Tarot and the Tree of Life

by Isabel Radow Kliegman

  For years I closed my lectures on the Nine of Swords by saying, “There is, of course, a positive meaning to this card, but I have yet to discover it.” One evening an astrologer came up to the podium beaming and helped me out of my quandary. She pointed out that the zodiacal signs on the quilt were there to remind us that “this too shall pass!” As the planets pass through the different signs, we can absolutely count on shifts and changes. The universe will not leave us stuck in our despair. The axis between the base of the spine and genitals carries our most primitive, basic, and deeply held experiences, but what is buried in Yesod can be moved into consciousness, where we can work with it.

  Ten of Swords

  As difficult as the Ten of Swords is, it is a quite different matter from the Nine, in that the good news is immediately obvious. And the good news is that there is no Eleven of Swords! This is as bad as it’s going to get. We have finally hit bottom! It can’t get any worse!

  The Ten of Swords is an enchanting image of a figure lying face down in the mud in the dark of night with ten swords piercing his back, from neck to buttocks. (In the Royal Fez deck, the swords continue down into the thigh!) The Nine of Swords falls in Yesod, the place of the unconscious, the place of nightmares and fears, depression and those larger-than-life mysteries that come out of our darkness. The Ten of Swords appears in Malchut, the end of a process, a culmination in the world, on Earth. Something ends, but we don’t end. Like the sap of the Tree, we remain mobile.

  When we work Kabbalistically, we work not only down but up the Tree, as well. We have reached the point at which our only choice is a t’shuvah, a return, a turning toward God. Having gone as far as we can go, we’re ready to move back up the Tree. Things have got to get better.

  The relation between the Nine of Swords and the Ten of Swords is subtle and complex. This may read like a joke, but I think a lot of people suffer from never reaching the Ten of Swords place. Let me tell you what I mean. I once arrived at an AA meeting at the same time as an extraordinarily good-looking, athletic young man who came bolting in off his bicycle. He was charming, articulate, and overflowing with good health and good spirits. He had come from a large family get-together. He said, “My family is Irish, and they drink. That’s what they do. They think it’s part of being Irish. They drink until they pass out. That’s what our family gatherings have always been like. We all get together, the aunts and the uncles and the cousins, and we play cards and we drink and we eat and we drink, and then we pass out. Last year I hit bottom. I knew I couldn’t do this anymore. And boy, am I lucky, because I see my uncles sitting around, and they’re forty-eight years old, and they don’t hit bottom. If they get sober now, they’ll still be forty-eight! I look at them and think to myself, ‘I’m so lucky to have done this and be on track again. I could have hung around, drinking for another twenty or thirty years. I’ve got my whole life ahead of me to be sober.’” Those uncles are still at the Nine of Swords place, finding ways to hold their lives together just well enough to keep from having to change. He was lucky to reach the Ten of Swords place, to have to make an end of that self-destructiveness at twenty.

  Some people absolutely have to push things to the limit. I knew a very brilliant young man who had graduated from Harvard in Scandinavian languages. He was of Scandinavian descent, and he had been awarded a Fulbright scholarship to Stockholm University, but when I met him he was a drunk living in a shack in Malibu. He couldn’t afford gas for his car. He could barely afford food. I remember his carefully measuring out a small portion of luncheon meat—that mysterious stuff of an unnatural color that you wouldn’t want to eat even if it were fresh. He was living rent free as a “custodian.” He was brilliant and charming and drunk and desperate.

  The last time I spoke with him, he was teaching Scandinavian languages at a major university and working on his Ph.D. I asked him what had happened to turn him around. He said, “One night, I drove home drunk, and I woke up in the morning to find that I had parked my car a thirty-second of an inch from the tree in the front yard.” He had been one thirty-second of an inch away from killing himself. I guess he thought that was close enough. He really didn’t have to get any closer. He saw the car but he couldn’t remember driving it there. He couldn’t remember parking it. But seeing where it was, he thought, “Time for a change!”

