Major Arcana Introduction: Balance and Development / A User Guide to R.M. Place’s Tarot of the Saints

 

A User Guide to R.M. Place’s Tarot of the Saints 

Meditations for Pulp Spiritual Direction Through Applied Contemplative Prediction

General Introduction

Major Arcana Introduction: Balance and Development

Major Arcana: Card by Card Analysis

Minor Arcana: Introduction

The Suit of Cups: Self Presenting Love

The Suit of Swords: Love Considered 

The Suit of Staffs: Love Made Real

The Suit of Coins: Sacramental Engagement

Keyword Guide to Tarot of the Saints

Transversal Theology: Technical Glossary

Major Arcana Introduction: Balance and Development

The Major Arcana is the most Commented on part of the Tarot deck.  The structure and development have inspired volumes of contemplative writing.  The sequence of the trumps seems to play out a navigation of balance and a progression of spiritual awakening or mastery.  Through narrating that awakening, the cards seek to portray complex issues such as theodicy, interpersonal relationship, vocation, cosmic relationships, etc.  As one grows one reassesses these relationships and actualizes their potentiality.  The trump cards usually start at 0 and proceed to 21.  Decks vary greatly in their presentation of the images on the cards, but the sequences are usually similar (with a few variations here or there).

On the whole, the Major Arcana presents the abstract and transcendent.  How one uses them in pulp spiritual direction is as a catalyst for moving from abstract to concrete concerning one’s query. Regarding evangelization, they gear toward the more abstract theological arts.  They are good cards to summon questions of cosmology, theological-anthropology, soteriology, ontology, hagiography, moral theory, the discipline of virtue etc.  With the Minor Arcana, we will see the opposite, the cards will work concrete / practical to abstract.  

In his book, A Gnostic Book of Saints R.M. Place notes that the saints portrayed are modeled off of a pageantry, a series of presentations meant to stimulate and elevate the soul. This interpretation allows for a linear and progressive interpretation of the journey of the soul, which starts as original, innocent, or idyllic union; then differentiates through suffering to struggle, and subsequently reintegrates as the culmination of spiritual maturity.  The “traveler” on the journey is the Fool (the 0 card) who is the “observer” of the structure and brackets the entire Arcana.  At the beginning of the sequence, he is a naive, ignorant, or unobservant Fool.  At the end, he is a wise, detached, and otherworldly “holy fool” whose wisdom comes off as folly to those uninitiated.  

The cards relate to each other in various ways and many formulas have been developed for categorizing their sequence. Forming a structure can help the director intuit meaning in a situation of direction since the meanings are complementary and can shed light on each other.  We will follow Place and divide the Major Arcana into three groups or “paths” to help us better understand the “pageantry” involved.   

Structural Contemplation Part I: Cosmic Balance

The first path concerns the union of opposites from aspects of the self and the world as “given” in the cosmos. The path runs from cards I-VII and the path forms a structure of chiastic parallelism ruled by an organizing card, the Chariot, which comes at the end of the chiasm.

Each parallel forms a compatible dyad with its opposite member.  At the center of the Chiasm are the Emperor and the Empress who are the terrestrial and immanent embodiments of masculinity and femininity. Working out from the center, these two are bracketed by the Papess and the Pope, which are masculinity and femininity connected to divinity as the transcendent and the immanent inner or exoteric and esoteric.  The magician pairs with the lovers in that he is the sacralizer of the elemental cosmos, while the lovers are the sacralizers of interpersonal relationships.  The Chariot is the driver of the two opposites who must pull them into functional compatibility.  These compatibilities may abide within the person or they may be elements that one must come into relationship with or form balance with from the outside.  From the outside they are roles imposed or personas the querent may encounter, from the inside, they are aspects of the self that present gender, authority (and how one naturally wields it), and innate skills for engaging the outside world. 

The Major Arcana consists of two chiasms of balance which must be brought into balance with each other before the Fool can successfully navigate the progress of the third path.  The first are the “givens” of the cosmos, the second is the interior virtues as spiritual skills that must be personally honed by the Fool as he journeys.  The balance of the first path is the balance of the natural.  The balance of the second path is the balance of the spiritual. The balance of the two paths themselves is the balance of what is given and what is honed, the inner and the outer.  

Structural Contemplation Part II: Personal Harmony 

The second path runs a gambit of spiritual skills and discipline.  This path is the exercise of will with virtue and is more personally or interiorly oriented.  The path runs from VIII-XIV.  These also form a chiastic structure to be balanced and they are ruled by Temperance, the spiritual balance of the cosmically (or exterior) oriented Chariot.  

The center of the Chiasm is the Wheel of fortune and Strength, which represent our struggle for mastery versus our acceptance of the order of the cosmos.  The next dyad is The Hermit and the Hanged Man, signifying the balance of personal edification through solitude and public sacrifice and engagement.  The last dyad brackets the chiasm. They are the motivations for moral life,  Justice and Death.  Death is a power that is feared by all of humanity, but it is indeed the motivator that works with Justice to inspire us to begin our work now and not delay.  The Memento mori is one of the most powerful spiritual catalysts available to humanity because at death we understand that we will meet justice.  The ruler that brings all these skills and virtues into balance is temperance, which gives each its place of usefulness in the psyche as the person needs them.

As much as one can bring the two paths each into balance and then balance them with each other, one is better able to navigate the third path.  But as we shall see, much of that path is acceptance of mystery, grace, and ultimately of one’s own weakness.  The path itself starts with a cataclysm that would destroy one’s sense of self security.  Thus the first two paths are an active balancing that is continuous and adaptable to the needs of the person in the context of the third path, not a “trick” to be pulled off and completed.  

Structural Contemplation Part III: Progress to Reintegration

The third group is not a chiasm, but an ascent whose tale notes the Christian theodicy of suffering that leads to redemption and reintegration with divinity.  The path starts with postlapsarian reality as it is. The first card displays the domination of the principality of  “this World”, the Devil.  That card is supplemented by the Tower which epitomizes all the structures that we create to protect our self delusion against God’s plan for us.  That Tower is “destroyed” and the ascent begins.  The first two cards are a dyad of Christian Theodicy that demonstrates how suffering can lead to strength and that “all things work to good for those who love the Lord.”  This initial cataclysm leads to a Star of hope.  That Star (Therese) rises to the Moon (Mary), drawn to its light, a light that is merely a reflection of the  Sun (Christ).  Once the light of Christ, coming from the Father through him and reflected from Mary, enters the subject and they receive it, see what it has to show, and integrate it into their self, they are judged.  After that, there is absolute integration (Wisdom Sophia, the World).

 The end of the path is a holistic integration of the self to the environment through a process called the three tiered integration of the self.  

  

The Major Arcana work as a unit and as various paths but, as Place notes, each Saint individually presents “an example of a saint’s heroic victory, sometimes the struggle was with evil, the best was when the struggle was with the saint’s own inner nature and the victory was the spiritual transformation of the self.”  The lessons of hagiographical narrative can coordinate with the position in the pageant and the original meaning in the Tarot to form harmonies of meaning that can be drawn on as one practices pulp spiritual direction.