Arcanum
noun: things that are mysterious or difficult to understand
noun: either of the two groups of cards in a deck of tarot cards
noun: information known only to a special group
Arcanum II. Priestess. Knowledge.
The Arcana depicts a woman sitting at the threshold of the Temple of Isis between two columns. Her face is covered with a veil, as a sign of hiding the truth from the curious and ignorant. A book lying on the lap and half hidden under a cloak means that secrets are revealed only in solitude to wise men who control themselves.
Don't look for explanations or justifications for the decisions you make. Rely on your intuition. Don’t give this power to everyday little things, appreciate every minute alone with yourself, turn to your inner voice. Keep your feelings and thoughts clear, be kind to others.»
— Papus
«In front of a massive stone pylon - the entrance to the temple, a woman sits on a smooth cubic stone. Her naked body involuntarily amazes with its waxy, amber, translucent color: its lines are very sharp and relief. Her legs are tightly clenched, and her frozen pose with a completely vertical back seems somewhat unnatural.
She wears gold sandals on her feet and a patterned gold lace around her neck, slightly covering her upper back and chest. In her right hand, pressed to her heart, she holds a scroll of papyrus, which lies partly in folds on her knees and falls to the soles of her feet. In her left hand she holds a lotus flower; its brush is tightly compressed and tightly grips the stem.
A slightly transparent blanket of smoky color is thrown over the head, covering the knees and part of the papyrus, almost completely hiding them from view. The Woman is wearing something like a metal helmet on her head; it has two horns supporting the ball. Directly behind her, against the background of the pylon, two mighty columns supporting the portal are clearly visible.»
«Absolute World First Cause, Triune Universal Spirit, in His Transcendental Nature, Incomprehensible and Ineffable, is known by approaching through the turner of the first three Arcana.
In His first Hypostasis It results in the Cosmic Transcendental Being and its first attribute - Will, in the second Hypostasis It is projected into the mind as Cosmic Transcendental Consciousness.
Both of these Hypostases are inseparable from each other, mutually condition each other, and the human mind, devoid of power dismember the supreme dilemma of Being and Consciousness, can only lead to its contemplation by the consciousness of the human spirit through their a priori constructions.
“The first three Sephira: Crown, Wisdom and Reason must be understood as One and One Something.
The first represents knowledge, the second is the one who knows and the third is what is known.
In order to explain this identity to oneself, one must know that the Knowledge of the Creator is not the same as the knowledge of creatures, for in these latter knowledge, as such, is different from the one who possesses it and depends on its objects, which, in turn, are different from the knower .
This is exactly what is explained in three terms:
thought, the one who thinks and what is thought (??? ????? ?????).
On the contrary, the Creator is in Himself at the same time:
Knowledge, and He Who Knows, and That Which is Known.
In a word, the form of His Knowledge does not consist in applying His Thought to things that are outside of Him;
knowing in oneself,
knowing yourself in yourself,
He knows and sees everything that is.
Nothing exists that is not united with Him, and that He does not find in His Own Essence.
He is the Type of all that exists, and all things exist in Him in their purest and most fully completed forms;
Thus, creatures have perfection precisely in this existence, through which they become united with the Source of their being, and as they move away from Him they lose this state, so perfect and so sublime.
—Moses ben Jacob Cordovero, "Pardes Rimonim"»
«Beginningless Cosmic Spirit, Source, Creator and Creator of everything, in the aspect of Arcanum II results in the doctrine of Divine Matter, about the Great Mother of all that exists, Isis Divine, about the Absolute Truth as the Primary Body of the Spirit.»
“Like a beauty hidden in the entrails of her palace, who, while her lover passes, opens for a moment a secret door through which she is visible only to them and again disappears for a long time, the doctrine shows itself only to the chosen and does not show itself with equal completeness to all the chosen ones.
At the beginning she only makes a sign with her hand in passing, and then the point is to see this sign - this is a method called the method of hint; later she approaches a little closer, whispering a few words, but her appearance is covered with a thick veil through which her gaze they cannot penetrate - this is a method called the figurative method, even further she appears before the chosen one with her face covered only by a light veil - this is the method of the Haggadah; finally, when he thus gets used to such communication, she appears before him, face to face and reveals to him the hidden corners of her heart - this is a mystical method.
The initiate then easily comprehends all those manifold mysterious truths that are hidden under the external meaning and which can neither be shortened nor supplemented.” — Zohar [Vladimir Shmakov “Holy Book of Thoth. The Greater Arcane Tarot.”]
