Haindl Tarot

XXI - THE UNIVERSE

HEBREW LETTER: TAV, "SIGNATURE"

RUNE: "GIFT"

ASTROLOGY: THE PLANET SATURN

ELEMENT: EARTH

Finally we come to the end of the Major Arcana. Compared to the earlier emphasis on personal development, we reach out now beyond our own concerns to embrace the consciousness of the world.

The number of the Universe is 21 and, like 12, combines the 1 and the 2 - the Magician and the High Priestess, light and darkness. It also adds up to 3 (1 + 2 = 3), the Empress. In that early card, we first saw the snake and learned some of its mythological, esoteric, and psychological associations. Here we see the dragon, the grand serpent of the imagination. The number 21 is 3 x 7, the final octave of the Chariot's victory. The victory here is one of spiritual liberation.

The Hebrew letter, the final one in the alphabet, is Tav, which means "Signature" or "Mark:" Paul Foster Case points out that a signature sets the seal on something. Trump 21 sets the seal on the Tarot's spiritual work. In fact, as the uncoiled dragon shows, it breaks the seal, opening up the mind to the hidden truths of the universe (breaking open seals that release spiritual power is a central image of the Christian Revelation of St. John).

Case links the idea of a "mark" with a passage in Ezekiel where God tells the prophet to go through the city and mark the heads of the righteous people who lament the sinning. Therefore, Tav means salvation. Case might have mentioned the more well known mark, when the Israelites marked their homes with lamb's blood so that God (not an angel as many believe) would pass over their houses on his errand to slay the firstborn of all the Egyptians. In traditional religious terms salvation means salvation from death. In the Tarot's esoteric psychology we overcome the fear of death through the Hanged Man's connection to life. The Universe signifies a greater awareness, in which we go beyond all the forms and limitations of the material universe to find eternity, blazing into light, like the fiery breath of the dragon, in every moment.

Just as Aleph, the Fool's letter, begins the Ten Commandments, so Tav begins the word "Torah," the first five books of the Bible. The Torah, like the teachings of the Hierophant, tells people how to live their lives. Christianity sees Christ's incarnation as the replacement of a written law with the living reality of God's love. As traditional Jews, the Kabbalists revered the Torah. However, they sometimes described the physical scroll as a reflection of a greater Torah - one that is nonmaterial and that existed before the universe. When God wished to create the universe He consulted this eternal Torah. Therefore, Tav - the Universe - signifies an existence and a truth beyond the physical.

The Rune is another form of Gebo, the gift Rune, found on the Sun. Runes have more than one written shape, for the Runic alphabets traveled through Germany, England, Friesland (now a part of the Netherlands) and Scandinavia. Where trump 19 showed us the gift of life from the Sun, 21 brings us the gift of truth in the dragon's fire. Remember also that Gebo means ecstasy. The rising of the kundalini snake is exactly that, an ecstatic opening of the self to the entire universe.

The planet is Saturn. In Greek myth, Chronos (Saturn) was the son of Ouranos (Uranus) and the father of Zeus. Snakes were sometimes described as the "spine of Chronos:" We have learned how the kundalini, which lies curled at the base of the spine, rises up the spine to the head.

Before the discovery of the three outer planets, Saturn was thought to be the last planet. Therefore, it has acquired the astrological meaning of limitations and restrictions. Many people see Saturn as a teacher that tells how we learn from our difficulties. The Tarot writer Mary Greer, in discussing the connection of Saturn with the World card, has described it as "dancing on your limitations." In the Haindl Tarot we also find a similar idea of breaking open limitations. We see this in the open circle. Compared to the ancient symbol of a snake with its tail in its mouth (called Ouroboros in Greek), the spiral form created by the dragon suggests open possibilities as well as evolution.

In J. L. Borges's Book of Imaginary Beings we find an interesting connection between Chronos and Hermann Haindl's vision of the Universe. Borges cites a sixth-century writer, Damscius, who describes an ancient teaching that the first principles were Water and Earth. From these two came a dragon known as Un-aging Chronos, who laid an egg from which the world hatched (remem- ber the egg in Aeon).

The element for the card is Earth. This may seem odd at first, for we have described the trump as transcending the material universe. But transcendence does not mean abandonment. In fact, it means embracing the Earth. In the Haindl Tarot we have learned to view the Earth once again as a divine being, the Mother of Life. In the state of awareness described in the Universe, we do not conquer the world but join with it. Every object - a pebble, a leaf, a drop of water - can unite us with all existence. Every moment can open to eternity.

