Tarot and the Gates of Light

by Mark Horn

  The inner gifts that we find unacceptable become shadow traits that fuel our nightmares, so perhaps the nightmare the figure is awakening from is in fact this unowned gift reappearing as shadow. There is also the possibility that what is unconscious has been expressed, but because it’s not fully conscious, the expression has been unskillful—hurtful. This could be a picture of the grief of someone who has hurt another with sharp words that seemed to come out of nowhere (at least to the speaker).

  Because this is Yesod, we also have to explore the sexual element to the image and its symbols. Swords, like wands, are phallic, and this is a figure alone in bed. Are these the “notches” in the bedpost of sexual conquest without real Connection? This visual could signify the deep emptiness of compulsive sexual Connection. And because there is an addictive quality to Yesodic energy, one can see this image as what is referred to in twelve-step programs as “hitting bottom,” when it feels as though one is as far as possible from the Divine light.

  When considering the interplay between the images of the Four and Nine of Swords, we come to a spiritual truth that many meditation teachers don’t share with students at the beginning of their journey. As you open yourself up to the Sephirotic energies, the chakra energies, or however you characterize the Divine Flow that is tapped into in meditation, over time the blockages within will be revealed. Meditation may feel peaceful and relaxing at first, but it will open you to the hidden emotions and repressed thoughts in the unconscious. When you encounter these consciously for the first time, it can feel like a nightmare.

  In the Four of Swords, we have someone who is experiencing the Flow of Chesed in meditation. It’s a Buddhist metta meditation of Loving-kindness, which begins with Loving the self and then radiating that Love out in ever-widening circles to include all; this is how the Buddhists express Chesed. But it’s also a Night Vigil. The knight may be meditating on Loving-kindness, but he is also watchful for the demons that lie within.

  Going within to tap into Chesed throws a light on the dark places where we don’t feel Chesed and don’t feel we are worthy of Chesed. These are some of the places we must heal in order to be in Relationship, to make a Connection that is spiritually Intimate. Because it is painful to experience these long cutoff emotions, we can see the figure in the Nine of Swords experiencing a dark night of the soul on this inner journey—a night that must be seen through with the open eyes of Chesed and without flinching, fear, or aversion in order to pass through it whole and healed.

  The pleasure of deep Connection—spiritual, emotional, intellectual, and physical—is our birthright. That is the compassionate promise of Yesod of Chesed in Yetzirah, if we use our discriminating intelligence to keep our eyes open and our minds free of projection in the experience.

  Day 6: Yesod of Chesed in Assiyah

  The Nine and Four of Pentacles

  _________within_________

  After the three previous difficult pairs today, this pairing comes as a relief! In the Nine of Pentacles, we see a woman who has channeled the energy of Yesod of Chesed in the world of action to create a garden of abundance. She is enjoying the fruits of a good life that has been earned through disciplined action. It’s not merely a garden, it’s also a vineyard, and in both Jewish and Christian symbolism, the vineyard is a symbol not only of fecundity but also of the spiritual life. In Judaism, the vine represents the people of Israel and the bounty of the Divine. Wine is part of every ritual meal and is sanctified by a blessing that speaks to the transformation from grapes to wine. So of course, this imagery continues through in early Christianity.

  I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinegrower. He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit. You have already been cleansed by the word that I have spoken to you. Abide in me, as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me.

  I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit; because apart from me you can do nothing.7

  In this card, we see the Pentacles shining on the vine. This in fact is profoundly Jewish: all creation is holy.

  But the woman in the Nine of Pentacles is alone in what appears to be a private garden. And Yesod is the Sephira of Connection, Bonding, and Relationship. Perhaps the connection here is to the Divine rather than to another human. It may be that the woman has chosen to give her life to work that helps realize the Divine in the world. In this way, the card can be seen as expressing the joy and rich inner life of spiritual pursuits that are further reflected in the world.

  Then there’s the image of the hooded falcon, a symbol of discipline and sexual self-control. So this card could be seen not only as a turning away from Relationship, but also as the sublimation of the sexual urge into one’s work in the world as a spiritual path. However, not everyone who sublimates his or her sexuality into work does so as a spiritual path. This very sublimation may well be behind a major social development in the United States, where in 2015, for the first time, the number of unmarried adults outnumbered married adults. About thirty-one million of these unmarried adults live alone.8 This doesn’t mean all these people are unhappy or lonely. Many people find fulfillment in life without marriage. But the question is, Where does one put the energy of the natural desire for Connection?

  In the Four of Pentacles, where the Flow is being stopped and held and where it is mediated by the Yesodic energy of the Nine of Pentacles, we have a day where outer Relationships can take a back seat to building financial success for solitary pleasure.

  We could also see the figures in these cards representing stereotypical roles in a heterosexual Relationship—where the man concerns himself with money and may even be secretive about what he earns, while the woman retreats to her garden. Their Relationship suffers because of this division. So this could be a call to consider whether you take either of these roles in Relationship, regardless of gender.

  Still, Yesod of Chesed is very much about Creating a fruitful Bond with another person that is built on Love. So this pair can help you examine your ability to share what you Create with this energy to build Connection.

