Switching Gears: Marriage as a Psychological Function*

First it was passion, then it became duty, and finally an intolerable burden, a vampire that battens on the life of its creator.

–CG Jung

)It will seem at the outset, perhaps, that the title and pull-quote forewarn unavoidable doom but it’s really simply a warning, something to look out for. Does anyone really warn you, “You know, about halfway through life, you’re going to have to switch gears and re-approach Life all over again from a different angle” (if you want to continue to experience growth, satisfaction, and a sense of significance)?

The ways that lead to conscious realization are many, but they follow definite laws. In general, the change begins with the onset of the second half of life. The middle period of life is a time of enormous psychological importance. The child begins its psychological life within very narrow limits, inside the magic circle of the mother and the family. With progressive maturation it widens its horizon and its own sphere of influence; its hopes and intentions are directed to extending the scope of personal power and possessions; desire reaches out to the world in ever-widening range; the will of the individual becomes more and more identical with the natural goals pursued by unconscious motivations. Thus man breathes his own life into things, until finally they begin to live of themselves and to multiply; and imperceptibly he is overgrown by them. Mothers are overtaken by their children, men by their own creations, and what was originally brought into being only with labour and the greatest effort can no longer be held in check. First it was passion, then it became duty, and finally an intolerable burden, a vampire that battens on the life of its creator. Middle life is the moment of greatest unfolding, when a man still gives himself to his work with his whole strength and his whole will. But in this very moment evening is born, and the second half of life begins. Passion now changes her face and is called duty; “I want” becomes the inexorable “I must,” and the turnings of the pathway that once brought surprise and discovery become dulled by custom. The wine has fermented and begins to settle and clear. Conservative tendencies develop if all goes well; instead of looking forward one looks backward, most of the time involuntarily, and one begins to take stock, to see how one’s life has developed up to this point. The real motivations are sought and real discoveries are made. The critical survey of himself and his fate enables a man to recognize his peculiarities. But these insights do not come to him easily; they are gained only through the severest shocks.

CG Jung (“Marriage as a Psychological Function,” Collected Works 17, ¶331a)

I suspect I’m going to want to just post this entire section by Jung, but here’s a link where you can read it all yourself if you want (starting from paragraph 331a, p. 193).

*The new discipline is to read 10 pages per day. And if I encounter thoughts or notions I want to memorialize, they go here for the foreseeable future.

Ubuntu. Or No Person is an Island,*

not even the pioneer undergoing a creative illness with the feeling of utmost isolation. Creative minds are indissolubly bound to their social environment, and also to a more restricted specific human context that comprises their masters, colleagues, friends, pupils, critics, and even adversaries. It is impossible to distinguish in a [person’s] thought what is truly theirs and what has been suggested by those around them or what they have read. The power of cryptomnesia should never be underestimated, nor that of the stimulation produced by contemporary events.

Henri Ellenberger (1970). The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry, p. 893-4.

This is about giving credit where credit is due in contrast to masculine boastfulness and the pretensions of an auteur. But not only credit where credit is due but also acknowledging that “my” ideas are always “our” ideas, realizing that I am a spokesperson not an imposter imposer, albeit possibly for a point of view only unconsciously shared or dimly realized. Never forgetting, “I am, because Others are” (ubuntu).

*The new discipline is to read 10 pages per day. And if I encounter thoughts or notions I want to memorialize, they go here for the foreseeable future.

Turn off the Projectors!*

What a blessing it would be, for instance, if even a small percentage of the population could be acquainted with the fact that it simply does not pay to accuse others of the faults from which one suffers most of all oneself!

CG Jung (“Analytical Psychology & Education,” Collected Works 17, ¶191)

*The new discipline is to read 10 pages per day. And if I encounter thoughts or notions I want to memorialize, they go here for the foreseeable future.

Today is Still 1924*

As a matter of fact, so very much is lacking to the educated [folk] of today that it is sometimes hard to tell [them] apart from a neurotic.

CG Jung (“Analytical Psychology & Education,” Collected Works 17, ¶191)

*The new discipline is to read 10 pages per day. And if I encounter thoughts or notions I want to memorialize, they go here for the foreseeable future.

INTUITING TAROT AND JUNG: Card XIX (the Sun)

Introduction & Disclaimer[1]

The twentyfirst post in a series that adds commentary to Nichols’ (1980)[2] Jungian commentary on the major arcana of the Tarot, here I comment on card 19: the Sun.

Over the past two or so years, I’ve been reading a lot of Jung’s writings,[3] and will continue to do so,[4] in part not only because his approach to psychology resonates with my own experience but also because when I read his works I experience a dislodging of psychic imagery that seems interesting and/or fruitful and/or inspiring. In addition, I have been doing Tarot card readings since 1986,[5] when my friend in college introduced them to me, and have even worked “professionally” as one.

So it proved very on-point and kind of my friend to think of me when she saw a copy of Nichols’ (1980) Jung and Tarot: an Archetypal Journey. This series, then, embodies my reactions to and commentaries on Nichols’ commentaries, &c, and will work through the major arcana (the trumps) of the Tarot deck chapter by chapter as Nichol’s book does in order from 0 to 21.

The Sun: Shining Center[6]

To repeat the opening from my previous post (in order to contextualize the sequences of cards from 17 to 20):

In my understanding of the Major Arcana arranged (excluding card 0 the Fool and card 21 the World) in sequences of four cards each (1–4, 5–8, 9–12, 13–16, and 17–20), where the first four sequences represent one of the puruṣartha or life-purposes (e.g., pleasure, power, dharma or service, and liberation, respectively), then the fifth sequence represents that state of one’s atman or spirit in an intermediate state in-between lives. From card 17 (the Star), through the Moon (card 18), the Sun (card 19), and then Judgment (card 20), these steps point to a process one undergoes during what I will call the Bardö state—whether you want to read this liminal life-state in a literal or figurative sense does not change the argument, only its application.

With the Star, we chose the arc of our next incarnation (with full knowledge aforehand) and with the Moon, as a governing timepiece, sank ourselves in amnesia so the experiences we sought in that next life—the things we wanted to learn (again)—could be experienced or learned. With the Sun, then, we “awake” out of that oblivion into the full consciousness of our Self, radiant and ready now to get born into our material forms, to (literally) incarnate. When people say, “You are a being of light,” they refer to this creature, though clearly it already represents a narrower and more limited being than the one who placed itself in the womb of the Moon. In Jungian terms, we might say that the being who puts itself into the womb represents the Self, and the Sun the much narrower slice of consciousness, the ego-consciousness. Astrologically, the Sun represents one locus (not the center) of gravity around which we orbit elliptically. So because we get bathed in the Sun’s light and constantly face it, we tend often enough to identify our ego-consciousness with the Self (the Sun). To correct this identification stands as one of the preeminent aims of the Bhagavad-Gītā but also analytical depth psychology as well.

The notion of the light of consciousness—the same sense of light as embodied in the sense of the word enlightenment—has various meanings in Indian philosophy, but it seems to rest squarely most of the time on something like a literalized metaphor of or analogy with physical seeing. Without (some) light we do not see the (physical) world, and so without the light of consciousness, we could not “see” (perceive, become aware of experiencing) anything at all. I do not believe we must or should understand this “light” of consciousness in any wave-or-particle (energetic) sense of light; in fact, even more exactly, we probably should understand the wave-or-particle (energy) form of (physical) light as a projection of our experience of the light of consciousness—and thus put the horse back in front of the cart. Either way, the Sun typically gets taken as an embodiment of the light of consciousness.

But before moving ahead to comment on Nichols commentary, I must admit I might have once agreed to speak about the Sun this way, but no longer. If the Sun knows in its own way, so does the Moon, and so rather than the embodiment of consciousness and the Unconscious generally, I would see the Moon and the Sun as simply the most symbolic embodiments of those two modes of consciousness, the reflective and the radiant (the introverted and the extraverted).[7] As the alchemists insisted that the union of opposites meant everything, then the light of conscious emerges not from the Sun alone or the Moon but out of the (re)union of the two modes of consciousness. This becomes linguistically obvious in that one speaks of two modes of consciousness, so the radiant and the reflective both designate lights of consciousness, underlying both of which we would find the Light of light.[8]

Nichols begins her discussion with a great deal of emphasis on newness, freshness, starting over, &c, pointing both generally and specifically at the Jungian sense of the archetype of the child. The depression of the moon has passed; now begins the sun of a new season, &c. Previously, she has described doubling in imagery as connected with emergence from the unconscious—“that marks the advent of new contents emerging for the first time from the unconscious” (314)—and one would expect that emphasis here, given the pair of children on this card, but so far, not yet. Rather, she draws attention to how

One feels instinctively drawn to young children because they symbolize the natural self. When one looks into the eyes of a child, one reconnect briefly with the innocence and purity of his own fundamental nature. The child symbolizes the archetypal self, the central guiding force of the human psyche with which we were all in tune as children” (329).

I have three comments to make on this passage and approach. Starting with the third, we might find it tempting to dismiss this claim as indulging too readily in the sort of sentimentalizing our culture makes of children, but Nichols does specifically quotes the following passage from Jung (1951),[9] which shows at least a distinction from the usual sort of claptrap about how we imagine the innocence of children; Jung writes of the archetypal eternal child:

It is thus both beginning and end, an initial and a terminal creature. The initial creature exited before man was, and the terminal creature will be when man is not. Psychologically speaking, this means that the “child” symbolizes the preconscious and the post-conscious essence of man. His pre-conscious essence is the unconscious state of earliest childhood; his post-conscious essence is an anticipation by analogy of life after death. In this idea the all-embracing nature of psyche wholeness is expressed. The “eternal child” in man is an indescribable experience, an incongruity, a handicap, and a divine prerogative (¶299–300).

In brief, in symbolic terms, the child archetype embodies as-yet-realized potential, either in the life to come at its beginning or in principle after the exhaustion of this given life; experientially, the symbol embodies hope. Thus, nothing dignifies the innocence (of the child archetype) per se except that that child (by definition) has the capacity to enter into life and affect the hoped-for desire, whether to undo some of the wrongs of the world or to elaborate something more akin to a livable utopia out of the sheer materiality of culture, &c. Thus, if we “reconnect briefly with the innocence and purity of [our] own fundamental nature,” this emphasizes the well of as-yet-still-untapped potential we might access, here specifically in the unconscious as the great wellspring of “potential” we have.

One sometimes hears the distinction between childlikeness and childishness,[10] as an intelligent desire to avoid seeming to advocate regression; the term “play” similarly takes on two accents, ad Schiller has explored to a vast degree—as Jung discusses some in Psychological Types—how sophisticated and expressly not childish such play can come about. This play, particularly in aesthetic terms—where the lowly pun as a “play on words” stands in as simply the readiest example to hand—involves precisely not, and in fact cannot function in the presence of, innocence. To make a pun requires an awareness of two things, not just the one or the immediately-before-oneself  of the innocent. For example:

Jesus walks into an inn carrying his cross, puts his nails down on the counter in front of the innkeeper and asks, “Can you put me up for the night?”

An innocent might only accidentally stumble across this piece of wit. And what gets involved in deliberately playing with language to uncover this hinges on tapping an untapped potential in the words, seeing a new context where “put me up for the night” becomes uproariously funny or grotesquely offensive. This, in fact, exactly describes one aspect of enlightenment, apropos of the Sun, insofar as it points to an enlarged understanding. The “innocence” involves more resembles Tolstoy’s deliberate use of the holy fool, the clown who pretends to not understand the ways of the world in order to expose them. Thus, in this sense of engaging potential, it does stand apart from the Mother archetype as the Source itself; the child gets fashioned out of the Source, but remains (experientially at least) apart from It.

For my second comment, when Nichols describes the child archetype as “the central guiding force of the human psyche with which we were all in tune as children,” this seems more perilously to miss the mark. As a provocation, we take it as a doxa that all children emerge from the womb as unmarked by the “scars” of culture: children do not come into the world as racist, sexists, homophobes, &c. This involves a different claim than that children come into the world innocent in general, which multiple philosophies and religion actually argue against. Whatever ultimate necessity the intolerant monotheisms argues for original sin and the fall, and whatever the degree and in whatever way that Islam, Judaism, and Christianity each emphasize this mythological hypothesis, the new child emerges with her first breath already marked into the world. If one may rightly rise an objection in the name of fairness, the doctrine of reincarnation as encountered in Indian faiths at least grounds the “marks” one gets born with as nothing more and nothing less than the (non-moralizing) operation of karma.

This all to suggest, against the generally thoughtless popular example otherwise, that perhaps not all children come into the world good. Psychiatrically, we find efforts to brand certain gene-carriers as born-criminals, &c. Efforts continue to impute somatic or genetic causes for narcissism, sociopathy, anti-social behavior, &c. Reading some of Jung’s (1970)[11] earliest works, one encounters a sort of breathtaking breeziness by which the psychiatric disciple confidently spoke of congenital criminality and the like, but nonetheless still almost entirely in characterological terms, not “genetic”. Most assuredly, in this view, the poor incline to depravity simply “by nature” (meaning “by character”), and the modern effort to find a gene to ground this assertion actually represents a more inhuman framing than one finds in such earlier psychiatric work. Because one may—though many might aver the impossibility—correct a character defect; if my depravity originates, by contrast, in my genetic structure, then death, suicide, or chemical management of that genetic mechanism remains my only hope—a grim situation entirely.

However, we needn’t only characterize some who come out of the womb as evil, gratifying or simplifying s that might feel. Whether “good” or “bad”—whether “innocent” or “evil”—Nichols insists on that “central guiding force of the human psyche with which we were all in tune as children,” and we might simply imagine that for any number of reasons a child might not have, in fact, experienced such in-tuneness. One would think that childhood trauma might sever that link, and if I include or simply raise adoption as a related experience, I do so because very many people do not acknowledge adoption as a form of trauma at all but, in fact, its very opposite.

If we all carry this experience of in-tuneness within us, then its sunny glow might get eclipsed by some sort of experience that covers it over. One description of karma, for instance, would suggest that the light of our Self, which we (metaphorically speaking) view through a window becomes obscured when our activities that accrue negative karma “smudge” the glass of that window, rather like smog or soot covering the glass. In terms of trauma, people speak of building walls, and walls block out the Light that streams perpetually from our Self; we just no longer see it. Conversely, if the experience of in-tuneness arises from our experience of the environment, then adoption may propose the alienation par excellence, insofar as whatever “vibe” or “resonance” or “culture” that should have prevailed around the new child to feel in tune has disappeared over the horizon once the adoption goes through. Or, lastly, one might read in Jung and even more so in Nabokov the intense “glow” of a happy childhood that obviously made a very formative impression on those writers, but it might overgeneralize to an excessive degree to impute such happy childhoods as a starting point for everyone. Simply an alienated or unhappy childhood might already provide more than enough to put one out of tune, and to push back an assertion of in-tuneness to age two or one or earlier seems reaching at that point.

Which provide a segue of sorts to my first point, which contends with Nichols’s statement, “One feels instinctively drawn to young children because they symbolize the natural self.” In Schiller’s (1795)[12] “On Naïve an Sentimental Poetry,” he speaks (or writes) at some length about the image children present, nothing not that we get instinctively drawn to them for their naturalness per se, much less their charming innocence, but rather the way they can she us by showing how artificial we have become. Schiller, beautiful soul as he shows, does not make this a carping jeremiad, but rather something poignant; in what we might now call spontaneity, and what Schiller refers to as the naïve of surprise—but I’ve said it well enough already; they show us how artificial we have become, how contrived.

To say, as Nichols does, that we see in children our “natural self” would agree with Schiller, in as much as he identifies children as at one with Nature, but would diverge from his point, because he does not assert a one-sided valorization of Nature. To acquisition of Culture may bring about a loss of contact with Nature such as the child exhibits, but beyond even any argument for the necessity of such a loss, he asserts it as desirable. Moreover, only by this radical dissociation does our fundamental human freedom prove itself—beyond the fact that we have the felt experience of it constantly—when we encounter the aesthetic experience of the sublime. And it seems—this latter realization by Schiller coming in his later (1801)[13] essay “On the Sublime”—that something like this sublime aesthetic response may inform his naïve of surprise; I mean that we may find the proof of our freedom (as well as the most significantly human aesthetic responses) when facing the archetype of the child (realized in an actual child or not). If the child shows our “natural self,” our response (per Schiller) does not reattach us again to Nature or that “original sense,” but to our radical embodiment as a (cultural) creature, a  creature of Culture or, more simply, a human being.

