Tarot and the Tree of Life

by Isabel Radow Kliegman

  People can go through a temporary Seven-of-Swords-reversed phase after a painful disappointment. If a relationship ends badly, involving lies, it is only natural to react warily for a while. But people to whom you need prove yourself on every occasion, who are as prone to suspicion after years of friendship as on first acquaintance, need to work with this card. So when the Seven of Swords appears reversed, we must ask ourselves, “Why is it so hard for me to keep the jury out for a while before I trust somebody? I don’t have to trust on sight. If I have a good feeling toward someone, it probably means that I’m a loving person, not that the person is trustworthy.” Or conversely, “Why am I never fully open to anyone? Who damaged that part of my spirit? If I believe in no one, it probably means I’m too suspicious, not that I have never met anyone honorable and solid.”

  Mark Kampe, a friend and colleague, has come up with a particularly rich insight regarding the Seven of Swords and its place in Netzach. If Kabbalah is indeed a study in balance, the playfulness and fervor of Netzach can be understood as relieving the potentially immobilizing power of intellect carried by Swords. This perspective becomes immediately persuasive in relation to the succeeding image. The prankster, with lateral thinking, has come up with a creative solution to an embattled situation: it will be hard for the enemy to attack with five of their seven swords gone; with a little luck, they’ll fight among themselves over who shall wield the remaining two.

  Eight of Swords

  We move next to the Eight of Swords, which is in Hod, the place of intellect. Since we have the suit of intellect in the place of intellect, we see exactly what we would expect when intellect is totally out of balance. As Ram Dass says, mischievously misquoting Descartes, “I think, therefore I am…confused.” There is a place for thinking, but it will lead to confusion if it is cut off from the other functions of consciousness. At that point we begin to obsess and despair, because we think if we can’t figure out the solution to a problem, that means there isn’t one. What crust! What arrogance! “I can’t figure it out; therefore, there’s no solution.” As I once read, “Nobody knows enough to be a pessimist.” There’s always the wild card. There’s always what we can’t foresee.

  When Andrew Lloyd Webber was asked to write the music for Phantom of the Opera, he refused. He hadn’t read the story, but he “knew” what it was about and he didn’t want to be bothered. Why did he change his mind? Because he happened (coincidence being God’s way of remaining anonymous, as they say in The Course in Miracles) to be walking past a used-book store, and he happened to see an old paperback of The Phantom of the Opera selling for twenty-five cents. He thought, “For twenty-five cents, I’ll see what it says.” That’s why we’ve all been treated to his extraordinary score. We don’t know enough to be pessimists. When we think we do, we find ourselves blindfolded and trapped.

  The Eight of Swords depicts a woman in a red gown, blindfolded and bound, standing on marshy ground amid eight swords. She is alone; behind her at a distance is a castle on a hill. When we look at the card, we may see at first a figure surrounded by swords. Yet this is not the case. This card is the Eight of Swords: there are three swords on one side of her and five on the other. That exhausts the eight. That means that no swords can be at her back. She’s not surrounded.

  The Eight of Swords is the card of preconception, the natural result of Swords in Hod. Hod, we recall, is the final sefirah on the Pillar of Severity. Hod means “splendor” and “glory.” It is associated with the wonders of consciousness, the dazzling quickness of Mercury, the brilliance of the human intellect. It is in Hod that our capacity for objective, analytical thought originates. Science, law, and all technical thinking are generated from this energy center. It is, however, a sefirah that is off balance in and of itself. It does not fall to the central pillar, but to the left-hand pillar of the Tree. In the Suit of Swords, the needed balance is not supplied. Because Swords, too, carry the energy of intellect and mind, the inherent problem of Hod is exacerbated. Hod provides the needed structure and containment for the energy of Netzach, but the Suit of Swords brings to Hod not energy, but more ideational form. Isolated from emotion, intuition, and groundedness, our thoughts become cyclical and obsessive. We go round and round within the closed system of our own preconceptions.

