Tarot and the Tree of Life

by Isabel Radow Kliegman

  Still, we need this childlike quality throughout our lives. Once again, if we approach the cards from a Jungian perspective, we each, man or woman, have all of these youthful archetypes within us. There has been a lot of talk about “the inner child” in recent years, but we have more than one inner child. We have a joyful child, a fearful child, a curious child, a budding adolescent, and a rebellious adolescent among the many inside us. We will see four of them in the pages alone. When one of these cards turns up for us, it very often stands for someone who carries this energy in our lives, but it always represents a part of ourselves that is being activated at the time.

  Page of Pentacles

  The Page of Pentacles, to my mind, is the most spiritual card in the deck. He stands out in nature under a golden sky; a pentacle like a magical rainbow bubble, upon which he has totally fixed his attention, floats just above his hands. He is mesmerized by the gift of the palpable, emanating from the Ein Sof Ohr, the unlimited light, into Atzilut. In his demeanor the Page expresses appropriate awe of the manifest: genuine reverence that there should be such a thing as the physical world. God could have chosen simply to imagine the universe but instead chose to create it. What generosity! How wonderful! His appreciation of the physical world is understandable; as we know, both pages and Pentacles are associated with Jung’s sensate function.

  It’s clear to me that the Page is fully aware of the star within the coin, of the God energy animating the outer form. Why else does he not grasp the pentacle? He could grab it merely by extending his elbows!

  Let me mention in this context that it is revealing to trace certain symbols through a suit of court cards. In the case of Pentacles, watch the different ways in which the figures hold their pentacles. In Swords, follow the birds. In Wands, pay attention to the salamanders; in Cups, the relationship of the figures to water.

  The Page of Pentacles is someone who senses the miraculous in the ordinary, or should we say, knows there is no such thing as the ordinary. He does not need to be in a temple, church, or cathedral to experience the kadosh quality, the blessed quality of the world itself. He can see it in a leaf, in the eyes of another person; he can feel it in the fur of an animal. He can hear it in the wind or in birdsong, even in the whirring of a well-run machine, yet he is especially affinitized to the natural world where we find him. He experiences the presence of God in the wilderness, on a beach as he watches a sunset, in the arms of love. The card represents someone who has cultivated the attitude of kavanah, holy intention, so that everything is experienced as blessed.

  We must remember that each suit and each of its cards has a flaw as well as a strength. The flaw in the Page of Pentacles is the danger of falling in love with money, power, prestige, status, influence, accomplishment—anything in the material world. It’s interesting that in the Knapp-Hall deck, the pages are called slaves. The pages have just received power from the divine hand of God, and they may be amazed, impressed, delighted, or confused by it, but they clearly can become slaves to it. We can all remember being teenagers and our first experience behind the wheel, our first dab of perfume, or our first venture at the stove. In the Knapp-Hall deck, the Slave of Pentacles is in a prison cell, chained to a wall. He looks through the bars of his cell out into freedom and light and up into the sun, which is, of course, a pentacle. He has made that pentacle his glory, the light of his life, and therefore is a slave to it, even a prisoner of it.

  How do we know which interpretation to put on the card when it shows up in a reading? We don’t; that’s what makes the game so interesting. That’s why there will never be computerized Tarot and why I urge you to pay attention to your own responses. It depends on what other cards are in the spread and the sense you have about the person for whom you are reading. It depends on your intuition at the moment.

  Page of Cups

  We move next to the Page of Cups, who gets my vote, hands down, for the most charming court card. He is absolutely irresistible. He looks to be about sixteen or seventeen years old. I used to teach students of that age, and there’s something about those young boys, when they’re just coming into their own—a jauntiness, a cockiness, a budding macho—that is entirely appealing. They have begun to shave, their voices have dropped, they are building muscle, and they have discovered a use for the comb. They’ve stopped wearing checks with plaids, and if their shirttails are out, it is by intention. It is just too endearing for words.

