The Spirit of the Tarot. Claudine Aegerter

kingdom is as evolved as it can be. We are trying to fuse with the light to make it part of our body, so we feed on the plants. Green is the principle of active life; it is the manifestation of light and its action in matter. It is the colour of life in spring, which brings support and hope to everything. All of this is why her feet rest on a green cushion. She is the Goddess of knowledge (Gnossos) and has the power over every thing alive and over the principle of life.

      In the card the two columns are those of the Tem ple of Solomon. They are called Joachim and Boaz and they represent the strong masculine and femi nine aspects, which are the forces that hold the world together in love and strength. They perpetuate mani festation and are just outside the temple so that the Holy of Holies will eventually become the world.

      The emblem at the top of each column is the styl ised flower, the fleur-de-lys, which represents purity, the Trinity and man as king. These are protective sym bols and are there to keep away all the malevolent influences that could come and disturb the houses of Yahweh, the God of time. Standing stones were used in the past for this purpose, because man was very sensitive to energies and could hear and feel the life vibrating within big stones, especially if they happen to be on ley-lines. At that time they took these stones to be the dwelling places for the Gods. When the Tarot cards were originally made, the symbols which are depicted were the common language among the initiates and therefore they can be seen as vehi cles for the ancient knowledge, rather than promoting particular religions or philosophies.

      The High Priestess’ red cloak is lined with green, for as has been said, green is the colour of life. The coat is red as a sign of spiritual domination. She wears it because she is the side of the manifestation of God that says that knowledge is the wisdom principle. She is the love-wisdom aspect; she holds the life of the second Solar System and is in communication with the divine. We must not see her as an entity, because she is a manifestation of a characteristic of divine wisdom.

      In the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis, the snake tells Eve “You will be like the Gods”, which meant that if the intellect were devel oped man would know all there is to know about the planet. This was true, because the Gods of that time were the elemental Gods of fire, earth, wind and water and the whole of life on the planet was at their mercy. The snake was just the intellect that was saying, “Come on, these are only elemental Gods, aren’t you going to understand them and become master of them?” We have to rehabilitate the snake, because he has been seen as the villain who put Adam and Eve out of paradise. Man was not chased out of paradise, rather he perceived with clarity what paradise really was, which was animal man in complete ignorance and with no self-awareness whatsoever. The minute that mankind observed and started to think and under stand the environment, he was on the side of the snake. So the intel lect took over and was not baulked by the old Gods, because they are only elementals; however, we have to realise that our bodies are made up of the elementals. The snake was a wake-up call, saying, “Come on nature, we have to rise here”. So we started looking at the opposites of black and white and started playing the game. With The Magician we become capable of rising above the idea that we are God on the planet, so rising above the elemental Gods. Even tually we can let go of the little snake of the intellect, which has served us well by taking us to philosophy, religion and healing; the next step is to learn to communicate with the divine. As the intellect translates the wisdom, the light of the higher mind will shape it as a diamond.

      This whole process happens via the occult or the inner life and cannot be found in form. It is a metaphysical pursuit and therefore it escapes the senses; this is why it is secret, because it is in the dark. It can only be passed on to initiates who have had many trials and meditated on them very strongly and profoundly, in silence and solitude. Everybody on the planet would have had a hard life, with a few exceptions, but it is only the ones who have been able to go in, meditate, ‘raise the bread’ and ‘make the wine’ within themselves, who will understand the symbol. They will have gone through the alchemical process of having made something of their hardships through the solitude and silence; this has brought them into wis dom, love and compassion. However, there are those who will pass by all this and not see anything in it.

      This is where the Star of Bethlehem translates as the light of the higher mind in the Soul, raising the house of bread, bread being the symbol for the biological life of human-kind. We each have our little Star of Bethlehem to take us to the Soul in the dark. The word Bethlehem means ‘house of Bread’. We are told in the Bible that bread has to be earned by the sweat of the brow, meaning it is hard work to be born into the world. That is what the bread symbolises, complete sacrifice and complete willingness to give of self, by going right down into the collective sub-conscious to do some of the burn ing. Bread is a representation of food as well as representing the body of the God we live in, so it is sacred. Bread has gone through three processes of transmutation; the grain has been ground; the dough has been kneaded, then raised and baked. The disciple undertakes these three processes (symbolically representing the work of the first three initiations) in order at the end to become the complete initiate. Bread is a complete spiritual food that represents the body of Christ, meaning the biological life that we have to sustain, so that eventu ally it is there to be given as sacrifice. In the Bible bread symbolises the body, while the blood/wine represents the Soul.

      The book, which The High Priestess holds in her right hand, is the sacred book of beginnings and end ings, of yin and yang, feminine and masculine. It is not knowledge; it is inner connaissance, an inner eternal renewal or renaissance as the two divine energies perpetually fuse their love into life. The High Priestess is a mis tress who will not suffer or accept us having any other teacher. We must not think that the world is going to do it for us; it is in us. Yin and yang is not an opposition, but a complete dance of the world, revealing its dangerous beauty to the slavish mind, or its secret to the initiate.

      This is the Number 8, symbol of infinity, the spiral without end. Eventually it becomes a complete sphere and ends when all is light. Each time a star falls, it keeps the memory of the light and the spar kle of where it came from. In the world of yin & yang we know that we are coming back, just like the day knows that it is has been born out of darkness and the darkness knows that it holds the light in itself. That is truly the beginning of great wisdom if we understand it fully. It is the star falling as a sacrifice, knowing that it holds the memory of the light.

      If we truly see life as energetic, any limitation is only an appear ance or an illusion. Spirit is not a prisoner in matter and we are not limited by it; we are free to create whatever we want in matter because it is the manifestation of Spirit. As long as we have com pletely accepted the process of manifestation, the only thing that limits Spirit is the lack of the will of its instrument to want to be truly alive. There is actually no limitation by matter, in fact it is the opposite and the possibilities of creating a new world are absolutely limitless. Yes, we have to be patient, but even that concept is a limi tation. We are of course essentially unstable, even when we come back with a bit of understanding in our mind, because we do live in the world of transmutation and instability. Looked at from the inner perspective, we can see that the superficiality of the world is only a cartoon caricature of the level of consciousness prevalent at the time. That idea should spur us never to fall back into the old ways, for who wants to be a Donald Duck!

      The initiate keeps in himself the love of everything that is still held in the bitter dark prison of pain; by the time he can do that there cannot be any ‘self’ left. While we are preoccupied by any type of ‘self’, we are going to expect the world to feed us on self love, self respect, or self-worth. The minute we stop focussing on self we hold the whole world in love, because we are in love, but not with self. We are not after any self-worth because the worth we have is the worth and respect of God. We are not lacking anything, because we have put it all into God and therefore made it sacred.

      At this point we will automatically hold the profane world in love, for we have understood that it is within us, so we’re going to hold it until the end.