In the intricate tapestry of the Tarot, the sixteenth card stands as a potent symbol of upheaval and transformation, the tumultuous nature of the human journey. This card, known as The Tower, resonates deeply with the wisdom of mythologist Joseph Campbell, who explored the universality of the hero's journey and the transformative power of chaos. As we delve into the archetypal landscape of The Tower from Campbell's perspective, we uncover layers of meaning that illuminate the human quest for self-discovery and growth. Which, between you and me is, in most cases, not done without pain. Joseph Campbell, renowned for his concept of the Hero's Journey, emphasized that myths are mirrors of the human psyche, reflecting universal themes that transcend cultural boundaries. The Tower card, with its vivid imagery of a towering structure struck by lightning and figures plummeting, encapsulates this notion. Let's take a closer look at card sixteen. The Tower is in the process of falling down or being destroyed, perhaps by fire or lightning. The forces of “heaven” (the Self) are “angry” (“listen to me!”) and attacking the structure (the Ego). In the Waite-Rider-Smith deck, a crown has been blown off by the impact, and two human figures (an elder and a young person) are catapulted from the windows. The social mask (persona) that served so well until then, either in the construction of the Ego towards adulthood or in its deconstruction in maturity, is no longer balanced, and the divine part of the psyche (self) is generating a rattle to see if the mask can be peeled off like an old snake skin that needs to be shed so it can grow. The fall from the tower parallels Campbell's "belly of the whale" stage, wherein the hero faces a perilous ordeal that is often characterized by the disintegration of the ego. This phase signifies the descent into the unconscious where the hero must confront their deepest fears and challenges. Campbell viewed this ordeal as an essential part of personal growth, as a profound encounter with the hidden aspects of the psyche that must be reckoned with in order to achieve transformation. The Tower, in its catastrophic imagery, mirrors this descent into the abyss—an archetype Campbell would recognize as a critical element in the hero's transformative journey. It's an easy Subject to think about and reflect on, but rather difficult to digest when you're going through it. In 2020 (two or three weeks before the global pandemic lockout) I was working in Paris and stopped to rest for a few days in Florence before returning to Brazil. There, I intended to buy a new tarot card deck. Serendipitously I came across the Golden Tarot—a beautiful gift set including a faithful reproduction of the historic Visconti-Sforza tarot deck and a book describing its history and symbolism—in a neighborhood bookstore. Looking back on those days, I am still surprised that I was in doubt about whether to buy it or not, despite its affordable price (I suppose it may have been because it was missing the purple satin cloth for readings it usually goes along with the box). Fortunately, the box accompanied me on the flight back home and was a source of inspiration during the difficult times of coping with Coronavirus. The Sforza deck, commissioned by the Duke of Milan in the 15th century, is a significant precursor to modern Tarot decks and provides a fascinating glimpse into the evolution of Tarot symbolism. I learned, from reading its accompanying book, that four cards had to be recreated in modern times, for they were lost from the original Visconti-Sforza tarot deck at some point in history: The Tower, The Devil, the Three of Spades (not by chance called La Sinistra – left –in Italian, meaning delusion), and the King of Diamonds. I am not sure about the missing King of Diamonds – the book suggests it would mean a person who wants money but doesn't work to get it. However, it never hurts to remember Campbell talking about the mentality that reigned in the Middle Ages and how people of that time literally believed in figures like God and the devil. Therefore, the absence of The Tower (as well as The Devil, and La Sinistra) may represent a narrative tampering—tampering by someone in the Middle Ages, who pilfered the cards so that there would be no representation of evil in the beautiful cards decorated with real gold. But, of course, this hypothesis is my fantasy rather than historical fact. The Tower's collapse and the figures plummeting suggest a confrontation with personal and collective shadows, challenging individuals to grapple with aspects of themselves that have been suppressed or ignored. From Campbell's perspective, this confrontation is integral to the hero's journey, as it paves the way for growth and self-integration. Campbell's exploration of mythology and symbolism sheds light on The Tower's potential for personal enlightenment. Just as the hero, amidst trials and tribulations, ultimately discovers the elixir of transformation, so too The Tower card offers an opportunity for self-discovery. Campbell asserted that the journey's ultimate boon is self-realization and integration—a state of being that transcends ego and embraces a deeper understanding of interconnectedness. The Tower, with its violent upheaval, provides the impetus for this transformative journey. It catalyzes the destruction of old structures that hinder personal growth, and leads to the revelation of a more authentic and resilient ego. Ok, the old structure is crumbling. What do we do now? The Tower's chaotic energy resonates with Campbell's interpretation of myth as a psychological blueprint for navigating life's challenges. Mythology, in Campbell's view, serves as a repository of collective wisdom that can guide individuals through the labyrinth of existence. The Tower's symbolism, marked by lightning and destruction, aligns with Campbell's notion of mythic events as representing internal psychological processes. Just as lightning illuminates the darkness and reveals hidden truths, the upheaval depicted in The Tower card unveils the hidden aspects of the self. Through this lens, The Tower can be seen as a wake-up call inviting individuals to embrace chaos, if it presents itself, as a catalyst for transformation. The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung used to say “when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as Fate” (Aion, CW 9ii). So, the call here may be to open up and deal with the situation in an adult, autonomous way, without waiting for the necessary transformation process to be present by external means. Throwing yourself off the symbolic tower is difficult, but letting yourself stay in the burning building can be even more psychologically lethal. This universality underscores the card's resonance as a mirror for personal experience, and invites individuals to navigate their own heroic journeys. After all, Campbell's concept of the "monomyth" underscores The Tower's universal significance. The monomyth, or Hero's Journey, posits that all myths share a common structure reflecting the human psyche's universal stages of growth and transformation. The Tower card, despite its variations in imagery across different tarot decks, encapsulates a core archetype that resonates with the monomyth's stages: call to adventure, ordeal, confrontation with the shadow, and ultimately, transformation. Finally, The Tower emerges as a powerful emblem of chaos, transformation, and self-discovery. In the light of Campbell's insights into the hero's journey, mythic symbols, and the transformative power of the unconscious, The Tower reveals its deeper significance as a catalyst for personal growth. As lightning strikes the tower and figures plummet, myth and archetype intertwine, inviting individuals to embrace the chaos and upheaval that propels them into a realm where profound transformation is possible. Just as the hero faces trials and descends into the unconscious, so too does The Tower card beckon the individual to journey inward, ultimately echoing Campbell's call to embrace the mythic adventure of being yourself, confronting one’s shadow, and emerging transformed.

