Wm. Blake SG - Your Favorite Major?

Melvis

Hi!

I thought I'd get something started here as I just finished the section of the book on the Majors. Wow! I really love some of those ideas on Forgiveness and Imagination.

So what's your favorite Major Triumph Card?
 

Melvis

My favorite card is actually a series, the series of cards from VIII-Assessment through XIV-Forgiveness. I just love the progression of Blake's ideas in those cards. I particularly like XII-Reversal card because Mr. Buryn has made it such an active card. As he states in the book: "In this prelude to Transformation, the soul chooses to reverse and reinvent itself, rather than be controlled by nature." I like that proactive slant. And the picture seems to show so much pontential energy in the character's handstand position.

I'm also rather fond of XIII-Transformation, because I like the combination of the angel looking both forwards and backwards.

Actually, it's hard to find a card I don't like because I like Buryn's explanations of the Majors so much, that they make the cards more appealing to me. The one thing I suppose I could be critical of is the tendency to demonize witchcraft and pagan practices in the early cards of the "Fall", but that was appropriate for Blake's time, I suppose. Also, I guess I see the Fall as the need to experience earthly, physical life, and what better way to do that than through an earth-based religion? :)

Anyway, that's what I've got so far...anyone else?

Peace,

Melvis
:TSTRE
 

Kaz

melvis, i have this deck and i just love these cards. i must confess i never tried to read with them though, the suits are different from standard and that makes it hard for me.
i like the eternity card, the one with the double 0 on it, but all of them are brilliant pieces of art.
 

darwinia

The Reason I bought the Deck

No question, IV REASON is my favourite card and the reason (pun!) I bought the deck.

This painting was the frontispiece to "Europe" and depicts Urizen, one of the four Zoas or divine energies. This one represents the mind of Albion. Because Urizen is associated with Air and Mind he goes with Science, the suit of Swords in other decks--I like this too. Albion is the universe personified--the human soul made up of four parts.

Urizen is tied to Zeus, Jehovah, Odin--no matter what pantheism he is the leader of the immortals. Remote, cruel, a white terror, a ghost of gloomy ego and stubbornness. Urizen is often called the Spectre--how apt for The Emperor card. Dualism, repression, one of THE most powerful images and associations in the deck.

I love Ed's phrase for this: "Impaled on the compass points of reason" as he speaks of finite perception denying infinity and introducing error. Domination and absolute law, and Ed hits the mark again when he refers to "fallen intellect." Pride as blindness and restriction. Blake's "Book of Urizen" among his entire mythology, probably requires a lifetime of study, but aren't we lucky to have a scholar like Ed Buryn to light the way? And the breathless, unspeakably beautiful art is unforgettable like a fire in the mind.

Some of these thoughts are augmented from Northrop Frye's book "Fearful Symmetry" (for which this painting is the cover, another apt tie-in.) Frye quotes this passage from the Book of Urizen which I'll quote here for The Emperor:

And Urizen gave life & sense by his immortal Power
To all his Engines of deceit: that linked chains might run
Thro' ranks of war spontaneous; & that hooks & boring screws
Might act according to their forms by innate cruelty.
He formed also harsh instruments of sound
To grate the soul into destruction, or to inflame with fury
The spirits of life, to pervert all the faculties of sense
Into their own destruction, if perhaps he might avert
His own despair even at the cost of every thing that breathes.
 

Melvis

Wow, that's a great quote, freesiaskye!

I think the Reason card is a great example of why I'm so drawn to the artwork of this deck. Blake connects one plane of existence to another through his characters, and he does it so strongly and almost defiantly. I guess I'm saying that I like how Urizen's body leans forward, almost right out of the picture, in order to reach down to the objects below. As I said above, the reason I like the XII-Reversal card is because it is so energetic, which is a switch from what I usually see for that card but is consistent with Blake's other artwork. I think it's that same kind of alternative perspective as in the Reason card.

Peace,

Melvis
:TSTRE
 

darwinia

00 Eternity = 0

The idea of doing a reading AND having this extra card really lit up my imagination. It is awareness, but with a galactic glow that hones right in on the power of such things. Opportunity, imagination, spirituality, and power, like a beacon. It transcends and belongs to no cycle, it is apart, the Ace of all Aces, the Lantern in the Woods.

Blake believed that nothing is real beyond the imaginative patterns men make of reality, and so there are exactly as many kinds of reality as there are men. "Every man's wisdom is peculiar to his own individuality." There is no other kind of wisdom as Blake says:

"Every Eye sees differently. As the Eye, Such the Object."

Perception and reality, gotta love it, gotta love Blake.
 

darwinia

Online Archive of Blake's Poetry

"Forth from the dead dust, rattling bones to bones
Join; shaking convuls'd, the shiv'ring clay breathes,
And all naked flesh stands: Fathers and Friends,
Mothers & Infants, Kings & Warriors."

http://eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/display/poet24.html

"For light doth seize my brain
With frantic pain."
 

Ruby7

Re: 00 Eternity

freesiaskye said:


So, the whole idea of doing a reading AND having this extra card really lit up my imagination. As Buryn says, it is significant in a reading because it's meaningful in any context, and highlights the spiritual aspect or gives a wake-up call to such. It is awareness, but with a galactic glow that hones right in on the power of such things. Opportunity, imagination, spirituality, and power, like a beacon. It transcends and belongs to no cycle, it is apart, the Ace of all Aces, the Lantern in the Woods.

At the moment "Eternity" is my favourite card. I am drawn into the card, as if I become part of the card. As I look at this vision of Blake's I believe in eternity, in an afterlife (this is something I am not always sure of). As Ed Buryn says "Eternity represents mankind's hopes for divine spiritual consciousness and for living in a world of shining imagination and everlasting truth."

When I first looked at this card I thought it looked dreamlike and then i noticed the figure at the bottom of the card who is indeed sleeping. The image being from the painting "Jacob's Dream" (book of Genesis, Jacob and his ladder to heaven) and in Blake's myth it is Albion asleep on the Rock of Ages---in spiritual limbo.

At the top of the card is, I have to quote Ed Buryn again because he says it so well, "the luminous, numinous sun is the "divine imagination" the god in every human, which shines within us day and night, the ultimate reality from which all things are created".

Ed Buryn also talks about how exalted beings carry symbols of the arts upon a celestial stairway that literally represents the arts as man's connection to eternity.

Overall I love this dreamlike vision for it's connection to the divine (however you personally want to define the divine), the imaginative power that emanates from the divine and our hopes to make this connection.

I think that I will meditate with this card before I fall asleep tonight and have a wonderful dream:), Ruby7

p.s. I have been enjoying all of your comments, it is so interesting to see what others see.
 

Melvis

I paid a visit to one of my local used bookstores today and found "The Illuminated Blake" for $13.49. Unfortunately it's not in color, but there's a lot of work shown in it, which is cool. It is subtitled, "William Blake's Complete Illuminated Works with a Plate-by-Plate Commentary" and, although it is rather dry, the commentary is quite useful for deciphering the hard-to-see parts.

Cool!

Peace,

Melvis
:TSTRE