Looking at the Tarot cards in the oriental way of a circle made it seem to me like the circle of life. It is a route we all travel along, like rats in a cage going round in never-ending circles. The difficult thing is to find out on which part of the circle we are at present, so that we can see our present problems and more importantly, see in which direction we should head. We usually go to a divinatory source when all other channels of action have failed so it can be assumed that we have got stuck at a particular point in the circle. We need to find a way to move forward.
These books of divination can be seen as part of an ancient wisdom concerned with the questions of who we really are, what we are doing here at all, where we are at this moment in time, and why? Then a question arises about where we are going or what will happen. Having seen what has brought us to this moment – the moment of perhaps asking a divinatory question - we can learn to understand ourselves and learn why we keep making the same mistakes. The question is always basically the same for every traveller who picks up a guide book (which is what both the Tarot and the I Ching are): “Where do we go from here?” Or, “How the hell did I get to this place?” This way of looking at the books of divination gives us so much more than a mere prognosis of events.
In the West we are bogged down with the idea of permanence, the idea of a permanent entity, and so we are hung up on the problem about what happens to that entity when we die. Because of this the Church had to create the idea of a permanent heaven and permanent hell to which the permanent soul must go. If we did not have this traditional belief of unchanging individuality so imbued into our culture, we Westerners would not have so much unhappiness in our lives.
The East has always maintained an attitude of flux, of change in everything we do and are. There is no changeless soul hanging like an identity card around our neck, weighing us down and giving us the attitude of: “Well, that's just the way I am... You can't teach an old dog new tricks” and so on. Instead, there is the feeling that whatever is happening is not going to last. Be it good or bad, like it or not, it gives us the possibility of change - of a way out. Our good fortune will not last forever and neither will our ill luck – unless of course we do nothing to change whatever it was in us that brought about the present situation.
Figure 6: The Major Arcana Tarot Cards set out in a Spiral.
No doubt we go round the circle many times but the great leaps forward come when we take off from the circle onto another level. It was only after I had studied the whole circle of the Major Arcana of the Tarot, together with its most important card, the Fool, that I realised I was looking not at a circle but at a spiral (see Figure 6).
Opening the circle up into a spiral also formed it into an egg or oval shape and I realized I had drawn the ancient symbol of the Ouroboros, the snake with its tail in its mouth, which lies at the heart of many religions and was particularly favoured by the Gnostics and was the original creation myth of the pre-Greek Pelasgians. It is usually taken as a symbol of a circle of regeneration, and was the only way I could portray on a flat surface the tail end of the circle going onto another level, together with the start of the cycle coming from two different directions: the earth and the sky.
The Yang - Yin Mindset
When placed around my circle, the Tarot cards fell into pairs of basically Yang or Yin cards followed by a combination card. If one were to join up the cards with lines, they would form a series of triangles (see Figure 1: and Figure 3: ). Yang and Yin are more than just active and passive, male and female. Fundamentally they are about the way our minds work.
We know that our brain is formed in two halves - like a walnut - each side joined together by millions of nerves and sensors along the ridge, the corpus callosum. Different parts of the brain have different functions, and there are a lot of parts whose uses we do not understand. We do know that the right side of the brain controls the left-hand side of the body, and that the left side of the brain controls the right-hand side of the body. In our society today most people are right handed and the left side of the brain is dominant. All the important parts of our daily lives - communication, speech, putting things in order, logic and mathematics - are dealt with in the left brain. The left brain is a Yang brain. Most of us today are left-brain people but some of us are more right-brained. The right-brain is more Yin in the sense that it deals with intuition, sensory perception, spatial awareness, musical appreciation and - some say - spirituality. The left-brain analyses; the right-brain absorbs.
Most of us are a healthy mixture of the two, but just to make the concept clearer, we can imagine Mr. Larry Left-Brain is walking down the street and sees someone he recognises. When asked to describe the man, he would tell you his name is Mr. Jones and he lives at number 13 and drives a red car. To Larry Left-Brain these are the important things about Mr. Jones, which put him in a place in Larry’s mind where he will recognise Mr. Jones again because of these associations. Mrs. Rosie Right-Brain meets the same man on the same street and senses from his demeanour that he is a kindly, approachable person, so she says hello and remarks on the weather. Because he responds amicably they chat a bit then continue on their way. She does not know his name or what car he drives, but she would describe him as a sympathetic, responsive person with a pleasant manner and sociable ways. That is what is important to her assimilating right-brain. Neither Larry nor Rosie would recognise Mr. Jones from the other’s description, but both are true and both are valid. A complete-brained person would not only appreciate what kind of person Mr. Jones is, but would also have thought to ask his name and where he lives.
