Tarot and the Tree of Life

by Isabel Radow Kliegman

  Still another interpretation is that this person, far from doing nothing, far from being indolent, is bringing this cup into his life, as indeed he has attracted the other three. This then becomes an image of centering ourselves, so that we know what we really need and want, and then attracting it—sucking it out of the universe, quietly drawing it into our life instead of scurrying around, getting involved in a lot of activity, and raising a lot of dust. Magnetizing our desires, rather than chasing them. You know, we go back to the notion of Abracadabra: as it is said, so shall it be. And isn’t that what affirmations are? After all these years, finally we come back to affirmations: the notion of the relationship between what we say and what happens to us. So this is a card of sending out the kind of mental energy that pulls into our life what we want and need.

  There is in the Four of Cups the suggestion of the Buddha sitting under the bodhi tree in meditation, cross-legged and undistracted. But there’s also the suggestion in the crossed arms of holding back and keeping ourselves safe from the world. There is a defensiveness in this posture, the suggestion of being closed off at the heart chakra, the solar plexus, or somewhere in between. Perhaps the figure is too recently out of a relationship (or three) to be ready to receive the love now being offered—not because the love is flawed, but because there has not yet been enough healing to risk further vulnerability. It is unclear whether the eyes are closed or the eyelids merely lowered, but the figure in the Four of Cups is clearly turned within, feeling rather than looking out. He is unaware of the mountain, always the symbol of pure, objective truth, truth beyond subjective feeling. Again we are off balance in Chesed, in need of form to balance feeling.

  Five of Cups

  We move on to Gevurah and the Five of Cups. Gevurah, we will remember, carries a force that is difficult and painful. Gevurah means severity, strength; it means judgment and is related to the left hand of God. It forces us to deal with the judgment we need to exercise in our own lives.

  We have in the Five of Cups a terribly sad image men invariably see as male and women as female. In fact, most people I know relate to it as a photograph of themselves. What we see is simple and clear: a figure shrouded in black, head hung in a posture of grief, faces three overturned cups while two full cups remain behind.

  This is clearly an image of mourning. There is a river, perhaps the River Styx, the river of death, which runs through Hades in Greek mythology. Or maybe it’s the River Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, which also runs through Hades. We see a little bridge that crosses the river to what looks to be a quite comfortable house. So one very common interpretation of the card is that there is no use crying over spilled milk. “If you would just turn around and see everything you still have to be grateful for, everything you don’t have to be unhappy about, if you would just recognize that you haven’t lost everything, you could cross that river and get on with life.” That is both true and extremely important.

  It also very much misses the point. The question is not whether this figure should turn around, see what life still has to offer, cross the river, and get on with life. The question is when!

  If I’m a mother, and I see my four-year-old son run over by a truck, what is my reaction? Do I throw up my hands in joy and proclaim my good fortune that I have three other children? Do I skip back into the house to play with them? To take denial to this extreme reveals it for the unauthentic response it is. Yet in more subtle forms, many of us are subject to it.

  What I have described is an enormously painful place, and there is no one reading this book who hasn’t been there, and there is no one reading this book who will not be there again. The question is not whether we’re going to be there; the question is whether we’re going to allow ourselves to feel the appropriate feelings when we are there.

  Pain hurts! We can’t wait to get out of it! When we’re little kids and we see something we want on the hot stove, we reach out to get it and our hands get burned. Nobody has to tell us to pull our hands back! Nobody has to explain to us why we should! Ow! That hurts! Our natural response to pain is to get away from it. And that’s true for suffering, too.

  Am I advocating wretchedness? Should we ache forever? Of course not. But most people don’t have that problem. The problem most people have with grieving is not that they stay in it too long. The problem most people have with anguish is that they won’t stay in it at all. We can’t get away from it fast enough! There is another reason we are all so anxious to get away from pain (as if we needed one). It makes us feel helpless.

  What is the first thing many people do with hurt? Convert it immediately into anger. Anger makes us feel powerful and strong! “Look at me! I’m charging around screaming! I’m yelling; I’m raging; I’m swinging at things! I’m frightening people! They are reacting to me. I’m no pathetic victim, reduced to useless crying and passive suffering.” That’s the way a lot of people deal with pain. They flat out deny it, turn it into rage. We can see it in their eyes, in their body language.

  There is a final problem with pain, apart from the present misery that reduces us to inaction and humiliating impotence: when we are in it, we don’t know how long it’s going to last. I always think when I look at this card of the signs on the Los Angeles freeways: three miles to Fairfax, two miles to Fairfax, one mile.…Where are these signs when we really need them? What we need is a signboard that says, “Three years until you never think about this again, six months until it becomes bearable, two months until you have a two-hour stretch when it doesn’t occur to you at all.” We might be able to stick with it then and go through the agony we have to go through. But we can’t count “how many days” until we get over the loss of a child or the death of a parent. We are only told how many shopping days there are until Christmas.

  Yet somewhere, unmarked on the calendar, is the day we get through unscathed. We look back on it and say, “You know, I didn’t think about him once all day!” If we knew when it was going to be, even if it were years away; if at the end of each day of suffering, we could cross a day off the calendar and say, “I’m one day closer to being free of it,” we could somehow find a way to make it without falling into despair and running away from the torment. But that day is there. We’ve got to believe it’s there. That is the meaning of the Five of Cups: to stay in pain as long as we need to.

