Why is High Priestess Moon? - Conclusions and Reflections
The Resolution and What we have learned
So was iť “Moon is for the girls”?
So, this whole headache aside. The insane source problems. Aside.
What about our Priestess? And her Moon? Ye, remember when that was what I wanted to get into? And here is where I’ll say I genuinely don’t fucking know! As we go from Gebelin and Mellet, the authors hallucinate on her a lunar crown, as they see Isis. The Moon connections that got fused to her is a result of Eliphas Levi syncretism nonsense, even if Gebelin is more careful. He does say a shit ton about beth as a woman, and so clearly a Moon. Then, Westcott and Mathers did their own gamer moves and just… Invented new assignments. The Cipher manuscript, wherever they fucking got it from honestly just gives no justification to the switch based on Hebrew letters, it merely states “It is according to her nature”. So. That’s fucking that. She just is Moon now. Isn’t it convenient that she and the Empress got to keep their feminine planets? I am not saying that’s all the reason there is. But after dragging myself through these manuscripts, the High Priestess is so oversaturated with the “WOMAN WOMAN WOMAN” attributes that I find it difficult not to believe it wasn’t at least a factor.
The truth is, I didn’t find the smoking gun for anyone. For Levi, his reason can easily rest in Pistorius’ Artis Cabbalistica or Rosenroth’s Kabbala Denudata and there is nothing I can do, because I can’t read Latin. Mathers and Westcott can too show their work in one of many of their writings I didn’t fully analyze. But… I think I’ve discovered something regardless.
There is a lot of material and commentaries that connect beth to Binah, and some of it directly talks about lunar nature, and about femininity. Kabbalah, especially from medieval times onward, very much invoked gender polarity. But it's not the source of it for Levi, nor for Golden Dawn. To them, if this polarity wasn't here, they would have just moved it to another part of the deck.
Alchemy, neoplatonism and Greek philosophy in general also pushed strongly in the direction of enforcing gender binary on concepts. To many people usage of sex and gender was a strong allegory and metaphor, and through "as above as below" they thought it applied to higher spheres as well. If the below is gendered and this gendering produces creation - then the above too must be gendered to be able to procreate. This instinct, to use the powerful metaphor of sexual reproduction is simply what underpinned a lot of mythologies, because it was, in many ways, the totality of knowledge that captured the imagination. It’s still used even today!
At every point all esotericists pushed into things they believed, creating loose connections, discarding what didn’t work. They cherrypicked. Made chains to confirm their own logic. It was their choice. They didn't accept everything as it appeared. But the gender thing they carried forward. To them, what was presented was a simple depiction of binary, which has to be the feminine, simply a reflection of a man, simply a rib of Adam. And then you look at Tarot, and what’s that? On the second card is a woman. Just sitting, with a book. So hey, let's connect her to every other woman in mythology ever (except some that we need for the Empress, let’s not run out of ALL the women guys) and also oh, beth was seen as possibly feminine by some commentators on Kabbalah? Wow our job here is done, everything checks out, this was easy, case closed, move on. This was just something carried forward by the whole momentum.
If their basis was a deck where the second card was a man, they wouldn't focus on the Moon. They would have adopted arguments that it's the Holy Spirit, or Jesus, something that one of the dozens of Christian commentators said. What I mean to say is that yes, I think gender of the figure absolutely played a role, and it was an easy solution based on the environment of esoteric thinking back then.
What I’ve learned, Reflections
I found this whole excursion an exercise in frustration but also
illuminating. I’ve never been able to pierce the curtain of the High
Priestess herself here, but I’ ve been drowning in her waters all the
same. And I’ve picked up knowledge and information I never did before,
and followed my own path. I can’t do Tarot card meditation but it’s
almost like Meditation on Hermit or High Priestess, and ultimately
it got me Right into the Scary Moon with the madness and barking of
dogs.
The question that naturally arises from this is “Does any of this
matter?” People have known that Golden Dawn was kind of a bogus for
years now and yet Tarot keeps going on. But really, is it fair of me to
even call them bogus? Many authors on Tarot’s history did just that.
However, they were outsiders to the practice and non-spiritual and
honestly just saw the whole thing as a fraud.
The question and honest answer is that every single person here created
a system that was satisfactory for them and did the job they wanted it
to do and legitimately produced interesting ideas. People use their
pathworking ideas, their magic. It produced a legitimate legacy of its
own, and much of occult and esoteric groups, including Wicca and modern
witches owe their practices to the Golden Dawn and its alumni. Beyond
that, many of these people were trying. They were trying desperately to
reach the outer truth. Their systems did something and despite problems
remain largely logically consistent and workable to the people who
include them into their practices.
