The Spirit of the Tarot. Claudine Aegerter

and be aware, so that we can translate the process. We can thank God we are doing the work! It is all about knowing that the personality is of no conse quence. We can liken it to screaming at a horror film; even though we know it is not real, we can still be afraid, but we know the differ ence between the drama and the real thing. We scream because we know we can go into drama and it is okay, it is not really happening, the real alchemy is in silence.

      The High Priestess is herself a veil in a way because all that she is going to confer to us, with her keys and her book, is what we truly have to absorb. We are talking about Soul work, for Soul absorbs and retains. Soul is a sea of memory, or a memory bank and she is showing us that. We don’t see the other side of her throne, just as with The Magician we only saw three of the four legs of his table, the other one being hidden. Her right side is not seen, but we can imagine the white sphinx there hidden by her cloak.

      Whether or not we are facing The High Priestess, the human ity of our nature needs to be completely honoured, loved and cel ebrated. There used to be an official near the Pope whose job it was to remind him ‘you are only a man’, just in case he was losing a bit of humility in thinking he was God on the planet. It is a tradi tion that should be kept. Do we want to become a God and escape being a man? Why would we want to escape? It is the same with the work we are doing, if we don’t completely own one hundred percent what we are at the time with love, compassion and humil ity, whether we are the abused or the abuser, then we cannot fuse with the higher understanding of the Soul that is infused with the light of the Star.

      Through the wisdom of The High Priestess and the secret of knowing that we are not this, that, or the other, we can actually fuse with the divine through the mind, the Soul and the higher intel ligence. When this is happening we may not be able to describe or sense what is going on. We must go through the intense purification of sulphur, for that is what is expected. Ancient Wisdom says that until the sixth initiation we are still in illusion, so there’s still a lot of burning and dissolving to be done.

      The Silver Key that The High Priestess holds gives knowledge of the natural things; being in her left hand it shows receptivity and intuition. Silver is the beauti ful energy that wants to rise up with hope and ‘esperance’, travelling right up to the higher mind to meet the lover. We have to start where we stand and we stand in nature, so we must have all the knowledge of the natural world. The silver will take us to the flower of what the intellect can do, which is phi losophy. Philosophy is a wonderful supreme science and a natural tool, which enables the intellect to uplift itself. The intellect works through philosophy in a beautiful and refined way, but it is still a human science. Religion is one of the flowers of human science.

      The leaves on the silver key represent the three virtues of religion, which are the beginning of the work of faith, hope and charity. They are still of the personality and require that the personality thinks and aligns to goodwill. Then, once the intellect is dropped, they are not needed. Faith is unnecessary because we know; we don’t need hope because we are in the now; we don’t need charity because we have compassion. We don’t matter and yet we are priceless! On the way there is always an exoteric lane and an esoteric path. A lane leads to a path and when we are going towards the esoteric path there will always have been an intellectual lane beforehand, such as a teaching, a guru, or something else exterior. The esoteric is hidden inside and the minute we go there we work with Soul.

      The intellect is the intermediary principle and the way through, for it is only through the intellect that we are able to translate the knowledge and vision of the Soul. Whichever form of expression we use; words, arts or sciences, we still have to use mind. To have rendered the intellect into a very well ordered, obedient servant to some higher quest is something quite beautiful. To be seen as intel lectually clever can bring difficulties, because even if we have been touched by the Soul, this does not obviate the fierce battle between the intellect and Soul. The seat of the Soul is in the heart and there fore in the emotional body, but the first contact with Soul is through the intellect. Active Intelligence is the divine side of intellect. A rise in consciousness has to come from a contact with the higher mind and the will. It manifests as a change of perception; it is the percep tion of everything from the point of view of the Soul that enables the rise to happen. We don’t have to get rid of problems, but rather transmute them by seeing them as teaching aids.

      So the silver key of science that The High Priestess holds in her hand symbolises all the qualities that have lifted us right up to a refined level of concrete knowledge. Though it is refined the knowl edge is still dogma; for example, we have a fixed idea that a plant is a plant and it grows like this or that, according to its species and its chemistry with the soil and the light. While a thing is seen sci-entifically it is a dogma, whether it is religion or science. Because of this we know that the next initiation has to happen from within, for there is no deeper truth than the one that comes from our inner chemistry, just as there is no possible plant unless the seed is taken from the heart of the plant so it can unfold into the flower and the fruit. When we have used all these beautiful social, initiatic paths at the level of matter, we have to kill the perception of ourselves as we are at that time, so as to be reborn into a different awareness; this is what we mean by the initiate killing his initiator. The plant in our example is then seen or perceived as a specific symbol of sacrifice; a gift, rather than what it is seen as purely biologically.

      On the top of the Gold Key is the symbol for sul phur, which in alchemy represents the burning and dis solving of matter and of anything that is impure. The Gold key holds wisdom and to be an effective channel for wisdom we need reason. Reason, which is another side of the intellect, has to be regarded as important, as long as it doesn’t become an end in itself. If it does, then all we keep doing is reasoning and so stay in the closed circle of the intellect. Having the light coming in with reason to express it, is the only right use of reason and intellect. Gold is the esoteric knowledge, which gives life, reality and gnosis and will only deliver all that after purifica tion with sulphur. Sulphur symbolises total purification and there is no realisation if we are not purified. If we are truly to be a tool, we must be completely clear so that what comes through us when the star comes up can be seen for what it is. Sulphur eliminates anything that is not eternal. It instigates a painful purification, because in the silence of our minds it destroys anything that has no value and is a lie. What it destroys are all the easy convictions of a lazy faith, which puts its trust into exteriorised affirmations and mantras that are recited from the lips but have no uplift, because they have not been experienced or understood. We think that if we keep on saying the same thing time and time again, we will go to Heaven! The natural way is in silence and it is only truly when man is in the silence of his own solitude that he can find his own God. Remember Moses, the prophet or the intellect at the service of the higher mind, when he told God “Oh Lord, you made me powerful and alone”.

      The initiate, having found his inner truth, has to take it beyond the God of religion, or the God that took him to where he is. He must rise above all dogma, wherever it comes from, in order to have a vision beyond his own preoccupation. This is initiation – to merge with a higher vibration of perception. Science is fantastic, because it is the job of the intellect to name everything, so that we know the body of the God we live in at the physical and chemical level. In the same way, religion is wonderful because there are tens of mil lions of people on the planet who need to be carried and protected by a structure. A religious service is wonderful, although if we rely on it to feel comforted and protected we have to recognise this as a need. We have to learn to participate humbly in its symbolism, rather than participating because it is beautiful and makes us feel better. It doesn’t matter which faith it is, all religious services are touching, because it is about the Soul of mankind moving towards God through a structure, which is as old as the beginning of the rise of consciousness in nature and it is beautiful. However, the true transformation can only happen inside, in silence. ‘The word is sil ver and the silence is golden’ – the word is the translation through the intellect and then silence is golden, because the understanding is complete and undiluted by the poverty of the intellect.

      ‘The Word’ is a teaching, given by a teacher or master. Silence is a re-thinking of the word, so that