BOOK REVIEWS/REPLIES (2015): R. French’s (2014) Baby Bjornstrand

Summary (TLDR Version)

Such a waste of time, it might waste too much time even to reply to it.

Framing/Background for Replies

If you’ve already read this section this year, you can skip it; if you’ve read the previous years, I’ve updated it. Either way, it describes the aim of these book replies.

Three years ago in 2012, I set myself the task to read at least ten pages per day and then write a book reply (not a review) for each one I finished (or gave up on).[1] These replies don’t amount to Amazon-type reviews, with synopses, background research done on the author or the book itself, &c., unless that struck me as somehow necessary. Rather, a book reply—as distinct from a reaction (review) or a response—focuses on what in these pieces I could not have said (or would not have known to say) except that the encounter of this text and my consciousness brought it about.

Consequently, I must at times necessarily say poorly informed stuff, &c. And while some people in the world may expect public speakers to possess omniscience so that they won’t bother to engage in a dialogue to uncover how to make the world a better place, then to the extent that each reply I offer provides an I found this helpful in this book, it becomes up to us (you, me, us) to correct, refine, trash and start over, or figure out what else we might do as part of that attempt to make our world better for us and everyone.

And someone won’t bother to take up their end of that bargain, that points blatantly to a central part of the problem that needs a solution.

A Reply To: R. French’s (2014)[2] Baby Bjornstrand

The more I wade through multiple books, the more often I find myself irked or scratching my head at the claims for those books found on dust jackets. I feel like I ought to get a Ph.D. in discourse analysis and take as my subject the disingenuous ad-text used to seduce readers into wasting their time on vacuities.

Having lately read three of Jim Woodring’s books (replied to here, here, and here), which one may certainly accuse often of seemingly aimless or random narrative and imagery even though Woodring (almost certainly) intends something extremely explicit in what he draws, my tolerance for actually impenetrable imagery—generosity makes me call it impenetrable; authorially non-intentional or vacuous might better express the matter—has dropped considerably, especially since the effort in the imagery also seems at a minimum. Put another way, few graphic novels over the past two years have made me feel so completely the sense of time wasted reading them.

Of course, splendid graphics or art (as a spectacle) can take the place of narrative interest. Dave McKean’s art often rescues Gaiman’s slack texts from themselves. Or Vaughn-James’ (1975)[3] The Cage, which seems to have as much narrative density as Woodring’s work but with much less hope of ever “deciphering” it, provides a world of mirrors, wires, knotted sheets, fences, and other objects to allow a reader/viewer to marvel at the visuals.

Not so here. The very short 21 chapters present very sparsely, both visually and narratively. So let’s consider the hyperbole on the book back. Warren Ellis, “author of Gun Machine, Red, Transmetropolitan” informs us of this graphic ‘novel’, “Like watching David Lynch and Samuel Beckett get mean-drunk: a demented comedy from one of the medium’s authentic geniuses.”

Presumably this means the David Lynch of Eraserhead (i.e., foggy black and white and strange imagery) and the particular imagining of a Samuel Beckett that never existed who gets taken by many talentless epigones as an excuse to deploy “meaninglessness” in a text. This imparts, supposedly, a sense of existential angst—you know: the notion that life “is” meaningless, hollow, empty. Rather like Derrida’s deconstruction, which made a kind of sense as an attack against the institutionally monolithic assertion of absolute meaning that French academia insisted upon at the time but which becomes not only incoherent but actually reactionary in a US setting where having multiple points of view (deconstruction as only one amongst them) turns out instead to politically neutralise rather than empower people, this reflexive transplantation of an imaginary Beckett to our current milieu not only fails in its project but simply represents a gesture of quietism and submission to the current social order.[4] If Beckett, at the time, challenged or wrote against a kind of monolithic culture of meaning (in theatre), his ironic gestures of negation no longer have the same meaning now, in a world where ironic gestures of negation have become the dominant norm. In a similar way, if you would think to accuse Eraserhead of meaning “nothing” (whatever Lynch did, does, or did not intend), then you might foolishly think to connect this book with that film-maker.[5]

Meanwhile, under Warren Ellis—who many might not know—a bigger name appears, Guillermo del Toro. He declares, “Baby Bjornstrand is both beautiful and brutal, warm and indifferent. Like all of Renee French’s art it hints at the innocent and the profane without missing a beat. A creature after my own heart.”

To arrive at “beautiful and brutal, warm and indifferent” would require narrative work within the book that French does not supply, accomplish, or even attempt, it seems. Random elements appear in the book instead: the characters wear masks and one has a small tail. And the situations lean so heavily on whatever “archetypal” significance they can get that the reader alone supplies all of the meaning. The reader supplies all of the art, in that sense.

Yes, yes—something of this happens in all texts, but it remains both naïve and wilfully ignorant to pretend that hundreds and hundreds of years of graphic composition studies have no bearing or import anymore on visual art. Rembrandt and other bozos like him did just flop paint on the canvass; a whole phenomenology of viewing came to bear when they painted, and even if most scribblers these days have little knowledge of, and even less ability to deploy that knowledge if known, those compositional rules and tricks, it remains the case that putting an image on a page cannot entirely excuse, erase, or disappear the scribbler’s presence. Pretending it all remains in the reader/viewer’s lap remains an untenable position, though it certainly helps to encourage readers to jack themselves off while giving the “artist” credit for their pleasure.

One can only imagine what del Toro would do with this book if he filmed it; he’d start by rewriting it, most likely.

I offer a challenge to someone. Determine in what way French has created an allegory of the 21 major arcana from the Tarot in the 21 chapters of this. The cover of the book represents chapter 0, card Zero, the Fool, of course.

Go.

Endnotes

[1] I planned also to devise a way to randomly select books to read (given certain constraints) from the public library; this, to avoid the tendency only to read books that pique my already existing interests. I haven’t followed through on this yet.

[2] French, R. (2013). Baby Bjornstrand. Koyama Press, pp. 1–130.

[3] Vaughn-James, M. (2012). The cage. Toronto: Coach House Books

[4] What a long sentence.

[5] And, by the way, I say this as no great admirer of Lynch’s work. But at least one finds an indisputable effort and intention in Eraserhead; it seems hardly fair to such work to liken this book to it.

BOOK REVIEWS (2014) – Sallie Nichol’s (1980) Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey

Summary (the TLDR Version)

By taking up the theme of “transformation” as fundamental to the notion of the Tarot, even when this theme appears in a (seemingly) dogmatic form, it may still “set the cauldron bubbling” in an individual (and his or her life) and bring about transformation nontheless.Because so many of us feel so stuck today, the prospect of something that may help to spur us to change seems welcome, even necessary.

Framing/Background for Replies

Two years ago in 2012, I set myself the task to read at least ten pages per day; last year, I did so. Continuing from then, I now have the task to read fifteen pages per day,[0] and I’ve added that I will write a book reaction (or reply) for each one that I finish (or give up on, if I stop).  I plan also to devise a way to randomly select books to read (given certain constraints) from the public library; this, to avoid the tendency only to read books that pique my already existing interests.

These replies will not be Amazon-type reviews, with synopses, background research done on the author or the book itself, unless that strikes me as necessary or if the book inspired me to do so when I read it. Rather, these replies amount to assessments of the ways I found the book helpful somehow. More precisely—and this describes what I mean by a reply, as opposed to a reaction (review) or a response—I try to focus in these pieces on what I could not have said (or would not have known what to say) except that the intersection of this text and my consciousness brought it about.

Consequently, I will sometimes say stupid stuff, poorly informed stuff, &c. Some in the world expect everyone to possess omniscience and won’t bother to engage in a human dialogue toward divining how to make the world a better place. To the extent that each reply I offer provides a I found this helpful in this book, then it becomes up to us (you, me, us) to correct, refine, trash and start over, or do something else we see as potentially helpful as part of attempting to make our world a better place. If you won’t bother to take up your end of that bargain, that signals of course part of the problem that needs a solution.

A Reply To:  Sallie Nichol’s (1980)[1] Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey

Over the past three or so years, I’ve been reading a lot of Jung’s writings,[2] and will continue to do so,[3] 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—and recently life-changing. In addition, I have been doing Tarot card readings since 1986,[4] 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. For some time now, I have posted reactions to and commentaries on Nichols’ commentaries in this book and, “symbolically” enough, I finished the last one so that it posted on 1 January 2014. This reply itself seems a touch anachronistic, as I wrote it on 7 December 2013 but only published it in 2014; so it makes for the first book replied to this year.

Much of commentary took issue with the gendered identification of symbolic material that Nichols asserted in the cards. For all that I benefit from Jung’s writings so far, I rankle most and quickly when he starts waxing beatific bout the anima or (worse still) his typically problematic expostulations on the nature of woman’s psychology.  In a useful summary of Jung’s notion of the shadow, which nonetheless seems analytically very suspect to me, Dehing (2002)[5] begins by quoting a female analysand: “I used to think that Carl Jung was a very wise man, that he didn’t even need to be reborn. Now I think that he definitely has to be reborn – as a girl, in Ethiopia.” (a woman – in Jungian analysis)” (¶1).

The spirit of this patient’s sentiment amounts to saying that Jung needs to really experience what women’s experience embodies, but this does not erase the otherizing the patient’s statement exhibits and even less that Dehing exploits it to provide an epitaph for his paper. As the feminist critique demonstrated so ably in some many fields, everything of any genuine cultural value needed revisitation through that lens.

But the problem or specific character of sexism embedded in Jung’s writing aside, and how it gets taken up or elaborated by Nichols in her book, my engagement with the habit of gendered identification in symbols certainly provided a major plus in my reading. For all that I might have seemed grumpy—and for all that I did become grumpy—I benefited from that engagement toward understanding male and female characters in the tarot as variously indicating, for example, radiant and reflective modes of consciousness. The temptation arises to identify these with male or female characters, but that precisely involves my avoidance. I would construe what I call radiant and reflective modes of consciousness as analogous to (if not identical to) extraverted an introverted modes of consciousness. And over the course of many such encounters with these gendered figures in the Tarot (as well as the overtly non-gendered or androgynous figures, pointing not simply to the alchemical hermaphrodite but also to the asexual persona as well as non-cis-gendered identities), my appreciation for the symbolism depend.

Some time ago, I realized that the archetype of the “mother” provides one of the most thoroughgoing and widespread metaphors for “the Source” (that out of which all things emerge). With that paradigm shift, that moved away from a sort of literalism about the archetype of the mother in maternal terms and more toward an imagery of the ground of emergence, if you will, this also brought about an understanding of card 13, Death, and the image of Death, s again a most thoroughgoing and popular image of “that which one does not wish to integrate”. In one sense, we might call this change. Thus, the Source and Change come to occupy the past and future respectively.

In light of this kind of paradigm shift regarding the metaphorical embodiment of archetypal content—particularly when it gets construed in  humanly universal sort of way—I found the dis-association of male and female emsymbolization very helpful. Much as, simply for descriptive purposes when writing, I want to say something like “we might link the Emperor card to extraversion, to the radiant mode of consciousness,” I now find a strong resistance to this, because even this “mere description” too much invokes the authoritative sexism and patriarchy of my culture. To allow the radiant mode of consciousness (extraversion) to rest, even for a moment, in the Emperor card seems to obliterate the possibility that we might associate the radiant mode of consciousness (extraversion) with the empress instead—or vice versa. The intense “gravity well” of this symbolism impresses me and shows, at root, how ultrafundamental the gender distinction remains in patriarchal culture, how deep, how necessary, how deeply necessary I find it to resist and strive to change.

The other most memorable consequence of this book—at least because this effect occurred recently and dramatically—involves its role in a literally transformative direction change in my life. I noted some of this here and should likely describe it in more detail elsewhere. For the commentary, this specifically involved revisiting the meanings of the Star, Moon, Sun, and Judgment—opening up to me not only a route to my own (involuntary) transformation, but perhaps also a means for enabling similar transformations in others. Of course, Jungian analysis (perhaps analysis in general) aims for such fruitful transformation, but this, more or less by definition, requires another person to help make it happen. In part, this prevails because our complexes do not allow u to see directly what we need to see in order to change:

Jung notes in his (1905) “Association, Dream, and Hysterical Symptom,” that people who have experienced trauma “have access to their psychic material only in so far as it refers to insignificant ideas; but where the complex is involved they are powerless” (¶846).

As such, the repressed content of the trauma becomes visible only indirectly (through the insignificant ideas), and so dreams and word associations can get at them. Of course, this would apply to all people, not just those traumatized (or, alternatively, in so far as we all have some trauma, our traumas only come out indirectly as well).

What seems important to me in this: it points to a limit on self-reflection. Even if I witness my own dreams, where presumably the repressed content becomes more directly visible (though still encoded in symbolic form), the domination of the complex will prevent me from analyzing that indirect content in its “true light”.

This points then not simply to the necessity of “community” (because others do not have, usually, the same complex domination we do and can see our symbolism for what it represents), but also to a critique of hyperindividualism, which disconnects us from any sense of obligation to others, meaning that someone else’s opinion about “my” symbolism gets de-authorized and accorded little, if not no, significance.

It allows the operations of capitalism, racism, and catastrophic global climate change to become more invisible to itself. Jung’s notion points to why “facts’ change no minds and why the right-wing strategy of telling stories (lies, or speaking to values) works better, because through those “insignificant gesture” (rather than going head on at it with the facts), such lies or stories touch the constellation of ides underlying the repressed content, and thus change or activate that content (maybe for better, maybe for worse, but it causes a change of state).

This points again to the importance of art, in so far as it indirectly touches on the complexes and consciousness’s of the audience; as  moment of intervention, it portends to create a change in the dynamics of the listener.

This points as well to the necessity of other people in general, an emphasis I’d like to think one needn’t make, but our hyperindividualistic culture—and a premise or promise of capitalism generally, which involves the idea that humans my detach themselves from social interdependency—makes this necessity disappear into the background.

We have this notion of contrasts: one can’t experience happiness, for instance, without also knowing sadness—but I don’t believe this: an orgasm does not feel good because I broke my leg once, &c. Similar, my identity as a self does not occur merely because an Other exists. Just because you stand there, seemingly and factually distinct from me, provides grist only for an internal monologue with myself. In point of fact, I do not encounter you but only my idea of you (my mental representation of you). So any contrast I experience involves one already and only in whatever terms I carry around in my head.

In this way we see how Jung’s notions about women’s psychology become so groundless. Or, more precisely, why whenever he speaks of the anima one must do him the courtesy, while wish he had done so himself, of emphasizing in every sentence that the anima denotes the figure of “woman” as the given individual man (or the male collective generally) conceives of it.

Just as an extravert typically has a caricatured understanding of “introversion,”[6] so males have a typically caricatured version of “female.”[7] We can use quotation marks in these sentences to indicate the caricatured-in-light-of character of these notions. In both of these cases, what the individual (or collective) understands as the positive term in the pair (extravert, male) provides the framework and terms for the distinction of the pejorative term of the pair (introvert, female). This should seem pretty obvious. Thus, if males describe males as rational, then “females” become irrational; if extraverts describe extraverts as outgoing, then “introverts” become anti-social, &c.

What must remain clear in this: this process requires no “other”. The “dialogue” or the “contrast” going on here remains wholly in the mind of one person. So that when a (rational) male encounters an actual female who exhibits rationality, if he dislikes her in general, he may accuse her of “mannishness” (or other like comparisons) or if he likes her (particularly if romantically) he may describe her as “level-headed” or “sensible” (or other like comparisons). Females, of course, may take this mantle upon themselves.  The author of Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche referred to Margaret Thatcher on a talk show once as a real man, and it often happens that women who seek political office will perceive or encounter an actual demand (from men) to act even more masculine than men, &c.

All of this involves a caricatured monologue, so that even the presence of an Other may become gratuitous. So if extraverts imagine “introverts” and males imagine “females,” then we may generalize this to: selves imagine “others”. But what we need for transformation (usually), what Jung’s statement above makes clear the necessity of, involves the voice of the Other—not just the presence, but the point of view of an Other. The other may see what we cannot, &c. And this other point of view, which can speak for itself (at least in some cases) can specifically speak against the caricaturing monologue. The male who dismisses a woman as irrational or who praises her rationality as (masculinely) sensible may find himself challenged an improved when the woman speaks her own position and turns the caricaturing monologue into a constructive dialogue.

I don’t hold such romantic views as to insist that all human experience must involve learning—that might constitute a pretty story to tell, but I doubt it always applies. People say they want someone to love them, and then complain about someone stalking them: they failed to more precisely express what they desired. People say that change “is” good; if I then immediately break their leg when they say so, I doubt they will show much enthusiasm for the change.

To leave aside these garish examples, if wisdom involves having a knowledge for how to navigate adroitly through life (whatever that means), then part of this must include knowing when not to learn as much as knowing when to learn (and having the wisdom to know the difference, in an infinite regress). But even disregarding this abstract assertion, anyone who remains self-honest can recognize in any day how often the opportunity arises “to learn” that they simply decline, even resist. Very often, it seems that people to advocate eternal learning for everyone mean this more for others and less for themselves, it seems; after all, why have they been pitching the same message for thirty years without any meaningful variation? That sounds like the opposite of the practice of learning. &c.

In the world of cybernetics (as also in the world of living systems) we regularly may identify positive and negative feedback loops; the former amplify signals, often toward some variety of transformation, the latter dampen signals in order to maintain (homeostatically) the current state of affairs, to keep the living system operating within the needed ranges of functioning. Learning, in the sense that seems normally meant, involves a kind of positive feedback loop, whereas we spend most of our time (biologically and cognitively) in negative loop mode. I could invoke an objection to this biological and cognitive inertia in favor of learning (i.e., a greater emphasis on positive feedback loops),[8] but this would not change that I see in the world—and frequently enough in myself—a desire to “stay the course” rather than “witch horses”. If my “inaction” contributes to the reproduction of patriarchy, I have no trouble advocating for change, but if my “inaction” preserves a resistance to cultural patriarchy, then the demand that I “learn” (change) becomes suspect and may even become reactionary. The only “change” I want to enact in the latter case would involve broadening my capacities to resist cultural patriarchy in its ever proliferating manifestations, and particularly in the way it attempts to manifest in light of the resistances I create in myself and the world.

In sum, thank you to Sallie Nichols, to Carl Jung, and to my friend Sarah for making this book available to me.

Endnotes

[0] More precisely, I will continue to read my usual ten pages but I will also read five pages per day of Burton’s (1620) Anatomy of Melancholy, a gigantic book that at five pages per day I will finish reading near the end of December 2014. I have wanted to read this book for a while, but various features of it make getting through it a challenge.

[1] Nichols, S. (1980). Jung and Tarot: an archetypal journey. New York: S. Weiser, pp. i–xv, 1–392.

[2] 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),

[3] 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).

[4] 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.

[5] Dehing, J. (2002). Jung’s shadow [online]. Accessed 7 December 2013 from here.

[6] And just as the introvert typically has a caricatured sense of extraversion.

[7] And females have a typically caricatured sense of “male”.

[8] I might also say we may often misperceive negative feedback for positive and vice versa, but that involves a different line of argument.

INTUITING TAROT AND JUNG: Card XXI (the World)

Introduction & Disclaimer[1]

The twentyfourth 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 21: the World.

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.

As a delightful synchronicity, it charms me that the “timing” for publishing this blog has it fall on the first of the New Year.

The World: A Window on Eternity[6]

In principle, card 21 represents the last, though (for those familiar with the notions of atman and Brahman and their identity), we have here nothing more or less than card 0, the Fool, all over again. Commentary on it becomes functionally gratuitous. The zero of the Fool already announced the enclosing “round” of atman/Brahman, and it invites us to reflect how any point on a circle from which we set out to transit around simultaneously represents the beginning (the 0) and the end (the 21): the beginning of  new transit that sets out from the end of a previous transit—and in that whole sequence of ends and beginnings, no “first beginning” ever and also no “last end”. As Jung () pointed out with the archetype of the eternal child, this speaks to the nonexistent “before” and “after” that reside outside of time (the sequence of cards from 1 to 20); in this way, Nichols’s characterization of the World (as also the Fool) as a window on eternity has  basis.

By definition, we cannot conceive the Inconceivable, just as we cannot—and as Jung always makes clear—perceive the Unconscious. But our inability to conceive the Inconceivable does not prevent our offering hypotheses about it or, as Jung did, to offer hypotheses about the structure of the Unconscious (as inferred from its activity). The paramount caveat in all of this, frequently emphasized in writings from India and symbolized in the sacred gesture of pointing to something and declare neti, neti (“not it, not it”), insists that we recognize: whatever we conceive of the Inconceivable necessarily fails to apply: neti, neti.

In occidental spirituality, we may identify a sometimes present (but probably never dominant and now hardly ever acknowledged) sacred tradition of negative theology, wherein one recognizes the unavoidable untruth of any limited statement about the Unlimited. By this, we refrain from the deceptive and deceiving temptation to give attributes to the divine—or, in more recently terminology, to put god in  box. One cannot understate the insidiousness of positive theology, which would put god in  box, since it proceeds by what seems a reasonable, rationalist claim. After all, can we not—the mewling argument goes—ascribe omnipotence to the divine; surely we cannot err to declare god as all-powerful. All-knowing and all-loving simply follow as  matter of course.

But examine this seemingly reasonable assertion more closely. Perhaps you know the quip, “Can god make a rock he cannot move” (which implies  limitation on the all-powerfulness). The convention answer runs: yes, if he wanted to.

Of course, even in this half-witty remark, we already easily detect a potentially empty boast of power; the kind analogous to: “I can quit smoking whenever I want to.” Well, show me then. &c. So that even in the claim that god simply does not desire to make such a rock, in absence of its demonstration we sense an inability that therefore signals a qualification on the claim to all-power. We discover something that god, in fact, cannot do,[7] and any being so limited does not deserve the title of a deity.

But more basically still than this—or, rather, to put this same point on a wider base: to claim that a deity possesses the attribute of omnipotence means to simultaneously claim that it does not possess the attribute of non-omnipotence.

On the face of it, this might seem a piece of semantic cutesiness, but we certainly know that some of the most poignant and affecting human moments we may feel for one another can arise out of sympathy for human weakness. Imagine the trench-runner in World War I who must deliver word not to proceed with an attack who arrives too late, only to see hundreds, maybe thousands, of his countrymen dead because he could not run fast enough. Our hearts might break in sympathy for him, and Winston Churchill’s very apt, “Sometimes it is not enough to do one’s best; rather, one must do what needs to be done” rings unhappily at this moment. Or more abstractly, our human inability to eradicate disease or suffering, try as we might, puts us in a sympathetic, if not tragic light. In many respects, try as we might to smear over with irony the ways of the world, we stand as helplessly innocent, as vulnerable as rabbits, before the annihilating vacuum of space. If we sometimes get cocky, we can hardly blame us; to become cynical and nasty about it marks the greater human error and ultimately, underneath it, just a piece of thwarted human innocence itself—the expectation that we could have done better, should have. A god who cannot fail, who does not lack in ability at times, who never has moments of weakness represents a god who (1) either lies about its true nature, or (2) cannot serve us as a deity.  And so a god who, while omnipotent, does not also possess the trait of non-omnipotence, does not deserve the name god—more precisely: cannot serve as a god.

