center and filled with coals to bring divine Fire down to Earth from the heavenly realm. 

The compass and square have long been used to symbolize the work of bringing one's "rough and uneven" human nature under discipline, giving us a way to define and measure out clean right angles and perfect circles. In the language of sacred geometry, the evolutionary path of consciousness for humans is compared with the masons' art of shaping building blocks into their finest, smoothest and most perfectly measured form, suitable for constructing a Temple to the Most High.  Add to this the Star of David, which has accumulated multiple implications of  "the meeting and merging of opposites" whether they be male/female, Divine/human, or any other standard polarity. Combined with the number six (referring back to the Lovers Trump) and the fiery coals hidden in the clubs, there is a sense here of enlivening stimulation between forces existing at different levels of reality, encountering each other at the border "between the Worlds" and creating something more than the sum of their parts.

So how do we read this card in the Fool position?  The placement looks ideal to me. The Fool position is the borderland between Macrocosm and Microcosm, between Cosmos and Self.  Where three "from above" meet three "from below", fertility and increase are sure to follow.  I see a mixing and mingling between potential and actual, between angel and animal, between what's distant and what is immanent. There's cross-pollination here that activates the divine aspect of our earthly experience.  Simultaneously, what is of higher value within us is promoted in association with the heavenly forces descending to make this contact.  The insight, wisdom, and clarity imparted by the Justice card in the World position are funneled into the Star card below, to assist in the enlightenment of the whole Creation, one individual at a time. 

If you look at this Star of David as having aspects of a Wheel, it can be imagined as churning and blending the ascending and descending energies into a new ecology, a new method of self-orientation. The Star of David is also the wheel of planets surrounding the Heart-center Tifferet in the Kabala tree diagram. This corresponds with the Sun in the solar system, center of all the revolutions of the planets, which we also see on the face of the Star card (below). The heart is the pivot, the fulcrum, the bull's-eye around which Above and Below circle and interpenetrate.  By staying open to and conscious of the heart's experience as it circulates the ascending and descending substances, we can be simultaneously grounded in both worlds.

Magus position: Star reversed

This is a beautiful card and I'm so glad that it turned up for this reading!  I'm going to show it to you upright (though it was reversed in the spread) because I want you to see its spiritual appeal without obstruction. Just remember that the phrase I attach to all reversed cards is "Go Within to encounter the energies of this card", and you will have a grasp of what this reversal might be pointing towards.

The Star card is the mirror of our highest hopes, our dearest dreams and our most evolved potentials. It's far enough along in the progress of the Trumps that it has outlasted a number of the soul's evolutionary obstacles -- notoriously, the Hanged Man, Death and the Devil, but just as insidiously, the Justice, Strength and Temperance.  In this image, the Soul (always envisioned as female) is naked to the heavens, collecting spiritual emanations in her person, and pouring out ineffable substances upon the land and the waters. A fully opened flower releases a butterfly into the air, a very old symbol of the ripening of the Mysteries within the heart of an Initiate. The time of being locked into the chrysalis is at an end, just as the time of being folded tightly in the bud has passed. By our own efforts we have loosed ourselves from the bindings of the past, and are rising now upon the Planes, though never without directing our gaze and our efforts back down to the Earth, offering our most sincere efforts to heal it and ourselves.

At the bottom right of this image we also see the nave of a tiny Temple against a checkerboard background like the floor of a Masonic temple.  Under the lintel between the two pillars we see the alchemist's crucified serpent, hung on a Tau cross. This symbolizes the necessary sacrifice of vitality and virility on the Rod of Discipline, and simultaneously the enlivening of the "cross of matter" by the sinuous, cyclical motion of the opposites -- yin/yang, death/life, and matter/energy.  <see scan of Flamel's Crucified Serpent> If this lovely maiden is now free to bless the world with her elixir, it is because she has done the work of shaping herself into a fit vessel for service.  Her arrival at this (comparatively) blessed state is not an accident, but is indeed part of an unfolding growth supporting the continuous expansion of consciousness throughout the universe.