We needn’t merely either/or this. Schiller poignantly emphasizes the moment when the (inadvertent) holy fool of the child shows us how far we feel we have strayed, while Nichols emphasizes how the spontaneity and audacity of the eternal child can galvanize us. Both offer us hope, and both require that we first recognize the possibility of hope, whether as in Schiller’s example, where it seems the imaginary viewer of the eternal child has forgotten hope might still exist, or Nichols’s example, which does not especially dwell or assert that detail.

In passing, I note that Nichols unconvincingly asserts that the two children on the card represent a boy and a girl. Doubtless, whether the artist intended two boys,[14] two girls, one of each, or something else will get determined most of all by the disposition of the viewer, and perhaps even usefully (helpfully) so. I can imagine Nichols’s argument for this assertion resting on the depiction of opposites in Tarot symbolism,[15] and perhaps her non-reference to doubling of images as a sign of emerging consciousness occurs because she asserts these figures do not represent doubled images (twins) but rather polar opposites (male and female). She asserts “that the heavy-set child on our left and the more slender figure on our right are of opposite sexes is underscored by the fact that their sexual parts re hidden by loin cloths” (330). It appears she takes this as an allusion to Dam and Eve, because “these loin cloths are not worn in shame or false modesty, but from an emerging awareness of their individual natures and in recognition of the creative opposites as a holy mystery whose essence must be protected and preserved” (330).

Besides that this seems something of a deliberate misreading for why Adam and Eve covered themselves, even if these two figures do stand somewhere in Eden, then it seems an especially barren part of it with just a stone wall in the background. However, the card hardly seems to have sufficient allusiveness in its imagery really to warrant reading Eden into it. And if we forego such thoughtless or reflexive lurch toward the dominating patriarchal discourse of our culture, then we can conclude, more simply per Occam’s razor, that the two youths have their bits covered in order to preserve their androgyny. Notwithstanding the parental colors of choice when dressing their newborns, we know how people will tend to assume a newborn’s gender along their own gender-identification; [16] people do the same with animals an insets as well. So the point boils down less to what gender or sex the figures actually express and more what we think they do.

The point, then, involves (again) the potentiality that the “eternal child” expresses, rather than any destiny, which a biological specificity would already begin to invoke.[17] Nonetheless, Nichols insists on making a lot of hay about the gender bifurcation here; noting in the series of Major Arcana so far that “never before have we seen [opposed pairs] pictured as two human beings of opposite sexes, naked and facing us” (330). Contextualizing this opposite sexedness as a projection, we can nevertheless note that “naked” represents a misrepresentation of the card. The tots sport loin cloths, and it hardly seems necessary to misread the card in order to drag in the banally familiar cisgendered binary; the point she wants to make more consisting of, “In The Sun, for the first time all opposites (male-female, spirit-flesh, soul-body, etc.) can interact directly and in a human way” (331).

Almost as if to refute her own point, Nichol’s next paragraph summarizes various myths about twins—Romulus and Remus, Castor and Pollux, various unnamed twin figures “in American myths” (331)—all of which seem only pairs of male twins, as (in fact) one typically encounters on many representations of the Sun. But despite this illustrative digression, she emphasizes also that the figures at least represent embodied (down-to-earth) figures. Per the alchemical saying she quotes—“the mind should learn compassionate love for the body” (331)—she sees this card as depicting the harmonious or felicitous union of body and soul (rather than a problematic or problematized or troubling one)—something that dovetails with alchemical imagery around the hierosgamos, or sacred union of opposites, often pictured as  brother-sister pair, &c. This likely grounds her insistence on the opposite sexedness of the figures on the card as well.

In this “vision” one may read out—at least by implication—the (harmonious) union of opposites she wants to ascribe to the sun, even if she gets caught up or distracted by the gender binary. I would say—on the one hand agreeing and on the other setting up a disagreement—that my sense of the Sun as it relates to the Bardö state applies here. With the Sun, we encounter the Self, the atman, in its full glory. For the sake of a distinction, if Brahman (the “world-soul) decides on the “other” side of the Moon (during the Star) what the next (multi-lived) course of adventure will consist of, then the Sun shows the moment when the personal-soul (the atman) of that adventure manifests. Psychologically, this embodies the Self, which for Jung necessarily incorporated Consciousness (including the ego-consciousness) and numerous other complexes) and the Unconscious.

If we wanted to imagine this as a solar system, we might understand the Sun as one locus, whose light so overwhelms the scene that we do not see the planets drawn into its orbit—but I want to disagree with this, and will in a moment. Aesthetically speaking (based on the card Nichols considers), the light of the Sun here casts no shadows; the figures themselves have no shadows. For the Atman, as a representation of the Self (with a capital S), this actually becomes literally true—in a state of perfect self-awareness,[18] we have no shadow. In such a state, it becomes unclear what even the term “opposite” would mean—more precisely, such a distinction becomes misleading.

A union of opposites proposes a third thing, the thing made by the union of opposites—symbolized, precisely, by the child as the outcome of the union of male and female. But what remains important—all biological reduction aside-hinges on the fact that one cannot “derive” the child from either the father or the mother. Imaginatively, we break analyze purple into some combination of blue and red, and with such proportions we might rebuild that shade of purple again. Not so with a child, even in the case of identical twins, which precisely makes its use as a symbol. Methodically, any 2 added to any other 2 always equals 4,[19] but this doesn’t hold for the creation of new human beings (and so much else in life).

Certainly Nichols and Jung do not insist that one may foreknow the results of any union of opposites; Jung everywhere reiterates that the encounter with the Unconscious comes with no script, no predestined outcome, and maybe often not even an end, &c. But Nichols’s discussion still gives something of an impression that the opposites “conjoin” here where it seems, rather, that no “opposites” even yet have gotten analyzed apart in the first place. Thus, when we think about human twins, we understand that their (apparent) identity, even though they actually lack that identity, nevertheless originated from the same source; whereas here, the twins present the numinous or surreal symbol of actual identity, not yet differentiated, even as they face one another.  Nichols notes “awareness of the other always appears with the fore of a revelation. In our Trot, this awareness busts forth, sudden as a sunburst” (331), but we might add to this that experiments in quantum physics have managed to actually create an object that exists in two places at once. S one commentator on this experiment remarked (I paraphrase): if this does not stop you cold in your tracks, you’ve probably not really grasped how bizarre such a thing exhibits.

I do not believe that this deck’s artist meant (even subconsciously) to demonstrate a quantum (empirical) fact; the figures do face one another and, notwithstanding technical incompetence (or at least certainly for that reason), they seem differentiated. An awareness of an Other does come with the force of a revelation, but this requires a differentiation out from a previous seeming unity.[20] If the distinction that this Sun card proposes (of Otherness) makes Bardö sense, then we might understand the emerging personality in front (split into two figures) occurs against a backdrop of the Sun (as the Self) itself.

I would suggest that the general image—encountered in many places besides how it gets pictured on this card—of the face in the sun suggests this. A normal way to view a sun with a face suggests reading the face as belonging to the sun, as an anthropomorphicization. But we might also read it as the emergence of something anthropomorphic out of the “larger” field of the sun itself. Such a reading glances back at the somewhat curious structure of the Moon card, where a crescent face, seen in profile, did seem superimposed if not eclipsing something like a black Sun (if not the sun itself). There, again, the “man in the moon” loses its quality as a personification and instead becomes prophetic or anticipatory, a mirror in reverse that reflects something (from the Sun) that yet does not exist, whose light has not reached it yet—an intriguing or amusing tweak on the notion of the Moon as the Sun’s mirror in the first place.[21]

Nichols tresses hos the brother-sister incestuous pair, familiar from alchemy, points psychologically to  one’s self-relationship.

Such an inner experience of unity will transform the hero’s relationships in the outside world also. If the hierosgamos is experienced and contained, he will emerge with a renewed sense of wholeness able to relate more consciously and creatively to his wife or lover. But if he projects the lost half of himself onto another human being, he remains forever incomplete (333).

Nichols remarks, “as the self is the center of our inner skies, so the sun I the center around which our planetary system revolves” (333). The short version of an anecdote I would want to relate here involves Kepler’s realization of the elliptical, not circular, character of the planetary orbits. I see this as a massively human moment, when a simplifying desire for perfection (circular orbits) gave way to an equally beautiful, but less simple vision (of elliptical orbits). In numerous places, Jung seems at some pains to describe something similar psychologically, and I feel it remains of greatest significance. So just as any system of Sun and planet requires a description in terms of an ellipse, not a circle, so too does this apply psychologically.

Specifically, keeping the metaphor, wherever the loci of the ellipse reside, neither rest “inside” either the Sun or the planet.[22] This elliptical shape changes the characteristic or consequences of the planetary motion, to the point that we experience seasons (in different ways) on the earth. It means the Sun offers the most predominating factor, but that not only do other planets exist, we might actually stand on them at different times, pointing to Jung’s notion of complexes—as alternative personalities (or at least pseudo-personalities within our psyche) as well as rationalizing his sense of possession. Epistemologically, this points not only to a multiplicity of points of view but also to their incommensurability into the bargain; it never boils down only to a difference of semantics, but to a fundamental difference in value-orientation that cannot resolve simplistically. Ethically, that we move relative to two “centers of gravity”—two loci of motion—means not only that we have a radical, existential demand to take responsibility for ourselves but also that the Sun must have obligations as well—we do not merely spin round the Sun, solely or helplessly worshipping it while it owes us nothing more than to just keep on doing what it always does and has. We become in our rights to make demands of it, which the Pueblo people nicely hint at when each morning they venerate the Sun in order to help him up. No simply all-powerful deity, humanity must serve as his alarm clock each day, suggesting that we not only have a duty to do so, for the sake of the whole world, but also a right to. Were it not for our intervention, the Sun might just sleep all day!

So it matters tremendously to “de-center” the sun, whether we understand this in a (literal) celestial sense or psychologically, where we tend, habitually, to inhabit the space of the Sun. There, the other planets (the multiplicity of other points of view within) have the right to make demands of the Sun. Metaphysically, one only rarely encounters the notion that God serves us—I use the hateful word “God” to make this point—the Bhagavad-Gītā provides a spectacular example otherwise in the figure of Kṛṣṇa. Similarly, we rarely feel a sense of beholdeness to our “planets”; that we expect them merely to venerate us, but a de-centered Sun not only suggests otherwise, it also more aptly describes the dynamics of the psyche anyway.

Nichols poetically note, “To observe the great sun wheel moving solemnly through the heavens is to transcend briefly the linear time of our everyday existence with its categories of cause and effect and to touch the acausal world of the archetypes” (334). As with the other cards in this row (the Star, the Moon, and Judgment), we can look at this card at different scales. In the Bardö state, for instance, one encounter no such movement of the (material) sun at all, but rather the (literal), non-linear, transcendental, synchronistic world of archetypal imagery itself. It seems to me that in invoking this archetypal sense, Nichols slides together the immanent and the transcendent. I say this partly because I can find little in the manifest motion of the sun itself that inspires this sort of archetypal feeling. I do not mean that one cannot experience such a feeling—or that it becomes impossible in the motion of the sun—outside of the “mere” contemplation of the Sun.[23]

The other more serious objections involves how the Sun itself functions astrologically as a centerpiece in the calendar time of the year. Precisely the solstices and equinoxes serve to mark crucial periods in the life of settled, intensive agriculture. If I find anything eternal in this, it involves that the cycle repeats, but within their ambit, the Sun grows and dies each year, thus tying it to the sort of consort-figures (as also the Children as consorts) of the Great Goddess figures. Prior to this, as best I can determine, the Moon provided the timepiece, and perhaps the Sun (as a background to a foregrounded lunar sense of time) might have something more timeless about it—a sort of “ground” upon which the cycles of (lunar) change take place, but this strikes me as unconvincing. I have read that if we go back far enough in Egyptian faith, that tradition does not distinguish day and night as strictly different, but rather two aspects of the same deity, one governed by the celestial body of the moon and the other by the celestial body of the sun.[24]

Lastly, Nichols remarks, “Traditionally, ‘the third’ signals rebirth into a new awareness” (335). This invites us to consider not simply how the Star and the Moon (as the immediately preceding two cards) now manifest as the Sun,[25] but also the earlier pairs:

on the level (life purpose) of kama (pleasure): Magician & High Priestess = Empress,

on the level (life purpose) of artha (power):  Hierophant & Lovers = Chariot,

on the level (life purpose) of dharma (service):  Hermit & Wheel of Fortune = Strength,

on the level (life purpose) of mokṣa (liberation):  Death & Temperance = Devil

A brief glance at these pairings, however, suggests they would require some pretty stretched or tortured guesswork to make them work, as also in the case of Star & Moon = Sun. While a third may indeed signal the new appearance of something, here I do not see much of a dialectic between the Star and the Moon, Death and Temperance, &c. This doesn’t mean such torture must yield nothing, but at least on the face of it (and in light of Nichols’s commentary), it would seem something more of a cul-de-sac to explore.

Endnotes

[1] As a general context, I do not believe Tarot cards are in any way inherently magical; I’m not someone who becomes psychically disturbed if you touch my deck or someone who claims you’ve ruined the vibe if you do. Personally, doing Tarot readings for people is one place in my life where my intuitive and intellectual sides work in tandem, rather than being at odds with one another—and that sense of co-operation is a pleasure to experience. For others—for the “us” that exists during the duration of the Tarot reading—it is a chance to have a conversation; as an example, I’ve had a radio show where I did Tarot card readings on the air with formerly incarcerated individuals in order to let the world listening hear the reality of incarceration, &c, but the conversation is also for the other person, to examine the forces, the patterns, the trends in her or his life, and to have the opportunity to change them. I continually ask questions when doing Tarot card readings; I don’t pretend to be or act psychic. And having said all that, to the extent that the imagery in the Tarot operates archetypally (as Nichols claims), to the extent that it can inspire images and dislodge psychic impressions in :those using and viewing the cards, then I agree that the Jungian approach Nichols brings to the Tarot stands to be helpful, insightful, and useful—hence this commentary on her commentary.

[2] Nichols, S. (1980). Jung and Tarot: an archetypal journey. New York: S. Weiser.

[3] Psychological Types (Collected Works 6, [1921], 1971), Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Collected Works 9, Part 1, 2^nd ed. 1968), Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (Collected Works 7, 2^nd ed 1966), Psychology and Alchemy (Collected Works 12, [1944], 2^nd ed. 1968), Alchemical Studies (Collected Works 13, 1968), Mysterium Coniunctionis (Collected Works 14, [1955-6], 2^nd ed. 1970), and Psychiatric Studies (Collected Works 1, 2^nd ed. 1970),

[4] I have Symbols of Transformation (Collected Works 5, [1911-12], 2^nd ed. 1967), Aion (Collected Works 9, Part 2, [1951], 2^nd ed. 1968), Experimental Researches (Collected Works 2, 1973) lined up next, and need still to find affordable copy of The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (Collected Works 8, 1970).

[5] I began with the Crowley-Harris (1972) Thoth Tarot, which I used for many years, acquired but didn’t find myself inspired by Dali’s (1955) Universal Tarot, owned, found myself inspired by, but did not use Tavaglione’s (1979) Stairs of Gold Tarot, used Brian William’s (1988) Renaissance Tarot during my professional phase, in part because the trumps readily leant themselves to that kind of setting, Gerhardt & Zeeuwen’s (1996) Terrestrial Tarot, which one reviewer describes as very unsettling yet still possessing a “strange magnetism,” and finally, Sergio Toppi’s (2000) Tarot of the Origins—Toppi being, as it turns out, one of my favorite illustrators of all time (see here and here, for my reviews of two of his books). I recently acquired the Mary-El deck as well.

[6] The title used for this header comes from the title of the chapter in Nichol’s book.

[7] Diffusely speaking, I would associate the Sun with the fundamental human value of recognition (or outstandingness or leadership) and the Moon with the fundamental human value of empathy—meaning neither of these in any gendered sense at all. The Star, then, I associate with the fundamental human value of fairness, because karma acts as a constraint on what life we next select for ourselves and fairness demands that we honor the rule of karma. So it becomes obvious that the Judgment card must form atoll the earth card, and associates with the fundamental human value of cooperation (coordinated action) with others. I say that Judgment revels itself as the Earth, because in the system of celestial bodies, with the Sun, Moon, and Star, why would we call our other locus of motion (as we orbit elliptically around the Sun) “Judgment”? It seems quite the correct name to characterize a fundamental human necessity, but why switch metaphors (from celestial objects) to cognitive capacities (judgment) in mid-system. It seems almost a belabored lack of faith that, if left referred to as “the Earth” then no one would believe any more that “earth” and “judgment” could coincide; that “Nature” (earth) has no such intelligence? More on this in upcoming posts.