Right off the bat, Nichols describes the figure on card 21 this way: “the dancer has the face, hair, and breasts of a woman but her slender hips and sturdy legs suggest that she is an androgynous being” (349); she insists on this in order to say, this being “combines and integrates within her body the masculine and the feminine elements” (349).

Thus we see immediately the problem of patriarchal bias. Certainly, when reading Jung (if not most writing from an pervious era) an assumed sexism distorts the text; if I have some patience for it in Jung’s writing, this occurs only because his very theory gives me a way to explain its otherwise garish presence.[8] I find no reason for Nichols to take this ideological turn. Just as she insisted on misreading (in my opinion) the two (deliberately androgynous) children on the Sun card as male and female, here despite a perfectly unambiguous—and extremely well-established symbolism of the world as a female dancer on practically every Tarot deck—Nichols wants to try to push a union of opposites ideology.

That union of opposites already occurred in the Sun card, I say; as the “container” of existence, the analog of card 0, the Fool, any sort of attribution (as per my analysis above) must necessarily fail: neti, neti. No small distinction prevails between insisting that “the dancer is neither male nor female” compared to “the dancer is a union of male and female”.[9] Pushing the cis-gendered agenda here serves only to mislead us. And if I had more interest to do so, one might wonder why Nichols insists on this distortion, especially here and at the Sun card, but even more generally in her (belligerent) insistence on referring to the “hero” of the Major Arcana as male.[10]

Nichols draws attention to the organic wreath as marking off a space in which the figure of the dancer resides; hence, “the dancer’s wreath creates a safe asylum for the newly emerging self” (350). Let me say that if we try to “scale down” this card to a more mundane level, such a description might have some merit, but I do not get to the point of considering it as such (1) because these sorts of themes Nichols emphasizes have amply expressed themselves in the previous Major arcana, and explicitly in the series from card 17–20, but also (2) because it ignores the “cosmic” implications of the card. If the wreath does indeed form a temenos—a sacred space—this would seem the grove of the Chaos, that original goddess who proceeds the (agricultural era’s) Great Goddesses and who exceeds by orders of magnitude the great Goddess’s limited creative power vis-à-vis (human) birth and (agricultural) fecundity. A most “obvious” union of opposites arises precisely in the identity of the World and the Fool, in the thou art that of the Upanishads, in the identity of atman and Brahman, and thus even in the implied union of the (later) Goddess and her Consort. What the wreath marks off, it seems to me, amounts to time, symbolized by the four figures (so-called angel, bull, lion, and eagle—better known as the symbols of the four evangelists,[11] but more properly seen as the four fixed signs of the Zodiac, Aquarius, Taurus, Leo, and Scorpio, and thus a pointer to the calendar year and time in general). Thus, the figure gets depicted as existing in a space beyond time, in a place where we might say “time neither exists nor does not exist”—neti, neti. As the Source (of everything), the human imagination has tended historically and cross-culturally to have embodied “Nature” (again, the figure who preexists the Great Goddess) as usually female, sometimes bisexual, sometimes asexual.

I do in fact think Nichols simply ideologically misreads the imagery of this card to insist on a male/female symbolism, and further cuts a lot of hay to explain why the figure has her genitals hidden behind a drape. I’d say, rather, that the creator of the card—unconsciously or not—channeled not the sexual ambiguity of the Source, but the actual non-applicability of gender distinctions themselves (“the source is neither (fe)male nor not (fe)male”; “the Source is neither gendered nor not gendered”). Thus we have a figure with breasts but hidden genitals. Our imagination will readily lapse this into a female figure, and Nichols, eager to find a union of opposites, will use the drape to insist something other than appearances might lurk behind it.[12] But human imagination around the world, as I say, has itself waxed ambivalent about “gendering” this Source; the imagery of this card does a nice job, I say, of trying to embody that ambiguity, which in our cultural traditions very, very strongly makes this figure, the Source, unambiguously female.

Happily—despite some talk about centers of consciousness—Nichols specifically characterizes the wreath as an ellipse, adding, “whereas a circle is one continuous round with one center or focal point, the ellipse has two foci—one at the top and the other at the bottom” (353).[13] The shape of the wreath specifically recalls as Nichols notes “a seed, an egg, the motion of the planets in orbit. Unlike the uroboros and the wheel, both of which endlessly repeat themselves, the mandorla [here pictured as a wreath] carries with it the suggestion of future development” (353).

This reminds me that the ultimate Source in Hesiod’s (late, patriarchalized) Theogony appears as Chaos, and that chaos (contrary to our more recent sense of it) means “gap” in ancient Greek. In his casual sexism, Hesiod reduces “woman” simply to a “gap” a vulva, the vaginal opening out of which everything comes. But we see further in this card that the Dancer dwells inside the wreath. I recall those sorts of Mesoamerican figures of saints with coverings, and when you lift the covering, you find a mirror—thus, you see yourself in the saint. Here, similarly, we have a peek inside the wreath, and we see the eternal Dancer. This points to how even the Great Goddess herself comes about by the creative force of something greater (symbolized here by the elliptical wreath). We see the symbolic representation of the union of atman (the dancer) and Brahman (that which “surrounds” the dancer). We get with this add a glimpse inside the world Egg, usually made opaque, if not also protectively encircled by a tail-eating snake. This numinous union—and Nichols talks more about the dancer of the card in light of sacred traditions regarding dance—Nichols cites also in a quote from Yeats: “how can we know the dancer from the dance” (315).

I hate dancing—only ever liking folk dance in junior high school PE, strangely enough[14]—but if I think instead simply of sacred motion, then I have less of an allergy to the current (popular) forms I find so alienating. This motion itself simply involves change and time, involves the diachronic expression of the Self simultaneously with the synchronic eternality of the Self. Nichols provides a detailed quote from Jung (1966)[15] that links dance, as getting in touch with the self, and the experience of the Self generally:

The widened consciousness is no longer that touchy, egotistical bundle of personal wishes, fears, hopes, ambitions which always has to be compensated and corrected by unconscious counter-tendencies. Instead, it is a function of relationship to the world of objects, bringing the individual into absolute, binding, and indissoluble communion with the world at large. The complications arising at this stage are no longer egotistic wish-conflicts, but difficulties that concern others as much as oneself. At this stage it is fundamentally a question of collective problems, which have activated the collective unconscious because they require collective rather than personal compensation. We can now see that the unconscious produces contents which are valid not only for the person concerned, but for others as well, in fact, for a great many people and possibly for all (¶5).

Nichols concludes her commentary with a helpful double invocation of quantum physics and depth psychology, quoting Erwin Schrödinger and Jung alike. She begins with her own summary:

This one world [conceived as a unity] is now understood as a continuous state of becoming; a constantly evolving process, of which each seemingly discrete entity (rock, plant, animal, or human) is a part. This, not in the sense that the universe is a giant jigsaw puzzle of which each of us represents one small segment, but rather than each discrete entity is, in fact, the whole world (362, emphasis in original)

I reproduce here Nichols’s quotations from (quantum physicist) Schrödinger and (depth psychologist) Jung as well, since they ably speak for themselves.

SCHRÖDINGER: … inconceivable as it seems to ordinary reason, you—and all other conscious beings as such—are all in all. Hence this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance. This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula which is yet really so simple and so clear: Tat tvam asi, this is you. … If we decide to have only one sphere, it has got to be  psychic one, since that exists as a given for all experience. … if, without involving ourselves in obvious nonsense, we are going to be able to think in a natural way about what goes on in a living, feeling, thinking being … then the condition for our doing so is that we think of everything that happens as taking place in our experience of the world, without ascribing it to any material substratum as the object of which it is an experience; a substratum which would in fact be wholly and entirely superfluous.

JUNG: The uniqueness of the psyche is of a magnitude that can never be made wholly real, but can only be realized approximately, though it still remains the absolute basis for all consciousness. The deeper “layers” of the psyche lose their individual uniqueness as they retreat farther and farther into darkness. “Lower down”—that is to say, as they approach the autonomous functional systems—they become increasingly collective until they are universalized and extinguished in the body’s materiality, i.e., in the chemical bodies. The body’s carbon is simply carbon. Hence “at bottom” the psyche is simply “world”.

Of course there is little or no hope that the unitary Being can ever be conceived, since our powers of thought and language permit only of antinomian statements. But this much we do know beyond all doubt, that empirical reality has a transcendental background … The common background of microphysics and depth-psychology is as much physical as psychic and therefore neither, but rather a third thing, a neutral nature which can at most be grasped in hints since in essence it is transcendental (quoted in Nichols, 363–4).

I find myself content to let those be the last words on this last card.

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] If we dispense with the demand that anything warranting the designation of  god should possess omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence, then of course these theological quibbles come to an end. But if “god” merely comprises the most-powerful, rather than something all-powerful, the most-knowing, rather than the all-knowing, &c., then t best it deserves the sort of acclaim we might accord to any record-holder in Guinness. And if, in that most-powerfulness, this god can, of course, reduce to jelly any mouthy critic, we can again do homage (as sometimes we must) to that sort of figure of the tyrant human history knows so well. But such a figure does not deserve the name of a deity then.

[8] At a sort of merely psychological level, the wee that Jung (as only one of any number of other patriarchal examples) elides the distinction between the anima as a male perception of the “nature” feminine into assertions about the actual nature of the feminine exhibits the conventional projection, overgeneralization, and thus the central value of patriarchy that would describe everything through masculine values. In other words, Jung (as we all do to some degree) projects his idea into the anima, his vision of the feminine part of a male. Bu more valuably, his psychological description also includes the notion of possession and complexes, and insofar as the anima represents a complex, it can possess us (as it does Jung and others oftenly enough), so that his sexualized presumptions get contextualized by this understanding.

[9] A similar sort of misprision occurs when Nichols analogizes the human-uttered insight “thou art that” (from Indian philosophy and religion) and the statement, attributed to Yahweh: “I am that I am.” To put it briefly, the former offers liberation from hierarchical oppression of all sort; the latter provides the starting point for hierarchical oppression of all sort—because the former identifies the personal soul with the world would, while the latter distinctly insists that the personal soul “is not” god (Yahweh).

[10] As a male, I can sense within myself a difference that can sometimes occur if I imagine replacing a male hero with a female one. In stories I remain not necessarily highly committed to—like ones I write—in, say, folk tales, I can swap a “heroine” for a “hero” and not necessarily feel much of  difference in how I perceive or receive the story. What I do wonder, at that point, arises from wondering if a female hero would actually act differently; I remain uncertain whether such “male minstrelsy” actually serves to offer a narrative difference. Certainly, in the political domain, women perceive the necessity of acting like men, sometimes even taking on the attributes of males more aggressively than males might. I could also say that, in imagine what masculinity consists of (as something apart from femininity), it comes out as a kind of caricature, just as drag queens in their representation of femininity tend to present caricatures. Thus, Mae West offers an authentic early version of the drag queen, because she so artfully took up that spirit of parody. Meanwhile, in stories I have more of a commitment to—particularly ones I write—I do find that I have more resistance to swapping the gender identification of a character; it seem that something “essential changes then, and this feels sexist to me. Or, at the very least, it points to some “point” or “task” that the story dramatizes that currently masquerades as a “human universal”. Various essays in Donovan (1975)* point out how authors (typically male) offer narratives about human universals that really apply only or primarily to male experience. If, indeed, my stories describe male experience (and why shouldn’t they), I might at least acknowledge that I do not try to describe the human condition generally, but only a portion of it.

* Donovan, J. (1989). Feminist literary criticism: explorations in theory. 2nd ed. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky,

[11] Nichols summarizes the assimilation of these figures to the evangelists later in her commentary, on page 359. She lists these four figures as symbolizing, of course, many things “the four directions, the four elements, the four humours, the four Jungian functions, the four fixed, cardinal, and mutable signs of the zodiac” (359), &c. I find this odd, for we have here a heaping up of various groups of four, all very familiar, but almost never linked explicitly to the pre-Christian or pre-Greek source of this imagery. I don’ know if this marks a blindspot or deliberate obfuscation—it may seem simply too scandalous, if not heretical, to make explicitly clear that in practically every Christian church one will encounter this blazing and blatant allusion not simply to astrology but to the original faith that Judeo-Christianity stole from in order to root itself. Some still remember the jokes that Reagan had an astrological consultant and frequently made no move without checking first, but astrology has provided access to magic from its first articulation. Perhaps revelation simply cannot admit that theft forms the basis of its Power? In any case, it seems flatly false to insist that the cardinal and mutable signs of the Zodiac get implicated in these four figures; they refer, as best I understand, only to the four fixed figures, and that because those astrological figures mark the essential moments in the growing cycle (the solstices and equinoxes) in the Northern hemisphere. They provide the most fundamental “markers” over the duration of the year, the other signs providing ever more finely gained timings.

[12] She refers later to the figure as a “quintessence, a state of being beyond the four dimensions of ordinary reality” (353, emphasis in original), but this still represents a positive knowledge claims, as opposed to “the figure is neither a quintessence nor not a quintessence”.

[13] As a point of technical accuracy, we may describe an ellipse as having a center as well, because a simple closed figure always has some sense of a center. In terms of characterizing the dynamics of the system, the motion, the foci have more descriptive relevance and power.

[14] I’d venture,, actually, that the group aspect of it allowed me to enjoy it, but I found myself especially fond of Russian and Jewish folk dancing, less the stuff that involved some variety of pairing off.

[15] Jung, C. G. (1966). Two essays on analytical psychology. 2d ed., rev. and augmented. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

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.

INTUITING TAROT AND JUNG: Card XVIII (the Moon)

Introduction & Disclaimer[1]

The twentieth 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 18: the Moon.

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 Moon: Maiden or Menace?[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.

I tend to read card 17 (the Star) as the moment in the Bardö when I pick the course of my next life. But, because I make that choice from the standpoint of eternity (and possibly with omniscience), to actually experience that life, I must first hobble my omniscience; I must shroud my Self in amnesia, in unknowing, in ignorance. The Moon signals that signal moment. One consequence of this: this makes the Moon the governess of Time, since through the slow unspooling of events in manifested reality I will experience, moment by moment, the life I have chosen for myself, in all of its vicissitudes and surprises.[7]

Nichols emphasizes how, for the first time, no human-like figure appears in the Moon card,[8] which I might take as pointing to the (necessary) eclipsing of the Self (with a capital S), prior to the emergence of the self (noncapital S) that will inhabit the next life.[9] She emphasizes the dog figures—and I regret that I cannot remember either what Heck and Cordonnier (2012)[10] say regarding medieval imagery for dogs in European bestiaries nor in great detail what Jung said in his (1956)[11] Mysterium Coniunctionis about dogs in alchemical imagery. Consulting his 15 pages or so devoted specifically to the dog, I offer a few remarks.

There (for one thing) the union of two dogs brings about a third that will “preserve bodies from burning and from the heat of the fire” (Khalid, quoted in Jung, ¶174), which itself refers to the ur-Symbol of the union of the Moon and Sun. Or, again, “This Dog, they say, being a certain divine Logos, has been established judge of the quick and the dead” (Khalid, quoted in Jung, ¶176), suggesting Anubis, and thus the whole mystery and Great Work of alchemy writ small; hence, Jung writes, “In this one thing all parts of the work are contained” (¶181). By which he means specifically, interpreting an alchemical text,

In order to set free the contents hidden in the “house” of the unconscious … the “matrix” must be opened. This matrix is the “canicula,” the moon-bitch, who carries in her belly that part of the personality which is felt to be essential (¶181).

All of this only to point to the literal depths of enclosure and obscurity the moon encompasses as a symbol. And, in part, precisely because it encloses (or delimits) the Unconscious itself, it becomes capable of carry a well-night limitless number of symbolic associations, where the dog represents only one (instinctual) aspects within it. Thus, we have also “that the dark, dangerous, rabid dog changes into an eagle at the time of the plenilunium [the full moon]. His darkness disappears and he becomes a solar animal. We may therefore assume that his sickness as at its worst at the novilunium [the new moon]” (¶183). Of these dangers, which on the one hand the (rabid) dog proposes but also which, as Nichols stresses, the hero may face by befriending the dog:[12]

It is not difficult to discern in these allusions the dangers, real or imaginary, which are connected with the unconscious. In this respect the unconscious has a bad reputation, not so much because it is dangerous in itself s because there are cases of latent psychosis which need only a slight stimulus to break out in all their catastrophic manifestations. An anamnesis or the touching of a complex may be sufficient for this. But the unconscious is also feared by those whose conscious attitude is at odds with their true nature. Naturally their dreams will then assume an unpleasant and threatening form, for if nature is violated she takes her revenge. In itself the unconscious is neutral, and its normal function is to compensate the conscious position. In it the opposites slumber side by side; they are wrenched apart only by the activity of the conscious mind, and the more one-sided and cramped the conscious standpoint is, the more painful or dangerous will be the unconscious reaction. There is no danger from this sphere is conscious life has a solid foundation. But if consciousness is cramped and obstinately one-sided, and there is also a weakness of judgment, then the approach or invasion of the unconscious can cause confusion and panic or a dangerous inflation, for one of the most obvious dangers is that of identifying with the figures in the unconscious. For anyone with an unstable disposition this my amount to a psychosis (¶184).

Nichols employs or indulges in and transcribe it seems considerable active imagination in her commentary on this card, dramatizing explicitly the sorts of actions the hero takes in this inhuman landscape. The value of this might prove considerable and it also strongly marks a change in how she comments on the other cards. At one point she relates a legend where the moon “gathers unto herself all the discarded memories and forgotten dreams of mankind” (317), and then in the morning releases them all into the earth so that “nothing of value is lost to man” (317). This seems a reminder that though the veil of māyā and Unconsciousness has gotten thrown over everything, it remains present; we simply cannot see it in the dark—just as we no longer perceive our Self because the darkness of ajñana (usually translated as “ignorance” but understood in at least one stream of Kashmiri Sivaism as a “partial understanding”) has made it impossible for us to see. From this, we might discern the command need not consist of, “Wake up!” but rather, “Clear your eyes.” The fault lies less with our vision and more with our looking.

A curious things about the card Nichols comments on concerns the artistic realization for the moon itself. Not  actually fully within the frame of the card, the moon (somewhat like the central star of card 17) superimposes three multi-pointe shapes: two 7-branched stars and one 14-branched star. This totals 21, and reprises the structure of the entire Tarot itself, with each minor arcana having 14 cards, and the Major Arcana consisting of three groups of 7. But, admittedly, the execution of the card gets muddy at the top of the image, and in a way that looks more inept than intentional. In any case, peeking ahead to the Sun, we see nothing so explicitly 7, 14, or 21 about the card, and this “allusion” to card 21 or the World conjoined to the circle (or the O) of the moon image itself seems a succinct references to the totality implied by the Moon’s obscuring. Like the gathered memories mentioned above, we may find everything in the Unconscious (in this card), and this also points to the sense of the sign Scorpio, which one excepts the crayfish—probably modified somehow—alludes to, itself an allusion to the Egyptian scarab.

But in addition to the multi-pointedness of this Moon, its coloration seems curious. I tend to think of the moon in its intermediate stages, waxing or waning. Probably we tend to physically see it this way the most frequently, because the full moon (though striking) doesn’t occur as often as crescents, and the new moon tends to get overlooked for its “invisibility”.  Here, though, the Moon’s crescent shape gets formed as part of a sideways halo on a face seen in profile, and a face safely and fully within the circumference of the circle that forms the base for all of the moon rays as well. Moreover, the artist colored the whole face of the moon blue—matching the water (the ocean) below and deftly (or in a sort of optical allusion) making the round shape of the moon echoed in the “round” outline one can imaginatively circumscribe the crawfish with.

The effect of this blue coloration makes it seem as if a sun has gotten eclipsed—that the moon per se on this card gets represented only by the crescent-faced profile but it still suffices to cover a sun in the background. It might also occur that this symbolizes (or attempts to symbolize) the “black sun”—an alchemical counterpart of the sun itself (the sol niger), or the Sun’s shadow (solis umbra).

All the more ruthlessly, therefore, does alchemy insist on the dangerousness of the new moon. Luna is on the one hand the brilliant whiteness of the full moon, on the other hand she is the blackness of the new moon, and especially the blackness of the eclipse, when the sun is darkened (Mysterium Coniuntionis, ¶21).

Because “the changefulness of the moon and her ability to grow dark are interpreted as her corruptibility” (¶28), the symbolism then enters into a great deal of sexualized comparisons between solar-masculine and lunar-feminine nature, which I will not reprise or ague with here. Nonetheless, when the alchemist writes that the moon “is the shadow of the sun, and with corruptible bodies she is consumed, and through her corruption … is the Lion eclipsed” (quoted in Jung, ¶172), we may understand this as a (collective) memory of the necessary ignorance we took upon ourselves in order to enter into this life; it denotes a statement, made from the standpoint of the partial understanding of the Sun, about the nature of the Self that feels threatened by Moon is a kind of regression. Occidental patriarchy then links this dissolution to emasculation, obviously unnecessarily, if not neurotically.

In its banal sense—if symbolism can ever have a straightforward banality in alchemy—the sol niger or black sun “coincides with the nigredo and putrefaction, the state of death” (¶113) or breaking down of the prevailing conditions so that the next steps of the alchemical process may occur and  be effective. It takes a while, but Jung amplifies this rather deceptively plain remark when writing about the dog s  symbol:

The theriomorphic [animal] form of Sol as a lion and a dog and of Luna as a bitch shows that there is an aspect of both luminaries which justifies the need for a “symbolization” in animal form. That is to say the two luminaries are, in a sense, animals or appetites, although, as we have seen, the “potentiae sensuales” [sensual power] are ascribed only to Luna. There is, however, also a Sol niger, who, significantly enough, is contrasted with the day-time sun and clearly distinguished from it. This advantage is not shared by Luna, because she is obviously sometimes bright and sometimes dark

By which I take Jung to mean that the alchemists identified contrasts of opposites already in the Moon, whereas they, forever hunting out oppositions, had to postulate a black sun as the sun’s opposite. Consequently, Jung continues:

Psychologically, this means that consciousness by its very nature distinguishes itself from its shadow, whereas the unconscious is not only contaminated with its own negative side but is burdened with the shadow cast off by the conscious min. Although the solar animals, the lion and the eagle, are nobler than the bitch, they are nevertheless animals an beasts of prey at that, which means that even our sun-like consciousness has its dangerous animals. Or, if Sol is the spirit and Luna the body, the spirit too may be corrupted by pride or concupiscence, a fact which we are inclined to overlook in our one-sided admiration of the “spirit” (¶148).[13]

In the last significant reference in Mysterium Coniuntionis to the black sun, Jung writes:

In the heat of the [blackening, the first phase of the Great Work] the “anima media natura” [the nature of the soul, or Wisdom] holds dominion.’ The old philosophers called this blackness the Raven’s Head or black sun. … In this state the sun is surrounded by the anima media natura and is therefore black. It is a state of incubation or pregnancy. Great importance was attached to the blackness as the starting point of the work. … In our context the interpretation of the nigredo as terra (earth) is significant. Like the anima media natura or Wisdom, earth is in principle feminine (¶729).

