Tarot and the Tree of Life

by Isabel Radow Kliegman

  How does the Nine of Pentacles relate to Yesod, the Foundation, and the Moon? The moon, you will recall, has long been associated with the unconscious, casting an eerie light that cuts through our ordinary way of looking at things. Objects at hand lose their familiarity and seem to demand a fresh look. What we perceive by the pale white light of the moon is often what we project. The imaginings, fears, demons, and imps of our own shadow conjoin with the shadow of the sun, the underside of the sun, the reflected light that is invisible by day. As the moon is the hidden light of the sun, so the unconscious is our own hidden light and, as we have previously discussed, the foundation of our lives. What we hold to be true in this hidden shadow of our being is what will manifest in our lives—modern depth psychology has its basis in this truth. The Nine of Pentacles holds out the assurance to us that, if we can truly accept and know ourselves well enough to discipline our passions, we are assured of serenity and abundance.

  Yesod is associated with the axis that runs from the base of the spine to the genitals. In the chakra system, this encompasses our most deeply rooted instincts: survival and procreation. How safe do we feel in the world? How comfortable are we with our sexuality? Our most profound and least understood feelings are buried in these least-conscious chakras, yet they constitute the foundation of the lives we manifest. The Nine of Pentacles, in fully accepting herself, magnetizes the abundance of which she feels worthy and is serene in solitude.

  Ten of Pentacles

  Finally we come to Malchut and the Ten of Pentacles. It’s one of the cards in the Tarot we have the most difficulty seeing. We keep feeling that we want to get around behind the pentacles so we can see what’s going on. They seem to be in the way. This is the danger of the Suit of Pentacles: allowing material things to become so important that we lose track of the animating force within. We are all capable of letting the money or the beautiful home or the brand new car get between us and our relationships with other people.

  In the Ten of Pentacles we see a multigenerational family and a grand manor house. Inspection of these images reveals many symbols, but the card remains unclear. We see another Romanesque archway—we have seen one in the Ace of the suit—beside which sits an old man. Is he sitting at the entrance to a courtyard, looking in, or is he looking out from a courtyard at the couple and child? It is a perspective that can shift.

  What is the relationship between the man and the woman in the Ten of Pentacles? They seem to be saying something to each other, but we don’t get the feeling that it’s necessarily drawing them closer together. Quite the most interesting question for me is, “Is the lady arriving or is the lady leaving?” Is she being lured into a relationship with family, or is she saying, “Good-bye, Charlie, I’ve had it! I can’t take this anymore! I need to be able to stretch out my arms without knocking my elbow on a pentacle!” And why is the young man holding a spear? Is he going to accompany her as protector, or is he barring her entry?

  The Ten of Pentacles is cluttered. There is a sense of unrelatedness among the people. Nobody is paying any attention at all to the old man, who at least should be acknowledged as an authority figure and almost certainly as one of wisdom. Surely his robe is more than opulent; it is mysterious and covered with provocative symbols. Is that a lyre we see? A throne? Where in fact does the cloak leave off? Perhaps he is a magician, a wizard in disguise. The gods of Mount Olympus often came to earth in disguise to see how they would be treated when taken for ordinary humans. In any case, we see wisdom ignored and age isolated.

  The little child clings, perhaps, to the woman’s robe, but he seems in his own world, lonely. The only actual touching involves the two dogs, hunting dogs, generally held to be the most loving. This is a family that seems unable to reach out to one another. Both the child and grandfather depend, for basic animal comfort, on their canine friends.

  We have much wealth here. We have a family crest in which there is also a pair of scales. How much weight is being given to the coin and how much to the pentagram, the star within? We see depicted the belief that “more is better,” when in fact appreciating more is better. Accumulating more is worse.

  On the positive side, we find that the ten pentacles form none other than the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. We will find this image nowhere else in the Tarot. What can this be meant to convey? The suggestion, I believe, is that with appreciation, all gifts can be transformed into what they should be, spiritual riches far beyond their material value.