[8] Who, in the Bhagavad-Gītā, goes by the name Kṛṣṇa.

[9] Jung, CG (1968). The psychology of the child archetype. In Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Collected Works 9, Part 1, 2^nd ed. 1968), pp. 151–81. Princeton: Princeton University Press

[10] Nichols makes this distinction explicitly, associating the pre-conscious state Jung refers to as a regression to childlikeness and the post-conscious state as a desirable, mature ego state. While this seems logically consistent, one might still quibble with the identification. I cannot tell from Jung’s example if his pre- and post- conscious states don’t actually stand outside of existence, i.e., before and after we have an ego-consciousness (self-awareness) at all. Because the post-conscious state lies in the realm of death, the pre-conscious state ought to lie in some “before” of life. If we identify human life as only biological, then “before” can only reference the time before the union of the egg and sperm—or, as the joke has it: “When does life begin? With the second glass of wine.” However, human life per se without self-awareness hardly seems to warrant life, and so the “before” in that case involves the period from conception up to the emergence, precisely, of the Sun card, as it were. If so, then regression becomes impossible in the sense that one cannot go back to the time before self-awareness; like the Unconscious, that state remains a hypothesis—a useful one as well, as Kant noted in another context. Thus, the childishness Nichols points to does indeed involve a regression, but to a period after the emergence of self-awareness—the sort of situation, as like Nora in Ibsen’s (1879)* A Doll’s House, when she crawls around on the floor like an infant.

* Ibsen, H. (2005). A doll’s house. Digireads.com ed. Stilwell, KS: Digireads.com Publications.

[11] Jung, C. G. (1970). Psychiatric studies. 2d ed. (Collected Works, vol. 1, trans. RFC Hull), Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press

[12] Schiller, F. (1966). Two essays by Friedrich von Schiller: Naïve & Sentimental Poetry, and On the Sublime (trans., ed. JA Elias). New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co.

[13] See note 11.

[14] Often, the Moon card gets put to the work of depicting friendship between females, while the Sun covers friendship between males. Sometimes, as in William’s (1988) Renaissance Tarot, this takes on homoerotic or homosocial overtones as well.

[15] In which case she might have more sharply emphasized the alchemical distinction between the Corascene dog and Armenian bitch when discussing the two dogs on the Moon card.

[16] Historically, we may remember that at the beginning of the twentieth century, boys were more often dressed in pink and girls in blue; when the fashion changed exactly, I don’t know.

[17] As against the notion that “biology is destiny.”

[18] (not the same thing as Brahman’s degree of self-awareness, of course, if such comparison even make any kind of sense still)

[19] (in base 10, &c)

[20] Whether as an actual fact, i.e., that the now-two were previously only one, or whether due to dawning awareness, i.e., that the one who believed himself herself alone discovers suddenly otherwise.

[21] Someone insisting on rationalism, or perhaps overwedded to patriarchal notions that make the Sun masculine and the Moon feminine—something one does not encounter everywhere, and explicit not in much of Indian tantrism—might insight that the Moon, associated with the Unconscious as it is, simply “sees” (or detects) and expresses the “face in the Sun” in advance of any conscious mind catching wind of it (in the Sun). In Bardö terms, this doesn’t follow. Whatever effulgent non-effulgence Brahman expresses or does not express prior to the inspiration to manifest in a limited form, a form made possible by the eclipse of superconsciousness that occurs with the Moon, ultimately it seems more exact (at least on this analogy) to insist that the Sun reflects the Moon’s “light” (its “face in the moon” its incarnating personality) rather than vice versa in an anticipatory sense.

[22] Considering the vast size and gravity of the Sun, its locus might, in fact, stand somewhere within its interior but will still not stand at the center of the sun.

[23] It seems unduly muddling to try to suss out, in a general way, precisely how the Sun presents an archetypal image. On the one hand, we might scribe to it something like the active force of beneficence to all life, but without almost making it into an expression of the Source itself, which seems reserved (imaginatively, an all ascriptions of femaleness to the Sun in various mythologies) most or more adequately embodied in the metaphor of the Mother. But even if somehow the Sun ‘stands in front” of the Source or issues out of it, it does not (to me at least) resonate with overtones or dominants of the Father. I find it considerably easier to conceptualize the Sun as Horus, the child of (a dead) father. But we might even say that  father itself represents an already gratuitous interpolation, as Isis (the Source) remains quite capable on her own for the creation of the Child—a fact even the story of Osiris, Isis, and Horus still captures, when Isis has to fashion a golden phallus to replace her dead husband’s missing on, and by that literal magic wand inseminates herself and begets her son.

[24] I don’t suggest by this that our ancestors gave no fig about the sun as a marker in the sky. Human culture has more extension that simply to dwell within the lunar round and repeat monthly the same set of rituals or activities thirteen times in succession. So the “use” or the “purpose” to which solar movements might apply become harder to identify. It seems that they might become more fluid—or at least simply not have the almost necessarily, rigorously concretized set-dates associated with solstices and equinoxes (and points in between).

[25] I have already described this relative to the Bardö state and in the previous two posts (here and here) about the cards in this row.

TWEAKING TAROT INTERPRETATION

A reminder ….

. panopticonsRus .

This essay is about symbolism, Jungian psychology, Tarot card reading, and other matters. It begins particularly with some background from Jung and gradually segues into a fairly detailed discussion of symbolism in Tarot card reading. In this way, I can imagine it being dissatisfactory for those who are here for one and not the other. However, the topics are not reciprocally incommensurable—certainly more knowledge of Jung’s psychology illuminates Tarot card reading (and thus one’s philosophy of life in general) and vice versa, however seemingly indirectly. Whatever metaphysical claims might be made about Tarot (or Jung’s psychology for that matter), both provide articulate, detailed, and helpful “explanatory vocabularies” for coming to grips with (1) the life of our mind, (2) our lives in general, and (3) the world in which these live and occur. So it may be I must ask for a bit more indulgence when parts of the below…

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MYTHS of THE SOURCE: A (Partial) Commentary on “The Hymn of Creation” (Rg Veda 10.129) With Comparisons to Sumerian, Babylonian, and Biblical Examples

The Rg Veda (one of four canonical Vedas in the religious/philosophical history of India) is “far more archaic than any other Indo-Aryan text” (c.f., here). By saying this, however, I want to keep things in perspective.

The oldest books (or texts) in the world (per here) are currently: the Sumerian Instructions of Shuruppak (~3000 BCE), which is an obvious source for the general mythology of the region (Mesopotamia) and thus biblical mythology some two thousand years later, the Akkadian epic of Etana (~2600 BCE), which prominently features the Great Goddess Ishtar, the Egyptian pyramid texts (~2400 BCE), the Code of Urukagina (~2350 BCE), generally considered to be the first political treatise, the Egyptian Palermo stone (~2400 BCE), one of Egypt’s earliest works of historical literature, the Egyptian Wisdom of Ptah-Hotep (~2400-2600 BCE), En-Hedu-Ana’s Hymns (~2250 BCE), written by a female priestess and the world’s first recorded (named) author, the Sumerian (or Akkadian) epic of Gilgamesh (~2000 BCE), the Sumerian Code of Ur-Nammu (~2100 BCE), and the Egyptian coffin texts (~2200 BCE).

In this context, the Rg Veda’s oldest purported date must be after the Indo-Iranian separation, which occurred ~2000 BCE. It has been suggested as well that the Rg Veda reflects cultural and linguistic similarities with the Iranian Avesta (the primary collection of sacred writings in Zoroastrianism) associated with the Andronovo culture (dated to ~2000 BCE). So, from all of this, one would expect significant contact and/or influence between the primary ancient Iraqi cultures in the area from ~5000 BCE to the date of the Rg Veda’s composition (i.e., Sumerians, followed by the Akkadian people who, in any case, seem to have taken over Sumerian religion entirely when they conquered Sumer, perhaps in the same way Rome retained the Greek deities). In particular, a significant part of the Sumerian creation story involves a flood story (and the construction of an ark by the hero, Atra-Hasis) so widespread that “waters” (saltwater Tiamat as “the deep” and freshwater Apsû) become expected and taken-for-granted motifs in later creation stories (e.g., the Babylonian Enûma Eliš, composed ~1800 BCE):

e-nu-ma e-liš la na-bu-ú šá-ma-mu	When the sky above was not named,
šap-liš am-ma-tum šu-ma la zak-rat	And the earth beneath did not yet bear a name,
ZU.AB-ma reš-tu-ú za-ru-šu-un	And the primeval Apsû, who begat them,
mu-um-mu ti-amat mu-al-li-da-at gim-ri-šú-un	And chaos, Tiamat, the mother of them both,
A.MEŠ-šú-nu iš-te-niš i-ḫi-qu-ú-ma	Their waters were mingled together,
gi-pa-ra la ki-is-su-ru su-sa-a la she-‘u-ú	And no field was formed, no marsh was to be seen;
e-nu-ma dingir dingir la šu-pu-u ma-na-ma	When of the gods none had been called into being.

(All of this uncontroversial information is pulled together from summary sources for the sake of convenience.)

The widespread flood accounts (see here for more detail, &c) in many cultures (and not just ancient Iraqi but also Mesoamerican, Ojibwe, and Indian civilizations) has led to attempts to find a historical instance of this flood. Geologically, this should involve nothing more than digging down into the earth until a level of total devastation is found corresponding either to the (untenable) judeochristian claim of world-wide destruction or the more modest Sumerian/Akkadian/Babylonian, etc claims of merely local destruction.  Archaeologically, some Sumerian cities present evidence of flooding, though this evidence comes from different periods and so could not be the Great Flood. In Israel, there is no such evidence of a widespread flood. Ancient texts reporting the discovery of sea fossils in mountains and other high places has been advanced as an explanation for flood myths. Volcanic eruption, a meteor strike, the sudden draining of a lake, and other natural disasters have been proposed, but the specific historical locations of each such explanation thus fail to explain (even by transmission) the myth elsewhere, particular the flood myth in Mesoamerican civilizations.

I suggest that what Jung points to as the egregious literal-minded of Western epistemology is (with typical extraversion) looking outward when it would do better to look inward. Specifically, this flood imagery (especially as expressed in ancient Iraqi civilizations and then parodied in Genesis) are drawn from, or make a metaphor, of human birth. The following illustrates a slightly abbreviated version of this point:

The biblical invasion of Canaan amounts to an incursion by nomadic people into a traditionally agricultural milieu where Great Goddess worship was already paramount. Also, Great Goddess worship figured prominently in ancient Iraqi civilizations’ religions, so both in the “insult” of the destruction of the northern kingdom by a Great Goddess culture (Babylon), the mere existence of a Great Goddess culture when followers of Joshua (according to the myth) returned to the conquered land, and the absence of a Great Goddess figure in that nomadic people’s mythology all would have contributed to a distinctly anti-Woman orientation. The kind of neurotic denial (if you will) of this resembles the pattern of emulation and revulsion seen in Papua New Guinea. (I have to add in passing that the further one gets along the lines of settled agriculture, the more and more the status of women tends to decline.) One sign of this emulation and revulsion appears in the blood taboos (i.e., revulsion for menstruating women, i.e., terror of blood, and emulation in the blood sacrifice of animals, i.e., the harnessing of the power of blood).

This is evident in the first chapter of Genesis, which I informally paraphrase in the following due to vast differences in translation. In the beginning was a Void, and darkness moved over the face in the deep. In Hesiod’s cosmogony, he gives “chaos” as that which exists first; contrary to modern usage, “chaos” means “gap” (or void) in Greek. It the opening out of which all creation comes, so it is obvious what piece of a woman’s anatomy is being referenced by this. (It is notable that Woman has been reduced to merely a hole at this early moment in a late BCE culture.) Hence, in the beginning was the Void, and darkness moved over the face in the deep. This “face in the deep” is a literal unborn fetus (I suggest). The deep, of course, is the salt-water amniotic ocean (Tiamat, in the later Enûma Eliš) out of which we all originate, just as we all originated out of the salt-water ocean itself.

Next: And the spirit of the lord brooded over the face of the waters, and YHVH said, “Let there be light. Mark Twain had the adorable objection to the creation story that it proposes light before there are stars or a sun (to provide light). This misses the what is happening here. In that “strange” episode much later, when YHVH sends Moses to ask Pharaoh to let his people go, YHVH keeps manipulating Pharaoh into saying, “No.” This seems weirdly petty at this point, because no one believes that Pharaoh really was a deity. at the time, however, it supposedly really meant something that YHVH could jerk Pharaoh (a god) around. In Genesis, the same claim to “manipulate a deity” is at work in “Let there be light.”

Even the most unregenerate sexist can’t really deny that he (or she) was not born of Woman. And the nomadic people invading Canaan had no illusions that they were the first people on the stage of history in the region. (In fact, the first chapter of Genesis has been established as being added later.) In the days when this faith of those people staked no claim except that it was valid unto itself, with no aspirations to annihilate its historical neighbors, Eden was simply a nifty place specifically created for the tribe. It appears that only later did it become necessary to start making bolder, intolerant claims about everyone deities generally; hence, intolerant monotheism (in Gerda Lerner’s phrase). So, no one could seriously pretend that YHVH originated ex nihilo (out of nothing). And this is why the text of Genesis resembles the Sumerian creation myth (or the Enûma Eliš, or whatever local Great Goddess creation tale that was “in the air” at the time), because Genesis proposes a parody of it. When YHVH declares, “Let there be light,” the claim is being made that he can manipulate the Great Goddess herself (probably Astarte). He is in Her womb, and is declaring he shall free himself. This “proves” he is a superior power. This is what I take Hyers (1984) to be getting at when he describes the purpose of the Genesis myth as repudiating “the divinization of nature and the attendant myths of divine origins, divine conflict, and divine ascent”. because his point is to set the creation myth in its cultural context, the conclusion from his work that Genesis does not borrow or appropriate the Enûma Eliš itself may be exactly true, without denying that the Genesis account is abusing the general mythological tenor of the region.

So then, the cervix dilating, this divides darkness from light, etc. And the next thing is another otherwise curious statement: let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. This restates the Sumerian cosmology that had a firmament between water above and below. But this itself seems already a very literal rendering of the circumstance at birth, as women who have given birth likely know; that is, when one’s water breaks, there is typically water still retained inside behind the infant; he divided the water that was above the firmament [the air] from that which was below the firmament. After this literal display of birthing himself, and thus simultaneously acknowledging and negating Woman, YHVH then goes on to the business of creating the cosmos, etc. This denigration of Woman was posited subsequent to her demonization as Eve, of course (in chapter 2, which is textually older than chapter 1).

Jung describes a symbol as that which attempts to adequately express unconscious material; that is, when material emerges from Unconscious, the form we encounter it in (in consciousness) is already a re-presentation of material that (by virtue of being unconscious) cannot have been presented. Mythology, then, represents a memorialization, elaboration, rescension, and further extrapolation of originally symbolized archetypal (Unconscious) material. To the extent that this material was originally projected (onto the world)–Jung would say, I believe, that it was originally and invariably projected “outward” onto the world–it then becomes an object of discourse (i.e., a sign, rather than a symbol) subject to all matter of cultural manipulation, denial, valorization, revision, &c. Thus, it can become ambiguous in Jung’s work to what extent he is referring to archetypal material still in its symbolic guise or in its acculturated semiotic form. (For instance, while Jung is careful to warn people not to equate “from overweening rationalism or sheer short-sightedness” our biological mothers with the Mother archetype (as the authentic Source we all originate from), even the notion of “Mother” as an archetype is itself an (obviously extremely ancient) archetypal sign, rather than symbol. Even with the advent in human knowledge of the male’s contribution to procreation, there remains something of a quality of the incidental about him (as a Source), so that the female, the biological mother, remains as the most immediately “to hand” if not the most compelling symbolization of our sense of Origination or Source.