Note especially the sense of pregnancy or incubation. Only too briefly, I would assert that masculine magic based itself on feminine magic, the most obvious embodiment of this manifesting as the creation of new life. If the four steps of this feminine magic involve conception, gestation, labor, and birth (realization), then these correspond as well to the suits of the Tarot: air, water, fire, and earth, respectively. The Moon, standing in the position of the suit of Water, makes the reference to gestation and pregnancy here especially resonant. But not just to strictly associated it with feminine magic; in masculine magic—i.e., in psychological work most generally (without any gendered distinction)—this phase of the Work consists in gestation, in unknown growth within the darkness the sea, &c. That which will manifest with the rise of card 18, the Sun, here remains sunk beneath the horizon, i.e., “underwater” an invisible in the murk.

In the Great Arc of that eternal part of myself that set itself apart from Brahman in order that, over a vast or perhaps few number of physical incarnations in life, it might reprise and so reëxperience the bliss of the attainment of enlightenment, each of those incarnations we might call, invoking the Moon, a phase. And in the sense that each such phase represents a kind of mania, a decided fixation on a given mode of being (during that particular lifetime), then the individual star that guides that life has that fixated sense of lunacy we psychiatrically associate with obsessiveness—another fit, or a phase.

All of this to hearken back to the insight that the Moon governs Time, and that the phases it marks—whether at the largest scale of multiple lifetimes or the smallest where minute by minute in any given lifetime we succumb to our various obsessions, devoted attentions, loving lingerings over, &–can gin illumination hen considered (or imagined) in light of the Moon, as timepiece.

I think what I especially want to stress, more or less against the active imagination Nichols brought to her sense of this card, which read into a specific an embodied journey for the hero: a phase in one’s life does consist of action, and in that sense can get marked off in a sequence and given the name “journey” for that reason, but it also has the character of a “lunacy”. The actions merely or simply fill up a span of time. Only afterwards can we look back and say, with a degree of certainty, what the journey “meant” or even that it occurred. I imagine the time of my gestation as a fetus—it seems unconvincing, if not bizarre, to call that a “journey”—it seems much more merely a time period (a duration) filled up with actions, most of them (if not all of them) fundamentally involuntary.

Again, afterward (once I draw my first breath on dry land), it seems more fit to look back and try to explain in terms of a journey what had happened (to me). And time seems this way in general. So that the Bardö state notion of the Moon does not have to remain pegged only to this most cosmic scale, we can distill its sense down as well to the phase of a given life, tot eh phases of that given life, to the phases within those phases, and so forth—all of which we humanly must, after the fact, make into a narrative, a journey.

And that gesture requires self-awareness per se, which the next card, the Sun, often gets called upon to embody or symbolize, but in the next post we will see it doesn’t work out so simply that way.

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).

[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), Psychiatric Studies (Collected Works 1, 2^nd ed. 1970), 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] I discussed previously in my commentary on the Star what the status of surprise or learning might consist of in the context of  Self (you, me, all of us) that stars (in eternity) from omniscience.

[8] Although this does not prevent her from speaking at length how the (masculine) hero will have to navigate his way through the alternatingly (in her view) marvelous and terrifying landscape of the card.

[9] Proposing this in philosophical terms from India, Brahman willfully eclipses itself, ultimately to form the Atman; in Jungian terms, a Self with total awareness manifests the collective unconsciousness, out of which (or from which) in the next card will emerge the self of consciousness (bringing with it a residue of the collective unconscious in the personal unconscious; or perhaps simply its shadow).

[10] Heck, C., and Cordonnier, R (2012). The grand medieval bestiary : animals in illuminated manuscripts. London: Abbeville Press

[11] Jung, CG (1970). Mysterium coniunctionis: an inquiry into the separation and synthesis of psychic opposites in alchemy. (Vol. 14, Collected Works, 2nd ed., Trans. R.F.C. Hull) Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press

[12] We might as well remember and note here, “The appearance of Diana [the moon] necessarily brings with it her hunting animal the dog, who represents her dark side. Her darkness shows itself in the fact that she is also a goddess of destruction and death, whose arrows never miss” (¶188).

[13] All of this as it stands, around ¶228 Jung goes off the rails into one of his vacuous tirades bout female consciousness under the guise of his own shadow or Sol niger; only for this reason does the passage have interest. Quite charmingly or ironically, the next mention of the Sol Niger finds Jung taking Nietzsche to task for “masculine prejudice” (¶330), which Nietzsche failed to notice or mention “first because nobody likes to admit to any inferiority, and second because logic forbids something white to be called black. A good man has good qualities, and only the bad man has bad qualities. For reasons of prestige we pass over the shadow in complete silence” (¶330)..

INTUITING TAROT AND JUNG: Card XVII (the Star)

Introduction & Disclaimer[1]

The nineteenth post in a series that adds commentary to Nichols’ (1980)[2] Jungian commentary on the major arcana of the Tarot, here I engage with card 17: the Star.

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 Star: Ray of Hope[6]

EDITED: for those following, in what follows I especially emphasize the sense of the Star as it relates to the emergence of a new sense of destiny, to the detriment or seeming negligence of it as “simply” a source of spiritual illumination. Of course, one may easily see how these two instances represent similar moments at different “scales” of spiritual life. Still, in order not to seem to neglect entirely this aspect, the following insert gives a quick sketch of this more “immediate” sense of the Star and may also seem familiar in its imagery, especially in the falling five-pointed stars. Jung (1912) [3a] writes:

This symbolism is expressed very plastically in the third logos of the Dieterich papyus: after the second prayer, stars float down toward the neophyte from the disc of the sun–“five pointed, in great numbers an filling the whole air.” “When the sun’s disc has opened, you will see an immense circle, and fiery doors which are closed.” the neophyte then utters the following prayer:

Give ear to me, her me, Lord, who has fastened the fiery bolts of heaven with thy spirit, double-bodied, fire-ruler, creator of light, fire-breathing, fiery-hearted, shining spirit, rejoicing in fire, beautiful light, Lord of light, fiery-bodied, giver of light, sower of fire, confounding with fire, living light, whirling fire, mover of light, hurler of thunderbolts, glorious light, multiplier of light, holder of fiery light, conqueror of the stars (quoted in Jung, ¶135)

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.

I find it helpful to think of myself as having chosen the whole course of my life—everything good, bad, indifferent—even if I often enough forget this assumption or get all gripey about something. I imagine I chose it all in advance during my previous Bardö state—foreseeing all of the details of it in advance, of course, because in the Bardö state I become (as we all do) omniscient—though, in my present (limited, physical) incarnation, I no longer remember any of those details.

I say this in this slightly tortured way, because I do not want to give the impression I require some commitment to any specific metaphysical reality for this “approach” or idea to remain consistent. Whether a Bardö state actually exists or not, I can choose to look at my life as if every detail in it I chose in advance.[7] Thus, instead of the absurdly tortured Christian theodicy in order to explain suffering in a context of an omniscient, omnipotent, and (theoretically) omnibenevolent divine being, the question, “Why do I suffer” gets answered, simply, “I chose it.” Perhaps as a challenge. Perhaps it arises as a consequence of some other detail in my life. The simplicity of the answer thus answers what remains an eternally vexing and thoroughly unfair situation—that I got born into a world without permission, and now I experience suffering as a result—and permits me to get past the problem of blame (e.g., my parents, or some divine being) and to move forward.

The power of this in my life personally stands in marked contrast to the inhumanity of it when advocated to others: to tell the child starving in Darfur, the woman sexually assaulted in the Congo, the cancer-ridden Chinese worker, or the Arab man unjustly tortured in Guantanamo that they chose those fates becomes, at times, not just a cornerstone in a grotesque indifference to human suffering but even a justification for it. In the notion, for instance, that suffering builds character (or what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger), then simple logic dictates that we should beat the fuck out of children, the younger the better, so as to truly build up their character into saints or captains of industry or whatnot.

As Kateb (1972)[8] remarks, in his discussion of pain and pleasure, “At times it seems that the antiutopians favor pain as men would favor it who never felt very much of it and think it may be good for themselves and surely could not be too bad for others” (126). This preference for physical pain over pleasure and an aversion to the flesh obviously go hand in hand; worse, that exponents of pain think that it “surely could not be too bad for others” provides a very ominous concomitant, since it remains a very short step from this idea to deliberate violence, if not to the sadism that masquerades as moral instruction. How many wives have been thrashed by domestic sadists to “teach her a lesson” in fidelity? How many teachers had erections as they paddled the naked buttocks of their pupils? How often was something other than atonement going through the minds of abbots or priests as they witnessed the physical penance of their monks? Kateb alternatively offers that “at other times, the antiutopians speak as men who have seen or had so much pain that they have become incapable of imagining that there could come a time when pain—at least in its more brutalizing forms—could cease to be” (126–7).

So, any choice to view one’s life as chosen in the sense I describe above may only rest on the choosing individual’s authority.  And if one makes such a choice, then the Star card represents that moment when, out of all the varieties of destiny or fate that one might choose for oneself, one in particular gets selected.[9] The Star in this sense represents a kind of center of gravity or a (literally) guiding star for the whole course of one’s life.[10] If we imagine life as an answer to a question, then the Star point to or symbolizes that question. In this sense, the conventional sense of the star (as one’s ultimate hopes or dreams) comes out, with the addition that one’s hopes and dreams (in this context) get discovered or uncovered or realized. If this seems to threaten too much a sense of predestination, for one thing, once one lies on one’s deathbed, when one’s capacity to choose outcomes or fates seems at its absolute nadir, then one can look back over the whole course of a life and say, “Well, here is exactly where I wound up.” All the other branching possibilities of life have gotten trimmed off (or shown as illusions), and there remains only the actual paths followed. That outcome, which we generally do not find unsatisfying unless we have chosen profoundly wrongly throughout life, every bit embodies predestination as the only possible outcome. The primary requirement, it seems, revolves around our maintaining a sense of choice, even as we choose the only possible outcome. So this all hinges on our knowledge, what we know—and that points to why, despite in the Bardö state already knowing how everything will turn out after all—we necessarily induce amnesia in ourselves, in order that the experience of life “startles us” or surprises us or catches us off-guard.

Nichols, commenting on the card in her deck, notes how a naked female figure pours water from two jugs, one into a stream the other onto the earth. She notes, “Psychologically speaking, the kneeling figure might be dividing and sorting out insights newly available to consciousness, separating out the personal from the transpersonal” (295–6). Nichols’ reading continues the terrestrial adventure of the soul (card 0, the Fool) from the previous sequence of cards, culminating in card 16, the Tower, but whether we should understand the sequence as a literal or physical continuation of one life, or the entry into the Bardö state to germinate a next life, does not matter: the argument scales not only in that direction but “backward” to smaller scales as well, i.e., when we go to sleep, we may understand this as “death” (with dreaming as the Bardö state), and waking the next morning as rebirth, &c.[11] Whatever the scale, this “dividing and sorting out insights newly available to consciousness, separating out the personal from the transpersonal” seem the crucial point in all cases.

Sine our hyperindividualistic culture tends to disregard the transpersonal entirely, the mere emphasis of it already portends a potentially transformative factor in our (literally “out”) life(s).

The card Nichols examines features seven, eight, or nine stars, depending upon how we parse them. Seven individual eight-pointed stars surround a central double star, formed by the superimposition of one eight-pointed star on a second one. Besides digging out these details by looking more closely at the card, the impression remains of seven lesser stars and one central one (making eight in all, perhaps signaled also in the eight-pointedness of each), and the fact that the central star itself (because of the alternation of the points) results in a 16-pointed star. That we have sixteen points (two groups of eight) on card 17 points to the sort of “transcendent” (or transcending) summary this card gets at. It seems technically redundant, if we remain sensitive to how this row of cards (17 through 20) functions relative to the proceeding sixteen cards. Meanwhile, the seven lesser stars themselves (each eight-pointed) suggest the days of the week, the chakras, “the seven stages of the alchemical process” (297), and (of course) the predominant astrological figures, with the double-star suggesting the sun itself.

Emphasizing trees as simultaneously “symbolic of the transpersonal, universal self” (298) but also representations of “the unique way the transpersonal self is made manifest in each individual” (298), Nichols then belittles her text:

The two trees in The Star might also remind one of the twin trees in the garden of Eden: the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Perhaps, like Eden’s trees, the two in this picture stand for two impulses rooted in the human psyche which move us to action—the one which impel us to live life, and the other which motivates us to know life (298).

The tree, as a symbol of the transpersonal and personal—the transcendent and the immanent—simultaneously does not need an analytical distinction between “Life” and “Knowledge of Good and Evil”. This redundancy offers an unnecessary distinction that ultimately gets reified into good and evil itself (“good” and “evil” falling on “life” or “knowledge” depending upon the inclinations of the philosopher or commentating carrying on about it). But we might live with this error were it not compounded by the prohibition on eating from the second tree, since whatever high-falutin claims one might hear about necessary falls and the like, the prohibition itself gets lost as a gesture of power—in a fable written by men who sought to secure their power over others, &c.

So if we connect this gesture back to the sense of the Star as it relates to the Bardö state, then this Power would amount to esoteric Power (hoarded by specialists, men generally), magic most generally and thus all of the appurtenances of priests, shamans, &c. And whatever histories we may identify in India regarding claims of exclusive access to esoteric knowledge, the Bhagavad-Gītā shamelessly declares openly the “ultimate secrets” for anyone who happens to hear it. The obvious largesse of this stands in distinct contrast to most “revelations”. So I see no reason whatsoever to imagine, even for a moment, that the two trees here must represent the false and politically interested dichotomy of Eden’s two trees.

Nor must we even put too much on the fact of two trees at all. As images (in the background of the card, hence in the “past” of the card) of the immanent expression of the transpersonal, universal self, they may refer simply to our previous lives.[12] And if I had to pick something else they might symbolize, I’d incline to link them to the recurring dominance of duality occurring on the car—the balanced opposition of the many stars’ points and the doubled duality of water and earth, each with their own jug of pouring water. For me, this duality—which carries through this whole row of cards, by the way—point still to those two modes of consciousness: the radiant n the reflective (extroverted and introverted). However, if I find a “justification” for this in the card, it arises from the two jugs, and not from the fact of two trees—the trees seem more the historical fact of previous incarnations, rooted in the (literal) ground of eternity.[13]

Somewhat like trees as symbols, which simultaneously display the traces of a very distant past while also manifesting immediately in the present, stars too represent something like time machines. Imagined vividly enough, we can resolve the paradox of their (on the one hand) unimaginable size in contrast to their (on the other) utterly minuscule dimness of light by placing them at what amounts to an infinite distance away. The form of guidance they offer does not resemble a lamp or a moon, in other words, but only their relative position in the sky (relatively fixed or at least predictably in motion) as it relates to our own journey. Thus, Nichols notes, “In this way, the stars connect each individual moment with transcendental time” (299).

Eliade (1959)[14] notes how this connection with transcendental time crucially informs the broadest conceptions of New Years’ rites.  First, insofar as all “real acts” occur only in mythical time (through repetition), what we might call our archaic mentality therefore exhibits an “ahistorical” character. Thus, the abolition of time entailed by exemplary repetition—by repeating the acts of mythological culture heroes—shows itself as an abolition of profane (non-sacred) time; that time taken up by all the non-important acts of life not preserved as exemplary gestures in myth. Eliade later convincingly illuminates the advantages of such a view; principally that it makes the terror of history, with its suffering, misfortune, social injustice and so forth, tolerable. Moreover, by annulling personal history:

archaic man recovers the possibility of definitely transcending time and living in eternity. Insofar as he fails to do so, insofar as he “sins,” that is, falls into historical existence, into time, he each year thwarts the possibility. At least he retains the freedom to annul his faults, to wipe out the memory of his “fall into history,” and to make another attempt to escape definitively from time (158).

This access to freedom has a correlate implication of access to power and creativity. This seems obvious in the re-creation of the world in events like Mardi Gras, Carnival, Festival, or new years’ rites generally, but every repetition involves the re-creation of a first gesture, and hence becomes an act performed for the first time. Eliade further demonstrates the ubiquity of this type of personal creative power as cosmogenesis in ritual: in temple building and for lands conquered by war, at times of coronation, consummation of marriage, and the birth of children, or even as a response to bad crops or bad luck.

For the cosmos and man are regenerated ceaselessly and by all kinds of means, the past is destroyed, evils and sins are eliminated, etc. Differing in their formulas, all these instruments of regeneration tend toward the same end: to annul past time, to abolish history by a continuous return in illo tempore, by the repetition of the cosmogonic act (81).

Against the notion that such a connection to transcendental time amounts to nothing, Eliade notes how the archaic mentality has served in good stead “tens of millions…century after century” (152), particularly even since the original publication of his work we may still say that “a very considerable fraction of the population of Europe, to say nothing of other continents, still lives today by the light of the traditional, anti-‘historicistic’ viewpoint” (152).

As no small aside, Nichols reframes the alchemical notion of “as above, so below” in psychological terms as “between the self and the ego” (299). This reiterates that the literal reading of the phrase, involving actual stars, represents a projection; hence, one remembers also Thomas Moore’s (1982)[15] now long out-of-print The Planets Within as well of course as other essential projections such as identified in Jean Shinoda Bolen’s (1984)[16] Goddesses in Everywoman and (1989)[17] Gods in Everyman. For Nichols, she links the symbology of stars to archetype, i.e., “they symbolize the archetypes which are the images that influence our lives and through which we experience the myriad aspects of the godhead” (300).

Because only a naked human figure appears on Nichols’ card, a figure she describes as wholly human (i.e., not divine), it becomes unsettling that she says, “Significantly, the hero himself does not appear in this picture” (300). Perhaps he does not, but why can’t the female figure constitute the hero—especially since Nichols has insisted this figure represents no divine character: “in The Star we see for the first time a naked human. Stripped of all identification and robbed of every pretension, her essential self is exposed to the elements. Wearing no social persona or mask, she reveals her basic nature” (295); moreover, “she is a human figure without wings, and the urns are blood red, symbolic of physical nature and human feeling” (296).

This unambiguous  designation of the figure as human—even if a human who straddles the transcendental and immanent realms and sorts out psychological experiences from that vantage point—points, I would say, very clearly to an unnecessary sexism that can’t understand—or wants to make some amount of hay out of the fact—that the “hero himself” does not appear in this picture. We would have to further understand—if we would fantasize that the (masculine) “hero” remains the subject of the transit of the soul through the entire sequence of Major Arcana—why the hero has appeared in single, double, and triple form previously, as well as in both (apparent) genders, i.e., Empress, Emperor, Hierophant, Temperance, the three-fold imagery on the Lovers, &c. Just as the imagery and the term “mother “ has served part of humanity metaphorically as the most thoroughgoing symbolization of the Source (or that which we must remain separate from, even as we acknowledge it as our origin), and just as the imagery and the term “death” has served part of humanity metaphorically as the most thoroughgoing symbolization of the Other (or that which by definition we do not wish to integrate but must), so the imagery and terms “male” and “female” would seem to have served metaphorically as two of the most thoroughgoing representations for (incommensurable) difference. While the reification of these terms, as also the terms “mother” and “death,” have made literal and perilous (if not destructive) what (if left symbolic) portends liberation and growth.

So it seems wholly misguided, and misguiding, to fret over any disappearance or non-appearance of the hero in this card, just as it seems misguided or misguiding to think that this card would have (or could have, or should have) nothing for male-bodied individuals because the human figure in this card seems female-bodied. In  pitiful statement, Nichols contrasts the male hubris of card 16, which experienced a complete reversal in the previous card, so that “Now he discovers that he is nobody” (301). I find this pitiful because it inadvertently means that the woman on the card constitutes this nobody. Nichols does not intend this, but if the “hero” has disappeared (temporarily), who occupies this card? Moreover, this masculine ego can ‘only through the ministrations of the Star Woman … be saved” (301).

We see in this an abrupt reversal of the humanization this figure had earlier from Nichols; suddenly, she represents something more divine, a Star Woman (with capital letters). Now suddenly, “this woman is an archetypal creature of the deeps. She lives and moves in the timeless world of the planets—a world that existed millenniums ago, long before the advent of man and his clocks” (301). In light of such an abrupt re-definition, I feel compelled to repeat what Nichols wrote a couple of pages earlier:

“in The Star we see for the first time a naked human. Stripped of all identification and robbed of every pretension, her essential self is exposed to the elements. Wearing no social persona or mask, she reveals her basic nature” (295); moreover, “she is a human figure without wings, and the urns are blood red, symbolic of physical nature and human feeling” (296, quotation marks carried over from the original above).

Most assuredly, the atman (the Self) that “dwells” in the Bardö state (in between lives) does indeed inhabit  timeless world, i.e., eternity, which does not just preexist but precludes any notion of clocks. And if we wanted, we could mull over in what sense or for what reason we have the atman expressed (on this card) in female form, though that seems beside the point at this juncture, but Nichols does not let it rest. Identifying the Star Woman as something like an archetypal timepiece in rhythm with the sidereal motion of the stars (in contrast to the artificial motion of man-made clocks), then, “In the psychology of a man, such  female figure represents his anima, or unconscious feminine side. In a woman’s journey this figure, being of the same sex, would symbolize a shadow aspect of the personality” (301).

I almost never find any discussion of the anima by Jung (or, apparently Nichols) rooted in truthfulness, for want of a better word. The fact that here the Star Woman gets construed as basically a man’s essential Muse and a woman’s discardable or dangerous enemy shows the emptiness of trying to populate “male” and “female” psychologies with identically valenced complexes. And continuously stupid as I find it, Jung’s psychological theory also explains why he could have so continuously repeated this error—above and beyond, of course, the world of patriarchal sexism he inherited by birth. As a numinous  figure, the anima (and animus) have the capacity to possess us as complex—Jung’s theory provides this psychological mechanism and explanation, and I believe such possession explains the bulk of his commentary on the distinctions between male and female psychology, especially where the anima and animus get concerned.

If we ask an extravert—more properly, someone in an extraverted mode of consciousness—to describe herself, she might say “gregarious, outgoing, sociable” and if asked to describe an introvert might say “socially awkward, retiring, standoffish.” Similarly, if we ask an introvert—i.e., someone in an introverted mode of consciousness—to describe himself, he might say “thoughtful, tactful, reflective” while if asked to describe an extravert might say “overbearing, loud, thoughtless.” Keeping this in mind, and that we all at different times operate in either an extraverted or introverted mode of consciousness, then (to use the extravert as an example), at those times when an extravert feels socially inhibited from expressing herself in an extraverted mode, then she might “switch over” to an introverted mode of consciousness or being. But for her, to act in an introverted mode involves being socially awkward, standoffish, &c. Similarly, the introvert who “switches over” to his idea of extraversion will tend toward thoughtlessness and/or loud and overbearing behavior. The person who gets too drunk at the party and stands on top of a table dancing with his shirt off and waving it around may, more likely, constitute someone more prone to introversion who has switched over, just as the bitter, carping loner out in the backyard all by herself, who wants no one to talk to her, more likely constitutes an extravert who has switched over to her parody of the introverted mode of being.

