The Major Arcana are often seen as a representation of the individuation process, or the means by which man returns to God. There are of course 22 of them in total, but the last one, The Universe or The World, is numbered 21. Curiously enough, the gematria value for one of Kether’s divine names, Eheieh, equals 21 as well. Eheieh itself translates to “I am,” or “I shall be” – very interesting given what we have just said about the Major Arcana.
Another way of looking at the Major Arcana is by seeing their positions on the Rose Cross, depicted on the back of Crowley’s Thoth cards. Without getting too absorbed in an explanation of this complex symbol, I will simply say that it could be seen as another representation of the Sephiroth, or the way God manifests itself and then relates to its creation. From the single point of white in the center of the symbol emanates a rose and cross, followed by additional petals and a much larger cross. The single point represents Kether (Eheieh), the unity, or Hadit if you are thinking in terms of Crowley’s Liber AL. Surrounding this first small cross is a ring of three petals, followed by a ring of seven petals, and a third ring of twelve petals. Here is where we find our Major Arcana.
The first three correspond to the three elemental majors, which in turn are associated with the three “mother letters” in Hebrew (Aleph - air, Mem - water, and Shin – fire/spirit). These would be 0 The Fool, XII The Hanged Man, and XX The Aeon respectively. Technically there is a fourth elemental card, The Universe representing the element of earth, but since it does not correspond to one of the mother letters it is not placed in this first ring of petals.
The next ring of seven corresponds to the planetary trumps, these being I The Magus (Mercury), II The Priestess (Moon), III The Empress (Venus), X Fortune (Jupiter), XVI The Tower (Mars), XIX The Sun (Sun), and XX The Universe (Saturn).
The third ring of petals on the greater rose represents the zodiacal trumps. These are IV The Emperor (Aries), V The Hierophant (Taurus), VI The Lovers (Gemini), VII The Chariot (Cancer), VIII Adjustment (Libra), IX The Hermit (Virgo), XI Lust (Leo), XIII Death (Scorpio), XIV Art (Sagittarius), XV The Devil (Capricorn), XVII The Star (Aquarius), and XVIII The Moon (Pisces).
What this symbol tells us is that each ring is a subsequent emanation of the ring before it, a further distillation of the meaning inherent in the cards prior. What I propose is that we can group the cards in families based on element, and thereby come closer to pinpointing what the 21-fold path to God is intimating.
Fire:
First, let’s deal with the fire cards, since Kabbalistically, fire is the first element, followed by water, air, and earth. This set is governed by XX The Aeon, which stands for the element of fire and spirit simultaneously. We are told that this has to do with the consumptive and enflaming quality of spirit. Fire is also attributed to the letter Yod of Tetragrammaton, and Abba, the Father who is represented by Chokhmah on the Sephiroth. XX essentially represents the Second Coming of Christ – the divine Self – who destroys the individual’s worldview and comes to rule over the soul as a lord. This, as we will see, is the overarching theme to the fire trumps. It is echoed in the two fiery planetary trumps, XVI The Tower and XIX The Sun. The former symbolizes the destruction of the ego’s fortress by the spirit. It is akin to the Harrowing of Hell by Christ following the Passion, when the Lord descends to the depths to liberate those trapped in Hell who did not deserve to be there (namely the beatific characters of the Old Testament). XIX on the other hand represents liberation, particularly from self-deceit, victory and triumph, the return of innocence, the Crowned and Conquering Child. Both of these planetary cards can clearly be seen as further developments of the original main idea contained in XX The Aeon.