There are, of course, many other symbols for the Source, despite the tendency (even among critics not inclined to be Freudians) to reduce the symbol to the Feminine (or some part of the Female). In this way, the number 0 or simply the image of a circle itself gets likened to a womb; the egg (and by a slight topological transformation, the vase) similarly means something midway between a closed or open uterus. And so on. On the one hand, to the extent that a symbol (in Jung’s sense) is still a symbol, it can be reduced this way only by doing violence to its numinosity. The maneuver amounts to transforming the symbol into a sign, which can be an authentic gesture of culture (when the countervailing tendency to revisit, renew, or not leave static the signs is also honored). So the idea that the above makes of “the flood” that it is the breaking of water antecedent to birth is as much concretizing and literalizing a symbol of the Source into a sign as undertaking a Grail Quest to discover where the Great Flood actually occurred.

Where one can more sense the symbolic embodiment of “the Source” in these discourses is in the way that Woman as Earth (who contains the ocean) mirrors and coexists with the notion of Earth as Woman (whose inward sea is our origin). Someone recently rather incautiously claimed that Greeks originated the idea of evolution. Whatever this claim was supposed to mean, as an argument for the precursor of Darwin’s sense of evolution, it falls woefully short; and as an argument for some original intuition about our origins, it’s egregiously anachronistic, insofar as the very first imagery humankind seems to have recorded on the matter already asserted (or intuited or guessed) that we come from the ocean. Perhaps it is somehow a bit backward of me, but I find this insight impressively perspicacious; I seriously doubt that most people strolling around today, if asked without the benefit of widespread scientific assertion, “Where did life originate,” that the answer would be the ocean.

So this is to say explicitly that it’s not at all that humans, experiencing the numinosity of archetypal material around “the Source” realized the Ocean was the Source because amniotic fluid is salty or vice versa. In one respect, it’s chicken-or-egg which came first. In one respect, the emphasis on water is curious, since humanity from the oldest times must have noted with much greater frequency the mysterious appearance of life (nature) out of non-watery things (i.e., the appearance of fruits on trees, the appearances of new leaves on seemingly dead branches). Perhaps it is a testimony to anthropomorphism in human thinking that was most astonished by the appearance of small humans out of women, but even that miracle was explained by the operation of Mother Nature (i.e., children were “implanted” in women by rocks, streams, trees, &c; Jung noted traditions where rubbing stones on women could induce pregnancy); the transformation that baptism purports is apparently a much later human invention.

Again, this material may not “reconcile” because what is in play are manifold symbols of the Source and not only two of the most concretized signs of the Source (ocean/Nature and Woman) humankind has elaborated. At least one the face of it, from the evidence available it seems as if woman-as-source at least provides more symbolic/imaginative detail than ocean or nature-as-Source. In the Sumerian story, for instance, the gods merely wish to be rid of humankind, visit a deluge upon it, and one hero (Atra-Hasis) is saved in an ark. The dissection of Genesis above show much greater specificity of birth imagery. this, however, may be simply a function of being later in history (when greater detail involved in human birth was available); it could be a function of the parodying function of the text; or it could be merely an elaboration of an already existing sign (of the Source).  What both stories have in common is a preexistent entity, housed within the timeless eternity of primordial chaos (before creation), which (with the expulsion of water in a Great Flood) heralds the beginning life, the creation of the world (as an egotistical sense that the world did not exist before I was created). This Great Flood (like the tower card in the Tarot deck) is “the end of your world as you know it, but also release from prison”. In this sense, the “humanity” that is destroyed is something pre-human relative to what we now understand as human. In a rather literal sense, what was before the Flood was an error; either by the genealogical founding by Atra-Hasis or Noah, there are worthy humans brought into being. These worthies, of course, both antedate the Flood, which is why they are permitted to serve as culture bearers and heroes for the new humanity. In other words, (the exigencies of stumping for intolerant monotheism aside) the greater literal detail in Genesis adds nothing essential to the much older Sumerian story. (These details are, in any case, discernible still in the Enûma Eliš, but on the cosmic rather than personal level, i.e., the separation of the waters.)

This still does not particularly explain how water should have become the primary focus; when fruit (or a leaf) appears on a tree, the tree is not ignored for the sake of the tree’s pith, or when lava oozes out of a mountain, the mountain is not excluded from the vision. From a human perspective, we might have germinated within an amniotic sea, but why ignore that that sea is a part of Woman or the Earth. This emphasizes the reminder to not take symbols as signs–the image of Ocean and Woman were deemed adequate symbols, but they were still symbols of an ineffable Source; their transformation into concrete signs (and subsequent elaborations thereupon) does not oblige us to accept the symbols as signs ourselves.

In particular, the Sumerian tradition (and its partial representation in the Enûma Eliš) point to “the deep” more pointedly than “waters” per se; that is, “waters” are already a symbol or sign for “the deep” (which even the text of Genesis manages to retain in “the face in the deep”). Jung would be quick to observe that “the deep” may be understood as an authentic symbol for the Unconscious, and this point to why “water” (more than “earth”) per se would serve as the symbolic metaphor of choice. Thus, the emergence of consciousness itself (ultimately constellated around the ego, in Jung’s sense) is even “further back” historically in terms of a sense of Source. Inasmuch as Jung says all such earlier apperceptions would have been projected, they then alit on birth, ocean, the number zero, the circle, etc, as ways to represent this emergence out of the deep. This emergence, as the death of the previously inadequate human (the nonselfconscious one), the end of our world and everything we know of it, but also liberation from the prison (of nonselfconscious life), along with the preservation of whatever was noble in our precious nonselfconscious condition are all present in this sense of Source as Unconscious.

In the Genesis text, as well as the earlier Enûma Eliš and other mythic texts from the era, we are already very far underway into an era where the Great Goddess has been transformed from a symbol into a sign to a large extent; so much so that misogynist authors such as Hesiod (~750 BCE) and the Ezraic and Nehamitic cultists (~450 BCE) could expressly denigrate it (the latter more brutally than the former). In this respect, it would seem plausible that the further back in time we go, the less explicit a parallel between Source and Woman (per se) in a denigrated sense would become. Evidence for this may be seen in the comparatively more cosmic emphasis on the Flood (as an emergence of self-consciousness, i.e., gods) in the Sumerian creation story generally, but also in the reactionary legislation against women in the Code of Ur-Nammu (~2100 BCE) compared to the earlier the Code of Urukagina (~2350 BCE).

It is against this complicated background that I propose to look at Rg Veda 10.129 (one of its hymns of creation). At the end is the Sanskrit text with transliteration[1]; here is the English translation (from here):

Existence then was not, nor nonexistence
The world was not, the sky beyond was neither.
What covered the mist? Of whom was that?
What was in the depths of darkness thick?

There was no death then, nor yet deathlessness;
of night or day there was not any sign.
The One breathed without breath by its own impulse.
Other than that was nothing at all.

Darkness was there, all wrapped around by darkness,
and all was Water indiscriminate, Then
that which was hidden by Void, that One, emerging,
stirring, through power of Ardor, came to be.

In the beginning desire arose,
which was primal germ cell of mind.
The Seers, searching in their hearts with wisdom,
discovered the connection of Being in Nonbeing.

A crosswise line cut Being from Nonbeing.
What was described above it, what below?
Bearers of seed there were and mighty forces,
thrust from below and forward move above.

Who really knows? Who can presume to tell it?
Whence was it born? Whence issued this creation?
Even the Gods came after its emergence.
Then who can tell from whence it came to be?

That out of which creation has arisen,
whether it held it firm or it did not,
He who surveys it in the highest heaven,
He surely knows – or maybe He does not!

Structurally, what is perhaps immediately striking about this is the presence of three verses prior to where most creation tales begin, “In the beginning.” In terms of a symbolism of the Source as a Flood (whether oceanic or amniotic), the three opening verses are tantamount to an acknowledgment of what is absent in oceanic and amniotic creation tales–the condition before creation (be that Earth, Mother, or Void). Here, it is not simply a matter that there was “nothing” (and not even a chaotic “gap”), but a “something” for which the terms “existence” and “nonexistence” neither apply. Here, it is not that there is nothing here, but rather something that (because /we/ are as yet uncreated) cannot compass or name. But it is “something” of which we can ask questions, like “What covered the mist? Of whom was that?” Fully three verses are given over to naming (by not naming) this unnameable precondition for Creation. Moreover, this Source is not gendered. Nor even is it identified with the “One”. Only after six lines does the statement occur, “The One breathed without breath by its own impulse.”

Indian philosophy is frequently confused as paradoxical, but more frequently this is due to a misreading on the part of the (Western) mind encountering the seeming paradox. For instance, the notion that “existence then was not, nor nonexistence” appears to propose a paradox, since one or the other of the conditions must prevail. But insofar as limited human concepts (necessarily limited by sheer incarnation as human beings) cannot conceive  (much less describe) the inconceivable, then a human concept like existence or like nonexistence both are inadequate descriptions of that (unnameable) condition prior to Creation. The statement, which on one view is true by virtue of being a tautology and by another view is true because it reminds us no human terminology for the Inconceivable can be adequate, is not paradoxical at all. With “The One breathed without breath by its own impulse,” however, veers closer to paradox. That the terms “breathed” or “breath” cannot apply to the “One” is platitude enough, but the more difficult image being conveyed here is the first emergence of (human consciousness); here, language is being asked to do the impossible, to represent literally that which is (i.e., is coming into being) and that which is not (the One, properly or still understood as Inconceivable). In this moment, one cannot quite see, but can “feel” numinously the identity of Brahman and Atman (or, in Jungian terms, the identity of the Self and the ego). In the literal birth imagery version, this is exactly the moment of breathing and not breathing, when we are still “breathing water” prior to breathing air. To the extent that “air” participates in the symbolism of spirit (the breath of life, inspiration, expiration, aspiration), the moment of breathing that is not yet breathing (air) is indeed the quintessential moment; in Genesis, this moment of the imminence of air is captured in “and the breath of YHVH hovered over the face of the waters”. To compare sequences:

Existence then was not, nor nonexistence The world was not, the sky beyond was neither.	In the beginning Elohim created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void
What covered the mist? Of whom was that? What was in the depths of darkness thick?	And darkness was upon the face of the deep
There was no death then, nor yet deathlessness; of night or day there was not any sign.
The One breathed without breath by its own impulse. Other than that was nothing at all.	And the spirit of Elohim moved upon the face of the waters.
Darkness was there, all wrapped around by darkness, and all was Water indiscriminate, Then that which was hidden by Void,
that One, emerging, stirring, through power of Ardor, came to be.	And Elohim said, Let there be light: and there was light.
In the beginning desire arose, which was primal germ cell of mind.

Whereas in Genesis, which this first chapter is intended as a later addition and metaphysical grounding, so to speak, for the revealed history in chapter 2 and onward, there is an extraverted inattention to the details involved. As a demonstration of the Elohim’s power, who cares what kind of “mind-states” there were. The purpose is to demonstrate the inferiority of whatever Great Goddess is being defamed (be it Ishtar, Astarte, etc). And so the Rg Veda expends considerably more attention and imagination on the mechanism and (symbolic) phenomenology of the emergence of the self. One may infer, perhaps generously, that to arrive at the demand, “Let there be light,” Elohim must have, through the power of ardor and due to the Logos (here, rather, the “primal germ cell of mind”) developed the desire and will to make the demand. Similarly, where the personification and avoidance of paradox is complete an thus problematic in Genesis (when the breath of Elohim hovers over the waters), the Rg Veda maintains a more intellectually candid depiction of the difficult-to-express moment of the relationship between Self and ego at the moment when they are (or begin to) differentiate. Also significant (as a depiction of the emergence of consciousness from Unconsciousness) is how the verse “Darkness was there, all wrapped around by darkness” (etc) comes before “In the beginning”; this is reversed in Genesis. It is not that the Genesis text somehow fails at the outset to invoke an earth without form and Void, but rather that this condition is identified as “the beginning”. In the Rg Veda, it is only in the third verse that that which Genesis identifies as “the beginning” comes into view, and even then, “the beginning” itself occurs only in the next verse.

Jung has emphasized many times the vastly more archaic character of the Unconscious; consciousness is a very recent emergence, by comparison, and here the Rg Veda more faithfully captures this. This also permits a certain amount of reclamation of Hesiod’s Theogony. Hesiod, like Genesis, will minimize any reference to whatever is “before” creation on misogynistic grounds, but once he does get around to laying out a genealogy, it proceeds from “gap” (Chaos) to earth (Gaia) through two kinds of “darkness” (Tarteros & Erebus) and then “desire” (Eros).  The necessity of Gaia in this second position is what I would call the misogynist’s compromise, the unavoidable necessity (even for those who would defame Woman) of acknowledging female origins. Int his case, it is a compromise because Chaos is already a denigration of Woman as a “hole”; that is, the figure that Gaia is supposed to account for already exists in Chaos.

Quite obviously, Chaos in the sense of an abyss participates entirely in the sort of “deep” that Tiamat points to, etc. What is at issue here is that Hesiod is understanding it at best in a negative sense. The best I can say of him is that he doesn’t even really understand the symbolism he is putting down on paper. But the sequence of chaos, presence, darkness, and desire [Eros] follows precisely the third and fourth verses of the Rg Veda 10.129.

Darkness was there, all wrapped around by darkness,
and all was Water indiscriminate, Then
that which was hidden by Void, that One, emerging,
stirring, through power of Ardor, came to be.

In the beginning desire arose,
which was primal germ cell of mind.
The Seers, searching in their hearts with wisdom,
discovered the connection of Being in Nonbeing.

It might seem I’m being unreasonable. It is not at all controversial to note Hesiod’s misogyny. Nor is his genealogy here having as its primary purpose to provide a (symbolic) representation of coming to consciousness. Just as Genesis uses some variety of a Babylonian or Sumerian creation myth to puff up its own deity, here Hesiod is merely trotting out a genealogical fantasy as a prelude to describing the Greek pantheon proper. The fact that these partially informed literalizations have been used for major cornerstones (in Western culture generally, and Greek culture specifically in the case of Hesiod) makes them worth debunking.

As just one more observation, one of the more striking lines in 10.129 would be “A crosswise line cut Being from Nonbeing,” which effectively appears out of nowhere. The visual image that can result, of a sudden crosswise line “cutting across” can be quite a surprise. In the first place, this is nothing less than the cognitive capacity of making a distinction, which we still semiotically signal with the / character. There’s s a lot of mileage one could traverse for how elemental and essential making a distinction is; G. Spencer Brown in his Laws of Form states this as the first logical operation. It is precisely by this crosswise line, this /, that the distinction between existence and nonexistence itself comes into being. At once, we are plunged into a world where subject-object duality is available, even if we are somehow not affected by it.

This all being so, this crosswise line, this /, marks the boundary between nonbeing and being, and so (in a literal reading of the emergence archetype) would be the passage out of the O of the womb and past the / of the mother’s genitals into the (created) world. In the oceanic version of the story, it is the moment of expulsion. But for the “emergence” version, this / becomes the ongoing moment of self-consciousness that is our boundary between what Sartre called the pre-reflective and reflective consciousness. If we imagine for a moment, the seemingly paradoxical sense of being somehow the Self and not the Self (the ego), then Bertrand Russell’s “solution” to this kind of apparent paradox was to specify a new logical level. (If it’s not clear what this means, just bear with me.) Another way to resolve the apparent paradox is to “invent time.” (Ditto if this is not clear.) Francisco Varela developed a three-part logic that allowed for self-referential items in a logical system; the sort of item that caused Bertrand Russell trouble in the first place. Varela’s solution was met with pleasure by Russell, who had never really been pleased with having to resort to a “new logical level” in the first place. A part of Varela’s insight involved the recognition that when one makes a distinction, when one proposes a / that divides this from that, we then actually occupy mentally (in a literal way) the distinction itself. That is, if I make a distinction of hot/cold, for the purpose of analyzing whether something is hot or cold, I “stand on the distinction” itself in order to survey the world 9even as I might be hot or cold myself). This poor exposition on my points back to the crosswise line in consciousness, the one that divides nonbeing from being. This is why, in the hymn, there is activity on both sides of the distinction, which is being viewed from the (literal) standpoint of the distinction itself.