In both cases, when we switch over from our more dominant or comfortable mode of consciousness, we take up a mode of consciousness based on an Other, but it represents little more than a parody, an ugly satire, of that Other’s mode of being. And since Jung insists that the difference between extraversion and introversion tends toward ‘fundamentally irritating,” the incommensurability of that distinction links it in type to the incommensurability of difference between “male” and “female” as well. And over and over in this commentary on Nichols commentary, the proposal that extraversion and introversion represent modes of consciousness (the radiant and the reflective respectively) has butted up against the conundrum of trying to link these things to gender, e.g., in the case of card 3, the Empress, and card 4, the Emperor. But when we understand that what a man means by “woman” and what a woman means by “man” falls into the same kind of parodying trap that extraversion and introversion represent, then we may already begin to start finding our way out of the futility at work in Jung’s distinction of anima and animus (and gender-identified differences generally).

At a minimum, it permits one to add a massive horse-block of salt to the dominantly patriarchal discourse, which Jung (and Freud even more egregiously) and “thoughtlessly” expressed in their attempts to universalize human psychology—with the difference that Jung’s psychology shows us a mechanism for understanding how this could have come about, while Freud’s theorizing does not. We can ask, with the feminists,[18] whether something like an incommensurably female psyche has a reality apart from the male psyche, or perhaps Jung’s admirably non-gendered psychological types more or less provide all of the incommensurable templates we might encounter.

However these large issues flesh out, to pretend that the “hero” disappears in card 17 represents a swerve into possession by a complex that distorts Nichols’ commentary, I believe. But, again to the credit of Jung’s theory, he provides a way to understand this. I have shown from the text how Nichols switches, with an impressive abruptness, from identifying the figure on the card as wholly human to one that represents instead the Star Woman “an archetypal creature of the deeps” (300, emphasis mine)—not even human, but a creature, this resurgence of the anima—a Muse in the psychology of a man—gets construed as a shadow in the psychology of a woman; so this manifestation of the anima represents (literally) a mistake by Nichols’ lights. That projections involve blindspots further explains how Nichols gives no sign of noticing this switch—once possessed by the anima, it speaks through her rather than her speaking for it. In the following, one can almost literally hear Nichol’s star “blowing up” (expanding), growing bigger by the moment, until the phrase “in either case”:

Since the Star Woman is drawn on the grand scale, larger than life, she could personify a quality far beyond the personal shadow and more akin to the self, that all-encompassing archetype which is the central star of our psychic constellation. In either case, the kneeling figure represents a hitherto inaccessible aspect of the psyche which, like a  fairytale princess, was formerly imprisoned in a tower and held captive there by cruel King Logos, ruler of our masculine-oriented society (301)

After “that all-encompassing archetype which is the central star of our psychic constellation” which also represents an almost total aphelion away from the notion of the card’s figure as a mere human being,[19] the phrase “in either case,” rings with a touch of calm down, after which point we suddenly enter a fairytale realm where the “hero” (the heroine) in fact appears, in the form of the princess held captive by cruel King Logos.

I suspect I will have to split a hair here. In card 16, Nichols identifies the hubristic hero (masculine) as the one imprisoned in the tower.[20] Here, in card 17 (as Nichols builds it up in this passage) we have a princess imprisoned in a tower as well, thus linking her with the hero of card 16. In such fairytales, we frequently find some Prince Charming who comes to rescue the princess, and in this current absence we might try to read the absence of the hero Nichols asserts. However, we also might recall that men relate such myths n stories, and that in historical epochs when women have penned such adventures, as occurred in droves near the end of the eighteenth century when female-authored Gothic fiction proliferated rampantly on the literary scene,[21] precisely female agency—not Prince Charmings—helped to get heroines out of the towers in which heavy fathers and cruel King Logoi had imprisoned them. Understood in this light, we need no Prince Charming to appear—the fairytale princess (heroically realized) has already the pugnacious wherewithal to save herself.

All of this goes far afield of the Star card, of course, even as it illustrates what seems a case of anima-possession on Nichol’s part, i.e., identification with archetypal imagery.

Briefly, Nichols alludes to the presence of the four elements of air, water, fire, and earth represented together “for the first time” (303) in this card, and that “not all analytical psychologists agree as to which element best symbolizes which [Jungian] function” (303).

My own notion is that air and water might represent thinking and feeling; whereas fire an earth might symbolize intuition and sensation. No doubt one’s function type influences the way [she] experiences and classifies the functions. The reader might find it useful to pause here and ponder on which classification feels right (303).

Instead, I would rather emphasize the dyadic relationship Jung propose for the four functions. Distinguish irrational and rational functions, which itself proposes a dyadic contrast, he contrast intuition & sensation (irrational) and feeling & thinking (rational). By this, he definitively insists on a sense of different but equal, though each of us will by habit or inclination favor one more than the others, which Nichols points to when she says “no doubt one’s function type influences the way [she] experiences and classifies the functions.” The mutual exclusivity of thinking compared to feeling or intuition compared to sensation largely involves a definitional exclusivity: we “think-feel’ all the time but in the moment of (rational) analysis we declare that we employ one or the other function and thereby assign by fit the precedence of thinking or feeling in that moment. The same applies for intuition and sensation. So that what I want to emphasize involves less that we preferentially declare various functions in various ways, but that to declare one function comes with a ‘value-structure” that simultaneously does not choose some other function. To employ the thinking function places the feeling function in the dark and vice versa, &c. This mutual exclusivity amounts to an incommensurability as well, between thinking and feeling or intuition and sensation, but also the irrational and irrational functions themselves.

With this in mind, it becomes clear how fruitlessly we might debate any absolutely “correct assignment” of the functions to the elements. Whatever scheme we might settle on must necessarily exhibit internal consistency, but the “rational” paradigm or the “irrational” paradigm itself (as only two examples) would not hold water, because we each assert our schemes from within “interested” positions. Related to this, Jung admits plainly that every psychological description represents a person’s own psychology; any talk of universal psychology then cannot rest at the level of form or content, but only at the level of (human) doing, in transactions between people.[22] For example, if I describe someone as predominating in an extraverted mode of consciousness, then I might further describe her behavior as remaining consistent with that description or “switching over” to a (parody of an) introverted mode of being or consciousness.  This mechanism of switching over—as the manifesting of a difference relative to a (recently observed) past—remains the only “universal” feature within the domain of my description of this other person.

We need, then, all of the varieties of (attempted) “correct assignment” we might get. Rather than never making an descriptive assignment because objective description remains impossible, we might desist instead in the habit of oppressively forcing others to admit only our absolute assignment represents the correct one—social injustice, oppression, and violence (I resort to redundancy) all begin in such a gesture. And at root, despite those times when Jung gets possessed by a complex (as we all do) and gets swept up into some hubristically overextended descriptive claim, Jung’s psychology supports the assertion of and recognition of (radical, incommensurable) difference.

Nichols seems more back on track when she notes:

Despite the fact that the ego is “out of the picture,” perhaps even because this is the case, it can now become passively aware of an expanding universe with dimensions hitherto undreamed. Flat on its back, the ego cannot participate in ordinary human activity; it can only lie inert in a deep depression. When the ego is immobilized, intuitions are free to soar. At this point the ego begins to be filled with a new sense of destiny and to experience its individual fate as part of the universal design. Purely ego-centered ambitions are now lost in contemplation of the stars, and life begins to revolve around a new center (304).

Widening the scale of this a moment, the disappearance of the ego during the Bardö state merely signals the disincarnation of whatever specific, limited life one’s atman had just experienced. Thus, the ego in its limited form, by definition, learns nothing because it has passed out of existence entirely. Now, to say this invokes the question to what extent can one even speak of a “course” or a “career” of one’s soul (atman) if, at the termination of each incarnation, we return to an omniscient, omnipotent state from which we select our next incarnated life-adventure. A simplest resort involves our omniscient self “preselecting” (so to speak) a whole series of “sub-lives,’ where each return to the Bardö does not automatically offer access again to absolute knowledge—thus, the process of one’s development over many lifetimes becomes conceivable.

But rather than remaining so literal, I would rather wonder what sense or value might get extracted from the notion that any “restart” might offer a total “disconnect” from whatever previous state we’d found ourselves in. We might enjoy finding ourselves stepped in some (lengthy) “journey,” but anyone who has played a video game knows sometimes the preference simply to end the current game (mid-stream) and start over, which seems the same thing as saying changing games in mid-game as well. In Cirillo and Wapner’s (1985)[23] very aptly named Value Presuppositions in Theories of Human Development, they point out that even the fundamental idea that we start in some kind of simpler or chaotic state and only gradually “develop” represents an untested hypothesis, that such a presupposition provides a way of thinking about how human beings experience time, but doesn’t automatically provide a priori some reason to assume that earlier represents something inferior, that later represents something superior, that normal development even exists or that we should regard certain kinds of development as abnormal or aberrant.

But if we assume a human need to (literally) make sense of our disparate experiences, if only because we live in a world where other people seem to insist on doing so, then we might speak of the self, whether in daily life or even in the Bardö state, as in a temporary suspension while a “bigger picture” gets more grasped t. This, precisely, seems the moment of sense making, when we construct (as authors) the necessary fiction of our life. For even the atman in the Bardö finds itself in that circumstance in media res (in the middle of things). It “wakes up” and says, “Whoa, here I am. What now?” so that the Star represents the moment of sense-making that answers that question. The point to emphasize here, it seems: the strictly delimited ego-consciousness does not serve as the primary author. The limited ego-consciousness, who more or less had the helm in each previous incarnation, now gets pushed out—something like a character in a play whose run has finished. And, insofar as the Self by definition stands in distinction to the ego-consciousness’s limited conception of itself, we might say that the author, therefore, stands as the audience (the watcher)[24]

So, whatever the scale we might settle on, the moment of the Star has a funny relationship to the star of a theatrical production. The old star and her performance enters into the annals of (theatrical, personal) history—the audience (the watchers) write reviews, the role maybe gets reprised or taken up by someone else, someone decides to write a musical of the play, &c—and meanwhile, a new star in  new play gets chosen. The important part of this metaphor seems the dissolution of the previous character (ego-consciousness?), even if the actor (ego-consciousness?) who played her winds up cast in the next production. Here, we find the tricky bit—the specific relationship of the actor to the character—and perhaps it would illuminate something to imagine the complex interplay that goes on between the development of the actor’s repertoire through portraying different characters but also the social reputation of the actor in light of those portrayals and developments. And difficult as we might find it to keep resolutely distinct the notion of ego-consciousness relative to “character” or “actor,” even to attempt a distinction seems helpful.

In another squelch of unhappy patriarchialism, Nichols refers to:

the woman [as] both active and acted upon.[25] She moves with a trancelike grace. Hers is the godlike absorption of a child creating a new world out of water and mud. Her intense dedication and total participation in this act of creation is not unlike that of the Deity himself (305).

This seems a very confused passage to me. From the picture on the card, I do not see any reason for Nichols to insist the figure—notice that Nichols has transformed her again into simply a “woman”—“is acted upon”. No. She acts, pouring out water from the jugs—nothing overtly imagistic determines her activity except the necessity of the task, whatever it consists of. Moreover, as a static image, it remains in the first place only metaphorical to say the figure “moves with a trancelike grace” but in the second place all the less so given that nothing in the picture suggests trancelikeness. This invocation of “trancelike”—ostensibly dignified by the further attribute of “grace”—links to somnambulistic or unconscious activity, thus reprising the patriarchal notion that women can only act unconsciously—even as patriarchy compliments them on that ability. Moreover, the card’s image gives no reason to describe her activity as resembling “the godlike absorption of a child”—being only god “like” and reiterating the unconsciousness (of a child) even as Nichols immediately draws a resemblance with the “act of creation … of the Deity himself”.

The presence of water and earth here makes the descriptor muddled pitifully appropriate. It seems as if Nichols encounters in this symbolic image of a Creatrix a kind of numinous de-centering that recognizes the woman as a Creatrix but cannot shake sufficiently the patriarchal or sexist presuppositions that otherwise insist on ascribing agency, creation, or creativity only to male figures. Nonetheless, at the end of a subsequent paragraph, Nichols quotes a maxim, “Silence is the inner space we need for growth” (305), and then adds, “This moment of inner growth is not one for extraverted doing; its essence is inner vision” (305).[26]

This may reveal why the card figures the Star in female form, to the extent that introversion—the reflective mode of consciousness—tends elsewhere in the tarot imagery (not necessarily in Nichols’s commentary) to link the feminine and the introverted. In any case, that this moment of inner growth involves what one might call meditation by the atman during the Bardö state, this does indeed not involve the extraverted or radiant mode of consciousness implicated in doing. We may see also how, despite the female-bodied imagery of the card, that nothing must compel us to reify this sort of gendered identification. Moreover, as Nichols observes, the process involved in the card (at whatever scale we imagine it) involves that “we change both the quality of our personal lives and the character of the collective unconscious” (305).

To give a concrete example of how, without resorting to spooky assertions about the collective unconscious, we may simply imagine how the portfolio of characters portrayed by a celebrated actor changes and influences our cultural life, however slightly. Because we all comprise actors as well, so that our own portfolio of performances also change the quality both of our personal lives and the character of the collective unconscious, which we (all) project as social life. One might almost say that culture itself represents our projection of the collective unconscious, but I think this claims too much. Social life gets implicated in the play of culture while the play of social life represents instead what we project out of the collective unconscious into our worlds.[27]

Nichols ends with a dubious paean to pain and suffering, which my comments earlier already provide a frame for rejecting. Instead, I’d sooner dwell on her closing remark. She cites the alchemical maxim, “What the soul imagines … happens only in the mind, but what [the divine] imagines, happens in reality” (311), the critical emphasis here being on imagination. In Ruland’s (1612)[28] Alchemical Lexicon, he defines imagnatio (imagination) as est astrum in homo, coeleste sivc supercoeleste corpus [the star in mankind, the celestial or supercelestial body]; Gibbons (2001)[29] detects this idea in Blake’s phase that makes imagination “the Human eternal body in Every Man” (117), while Willard (201)[30] draws the distinction between the alchemists, who saw imagination as a mental faculty, and the Jungians, who regarded it as a mental process. Hence, as Nichols says, “By connecting [us] with the world-creating imagination of the godhead, [the Star] imbues [our lives] with new meaning and purpose” (311).

I have, perhaps belligerently, insisted on referring to the figure on card 17 as the Star, whereas Nichols seems to distinguish her as a figure—and one that she (Nichols) cannot treat consistently as either active or passive, divine or human, conscious or unconscious. Because this entanglement in Nichols’s text seems rooted in (inherited) sexist discourse, I find it less interesting than if it arose from a genuine (symbolic) tension.

In any case, if we take at face value the alchemists’ insistence “imagination is the star in mankind,” then the discursive sense-making, the very literal creativity, involved in that links to our own authorship of our lives. Jung’s active imagination certainly offers a key tool for this, and if one can practice it honestly enough alone then one wouldn’t need an analyst. But even without it, beyond our cognitive ability as symbolic thinkers—creatures that read more than mere sense out of the world, which itself already provides us a radical inheritance—imagination takes the factualness of our symbolic experience and allows us to turn it into hypotheticals. We might then run with this idea all over the place, but as it specifically involves the Star, this amounts to the enormous potential within our capacity to ask ourselves of our life, “What if?”

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).

[3a] Jung, C. G. (1976). Symbols of transformation: an analysis of the prelude to a case of schizophrenia. (Collected Works Vol. 3, 2d ed., trans. RFC Hull). Princeton: Princeton University Press.

[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), Psychiatric Studies (Collected Works 1, 2^nd ed. 1970), 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] Nichols alludes to the possibility of reincarnation later “In a continuous circular rhythm … we human beings borrow illumination, energy, and talents from the stars to complete our earthly selves, returning these to the heavens (perhaps replenished and enhanced?) when our life on earth is done” (300).

[8] Kateb, G. (1972). Utopia and its enemies. New York: Schocken.

[9] Whether one crafts in infinite detail every detail of one’s life and knows that in advance or if only rough details get sketched in, even as all of the consequences of that sketching remains omnisciently visible as well, doesn’t matter much. Doubtless one would find a vast array of ways one makes such a choice; all that matters here involves that the star of the Star card itself symbolizes the “star” one gets born under—the same sort of “star” that messed up Romeo and Juliet and Tristan an Isolde as star-crossed lovers, and which the word disaster etymologically point to.

[10] Nichols refers to this in a more literally terrestrial sense: “Another popular belief held that, at birth, each human being was given his own personal star representing his transcendental counterpart or guiding star. Such a star was believed to watch over the affairs of its earthly charge, guiding his destiny, and protecting him from harm” (299). In Robertson Davies’s (1985)* What’s Bred In the Bone, he invokes a related idea in the daemon, except that this figure associates specifically with artists, being something of an artist itself, who mucks with the artist’s life in order to turn her into a creature capable of creating a masterpiece. I remember this as a contrast to the idea of protecting from harm Nichols just noted; daemons will definitely put “harms” cross one’s path—sufferings at least—in order to provide a necessary resonance with the work they will create.

*Davies, R. (1985). What’s bred in the bone. 1st American ed. New York: Viking.

[11] Nichols emphasizes this change as well: “From this point in our Tarot series, so we shall see, we enter a new dimension of understanding within which life’s vicissitudes will be viewed under the aspect of eternity” (296).

[12] (as also the stars might as well, given that they seem like lesser lights compared to the 16-pointed double-star).

[13] Nichols goes on to link the two-ness of the tree to how material emerging out of the unconscious often gets doubled in dreams and the like. This seems a more fruitful direction than linking it to the totalitarian desire for control exhibited by YHWH in Eden.

[14] Eliade, M. (1991). Cosmos and history: the myth of the eternal return (trans. Willard R. Trask). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press

[15] Moore, T. (1982). The planets within: the astrological psychology of Marsilio Ficino. Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne Books.

[16] Bolen, J. S. (1984). Goddesses in everywoman: a new psychology of women. San Francisco: Harper & Row.

[17] Bolen, J. S. (1989). Gods in everyman: a new psychology of men’s lives and loves. San Francisco: Harper & Row.

[18] See Donovan, J. (1989). Feminist literary criticism: explorations in theory. 2nd ed. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky

[19] One might also note the sudden symbolic displacement that makes “the star” into the figure more typically placed at the center of (astrological) consciousness, the sun. and while, scientifically speaking, the sun represent the nearest star, imaginatively the sun, moon, planets, and stars all stand s radically distinguished celestial object but also, speaking in terms of the tarot, the Sun gets represented (along with the Moon) in the next two cards, so it becomes redundant or gratuitous to make the Star the Sun.

[20] In point of fact, the Tower shows two figures imprisoned in the tower.

[21] See Tompkins, JMS (1961). The popular novel in England, 1770-1800. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, as well as Ellis, KF (1989). The contested castle: Gothic novels and the subversion of domestic ideology. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

[22] This points, incidentally, at the utility of cybernetics all over again.

[23] Cirillo, L, and Wapner, S (1985). Value presuppositions in theories of human development. Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates.

[24] Who might, nonetheless, have some relationship with the actor who played the character in the previous drama. After all, authors sometimes play in their own works.

[25] As part of the symbolic “wobble” that occurs throughout this chapter about this figure, Nichols later insists “she is not passive. As we have observed, she takes action” (309). Recall the sentence, “she is, by nature, unconscious” (306).

[26] Nichols relapses soon after however, repeating that the woman represents a creature of the deep, that “she is, by nature, unconscious” (306). The ideological insistence on this becomes galling. One can hardly imagine something similar getting said of the man who mixes chalk and mint (to make toothpaste) that he can do so because he “is, by nature” as inert as chalk and as vegetative as mint. Moreover, “soon she herself will sink back again into the water which is her element, leaving the hero bereft of her ministrations—totally alone in the silent world of elemental being to confront the monstrous deeps as best he may” (306). To the extent that the figure on the Star, with its Aquarian associations all the more so, links to a figure like John the Baptist, it becomes almost incomprehensible how Nichol can so totally eviscerate the woman’s agency here. John the Baptist stood as no watery thrall but had such a mystical understanding of water that he could, without identifying with it, use it toward a ritual/spiritual end. From this (denied) link, we may infer that the figure of the Star, therefore, represents (1) a means to an end* but also that (2) she portends a new step yet to come, the herald of the savior, not the savior herself. This certainly seems appropriate as the first card in a series of four, which in its Christianized imagery ends with a last judgment and thus the (destructive) appearance of the savior.

*At one point, Nichols specifically denies this: the figure on the card “seems absorbed in her tsk, not as a means to an end, but as something useful and interesting in itself” (310). I don’t mean to harp on this, but this lens an air of stupidity to the figure, as if she does not (or cannot) imagine some further purposefulness to her activity. This description makes her sound short-sighted when in fact the figure in the Bardö state has the longest possible vision imaginable.

[27] “Jung’s method of active imagination and dream amplification is by no means ‘free association.’ … The Jungian method of amplification follow a circular course. Keeping the original image central, it moves around its periphery, amplifying its meaning by analogy and contrast, using associations which proceed from it and remain connected directly to it, like the spokes of a wheel. In Jung’s method, the secondary images revolve around the central one as the planets pictured in the Star revolve round their central sun” (307).

[28] Available in one translation here.

[29] Gibbons, BJ (2001). Spirituality and the occult : from the Renaissance to the modern age. London: Routledge.

[30] Willard, T. (2012). The star in man: CG Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz on the alchemical philosophy of Gerard Dorn. In A. Classen (ed.) Gutes Leben und guter Tod von Spätantike bis zur Gegenwart: Ein philosophisch-ethischer Diskurs über die Jahrhunderte hinweg, Theophrastus Paracelsus Studien, 4, pp. 425–61. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter.

INTUITING TAROT AND JUNG: Card XVI (the Tower)

Abstract

The Tower signifies the end of our worlds as we know them, but our “world” does not encompass only what we recognize as “ours.”

Introduction & Disclaimer[1]

The eighteenth post in a series that adds commentary to Nichols’ (1980)[2] Jungian commentary on the major arcana of the Tarot, here I engage with card 16: the Tower.

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 Tower of Destruction: The Stroke of Liberation[6]

In general, the sort of fear or nervousness evoked in those unfamiliar with the tarot when card 13 (Death) appears in a reading more deserves that response here, since the shallowest meaning of this card reads as: the end of your world as you know it.

In that context, an important preliminary remark involves that one survives this end of the world. Certainly,  major part of Christian eschatology (speculation about the end of the world) revolves around the massive optimism that the saved will receive Heaven as a reward for that end—along also, perhaps, with the satisfaction that the damned receive Hell as their own reward as well. In either case, the end of the world promises no survival in the old context but, rather, promises a complete change of place. Similarly, a very great number of Occidental fantasies centered around the collapse of (Western) civilization involve the great hope that one won’t live to see it. As a kind of secular religious gesture, a certain select few (those “saved” by mere chance) will persist in a massively changed world, but the book reader or movie viewer of such stories of survival and overcoming (or complete annihilation) watches or reads the events from afar, as if from a kind of safe haven. Listening to various popular discourses about catastrophic climate change, the notion that we have passed already the point of no return and that none of us (individually or collectively) will live to see the final death imposed by our ecological adventurism arises out of a kind of optimism: because to live in the world where hat disaster occurs will surely—except for a handful of Luddite-types—offer an unpalatably boring, manually intensive life.

So let us remember as we work through Nichols’ commentary on this card that in its end of the world as we know it, it does not promise the complacency or simplicity of death—it specifically points to a truly radical transformation. And, yes, in the greater arc of the Major Arcana, this end of the world as we know it provides the hinge or pivot to the last row of four cards (17–20), and thus points to the disincarnation of one’s body in this life along with its actual continuation along its further course of a next incarnation.