  Questions for reflection and contemplation: Day 6

  1. (Wands) What fears or defenses does the prospect of Intimacy activate? What is the most Intimate thing you could say to God? Say it in a prayer.

  2. (Cups) Examine any ways that you use your position in the world to block Intimacy; how can you release this block?

  3. (Swords) Do your relationships have a strong enough Foundation to enable the expression of difficult emotions such as anger? What is your experience using substances or behaviors to avoid Intimacy or feeling loneliness?

  4. (Pentacles) In what ways do you channel your desire for connection into your work? In what ways does your Relationship with money affect your ability to be Intimate with another?

  Day 7: Malchut of Chesed

  Accepting Love and Being True to Who You Fully Are in Relationship

  Today is the seventh day of the Omer, which is one week of the Omer.

  Today is the first day that completes a week; it’s the first day we experience the Sephira of Malchut, which, with no energy of its own, receives and reflects all the energy from the nine Sephirot above it. Sounds heady. But the meaning is simple: everything in the world is Divine energy in a multiplicity of manifestations, and it is all here for us to experience, to see it clearly for what it is and celebrate its many blessings. It’s all here for us. So today is the day when each of us should strive to see our place in the world clearly and experience all as a manifestation of the endless outpouring of Divine Chesed. This outpouring is for your sake.

  One word used to define Malchut is Kingship, which can point to the danger of seeing everything as here for you. Because while there have been many Noble monarchs in history who have seen their position as one of service, overall they’re in the minority. Kings ca
n be arrogant. They feel entitled; indeed they have a title, and it’s the highest there is. That’s why Rabbi Bunem Simcha offered the teaching that we should all have two pockets with a note in each. In one, the note reads, “For my sake was the world created.” But when we feel entitled, it’s time to be reminded by the other note that without this Divine outpouring, we are “but dust and ashes.”

  As humans, it’s hard to remember both truths at the same time. But together they are the truth: the world is a manifestation of Divine Love, here for us. Without it sustaining the world (and us) in every second, we are but dust and ashes.

  Day 7: Malchut of Chesed in Atzilut

  The Ten and Four of Wands

  _________within_________

  In the Ten of Wands, we have someone who is experiencing Divine Love in all its manifestations as a burden. It’s become too much to bear all this Love, all this creative energy. We all know someone who has a life filled with blessings, yet all they can do is complain. There is a culture of complaint that comes out of an old superstition that if you say how good things are going, you’ll jinx them. You may know the old Yiddish phrase “kineahora,” said in response to someone saying how good things are going in order to ward off the evil eye. Well, there’s a strategy that goes one step further and doesn’t even admit to how good things are going. So in answer to a question about one’s health, instead of saying, “My health is terrific, kineahora,” someone would say, “Oy, don’t ask,” and launch into a litany of complaints. It’s about an attitude. I’m suggesting that it’s possible that the man in the Ten of Wands is the recipient of great blessings but is responding from a culture of complaint.

  Looking at this card in another way and thinking of the celebration in the Four of Wands, I can also see this card as a man bringing the gifts of Loving-kindness for everyone to share at the celebration. He is the one who has taken the Responsibility to gather the sparks of the shattered vessels. He has taken on the joyous burden of Tikkun Olam.

  Not all of us are strong enough to do this, and while we are enjoined to take Responsibility in repairing the world, we aren’t expected to do the whole job by ourselves. That would be overwhelming (and is in fact one of the dangers of Chesed out of balance). So this card can also be seen as a caution not to take Responsibility for everything. Sometimes the best way to give and receive Love is to share Responsibility.

  Day 7: Malchut of Chesed in B’riah

  The Ten and Four of Cups

  _________within_________

  In Jewish myth, the rainbow is a sign of God’s promise not to send another world-destroying flood. Chesed, though, can be connected to the image of a flood. It washes over and through everything. And as we’ve noted, this can be experienced as either liberating or terrifying (or both). In the aspect we see in the Ten of Cups, though, liberation and celebration are clearly the feelings we’re meant to come away with.

  So here in the Ten of Cups, we have a family of four dancing beneath a rainbow arcing across the sky, with ten cups arrayed within it. Leaving aside the heteronormativity of the scene (after all, the Waite-Smith Tarot was created by people who came of age during the Victorian era, even if they themselves lived unconventional lives), the image and its symbols suggest that this is a very happy family, where it’s okay to feel and express the full spectrum of emotions. Children who grow up in such an environment develop not only good skills of expression but also a Grounded Self-Possession that is experienced by others around them as a kind of Dignity. This is the Sovereignty of Malchut. The children dancing in the card enjoy a sense of security that should be the birthright for all of us but is so often short-circuited by damaged family dynamics. These are children who will grow up to be able to Love fully and completely, whose Love will not impose selfish constraints on another nor result in a need to pretend to be anything other than who they truly are. So while the young man in the Four of Cups still appears to have some block to receiving the Chesed that is rightly his, the ultimate promise of Malchut of Chesed in B’riah is freedom from anything that takes away from fully giving and receiving Love.