In a film made about the Haindl Tarot the film crew followed Hermann Haindl's creation of this card through its various stages. Compared to many earlier cards, the Universe is a simple design.

We see the bottom half of the Earth, with a dragon beneath it. Actually, the dragon circles the planet, as implied by the way the head and tail disappear up the sides of the card. Scandinavian myth described the World Serpent as coiled tightly around the Earth. This dragon has uncoiled. The head appears below the tail, suggesting a downward spiral, the spirit returning to ordinary life. In other words, we do not "ascend to heaven" and stay there. At the same time we gain spiritual understanding, we become more ordinary. We go down at the same time we rise up. When Watson, Crick, and Franklin discovered the double-helix shape of DNA, the basis of all life, occultists recognized the image as the double spiral basic to esoteric tradition.

We see the bottom half of the Earth, and below it the heavens, filled with other worlds. Usually, pictures of such a scene depict the top half of the globe, with the sky above. This is because we look up to see the stars. The idea of reversal - or going down, as we know from the Hanged Man, the Star and Aeon - is one of the particular themes of this Tarot.

The dragon and the Earth are both green, the color of new life. The Earth is smooth, not pitted. This indicates that the Earth is both eternal and in a state of renewal. There are ten planets below the dragon's body, a link to the Wheel of Fortune. Above the dragon we find twenty-two planets, the number of trumps in the Major Arcana. In the Kabbalah, the number thirty-two can be said to represent the universe, for it signifies the Tree of Life, with ten Sephiroth and twenty-two pathways between them.

From between the dragon's eyes strange shapes rise up, symbolizing the experience of the third eye opening. The shapes open from the top of the head, the crown chakra. The highest Sephirah on the Kabbalist Tree, the one that leads back to the divine, is also called the "crown."

Like the dragon in fairy tales, our great serpent breathes fire. Red, the color of blood, mixes with white, the color of pure thought. Here, fire is breath. The English words "spirit" and "inspiration" both derive from Latin spiritus, meaning "breath." In Hebrew, ruach (remember "Ruach Elohim" from Aeon) means both "spirit" and "breath:" Breath allows us to live. In many religious traditions God breathes life into humans. Some people believe that when a person dies the soul leaves the body with the last breath. But we do not just breathe in at birth and hold onto it, we constantly breathe in and out. If we become conscious of our breathing we will recognize that we constantly exchange energy with the world. The oxygen we breathe in comes from plants; the carbon dioxide we breathe out goes to plants. Therefore, the ego's belief that it exists separate from the rest of creation is an illusion, disproved by our most common activity. These days, such an illusion has become extremely dangerous. For if we cut down the forests or if holes in the ozone layer destroy the plankton in the seas, then we destroy the sources of our own air for breathing.

In the fairy tales, the dragon's breath is danger and destruction. Here we can describe it as burning away illusions. This is not simply a metaphor; to see reality is indeed like breathing in light and fire. The term "enlightenment" does not mean an educated attitude. It means a great flash of truth, like a lightning bolt.

In the Middle Ages people described dragons as combining Air and Earth (spirit and matter) - as a lizard, the dragon belonged to the ground yet could fly. Our dragon has no wings but the breath combines Air with Fire, while Earth is the element for the card. Water comes in when we learn that the Ouroboros was described as coiling the planet at the bottom of the seas.

For Hermann Haindl the Ouroboros signifies what he thinks of as the old belief, that existence is closed and repeats itself over and over. In this view people must fulfill their function in life and not strive for anything more. Social patterns remain fixed forever. But the modern world has changed this. We have discovered the possibility of individual activity, of the universe as a place that is always new. In Hermann's view, this has led to arrogance and danger, but we should not give it up even if we could. The snake has opened the circle. At the same time we do need to return - not to the old rules, but to the genuine truths found in the ancient traditions. We need to return to reverence for the Earth and all of Her children. And so Haindl's serpent does not rear up, but spirals down.

The World Serpent of Germanic myth was very similar to the Ouroboros. The Serpent lived beneath the sea; Snorri Sturlason, the great preserver of Scandinavian mythology, described the Serpent as biting its own tail. But the stories also described the Serpent as evil, as in the fairy tales. The Serpent gnaws at the base of the World Tree and fights with an eagle that flies round the top of the Tree. An eagle, as we have learned, symbolizes spirituality, and a snake the unconscious. But as we saw in the card of Death, they are actually the same thing. The fear of the unconscious - the fear of our own desires and our personal fears and dreams - cre-ates the illusion of the eagle and the snake as opposing energies.

