Chapter 11: The Torah and the Tarot
(Wheel of Fortune)
PREV HOME NEXT0. "All the power that ever was or will be is here now."
10. "The Kingdom of Spirit is embodied in my flesh."
"Heaven and Earth are not benevolent. They treat all things as straw dogs. Sages are not benevolent. They treat the people as straw dogs. The space between Heaven and Earth - is it not like a bellows? Empty it is not finished, move it and more comes out. Many words lead to numerous exhaustions. It is better to keep to the center."
"Thirty spokes unite in one hub, but it is on the lack of substance (the hole for the axle) that the cart depends."
"The Tao produces one. One produces two. Two produces three. Three produces all things. All things bear Yin and embrace Yang. They merge their energies to create Harmony. What men dislike is to be 'orphans,' 'widows,' and 'without grain.' But the lords and nobles [humbly] call themselves such names. So some things are increased by being diminished, and some are diminished by being increased. What others teach, I also teach. 'The violent do not get their [natural] deaths.' I will take this as the father of all teachings."
"Your name or your body, which is dearer? Your body or your goods, which would you have more of? Gain and loss - which is the illness? Therefore, what one greatly loves must cause greater expense; what one hoards more of must be more generously lost."
When Master Zhao stood up and walked to the door, we both instinctively also stood up. After he closed the door, we looked at each other. "Where's he going?" asked Rivah.
I shrugged. Rivah went over to the window and looked out. "Huh, I can't see him," she said in surprise. Then she went over to the door, opened it, and stepped outside. A few moments later she came back in, shaking her head. "Where did he go? He's gone."
"That's the way he is," I said. "He comes and goes as he pleases. He lives alone up here, and maybe it was time for him to take a walk. He is a martial arts master and knows how to make himself scarce when he wants to. In any case, I think we have gotten all we're going to get from him, at least for now. He actually gave us a lot to chew on . . . . Boy, how did he know that I wanted to ask him about Sabutai! I mean, I haven't even told YOU about him yet!"
"You can fill me in on that," said Rivah. "What he showed us about the Tree of Life confirms its connection with the seven-branched Menorah. That symbol shows in abbreviated form the way of linking the chakras. It also shows the symmetry of the upper and lower chakras mirrored by the heart chakra in the middle. That was neat how he connected it to the human body and to the eight trigrams. And then he got the 64 hexagrams, too. There was also something in that about relationships."
"Yes, I think he meant the pairing of inner and outer trigrams to make hexagrams can be looked at in terms of a relationship between two people. That business about victims playing a game with oppressors was strange, too," I commented.
"It reminded me of Pushkin," I continued. "In his play 'Boris Godunov' he spoke of a 'priyatniy plen,' 'a pleasurable captivity.' You know that play is about the historical events surrounding Boris' role as regent for the young prince Dimitri, sole surviving son of Ivan the Terrible, who has killed his older son and intended heir with his iron staff in a fit of rage. Boris as regent murders his youthful charge and usurps the throne. Then a young orphan monk, Gregory, escapes from the monastery he is living in and assumes the role of a false Dimitri, claiming the throne of Ivan the Terrible. He gathers popular support and challenges Boris. Boris fights a losing battle against the Pretender and finally dies of a heart attack. At one point in the story Dimitri escapes to Poland, where he falls in love with a beautiful Polish temptress named Marina. Gregory enjoys this bubble of a quiet romantic interlude in the midst of the turbulent politics of his situation. He senses that Marina will use him as an opportunity to grab power. Yet he finds a strange pleasure in the whole suicidal venture. Although Gregory triumphs over the guilt-ridden Boris, he is soon overthrown, killed, and replaced by the boyars with a new Tsar, the first of the Romanovs. . . . It's a complicated story, but right smack in the middle of the whole thing Pushkin suddenly, just for a moment, tosses out the notion of a pleasurable imprisonment, like the eye of a hurricane . . . . Anyhow, back to reality. What do we do now?"
