kwaw
kwaw said:
"A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book nothing can help him."
- Edna St. Vincent Millay
XVI - La Maison Diev
"A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book nothing can help him."
- Edna St. Vincent Millay
itrocksmyworld
The "House Of God"
IT is interesting to me.... after having read the previous 12 pages of posts on the topic of the XVI Triumph, and a fascinating couple-hour journey IT has been, too.... i haven't read anything describing the interpretation that came to me in a recent meditation upon this image....
With the TdM image being called "The House Of God", i understand this term to be generally ascribed to a church, temple, or holy building.... and if the Tower structure is indeed representative of "The Church" of the contemporary period, then The Establishment Church is clearly topped with a Crown, ITself representative of monarchic political power, and the Crown is being blown off by a Divine bolt from the blue, forcing The Church's inhabitants to flee their untimely demises by egress.... This righteous fire-from-above would seem to send a clear message of the Almighty's attitude towards the established collusive entity comprised by the close economic ties between the Catholic Papal structure and the various monarchic governmental systems ordained with spiritual authority....
The fleeing folks are forced out into The World, with ITs hills and grass and Nature, there perhaps to redefine their faith-&-belief structure in terms of a "re-entrance" into The World, the original and perennial "House Of God" from which they have been cloistered by church-and-state politics for so long that they had forgotten what natural spirituality was all about.... until a catalyst of holy fire brought an unavoidable egress back out into the True House Of God.... a pictoral transmission of the timeless aphorism, "The Church is not the building; The Church is the people...."
IT seems to me that this image, in conjunction with this particular title heading, is potentially quite countercultural for the time, and might reflect a populist (or possibly Gnostic / Hermetic) statement of the period....
peace
Nolan ;-)
IT is interesting to me.... after having read the previous 12 pages of posts on the topic of the XVI Triumph, and a fascinating couple-hour journey IT has been, too.... i haven't read anything describing the interpretation that came to me in a recent meditation upon this image....
With the TdM image being called "The House Of God", i understand this term to be generally ascribed to a church, temple, or holy building.... and if the Tower structure is indeed representative of "The Church" of the contemporary period, then The Establishment Church is clearly topped with a Crown, ITself representative of monarchic political power, and the Crown is being blown off by a Divine bolt from the blue, forcing The Church's inhabitants to flee their untimely demises by egress.... This righteous fire-from-above would seem to send a clear message of the Almighty's attitude towards the established collusive entity comprised by the close economic ties between the Catholic Papal structure and the various monarchic governmental systems ordained with spiritual authority....
The fleeing folks are forced out into The World, with ITs hills and grass and Nature, there perhaps to redefine their faith-&-belief structure in terms of a "re-entrance" into The World, the original and perennial "House Of God" from which they have been cloistered by church-and-state politics for so long that they had forgotten what natural spirituality was all about.... until a catalyst of holy fire brought an unavoidable egress back out into the True House Of God.... a pictoral transmission of the timeless aphorism, "The Church is not the building; The Church is the people...."
IT seems to me that this image, in conjunction with this particular title heading, is potentially quite countercultural for the time, and might reflect a populist (or possibly Gnostic / Hermetic) statement of the period....
peace
Nolan ;-)
kwaw
kwaw said:
In the case of our loose leaf book, that would make the fool its publisher then!?
Hiya Nolan, welcome to AT - and the Marseilles / Early Decks forum in particular
Melanchollic
A bit of speculation.
At the trial before the Sanhedrin, a witness claimed that Jesus said,
"I will destroy this man-made temple and in three days will build another, not made by man." (Mark 14:58)
And from Matthew,
"I tell you the truth, not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down." (Matt 24:2)
He seems to have been prophesying the future of the temple, and of the old covenant in general. For the Christian believer, Jesus did in fact replace the man-made temple with one that was not made by man.
Could 'The Tower' card be showing us the end of the old covenant? The following card, the Star can easily be interpreted as the Advent of Christ - in some decks the depiction is blatant. The Sun, perhaps the resurrection, followed by Judgement, then the New Jerusalem?
Theologically, I reckon the order is wonky (yes, that's a theological term). The old covenant would probably be considered to have been destroyed at the crucifixion, and the new covenant starting at the resurrection. Comments? Critiques? Crème brûlée?
At the trial before the Sanhedrin, a witness claimed that Jesus said,
"I will destroy this man-made temple and in three days will build another, not made by man." (Mark 14:58)
And from Matthew,
"I tell you the truth, not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down." (Matt 24:2)
He seems to have been prophesying the future of the temple, and of the old covenant in general. For the Christian believer, Jesus did in fact replace the man-made temple with one that was not made by man.