  The Page of Cups is ostentatiously well dressed. He’s in pink tights and an aqua tunic with pink tulips. What a guy! He wears a wonderful Elizabethan cocked hat and stands with his hand on one hip. He’s playful, imaginative, full of fun and surprises, and he has no expectations about life. He’s ready for whatever comes. He raises a cup to his lips to drink, and a fish jumps out. As Dylan Thomas says of Captain Katt in Under Milkwood, “He drinks the fish.”

  There’s no sense of horror. There’s no sense of disgust. There’s no terror of evil, no “How has this unholy abnormality come about?” Instead, “Hey! Neato! Look at that!” is what the expression on his face conveys. “What a great universe! Anything can happen!”

  You know, childhood is an age when anything is possible. When my daughter was about two and a half or three years old, we had a goldfish bowl with two fish in it. As she was watching them, one of them swam near an angle of the bowl causing a mirror effect through light refraction. “Look mommy,” she said. “Now there are three fish!” That was OK with her. No explanation was required. That’s the charm of the Page of Cups. He takes life ever so lightly. He’s self-confident and just loves being alive and being a young man. The world is his oyster. He’s spontaneous and impulsive and ready for anything.

  The Page of Cups has another set of associations arising from his belonging to the suit of emotions. The fish is an emissary from the unconscious, a creature that surfaces to consciousness from the deep, dark, mysterious waters. When this messenger emerges—a dream, an irrational response, an uncalled-for feeling—the Page does not turn away from it. He does not ignore it. He engages the visitor, looking it squarely in the eye. He is prepared to look at whatever material from the unconscious presents itself for his attention. Where does he find such courage?

  Unfortunately, the answer is “inexperience.” Feelings emanating into Atzilut from the godhead are a gift and, having been newly received, are as yet unknown. The Page has no idea of what John Bradshaw calls “the dark side of love—abandonment, death of the beloved, jealousy, and insecurity.” We need only remember our own first love to understand his vulnerability and the lack of experience, the innocence that permits it. Unlike the other court cards of his suit, the Page stands on what appears to be a stage. Some readers, having attuned themselves to the concept, will have already recognized the Page of Cups as a separation card. It is the last we will find, being the only separation card of the sixteen court cards. If water represents emotion, the Page is one step away from the action. It’s as if he is playing or playacting. In either case, he has not yet experienced the bitterness of love or the darker elements of his own unconscious. So he is in touch with and honest about his emotions, but doesn’t yet know himself or what he is capable of doing or feeling. His willingness to confront the fish, however, whenever and wherever it happens to emerge, will deepen and mature his self-knowledge.

  The Page of Cups, for all these reasons, is the card of the performing artist—anyone who enjoys the limelight and being center stage, from stand-up comic to lead singer in a band, from tightrope walker to Shakespearean actor, from diva to party cutup with his string of jokes, card tricks, and wild dance steps.

  Page of Swords

  We move next to the terrifying image of the Page of Swords. Giving a sword to a page is a little like giving a loaded handgun to a fourteen-year-old. By definition he is not mature enough, developed enough, experienced enough to handle it responsibly. Freud said that no one ever overcomes the trauma of having been a child. This experience of helplessness, weakness, and depend
ency is exacerbated by constantly having our will overruled. What we all have as adolescents is a residue of anger. It is in this state of being that we receive the sword, floating into Atzilut, the olam of emanation, from God’s own being.

  The Page of Swords is scary because his weapon is intellect, Swords representing intellect and will. He is articulate and very sure of himself, and he knows just how to wound. Any parent who has raised a bright teenager will resonate to the following experience.