"I think we are done here," said Rivah. "Let's go back to Telluride, get a comfortable room, and you tell me about this Sabutai and what he has to do with International Terrorism. And then we'll figure out what we're going to do about it."
"Good idea," I said.
While she finished her glass of tea, I took a scrap of paper from my notebook and, as a farewell joke, jotted down one more poem in Chinese - one I remembered by Li Ao:
You've disciplined your body 'til its form is like the crane's,
And live beneath a thousand pines with two little classics.
I come to ask the Way, and you say nothing else, but --
'The cloud is in the blue sky, and the water's in the bottle.'
I translated it for Rivah, explaining that the crane is a Taoist symbol for immortality. She asked, "What are the two little classics?"
"Good question," I replied. "I don't know why I remembered this poem. It just popped up as the right thing to say. The two little classics might be the Tao-te-ching and the Heart Sutra. But Zhao doesn't seem to keep any books on paper around here. He knows them all by heart anyway. Let's say it's Yin and Yang. That fits the last couplet better, too. I have a feeling that if we get into that last line it may help us on our quest."
While I posted the poem on the door where I had put the first one the night before, Rivah went and relieved herself at the little outhouse. I then followed suit. Our inner loads lightened, we shouldered our packs and began the trek back down to Ophir. As we hiked along, I told her some stories of my experiences with Master Zhao thirty years ago back in Taiwan when I was a travelling student and seeker of the Tao. I was particularly surprised to meet a Zen master who was married and smoked.
"Yeah," remarked Rivah. "A Transcendental Meditator once told me that the Maharishi told his followers that smoking was the grossest thing in the universe." Rivah was a non-smoking health food nut.
"Well, I was shocked when I saw Zhao smoking. And I remember that, during my first one-week Zen meditation retreat with him, he would smoke during the breaks. And then he would cough during his talks. This really began to trouble me, and finally I asked him why he smoked if it made him cough. He turned to the whole group of about twenty meditators and said, 'You see, this American student, Lao 'Wa, he has more compassion than you do.' What a trip that was to see him today, calmly smoking away, fit as a fiddle in his eighties, with skin like a baby's."
"Maybe he was doing it especially for your benefit, just to get your compassion up," said Rivah with a wry smile.
"I haven't seen him for many years," I continued, "but I heard that his wife eventually divorced him. It seems he had a habit of taking numerous mistresses, and she couldn't handle that situation. But he wrote lots of books and taught thousands of students, reawakening an interest in meditation among two or three generations of young Chinese. Then he suddenly stopped all that and went into seclusion. Why he dropped things and came here I haven't a clue. I know that as a young man he spent three years in a thatched hut on Mount O-mei in Sichuan Province, living literally on peanuts, and reading through the Buddhist Tripitaka - all 56 volumes of fine print. He has a prodigious photographic memory and used to learn the classics while spending an hour in Horse Stance and other qi-gong and martial art postures. That's why he doesn't need to haul books around."
We continued chatting, Rivah telling me about her childhood on the Kibbutz in Israel and the Seven Day War when Egypt attacked through the Sinai, and then her family went out there into the Negev to pioneer desert farming.
After that I told her what I had learned so far about Sabutai from Kang and Noah - which wasn't a whole lot. But at least it was a name and a general location, which Zhao seemed to confirm with more details. We now knew he was running a large clandestine operation deep in the bowels of the space and telecommunications programs of Russia and China and who knows where else. We also knew he had a hand on the trigger of international terrorism.
In about an hour and a half we had tramped back down to Ophir. From there we hitched into Telluride in the back of a beat up old pickup truck. We got out at a small motel and checked in. Telluride is a trendy upscale ski resort town of about a thousand permanent residents, with a fair amount of New Age activity mixed in for flavor. It was off-season now, too late for winter sports, and too early for summer hiking. We took turns showering off the sweat from the hike and changed into fresh clothes. Then we left our camping packs in the room and headed out for lunch at a small restaurant. After lunch we decided to walk around the main street and see what there was to see. Most of the specialty stores were ski shops and camping goods.
