Buddha Tarot - The Chakras - The Morning Star (XVII. The Star)

I find this card one of the most interesting of the deck in the way it incorporates a huge body of philosophy, actually two bodies, completely unrelated, AFAIK, to the original meaning of the card, and grafts it onto the card quite successfully. The two philosophies are Buddhism proper, of course, the theme of the deck (der!) and the chakra system.

Place's ever-provocative commentary to this deck notes that "Although Tantric Buddhism teaches us that Gautama's kundalini would have activated his chakras on the night of his enlightenment, the chakras are not mentioned directly in the ancient text." His image adds the chakras to the image of the Buddha still sitting in meditation after enlightenment into the beginning of the monsoon season (monsoon not depicted on the card). Mucalinda, the king of the nagas, coiled around the Buddha's body seven times and protected his head with his own seven heads as an umbrella.

I'm thinking that the card depicts the moment after the rains have stopped (hence the morning star, which is a pretty thin tie-in, actually, to the original Tarot meaning of this card) and the moment before Mucalinda takes the form of a beautiful youth and bows to Buddha.

Whew! The keywords for the RWS star are along the lines of health and healing, hope and optimism, peace and serenity, the dawn of better times. This card seems just as positive as the usual Star, but holds a much more strongly transformative message in its evocation of the kundalini.

In short, this card blows my mind.

I actually really love the chakra integration in this deck. I'm surprised that I do, but I do. Have you done the chakra spread that he describes in the LWB? I think it provides a great reading. I've done two, one for myself and one for a friend, and they were both among the most insightful and helpful Tarot readings I've done. It's definitely the most successful way I've used this deck.

JonMAblaze said:

I actually really love the chakra integration in this deck. I'm surprised that I do, but I do. Have you done the chakra spread that he describes in the LWB? I think it provides a great reading. I've done two, one for myself and one for a friend, and they were both among the most insightful and helpful Tarot readings I've done. It's definitely the most successful way I've used this deck.

Click to expand...

I have not done that with this deck yet. I did *a* chakra reading a couple of months ago with my old RWS, and I've been meaning to do it properly with this deck and compare the two readings.

In the expanded commentary in the BYB (Big Yellow Book), Place actually goes on quite a bit about the Western chakra system and how it is a recovery of the Pythagorean system by means of melding it to the original Tantric system. I think one reason the chakra integration works so well in this deck is that the author thought/intuited so hard about it. Every line and and every shade of color on this deck has a spiritual/symbolic meaning as well as an artistic one.

There is a also a whole-deck meditation on the cards that I mean to do when my house is empty of onlookers, but that's a rarity.

M~