The hermitage offers the seclusion required to hear one’s inner voice, a knowing that is often drowned out in the noise and bustle of daily life or, even worse, silenced by society’s enculturation. For people like me, breaking through the internalized restrictions of society requires an internal struggle, our own voices entangled with what we have been told to be. In such circumstances, solitude becomes all the more necessary to differentiate the driving forces in one’s life. Perhaps this is why I have always been fascinated by the stories of female mystics in their hermitages. For instance, in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, Parzival’s cousin, Sigune lives in a hermit’s cell. Dedicating her life to prayer, she exists on the margins of the Arthurian court and is, therefore, not bound by her courtly responsibilities. Her hermitage frees her from the repressive societal rules pertaining to women. In some ways, this bestows her with social power she would not otherwise hold. She is known for her wisdom and receives nourishment directly from the Grail every Saturday evening (438, 439). Sigune’s strength is found not in her aristocratic rank or wealth, but rather in the wisdom she has found in the seclusion of the hermitage. Sigune separated herself from society and committed to a life of poverty and prayer. Eschenbach’s Sigune resembles the female mystics who arose during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries who also separated themselves from the world in order to devote their lives to prayer. Their vivid visions were often seen as threatening, but being divinely inspired, they were not threatening to God. As the medieval scholar Caroline Walker Bynum explained, “When religious superiors denied the cup or the host to women…Christ often fed them directly in visions” (Bynum 118). These female mystics challenged the societal spaces that were not available to them by finding wisdom within. The Hermit card offers a similar invitation. In Myths of Light, Joseph Campbell tells a story told to him by Ramakrishna, a story of a tiger who was raised by goats. The tiger grew up believing it was a goat because goats were the only family this young tiger knew of the world. The tiger ate grass, grazed the fields, and bleated as goats will do. And yet, the tiger always felt out of place, unfulfilled, and experienced an unsettledness that seemed to be ever-present. One day, while the herd grazed, a large elder tiger hunting for food pounced on the herd. The goats scattered, but the young tiger held its ground; an instinctual impulse from within urged the small tiger to challenge this aggressor. The large tiger looked down in astonishment, asking why this small one lived amongst the goats. The young tiger answered with a bleat and then continued to eat grass. The strange response disturbed the aged tiger. To see one of its own so disconnected from its true nature was upsetting. There had to be something done about this situation. So the elder tiger grabbed the young one by the scruff of the neck and took it to a nearby pond. “Look,” the elder tiger said, “You are not a goat. You are a tiger.” The young tiger appeared confused, but the elder tiger kept at it, teaching the young one day-by-day the various experiences of a tiger. Eventually, the tiger nature within the young one awoke and took hold. Driven by something deep within, the young tiger stretched out as far as its body would allow and released the uncertain rumblings of what might be interpreted as a roar. At least, for the elder tiger, it was a vision of what might be possible once the young one embraced its true nature. Campbell returned to this story often, finding it meaningful, he said, for it showed how we are each a tiger living among the goats, mirroring the behaviors surrounding us and silencing the pull from within to become something different, something more, something that is more genuinely ourselves. Campbell found within this story an invitation to ignite our inner light. As Campbell states, “go into the forest, and in the forest of the night, find the tiger burning bright in your own profound depths” (138-140). For the young tiger who thinks of itself as a goat, this process of finding one’s inner light begins by separating from the herd. The image of the Hermit evokes this journey. One must disconnect from society to find one’s own inner light, the tiger burning bright in our own depths. In the Rider-Smith-Waite deck, the Hermit carries a lantern, illuminating the pathways in the darkness. The Hermit invites us to leave the material world in order to illuminate our internal world. We maneuver these depths not with our intellect but by following our intuitive wisdom, by learning to see in the dark. The paradox of this journey is that to find one’s own light, one must venture into the dark, for it is the darkness that teaches us how to find the light within.

The Hermit and Reflection My first favorite hermit was Obi-Wan Kenobi, who came to the big screen in the early summer of ’77. I suppose I was drawn to the whole package, the whole iconography of this unusual figure cloaked in a deep-hooded, earth-toned mantle, thoughtfully discerning tracks in the sand to read the tales of events just-passed. There was something different to this character from the standard Hollywood heroes and heroines whose special abilities were more overtly rendered, more consistently on display. Obi-Wan seemed to possess an unfamiliar hidden power beneath all that quiet appearance and quiet action. I recall the wonderful scene where he tells the stormtroopers (and with a simple wave of the hand) that they don’t need to see Luke’s identification, and the stormtroopers parrot back “we don’t need to see his identification”—even then it was clear that something was afoot. Luke, however, had not quite caught it: “I don’t understand how we got past those stormtroopers.” But didn’t you see him do that thing with his hand??? I wanted to blather, wide-eyed, as any ten-year-old amped on candy and movie-magic would. Naturally, we played imaginal Star Wars that summer, all the kids running around exclaiming: “I’m Luke and I’m gonna get you with my starfighter” or “I’m Han Solo and I’m gonna shoot you with my blaster!” It was weird to me that nobody wanted to be the seasoned jedi, and so I never played Obi-Wan in our games and kept my fondness for this apparently less popular figure to myself—not unlike what a hermit might do in such situations: holding a quiet, personal space for oneself, which introduces a scale of hermitting: on the one extreme, something as simple as listening more than speaking in a social setting, or taking a Friday night off to read alone and not play Star Wars with the other faculty members in your department. I think the influence of the hermit-figure can arise whether others are around or not. This approach helps make the content of the Hermit-card more applicable to our often less than isolated lifestyles. And it suggests that we aren’t necessarily obligated to engineer extreme productions of solitude that leave us shivering and alone, drifting through starlight on ice floes in the arctic sea. Nonetheless, extreme productions have extreme benefits: extreme balance, extreme composure, extreme presence. And if “extreme” sends up a red flag (as it probably should) then feel free to substitute with “very deep.” The relationship between extreme/deep solitude and social-involvement is seen in the recently-enlightened man in the tenth image of the Zen Ox-Herding Pictures, who returns after a long solitude to walk transformed among the people of the village. However, to the others he appears unchanged and unremarkable—attributes which, like an immaterial cloak, preserve the integrity of his hard-won internal solitude, and the unique individuality of this one-of-a-kind, self-aware event moving through the masses, a part of the crowd but alone. Fittingly, our word “alone” derives from the Old English eall-ana, being “all + one.” Hence the all one-ness of individuation (although it’s really two as one, or many as one, but that for another time). And with such comes the inevitable onset of “loneliness” (derived from the same root). Simply being aware of this etymological correlation (for me at least) makes the slow ache of loneliness more welcomed, if not more bearable, because I know I’m being deepened, soulfully enriched. And so concurrent with the pain, the healing virtues of individuation can be appreciated while the price is being paid. To amplify our understanding of the hermit archetype, let’s look to the other, more extreme side of our scale, like living in a cave deep in the mountains or in a remote desert, like Obi Wan did. By the way, “hermit” descends from the Greek erimίtis or, literally, “desert.” The setting is important, especially for those who find it challenging to preserve their psychological status in the turbulent face and faces of society with their perpetual influx of projections. Hence, natural settings are ideal, removing their influence altogether. As with all (or nearly all) things psychological, the hermit-stage is not a level slated for completion, to merely pass through and receive a nifty certificate or trophy to gather dust on a shelf. Rather, it is a stage to integrate, to carry and employ when contexts call for it. I prefer “stage” to “level” because it denotes a venue or environment within which one’s perspective is forced to shift to accommodate in order to competently navigate its terrain and conditions. Further, let’s keep in mind that our external environments are also reflections (to whatever degree) of our own internal, psychological environment. After all, if I’m pulled over in the middle-of-nowhere with a flat tire and without a spare, how miraculous and lovely is that epic sunset? Either way, a shifted perspective indicates a psychological transformation, whether great or small. Shifted perspectives are both the catalysts for, and the effects of, being transformed. To this point, the hermit card’s number is nine. Much can be said of nine, but for now I’ll only highlight that it’s the number of months (or etymologically, “moons”) it takes a human being to gestate in the womb from conception to its own autonomous body. The moon is a great symbol of transformation, perpetually waxing and waning from nothing to fullness and back again. Furthermore, it symbolizes reflection, which is precisely what makes it visible to us in the first place. Similarly, the business of the hermit is reflection, whether by meditation or mindfulness or what-have-you. If we look into the “environment” that surrounds the hermit-figure in the Rider-Smith-Waite deck as being also the metaphorical representation of his perspective, we see that the moon is present, albeit implied, latent in that environmental property called color. Perhaps more so than any other component of an image, color bears the message of tone, the message of “mood,” reflected in shades and hues, in degrees of dimness and brightness. Never quite pure white, but rather in off-whites, greys and blues as rendered in the card: the snow-clad mountaintops; the subdued, gently illumined, steel-blue atmosphere; even the grey of the hermit’s cloak and beard. In fact, nothing in the environment is not of a moonlike color with the exception of the bright gold lantern (consciousness/sun) that he bears along with the similarly golden staff, grounding that consciousness back down into matter-earth, down into the body—a narrative which provides us with the instructions for (and the direction of) reflection.