The Yang brain individualises and likes to categorise, and is the major way of working in our present solar society. The Yin is a more appreciating side of the brain that feels more in tune with the world, with other humans and with animals; but it is less often heard and when it is heard it is usually dismissed because its ability to express itself verbally and to argue intellectually is far inferior to the left-brain. However, it is the right-brain that contains the area which connects with the subtleties of our origins. Our left-brain has a hard job even to acknowledge the presence of the right-brain, which is why our left-brained society is so materialistic and atheistic.
It is thought that in our early history - before the invention of writing - the right brain was much more important because it was essential for one human being to appreciate at a distance what type of person another was i.e. whether he was friend or foe (this is the faculty Rosie was using when she met Mr. Jones). There is a part of the right-brain (Wernicke’s Area) that mirrors one of the hearing areas of the left brain, but these days it is not known what, if anything, it does. Jaynes1 suggests that it was through this area of the brain that early man ‘heard the voice of a god’ and it has popularly become known as The God Spot, though it is now believed there are a number of areas of the brain that respond in the same way.
The dominance of the left-brain came about with the invention of writing and the simultaneous dwindling of the aural and oral abilities as well as memory. (You did not need to remember something if you could write it down and refer to it later). At the same historical time we start to find statues of gods who were no longer attainable by listening with the right-brain. At this same time historically divination became widely practiced. It may be that the Tarot and I Ching – being more sophisticated forms of divination than some others – are both attempts by early man to connect with his gods and assimilate what they wanted to communicate to him. Similarly, these divinatory methods may be able to lead us back to an appreciation of the source from which all our present-era absent-god religions evolved.
After more than 3000 years of left-brain society it is hard for us to appreciate there might even be another way of looking at life. The right-brain has been quietly mulling away in the background and has much to offer, but it needs to find a way of expressing itself – which is not easy after being ignored for so long. The left-brain too needs to understand that there is so much more to l
ife than the logical placing of facts, and that we can never understand our place in the world unless we first accept the existence of the other side of the coin. It is the same coin but we have never turned it over to look at the other side. Interestingly, in I Ching divination with the use of coins it is the Yin that is the inscribed side (generally the side of the coin with the value written on it) whilst the Yang is the blank side! One wonders why this should be, when the Yang is supposed to be the one that takes in information, and I am sure in this day and age one would expect the Yang to be inscribed, but the I Ching is older than 3000 years and dates back to the time of a matriarchal society. The important part of the divination, however, is in the movement that occurs between the Yang and the Yin.
Having never been a great champion of women’s causes even though a woman myself, I found I was necessarily becoming a champion of ‘The Yin’ if only to balance the equation. We can see how, for instance, Richard Wilhelm’s translation and commentaries of the I Ching reflect his upbringing and the attitude of his times where the idea of the heavenly, creative male aspect and the dark, repressed female aspect run through his translation until the heavenly male Yang (in the fashion of his era) triumphs over the dark female Yin. In spite of that, I found his translation in the main remarkably enlightening, and we must be clear that we are not talking about political repression, social inequality or women’s rights – this is simply about the way our minds work.
We need to see beyond the negativity in the translation for some hexagrams relating to the Yin cards, such as Hexagram 7 entitled ‘The Army’ for the card of the Empress. The Abyss for the card of the Moon was the ultimate challenge! One needs to appreciate that all the interpreters and translators of the hexagrams in the I Ching - even from the time of King Wên and Confucius - were men, who inevitably looked upon the Yin as being - if not inferior to the Yang - then at least difficult in some way, which in turn reflected in their interpretations even though it was probably quite unintentional. Nevertheless, in all cases I found that the hexagrams eventually enhanced my understanding of the cards rather than challenging them.
My introduction to the Tarot was with the Rider pack of cards designed in 1910 by Arthur Waite with drawings by Pamela Colman-Smith and the excellent two-part book by Rachel Pollack: Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom: A Book of Tarot and it was her deep insights that originally inspired my interest. But after a while I realised the Tarot cards I was using did not in every case match my thoughts and came to the conclusion that I would have to attempt to draw my own picture cards. It seemed a daunting task so I tried to imagine myself meeting a traveller along the road who showed me the cards, the essence of which I had to reproduce to the best of my ability with whatever I had to hand. Each picture was marked by a rough oval and named for its idea. The shape appeals to the eye, they would fit practically in the palm of the hand and stow sensibly in a traveller’s pack, whereas square or oblong ones would soon become dog-eared turning them into rounds or ovals anyway. Ancient playing cards were often circular, not oblong or square like our present-day ones. This in itself shows how we have lapsed from the idea of a sacred continuity into the four-square solidity of materialist thought.
The Language of Numbers and the Octave
On closer examination of our image of the remnant of cloth in which the Tarot and I Ching are the warp and the weft, we can discern a thicker thread in the fabric that catches the eye. This thread weaves its way through the warp and weft and draws them together in a pattern of interconnecting numbers, so that the cloth contains a design – one that particularly appeals to the human mind because the same numbers, the same threads, are inherent in our DNA, our own genetic make-up. Yet how could such a modern concept have been incorporated into such ancient wisdom? Or is there nothing new on this earth?
