Notes of a Hermetic Conversation between Phillip and Joel on September 21, 2023.
Perhaps the table in front of the Magician is identical somehow with the square space below and behind the King of Batons? Like the Self behind the self, the Transcendent Self behind the empirical self. Standing them back to back. The “reverse” of the King of Batons is the Magician (table is in front of Magician, in back of King).
Is the Magician’s yellow bag related to the yellow stomach-shield of the King?
The stomach-plate of the King has the forms of both the Magician’s rod and the Magician’s coin within it. And the position of the King’s right hand is very similar to the way the Magician holds both of his hands. Perhaps both rod and coin are contained in this stomach-plate?
Remembering the picture on the back of the horse in the Knight of Swords, representative of the Tower of Destruction:
This yellow bell shape on the King of Batons’ right arm. It seems more related to the yellow bag. It has that piano-key sort of pattern on it, which continues to the blue on his lap. Like he’s wrapped in it. Has it unrolled from the baton? Or is he getting rolled around the baton, like a scroll? Condensing into nothing. The negative space around the self as the greater Self.
The space below the King is like an upside down/inverted table. It goes in instead of out.
The bottom of the King’s baton is akin to the blade of grass, the leaf between the Magician’s legs.
It’s like an upside-down, puddle reflection…”Don’t I look great!” How the Magician perceives himself:
The life force of the blade of grass…Nature…Seeing it as the vehicle for the greater humanity of the individual to communicate or impinge upon normal life. Entry point or gateway.
It’s the King’s baton poking out from under the surface, subterranean.
Like the end of The Silver Chair, when they are rescuing the lost prince from the underworld, breaking through the crust back into Narnia. The moment of returning home, against all odds.
The earthly self vs the Transcendent Self. It’s weird to think of the Transcendent as upside down or below. This dark quality of being imprisoned, or under the sway of another power.
The potential for the transcendent Self to experience inflation/megalomania.
If the stomach plate is mirrored in the rod that the Magician holds, there is no real mirror of the King’s huge baton in the Magician. The Magician is so much more mundane, missing the presence of this powerful implement. Just this bare indication in the blade of grass, that can easily go unnoticed.
It’s either a postive entity (blade of grass pushing out) or a negative space, a slit or an opening, like a vagina, a birth canal. The split in the curtain behind the Magician. The potential. Tomberg’s retelling of the legend in the Letter-Meditation on the Wheel of Fortune—woman as the opening in the spiral, the sabbath.
From the other way, it’s harder to see…heaven above? Hanged Man below?
Really it only makes sense the other way around. The Magician has ground beneath his feet. The King does not.
Maybe if the King covers half of the Magician? Then it’s like he falls out of the trapped door.
The mundane “falls” out of the spiritual, then the spiritual is “buried” below when it rights itself.
We can’t even really think of it as “above vs below” in the Emerald Tablet sense. It’s a flipe, an inversion, a reversal. Somehow the baton disappears as he is turned inside out.
The pivot around which it all rolls—compression of everything, makes the baton disappear as the inversion happens.
The King is superior to the Magician.
The Magician is all bout mastery, concentration without effort…but it’s only due to the King of Batons hidden presence, as the hidden origin or background of the Magician that there can be any mastery.
The King is this astral reversal, he’s peripheral. He can’t be fully expressed in the manifest world.
There isn’t really anything of an explicitly Arcana depiction in the Magician, not compared to, say, the Hanged Man. The Magician could really exist, odd as he might be. No appeal to that state of spiritual crisis, to the imagination. In that way, he’s nice as a starting point, since the question can be as simple as “why doesn’t he look at his hands?” or “where is the fourth table leg?”
Simpler, more mundane observations, and therefore a simpler, more mundane “crisis.”
The ground of the Magician as the transformation of the Baton of the King (following the idea of the blade of grass as the pointed tip of the baton).
All that radiant glory in the King wraps around the baton during the inversion, becomes the foundation of the Magician. So if there’s anything truly Arcane in the Magician, it’s subterranean. The Arcane is the foundation for the mundane.
Literally the case—the Tarot became playing cards.
