PICTURE: "Papal Triumph" by Giorgio
Vassari, Mid-1500's showing the church as the Popess-->
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.
With so many different cultures and languages involved and the
inevitable proliferation, demise and revival of countless versions
and variants over two thousand years, there is no one thing called
"Gnosticism." We must content ourselves with using this
word as an umbrella concept, holding within its broad description
myriad offshoots, competing ideas and exotic forms of practice.
PICTURE: "Papal Triumph" by Giorgio
Vassari, Mid-1500's showing the church as the Popess-->
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.
Gnosticism & Tarot
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.
PICTURE:
Popess, Lombardi Tarot, The Gnostic Priestess-->
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 book, 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 Church's 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, Zoroastrian Gnostics and
Hermetic Gnostics. They didn't all believe the same things, although
most of 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 from antiquity to again see the light of day, albeit
in card form.
Gnosticism And The Goddess
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
Solomon's 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 women's 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 bloodthirstiness (Swords, the mercy killer).
PICTURE: Queen of Cups, Ibis Tarot-->
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 world's 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 Queen's 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,
Mary and the children traveled across the Mediterranean to Marseilles,
and she lived out her last thirty years in Europe.
Susan Haskins's 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. I will make direct reference to examples
in various Tarot decks as we go along.
Gnosis Means Direct Knowledge
According to the Old Testament-based religions, direct mystical
or spiritual experience was not accessible to ordinary humans.
In contrast, 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.
Pessimist vs. Optimist Gnostics
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 his fascinating
Tarots 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 that 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."
The Penetration of Gnostic Concepts into
European Culture
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 saving much
of this early knowledge, because they were the one ancient nation
who encouraged the literacy of every adult male in their tribe.
Following the lead of Hebrew tradition, the New Testament writers
encoded a full set of astrological and numberological codes into
their Gospels through the Greek alphabet. The Jews themselves
migrated into Europe around the 900's CE.
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.
PICTURE:World, Anonymous Parisian Tarot-->
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 all 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.
Gnostic Concepts Embedded in European Imagery
and Tarot: Three Themes
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 developed the Tree format.
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
challenge 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 in Byzantium
through the Dark Ages to re-emerge in the mid 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 backward, 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 chapter). 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. This is the origin
of the idea of soul mates.
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 waist, 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, Etteilla,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 Hebrew 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-Christian paradigm.
In Summary
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.
I would like to leave you with one last comment on the gnostic
creation story and the events of the Fall.This is from the most
excellent Frances Yates, in her peerless book Giordano Bruno and
the Hermetic Tradition.
" It is true that he falls, but this fall is in itself an
act of his power. He can lean down through the armature of the
spheres, tear open their envelopes and come down to show himself
to Nature. He does this of his own free will moved by love of
the beautiful Nature, which he himself helped to create and maintain,
through his participation in the nature of the Seven Governors
[the Elohim, or planetary Sephiroth].... And Nature recognises
his power, the powers of the Seven Governors in him, and is united
to him in love.
"It is true that this is a fall which involvs loss, that
Man is coming down to Nature and taking on a mortal part, under
the domination of the stars, and it is perhaps punished by the
seperation into two sexes....But Man's immortal part remains divine
and creative....In short, the Egyptian Genesis [she is citing
the Hermetic Pymander tells the story of the creation and fall
of a divine man, a man intimately related to the star-demons in
his very origin, Man as Magus." (p. 27-28)
It is no wonder that some persons were attracted away from the
fire-and-brimstone Roman church to the Gnostic church of love
in the embrace of Nature. The patriarchal Church lost adherants
over this schism in every generation, from the early centuries
of Christianity through the flowering of the Cathar movement in
southern France a thousand years later, and certainly the exodus
has not ended yet. A philosophy devoted to Wisdom in her female
form ("philo-sopher" means lover of Sophia!) would have
appeal in any generation, which may help us to understand the
popularity of Tarot from its first inception, despite vigorous
Church disapproval.