The great enemy of the Serpent is Thor, God of Thunder and therefore, along with Odin, similar to Zeus. (Some myths describe Thor, not Odin, as the father of the Gods, while the Romans identified Thor with Jupiter/Zeus and Odin with Mercury/Hermes.) Two stories describe Thor battling the Serpent. In the first story, Thor comes to a hall of giants who challenge him to a test of strength. The mighty God agrees and his hosts tell him to pick up a cat lying on the floor. To Thor's embarrassment he can only raise the animal very slightly. The laughing giants tell him the creature was the World Serpent. Now, if the Serpent represents the unconscious, or more broadly, life itself, then Thor in this tale symbolizes the powerful ego trying to conquer the world through the force of its will. In the second story, an angry Thor invites one of the giants to go fishing. Thor's hook catches the Serpent. Using all his might, Thor manages to raise the head and readies his hammer to smash the Serpent. The giant, terrified of the end of the world, cuts the line and the Serpent sinks back below the waves.

The ego sees itself as the hero and the unconscious as the poisonous beast. But the unconscious is not "out there"; it lives inside of us. And the simple lesson of every breath teaches that the whole world is inside us, just as we are inside the world. The Scandinavians, like many other people, prophesied the end of the world. Their name for this disaster is Ragnarok; in German it is Gotterdamerrung, the name Wagner gave to the final opera in his Ring cycle. Many cataclysmic events will signal Ragnarok, including the awakening of the World Serpent. When it uncoils, the water will rise up to engulf the land. We have learned that psychologically the seas represent the unconscious, and the land the ego. Therefore, the "end of the world" comes when the hidden energy awakens and overwhelms the narrow ego.

In Ragnarok, Thor battles the Serpent for the final time. He destroys it but the venom kills him as well. A similar fate meets the other Gods, and so the world ends, only to begin again after an unimaginable time. Many people have observed the courageous pessimism of this story, the same events always ending in the same destruction. But as we have learned in the Hanged Man, we can choose an alternative to courage and battle. The alternative is surrender, joyously and freely given. If we do not see the world - and our own selves - as enemies, then the dragon - the snake - uncoils like the Shakti, burning away fear as well as illusion.

In the Empress we saw how Marduk declared a great victory by killing Tiamat, his serpent ancestor. The myth tells how he cut her body apart to create the Sky and the Earth, then placed him self on a throne to demand obedience. For the arrogant ego, creation means separation, conquest, and strict rules of above and below. Any change in these rules will threaten destruction. But in the card of the Universe, the final "triumph" of the Major Arcana, we find Tiamat uncoiled. And the message is not of conquest or destruction, but of liberation and love.

The traditional meaning for trump 21 is success. This may refer to something specific, such as success in business especially if the person has asked a work-related question. The card can also mean becoming happier, more fulfilled. If the card comes up during a , time of struggle, it signals a release, with a better life ahead. The meaning is the same whether the struggles are practical, such as starting a business, or emotional or health-related. The Universe occurring in a reading for a person who is ill will indicate recovery and a new sense of well being. If a person asks about a career, the Universe tells of an exciting future.

Usually the card does not mean success in practical terms only. It also implies satisfaction, a feeling of justified pride. Life in general is going well. There is a further sense of using your life well, of not wasting talents or experience. The card is joyous and fulfilling at the same time that it opens new possibilities from the success in what has gone before.

Sometimes the reading as a whole indicates that success will not come automatically, and that the person must do something. This may mean overcoming resistance from other people, or it may mean not giving up at initial setbacks. The person might have to overcome apathy or pessimism. The Universe says, "You can achieve great success and happiness if you believe in yourself."

The particular symbolism of the Haindl version - the spiraling dragon - suggests the idea of a person going beyond previous limitations. It shows a life opening up. There is a sense of newness, excitement, new ideas, and opportunities.

REVERSED

The reversal of the success card does not mean failure. Usually, it indicates stagnation. The situation or the person has gotten stuck in some way. As a result, possibilities for success or happiness have not been realized. Sometimes stagnation results from outside opposition. Often it comes from the person having a fear of taking chances (especially if the Universe reversed should come up with the Fool reversed), a lack of willpower or confidence, or a desire to keep things the way they are, a fear of the future.

The reversed Universe may emphasize the person's limitations, or that the person does not try to go beyond such limitations as education, finances, courage, imagination. In connection with romance, they may mean shyness. Limitations may be selfdefined: "I don't dare." "I'm not smart enough." "No one will like me." "It's too late." "I'm too old." "I'm not creative enough." The presence of the Universe in a reading signifies a potential for success and fulfillment. Reversed, the Universe may emphasize resistance or opposition, but the potential remains.