The Fool's Journey Read online

  The fire of the Ace of Wands, like that of Strength and Kether, is the fire of the Spirit, life as an everlasting fire. With this card of fiery energy depicting the chosen branch of the sacred tree, we are in the territory of the burning bush that was never consumed, the tree of life steadfastly illumined by the path of the lightning flash. The Ace of Wands is a card of pure transformative energy, pure being.

  It is a card, too, of intent. For the single wand is the emblem of the baton in the Magician’s hand. Here we see the creative baton of the Magician as the wand of transformation. It is the emblem of attainment of wishes, the magic wand (though its effects may be illusory) which will put things right.

  As the hastening branch, the Ace of Wands is the power of transformative heat, activating and accelerating inevitable reaction and outcome. Setting in motion, this wand brings a spur of activity, setting the ball rolling, getting ventures underway and then maintaining a steady momentum to keep the ball in play. Establishing new roots and cultivating and maintaining the subsequent growth, it is a card which heralds future expansion and growth in the years to come. It promises the fruit of the seeds being planted. With this card we know clearly the next stage of the journey. We have definite plans and can see where we are going. The sparks set alight, a decision has been put into action; plans are set in motion.

  In mundane terms the Ace of Wands can herald a birth of any kind. The birth can be of an idea, a project, a way of living, or an actual life. In relation to the Ace of Cups, the Ace of Wands is the masculine positive energy engendering living dreams in the feminine waters of the womb of life. Yet, although both Aces indicate new beginnings, there is a contrast to be made. For together they are as Spring and Summer. The Ace of Cups indicates the birth itself, the fulfillment of the dream and the congratulatory celebrations. Meanwhile, imbibing from the Magician the power of becoming and from Strength the dynamic life energy, the Ace of Wands implies not so much the fulfillment of plans, but the planning stage, not the actual birth but its conception.

  That which is conceived in the Ace of Wands, however, in keeping with the imaginative powers of the Magician, is very often mental, deriving from the creative fires of the intellect and imagination. For, again both qabbalistically and as synthesising the powers of the two majors here, the Ace of Wands is the Wand of Power. It is both strength and the will (velle), hence the strength of will, or willpower, to plan ahead and to begin to lay the foundation stones to bring one’s intentions into manifestation.

  With the tremendous stimulating potential of the creative imagination in all of us, this card turns us all into visionaries. From great plans to the seemingly trivial - the relative importance of each lying in the eye of the beholder, the Ace of Wands denotes the capacity to envision in a practical way a future unmanifest as yet in the potential of the present. This Ace signifies both the ideas, and the energy and opportunity needed to put our projects into motion. A card of applied strength, the Ace of Wands indicates, finally, attainment. With the successful transmutation of the will of the Magician into the flowing, controlled energy of Strength, the Ace of Wands indicates realisation of intentions. The journey of self-discovery is underway.

  Linking to the mystery of mysteries that ‘is the door of all essence,’ that only as ‘the mother of all things’ is nameable, and to Kether as Divine Breath, the Ace of Cups corresponds to the eternal mother principle.

  Adjoining with the 11 of the Great Mother in Strength to reach the 111 of the Empress, the chalice of this cup card is the womb of formation which is to be filled with the great bitter-sweet sea of Binah, the seat of the Empress. As the cup of the living waters poured to contain the fish of life, the mystery of the Ace of Cups relates to the mystery of fulfillment, both literally and emotionally, of creation. It is a card of giving, from the depths of one-self to one-self in the union of the harmonious flow of yin and yang, of giving and taking. For the Cups are the suit of the heart, of feelings and emotions, and of course of the element of water.

  The water of the Ace of Cups signifies pneuma (breath of life). It is the well of water springing into everlasting life: ‘whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst.’[22] Brimming with living pneuma, this is the cup embracing the world, filling us with the intoxication of being, the sheer joy of life.

