The Fools Journey to Wholeness as Central Teaching
The Fool’s Journey to Wholeness makes up the bones of the Major Arcana and perhaps represents its most profound psycho/spiritual teaching. It signifies a psychic map that initiates of the Tarot follow to attain enlightenment. Enlightenment representing a psychic awareness of oneness, the cycles of birth, death and rebirth, egoless-ness, love, and the balancing of energies. This spiritual map guides initiates through a maze of relating, balancing and experiencing the play between masculine/feminine, black/white, chaos/order, nurturance/self care, love/fear, movement/stillness, doing/being, sacred masculine/sacred feminine.
Just as all spiritual paths have prescribed tests that must be successfully navigated for expanded consciousness, in preparation for the ultimate state of wholeness, so does the Journey of the Fool in the Tarot. These expanded consciousness states prepare initiates to manage, and contain the energy surges rising from the personal and collective unconscious. As experienced Tarotists will testify, this movement to expanded consciousness ever spirals around and upward. The initiate continues to expand beyond your first arrival to wholeness – wholeness is a process, not a fait accompli.
The Magical Process of Working with Tarot Changes the Initiate
It wasn’t until I began the interpretive work on my own Major Arcana that I recognized the power of this process manifesting in my life. When I began interpreting original art work for an article I was writing for an online ezine, I was struck by the synchronicity of the appropriateness of the card to events taking place in my life. Two or three months into the work, I was astounded to realize that this was more than synchronicity – this was magic. In awe, I noted a predictable resonance between my Majors work, and my dramatically altering life events.
In a moment, I realized that my students were going through the same transformational process in their lives; transforming life events dancing in step with their journey to magical readership. Magical readership is the kind of readership that gracefully and brilliantly combines intuition with Tarot academia, empathy with self-awareness, practicality with frivolity, and Yin with Yang.
Daughter’s of the Moon
Ffiona Morgan, author of the Daughters of the Moon states, “There were times when I feared our intense transformational process would prevent the tarot’s publication. Events in my life and the environment threw boulders in my path at every turn.”
Morgan describes this same process engaging all the wimmin involved in the Daughter’s of the Moon creation almost 30 years ago, and many more Tarot initiates have become aware of this same phenomenon.
Fool’s Journey to Wholeness Speaks to Women’s Spirituality
Central to my point is that The Initiates Journey to Magical Readership represents a feminine path to enlightenment.
The core of the Tarot experience is reading the Tarot – this represents the ultimate goal of the Tarot’s teachings. The Tarot as Guru-ess, guides initiates along a sacred path to wisdom whereby they will perform as wise ones guiding others through their readings. The Tarot teaches and demonstrates the developmental tasks that are archetypal through a series of images that point specifically and uniquely to the power of the sacred feminine.
Additionally, readership is a profoundly relational activity and women develop psychologically within relationship. (Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice 1982). Also read StarHawk’s book Spiral Dance Special 20th Anniversary Edition).
“Fortune-teller” Re-Claimed
Cynthia Giles, author of two excellent books on the Tarot, points out in her work that women have traditionally been the “fortune-tellers” while predominantly, males have Kinged the presumably loftier positions as the academic esoterics.
The time has come for feminist Tarotists to reclaim the word “fortune-teller” just as the women’s movement have reclaimed other words like “crone”, “hag”, “witch” and “dyke”. This is an important step for us to take as Tarotists in the 21st century. Women as “fortune-tellers” have been doing valuable psycho-spiritual work in their communities for centuries. They have followed a path to enlightenment which profoundly exemplifies what a woman’s path to enlightenment looks like! Women doing the grass roots work of nurturing others to enlightenment, empowerment and ultimately freedom. The interpersonal aspects of counseling is exemplified in the vision of a woman sitting at her kitchen table with friends and their deck of cards; empathetically, and with words of encouragement, and love sharing their worries, hopes, dreams, fears, angers, and joys.
The Status of Men in the Tarot Culture
Meanwhile, the Kings in Tarot (Paul Foster Case, Edward Waite, Aleister Crowley and other known male members of the Hermetic Order) are writing and pontificating on the meanings, dictating how the cards should be read, and determining how the true divinatory meanings must be defined. Meanwhile, they tell artistically talented women how the cards should be painted and then do nothing to insure these women are awarded appropriate recognition and compensation for their extraordinary accomplishment! Studying, reading and teaching the Tarot, points succinctly to the feminist issue!
Women’s Journey to Wholeness in Becoming a Magical Reader
The Journey to Magical Readership is women’s journey to wholeness, magic, and enlightenment. 99% of Tarot readers are women and 99% of people who go to readers are women. I hear this everyday in my practice, “Why do you think it is that only women go to see a Tarot reader?” One woman joked that she thought it was because men have trouble asking for directions so why would they seek counsel in determining a life direction? But I think this feminine domination of the practice of reading the Tarot, points to a deeper reality.
The Emperor, the Hierophant, the Hermit, the Hanged Man, and The Devil represent the masculine path but they tell a very different tale to women. This is why I maintain that it is crucial that Tarotists wishing to achieve magical readership read only decks that are non-racist, non-sexist, non-classist, and non-hierarchal; in effect that we favour only decks that are inclusive. Magical Readership can only be attained with the right tool!