Haindl Tarot

I -The Magician

HEBREW LETTER: BETH "HOUSE"

RUNE: PEOH, "CATTLE"

ASTROLOGY: THE PLANET MERCURY

ELEMENT: AIR

The number one traditionally symbolizes the male principle. This comes from the phallic shape, and also from the idea of masculinity as single-minded, direct, forceful. The number one signifies willpower and directed consciousness.

The Hebrew letter is Beth, which means "House." A human creation, a house symbolizes culture, civilization, and creativity. But a house can also isolate us from nature - cities began as collections of houses. (In the Tower we will see again Hermann Haindl's idea of the skyscraper as expressing a desire to separate from the Earth.)

In the Bible, which begins with the letter Beth, God speaks - "Let there be light" - and order begins to emerge from chaos. The shape of the Beth is a little like an open mouth, out of which all creation pours forth.

The Rune is Peoh, P. It literally means cattle and, by extension, property and wealth. Peoh was sacred to the God Frey, a Norse God of sexual potency and peace, as well as wealth and the enjoyment of life. Weapons were not permitted in Frey's temple, He received no sacrifices. Frey was a God of the Vanir, the original Gods of Scandinavia, who were overthrown by the Aesir and their chief Odin. (We will look more closely at this change in the Emperor.)

Peoh signifies cosmic fire, the male principle of creative force. In Norse myth the world begins with fire melting ice, and it will end in the fiery destruction of Ragnarok (see Aeon and the Universe).

The German for Peoh is Pa. Haindl has discovered various word plays with this syllable. Pa is father. It also suggests fa-che, German for torch, and fa-cere (doing, and thus action), and phallus for maleness.

The astrological planet for the Magician is Mercury. Mercury was the God of magicians but also of healers, writers, swindlers and thieves. In other words, Mercury represents mental and magical power. His Egyptian form Thoth invented writing as well as magic. As we saw in the introduction Thoth, as Hermes Trismegistus, supposedly gave his Book of Thoth to the first Egyptian magicians. Aleister Crowley used the name the Book of Thoth as the title for his own set of Tarot cards painted by Lady Frieda Harris.

When the Romans encountered the Germanic tribes they interpreted Wodan (Odin) as their own Mercury. Thus, the Magician signifies both Frey and the more aggressive God who overthrew him.

The element for the card is Air. The Magician represents the creative power of the intellect.

We see in this card various axes crossing each other. A vertical axis runs from the four symbols at the bottom to the face of the Magician above them, and a dark shapeless face rising from the Magician's forehead. The spear and the sword create diagonal axes as they crisscross each other. The four symbols represent the four suits of the Minor Arcana and the four elements - Fire, Water, Air, Earth.

The symbols are also ritual objects for the Holy Grail, the magical chalice sought by the knights of King Arthur's round table. In traditional versions of this card the four symbols lie on a table before the Magician. Here, however, they occupy the forefront of the card and, instead of lying apart, they join together, the male sword and spear penetrating the female stone and cup.

To the left of the Magician we see a field of crystals, and above that the Sun. To the right we see a group of eyes set in a nighttime sky, shining above them is a crescent Moon.

The occultist sees the universe as built upon polarities. These include light and dark, conscious awareness and unconscious energy, intellect and instinct, action and stillness, the positive and negative poles of electromagnetism, and of course, male and female. The occult description is actually more complex, for it recognizes as well the trinity of body, mind, and spirit, and the fact that some forms of matter, such as stars and rocks and onecelled organisms, lack sexual polarity. More important, the poles are ideal abstractions. In reality they never exist separately, but join together, with one side more dominant than the other. The day is never entirely light, and the night is never entirely dark.

Card 0, the Fool, has an androgynous quality. But the Fool exists outside normal experience, in a kind of perfect innocence.

When we "fall" into the ordinary world, we need to deal with the opposites and contradictions of life. And so, the numbered cards of the Major Arcana begin with the Magician and the High Priestess, male and female.