"Oh, here's an interesting one," said Rivah, pointing to a little shop that displayed a hanging wooden sign with large embossed and gold painted letters: 'The Wheel of Fortune.' Below that title was an embossed emblem of a wheel painted in red with eight spokes. To the left of the wheel was the column 'Books, Rocks, Decks, Games.' To the right of the wheel it said, 'Herbs, Incense, Fortunes, Fun.' At the bottom was a phone number.
"Let's go in and get our fortune told," I said with a bright-idea smile. "We can ask how to solve the mystery of International Terrorism, and who knows, we might even get a useful answer."
Rivah nodded with a laugh, and we went in. There was soft relaxing music playing, and the smell of cedar incense and sage mixed with a medley of other herbs that were hanging about, many tied in bundles to nails in the rough wooden rafters. One section of the store had displays of various colorful minerals and crystals, including knapped flint arrowheads and assorted Indian handicrafts, including fine objects worked in silver with turquoise inlays. There were also a couple of cases of books on the subject of rocks and traditional Indian crafts. In another section there were several cases displaying sample cards from fortune telling decks and other spiritual games.
"Look, Derek," said Rivah excitedly, "They have Tarot decks! The gypsies used these cards to tell fortunes. But they have an important relationship to the Kabbalah. Let me show you."
So we browsed about looking at several decks and admiring the beautiful colors and designs on the cards. Rivah and the proprietor, a middle-aged man with thick glasses who introduced himself as David Potter, took turns explaining to me how the Tarot was the origin of our modern playing cards, but was used for reading fortunes rather than for gambling. Apparently the original decks had fourteen cards in each suit, ten pips and four royalty - King, Queen, Knight, and Page (or Prince and Princess.) Instead of the familiar hearts, spades, diamonds, and clubs, these older cards used cups, swords, coins, and staves, symbolizing the four main castes of society - priests, warriors, merchants, and laborers. That made 56 suit cards. But there were also 22 Trumps, or Major Arcana, giving a total deck of 78 cards.
"Did you say 22?" I interrupted the discussion.
"That's right," said David. "The Trumps are the same in number as the original Hebrew letters. You can often find a Hebrew letter written on each of the Major Arcana. And different traditions assign the Trumps to the letters in various ways. In fact, the Major Arcana are supposed by some to contain the essence of the Torah. The resemblance of the names Torah and Tarot may not be coincidental. Here are some of the more well-known systems for attributing the Hebrew letters to the Major Arcana." He pulled down a book entitled The Encyclopedia of Tarot and thumbed it open to a page with a chart. There were two main systems: one by Levi, Papas, and Wirth, and another one by Waite. And there on the page were the ancient Hebrew and Phoenician letters just as Rivah had shown me.
"OK," I said. "Let's pick the deck that attracts us the most. Then we'll go back to the room and ask it our question. Only, instead of using the whole deck, we'll just use the twenty-two Trump cards. That will take us into them faster. Then we can study them and see what we learn about the alphabet as well as our question."
Rivah agreed. So we looked over about 25 or 30 decks and finally picked the one by Paul Foster Case, from the Builders of the Adytum. The cards were uncolored. David explained that this was so the user could color them on his own. The enclosed booklet explained the suggested color scheme. On the backs of the cards was the emblem of the B.O.T.A. in the form of a solar disk with rays emanating. The solar disk was quartered by an X over which was drawn a cube oriented with a corner in the center and inscribed in a black circle. The three visible faces of the cube had symbols on them: a Greek Theta, a symbol for Mercury, and a symbol for Venus with a triangular top. I immediately noticed that the cube could be the Hebrew letter Beth drawn three dimensionally as a building block; the black circle could be the Hebrew Oayin, the letter 'O'. The X could be the old letter Tau for T; and the sunburst could be an original form of the emblem for Aleph, the bull whose horns represent the sun's rays.