Nichols begins by discussing the Tower of Babel imagery typically associated with this card. Unfortunately, we primarily know this imagery through its hostile biblical representation, where the Tower itself gets read as a hubristic gesture and which still gives us the word (the name of the builder of the tower) Nimrod as a synonym for idiot. Nonetheless, “the towers of ancient Mesopotamia, far from being built as fortresses to defy heaven, were usually created as temples of worship” (283); “symbolically, then, a tower was originally conceived as a vehicle for connecting spirit and matter. It provided a staircase whereby the gods could descend and man ascend” (284). Nichols then attempts to construe the particular tower depicted in the deck she examines as inaccessible, closed, with no doors or windows, impiously with a crown placed on top, &c. Whatever one might further say about liberation and the like, I see in this specific imagery only a mechanical reproduction of the original bigotry that called such towers hubristic in the first place.

Nichols then switches attention to the lightning striking the tower, observing that “lightning has always been experienced as a symbol of divine energy, a numinous force emanation for [Above]. It represents naked power and illumination in its most primitive and immediate form” (285). Later, she notes Jung’s (1968)[7] observation that lightning signifies “a sudden , unexpected, and overpowering change of psychic condition” (¶533). And, before describing lightning writ large, we and note Nichols later point that often we get small jolts first; “a small jolt almost like an electric shock, small but still of sufficient force to crack open our shell and put us in touch with reality once more” (290). By ignoring these small jolts, we often set ourselves up for much bigger ones, individually and socially. In my commentary on Canetti’s (1960)[8] Crowds and Power, I explored the “meaning” lightning at considerable length; here I reprise a portion of its summary.[9]

Insofar as someone (or something) calls for the convening of a pack, for a crowd to have a pack-like quality seems to require similarly that someone (or something) must call for its convention as well.[10] …

The analogy seems to suggest a crowd needs a “lightning rod”—an ironic image compared to power issuing into the crowd as a hail of magic arrows [which Canetti earlier resorted to]. However, Canetti’s image proves accidentally more apt than he realizes.[11] He insists that the command “may originally strike a single individual from above, but, since others like himself stand near him, he immediately passes it on to them” (310). We might remember that the symbolic magic arrows so common among atmospheric deities (like Zeus, Odin, the devas) suggest the forks of lightning, and that lightning—as every player of role-playing games knows—has a form of chain lightning that strikes one individual and then leaps to those around her, doing damage as well.

We see in this Canetti’s insistence on the elevation of the leader as unnecessary, if not misleading. The gods limn the leader with the holy fire of lightning, which then immediately passes to everyone else in the crowd, and so forth, thus galvanizing them (in this case with metaphorical literalness). Except that being struck with lightning most assuredly leaves a scar, if it doesn’t kill you, that it flashes over the “surface” of a body and does not penetrate it lines up with the sense of a stingless command. The verb discharge shows itself as very apt as well.

I might believe Canetti intends the full range of this symbol—lightning as the symbolic emblem of power—if he elsewhere followed the logic of it. The leader, like Jove, thundering and raining lightning on one person in the crowd that then spreads to everyone else fails to explain countless cases of crowd formation. We may imagine a tense moment; a group of people seem restless—and suddenly,  single cry goes up from somewhere, inarticulate, perhaps well-formed, and suddenly this cry becomes the rallying point, the lightning rod, that impels the crowd to act. We need no commander to explain this, and one may remember any number of pathetic attempts by leaders to get folks fired up. The would-be pep-talker has gotten ahold of Odin’s lightning bolt but manages instead to come off fuck-daffy in its use. By Canetti’s lights, this must remain impossible—when Power thunders, people jump, &c., but this again belies his symptomatic fascination with Power.

Merely as a consequence of definition, whenever this “lightning” strikes anyone “in” a group of people (that yet comprises a crowd), and this includes any of those deemed “above” all others by virtue of their mantle as leader, that refulgent moment of illumination may provide (or rather does provide) … the occasion for the seeming-consensus that then orients people in the crowd to act. While this oversimplifies things somewhat,[12] this person “struck by lightning”—by the divine approval of the sky fathers—then stands out, literally and figuratively, just as we conventionally speak of leaders also as outstanding. And once something outstanding occurs, others may (or may not) see that example as an alternative for themselves and either take it up (or not).[13]

Thus, while Nichols emphasizes the individual aspect of the Tower, I suggest that it points instead (or at least also) to the whole of the social world. In the familiar Chinese notion of the Mandate of Heaven, we see how “the gods” single out some individual to act as the head of society. Thus, symbolically, the head literally gets struck by the naked power and illumination of lightning. It comprises a most literal and visible sign of election (and selection) from above. So whatever world destruction the tower portends applies to the whole of the world, not just to an individual; hence not only “as above, so below” but also “the king is the land” and other insights.

So this points as well to how “our life” and “out world” coincide, even though currently consumeristic culture pretends no link, no actual sociability, inheres between all individuals. We cannot just say that “our world” consists of those we recognize as near and dear—our total interconnectedness and relatedness to others gets brought to the ore by the end of the world that the Tower points to.

In the most literal version of this end of the world, i.e., physical death, some of the lamentation rituals of Australian aboriginal people disclose an important point. Almost always when someone dies, it gets treated as a crime and various rituals and actions follow designed to discover the culprit, the murderer. This occurs, despite a widespread belief in reincarnation, which we might imagine would mitigate or make unnecessary such a judicial approach to (unexpected) death, but such an investigation remains warranted because the “wound” delivered by the death does not involve the individual but rather the social body that has had that individual torn out of it. Such rituals also (while also perhaps placating the dead spirit) act as an implicit assertion in the social world: as I treat this social wound following the death of someone, so too will you treat my death also. Much of aboriginal tribal organization consists of a tight and complex net of mutual obligations, so that a person’s death may portend a vast array of ripples—whole alliances might break if someone disappears from the social fabric. Beyond this, as well, as we die, we have little choice but to entrust those desires and whatever obligations we do acknowledge in our lives (to our loved ones, to our friends) that we wish to see honored to others. I want to die knowing that you will take care of what death precludes me from ever taking care of again (whatever the ultimate disposition of my soul in the afterlife, whether reincarnated or not).

By this simply most literal end of the world, I wish to stress the social and not only the individual sense of the Tower. Nichols touches on broader social factors when she draws attention to literal (prisons, skyscrapers, office buildings) and intellectual towers:

Psychologically speaking, many of us live “up in the air,” imprisoned in ideological towers of our own making; for the tower can symbolize any mental construct be it political, philosophical, theological, or psychological, which we human beings build, brick by brick, out of words and ideas. Like their physical counterparts, such towers are useful for protection against chaos, for occasional retreat, and as a vantage point for taking our bearings in relation to the wider view. They are useful as long as we allow room for a little remodeling from time to time and keep the doors open so that we can come and go at will. But when we built a rigid system of any kind and crown it king, then we become its prisoners. We are no longer free to move and change with the moment, to touch the vital earth and to be touched by its seasons (288).

Nichols notes, “All important psychic changes are experienced as acts of violence” (288). Insofar as I take “violence” only as destructive, I would say: all important psychic changes are experienced as acts of force, or, as Jung (1955)[14] noted, “The experience of the self is always a defeat for the ego” (CG Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, ¶778). Schiller’s (1801) “On the Sublime” (from here) begins with the problem of violence:

Nothing is so unworthy of man than to suffer violence, for violence undoes him. Whoever offers us violence calls into question nothing less than our humanity; whoever suffers this cravenly throws his humanity away (¶2).

But he is supposed to be a human being unconditionally, and should therefore under no circumstances suffer anything against his will. If he is no longer able to oppose physical force by his relatively weaker physical force, then the only thing that remains to him, if he is not to suffer violence, is to eliminate utterly and completely a relationship that is so disadvantageous to him, and to destroy the very concept of a force to which he must in fact succumb. To destroy the very concept of a force means simply to submit to it voluntarily (¶4, italics in original, underlining added).

This applies even to death which Jung described as simply the final (literally ultimate) act of one’s life. This makes death a goal, not a mere event. But in Schiller’s case, I take his usage of the word violence to mean (precisely) not mere force, though one would similarly destroy the very concept of force also by submitting to it voluntarily.

The Major Arcana in general confront us with circumstances we must address; in this respect, they represent dread necessities—and so we find our freedom (and human dignity) when confronted by them in how we determine our attitude toward those circumstances. Psychologically, whether due to our hubris we find ourselves pulverized by the recoil or innocently through no discernible cause our unconscious beleaguers us with inundating and overwhelming imagery that ends our worlds as we know them, we still fin our freedom n human dignity in the attitude we take toward it. From a therapeutic standpoint, Jung (and other psychologists) argue vehemently that engaging (i.e., not repressing) this sort of material points to the way through—this represents the kind of voluntary submission Schiller speaks to.

But this remain true in the social sense of this card as well. In du Chaillu’s (1861)[15] Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa, we find descriptions of cultures where kings ruled (and understood they would rule) for some artificially limited duration of time—sometimes only seven years—before one of their handlers would strangle them to death. The dignity of the king hinges on their voluntary submission to this, which otherwise could only embody murderous violence. Thus, when Nichols notes of the two figures on the Tower card she examines, “we can see that these two mortals are similarly saved from psychological destruction and liberated from the prison of their prideful egocentricity” (289), not only does her accent on individuality mask the social implications of the card, even the very fact of two figures gets missed. She may as yet direct some commentary to whatever distinction these two figures might represent[16]—perhaps the introverted and extraverted modes of consciousness—but nonetheless whatever fate the Tower card dishes out here, it embodies a fate that more than one person experiences. The destruction of the Tower, whatever else it implies, denotes something we share.

Nichols proposes:

One of the possible outcomes of our own meditation on the Tower of destruction might be to help increase our awareness of areas in our own life where we are in danger of psychic imprisonment; of attitudes or ideas we have crowned king. Where do they constrict our freedom? In what ways do we use religious, psychological, or philosophical systems to elevate ourselves above the mass of human kind (290).

She later relates an experience where she felt humiliated by a colleague she admired, and as she reflected in her hotel room on the Tower card, she noted acutely that the tower gets struck by lightning, not the people inside (who get knocked out). Thus, one’s towering ambition, monumental ego, or towering preoccupation gets struck by lightning, not the person. And whatever we may further infer from this, it points again to the institutional or transpersonally social aspect of the card. “the king is dead; long live the king” merely serves as the lightning rod for the broader social milieu generally.

This segues to the sense of this card as a culmination of the row of cards (13–16) devoted to the life-purpose of liberation, or mokṣa. While renunciation may easily turn into a merely selfish endeavor, realized in its better sense, its pursuit can serve the social purpose of modeling a possibility for other people not otherwise realizable to dharma (or service), can manifest or channel a power not available to those pursuing power, and can engender pleasures—bliss specifically—not otherwise available to experience for those pursing pleasure. As a sequence, from the transforming change of understanding brought about by card 13 (Death), which makes us aware we need not any longer brood on sense objects, then we begin to temper in card 14 (Temperance) our living sense of attachment and non-attachment so that all that then follows from desire and card 15 (the devil) permits us—by the blinding flash of illumination lightning or its smaller shocks afford—to reach liberation itself.

We might also consider this card in its relationship with similarly positioned cards in other rows: card 4 (the Emperor), card 8 (Justice), card 12 (the Hanged Man).[17] All four cards show a strong emphasis on the social—the Emperor as a figure ostensibly struck by the lightning from Above to serve as ruler, Justice as the coordination of conflicts within the social body generally, and the Hanged Man (in his most banal sense) as the one who sacrifices himself for the sake of god, country, and countrymen, &c. Where the Emperor operates through a façade of power that we permit—the symbol of Power per se, which manifests in the operations and miscarriages of Justice, embodied in the person of the Judge—that same figure may become the scapegoat for the social’s ills, whether because we see that heaven has withdrawn its mandate or (as in the case of African kings) when we call literally upon the figurehead to yield up his or her life. all of these images lend themselves to individualistic symbols, but with the Tower, the king or judge or savior disappears and the whole of society, i.e., the world, gets struck. This shift of emphasis simply reprises the same kind of distinction between the first three rows of cards—dedicated to individualistic the life-purposes of pleasure, power, or dharma—and the fourth row’s emphasis on a non-individualistic life-purpose, liberation.[18]

The Indian metaphysical details of this aside, I tend to suspect that individuation in Jung’s sense occurs primarily on this row of cards. In a passage I cite often, Jung (1921) noted:

As the individual is not just a single, separate being, but by his very existence presupposes a collective relationship, it follows that the process of individuation must led to more intense and broader collective relationships and not to isolation …(Psychological Types, ¶758)

A norm serves no purpose when it possesses absolute validity. A real conflict with the collective norm arises only when the individual way is raised to a norm, which is the aim of extreme individualism … The more a man’s life is shaped by the collective norm, the greater is his individual immorality (ibid, ¶761).

Here, Jung mediates between (his opposition to)  socialist/collectivist form of life, which (destructively) demands conformity to a norm to the detriment of individuality, but also to the hyperindividualism of consumerist/capitalist cultures that demand individuality to the detriment of any collectively shared value. One might wax cutsie, and say that nonconformity denotes our collective conformity or other like phrases, but this seriously misdiagnoses our current condition. In the aboriginal tribes studied by Spencer and Gillen (1904),[19] it becomes very clear that the shared culturality has (as it must) both oppressive an self-actualizing elements, which do not wholly destroy individuality, just as the largely invariant dress code of the mish or Hasidic Jews, or the notable “conformity” of Vietnamese culture does not annihilate individual self-expression. Consumerist culture maintains otherwise, and offers precisely the premise that the sort of mutual obligation that comes with such shared culturality can get severed or denied.

In other words, we like to imagine that “natives” somehow “mindlessly” or “superstitiously” conform to a cultural more, and this informs any sense we have of those who, in our own culture, seem to conform as well. But also, because we all comprise human beings, our activities in the world run in a limited ambit—we eat, shit, sleep, wear clothes, &c. this creates an accidental appearance of conformity where none may actually prevail. We want to state independently our affiliations, not to have them dictated to us by culture. &c. We start from the assumption that we may excuse ourselves from culture and that assumption makes any apparent conformism on our part an appearance only.

In point of fact, non-conformism poses a significant problem in “traditional’ cultures, because eventually a culture will find some degree or expression of non-conformism it cannot handle. Homosexuality provides a great example of this—and by “homosexuality” I do not mean only in its culturally chauvinistic Occidental forms. Obviously, hundreds of human cultures have found non-exclusionary forms that accommodate, embrace, even celebrate non-heteronormative or noncis-gendered sexual expression. And precisely by such developments, that variety of non-conformism ceased to function as a non-conformism. Again, one could say “our” non-conformism occurs precisely with conformism, and thus we become paralyzed or merely indignant when fascism rears its head all over again. But this seems merely cutsie to me because fascism represents the anti-thesis of “traditional” society. If Jung draws his conclusions from Orientalist literature, he might likely declare “too superstitious” those who live in “traditional” cultures, but I’d venture in his travels in Africa he witnessed first-hand what he describes when we says the expression of a collective norm as the essence of individuation and social health.

In any case, we might not necessarily need to nail down a “proper sense of individuation” only to the fourth row, but this row does most extensively address a non-personal view of human experience, meaning a view of human experience that specifically looks at it through a lens of assumed social interconnectedness. This lens does not preclude an individual element—individuation, as the name suggests, “presupposes a collective relationship, [so that] it follows that the process of individuation must led to more intense and broader collective relationships and not to isolation” (¶758). Thus, we see the general applicability of this whether or not we have any commitment to the metaphysical aspects underlying the concepts as well.

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).

[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), Psychiatric Studies (Collected Works 1, 2^nd ed. 1970), 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] Jung, CG (1968). The archetypes and the collective unconscious. (Vol. 9, Part 1 of Collected Works., 2nd ed., Trans. R.F.C. Hull). Princeton: Princeton University Press.

[8] Canetti, E. (1981). Crowds and Power (trans. Carol Stewart), 6^th printing. New York: NY: Noonday Press.

[9] You may find the whole post here and more material here.

[10] For Canetti, the moment of discharge demarks the boundary between crowd and not-crowd, but this puts the cart before the horse. The whole problem of a crowd’s boundaries, &c., remains unaddressed by Canetti.

[11] That is, he belies no sense of its symbolic consequences.

[12] Maybe the most obvious “lightning rod” in a group of people is the group of people itself. For those who have ever idled in a car at a train crossing while a long, long train passes, the moment may come when someone up ahead decides to hang a U-turn and leave. With that one example, others might follow; some will remain. It seems an error to suggest that the first one to depart acts as a leader. Notwithstanding we know nothing about the person in the car, they leave presumably without any thought that others might follow their example. And we might talk about “sheeple,” placidly sitting at the railroad crossing “mindlessly” helpless before the bad luck of the crossing train, in comparison to the “audacity” of the one who decides to turn around and leave, but this equally misreads people’s motivations as well. Once that first person goes, some who felt helpless and put upon by the situation might realize they have an escape; some might take courage from the example, having imagined they might turn around, but were embarrassed or scared to (what if a police officer sees them turning around illegally—without knowing if such a U-turn actually is illegal), and so forth. Whatever motivation in the person who first turns around, and whatever the motivations in those who subsequently turn around as well, parsimoniously we may say only that given an initial condition (of waiting for the train to pass), one of the people waiting enacted an alternative, and others did or did not similarly enact that alternative as well. Conventionally, we say they “followed” the example, but this denotes a following without a leader, because the first person made no demand that anyone follow her example. Similarly, those who did not enact the alternative don’t constitute cowards who lacked audacity or whatnot.

[13] Elsewhere, I also wrote the following, which points to shells and castles, hence the imagery of the tower, but the point seems too tangential here to include in the main body of the essay. The link just indicated goes to the entire essay, but some of the relevant passages follow here:

The fluid situations of power we see in Errington and Gewertz’s (1987)^* description warrants taking a cybernetic view of them (as explored previously)—one may speak of a key variable or variables that either must remain within an acceptable range (of values) or, that some process (of negative feedback) exists to return those variables to the acceptable or necessary range whenever they rise or fall outside of it. This amorphous, shifting view of power differs sharply from the militaristic image of the commander on his throne throwing lightning bolts. And if the Chambri politician finds himself all out in the open, exposed on all sides and fundamentally dependent on other males and females to keep the key variable of his power in an acceptable state, then our modern politicians have the advantage of being less out in the open. The myth of (modern) power bluffs a non-dependency on other human beings but what security has been bought by the impermeability of boundaries (separating those in power from other people, i.e., the castle walls) creates difficulties in terms of knowledge. At the risk of putting it too fancifully, the chitinous shells of crustaceal life, which proved advantageous for reducing the exterior vulnerability of various life forms, also closed off for many species whatever evolutionary pathway that eventually led to once again shucking off such enclosures.^** [FOOTNOTE: ^**Once again, the particular power of this second appeal rests in the fact that it proposes a “they” to which the listener may feel compelled to join. The issue no longer involves whether I might really do such a thing, and whether or not I might do such a  thing to you, but rather that “they believe” I can and will act accordingly. Whether as a threat or as a boast of significance, the shift involves a change from a claim by one to a claim about many or several.]

If, to continue the metaphor, power took the resort of evolving a shell (a castle) to reduce the sort of vulnerability one readily discerns in Errington and Gewertz’s (1987) description of Chambri political life, then this “simply” reconfigures how power structures itself (e.g., specific points of egress and exit), with its own set of advantages and disadvantages, but this does not negate the dependence of power on others any more than a clam’s shell negates its dependence on the environment. An further, if on some kind of dubious anthropic principle, we get impressed by the fact that mammalian life found a way to get rid of the shell (and thus become once again more “open” to “environmental information”), then power might similarly benefit from trading in “shell” for “skin”—if, in fact, that has not already started to happen. But even if power has traded in shell for skin, that still does not negate the dependence of power on others. If power, in its most vulgar bourgie sense, saw a man’s home as his castle and his entire worth no longer in his reputation but simply in what he owns—like a dragon with its horde of treasure that no one else ever needs to see, that requires no social acknowledgment to have worth (at least for the dragon)—then the outer extent of that myth requires pushing back as far as possible, to infinity ideally (if impossibly), any sense of connection with other people.

*Errington, F, and Gewertz, D. (1987). Cultural alternatives and a feminist anthropology : an analysis of culturally constructed gender interests in Papua New Guinea. Cambridge [Cambridgeshire], New York: Cambridge University Press.

[14] Jung, CG (1970). Mysterium coniunctionis: an inquiry into the separation and synthesis of psychic opposites in alchemy. (Vol. 14, Collected Works, 2nd ed., Trans. R.F.C. Hull) Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press

[15] Du Chaillu, PB (1861). Explorations & adventures in equatorial Africa: with accounts of the manners and customs of the people, and the chace of the gorilla, crocodile, leopard, elephant, hippopotamus, and other animals. London: J. Murray [online]

[16] She alludes or suggests briefly that they might represent the two slaves of the Devil from the previous card, describing them as previously “slaves to their devilish instinct, in the tower they became prisoners of their equally devilish intellect” (289).

[17] And also card 20 (Judgment), but I’ll reserve comment on that card till it comes up in Nichols’ progression.

[18] Though, again, nothing prevents anyone from egotistically making liberation into a personal holding. We simply only need recognize this as a gesture of pleasure, power, or even dharmic service, rather than the actual non-goal of liberation itself.

[19] Spencer, G, and Gillen, FJ (1904). Northern tribes of Central Australia, London: Macmillan, available from here

INTUITING TAROT AND JUNG: Card XV (the Devil)

Abstract

How often we hear, “What the devil are you up to?” but why not also, “What the devil aren’t you up to?”

Introduction & Disclaimer[1]

The seventeenth post in a series that adds commentary to Nichols’ (1980)[2] Jungian commentary on the major arcana of the Tarot, here I engage with card 15: the Devil.

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 Devil: Dark Angel[6]

At the outset, I should confess: I like the devil—not so much in the sense the meaning of the evil card gets after (i.e., binding desire) but the general figure itself. My liking, however, hinges on only the last of the three major forms of the Devil that occupies Occidental imagination, i.e., of Old Nick (the “folk devil”), Satan, and Lucifer.

Obviously, cultural products rarely keep rigorously separate the attributes of these three figures, and to try to distinguish them exactly through examples would frustrate the process. With Lucifer, who finds one of his most pure representations in Milton’s Paradise Lost, we have the figure of the justified rebel, the contrarian on behalf of individuality. He tends to exercise our greatest sympathies, both then and now. But Old Nick we see most frequently; the worldly rock star, the enjoyer of wine, women, and song in movies like (1997)[7] Devil’s Advocate and countless others. He ranges from the pathetic mustachioed villain of the melodrama that we might easily overcome or outwit to anti-heroes like Ozymandias from Moore’s (1986)[8] Watchmen.  A motive difference between Old Nick and Lucifer involves this: where we might defeat Old Nick by our own wiles or at his own game, we cannot so easily defeat Lucifer, because he will destroy himself first. By contrast, Satan offers nothing noble whatsoever and embodies pure malevolence, whether with the sanction of the highest deity—when he acts as the torturer of Job for YHWH, as Jung (1952)[9] explores—or when he represents the shadow of YHWH, caught beautifully in Tom Waits’ lyric “don’t you know that there’s no devil, that’s just god when he gets drunk” (see here).

