The Spirit of the Tarot. Claudine Aegerter

yet at the same time has to hold the depths of the inner expansion of the 1 to 3. This can cause conflict if they only stay on the surface and concretise their position there, where everything looks like gold. Power doesn’t last very long if it hasn’t got its base in the purity of the inner world of the imagination and intuition. In any civilisation, if power is not fed from a very deep source, then it has no chance of changing or rearranging the world for the future, which is what the 4 has to do. The 4 is a true inner way, yet it uses everything in mat ter that is used by the world except magic, because magic is not the permanent true way of uplifting the elemental world.

      Once the Soul is aligned with the personality, there are only three ways to manifest; this is why The Emperor has a plait with three strands around his neck. This plait represents the long chain of initiates who have come before us to give help in three different ways. It is a beautiful canvas; it is the veil of Mary, or the Holy Ghost.

      The Emperor is not the creator; he is the one who brings in the force and the influence for the creative process to happen. He is not matter, but he is the actualisation of the idea and because the idea is very pure and white he has to be sensitive to the movement of the energy, so as to know what is needed according to the will of God. He has come into the world of facts and deeds so he must be con crete and impose the structure, which is the energetic life of the God in which we live and the karmic principle, pushing the ‘will to be’ of the 1 into manifestation.

      The Emperor has to be completely pure and centred on the job of adapting the idea to the level of the possibilities of manifestation, according to where the world is at the time. His eyes are looking far away, for he has to keep his eyes on that web or plan, from which he is reading all the virtual possibilities for the world. The male ele ment in the Tarot always represents the active principle within us, which is recognised as truly doing the will of God for tomorrow. We are told we have to live in the present or the now and that the past is the past, but he doesn’t live in the ‘now’, for he has understood the transitory quality of it, seeing that it is nature and only a step. He has the vision of where we are going; so he has to feed drops of that vision into the reorganisation of matter and then eventually the whole of matter is ready to see the vision for itself. This is a job and a half! The plan is the original past, so we must retrace our spatial past journey to fuse with the blueprint of our future.

      He hasn’t come to make the idea practical, but has come to mould the world according to its flexibility and adaptability. Adapt ability is not an obvious attribute of the 4, but if the form only thinks of itself as practical and righteous, the point of creative genius is missed. What allows him to do the job is the fact that he can first adapt the idea to what the world needs at the time, so as to adapt the world to the new idea. For example, when we look at a person and we see what the potential of that person might be, our task would be to adapt the thought-form and the feeling of that person into the next step, so that eventually they arrive there. We can call that prac tical common sense, but that is not really what we are talking about here, rather we are saying, “Have you got the strength of charac ter?” “Have you got the will?” and, “Have you got the intelligence to survive?” All the time it is an inner thing.

      The Emperor has to mirror and apply the learning of the realm that is above him, then translate it so that the world can make sense of it and use it; this is why he has to look far ahead. If we look far ahead we don’t look for immediate results, but we know it is going to happen one day. So we keep looking ahead, applying whatever our adaptable mind can provide according to what we can perceive from the messages on the web. He has come back to help every body follow their own destiny; for he is the one that has the eye on the higher destiny of the plan. There lies the difficulty, because we all have free will. Many times we think we have made a choice and we make ourselves believe that we are on the path, but in real ity we have turned our backs on the path. That applies to all of us. Following the path is a natural state, like grace and humility. When we think we have to make a choice, we are automatically outside the path. If we know exactly where our beam of light resides and we want to merge with it there is no choice, so we don’t have to make one.

      This little world is under the illusion of making a choice every day, but in reality it is grounded in anarchy and dissolution. The world has a tendency towards destruction, because all the little units want as easy a time as they can get and they do not want to accept responsibility for the damage they do. So The Emperor has to act with the force of persuasion and not the heavy “You must do it!” He must act, for how long would it take society to wake up if we didn’t have all those lovely emperors? How long would it take humanity to come out of chaos and the swamp?

      Because he has dominion in a world where so many people are still so far from the light he has to use force, which looks as if it is against them but is actually for them. He is very misunderstood, like a parent who smacks a child to prevent him from burning himself, after telling him to be careful because it is dangerous. It feels like it is ‘against’ the child but it is actually for his benefit. There is a fine line in this, so be careful!

      When everything has been said and done (which from the begin ning of time it has), we know that the one who is resisting the most and taking the longest to come round, is going to be the best Emperor. The Emperor would certainly throw out the one who is always saying, “Yes sir, no sir, I will do it sir”, because that one is afraid of getting hurt. The question is always; “Has he got the will and the strength to go and be an Emperor?”

      The level of consciousness of humanity, the karma of the life of the planet and of the Solar System, determines the exact manifes tation of the expression of the God we live in at the time. We live in a huge energetic bubble which is all energy and movement. The development of the perception of God has occurred as human beings have become aware of their own environment. At first there were the four elemental gods of fire, water, earth and air, who were feared because they could punish and kill us. If we were good they would feed us, give us a good harvest, keep us warm and cook our food. We are made of these great elemental gods, but once we cease to pay homage to them we can have some kind of dominion over our own elementals. If we are not driven by our fires, or completely drowned in our waters; if we are not weighed down by the heaviness of our earth; if we are not completely flying and day-dreaming with our air element; if all four follow the will which is within us so that they harmoniously form the next materialisation of the idea in our heads, then we have good dominion over our elementals. This then means that the gods of old are not the gods that we are going to pray to. The way that the elementals worked and were understood was mainly through fear, so when the Spirit of truth descended into biology and mankind, it was quite a dramatic realisation to see that everything we think, do and care about has to do with survival. There were high initiates now and then, but most of the priests would have understood it according to the teaching they were given, which was to do with the elemental gods. The scriptures tell us that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, but the other way to look at it is not to fear, but to respect; if we respect our elementals then they can work for us. If we fear them, they automatically play the game. The Emperor has complete respect for the planet, therefore for all the elementals in mankind; it is that respect which will bring in ‘thy will be done’. It is that force in the will of God to implement the plan that a person will completely respond to, rather than fear.

      When mankind realised there was something much stronger than him, which was nature, then nature was definitely his God. The first attribute of that God was fear, for it was the power of nature which man feared. Man had to bow his head and respect that great God, who could eat him alive. As we grew and started to internalise, we had to completely revise all our understanding, for fear has to get out of the way. It is not about losing fear; for fear is the name we gave to the apprehension of the energy that tells us that our spiritual guidance wants us to move a bit deeper into matter. The first step is to be aware of something much bigger and greater than us, which can take our life in an instant; that teaches us to respect the elemen-tals. Eventually, as our experience takes us more and more into the world of energy and matter we realise that our own life is eternal, for we have been here before. Even if the coat or body we have been occupying dies, it doesn’t mean that the experience will die with it, so we end up believing in a much more metaphysical God.