So, just as the oceanic version of the Flood (the emergence into consciousness) proposes a distinction that one crosses (from the unworthy condition to the worthy condition, from nonbeing to being), while nevertheless retaining some sense of continuity, this is much more concretely realized in the amniotic version of the Flood, where the boundary between Nonbeing and Being still retains, perhaps wholly by accident, the sign of the / that we cross from the womb into the world. In general, then, we see that if the symbol of Woman has since been turned into a sign (and denigrated in that embodiment as a sign), if the Unconscious has been turned into a womb and the cognitive capacity of desiring distinctinos into the / of female genitals, then 10.129 provides us with an (introspective) imagistic/literary symbol of the Great Flood, in the form of our expulsion out of the Nonbeing of the Unconscious into the created world of Being. an emergence that, again like the Tower card int he Tarot, signals the end of our world as we know it, and a release from prison and all that that portends.

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[1] नासदासीन नो सदासीत तदानीं नासीद रजो नो वयोमापरो यत |

किमावरीवः कुह कस्य शर्मन्नम्भः किमासीद गहनं गभीरम ||

न मर्त्युरासीदम्र्तं न तर्हि न रात्र्या अह्न आसीत्प्रकेतः |

आनीदवातं सवधया तदेकं तस्माद्धान्यन न परः किं चनास ||

तम आसीत तमसा गूळमग्रे.अप्रकेतं सलिलं सर्वमािदम |

तुछ्येनाभ्वपिहितं यदासीत तपसस्तन्महिनाजायतैकम ||

कामस्तदग्रे समवर्तताधि मनसो रेतः परथमं यदासीत |

सतो बन्धुमसति निरविन्दन हर्दि परतीष्याकवयो मनीषा ||

तिरश्चीनो विततो रश्मिरेषामधः सविदासी.अ.अ.अत |

रेतोधाासन महिमान आसन सवधा अवस्तात परयतिः परस्तात ||

को अद्धा वेद क इह पर वोचत कुत आजाता कुत इयंविस्र्ष्टिः |

अर्वाग देवा अस्य विसर्जनेनाथा को वेद यताबभूव ||

इयं विस्र्ष्टिर्यत आबभूव यदि वा दधे यदि वा न |

यो अस्याध्यक्षः परमे वयोमन सो अङग वेद यदि वा नवेद ||

 

nāsadāsīn no sadāsīt tadānīṃ nāsīd rajo no vyomāparo yat |

kimāvarīvaḥ kuha kasya śarmannambhaḥ kimāsīd ghahanaṃ ghabhīram ||

na mṛtyurāsīdamṛtaṃ na tarhi na rātryā ahna āsītpraketaḥ |

ānīdavātaṃ svadhayā tadekaṃ tasmāddhānyan na paraḥ kiṃ canāsa ||

tama āsīt tamasā ghūḷamaghre.apraketaṃ salilaṃ sarvamāidam |

tuchyenābhvapihitaṃ yadāsīt tapasastanmahinājāyataikam ||

kāmastadaghre samavartatādhi manaso retaḥ prathamaṃ yadāsīt |

sato bandhumasati niravindan hṛdi pratīṣyākavayo manīṣā ||

tiraścīno vitato raśmireṣāmadhaḥ svidāsī.a.a.at |

retodhāāsan mahimāna āsan svadhā avastāt prayatiḥ parastāt ||

ko addhā veda ka iha pra vocat kuta ājātā kuta iyaṃvisṛṣṭiḥ |

arvāgh devā asya visarjanenāthā ko veda yataābabhūva ||

iyaṃ visṛṣṭiryata ābabhūva yadi vā dadhe yadi vā na |

yo asyādhyakṣaḥ parame vyoman so aṅgha veda yadi vā naveda ||

 

 

TWEAKING TAROT INTERPRETATION

This essay is about symbolism, Jungian psychology, Tarot card reading, and other matters. It begins particularly with some background from Jung and gradually segues into a fairly detailed discussion of symbolism in Tarot card reading. In this way, I can imagine it being dissatisfactory for those who are here for one and not the other. However, the topics are not reciprocally incommensurable—certainly more knowledge of Jung’s psychology illuminates Tarot card reading (and thus one’s philosophy of life in general) and vice versa, however seemingly indirectly. Whatever metaphysical claims might be made about Tarot (or Jung’s psychology for that matter), both provide articulate, detailed, and helpful “explanatory vocabularies” for coming to grips with (1) the life of our mind, (2) our lives in general, and (3) the world in which these live and occur. So it may be I must ask for a bit more indulgence when parts of the below seem unrelated to other parts. Also, to the extent that any of the following has attached and does attach to astrology, the vast number of ways that astrology has been proven as a pseudoscience (at best) may be taken as evidence that astrology cannot be and therefore needn’t be thought of as “true.” This is no news. Jung makes it clear (in his Psychological types and elsewhere, particularly vis-à-vis psychology as a discipline in general) that the criteria of “truth” will always be inappropriate. In the most general sense, human life is not a scientific phenomenon, insofar as it is neither falsifiable nor repeatable, so the matter is outside the domain of science and can only “have reality” as a matter of philosophy (i.e., as something about which we can offer only descriptions of human experience).

Since the beginning of this year (2012), I have set myself the task of reading 10 pages of a book (generally nonfiction) per day. Part of that project has been to read more deeply in works by CG Jung, specifically his three magisterial tomes on alchemy (Psychology and Alchemy, Alchemical Studies, and Mysterium Coniuntionis).

Part of the rationale for reading Jung’s work is selfish beyond the value of whatever insight, analysis, and knowledge they impart. One of the things that I find very helpful in some of the parables from India is how they implicate one during the telling of the story. That is, in the process of seeming to be a mere bystander to the recitation (or reading) of the parable, it becomes clear at the end (or the realization is available at the end) that the listener or reader was not a bystander at all, but actually a participant in the “moral” of the tale. A related claim is that merely to encounter Hindu scripture (whether simply to read it or to hear it recited aloud) induces some degree of enlightenment even when the content itself is unclear (to the listener). I cannot speak to this last claim so much since whatever degree of enlightenment I have gleaned from Hindu scripture (specifically the Bhagavad-Gita and the Siva-Sutras) precisely arose from what understanding I had, because I encountered the texts in translation. This relates to my reading of Jung to the extent that reading his works has an effect that I must count as analogous to that claimed by Hindu parables; that is, reading his work activates imagery in my unconscious. Stuff gets “called forth” as it were. One of the points that Jung makes somewhere (I can’t remember where) is the general distinction between the psychological “needs” of the first half of life as opposed to the second “half” of life (with all due qualifiers to the notion that life can be divided in this way in the first place). As with most things Jungian, he provides an at least reasonable-sounding justification for such a division: that the first half of life (as it were) consists of a process of psychic accumulation, so that the dominant of psychological activity more often is devoted to “dealing with new material” (as it were), while the process to be identified with the second “half” of life concerns itself less with encountering (or encouraging the encounter with) ever new material and more with getting old material out of the way so that experience can continue to “flow” in the individual’s life.  If the first half of life is characterized by fostering sufficient breadth in the life-experience toward building a foundation, the second half concerns not allowing the existing edifice one has built to preclude new experiences.  The problem of the second part of life consists, precisely, in not becoming too ossified, to get overly set in one’s ways, to remain closed off from creativity and experience—in effect, too become so overly banalized with the supposed “familiarity” of every day experience that growth shuts down (or is more than necessarily retarded). In the first half of life, the opposite challenge prevails, insofar as everything is so abundantly available experientially that no growth occurs (or occurs only accidentally) for want to paying attention. In any case, I recognize that I am definitely in the second half of my life and so, if I am going to continue to foster growth, if I am going to continue my path of individuation, which Jung advocates we all continue to the very day of our death, then my process must be one of inviting the integration of material from my Unconscious, and Jung’s work—that is, when I read Jung’s work—has the effect of calling up and activating material in me that, at the very least on selfish grounds, proves valuable to me.

Jung’s contention, which remains valuable even when one might want to claim it isn’t “true,” is that European alchemy (or, more simply, the alchemical texts he researched) may be understood as indicating the psychological process of individuation (and not simply or not only) an often muddle-headedly confused or misdirected protochemistry that continuously failed and could only be of passing historical interest. On this view, the many drawings and illustrations Jung includes are not simply for the sake of illuminating his points; they also stand as living embodiments of the symbols of alchemy itself and so, at least in principle, continue to have the same kind of numinous force that prompted their creation in the first place. Below is (but) one example; the one that “activated material” in me and became the inspiration or point of departure for this essay:

From Jung’s Psychology And Alchemy

For Jung, what he means by “symbol” is very precise (i.e., it refers to something quite specific) and something, if one is familiar with various strands of thought in Euro-American philosophizing, distinct from the usual casual  sense of symbol one encounters. Specifically, a symbol is the embodiment (usually the realization in visual form) of something that is as of yet not known (and perhaps not even directly knowable). A symbol is not a token or a marker for something already known, in other words; Jung reserves the (semiotic sense of the) term sign for that. In common parlance , then, much that gets called a symbol is, for Jung, only a sign (e.g., a nation’s flag is not  symbol for the nation but only a sign).

To continue with this example, one might (with some justification) argue that a flag is a symbol (in the full sense of the word) to the extent that it in fact embodies whatever otherwise vague or unnamable qualities of a nation that one gets attached to (under the name of patriotism). In the first place, we must maintain the distinction that a thing might be used in a symbolic sense even though it itself is still only a sign. However vaguely we might be inclined to state what a flag actually points to (as a sign of governmental authority or whatnot), this vagueness is a function of not bothering to name what the sign signs rather than pointing to a legitimately unknown “something”. Second, it is also the case that that which may have once been an authentic symbol can (and usually will over time) become merely a sign. Jung spares no expense defending (if you will) the validity of the Trinity as an authentic symbol but also stints no criticism of how that (authentic) symbol becomes dogmatically merely a sign in social usage (particularly in reinforcing the authority of the Church). But Jung has further caveats to characterize what me means by symbol (as opposed to sign). The most important of these is that no human being ever “makes up” a symbol.

Whatever material realization we humans accomplish, a symbol is already always our best attempt, our most adequate approximation of a numinous reality we cannot yet fully grasp. The point here is not that Jung is claiming a human incapacity for invention or asserting there can be noting authentic in “concocting” some kind of sign; the advertising industry, in particular, is paid enormous sums of money to create logos that stand in as signs for the corporations they represent. (One can see here how tempting it is to say that a logo is a symbol for a company, but this is precisely the usage Jung’s distinction wants to guard against). Rather, he is pointing to the empirically lived human experience of encountering something “not of our own making” (so to speak) and our subsequent effort to try to embody the numinousness or strangeness or unnervingness of that experience in a visually (or otherwise materially) representative form. This doesn’t mean that each symbol can only be or must always be utterly unfamiliar or “chaotic” jumbles of imagery. It is precisely the contrary, in fact. Insofar as all human archetypes cannot be encountered “in person” but only through a mediated (materialized) form, it follows that the archetypes will appear as symbols and how those symbols are realized will be subject to human creativity, sensitivity, and attention. Thus, to point only to one of the most widespread archetypes of all, the human notion of the Source (out of which each of us, as human beings, originate) has almost universally been described in nearly every culture in the world in the image of Woman (Nature, chaos, matrix, mother, &c). In Psychological Types, Jung goes out of his way to try to separate the notion of our biological mother from the “divine Mother” who is the more adequate symbol for our numinous sense of “Source” or “Origin” than our biological mothers. (This archetype is so pronounced in Jung’s view, to say nothing of other psychologists as well, that despite his call for maintaining the distinction, his engagement with his material permits him to collapse the idea into a hypostatization of “male” and “female” in the anima and animus complexes.)

With this notion of symbol in mind, it will be clearer how the image I included above could function as a prompt, a psychic goad occasioning further reflection. At the School for Designing a Society, two ideas are emphasized that dovetail with the above.  The first is to understand the notion of “composition” analogically, as the image of a society that does not yet exist (or even an image of a desirable society that does not yet exist). The sense here of “does not exist” is arguably problematic, for if it lacked existence then in what sense do we refer to or orient toward it at all? In this regard, Mannheim’s distinction for utopia is helpful. He defines society as simply everything that currently happens—whatever occurs, is (whether society approves of this or not). So in the South for a time, the current operating order of society included White plantation owners who kept octoroon mistresses. Meanwhile, everything that is not a part of the current operating order may be termed utopia (whether it is desirable or not, though most proponents of utopias assert that they are, in fact, desirable and should be brought into existence). Super. What this points to is that utopia has existence in an ideal form even within the current operating order of things. And one might argue (with some justification) that it is precisely by making utopia available to imagination in this way that it is neutralized and prevented from coming about. In any case, even without formulating the specifics of a compositional analogy, one may state that a composition (and thus a symbol) is oriented to or points to something “in utopia” (as a yet to be realized potential). Insofar as a composition in this sense analogizes with a utopia, there can be no question of asking the composer (or establishing in any way) what precisely the one-to-one correspondence (if any) there is between the composition (the symbol) and the desirable society (the archetype) that it analogizes with. One cannot, in this sense, “rationalize” the symbol by deconstructing it or whatnot any more than one can derive the utopia-to-come by dismantling the composition that analogizes with it. In human terms, the symbol (the composition) is all we have to work with, although this does not preclude making further compositions (or elaborating further symbols). I say this with the caveat, as Jung noted, that one cannot deliberately concoct a symbol; such would only denote sign or a logo. And any number of compositions would, for this same reason, fall into the category of sign. (In this respect, it is an adorable “coincidence” that a more authentic approach to approach to embodying a composition—that is, a way to avoid concocting a sign—occurs by de-signing instead.) The difference is in how one proceeds. Confronted by archetypal material, a human being then attempts to find an adequate embodiment for that material, and thus arrives at a symbol; so also the composer, confronted by utopian desire, then attempts to find the adequate structure and sequence of instructions for that desire. The second key emphasis in this follows from the first: a composition (a symbol) is always a point of departure, never a point of arrival. A sign leads you from the sign to the thing signed as the end of a journey (as a point of arrival); a symbol (a composition) on the contrary, precisely because it is already and an only ever partially adequate representation of something, becomes the point of departure for further speculation, thought, reflection, and human experience vis-à-vis that symbol (or composition). In this respect, to treat a symbol as a point of arrival, rather than a point of departure, represents a major blow to our capacity to find our way out of whatever undesirable trap we have made for ourselves (the current social order of things and the current ambit of our thinking) because treating the symbol or composition as a point of arrival blocks off the variety, richness, utopia, and alternatives embodied in the symbol or composition taken as a point of departure.

So, to return to the image for a closer examination: one especially notable detail is the the order of elements listed in the drawing (terra, aqua, aër, ignis—or earth, water, air, fire). Northrop Frye (in his 1957 Anatomy of Criticism) made the remark that science might indefinitely elaborate the number of elements in the world, but that in the human imagination there would forever be only four (earth, water, air, fire). To say there is too much already written about these four elements would be an enormous understatement. These four building blocks (and “ether” as the fifth element, or quintessence, upon which or within which the other four rest) have provided the explanatory building blocks in human culture for literally thousands of years. And the idea is by no means obsolete—nearly everyone is aware of their astrological sign and frequently whether that sign is either earth, water, air, or fire. That “sign” of the extent of the four elements also may be seen in the relentless presence of the four elements in the domain of magic (and thus also divination using Tarot). Earth, air, water, and fire are four (of seven) fundamental elements in most Tantric (chakric) Indian philosophies; they are pivotal in ayurvedic and Chinese medicine, &c. On and on. My own experience with this four-fold terminology comes primarily from doing Tarot card readings for people. And in particular, what activated my imagination here is the proposed sequence (earth, water, air, fire), since this is at odds not only with my own engagement with this series but also the dominant discourse in astrology. It becomes not only an important point of curiosity but also a principled systematic difference that the artist who drew this very old illustration serialized the four elements in this way. To examine why is the purpose of much of the rest of this essay.

Having invoked this stuff, I want to be clear: one may choose to serve (delicious) vegetarian food at a public event because (1) carnivores will not necessarily feel cheated if they have delicious vegetarian food as an alternative, (2) serving vegetarian food acknowledges and accommodates vegetarians, and (3) the choice reduces the risk of exposure to various forms of food allergies that seem so prevalent these days. Similarly, if my claims about the utility of the Tarot do not on the one hand invoke any wu-wu claims about magic, occult phenomena or whatnot vis-à-vis Tarot cards or, on the other hand, pooh-pooh them, this is more for the sake of not courting any of the distracting varieties of controversy in this regard. Just as there is a value to be extracted from yoga or martial arts quite apart from whether one accepts or rejects the metaphysical or spiritual benefits that are claimed by some, the value of Tarot that I have identified over the course of my life does not depend upon any occult metaphysics as well. Just as I said earlier of Jung’s work, that it is helpful quite apart from whether one could ever do the impossible of proving or disproving it is “true,” so too in the present case. Just as Jung insisted when in Psychological Types he proposed the types as (he didn’t put it this way exactly) symbols that connoted, rather than signs that denoted, the individual realities of people, the helpfulness of the four-fold articulation of elements proves a symbolic explanation for life experience, not some “factual” claim.