The three zodiacal trumps for fire, IV The Emperor, XI Lust, and XIV Temperance, all also deal with these themes, but in a more specific fashion. The Emperor speaks of self control and self-lordship. He is a man of war being also associated with the alchemical sulfur. He is sudden in his actions and occasionally destructive without care. We can see that this represents the war against the ego, which flies about with little sense of direction. To tame it, we must be equally sudden and sometimes ruthless in our governance. We must consider its losses as a delight, and not something to mourn for. This is man’s innate “will to power” put to good use; rather than using it to destroy one’s peers, we can use it to destroy our false selves and thereby attain true Power. XI Lust also has the same nonchalance when it comes to its potency – what it destroys in its unleashing is quickly forgotten about. Lust represents the erotic union between masculine and feminine energies that are both inherent in the human being. The energy generated by this is enough to cause the Kundalini serpent, coiled at the base of the spine, to rise. Being situated in that place on the body, the serpent represents a very wild, natural energy form that can be seen as an effect of our “lower sensibilities.” By causing it to rise, we are bringing these “lower” essences more in line with our divine energies. We allow them to be governed more easily by spirit, or the Divine Self. XIV Art again deals with the harmonization between masculine and feminine, itself being a depiction of the androgyne. These energies are refined to their purest forms and then fused back together into a unified androgynous being – a more accurate representation of the Divine Self.
Understanding this, we can see that the fire trumps all deal with the War against the false self, as well as the governing of the human being by spirit, the Logos as represented by Christ.
Water:
Next comes water, which represents the Divine Feminine, the Mother, Binah on the Sephiroth, Aima, the Heh primal of Tetragrammaton, etc. So while fire represents the Divine Will, water is the actual understanding or interpretation of that Will. Therefore, we should expect the water trumps to further explain the fire trumps in a more passive way. Its elemental trump card is XII The Hanged Man, which is a curious and sometimes frustrating card in my opinion. It’s one of the trumps that Crowley felt needed revision since it so obviously depicts the mysteries of the Aeon of Osiris which has supposedly now passed. Primarily, he rejects it as a symbol of sacrifice conflated with morality. But while sacrifice may no longer be a relevant action today, the card still represents the descent of the Divine Self for love – not love in the sacrificial sense of Christ, but in the ecstatic form described by Nuit in the Liber AL (“for I am divided for love’s sake, for the chance of union”). An important aspect of the Hanged Man is that he is upside-down, meaning that his perspective is seemingly opposite to our own. Yet, Crowley writes that water is an element of illusion, and it would seem that the Hanged Man’s perspective is actually correct, and our own is deceptive. Thus, we “understand” the effect of XX The Aeon. The Aeon rectifies our perspective, and demonstrates to us that we are actually divine beings.
II The Priestess, or the Moon, is the one planetary trump for the element of water. Again, the card represents the truth concealed behind illusion. Manifested existence is simply a lovely guise for the One Truth – the One God, who hides himself therein. Now, we must compare her to the fiery planetary trumps, XIX The Sun, and XVI The Tower. These two cards also represent the shattering of illusion by Spirit, the Second Coming. The Priestess is the passive version of this, secretly telling us through our intuition that the form represented by the Tower was false, and that the only Truth is that of the Sun. We must remember that in Neo-Platonic thought, the sun was the closest representation of the Monad man could conceptualize. Mystical experience with the True Sun in this philosophy was the first major step towards union with the Source, as the two are so similar. The fact that the Priestess hints at the secret unity of life shows that she is in a direct relationship to XIX The Sun. So far, both the fiery and watery trumps have expressed practically the same ideas within their specific hierarchic levels. (In other words, the elemental cards express the same idea, and the planetary trumps together express another idea.)
The zodiacal water trumps are a bit trickier, though our theorem is still applicable. VII The Chariot represents control over the soul by the hidden One God. Ultimately, all actions of the soul are set in motion by God. By further defining the Hanged Man, we can see that whatever agency we believe ourselves to possess is false, and the only real authority possible is divine. Additionally, the card’s meaning is similar to IV The Emperor, but we see that the Emperor’s agency comes not from man himself, but from God alone. The Emperor is the pure idea of divine authority, the Chariot is a deeper (and therefore less pure) interpretation of that governance. Another, more simple way of comparing them is by noting that both are images of war and conquest. Though, while the Emperor is more spontaneous and active as a conqueror, the Chariot is simply directed and does not have a specific target of conquest.