  I once did a short reading in which the card turned up reversed. When this card turns up reversed, you know the person is in trouble, because the reversal suggests denial. I said to the querent (the person asking the question), “Have you recently lost someone you loved?” and she said no. I asked, “Have you suffered any loss?” and she said no. “It doesn’t have to be recent,” I persisted. “Can you think of anything?” She thought a while, and finally said dispassionately, “Well, my mother died, but that was a year ago.” Muffling my astonishment, I asked, “How long do you think you should (and I purposely used the word should) grieve for your mother?” To my further amazement, she answered me with a number. She thought about it and said, “A year.” “I don’t agree with that at all,” I told her. “You grieve until you’re through grieving, and the place in you that mourns doesn’t care what your conscious mind thinks about it. Your conscious mind does not get a vote. Your rational mind does not get to decide how long you ‘should’ grieve.” At that point, she suddenly broke down, and she said something that made me cry, too. It was naive, but it expressed an emotional truth. She said, “I worry about her sometimes. I worry about her being in the ground, and I worry if she’s cold.” Now, of course it’s only the body that’s in the ground. We know that. But the fact is that it was the body of her mother. That was the feeling the card reflected, and it appeared upside down because she had been repressing it.

  When the bloody warrior planet Mars strikes, we have to mourn, to allow ourselves to hurt. We have to stay with the pain until it changes something in us and releases us. Only then can we release it. But we can’t decide from a logical, quantifying place how much pa
in we’re going to allow ourselves to feel. We just have to be brave enough and have enough faith—in God, in the universe, and in ourselves—to know that somehow, if we allow the process to complete itself, we will come through. So yes, this is a card of grieving. First we have to cry, “I have lost the use of my legs! He was the drunk driver! He walked away! I lost the use of my legs.” Then we can turn around to the two upright cups and say, “Life isn’t really over. I still can see; I can communicate; there are still good things in my life!” Only then is it time to cross the bridge and begin again. When we have experienced Gevurah’s dark night of the soul and submitted to God’s judgment for the restoration of karmic balance, when we have endured the severity of the experience and exercised our judgment to stay with our pain until we have learned the spiritual lesson, then we can be released from suffering.

  The right shoulder, arm, and hand of Chesed and the left of Gevurah meet at the throat chakra, the chakra of communication. In the Four and Five of Cups, we see images in which there is no avenue of expression. We may chant to the Four of Cups and sob to the Five or bring the images together in spontaneous song. Perhaps we can use the voice of our pen to express what these images release from our unconscious. For most of us, the left hand offers us the opportunity for automatic writing; the right, more directed, conscious pursuits. Both efforts would be well spent in relation to these powerful cards.

  Six of Cups

  Now we move to Tiferet, beauty, which is the sixth sefirah on the Tree, and we find the Six of Cups, a card that is apparently simple at first glance. We see two children in the courtyard of what looks like a wealthy estate. It is a card of unutterable sweetness; it is not only filled with cups, but the cups are filled with flowers! We see a little girl three or four years old, looking up adoringly at her brother, who is five or six. He is offering her white flowers. She thinks he’s wonderful, and the card is just as sweet as can be—until we look a little more closely.

  The first thing many of us notice is that there is something odd about the figure of the little boy. We begin to wonder whether he is a child or whether we are in fact looking at a dwarf. That would explain the disproportionately large upper body. If that is the case, the meaning of the card changes dramatically. What we are actually seeing then is a dwarf adored by someone who is too little to know that he is “abnormal.” We are reminded of Ghirlandaio’s painting of the loving upturned face of a child who sees only his beloved grandfather and not the disease that has ravaged the old man’s face. Sadly, the dwarf cannot expect to receive such love except from a very small and unquestioning child.

  Who is the figure retreating in the background? Is he the caretaker, his work on the grounds completed? Or is he an abandoning parent, leaving the children entirely on their own, in their sweetness and innocence? Let us turn our attention next to the shield bearing the diagonal cross of the martyred Saint Andrew. The suggested martyrdom forces us to focus on the question of why the image of the Six of Cups shows up in Tiferet.

  Tiferet, as we may recall, is the place of the sacrificed god, the place of Christ consciousness. It is the place of the wounded warrior. Why is the cross of the martyr in the card of children? The shocking answer is that children are always martyred. William Wordsworth, in his magnificent “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” tells us that we come to Earth “trailing clouds of glory.” The god-spirit, fresh from Keter, is suddenly subjected to all the pain and harshness of Malchut. The soul is sacrificed to the rigors of conformity, socialization, arbitrary rules, rigidity, rejection, disillusion, and “all the natural shocks that flesh is heir to,” in Shakespeare’s words. Between incarnations we choose our wounds. We choose to be wounded so that the warrior we emerge to be is feeling, as well as strong. Often the martyrdom is of such proportion that it is beyond bearing. My practice as a Tarot reader affirms John Bradshaw’s assertion that one in three children is sexually molested. When we add to this figure other forms of physical abuse and to that, emotional and mental abuse, the reality becomes staggering. It takes a lifetime of work and great faith to believe that there is a matrix from which we chose our experiences for our own karmic growth. So yes, children are always martyred.