What we can call bogus is that every step of the way we see the same
problem over and over. The invocation of some ancient sources, some
wisdom further and further away. No I have it right - the guy before me
was bluffing concealing knowledge or just wrong. Now I have the
knowledge. No one can just say hey I made this and created something
coherent. We place so much focus on the whole, “am I right” image. What
sells is certainty, and history, after all, is certainty. It worked for
someone, so clearly there is something to it.
And this is a problem even today. Some people will suddenly release a limited edition of Golden Dawn tarot that is realer than those we have before. (problems fixed! more accurate to the real version!) People will scoff at Tarot then turn to Marseille editions and claim them ancient or better based on their wisdom. People will scoff at anything but seeing the cards as Renaissance metaphor, which to them holds the true wisdom. I have seen an article where someone selling courses on cartomancy claimed that Tarot is the corrupted version of the wisdom of playing cards, which they CLEARLY have because “4, 13, 52 were magic numbers in Ancient Egypt”. We just keep doing it over and over. Chasing our own tail in the darkness of the past to pass as a sliver of Knowledge and usually selling it as a course.
I get it partly. Occasionally I get hit by a possession to search up queer history and then get disheartened by the fact so much of it is records of pederasty. But do I need that truth to be something here? Why can’t I simply admit that a lot of stuff is fragmented by design, by lack of archivation? Why do I reject the idea of modern history being meaningful on its own, knowing for sure that people like me felt the same things, even if they comprehended them differently? Again… The need for ancient explanation is a deeply implanted impulse. And for these people it was a rallying cry that allowed them to make their secret societies and draw people into it. We will see that true wisdom is a better position to draw from than proving your system from something. It gives you solid ground. And even I did it, chasing Levi’s attribution to the ends of Earth, feeling it close, hunting it like my own white whale. And for what? Was I truly scared there was something ancient? That would prove I am wrong and misunderstanding him, that there is something I have to listen to? I had to dig deeper. The idea that the whole tradition rested on imaginative reading seemed unrealistic to me, even though, why would it be?
Mathers, Eliphas, Christian, Gebelín all called out to something ancient to prove the wisdom of Tarot, which to me lies, simply enough, in the universal power of humanity. The ability to notice and see patterns. The power to organize your thoughts, to mediate and this gain more insight from what you’ve seen before. For Gebelín, he saw the story of human’s fall from the Monde Primitif, the Golden Age, whose language he was recovering. For Christian it was a convenient set of tales of induction into secret societies. For Levi, it was a good symbolic concept that permitted ease and flexibility, a symbol worthy of his universal religion. Notice all of the ways Levi used High Priestess in different connotations changing her from this, to that based on context.
The prophets spoke in parables and images because abstract language was lacking to them, and because prophetic perception, being the feeling of harmony or universal analogies, is naturally expressed through images. (Rituel de la haute magie)
He was so close.
In trying to turn Tarot into something that was always ancient, they accidentally succeeded in proving the main power for which it’s used even today. They just weren’t honest about it.
And there is the real problem of just consuming whatever we see and inherit without thinking about it, considering every connection and universalization impulse just. Esotericists included a MASS of something that was appropriated by Christians from Jewish mystics. They also took from Indian and Buddhist sources without thinking much about it, as long as it created something. This is how ideas propagate, but these people committed to the simple idea of enlightened universalism, not noticing their own bias and ignoring the function these belief and thought systems played in their cultures. They made many mistakes and repeated distortions openly. Should we just recreate that? This is a deep ethical undercurrent to all of this and in the end, it depends on people doing the magic, but again - I strongly urge at least basic education on the topics, so as to not commit to speaking about these already misunderstood and sometimes violently erased cultures. People can’t just erase all bad from their spirituality and things they inherited. But we needn’t be Eliphas Levi, shamefully holding onto ideas and defending them with spite. He repeated anti-semitic theories and books made to convert Jews into Christians, because he needed to believe his Church was right. I’d even say we shouldn’t be that. I don’t think the solution is just stopping and imploding one’s spiritual practice. But the question of what to do with our inheritance is a personal one, since practices outside of institutional religions are deeply individual. What is my goal? What do I gain? What do I absorb? That to me is the core, but what to do is just… difficult to Answer. The reason for my carefulness is that I know that simply wholesale replacing one’s whole spirituality is difficult and must be left to the practitioner. I hope it doesn’t come across as excusing these facets.
