Tarot and the Tree of Life

by Isabel Radow Kliegman

  What good thing can we possibly say about the Four of Pentacles? Well, if you’re somebody who has been bankrupt most of your life, somebody who can never manage to get the light bill and the gas bill paid in the same month, someone who lives from hand to mouth, this is a good start to getting yourself together. It’s a move toward marshaling your resources, being aware that these resources aren’t infinite, and taking responsibility for budgeting what you have. So for someone who has just come out of drug or alcohol detox, or for someone who has been unemployed for ten months and is heavily in debt, this is a terrific energy. Discipline! Control! Yeah, hold on tight!

  The message of Chesed is simple: Tap into this energy when you need it, but don’t get stuck there. Know when it’s appropriate to use this energy and when it’s appropriate to let go. Know how to receive and also how to give. There is another important lesson we learn from seeing the image of the Four of Pentacles in Chesed. It has to do with the question of “enoughness” with which we all deal throughout our lives. What is enough? When have I received enough? How do I know it is enough—enough love, enough money, enough security? Is my wardrobe fashionable enough? Are my grades good enough? Is my house high enough in the hills? Does he bring me flowers often enough? Does she spend enough time with me? Is he thoughtful enough? I remember my amazement in learning that people can be broke at different levels. If my cash outlay exceeds my cash income, I’m broke, even if that means I can’t make the payments on my second house, my third car, and my daughter’s finishing school education!

  Many would say the figure in the Four of Pentacles has more than enough, four times what he needs. Clearly he doesn’t feel he could do with any less, and if he has enough, it is barely so. We are reminded then that Chesed, bountiful as it is, linked to the expansive energy of Jupiter, is not on the central pillar of the Tree of Life. There is a reason that it is on the right-hand pillar, the Pillar of Mercy, and not the Pillar of Harmony. Chesed by itself leaves us out of balance. The right shoulder, arm, and hand of God, tenderly dispensing compassion, can well be taken for granted. Without the balancing force of Gevurah, we don’t know what emptiness is and so cannot gauge how full we actually are. The young protagonist of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ The Yearling is always complaining of being hungry until his return from several days of self-imposed isolation in the woods. When asked later, “Are you hungry?” he replies to his mother, “I ain’t never been hungry but once.”

  I am reminded, too, of an interesting complaint registered by a Swedish immigrant about the weather in Southern California: “In Sweden, there’s so much rain and cold and snow, we wait for the sun to shine. Here it’s always sunny—you can’t even appreciate it!” He missed the miserable weather, not because he liked cold and rain, but because it was miserable. Without the austere force of Gevurah, the sweetness of Chesed seems normal—unremarkable—and for the Four of Pentacles, barely sufficient. When the universe isn’t giving us enough, perhaps we should look more to ourselves than to the universe.

  Five of Pentacles

  We move next to Gevurah. Gevurah is the fifth sefirah and carries fiery Martian energy. It is the place of severity and judgment, the toughest place on the Tree, the place where infractions of karmic law are corrected. The fives of every suit are terrible in the truest sense of the word. It is not difficult to remember that they refer to the sefirah of Gevurah.

  We find here one of the most profoundly important cards of the entire Suit of Pentacles, and from my perspective, the whole Tarot deck. It is a card that has many meanings. What we see on first glance are two ragged people, perhaps beggars, walking either barefoot or barely shod through the snow in a fierce storm, huddling for warmth inside their clothes, and not even in contact with one another. One is lame, as we see from his crutches, and a leper, as we see from his bell. Oddly, they are passing a cathedral. Why don’t they go in? What are they doing out there in the cold and dark when there is a place of refuge, with light shining through the window, that is there for them? This has to be the first question that occurs to us.