  It has already been said that the Ace of Cups can herald a birth. The birth prefigured in this Ace inherits its relationship to Kether from, on the one hand, Strength, as the life-force, the power of love, and the Anima Mundi (world soul); and on the other, from the Magician as logos, the first word.

  Kether has been likened to an outflowing and inflowing of breath, and qabbalistically the Ace of Cups is the spiritual union of breath and body. Hence, the birth here can in fact often be a physical birth, with the Ace denoting the baby itself, the new life. Connoted here also is the emotional fulfillment of motherhood, and, in keeping with the alignment in Kether, an outpouring, a release of love from within.

  With its blessings of inner renewal or rebirth, the water chalice is associated with the baptismal font. This in turn has its parallel in the hermetic basin filled with Nous, and in the cup relating to Kyllenian Hermes which signified the original man as well as the spiritual man who was reborn. Again the emphasis is on union of spirit and body, Kether and Malkuth.

  Denoting completion and fulfillment the cup of this card is the cup of wholeness. ‘The cup of prayer contains wine and also water...it is filled with the Holy Spirit, and it belongs to the wholly completed human. When we drink of this, we shall receive for ourselves the (condition) of the completed human.’[23]

  To seek the completed human is to pursue the grail quest. The Ace of Cups signifies, primarily, the grail cup of wholeness. As the grail card this Ace identifies with the inexhaustible vessel of life, the crater of becoming, continuously pouring and receiving the energy of creation. The grail Ace signifies the pouring of the Self into the self, the pouring of spirit into matter, and the outpourings of the heart in a flowing stream of love reaching out to love.

  In its aspect of grail card this Ace denotes, too, the beginning or end of a quest. Yet even where the pursuit, and the gain, lie in the empirical world, the importance lies always with the inner worth of the quest and with the inner journey, from birth to rebirth.

  The journey may be through the realms of the heart, awakening aspects of ourselves long dormant. As the suit of emotion, the Ace of Cups can, mundanely, suggest the spiritual union of two people in the bond of marriage.

  In the past, therefore, the card would signify a wedding. In the present day, however, it can simply refer to the mutual feeling of love uniting two people so that they live together as two-in-one. In keeping with the number one and the initiating becomingness of the Magician, this relationship will either not yet be manifest, or may just be beginning. Nevertheless, the card indicates the strength of feeling that will develop over time, leading to strong bonds of commitment to another, and, usually, eventually to children from the relationship.

  Ironically, when it initially arrives, the relationship will probably be greeted with mixed feelings. Though wanted, it may also be regarded as a partially unwelcome intrusion into the contentment of one’s solitude, and a constraint on present independence. Into the peaceful haven of satisfied contentment with one’s lot swims the grail fish, exhausted and needing attention after a long journey. The Ace of Cups shows both sides. For this vessel is that which pours and receives. On the one hand, the card can denote the shores of peace reached after a difficult time. Conversely, it can also represent the intrusion into one’s contentment of something to awaken one to another life where things are not so serene - to life beyond one’s own immediate centre. Waking up to the world beyond, and to its diversity of needs, the next step is to reach beyond oneself to explore the circles of others.

  The giving up of the initial ego-perspective is not easy. Yet any difficulties and responsibilities brought by the gifts of this card are agreed t
o in the choice. Like the Magician, this is a card of freewill. It should be remembered here, too, that the power of the magus connected with the element of water is ‘to dare.’

  This emphasises another point. For, at the beginning of the journey, this Ace can portend a difficult task that will be undertaken voluntarily, with freedom and independence relinquished in order to move from the ego-centredness of the initial ‘I’ of the young Magician, to the shared union of the all-embracing ‘II’ of Strength - the unity which allows room for others.

  More encompassing, the challenge of the Ace of Cups is simply to dare the journey through the waters of life: the Fool’s journey with all its emotional highs and lows. The mystic experience of Kether is union with God and the mystical symbolism for such experience has long been expressed as being drunk with the wine of the wine cup:

  The whole universe is as His winehouse,

  the heart of every atom as His winecup.

