Whenever I think I've come to grips with the Magician, I dont' really understand him anymore. I see him as the 'masculine principle' and his opposite (but opposite in the same way as yin/yang are opposite) is the High Priestess or the 'feminine principle'. These don't really relate to masculine and feminine the social constructs but the essence of Man and the essence of Woman. Something within each sex that makes them different yet complimentary to the other. Distilled in its crudest form this is the sexual organs, so the Magician is the Phallus.
Moving onto archetypes, he is active, creation, the will. He is able, confident and talented. He is a communicator but in the sphere of the rational, the consciousness, as his alter and opposite is a communicator in the subconscious and the irrational. He is the Sun as the High Priestess is the Moon and each provides guidance within their realm and cautions wandering from one to the other without prudent thought.
He is referred to here as the trickster but I see that as the role of The Fool, not the Magician.
His wand points to the sky as though he is channelling the divine seed into the earth and from this all things become manifest. Around him are roses and lillies, the flos campi and lilium convallium in reference to the Song of Solomon, a series of erotic poems. He is Le Bateleur or the Wand user, who holds raw energy, the Ace of Wands in his right hand.
He wears the Ouroboros as a belt, symbolising the eternal return or the cyclical nature of the cosmos. It also represents "All-in-All" or the totality of existence. In the Thoth deck the snakes represent, among other things, the transcendence of gender in reference to the snake's ability to shed its skin and be reborn. (It also usurps therefore, the need for the womb). Tiresias, a priest of Zeus from Greek mythology, came across a pair of coupling snakes and smote them apart angering the goddess Hera who punished him by turning him into a woman. Seven years later, he came across another pair of mating snakes and left them alone, his lesson learnt, he was turned back into a man.
However, according to some accounts, Hera and Zeus got into an argument regarding who has the most pleasure during sex, a man or a woman. The unfortunate Tiresias was asked to settle the dispute as he had experienced intercourse from both perspectives. He answered that he'd had greatest pleasure as a woman thus infuriating Hera who did not wish Zeus to know this 'womanly secret' so she struck him blind. Zeus couldn't retract Hera's actions but he gave him second sight to make up for it.
Thus the legend of the unfortunate Tiresias combines many important archetypal elements such as the blind seer, impiety, shamanic blurring of gender and the Caduceus (Wand and Serpant) the herald's staff and symbol of Hermes the winged messenger. The caduceus contains the ability to heal or harm and is sometimes confused with the Rod of Asclepius which represents the healing arts. The serpent is representative of rebirth and the Wand is Asclepius the Greek god of medicine. There is a similar symbol in Hebrew mythology called the Nehushtan which Moses used to heal the Isralites of snake bites.
Jesus referred to the Nehushtan,
"As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life" (John 3:14-15).
Rather than the trickster, I see the Magician as representative of the ego and the ability of the querent to trick
themselves. The word ego is taken directly from Latin where it is the nominative of the first person singular personal pronoun and is translated as 'I myself' to express emphasis. Ego is the English translation of Freud's term 'Ich.'
Freudian psychoanalysis refers to the division of the psyche into three parts: id, super ego and ego. The id is primitive desire such as sexual desire or hunger. The super ego is society's imposed norms that we enter upon within a social contract and the ego is the medium between the two.
The function of the ego is to satisfy both the id and the super ego, it is the gratifier of our primal urges but within societies norms. For example, we may have a primal urge to punch someone (our id) but because this conflicts with the law and therefore the super ego, our ego holds us back and we may let off steam in some other more accepted manner. The normal development of our psyche depends on our upbringing and the different stages of our development.
Anyway, I seem to be babbling. I think we sometimes desire something so badly that we project what we want onto it and make it something other than it is. It's like the urge to buy something because we really want it but when we get it home, it isn't really that great after all. We do this with people as well, we make them perfect, our 'soul mates' and 'other halves' without even knowing them properly and that, I think is the Magician at work.
I'm going to stop here, my apologies for the length of this post