  One interpretation addresses organized religion. There’s the cathedral; where’s the door? How are people supposed to find their way to God when organized religion slams doors against them or, worse, doesn’t build doors to their houses of worship? I read once for a client who had been raised in a household where the Christian virtues were held second in importance only to the eschewing of sin. At thirty-seven, beautiful, sensual, and vital, this woman was involved in her third marriage and still tormented by having experimented sexually as a teenager. She felt forever tainted and longed for God’s forgiveness, but from the age of fifteen had been too ashamed ever to cross the threshold of a church. How terribly sad.

  Another meaning, of course, is the experience that many of us have who don’t follow an exoteric form of religion. There was a program on PBS in which religious fundamentalist ministers in Texas were telling Bill Moyers, who is a Christian and a Texan, that if he didn’t believe every word of the Bible was the inspired word of God, he was no Christian. I made an instant decision to strike that town from my “must visit” travel list. I suddenly felt what it must be like to wake up some morning with a cross burned on your lawn because you’re a Jew or a Christian who happens to think that the Bible is not the literal word of God. I was suddenly aware that, for example, when we read in the Bible, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” God wasn’t advocating the murder of bag ladies, Tarot card readers, people who talk to animals, or whatever someone decides constitutes a “witch.”

  Clearly, too, in the Five of Pentacles we are looking at an image of impoverishment. On the most literal level, this can be monetary. If this card shows up in a reading about troubled circumstances at work, you may have to prepare to hit the unemployment lines. The check you are expecting to cover your next rent payment may be delayed with the disastrous consequences of the homelessness depicted. But the impoverishment may be of a totally different kind—lack of mental stimulation, spiritual barrenness, or emotional isolation. Certainly the figures are friendless, unable even to touch one another.

  There are many meanings to this card, then, but for me, the most profound meanings are always the ones that go deepest within. Not the extroverted ones but the most internalized ones. And what this card finally means is lack of self-worth. The reason the paupers do not go into the cathedral is that it doesn’t occur to them that this beautiful place of refuge is for them. Maybe they think they can’t go inside because they aren’t rich enough. Maybe they think they can’t go in because they aren’t smart enough. Maybe they think they aren’t good looking enough. Maybe they think they are of the wrong socioeconomic class or the wrong ethnic background or don’t wear stylish-enough clothes. Maybe it’s, “I can’t go in there. I used to beat up my little brother every day when my parents weren’t home. I don’t belong in a house of God. I feel too guilty.”

  What’s wrong with these people, thinking that they aren’t good enough, in some way, to receive comfort? Are they crazy? If so, we’re all crazy, because we all have some issue with self-worth, and most of the time we don’t even know what it is. I’m too fat, I’m too thin, I’m too bald, I’m too hairy, I’m too old, I’m too young, I’m not intellectual, I intellectualize everything—whatever it is: I don’t belong in there.

  I spent my freshman year at Bryn Mawr College having come from a neighborhood in Brooklyn where 95 percent of us were Jewish. Suddenly I had friends with first names like Whitney and last names like Rockefeller. They were all excited about cotillion balls and coming-out parties. If I didn’t feel like Cinderella, I don’t know what Cinderella felt like. That was the Five-of-Pentacles place for me—the place of not even pressing my nose against the window to peek in at the debutantes.

  But that cathedral is there for everyone. When we can bring to light what it is about ourselves that makes us feel we don’t deserve to go into God’s house, we can begin to deal with it. When we bring to consciousness whatever our
own mishigas (our own craziness) is, we can begin to resolve it. We can find creative ways to work with our feelings about ourselves as worthy and our feelings about ourselves as worthless. None of us is a leper, unfit for human kindness and contact, and each of us is crippled in some way. An optimistic slant on the Five of Pentacles is that in circumstances of extreme adversity, the figures have not given up. They are not sitting passively in the snow, waiting to freeze to death. They are moving forward.