  Now preconceptions are very dangerous, because unlike assumptions we can’t question them. How can we question what is preconceptual, what we can’t even articulate as a position we hold? Funny example: A woman in one of my classes called to ask whether she could bring along her cousin that night. I agreed, but when they arrived, I reeled back in shock! The woman arrived with her cousin all right, but her cousin was a man!

  Now, I know what cousin means. I know how you get to be someone’s cousin. But it never occurred to me that a cousin could be a man because when I picture a cousin, I picture my cousins, and they’re all women. If this were an assumption, it would obviously be ridiculous. But because it was a preconception, it never occurred to me to question it.

  I’ve got a better example. You have to take my word that the story is true, because it strains credibility. One of my friends has been married for twenty years to an internationally known geneticist whose lab made a major breakthrough in recombinant DNA research. He is invited to speak all over the world and gets huge honoraria for his speaking engagements. One day my friend went into the kitchen, opened the trash pail and found, sitting atop the garbage, a check made out to her husband for fifty thousand dollars. In the trash. How could this happen? Well, in her family of origin, her mother—in deference to her husband, a busy doctor—always slit open the envelopes before leaving the mail on his desk. In her husband’s family of origin, a slit-open envelope meant, “This mail has already been processed; look at it only if you wish.” So for twenty years, she’d been slitting open envelopes with huge checks in them, he’d been seeing the slit-open envelopes—and throwing them away. It never came to anyone’s attention because she paid all the bills and made all the deposits to their checking and savings accounts. She wasn’t expecting the checks, and he didn’t know they weren’t being deposited. If they had been dealing with assumptions, she might have said, “I assume you’d like me to open the mail for you.” Then he would have said, “That would be great,” or “No, I’ll take care of it.” But they were dealing with preconceptions.

  That’s the danger of preconceptions. We don’t know that we have them, much less what they are. We’re all full of preconceptions. Unless something draws our attention to them, they can exercise an enormous force over our lives that we would never allow if we were aware of them and could question them. If you want to discover your preconceptions, get married. If you are a woman, is there a less-than-conscious expectation that you never need to check the oil in your car? If you are a man, is there a subconscious anticipation that your wife will take the day off when your child has a stomachache? John Bradshaw tells about the difficulties holidays introduce: In his family, presents were torn open rapidly and simultaneously on Christmas Eve. In his wife’s family, presents were opened on Christmas morning one by one, with all eyes on the person unwrapping the gift; the ribbon and paper were carefully saved. How many Christmases were filled with vague irritation, disappointment, and hurt feelings before there was a discussion about what each held to be “the only way” to enjoy Christmas?

  The figure in the Eight of Swords has a number of options. While it’s true that she’s blindfolded and that her arms are bound behind her, to say that she’s trapped is never to have seen a martial arts movie. If her legs and feet are free, she is not trapped. She can edge her way through the marsh, albeit slowly and with difficulty. Or she can make an about-face and head back toward the castle. There’s nothing to prevent her turning around, making the t’shuvah (the return). Often precisely what we need when we’re involved in preconceptions is the capacity to make a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn and just go the other way.

  The Eight of Swords has a political and sociological
interpretation as well. It says that one way in which people have always been kept down or kept victims or kept in bondage is by isolation. This card addresses the need to break seclusion. The figure needs help. It’s why the twelve-step programs work so well. So part of the meaning of the card is that if you think you’re totally alone in your misery and helplessness, find a support group. You’re not the only person who’s ever been violent under the influence of alcohol or drugs. You’re not the only person who has gained fifty pounds because you can’t control your appetite. You’re not the only person who’s ever been promiscuous because you can release anxiety only through sexual contact. Find a support group. Don’t allow yourself to be solitary. This interpretation is supported by the fact that we are not dealing here with the Two of Swords. Until someone unties this figure’s hands, there is no way she can remove her blindfold. The image of the Eight of Swords reminds us that companionship and contact are essential. We are pack animals. We are meant to be gregarious. We are not meant to be alone.

