The cards haven’t changed as much as we have. Back in the day, the owners of the tarot decks tended to be royalty and nobility; indeed, the first tangible evidence of their use dates from 1392 when a French painter presented his version of the tarot deck to his employer, King Charles VI. Users tended to be Catholic—almost everyone in fourteenth-century Europe was Catholic—despite the risk of enraging the local church. As Joseph Campbell writes, “It is from the beginning of that century, 1330, 1340, or so, that we begin to hear complaints from clergy about members of their flocks making use of playing cards” (Tarot Revelations, p. 9). Why did the Church care? Perhaps because the deck was stacked against them: people were turning to the tarot for guidance, and guidance was the wheelhouse of Rome. I would argue that this intimate, self-guided practice of augury was a foreshock (as we Angelenos might call it) of the Protestant Reformation wherein the projection of spiritual autonomy was withdrawn from its Vatican headquarters and placed squarely in the homes of Martin Luther’s faithful. While the increasingly curious, Renaissance-influenced, nonreligious humanists dealt cards, the newly empowered Christians thumbed gilt-edged Bibles. There must have been a merchandising genius behind the evolution of the Marseille deck, because there was a shift in imagery commensurate with the evolving Weltanschauung of Luther’s German experiment: [W]hen we turn to any one of our own decks of playing cards, the symbolism that we open to is of the Protestant seventeenth century. The Swords have become Spades … The Cups, which formerly represented the chalice of the Catholic mass, have become Hearts; for in Protestant thinking it was not in the rituals and dogmas of the Roman clergy but in one’s own heart, one’s conscience that spiritual guidance was to be found (Tarot Revelations, p. 11). There is something very Protestant about arrogating to oneself the facile implements of self-discovery. Who needs a papist confessor? The Devil card, this month’s prompt for our collective reflections here at the Joseph Campbell Foundation, remained a stable icon of evil from an age where evil was projected outward rather than discovered within. That’s who we were back then. We didn’t have Jungian shadows; we had the devil. Or, as Campbell himself put it, “Gods suppressed become devils, and often it is these devils whom we first encounter when we turn inward” (Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor, p. 63) The devil didn’t change. We did. I can say this because I had pizza last night at a restaurant on Ventura Boulevard called Lucifer’s. Really? Is the Tempter so drained of efficacy that we can name our pizza joints after him? (They advertise four different levels of “heat” in their spicy sauce.) I never had a personal devil in my universe, although I was raised by Catholics. Both sides of the family were Catholic. Everyone I called family had been baptized, catechized, and, to some extent, hypnotized by the compelling majesty of what Dad liked to call the “one true faith.” He always chuckled when he said it. He never once mentioned the devil except when he was talking about Dante (after whom he named his fourth child). The devil’s card remains fixed in its meaning and intent by that fourteenth-century Italian who basically gave us hell as we know it. Leave it to my people to imagine a place of truly poetic forms of eternal retribution. Imagine the imagination which imagines infinite punishment for finite sins. I come from a grudge-holding culture, and Alighieri is the finest fruit on that bitter tree. My mom never mentioned the devil. Somewhere she had been inoculated against certain symbols from the past, believing that flirtations with the occult were harmless and kept children amused. Like the time she bought a Ouija board for use as a game at my seventh birthday party. The neighbor’s children innocently reported the incident to their parents, and all hell broke loose. As it turns out, my neighbors back in Broomhall, Pennsylvania, really did believe in the devil. And I know this because I’ve been calling them and possibly freaking them out with questions about how they were taught to think about Satan and whether they still believed in those things. Though I haven’t spoken to Tom Shales in over sixty years, I contacted him to ask him if his parents believed in a personal devil. He lived next door. “My parents told me that the devil hated people,” Tom texted, “and wanted to drag them to hell with sins … In my late teens, I talked to Mom about the devil once. She talked with me briefly, but it was clear to me that she was frightened by the subject. That chat took place after my brother dabbled with a Ouija board.” Oops. My informal poll of startled neighbors from sixty years ago has yielded the same results with few exceptions. I grew up surrounded by Satan. The Prince of Darkness has but a slender hold on my psyche and I credit this to my occasionally enlightened parents, who nudged me to look inward, not outward, for evidence of evil. Even Goethe’s Mephistopheles knows better than to cling to past personifications as he objects to a witch’s use of his old name in Faust, Part One: THE WITCH: I’m crazy with excitement, now I see our young Lord Satan’s back again! MEPHISTOPHELES: Woman, don’t use that name to me! THE WITCH: Why, sir, what harm’s it ever done? MEPHISTOPHELES: The name has been a myth too long. Not that man’s any better off—the Evil One they’re rid of. Evil’s still going strong. The “ancient foe” of Luther’s Ein Feste Burg (Google translates this as “a solid castle.” You may know it as A Mighty Fortress.) has been reduced in rank, his pungent, sulfuric scent perfumed by platitudes about moral relativism. As one online influencer put it in his review of the Grateful Dead’s Friend of the Devil, “Rock fans know that our love of the Devil isn’t about devotion to darkness and misery … If holiness involves being a judgmental Puritan, then Satan is just the ultimate bar buddy, the kind of sweaty, good-natured dude who just wants to skull a cold beer.” As I say, the cards haven’t changed as much as we have.

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.

