JOURNALING THE THOTH - XXI THE UNIVERSE - Foreground
At first sight this card gives me a very dreamy atmosphere. Things looks to me slowly moving counterclockwise, with the head of the goddess as the weight that determines al the movement. The center around which everything revolves is in her groin area, where she joins 4he center.
Actually, it's her and the serpent rotating while the rest of the environment does not.
More movement is the flowing of water from the four Cherubims in the corners, but that being directed towards the outside of the card, it doesn't really catch the eye unless you look at it. And the rotating movement is really mesmerizing and takes the attention from anywhere else.
It is an exercise just to remain consciously present and keep journaling cause one would be induced to just close the eyes and meditate...
But its not the moment, i am not alone, and actually my dog is getting sick.. WHAT?!?!
OH My poor baby Tizer maybe eat too much and...
No worries he is better now, he trow up his last meal still just chewed.. he freed himself tho..
He is sitting on the couch besides me now, getting asleep on my lap and i am actually writing with my tab on his neck..
By the way he was at my back while getting that strange sensation of movement.. i feel guilty I might have shared that sensation to him, it was so real...
Lets get back to this card. After a quick nap Tizer wanted to go for a walk, had his stuff done and now is again his usual happy self!
The main characters are a nacked woman and a huge serpent. Leaving alone what AC and the GD people meant her to be, here I want to express who she is for me.
I consider myself a pagan: I believe that there is a superior Will/Intelligence that has created us and partakes of our experiences, and I envision her as an Earthy Mother goddess.
I visualize her as the planet as a living organism, and I see her in every new sprout of a plant, every pup, every baby..
Then also the sea, forests, etc are deities that work on more specific fields, but this is not the place to mention all of them.
So this woman for me is my goddess, Gaea, fertile, primeval, ancient. Powerful.
She is slow because her time is the time of the galaxies and the stars.. she might be going counterclockwise to indicate that she is about the beginning of time and she wants to bring me back with her to the beginning.
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The headdress of the woman actually looks to me as an oyster, which is something AC wrote about, so I need to check this . As for personal impressions, it doesn't speak much to me, except maybe for this sense of weight that gives rythm and momentum to the rotating movement.
I read the light quadrangle surrounding her head is significative too, but honestly i didn't even seen it before reading about it.
The Serpent is the second main character. The card is actually about the interaction of the Serpent with Gaea, more than about the two of them taken singularly.
This to me resonates with the duplex meaning of the card.
Being the last of the Majors, her full accomplishment is actually (re)becoming the Fool, ready to start it all over again, at a different level. This "trick" is very much a quabalistic criterium, where once one reaches the lowest of the low, finds that divine spark that makes him one with the Highest: and life starts again and again ( the circular, spiraling movement that i sense in the card)
The serpent in itself has a very sleepy look, and doesnt look upset at having the foot of the goddess on his head .
This is another symbology I have read about: in judaic/christian view (which remains the cultural background of this deck, despite my trying to "personalize it" where I can fit my own view) the serpent is considered as an emissary of the evil forces. He makes his first appearence right at the beginning of the Bible.
He is said to have talked Eve into eating off the forbidden Tree (by the way, were the trees actually two, or was that just another trick, and the tree has been one and only one all along? Any insight is welcome.), eventually leading to the Fall of Man (nothing less) and the curse over mankind and women in particular.
Then, when Christianity and New Testament sealed the reconciliation between the Jews' G-d and mankind, Mary is depicted in tryumph as walking on the serpent's head, as a sign of full defeat of the forces of Evil. The symbology is often found in imagery related not only to the Holy Virgin Mary, but to Archangels and many Saints as well. (Just on top of my head, St Patrick that banished snakes from Ireland: they actually don't survive there, i didn't believe it but it is true!!!)
The things that makes me think is that in this christian imagery the serpent is seen as trying to fight back, the image wants to show the very moment a single second before the serpent perishes. I have never seen the serpent already dead, and in that case i think it might have a spear cast through him, or something that clearly refers to a hard struggle, just won by Good thanks to the last of your little prayers' energy.
The passive air of the Serpent doesn't click at all with this meaning. And then certainly AC wasn' t a great fan of the Virgin Mary. At the opposite.
So i think this attitude could be related to some message about the barrenness of the Archetype of the Virgin Mary, since the reference is there. But the serpent seems quite content with what happens; so all the grandeur in the Christian icon of the Virgin Mary struggling to overcome the Serpent, gets definitely deflated, like "he never bothered to fight in the first place, so no wander you have him underneet your feet, it's him allowing you to do so".
At least this is what i get.
Even because, thinking of it, the Fall is not that bad a thing, cause it gives mankind humanity and free will. Before that, what were we? Just ignorant, sheepishly content puppets with no room for growth and improvement. It was quite a sad condition.
