Reflection: The World Card of Wisdom (around the World)
Reflection for Unitarian-Universalist "wisdom" service via Zoom, March 22, 2020
slightly-longer than the spoken version in church, with pictures and references added
by E. Alan Meece (Eric Meece)
First UU Church of San Jose
In college I studied philosophy, or the love of wisdom-- philo-sophia. The great work was The Republic of Plato [1], which was about Justice. Plato concluded it’s the right balance of the 3 parts of the soul, reason, passion and appetite, each doing its part, thus reflecting the perfectly just republic. We evoke 3 similar parts of the soul, mind, heart, and body in action, in our chalice lighting ceremony: the warmth of love, the light of truth, and the energy of service.
In the Republic, the 3 soul-parts each develop a virtue: Temperance for appetite, Strength (or Fortitude) for passion, and Wisdom for reason, which together in balance create Justice. In Buddhism these are the 3 poisons which in Enlightenment become nectars: greed becomes generosity, anger becomes compassion, and ignorance becomes wisdom.
While I studied Plato, I also got my first tarot readings. Later I discovered that 4 of the cards were taken right out of The Republic: Temperance, Strength, Justice,
and the World card, with Sophia, goddess of Wisdom, in the sacred center.[2] The tarot represents the spiritual journey to Enlightenment[3], represented by the World card of the same Wisdom that’s found in all religions. It thereby reveals that we are all one people, and reveals to me that I am the World in miniature.
Author Robert Place, who showed me the Tarot-Plato connection[4], points out that the Egyptians aligned their sacred monuments with sunrise in the East, sunset in the West, the summer solstice in the North, and winter in the South.[5] As in Egypt, these 4 directions are also linked to various animals on the Native American ritual of the Medicine Wheel, and to the 4 seasons and the 4 elements of the World and the Soul.
Most directly, the World card pictures the prophet Ezekiel’s vision of the one universal God of Wisdom within. He saw wheels around God’s throne, which like the Medicine Wheel is framed by 4 creatures, which in this case are the 4 zodiac signs of Taurus the Bull, Leo the Lion, Scorpio the Eagle, and Aquarius the Man.[6]
This vision is also found in the Book of Revelation [7],
and in the Koran, which inspired the Taj Mahal with its 4 towers surrounding an oval central dome.
The greatest temple in the world, the Hindu and Buddhist Angkor Wat in Cambodia, is built on the same pattern and aligned to the 4 directions.
The Mayan monuments at Teotihuacan actually record sunrise on Feb.11 and Oct.29, in Aquarius and Scorpio, and sunset on Aug.13 and April 30, in Leo and Taurus. These dates are separated by 260 days (or degrees), thus providing their calendar.
These are the 2nd, 5th, 8th and 11th signs of the zodiac, and these numbers add up to 26. The Hebrew name of God is YHVH (yahweh), and the numbers assigned to these 4 letters also add up to 26, the # of God.[8]
The World card represents this universal wisdom. In the center of the wheel of creatures[9] is Lady Sophia that we all know who shines white light at the top of the pyramids, The Stairway to Heaven, which IS the all in one and the one in all. Scantily clothed, Sophia reveals in cosmic consciousness the naked truth at the end of the tarot journey, that what we thought was just the world is in fact our sacred soul. And today, impelled by crisis, I see the lesson of allowing the World’s creatures, and the World’s native peoples, their sacred space, so that through perfect Justice we can recover our wholeness, which is our health, and our sacred integrity.
[1] The Republic of Plato, translated by John Davies and David Vaughn, London, Macmillan and Co., 1929
[2] The order of things gets switched around and around, sometimes. Reason corresponds to the light of truth and Wisdom, passion corresponds to the warmth of love and Strength, and appetite corresponds to the energy of service and Temperance. In Plato, Justice corresponds to Enlightenment that balances all the virtues. But Thomas Aquinas considered Wisdom (or Prudence) the most important virtue, instead of Justice. The tarot, invented in the Renaissance in Italy and France, followed his order, so Wisdom became The World, the goal of the journey and the final card.
Furthermore, the originators of tarot reversed Plato's soul hierarchy, putting the higher virtue first and the lowest last, as if they are coming down from above. So Justice (card #8) came first in the tarot order, followed by Strength (card 11), and then Temperance (card 14), with World as the final card #21. At the turn of the 20th century, the Order of the Golden Dawn group made yet another change for their famous Rider (Waite-Smith) deck, switching the positions of Strength and Justice.