Some tarot cards conjure dread in folks who have just a passing understanding of them. Either the image itself or the card’s name can be enough to evoke negative associations. In the major arcana, for example, the Tower and Death cards immediately rouse fatal visions of tragedy. However, neither of these images carries the supernatural or occult connotations of the Devil card. As the embodiment of evil, the Devil lives in the Western consciousness as something far worse than loss or dying—he possesses mysterious powers to actively wreak suffering and pain on humanity, even beyond death. But just as the Tower and Death cards have more subtle and nuanced interpretations than their fearful appearances might suggest, the Devil also has a wealth to reveal when grasped at deeper, more archetypal levels. I’d like to use a pop-culture reference in my exploration of this topic. For the Devil card, I instantly think of the Fox/Netflix series Lucifer, taken from Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman comic book. In the show, Lucifer (played by Tom Ellis) leaves Hell and becomes a nightclub owner in Los Angeles. The Devil here appears as a handsome, witty, and charming man, not a being bent on humanity’s destruction. However, he cannot escape the one function he performed in Hell: punishing wrongdoers. This leads him to a position as a consultant with the LAPD, in which he can track down criminals and help mete out justice. One of Lucifer’s superpowers is his ability to ask of anyone what they truly desire, and the fact that he always gets a truthful response proves to be useful in detective work and suspect interrogation. Moreover, Lucifer’s own (mostly hedonistic) desires drive his earthly lifestyle, and thus one of the primary themes of the show is desire and its consequences. The standard Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot presentation of the Devil card carries a strong resemblance to the Lovers: the supernatural figure in the center, flanked by Adam and Eve. But the humans bear the Devil’s horns on their heads and, more tellingly, are bound by chains to the Devil’s perch. Thus, the image insists that bondage and becoming devilish is a consequence of the Devil’s presence. And using the themes suggested by Lucifer, desire itself is the pathway into this slavery. To want something strongly is to become attached to it, and the more intense the desire, the more unbreakable the attachment. In Tibetan Buddhism, the term dö chag means “sticky desire,” the yearning to grasp something or someone that grabs you back when you experience it. Whether we label it adhesion or enslavement, craving fetters us to an external object. Joseph Campbell viewed desire in its proper place as the flip side of fear—what we are most afraid of is often the opposite of “what we truly desire.” And he related desire and fear back to the Garden of Eden and the Fall: “The fear is that of death and the desire is for more of this world,” he asserts in Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor (p. 51), “fear and desire are what keep you out of the Garden.” The Devil, then, is what pulls you in the direction of either debilitating fear or excessive desire, often linked to a common root. Between those two sides lies “the Garden” or, as Campbell references in his conversation with Bill Moyers in the first episode of The Power of Myth, nirvana: “the condition that comes when you are not compelled by desire or fear, or by social commitments, when you hold your center and act out of there.” The ”center” that Campbell refers to resides purely in neither the ego nor in the persona. It is the integrated aspect of the psyche, one that moves beyond the strong pull toward or avoidance of the pairs of opposites in life. The most powerful creator of the Devil, or the demonic, is the psyche’s natural tendency to repress the very powers it contains, the gods of our polytheistic soul. “My definition of a devil,” Campbell posits, “is a god who has not been recognized … a power in you to which you have not given expression, and you push it back” (An Open Life, p. 28). We often do not even recognize our unconscious gods/devils that drive us within the desire/fear dichotomy. Much of the mystery and supernatural qualities we ascribe to the concretized images of both the divine and the demonic are due to the power we ourselves give them through extremes of attachment or avoidance. One of the many aspects that I appreciate about Lucifer is that the main character goes to therapy. While in daily life he pursues what he himself desires (and avoids what he fears), therapy impels him into self-reflexive spaces where these aspects receive introspection and contemplation. As he experiences the pains of being human for the first time, his acceptance of his unexamined drives leads him toward integration. As Campbell notes, “The demon that you can swallow gives you its power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply” (The Power of Myth, p. 202). Lucifer’s painful journey into himself—his self-swallowing, if you will—provides him understanding and power, and we viewers can come along for the journey. Lucifer may have left Hell to be in Los Angeles, but he continues grappling with his fears and desires from an egoic standpoint, which effectively serves to bring Hell with him. For Campbell, “Hell, properly, is the condition of people who are so bound to their ego lives and selfish values that they cannot open out to a transpersonal grace” (Thou Art That, p. 100). Can the Devil, or we who are chained and wear the Devil’s horns, break free of the shackles and move into grace? For the answer found in the series, I suggest watching it on Netflix. For your own answer, perhaps the same kind of reflections on life’s pain, accompanied by a coach, therapist, or conscious friend, can begin the process of emancipation from the chains of desire.