In general, we do not frequently encounter the picture of the (Tarot) Devil in his guise as Satan, because of his genuine loathsomeness. But what makes him loathsome has nothing to do with his putative evil, because he does not own his own will, but serves another. Thus, when de Maistre (1821)[10] describes the executioner, he describes the figure of the Devil in his Satanic form:

He steps down; he stretches out his blood-stained hand, and justice throws into it from a distance a few pieces of gold which he carries through a double row of men drawing back with horror. He sits down to a meal and eats; then to bed, where he sleeps. And next day, on waking, he thinks of anything other than what he did the day before. Is this a man? Yes: God receives him in his temples and permits him to pray. He is not a criminal, yet it is impossible to say, for example, that he is virtuous, that he is an honest man, that he is estimable, and so on. No moral praise can be appropriate for him, since this assumes relationships with men, and he has none.

And yet all grandeur, all power, all subordination rests on the executioner: he is the horror and the bond of human association. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world, and at that very moment order gives way to chaos, thrones topple, and society disappears (from here).[11]

Offhand, I can think of only one film where this sort of satanic malevolence gets given narrative form, Donner‘s (1976)[12] The Omen.

But as soon as I say this, Friedkin’s (1973)[13] The Exorcist comes to mind as an alternative.

But gruesomely as Pazazu acts in that movie and book, we still have here a class-image of a particularly bourgeois (rather than traditionally “folk”) devil. We might justly or not find horrific the cruel, sexualizing acts of this devil, but his particularly small-minded attack—directed wholly against Regan’s mother at first, but then at the plainly mortal priests—show the essential vulgarity of this devil. In a  similar way, for all of the monstrousness and creepiness of torture employed by the BTK killer—whose initials stand for bind, torture, kill, a description of his “method”—the sexual or simply psychological titillation of treating another person in such a fashion remains comprehensible, however disgusting. Perhaps one cannot reach the point to understand how such cruelty could arouse someone sexually; that failure of imagination, however, does not deny the acknowledgement that for Dennis Lynn Rader, the BTK killer, he did derive sexual or psychological satisfaction from such acts.

By contrast, the executioner, the State torturer, and by extension Satan, enacts his cruelties or tortures dispassionately.  de Maistre emphasizes how the torturer holds out his bloody hand to accept from justice some coin, but this I think represents something of a mask. It’s a dirty job, someone has to do it, and you might as well get paid for it, but at least to the extent that—just as we might understand if not comprehend Rader’s sexual or psychological motivations—money allows us to understand if not comprehend how someone could take on the job of a torturer, this “rationalization” papers over a greater malevolence.

Mind you, for the torturer who enjoys his work—not simply in terms of doing a job well, as de Maistre notes, the torturer “congratulates himself, he says sincerely, No one can break men on the wheel better than I”—but enjoys in a sexual or psychological sense, then we have found simply a Dennis Lynn Rader clever enough to get himself a proper job post. In The Exorcist, the devil clearly has a whale of a time. Whereas in The Omen, most usually remembered for the “evil boy” trope it employs, the devil has a very different guise. This movie features someone crushed to death between the couplings of two boxcars, another sliced to ribbons by a falling and shattering glass elevator, and another pinned to the ground like an insect by a lightning rod. By contrast, the antics of the evil boy (the devil’s offspring, if memory serves), such as causing his mother to fall to her death, seem puny. What most struck me, watching the movie long ago, hinged exactly on the wholly exaggerated overkill when Evil destroyed someone. The smallness of human bodies gets contrasted grotesquely with enormous and unnecessarily vast killing-gestures.

This sort of excessive scope characterizes Satan and the torturer. I steal a piece of bread, and the whole apparatus of the State an all its functions turns its gaze on me; thousands of human bodies get implicated in strapping me down to a table and putting a needle in my vein, &c. The torturer, in this case, merely holds the ax, but behind him looms a massive pendulum or hammer swinging down on the victim.

I have no love or affection for this figure, it may not need saying. And as we head into the turbulent water of the Devil card, I will show no patience if Nichols starts spouting apologetics for Satan, as the “shadow” of YHWH, or for the torturer as the secretly beneficent influence from the unconscious. I do not mean, of course, that the “rigors” brought upon us by Unconscious mechanisms never lead or can never lead to insight—quite the contrary. I mean simply that when the image of Satan, as YHWH’s torturer, either deliberately or accidentally pulls into the picture or Nichols’ argument those elements of State-enacted horror brought about by the agency of its torturers, then I resolutely refuse to do anything but denounce such violence as morally indefensible. Nothing good ever comes of that.

Nichols begins by surveying the conflicting reports about the Devil—for the rest of this post, I use “Devil” (Capitalized) to refer to the card or Nichols’ discussion in its most general, non-specific sense, and say Old Nick, Lucifer, or Satan when I want to emphasize the different attributes noted above. So in her opening survey, she alludes (not by name) to Satan, Old Nick, and Lucifer, and specifically cites the problem of (the biblical) Job; she notes:

The argument as to who is responsible for Job’s suffering has been going on for centuries. It hasn’t been settled yet and it may never be. The reason is plain: the Devil is confusing because he himself is confused. [On the Tarot card Nichols considers] he present himself as an absurd conglomeration of parts. He wears the antlers of a stag, yet he has the talons of a predatory bird and the wings of a bat. He refers to himself as a man, but he possesses the breasts of a woman—or perhaps more accurately, wears them, for they have the appearance of something stuck or painted on him. This odd breastplate can be little protection. It is perhaps worn as an insignia intended to camouflage the wearer’s cruelty; but symbolically it might indicate that Satan uses feminine naiveté and innocence as a front in order to charm his way into our garden. And, as the Eden story makes clear, it is through this same innocent naiveté in us (as personified by Eve) that he operates (262).

Nichols may tweak her commentary in subsequent passages, but the seeming disingenuousness here needs remarking upon. First, just to keep the distinctions or attributes clear, the shift from “devil” at the top of the paragraph to “Satan” later becomes problematic, because “the devil” merely offers the picture of Old Nick while Satan substitutes into its place the torturer of YHWH, which I address below more in the footnote.[14] Here, I want to dwell on the anti-queer elements of this passage.

First, we needn’t imagine that Nichols shares this anti-queer sentiment, though she gives no indication she notes it. Whatever else the original artist of the card intended, the Devil here clearly presents something of a sexually non-conformist picture, whether literally hermaphroditic (or transgendered) or only figuratively a transvestite; that Nichols specifically uses the words “confused” and “absurd conglomeration of parts” points especially to the (strongly) anti-queer bias. One hardly believes that the hermaphrodite, transgendered folks, or transvestites must comprise the confused; rather, a dominant discourse little able to categorize such non-gender-conforming (or non-sex-conforming) figures into available cultural categories point, rather, to the labeler’s confusion.

Again, I don’t especially sense that Nichols specifically takes up this discourse with active hostility, but I do think that the card’s original artist did. In that study of homosexuality in England I can no longer remember the title of—I do not mean Boswell’s (1980)[15] book, but do probably mean Bray’s (1982)[16]—the author identifies the unholy trinity of papists, witches, and sodomites that drove the (proper) English mind to break the very plausibility of language itself in attempting to describe the horror of such figures—the Catholic priest (in his girly robes while molesting boys) being all three bugaboos rolled into one. &c. Of course, with this androgynous image of the Devil, we have also something of the chaos of the Greek god Pan—here represented with locally demonic Celtic antlers, rather than Greek goat horns—and the dangerously effeminate boy-god Dionysus, when not manifesting in his expressed (rather than repressed) rage form as a destroying bull-god.

What matters here, of course, involves the representation. We may see “beneath” the attempted scurrility of imagery here—the Devil’ eyes, for example, seem deliberately goofy, and thus ridiculous—the “truth” that one must integrate the masculine and feminine, &c., but this doesn’t change the fact that the original artist imaged such a (necessary) integration in grotesque form as, precisely, an absurd conglomeration of parts. So we deal here with an already extremely biased image, but one that specifically tropes on anti-queer fears, with its (at least distant) evocation of those cities that YHWH destroyed entirely, with everyone in it, merely because the populace permitted homosexuals to persist within their walls.

At its briefest, this incarnates the Opposition, as non-conformist; no wonder mainline iconography makes him into a hyena-like absurdity. Perhaps in this context it bears mentioning: Nichols observes that the Devil holds his sword in his left hand (and negligently at that); this means that “his relationship to his weapon is so unconscious that he would be unable to use it in a purposeful manner, meaning symbolically that his relationship to the masculine Logos is similarly ineffectual” (262). Of course, from our point of view, it looks like the sword stands on the Devil’s right side, and this optical illusion that might lead us to seek for a cause in the sort of actions the Devil engages in with his “indiscriminate destruction, wanton murder in the streets, [and] berserker who takes random potshots on the freeway” (262); against these actions we feel “we have no defense. Such forces, we feel, operate in a darkness beyond human comprehension” (262). But just as we might deceive ourselves about a rationality behind the chaos, this sort of argument serves to keep safely in place (for the sake of demonizing it when necessary) the Chaos portended by the non-conformist, the Other who lives amongst us. That Nichols shortly later links the left or “sinister” hand not simply with the unconscious but as “directed at conflict rather than peace, and at power rather than love” (263) only makes this demonization of the Devil (the Opposition, the Non-conformist) more sinister.

In asking what specifically the devilish attributes consist of, Nichols once again emphasizes his “admixture of parts that is difficult to pin … down” (267); we can take this also in the light of her rather curiously repulsed description of the bat (vis-à-vis the Devil’s bat wings), the bat itself “a monstrous aberration of nature—a squeaking mouse with wings” (264). This seems hyperbolic and the earlier description more mythical than factual:

The bat is a night flyer. Avoiding daylight, he retreats each morning to a dark cave where he hangs upside down, gathering energy for his nighttime escapades. He is a blood sucker whose bite spreads pestilence and whose droppings defile the environment. He swoops around in the dark an according to folk belief, has a penchant for entangling him in one’s hair, causing hysteric confusion (264).

This needs little further comment, except to add that Nichols invokes again later the bat’s “dangerous, filthy habits” (264). One recalls the filthiness of the magical and hermaphroditic hyena as well, whose bite possesses legendary destructive force n disease for having fed on the dead. Thus, all of this hybridity—Nichols also says an “obnoxious …. Senseless conglomeration of its various parts. Such an irrational assemblage threatens the very order of things, undermining the cosmic scheme upon which all life rests” (265)—and filth seems especially to occupy Nichols specifically.  But

According to Jung, any kind of psychic function that is split off from the whole and operates autonomously is devilish. To be slavishly and unconsciously bound to even the most altruistic code as surely marks one a creature of the Devil as to be victimized by one’s animal appetites. It is the unconsciousness and autonomy that are crucial here (267).

Not, I would emphasize again, the hybridity or filthiness. Consequently, “it is a truism of life that when negative aspects of ourselves are not recognized as belonging to us on the inside, they appear to act against us on the outside” (269). In an interesting formulation, then, Nichols asserts:

As consciousness expands, conscience becomes more refine so that one becomes increasingly aware of the potential harmfulness of even the most casual word or deed. Since every human drive is essentially amoral, what makes an instinctual action immoral is simply its unconsciousness (271).[17]

I can imagine ways to nip at the above, but I remain content for now to let it stand, and would pay more attention to the “covert” Eastern attitude hiding in the following, when Nichols writes:

To put some of this in broader psychological terms, any break away from the original unconscious identity with the self involves feelings of guilt. Yet, if we are to move on toward a conscious relationship with the self, we must make this break and absorb the guilt. Paradoxically, one is driven by the self to move away from this original identification in order to establish a reunion with the self on a different level of awareness (272–3).

At least, it seems as if something like an Eastern ethos remains tucked in here.[18] The invocation of guilt does not follow, however—a very great deal of the problem of the ignorance (of one’s true identity with the self) does not involve guilt at all, an frequently quite positive arrogance and confidence; in other words, precisely ignorance. Even at the furthest reaches of Indian metaphysics, one my find the reason for Brahman’s incarnation in individual souls rooted not in guilt or boredom or failure but in delight, in bliss, over the dawning gradual process of enlightenment.

In such a context, the narrow moralizing of the Eden story provides no adequate ground for understanding necessity; the very distinction between YHWH and the creations of YHWH itself being the primordial piece of ignorance. In the ultimate sense—ultimate metaphysical sense by way of Indian philosophy, I mean—we chose to incarnate in this limited form and so whatever “expulsion” we experience from any so-called Eden doesn’t simply not involve some unconvincing piece of culpability portending guilt for all humans but doesn’t only involve expulsion at all—a willed (necessary) ignorance as the prerequisite for gradually attaining enlightenment (guilt might provide just one such ground for that process) in all of its virtually unlimited forms.

Thus, we will find no paradox in all of this, viewed from the correct angle. In fact, I suggest that where we typically find the word paradox employed, we may feel confident that it tends to paper over a confusion or conflation of terms.  In this specific case, the “paradox” results from the only partial understanding we experience of believing that we stand somehow “metaphysically” separated from our total self. Once we believe that ego-consciousness comprises the center (if not the whole of) our consciousness, then this confusion becomes the “ground” we must give up in order to “re-center” ourselves in the more prevailing actuality our consciousness inhabits. Thus, if we must give up the “self” to achieve the “self,” this becomes a paradox only because we misidentified our self in the first place. This involves our partial understanding of the situation, not a paradox.

Helpfully, Nichols also observes, “We usually think of ‘devilishness’ in terms of overt action, often overlooking the less obvious truth that passive acquiescence and blind naïveté can be equally devilish” (280). One needn’t really add anything to this apt observation, except how Martin Luther King Jr.’s remark, that history will less remember the foul words  of evil men than the appalling silence of good people, points in his use of the word “appalling” to the devilishness of such standing by.

In Nichols’ grouping of the cards in three groups of seven, this places the Devil above card 1 (the Magician) and card 8 (Justice); in a much earlier post in this series, I commented on the possible relationships of those three cards.

In terms of the cards grouped in five groups of four each, the Devil stands as the third card in the fourth row, the one devoted to the puruṣartha, or life-goal, of mokṣa, or liberation. As the third card, it corresponds or aligns with the suit of fire, and thus signals some kind of promise, comment, or particularly the practice of the will. In some commentaries, the devil then becomes a figure of addiction, particularly for the way that one’s addiction—often described by people in Alcoholics Anonymous as baffling and demoralizing—thwarts, defeats, or mocks one’s will: I promise myself I will never drink again, but then I do, &c. In Schiller’s (1801) “On The Sublime,” he notes:

This would, then, be the end of his freedom, if he were capable only of physical science. But he is supposed to be a human being unconditionally, and should therefore under no circumstances suffer anything against his will. If he is no longer able to oppose physical force by his relatively weaker physical force, then the only thing that remains to him, if he is not to suffer violence, is to eliminate utterly and completely a relationship that is so disadvantageous to him, and to destroy the very concept of a force to which he must in fact succumb. To destroy the very concept of a force means simply to submit to it voluntarily. The science that enables us to do this is called moral science (¶2, from here, italics in original, underlining added).

For the addict, this means saying, “I’m not an addict; I can quit whenever I want.” But the force that Nichols has described so far, while just as compelling (rather than compulsive), that appears in the guise of the Devil appears so violently, for the most part, due to previous neglect. The cosmos, if you will, has previously given us numerous opportunities to “learn a lesson” or “get it right” and we, through inattention, vanity, or other habits, neglected to attend to it. And now it appears in our lives in an all but wholly unavoidable way that often takes on a quality of necessity, inevitability, or doom.

Nonetheless, for Nichols (as for Jung generally), the appearance of this force, like a less even-handed and less patient Justice, pulverizes in its recoil those who would vainly set their shoulder to unlawfully move the bar of Justice,[19] who would, in Jung’s terminology, remain too one-sided,[20] whether too rational to the detriment of feeling, too affective to the detriment of reason, and the like. Nichols highlighted the ‘rudeness’ of this force (if not sometimes its ‘crudeness’ as well) when she noted, “it is a truism of life that when negative aspects of ourselves are not recognized as belonging to us on the inside, they appear to act against us on the outside” (269).

However—and to simply rush headlong at the goal—the Devil would seem, in the course of Nichols commentary, to function in the role Jung ascribes to the shadow; Dehing (2002) offers the following summary (from here):

The Critical Dictionary of Jungian Analysis (Samuels & al, 1986)[21] provides us with an excellent entry on the shadow:

In 1945 Jung gave a most direct and clear-cut definition of the shadow: ‘the thing a person has no wish to be’” (1946a, § 470)[22]. In this simple statement is subsumed the man-sided and repeated references to shadow as the negative side of the personality, the sum of all the unpleasant qualities one wants to hide, the inferior, worthless and primitive side of man’s nature, the ‘other person’ in one, one’s own dark side. Jung was well aware of the reality of evil in human life.

Over and over again he emphasises that we all have a shadow, that everything substantial casts a shadow, the Ego stands to shadow as light to shade, that it is the shadow which makes us human.

“Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one has always the possibility to correct it. Furthermore, it is continually subjected to modifications. But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected, and liable to burst forth suddenly in a moment of unawareness. At all counts, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions” (1940a, § 131).[23]

As “the thing a person has no wish to be,” this points not only again toward card 13 (Death) as a most adequate symbol for the incorporation of that which we do not desire, but also to our resistance to enlightenment—or, more precisely, to the very darkness of our partial understanding masks our awareness of our Self. Jung, however, does stress the shadow in its malevolent forms—though we might recall Meister Eckhardt’s saying, “Those who have not made their peace with life will seem beset by demons; but for those who have made their peace, they will seem as angels”.

As the Bhagavad-Gītā asserts, from the brooding on sense objects personal desire arises—and after that, we remain trapped in the cycle of rebirth. This forms the ground on which the gurus advise non-attachment and thus, in the course of the pursuit of liberation or mokṣa, a cessation of attachment to desire. In this respect, the lone devil on the Devil card falls numerically far short of the hordes of devils (desires) that throng about in Tibetan Buddhist iconography.

Nonetheless, as one had first to have the idea or inspiration of transformation (liberation) in card 13 (Death), and then in card 14 (Temperance) came to understand not only the meaning of significance of this possibility but also the balancing at between continuing to live (with its hazards of attachment) while cultivating non-attachment itself, with this card (the Devil), we ask of ourselves n at of will, a promise, to move forward in the renunciation of the fruits of our actions or from even our desires for liberation in order to achieve liberation in fact, in card 16 (the Tower).

In the metaphysics of the Bhagavad-Gītā, as also in its practical psychology, all manner of desires (along with everything entailed by such desires) arise as expressions of the guṇas and, as manifestations of the material/energetic world, must necessarily prove transitory and therefore merely a phenomenal effect—one, nevertheless, helpful if not crucial ultimately for liberation itself eventually. But insofar as it exists at all, we remain in the shadow (in ignorance, in a partial understanding of things) so long as we act as if the appearance we perceive constitute the actuality of things.

With this in mind, if we speak of the Jungian shadow in a personal sense, then this thwarting or frustrating power represents the undesired consequences of karma—the loss of reason, unhappiness, and misery that comes from the desire that comes from the brooding on sense objects. If we speak of the Jungian shadow in a more collective sense, then this points to the partial understanding in people that succumbs to māyā, as the illusion of distinction; while we might leverage this to illustrate (or at least suggest) an explanation for social atrocities an violence, the malevolence of this shadow just as much rests on a (collective) partial understanding as well. This point matters because, while the rigors of the personal (or collective) shadow on our individual lives makes for the stuff of the therapeutic couch, the illusion that we stand separate from all other people remains a key piece of the Occidental shadow, one so thoroughly embraced we hardly recognize it as a shadow. Elsewhere—echoes of Meister Eckhart again—we may recognize the figure of the Devil as a negative image of Śiva, &c.

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).

[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), Psychiatric Studies (Collected Works 1, 2^nd ed. 1970), 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] Warner Bros. Pictures (1969- )., Milchan, A., Kopelson, A., Kopelson, A., Hackford, T., Reeves, K., Pacino, A., Theron, C., Howard, J. N., Lemkin, J., Gilroy, T., Neiderman, A., Regency Enterprises., & Kopelson Entertainment (Firm). (2009). Devil’s advocate. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video.

[8] Moore, A., and Gibbons, D. (2005). Watchmen. New York: DC Comics.

[9] Jung, CG (2010). Answer to Job. (Intr. Sonu Shamdasani, paperback Fiftieth Anniversary Edition). Reprinted from Jung, C.G. (1968). Psychology and religion: West and East. (Vol. 11, Collected Works., 2nd ed., Trans. R.F.C. Hull). Princeton: Princeton University Press

[10] Maistre, J-M. comte de (1993). St. Petersburg dialogues, or, Conversations on the temporal government of Providence (trans. RA Lebrun). McGill-Queens University Press.

[11] The passage that immediately precedes this reads:

Who is then this inexplicable being who has preferred to all the pleasant, lucrative, honest, and even honorable jobs that present themselves in hundreds to human power and dexterity that of torturing and putting to death his fellow creatures? Are this head and this heart made like ours? Do they not hold something peculiar and foreign to our nature? For my own part, I do not doubt this. He is made like us externally; he is born like us but he is an extraordinary being, and for him to exist in the human family a particular decree, a FIAT of the creative power is necessary. He is a species to himself. Look at the place he holds in public opinion and see if you can understand how he can ignore or affront this opinion! Scarcely have the authorities fixed his dwelling-place, scarcely has he taken possession of it, than the other houses seem to shrink back until they no longer overlook his. In the midst of this solitude and this kind of vacuum that forms around him, he lives alone with his woman and his offspring who make the human voice known to him, for without them he would know only groans. A dismal signal is given; a minor judicial official comes to his house to warn him that he is needed; he leaves; he arrives at some public place packed with a dense and throbbing crowd. A poisoner, a parricide, or a blasphemer is thrown to him; he seizes him, he stretches him on the ground, he ties him to a horizontal cross, he raises it up: then a dreadful silence falls, and nothing can be heard except the crack of bones breaking under the crossbar and the howls of the victim. He unfastens him; he carries him to a wheel: the shattered limbs interweave with the spokes; the head falls; the hair stands on end, and the mouth, open like a furnace, gives out spasmodically only a few blood-spattered words calling for death to come. He is finished: his heart flutters, but it is with joy; he congratulates himself, he says sincerely, No one can break men on the wheel better than I.

[12] Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation., Donner, R., Peck, G., Remick, L., Warner, D., & Deltamac (Hong Kong) Co. (2004). The Omen. Collector’s ed. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment.

[13] Warner Bros. Pictures (1969- )., Blatty, W. P., Friedkin, W., Burstyn, E., Sydow, M. v., Blair, L., Cobb, L. J., & Warner Home Video (Firm). (2010). The exorcist. Extended director’s cut. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video.

[14] In Jung’s (1952) Answer to Job, he asserts that Satan takes advantage of YHWH’s unconsciousness; this offers a shift pretty much as radical as Poincare’s relativity of time. It offers a shift or modification to something typically taken as not modifiable or shiftable, and thus opens a way (for Jung at least) to find his way through the rightly morally repugnant picture of YHWH with respect to Satan and Job. And so then that same (deliberate) ignorance by YHWH in the Garden of Eden permits Satan to run his deception.

