the universe card and the hidden tree of life

Helvetica said:

And the representation of the Universe is that Origin, symbolized by the woman and the snake - the Tree - "In The Beginning", the moment when creation started, but before history, when there was no shame and no fear of death. It is a circle back to that Berechit ("in the beginning"), when the breath of God created everything - that is, it created sex, the ultimate creative urge - and "saw that it was good". But eating from the Tree - which brought shame - also brought death, which completes the creation cycle. So is Crowley trying to achieve the impossible? Creation without Death? Or does he want another go at the Woman and the Serpent - The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil - only this time, shame does not ensue?

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That's an interesting observation, Helvetica. In some qabalistic traditions the tempting serpent in the Genisis myth of the fall, is said to be God in disguise.

Hebrew: MShICh - Meshiach - Messiah = 358
" " : NChSh - Nachash - Snake or Serpent = 358

yeah!

Aeon418 said:

I can't say that I've seen it. I suspect that the entire Tree of Life is represented on this card though.

If you look at the groin area of the dancing goddess you can see the wheel of Light that Crowley mentions. That might be Kether.
The wheel of the Zodiac corresponds to the sephira Chokmah.
The strange black Lunar crescent / Sickle could be a symbol of both Binah / Saturn and Yesod / Luna.
The Moebius strip is coloured in shades characteristic of the sephira Chesed and Netzach.
The Eye could relate to the destructive Eye of Shiva and Geburah.
The colour gold relates to Tiphareth and the figure 8 created by the goddess and the serpent is that of the sephira Hod.
Finally the four Kerubim are the four elements of the Sephira Malkuth.

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A.C. woulda given you a lollypop for that one, I love it!
he certainly conciously layered the symbolism in the cards.
And like all good magicians, maybe at times didnt even know himself what he was showing us (or did he?).
Living in Australia the snake can easily be identified as the rainbow serpent (or carpet snake or diamond python ... see the diamond pattern?) It is a very important totem in Aust. Aboriginal mythology and relates to the original forces of creation (Wallenganda, the sky snake, milky way and Ungud the earth serpent. The movement of the snake through the earth created the first land forms from the void (Creation of a new 'universe'.)
Also, if one looks at an ASTRONOMICAL map we see 13 (not 12) constellations on the ecliptic, the extra one is Opheicus, the serpent handler or serpent holder, so perhaps now Universe can do triple time (corresp. to saturn, earth aOpheicus?

Aeon418 said:

I can't say that I've seen it. I suspect that the entire Tree of Life is represented on this card though.

If you look at the groin area of the dancing goddess you can see the wheel of Light that Crowley mentions. That might be Kether.
The wheel of the Zodiac corresponds to the sephira Chokmah.
The strange black Lunar crescent / Sickle could be a symbol of both Binah / Saturn and Yesod / Luna.
The Moebius strip is coloured in shades characteristic of the sephira Chesed and Netzach.
The Eye could relate to the destructive Eye of Shiva and Geburah.
The colour gold relates to Tiphareth and the figure 8 created by the goddess and the serpent is that of the sephira Hod.
Finally the four Kerubim are the four elements of the Sephira Malkuth.

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So.. the tree of life is there then, just not in the form we are used to seeing it. It can no longer be represented in its' previous form because this card represents seeing it in another light. It's like it's been destroyed and re-created. Maybe that's the underlying meaning behind this card? Everything is connected, the paths are there, the points are there, but we have to truly realize who we are before we can walk our own path, get ourselves into that forth dimension. Once we can do that, the Tree of Life re-creates itself in a unique way for all of us. Or something.

The Universe card features many details that match the Pelasgian Creation Myth as told by Robert Graves in the first chapter of _The Greek Myths_.

Here are a few details:
"In the beginning, Eurynome, the Goddess of All Things, rose naked from Chaos, but found nothing substantial for her feet to rest upon.... She danced towards the south.... Wheeling about, she caught hold of this north wind, rubbed it between her hands, and behold! the great serpent Ophion....

"Ophion, grown lustful, coiled about those divine limbs and was moved to couple with her.... Next she assumed the form of a dove, brooding on the waves and, in due process of time, laid the Universal Egg. At her bidding, Ophion coiled seven times about this egg, until it hatched and split in two. Out tumbled all things that exist, her children: sun, moon, planets, stary, the earth.... [Later] he vexed her by claiming to be the author of the Universe. Forthwith she bruised his head with her heel, kicked out his teeth, and banished him to the dark caves below the earth."

Mary

Calabi-Yau

Does anybody else think the swirly thing behind The Goddess/Eurynome looks surprisingly similar to a Calabi-yau manifold, a 6-dimensional space that is central to string theory? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calabi-Yau_manifold

Quite remarkable and appropriate if you ask me.
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btw... I think the stars are supposed to be the actual representations of the zodiac, but I don't think they're done particularly well. To be honest, It's hard to tell if they're a poorly done zodiac, or whether I'm seeing what I want to see. The space *is* divided up into 12 differently colored sections.

Perhaps the 'Pure of Heart' can see the Tree of Life everywhere; (and in more than one way in the Universe card, for example) in the way a car works ... a chemical combination, etc ? .... The pure of heart may be someone who has taken in the correspondences and learnt them by 'heart' so their reflection can be seen around us in manifest reality (including obscure Tarot cards). It gives one a template to understand things and is one of AC's requirements (learning by heart the correspondences) before making candidates Companions of the Royal Arch (Perfect Magicians - ie. IV degree OTO).

Teheuti said:

The Universe card features many details that match the Pelasgian Creation Myth as told by Robert Graves in the first chapter of _The Greek Myths_.

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Mary! Great cross-reference... Digging in my Graves () doubletime. And you reminded me that the Orphic mysteries, the Dionysian mysteries, Mithraism, the Dioscuri, and the Isis/Osiris cults all borrowed shamelessly from each other. On this card, Crowley shows his love of Levi (looking for esoteric headwaters), and a similar willingness to plant and climb the Tree poetically.

Sometimes I get so caught up in Crowley's Victorian Egyptophilia that I forget to poke around in his contemporaries. And like Crowley, Graves was a strange hybrid of scholar and poet, willing to look for poetic Truth even when he couldn't establish empirical "truth." Ophion in excelsis.

Fascinating posts, y'all... Great thread.

Scion

I recently found, in a textbook, a picture of a sixteenth century engraving that was extremely like the universe card. The "house". on the bottom of the card, was centered on the carving, and fire, earth, air and water were drawn around it, illustrated by circles The faces were only at the bottom corners, and were blowing in rather than out.
oddly, the whole thing was about the sun being the center of the universe rather than the earth, as was thought before galileo invented the telescope.
I found it very interesting.
Manda