Our MythBlast essay series continues to explore the archetypal imagery of the tarot, focusing this month on Card XV in the major arcana: the Devil. For almost two thousand years those who practice the occult arts have been portrayed as dabbling in the demonic. We all know the story from countless variations in book and film: even those who display innocent curiosity are depicted as opening themselves to satanic influences, which never end well. From Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors in 1965 to television’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, drawing the Devil card sets a sinister tone. And small wonder: in Christian dogma the devil is considered summum malam, the highest or supreme evil. But is this what the Devil signifies in tarot––portents of evil? Or is there more nuance to this mythic figure? How the devil did the devil become the Devil? Surprisingly, there is no identification in Hebrew scriptures of the devil with the talking serpent tempting Eve in the Garden. Similarly, the only mention of “Lucifer” (“shining one” or “light bearer”) in the Jewish canon appears to be an allegorical reference to the king of Babylon (Isaiah 14:4–23), though this passage is later taken by Christians (but not Jews) as a veiled account of the devil’s origin. Nor is “Satan” the devil’s name. The Hebrew word śāṭān means “accuser” or “adversary,” and is so translated to describe a number of figures—from King David (in I Samuel 29:4, where the Philistines fear he will become their adversary) to an “angel of the Lord” who blocks the sorcerer Balaam’s way (Numbers 22:22). However, when used with the definite article (ha-śāṭān: “the Satan”), which occurs only in the Old Testament books of Job and Zechariah, it’s a title applied to a member of God’s heavenly court who serves a prosecutorial role. At this stage of his evolution, Satan appears to be a spirit being who reports directly to God in heaven, does God’s bidding, and even indulges in a gentleman’s wager of sorts with the deity; this figure is no fallen angel residing in hell, nor is he at war with God––and he is definitely not the source of evil. That role is reserved for the God of Israel, who declares, in Isaiah 45:7, “I form the light, and create darkness; I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things” (KJV). And He does. Whenever Pharaoh is on the point of agreeing to the Lord’s demand to allow the Israelite slaves to leave, it is God, not the devil, who hardens Pharaoh’s heart, compounding the suffering of Hebrews and Egyptians alike (Exodus 7:13; 9:12; 10:20; 10:27; 14:4). It is God, not the devil, who sends an evil spirit to torment King Saul (I Samuel 16:14). And when Israel’s King Ahab seeks to know the will of God, Ahab is killed in battle because “the Lord hath put a lying spirit” in the mouths of the prophets (I Kings 22: 5–23). The figure of Satan as the epitome of evil, in perpetual conflict with a God who is only righteous and pure and good, doesn’t emerge until the period of the Babylonian captivity. After sacking Jerusalem, in 597 BCE, Nebuchadnezzar II forcibly deports the bulk of the Jewish religious leadership and nobility to Babylon, where they and their descendants remain in exile for the next sixty years. Cyrus the Great, founder of the Achaemenid (aka Persian) Empire, eventually defeats the Babylonians and allows the Jews to return to Jerusalem. Thanks to cross-fertilization with Zoroastrianism, the dominant religion in the Persian empire, the exiles bring with them new ideas: Now there were two extremely important innovations that transformed the mythologies of the Levant and that then very soon affected Europe. One came along with the rise of Zoroastrianism, where the principles of light and darkness are separated from each other absolutely and the idea is developed of two contending creative deities . . . absolute good and absolute evil. There is in the earlier traditions no such dualistic separation of powers, and we in our own thinking have inherited something of this dualism of Good and Evil, God and Devil, from the Persians. (The Mythic Dimension, p. 256-257) With this movement, the figure of Satan morphs into the devil we know today––but in the Christian era the conceptualization of the deity also undergoes a transformation. In most other belief systems, the adversary/trickster figure is not wholly evil––even Loki has his moments––but in Christianity, as in Zoroastrianism, God is conceived of as the ultimate source of all that is Good, and only Good . . . and pure good, pure light, casts a dark and monstrous shadow. If God is only Good, then his shadow, everything that God isn't, must be utter Evil. You cannot have light without the shadow; the shadow is the reflex of the figure of light.(Thou Art That, p. 75) According to Jungian psychology, the shadow is frequently related to one’s personal unconscious, which is called the unconscious not because it is unconscious and without purpose but because the waking ego (“me,” “I”, how I perceive myself) is unconscious of these deeper parts of the psyche: The shadow is, so to say, the blind spot in your nature. It’s that which you won’t look at about yourself . . . The shadow is that which you might have been had you been born on the other side of the tracks: the other person, the other you. It is made up of the desires and ideas within you that you are repressing—all of the introjected id. The shadow is the landfill of the self. Yet it is also a sort of vault: it holds great, unrealized potentialities within you. The nature of your shadow is a function of the nature of your ego. It is the backside of your light side. (Pathways to Bliss, p. 73) Shadow contents, those unknown or repressed parts of one’s being, are experienced as threatening to waking ego. Rather than accept these shadow traits as part of oneself, we tend to project shadow contents outside ourselves, onto those who have hooks in their personality, on which those projections might catch and snag, thus allowing us to evade self-loathing and self-knowledge, by directing fear and hatred outward, onto some “Other.” Is it coincidence that God instructs Moses, “Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me to you” (Exodus 3:14)? Certainly, “I AM THAT I AM”––the name of the deity in the Judeo-Christian tradition––has been interpreted as a statement having profound theological implications; at the same time, at least on the surface, it sure sounds like a declaration of ego. And if that divine ego identifies itself only with all things good, then all things evil fall into shadow, which is projected outward onto the gods of others, who are then considered to be devils. In this mythological context the idea of the occult, as black magic, becomes associated with all of the religious arts of the traditional pagan world, and the very symbols of such gods as Śiva and Poseidon, for example, become symbolic of the devil. The trident of Śiva and Poseidon and the pitchfork of our devil are the same. Moreover, there now begins to become associated with the occult a new tone, one of fearful danger, diabolical possession, and so forth, and what formerly was daemonic possession—possession by a god such as Dionysus—becomes evil: a new