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The Tarot and the Kabbalah,
the Ancient Mesopotamians and the Sufist
by Nicholas Swift
(an extract from Mirror of the Free)
www.vaxxine.com/mirrorofthefree
Authors of books on the Tarot cards commonly assert that
their true origin is unknown. One sometimes gets the impression,
however, that their attitude to the mystery it presents
is ambivalent: knowledge means not only less excuse to
speculate but, also, more responsibility. They write as
if they want to know; or as if they want the reader to
think they want to; or as if they acknowledge, almost reluctantly,
that they really ought to make an earnest effort to find
out: but, when it comes down to it, might, for some reason,
prefer not to...
Perhaps more generally, and less excitingly, there is
the threat of something even more difficult to deal with:
a sense of anticlimax. Instead of enjoying the mystery,
one has to work at understanding something.
It is true that if you read this book you may find it
difficult to continue to justify the uses to which you
are accustomed to putting the Tarot.
On the other hand, you may decide that there is a great
deal more to the Tarot than you ever suspected; and, having
become aware of certain facts, that those facts conflict
with your beliefs; and that, if you are to be honest, you
have to shed some of them.
If what you are already doing with the cards, as they
say, 'works for you', you may even find that the information
offered here constitutes an opportunity to come to a deeper
understanding of what it is you have really been doing
all along...
 
Looking at photographs of impressions made by Mesopotamian
cylinder seals can be almost the same as looking at an
old photograph - a very old photograph.
Four or five thousand years old, to be precise.
It is not really the photographs that are old, of course:
it is what has been photographed.
Because they are physically relatively shallow impressions,
and have to be highlighted to be clearly discerned, they
have an eeriness about them, attributable though this may
be to our conditioning through occupying the place we do
in the history of visual media. (The present book uses
charcoal pencil drawings closely based on the originals.)
Figure 2 shows a Mesopotamian deity that has not been
identified with certainty.
How do we know it is a god? By the horns. Its head-gear,
if you look closely, is curled up at each side. In the
times and at the place of which we speak, one of the ways
that gods and goddesses were recognized was by their horns.
Isn't that the wrong way round, though? Isn't it the Devil
who has horns?
If it is a god - and thus corresponds, presumably, to
something good - why does it have horns?
Or is it just proof that all those old pagans were wicked
anyway, worshipping what we now know to have been evil?
On a more basic cultural and, even, psychological level,
the issue of 'the Devil' being, in popular imagination,
a creature with horns relates critically to the question
of the difference between appearance and reality.
The same theme features in a brief passage in Ihya 'Alam
ad Din (Revival of Religious Knowledge)
by the exceedingly influential eleventh (CE) century
Muslim thinker and Sufi Al Ghazali.
In discussing knowledge of 'the world' and contrasting
it with that of spiritual things, he wrote: 'He who is
experienced in the religious sciences is inexperienced
in worldly learning. For this reason, the Prophet said: "Most
of the inmates of Paradise are indifferent": in other words,
they are inattentive to worldly matters.'
It is the next line, however, that is arresting in the
context of considering understanding of 'devils' or 'the
Devil', mainly because the way in which it is phrased would
seem to suggest that it might allude to the reported ability
of Sufi masters to somehow experience the immediate, living
presence of other Sufis of the past and future, even the
distant past and future, and to communicate with them:
Ghazali quotes another historically prominent Sufi named
Hasan al Basri ('of Basra'), thus: 'We have seen such people
whom you would think, if you had seen them, diabolical...
If they had seen you, however, they would call you devils.'
Basra was, at the time of Hasan - and is still today -
in what is now called Iraq. Indeed, it is only a few miles
from the modern city Babylon.
'They would call you devils...'
Looking again at the image of what has universally been
interpreted as a tower struck by lightning, what may strike
us is the fact that the object - or phenomenon, if you
insist on seeing it as lightning - that seems to be causing
the destruction resembles nothing so much as a gigantic
feather.
The winged gate or door (Figure 19) is one of the motifs
that occur over and over again in Mesopotamian seals for
which no one seems yet to have come up with a satisfying
explanation.
