Using Tarot to Understand Literature as States of Consciousness [by Benebell Wen]

Beyond its interpretation of success, achievement, and validation of the ego, Key 19, The Sun card in tarot is symbolic of the individual external life. It is the state of consciousness. Meanwhile Key 18, The Moon is symbolic of the dichotomy between that externalized life and the spiritual internal. The Moon reflects the tension of that duality existing within every one of us. It is our subconscious.

Regressing backward to Key 17, The Star, the cards begin to talk about the varying states of human consciousness, synthesizing the messages of both the Sun and the Moon. These cards might serve as metaphors for literature as states of consciousness.

In prose, there is nonfiction, let’s say creative nonfiction for our discussion purposes, and fiction. Creative nonfiction helps us form a bridge between the physical world and the human consciousness. It is what we are aware of; it is full cognition and action; it is our filtered intellections and emotions. It is often our Sun card.

Fiction is the bridge between the consciousness and the soul. It engages our subconscious. It is our astral body moving about and expressing its observations. It is often the unintentional cognition and action, the unchecked, unfiltered intellections and emotions that speak to our truths, but we have put them in fiction form because we are not yet ready to tackle those truths in a nonfiction, conscious form. It is The Moon.

Poetry is ritualized language for tapping into the personal unconscious, and it forms the bridge between our personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. The collective unconscious is the essence of the godhead beneath the surface of nonfiction and fiction. The poet is the angel depicted on The Star card.

The Star card is about hope, inspiration, and spiritual abundance. Its Saturn planetary governance infuses the card with an aura of wisdom, but also of hardship and suffering. The Uranus influence conveys the poet’s eccentricity and genius. Incidentally, Uranus is associated with arts and literature.

To understand the collective unconscious, one must first speak its language, and that language is poetry. Myths are our metaphors for expressing the collective unconscious. Tarot works as a divination tool because it uses myths, our metaphors, to help us access that unconscious. Tarot works because like the Iliad, it is poetry. To read and write poetry is to reveal the unconscious. Poetry itself is literary divination.

Comments

[amy glynn]

Bell,

POetry is literary divination. YES. Exactly.

As much I hate to start a sentence "I'm thinking about Uranus..." -- this post brought up a sidebar I have been preoccupied with for a while now, which certainly comes up in the reading you did on my book. As I understand it, Uranus has an orbit of approximately 84 earth years and so from roughly 39-41 a given human will be in a cycle wherein Uranus is at 180 degrees opposition from its position at the time of the person's birth. Uranus opposition is essentially the mid-life crisis -- a time of enormous upheaval, shedding of previously held orthodoxies and beleifs, expansive and explosive creative thinking and bizarre master insights that often fuel the next several decades of a thinker's intellectual life. Also, it's about breakdown -- families fall apart, major illnesses rewrite the body, maybe you get a sports car you can't afford :-)

I'm thinking out loud, but the idea that the poet's craft is an outer-planet operation is interesting to me in this regard. my own uranus-opposition crisis began EXACTLY on schedule when i was 39 and that is when the book i'm working on now first came into being. Do you know when Yeats first got into the occult and the golden dawn thing and all of that? was it at that age?

[b_wen]

Not sure, Amy, though in Mary Greer's book Women of the Golden Dawn, it's cited that Yeats was initiated into the Golden Dawn in 1890. Given his date of birth on Wikipedia (yay, real research), I'm going to say he was 24-ish when he was initiated.

My understanding of western astrology is limited, so the precise influence of Uranus is not something I can speak about. My basic thoughts are on point with yours, though.

[Marilyn]

Fascinating discussion that jibes with my own life experience.