  My own daughter was an excellent Page of Swords. When she was about twelve years old, she made a reasonable request: Could she go to a rock concert? She had two reassuring pieces of information for me: first, the friend who was driving had received his license a full week ago; and second, since she had both a history test and math test the next day, she would be home by four in the morning. Even though I knew that a rock concert was a perfectly safe environment, one where there would never be any, say, drugs or alcohol, I said no. Her eyes flashing like the steel edge of a sword, she cried, “You don’t care if I have no friends!” Then came the Page of Swords zinger: “You don’t care what’s the last thing I think at night before I go to sleep!” She did not get to go to the rock concert, but I surmised her last thoughts before she fell asleep. I, on the other hand, didn’t sleep at all. So the incident wasn’t a total loss for her.

  We don’t get any brighter from the time we’re born—we just get a little more articulate. The Page of Swords has had just enough experience to really know how to use his intellect and words to cause pain. He does not yet have enough experience, however, to know how deep the wounds he inflicts are. I have a brother who is four years younger than I. When we were eight and four, I was a source of constant frustration for him. Although I too was a child, my mastery was worlds away from his: I could tie my shoelaces, cross the street, read, spell, jump rope, and tell time. To add insult to injury, I was a well-behaved child and a good student. I was also strong enough to push him out of my room when he became too irritating to bear. One day in the middle of a fight, he cried, “I hate you!” There was no mistaking his sincerity, and I, startled and hurt, began to cry. My brother’s response to my tears was a classic Page of Swords reaction: delight! His little face lit up with pure joy. It was that easy to win? That’s all there was to it? “I hate you,” and the invincible monster, whose bedtime was hours after his, crumpled? His hatred was real, but it was the hatred of a four-year-old. He couldn’t know how it would be felt by someone who was eight.

  The Page of Swords is extremely volatile. As I have suggested, it’s interesting to track the birds in the court cards of this suit; in the Page they are in a kind of wild flurry. His hair is tossed by the wind; the clouds and trees are blowing wildly. Look at the ground he’s standing on—it looks like water, like it can shift under his feet. Look at the difference between the ground on which he stands and the ground of the Page of Pentacles.

  The entire card is explosive. In it we see more will than experience, more power than judgment. There seems to be an ineffectual flailing about, a generalized rage that puts any random passerby at risk. There is an additional element of danger because the sword is, of course, double-edged. The Page is as likely as anyone else to fall victim to his irresponsible attacks. In his inexperience, he is likely to harm himself with the lacerations of guilt, remorse, and self-recrimination.

  However, there is a most positive side to the Page of Swords. Here is the young Sir Galahad, son of Lancelot—of all King Arthur’s knights, the purest of spirit. He is the consummate idealist who will risk his life for what he believes, something that more experienced, older people are much less likely to do. In 1964, when three boys (two of them white) went down to Mississippi on a Freedom March and were killed for acting on their principles, they were manifesting Page of Swords energy. Some would say that it wasn’t the white boys’ battle to fight. But it was their battle because it involved injustice. One of the most engaging qualities of young people, teenagers, is that they can be appealed to in terms of idealism. Sometimes those who seem the most bitter and jaded are the most vulnerable. Because they want so much to have something to believe in and haven’t found it, they create defenses against further disillusion. Yet the passion for right of the Page of Swords burns brightly within them.

  Page of Wands

  For many years, the Page of Wands was the most enigmatic card in the deck for me. I had a problem with a page who has received the gift of intuition from the hand of God and clearly doesn’t know what to do with it. The young man pictured is measuring, challenging his wand, demanding that it prove itself. Yet the last thing we want to do with intuition is to scrutinize it! What we need to do is release ourselves to it, turn ourselves over to it, trust it. But of course, he’s only the page. He’s just received this gift. It has just emanated into Atzilut from the Ein Sof Ohr. He doesn’t know how to use it yet.