  In the Ace of Pentacles we found a Romanesque archway leading from a sequestered garden to the mountains of pure truth. In the Ten, we find another of these mystical gateways leading to the Tree of Life. The truth to which this gateway leads us is that by flipping our perspective, we can recreate the Garden of Eden at any moment. When the ten pentacles forming the Tree of Life become the focus rather than the distraction, when we see the holy pattern rather than the individual coins, we restore blessing to our lives and love to our relationships. We do this simply. We do it with a barucha, a prayer, and with kavanah, holy intention. We make the moment kadosh, holy, by remembering who we are.

  Malchut, the kingdom, is the earth plane and the planet Earth. It is a dangerously comfortable place for Pentacles. We are involved in a study of balance in this work; pentacles in the place of Earth, while offering us the only Kabbalistic Tree of the Tarot, can also clutter our lives with the material and mundane.

  Malchut is associated not with a chakra but with the soles of the feet. Malchut is the sefirah to which action is appropriate. Whether the lady is departing or returning and accompanied or alone, action is implied. She is setting out upon or coming back from some quest in the world at large.

  The danger and challenge in Malchut is exacerbated by the Suit of Pentacles: the danger on this earth of accumulating things while forgetting the Creator of all we treasure most and the animating force that is its true value. But with this danger comes the opportunity to remember the star in the coin, to remember who we are, and to set out in the world bearing the Kabbalistic Tree as our shield and guide.

  CHAPTER 4

  Cups: Plumbing the Human Heart

  WE HAVE SAID that each suit of the Tarot represents a way to spirit. The way of Cups is the way of love. Love is so powerful an energy that Emmet Fox, the Christian theologian, tells us that with enough love, there is absolutely nothing that cannot be accomplished, no barrier that cannot be broken down, no wall that cannot be scaled, no situation that cannot be reversed. If we look around us in our everyday lives, we see expressions of this all the time.

  I don’t know how many of you have seen the film or read the book My Left Foot. They dramatize a clear example of the power of love in the perfectly true story of a man born with so crippling a disease that he had no control over any part of his body but his left foot. Eventually and with great difficulty he taught himself to speak, but as a child he seemed mentally defective as well. Here was someone who might have been tossed aside as a total loss, a human being the Spartans would have abandoned on a mountaintop to freeze or starve to death within hours of his birth. Yet this person became an accomplished writer and painter. He married and lived as normal a life as the restrictions of his physical body allowed. The limitations on his life were all physical; they weren’t spiritual, they weren’t emotional, and they weren’t mental. What freed him? The love of his mother. It was her refusal to give up on him, her refusal to believe that he was hopeless, her insistence that he be treated with respect, and her patience in the way she spoke to him, even before she believed that he could understand, that ultimately redeemed him.

  However, the Suit of Cups does not represent love alone. It represents emotions in general, negative as well as positive. I am not in favor of hatred. I am not in favor of jealousy. I do not advocate resentment. I am not saying that it is wonderful to be in despair. What I am saying is that all of these emotions exist. And because they exist, they must be acknowledged and permitted expression along with all the rest of human experi
ence pictured in the seventy-eight cards of the Waite Tarot.

  There is a problem with the positive thinking and affirmations so often advocated in popular self-help books. While they have a place, they can pull us off balance. Balance—that’s all we see in Tarot; that’s all we see in Kabbalah. The central Pillar of Balance in the Tree of Life serves as a gravitational focus between the two extreme Pillars of Mercy and Severity. When we are not striving for balance, when we are striving only for perfection, we are prone to what I see as the most dangerous psychological state possible: denial. A woman I know recently said, “My boyfriend wouldn’t make a commitment to me. He said he loved me, and I was crazy about him, but he just couldn’t make a commitment. Now, one year later, he has made a commitment to someone else. I keep thinking I have forgiven him, but I find I have to keep doing it over and over again.” Although she is a good person, clearly on a spiritual path, and although it is wonderful that she has affirmations on her bathroom mirror about forgiving and being entitled to abundance, she is subject to all the emotions of the rest of humanity. There is a time to forgive, and it comes after honestly experiencing harsher, darker feelings.