It thus seems at least possible that the eight sefiroth of
the original Kabbalah of the Ikhwan as Safa and
the Sufis consisted of the seven lower sefiroth of
the Kabbalah we know, plus the three upper sefiroth combined
into one; if so, it would confirm Blavatsky's assertion
that the division of the top sefirah into three
is a 'blind'. Moreover, the description of the first three sefiroth as
'hidden potencies' that 'do not act in the visible sphere'
as do the other seven obviously closely parallels the relationship,
and difference, between the law of three and the law of
seven as Gurdjieff taught them.
In Figure 11 we see the king, the one in the middle, with
his two escorts, who are divinities in their own right.
The round object on the table the leg of which the individual
in the front is grasping is a 'sun-disk', an emblem of
the god Shamash, the great god to whom the king is being
presented. About the odd bearded fellows in the upper right,
even what significance it may be possible to gather in
the context of the stele image cannot be considered here,
because what is shown here is only that part of the scene
that is likely to have been the origin of the image on
the card The Lovers. It requires no great effort of imagination
to see how the figures aloft who seem to be executing some
procedure with some kind of ropes extending down to the
sun-disk have become the arrow-shooting angel, and the
sun-disk the angel's nimbus.
Over the centuries of their existence up to the time of
the writing of the books of the Bible - as, of course,
in the centuries since - the Jewish people, whether through
captivity or by other means, came into contact with a wide
variety of foreign cultures and languages, and their language,
Hebrew, was inevitably much changed by those contacts.
Arabic, on the other hand, was, until the time of the expansion
of Islam, the language of a relatively isolated people.
One consequence of these unarguable historical facts is
that of existing languages, Arabic is the closest to Protosemitic.
If knowledge or methods of encoding and accessing it, or
both, were woven into Protosemitic, and they are to be
sought in any currently used language, Arabic is the obvious
choice.
If, moreover, we take the methods - the ones of which
we may have an inkling, at any rate - used to embed knowledge
in one place (such as Arabic) and try them out in another
(such as ancient Hebrew writings), especially when the
two are known to have a common ancestor, and the results
appear meaningful, it is reasonable to conclude that the
same methods were used to embed knowledge in that other
place.
The philosophical principle that dates from the European
Middle Ages and is referred to as Occam's Razor states
that if there is a simple explanation for something, you
should not seek a more complicated one. The obvious defect
of this principle is that one's very notion of what constitutes
simplicity is itself almost certainly heavily culturally
conditioned: which is to say it rests on a foundation of
relative ignorance that is felt, on the contrary, to be
a foundation of relative knowledge.
Another way of putting it might be to say that Occam's
Razor is fine for shaving, but try to use it to do something
requiring a finer instrument, such as brain surgery, and
you will discover its limitations.
It is worth looking again at the image of Shamash sitting
receiving Nabuplaiddin, and considering in juxtaposition
to it another passage in Meetings With Remarkable Men.
In the passage in question, Gurdjieff is describing what
was ostensibly an attempt he made to relieve his poverty
by setting himself up as a shoe shiner on a public street.
Not having much luck at first, he decided he needed to
innovate, and so obtained an armchair of some special kind,
and put one of Edison's phonographs underneath it, where
it would not be seen by casual observers. To this he connected,
he says, a flexible tube with, on the other end, an apparatus
that the customer, while resting comfortably in the armchair,
could put to his ears even as Gurdjieff surreptitiously
started up the record player for them. He even names the
Marseillaise as one of the pieces of music they would indulge
in (others being operatic works) while he shined their
shoes. Further, he says, he affixed to one of the arms
of the chair a tray to bear liquid refreshments and magazines.
His advanced ideas about customer service paid off well,
he notes.
A third passage may be reflected upon in the light of
the two odd bearded figures, who only seem to exist from
the waist up, leaning out from the front of the covering
of Shamash's shrine in Figure 29 or 31.
He says that, one day, as he was walking on the Kurfurstendamm
(in Berlin) toward the Zoological Gardens, he spied a man,
who had lost both of his legs, on a little hand-operated
wagon and turning the crank on an 'antediluvian' musical
box. Somewhat further on, he again mentions the character,
having related a story about his life as it had been before
he came to his current predicament; again he describes
him as without legs, operating the music box in the manner
described, and accepting German coins of small denomination
from passersby.