One interpretation of the maiden pouring water by the river is that we are witnessing a mikvah; the ritual bath Semitic women would take after their menstruation to purify themselves for another cycle. But the purple and violet lights we see illuminating the Soul make a direct reference to the Crown or 7th chakra, umbilicus to the Pleroma of her immortal origin. In combination with the touches of gold that enliven the whole image, this card denotes the realm of Akasha, the quintessence at the intersection of the Four Worlds/Elements/Directions.  So if there is a purification being enacted, it is of the Earth as a whole, by the Soul of Humanity, operating at the highest level of individuated consciousness.  We are witnessing a self-chosen act of spiritual self-insemination, where an awakened and divinized Self becomes one with Cosmos without losing its link to Earth.

But note the unique treatment of the planets around the Sun. This is not a heliocentric image of our solar system! In this diagram, the planets ~descend~ from the Moon (outermost circle) through Saturn in six concentric rings culminating on the Sun. This is an old Secret Society reference to the ancient Zoroastrian earthly heaven. This is, as Henry Corbin says in The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, (pp.  40-41):

"... a shadowless country peopled with beings of light who have reached spiritual heights inaccessible to earthy beings. They are truly beings of the beyond; where the shadow which holds the light captive ends, there the beyond begins.... [A people] whose soul has reached such completeness and harmony that [they are] devoid of negativity and shadow; it is neither of the east nor of the west.... To long for [this earthly paradise] is to long for the Earth of vision in medio mundi; it is to reach the center, the heavenly Earth, where the meeting takes place with the Holy Immortals, the divine heptad of Ohrmazd and his archangels [the Sun and the Planets]. The mountain of visions is the psycho-cosmic mountain, the cosmic mountain seen as homologous to the human microcosm. It is the 'Mountain of dawns' from whose summit the Chinvat Bridge springs forth to span the passage to the beyond, at the very spot where the auroral meeting of the angel Daena and her earthly ego takes place. Here, therefore, the angel Vohu-Manah (Persian, Bahman, "Excellent Thought'"...) enjoins the visionary-prophet to cast off his robe, that is, his material body and organs of sensory perception, because [there] it is the subtle body of light that is the seat and organ of events. And it is there, in medio mundi and at the summit of the soul, that the Zarathustrian seed of light is preserved...."

Notice that the six rungs of planets echo the six steps leading up to the Temple. If the Sun is the seventh step, then the Crucified Serpent is its analog. Macro-Self and micro-self fuse and exchange qualities, to the great anguish of the ego, but conversely to the joy of both Spirit and the Creation, which both experience healing in the transaction.

This is the advice of the Masonic Tarot's Star card falling into the Magus position in our World Server's Spread:  make wherever you are into Heaven.  Reach up (and down!) into your own firmament and draw out The Star, enshrine it in your heart, radiate the uncreated Light of the Pleroma out into the world, and golden your surroundings.  That is the solution to the problems we are having, and there is no other way.

My reader can surely see how much insight can emerge from a plain-speaking Tarot deck built from universal symbols that have been buffed and polished by the contemplations of generations before us. But as well, the particular cards pulled are interacting with their placements in a very magical and illuminating way.  Both the cards that have turned up and the spread as a whole discuss principles of integration between the personal and Divine realities, and an approach to living that balances the visible and invisible worlds in consciousness.  This is certainly the age-old path of the mystic, but it takes on increasing urgency for the whole of humanity here at the dawn of the 21st century. If there is any wisdom to be had, any vitality to be drawn, from these ancient symbols and the things to which they refer, then now is the moment of each of us to come awake and seize the inspiration. Perhaps it is through a vision of the "heavenly Earth" that we will be guided in the healing of the Earth that we currently experience. Certainly the longing for a time of earthly paradise" is built into us at the foundations of our beings. Maybe if we truly let it in, that we are the souls who labor to climb the holy mountain, and now is the time to strive anew, with the reward being a healed and purified Earth  -- if we just believed it firmly enough, it’s possible we could "make it so"!

Blessed Virgo to all.

Christine

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*Christine Payne-Towler*
Research: Esoteric Tarot, Literature and Practice; Tarot.com
Publisher, The Tarot Arkletters
Bishop, Gnostic Church of St. Mary Magdalene
Founder: Tarot University;
Author: The Underground Stream;

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