The Ancient Sky presents: Tarot and The Nature of Re-Enchantment

The Nature of Re-Enchantment

The symbolic maps of the stars, or the game of Tarot, so easily disregarded as superstition and unnecessary to the progress of Man, are the remains of what used to be an art of re-enchantment.

It was through his translation of Plato and astrology's depth psychology that Marsilio Ficino rediscovered that enchantment; this during the Renaissance while he was "physician of the soul," for the great d'Medici family.

Enchantment consists in assigning of a consciousness to objects and occurrences against the full objection of "rationalists."

Our era may choose to hinder a Re-Enchantment by assigning to these same objects an abject lack of consciousness. By contrast, to the medievalist rocks, trees, mountains, planets and herbs-- everything in nature was "enchanted" with their specific mythic capabilities.

It requires an imaginative Participation Mystique to understand the names of the spirits, or to watch the planetary hours. When we do become Astrological in our thinking it is then we are engaged in re-enchanting our inner world, imbuing it with color and nuance, and engaging all of Nature into our imaginative process. We do not, like Bacon suggested, "split Nature apart," to gain her secrets.

Fairy Tales...

We watch expectantly for the moment when the astrologer suggests our new love may arrive on the front porch. We seize at life because we recognize the essential girding of the archetypes under our feet. We are capable of perceiving, based on whether "the Moon is in aspect to my Venus-ruled ascendant." We may ask ourselves, "Will she deliver her fullness (fulfillment) to me?"

The good fathers at the Catholic church may argue in excellent Catholic tradition, "because it diverts our attention away from the Divine eye by which we are informed." However the Holy Fathers diverted the eyes of their acolytes away from Nature in order to crush their "enchantment." Jung would have described it as a diversion of the libido in favor of worshipping Christ. Religion achieved the splitting apart of Nature inside the heart of the religious instinct before it became concretized by Newton and Bacon, then projected into Intellect and Reason.

We all ask our children daily, "How're you doing in school?" as a primary focus. We worship Text, Reason and Intellect. However, the disastrous effect of our lack of sacred projection upon Nature has been ours to witness. Science has tried to achieve "objectivity," and long held that Nature's secrets could by yielded by cracking her open, smashing her, dismantling the molecules and cells, discovering atoms and their energy.

My Grandmother's Tarot

We benefit in the western world where creature comforts and disposable income are an everyday expression, taken for granted. We are, as members of the Catholic-oriented age, informed by Spirit alone which resides "up there," where we sinners cannot reach, but we try anyway to strive upward toward Christ's example. It does occur to those who love Nature too that there seems to be a missing female component in the trio of "The Father, the Spirit and the Holy Ghost." There it lacks the soul, the container of enchantment. Re-enchantment adheres to the projection of soul upon all things, lamps, roads and clouds. Let us love Nature by imbuing her with a genuine feeling of its sacredness. Let us have a complete picturing of Nature as an enchanted place full of meaning and connection, an environment which holds and nourishes us. (This would of course include the Galaxy. Infinity and Beyond, as a famous movie star once said.)

A Personal Tarot
coloring by CF Perez

For St Thomas Aquinas the question rested on whether we were inspired by Lumina Naturae (the pagan lore which enchanted the world) or Lumina Luminae (the light of the spirit of Our Lord Jesus Christ). I think if we referred to the complete writings left after the time of Christ, and included the books of Thomas and Mary (much like including the Planets when speaking of Nature) we might find much greater reliance on the imaginative style that the Gnostics bring to the religious function. But the early leaders, Paul and Peter and others who used the Roman Military as their model for the hierarchies of the Catholic (meaning, "universal" in Greek--one size fits all!) monolith. It is to the alchemists that goes the greatest achievement: they retained the pictorial style which still imbues the alchemist's participation with the Universe to connection with the Eternal. Shakespeare still struts the stage because of the eternal archetypes that people his plays. In the alchemical or astrological way of perceiving ourselves, we are not objects as described by Descartes, with finite borders around where the skin and the air meet; we are a part of nature, joined by archetypes and underpinned in our psychology in the way the myths of old describe.

We cannot be surgically removed or made to be viewed in the fantasy of the Scientist, as if completely outside of Nature. Even the astronaut must carry some of Nature with him, or be dashed by the vacuum. The "objective" journalist has still yet to be found. Our experiment in Objectivity, since the nuclear discoveries which launched Quantum Physics, has been shattered. The Heisenberg Effect ended the hope of ever arriving at a fully objective view of Nature. As a discussion, we are each visited by Mercury at the moment of our writing, that is a re-enchantment.

Let us invoke the Venus function, give it whatever name you want, Buddha, Christ, Robin Williams--they are all about the inner peace, that glowing smile. We carry it like the astronaut. It is our bubble for survival against the harshness which is also an archetype. Our perception of all these components of the Re-enchantment returns new life to our tired souls. We are oxygenated by enchantment in the soul and astrology, alchemy, tarot and all visual/nature-based traditions have this in common. Why should these traditions survive? Because at some level along these very well-meaning, civilization-bearing dictates by the Church are empty of enchantment.

We have, at the millennium, finally realized our necks are breaking from so much searching upward, and that we must finally recognize the Earth on which we stand as deserving our attention, our libido and care. Let us re-enchant this green and blue ball by connecting ourselves in a sacred work, making Nature the source of our wisdom. Christ lives in my heart too, only I'll take the spoken (right brain) word of Christ like the Gnostic did; eye to eye, heart to heart. The text-based religions have shown themselves exhausted; and our worship of the written word is lacking in the sensuality and humanity of Earth, Air, Water and Fire, the way the ancients saw the "Types."

The Alchemists saw the split as occurring between Matter and Spirit. "Mater," the matrix of all earthy, dark and perhaps dense material symbolized the lower level of consciousness. It was Mother Earth with a "kick me," sign pasted to her back. That sign was created and pasted by Text Based Religious Types, belonging to the shiny brightly polished Solar side of the typology, the ones with the Power and the Reason but there lacked a balance. It became too one-sided, all Solar worship (Sun of God, Son of God is often transliterated) and nothing for the Number Two of Pythagorean tradition. Earth was "dissed." Her formula for sacredness is a re-enchantment based on her healing powers, her silences, her constant resource for nourishment and refreshment. We need to keep her Green, but if the corps from the religions of Scripture prevail, it will only be black and white. We can open a much greater source of insight, fresh from the fringes of our culture, and greet the Shadow, heal the rift between the psychology of tyranny as led by Science, promote a sacred attitude which may (hopefully) in a timely fashion (with an aspect from Saturn, no doubt) turn the tide of Nature's destruction.