  Reason is drunken, angels drunken, soul drunken,

  air drunken, earth drunken, heaven drunken.[24]

  The willingness to drink to the fill the cup of life, savouring the taste of every drop, both bitter and sweet, immerses one in the journey of being, the challenge of wholeness.

  As Tarot is a spiritual path, however, ultimately, the challenge, like the journey, leads totally within. It is the challenge of the Fool’s journey through the realms of the psyche, or through the sphere of Daath, in quest of the ‘mystery of mysteries,’ the treasure hard to attain, prefigured already in the cards of the Magician and Strength.

  The quest for the Holy Grail, or, in the religious mysteries of its pre-Christian origins, the quest for the cauldron of inspiration, led the hero on a journey through the strange, perilous, enchanting realms of the ‘Other World.’ Reminiscent of the three elements of the eastern Aum, from the cauldron of inspiration came the three drops of wisdom, the mystic Awen (pronounced Ah-OO-En).

  The cauldron of inspiration and plenty is the cauldron of goddess lore, which, with its three drops of wisdom, reveals again the connection of the Ace of Cups with the emotional waters of the Empress and with the triune goddess or trinity of goddesses in unity. In the text of the Sefer Yetzirah the three mothers of creation, themselves fire, air and water, are described as ‘a great mystical secret.’ Hermes, guide of souls, was lord of the caduceus and of the goddesses three. The three were Aphrodite, Athena, and Hera - love, wisdom and the understanding mother. This parallels and exposes again the hidden connections between the Magician and Strength, the High Priestess and the Empress, themselves love, wisdom and the mother of understanding, linked together as three-in-one in the supernal triangle.

  The three supernal mothers of Tarot: Strength, the Empress and the High Priestess, are together the vessel, the waters, and the air that breathes on the waters. For the surface of the waters in the cup is the face of the waters in which the High Priestess will gaze to see herself reflected. Together waters and cup are the mirror of the self, and to drink of the waters of the cup absorbs one in the quest to ‘know thyself.’

  With the Ace of Swords, the strongest characteristic derived from the Magician and Strength cards is the contrariness of meaning. For this is a double-edged sword, containing within itself the opposites: creation and destruction. It can bring great release from pain, pruning away all the extenuating problems and freeing one to start again, yet it may also bring great suffering. It is the sword of justice, the sword we shall meet again in the hands of the Justice figure of card eight, and connects therefore with the Magician in his aspect of Thoth, the law-giver.

  Mundanely the Ace of Swords may presage legal matters (the issues becoming more involved with Justice, too, in a spread). Yet it may, more simply, denote an uninvolved and unbiased advisor and the advice itself, or the discriminating power of the mind, distinct from all emotional considerations, to arrive at a just solution to a difficult problem.

  This sword indicates the power of the mind. It is of the suit of the element of air, the power of noscere, to know, and indicates the strength of knowledge in a specialised area gained through concentrated focus on the chosen path. The Ace of Swords denotes clear knowledge of what one must do to forge ahead, and it points to the responsibility of acting in accordance with one’s knowledge, in the face of what may seem to be insurmountable obstacles.

  Yet the obstacles can and will be overcome if the challenge of this Ace is accepted. For this is a sword of power. It offers a position of power and responsibility (often promotion), but in keeping with its justice aspect, the position will demand continually hard, yet ultimately rewarded effort. The gains can be tremendous, but will have been well-earned.

  It is our inner Magician who offers to us the challenge of this sword, which we accept only if we feel strong enough to carry it. This is the sword of heroic qualities, of courage and fortitude in the face of the bridge of trials. On a par with the Ace of Cups as the grail of the hero’s quest, the Ace of Swords is affiliated to those magic swords of myth awaiting their rightful claimant: the sword in the stone drawn by Arthur, or the sword under the stone awaiting the Greek hero Theseus, or alternatively the sword which only the German hero Sigmund could withdraw from the tree at the centre of the vast hall, after the great magician god Odin had thrust it there.