  I remember the year I was working full time in a new demanding sales position and raising a child alone. Either the house wasn’t clean, or I was leaving work early, or my kid wasn’t getting enough attention, or the dogs weren’t getting exercised and brushed. I was the bread winner, housekeeper, and sole parent. I did the marketing; I kept clean laundry in the drawers and hot, balanced meals on the table. I showed up for work on time every day and bore the pressure of making sales and earning commissions. I’m the one who sewed badges on the Girl Scout uniform and took the dogs to the vet. But sometimes my daughter went five days without a shampoo, and the punitive voice of shame would demand, What kind of mother are you? I went around with a nagging feeling of guilt and worthlessness all the time. It wasn’t anything I articulated to myself, because if I had analyzed it, I would have said, “Hey! I’m one person and I’ve got two full-time jobs here! I’m trying to be a great mother and a professional success. I’m not doing so badly.”

  Gloria Steinem has said, “The purpose of the women’s movement is to show that the personal is political.” Is losing your job a personal problem? If you’re going to have a baby, it can affect your job security unless, of course, you’re a man. A man who is going to have a baby doesn’t have to go through pregnancy and delivery. He doesn’t have to struggle with the option of breast feeding. When he shows up for work the very next morning after the baby has been born he hands out cigars. That’s a political problem, not a personal one. More than half the people on this earth are women. That’s something that should be taken into account in our social structure, and in fact, in Scandinavia it is.

  Often what we experience as personal is general, if not universal. We need other people to give us a new perspective on our situation, and, by so doing, reveal the preconceptions that make us feel stuck, trapped, and immobilized when we are not.

  The final meaning of the Eight of Swords is having the courage and faith to move forward even when we can’t see where we’re going and even when we feel helpless. Many people see this woman as stopped dead in her tracks, just plain stuck. But some people see that she’s edging her way forward, doing the best she can under the worst possible circumstances. Perhaps she has come a long way just to arrive where we now see her; perhaps, deprived of clear thought, intuition has guided her to the place from which she can thread her way between the swords.

  We all feel this way immediately after divorce, death, or other traumatic change. We feel this way in the first weeks out of a care unit, where we have detoxed from drugs or alcohol. Our lives are now entirely different—and scary. Can we make it, clean and sober? We don’t know how we’re going to get through the next day, but we know it’s going to be one step at a time. Some even see in the Eight of Swords a certain serenity, a resignation of personal will to a greater will, a certainty that when the time is right help will arrive.

  Netzach, associated with the top of the right hip, and Hod, associated with the top of the left hip, meet at the solar plexus. The prancing figure of the Seven of Swords is perhaps the very one to cut free the lady in the Eight, and trick her out of her preconceptions. In the chakra of solidity, the marsh may become easier to traverse.

  Nine of Swords

  The Nine of Swords is a very difficult card, one of enormous pain. It is arguably the most painful card in the Minor Arcana. We see a ghostly white figure sitting bolt upright in bed in the dead of night, head in hands, entirely alone. Men invariably see this figure as male, and women invariably see it as female. What most people see, in fact, is a photograph of themselves, which has somehow been stolen out of their night-table drawer, for the purpose of reproduction in the Tarot deck. Everyone gets to feel at some time or other the pain portrayed here. As a nine the card falls of course to Yesod, the place of the unconscious. Yesod is where material too painful for us to deal with on a rational level is lodged. It is where our nightmares come from, where, by the light of the moon which belongs to it, our perceptions grow shadowy and distorted.