The tip of the baton and the blade of grass—the pivot. The focal point for things to move around.
The King of Batons is the Master Builder. The human impulse standing behind nature.
The ground, everything off-scene in the Magician is the King of Batons, the natural forces and elements that lead to the human being.
The Washing of the Feet—we are “higher” than the stones, plants, animals, yet we rely on them for our existence—and they are nothing less than the sacrifice of beings higher than we are!
The elemental kingdoms are the essentially human consciousness behind nature.
It’s funny to think—it seems like a rather obvious spiritual concept. But somehow this move from the King to the Magician makes us really feel that Nature is as deeply aligned with and participating in the human story, an element of humanity itself.
And even that is not right…we can’t express it…it’s more personal than that. *What he is*.
Christ as Lord of the Elements.
Christ as the Person of Nature, not a vague general “humanity.”
The I AM within Nature, as the personal essence within Nature.
The Burning Bush—Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh, I AM that I AM.
Is the blade of grass the prototypical Ace of Batons, the burning bush? Again maybe upside down?
The cut at the bottom of the Ace of Batons (when right-side up) is the inverse of the color scheme at the bottom of the Magician. A beige or yellow cut in the midst of the all-green baton vs the sliver of green (blade of grass) emerging from the all-golden landscape.
The upside down Ace again draws us into the Hanged Man.
We didn’t look at the Ace of Batons upside down very much. It’s a different feeling than the normal orientation—like we’re being showered with something pouring from above.
There’s a connection there, between the red at the top/(bottom) of the Ace of Batons and the red in the King’s hat-crown.
The curves in the King of Batons’ neck…so much like the Hanged Man’s. They go with the curves in his “throne.” But…none of the visible curves of his throne line up with each other. Some by his left shoulder, some under the “yellow bell” shape, some between his legs, and some by his right hip. Four totally different patches. And then a fifth patch in his neck which sort of matches the one coming out of his shoulder, connecting to the blue pillar.
The theme of the thrones in the Arcana—it’s not everytime, but often, they are obscured by something in front of them, or just strangle shaped.
Trying to make sense of it with a bell shape that relates to his shirt about as much as to the throne. His throne is as hodge-podge as his garment…and yet it all goes together somehow. We’re back to all of this coalescing around the baton itself. It’s the distinct object in the image, even if it isn’t obviously a baton.
Everything else is in a swirley indistinctness that simultaneously makes them all seem related.
That “blue wing” on his right could just as well be part of his throne as a part of his garment. It matches the pillar a bit.
The blue wavy “piano keys” in his lap are like a combination, a uniting, of the blue fin on his right and the yellow bell on his left.
All the “glue” gets extracted as he transitions to the Magician…the cloud, the glory, the cotton candy swirled around the stick…the rest of what’s left falls on the table in front of him. Even for him, his crown is just a hat. All held together in this glory-web…and it falls down (up?) to earth.
The glory web is removed, it reverses…down becomes up and up becomes down [as I transcribe these notes, I realize that it’s like when we are born. In the womb, we have our heads down and our feet up, when we’re born down becomes up and up becomes down].
The King has celestial gravity, like the Hanged Man. The Magician has earthly gravity.
The end of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The sudden return to normal kids, after having lived decades in Narnia and become royalty. Perhaps a subtle reminder of what was experienced is there (the blade of grass poking through between his feet)—yes, it was real.
There are other characters with neck-folds through the Minor and Major Arcana…but he has lines that go all the way across. With others, it’s just a shading.
Could be a turtleneck?
Are the Magician and the King of Batons simultaneously each other, rather than a sequence, a change of state? A second self that exists in non-contamination (like the Twin Soul).
The King is not contained in the Magician—he’s active in the atmosphere, the surroundings, a working.
Whereas the Magician and all of his elements are contained within the King.
The human united with the higher Self prior to birth is the King of Batons…it then splits into karma, nature, the cosmos.
The Magician is the one participating consciously in the construction and unfolding of destiny through the elements before him, but it is his own higher being that actualy is destiny.
