The Spirit of the Tarot. Claudine Aegerter

to the greater life, because we already belong to it; this enables us to avoid the martyr archetype.

      The High Priestess is the guardian of the door; she is also an archetype and we need to absorb and translate the ‘pass-me-not’ of cosmic wisdom. So we should not take ourselves seriously, because whichever archetype we have projected for ourselves, we can for get ourselves in knowing that we are just an instrument or cell for the greater life we live in. Removing an archetype can be a tricky thing, because behind it there is nothing but reality and reality is quite shocking. This is because we recognise the games that we are playing. To do this we have to be completely dead to any self-intent and while we think either that we have nothing left to give up, or so much to let go, we put ourselves in the realm of the archetype of the self-obsessed! After The Empress, the rest of the Major Arcana describes the conditions and the right ingredients for the alchemical process to be realised within the initiate, so that he can pass through the opened door to divine wisdom.

      The inner man is where the great Saturn of Capricorn operates, for this is the initiate. He has climbed the mountain and is very sin gle minded and resilient to the point of stubbornness, so as to reach the top. It is important to transmute stubbornness into the spiritual quality of endurance and use it when it is needed. If we know stubborn people, we should help them to use their stubbornness for the work of the light. To climb the mountain we have to be as tough as the mountain, but remember we do not have to carry it on our shoul ders, the mountain carries us on its back and the mountain invites us to its summit. Once we have understood that we can climb it, so we have to make light of the task. Endurance is a wonderful qual ity; this is the lesson, for if we mean to live as we affirm we mustn’t move from our affirmation. The mountain will come and go, but that affirmation will remain.

      The French word for Empress is ‘Imperatrice’ and is linked to the word ‘imperative’, which means absolutely necessary. It is impera tive that the mind is clear, poised and impersonal. Because it is a virtual world, man is there to recreate it through his own thoughts; this means changing his perception, so The Empress works though impressing thoughts. If there are enough of us seeing the world in a particular way, it will happen. So we have to understand the impor tance of how we perceive the world and in which direction we align our mind.

      The Empress is Active Intelligence, which knows itself as a mind with a mission. It is intelligence being conscious of itself and there fore can open to the higher spiritual truth. With The Empress we have started to understand that it is a virtual world created by our minds and because each mind is unique, the creation is seen from as many angles and points of view as is possible. If we understand this, we can respect everybody’s point of view, knowing that we are all an expression of the great life.

      The Empress is a mighty hermaphrodite – she is Mercury in all its beauty. She is a perfectly receptive intellect. The intellect is the mas culine characteristic of the personality, but because she has rendered it receptive she is represented as feminine. This is why we get the double qualities of masculine and feminine in her. She is the qual ity of mind that becomes the silver thread, linking the divine to the higher intelligence of the initiate as he goes back into life. He can then make sense of the process, redeem it and render it sacred through a pure heart and an open and loving mind. She teaches the human family to recognise its spiritual heritage and to develop wisdom.

      The book that The High Priestess was holding is now opened by The Empress. To open that book requires intelligence and wis dom; this is why Number 3, The Empress, represents intelligence. It is the wisdom of application which appears in humans as eternal wisdom, when a state of humility is present. It is that intelligence and wisdom that The Emperor will give to the initiate. The Empress represents Active Intelligence, which pervades the whole of the sys tem and enables it to manifest in its manifold glory.

      The High Priestess has to be veiled, for she’s a mystery and therefore she will only address a minority. On the other hand The Empress is available for everybody to see and appeals to all men of goodwill, meaning those who can listen to the message of life. It is here that we start to point our will towards good and God and away from ourselves.

      The Empress is mercurial; she is the equivalent of Athena (Greek), or Minerva (Roman). She’s the intellect when it is self-conscious. The initiate has to have a complete understanding of life at the intel lectual level to be able to use all the knowledge that is locked into Active Intelligence or life on this Earth. If the intellect is developed it can then fly and reach the higher mind, so The Empress has a com pletely open, playful mind, obsessed with the love of understanding the energy behind things and the knowledge that truth is universal. In this way the eternal student becomes the eternal teacher. People’s level of perception reflects how much endurance they can bring to bear on coping with the suffering of reality. Most human beings are still cocooned in the mind-set that all they need to do is to be com fortable at home in front of the TV with two nice meals a day, thank you very much!

      The intellect, curiosity and open mind of The Empress help to break down the mind-sets where we are stuck in prejudices and pre conceptions. Ultimately she searches for the one universal truth and so she knows that all the little truths along the way are quite useful, even if they aren’t complete.

      She has a peaceful, placid face to symbolise the mature intellect. She’s at peace with her environ ment, because she’s in complete possession of the mind that has created it. The mind learns speedily and eventually, through knowledge and open mind-edness, it knows how to discriminate, eliminate and choose – this is what The Empress does. If the result of her work is not practical and viable, the higher intelligence will soon abort it. Nothing is ever wasted, everything is used in the best possible way.

      Her feet being in contact with the Earth brings a grounded qual ity to whatever The Empress has to do. It is only because of this quality that self re-creation can happen, and then it is through her own effort and her love of fusing with the truth that she knows how to re-create. She knows she is only the messenger and not God, so she sees her limitation. The breaking through of the intellectual life is absolutely necessary for the initiate to access the cosmic wisdom, so in her we see the willingness to break through and uplift her mind beyond the control she thought she had over creation; this is why she has wings.

      When our intellect is flowing with life, love, discrimination and observation, it is marvelling at its own Active Intelligence and we have to bring it back to terra firma to apply its findings practically. Without the grounding and assimilation, the vision and the knowl edge aren’t used.

      The planetary preoccupation of the survival of matter is needed as much as anything else; it is all the same divine process. We tend to open our hearts and feel pain for tiny unimportant things, when we should know that we are here for one job only; yet for that important job we have no time. This is where humanity is. We have to see how much beauty there is on the planet and cherish it all as we would our child; this is the incredible job we have to do. In the next few hundred years we have to de-personalise any hurt that has been done to us. The hurt had to happen in the first place for we had to feel and know it, but now we have to own our part of it so that when we tell people that there is no guilt in humanity, only responsibility, we sound real. Until we are grounded we can’t do that, for without the grounding the vision can’t be used by the Earth as it stays in the higher planes.

      Our repeated incarnation is, to a large extent, motivated by the gathering of our experiences; it is through this that we acquire a good solid base of understanding and knowledge. This is what awareness is: we come in, we go through an experiment and then affirm that we already know about that particular one, so we need never go back in and do it again, unless we recognise an addiction to the feeling of unease through the experience. The light that comes in through the ‘déjà-vu’ feeling enables us not to be taken in by any thing degenerative and wasteful.

      One of the poignant aspects of transformation can be illustrated by what happens when the butterfly comes out of its chrysalis; for a few minutes it is wet and cannot fly because its wings have to dry. It has had to let go of its protective case and there’s an incredible fragility in that instant, when for a few minutes it is completely at the mercy of any bird or anything that can eat it. This is like baby humanity,