"My God!" I thought. "The whole emblem complex spells B.O.T.A. in ancient Hebrew!" The circle with the X in it looked also like the letter @eth, whose Greek form is Theta. And there was a Theta inscribed on the cube. That wheel with four spokes was exactly what was on the shop's sign, except for having half the number of spokes.
[BOTA logo]I asked David why he chose that emblem for his shop. He picked up the deck we were playing with and pulled out a card entitled 'Wheel of Fortune.' Right on that card was the wheel with eight spokes! Not only that, it had the three symbols that were on the BOTA cube, plus a funny doubled zigzag - "Aquarius, for the dawning Aquarian Age?" I wondered. It also had four letters which looked almost the same as the BOTA emblem: they were T, A, R, and O at each quadrant - the same except that the B of BOTA was an R - it spelled ROTA! That's the word for 'Wheel' in Latin! And then, in between the Latin letters, there were the four letters of the Tetragrammaton written in Modern Hebrew.
"I see. It's the symbol from the Wheel of Fortune card . . . . Say, David," I said as casually as I could, "Did you ever notice that the symbol on the back of this deck is based on the Wheel of Fortune symbol?"
He took another card from the deck, face down, and put them side by side. "You're right," he admitted.
"And here's something else," I continued. "Look at the Hebrew letter chart in your book. The letter B originally resembled a corral, and its Egyptian source was a glyph of a cubic building or divine throne, representing the world. And here's the letter O, and T, and A - the bull's head with ears and horns representing the rays of the sun. The BOTA emblem spells BOTA in ancient Hebrew letters."
"You know," he commented with a smile, "BOTA has a fifteen-year correspondence course on the secrets of Tarot. I have been taking it for over six years now, and they never mentioned anything like that. Nor did I notice it. I don't know the ancient Hebrew letters."
"And they probably won't mention it either," I replied. "Although the symbol in the picture clearly represents @eth, and the Theta on the cube is the Greek form of that letter, on the bottom of this Wheel of Fortune card the BOTA people put the letter Kaph. Look at the other cards. Their letter assignments are different from the lists in the book. This is yet another system of assigning the letters. But Kaph is definitely not @eth. The letters are scrambled against the icons. When you think about it, that's not really such a surprise. (I recalled Zhao's comments.) Intentional scrambling of data is one of the fundamental principles of Kabbalah, if I understand what Rivah's been teaching me. It's Temurah. Putting the letters on the cards more or less randomly is just a clue telling clever people to look for the letters in the card illustrations, and to keep everyone else confused."
"Say, thanks. I'll play around with that," David said, still a bit bemused by the whole thing, but happy to see our interest in the decks.
"And we'll definitely take a BOTA deck," I said.
"And let's take a copy of the Tarot Encyclopedia," said Rivah.
"Actually, you see, it's a three volume set," said David, pointing to two more thick oversize books on the shelf.
"Oh," she laughed, "We're travelling light, so I guess we'll come back and look up anything if we need to. But the Tarot will have to serve as our handy pocket Torah, and our Rota Wheel of Fortune."
"That - ORAT - speaks to us in the language of TAOR, also known as Bull," I added jokingly.
"And the language of ATOR, for us Egyptian Cow goddesses," added Rivah to get even more mileage.
We paid for our deck and started walking out into the street, when we noticed a bulletin board next to the door. On it were tacked a number of posters announcing events. Two caught my eye. They were to be held at the same place, but at different times. One said, 'Experience the Stargate.' The other promoted a seminar called 'The Flower of Life.' David saw me jotting down the address, times, and phone number and commented, "That's at the house of my friend Stan Selkin. He has some of the largest crystals in the world at his house - definitely worth seeing. Do the Stargate workshop. That's a great experience. And it's tomorrow, if you're still in town. You can get a good introduction to the Flower of Life materials by reading this little book in an hour or two. Then take the seminar if you want more. Drunvalo's quite a storyteller."