I pulled the card, turned it over, and there it was…Death. My stomach turned at the sight of it. It was a sunny day in New Orleans and I was captured by the atmosphere of the city. Having my Tarot cards read seemed adventurous at the time, after all, a Southern Baptist from Texas would never do such a thing! I was mesmerized by the rhythm of the shuffling cards and the delight as each card was turned over to reveal a curious image. I waited with anticipation to be told what it all meant, until the Death card revealed itself. I couldn’t take my eyes off the image. Some of the information I received that day was welcome and some less so, much like life. But the feeling of dread at the sight of the Death card loomed over the ordeal. This moment, at least as memory recalls, was my first lesson in how to hold endings. Facing our own mortality is one of the most influential catalysts in our decision-making. Peering into death’s unknowns evokes fear and we attempt to preserve our lives at all costs. In Primitive Mythology, Joseph Campbell suggests that the experience of death, and how we as humans conceptualize that experience, is central to the myth-making function. The way in which our ancestors welcomed or resisted death informed the earliest myths, determining the “ultimate structuring of the psyche and its dreams” (The Masks of God, Vol. 1: Primitive Mythology, 120). The threads of this mythology live within the myths we know today. And yet, in the Tarot, we draw the Death card time and again, nudging us to create a deeper relationship to Death in order to understand Death’s connection to life. Furthermore, in the Tarot, the Death card is symbolic. Its appearance heralds a change rather than our impending demise. And while Tarot cards such as the Tower suggest external change as the structures around us crumble, Death is much more personal. It invites a turning inward to something spiritual or psychological that must die in order for something new to be born. In the Rider-Smith-Waite deck, Death is bedecked as a knight, rides a white horse, and in the background the sun rises at the break of dawn. The image displays the cyclic connection between ending and beginning. Each summons the other. And in the Marseille deck, Death wields a scythe, illustrating the dark reality that the harvesting of one life nourishes another. Much like the Reaper’s scythe, the image connects death with new life, the ongoing cycle of death and renewal. Both images capture the mystery of transformation. The Death card dismantles us. It dissolves some aspects of our lives in order to create the space for something new. Sometimes, such change is welcome. Often, it is met with resistance and heartache. Either way, we are left changed. Some new form of life has presented itself to us, and we grow and develop into this new aspect of ourselves. And then the cycle repeats. Tiny deaths happen again and again in our lives, changing and shaping us. From each of these experiences, we learn about letting go. The process of releasing what no longer serves us is essential for expanding into that which does. The image of Death then appears less daunting, for we know how to make our way through these tiny deaths in our lives. We come to a deeper understanding that these tiny deaths are not our literal end but rather, an ending that offers another beginning. Campbell states in Tarot Revelations that we pass through to what he calls the mystery of “the Image of God within us” (25). The pathway to the immovable space within oneself is achieved by living through the painful experiences in life. Each tiny death in our life teaches us how to let go so, finally, when our time comes to an end we can welcome Death as an old friend. In this way, death – how we conceptualize it, our relationship with it, and understanding of it – permeates how we imagine our lives. If we find life holds a linear pattern with a beginning, middle, and end, then death leaves us in stasis, frozen in time. We then have a finite amount of time to prove our worth, to get ourselves together enough to leave a lasting impression. Like a statue atop a tomb, we are solidified, remembered by our greatest accomplishments or our worst deeds. However, if we find life holds a cyclical pattern, continually transforming from birth to death and then rebirth, then death is the next stage in an ongoing cycle. Death is the regeneration of life. We are forever a work in progress. Our ideas about death inform the stories we tell about our lives. The myths we hold dear not only tell us how death transforms us but also how to live, and hopefully live well for the generations after us. In an attempt to relate to the chaotic aspects of the human experience, we create myths that point beyond themselves, into the vast unknown, the ineffable. To stare into such depths unguarded is akin to staring at the sun without solar glasses. We are blinded. Mythology presents pathways to follow, ways in which to live a life, many of which are informed by how we imagine our death. Our myths teach us resistance to death or a willingness to succumb to it, the ways in which a life is transformed, or not. But ultimately, mythology helps the world make sense. Our stories work as protectors, shielding us from the unknown so that when we must approach it, we don’t stare into the abyss alone. Myths hold the mystery but can’t contain the fullness of it. As Campbell explains, “the imagery of myth … can never be a direct presentation of the total secret of the human species, but only the function of an attitude, the reflex of a stance, a life pose, a way of playing the game.” (Primitive Mythology, 121). And death is always a part of the game. Campbell offers an invitation. We are always welcome to change our attitude, take a different stance, or imagine a new way of playing the game. Myths evolve and change, and the invitation of the Death card is to do just that. It beckons us to take off the glasses, stare into the unknown, and imagine differently. I return to the tarot often. When I pull the Death card now, I still sense resistance, and at the same time, I welcome the change. I know it will be uncomfortable, but the process is familiar. New life emerges from that which can no longer be sustained and I have learned how to hold endings. Life has taught me how to play the game.

The problem with towers is that they’re already high up. And then there’s this other problem called gravity, accompanied by its heavyweight siblings grave  (as an adjective or as a noun) and gravitas —in short, all things down and that bring us down.    So it’s the “high-up” element that sets the stage. Simultaneously, in psychological terms, high-up implies conditions like ambition and egoic inflation, and even  (in milder contexts)  comfort and security. These abstract psychological correlates are good to keep in mind while this inquiry attempts to attend more to the vehicles of the metaphors—that is, to the images per se.    As a brief reminder, and I think a good way to emphasize the heart of the matter, metaphors “need” concrete images to summon emotions and concepts from levels of perception that exist in the more intimate strata of the human psyche—namely, imagination, personal association, intuition, and so on. This dynamic is one of the greatest values to the detailed imagery in any of the cards of the Tarot deck. In short, through these channels, the “data” that is prompted by the image is always (and in a deeply human context) more “accurate” than what standard abstract conceptual exposition could ever hope to accomplish. That said, this essay is abundant in abstractions. But this is the only way that can be taken short of writing a poem around the topic, or of the reader simply gazing at the image of the Tower card and leaving it at that. Anyway, without further ado, let’s dive into it (so to speak).   Most would agree that getting blasted by lightning from one’s seemingly secure tower (that of course took so much time and work to build) and thence sent plummeting headfirst, and partially on fire, accompanied on all sides by random debris (also partially on fire) down to the cold hard rocks below is bad.    We naturally wish to preserve ourselves from such episodes. Banisters, for instance, are a popular architectural feature, preserving us from potential falls. However, to a mythologist, all such content is ambiguous. Whether in a fall or in a thing that preserves us from falling, both contain their positive and negative values. So our tower which preserves us from exposure to dangers also obstructs our contact and involvement with the world. We are safe, but also we are alone, walled in, imprisoned. This can be the case even if our tower is fine and luxurious. Let me add also that the problem is not in the tower per se—we all have them and, indeed, need them. Rather, it is in the kind  of towers we build or inhabit, and that we are mindful of inevitable collapses and falls.    The presence of the paradoxical (and often ironic) evolutionary values that accompany a fall slowly accrues in the awareness of those who study myth, to whom a fall is an initiation into transformation on behalf of, and upon, the soul. The root mythological metaphor of the soul’s transformation is contained in the underworld motif and in the characters, narratives, and images that inhabit it.    Hence, we have so many downward (either physically or conceptually) and death-like initiation-catalysts: baptisms by water (drowning), fasting (starving to death), shamanic initiations that involve illness, deprivation, and psychedelics (physical dilapidation and losing one’s mind), and let’s not forget lightning bolts, which in the case of the Tower card, deals the initiating blow.   Most obvious is that our inflation or excessive self-preservation which places us high-up is perhaps precisely what attracts  the lightning-stroke. As it is in the natural world, the higher the object, the more likely it is to be struck. And let’s also consider that sometimes it is not we who place ourselves high-up, but rather that we are placed there by an outside agent. As a practical (albeit mild) example, it may have been pleasant being lifted up when you were receiving great praise from the boss at the workplace, but the next day, you may receive some subtle lightning-strikes from all the other smaller towers (i.e., envious coworkers) around you.    In his master’s thesis, A Study of the Dolorous Stroke: On Wasteland Imagery in the Arthurian Legends , Joseph Campbell addresses an unusual image that occurs in several Arthurian-literature sources. He quotes:    And in the midst of the chamber was a great table, and of very rich silver, placed upon four legs of silver; and upon this table was a great basin of gold, and within this basin stood a lance, perpendicularly, point downward, and any one looking at it would have marveled because it was not inserted, nor supported, nor fastened anywhere. ( Romance of the Grail: The Magic and Mystery of Arthurian Myth  173)   The lance described above is the object that is used to wound the grail-king through his thighs which, of course, fells him. And then (and quite literally like a tower) the castle magically crumbles in ruin and many are killed or wounded. These events are precipitated by the lance—our metaphoric lightning-bolt counterpart—which, like actual lightning, is neither “supported” nor “fastened” anywhere.   Within his thesis, Campbell addresses many different mythologies from around the world in which this theme occurs—sometimes with a sword in place of a lance—and eventually, he refers to the weapon (in its general, archetypal sense) as the “lightning lance.” He also addresses it as a fertility symbol, which is quite fitting to our present inquiry into the Tower card since we could say that the fall, the downward direction, whether it be to the mythological/metaphorical underworld or simply down into the ground, is where fertilization and subsequent rebirth/renewal transpires.     Most interesting to me however, is that it is this “dolorous stroke”—via lance, sword or lightning—that in the Arthurian mythology initiates the great quest to heal the wounded king, who by the way is also known as the “Fisher King'' which you may recognize in the substrata of T. S. Eliot’s infamous and notoriously mythic poem “The Waste Land.”   I’d like to close with a somewhat negligible solution to managing the tower-lightning problem—although “negligible” is better than the alternative “nothing”—and simply suggest (to myself, perhaps most of all) that one should do well in building towers, in fact plenty of them, but maybe try to keep them small, cozy, and, especially, low to the ground.    Thanks for reading!