XIII Death is also a card full of illusions and misconceptions that must be wiped away by the Spirit. While unaware of divinity, we believe in and fear corporeal death. It also speaks to the Dying Man-God Formula espoused by the Aeon of Osiris and the Hanged Man, as it represents Osiris himself. Osiris is the closest analogy to Christ we can find in the Egyptian Mysteries, and was most likely the ultimate predecessor to the archetypal story of Christ’s Passion. This card seems to be the most layered in its relationships to the element of water and its complement, XI Lust. Lust, as we know, represents the erotic fusion between masculine and feminine archetypes within the individual. On one hand, Death could therefore represent the death of orgasm when the two halves no longer distinguish differences between each other. On the other, Death shows us that whatever manifestations our personality goes through, each one is ultimately brought about by our pure Divine Self, who seeks to rectify our nature. Death purges us of unnecessary things, which causes us to feel “pain.” But this pain is a sort of divine ecstasy as it brings us closer to God.
Lastly, XVIII The Moon is entirely about deception and fear of the unknown. Without knowledge of God, we flounder through life feeling lost and confused about the future, our ambitions, who we are, almost anything you can imagine. Yet, buried deep under all that muck lies the sun waiting to be reborn. Note that each zodiacal water trump has depicted the Divine Self or Christ in some form, almost always in a solar aspect. The Chariot represents the “blood of the Sun” contained within the Holy Grail; Osiris, a god of vegetation and rebirth is naturally quasi-solar; and Kephra, the beetle, rolls his solar disk through the underworld. But XVIII is once again a hieroglyph of truth concealed in illusion. It resonates with XIV Art in that both of them show a sense of direction. While Art shows the path to balance and the Divine Self, the Moon demonstrates the need to stay connected to that solar middle path. It also speaks to the confusion created by the separate needs and desires of our masculine and feminine halves, as the cards two towers stand darkly opposing each other. The path between them is tread by Kephra, the sun.
It seems clear now that the water trumps depict the passive side of the “War” against self. They show different sides of the fire trumps by giving them more definition.
Air:
Air is the element attributed to the Son, the Vav of Tetragrammaton, and Tiphareth (the sun) on the Sephiroth. This is the heart of the Divine Self and the active consonance between the Divine Will and the Divine Understanding (fire and water). It is primarily defined by 0 The Fool, the letter Aleph. The Fool represents the wandering prince/knight-errant, perhaps even the incarnated Christ. He stands for divine mania, innocence, purity, fertility, ecstasy, androgyny, etc. He is the result of the fusion of masculine and feminine – by doing so he has regained his divine nature, and life becomes less of a grim struggle and more of a playground with little intrinsic meaning other than enjoyment. He can also be seen as the opposite and real nature of the Hanged Man.
The two planetary trumps for air, I The Magus and X Fortune, both speak of power and agency. The Magus shows that, with the War being won, the individual is free to craft their reality as they choose, since they will have discerned the illusive quality of existence and transcended it. Also, the Magus represents the alchemical substance of merucury, which is considered to be androgynous and a hybrid of sulfur and salt. Fortune echoes this, for the card tells us that as long as we are not in control of our multiple personas and powers, we are equally not in control of our lives and the seemingly “random” events that occur in them. Being an aspect of the Fool, we learn that all of the events that we want to take seriously really are just neutral events that are there to instruct us. In the case of the Fool, however, he is in control of the hand that turns the Wheel. Note that the Wheel of Fortune has a clenched fist engraved on its rim at the bottom; from this radiate six violet rays. Six is the number of the sun, as it is the number of Tiphareth on the Sephiroth. Essentially, the “hand of fate” is our solar, divine, Christ-like True Selves. The Fool, having recognized this, is free to manipulate his own destiny. Additionally, the Magus may further be a representation of the incarnated Christ, as the god Mercury is also a psychopomp, meaning he guides the souls of the dead. He is able to connect the highest to the lowest (“As above, so below”) and thereby redeem the lowly. Perhaps the ultimate message is that our highest good in the material plane expresses itself through our desire for freedom without prejudice against others. The Fool is indiscriminate because he is too innocent to pass judgment.