mythology of warlocks and witches, pacts with the devil, and so forth, comes into being. But there is an earlier mythological law that tells that when a deity is suppressed and misinterpreted in this way, not recognized as a deity, he indeed may become a devil. When the natural impulses of one’s life are repressed, they become increasingly threatening, violent, terrible, and there is a furious fever of possession that then may overtake people; and many of the horrors of our European Christian history may be interpreted as the results of this natural law.” (The Mythic Dimension, p. 258) Thoth Deck Copyright © 1978 by U.S. Games Systems and Samuel[/caption] And so, we come full circle, back to “the idea of the occult,” specifically, the Devil in the major arcana. This card signifies evil primarily to those unfamiliar with tarot. But there is another way to interpret this image: What is the obstruction in your life, and how do you transform it into the radiance? Ask yourself, “What is the main obstruction to my path?” . . . A demon or devil is a power in you to which you have not given expression, an unrecognized or suppressed god. (A Joseph Campbell Companion, p. 156) That’s worth repeating: a “devil is a power in you to which you have not given expression.” By becoming aware of and giving expression to what has been unconscious, we disempower the shadow’s ability to disrupt our lives. [T]he attitude that Joyce has in his work is not that of withdrawing but affirming; yet in the affirmation, having lined up on one side, you are not to identify yourself with God and the other side with the Devil; the two represent a polarity. Or if you do identify yourself with God and the other with the Devil, then you must realize that there is a higher principle, higher than the duality of God and Devil of which they themselves are the polarized aspects. (Mythic Worlds, Modern Words, p. 271) When I draw the Devil in a tarot spread, I do not take the card as evil. Rather, for me, it’s a reminder to seek out what I have ignored, repressed, or overlooked in my life––which takes honest and often challenging self-reflection––and then embrace it. The path to wholeness begins with owning one’s own shadow. As Joseph Campbell often noted, citing Nietzsche, “Be careful lest in casting out your Devil you cast out the best that is in you” (Asian Journals, p. 221). Maybe it’s time we give the devil his due . . .

Like all the tarot cards, the Chariot contains a complexity of sub-images and details. We can safely assume that each sub-image is not merely a random or decorative item and that there’s a purposeful and organic relationship between them all. We start, of course, with the main motif: a figure riding in a chariot. His countenance bears authority and clear intent. His gaze is firm. Clearly he is in control. But in control of what? In control of life, it seems. More immediately, he’s in control of the two sphinxes that pull the chariot. On closer examination we realize the sphinxes have inverted black-and-white coloring. And each sphinx would go its own way if it weren’t for the governing will of the charioteer. He carries the wand of authority with such resolute intent that the chariot materializes as a virtual extension of himself as the charioteer. Yet it would seem from the card’s pictorial and structural elements that the charioteer does not bring forth his unquestioned authority out of himself alone. It seems that he has a mandate from the overarching Heavens, the realm of ultimate authority and command. The picture suggests that the charioteer fulfills his mission by uniting the archetypal feminine and masculine (as contrapositions) within himself. The marriage of two contrary elements within the psyche is indicated by the chariot’s crest, which features the lingam and yoni. A thorough study of the tarot requires us to hold a spherical and holographic consciousness, as well as a binary one. So when contemplating this card—beyond the charioteer being driven to merge the dualities within himself and balance the archetypal polarities (the yin and yang of the sphinxes) or the secondary antipodal notions of heaven and earth—there’s still myriad other intersecting influences within the psyche to harmonize, an extensive array of pluralisms, not only singular dualities. Unfortunately, there just isn’t the space in this MythBlast to delve deeper into all the other diverse elements requiring integration, but in Letter VII of Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism, the anonymous author does hint at some of the more complex, contrary elements that are simultaneously at play. The integrated man, master of himself, conqueror in all trials—who is he? It is he who holds in check the four temptations—i.e. the three temptations in the wilderness described in the Gospels as well as the temptation which synthesizes them: the temptation of pride, the center of the triangle of temptations—and who is, therefore, master of the four elements which compose the vehicle of his being: fire, air, water and earth. Master of the four elements – that is to say: creative being in clear, fluid and precise thought (creativity, clarity, fluidity and precision being the manifestations of the four elements in the domain of thought). It means to say, moreover, that he has a warm, large, tender and faithful heart (warmth, magnanimity, sensitivityand faithfulness being the manifestations of the four elements in the domain of feeling). There is, lastly, to add that he has ardor (‘man of desire’), fullness, flexibility and stability in his will (where the four elements manifest themselves as intensity, scope, adaptability and firmness). To summarize, one can say that a master of the four elements is a man of initiative, who is serene, mobile and firm. Here presents the four natural virtues of Catholic theology: prudence, strength, temperance and justice; or rather Plato’s four cardinal virtues: wisdom, courage, temperance and justice; or yet again the four qualities of Sankaracharya: viveka(discernment), vairagya (serenity), the ‘six jewels’ of just conduct, and the desire for deliverance. Whatever the formulation may be of the four virtues in question, it is always a matter of the four elements or projections of the sacred name יהוה‎—the Tetragrammaton—in human nature (p. 183). The triumphant charioteer is victorious in bringing these many and variegated life modalities and principles into a coherent working relationship. The union, though, is not one where the contrary elements meld into one another blithely. The elements perpetually remain as a balance of otherwise converse intentions requiring constant vigilance, reanimation and restoration on a moment-to-moment basis. This harmonized symphony can only be acquired through the continuous renewal process occurring within the charioteer’s maturing psyche. This process of ongoing equilibrium is required or else the charioteer and his chariot, and hence his life purpose, will be rudely torn apart. An example of a mythic character with an immature and unintegrated psyche is Phaeton, as shown by his handling of the sun chariot. Joseph Campbell references this myth in The Hero with a Thousand Faces: The mystagogue is to entrust the symbols of office only