Episode 84: Mona Lisa Smile: On the Empress, the Third Card in the Tarot

Weird Studies

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel

Society & Culture, Arts, Philosophy

4.8 • 688 Ratings

🗓️ 14 October 2020

⏱️ 80 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This second instalment in our series on the major trumps of the traditional tarot deck features the Empress. As Aleister Crowley writes in The Book of Thoth, this card is probably the most difficult to decipher, since it is inherently "omniform," changing shapes continuously. In a sense, the Empress is variation itself. Her card becomes the occasion for a conversation about the less knowable side of reality, the one that tradition associates with the Yin, nature, potential, and -- controversially -- the feminine. This in turn leads to a discussion of white versus black magic, and how the two may not always be as diametrically opposed as we might believe. REFERENCES P.D. Ouspensky, The Symbolism of the Tarot Anonymous, Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism Weird Studies episode 82 on the I Ching Patrick Harper, The Secret Tradition of the Soul Aleister Crowley, The Book of Thoth Simon Magus, religious figure Henri Gamache, The Mystery of the Long Lost 8th, 9th, and 10th Books of Moses Solomon grimoires Lionel Snell/Ramsay Dukes, English magician Weird Studies episode 3 on Arthur Machen's "The White People" Joséphin Péladan, French magician Susanna Clarke Piranesi Shawshank Redemption, film Franz Liszt, musician Twin Peaks: The Missing Pieces Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Spectrevision Radio
0:03.3	Welcome to Weird Studies, an arts and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.
0:20.3	For more episodes or to support the podcast, go to weirdst. I'm J.F. Martel. In July of 2020, we released episode 77,
0:56.2	What a Fool Believes, about the unnumbered card in the tarot deck. We said then that we devote a show
1:02.3	to each of the tarot's 22 major arcana. This is the second installment in that series.
1:08.3	For reasons neither Phil nor I fully understand, we've decided to work out of a
1:12.8	sequence, and so the show you're about to hear isn't about Major Arcaneum number one, the
1:17.5	battler, juggler, or magician, depending on the deck you're using, but number three, the
1:22.1	Empress, which came up recently in our episode on M. John Harrison's The Course of the Heart. Maybe that's why
1:28.3	we're doing it now. Who knows? I'll try to keep this brief because at the very beginning of today's
1:34.3	discussion, I read a passage from a book that does a good job, I think, of introducing the
1:38.5	Empress. Suffice it to say that the tarot has been, on our respective journeys, no less
1:43.6	important than the I Ching. But we can't talk about the tarot has been on our respective journeys no less important than the I Ching.
1:45.8	But we can't talk about the tarot the way we talk about the I Ching, that is, as a wise old
1:51.5	friend and faithful guide. The taro has never presented itself to either of us as a wise old
1:57.8	friend, but always rather as a dark stranger, whom we can know only by her
2:03.2	epithets and the stories that precede her. Like the Empress, the tarot is, to quote Alistaira
2:08.7	Crowley, impossible to summarize for this very reason that she continually recurs in infinitely
2:14.5	varied form, end quote. Unlike the more or less straight roads of the
2:19.5	Eiching, the paths of the taro are different every time you take them. They aren't secure
2:24.9	trajectories through weird country. They fully belong to that country and share all of its qualities.
2:32.0	Some will warn you that there is danger in taking those paths, that in doing so
	...

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