Once upon a time the devil was looking for the most effective weapon against God. The first demon proposed to tell people that there is no God. Another said it’s better to tell them there is no soul. The third proposal was the one the devil accepted: people should be told there is no rush. Our biggest opponent in the metamodernistic age of overabundant information is procrastination. Schopenhauer said that our existence moves like a pendulum between suffering and boredom, and we are, at the same time, tortured souls and devils to one another. A visual metaphor of this is evident in the shackled humanoid figures at the bottom of the Devil tarot card. They are discouraged and in no hurry. Above them is their master the Devil, the embodiment of vanity, ambition, and power. The card represents the diabolical extremes of our ego. All or nothing. The artistic representation of the devil did not mature for years after the Middle Ages. The devil seems like a confused child who wants to try everything. His body is an extravagant and grotesque pile of extremities: wings, horns, breasts, claws, hooves, eyes on his belly, etc. The pentagram is a symbol of Venus, the first morning star, the planet of pleasure, perfection, and love. The horns are a symbol of divine wisdom. In Hinduism the trident was a weapon against evil, and in ancient Greece, the scepter of Poseidon, the god of the sea. All these symbols were added gradually as the church battled the pagan mythologies. Semitic monotheistic religions based their aesthetic representations of mythology on the text of the Avesta, the holy book of Zoroastrianism, whose main characters are Ahura Mazda (god of good) fighting against Anga Mainyu (spirit of destruction). In ancient, pagan religions, or in Hinduism, we will not find such discrete expressions of the roles of good and bad. The principle of evil is opposed to the principle of good, and evil must therefore be ugly per se. Ugly itself has no definition. It is simply the opposite of the beautiful.  Goethe’s Mephistopheles is a force that always intends evil but produces only good. Hindus always leave a part of the temple, such as a window, unfinished so as not to invite the evil eye. Perfectionism is a disease of the ego. "I want to know '' is the line of Irina Spalko, a scientist who aspires to get all the knowledge of the universe from the aliens in the film Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008). The Bible would not be interesting if Adam and Eve remained knowledge free. Every good mythology must have good guys and bad guys. Conflict (agon) is the basis of every good drama. Who would watch a movie that focused only on after the characters got married and lived happily ever after? It took the serpent, who did the first successful marketing campaign in history by convincing Eve to persuade Adam to taste the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Good and Evil. By giving us knowledge, she opened the door to pairs of opposites. If the ugly is the absence of the beautiful, and the evil is necessary to perceive the good, then we have a culprit on call for all the darkness in our soul. Balashevich, one of the best Slavic songwriters, talks about our devilish instincts like this: “… đavo mi je kriv. On mora sve da proba … Ne pijem što uživam, nit što mi dobro stoji. Pijem da njega napojim. Ne lutam što uživam, nit miris druma volim. Lutam da njega umorim. Ne sviram što uživam, nije to pesma prava. Sviram da njega uspavam.” “… It’s the devil’s fault. He has to taste everything … I don’t drink because I enjoy it, nor because it fits me. I drink to feed him. I don’t wander because I enjoy it, nor do I like the smell of the road. I wander to tire him out. I don’t sing because I enjoy it, it’s not a real song. I sing to put him to sleep.” The devil, as the instinctive nature of our libido, represents the grotesque side of the unconscious shadow that we project through the ego into the world around us. The devil is ambiguous by nature. He leads us to sin, but sinning gives us self-knowledge. Without the devil’s interference, we would not have free will or the opportunity to choose. We would not be able to get to know and overcome our egos. We would be animals ruled by instinct, trapped in formulas and routines of programmed obedience. Al Pacino as John Milton, the devil in the movie The Devil’s Advocate (1997), explains himself: “I’m here on the ground with my nose in it since the whole thing began! I’ve nurtured every sensation man has been inspired to have! I cared about what he wanted, and I never judged him... I’m a fan of man! I’m a humanist. Maybe the last humanist. Who, in their right mind, Kevin, could possibly deny the twentieth century was entirely mine? All of it, Kevin! All of it! Mine! I’m peaking, Kevin. It’s my time now.” In this film, the devil is a rich businessman in an Armani suit who has his fingers in the legal system. In the twenty-first century, the Devil has extended his jurisdiction to bankers, pharmacists, the IT industry, and construction. Artists or philosophers are no longer under his clutches, as they were in the Middle Ages. Vanity is the devil’s favorite sin. He has taken over all the activities in which man wants power and perfection, and thus puts temptations before our egos. The third chakra in the solar plexus is the Manipura chakra. The solar plexus focuses on the power and autonomy of metabolism. The element of the solar plexus is fire. Activating fire helps digest food. Manipura chakra is the center of vitality. It is also the center of projection and fear. “For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come unto me” (KJV,  Job 3:25). When this chakra is in balance, we are calm, and we have no problems with panic, worrying, overthinking, vanity, or lust for knowledge or power. This is the warrior chakra, and it is activated in the defense of individuality. The energy here can be devastating. And next to the fire, her symbol is a ram, which has horns. On the Tarot card of the Devil, a special pair of eyes is located in the place of the solar plexus. This chakra is home to the devil’s place of movement and the fiery energy of the ego. “The energy is aggressive. Conquer. Consume. Turn everything into oneself.” This is how Campbell describes this chakra. When our ego hardens so much, we get stuck with it. Hell is filled with people who are stuck with themselves. The devil’s intentions turned against him, and he failed to control the Manipura fire in which ego and self must be rejected in order to accept both good and bad. The universe is not perfect, and the pursuit of perfection and the ambition to be the best led the devil to Hell. It’s not easy for him there, stuck between obsession and discouragement. There is a Sufi legend from Persia, in which Lucifer’s fall into hell is explained interestingly. According to Islamic tradition, there are three types of beings: angels (beings of light), jinn (beings of fire, not all of them bad or demons), and humans (beings of the earth). These three elements are what these three types of beings are made of. We humans are made of carbon, clay. When God made us, he asked that all the angels worship the clay man. Lucifer refused because he did not want to worship anyone but God, causing Campbell to say of Iblis (the Islamic name for Satan) that he was God’s greatest lover. The devil cannot see the one he loves. He lives only on the memory of his beloved’s voice from the last time he heard it. And what does someone who has been rejected or deceived in love do? Sadness and anger turn into infernal egoism, which, with its ambition and lust for power, destroys and frightens everyone around it, trying even to destroy what its loved one loves. In this battle within the solar plexus, the wolf we feed more wins. One is evil and the other represents joy, peace, self-awareness, gratitude, empathy, truth, and love. (The parable of the two wolves occurs in Cherokee Indian culture as well as in Zen Buddhism.) At the end of the story, we should thank the devil. Without him we would not have fought the battles in our lives and come to know good, truth, or love. The experience of life is the greatest gift that we should not ignore. We have two options: to do nothing, like the chained figures at the bottom of the map, or to do it all, like the devil himself. No special meaning should be sought in this. As Campbell says: “Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life … I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.” Campbell is on the same page with Sadghuru’s teaching that life is an experience to be fully lived. What we should seek is the rapture of the experience of life, not waiting for it to happen but actively participating in all the dark and light parts of our soul. And as for the bad, dark, and ugly expressions of human nature, we no longer need a scapegoat. We no longer need to say the devil is to blame, the devil made me do it. Our devils are inside us, and that is a great realization. From that perspective, we have much more influence and authority over our own lives.