Traditionally, the Magician signifies light and consciousness, the ability to analyze and create, while the High Priestess represents darkness, or the unconscious with its sense of wholeness and mystery. When we look at the Haindl cards we see a more subtle blending because, although the High Priestess shows a night scene, the card is filled with light. And even though the Magician's face is radiant and we see a field of white crystals, the card carries a dark brooding quality. This suggests that the Magician, the creator, must struggle with the dark mass of matter in order to release the light hidden within it.

In the early days of Christianity the Gnostics (the word "Gnosis" means "knowledge") formed an esoteric alternative to conventional Christianity. Though the official church stamped out organized Gnosticism, the Gnostic ideas remained as an underground influence on such later teachings as Kabbalah and the Hermetic tradition in Europe.

The Gnostics believed that God, and all existence in its true state, consisted of pure light. This light became broken up and trapped in the gross darkness of the physical universe. Gnosis consists of recognizing the truth and attempting to release the light so it can return to God. We see, then, in the left-hand corner of the Magician, a formless mass of dark brown changing to green, the color of life, while from the Magician's forehead emerges a dark lumpy face, as if the light could sink back and become trapped once again in the material world.

What should we make of this strange figure arising from the Magician's head? the Magician wears a tiara, symbol of the crowning power of the intellect; he represents thought, while the High Priestess represents intuition. But out of this mental crown we see the dark figure, as if the Magician has not integrated his own darker emotions with his intellect. His ideas can become distorted and he can lose his ability to perceive the pure forms of existence, here symbolized by the field of crystals radiating from the Magician's left eye. Notice that the dark face looks the other way. the Magician can fall from the truth, perhaps through such temptations as the desire for power over knowledge or the distractions of physical needs such as sexuality, which he may think he has left behind or overcome.

The lumpen face bears a scarred hole, as if something were torn from its forehead, perhaps symbolizing the archangel Lucifer who lost the emerald that had blazed light from his face into the heavens when he fell. The name Lucifer means "light-bringer" and his fall symbolizes the Gnostic myth of Creation as an imprisonment. The light existed as a pure force, an archangel, but when it entered into the physical world it became buried, and the beautiful Lucifer devolved into the shapeless lump we see in the card. In the figure's sad, downward-looking eyes we see the sense of loss as well as the confusion that results from being separated from the truth.

Apart from the rituals and the complex theories, what does the Hermetic Magician try to do, and why? Human beings possess a desire for joy, a desire to transcend the problems of life. But the world resists our efforts with the sluggishness of a great mound of dirt pushed at by a small child. We find ourselves hungry, weak, prey to sickness, loneliness, and death. Our efforts to join with others are often misunderstood, and no one seems to care or recognize the truth about us. More subtly, we find we cannot know ourselves, for that most basic knowledge remains locked in the unconscious. At this most basic level, the Magician seeks to overcome this separation from self.

Like the scientist, the Magician seeks to become a master of the physical universe. The four objects in the foreground of the card symbolize the elements of creation. They are also the tools used in magical rituals. Many magicians, like many scientists, seek power for its own sake. In orthodox Christian mythology (not the Gnostic version) Lucifer fell because his lust for power caused him to rebel against God. But the true Magician, like the true scientist, works to master the world simply because the world is what's there. The Magician seeks truth - an awareness of the inner nature of reality, a confrontation with the self, and finally a reunion with the divine presence that lives hidden within all existence. Think again about Lucifer's Fall. How could he have rebelled against God if he had considered himself part of the divine? So the Fall (the great mistake) is not just the desire for power, but rather the separation of the ego from the rest of existence. Therefore, the Magician seeks to overcome the illusion of isolation.

Just like the court jester (or modern comedian) with the Fool, the ritual magician is a person acting out an archetype. The archetype appears in the card as a wise old man. We can think of him as Merlin - master of wisdom, King Arthur's teacher, counselor to the knights seeking the Holy Grail (such as Parsifal, the Fool). The Grail itself appears as the cup in the front of the card.

