Why should you potentially waste your time with Tarot? The normal course of a tarot reading involves randomly shuffling the symbols and cannot possibly have bearing on the subject asked about. Yes and yes. Part of the thesis of the way tarot works is that higher entities govern its movements. Despite the inherent illogicality of taking random symbols for having any bearing on your lived reality, the value of a higher archetype weighing in on whatever you are asking about is immeasurable. The cards don’t work but they work. I have had the unilluminated say the cards don’t lie when faced with an accurate reading, but they do lie, they mislead, and they should be regarded with mistrust. That said, they are in fact guided by whatever the higher principal is of the symbol and can be profoundly accurate in mundane situations. The point of this series however is to expand and elucidate the actual symbols themselves, while not eliminating the divinatory uses of a deck of tarot cards. If you use tarot for guiding decisions on everyday life, that is and can be valid, but the real value of the cards, and especially the trumps, is their illustration of spiritual principals. The cards are based on mythology and mysticism and give profound spiritual lessons on specific practices and techniques. The purpose of this work is to, sometimes painfully and at length, expand the tarot from divinatory meanings to their initiated meanings as glyphs of practices on the road towards truth. No initiate has done this previously and surprisingly no initiate has shown up to stop me…so here we go.
0. The Fool
We are all the Fool. The first thing to understand with tarot is that this is you, this is your beginning and your end. Everyone who picks up a tarot deck and everyone else besides is the Fool, it is the nature of all souls. It has many positive aspects, and if carefully executed it has no negative aspects. This is the point of issuance and the state of the soul while being incarnated. If you gather nothing else from the tarot just gather that you are the Fool and need to be the Fool. The Fool implies a state of purity foremost, and suggests that you, dear reader, should engage in purification practices in order to reach the absence of conscious complications. The Fool, is ignorant of the consequences of his folly because his purity allows no consequences i.e no Karma. It is illustrative that the etymology of fool comes from follis which is a wind bag according to Crowley, the foremost authority on tarot. This suggests, and is totally accurate in saying, advanced pranayama and breathwork is the way to purify enough to live as the Fool. This is no small feat. The fool escapes consequence through purity, but the only way for us to be pure, is through careful practice of breathing exercises, which require a very non-foolish way of living. He carries the treasure of the world in his hobo bindle, which shows he wants for nothing, but in the current milieu this seems like a serious undertaking. The apparent message of the card then is to have faith in the breathwork, for it will get you there.
The fool is the pure soul, or for us the soul purified. There will be no end of complications, but you can short-circuit these complications through attending to your purity. Potentially the best practice for this other than ritual purification is a daily practice of Kapalbhati breathing. This is a pranayama in which a short outbreath is performed through the nose while letting the inbreath come as a reflex of the lungs. It is known as the skull-shining breath, and is quite valued in the soul-developing forms of yoga. In serious cases, or to trigger Kundalini, breath of fire could be used to great effect and is a quite similar practice. The point of these practices is to cleanse and purify the consciousness, which for our purposes is synonymous with the soul. The natural intelligence being that which sees. The soul and that faculty within us that is capable of observing are one and the same. If you have doubted the existence of the soul, notice that you can notice, that is you observe, internally and externally, and that in itself is a miracle. Far from being an unobserving rock and even without performing actions or making changes you are the universe observing itself which is a greater miracle than the Big Bang. Not only do things exist, we are aware of things existing and that is the root of belief in a soul.
On the one hand the fool can be seen in this act of pure observation without judgment. He knows nothing, so can just perceive, on the other hand, this is a mad and radical act. It is mania, folly, and passion to perceive and requires an insane fire, akin to the fire present in a star, to make the connection between existence and perception. It doesn’t just exist, it seizes and consumes. In its radical appetite it will devour everything it comes into contact with, while feigning ignorance of its carnality. Think about your awareness, it seizes and consumes every bit of input, it lets not a drop get away. This is not to say you are conscious of everything, but when you are conscious of something, the intelligence is ravenous. Whatever drifts by your wandering faculties, becomes food for the observation maker. The ultra-radical act then, and practice inspired by the cards, is to focus and refine this fire into a madness of pure observation. In this act is power. In the Crowley and Frieda Harris deck, which we will be taking most of our inspiration from, some of these ideas can be seen in the sun symbol on the Fool’s belt, and more clearly by the spiral force around his figure. In the act of pure observation without judgement power is attained. In fact, the pure observation, and the act of creation are the same. We can see this in the observer effects of quantum mechanics experiments. In the quantum world the act of observation changes the results of the experiment, but this can also be extended to the macro world we live in, perceiving is the act of creating the perceived. If we can in fact, still the small local system containing the observer, we can gain control of the larger system containing the perceived. If you purify the consciousness you gain control over that which is observed.
The elemental attribution of the Fool is air. The practice inspired by the card is breathwork, and the etymology of the word fool is windbag. This could not be more clear. Practicing breathing exercises is the solution to the entire tarot deck. If the symbols pose a riddle(and they do actually pose 78 riddles) the starting and ending points are at 0, and the solution to this card is the solution to the whole complex of cards. It’s pranayama. Through the practice of pranayama, you will learn all the other important bits of meditation and come to conquer the Universe. Wine drunk on creation and in possession of the treasures of esoteric knowledge you can leave this world as purely as you entered it.