In Psychological Types, Jung identifies four fundamental, mutually exclusive psychological functions (the irrational functions of sensing and intuition, and the rational functions of feeling and thinking). Given that Jung’s book is more than 500 pages long, it’s not quite feasible to try to offer a summary reduction of what each of these functions gets at, or why sensation and intuition are irrational (one probably readily assumes how intuition could be classified as irrational) and why feeling and thinking are rational (here, the designation of feeling as rational may seem confusing). The basic distinction at work between irrational and rational is that rational functions involve, for want of a better word, a quid pro quo. Where thinking is concerned, we are all familiar with how one is “presented with some facts” and then, based on those “facts,” one draws a conclusion–it i precisely this dependency upon some identified basis that makes this operation warrant the name “rational”. It is to Jung’s credit that he recognized a similar kind of quid pro quo at work in the domain of feeling. (The definition he gives in Psychological Types is fairly astonishing in fact.) In both cases, the point is precisely that one “knows” something (whether intellectually or affectively) and draws an inference from that; this makes both functions rational. The irrational functions, by contrast, do not have this benefit of inference; here, the given simply “appears” or already seems to be and is accepted (as a point of departure) on that basis alone. Simply by looking in any one direction, you will encounter “on the screen of your consciousness” whatever visual data you encounter. Epistemologically, there is no rational ground for the assumption that “because I sense it, something must exist.” Herein lies the irrationality of sensation. Obviously, we constantly proceed from the assumption that this is a completely reasonable thing to do; nevertheless, it is (by definition) specifically irrational, as Jung (and basic logic) demonstrates. With this notion of irrationality in mind, it is easy to see how this conforms with intuition as irrational as well, in part because we are already inclined to dismiss intuition as irrational (e.g., those superstitious cases where “because of a feeling” we do or don’t do something).

So far as I have encountered, Jung does not correlate his four functions with the four elements (his scientific compunctions might have prevented him doing so publicly, if not privately), but it is easy enough to see that the elements (especially in light of the already vast amount of signification accorded to the elements in Tarot) can align as follows: earth (sensation), air (intuition), water (feeling), and fire (thinking). To be clear: it is not that the four elements and four functions must be or should align in this way; rather, as an explanatory system, one can choose to make this alignment and then explore the  consequences and insights (for Tarot card interpretation) that comes of such an alignment.

One might argue, why bother with details about the sequence as earth, air, water, fire—maybe the order doesn’t matter. In fact, order is at least as important as the elements themselves. The difference between helium and carbon, for instance, is a difference in the configuration of exactly the same elements—so structure, order, sequence cannot be taken as negligible. A musical composition in the key of C has (in general) exactly the same elements as any other musical composition in C, yet it is the sequence and structure that makes the specific composition. A poem might have the same words as a laundry list—it is the structure that distinguishes them. Moreover, a configuration or a sequence points less to any relative position of the elements and more to the relationships implicated between those different elements. So it will not be a negligible difference if earth is followed by air or by water, &c.

The sequence earth, air, water, fire is the same as the astrological sequence of signs (e.g., Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces, Aries); a sequence that occurs three times (resulting in so-called cardinal, mutable, and fixed versions of earth, air, water, and fire). [For the sake of completeness, cardinal signs are signs that indicate the change into a “temperate” season and are specifically associated with Aries (fire, the beginning of spring), Cancer (water, the beginning of summer), Libra (air, the beginning of autumn), and Capricorn (earth, the beginning of winter).  Mutable signs are those that are “between” seasons and thus participate or change the characteristics of both; these are Gemini (air, between spring and summer), Virgo (earth, between summer and autumn), Sagittarius (fire, between autumn and winter), and Pisces (water, between winter and spring). Fixed signs are those that that are “within” a given season and wholly characteristic of it; these are Taurus (earth, spring), Leo (fire, summer), Scorpio (water, autumn), and Aquarius (air, winter). The symbology of of these fixed signs may be familiar but unrecognized in many Western churches, given that these four figures (in the form of the bull, the lion, the eagle, and the angel) have been co-opted as signs for the four Evangelists and thus comprise a widespread Christian image. When people accuse various Christian churches of “pagan” roots, this is one of the authentic pieces of evidence of that, but one nevertheless finds this symbol in both Catholic and Protestant settings.] In the popularized form of chakras in the west, the sequence (of the first four) is earth, water, fire, air—which is the sequence I originally encountered and have used to date in Tarot card reading as well. [In many, if not most, “descriptions” of Tarot decks, the sequence of suits is swords (air), cups (water), clubs (fire), discs (earth). This is the same order in conventional playing card decks as well; more will be said about this below.]

Sequence matters for the consequences that arise from adopting a a given sequence; it cannot be a question that there is only one right sequence, especially in a domain like this where human values and explanations are at stake. This would be intellectually sloppy were it not for the fact that we can only ever generate a relative adequate explanation, not in some scientifically verifiable sense, but in the moment by moment actual human interaction with oneself or another human being. The only cardinal sin in this respect is mistaking the system for true, in fact—in placing the knowledge I possess about (say) “Taurus” or “fire” as trumping all of the variation of human expression I actually encounter from someone “born in Taurus” or who exhibits a “fire” tendency. Ultimately, the fatuous dismissal by science of these kinds of explanatory systems redounds on science itself, even as it refuses to acknowledge its own epistemology. By definition, science can only strip away every existentially human aspect in order to talk about what is most inessential (on the human plane) about a human being—her material make-up. Physical materiality matters, of course, precisely where physical make-up is concerned (for instance, where medical biology or medicine is involved), but elsewhere it is not merely a non sequitur (e.g., in the domain of psychology or any other domain where existential condition in the cosmos is in play) but proves actually toxic and destructive for the human condition—this is what is meant when people object to “reductionist” explanations, and rightly so. Ont his view, it is completely unnecessary to try to figure out how to “reconcile” one chakric sequence with the sequence of (Western) astrology, though obviously there may be fruitful crosspollinations that come from the attempt. Ultimately, the elements themselves (air, water, earth, fire) are at the very least originally symbols, even if they have since dogmatically reduced to signs by long usage. One in fact might even find it fruitful to look at how the (various sequences of) chakras (earth/sensation, water/feeling, fire/thinking, air/intuition) relate or not to the astrological sequence (earth/sensation, air/intuition, water/feeling, fire/thinking) and to the alchemical sequence in the illustration above (earth/sensation, water/feeling, air/intuition, fire/thinking). [It goes without saying that the proposed terms after each / above are debatable–I’ll even anticipate myself and say that the different configurations one might offer instead would prove necessary to really making the various systematizations “work.” What is clear from Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy is that this very variety of expressions is endemic to alchemy–and explains (in contrast to the uncharitable insistence that this is all just errant nonsense) by the sequences of chakras, astrological signs, and the list in the alchemical illustration above would be different. On the one hand, this can be explained in that astrology, chakras, and alchemy are all pseudosciences, which is tantamount to admitting, again, that we should neither expect them to be true nor to abandon them for not being what they are not. Underneath all of these systems, Jung might argue, are humanly, perhaps even universally, recurring archetypes which each “system” attempts to name with the symbols of astrological signs, alchemical elements, or chakric nodes. In Jung’s Psychological Types, his own terminology for these archetypes are sensation, intuition, feeling, and thinking. And if I’m using them it’s partly for their flexibility and the intelligence with which Jung embodied them but also, perhaps in a spirit similar to Jung, to avoid the complacent dismissal that may arise when one talks too much about astrology, chakras, or ancient elements. Whatever terminology we use, the psychic functions of sensation, thinking, feeling, and intuition are empirically observable, lived everyday human experiences, and imagining that we cannot talk about these things using a vocabulary like air, earth, water, and fire (or astrological symbols, or chakric names) has the tendency of abandoning to the empty sayings of science the “duty” or responsibility of providing such a way to talk about that human experience in the first place. Thus, one encounters no end of empty-headed “scientistic” superstition in the form of “genetic explanations” for human behavior or the pseudoscience of sociolinguistics, which perpetrates an intellectual fraud on people every bit as “untrue” as astrology, chakras, or ancient elements.]

The difference between the sequence in the alchemical illustration (earth, water, air, fire) and the astrological or chakric (ayurvedic) sequences may boil down to a difference in what significance someone accords to each element; i.e., precisely how earth, water, fire, and air might or does line up with Jung’s four functions (sensation, intuition, thinking, and feeling) will be not only open to variation (since, on the one hand, there is no question of truth but only thoroughgoing consistency in the application of the terms) but will also (as Jung’s psychological typology suggests) necessarily vary according to the explanatory emphases of the psychological type doing the categorizing. For example, in one prevailing set of symbol associations, air and thinking tend to be linked, while water get linked with feeling; however, with equal justice (and equally often) water gets associated with intuition. Viewed one way then, the alchemist’s progress of “earth, then water” may be construed as a progression from “sensation to feeling” or “sensation to intuition.” If there is any reason to pick one over the other, Jung’s placement of irrational functions together (i.e., sensation and intuition) might signal a preference for the latter. But such a decision is itself a function of Jung construing feeling as rational and intuition as irrational in the first place; a different psychological type would reckon feeling irrational and intuition rational (or neither, or both, or something else entirely, &c).

One thing that the alchemical, astrological, ayurvedic (chakric) systems all seem to agree upon is that earth is the first part of the sequence. A caveat must be offered here. In the alchemical treatises that Jung surveys in Psychology and Alchemy, that which signifies the beginning of the work also signifies the end; symbolically, then, earth occurs at the head and tail of the sequence. This may seem intellectually disingenuous, but not only is the beginning of any circle also the end, the intent of alchemy (as also the procession of time from one year to the next) consists in progressing from manifestation to manifestation, from realization to realization. Thus earth, in keeping with the sense of a symbol I desire to protect, serves as a point of arrival and point of departure simultaneously; more precisely, the moment one reaches a point of arrival, it legitimately should become the next point of departure. There is certainly no mystical obscurantism going on in this. Thus, merely for convenience one might describe the sequence as air, water, fire, earth (or, from the alchemical example, water, air, fire, earth; or in the ayurvedic sequence, water, fire, air, earth). [In the interest of accuracy, the ayurvedic or chakric sequence is not limited only to four elements; the first four chakras do correspond to the “gross” elements of earth, water, fire, and air, but the last three correspond to the “subtle” elements of time, space, and consciousness (or sound, light, and consciousness, or other similar terms). In this sequence, manifestation moves beyond the materiality of the gross elements into the subtle elements, and only then “reincarnates” figuratively and literally (as earth). Personally, I think this extension of the elements in the Indian is especially canny, but Jung’s system in general did not make any genuine feint in the direction of trying to accommodate this. He refers often to the notion of the self, which is comprised of the (conscious) ego and the (unconscious) remainder—and it would be in the unconscious parts of the self that one might further locate these additional chakric elements. Thus, even as Westerns symbolism unfortunately, with its unregenerate literal-mindedness, takes account only of the four gross elements, it nevertheless does not wholly sacrifice its utility or its capacity to be expanded, by those who would seek to, to accommodate the broader explanatory capacity of the chakric 7-fold sequence.]

For the purpose of this post at least, it will suffice to limit the discussion to the gross elements, remembering that (whether one looks at 4 or 7 elements) the notion of recurrent cycles (and the circle) is a wholly central facet of all the systems under examination. Moreover, it could never be a question whether a 4-element or 7-element system is more true or, necessarily, even “better.” In the first place, where Tarot is concerned, the four suits of the minor arcana (swords, cups, wands, discs) clearly correspond to the four gross elements; a simple enough conclusion to then infer is that the major arcana may be taken as embodying the remaining three subtle chakric elements. The fact that there are 21 major arcana (more precisely, the Zero of the Fool as the circular symbol of “all” and 21 progressively embodied other major arcana), suggest that the major arcana themselves may be divided into three sequences of 7 cards apiece. In Jung’s symbology, his focus on the four “gross” elements of psychology (i.e., the observable functions) thus also maintains an agnosticism about the nature of the unobservable (unconscious) “subtle” functions. What is salient here is that Jung does not permit himself to over-generalize the nature of the (unknowable) unconscious functions by analogizing them in some way with the conscious functions. He does not claim, for instance, that there is some unconscious equivalent of the functions of sensation, thinking, feeling, or intuition. This is an important piece of restraint on his part, because in all explanatory systems, which can only ever be incomplete, there is usually the temptation (if not an apparent necessity) to use the available heap of terms one is using to account for everything, even when it is not appropriate to do so. In binary explanations (e.g., to pick one quick example: the notion that everything can be boiled down in human behavior to love or fear), this binary immediately calls up the counter-factual experiences of “fearing what we love” and “loving what we fear”. This love/fear binary cannot, however, account for these counterfactuals and must either ignore them or cram them into one or the other of the available categories. So Jung’s restraint in not using his four observable psychic functions as a Procrustean bed for the unobservable functions of the Unconscious avoids distorting the “subtle” elements of the Unconscious (if we ever wanted to try to extend Jungian depth psychology). [This does not mean that Jung did not offer “names” for the structure of the Unconscious. Certainly his use of the term “self” is the analogy of the highest chakra, and his notion of archetypes corresponds to the chakra variously associated with  “space”.] Similarly, in astrology, although the popularized form of it tends to only speak of one’s Sun sign and the main thrust of symbology covers only the gross elements of air, water, fire, and earth, a more detailed familiarity with the system shows the central influence of 7 planets overall (as also then the 7 gods of the heavens). Given how old and widespread astrology is, and in the main how secretively it was treated as a revealed knowledge, it is probably vanishingly difficult at this point to determine to what extent astrology ever sustained a principled distinction between gross and subtle elements. It is very clear that much of astrology these days has been wholly materialized (even when people use the term “energy” rather than matter). But what this likely means in practice is that astrology will tend to over-generalize the materialism of the gross elements to the explanatory detriment of the subtle element. The avowedly “practical” nature of astrology may also contribute to this tendency to talk about materialities or observable actualities. In alchemy, at least as Jung surveys it, this is obviously the case. Jung expends great care to show that alchemists were, in fact, engaged in a ‘spiritual” process, where some were far more aware of this than others. But in the course of even these spiritualized alchemists, they never had more than four elements and everything that might “properly” be lodged in the domain of the subtle elements is either mystified (as god or the holy ghost of Christ) or various claims are made of elements that “over-generalize” their explanatory utility. Again, the particularly practical emphasis of alchemy somewhat rationalizes this excessive emphasis on the gross elements; there is a kind of sense that one needn’t pay too much attention to the details of any ‘subtle” aspects because it will, in effect, work itself out. It would be somewhat akin to someone doing akido without devoting any attention to the underlying metaphysical or spiritual aspect of the practice, either trusting that it will “come to the fore” itself merely by proper performance of the work, or perhaps even without ever thinking about it at all. The blunt benefit of this notwithstanding, unless we are going to insist that some people just can’t “handle thinking about it,” there is no intellectual reason for hobbling the explanatory flexibility of a hermeneusis just because 4 is easier to deal with than 7, or something like that. More precisely, the very act of “leaving it to god” (or any other obscurantist mechanism) to work out the spiritual aspects of alchemical practice is contrary to the generally rationalist pretense of alchemy in the first place (and thus also generally contrary to any rationalist pretense of any endeavor when it allows itself to adopt an irrationality in its scheme, even to make a fetish of it–as when sociology gleefully admits an inability to define the object of its supposed discipline, when physics cannot define  central object of its study, energy, or intelligence “researchers” admit in a US court of law that they can no more define what intelligence is, much less measure it). However, to be clear, even this generalization (in a context of 1,7000 years of alchemy) can be qualified–the Ripley Scrowle at least (as just one examples) specifically notes 7 steps of the alchemical process, though it is also possible that, by the time of its composition, this 7 had be articulated as the 7 heavenly bodies rather than seven terrestrial/spiritual elements.  [Since this paragraph is already too long, it can only help to add to it. With respect to how alchemists, with only four elements at their disposal, inevitably wound up attributing in explicable categories to things like mysteries and obscurities, Jung can still conclude, “It is clear enough from this material what the ultimate aim of alchemy really was: it was trying to produce a corpus subtile, a transfigured and resurrected body, i.e., a body that was that same time spirit” (Psychology and Alchemy, ¶511).