He handed me a little book by Bob Frissell entitled, NOTHING IN THIS BOOK IS TRUE, BUT IT'S EXACTLY HOW THINGS ARE. The cover had aliens and flying saucers on it, and the Face of Mars. I flipped through the table of contents. "Hmm. I see lot of stuff in here on sacred geometry. And a section on Prana - a kind of Spherical Breathing. Then it gets into the secret government. What do you think, Rivah?"
"Let's look it over. It might be helpful," she agreed.
We bought a copy. The title alone seemed to sum up my recent experiences pretty well. At the counter we saw David's collection of incense, and on impulse Rivah bought a packet of the same kind of cedar sticks that he was burning in the store.
We walked straight back to our room, stopping only to pick up a few sandwiches and drinks to snack on later in the room.
Rivah sat with the deck at the little table in our motel room. As she culled the 22 trumps from the deck, she stated our proposal, "We'll do a reading on our quest - 'How do we eradicate terrorism from the world?' We'll just use the Major Arcana. We can keep it real simple. The first card will be the past that has resulted in this situation. The second card will be the current situation. The third card will be where we are going. Then we'll pull three more - a key for releasing the past, a key for releasing the present, and a key to the future."
"That sounds good to me," I agreed. "We'll see how far we can get with that, and then we'll see if the rest of the trumps match up to the letters iconically the way the Wheel of Fortune seems to fit @eth."
Rivah lit a stick of the cedar incense to create a subtle atmosphere, saying, "I picked cedar incense because the Hebrew word for cedar AeReZ is a Kabbalistic code for the World, AeReCh. LeBh means 'heart,' and is the root of the word 'Love' in English. The Cedar of Lebanon is the Heart Tree of the World, like the Nordic Ash, Ygdrasill. Our quest is to ask the Heart of the World for the answer to this trouble."
I nodded in appreciation, spread the deck of Trumps face down on the motel room's table, and shuffled it around thoroughly. Then I gathered the cards together and shuffled them a few more times in my hands. We set chairs next to each other so we could both face the cards as we lay them on the table. We decided to take turns drawing the cards. I went first. I drew Judgement. The picture showed a winged angel blowing a trumpet in the sky. Below the angel a man, woman, and child, all naked stood up from what looked like opened graves: a conventional vision of the Biblical Day of Judgement.
"Interesting," muttered Rivah. "Maybe it's our own judgements of each other that have created the world mess that we are in. Maybe it can also be that everything from the past is a kind of wake-up call."
Then she drew a card, and placed it to the right of Judgement. It was titled 'World.' The illustration showed a naked woman with a scarf over her shoulder, stepping forward with her arms spread holding in each a helical coil. She was framed by what looked like a laurel wreath, and esconced in the four corners of the card were the heads of a bull, a lion, an eagle, and a man.
"The woman must be Gaia, the World we are consulting about," I suggested. "The wreath traditionally crowned poets, champions, and conquerors of the world. The two helical coils may be the strands of DNA that encode the evolution of life forms on the planet. The heads are like heraldic totems."
"Those heads are from Revelation, too," cut in Rivah suddenly. She went to the bed table and pulled open its drawer. Sure enough, there was a Gideon Bible. She opened it to Revelation. "Here, Chapter 1, verse 10: 'I was in the Spirit on the Lord's day, and heard behind me a great voice, as of a trumpet, saying "I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last . . . Fear not."' The voice comes from behind; that must be the Past speaking. That's Judgement, with its trumpet. And over here in Chapter 4, it describes a throne surrounded by 24 seats - the 24 hours of the day? 'And there were seven lamps of fire burning before the throne, which are the seven Spirits of God.' That sounds like our Menorah lamp with seven chakras in the body, doesn't it. . . . This card must be Beth, the body, or the world, represented by the cubic throne.