  The dark force of Gevurah is the left hand of God, the hand with which He smites us. But we are not smitten out of cruelty, and the poverty we experience in our own lives is not gratuitous. Our material disadvantages, our ill health, our impoverished self-esteem are no less blessings than the generously bestowed gifts of Chesed. Less enjoyable, granted, but no less blessings. They are given to us as opportunities for psychological insight and spiritual growth. They are the painful offerings that enable us to correct infractions of karmic law and grow in compassion. They are no less for our ultimate good than the vaccinations that prevent smallpox and tuberculosis in our toddlers—and just about as enthusiastically welcomed. The left shoulder of Gevurah and the right shoulder of Chesed meet at the throat chakra of communication. At a quiet time, hold the images of the Four and Five of Pentacles together in your mind and begin to speak. Allow what you perceive to find its true voice, whether it comes in words or sobs or screams or muffled whispers. Experience the jovial generosity of Chesed more fully for the Martian destruction of Gevurah.

  When the Five of Pentacles turns up, take a good look at what in yourself you find most loathsome or shameful and find a way to forgive yourself. To love yourself. To accept yourself. Think of the person you love best in the world and ask yourself whether, if the problem, fault, or behavior was theirs, you would give them the heartless, harsh, unrelenting message you give yourself. Then determine never to say anything to yourself that you wouldn’t say to the person you love most in the world.

  Six of Pentacles

  With the Six of Pentacles, we move to Tiferet, the place of the heart chakra. Here we find another card of enormous complexity in levels and depth of meaning. What we may see at first glance is a middle-class person who has achieved a degree of wealth holding a scale, distributing coins to two kneeling beggars. So we may first see this as a card of generosity—of sharing, fairness. The scales are nicely balanced. But at some point, we may ask the question, “How generous is giving that is done with a scale in hand?” If we measure and balance how much we give, have we lost the essence of giving? Isn’t giving open-handed and full hearted at its core? Mother Teresa has said that true giving has to hurt a little bit. Her example is of a small child who once offered her a packet of sugar—the size we use in a cup of coffee—which was his allotment of sweets for the day. In giving it to her, he went without the delight of his day.

  The next question that comes to mind is, “Who likes to receive down on their knees?” When this card turns up, one of the first questions to ask is, “Am I involved in a relationship in which there are energies of domination and submission, of superiority and genuflection? And if I am, with which of these three figures do I identify? Do I have all—or at least too much of the power? Do I have to get on my knees and beg in order to get what I need and want? Or is it even worse? Am I on my knees begging and not getting anything anyway?”

  Whether it’s a personal or professional relationship, it’s essential to raise this question when the Six of Pentacles card comes up. I actually once read for a blissfully unselfconscious client who volunteered, on seeing this card, that he “only hires emotional cripples” so that he can control them easily. In less extreme cases, it can represent the doling out of time, affection, attention, or sex—or pleading for any of these, possibly without success. “You look great,” “I love you,” and “I missed you” all lose their sweetness if they are responses to “How do I look?” “Do you love me?” and “Did you miss me?” If we have to ask, the giving is at best blemished. Sometimes, however, we suffer the humiliation not just of asking, but of less rewarding responses: “OK—Why?”, “Don’t keep asking me that!”, and “Stop pressuring me with your insecurities” are some blood-curdling examples.

  Another interpretation of the Six of Pentacles, and a profound one, is that if what we really want is to give, we have to be very clear on what and how much a person can and wants to receive. True giving is not simply an outpouring of what we want to impart. Unsolicited advice may be unwelcome, regardless of its wisdom. Statements that begin “The trouble with you is…” are often more accurate than helpful. A wealthy interior decorator may not delight her newly wedded daughter by surprising her with a fully furnished new home. (I am reminded of the Christmas when my brother presented my mother with the most wonderful gift he could imagine. A cap gun! He was seven years old at the time, but some generous people never get beyond that level of awareness.)

  Additionally, the issue may not be one of desire but of readiness. A four-year-old comes up to us and asks, “Mommy, Daddy, where do I come from?” How much information do we want to offer? We have to measure what the child is really asking and how detailed and explicit we want to be. Do we need to tell a four-year-old about desire and passion and the dangers of lust? Probably not. Generally a four-year-old is satisfied with, “You came from inside my tummy.” And when the four-year-old turns six and asks the question again, we again have to evaluate, measure, and weigh what the child is ready to receive.