  What I came to realize was that I had difficulty with the Page of Wands because that is exactly what I tended to do with my own intuition. I was raised in a family, a culture, in which we were congratulated for accomplishing things that were objectively quantifiable: getting good grades, keeping our rooms neat, being reliable, remembering peoples’ birthdays. Mine is a family of lawyers. If you don’t know what you are talking about, if you can’t prove it logically or scientifically, do us all a favor and keep your mouth shut. In our society nobody is very interested in our clairvoyant experiences. “Oh, stop being silly,” we’re told as children. “Go do your math homework. Go learn your spelling words.” I grew up, as have so many of us, with an overdependence on my Swords function and no trust at all in my Wands.

  When my daughter was four, before she “found out” that you can’t read people’s minds, she sat at the table finishing her toast. I, my back to her, had begun washing the breakfast dishes. The running water drowned out the sound of the morning news. But I wasn’t listening to the radio, really. I was thinking about a trusted friend who had let me down. “What a chum,” I thought of myself. Imagine my reaction when I heard a little voice behind me pipe, “Mommy, what does chum mean?” If I had verbalized my thought—which I hadn’t—I’d have had to scream it for her to hear me over the sound of the radio and the running water, with my back to her! She didn’t hear it from me, but eventually somewhere along the line she “learned” like the rest of us that “you can’t read people’s minds.” So now she hears like an “adult” only the audible.

  I’ve come to like and understand the Page of Wands better as I’ve become more comfortable with my own intuition. I’ve also followed my own advice about working with the Tarot cards with which we connect least well dynamically.

  There is a desert landscape in the Page of Wands that runs throughout the court cards of the suit. It reminds us that Wands needs water, that we are left in an arid terrain if all we have are flashes of intuition. But the three pyramids in the background suggest magic—the secret of mummification that went to its grave with the demise of the Egyptian empire. Pyramids symbolize mysteries and secrets that we cannot comprehend but may nevertheless apprehend and are therefore appropriate to the Suit of Wands. They refer to the union of opposites through the creative endeavor we associate with the number three. Each face of a pyramid is a triangle composed of three sides and three angles. Having three pyramids, the Page of Wands is filled with the same transformative potential that we have seen in the threes of the pip cards.

  There is an additional symbol of magic in the Page of Wands, a symbol we see throughout the court cards of the Suit: the salamander. In medieval times people believed that salamanders were born of fire. This is because salamanders, when they leave the water, crawl into dead, rotting logs whose dampness keeps their amphibious skin from drying out. When wayfarers, stopping for the night, used these dead logs to build a fire, the predictable seemed miraculous: emerging from the flames as fast as their little orange feet could carry them would scramble flame-colored salamanders! So it was believed that salamanders were born of
fire and therefore magical. The Page of Wands is the magical child.

  The Page of Wands is also the natural student of life, willing to return to ground zero, to start from the beginning, to say, “Maybe I’ve got it all wrong! Maybe all the things I’ve learned have really not been true for me. How were my identity, character, and self-awareness forged? Let me raise the ultimate question: How much of my life reflects my life force, my intuition, my life energy, and how much of it manifests internalized ideas derived from others? Am I simply living out somebody else’s script? The Page of Wands represents the readiness to go back in time to the formulation of our values and start again, this time beginning with our own intuition.

  Again, since Wands is the suit of libido, the Page of Wands represents the time in an adolescent’s life, male or female, when sexuality first stirs. We can see the confusion and mystery that the wand carries. The Page seems to be asking, “What is this? And what am I supposed to do with it?”

  In closing, a personal note. The figure of the Page reminds me of the statue of David, not the one by Michelangelo, but the less-famous one by Donatello. David, elbows akimbo, having just slain Goliath, stands naked except for a jaunty feathered hat. The Page’s feathered hat thus brings to mind the David and Goliath story. What I now see in the Page of Wands is that intuition, in our society, is the David of our functions of consciousness. Yet our dwarfed intuition can slay the Goliath of the bullying conscious mind. Linear thinking, logic, scientific method, technology, quantifiable proof, though we live under their domination, cannot defeat us if we honor our intimations and attend to our dreams.