Could 'The Tower' card be showing us the end of the old covenant? The following card, the Star can easily be interpreted as the Advent of Christ - in some decks the depiction is blatant. The Sun, perhaps the resurrection, followed by Judgement, then the New Jerusalem?
Theologically, I reckon the order is wonky (yes, that's a theological term). The old covenant would probably be considered to have been destroyed at the crucifixion, and the new covenant starting at the resurrection. Comments? Critiques? Crème brûlée?
Richard
A. E. Waite: "In yet a deeper sense, it [The Tower] may signify also the end of a dispensation....."
'Dispensation' no doubt refers to the old covenant dispensation. His description of The Star hints at a connection to the new covenant. "It has been said truly that the mottoes of this card are 'Waters of life freely' and 'Gifts of the Spirit.'" No doubt, among other things, Waite has in mind the Star of Bethlehem.
'Dispensation' no doubt refers to the old covenant dispensation. His description of The Star hints at a connection to the new covenant. "It has been said truly that the mottoes of this card are 'Waters of life freely' and 'Gifts of the Spirit.'" No doubt, among other things, Waite has in mind the Star of Bethlehem.
Richard
The chronological order is both correct and incorrect. The Easter event did indeed have to take place before the old covenant could be replaced by the new. The actual star signalling the birth of the Messiah appeared some thirty or so years before this. However, if the Star is taken to symbolize the new covenant (just as the Tower symbolizes the old covenant), then it is correct for the Tower to precede the Star. (Enough of this theological/semantical nitpicking.Melanchollic said:
)kwaw
awoken by thunder
fading into the call
of the imam
fading into the call
of the imam
venicebard
By George, I think you're onto something. I had not really completely grasped before that this trump, with its title LaMaisonDieu, would be fairly obvious in its symbolism to anyone of that time (meaning the era of TdM's inception, which I take to be the late Middle Ages): the house of God has placed secular power (a crown) at its apex and thus deserves a 'jolt'. Moreover, the Gnostic (or at least reformist) bent of this symbol would also be obvious, but only perhaps to fellow Gnostics (or reformists). And yes, I say, to its being a Gnostic statement: the entire symbolic structure of TdM betrays its Gnostic (albeit not quite dualistic, since LePape indicates blessing, which he would not have from the point of view of hard core dualism or Manicheism) origin, based as the symbols are on deeper understanding of the (pre-Christian) tradition surrounding letters than exists today amongst those who would connect trumps to the Hebrew alphabet without reference to any other (such as the Irish, whose tradition is at least as old and which preserved the numbering of letters that predated ordering into modern alef-bet order).
venicebard
You have hit the mark squarely, methinks! For I will tell you that in the actual symbolic structure of TdM (based on bardic numbering of Irish tree-letters and their calendar placement and the phonetic simplicity underlying this) the central pillar of things (vertical diameter of the round) is formed thus: in the center of the zodiac (of the body seated in meditation) is alef, the 'Magician', and this surmounts the World, beneath which is the Devil; over the Magician looms Justice (i.e. Law, the OLD dispensation), coincident with which is LaMaisonDieu, which represents the shattering of the old dispensation, because above it—above the summit of the round, namely at the summit of the next larger of Ezekiel's wheels (whose bottom half is the bowl of the surroundings) and hub of the first (the largest, the Monad, in whose bottom half rest the surroundings, just as in the surroundings' bottom half rests the zodiac of the body seated in meditation)—is the only trump whose station reaches from the very bottom to the very top (being the all-inclusive Monad itself, the first of Ezekiel's wheels), namely VI L'Amoureux, the Lover, which of course represents the New dispensation. The flawless order represented by this arrangement of trumps on the central vertical axis is one of the shining jewels in my argument for placement of the symbols according to that wider view of letters which includes Irish tradition and is consistent with letter-shapes and letter-names in other ancient alphabets—that is, for my 'bardic tarot' interpretation of TdM (which I take to be the original tarot).
Richard
Recently I have come to think that A. E. Waite's commentary on the Tower in PKT may have been referring to Joachim de Fiore's Age of the Holy Spirit (universal love) superseding both the Age of the Father (the Old Testament) and the Age of the Son (the New Testament). Biblical warrant for this is in John 4:21-23. "...the hour cometh, when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father.....But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth..." Temples and churches (Houses of God) are thus an anachronism. Waite was a Gnostic, by the way, by no means an orthodox Christian.