  As appalling as this notion is, what I am about to say is still more horrifying. There is one sense in which the children must be martyred.

  When children are very small, we have to promise them that we will always be there for them, that we will always take care of them, that we will never let anything bad happen to them, that they are 100-percent safe. I have a five-year-old niece whose closest friend was recently killed in an automobile accident. She is plagued with nightmares and in such terror that she doesn’t want to leave the house, much less get into a car. Her parents have to tell her, “It’s not going to happen to you! It can never happen to you! You don’t have to worry about it.”

  When small children first see someone in a wheelchair or a blind person walking with a cane, they become very frightened. They feel their own vulnerability. They are so little. They don’t know how to cross the street; they don’t how much a quarter is; they can’t read. Children are so helpless that unless their parents tell them, “You’re all right, you’re safe. I’d never let anyone hurt you,” they wither. Research has shown that very small children, two or three years old, give up on life if they don’t get reassurance and nurturing. It’s too scary for them. They either die or they become schizophrenic. They totally withdraw from the world. We have to make them this promise of total safety.

  What happens when little Georgie is no longer four years old, and I’m no longer putting a bandage on his knee and kissing his boo-boo and telling him it’s all better now? Now Georgie is sixteen, and he says, “Oh, Mom! I didn’t do my term paper, and it’s due tomorrow. You know a lot about the Civil War. Just type something for me fast, will you?” I say, “Excuse me? Whose term paper is this? You mangled it. Fix it! You stay up all night and type it, or you explain it to the teacher.” And he says, very rightfully, “But you said you’d never let anything bad happen to me! If I go to school without the paper, I’m going to fail! Are you going to let that happen to me?” And I say, “You bet.” And that’s betrayal. I lied. I promised him something, and I was lying, and I knew I was lying at the time.

  When our kids are busted for drugs and hauled off to the police, what is the devoted parent to do? We remember what we swore to our children; shall we go down to the police station and say, “You’ve got this all wrong! Actually, my friend and I were having a little party and it was our stash; it had nothing whatever to do with my son.”

  If we don’t lie for the boy, he’ll be arrested, and he may go to jail. We promised him we’d protect him from anything bad. To be honorable, not to mention consistent, don’t we have to spare him the terrible consequences of his behavior?

  We could follow this course. That’s how we raise nice little sociopaths, people who have no sense of responsibility. So what are we to do? Do we tell kids when they’re two years old, “Stand on your own two feet. Yes, you could be killed in a car crash. You just have to take your chances”? Or do we, when we are dealing with teenagers who are being irresponsible, say, “Don’t worry. I’ll hide you; I’ll take care of it”?

  There is only one remaining alternative. We have to martyr our children. We have to lie to them; we have to betray them. There is a time in their lives when they have to feel totally protected although they aren’t, and there is a time when they have to take full responsibility for their actions.

  The Six of Cups is a card of sacrifice for the parent as well as for the child. The retreating adult carries a spear. A time comes when we cannot protect our children, no matter how much it hurts us to do what we know is the right thing to do. No, I will not write a sick note for you saying that I had a cold compress on your forehead all day if you were at the beach surfing. I won’t do that. It hurts me to refuse, but I know I must. Our crucifixion as children is to be betrayed. Our crucifixion as adults is to betray the ones
we love most.

  The good news is that resurrection follows crucifixion, and the sacrificed gods—Osiris, Balder, Jesus—don’t stay dead. Even Orpheus and Proserpina returned from Hades, the kingdom of the dead. The variety and meaning of sacrifice notwithstanding, all these myths share an ultimate meaning: return brings a new perspective, a new understanding, a lucidity that comes to us in no other way. With Tiferet comes the sun in all its blinding brilliance. With the sun, our hearts re-emerge from the darkness of our sacrificial night, and there is beauty in the transformation we have survived.

  Seven of Cups

  Next we move to the Seven of Cups, which is in Netzach. Netzach is an energy of movement and passionate Venusian feeling. The Seven of Cups shows a figure standing in silhouette with seven cups hanging in the air. Some of them hold overflowing jewels, castles, victory wreaths, and angels. In the others are a dragon, a serpent, and a ghost-like figure. On one, a skull seems to confront us. This is the card of projection and fantasy. We see here someone who stands with his head literally in the clouds! He has no reality check. This figure in the Seven of Cups is operating totally on feeling; there’s no balance. Netzach carries energy which needs to be balanced by Hod. Without the balance of rational mind, projection results.

  The projection seems to be of a negative sort. The figure is in silhouette, and the raised hand is stiff and suggestive of fear. Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper depicts such a hand. The painting reveals the dual nature of Jesus: the left hand, representing his divine nature, is upturned as a gift. It says, “I will be betrayed. I will be crucified. It is part of God’s plan. I must suffer.” The right hand represents Jesus’ humanity. Palm down and tense, like that in the Seven of Cups, it shows his fear of what lies ahead.