  Whether it’s in terms of humiliation or degradation or physical abuse, some people have to hit bottom before they can see the writing on the wall. Until it comes to a point of clear choice—live or die—they will not make the change. So the Ten of Swords is a “good” card in that it finally puts an end to something that simply has to come to an end. And it can only happen in Malchut, on the planet Earth. We can’t reach that point intellectually in Hod, or passionately in Netzach, or anywhere else on the Tree. Malchut is associated with the soles of the feet; finally, we must walk our talk. We must experience where we “know” we are. Only then does the golden sun rise, promising a new day and the opportunity to get back on our feet again, as the horizon in the Ten of Swords suggests.

  The Ten of Swords reversed can be a serious problem, because it very often represents the end of a relationship, a job situation, an addiction pattern, or whatever, but refusing to admit or accept it. Resisting the awareness. Being in denial. “It’s not over. I won’t let go. I can’t change. It’s not that bad. ”

  On the other hand, the reversal can have positive interpretations. It can mean that things truly aren’t that bad. It’s the end of something, but nothing essential to our lives. We can handle it. Another positive interpretation is that the worst is over, and the swords are about to fall out. The law of gravity eases them out. In that case, the querent is faced with the challenge: “All right, these swords have fallen out of my back. I’m in a resting place now. But I’m the one who got myself into that situation. How am I going to make sure that a year from now I don’t find myself in the same place?” It’s critically important when the card is reversed to see accurately what the problem has been and what changes we must make to keep it from recurring. Otherwise, we may replace our debt to Visa with a debt to MasterCard, or alcohol with cocaine.

  A final observation of great significance was suggested, once again, by Mark Kampe. Appropriately enough it was made at his father Tom’s memorial service, where Mark and I first met. He pointed out that the visible hand of the moribund figure falls into a configuration of blessing, reminiscent of that which we see in the Hierophant (or High Priest) of the Major Arcana. With the ring and small finger crossing over the palm, held down by the thumb, and the index and third fingers open, the suggestion is that part of the holy mystery shall be revealed, while part of the mystery of death shall remain hidden. (You may recall that we have explored this symbol of benediction in relation to the standing figure of the Six of Pentacles.) In the Ten of Swords the great mystery is death—and, as the yellow sky of a newly dawning day implies, rebirth. Whether the death is literal or symbolic, physical, emotional, or even spiritual, our understanding of the transformation is partial at best. Only as we make our return to life can we come to understand the full nature of the death we have undergone.

  With this observation, we leave our exploration of the Suit of Swords. Rare is the reader who does so with regret.

  CHAPTER 6

  Wands: Life More Abundant

  TET’S LOOK BACK for a moment at our work so far. Having compared the values of balance and integration in Kabbalah and Tarot, we contemplated the Suit of Pentacles, associated with Jung’s sensate function and with the element of earth. Its way to spirit is that of appreciation and service; its flaw is accumulation, forgetting that there is always a star in the coin. We examined the Suit of Cups, associated with the feeling function, in Jungian terminology, and the element of water, whose way to spirit is love and whose flaw is passivity or surrendering to dark, negative emotions. And we have explored the Suit of Swords, associated with air and Jung’s thinking function, whose way to spirit is courage and the pur
suit of truth, and whose flaw is harsh criticism and the despair that ensues when we cut the intellect off from our other functions of consciousness.

  If we take a good hard look at the world and just think things through, it becomes clear that we’re not going to get out of this one alive! Thinking does not engender hope, because we can’t prove that there’s anything beyond our material experience. Throughout the ages, brilliant minds, philosophers and saints have tried to prove God’s existence. Saint Anselm, Saint Thomas Aquinas, but also Spinoza, a Jew, wrote such “proofs.” All attempts failed, of course—because for every argument there was a counterargument. The “proofs” all depended on the acceptance of their premises, which were often precisely what were in doubt. But at the Simon Wiesenthal Center during Holocaust Remembrance Week, a rabbi said something very beautiful. He said, “There are no proofs of the existence of God, only witnesses.” Fortunately, we do have among us witnesses whose lives are a testimony to divine energy permeating the world. What more convincing proof of God’s existence could we have than Mother Teresa? So it is not our rational faculty that leads us to apprehend the presence of God in the world, of life beyond life, of life beyond the body. It is something else.