In his initial general behaviour, Gilgamesh obviously
represents the commanding self or, possibly, even the nafs
al haywaniya, the 'animal self', to which regular
commanding-self people may sink if they are not careful.
He meets and does battle with his 'twin' - Enkidu, the
wild man - which is to say, unconditioned or less-conditioned
reality, a spiritual reality that is also his own real
self or, possibly, a teaching pertaining to it. Enkidu
is rendered more presentable after his rendezvous with
and seduction by Ishtar's agent, which represents the capturing
and relative neutralizing of that reality by the lower,
conditioned world. (Another ancient story with the same
theme is the Biblical story of Esau and Jacob, which we
will look at soon.) Enkidu's struggle with Gilgamesh may
thus also correspond with the manifestation of the accusing
self, and their subsequent harmonization with the inspired
self, or nafs al malhama: Gilgamesh and Enkidu
together slay Humbaba, the beast in the forest; as it happens,
another spelling of malhama means 'bloody combat,
slaughter'.
Shibli must have seemed like one kind of fool when he,
an intelligent and capable man, followed the instructions
of Junayd and sold sulphur, begged, and went from door
to door looking for people he might have offended during
his career as a civil servant in order to apologize to
them. He must have seemed like another kind of fool when
he first put sugar in the mouths of those who repeated
the name of God; and then, as his 'state' increased, offered
gold to those who would repeat it for him; and finally,
when anyone repeated it, came after them with a sword because,
he said, he had realized that they were only doing so out
of mechanical habit.
The gradations of being in this scheme of the Ikhwan do
not represent aspects of divinity, but stages of manifestation.
Nor do they, as given, have intricate and specific interconnections
as seen in the sefirothic 'tree'. The intermittent
inclusion in the midst of the latter of Da'ath, 'knowledge',
however, and the interconnections of the points of the
circumference of the enneagram, the inner triangle of which
is supposed to represent the vital status of the thing
or process represented, does suggest that the formulators
of the sefirothic Kabbalah were trying to produce
something of their own by combining elements of the teaching
of the Ikhwan and the enneagram of the Sarmoun,
and other Sufi doctrines as well.
 
Wasu'a (after 'Esau', of course), on the other
hand, corresponds to meanings of 'spacious, vast, extensive',
'contain, comprehend, encompass, include', and 'be generous,
liberal, open-handed': suggestive of the spatial, 'holistic'
(to use an over-used word), and selfless aspect of the
mind. Waswas is 'temptation, delusion, fixed idea',
and also 'anxiety, concern, melancholy'. Iswa means
'example, model, pattern'.
Isaac in his fatally weakened condition represents the
same reality as Esau rendered delicate by extreme hunger,
the same hunger that Isaac now expresses when he states
his desire for some of Esau's strongly flavoured wild game
(the vividness of less-conditioned reality). The difference
is this: Esau, after he had partaken of Jacob's bowl of
stew, recovered; Isaac is not going to recover. Sufis say
that spiritual states are temporary, but stages are permanent.
The fact is, Mesopotamian cylinder seals have more people
pouring things in them than the U.S. Air Force has explanations
for Roswell.
The days and nights as well of Mesopotamian priests were
anything but badly planned, being filled with precisely
timed prayers, liturgies and sacrifices, and with new moons
and the ends of months marked by festivals. Each deity
had its own priesthood, from the highest offices of (the
Sumerian) sanga and en all the way down
to the sacred temple prostitutes that scholars since the
advent of Latin have politely referred to as 'hierodules',
very large numbers of whom, along with eunuchs, were necessary
for the rites of Inanna/Ishtar to be properly performed.
Speculation is still the best we can do when it comes to
determining the precise functions of the various categories
of priests, although their Sumerian and Akkadian names
are known; one kind, for instance, seems likely to have
been concerned with literary and musical forms of worship,
and another with the flow not of sounds, but of celebratory
inebriants and ablutions.