  Day 7: Malchut of Chesed in Yetzirah

  The Ten and Four of Swords

  _________within_________

  The Ten of Swords is one of those dramatic cards: people see it in a reading and get upset or become afraid. Some tarot practitioners like to say that it’s nothing to be afraid of, that the card is about the death of something we need to let go of—a defense, an outworn belief, or the thing that really doesn’t want to die: the ego. Nothing to be afraid of here? Have you ever noticed a defense going without some furious resistance?

  There’s a reason this thing that needs to die has ten swords sticking out of its back! It’s strong and hard to kill. Sort of like a psychological or spiritual Freddy Krueger, it’s not gonna die. Like Rasputin, it will have to be shot again and again before it’s really dead, if it ever really is. It hardly seems like we’re in the week of Chesed, right?

  Remember, this is in the world of Yetzirah, of the intellect, and in the suit of Swords, discriminating intelligence. And in the Chesed card, the Four of Swords, we have the knight-to-be in his Night Vigil, keeping watch for the inner demons that must be faced. This is not a battlefield where he will have to kill these demons. It’s an internal landscape where the (not so) simple task is deep awareness without reacting with desire or aversion. Because in meditation, awareness without reaction is the practice that weakens and eventually kills these demons. These demons are the unskillful habit patterns of the mind that are pierced with the discriminating insight of the Ten of Swords, and when these habit patterns are seen and recognized for what they are, they die a little. Sometimes we have to learn to recognize them again and again before they totally die. Sometimes we only need to see them once. But once we have seen them, without aversion, with clarity and Love for ourselves, we are no longer enslaved to them. We are then truly the Sovereign of our soul; we are transformed, free.

  Day 7: Malchut of Chesed in Assiyah

  The Ten and Four of Pentacles

  _________within_________

  The Ten of Pentacles is the last numeric card in the Minor Arcana, and it is the only card in the deck that explicitly depicts all ten Sephirot in the Tree of Life. But unlike the Four of Pentacles, where the figure is interacting with the pentacles, holding tight to three of them, these objects seem to be floating in the air, unseen by all the people pictured in the Ten of Pentacles. Everyone in the card seems to be a recipient of the material benefits of Divine Flow. But where’s the Love? No one seems to be connecting to anyone else. It’s as if everyone in the scene is like the figure in the Four of Pentacles: they have theirs, and they’re not sharing it with anyone else.

  The only reason we call this suit Pentacles is that Waite decided to add the star to the center of the disk in the suit known previously as Coins, and there are two things to consider when we think about this decision. First, that the Pentacles can still be seen as money, as coins. After all, we’re in the world of Assiyah, and as Madonna expressed it so eloquently, “We are living in a material world, and I am a material girl.” However, Einstein taught us that matter multiplied by the speed of light squared is energy, and the star inscribed inside each disk is a reminder that they’re not just matter, they’re not only money, they’re also energy that’s just moving very slowly.

  The issue raised by Malchut of Chesed in Assiyah is whether we’re going to see another person through Madonna’s eyes or Einstein’s. Are you only worth your net worth, or is your value beyond valuation? Is your relationship to others based on material gain, or do you approach everyone else as an individual with equal Dignity, regardless of what’s in their bank account? Because the suit of Pentacles is about practicalities and pragmatism, there’s a danger of relationships becoming transactional: what can you do for me? This sees the other person as a stepping-stone or a tool; in other words, an object, as opposed to an expression of Divine Love made manifest in the world.
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br />   This is the razor’s edge of therapeutic relationships, whether with a healer or a guide of any kind. The role of the guide is to see the Dignity of the client, to see that the client is an expression of Divine Love. But the therapist is also dependent on the client for income. Your feelings about material blessings or, more directly, money, can either strengthen or undermine such a relationship. But approaching this dynamic from a nondual point of view, it’s possible to see the financial arrangement as an expression of one’s spiritual commitment to the relationship.

  When I see the old man in the Ten of Pentacles, I am reminded of a story from the Babylonian Talmud in which Rabbi Joshua ben Levi meets the prophet Elijah and asks him when the Messiah will come. The prophet tells the rabbi to ask the Messiah himself, since he can be found sitting among the beggars outside the city gates of Rome. When the rabbi finds the Messiah and asks him when he will come, he is astounded at the answer: today. However, when the Messiah does not come that day, the rabbi goes to Elijah and says that the Messiah lied to him. But Elijah tells him that the Messiah meant he would come if people would follow his teachings today. It’s highly doubtful that either Waite or Colman Smith knew this story, but I find a real resonance with the image in the card. The old man is the very picture of patience and wisdom. If everyone pictured in the card related to the others by seeing the Divine in them, the Messiah would have no need to come, because God’s Kingdom (and Queendom, since Malchut is also associated with the Shekinah) will have been established here on Earth. And indeed, looking at the Four of Pentacles, we can note that the man in that card sees and interacts with the Pentacles: his feet are planted firmly on two of them, showing that he knows the ground he stands on is holy and he knows “the kingdom of God is within you.”9 When we all know this truth within ourselves and can see it in everyone else as well as in all creation, there’ll be no need for the Messiah to come.