At the end of his story Merlin allows the sorceress Nimue to imprison him - some say in a cave, others say in the heart of a tree. Either way, we can see this as the light imprisoned in matter.

A master of prophecy, Merlin knew this would happen. Yet his lust for Nimue made him powerless to stop her. The intellect alone cannot deal with life. If we separate thought from desire then that desire may overtake us and destroy all our grand plans.

If Merlin's weakness seems strange, the experience with Tarot readings may show the truth of it. Very often a reading will indicate that a person's current course of action is leading to some unpleasant outcome. The reading will outline this explicitly, so that the person can understand and agree with what is said. And yet, most people will continue in the same direction. Desire overpowers knowledge.

The Magician seeks to become a master of his destiny. But he cannot do this simply by willpower or intellect. Instead, he needs to raise up the unconscious, allow it to become conscious of its power and transform it into liberating energy. The Gnostic methods involved sexual magic (possibly influenced by Tantra, the esoteric branch of Hinduism mentioned in the Introduction), and their teachings included the idea that rebirth into heaven demanded a psychological merging of male and female. We will look at these ideas again in the Empress and the Lovers.

So far, we have viewed Merlin's story as an allegory of thought (light) imprisoned in matter (darkness). But there is another, perhaps older, interpretation that returns us to the Fool's theme of harmony with nature; imprisonment in a cave symbolizes the womb of Mother Earth; imprisonment in a tree acknowledges the pre-Christian religions of Europe where trees were worshipped. Some, such as the oak, were seen as symbols of male potency and creative force, yet these masculine trees "belonged" to the Great Goddess of the Moon and the Earth.

We return to Herman Haindl's idea that the masculine must unite with the feminine, the technological must return to the Earth. For the patriarchal mind such a return may seem like defeat or imprisonment. But we can imagine an earlier form of the tale of Merlin and Nimue, in which the Wizard joyously gives himself to the Earth Goddess.

The Grail-like objects of the Magician derive originally from Celtic mythology, as do the stories of King Arthur and Merlin. In his famous book The White Goddess Robert Graves described how the ancient Celts in Britain practiced a system of magic - and a philosophy and a poetics - based on trees. Not only did the trees represent the life force, they also formed a language which the Magician learned in order to compose poems to the Goddess. Thus we see a vital connection between thought - for poetry means speech and speech, remember, comes from the intellect - and nature. Merlin submits to Nimue, indeed becomes joined to her in the form of a tree. In the card, the Magician's face appears gnarled, almost like the bark of a tree. And if we look again at the dark face above him we will see that it indeed metamorphoses into a tree trunk.

When we first glance at the crystals on the left side of the card they suggest intellect released from the physical world, for they appear cool and abstract. Many contemporary people have begun to explore the ancient healing power of crystals; among some Native Americans, crystals were known as the "brain cells of Mother Earth."

Notice that the dark face separates the Sun and Moon, the day and night. These stand for all the polarities described earlier - light and dark, male and female. For the Fool to become a true Magician he must overcome the false polarity created when intellect separates from nature. Ultimately, magic is as androgynous as the Fool, its power found in the union of male and female. Eyes appear in the dark below the Moon. Perhaps they symbolize instinctive knowledge and a yearning for truth and release, for they look up toward the blocked sun.

The four Grail symbols dominate the card. The lance and the sword create diagonal movement, one upward, the other down. Crossed, they also form two triangles, one pointing down, the other up, meeting at the apexes. We will see, in the card of the Lovers, that the two triangles signify matter and spirit, the Earth and the sky, female and male. At the same time the lance and the sword form phallic symbols and therefore signify the masculine principle, while the cup and the stone disk represent the feminine. In each pair the two symbols have interpenetrated, again showing the necessity of union. King Arthur, Merlin's protégé and successor, proved his mystic right to rule by drawing a sword out of a stone.