  We want to open ourselves to good things. We can miss them if we are not open to them. But to expect life to be a symphony, to imagine that we’re going to leap from bed every morning feeling refreshed, joyful, bountiful, and loving to our enemies as well as our friends, is to set ourselves up for frustration and disappointment at best. We must be aware of all of our feelings, and we must be honest with ourselves about those feelings whatever they are: discouragement as well as hope, despair as well as euphoria, and fury as well as serenity. So if I say the Suit of Cups is the suit of emotions and that it covers all the negative emotions as well as the positive ones, I’m not saying that this is the way things should be—only that this is the way they are. To deny the truth is to invite trouble.

  Of course it is important to forgive, and it is healing for us to let go of anger. But when? When do we expect to forgive the mugger? While we’re being stabbed? We need time to process our feelings. We have a multitude of reactions and we have to allow them all. After we have them, after we experience them fully, after we go through them completely—only then can we release them. But we can’t take the short way around; there are no honest shortcuts. The Suit of Cups is the suit of all emotion.

  As we have observed in relation to the Suit of Pentacles, every suit and every card has its shadow side as well as its light side. Every suit has its way to spirit as well as its flaw. The way of Pentacles to spirit, we suggested, is the way of service and appreciation; the flaw is the tendency toward accumulation—getting caught up in the material, forgetting the star and remembering only the coin.

  In the Suit of Cups, there is a twofold flaw, a twofold danger. One is getting caught up in negative feelings. We’ll talk about these in detail when we look at the court cards. The other flaw of the Suit of Cups is passivity. Cups, representing emotion and associated with water, seek their own level, and we can feel and feel and feel more and more deeply and never do anything about what we are feeling.

  There are people who are so enormously compassionate that they faint at the sight of blood. These are the last people we need around us if we are wounded. If you were bleeding to death, who would you rather have at hand: a skilled and insensitive surgeon who would put down their sandwich, sew you up, and go back to their rare roast beef on rye, or someone who is so full of feelings that they tremble, cry, scream, or faint but can’t even get to a telephone to call for help? We want compassion, we want sympathy, we want deep feeling, we want intense emotion in our lives. But we don’t want feelings alone. Cups need to be married to the other suits. We’ve talked about Pentacles; we saw how Pentacles need Cups. Earth needs water to be fertile. Without water, the earth becomes dry and cannot bring forth life. But without earth, the water runs off and is useless. Cups need Pentacles, too. If there’s no action, if we don’t make some difference in Malchut, the plane of earthly existence, then our most intense feelings aren’t going to help anybody.

  Ace of Cups

  Let’s begin now looking at the individual cards of the suit. We begin as before with the Ace. You will recall that the number-one sefirah is Keter, the crown of the Tree, and our own crown chakra. It is the place where the divine emanation of God’s essence first enters the Tree. And it refers to the Ace, the number-one card in the suit.

  What we see again is an oversized hand, which can only be the hand of God, coming out of the heavens through a cloud, shining with white light, offering us a gift. The gift is a cup, and the cup is overflowing. If there is an image for the line of the Twenty-Third Psalm, “my cup runneth over,” it would have to be the Ace of Cups. There is a sense of joyfulness in this card, of buoyancy and unlimited love. To me it brings to mind Handel’s Water Music, music a friend once described as joy more profound than any sorrow. What a magnificent notion!

  The symbolism of this card is enormously rich and highly spiritual in that it combines the symbols of three great religions. The most obvious of these is the Christian symbolism. The cup suggests the Holy Grail, the goblet from which Jesus drank at the last supper and which caught his blood when his side was pierced at Golgotha. It is the cup for which the knights of the round table went in search. There is, therefore, the suggestion of the Holy Eucharist. We see as well a white dove—a Catholic symbol of the Holy Ghost, the Holy Spirit—dropping a communion wafer into the cup. The wafer represents the body of Christ just as the wine represents his blood. The myth is that every year the wine is refreshed and renewed in its power by the presence of the Holy Spirit dropping the Eucharist wafer into it.