"Now here it talks about the four totems on our World card: 'And round about the throne, were four beasts full of eyes before and behind. And the first beast was like a lion, and the second beast like a calf, and the third beast had a face as a man, and the fourth beast was like a flying eagle.' And listen here to what the beasts are saying: 'Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come.' That's the reading layout that we decided to use just now - past, present, future! And over here at Chapter 7 it says, 'I saw four angels standing on the four corners of the earth, holding the four winds of the earth.' The winds are drawn on the card as the puffy clouds around each head. That was a common convention in the drawing of maps in ancient times."
"Whew!" I gasped. "Here we are. It looks like Judgement Day is arriving on our world, Planet Gaia! What comes next? . . . . It's my turn." I drew another card and placed it next to the World. I couldn't believe my eyes. It was the Wheel of Fortune. Chills ran up and down my spine, and my whole body broke out into goose bumps. There at each corner of the card were the same four angelic totems.
"You know," said Rivah, "the astrological symbol for Earth is a circle with a cross in it. Tav can be written either as an X or a +. So those astrological symbols represent Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Aquarius. By the way, I just remembered that TaRO in Hebrew means to blow a trumpet . . . And . . . Oh my God, check this out."
She grabbed Gideon again and flipped to the book of Ezekiel, 1:10 and read from his vision of an angelic UFO. 'As for the likeness of their faces, they four had the face of a man, and the face of a lion, on the right side, and they four had the face of an ox on the left side; they four also had the face of an eagle.' This passage sounds like a major flyby or landing of strange aircraft that are actually living creatures.. Listen to this: 'The appearance of the wheels and their work was like unto the color of a beryl: and they four had one likeness; and their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel.' There are the four faces on the card, and a wheel within a wheel. Ezekiel was a prophet seeing visions of the future. But, by the way, his Wheels of Fortune flew along, but did NOT rotate."
"There're three other images on this version of the card," I said. "They look Egyptian. On the top that's a sphinx holding a sword."
"Yes," said Rivah. "The snake is Apep. He personified the darkest hour of the night, the greatest challenge to Ra. That other creature with an ass's head, that's Set, the son of Seb and Nut, Earth and Sky. He is also a night creature. He married his sister Nephthys and murdered his brother Osiris. Then there was a great aerial flying saucer dogfight in which Horus, the son of Osiris, and an incarnation of Ra, avenged his father's murder by wounding Set and driving him into exile. Set, spliced together with Apep is no doubt the prototype for the Biblical Satan. Those two characters seem to be symbols of evil in the Wheel of Fortune, but the Sphinx with what looks like a sword of justice stands on top. The sphinx has the head of a woman and the body of a lion. The lion is a solar image. The sphinx may be a splicing of Ra and Hathor, or possibly Leo and Virgo . . . "
"OK. So that's our scenario of past, present, and future. We have Judgements, or Awakenings, that have placed the Earth on the Wheel of Fortune so that the future is in question. What's the key, what do we do? It's my turn to take a card. Let's see."
She turned over the next card and placed it under Judgement. It was the High Priestess. "That's me," she laughed. The priestess sat holding a scroll with the letters TORA visible on it. "And there are the four letters again, and the Torah is one of my specialties."
Behind the Priestess were two pillars, one white and one black, with sensuous bud-shaped capitals on top of each. On the black pillar was the Hebrew letter B - "For BheHU, the Voidness of the Earth in the beginning?" guessed Rivah. And on the white pillar was J - "For Jehovah, the Light that quickens the Void?" I speculated.
Between the pillars, hanging behind the Priestess was a curtained doorway decorated with pomegranates arranged in a pattern that certainly looked like the Tree of Life hexagonal grid.
"That card certainly looks like a sacred portal or doorway. It looks like Daleth to me," I commented. "She's a gorgeous woman, and those capitals look very pudendal, although they certainly look like phalluses too."
"I agree," replied Rivah. "And the pomegranate is a traditional Mid-Eastern symbol of fecundity," she added. "The pattern they form is the Tree of Life, but only seven Sephiroth are showing. That's our seven seals or seven-branched menorah again. And the heart chakra is right over that solar disk with ray-horns that is her headdress."