“You’re going on a trip,” Great-Gramma Jennie told my mother. Mom was a child then, in the prewar years of the Great Depression. Grampa and my uncles left during the day for work and school, and Mom stayed home with her mother and her mother’s mother, my Great-Gramma Jennie. Every afternoon these three generations—maiden, mother, and crone—paused their work of garden weeding, jam canning, laundry hanging, butter churning, and pie baking to gather at the table for tea. Loose-leaf green tea it was, brewed in an enameled pot tinted the same pale green as pistachio ice cream. Steam shot from the kettle like destiny, impatient to hear itself discussed, as Gramma poured hot water over the leaves. Then, to Mom’s child-sized cup, Gramma added warmed milk from the family cow and a spoonful of sugar. The woody perfume of Grampa’s pipe smoke lingered in the very floorboards of that kitchen, blending with the aroma of whatever simmered on the stove for supper. As Gramma and Great-Gramma Jennie drank their warm, grassy tea, they chatted about news and neighbors, and when they finished, Jennie completed the ritual by examining the remaining leaves that flecked the bottom of Mom’s cup. “You’re going on a trip,” Jennie told her granddaughter every day, peering seriously into the cup as though it were a tiny Holy Grail. “Yes, you’re going on a trip.” That was always Mom’s future: you’re going on a trip. If Jennie used tarot for divination instead of tea leaves, she might have kept the Chariot card on top of the deck. Portending travel and adventure, the Rider-Waite version of the card shows a rider standing in a chariot harnessed to two full-bosomed sphinxes. But instead of reins, the rider holds a scepter. In The Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work, Joseph Campbell relates the story of the Arthurian knight Parzival, who, at one point in his quest for the Grail, rides with the reins slack, letting his horse lead the way. “The horse represents nature power and the rider represents the controlling mind,” Campbell says. “The slack reins mean that he’s riding nature. His own nature. It’s a noble horse who has the same heart as he” (p. 128). Perhaps the Chariot rider, too, has learned to share the same noble heart as the wise-woman sphinxes who give the Chariot its energy and wisdom. The rider exerts the soul’s sovereignty, symbolized by the scepter, to let other powers lead, relying on faith and instinct more than control. You’re going on a trip. I can imagine Mom’s big green little-girl eyes shining at this thrilling oracle from her adored Gramma. Jennie’s prediction was a blessing, a benison bestowed on a beloved granddaughter. For me, this family story underscores how similar in meaning the words godmother and grandmother are: wise older women who cherish and gladly work magic on behalf of the youngling. In 1892, when she was eighteen years old, Jennie herself spent ten weeks traveling alone by stagecoach-chariot from upstate New York to Boston and then to the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Her cousin invited her, Jennie later wrote, telling Jennie that “if I came they would take me around and I would see things to think of and tell of in ‘future’ years and it has proved so. For every night … after I go to bed—it all comes back to me in the quiet hours—of the night—like a moving picture.” Jennie’s adventure became a lifelong stream of mythic memories. She carried her tales of travel in the chariot of her heart as she moved from maidenhood to motherhood and then into cronedom. When she read Mom’s tea leaves, maybe she wished a similar gift for her young granddaughter. That same—or greater—opportunity. Soon after Jennie’s trip, she earned a teacher’s certificate and got a job at a school for the children of homesteaders who raised sheep and cows far up a hillside riddled with gullies and streams. To deliver Jennie to that remote village, where she lodged with the families of her students, a school trustee gave her a ride up the hill in his wagon-chariot at the beginning of the term, and back down again at the end. That steep, forested, rock-pocked trail would have been a bumpy ride indeed, but something about the company must have proved agreeable, because before long Jennie married the trustee and gave birth to my grandmother. The Chariot carried Jennie to adventure, to her work in the world, to her future family. That’s what the Chariot does: It carries. It conveys. The Chariot moves the soul from Point A to Point B faster than that soul could have traveled on its own power. I imagine Jennie as the rider on the card, standing tall with a twinkle in her eye, holding that scepter of sovereignty, propelled by wisdom. I see Gramma as the rider too. I see Mom as the rider. Myself. My whole family. You, if you like. Myth is not only the province of princes and queens. Quiet lives are mythic too. “You’re going on a trip,” the Chariot says, and that’s how many stories begin—stories of adventure, quest, healing, discovery. “The trip is called your life, and I will carry you anytime you like.”

One day, long ago, the ever-spinning Wheel of Fortune found me sitting at a desk in an open office workspace, my back to a room full of coworkers. Absorbed in a document on my computer, I had just reached an impasse and needed to go ask someone a question. But at that moment a colleague I hadn’t seen for years was striding toward me. He whooshed into the chair beside my desk at the same instant that I whirled around. Whoosh-whirl—and our faces were way too close together, so close that his leather-and-sandalwood cologne must have mixed up with my jasmine perfume, and I found myself staring deep into unknown eyes without even seeing the rest of this person’s face. But I didn’t see his eyes, not really. I saw through them, past them, beyond them into a midnight-blue cosmos where stars explode and nebulae roil with galactic lightning. The whole idea of eyes fell away. I felt like I saw the million invisible dimensions of his soul, its shimmers and flickers spiraling into the indigo infinity. “Hello!” he said. I jerked back to a decorous distance, stammering, confused. This was a person. A literal, rational, breathing human. And we were at work. I couldn’t burst out with an “Oh my goodness, I saw your soul and it’s gorgeous!!” Instead, I stuck to convention. “Hello!” We chatted and caught up, but a part of my awareness remained drunk with awe, high on the vapors of beauty and magnificence. That feeling of altered consciousness lingered for days as I went through the motions of meetings and emails, while the Wheel of Fortune kept turning. That’s the Wheel’s job, after all. It turns, turns, turns, turns. In the tarot deck, the Wheel of Fortune depicts the ongoing roll of the universe. If we didn’t know better, we might think this card was a four of something. Four lines form a compass decorated with four Latin letters, four alchemical sigils, and four Hebrew letters that would spell the name of God if they were all together. Four golden animal powers hover on the muscle of their beating golden wings in four separate clouds while perusing their four books. But the card shows important threes, too: three concentric circles around which three cosmic powers ride like a merry-go-round of Egyptian myth. Apopis, the troublemaking serpent, wiggles down into the thick of things. Anubis, the guide of souls, cruises upward and glances at us as though to say, “Buckle up, kiddos, we’re going around again.” And a wise, regal Queen Sphinx rules over it all, unperturbed and unperturbable. Of all the beings on this card, there isn’t a single earthbound human. We see gods, forces, symbols, and ideas, but not one mortal. Instead, powers gather here to show the dynamic processes of the cosmos in a productive, creative tension that keeps the wheel turning. At any moment, the card says, big things could happen. But the card shows something else too, something tiny and yet key to the whole image. If we drew a line from the upper left corner to the lower right corner, and then another line from the upper right to the lower left, those lines would intersect in the center of the card. What do we find there? The center of the Wheel. The hub. The unmoving spot without which the wheel couldn’t turn. This is the stillness required for change, the stillness necessary for new life. “The New Life,” Joseph Campbell observes in Mythic Worlds, Modern Words: On the Art of James Joyce, “is the life of the awakened spiritual, poetic … relationship to the world through the physical realm” (35). Campbell is referring to Dante’s Vita Nuova and James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, both of which blossom forth from an experience of what we might call the center of the Wheel, where new life emerges from a revelatory moment of awe. That’s where Dante stood when he saw Beatrice, where Stephen Daedalus stood when he saw the young woman at the beach, where I stood, so to speak, that day at the office when I saw the cosmos in a colleague’s eyes. Campbell calls this experience “a ray of the light of eternity” (19). Once in a while, we inhabit the hub and feel reborn. For Dante and Joyce, the experience inspired singular literature. “Time and space are gone in the enchantment of the heart,” Campbell continues, and I think he’s right. The Wheel of Fortune’s compass can guide us through the vicissitudes, but the card’s center is the aperture to magic. I never told my coworker what happened that day. But I kept an eye on him for a while, in case he turned inside out in a cloud of purple smoke and revealed to everyone the secret that, in the center, you fall in love with everything, anything, and most of all with love itself.