In both cases, however, the omniscience of YHWH, which Jung never qualifies in the biblical deity but simply insists more than once—and somewhat surreally—that YHWH simply does not consult his omniscience, still leaves open the question why. Whatever the case as Jung develops his argument, here we may simply note that if we see Satan in the Garden of Eden, then we know we see YHWH’s torturer, not one of those wily folk devils (like Pazazu, &c) trying to start some shit, as they often seem wont to do.

Put another way: We often find suffering easier to bear when it seems necessary, when we can find no helping that those particular events seemingly had to come to pass. When they seem unnecessary, however, then our moral indignation rises. If I contract cancer or lose a loved one in an accident, I can try to learn how to move forward from that; but when a man tortures me, whatever good reasons he claims (for sexual titillation or to extract information I may or may not have), the innecessity of that torture makes the act seem utterly reprehensible. I can even “accept” caused suffering, if with more difficulty, when those doing the harm acted under some seemingly too-strong or overwhelming compulsion, as when a drug addict, for example, murders my spouse for money, &c. But when an all-knowing, all-powerful deity allows (unnecessary) suffering to happen that could (obviously for omniscience about it and easily for omnipotence with respect to it) have avoided, our moral indignation stands on utterly solid ground, even in the face of YHWH.

[15] Boswell, J. (1980). Christianity, social tolerance, and homosexuality: gay people in Western Europe from the beginning of the Christian era to the fourteenth century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

[16] Bray, A (1995). Homosexuality in Renaissance England. New York: Columbia University Press.

[17] I think Friedrich Schiller might disagree—see my review of his Naïve & Sentimental Poetry and On The Sublime (here)—unless we understand immorality as hinging, precisely, on something not chosen, that the im-moral (by definition) stands outside of the domain of our ability to choose.

[18] Perhaps I remain a bit sensitized to such lately, since even in Schiller’s essays from 1795 and 1801 respectively (as already referred to previously in this post) I felt I found “Eastern” sensibilities as well, though in that case holly German-grown and arrived at independently of Indian illumination.

[19] From Emerson’s (1878) Sovereignty of Ethics (from here): the passage runs:

Secret retributions are always restoring the level, when disturbed, of the divine justice. It is impossible to tilt the beam. All the tyrants and proprietors and monopolists of the world in vain set their shoulders to heave the bar. Settles forever more the ponderous equator to its line, and man and mote, and star and sun, must range to it, or be pulverized by the recoil .

[20] A concern that Schiller speaks to in his “Naive & Sentimental Poetry” as well.

[21] Samuels, A., Shorter, B., & Plaut, F. (1986). A critical dictionary of Jungian analysis. London ; New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

[22] Cited by Dehing (2002) as Jung, CG (1946). The psychology of the transference. In: Collected Works 16, §353–539.

[23] Cited by Dehing (2002) as Jung, CG (1940). Psychology and religion. In Collected Works 11, §1–168.

INTUITING TAROT AND JUNG: Card XIV (Temperance)

Abstract

Aesthetically, temperance (art) involves the mindful combination of disparate elements into a meaning, a surreal whole, not currently available to the status quo; psychologically, it signifies the mindful integration of ego-consciousness and archetypal material from the unconscious; interpersonally, it represents the mindful care of the “us” formed by you and me; socially, its points to individuation (as the individual expression of a culturally collective norm), &c.

Introduction & Disclaimer[1]

The fifteenth post in a series that adds commentary to Nichols’ (1980)[2] Jungian commentary on the major arcana of the Tarot, here I engage with card 14: Temperance (or Art).

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.

Temperance: Heavenly Alchemist[6]

As a first note, whatever I now think about Crowley’s Thoth deck, I certainly appreciate that it named card 14 “Art” rather than “Temperance”. As an artist, but also by not using a word I would otherwise associate with prudery and not drinking—as Oscar Wilde said, “Everything in moderation, including moderation”—Crowley’s term put a sense on this card that kept me thinking about what I have at stake in the creation of art, namely: the regulated combination of disparate elements to create a whole.

By regulated, I mean that the choice of elements  I combine occurs cybernetically, deliberately, and essentially non-randomly. By a whole, I mean a meaning not otherwise available in culture (i.e., a place where culture currently has a hole). All of this lives, of course, in the conceit that this whole offers a more desirable alternative to those currently available in our culture.

With this idea still dim in my mind in college, I found the surrealist’s project compelling, building as they did from that quintessential example of (linguistic) surrealism given in Lautréamont’s (1869) Maldoror and cited often by Andre Breton: he was as beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing machine and an umbrella. Or, “in a direct reference to Lautréamont’s ‘chance meeting on a dissection table’, Ernst defined the structure of the surrealist[7] painting: ‘A linking of two realities that by all appearances have nothing to link them, in a setting that by all appearances does not fit them’ (quotation here, example here).[8] Not just blending, then, but blending somethings together to rete an as yet unknown unity;[9] or (and) as Jung puts it in Nichols’ summary, “the necessity arises daily to reconcile the world of our dreams with that of our daily lives” (254).

Specifically, Nichols notes that the angelic figure on the card presides over the ceremonial involved in the mixing of disparate parts, in this case opposites. This requires care, because the combination of (in this example) fire and water threatens to evaporate all of the water if too much fire or quench the flame in the presence of too much water. Even in the correct proportions, it seems steam would result—a desirable result if we aspire to drive a locomotive or steam-punk airship—but also perhaps still a “waste” into a cloudy nothing. The admixture of fire and water itself also suggests fire-water, or alcohol, though how one chemically arrives at such a point from these inputs remains obscure, even if we could apply some kind of distillation.

The emphatic point involves the care involve in the preparatory ceremonial, whether we understand this in literal alchemical terms, metaphorically in psychological terms, or somewhere between literal and metaphorical as far as artistic combination goes. But even to flag these three categories understates things. Every second of every day involves some tricky integration of self and society, mind and body, analytic and synthetic categories, here and there, past/future and present, &c, or (if we invoke some Buddhism) the process of engagement in the world without becoming attached. To mediate these—a pun on “to put into media”—involves quite literally the “art” of living.

Generally, Nichols seems to resort mostly to larger-than-usual statements that seem only partially attached to the card. Helpfully, she names three virtues, symbolized (in what she groups as the middle of three rows of seven Major Arcana) in Fortitude, Temperance, and Prudence (the last of which sometimes appears in place of the Hanged Man). She does not say so, but the link between the Hanged man and Prudence seems obvious to me; becoming an example of the Hanged Man happens if you do not practice Prudence.

In general, she identifies this entire row as devoted to (moral) equilibrium, so that if all of the cards have deployed balance in one way or another (Justice’s scales, the ups and downs of the Wheel of Fortune), then it makes sense that balance per se, as temperance, should make an appearance as a capstone. How we mediate this balance in ego-consciousness becomes crucial, because:

when the unconscious steps into our outer world to borrow as its dream symbols the events, persons, and objects of our daily experience, it threatens the accustomed order of everyday life. In a similar confusing way, the rational ego mind can intrude into the image world of the unconscious, disturbing and disrupting its healing work.

When these two worlds get mixed up unconsciously, with no guardian angel to preside, our lives become muddled and confused, often with disastrous results. If we try to live on the outer side a drama that more properly belongs to the inner, the plot could end in tragedy … It is equally impractical, of course, to attempt to squeeze into our inner world events which properly belong in outer reality. If, for example, we have a problem with our spouse or neighbor, it is futile to take this drama wholly on the symbolic level, spending long hours concocting imaginary dialogues with this person or theorizing in solitary confinement about possible reasons for the other’s behavior. Although some introspection is valuable, there comes a time when one must step into reality and initiate a real-life dialogue with the person in question (254–5).

I call this making actual of archetypally material presented to one’s imagination as an impulse literalization. In Thomas Moore’s (1992)[10] Care of the Soul, he presents an excellent example of this. A business man who has been happily married for decades suddenly finds himself wanting to have an affair with his secretary. Rather than following this impulse, which he finds disturbing but threateningly hard to resist, and a lose-lose situation whatever he does, since if he betrays his wife, he will (1) either have to start lying to her or ruin everything by telling her, and (2) treat his secretary unfairly by either giving her false hopes that he would leave his wife or, in fact, actually leave his wife. So, he seeks out Moore, who invites him to play out this fantasy in his imagination rather than further repress it, and in the process of working through this fantasy, he comes to realize that his actual desire resides in wanting again the sort of youthfulness an freshness with his wife that he’d once had with her. From that (new) starting point, he approached his wife to re-kindle the fire, as it were.

This story aptly illustrates what Nichols means by letting the unconscious (literally) into the outer world such that “our lives become muddled and confused, often with disastrous results.” I have frequently seen, both for myself and in others, how such literalization does, very often, portend disaster, whereas by allowing such impulses a free rein in the imagination (if they do not simply dissipate from their own inertia), their “true interest’ becomes apparent. I have also found that almost never—in fact, I can think of no occasion—when the actual thing desired could get readily or easily inferred from the apparent impulse. An experienced therapist or psychopomp might have inferred that the businessman’s desire for his secretary really had something to do with his wife, but in what sense? *c. In any case, the point doesn’t require some clever human insight or wisdom in advance, but only a willingness to ask questions, to listen, and to give the impulse free rein to expose what it “really wants”.

How often do people eat because they have grown bored? The impulse to eat, which only adds extra calories, runs exactly contrary to (perhaps) the desire to get up and go outside and run around, to feel active. People recovering from addiction know intimately how their beast will devise manifold pretexts for using again, but event eh desire to use may already over some more deep-felt desire—and not just to “mask the pain” and so forth. At such times, odd as it may seem, it can help, it can provide insight, to ask the beast, the importuning complex: “what do you (really) want,” to let the impulse, whatever it consists of, to have free rein in one’s imagination.

Practicality makes doing this for every impulse unfeasible but also only infrequently always necessary; the problematic impulses—as people recovering from addiction can attest—involve the ones that specifically thwart our wills and have or threaten detrimental impacts in our lives. Trimpey (1996)[11] spends far too much of his time critiquing the approach of Alcoholics Anonymous, but his recognition of the distinction between chemical dependency and addiction remains pertinent, where the label addict applies only if she or he has a chemical dependency they cannot control or manage. Once a person reaches this point,[12] then Trimpey’s approach kicks in. But he characterizes the addiction as a beast, recognizably a complex in the Jungian sense, as a presence in consciousness that threatens to thwart or usurp our ego-consciousness. Attempting to reason with this thing may prove fruitless, but letting the beast have free play in one’s active imagination at least (1) does not perilously attempt to repress it, and (2) allows it to spend whatever energy it has on its “fantasy” rather than our (problematic) use of rugs, food, sex, or whatever else we feel addicted to (or chemically dependent upon).

Precisely in the way that this represents something of a negotiation, it points to the needfulness of temperance in the combinatory sense rather than in its virtuous sense as moderation. Ultimately, it become moderating to find a (socially harmless) expression for (beastly or compensatory) impulses, but moderation rather gets understood in such a way. The fact of negotiation presupposes equality of speaking power even if the parties themselves differ vastly in power, as may often prove the case between a small band of protesters and a multinational corporation, or one’s ego-consciousness and the unconscious. It also, for that reason, does not propose turning the other cheek.

Notwithstanding that Christian discourse selectively ignores its own discourse, we should not confuse turning the other cheek and nonviolent resistance. One might say the former more resembles pacifism while nonviolent resistance embodies a counterforce more powerful than violence itself, but the more salient distinction involves the (necessary) publicity or visibility of the latter. Turning the other cheek when the world cannot see it justifies critiques of this as pacifisms though, of course, one cannot always assure or control the environment so that one’s pacifism remains or becomes publically visible.

I will disagree with myself some, since the degree of visibility plays a role here. James Lawson, who helped to discipline and organize the students of the Nashville Lunch Counter Sit-Ins in 1960, reports in (2000)[13] A Force More Powerful about an African-American tied to a tree by white would-be lynchers intending to beat him with chains, and as they did, the man said something like forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do, and this had the effect of confusing his attackers; an argument broke out amongst them. Thus, although here the only witnesses to the man’s nonviolent resistance comprised his attackers, nonetheless even that limited degree of visibility had an effect (in this case) an thus transformed (invisible, i.e., non-public) pacifism into nonviolent resistance. Thus, even in a solitary torture cell or in a case of rape, there still remains one other human being as a witness to your torture—although to what extent one may launch an appeal in a society of two where one acts as a perpetrator may not prove “visible” enough.

A situation of actual negotiation does not carry such literal threats of violence, even as it threatens whatever change (as a tempering) must result between the two parties that face-off over the negotiating table—whether this occurs between our ego-consciousness and some archetypally grounded complex, between another human being we find ourselves in conflict with (especially in romantic relationships), or with some more diffuse “corporate” entity. The presence of the supposed angel on the Temperance card suggests something like an arbiter—in fact, Nichols makes very much of the necessity of this presence, even though most of our negotiations in life do not have the luxury of such an overseeing force.

In the analytical setting, a therapist may stand as this mediating force; in some legal negotiations, an arbiter gets formally involved. But when it comes to interpersonal disputes, we tend to eschew a neutral party and instead try to amass a force of supporters (if only in the form of their arguments)—though one might say, again, that in any circumstance where “winning” or achieving “power-over” someone else becomes a criterion then one has ceased to negotiate.[14] In this light, one might precisely appoint a neutral party to oversee one’s interpersonal conflicts,[15] or we might precisely recognize that between you and me stands our “us,” which me may address ourselves to in seeking to find a resolution to our conflict. Married couples often know this egregiously, since the alternative to working out the negotiation involves divorce, separation, or worse.

In one of the more radical components of Jung’s thinking, he affects something like a Keplerian revolution on the notion of consciousness. I mean, at times in his attempt to describe the relative “positioning” of elements within consciousness relative to the total Self (which includes conscious and unconscious elements), he more or less “de-centers” ego-consciousness. To describe this geometrically, he suggests something more like an elliptical than circular “orbit” for consciousness, that we do not have one center (to the Self) like a circle, but something more like an ellipse, with its two central foci. Like planetary orbits, these centers of gravity do not have equal size—the Sun has vastly more mass than any given planet, but the ellipse traced out by each planet depends upon those relatives masses.

If synchronicity comprises Jung’s best-known ‘weird” idea, and his contention (I cannot quite remember where) that our consciousness actually (and literally, it seems) extends outside of our bodies into the space around us represents his “weirdest” (but not at all so well-known) idea, I suspect that this realization that the Self (the totality of the consciousness and unconscious taken together) has a literal double-focus may prove of greatest importance for humankind as we move forward (hopefully). I can’t begin to tease out the ramifications of this, but s far as the Temperance card goes, this two-part function of consciousness fundamentally involves then the sort of blending, moderation, or negotiating described above.

I principally mention this because we often hear platitudes about the center, including frequently enough from Jung, but also at the same time about “balance”. In Jung’s elliptical description as also in the vast distances that some of the planets must remain from the Sun in order to “preserve their orbits,” it becomes clear that the “center” at the very least does not occur spatially or positionally. When we fancifully employ some instruction software that gives us a teeter-totter with a heavy weight on one end and a light one on the other, and the assignment to locate the fulcrum so the two sides balance, we notice that the balance-point does not stand in the center unless we start with equal weights in the first place.

In the case of consciousness, however, we have the capacity (Jung observes) to focus on either foci (literally); we can occupy the position of ego-consciousness (the planet, if you will) or we can (sometimes involuntarily) occupy the position of the archetypal material presented to consciousness (the Sun), often with the effect of ego-inflation or what Jung calls godlikeness.[16] Whatever the case, the conventional or platitudinous sense of “balance” does not appear here. We do not receive in equal measure some offsetting bit for each part of experience and, importantly, the promise of karma does not consist in just desserts either, but only in the assertion of consequences for action. Jung frequently speaks of the action of the unconscious in a compensating sense; we become too one-sided and the psyche attempts an offsetting compensation, but this does not involve adding, say, a -3 to our 3 so that we arrive again at 0. If, on the heavy end of the teeter-totter we add some more weight, and we keep the balance-point in the same place, then we do not simply add the same addition of weight to the other side to maintain the balance.

Example: if a 56 pound grandson sits 8.5 feet from the pivot point of a teeter-totter, then his 240 pound grandfather must sit approximately 1.9 feet from the center on the opposite side to balance the teeter-totter. If the grandfather then holds his 13-pound granddaughter as well (and if we do not move the balance point of the teeter totter), then the grandson would have to hold not an additional thirteen pounds but only a fraction more than 3 pounds to keep the teeter-totter level.

Just to continue this metaphor, if we keep the balance point in one place, then as we increase grandfather’s mass he would have to sit closer and closer to the pivot point or, alternatively, the grandson could sit further and further away (if we could extend his end of the teeter-totter). These changes remain proportion; thus, if we double the weight on the grandfather’s side, this requires a double of the weight on the grandson’s side.

Consequently, the amount of “increase’ on the (much larger) side of the Unconsciousness requires  proportional (but smaller) reaction in consciousness, depending upon the “distance” one stands from the Unconscious material. Conversely, when we find ourselves “close” to the increase of Unconsciousness, this requires more (weight) from us to compensate for it.

We don’t have to make this literal, but by acknowledging two foci and relative center of mass, this provides  way to understand why some psychological phenomenon may have little charge for us while other, sometimes even seeming slight changes, can have devastating effects. But it also points to what the term “balance” means—not as some equal-sized, equal-weighted counter-gesture to whatever gets thrown at us. And this informs, in turn, how Temperance functions; more precisely, Temperance needn’t remain concerned only with blending polar or equal opposites—we might mix equal parts red and yellow to get a neutral orange, or we might mix a great deal of yellow into red to get an extremely pale orange. Temperance involves the art of intermingling or mixing, keyed of course to the specifics of what we mix but not (as a process or means) determined by the component parts.

In a relationship, whether opposites attract or not, the two palettes as a set of attributes in the pair involved intermingle into whatever they do—she, with her volatile, dominating charisma, he with his self-effacing easy-goingness, or the two of them with their equally ambitious, at-the-gym, perpetually “on” motivation, or whatnot. Or the (mathematically much more complicate) multidimensional orbiting of a group around some common point of interest, which has become utterly conventionalize in orchestral music (to achieve certain effects). Or in the psychological reality where multiple complex make their demands and announce their (sometimes murky) intentions within the court of the ego-consciousness—that sovereign who (after the manner of card 3 or card 4) has to try to integrate a whole kingdom of subjects (under an often too-apparent bluff).

One final note about balance then. On a cybernetic view of living systems (too sketchily presented), the general run of things involves the absorption of changes of state in a living organism, often through (mostly negative) feedback loops.  This regulatory function has the aim (so to speak) of maintaining what an observer might describe as key variables necessary for the continued functioning of the living system.  In  most general way, we can say that all living systems share this structure of perturbation and compensation, but what matters more involves that what each living organisms’ system “aims” to preserve stands as organism-specific so that (similarly) each compensation for a given perturbation remains organism-specific as well.

Analogously, imagine two sets of grandfathers and grandsons in the example described previously. In both cases, the amount of additional weight each grandson will have to hold in order to balance the teeter-totter differs and depends entirely on the whole system (grandfather, grandson, teeter-totter, distances, weight added). Even though both examples share the (mechanism of a) teeter-totter in common, what “balance” means for the two situations differs.

All the more so with living systems, where more than merely “changes in weight” introduce themselves, evening as something like a “balancing” function (a verb, rather than the noun of “balance”) plays a role for all living systems. This additional level of complexity, however, seems still at least an order of magnitude less than any sort of “living system analogy” we might offer for how “balancing” works in our psychological make-up.

In living systems—and Maturana and Varela (1987)[17] aver in any case the extension of their descriptive biology to things other than biological systems—this description of (homeostatic) “balancing” remains helpful because it describes primarily a mechanistic-like process, as understood from the standpoint of an observer. Like so-called inert matter, where differences in sample generally do not obtrude destructively into whatever sought-for outcome scientists or engineers might desire in an experiment or process, on the “merely physical” side of biology, one may similarly disregard difference in sample—hence, on the strictly physiological side of things,  host of different kind of medical treatments achieve their desired outcomes. But as we begin to shade over from strictly biological or physiological properties of matter—where disregarding differences does not affect outcomes—one we get far enough into the psychological realm, we can no longer ignore differences—and so many (if not most) psychotropic medications only in a gross sense of the term ‘work” and often seem to make patients lament the cure more than the ailment.

In the absence of a better term, we can just as well say “tempering” to describe the actual process that occurs, and in which we can sometimes find ourselves complicit, when perturbations cause changes of state to our psychology and then through amplifying or inhibiting cognitive feedbacks attempt to regulate or absorb or compensate for those perturbations. How this differs in practice,[18] from the sort of permanently reified “balancing” of living systems involves how what constitutes “balancing” itself (in human experience) may, can, or does change.

Part of what distinguishes living systems from non-living systems involves a greater range of compensations for a greater range of perturbations; the limits of this “adaptability” then generally denote the limits of the organism’s survival capacity, i.e., the capacity of this “balancing” to absorb a given variety of perturbations. “Tempering,” by contrast, proposes something like an adaptability of adaptations, though to unequivocally or absolutely distinguish between the “mere adaptability” of a cell or bodily organ as opposed to some putative “adaptability of adaptabilities” that we (credit ourselves with or) claim needn’t get insisted upon.

With this, we push (somewhat unnecessarily) against the limits of the metaphor of formal biology as far as this blog goes. But it points still to the notion that Temperance (cad 14) differs mechanically and in substance from Justice (card 8) with its perfectly reciprocal arm-balances. The high-wire act of temperance, often accompanied in its practitioners with just the balance-arm but no balance pans, doesn’t necessarily ever aim for perfectly level, but must constantly adjust to keep the performer from plunging headlong. And were a bird to land on the bar, a lover of strict justice might complain on principal that this throws everything off, but the exigencies of the situation don’t allow for too long such precious argumentation—unless we want the performer to go over the edge. Moreover, this image of a bird on the bar shows how Justice’s pans occupy fixed positions on the end, whereas the bird might land anywhere, demanding then a different response an offset.

In the Temperance card itself, we see this depicted as a solid stream of water passing (as in the hands of a deft bartender) from jug to jug. The fluidity points (precisely one would think) to something unlike the fixed bar on the Justice card. As one throws water from jug to jug, this calls (as also for  juggler) constant adjustments; a mechanistically fixed set of responses will likely quickly end with water everywhere but in the jugs any longer.

And, in fact, we do this continuously, as we may see at the fundamental level of our physiological selves, but all of this activity remains unconscious. With this card, in the second “half” of the major Arcana, we have instead the possibility of doing this tempering conscious, deliberately. If not in every instance (thought why not), then certainly at least in the sort of crucial moments we encounter in our encounters with ourselves, with others, with the world, &c.