to a son who has been effectually purged of all inappropriate infantile cathexes—for whom the just, impersonal exercise of the powers will not be rendered impossible by unconscious motives of self-aggrandizement, personal preference, or resentment. Ideally, the invested one has been divested of his mere humanity and is representative of an impersonal cosmic force. He is the twice-born: he has become himself the father. And he is competent consequently now to enact himself the role of the initiator, the guide, the sun door, through whom one may pass from infantile illusions of good and evil to an experience of the majesty of cosmic law, purged of hope and fear, and at peace in understanding the revelation of being (p. 115). The charioteer in the tarot card, unlike Phaethon, masters the situation because he has mastered himself. This card is therefore both an archetypal representation of, and instruction for, our common shared project: healing the psyche by integrating its numerous and disparate parts. Without constant vigilance and self-discipline, the psyche is liable to lapse into discord with the consequent dispersion of its divergent energies. In this card the charioteer is austere in his willful commitment to purpose. And so in our own lives, we, too, are to exert this same discipline and focus, but we must also temper this disposition through the practice of bestowing kindness and compassion to ourselves and others. These are the attributes that empower a supreme sovereign capacity as denoted by the star crown that the charioteer wears. Finally, our anonymous author states, “For mastership is not the state of being moved, but rather that of being able to set in motion.” It’s only a mature and integrated psyche that can set the forces of life in motion, because it’s recognized itself as the vehicle (the Chariot) of the Divine.

“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.”

The Chariot card is traditionally designed with the image of a strong male figure in a car conducted by two sphinx-like beasts; the dark one at the left side and a white one at the right side. The armored charioteer carries a scepter, suggesting his royal nature or, perhaps, that he is a servant of royalty. In 1976, the first edition of A Feminist Tarot  was published. Authored by Susan Rennie and Sally Miller Gearhart, it began a welcome explosion of women’s tarot decks in the 1980s and 1990s. As the pioneer, A Feminist Tarot refers to the images of the traditional Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot Deck, presenting them from the perspective of the emerging cultural feminist theory. Whatever the perspective, though, what this card has in common with other decks is that the central figure is trying to unite distinct animals in dark and white colors. In “The Magic Flight,” chapter six of The Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work, Campbell was asked about the more interesting questions that he had heard after his lectures. And his answer was: “The most interesting question I ever got was when I was lecturing here at Esalen in the [Abraham] Maslow Room in 1967. Somebody asked, ‘What about the symbolism of the Waite deck of tarot cards?’” (p. 172). Only people with good ego strength can afford to say I don't know, let me find out and come back the next morning as Campbell did, with the happy smile of having been introduced to something new out of the blue. According to Campbell, he was excited to have had the luck to recognize a couple of sequences in the tarot deck. The first one, he says, is that “there is one for the Four Ages of Man: Youth, Maturity, Age, and what Dante calls Senility. He also calls it decrepitude.” Campbell continues: “Then above that I saw another sequence where there was a woman pouring water or something from a blue vessel into a red one and this was called Temperance.” We may guess that Campbell saw card number seven, the Chariot, contained in the first sequence he referred to as the Four Ages of Man, and identified the theme of the passage from youth to maturity, what the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung called metanoia. Metanoia, very simply, is a shift in the personality, one that would act to balance the dominance of the Persona—the social mask that keep us functional in the world—toward the integration of other autonomous aspects of us, like the shadow, which contains the parts of ourselves we do not develop or accept. No wonder the animals pulling the chariot are meant to, in general, suggest the opposing forces that have been reconciled in the previous card (the Lovers). But, still, a strong yet flexible ego is needed to reconcile the new internal conflicts. And make no mistake, they will be there. These conflicts may present themselves in the form of external enemies, situations, or obstacles in one’s life. However, if we follow the psychological approach to these symbols, they can tell us what is happening inside our own psyche. As Jungian psychoanalyst Sallie Nichols points out in Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, Jung noted that the psyche is a self-regulatory system. Although the beasts might not be heading together toward a direction, they may yet balance the ride and prevent the chariot from ending up in the moat. If we look again to the charioteer, he is privileging neither the left nor the right beast but, in some way, allowing the synergy of these opposing forces to foster a third thing that might show up as a solution (Jung called this the Transcendent Function). The result of the struggle suggested by the card is a transformative change in one’s thinking, feeling, behaving, or relating levels—perhaps even all of them altogether. It is easier to talk about transformations than actually go through them. If you pay attention to the charioteer’s shoulders, you may see the crescent moons. This suggests that we are dealing with unconscious emotional aspects underneath the habit patterns, that this is not an easy nor a crystal-clear process when we are wrestling with what life wants from us in order to facilitate the necessary personal growth. As Campbell said, the next sequence is the Devil, then a thunderbolt hitting a tower: “the Tower of Destruction, which is the traditional sign for purgatory, you know, the tower of evil being smashed by the thunderbolt of God’s destruction of all of your tight ego-system relationships” (p. 172). Benedict XVI may have declared the extinction of the purgatory as a material location in 2011. Whether or not Purgatory has ceased to be important in the popular or symbolic imagination is another matter. In view of this, the Pope said it might be “an interior fire, which purifies the soul of sin.” If we consider sin symbolically as what prevents us from fully being ourselves, from expressing our potential for wholeness (the archetype of the Self), then the suffering we experience in the psychological sphere does indeed make better sense. Campbell was fascinated by the tarot experience, and for him “what it represented was a program for life that derived from European medieval consciousness” (p. 175). And that, in the end, has to do with the mystical path disguised in a pack of cards traditionally used in fortune-telling.