What, if any, is the value in consulting the tarot? In an age where the rational mind reigns supreme, all forms of divination would seem little more than the fading traces of archaic superstition. After all, how could anything so vague and subjective impart any useful information? That question misses the mark. True, there can be no independent, objective meaning to a tarot card apart from the individual who draws it, but that’s a feature, not a flaw. The point of any oracle isn't so much to predict the future as to access the imagination by stepping outside the linear, rational constructs that prevail in our contemporary culture. That perceived vagueness is why oracles work. It’s much the same way that two different people spy two different images in the same cloud, or in a single Rorschach inkblot; neither is either right or wrong—it's still a cloud, still an inkblot—but the patterns one sees there are projections of one’s own imagination. The same holds for horoscopes, tarot spreads, and other forms of divination: what we make out is a reflection of what we bring to the medium, those possibilities and concerns licking at the edges of perception, past, present, and future. To repurpose as metaphor an insight borrowed from physicist Werner Heisenberg, the act of observation determines what is observed. Oracles serve as a mirror, bringing that inner world into sharper focus, offering an opportunity to reimagine and mythologize the circumstances of one’s life. What the tarot, dream imagery, astrology, the I Ching, and other oracles all have in common is a rich trove of symbols, images layered with polymorphic meanings (the same symbols and motifs that surface in mythology), in combinations that both mirror the present moment and correspond to those patterns in the human psyche that Jung terms archetypes of the collective unconscious. Joseph Campbell’s explanation of how to read the I Ching fits all forms of divination, old and new: The seeker is supposed to look for some sort of correspondence between all this and his own case, the method of thought throughout being that of a broadly flung association of ideas. One has to feel, not think one's way into these secrets, letting each symbol grow into a cosmos of associated themes ...”(The Masks of God, Vol. II: Oriental Mythology, 413) But beyond insights peculiar to one’s own life, these archetypal figures inspire deeper reflections as well. One such image in tarot is the Wheel of Fortune. The central image on Card X of the major arcana in the Thoth deck (pictured here) is typical for tarot cards: a spoked wheel bearing different creatures as it turns—some going up, some going down. Often those figures are Anubis (guide of souls to the Underworld), Typhon (a serpentine dragon associated with chaos), and the Sphinx, though these may differ in more modern decks. But what is constant, from one deck to the next, is the depiction of a wheel. The Wheel is an archetypal image that rolls through a wide range of mythological belief systems: In tantric yoga, the kundalini serpent rises up the spine, passing through seven stations, or çakras (“wheel” or “cycle,” in Sanskrit). The Wheel of Rebirth figures prominently in Hindu and Buddhist belief systems, as does the Wheel of Dharma. Aeon, a Greco-Roman deity associated with Time, is often depicted holding a wheel bearing the signs of the Zodiac (a belt of constellations that encircle the earth). Large stone medicine wheels with spokes, created by a variety of First Nations peoples, have been identified at seventy different sites in the northern United States and southern Canada (the oldest, the Majorville Cairn and Medicine Wheel in Alberta, constructed roughly 5,200 years ago, shows evidence of near constant use, save for a significant gap three thousand years ago; one could even argue that the woodhenge at the Cahokia Mounds outside St. Louis, Missouri, erected circa 900 CE, is one of the more recent variations on this theme). The word yule, marking the winter solstice, is descended from the Old English geol, apparently derived from the Indo-European base qwelo, meaning “go round”—the source of both “cycle” and “wheel”—thus denoting the turn of the year. And this is a recurring theme throughout James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which Campbell (in Mythic Worlds, Modern Words, JCF’s featured work this month) describes as “one continuous present tense integument [that] slowly unfolded all cycle-wheeling history” (xxii). Jung even saw this shape, in the form of a mandala, embedded in the human psyche. These various wheels have no beginning and no end, and appear to be associated with the cycles of the heavens, the cycles of the seasons, and the cycles of life. On the one hand, that is a profound realization. From an individual perspective, however, each of us lives our life out on the rim, where there is no escaping that roller coaster ride. The Wheel is turning and you can’t slow down, You can’t let go and you can’t hold on, You can’t go back and you can’t stand still, If the thunder don’t get you, then the lightning will. (From “The Wheel” by the Grateful Dead) When I pull the Wheel in a tarot spread, it suggests a change in circumstance—maybe for better, maybe for worse, but the one certainty is that change is inevitable. The Wheel just keeps on turning. And yet, if I step back from my immediate drama, there is a deeper dimension to this image, one easy to overlook. We join spokes together in a wheel But it is the center hole That makes the wagon move (Tao Te Ching, Stephen Mitchell translation, © 1988) As Joseph Campbell explains to Bill Moyers, In the Middle Ages, a favorite image that occurs in many, many contexts is the wheel of fortune. There’s the hub of the wheel, and there is the revolving rim of the wheel. For example, if you are attached to the rim of the wheel of fortune, you will be either above going down, or at the bottom coming up. But if you are at the hub, you are in the same place all the time, centered.(Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers, 119) The hub is symbolic of the axis mundi, or World Axis, the still point around which all things revolve. It appears in myth in many forms: as the World Mountain (Mounts Sinai, Olympus, Meru); the World Tree (e.g. Yggdrasil in Norse mythology); the immovable spot at the foot of the Bodhi Tree where the Buddha experienced illumination; and in the symbol of the Cross. The image of a wheel, however, presents a more complete picture of the axis mundi in relation to the field of opposites that surrounds it and forms the world we experience. To man’s secular view, things appear to move in time and to be in their final character concrete. I am here, you are there: right and left; up, down; life and death. The pairs of opposites are all around, and the wheel of the world, the wheel of time, is ever revolving, with our lives engaged in its round. However, there is an all-supporting midpoint, a hub where the opposites come together, like the spokes of a wheel, in emptiness. And it is there, facing east (the world direction of the new day), that the Buddhas of past, present, and future—who are of one Buddhahood, though manifest in series in the mode of time—are said to have experienced absolute illumination(The Masks of God, Volume II: Oriental Mythology, 16) On one level, the Wheel of Fortune in the tarot speaks to the ever-changing circumstances of one’s own life. For those who are adept at reading symbols, however, this card also offers a more profound realization: yes, we continue to live on the rim, experiencing all the ups and downs, all the agonies and the ecstasies, of this passion play that is life—but when we seat our consciousness at the hub, the nature of that experience changes dramatically. The key is learning to embrace both realities at once. The last word belongs to Joseph Campbell: But for those who have found the still point of eternity, around which all—including themselves—revolves, everything is glorious and wonderful just as it is. The first duty of man, consequently, is to play his given role—as do the sun, the moon, the various animal and plant species, the waters, the rocks, and the stars—without fault; and then, if possible, so to order his mind as to identify it with the inhabiting essence of the whole.”(The Mythic Dimension: Selected Essays, 1959-1987, 20)

I am not exactly sure when I first heard “Wedding Song (There Is Love)” by Paul Stookey of Peter, Paul, and Mary, but I am quite sure it evoked what Joseph Campbell terms (in a reference from James Joyce) “aesthetic arrest”—a moment of complete seizure when viewing a work of art. Mind you, this was in the 1970s and I was a preteen, so my stunned state was probably due more to the song’s musical rather than lyrical qualities. However, growing up in a church environment, I understood the basics of the words’ surface meaning: a Judeo-Christian view of what marriage “means.” Only later in life, did I come to realize the more expansive meanings associated with the vision Stookey evokes. So in the context of poetic images from “There Is Love,” I want to meditate on the tarot’s version of The Lovers. “He is now to be among you”: I find it interesting that Stookey’s first word is “He.”