"The pomegranate in Hebrew is called Rimon," continued Rivah. "In the Song of Solomon there's a famous phrase describing a beautiful woman: 'Thy plants are a Garden of Pomegranates with precious fruits.' And there's more, too."
She reached for Gideon again. I put my hand lightly on her wrist to stop her, and, reaching into my pack, pulled out volume two of my JPS edition of the Hebrew text that I had brought along. "Use this."
She read, "'Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet, and thy mouth is comely; thy temples are like a pomegranate split open behind thy veil.' Well, what do you know! There's the veil with the garden of pomegranates on it, right on the card. Bingo again."
In the excitement of discovery exploring the cards and the corresponding Biblical passages, especially with the sensuous imagery of this card, I became increasingly aware of her leaning next to me, with her black curls brushing my face and her warm, firm unbra'd breast occasionally brushing against my arm.
"Yes," I agreed. "But splitting open a pomegranate doesn't sound right if the temples are on the woman's head. I don't think the intention is to kill her. They must be somewhere else. What about her thighs? It makes more sense if it describes a woman's genitals. And the veil would be the cloth she covers them with, or possibly the hymen."
"Well, didn't Master Zhao tell us that we would have to explore something to do with sex?" commented Rivah with a bright-eyed, mischievous smile. "By the way, at the end of the Song it says, (and she thumbed toward the end of chapter 8 -) 'If she be a wall' - ("See the wall in the background?" Rivah pointed at the card. 'We will build upon her a turret of silver. And if she be a door, we will enclose her with boards of cedar. I am a wall, and my breasts like the towers thereof.'
"What do you think? Am I a wall, and these my towers, and this my door?" She stood in the center of the room and with an exaggerated gesture and a cocking of her hips placed her right hand over her left breast and with her left hand grabbed her Levi'd crotch in a gesture reminiscent of a Madonna video.
"Moving right along," I said with an embarrassed smile, the blood running into my face and other parts of my anatomy. "It's my turn to draw." I took another card and set it next to hers and under the World card. It was The Magician. He was a handsome man standing in a rose garden pointing with his left hand at a table on which the symbols of the four suits lay: cup, sword, coin, and staff. With his right hand he held aloft a wand - presumably a magic wand. The wand had a flanged and tapered tip at each end. His belt was a serpent biting its tail, and over his head floated a floppy halo that, from the angle it was drawn, looked like an infinity sign.
"Well, that must be me here learning the magical secrets of the Tarot symbols," I said with a laugh. "With that dominant halo, this card looks like a ringer for 'Oayn, and according to what Master Zhao showed us, it suggests the timeless present moment of eternity, the Oayn Soph of zero nothingness, sunyata illusion Kung that interpenetrates all and yet is never connected to anything. From what you told me of the Rose Shoshanah, the rose garden may represent the whole alphabet coming out of that eye of emptiness."
"There are also lilies or Havatselet in with the roses," noted Rivah. "They may be the 'lilies of the field that toil not neither do they spin.' They just grow beautiful flowers like magic. Actually, the roses and lilies are reversed in the original Hebrew. Maybe the Kabbalists did some more switching on us. In the Song where it says, 'I am a rose of Sharon, a lily of the valleys,' 'Havatselet' is translated 'rose' and Shoshanah is translated 'lily.' The lily has six petals and looks like the Star of David from straight on. Throughout the Song the poet often refers to the Shoshanah-lilies. For example, 'Thy two breasts are like two fawns that are twins of a gazelle, which feed among the lilies, until the day breathe, and the shadows flee away, I will get me to the mountain of myrrh, and to the hill of frankincense.'"
"Well, we have one more card to show where the Priestess and the Magician may take us," I said. "It's your turn. But why don't we do this last one together?"
She nodded and her eyes met mine. For a long moment we gazed at each other, and the room again filled with that undefined light and warmth. Then she reached out and held my left hand in her right, and together we lifted a card from the deck and placed it under the Wheel of Fortune, next to the Magician.