  The central supporting tree of the German myth is obviously a microcosmic correlation of the world tree Yggdrasil, while Odin, god of magic, reconnects us to our Tarot Magician, offering the sword of power to penetrate the veils of maya: illusion.

  Applying the double-edge, this sword of power is also a challenge of power - the challenge not to misuse the position of power. For, although the struggle will often take place in an external arena, the real challenge of the Ace of Swords is in the battle with the self. It is the sword of the spiritual warrior, the sword of gnosis.

  ‘I came not to send peace, but a sword,’ warned Jesus.[25] The sword is not of war - unless the war be with the self. It is a sword of division, and of separation. It separates the real from the false, what matters from the trivial. It is also the separation imposed by the burdens of responsibility and knowledge, by which you may feel, reluctantly, distanced from others. With this Ace such distancing is inevitable. Relationships cannot continue as before; people will perceive and behave toward you differently. The Ace separates from others of the past, which is part of the cutting away process making way for new relationships. It also separates you from what you were. There is no turning back once the challenge of this Ace’s journey has begun.

  On the spiritual level the separation is equivalent to the alchemical separation of the elements to extract the anima or spiritus from the prima materia, during which operation Mercurius appeared with his divine sword. This is the sword then, with which the Magician separates the elements, dividing, and thereby destroying the unity of what was, to create anew from the same force, just as the alchemical sword was thought to bring about the separation of the elements in order to restore the original condition of chaos so that a new and more perfect body could be produced. In keeping with Mercurius as giver of life and destroyer of the old form, the sword is, like the lion of the Strength card, that which ‘kills and vivifies.’ It is the two-edged creative/destructive sword that is, quite simply, evolution on all levels. For ‘the sword is very much more than an instrument which divides; it is itself the force which “turns” from something infinitesimally small into the infinitely great: what it means is the transformation of the vital spirit in man into the Divine.’[26]

  The Ace of Swords, like Strength, is, in relation to Kether, the nearest of the minor cards to the concepts of nothingness and the Unmanifest. Under the touch of its blade, forms again disintegrate and life is dispersed in a total release of energy. The sword acts as the destroyer and disintegrator. It is the weapon with which the Magician brings down the curtain on the play, just as in the Germanic myth Odin reappears at the end of Sigmund’s life, and the sword which had given him so much victory simply breaks
in two, under the piercing glance of this ancient magician-god, whose arrival this time, heralds an ending.

  Separating the stages of the journey of individuation, the Ace of Swords follows the path of the lightning flash, or order of evolution. Bringing to mind the narrow sword bridge of Celtic myth, the qabbalistic path of the lightning flash is, in Tarot, the path of the flaming sword. This is the path of the wayfarer, journeying up and down the tree. Genesis tells us ‘he placed at the east of the garden of Eden...a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.’[27] One further step completes the circle - and reaffirms the sword as intricately bound up with the Magician. For, according to Philalethes, Mercurius, for us synonymous with the Magician, actually is ‘that two-edged sword in the hand of the cherub who guards the way to the tree of life.’[28] The Magician, the great imagination, is himself then, the sword which turns every which way, while the Ace of Swords is the manifestation in the minor suits of the path that we can follow if we wish to be in tune with our inner Magicians, unfolding the knowledge of the path of life.

  The Ace of Discs is the image of Malkuth in Kether. Linking to the world of Asiyah, it is the root of the powers of earth, the kingdom of the physical: in macrocosm the universe, in microcosm, the body.

  Its deepest kinship is with the female and the lion of the Strength card as designating the universal great mother. For this is the card of mother earth, the powers of nature, and of the manifestation of the spiritual in the physical. It is the card of the function of sensation, of knowledge through the senses, and of concern for the body as the physical temple housing the soul.