* The song celebrates two people uniting in marriage, but this other—this third—occupies the prime spot, not “you” or “you both.” (Stookey later clarified, “In matters of theology, it’s wise that we remember, in Christ there is no East or West, in God there is no gender.”) The Rider Waite Smith tarot indeed shows this third figure as an angel hovering between the male and female. In conversation with Bill Moyers, Campbell contends, “By marrying the right person, we reconstruct the image of the incarnate God, and that’s what marriage is.” (This and all subsequent Campbell quotes are from The Power of Myth, Episode VII, “Tales of Love and Marriage.”) This incarnation of the third relates to Jung’s concept of the transcendent function, “a living, third thing…a living birth that leads to a new level of being.” (Collected Works, Vol. 8, 90) Stookey references this aspect later as he paraphrases Matthew 18:20: “Whenever two or more of you are gathered in His name.” (Lyrics by Noel Paul Stookey, ©1971 Public Domain Foundation) A joining in accord, a “union of spirits,” no matter its nature, summons the transcendent into their midst. And although “the two shall be as one,” in that one are three, the “something that you’ve never seen before” Stookey refers to later. “At the calling of your hearts”: When Moyers presses Campbell on how one chooses this “right person,” Campbell replies, “Your heart tells you.” While the Lovers card depicts Eve and Adam naked in their pre-fallen state, their open-armed gestures indicate an even deeper vulnerability—an open-heartedness. Something about this core part–indeed, core comes from the Latin word for “heart,” cor–shows that the third is invoked and evoked from the inmost place, not the brain or the reproductive organs. Clearly Stookey wants to differentiate the “language” of the heart from that of the lower or upper chakras of the human being. “Rest assured this troubadour is acting on His part”: The troubadours celebrated a much different view of love (Amor) than had been part of the earlier overculture—a person-to-person connection that transcends both the animalistic erotic and the generically spiritual. Campbell elaborates Stookey’s reference to the troubadour’s role when he suggests, “The troubadours recognized Amor as the highest spiritual experience,” even paradisical, as the Lovers card depicts. This is as opposed to Eros, a purely physical/psychological experience, and Agape, an impersonal, though noble, one. As the angelic presence in the card represents the third that appears in an Amor connection is both personal and of the highest spiritual order. Stookey as troubadour is reassuring the uniting couple that his work aligns with this supreme sphere of human self-actualization. “Woman draws her life from man and gives it back again”: While overtly this alludes to the biblical story of Eve being created from Adam’s rib, a deeper reading awaits. If we use the esoteric approach of yin and yang—the feminine and the masculine as emblems—then the principle of “the receptive” drawing in, transmuting, and creating in reciprocation to “the directive” removes any hint of male primacy. Moreover, referring to the yin/yang relationship, Campbell asserts, “You couldn’t relate at all to something in which you did not somehow participate.” The male and female principles not only need each other but somehow contain each other; they are not absolute others. Nor, as he goes on to say, is the Divine. Thus Stookey encapsulates the mystery of the union of two opposites: woman and man, as well as human and divine. “Is it love that brings you here, or love that brings you life?”: While most of us would define libido as just sexual drive or lust, depth psychology views it more subtly as energy itself, in particular the energy of life. “Libido is the impulse to life,” Campbell explains, “It comes from the heart…the organ of opening up to somebody else.” The Lovers card also portrays the Tree of Life and the serpent, symbolic of libido. So Stookey asks the philosophical question—are you getting married because that’s what people in love do? Or are you doing it because that’s what life does? “What’s to be the reason?” he wonders. Is your heart open enough to look beyond what you think of as an individual choice to see these greater powers at play? Self and other, the directive and receptive, the transcendent third, life energy itself? I have been receiving so much pleasure later in life, having encountered the works and ideas of Joseph Campbell and many others in the fields of myth and depth psychology. And when I reexamine cultural “artifacts” from my early years—songs, books, movies, and so on—with a fresh set of lenses, I almost always find that the texts which I loved as a child hold so much hidden treasure that my childhood eyes failed to apprehend. Paul Stookey’s beautiful and seemingly simple song is a perfect example of this phenomenon, especially when contemplating the richness and complexity of the Lovers in the tarot. Perhaps it will get you closer to something you have never seen before.

Joseph Campbell’s work is full of reflections on love. I like to think this is due to his successful marriage to his life partner, the dancer and modern dance choreographer Jean Eardman (1916–2020). In a Q&A session during Joseph Campbell's Mythos series, The Ego and the Tao, the mythologist uses the Eastern notion of Tao, that circle with a sinuous line that divides it into equal parts, one white and luminous and the other black and dark, to speak of the wisdom of the body to produce the world. In this symbol, he highlights the interaction of the pairs of opposites, rotating his hands in a moving sphere to convey the idea that this interaction is not static, but happens in a continuous, circular way. Therefore, life must conform to this cycle. According to Campbell, it’s important to watch closely in order to take the right action at the right time. This essential capacity for observation and discernment, which underlies the processes of choice, is clearly represented in tarot card six, the Lovers. Most people interpret it as the arrival of romantic love in life, which may be correct in some cases. But if you have a Raider-Waiter-Smith deck, hold card six in your hands. You will see a sun that opens wide onto an angel-like figure with its wings spread out over male and female figures. The woman is innocently standing in front of a tree with a snake wound around its trunk. The metaphor captures Eve, of course, on the verge of eating the forbidden fruit, a choice that will grant them wisdom but also represents the end of their paradise, or at least that particular experience of paradise. Well, Jungian psychology is solidly based upon the concept of the union of opposites. This is because the male and female figures are not only symbols of love and marriage, but also of our own dual nature. In this psychological approach, the integration of the conscious and the unconscious is the ultimate goal. The interesting thing is that in this choice the union of duality gives rise to a third condition, which is dialectical, called the transcendent function. Something new emerges that did not exist before. In the mythic tarot deck this card is represented splendidly by a scene inspired by the judgment of Paris. As we know from the Greek myth, Paris is minding his own business tending cattle. He is the son of King Priam of Troy. And out of nowhere, Hermes chooses him to award the golden apple to whichever of the three goddesses before him he deems fairest: Hera, Athena, or Aphrodite. A tough choice, and he doesn’t want to do it, as he probably intuits the mess it will inevitably cause. The goddesses, as is their way, try to cast their spells upon him: Athena promises him power in war, Hera promises to make him king, and Aphrodite promises he will get the most beautiful woman in the world. The most beautiful woman in the world? Paris is a young man, and like most young men he has romantic love on his mind. He can plainly see that Aphrodite is offering him the most beautiful mortal woman in the world, Helen. And, as we know, this event precipitates the Trojan War, for the beautiful Helen is married to King Menelaus of Sparta. There’s perhaps a side of us that wants to point the finger at Paris and say, “Hey, you didn’t choose wisely.” But let’s face it, the contest had been imposed on him (by a God, the metaphor for that divine part of the psyche that wants our personality to relate to the Self, the most integrated, whole version of ourselves). The contest takes him out of his bucolic comfort zone and throws him into something entirely new. After choosing love, his entire known world is radically transformed. What he will likely learn as the story unfolds is that every choice has its own particular consequences, and we are responsible for them. And yes, as the ancient Greeks might have said, skata happens, and eventually it will be all right. And this brings us to one of Joseph Campbell’s favorite themes: the troubadours and the Arthurian legends. The troubadours used to associate love to spiritual life. Perhaps, in our troubled times more than ever, it is necessary to have a kind heart—that is, a heart capable of love—in order to face the interesting and challenging times of today. As Campbell says in Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers, “the best we can do is ‘lean towards the light’ in an attempt to understand the other in a compassionate way. (197) Because the other mirrors a conflict that is within us, in our family, our community, our country, our culture, our world. It was Campbell’s integrated perspective on body, love, and spirituality that captivated me when I first heard him talking about stories of love and marriage in the Power of Myth series with Bill Moyers. I never forgot the journalist’s frequent surprise when he asked Campbell a question. It was as if he were facing a wise old man like no other. I felt the same way. I imagine that, like many, I was hooked by the erudition and sympathy of the mythologist, who interpreted profound mysteries in a passionate and simple way. The series first aired on Brazilian public TV in 1991. I diligently recorded each episode on VHS tapes so I could review them whenever I wanted. Eventually the series could be purchased, and I acquired the box set to use in the mythical narrative structure classes I taught to students of journalism in those days. For the past year, and two residences later, I’ve been organizing my house and moving things up to the attic. I confess that I couldn’t merely put these old tapes in a cardboard box and banish them to the solitude of the attic. For me, those tapes represent something that I consider to be among the best of my academic and human training. They reflect the heart of who I am. I have learned from Campbell that troubadours recognized love as the highest spiritual experience. And, for me, the individual experience in relation to another is still the toughest and the most sacred journey, one that smooths one’s edges day after day. Woe to Paris, woe to Tristan and Isolde, and woe to us lovers all!