This whole idea for the essay started because to me, a lot of notes surrounding High Priestess sound like a result of a common esoteric misogyny. Eliphas alone and how he saw women is very much worthy of a stop. But is it bad to keep doing it? Is that what she has to be? Meanings for Tarots changed. In the 70s when it started to become a real thing, people, many of them women, slowly shifted their meanings based on their own meanings. Almost every card shifted with the world that changed. Our Priestess was Isis, Diana, the Wicca Goddess, the reminder of femininity, young girl, Sophia the goddess of Knowledge, a contrast to exoteric religion etc. etc. Many people took her in today and changed her to be what we need - today. A respected femininity and womanhood. Not one that is merely a reflection, a pale version of the masculine, not just a rib. Meanings are created not just ex nihilo but in response to something. But again, these thoughts are not isolated. Moon as a feminine force is an ancient metaphor, but one that eventually turned into cosmic truth grasped by all of cultural baggage. The whole polarity of feminine and masculine is like that, and insistence on it made several Wicca groups hostile to queer people of all kinds. Never examined if it was just a metaphor or truly a deep cosmic truth that demands whole groups of people as unable to work with it for no reason. To recruit Empress into this as well, Eliphas didn’t even see this card as a woman. He saw the womb, the child that arose from a combination of masculinity and femininity. In one tract of his he describes that “a pride of a man is his golden head, and pride of a woman her silver womb”. We can respect both of them, we can point out how being a woman is still important to a massive amount of people and how that experience reflects in these cards. But do we have to engage with these words and their legacy? Again, we can’t remove this core, this past and again, every person has their own needs. But just saying “this is how it was/is” is not enough, in my eyes.
So, here are my cards on the table - I am a secular ex-Christian. I engage in Tarot because I love its combinatorics and organizational usages in creating meaning. The history of Tarot fascinates me partly because of the layers of false truths created around it. Unlike many people I consider this a natural evolution of it. I've been deeply inspired by Markus Katz and Rachel Pollack, who got me into this idea of wonder, play, and myth-making. Even Camelia Elias who I find … a touch annoying to read, said something great “I don’t care about the history, I care about the reading”. That’s what Tarot is to me, and why I love it in all its forms, modern, ancient, etc. I will never fully understand what it means to someone spiritual or religious who uses it as part of their practice. However, I can assure you, many of these people know about the gaps and intelligently engage with them. Trying to beg for rationalism assumes that that worldview is the only one that matters or produces a worthy meaning.
To me Tarot cards simply took on a side as a different tool. No, no one now is debasing their noble use as the instrument of gambling, but simply adding their own page to their varied use. We can’t simply look at recent history and proclaim it invalid, like we can only search for meaning in “exotic” lands and lost times. Historically, people found meaning and usage in anything they had on hand.
If this excursion has shown me anything, it is that Tarot is in many ways not unlike Rosencruzians. To briefly explain the history – someone in Germany posted three pamphlets showing the descent of a secret society of ancient wisdom. It wasn’t true and its very probable author later regretted publishing it. However, many societies did emerge based on this, with even Golden Dawn itself coming from this family tree. In the same way, the modern Tarot foundation is based on an esoteric core that is not historically grounded or “true”, but does it matter? It has become its own living tradition of many approaches.
I just hope we can be more honest than our predecessors.
Final disclaimer
I myself am not a perfect observer. My grasp on languages is weak. I can't go through Kircher's or Rosenroth’s whole tract because just a few pages is tiring. I don’t know the context for many of the people involved or the orders. The Mackenzie connection is where I am lost the most - a lot of my knowledge is Tarot hyperfixation derived. What is this Masonic shit? This is my hobby, not my work. I have other hobbies and I really just want to finish my Kingdom Come Deliverance hardcore playthrough to be honest . Also I am an idiot, who shortens observation and simplifies complex causes because I was already stressed by how long this was getting. In many ways, I am one of these men. Waite, Crowley, Papus, Levi. I won't pretend otherwise. I welcome corrections where my interest fails me. This was born out of legit curiosity, and my own frantic attempt to trace it.
I also skipped over reproducing a lot of Levi’s actual misogyny and anti-semitism, but it’s there. It’s absolutely there and I want to warn people about it in case they want to read him. He is seen as more approachable as Golden Dawn or Crowley, and it’s true he is less outspoken about his bigotry than Crowley was, but I would say it is everywhere in his writing nonetheless.
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