  Some of us don’t have nightmares, but wake up feeling awful and don’t know why. There have been mornings when I’ve thought to myself, “I’ve been awake for ten seconds. What could I have done in ten seconds to justify feeling this rotten? I haven’t had time to screw up yet!” (I’ll bet I’m not the only person who’s had that experience.) The Nine of Swords represents whatever lurks in the darkness of the unconscious with which we can’t deal on a conscious level. This is a dark card; no light illumines or softens its black background.

  It is interesting to consider the Nine of Swords in relation to the Three of the suit. The Nine is a card of nightmare, anxiety, depression, and despair. Nine after all is the trinity of trinities, the three of threes. The Three of Swords depicts the necessity of taking pain into our heart so it can work the transformation for which it was given to us. But what happens if we don’t allow ourselves to feel the pain? If we sweep it under the rug? It comes back and back and back, at three times its original strength. If we don’t process it when it comes, it just hangs around in the unconscious, festering and growing. We have exchanged lancing pain for chronic depression and melancholy as a way of life. But if we’re able to say, “Oh God, that hurts, that hurts, oh, that hurts, I can’t stand it!” yet stay with it, we are very unlikely, nine months or years down the road, to be subject to the insomnia, nightmare, terrified awakening, or desolation depicted by the Nine of Swords.

  Also of interest is that the swords in the Nine of Swords are not in position to menace the figure in the card. The suggestion is that, the pain being experienced is pain for someone else. Maybe you love someone who is very sick, perhaps in critical condition, or someone who is involved in self-destructive behavior. The cause of our grief and despair is someone other than ourself.

  There is a further extension of this meaning to a kind of cosmic proportion, what the Germans call weltschmerz, “world-sorrow.” Supporting this interpretation is the quilt: the red roses of passionate feeling are interspersed with the signs of the zodiac. These latter suggest that the pain is universal in scope. No matter which sign we are born under, we will share in this experience. It’s not just that I am still in love with someone who doesn’t want me anymore, it’s that this happens all the time. What a world, peopled with heartbroken lovers! It’s not just that I’m worried to death about my father’s health. It’s that everybody’s father eventually dies. Everybody’s! How can we stand it? How can we bear pain that is so great?

  The Nine of Swords also carries a sense of our own mortality. The bed on which the figure sits looks hard and narrow like a coffin. Into its wooden side is carved the image of a satyr chasing a nymph that Keats writes about in his “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Keats says, basically, “How lucky you are! You will never catch her! She will always be young and fresh and consummately desirable. You will always be excruciatingly alive with passion. You’ll never have a chance to be disillusioned or simply bored. You’ll never reach a point where you’re satisfied and, pas
t satisfied, satiated and tired of it. You’ll always be at that pinnacle moment of ecstatic yearning.” Certainly that’s not our experience of life. In reality, we project our dream of perfection onto an object of desire. While we may experience the intense feelings portrayed, they possess us only fleetingly. Instead, if we’re lucky, we get to know our love object as a person and eventually feel the letdown of recognizing their limitations and flaws. Then we’ve got to get down to the hard work of loving that person as a human being. But the euphoric peak moment, that magical, exquisite zenith of desire, is gone forever. That in itself is a loss beyond expression.

  We come to awareness of the ineluctable limitations of mortality in many ways. Imagine what it’s like to be a ballet dancer or a great athlete and to be old at twenty-eight—to know you’ve had it, you’ve bought it, you’re past it at twenty-eight! What is the rest of your life going to feel like? There are people who never recover from that experience. Every country in the world is full of people dragging around their past glory: the former captain of the high school football team who wasn’t good enough to play professionally but could never accept an ordinary job because he had been a hero. His life was over at eighteen, when he graduated from high school. Perhaps you are a scientist who, at sixty, recognizes that his research will never break new ground. Perhaps you are a woman who realizes at forty-eight that you will never have a child. You will never dive the Great Barrier Reef or fly over the Serengeti Plain or see Naples. The sorrow in the Nine of Swords is universal: it is the sorrow over what we have always longed for and now know we will never have; over what we have most prized that has been lost to us, never to return.