For the month of July we will be looking at what, in most tarot decks, is the seventh trump or major arcana card, the Chariot. In the tarot, the Chariot is largely about overcoming challenges, mastery of oneself and one’s environment, and the journey to achieving one’s goals. As you might imagine, the invention of the chariot (itself made possible by the invention of the spoked wheel) was revolutionary. Of course, at the bottom of all this technology is the domestication of animals such as horses and oxen. Horses were first domesticated in the Steppes, the southeast region of the Ural Mountains, sometime before 2500 BCE, more than six hundred years after the wheel arrived from the Middle East. Strangely enough, the chariot was in use fifteen hundred years before humans began to regularly mount and ride horses. There are very early drawings of people trying to mount horses, but those attempts must have been largely unsuccessful until selective breeding developed stronger, larger, more accommodating animals. Almost immediately the chariot became a highly valued instrument of war. It provided a charioteer with an opportunity to cover a great deal of ground at dizzying speed and a stable platform from which one could use a bow and arrows to devastating effect. Around 500 BCE, the use of chariots began to decline because of the increased popularity and mobility of soldiers on horseback, organized cavalries, and improved infantry tactics that deprived chariots of their once novel advantages. Although, it’s worth mentioning that the indomitable Celts were still using chariots against the invading Romans until around the fourth century of the Common Era. For the most part chariots had become the focus of entertainment, and chariot racing became popular for the masses, particularly in Rome. Plato moved the chariot into the realm of metaphor and myth. In his Phaedrus, we overhear Socrates lecturing on the nature of the soul, which he compared to a team of winged horses and a charioteer. The horses of the gods' souls are good, beautiful, and obedient, but mortals’ souls have one horse that is beautiful and good, and one that is ugly and unruly. In some previous ethereal existence, the souls of mortals followed the gods around the vault of heaven, seeing divine sights and experiencing sacred revelations as initiates in the rites of the gods. The mortal souls that are able to follow the gods do so just barely. They understand some things but not others, and they have trouble with their horses, constantly rising and falling. Some of these souls are unable to keep up at all, and continue to fall earthward on ever shrinking wings, failing to get any glimpse at all of divine reality. Once incarnate these souls, in their postlapsarian state, are more invested in their own opinions than in any sort of ultimate truth. Any soul that caught sight of even one true thing is granted another circuit where it can see more, but eventually all souls fall back to earth. Those that have been initiated are put into various human incarnations depending on how much they have seen; those made into philosophers have seen the most, with kings, politicians, doctors, prophets, poets, manual laborers, and tyrants, descending accordingly as to their relative ignorance. But what a happy coincidence for Plato that philosophers are deemed to have seen more truth than other stations of life! Chariots are also good metaphors for books (this might be the right place to imagine the record scratch sound effect). Books are capable of transporting us to other places, regions, countries, even other worlds in the few minutes it takes to pick one up and engage it. Books can do for us exactly what Plato described his soul chariot doing; they offer us sublime revelations and truths. They offer us beauty, emotion, and relationships. Books initiate us into the human experience and ultimately teach us to be less parochial and more humane. When we learn to read compassionately, generously, and carefully, we can’t help but incorporate those habits into the living of our own lives, and we may even notice that our own lives seem to have acquired the qualities of well plotted novels. In a letter to a friend, Franz Kafka wrote that “we need books that affect us … A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.” For those of you who regularly read the work of Joseph Campbell or the MythBlast newsletter, or listen to one of the Joseph Campbell Foundation’s MythMaker Podcast Network’s podcasts, we are offering yet another tool, a freshly sharpened ice axe with which one can address that frozen inner sea. This month we’re introducing JCF’s Skeleton Key Study Guides, a new series of study guides for books by Joseph Campbell. These study guides are written by contemporary experts in myth, and may help you further discover the joy of Campbell’s writing and his insights into mythology. Each Skeleton Key Study Guide focuses on one book by Joseph Campbell. You'll find a chapter summary for each chapter in Campbell's book plus notable quotes, points of interest, reading lists, and ideas for working with the material in that chapter in the form of discussion questions, essay topics, or creative prompts. These study guides are written for teachers and students who study Joseph Campbell, but Skeleton Key Study Guides are also ideal for creatives, psychologists, and any seekers who feel drawn to myth. Our vision is for these guides to open a portal for you into Campbell's work. The first study guide in the series, Goddesses: A Skeleton Key Study Guide, is available now in ebook and paperback formats. The study guide accompanies Joseph Campbell's Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine. View the recording of a webinar with two of the authors of Goddesses: A Skeleton Key Study Guide, our own Dr. Joanna Gardner in conversation with Dr. Olivia Happel–Block about the study guide on the Joseph Campbell Foundation's YouTube channel