The 3 parts of the soul also correspond to three of the chakras, or energy centers in our being. "The energy of service" corresponds to the 3rd chakra at the solar plexus of energy and power, and to the Strength virtue card, which comes in that position in this latest tarot card order. "The warmth of love" corresponds to the 4th chakra of the heart, and to Justice at the heart of the tarot order, and "the light of truth" corresponds to the 6th chakra of light, vision and intuition at the third eye. Thus the virtue that Plato considered the highest, and which balances all the others, Justice, now corresponds to the heart chakra, which is the seat of the authentic Self of Love that balances and harmonizes.
[3] The tarot deck consists of 78 cards (3 x 26), 40 pip or minor arcana cards numbered from Ace to 10 in 4 suits like a regular deck, except the suits are called by their European names, Wands (or Staffs), Coins (or Pentacles), Swords, and Cups, corresponding to clubs, diamonds, spades and hearts; plus 16 face cards, 4 in each suit, kings, queens, knights and pages instead of kings, queens, and jacks. In place of the 2 jokers, there is a fifth suit called trumps or major arcana of 22 cards, which represent the spiritual journey to enlightenment or the elixir of eternal life. It's called the hero's journey story, and card 0 represents the seeker called the Fool (the story is also called The Fool's Journey). The trump cards, numbered from trump 1 for the Magician to trump 21 for The World, symbolize the journey as each card "trumps" (triumphs over) the previous card and thus defines the sequence of the hero's journey (trump has no relation to you know who). The tarot cards were originally (and still are) created for a game similar to bridge, and from which bridge was derived, and were given occult meanings starting in 1781, the year Uranus was discovered and the modern world began. See Robert M. Place, The Tarot.
Elemental correlations are also made. The four suits of the minor arcana are usually linked to elements this way: Wands are fire and indicate enterprise, Pentacles are earth and indicate wealth, Swords are air and indicate intellect and sorrows, and Cups are water and indicate feelings. In modern physics terms, earth is solid, water is liquid, air is gas, and fire is energy. In the Unitarian-Universalist chalice lighting ceremony, fire (warmth, light and energy) contains within it the other three elements: water for love, air for truth and earth for service, which are derived from the Unitarian-Universalist Affirmation of Faith: Love is the Doctrine of this church, the quest of Truth is its sacrament, and Service is its prayer. May this wisdom help us to "grow into harmony with the divine."
In the recent version of The World or Universe card that Rev. Nancy posted in her reflection in this UU service, symbols of the 4 elements replace the symbols of the 4 zodiac signs, which in astrology correspond to those 4 elements. Note that these signs or constellations are not about fortune telling, but are a crucial part of the consciousness or vision of God depicted on The World card, and are symbols of the divine, elemental order within ourselves and in the world and universe, and which appear all over the Earth in the monuments and rituals that provided ancient peoples with a way to predict the equinox and the 4 seasons and evoke wholeness, Wisdom and Justice. Ancient peoples oriented their cities, monuments and lives to the divine order of the sky and to the cycles of the Earth which goes round and around in a circle, as the Shadowfax song that John Ector sang mentioned. As above, so below.
[4] Robert M. Place, The Tarot, Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2005.
[5] Robert M. Place, The Tarot, Magic, Alchemy, Hermeticism and Neoplatonism, Saugerties NY, Hermes Publications, 2017, p.45.
[7] http://www.solarmythology.com/biblenotes/revelation.htm
[8] Paul Foster Case, The Tarot, Los Angeles, Builders of the Adytum, 1947, 1990, p.121
[9] the word "zodiac" means circle of animals
LINKS
HOME
First Unitarian Church of San Jose
original version of What Goes Around by Shadowfax
the tarot journey
my favorite music, Bach's Toccata in F, BWV 540, represents the spiritual hero's journey as told in the tarot and the chakras, and how it connects to many esoteric and philosophical/scientific symbols and stories. The four main notes of its theme, known as the World or God chords, when the second and fourth notes jump up an octave later in the piece and in the journey, add up to 26 (the God number) according to the tone numbers, 3,8,7,8. When earlier they don't yet jump up an octave, the four notes are 3,1,7,1 and add up to 12.
See the end of the soul of reason section.
See also the table of the four-fold world represented by the World card and the four imperial cards (trumps #2-5), and all their correlations, with the fifth element, the Magician and Sophia in the sacred center.
UU Band of Writers Essays
The Four Corners