'What moves may always rise'

Note on the minor arcana, the natal chart, the kabbalah, and finding what is lost within or behind life's mundane moments

I wrote recently of encounters with Hermes and Aphrodite:¹ “When the Gods show up and aren’t acknowledged or met as such, they come out sideways, slant, as pathology, illness, madness. As the wonderful writer and therapist Jane Clapp emphasized recently, this doesn’t mean we try to cultivate relationships with them, never mind with their Shadows, to ‘purify ourselves.’ But recognizing images of divinity when they come to me has, indeed, been one way that I have refrained from skating on endless horizontal surfaces of madness, too.” Engaging deeply with the Minor Arcana is one way I have learned to recognize, honor, and travel through and with images of Divinity. Unlike the Major Arcana, which often arrive in our lives as forces to bow before, the Minors show us the ways in which enchantment, magick, and the Godhead, for better or worse, come to us through routine life, small situations, what seems “normal.” They also show us how we amplify or exaggerate the mundane, how it can rule over the emotional, physiological and psychological tones of our lives in intense and extreme ways. Learning the astrological and kabbalistic esoteric associations of the cards can help us to place our daily experiences within their proper context. They help us understand the necessity of opposition and hierarchy within the human mind and within human life. We can rail against the realities of binary thinking and hierarchical social order all we want, but until we learn to look at, touch, travel through, know, and understand how these shapes of logic, self, and life operate within us, we won’t be very effective at detaching from or changing them within ourselves and our personal lives — never mind in the public sphere.

As the psychoanalyst Michael Eigen writes in his book on Kabbalah and Psychoanalysis, “Life partly is a search for what is lost at birth.” To realize or reach an honest “awareness of what one is to do in life,” Eigen continues, one “must find one’s own loss, a process that enables him to [then also] find the losses of others.” Similarly, in her writing on the Mystical Qabbalah, Dion Fortune remarks that the study of the Hermetic Kabbalah’s verticality alongside other esoteric systems can allow what is lost in our common sense notion of ourselves, to be reclaimed, if only for a moment. To be glimpsed. Is this moment an image of a God? Or is it an image of what can only be called Sickness, the pull of dispersion? Are we in the midst of Failure, as the Seven of Disks proclaims when we turn the card over for ourselves in answer to a pressing question, or Victory in Action, as the card signifies when placed on the Tree of Life? Could the two possibly be true at once? If so, how? Is one truth greater or lesser than another? Put more philosophically: What does mystic Simone Weil mean when she writes that the planes of consciousness are, by necessity, contradictory and that only divine grace can draw us upward from one to the next?

Feeling into the space that sometimes follows such questions is part of the work of Minor Secrets: The Vertical Axis and the Minor Arcana of the Tarot, a six-week course I’m teaching. “If we want to get the best out of our minds, we must learn to allow for this period of latency, this impregnation of our minds by something outside our plane of existence, and its gestation beyond the threshold of consciousness” Fortune writes. My hope is the the course, which starts Wednesday, will be a period of conscious latency, grace in the presence contradiction, and the recovery of lost secrets of the soul, however small. At the very least, may it inspire an inner movement, one way or another. As I recently read in an astounding introduction to Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground: “What moves may always rise.”

There are three spots left. Here are more details. Join us!

Graphics of the Natal Wheel and the Tree of Life, with my own correspondences, designed by the brilliant Becker Corrigan.

²

1. Read about encounters with Hermes here and Aphrodite here.

2. Here’s the website for artist and designer Becker Corrigan if you’d like to work with them. Also subscribe to their newsletter for brilliant writing on the intersection of spirituality, culture, and more.