The Wheel of Fortune tarot card serves as a poignant pointer to the sobering fact that we do not, and cannot, control the deep substrate behind our lived existence, even though we do instinctively and intuitively experience the presence of this substrate. This reality can, and does, manifest itself pictorially within dreams that bear archetypal motifs and patterns. We commonly have very little capacity to modify this deep substrate realm, and as such, it exists within us as an immutable fact. Within the realm of everyday life we can, and do, have difficulties governing our quotidian feelings and thoughts. Often only by degrees can we transmute or steer the everyday highs and lows, the fortunes and setbacks that come our way due to the mandates of chance or personal and collective karma. An unexpected gift can easily morph into an unexpected disappointment. Much in life is unpredictable, transient, and indeed ephemeral, but through attention, application, practice, and courage, we can build resilience and acquire a raft of skills to advance our lives constructively. The Wheel of Fortune sometimes does bring misfortune and here the Fates present us with opportunities to strengthen and recast ourselves—because that’s their central mission. It’s why this particular tarot card can serve to remind us, although tacitly, that there need be no absolute failure of despair. When our paths are the most gritty and challenging, it’s here where the greatest potential for our soul’s refinement and renewal exists. In this moment the psyche inhabits a zone of freedom, if it can find the still center. Joseph Campbell explained it to Bill Moyers in The Power of Myth this way: “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” (p. 119). Our psyche-soul is immensely large and richly multidimensional and is an undiscovered territory for our everyday consciousness and its interests. And precisely because so much of it is undiscovered, unrealised, and hence unexplored, when we do begin to enter the psyche’s depths we may encounter realms that are frightfully unfamiliar and seemingly chaotic. But on the positive side, these new realms of unknowing and attendant confusion are in fact a subterranean storeroom, the storeroom of the unconscious. Within this vast storeroom are suppressed energies, or actual soul identities, which have long been alienated. These are awaiting the sight of our compassionate recognition, yearning for our awareness and caring attention. If shunned, neglected, or resisted, the pent-up energies within this subterranean storeroom will impel their presence and demand our attention. Without acknowledging them, they’ll place hindering obstacles along our path. In doing so, they awaken us to a more comprehensive understanding of ourselves, while simultaneously hoping for our aid to release them from the netherworld’s bondage. In this sense, the storeroom is also a treasure room too. Among the treasures are gifts that, when opened, prompt us toward a more rounded self-awareness. And these gifts will help us lean into our nascent and actualized divinity, which wishes to be further born and expressed within us. As particular fairy tales often remind us, we alchemically spin the raw substances of our soul’s underworld into threads of fine gold. This gold is woven into the fabric of our soul’s upperworld when we enlist the darkness to be in service to the sacred Self, guiding our unconscious and instinctive selves toward an ever more refined expression. Along this line of thought, the anonymous author in Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism states that “the practical task which follows from this is that of inner alchemy: the transmutation of fallen instincts into their non-fallen prototypes” (p. 281). However, these are no mere words. There is a Hermetic science within this metamorphic process. The Wheel of Fortune (and Misfortune) rotates around and within our personal lives, ever turning to prompt the movement of individual and collective destinies. We may find ourselves plunged into currents of flux and swirl as we encounter life’s gifts, opportunities, and challenges, but as the card indicates, the Wheel of Fortune has a relative constant (other than the hub, which Campbell mentions). That constant is reflected in the twelve zodiacal signs. The zodiacal realm is an abode of permanence and a zone of reference. In a condensed way, the zodiac is represented by the four fixed signs seen pictorially here by the four creatures, one on each corner of the card. Hence, the reality in which we are embedded and that which embraces us is necessarily composed of contrary dispositions: the steadfast and the mutable, the fixed and the shifting. When the significance of these contrary states is discerned, we can perceive how each is the mentor for the other. In summary, the four creatures can be pictured as follows: Eagle (cognition), Lion (feelings), Bull (digestion and volition), and Man (the original protoarchetypal man as integrator). This integration process is assisted by the Sphinx, which works toward wholeness in the macroexpression (cosmos) and wholeness in its microexpression (the human being). And so it is with our own lives too. Soul-wise we draw on each of these four creatures as the four integral elements of the psyche. Also necessary within this Hermetic science is the powerful exchange between the creatures that sit in direct polarity to each other, i.e. Man and Lion, Bull and Eagle. Within this exchange there exists an unceasing consummation of opposites, a perpetual process-event that provides the vigorous dynamic for the psyche as a living organism. There’s so much to contemplate here—it’s a never-ending project, of course—but it’s hoped that our meditations upon the Wheel of Fortune card (and the Tarot overall) will further inform our experience of life’s both fixed and mutable elements.