Which, of course, makes VIII Adjustment so interesting. Adjustment has nothing to do with any moral evaluation, only equilibrium. I believe we will find that the three zodiacal air trumps deal with the power and agency of the incarnated Christ, though I admit the air cards are particularly difficult to pin down (which makes sense, given the nature of air). But Adjustment, coming as a reaction to the harmony between the Emperor and the Chariot, teaches us that any action taken will have its repercussions in nature. Now that the individual has gained mastery over themselves by attaining Divinity, their lower selves (the Heh final of Tetragrammaton, the Princess) have been rectified and equilibrated. Its usual pendulum-like behavior has been balanced, thereby placing the Daughter on the throne of the Mother, Binah. Remember that Crowley writes that this card depicts that moment prior to her enthronement. She holds the sword of the Magus because with it she has focused all of her being toward this one goal.
XVII The Star, interestingly enough, comes as a response to Lust and Death, and depicts the manifestation of Nuit, the goddess of infinite space and nothingness. The letter associated with the Star is Heh, the letter of the Mother and Daughter, or Binah and Malkuth on the Sephiroth. The Star tends to represent that infinite potential of the universe encapsulated within the divine human being. All events for her are representations of the universe’s love. Primarily, we can see how this is connected to the ideas of the Magus and Fortune – as a divine being, man can access the infinite power of Divine Will (note that she pours upon herself the liquid spiral energy of a golden, a.k.a solar cup or bowl). She herself has become the conduit for the Divine Will and dispenses her blessing on the manifested Universe itself. Remember also what Crowley says, that all events are “a play of Nuit.” So after the ecstatic union achieved in Lust, understood to be a sort of release from the false self in death, the Star sees herself not as a divided being, but as one who contains both masculine and feminine impulses within herself, or perhaps rather the potentials for both.
Lastly, we have VI The Lovers, which is the counterpart to XIV Art. The former represents the alchemical act of solve while the latter is coagula. Both represent marriages of some kind. Let us remember that all magical working deals with these two activities – one can either divide or assemble when it comes to the goal of a magical operation. In fact, these are the only two operations of the Universe as a whole. Again, we see the empowerment metaphor of the Fool/Christ as reigning Lord. In response to Art and The Moon, the Lovers seems to decidedly advocate for separation, as the Hermit or Logos stands in the Sign of the Enterer, as if to authorize the marriage between man and woman. But, remember that The Lovers has a strong female element, as it is the influence of the Mother Binah upon the Son in Tiphareth. Perhaps we can see this card as a reminder to the Son of what his primary goal is – to marry the Princess and redeem her. In this light, perhaps the Prince has been given all this power and agency to entice the Princess.
It intrigues me that even though the element of air is meant to deal with the Son of Tetragrammaton, the reigning Christ after his fiery return in XX The Aeon, there is a strong presence of femininity in the zodiacal trumps. While we can suggest this is only natural given the Fool’s androgynous nature, it may also be intended to remind us of the Tetragrammaton cycle and the process of apotheosis. The Prince is always intended to marry his sister the Princess and set her upon the throne of her Mother, whereby she awakens the Eld of the All-Father and becomes one with God. So in the air trumps, we see the actual goal or focus of all the activity in the fire and water trumps – the redemption of the Princess. It is as if the entire force of creation surges to save her in loving joy.