  The cup we see literally overflows. There are five streams. The number five represents human beings with our five digits and five senses. There are five streams because the gift is for us, for human beings. We are the ones who can receive the gift with awareness. This then is the great Christian symbolism.

  When we look at the bottom of the card we see the waters that we know run deep because floating at their surface is the lotus, or water lily. Water lilies have very long stems whose roots, like the Tree of Life itself, are buried in the good, rich, moist earth at the bottom of the water. The lotus grows upward from this dark place, representing the movement of spirit up into a place of divine light. This is Eastern symbolism, associated with both the Hindu and Buddhist religions.

  Finally, there is the symbolism of Judaism in this card as well, in the little droplets of water. To understand these droplets requires a digression from the Ace of Cups of some length. However, the symbolism recurs with sufficient frequency and import in the Tarot to justify a full exploration of its significance.

  The name of God in Hebrew is never pronounced, or as Rabbi Don Singer would say, “God is nameless.” He can have no name because we cannot know His essence. When we name something, it suggests that we know what it is. It confers a kind of power over what is named. I can say, “Bring me the chair,” if I know the word for chair. I now have control over the chair and the way in which it is manipulated. But since there is no way for us to grasp what or who God is, there is no way for us to give a name to that energy, that being.

  God first speaks to Moses from a burning bush, commanding him to lead the children of Israel out of Egypt. Moses asks this voice, “Who shall I say is sending me to lead the children of Israel out of slavery?” God replies, “I am as I am,” or “I am that am,” or “I am Who am.” In other words, “You can’t put a name on Me, because if you name Me, you distinguish Me from something that I am not. If you say, ‘That’s a chair,’ you distinguish the chair from what is not the chair. I am ‘Amness.’ You can’t distinguish Me from anything, because I am everything; everything is in Me.” Rabbi Ted Falcon understands this to mean, “Everything that partakes of being is an expression of Me. How could it be if it did not partake of being, which is My essence? I am being!” Martin Buber translates this mysterious reply as “I will be there for y
ou.”

  Because we cannot name God, we represent His name by the Holy Tetragrammaton, four Hebrew letters: Yod He Vav He. As an interesting aside, pronunciation of Yod He Vav He as “Yahwah” or “Jehovah” reflects a fundamental confusion since as Rabbi Falcon puts it, the rules of the Hebrew language do not allow the necessary placement of vowels in order to make the Holy Tetragrammaton pronounceable.

  Rabbi Steven Robbins concurs when he says that “the rules of vocalization in Hebrew are almost impossible to apply to the Yod He Vav He.” He refers to it as “the most nebulous of pronunciations—two breaths, as insubstantial as it can be.”

  Rabbi Stan Levy interprets the Yod He Vav He as a formula, an abbreviation. He explains that Moses is really saying to God, “Tell me who you are,” and the answer, as each of us knows, can never be a name. God responds to Moses’ real question, which is not for a label, but for the reassurance we all need in times of crisis. God seems to be saying, “I will be there for you” or “I will be present is who I am.” Rabbi Levy likens the Yod He Vav He to Einstein’s E=MC2. Is it a name? In a sense, it is the name of an equation. But, as Rabbi Levy asks, “How would you pronounce it? It is not designed to be expressed or pronounced.”

  Again, Rabbi Singer reminds us that scribes writing the Yod He Vav He entered the vowels from Adonai or Aloheynu as a reminder that this was not a name to be pronounced but an “ineffable name” to be replaced by “Adonai” or “Aloheynu” when we read or speak! So holy is this combination of letters, and so powerful, it could be breathed only by the high priest of the Temple of Jerusalem (before its destruction two thousand years ago) and only on the Day of Atonement. As an aside, Rabbi Mordecai Finlay refers to Adonai, which means Lord, as a code word. The Yod He Vav He that it signals, however, he translates as “Cause of All Being.” He then reflects on the consequences this confusion has had on all of us in the history of Western civilization and the lives of women in particular. You don’t have to be a feminist to imagine the effect of a Bible rendered with that single change.