In Mythic Worlds, Modern Words: On the Art of James Joyce, Campbell embarks on a mythically based, archetypal study of James Joyce, beginning with Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It is here that Campbell picks up the notion of “the Wings of Art” using Joyce’s imagery from the novel. The myth of Daedalus plays a large role in the novel as can be gleaned by the name of the title character, young Daedalus. But the image of Icarus also comes into play at a crucial moment of the young man’s conversion into the path of the artist. This is the vision of a birdman rising toward the sky, “a hawk-like man flying sunward above the sea,” which stands, in the context of the novel, as a symbol of the most radical form of human individuation. Thus Campbell’s idea of the Wings of Art evokes the “transcendent function” which enables our humanity to soar into the heights of cultural achievement. Thus the transcendent quality of all cultural creativity is evoked by the image of the Wings of Art. Notwithstanding the loss of Icarus, as Campbell writes, “release” is possible for an artist following their bliss. “I don’t know why it is that people talking about the flight of the artist always refer to Icarus and not to Daedalus. Icarus flew too high, the wax on his wings melted, and he fell into the ocean. The sentiment on most people’s part seems to be that artists can’t make it. Well, Daedalus did. Joyce was an optimist with respect to the capacity of a competent artist to achieve release” (Mythic Worlds, Modern Words, p. 9). In truth, it is possible for anyone to free themselves from the spiritual bondage of the status quo. It is always possible to break out of the cave of submission to the ruling ideologies of the time, although the hero may need to pay a hefty price. The sacrifice of Icarus is itself part of the transcendent act. Daedelus grieved bitterly after his dear son plummeted into the depths. As we read in Allen Mandelbaum’s translation of The Metamorphoses of Ovid: And Daedelus cursed his own artistry, Then built a tomb to house his dear son’s body. There, where the boy was buried, now his name remains: that island is Icaria. (Book 8, p. 256) Now in the case of Joyce, this notion of the sacrificial child is not just a metaphor. Sadly, it was in real life played out by the sacrifice of his own daughter’s mental life. James Joyce’s daughter, Lucia Joyce, in the early 1930s consulted Carl Jung as a last resort in dealing with her psychic ailments. Jung did not hesitate to interpret her mental condition as a kind of symptom, the product of being imbued into the titanic spiritual currents with which her father was contending. The presumption is that her father’s creative genius exposed her to the strongest waves of the archetypal psyche from a very young age. Jung described Lucia being “far more lively” than her father: “She was very attractive, charming—a good mind. And her writing, what she did for me, had in it the same elements as her father’s. She was the same spirit, oh they cared for each other very much. Yet unfortunately, it was too late to help her” (C. G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, p. 241). In 1934 Jung diagnosed Lucia with schizophrenia and had her committed to the Burghölzi Psychiatric hospital in Zurich. Jung understood both father and daughter to be “like two people going to the bottom of a river, one falling and the other diving” (Richard Ellmann interview, 1953). Evoking this image of the river recalls the first line of Finnegans Wake: “riverrun, …” So did Lucia fall into the abyss as a kind of Icaria, another child who flew too near Father Sun, too close to the source of all life and being. They were both undone at the peak of their flight, falling into the irresistible abyss of the collective unconscious. Would not James Joyce have reason enough to curse his own artistry as Daedalus did? The wonderful Wings of Art are bought at the highest price imaginable, a level of self-sacrifice not stopping short of the “accidental” sacrifice of others, especially those closest to you. So beware of the envy of the great artists and other personages of history. You never know how steep a price they paid for their “success” or genius. In the same vein, we may look at another great artist, Michelangelo Buonarroti, who doesn’t leave things to chance. He does not blame the Wheel of Fortune nor the Stars, any more than Divine Beauty or Fate for the sacrifice that must be made in the name of art. The price to be paid, however, seems to lie in the embrace of the key opposites of Love and Death. As we can read in Michelangelo’s sonnet “The Artist”: The ill I flee, the good that I believe, In thee, fair lady, lofty and divine, Thus hidden lie; and so that death be mine, Art, of desired success, doth me bereave. In this bereavement of life Michelangelo makes death his own. In the most passionate investments of our lives, we burn our lives away as a candle from both sides. The fall of all Icaria, all “eternal children,” is a question of fate. No doubt they were all served a bad turn on the Wheel of Fortune. Were these pueri aeternitatis? Eternal youths only guilty of being there in the wrong place and at the wrong time? Or is the artist’s ambition a self-fulfilling prophecy of dismemberment and death? Michelangelo doesn’t seem to think so: Love is not guilty, then, nor thy fair face, Nor fortune, cruelty, nor great disdain, Of my disgrace, nor chance nor destiny, If in thy heart both death and love find place At the same time, and if my humble brain, Burning, can nothing draw but death from thee. Michelangelo dispenses here with the panoply of excuse-making that makes mortals want a scapegoat for their sorrows and disappointments. This level of ethical responsibility does not come about by chance. Despite Fortuna’s supreme status as Imperatrix Mundi, “Empress of the World,” in every act of transcendence the hand of human freedom interweaves the subjective thread of our lives into the fixed strings of the warp of Necessity. Using the needle of Chance, the soul traces its path through the  given conditions of objective existence. The interblending of both love and death is, therefore, nobody’s fault. It’s not even a matter we need to lament, as the lamentations of Michelangelo very nicely presage a key psychoanalytic insight into the nature of psychic energy: the intrinsic unity of Eros and Death-Drive are the fundamental poles of its dynamic and structures.

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)