The name 'Iblis', again, means 'the wicked one', or 'the
hopeless'. His other name in Arabic, Shaitan,
means 'one who opposes'. Satan particularly disliked that
he, a creature made of fire, was expected to humble himself
before man, who was made of mere clay. 'So the angels prostrated
themselves, all of them together: not so Iblis: he refused
to be among those who prostrated themselves. God said: "O
Iblis! What is your reason for not being among those who
prostrated themselves?" Iblis said: "I am not one to prostrate
myself to man, whom Thou didst create from sounding clay,
from mud moulded into shape." God said: "Then get thee
out from here; for thou art rejected, accursed. And the
curse shall be on thee till the Day of Judgment." (Koran,
Sura 15, verses 30 to 35.)
Gurdjieff's explanation as conveyed by Ouspensky is confusing
inasmuch as he says that the broken-away pieces of consciousness
that unite and are, in effect, evil in the sense that they
oppose the (new) evolutionary manifestation are themselves
from the evolutionary process (presumably an earlier, failed
one), but that they do so at certain points in the involutionary
process. The 'involutionary process' and 'evolutionary
process' sound more than a little like the Sufis' 'arc
of descent' and 'arc of ascent'. Apart from the context
of individual souls, examples of involutionary processes
would, one thinks, be all forms of higher teaching that
become coarsened and distorted through progressively greater
degrees of mixing with the lower levels of reality: like
Esau eating his stew, or Ishtar in the underworld, or like
a great religion twisted into a killing machine, or like
Sufi teachings in a pack of cartoonish cards. The evolutionary
process, however, would seem to be something that takes
place partly through engaging with those remnants, if only
to the purpose of developing the discernment to understand
that that is what they are, and then going on to seek out
fresher and purer impulses.
The idea of it happening at certain points in the involutionary
process, then, can only mean when a certain quota of transcendent
content has been lost; when a certain corner has been turned,
in the sense of no longer merely deviating from the original
direction, but becoming opposed to it. It resonates, 'like
calling to like', with the errant consciousness at a vulnerable
stage in its evolutionary climb, and turns it aside.
Zohra, Venus, is Ishtar. In the myth of her descent into
the underworld, she escapes by arranging to have Tammuz
substitute for her, which it turns out may be a way of
saying that when people get through with distorting a teaching
about higher reality, all they are left with is their own
tendency to turn something alive and uncontrollable into
something as docile as a sheep. One way of reading the
story may be to see the two principal characters' 'substituting'
for her as having the same significance. One of the meanings
of nabi is 'deputy', who is a substitute for the higher
authority. People come to the Tarot cards wanting to learn
a kind of magic...
None of this is to discount the importance of the fact
that, for instance, there is a basic practical - if you
like, psychological - relationship between 'secrets' and
'power'. Arabic for 'hair' is sha'r. In fact,
if meanings of words that sound like sirr and sar and sha'r are
considered altogether, one of the things they can be assembled
into is the story of Samson in the Biblical Book of
Judges.
'Once so strong and mighty,' the Contemporary English
Version has him saying, in the 'riddle' he composed
after he found the lion he had slain earlier with his
bare hands had bees living in the carcass, and he had
sampled their honey, '- now so sweet and tasty!'
'When the seeker of truth,' Attar records Abu al Hasan
Khirqani as saying, 'has cheerfully tasted poison nine
times, on the tenth time he tastes sugar... To me it is
as if there is something I do not know but that is in my
stomach and that feeds me. It is as sweet as honey and
as fragrant as musk. The world does not know in what way
I am fed.'
The Tablet of Destiny or, to use the Sumerian word for
it, the me ('meh' or 'muh'), was a sort of divine
template. They are sometimes referred to (whether by the
ancients or by the translators) in the plural, the Tablets
of Destiny. The me were, according to some, the
property of Enki/Ea (even though Zu stole them from Enlil),
and occupied a position of overwhelming importance in the
religion of the Sumerians and, hence, for the many people
who took over their land and religion. They were the decrees
of heaven, written before our world came into being, and
formed the basis of all insititutions and, even, every
aspect of society, religion and civilization; from another
point of view, they were discussed as including actual
physical objects as well as abstractions, from musical
instruments and artisanal tools to truth and lies, sex,
various kinds of priest, victory and royal paraphernalia.
