Temple of Apollo at Delphi, by Sam Korn, GNU Free Documentation License
The late Joseph Campbell inspired me to reexamine mythology and to approach myth as my mentor, my muse, a sage. Myths are maps that guide us from departure to destination because in myth we can find a metaphor for our own lives, and it is that metaphor that is meaningful to us. That metaphor is the template for what actions and conduct we must exert to achieve the goals we set. That metaphor is how we reflect deep within so that we may heed the revelation of the Delphian oracle: to know thyself.
Historically and common across many civilizations has been the expression of myths in poetry form. Curiously enough, that heritage of poetry is never lost because poetry through the ages returns to myths for the ontogenesis of personal metaphors. Eavan Boland’s poem “The Pomegranate” raises themes of motherhood, of the relationship of nurture between mother and daughter, and weaves her personal narrative with that of Ceres and Persephone. Boland writes of a universal archetype memorialized in the tarot, Key 3, The Empress card, which also happens to be a card that relies heavily on the symbolic significance of pomegranates. In “The Fall of Hyperion,” John Keats superimposes himself into enchanted dreams, suggesting an unconscious state—I speculate a journey through astral planes—and sets the landscapes of several Western myths with the poet as the direct attesting witness while he ponders metaphors for evil and good. In a reading of the poem, the tarot practitioner will nod with familiarity at many archetypes also found in tarot. The progression of the poem itself reads like the Fool’s journey. Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “Merlin” calls forth the myths of Dagonet the jester of King Arthur’s time (Key 0, The Fool card) and Merlin the magi (Key 1, The Magician).
All that is not to say that Boland, Keats, or Robinson had anything to do with the tarot, but it is simply to contend that there is a natural kinship between poetry, poets, and tarot, and not because poets must have actually consulted the tarot, but because of their similar DNA. Poetry and tarot are connected to one another by mythology and metaphor. There is synchronicity between poetry and tarot.
A myth is a story, one certainly with a specific narrative, but one with broader implications. It can be set anywhere, be about anyone, either familiar or fantastical, and yet the themes will resonate universally because the story itself is a metaphor that shrouds a greater truth. By concealing, we reveal. And that is the classical schema of most poetry, to conceal by diverging from the literal, dwelling in the figurative, and through metaphor, confess certain truths. Tarot, too, is a story book with a specific narrative, but one with broader implications. How poets approach mythology as metaphors for their personal stories is exactly how tarot readers approach the semiotics of tarot to divine a person’s life path.
In that sense, tarot is poetry for the poets. The tarot—and I am thinking specifically on the Rider Waite deck—is a deck of cards depicting characters that have become myths, like Mother Earth (Key 3, The Empress), Lady Justice (Key 11, Justice), the magus (Key 1, The Magician), Alexander the Great (Two of Wands), Julius Caesar (Ten of Swords or King of Pentacles, depending on who you ask), Pope Joan (Key 2, The High Priestess), the legendary female pope, the archangels of Judeo-Christian mythos (making their appearances in The Lovers card, Temperance, Judgment, among others), Peter the Hermit (Key 9, The Hermit), Jesus Christ (fish motif throughout the Cups court cards; for many he is more than myth but stay with me here), the Judeo-Christian devil (Key 15, The Devil), the Egyptian deity Thoth (making its appearance on the Wheel of Fortune; represented in the Key 17, The Star by the ibis), and many others, and yet the delineations are obscure, and leave question as to whether these characters of myth are before us delivering a message or whether the characters are incarnations of us, delivering a message from the unconscious to the conscious.
Tarot practitioners would say that the characters are us, because the narrative told by the tarot in a reading is our narrative. The prophesied ending is what could happen should we choose one fork in our path over another. Mythology is how we dive into the unconscious and raise truths to the surface of the conscious. That process, of transforming the latent unconscious into the manifested conscious, often requires ritual. That is why tarot practitioners have ritualized methods for shuffling, cutting, prayers, invocations, and why ambiance matters. Poetry is no different.
Poetry itself is ritual. It is ritualized language. Its rhythm and metrics are intentional for transforming states of mind. Likewise, tarot uses a ritualized set of signs, symbols, theosophical concepts, and myths as metaphors to transform the state of mind. Each card is a line in the poem, a two part poem (the Major Arcana and the Minor Arcana), a poem for the poets, and each of the four suits of the tarot a cohesive stanza.
There is such universality to the mythology, the metaphors, and the poetry of tarot that poets call upon the tarot’s images without even knowing it. I have no knowledge and not even any speculation one way or the other of whether poet Ed Bok Lee has ever dabbled with tarot. Yet his poem “Moon Projector Over Sea” echoes with the imagery of Key 18, The Moon. Lee’s poem is a felicitous interpretation of the card:
Life, the cluttered back-
stage of dreams.
In between, our
sleeping shadows
stealthily remove a single marionette
from the moon.
from “Moon Projector Over Sea” by Ed Bok Lee, Whorled (Coffee House Press, 2011)
Same with the up and coming Henry W. Leung, who published two poems in Kartika Review, “Portrait of Anonymity,” which calls to my mind Key 6, The Lovers, reversed, or maybe the meaning of Key 15, The Devil, and—apt as it is to this discussion—draws a mythological reference: “as Persephone did from Hades: bereft, delighted / by that tempered, accidental bloom, desire.” Leung’s “Quarantine” talks about the Black Death as both myth and metaphor, and I envision Key 13, Death, the hooves that—
…pound perimeters
into the earth, and I grow old
while the long, imperceptible curve
of the city cuts ahead of me
like a ledge. …
from “Quarantine” by Henry W. Leung, Kartika Review, Issue 15, Spring 2013
There is universality to our unconscious knowledge, which is why poetry so often reflects tarot and tarot to poetry. The poet and the tarot reader tap into the same collective pool. Poet Alice Notley has said about tarot and poetry: “words are like tarot cards . . . a poem manipulates unpredictable depths with its words. . . I like the tarot because it works like poetry . . . The symbols are remarkably durable and beautiful; they float out to encompass all kinds of meanings.”
If prose is the language of the solar eye, of aspirations, will, and that which is perceived through the conscious mind, then poetry is the language of the lunar eye, of intuition and connectivity to our unconscious. Prose makes sense of the landscapes we see. Poetry is the reflection of light after dark, the mining below that landscape for gems that might authenticate the nature, the essence of the godhead.
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