  Each suit needs to be balanced by and integrated with the others. We have seen, for example, that Pentacles, the suit of earth, action, service, and appreciation, need the deep feelings of Cups to keep from experiencing the world as merely a collection of material objects. The Suit of Cups needs Pentacles, so that emotions find useful expression. Cups also need Swords so that, in the face of passionate feeling, we are still able to take a giant step to the side and say, “I’d better think this through. Is this the objective truth of the matter? Or am I being overly sensitive, capricious, overreactive, or whatever?”

  The Suit of Wands is associated with the Jungian function of consciousness called intuition, and intuition is really quite miraculous. It is a way of knowing that has nothing to do with reason and very little to do with perception. It is knowing without having learned. Something has come to mind that is totally new. It is not the result of study or of inductive or deductive processes. If we had scoured our brains, all our ideas, and our entire conceptual framework, we would never have come up with what has suddenly come to us in a flash. What we experience is a miraculous entry into consciousness of something that seems to come from somewhere else. All at once we just know!

  It seems appropriate to me that the element of Wands should be fire, with its quickness, suddenness, and dissimilarity to its source. You begin with a match and a matchbook, and all of a sudden—in a flash—you have a flame, which looks nothing at all like either the match or the matchbook. There’s no way to figure out how you can get fire from these two inert little pieces of cardboard. That’s the way intuition flashes into consciousness.

  The Suit of Wands represents as well life energy of all forms, what Freud called libido. It is the animal energy that drives life, the vital force that we feel surging up within us. And although those two—intuition and libido—may strike us as totally different from one another, they really are related, as suggested by the word sublimation. Sublimation clearly means “to make sublime.” So if we take that basic life energy and express it, not in its most primitive way, not in terms of frank physical sexuality, we can elevate it to a point of artistic expression. By moving the energy to that creative place, we make it sublime.

  We must remember an important lesson of Kabbalah: the Tree of Life—the universe, each of us—is a closed system. There is no way to get rid of anything. Nothing ever goes away. Energy can be transformed but it does not disappear. We saw an example of this in relation to the Five of Cups. Grief can be experienced until it transforms us into a readiness to turn our lives around, to see the two full cups, the bridge, and the house. Or it can be transferred to the unconscious, behind the “curtain” of the Nine of Cups. But neither grief nor sexual energy nor anything else simply goes away when we ignore it.

  This is a secret that religious orders have known for thousands of years: the life force, the energy that creates life, doesn’t go away if we don’t discharge it sexually. It moves into other areas, which is why celibacy has been central to so many religious traditions. If you are a monk or a nun in the Catholic Church, the sexual energy you hold back can, if you choose, be redirected or transformed, elevated to a higher level of expression. Lovemaking leaves us with a serenity and sense of well-being that does not tend to motivate passionate work. The tension that builds in abstinence demands an outlet, making us more aggressive in our pursuit of truth and creative endeavor.

  Now of course in the Western tradition, we run into the contamination of puritanism: guilt, shame, and all of that garbage. But the notion behind abstinence is that there is powerful energy here. It is one of the reasons why virgins have been prized in so many societies. There is a sense is of magical power that has not been diffused or dissipated. In the Eastern tradition, Buddhist monks remain celibate for just that reason. The yogic discipline of awakening kundalini through meditation is based on the same principle. The choice seems to be between physical and spiritual climax. It’s the same energy. So the restraint of sexual energy from immediate expression has long been recognized as powerful; it was not Freud’s discovery.