Let us consider this startlingly un-primitive conception
in light of the ideas that we discussed earlier about levels
of reality emanating from a sublime source. Looking down,
as it were, from God's point of view - and as blasphemous
as that might sound, it is only an exercise to try to follow
what the great teachers have said about how it really is
- the First Intelligence was created; the Universal Soul
was produced out of that; and the Intelligence then transmitted
to the Soul - the Pen wrote on the Tablet - everything
that was to be; and the World Soul made it, and continues
to make it, happen. At some point, as Ibn al 'Arabi said
in so many words, this means everything we know ... 'Arsh means
'throne', but a closely similar word, arsh, in
Arabic means 'creatures', in the sense of 'all creatures'.
In its meaning it corresponds with the sefirah Malkuth,
'kingdom', even though in the Ikhwan's formulation
it was meant to comprise 'minerals, plants, and animals',
but not humans.
The opinion of historians is that the individual shown
in Figure 53 - the original is right side up - is the priest
spoken of in the seal's accompanying inscription. Adad,
again, is another name for Enlil and is, supposedly, represented
by the winged disc to which the priest is raising his arms.
His mid-air position may indicate that he is performing
some act of ritual worship, or that he is dancing ecstatically,
as did the dervishes of the god Baal on Mount Carmel who
are mentioned in the eighteenth chapter of the first book
of Kings in the Old Testament. The reason for showing him
upside-down here should be obvious. Someone else, a few
hundred years ago, also saw him that way.
The origin of the name, 'The Hanged Man', may be not that
hard to discern: the inclusion of the word 'man' could
be what gives it away. We have already seen the importance
of the Sufi teaching concerning what they call al insan
al kamil, the 'perfect' or 'complete man'. Insan is
'man', kamil is 'complete'. Another word for 'entire,
total, universal' is kulliya(t). Arabic for 'hanged'
is 'alaq. Someone may very well have misread insan
al kulliya(t) as insan al 'alaq.
 
That leaves the question: what gave them the idea of a
'hanged man' in the first place?
Where the Moon card showed a situation, a condition, in
which there is no 'self' to be seen and, yet, there is
a suggestion of something that was, at some point, constructed,
although it now may be in disrepair - the lunatic world,
in which the fateful moon syphons off the energies that
could, with effort, knowledge and luck, be raised to the
spiritual level of the Sun; yet for which, paradoxically,
there is still (in a word) hope - while that is the case
with The Moon, the scene on The Devil may show the end
result of persisting under that influence, of failing to
escape it, where two beings regard each other with what
may be desire, or loathing, or horror: but is unlikely
to be indifference, because the fact that they are bound,
held in stasis, would be meaningless if they had no will
to be restrained and to make it worthy to be called Hell;
if it is anything like attraction they feel, they are so
similar-seeming as to make that something of a joke; and,
if loathing or horror, the same applies, although for the
opposite reason. They cannot even be said to have the satisfaction
of being, fully, whatever it is they now are, as is demonstrated
by their stunted state relative to the 'real' Devil who,
obviously, rules over them, and of whom they - as a further
dimension, almost a luxury, of unfulfilment - are prevented
from seeing and knowing. The two may be and, indeed, probably
are - in the perfect expression of the nature of Hell -
the same person: and that person's being portrayed as two
small, imprisoned devils may be the ultimate representation
of what it means to have a self, to be a self, to be condemned
to be that self, and never have the possibility of being
anything but that self, yet not to know that self, and
to know that you do not know yourself, and now never will.
Same people; different card. Same sun. It is even apparent
that the horizontal lines of the support for the sun-disk
have transmogrified into the brick wall behind the two
friends. One could say that it is not unlike watching Law
and Order and noticing that the actor who is playing
a blackmailing doctor in the current episode is the one
who played an accountant who was an important witness a
few weeks ago; but, there it is.
That the importance of the duality of consciousness that
in our time has found an anatomical correlative in the
brain hemispheres was something recognized by the ancients
is shown by the fact that the Jacob and Esau story is far
from being the only part of the Jewish scriptures to deal
with it.
While it may have been Herakleitos who said, 'Character
is destiny', and Nietzsche who said, 'I am a destiny',
only Butt-head, or someone very much like him, can, with
full accuracy, say, 'I am a character'; and in the last
analysis, of the three, he is by far the most influential.
[Thank you to Nicholas for permission to include this extract,
also on his site, in this Newsletter]
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