Numbers form a language that crosses the boundaries of countries and traditions. They can wipe away prejudice with a completely independent sweep. There is no argument with them, no ifs and buts. Numbers either add up or they don't. Well, almost! There are some combinations of numbers, such as the Fibonacci series, that are the equivalent of that great leap forward transforming a circle into a spiral. Michael Hayes' book The Infinite Harmony1 was an inspiration for me into the intricate weaving of numbers throughout the hermetic tradition and the religions of our world, and was largely influential in confirming my ideas about the Tarot and I Ching. Numbers are everywhere in our lives whether we are aware of it or not. Pythagoras understood it, and it is worth taking a second look at this great man for he was so much more than a mathematician. He should perhaps be regarded as one of the great spiritual thinkers of our era, but he has been saved from the dubious privilege of having his wisdom turned into a religion.
Pythagoras was a Phoenician born at the start of the 6th century BC at the town of Byblos (present day Sidon) a great sea port on the Levant, during a time of renaissance in the ancient world. The Phoenicians were a seafaring nation, the greatest navigators and therefore the greatest geometrists and astronomers of their day, the provenance of whose knowledge is unknown. They created a library at Carthage much like that at Alexandria, containing 500,000 works of ancient knowledge, subsequently annihilated by the Romans2. We do not know how they accumulated their knowledge.
Sometimes the simplest statements are the most telling, and yet the most ridiculous to the uninitiated. Pythagoras said, “Establish the triangle and the problem is two-thirds solved”. I can hear every schoolboy groaning at his desk, but to the initiated it is excitingly obvious and can be explained in a variety of ways that include the most up-to-date scientific knowledge and the most ancient Taoist belief system (see Figure 7: ).
Figure 7: The Triangle
It is really very simple. We have three parts in every thing: positive and negative and some force that attracts or repels and in so doing creates an impulse that causes a change to occur. We can see this as 1) Yang, the positive, creative force, and 2) Yin, the negative, receptive force. These two are static and opposed, attracted to each other but immovable. They are a problem, and unstable, moreover they are drifting away from each other. What is required is the third force 3) Time, movement, change. Like a positive electrical terminal and a negative electrical terminal they do nothing until they have electricity flowing between them. In exactly the same way, every problem involves two opposing forces which, like the two sides of a triangle, diverge endlessly unless they are joined together by the third line – the hypotenuse, which represents the changes that Time inevitably brings about. With the harmony of the Tao and correct timing, the opposites flow towards each other. That is what the triangle is all about. As we look through the Major Arcana of the Tarot and relate it to the Yin/Yang aspects of the Tao, it forms into a series of triangles (see Figure 8: ).
Pythagoras' theory of pi (π) simply states that the number 22 when divided by the number 7 will be found to produce a number with an infinite number of decimal places. It therefore represents infinity because one can find no end to it. Pythagoras did not invent this for it was known by the earliest dynasties of Egypt, (historically contemporary with Fu Hsi, the legendary founder of the I Ching), and it is most likely that Pythagoras learnt of it on his travels to Egypt, for it is thought he was initiated into the mysteries of Isis at Thebes.
The theory of pi (π) is related to music and harmony in the form of three musical octaves. Pythagoras taught that everything emitted a vibration, like a sound wave, and that the harmony of the world and of the other planets, and of the whole universe was what he called the Music of the Spheres. He believed that within everything there was a basic harmony which included mankind. Yet it seemed that mankind was out of kilter – somewhere along the way he had gone wrong - and he needed to get back to that basic harmony. Although Pythagoras may not have known of the Tarot, we know that he was well-versed in the wisdom known to the Egyptians that lies behind it, and we can see exactly how pi relates to the Major Arcana of the Tarot in the numbering of the cards and the ide
as behind them.
Excluding card 0, 'The Fool', there are 21 cards in the Major Arcana, which can be divided by the sacred 7 into three sections of cards. These are usually called the Material Sequence, the Psychological Sequence, and the Spiritual Sequence. If we think of these three sequences in musical terms we have the physical ear, the psychological sound and the spiritual vibration. Every musical note is a vibration: the sound we hear with our ears is the physical appreciation of the rate at which the string or note is vibrating. The shorter the string, the faster is the vibration and the higher the note. The physical appreciation of the combination of notes strung together appeals to our hearts and minds and leads us to the psychological phase. This psychological appreciation of the music can touch our soul and uplift our hearts, moving us into the spiritual phase so that even we too may appreciate the Music of the Spheres of which Pythagoras speaks. But this can only happen when we are in total harmony – and for that to happen we need to include the Fool.
The Tao in the Tarot Page 3