In the scheme of life-goals or puruṣartha, card 14 stands as the second in the domain of mokṣa or liberation. In addition to all I’ve already said, this points specifically to what often seems to come up in Occidental encounters with Buddhism (or Eastern philosophy generally): the confusing relationship of acting in the world while seeking non-attachment.[19] Frankly, from my reading of the Bhagavad-Gītā, the means for non-attachment seem overly simplified—just do all I do for the sake of the deity of my choice and non-attachment occurs automatically. (I say this also without ignoring that this approach, differing as it does between karma yoga and bakhti yoga, constitutionally does not appeal to me either, which Kṛṣṇa assures me poses no problem, as jñana yoga more floats my boat).

I have to, in fact, avoid some temptation here to align cards 13–16 (Death, Temperance, the Devil, the Tower) as explicitly corresponding in some defensible way with bakhti yoga, karma yoga, raja yoga, and jñana yoga specifically;[20] I will stick for now with the idea that the sequence itself reprises the steps of liberation, where each of those steps has its analogous moment in the four principal types of yoga.

The issue of engaged Buddhism seems more problematic in Occidental culture, and not merely because it arrived after centuries of engaging the idea in India and elsewhere. The message in the Bhagavad-Gītā iterates in several places that one should act; one should follow one’s dharma, and that premature withdrawal from the social world, even for the noble aspiration of renunciation, portends a social wound. Certainly in the now world-wide interpretation of the Bhagavad-Gītā by the founder of the Kṛṣṇa Consciousness movement A.C. Bhaktivedanta Prabhupāda—himself coming “to” the text principally by way of the Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam, a later commentary on the Bhagavad-Gītā—he unambiguously advises a change of mind or intention in how one acts more than a change of action, this “line of advice” seemingly used to avoid running afoul of the existing social order (of castes) or the imputation of promoting overt civil disobedience or revolution . Kṛṣṇa himself in the Bhagavad-Gītā states one does better to do one’s own dharma badly than someone else’s dharma well.

Whatever the details of this, it becomes clear both in the Bhagavad-Gītā itself as well as in the Kṛṣṇa Consciousness movement that non-engagement stands as a non-option, however one can remain non-attached in all of that. It seems to me that Temperance particularly points to this, not simply in whatever groundwork gets laid for reintegrating the personal soul (atman) and world-soul (brahman) but also for continuing to live in the world while not accruing karma.

From brooding on sense objects, attachment to them arises. Out of that attachment, personal desire is born. And from desire, anger appears. Anger confuses the thinking process, which, in turn, disturbs memory. When memory fails, reasoning is ruined. And when reason is gone, one is lost (Bhagavad-Gītā II.62–3).

We see that out of the problem of attachment, addressed by card 14 (Temperance), personal desire is born, addressed in card 15 (the Devil), from which anger appears. From confused thinking, disturbed memory, and ruined reason, one then becomes lost, addressed in card 16 (the Tower). But this impressively succinct diagnosis of the problem also signals the steps towards its resolution; by not brooding on sense objects (Death), we may become or remain non-attached (Temperance), may thus not experience destructive desire (the Devil) so that we experience the Tower not at the terrible end of the world as we know it but rather as “escape from prison and all that entails”.

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).

[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), Psychiatric Studies (Collected Works 1, 2^nd ed. 1970), 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] Often, I find the surrealists too addicted to Freud in their effort to get at the unconscious—the desire being more relevant finally than their (poor) choice of theoretical understanding of means. But this provocation by the unconscious, which leads to the kind of desire Breton expresses when he says he wishes to “effervesce’ language, cannot and will not and does not rest on mere dialectics. What emerges, by the combination of disparate elements on an alien ground, only appears after the fact, so to speak. The synthesis does not come with foreknowledge. In Jung’s terms, borrowed and bastardized slightly, such a combination would provide a symbol, not a sign, of something, though we would not s yet know what it symbolized. In Jung’s usage, one encounters numinous material and then attempts to embody it, in a symbol; by definition, one cannot construct symbols then. But surrealism demonstrates we may, in fact, construct that something like  symbol, so long as we admit in advance that we do not know (yet) what we symbolize. Or, again, on another note; this approach remains explicitly non-dialectical for reasons Bakhtin (1986)* describes:

Dialogue and dialectics. Take a dialogue and remove the voices (the partitioning of voices), remove the intonations (emotional and individualizing ones), carve out abstract concepts and judgments from living words and responses, cram everything into one abstract consciousness—and that’s how you get dialectics (147)

* Bakhtin, M. M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays (trans. and ed., M. Holquist & C. Emerson). Austin: University of Texas Press.

[8] One wonders, in our so-called postmodern age, why we seem never to hear of synergy’s opposite (e.g., contrergy, hetergy, antergy), where the whole stands less than the sum of its parts. While anergy indicates “a lack of reaction by the body’s defense mechanisms to foreign substances,” which seems useful in dealing with the many hetergic cultural objects we daily encounter, synergy’s specific antonym still seems necessary; the Urban Dictionary proposes (obviously) antergy:

Where synergy is defined as “combining of forces for greater productivity and mutual understanding” or “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” antergy has the opposite effect: each additional team member that is added means that the project will take longer to complete.

I object to this only because it more offers a description of muddled cooperation. If I split a hair, imagine that two work toward an end and then a third comes along and (tries to) “help” and slows the process. What gets created involves less the sum of its parts and in fact still represents some sum greater than the parts, but a sum that the original two synergists did not desire. The process of utilizing synergy, conceptually and descriptively, results in the greater productivity and mutual understanding (ideally) that the Urban lexicographer notes, but such implementations of synergy does not limit its sense or its implementations only to that. Technically, I wonder if for instance a combination of colors or a combination of musical instruments to create hues and timbres otherwise not possible without those inputs denotes cases of synergy as well—I don’t think I want to allow “mere blending” an exact synonymy with synergy. Meanwhile, I imagine a case where a great movie gets subjected to a tried and true method of parody, but the result turns out a stinking heap of shit. Or a case where the weaknesses of two people, when they work together, results in a more disastrous outcome than either could have achieved individually. There I find true antergy.

[9] Related ideas include cooperation, synergy, that the whole stands greater than the sum of its parts, the psychological processes of alchemy (which Nichols will doubtless raise and discuss), the (not-dialectical, see Bakhtin above) re-merging of dichotomies, the many topics discussed in Oyama’s (2000)* Ontogeny of Information, and Aristotle’s hylomorphic theory, at least as Frederick Copleston (1946) described it. Nichols summarily emphasizes the intermingling “as symbolizing spirit and flesh, masculine and feminine, yang and yin, conscious and unconscious … ‘the marriage of Christ and Sophia’ or ‘the union of fire and water’ (249–50), &c.

* Oyama, S. (2000). The ontogeny of information: developmental systems and evolution. Durham, NC: Duke University Press

**Copleston, FC (1946). A history of philosophy: Greece and Rome. New York: Doubleday.

[10] Moore, T. (1992). Care of the soul: a guide for cultivating depth and sacredness in everyday life. New York, N.Y.: HarperCollins.

[11] Trimpey, J., & Rational Recovery Systems (Organization). (1996). Rational recovery: the new cure for substance addiction. New York : Pocket Books.

[12] An objectionable part of Trimpey’s description suggests that chemical dependency (or addiction) remains strictly an individual problem. If I drink, but not to a degree that I find problematic despite its effects on my mate, family, children, friends, or other relatives, then my chemical dependency remains just that, but not yet an addiction. Again and again, Trimpey iterates that users presumably know the consequences in the main and have a right (in a free country) to continue to use—to destroy their lives, as someone else might say. In Trimpey’s calculus, destroying my life might necessarily include affecting the lives of those around me as part of my freely willed determination to keep using. And so long as I remain willing to affect the lives of those around me, then I remain in the zone of chemical dependency and not addiction. This all seems on the dicey side, but the distinction between chemically dependent and addicted remains helpful.

[13] Ackerman, P., & DuVall, J. (2000). A force more powerful: a century of nonviolent conflict. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

[14] The statement ‘we do not negotiate with hostage takers” belies (accidentally) and precisely that such “negotiations” do not deserve the name negotiation at all.

[15] How the two involve select such a neutral party already reprises, writ-small, the problem of cooperating to find a solution in the first place.

[16] If I stick strictly to the metaphor of planetary orbits, then the unconscious per se becomes space itself (or space-time),a s the ground on which the Self (as conscious and unconsciousness together) stands. By definition and empirically, we never encounter the unconscious directly, but only through psychically embodied archetypal material; such emanations “from the Sun” constitute one of the psychological focal points in consciousness generally. It appears as “toward the center” (i.e., on the interior of our orbit) but the physicists assure us that the center of gravity in the system exists somewhere other than either focus. That “true center” (o gravity) marks the actual “location” of negotiation, but it offers nothing material or substantial in terms of the “bodies involved”. Locating that shared point, as an intersection of values (for instance) may help in any negotiation; were I to negotiate with President Obama for some social good, I’d find it hard not to get blinded by the mere radiance of his position as president, &c.

[17] Maturana, H. R., & Varela, F. J. (1987). The tree of knowledge: the biological roots of human understanding. Boston: New Science Library.

[18] Besides the sheer fact of us having a practice at all.

[19] In a Christian context, what one does after the attainment of grace proposes a similar kind of question, though one generally far more glibly answered.

[20] The way I list these yogas suggests a correspondence with the cards, but I can’t really seriously defend these choices. The sense of “transformative sacrifice” implied in Death might align with bakhti yoga just as well as the fundamental emphasis on Desire in the Devil card, but the sheer “doing” of the death card points to the sheer doing and transformation in Karma yoga. And so on, unsatisfactorily.

INTUITING TAROT AND JUNG: Card XII (the Hanged Man)

Introduction & Disclaimer[1]

The thirteenth post in a series that adds commentary to Nichols’ (1980)[2] Jungian commentary on the major arcana of the Tarot, here I engage with card 12: the Hanged Man.

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 Hanged Man: Suspense[6]

The most familiar summary one might offer for this card runs: if life hands you lemons, make lemonade; more profoundly, one might quote the paraphrase of Meister Eckhardt from Lyne’s (1998)[7] Jacob’s Ladder: if you have no made peace with life, those that beset you will seem as demons, but if you have made your peace, you will see they are angels. Nichols emphasizes this by pointing out how differently the card looks whether viewed in its correct orientation (with the hanged man upside-down) or inverted[8]—and while he goes from one suspended to someone seeming to dance an Irish jig, Riverdance-style, that “he appears to smile as if he knew a secret” (216) seems a stretch given the card Nichols specifically comments upon.[9]

I mention this, primarily to avoid any too much glibness about the predicament this card offers. The advice, if life hands you lemons, make lemonade, almost invariably issues from someone not actually hanging from the gibbet; an elemental response might come back as, “Easy for you to say!” Yes. Eckhardt’s observation, which has all the radical force of a heresy when you get right down to it, probably has more useful application; I feel like I could more easily use his remark to find solace while suspended. It certainly functions better than “suffering builds character” or “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,”[10] if primarily because (1) one cannot always believe survival remains guaranteed, and (2) whatever salutary lesson may remain wholly obscure, perhaps even for a great many years.

In any case, such seemingly facile observations, pertinent as they may prove, often do little to ameliorate the sort of circumstance demanded by the Hanged Man. And, in fact, if card 11 (Strength) pointed to the “archetypal” basis (the Platonic ideal) of all things—i.e., Kṛṣṇa’s “I am the strength of the strong” (Bhagavad-Gītā, 7.11)—this card literalizes the dilemma or opportunity signified by the Major Arcana themselves; I mean, they each symbolize or embody aspects or rites of passage that we cannot avoid, so that our only ‘freedom” in the face of such necessity involves how we will respond to it. If card 10 (the Wheel of Fortune) points to the aspect of “fate” in the saying “at is what happens to you; destiny is what you make of it” then card 12 points to the “destiny” portion of the saying.

Nichols emphasizes one sometimes former name of this card—the Traitor, with its appended associations with Judas—but also that errant knights sometimes got dangled like this and flogged, as a means of public shaming, not crucifixion per se; such public punishment went by the name “baffling”.[11] So the associations with this card do not merely include suffering but punishment for hubris (and/or also forms of unjust abuse of power by those offended by some just act by a knight or person). Nichol emphasizes the hubris:

Any notion that human nature is stronger than Mother Nature, or that man’s intellect is the ruling function of all life, upsets the Great mother and ultimately the human culprit as well. In retaliation, the goddess may grasp her impudent son by his heels n dunk his proud brains once more in the womb of her moist earth (216–7).

Note here Nichols pun in how the Great Goddess and ultimately the human culprit gets upset—the former in a dudgeon, the latter inverted on a gibbet. Also, one might her echoes of the legend of Achilles, dunked so as to achieve immortality in water but left vulnerable at his heel where his dunker held him. Nichols further elaborates the tree from which figure hangs baffled:

The tree, and especially the truncated tree, is a universal mother symbol. Osiris’s body, for example, was enclosed in such a tree, the lopped branches of which symbolized both the castration of the son (masculine ego consciousness) and also the possibility of new growth—or rebirth—into a larger sphere of awareness (217).

We needn’t keep the gendered attributions Nichols insists upon here. “Mother” may provide one of the most apt—or at least the most conventional—metaphors for “the Source,” but we should not mistake the metaphor for the thing metaphorized. That we “dissolve” out of our (necessarily) narrowized ego-consciousness when subsumed in the Tree so that we may then reform—get reborn—in a new form also does not require testicular (or even ovarian) loss; the forced and enforced immobility of the cocoon may seem to strip us of agency, but (1) casting this in terms of emasculation again puts a gender on the scenario that implicitly takes no cognizance of women’s effeminization, and (2) the more salient point involves the (apparent) necessity of the experience, whether we feel powerless during the process or not.

Before this, however, Nichols has jumped the gun some. The hanged Man does not go through or symbolize this kind of transformation, which most typically (if not properly) belongs to card 13 (Death), which follows. This circumstance may pave the way for transformation, just as the caterpillar hangs itself upside-down from a twig before wrapping itself in a cocoon and undergoing metamorphosis proper. Whatever the hanged man symbolizes, the change it portends does not involve outward appearances, as from a caterpillar to a butterfly (i.e., the Death card, or Nichol’s example of Osiris). When Nichols alludes to the ordeals involved in initiation rites, I think she hits the mark, so long as we understand this more in a social, rather than individual, sense.

Taken at face value, the baffling of  knight served to restore his public (social) reputation, just as the stocks of the Puritans and the like served a similar function. Shaming involves an adjustment to one’s social presence in the communal body more than any kind of necessarily momentous inner change. Baffling, which occurs involuntarily, involves a social imposition, a punishment, whether it provides any sort of actual rectification within your soul or simply exacts your obedience to a social contract (whatever sense of the justice or injustice of the act you hold privately). Nothing says such shaming can never work, and if we distinguish between shaming, as actually socially beneficial, versus humiliation (as a form of abuse of power that might often inspire the humiliated individual to take some form of violent revenge), then perhaps the distinction becomes illuminating.

We may understand from this that the punishment never intends a lethal or fatal outcome; it occurs always with an expectation of survival, though during it one might wish otherwise. This needs mentioning to not allow the card to turn into the “crucifixion” card,[12] whatever claim respecting the world one makes for the Passion narrative. Eliade’s (1965)[13] observation excerpted in Henderson (1967),[14] “Between the two (worlds) there is a break, a rupture of continuity … (For) passing from the profane to the sacred world in some sort implies the experience of death” (90) certainly applies, but not to the Hanged Man, for in this kind of shaming any rupture of the world occurred with the “wrong-doer’s” wrongdoing in the first place, where this kind of public display intends to set that aright again; precisely to maintain continuity does the knight get baffled. Nichols gets back to this when she notes, “As history has repeatedly shown, any person whose individual conscience is in opposition to the collective viewpoint can appear as a traitor to the establishment” (218), yet she continues to emphasize initiation, death, and transformation; hence:

We, like the Hanged Man, have been disconnected from our roots. Our need is to descend—to reconnect with our origins in history and in nature. The motif of sacrifice and dismemberment, hinted at in the blood-red stumps of the truncated trees [on the card Nichols examines] is repeated in the red legs and upper arms of the hanging figure, suggesting that he too must give blood, must sacrifice his former ways of understanding and acting (219, emphasis added).

What Nichols seems to fail to draw out here involves the motif of sacrifice an dismemberment constitute a threat, not any actual fate (at this point, for the baffled knight). The Power of the social world, far more affronted in a specific and concrete way than any deity over human hubris, will exact its revenge. Spencer and Gillen (1904)[15] provide explicit evidence of this in contrasting aboriginal traditions about dead spirits:

It was stated by Mr. Curr that “outside of the family, the power which enforces customs in our tribes is for the most part an impersonal one.”[16] In regard to the Arunta we have pointed out that, in the first place, the native is firmly convinced of the reality of the penalties which are supposed to inevitably follow any breach of tribal law; that in the second place, public opinion and fear of ridicule and opprobrium are also strong deterrents; but that, in addition, the offending native is perfectly well aware that he will be dealt with by something much more real than an “impersonal power” (25)

This self-same force very much more real than an impersonal power strings up the knight for baffling.

In those cases where fatality results deliberately we have cases of sacrifice or scapegoating, though properly speaking this card does not seem to get at that. The associations it has picked up in that regard seem telling then, i.e., the demands of stuff like nation-state for individual sacrifice, &c. Carton’s elf-sacrifice at the end of Dickens’ (1859)[17] A Tale of Two Cities seems well-night archetypal, but this ultimate form of sacrifice remains, I feel, an illegitimate appendix to the card’s fundamental sense.

All the more so recalling that this card represents the last in the dharma row of the Major Arcana; the sense of “sacrifice” here means the sacrifice of “mere self-interest” before the demands of social convention. With the rise of radical individualism, such  notion gets banished to the historical backwater as a possession of “backward” and “primitive” tribes around the world. One sees, many times over in ethnological treatises, what reads to us as a superstitious degree of adherence to custom—the word “superstitious” makes an essential part of this description, since we fancy our own adherences to customary non-conformisms denotes rational, or at least enlightened, self-interest having nothing to do with superstition.

Notwithstanding the conceit of this, we can simply say that the tension between “self-expression” and “social demands on self-expression” plays an important role in Occidental culture. Jung (1921)[18] “resolves” this tension by insisting not only that individuation but also general societal health deepens necessarily on the individual expression of collective norms:

As the individual is not just a single, separate being, but by his very existence presupposes a collective relationship, it follows that the process of individuation must led to more intense and broader collective relationships and not to isolation … (Psychological Types, ¶758)

A norm serves no purpose when it possesses absolute validity. A real conflict with the collective norm arises only when the individual way is raised to a norm, which is the aim of extreme individualism … The more a man’s life is shaped by the collective norm, the greater is his individual immorality (ibid, ¶761).

When we do not recognize this, it sets us up to become overweening orientalists, insisting for instance that Muslim women cannot lead fulfilling lives—or delude themselves in believing so—within the strictures of their culture, and the like. For us, the kind of reconformation to the demands of culture this card signifies seems especially unjust, draconian, and the like, and one may find millions of minority cultural peoples living amongst majorities who precisely had their human potentialities cramped if not crushed because whatever actual social consensus or oligarchical Power that strings the knight up in the first place takes no cognizance of the diversity such minoritarians represent. However, most of those of us in the United Stets represent members of the cultural majority, so that bowing our necks at such ‘consensus’ demands already begins to smack of hypocrisy, because to make such a resistance requires the continued oppression of the marginalized or oppressed (i.e., unrecognized) minorities within our culture.

Understood in a positive sense, at least—and I have witnessed how this plays out in Việt Nam, for instance—the assumed distortion to the Self, the sort of unbearable or ineluctably damaging constraints on self-expression, we imagine when we think about ‘conforming” to some social norm represent just that: assumptions. To take an obviously clear example: we might imagine that Amish men and women cannot practice individuality or self-expression merely because they groom and dress as identically as possible; one might even justly ask how “authentic” our self-expression really comes to if it hinges on my having a certain kind of hair-cut different from everyone else. We might more uncomfortably ask if this sort of faux individuality—never mind the secret currents of conformity that often come along with various “looks”—serves to co-opt us (as drones) into the mindless engine of capitalism, so that the more profound delusion of individuality and quality of life occurs in us, not “them” (whoever “them” consists of).

The point of all of this: let us not jump the gun and ascribe attributes to this card that likely more probably belong to the next one, card XIII (Death). Whatever pros and cons we may adduce for the shaming function involved here, we needn’t merely declare as superior the procedures we’ve culturally articulated since. Moreover, we might remember that this card occurs in the context of the row dedicated to dharma (or public service). While the previous, analogous cards (the Emperor and Justice) make mere individual fiat or the mere (pleasure of) the practice of power into the ruling principles, here the individual submits (voluntarily or not) to the whole of the social fabric itself–however problematic we might make that concept, &c. If this twits our knee-jerk sense of individualism, we might remember at the same time that our individualistic Empire currently busies itself destroying the very world that makes it possible.

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).

[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), Psychiatric Studies (Collected Works 1, 2^nd ed. 1970), 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] Carolco Pictures Inc., Robbins, T., Peña, E., Aiello, D., Lyne, A., & Rubin, B. J. (1998). Jacob’s ladder. Special ed. Santa Monica, Calif.: Artisan Entertainment.

[8] In a sloppy way, one may imagine in Arabic numerals how this “12” becomes “21” when inverted, thus pointing to the end-all be-ll outcome of the entire archetypal journey through the Major Arcana.

[9] She also later remarks, “Experience shows that the why-did-Fate-pick-on-me approach is a dead end. But if [the Hanged Man] asks, ‘Who am I that this should happen to me’ he may unlock hidden treasure that put him in touch with the meaning of his life in a new way” (220.

[10] Or even, “The divine will never give you more than you can handle.”

[11] An etymology for the verb baffle ::

1540s, “to disgrace,” perhaps a Scottish respelling of bauchle “to disgrace publicly” (especially a perjured knight), which is probably related to French bafouer “to abuse, hoodwink” (16c.), possibly from baf, a natural sound of disgust, like bah (cf. German baff machen “to flabbergast”). Meaning “to bewilder, confuse” is from 1640s; that of “to defeat someone’s efforts” is from 1670s (from here)

[12] Notwithstanding the narratively cheesy resort that Christ cannot die in the first place, being immortal, which makes the narrative as much of  hoax as Baigent, Leigh, & Lincoln’s (1983)* claim in Holy Blood, Holy Grail that Jesus and cohorts hoaxed even the crucifixion itself.

*Baigent, M., Leigh, R., & Lincoln, H. (2004). Holy blood, Holy Grail. Delta trade paperback ed. New York: Delta Trade Paperbacks.

[13] Eliade, M. (1965). Rites and symbols of initiation: the mysteries of birth and rebirth (trans. WR Trask). New York, Harper & Row.

[14] Henderson, JL (2005). Thresholds of initiation. Wilmette, IL: Chiron Publications.

[15] Spencer, G, and Gillen, FJ (1904). Northern tribes of Central Australia, London: Macmillan, available from here,

[16] Curr, EM (1886). The Australian race: its origin, languages, customs, place of landing in Australia, and the routes by which it spread itself over that continent (volume 1). Melbourne: John Ferres, Government Printer.

[17] Dickens, C.(1993). A tale of two cities (ed. HK Browne). New York: Knopf.

[18] Jung, CG ([1921], 1971). Psychological Types (Vol. 6, Collected Works, 2nd ed., Trans. R.F.C. Hull) Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.