  The Suit of Wands represents such energy on both ends of the spectrum and all points between. Again, just as we don’t talk about higher and lower energies on the Tree of Life, we don’t talk about lower and higher on the spectrum of sexual energy. Our sexuality is less than sublime only when it is split off from other functions of consciousness: the leisurely sensuality of Pentacles, the tenderness of Cups, and, ideally, the approval of Swords. If it is wedded to the spiritual, emotional, and mental realms, sexual energy in its most basic and direct manifestation can be sublime. Fire obviously remains the element best associated with this aspect of Wands. We see this even in our choice of language. We speak of the “igniting of passion,” the “flame of desire.” The suddenness and quickness of “burning desire” bespeaks its fiery nature.

  The way to spirit for the Suit of Wands is inspiration. This justifies the association many make between Wands and the element of air. (Fire is then attributed to the Suit of Swords, whose steel is tempered by fire. If the steel survives successive heating and freezing, fire and ice, it becomes a true sword. This is an apt metaphor for the torment of the soul we saw depicted in that suit. If the soul survives its trials, the result is its own metamorphosis.) Adam was formed from clay, but not created until God breathed life into him. There is a reason why “inspiration” is obviously related to “respiration,” and the word for breath and the word for soul in Hebrew share the same root. This makes breathing a pretty exciting pastime, when we think about it. It’s as if, when we inhale, we’re filled with the breath of God, filled with life. That’s what animates and drives our existence.

  Whenever we inhale, whenever we take in breath, we interact with the universe; we receive something. Whenever we release breath, we offer something. This wisdom is not exclusive to mystical Judaism. In the Eastern traditions, the student of meditation is directed to focus attention on the breath. In the yogic practice of nadi sudi, we inhale for half as long as we exhale as an expression of our desire to give back to the universe twice what we take from it. This awareness, like all spiritual truth, crosses cultures and religious backgrounds.

  The way to spirit for Wands is inspiration—intuitive knowing, sudden understanding that we cannot explain or justify. It is the way of liveliness and the fullness of life—of the life force itself. However, Wands, like every other suit, has its flaw. In the case of Wands, it is “airheadedness”—impetuosity with no follow-through, impulsiveness without plan, passion without vision or discipline, quick starts that go nowhere and find no completion. We have seen how the other suits need each other. Now we can see how Wands are not sufficient unto themselves. A flame that climbs ever higher and burns ever brighter eventually burns itself out. So the fire of Wan
ds needs Pentacles because Pentacles are earth—fuel. Pentacles ground Wands so they can accomplish their dreams. Fire also needs air for combustion; we smother a fire if we deprive it of air. So Wands need Swords, too—the clarity of mind to envision the whole and the determination to sustain effort.

  If I had a nickel for everyone who said to me, “Someday I’m going to write a book,” I could pay off my mortgage. This is because the idea of writing a book is fun and exciting, and sitting down to write a book is something else entirely. Everybody knows someone who has either a garage or an attic filled with unfinished projects. “Well, what I really wanted to be.…”, “What I’ve always wanted to do.…” So you go out and buy an expensive set of drums and you set them up, and you find that having them does not make you Ringo Starr. After a while the drums wind up in the garage, because what you really wanted was to be was a terrific figure skater. So you buy the best ice skates you can afford, and then you go around the rink and fall a couple of times. You look at all the elegant, athletic skaters who have been at it for years, and then the ice skates wind up in the garage, because it’s too hard to stay with skating, and you’re not really in good shape. Then what you really want is to be a writer, so you get a word processor and sooner or later that winds up in the garage because you find out that the word processor doesn’t write the book; you’ve got to sit down with the word processor and keep it company and do a little thinking. After that come the tropical fish. How many people do you know who have vast tropical fish tanks? Who could resist those gorgeous, brilliantly colored fish? But nobody mentioned cleaning the tank. So it gets really gross and the fish die.