Suspended between Strength and Death is the Hanged Man. He doesn’t look particularly concerned. The illustrator of the emblematic Smith-Waite tarot deck, Pamela “Pixie” Coleman Smith, portrayed him as seemingly unsurprised and unbothered by his situation. His hair dangles down, and blood begins to pool in his head, which is encircled by a halo of yellow light. He swings gently in the breeze from one elegant leg, the other bent down behind it as a sort of physical and visual counterbalance. His hands are—clasped? tied?—behind his back. For more than one hundred years, tarot readers have wondered at Pixie’s illustration, turning its meaning over in their minds and deciding how it might reflect a truth personal to them alone. And the numbers of those handling cards are growing: the early pandemic years saw a boom in the number of tarot cards sold in the United States, causing some game companies to double their printing in 2020 and 2021 to keep up with demand. In this month’s featured text, The Mythic Dimension: Selected Essays, 1959–1987, Joseph Campbell reflects on the cycle of humanity’s love of the occult in the essay “The Occult in Myth and Literature” (302): The Old Bronze Age realization of a micro-macrocosmic unity is returning, and everywhere all the old arts that once were banned are coming back. I have myself been traveling about quite a bit these years, from one college campus to another, and everywhere the first question asked me is, ‘Under what sign were you born?’ The mysteries of the Tarot pack, the I Ching, and Transcendental Meditation … Well, all this is just the beginning, the first signaling of a dawning realization of the immanence of the occult, and of this as something important for our living. When Campbell published this line in 1977, the curtain had just gone up on the Broadway revival of Hair, the “American tribal love-rock musical” of 1967. The show had been regaling audiences with its representation of hippie subculture for ten years, enthralling and alarming viewers in equal measure with nudity, drug use, and occult references alongside a vehement rejection of the country’s puritanical Christian philosophy. The musical is called Hair, for gods’ sakes, the ultimate symbol of liberation and power across cultures for millennia from the Indigenous peoples of the Americas to ancient Greek gods and heroes. “My hair is holy,” Dionysus says in Euripides’s tragedy The Bacchae. “I grow it long for the god.”  Hair is packed with references to Christianity as both allegory and foil to the tribe’s aims and antics. Alongside these are vibrant celebrations of the natural world, especially the stars, a mainstay of the occult. Even though British astrologer Neil Spencer referred to “Aquarius,” the show’s anthem, as “astrological gibberish,” it had no bearing on its wild and sustained success. The Civil Rights movement, the sexual revolution, antiwar fury, and women’s liberation made it imperative for Western seekers to find beliefs that better suited their ideals of love, freedom, and connection with all things. Christianity fell extraordinarily short in all areas, leading to a surge of Eastern practices in the US and England, as well as a rebirth of many esoteric practices, including tarot and astrology. The “ancient” feeling of these disciplines resonated with people looking to escape the confines of their tight-laced post–World War II upbringing, even though many of these practices had been refined at the beginning of the twentieth century, but it was music that offered the direct pathway to the ineffable. Campbell was given the opportunity to see the Grateful Dead in concert near the end of his life. He told his audience in a lecture after the show that “this is Dionysus talking through these kids.” He further describes the experience in The Mythic Dimension: Rock music had always seemed a bore to me, but I can tell you, at that concert, I found eight thousand people standing in mild rapture for five hours. The place was just a mansion of dance. And I thought, ‘Holy God! Everyone has just lost themselves in everybody else here!’ (260-261) “[Music] is the oldest form of religious worship,” writes Peter Bebergal in his 2015 book The Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll: when magic and religion were inseparable, where myth was communicated through a colorful and often wild blending of costume, song, and dance. This type of yearning for freedom and self-expression is our first and earliest glimmer of the spirit of rock and roll, a primeval and communal method to transmit a truth, to celebrate, to mourn, to sacrifice something to the gods. And to do it together. (18) Occultism isn’t one set belief, making the figure of the witch the perfect symbol of counterculture, outcasts, and weirdness: too loud, unpredictable, otherworldly, and, most terrifying of all, sexually liberated. An accusation of witchcraft is still mortally dangerous in many parts of the world; far from a kitschy symbol of rebellion, the witch is a declaration of freedom in spite of legitimate deadly risks. It’s little wonder that witches were invoked in the face of life-or-death causes like Civil Rights and the Vietnam War, or by groups like WITCH (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) founded by radical feminists to fight for women’s liberation. One of the leaflets WITCH dispersed at their protests in the late 1960s read: If you are a woman and dare to look within yourself, you are a Witch. You make your own rules. You are free and beautiful. You can be invisible or evident in how you choose to make your witch-self known. You can form your own Coven of sister Witches (thirteen is a cozy number for a group) and do your own actions ... You are a Witch by saying aloud, "I am a Witch" three times, and thinking about that. You are a Witch by being female, untamed, angry, joyous, and immortal. (Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshipers, and Other Pagans in America. Margot Adler, 1979) Witchcraft, this vector of fascination as well as fear, was criminalized in Britain until 1951 when the old law was repealed and replaced with the Fraudulent Mediums Act. Hair itself wasn’t permitted to be performed in London’s West End until 1968, when the Labour government repealed a 1737 law that prevented the show on the grounds of nudity and drug use, itself a revolutionary act for free speech that boosted the show’s popularity in the UK. Once the curtain was up, reviews began flowing in. Most were positive, if overwhelmingly English; Philip Hope-Wallace wrote for the Guardian, “It is all a good deal less awful than it sounds but will probably find its own proper audience, if that is the right adjective.” The renewed celebration of the witch, and the discomfort and alarm that follows, is not so different from the journey of the Hanged Man himself: someone unfamiliar with the tarot will often take the card as a bad omen based on the name and imagery, but spending time with the card, turning it over and examining the details with an open mind, might lead them to some surprising revelations. A.E. Waite of the Smith-Waite deck wrote The Pictorial Key to the Tarot in 1910, which includes descriptions and interpretations of Smith’s illustrations. He wrote of the Hanged Man that “it has been called falsely a card of martyrdom, a card of prudence … a card of duty.” A rope ties you in place where you hang, uncomfortable and unable to release yourself. What it does mean, Waite writes, is enlightenment: expansiveness, perspective, intuition, circumspection, prophecy. One interpretation of the card even says the Hanged Man put himself up there, tying himself deliberately to the Tree of Life to gain knowledge from experiencing a new perspective. As long as there are cultural norms, there will be the drive to rebel against them, and the witch will be there. As the Hanged Man alarms passersby in his personal quest to achieve enlightenment, the witch strives for truth and empathy with the full knowledge of disruption and fury it will inevitably provoke. The old arts that were once banned are back. A “micro-macrocosmic unity” is what makes the occult appealing, and is why it will always, in some form, return. We need this connection: tying ourselves upside down to the Tree of Life, a radical rejection of convention, a tug-of-war between duty and spiritual expansion—and a responsibility and connection to one another.