Earth:
The last of the elemental trumps is XXI The Universe, which represents the Daughter fully enthroned in the New Jerusalem or Eden. It is akin to the Assumption of the Virgin into Paradise. At this point in the apotheosis formula, the Prince, along with any sense of individuality, has been sacrificed, allowing the Princess to be a complete vessel for the One True God – or rather, to actually become one with God. It is the fulfillment of the prophecy that the Kingdom of Heaven shall come to reign on earth.
The Universe is also Saturn, and along with III The Empress, constitutes the planetary majors for earth. As definitions of the New Eden, they both possess a sense of longevity and eternity. The Empress is the alchemical substance of salt, which represents death, slowness, inertia, etc. Saturn similarly represents the heaviness of time and its procession onwards. So having attained Godhead, the individual has also become one with Eternity. There is only one moment in this state – an eternal present; the past and future are not relevant. Furthermore, what was begun by the Masculine (IV The Emperor) has found completion in the Feminine (III The Empress). Venus as a planet represents beauty and love, and thus we see once again that all the work of the Universe has been ultimately an act of love. Paradise has regained its greenness as Hildegard von Bingen would say, and is once again beautiful.
For Crowley, XV The Devil is a representation of Kether, the single and only true perspective in the Universe. He is a symbol of mastery and initiation, but is also ruled by Saturn. The card is also a representation of the incarnation of the divine in matter, represented by the large phallus depicted in the card. But the idea is that God chooses to manifest Himself for better or worse. Let us also recall the traditional Neo-Platonic mythology surrounding apotheosis. Upon returning the unity, the individual is expected to return their eros or life energy to the demiurge so that He can create new forms. This is what it means to “pour one’s blood into the Cup of Babalon” and to thereby “awaken the Eld of the All-Father.” One has completed the work of self-mastery set out in The Emperor, The Chariot, and Adjustment. By becoming one with God, one partakes in the profoundly beautiful act of creation.
V The Hierophant is the hieroglyph of teaching and spiritual guidance, of exoteric revelation. As Crowley would say, he has become Master of the Temple by reaching Paradise. It is his duty to now instruct others who have not received initiation, to guide them toward Truth. His letter, Vav, means “a nail,” and is again a phallic symbol. He must generate spiritual progeny by infusing others with his inspiration. Even though he has completed the Great Work, he must continue to participate in it.
One last card, IX The Hermit (phew). Let us recall that the mutable zodiacal trumps have tended to do with the direction of willpower. Sagittarius directed it toward the Divine; Pisces hid the divine goal from the will and let it wander alone; Gemini taught the will to cleave to the Divine, but also to embrace the properties of division inherent in the Universe. Now the Hermit is a representation of the Divine Will working silently throughout nature, as its sign, Virgo, is ruled doubly by Mercury. But Mercury as psychopomp also seeks to redeem the individual soul – hence the depiction of Cerberus in the card’s lower right corner. And in the Hermit’s hand, he bears a lantern containing the sun. Through the guiding hand of the Logos, the Universe is cultivated and returned to its paradisical state. Again, we have a call to continue the Great Work until the whole Universe is integrated. It is no longer about the will of the individual, but about the Will of God. Also, we see a spermatozoon in the lower left corner, demonstrating the impregnating effect of this Will. But it is of course yet another phallic symbol.
Therefore, the earth trumps deal with Garden of Eden, Paradise, the New Jerusalem on Earth. They complete the apotheosis of the individual, but by doing so makes them an even more integral part of the Great Work for existence itself. On a personal note, I must add that this is exactly what Hildegard von Bingen writes about. She constantly talks about the need to return Paradise to its original green state prior to the Fall and the Incarnation of Christ.
Wrapup
We have talked about every single trump, and I’m exhausted. But I believe I have touched upon something very important, and I hope it clarifies the apotheosis process for all of us. I also hope it shows us how the trumps are all thematically related, and do ultimately demonstrate Eheieh, the unity of life.
If you have any questions, please let me know.