In Christian legend the Holy Grail was the cup used to collect Christ's blood as he suffered on the cross. In older versions of the Grail story, however, the Grail was a stone rather than a cup.

In later centuries the Grail came to symbolize the presence of the Holy Spirit giving life to the world of matter. Christians saw the lance as the spear that wounded Christ in the side. In the card the spear's fiery tip (Peoh, as creative fire) can also indicate blood. And so we return to the Fool's theme of wounded nature.

Many people believe that the cup and the spear go back before Christianity: the cup symbolizing the Goddess and her gift of life pouring onto the world; the spear symbolizes her male consort. We can say the same for the sword and the stone.

The four symbols form some of the tools used by the Hermetic magician, with a wand substituted for the lance, and a disk or pentacle for the stone. The four also stand for the suits of the Minor Arcana, and the four elements which make up the physical world. We find the four elements in the zodiac's twelve signs (four elements of three signs each) and the four-letter name of God in Hebrew, the Tetragrammaton, YHVH. This name can be spelled but not pronounced and so signifies the unknowable, that which cannot be reduced to words or explanations. At the same time tradition tells us that God used these four letters to create the physical universe. The sword of spirit penetrates the stone disk of matter.

In many Grail stories a woman appears carrying the cup on a disk, while others carry a sword and a lance. We have already mentioned that the appearance of the Grail required a response and that Parsifal failed by keeping silent. We cannot expect that we will automatically move through the different steps of the Major Arcana to evolved consciousness. We must make an effort. On a more mundane level, the problems of the ordinary world will not simply go away. We must not hold ourselves back like Parsifal, but must commit ourselves to life. By doing so we will find that life responds and we will learn to recognize the divine spirit that lives within nature and our daily existence as well as the exalted realms of the Magician.

DIVINATORY MEANINGS

The Magician is a card of power. For both men and women it signifies feeling strong and in control of your life. This does not mean rigidity nor "control" as repression. Rather, it means the power to direct your life in positive ways. Magical power means transforming old situations and bringing new ones into existence. If a person has gone through a stagnant period, the Magician's appearance in a reading will point to a burst of energy and the ability to make things happen.

The Magician signifies creativity. Artists instinctively look upon the card as their "patron." In the twentieth century, many artists and performers have investigated Kabbalah, Hermeticism, and other disciplines involving magic. They have understood that art and magic share an underlying experience - that of a spiritual energy literally flowing through the body. Musicians, writers, and others often say that they do not create their works. A force works through them to bring the work into the world.

This creativity is not just for artists. The Magician tells a person that he or she can begin new projects or further develop projects already started. The card signifies imagination, the ability to take a fresh approach to problems, and to come up with new ideas. The Magician is a card of focused will. It shows someone persuasive, dynamic, able to excite others and bring them along on his or her projects and ideas. The Magician overcomes resistance in other people, but also in himself. The magical power transforms situations. It breaks down obstacles.

The Magician is a card of wisdom. Merlin's power came partly from his understanding of people and events. But it is also a card of service to others. Merlin was strong when he used his magic for the sake of Arthur and the kingdom. When he cared only about himself - when he gave up his duty for Nimue - his power vanished and he became trapped.

REVERSED

The Magician reversed indicates a block to the natural expression of a person's energy. This may happen if outside resistance prevents the person from realizing his or her potential. The reversed card may also show an inner resistance. The powerful Magician energy requires openness; if the person carries repressed fear or emotional pain, these may close off the flow of creative force. The trapped energy may show itself as physical troubles, depression, or anxiety. Notice that the repressed material itself does not cause the trouble, but rather it prevents the Magician archetype from its natural expression. At another time old fears or long-buried pain might not disturb the person in the same way. Although the Magician shows a time of power, that power will need to flow openly.

Alternatively, the reversed Magician can signify arrogance or the misuse of personal power to dominate others. The person has the magical power to overcome resistance. However, he or she lacks the wisdom to use it for a good purpose.