“The one who was with you since the beginning” is you Neighbor. Bottom of page 126 in the Letter-Meditation on The Lover.
An interesting twist—this Twin Soul, this Neighbor from the beginning is not your lover, not a different individual, your roomate, your partner…it’s you. Interesting to think of the two Jesus children that way.
To love one’s destiny as that which you will consummate and fulfil. To pursue it like a Lover.
Extending anthroposophy…my karma is determined by me, because I love my destiny, I pursue it, it will fulfill me. Not this other person, this temporary ecstacy.
It’s not mutually exclusive though. The other individuals in my life as companions, neighbors.
“I was there since the beginning”—Christ is very close to all of that, and all humanity shared that.
Christ as my own individual fulfillment, and yet also of “we”, of “us” as one.
“Love one’s Self as a Neighbor.”
“Self as Destiny.”
Multivalent:
Love of Neighbor Above; Love of Neighbor horizontally; Love of Neighbor below—even the megalomaniacal shadow.
Despite the insanity of the world, all is embedded in overall harmony.
We have curved back to the beginning, but now we know what came before the beginning.
We thought we were at the beginning when we started 7 years ago with the Magician…but we didn’t know all of the Minors were there in the beginning.
We don’t feel that we see anything new, but we didn’t see in the Magician then what we see there now.
Confusing developmental process of this world…
Thinking of young Robert Powell growing up in Brighton, in more-or-less the same town as the elderly Valentin Tomberg. They very likely crossed paths at some point, shopping in the same grocery store or something.
Not realizing as we “walked through” the Magician that the King of Batons was under our feet, hiding underground. We certainly noticed that blade of grass, but had no idea it was the pivot, the focal point of the centripetal force that is the working of my higher Self.
The Path to Shambhala. Threefold Walking. Joel was in Assisi when Robert first introduced this element of the Path, during which he encouraged us to experience gratitude for the fact that Mother Earth holds us up with every step we take. We never have to worry about that. That evening, there was an earthquake in Assisi. The first and only one Joel has been in. He thought he was going to do. It brought home to him in the most visceral and terrifying way the importance of the apparantly mundane and obvious fact that Mother Earth supports us with every step we take! A new and permanent appreciation.
During the Magician, we only saw the blade of grass, but didn’t realize the pivot of all destiny lies behind it. We must develop gratitude and awareness for the unrecognized aspects of life that constantly hold us up, keep us well.
Phillip speaks of the second vertabrae, this axis that the skul pivots around. Miraculous structure of the human body. The outside of the body and the head vs the inside of the body and the trunk—this is the complicated weaving of glory that surrounds the King of Batons.
We end our journey through 78 Arcana with the 1st Stanza of the Foundation Stone Meditation, which has perhaps never found its place so perfectly as after this conversation.
Human Soul!
Thou livest in the limbs,
Which bear thee through the World of Space
Into the Spirit’s Ocean Being.
Practice Spirit Recollection
In depths of soul,
Where in the Wielding Will
Of World Creating
Thine own I
Comes to being in God’s I.
And thou wilt truly live
In Human World Being.
For the Father Spirit of the Heights holds sway
In Depths of Worlds, Begetting Being.
Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones!
Let there ring out from the heights
What in the Depths is echoed.
This speaks:
Ex Deo Nascimur.
The Spirits of the Elements hear it: in East, West, North, South—
May human beings hear it!
[And now we come to the end of our journey…as we considered the Numbered Coins as the journey through the sphere of Fixed Stars; the Court Coins as the Saturn Sphere; the Numbered Swords as the Jupiter Sphere; the Court Swords as the Mars Sphere; the Numbered Cups as the Sun Sphere; the Court Cups as the Venus Sphere; the Numbered Batons as the Mercury Sphere; and the Court Batons as the Moon Sphere, we finally come to the place of incarnation at the end of our journey…inaugurating the return to the moment of conception, the Magician, leading through gestation (High Priestess) to birth (Empress) with the music accompanying this moment—Beethoven’s Fantasia in C Minor (particularly the finale):
Thank you for reading and sharing in our work…more to come in a different format soon…stay tuned…]
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