  Another meaning of the Six of Pentacles is to keep someone in an uncomfortable, demeaning, or even humiliating relationship by giving them “just enough.” Not enough to satisfy them, but just enough to keep them in tow—stuck, hoping for more. A small raise, instead of the large one promised, that comes after two years instead of six months. The flowers that arrive after the fifth broken date; the dinner invitation just when we have decided to seek companionship elsewhere. Only a masochist could be comfortable in the place of the crouching beggar who pleads and implores and never gets anything. That way, they know that the person they are begging from is really important, because they are able to withhold so completely. How lucky to be with so powerful a partner!

  Let us turn now to a completely different view of the Six of Pentacles. The standing figure can be seen to hold the scale of law and justice, and the law we’re looking at is the law of human nature. There are rabbis and priests who look at the evolution of humanity in terms of the prophets who were recognized in various stages of history. Why, for example, did Moses place such an emphasis on law and Jesus such an emphasis on love? Huston Smith notes that Christianity bears the same relationship to Judaism that Buddhism bears to Hinduism. In each case all the elements of the latter can be found in the former. The former, however, are religions that are ethnically or societally based and therefore restrictive in some way. As Smith puts it, “I could never be a Hindu because I wasn’t born into a caste.” The newer religions open the theologies of the older to a universal audience, but the truths developed by the offspring are contained within the parent.

  There was a time in human development, going back three thousand years, when the human race was not ready for the message of Jesus. We were ready for the message of Moses, the lesson of law—rules and accountability. We required the message of fairness before we could temper that justice with mercy. Perhaps Moses, himself an adept, understood everything Jesus taught. In fact, there was probably someone very like Jesus who was a contemporary of Moses but never made an impact because we were not ready for him.

  When Jesus taught the law of love, he was not alone. Rabbi Akiba, roughly contemporaneous with Jesus, also taught that the key to the entire Torah was “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” (Like Jesus, Akiba died a martyr’s death, and his last words were of love. As the skin was flayed from his living body, he said, “Now I know what it means to love the Lord my God with all my heart, with all my soul, with all my mind.”) We are given what we are spiritually ready to receive.

 
; We can see in the Six of Pentacles a powerful symbol of this divine judgment in the hand dispensing the coin. It is the hand of a priest making the sign of the cross, the last two fingers of his hand folded over his palm. The suggestion of the partially open palm is the same in each case: something is offered, but something is held back, too. There are gifts that are gifts only when the recipient is prepared to receive them; until then, wisdom withholds them.

  There’s a final interpretation of the Six of Pentacles that goes within and to me is the most profound, the most moving, and the most challenging. The soul is infinite while the body exists in time and space. If we see the standing figure as the self, soul, or spirit, we may see the crouching figures as different aspects of our soul, the different roles that we play. Who among us has not faced the challenge of deciding where our time and energy will go? If I’m a nurturing mother, it’s dollars to doughnuts I’m not a diva or a ballerina. If I’m spending a lot of time at my job, doing it as well as I can with an eye to promotion, I’m probably not spending a lot of time with my dog. If I’m a meticulous housekeeper, I’m probably not a seductive courtesan to my husband; and if I’m a gourmet cook and fabulous hostess, I’m probably not working out at the gym. We have just so much time and so much energy, and it’s difficult for us to set priorities and to be satisfied with the decisions we make. It’s tempting to do always what is most urgent instead of what is most important. These bills have to be paid now, so when do I write my poetry? The refrigerator’s empty, but the light is perfect for painting. There’s always a leak in the dike. Somebody’s always got to go to the pediatrician or the vet, or the plasterer has to come in, or the toilet is leaking, or the checkbook doesn’t balance. Something is always making demands on our time. So when does the soul get to dance? When do I get to be all that I am?