In this it finds common ground with Chinese alchemy, as we have learned from The Secret of the Golden Flower. There the main concern is the “diamond body,” in other words, the attainment of immortality through the transformation of the body. The diamond is an excellent symbol because it is hard, fiery, and translucent [i.e., water-like]. Orthelius tells us that the philosophers have never found a better medicament than that which they called the noble and blessed stone of the philosophers, on account of its hardness, transparency, and rubeous hue (Ibid, ¶511)

I cite this passage in detail to underline once again the symbolic inversion that culture has affected in the suits of conventional playing cards. There, the suit of diamonds is typically the least valued or weakest suit, while here is it clearly the pinnacle of the progression that goes from spades/swords, hearts/cups, clubs/wands, and diamonds/discs. That Orthelius refers to the diamond as rubeous even discloses why the suit of diamonds would be red.]

To press further into Tarot symbolism: one of the things apparent from Jung’s Psychological Types (it may even be the point of most enduring significance for humankind) is the notion that the 8 types Jung specifically names constitute 8 angles of “truth” that are otherwise incommensurable to any other. Here, the details of the 8 types are not what matters, but only a description of how one arrives at them.

In his pairings of sensation and intuition (on the one hand) and thinking and feeling (on the other), Jung defines each of these functions in terms mutually exclusive to the others. Moreover, while an emphasis by a person on sensation simultaneously affects an antithetical deëmphasis intuition (and vice versa), the same is true of thinking with respect to feeling (and vice versa). So, if one’s primary function is feeling (imagine it placed at 12 o’clock on a clock) then thinking (placed at 6 o’clock on a clock) is necessarily the inferior function. By primary and inferior here is not implied a better or worse but rather only that the primary function is the most habitually developed, while the inferior function is the most undeveloped. The platitude that highly cerebral people often have a very childish range of affective expression (or can’t express themselves at all) is simply a general indication of this observation. It is not, as one sometimes hears, that “thinkers” have no feelings (or vice versa), but only that the relative sophistication, variety, and facility of the primary function far outshines the relatively underdeveloped, clunky, or inept inferior function. Jung adds further that if one’s primary function tends to be extraverted, then the inferior function tends to be introverted and vice versa. Lastly, while the primary function tends to be under “conscious mental control,” the inferior function, being predominantly sunk in the unconscious, typically has a collective (i.e., transpersonal) or “archaic” quality. To illustrate what this might look like, an overly rational person might tend to be seized by absolute childish wantings or querulous, almost petulant demands, etc. Similarly, a charismatic and gregarious person might be subject to positively adolescent fits like “everyone hates me.” Meanwhile, whichever function tends to have the primary role (along with its antithesis in the unconscious), the remaining dyad (sensation/intuition when thinking or feeling tends to predominate, thinking/feeling when sensation or intuition tends to predominate) serves in a kind of supporting role, or as a half-conscious, half-unconscious mediation between the primary and inferior function.

For those familiar with the Myers-Briggs, the above serves to illustrate (to some extent) where some of the famous letter combinations (like INFP, ESTJ, INSP, &c) come from. If one is an intuitive (N) as opposed to an sensing-type (S), then the rational functions (thinking T, and feeling F) will be the support functions for the primary N, hence the NT or the NF (whether this core type is then introverted I or extraverted E and whether it is characterized by perceiving P or judging J thus yields the familiar four letter-dyads such as INTJ, ENFP, &c). What is not yet clear to me, as I’ve not read Myers-Briggs work specifically, is why in their scheme when (for instance, sensing S predominates) that a judging J or perceiving P function comes to the fore (so that one ends up with two more core types, SJ and SP). It is clear from Jung’s exposition in Psychological Types (upon which Myers-Briggs base their work) that he uses the term perceiving as a kind of analogy for irrational, insofar as perceiving types “accept the given as given” while the judging type is more analogous to a rational type, insofar as judging involves making a judgment. But from Jung’s book, it is not clear why this resort should be taken. In Keirsey & Bates’ Please Understand Me, which was another major deployment of the psychological typing schema (based on Jung’s, but after Myers-Briggs) also adopts the J and P distinction seemingly in contradiction to Jung’s scheme.

As Jung describes it in Psychological Types, his reference to 8 types points to the four constellations of functions that result from placing each function as primary (i.e., a primarily intuitive type with thinking and feeling as mediating functions to an unconscious sensing function or NTFS, a primarily thinking type supported by intuition and sensation over an inferior feeling function or TNSF, a primarily sensing type with thinking and feeling as mediating functions to an unconscious intuitive function or STFN, and a primarily feeling type supported by intuition and sensation over an inferior thinking function or FNST) with an introverted and extraverted version each.

In terms of what constitutes “truth,” the difference in orientation between extraversion and introversion proves to be highly significant; Jung even describes it as “fundamentally irritating.” Appeals to experience about this notwithstanding, the issue is that the difference in how “truth” is constructed and claimed winds up being effectively antithetical (and almost never a matter simply of semantics). But this fundamentally irritating difference manifests also depending upon the constellation of one’s functions—someone with an NTFS constellation is liable to find someone with any of the other three constellations irritating as well, or at least perversely determined to misconstrue everything one intends. Even when this difference can be negotiated gracefully, the fact will remain that the different emphasis in the constellation of functions will  tend to yield differences in emphasis when it comes to describing human experience, the world, &c. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the four different constellations of functions (plus their two variations of introversion and extraversion) effectively amount to different dialects.

The purpose of this (perhaps seeming) digression is to provide enough ground simply to explain a difference in the astrological, ayurvedic, or alchemical sequence of elements in terms of whatever psychological type the author of any given version of those series embodied. What is unfortunately but crucially necessary to underline in this is not simply that the apparent differences between the astrological, ayurvedic, or alchemical list of elements is not “merely semantic”. It is clear that all three lists begin with earth, but the next “step” in the sequence varies as air, water, and water (respectively). Presumably some system out there has fire “second”.  This difference between air or water (and even water and water in the ayurvedic or alchemical sequence) cannot be explained away with an argument of the type “well, by air the astrologer really meant the same thing the ayurvedic or alchemist meant.” In point of fact, this might be true if only because one system influenced another, but in general, the internal consistency of one system is not analogous (is incommensurable) with the internal consistency of another. More importantly, the specific shift of emphasis (for example, placing intuition above thinking, or some such) means that what “thinking” means when it is a support element for “intuition” is not the same thing as thinking when it is the primary function. Interpersonally, it is easiest to note this when dealing with someone who places our “inferior” function as their primary. What the intuitive construes as sensation can often be so “loopy” as to make a sensing-type pull her hair out, while what the intuitive-type considers as the sensing-type’s utter inability to get beyond being so damned literal-minded is a source of frequent exasperation. In theological circles, the high dudgeon and ceaseless controversy over literal and allegorical interpretations of the bible can be illuminated in this light. Similarly, the difference between thinking and feeling is so pronounced that thousands of years of patriarchy have now aligned this difference (incorrectly) along gendered lines. Notably, the claim by thinkers (men) is that feelers (women) are irrational, which itself may be understood, partially, as a function of the tendency of primary thinkers to have archaic, undeveloped feeling functions. Similarly, feelers (women) claim that thinkers (men) have no feelings at all, a point of view that again is illuminated by the tendency of feelers to have underdeveloped habits of (analytic) thought. The point of all of this is that the valence that arises from the primacy of one function renders the interpretation of all other functions in the light of that primary—and only other people who share one’s primary are going to be easily inclined to agree with whatever emphases one is throwing around.

All this being said, while the lens of personality type not only defines but also defines where one’s attention is placed (what emphases will tend to be made), one can still say that we all address ourselves to the same kind of numinousness of human experience. Jung was perfectly frank that all evidence points to (and in fact demonstrates) the impossibility of “seeing reality” outside of our perceptions, but he also absolutely accepted the hypothesis that there is some kind of “out there” out there. It is not, in fact, necessary to resort to such naïve realism (or even to take such a hypothetical reality in, precisely, a hypothetical sense). Nevertheless, it would only take a tweak on Jung’s outlook in general—the addition of a sort of quotation marks around certain terms and usages he took as hypothetically worth asserting—to sidestep this unnecessary (and unrealistic) realism.  That is, Jung’s scheme describes archetypes as “forms of thoughts” so whether sense data originates from without or within, the forms of thought in cognition will determine the contents of consciousness regardless. Consequently, similarities or (apparent) analogies between different explanatory schema may be said as arising precisely from the similarities or apparent analogies present in human experiences of forms of thought themselves.

To return to Tarot symbolism, the assignment of “intuition” to air (as opposed to water) would easily be one of those controversial moments. For one, a dominant symbol for intuition is, precisely, the ocean and water signs (Cancer, Scorpio, and Pisces) are famous or notorious for their intuitive capacities (i.e., are credited with tremendous intuitive capacities). Similarly, the air signs (Gemini, Libra, Aquarius) tend to be associated with reason, though the imputed “ADHD” of Geminis and the “spiritual” detachment of Aquarius make both seem colored by something else besides just “pure rationality”. And this can only be considered the tip of a very large explanalogical iceberg.

More light may be shed on this from another angle, by understanding sorcery as a masculine imitation of female creativity. That is, if the preeminent act of female creativity will be identified in the creation of new life, then this process may be characterized in four stages: conception (air, or in-spiration), gestation (in the watery amniotic ocean), labor (as the willing of the new life to be realized), and birth (as the physical realization of the process of creation). In the artistic act of creation (monopolized in a historical sense and a real sense often by males only) the phrasing I have chosen brings out how the artistic (male-creative) process is a mimicry of female creation: inspiration, gestation, labor, and realization. The process of magic (and thus also alchemy, both in Europe and in its Tantric forms in India) are imitations of female creativity. [And I want to add: prior to so-called civilization with the advent of the Agricultural Revolution, the notion of Woman as Source—the identification was not everywhere always with Woman—made Her the Creatrix of everything. She was, in the most literal sense, THE creator. With the advent of the Agricultural Revolution, this creativity was at first embodied in all of the world-famous images of the Great Mother we still are aware of (Isis, Astarte, &c), but this creativity became gradually narrowed down to the production not of everything but only crops and children. And eventually even this miracle or dignity was undermined as men began insisting that it was they were the creative principle in reproduction because Woman was merely a passive vessel. Even at the height of such sexism, however, no man could deny he came from a woman—certain fatuous myths about Athena notwithstanding. And even the book of Genesis, which is one of the awful pieces of woman-baiting in human history, begins with a covert reproduction of birth-as-creation in chapter 1. In any case, when I say that sorcery is a reproduction of female creative magic, I mean an imitation of that creativity understood strictly in terms of the Great Mother notion of woman, i.e., as an analogue of pregnancy. Moreover, prior to the significant decline in claims to creative power in Woman that the Agricultural Revolution gradually and gradually everywhere brought about, the claim here is not that females necessarily were (or had to be idealized) as Nature herself. It was (likely) more that the sheer fact of women occasionally manifesting the creative power of Nature in a way that no man could (by creating children) made Woman seem somehow if mysteriously closer to Nature (and not necessarily “more sacred” than men). I’d like to believe otherwise; or, to put it another way, I don’t insist on this in order to belittle women or to deny them access to the kind of creativity that human culture could claim for MOTHER Nature. I do think, however, that this closeness to Creativity Per Se established their cultural role in the invention of so many basic elements of human civilization (the inventions of cooking, pottery, the oven, bread). Part of why I doubt that these culture heroines must have been everywhere revered for an identification with Creation is the range of (pre-agricultural) cultures still in evidence where Woman is denigrated (even if because She possesses a terrifying degree of power that Man tries to keep in check or under control). This is obviously an acknowledgment of power, but a very left-handed one.]

In this progression (of Creation or the mimesis of creation through sorcery), the process begins with a preexisting materiality (earth) and then in-spires (air) it, lets it gestate (water), and then through labor (fire) is brought to realization (earth). In a more literal, less magical sense, creation or creativity may be understood as a process of (irrational, i.e., not rationally explicable) inspiration as a “given” of perception; in the presence of this “raw experience,” one then (rationally) assigns a significance to it; with that significance decided, one then (rationally) decides upon a course of action (for materializing the significance) and commits to making it happen; and finally, there is the (irrational) realization of the significance itself (as a work of art, a bridge, &c). [The reason this last step may be called irrational is because, for all the rationales for how to get from point A to point B there is no question but that such a path is not necessary; thus, the adherence to the plan (other than for the sake of the givenness of the plan) is not based in rationality per se. Moreover, for all that one plans an action (a doing) the actual moment of doing itself has a quality of improvisation about it, precisely because there is already a disconnect between our conscious willing to action and how that action actually gets carried out by our bodies or the people we are asking to do things. Even in something so simple as moving your hand can this be seen. I most assuredly may decide to move my hand, but when it comes to actually getting down tot he nuts and bolts of how I am doing that, the whole process is sunk in unconscious habit. As such, this disconnect between “willing” and “action” also points to a moment of irrationality.]

From the early observations Jung offers once he gets around (in Psychology and Alchemy) to working out the details of the alchemical process, the juxtaposition of earth and air is shown to have a particular significance. To the extent that air signifies “spirit,” then the whole process of alchemy is, in some general sense, the liberation of spirit or essence from matter itself. The sheer fact of this transformation (as a mutation) makes quicksilver (as the quintessential air-water-fire-earth substance par excellence) as a sort of capacious master metaphor for the work generally, but there is (nevertheless) frequent resort to images of water to convey the protean nature of the entire process. And then again, if water (the universal solvent) is the master catalyst for change, what is actually being actualized—and that variously may be described (again) as the essence of matter (the stone). Or, if you would prefer, the essence of the stone per se (i.e., its spirit). By definition, between spirit as rational or irrational, one has to say that the heart has its reasons but spirit is a mystery. Moreover, understanding spirit (air) in a sense of wind winds up being a misleading metaphor—we only know the wind by its feel or through indirect phenomenon (like clouds) that we take to indicate wind. But in point of fact, the movement of the wind can only be guessed at or inferred; its operation is perpetually before our eyes, but we don’t see it; and every breath we take is implicated in it yet it is often the very last thing we would think about. [Also, to be more precise, taking the element of “air” to be “wind” may be more confusing than helpful. All matter, all appearances, are formed of all four elements in some admixture. one never encounters the elements in their pure form–so wind itself consists of air, water (vapor), fire (sensible heat), and earth (dust). Thus, the literal materiality is implicated more in water, fire, and especially earth than in “air” per se.] In this respect, air as a symbol for rational consciousness seems somewhat inapt—it is however  legitimate symbol for an “idea” if by idea is not meant a derived conclusion. The particularly compelling reason for this interpretation (in light of Jung’s exposition) is how “spirit” (as the essence of materiality) is implicated in the earth, air, water, fire sequence overall.

But if “air” is not going to be “thinking” and if it is going to stand in the place frequently reserved for “water” (as intuition), then what? For the alchemists in particular, they certainly emphasized something like reason or rationality (the “nous”) or intelligence as the preeminent function—that is, there is a dominant streak of this emphasis throughout the alchemical texts Jung surveys. This makes alchemy have some kind of more or less close association with Gnosticism in general, which (among other things) may be called the suppressed part of western religion; that is, to the extent that intolerant monotheism places a greater premium on affect (c.f., Augustine’s “I believe so that I may understand,” which pegs intelligence at least one notch below belief, even as Augustine was himself no unbright cookie). To say this is not to defame intolerant monotheism; in India, this “gnostic” element found full and uninhibited voice in Tantrism (and the complexly related phenomenon, Buddhist alchemy). This is to say that those who placed a premium on the thinking function might well find themselves in Europe drawn to a gnostic or alchemical calling, insofar as it provides the kind of spiritual outlet that, in India, would go under the heading of jñana yoga (knowledge yoga). Or to put this another way, for a thinking-type (TNSF), matter (sensation) and spirit (intuition) might especially seem an irrational Stoff amenable to the solution of ever dissolving water and transforming power of (fiery) consciousness. In such a scheme, air would likely move down into a dyad with matter (and one could further expect affective ejaculations from such an alchemical point of view given the then inferior function of feeling this implies).