It was The Sun. A great solar disk filled the upper half of the card, with its rays spreading in every direction and an open-eyed tranquil countenance. Below the sun were numerous Hebrew yods (Y's) representing sparks of light.
"According to one Kabbalistic tradition," said Rivah, "The alphabet letters all spring from yod, the first letter of the Tetragrammaton, like flames from a spark. If the Sun, source of all sparks, gives birth to all flames, it must be the brain that generates all thoughts whose creative seed letter gives birth to all the other letters. See. The sunburst is a giant head. So it must be the letter Resh, which means 'head' in Hebrew."
The lower half of the card showed a garden filled with sunflowers, suggesting perhaps the Garden of Eden and also the idea that plant life embodies the light energy of the sun. In the foreground were two naked children - a boy and a girl - playing in a grassy circle. They were holding hands, just as we were.
"I think you're right, Rivah. This has to be Resh, the Sungod, known in Egypt as Ra," I said. "The two children are stepping into a circle of light on the earth. This is the triumph of light and a return to Eden."
"They are the Lovers as children," murmured Rivah quietly.
I continued excitedly, "And up here is the Wheel of Fortune . . . . Oh . . . Wait a minute." . . . I reached up and reversed the Wheel card to see what would happen. When I turned it upside down, lo and behold, a vision leaped out at me. "Hey, that's the Sacred Monogram!"
"What's that?" asked Rivah, in surprise.
"It's the fiery sign that the Roman Emperor Constantine saw in the sky over his army," I replied. "He took it to be an omen from God that Christ was the conqueror, and he made that the monogram on his imperial standard and proceeded to win his battle. From that point Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. Who knows, maybe it was really some sort of alien craft such as Ezekiel saw."
"What does it look like? Rivah continued asking with a puzzled look. "I'm Jewish, you know. So I'm not so familiar with the Christian symbols."
"What Constantine though he saw was the letters Khi Rho superimposed. He took that as the first letters of the name KhRistos, signifying Jesus Christ. What it looks like from here, if we substituted Hebrew letters, is P (that is, a Resh) with an X (using that variant of T) through its stem. Often the Christians put Alpha and Omega on each side of the X and encircled the whole thing in a cartouche. That gives us the letters APOX, or AROT in English letters, or, read the other way around, as Hebrew would be read, - TORA, - our four letters again. Running all the way around the Sacred Monogram we have TAROT, which is the deck we are playing with."
Rivah looked me in the eye again. "Does this mean that we can solve the problem of World Terrorism and get back to the innocence of the Garden of Eden by sex, emptiness, getting our heads to think like children, and turning everything upside down? Reading the letters we have identified in the second row gives us DOR. DO means knowledge or wisdom, what the mind, Resh, holds. Read it the other way and it gives us ROD, an earthquake. RO is 'friendship' or 'evil.' OD means 'eternity.' It's the eye and the pyramid. OeDeN is the Garden of Eden. The Judgement card shows an adult couple with a child in the middle. Both are waking up from their coffins to the angel's trumpet call from above. What letter could that be? We'll have to work on that. The Wheel is the TORATAROT. Running Judgements on the World, we get Torah, the fixed Wheel of God's Law, like the Buddha Dharma. Being Divine Eternity, we get Tarot, which is the letters arranged helter-skelter any way we like. That sounds like fun."
She reached down and stroked her hand lightly up my leg to my crotch. I felt urges stirring in me. "What are you doing?"
"Having fun. That village of Ophir we just walked through, that's the Hebrew name for the young hart that nibbles on the lilies. I thought I'd turn your grief upside down and your mourning to evening by nibbling on your lily for a while."
So saying, she loosened my belt, undid the brass button on my Levi's, and pulled down the zipper. Her warm fingers penetrated into my boxer shorts and gently drew forth an organ that was already swelling up to her loving touch. "Oh-ho, he's grown much bigger than yesterday under the waterfall." She put her lips to the crown and gently kissed his highness. "Now let's see if we can get your compassion up."
PREV HOME NEXT