I dont believe we ever have been in any Eden (but I do get that we must have been just the spark of an idea in the Goddess' mind at some point), but if we were, than we only have to thank the serpent to have freed us!
So, putting these ideas in order for now, I get that to me the serpent, through dancing with the Goddess, and allowing her to even step on his head (to symbolize their ultimate intimacy, yes!), brings the spark of Her idea of us one step further through the process of manifestation.
The serpent sees to be coming off the Eye.
The Eye has got its own symbology on which I ll go later.
For now I would go with my feeling that the Serpent is just coming off it. To do what?
I mean: how is it that we get shown that he is coming off the Eye. It suggest to me that it is important to work out what the Serpent is coming off to do. Doesn't look that the only reason is to dance with Gaia.. because he is also coiling around two egg shaped forms.
And here I find it bizzarre that we dont get to see the end of its tail... but maybe that the ray just happen to pass "over" the tail, and we can't see through it.
So let's assume for now that the tail is at the back of the big, yellow ray issuing from the Eye that meet the first coil of the serpent: it rubs (in its slow movement) around an egg of the same color of the ray. The egg bears a lemniscate (I think is called), the sign for infinity.
Oh.. WOW, just noticed this: the second egg is actually touched by a second, dark ray, and the egg getting rubbed inside the coil is dark too. And there are signs on the serpent of the same hue, (that aren't anywhere else o its body), five of them, to form a five pointed star that resembles the rays of a dark sun too.. and reminds me of a starfish as well. check this as well.
These eggs, with the dark ray confirming this, are another connection to duality (the other being the couple Goddess/Serpent): here is even more clear the opposition of light and dark, while Gaea and the Serpent are more about male and female. Yep, I am happy with this!
This is to me a neat representation of how life is cyclical: every end (dark) must exist because it is functional to some further beginning (light). Every dancer (feminine principle) needs its serpent (male principle) and so on. So I see this very much resonating with Atu XXI being the last and thus connected to the very first: Atu 0.
I believe in the connection of the 3 mother letters to the horizontal paths of the Tree of Life, the 7 doubles on the vertical paths and the 12 zodiacal on the diagonal ones.
For the rest i still dont know.
But what i see here is the Fish Hook, loud and clear: that to me refers to tzaddi.
Does it means the card is to be attributed to tzaddi? How would that fit with the famous "Tzaddi is not the Star"? I don't know and look to dig more, but what i am positive about is that the draw does depict a fish hook, and that given this thing of having to find the right attribution, it is not here by chance. It must be important.
I checked this out and unfortunately tzaddi is not one of the seven double letters, so it does not fit on the path 21 from Malkut to Yesod (since this is one of the seven vertical path on the three. Being Tzaddi one of the 12 simple letters, it should go on one of the 12 diagonal paths.
I hope to be able to develop this further.
I am sure I have read about that here as well.. This is something else to look up too.
The Eye itself makes me think of the source. That would be appropriate, as the card is all about how completition just brings inside herself new beginnings: the two are impossible to split neatly; they imply each other.
Also, with the Eye we have completed the representation of the three Supernal Sephirot: Kether, the Crown, would be the Eye. Chokmah, the Father, would be the Serpent. Binah, the Mother, would be the Goddess.
The Eye gets repeated if you turn the card horizontally: the vescica piscis created by the four Cherubs at the corners becomes the lids and the "zodiac circle" becomes the iris. This way the Goddess and serpent create the symbol for infinite, that gets almost repeated between the rays and the hook... (but not quite, this one... uhm.. it tricks the eye tho... interesting..)
From the eye issue ten rays, to confirm... uhm.. yes the ten sephirot..
But if the Eye itself is the Source (Kether), then the rays should be 9 unless.. the dark one is Da'ath...
But i dont know much about Daath.. more study I guess..
Any insight would obviously be super welcome.
This card has LITERALLY LOADS to it, so i ll better split this "what do i know till now" section of the journaling
and leave this post at it for the foreground, and come back in the next days for the background...
I have something else to say here, more as a reminder of a challange and to spark the discussion, than as i really had something solid to say about it.. here it goes:
The hook has a very particular meaning to me: I have been studying both the AC's attributions and the GD ones, and i have concluded that despite what proclaimed, the true attributions have never been published yet. I understand it is always been a task for the adepts to work out the attributions. So I think that the one of us that really want to get to the bottom of the meaning of this deck is espected to do the same. This doesn't mean you can't use the official ones for your readings.
What I think has been done is the publication of enough clues to let a strong willed student to do the job.
I intend to try and find my own, and will be mentioning my opinions in these journal posts, but i will study the official ones meanwhile and use them for my reading practices
It is a very interesting and challa ging experience tho... I am glad I am doing it!!!