I pointed out before that each of the different constellations is incommensurable with any other because the “derived terms” of each configuration cannot match terms in any other configuration. In this present case, we see how intuition (air) is “suffering” (is being construed as “irrational”) in a way that a primarily intuitive orientation would not make. To see the difference, one need only look at various mystics in the European tradition (or elsewhere, of course). Because “intuition” is so often associated with a “feeling,” this makes sorting out instances of the distinction difficult—for instance, Nietzsche seems predominantly an intuitive (note also particularly how in service to his intuition his prodigious intelligence is devoted). At the same time, one can compare the difference between “ecstatic” mystics (i.e., Maria von Morl, or Jellaludine Rumi) and “contemplative” mystics (Meister Eckhart or the author of the Cloud of Unknowing). [By this, I’m not claiming that this distinction can be maintained so tidily.] In this context, that fire (as the fire of consciousness) ends up as the most crucial function is hardly surprising (nor a demerit of the system). By contrast, in the ayurvedic sequence, the linking of water with the second chakra (the genitals, the belly) anatomically associates with gestation, digestion, acidic dissolution, destroying to create (converting food into nutrition) and of course sexuality. Here, in part because the “subtle” elements (i.e., more spiritualized) are dealt with in other parts of the chakric system, it is not necessary to load this “second step” with the kind of spiritual claims one encounters with air as spirit and the essence of materiality. Even so, that this step involves breaking down mere materiality (earth) for the sake of liberating energy or nutrients still shows a kindred analogy (with the alchemical sequence) at work. Moreover, to the extent that this has anything of spiritual nature about it at all, in more Western terminology it could be likened to the soul (i.e., soul food, soul music), where soul is the diachronic expression of the (synchronic, or eternal) spirit. Thus, where spirit aerates earth preparatory to further transformations (by water and fire, by significance and consequence) in alchemy, soul dissolves earth preparatory to further sublimations (by heart and voice and time and space and consciousness).

In a typical interpretation of the suit of air (swords) in Tarot interpretation, swords have a certain negative “reputation” largely for the association with “combat” or struggle that they tend to obviously suggest. One might (playfully) infer something of a female bias insofar as it would have been men who were  more primarily responsible for sword-wielding, while the (female) Tarot card readers placed a less negative valence on the suit of cups (water/love). Understanding air (and swords) as intuition, then, reconfigures this perhaps overly literalized meaning. In the first place, the sexual imagery of in-spiration (as conception) at least makes a (generally) friendlier stabbing out of the sword, but in a more general sense, since for there to be a new creation what already is must be supplanted or put aside. This need not always be literally the case, but in the economy of the unconscious (or the womb) the new creation starts as an island of exception to the current landscape. In this respect, there is at least some kind of breaking down of the status quo, and this can be signaled with the (cultural) image or sign of war. Perhaps even more particularly, it suggests the hero motif in general, where the (mythologically) male figure goes to conquer, overcome, or slay the (earth or cosmic) dragon of materiality. The unfortunately sexist consequences of this myth are that women have been associated with materiality and men with the hero; the problems of this alignment are enormous, continuous, and ongoing, and far too extensive to go into here in any detail. One can also see in the “sudden appearance” quality of an inspiration how in itself this is already a “miraculous appearance” out of the (materiality of the) world. And as a miracle (or at least a rupture of the typical) simply by virtue of being a-typical, it then has the quality of irrationality (even if after the fact were are quite capable of rationally explaining that irrationality away).

Archetypally, we may say (with Jung) that there is a sequential, near-recurrent cycle of human psychological activity that Tarot symbolizes (or can be used to symbolize). I expect as I read more of Psychology and Alchemy, further details will emerge to deepen this basic statement. For instances, while the stages of alchemical work have been characterized in more than one way, the most dominant forms involved (at least initially) four stages: melanosis (or the nigredo), leucosis (whitening, or the albedo), xanthosis (yellowing or citrinitas, which was eventually dropped altogether), and iosis (reddening, or the rubedo; Jung adds “this word comes from ιός [poison]. But since it has about the same meaning as the red tincture of later alchemy I have translated iosis as ‘reddening’”). Moreover:

Whereas the original tetrameria [the four-step process of alchemy) corresponded exactly to the quaternity of elements, it was now frequently stressed that although there were four elements (earth, water, fire, and air) and four qualities (hot, cold, dry, and moist), there were only there colours: black [nigredo], white [albedo], and red [rubedo].

The nigredo or blackness is the initial state, either present from the beginning as a quality of the prima material, [also known as ]the chaos or massa confusa, or else produced by the separation ([various called the] solutio, separatio, divisio, putrefactio). If the separated condition is assumed at the start … then a  union of opposites is performed under the likeness of a union of male and female (called the coniugium, matrimonium, coniunctio, coitus), followed by the death of the product of the union (mortification, calcination, putrefactio) and a corresponding nigredo. From this, the washing (ablutio, baptisma) either leads directly to the whitening (albedo), or [alternatively] the soul (anima) released at the [previous] “death” is reunited with the dead body and brings about its resurrection, or [s yet another alternative] the “many colours” (omnes colores) [also known as the] “peacock’s tail” (cauda pavonis) lead to the one white colour that contains all colours. At this, the first main goal of the process is reached, namely the albedo, [also known as the] tincture alba, terra alba foliate, lapis albus, &c., highly prized by many alchemists as if it were the ultimate goal. It is the silver or moon condition, which still has to be raised to the sun condition. The albedo is, so to speak, the daybreak, but not till the rubedo is it sunrise. The transition to the rubedo is formed by the citrinitas, though this, as we have said, was omitted later. The rubedo then follows direct from the albedo as the result of raising the heat of the fire to its highest intensity. The red and white are King and queen, who may also celebrate their “chymical wedding” at this stage (Psychology and Alchemy, ¶333–4).

The specificity of Jung’s summary here may make it harder to follow than need be. Nevertheless, it points to three stages (nigredo, albedo, and rubedo, or black, white, red) with the acknowledgment that alchemists gradually dropped a yellow (citrinitas) phase that otherwise occurred between the white and the red. [Note the correspondence of black, white, and red with the standard deck of playing cards–a lingering trace of the alchemical symbolism.] In effect, these three stages may be summarized as involving the preparation (nigredo) of the earth, then its washing (albedo), and its heating or firing (rubedo). One can see in this how alchemy served as an input to the development of chemistry.

When Jung writes, “If the separated condition is assumed at the start … then a  union of opposites is performed under the likeness of a union of male and female (called the coniugium, matrimonium, coniunctio, coitus), followed by the death of the product of the union (mortification, calcination, putrefactio) and a corresponding nigredo,” this is not a step in the process per se, but a sub-step in the process of preparation (the nigredo) itself. Taking this sub-process in a chemically literal sense, if one planned on working on “salt,” but you had only sodium and chlorine, it would be necessary (because the elements are separated at the beginning) to first join them in order to proceed. This process of joining itself reprises in miniature the opus of alchemy in general; it is a mise- en- scene, though one whose end goal is something more like the initial prima material itself rather than the sought after lapis of alchemical work overall. This is why the end result of the process brings back the initial nigredo condition.

That the rubedo involves heating (fire) and that the albedo involves washing (ablution, or baptism) points clearly to the notions of elemental water and fire symbology. Moreover, while an application of heat may most probably have always quite literally meant (in a physical interpretation of alchemy) the use of fire, with “washing” (ablution, baptism, whitening) it cannot be that this means only rinsing with water, but points rather to any use of liquid (cf acid washing). Jung observes that some alchemists took “water” to be the beginning and end of the work—it was their master metaphor—here again, the mere physical thing of “water” is not the principle invoked by the “elemental quality” water itself (fluid, dynamic, changing, dissolving, &c).

In his respect, it is significant that the “separation” produced during the nigredo is referred to variously as “solutio, separatio, divisio, putrefactio”. Here, we have a metaphor of death (disintegration) in putrefactio, splitting apart in separatio or divisio, and the water sense of dissolution in solutio. The appearance of a water metaphor here suggests how some alchemists could have arrived at the element of water (not the physical actuality of water) as a master metaphor for the work in general. With putrefactio, the metaphor is not exactly one of “dissolving,” but of physical de-composition. With splitting or dividing, however, the metaphor is virtually a physical process, of severing, cutting (with a sword or scalpel or chemical implement). The present-day technique of frakking is a very current version of using air to shatter earth (and liberate what is trapped inside). What I am pointing to by noting the variety of techniques here is how they signal already different emphases of approach: those who favor water (feeling-types) may see this preparatory step in terms of a solution, while thinking types may characterize it in terms of a divisio; intuitive types might describe the process in terms of an airy separation, while sensing types might describe the process in terms of an inner capacity for de-composition (a putrefactio) in earth itself.

The helpfulness of Jung’s terminology is not simply that one can file away phenomenon as I have just done; as Todorov noted, the weakest possible hypothesis about a phenomenon is that it can be classified. The strength of Jung’s terminology is that the classification has more explanatory power than simply taxonomizing. For instance, if a sense-oriented alchemist may locate the nigredo in the de-composing nature of earth itself (in a putrefactio), then this orientation should belie also an “inferior explanation” (a supporting piece of “evidence” originating from the inferior function along with this primary assignment to sensing). To put this another way, what would be the (symbolic) participation of “air” in this context of putrefaction; or, in what way do the values embodied in the symbol of air “make an appearance” here. In a literal and empirical sense, air would appear exactly as the gas of decomposition, which would have the appearance of manifesting from out of nowhere. It would seem that there was some mysterious inner presence (in a body) that suddenly makes it bloat, that (of course) stinks to high Heaven (that being its desired destination in any case). The irrationality of this is that if earth is materiality per se, then why posit (all of a sudden) this non-material presence “within” matter. Here also, spirit seems to appear more as flatuus than pneuma. But the point is not to “critique” a view that puts an emphasis on earth (or putrefactio) but only to point to the explanatory utility (or consequences) of saying one is a sense-configured alchemist. Conversely, those who would emphasize air (a separatio), in the first place this begins to blur off into having a sense of an “analytical” (dissecting) approach, but I do not want to follow that thought at the moment. To describe the metaphor in physical terms, air “gets into” the material to be split apart and thus breaks it down. For human beings, standing around in our earliest days, and wondering at the unnerving process of decomposition, great debates might have raged whether the process was happening from without or from within—is it the body itself (the earth) decomposing or something (invisible) in the air that is responsible. Insofar as an airy explanation is rooted in intuitive imagination (with close observation giving credit to or blaming flies for having something to do with the delivery of “death” from out of the spirits of the air), the essential nonmateriality of air, with all of its positive associations about higher realities and “spirit” in the lofty sense, must confront the gross (figuratively and literally) materiality of the rotting body. How, after all, could the “holiness” of spirit (air) somehow “cause” the gross material transformation of the body after death. Here, the inferior explanation is, precisely, that the body itself is fallen, disgusting, profane—here we can see one of the human experiences that may be an input to Manicheanism (or at least the Manicheanism that the Catholic Church objected to as a heresy), which insisted that everything that exists materially is “evil”.

The conventional ordering of the Tarot suits is swords (air), cups (water), wands (fire), and discs/pentacles (earth). These correspond in a regular deck of cards to spades, hearts, clubs, and diamonds. It is a seeming piece of irony that the suit of diamonds (i.e., some of the most valued and highly compressed earth/carbon there is) should be generally the weakest suit. There is some very tangential sexism in this insofar as patriarchy had to find a way to denigrate Woman but could not completely erase Her from the picture (since self-evidently everyone originates from Woman). Not accidentally, then, the suit of spades tends to be the most valuable. The word spades derives in an immediate sense from Italian, where it means “sword” or “spade” (i.e., the shovel). This itself derives from Latin’s spatha, while is a “broad, flat weapon or tool.” At this point, there might be a temptation to get into a chicken-or-the-egg argument whether the shovel proceeded the sword or vice versa or, perhaps more pertinently, why the same word should refer to both. But the history of weapons suggests that very many of our most common melee weapons developed (from obvious necessity) out of farming implements: the dagger is simply any knife, the sword was a kind of shovel, the hoe (a stick with a blade on the end) becomes the ancestor of various gisarmes, halberds, bec-de-corbins, glaives, etc. But what particularly matters here is exactly that a shovel is used for digging into, breaking up the earth (a separatio). And lest I be accused of overreading a legible sexism in this, it is worth remembering that the aboriginal word for “penis” and “plow” is the same. (We can be grateful to the aboriginal people for being so forthright and noneuphemistic in their terminology.)

In Jung’s Pychological Types (as distinct from Myers-Briggs exposition of the topic), he would distinguish between (say) the intuitive type whose thinking function supports the primary function and a primarily oriented thinker whose intuition supports that thinking. For either type, however, air (as a symbol) will likely recommend itself as a center or starting point. I suggest this may be why there is an ambiguity between, say, a separatio (what I’m going to call a breaking up or even a blowing up of earth) compared to a divisio (a cutting apart that more resembles, or at least easily shades off into the sense of “analysis” as a dissecting or breaking down). Perhaps it is even sufficient precisely to point out that one is a “breaking up” (intuition) and the other is a “breaking down” (thinking). Thinking and intuition are not, in Jung’s scheme, antithetical (even as they are incommensurable, or mutually exclusive). The presence of one permits the support of it by the other (or the mediation of the primary function and the inferior function). I’m suggesting that a thinking type will tend to raise that primary function to the highest function of her alchemical series—this may be why there are so many alchemists who tout intelligence or reason as the highest of all human capacities (higher even than the soul). In this case, air comes to symbolize the genuinely irrational (the unknowability of spirit) so that “reason” (or intelligence) makes a delighted fetish out of the very unknowability of spirit (air). Where the inferiority of this explanation particularly begins to become visible is when intelligence (the highest function) begins to claim for itself a capacity (by the processes it undergoes) to know this unknowable thing. This is obviously a piece of self-deception; one that arises particularly from coming to mistake the contents of one’s consciousness (and one’s descriptions of reality) for reality itself. To a certain extent, this is visible in eastern philosophy as well, although the caveat that language can never adequately describe the undescribable seems not to be forgotten for long.

All of the foregoing, then, in a perhaps stumbling way, attempts to conceptualize the different sequential approaches one can find in Jungian, ayurvedic, alchemical, and astrological sequences of earth, air, water, and fire. The attempt has been to show how disagreements about what would constitute the “right” ordering of these four elements is beside the point (on the one hand) but also to avoid the temptation merely to say “each sequence is saying the same thing; it’s just a semantic difference”. Within the context of any given explanatory schema, one may certainly critique internal inconsistencies, but the value of other sequences lies precisely in its own different, but still internal consistency, as an alternative schema. and of course, if I am thinking-oriented, then I will not feel persuaded to adopt a feeling-oriented configuration, but neither do I need to. The primary error for everyone consists in believing that their explanatory scheme is not only true but also the only one.

Concretely, the foregoing suggests an addition tot he notion of how the suit of swords (or air) symbolizes.  It’s surface interpretation as conflict may still be useful, but (reading that conflict in a Jungian sense) what is at stake is not a war in the human sociological sense of war, but rather the breaking down of the status quo, the invasion of (complacent, settled) earth that may no longer be bearing fruit. Farmers know the earth must be aertaed (but not so much that it turns to dust and blows away). Rather by definition, this external input is not likely to originate in “the known”–it will arrive precisely with the force of a visitation, an in-spiration.  If it appears as an “idea,” it is less that this is a rational idea (a thought, an idea as a product of thinking) and more like an image, a vision–as something that could in all likely only be adequately embodied as a symbol, the very creation of a new idea in its. THe forms of these ideas are, of course, as determined as any other, in just the same way that every newly fertilized egg is the familiar template of a human being, without in any way making a claim about how that human being will ultimately develop (other, of course, than vague and useless biological platitudes). If we can extract the sexism, then we can see the suit of swords and air as pointing toward the hero’s journey. If this can all be summarized in a single distinction, the difference here is between “an idea” and “a thought”.

Moreover, if this resort will be taken in Tarot interpretation, then the irrationality of intuition must be located here and not with the suit of water. (reading Jung’s definition of feeling in Psychological Types would be extremely helpful for understanding his sense of feeling as rational as well as the underlying epistemology and “knowledge” of feeling). Still more could be added about the consequences of this shift of interpretation for the suit of air, but this is all more than enough for now.