THE LOVERS
I saw a blooming garden in a green valley, surrounded by soft blue hills.
In the garden I saw a Man and a Woman naked and beautiful. They loved each other and their Love was their service to the Great Conception, a prayer and a sacrifice; through It they communed with God, through It they received the highest revelations; in Its light the deepest truths came to them; the magic world opened its gate; elves, undines, sylphs and gnomes came openly to them; the three kingdoms of nature, the mineral, plant and animal, and the four elements—fire, water, air and earth-served them.
Through their Love they saw the mystery of the world's equilibrium, and that they themselves were a symbol and expression of this balance. Two triangles united in them into a six-pointed star. Two magnets melted into an ellipsis. They were two. The third was the Unknown Future. The three made One.
I saw the woman looking out upon the world as though enraptured with its beauty. And from the tree on which ripened golden fruit I saw a serpent creep.
It whispered in the woman's ear, and I saw her listening, smiling at first suspiciously, then with curiosity which merged into joy. Then I saw her speak to the man. I noticed that he seemed to admire only her and smiled with an expression of joy and sympathy at all she told him.
"This picture you see, is a picture of temptation and fall", said the voice. "What constitutes the Fall? Do you understand its nature"?
"Life is so good", I said, "and the world so beautiful, and this man and woman wanted to believe in the reality of the world and of themselves. They wanted to forget service and take from the world what it can give. So they made a distinction between themselves and the world. They said, 'We are here, the world is there'. And the world separated from them and became hostile."
"Yes", said the Voice, this is true. "The everlasting mistake with men is that they see the fall in love. But Love is not a fall, it is a soaring above an abyss. And the higher the flight, the more beautiful and alluring appears the earth. But that wisdom, which crawls on earth, advises belief in the earth and in the present. This is the Temptation. And the man and woman yielded to it. They dropped from the eternal realms and submitted to time and death. The balance was disturbed. The fairyland was closed upon them. The elves, undines, sylphs and gnomes became invisible.
The Face of God ceased to reveal Itself to them, and all things appeared upside down.
"This Fall, this first 'sin of man', repeats itself perpetually, because man continues to believe in his separateness and in the Present. And only by means of great suffering can he liberate himself from the control of time and return to Eternity—leave darkness and return to Light"."
— The Symbolism of the Tarot by P D. Ouspensky, c. 1913
“Just as a statue pre-exists in a tree and is contained in each member of the statue, etc. ad infinitum, so the gigantic statue - the cosmos - exists in the One.” - Yogavasishtha
Arcanum IV is the teaching about the Logos, about the birth in the Universal Spirit of creation and the primary potential birth of the cosmic family of monads - the Universal Man - Adam Kadmon. Arcanum V proclaims the doctrine of individuality as the second hypostasis of the individual spirit, affirming its very existence. Arcanum VI is a teaching about Heavenly Nature, Eden, the Abode of the Primordial Adam, the World of the Created Spirit. Heavenly Nature - like Divine Nature, is the Kingdom of the Pure Spirit, but at the same time, in their very essence they are different from each other, and therefore Arcanum VI is similar to Arcanum III, but not equal to it.
Arcanum III speaks about the Divine Nature, about the Life of the Divine in Itself; Divine Nature is entirely imbued with Unity; The Heavenly World, as the Hypostasis of the Divine Existence and His Self-Consciousness, is One and Homogeneous; each part in Him penetrates the Whole and reflects everything in itself, and therefore every thing is a part and the Whole; this World is an absolute closedness: every aspiration here is satisfied, every desire is consubstantial with fulfillment, every attraction is saturated with reciprocity, every quality is fully revealed.
Closedness is a limitation only in the phenomenal world, and at the same time it is always imperfect - absolute closedness is the completeness of the perfection of use; The Upper World is saturated with isolation, for in It there is no very concept of limitation; He is the perfect realization of all the possibilities of the Spirit in Perfect Spiritual Consciousness, in Him there are all causes and all effects, and therefore there can be no action in Him; He is absolutely perfect, and therefore absolutely motionless.
“Where God sits, there is balance.” - Sifra Zeniuta
Arcanum VI speaks about Heavenly Nature, about the Life of the Divine in His luminous shadow outside of His True One Nature, about the harmony and integrity of the universal totality of the multifaceted aspects of His Existence. Celestial Nature bases Its Existence on the Universal Logos, which reveals It from the Divine Spirit by the affirmation of the principle of creation. The principle of creation, born from the Bosom of the Absolute, as the Noumenal Verb transforms itself into reality, enters the Primary Divine Matter, dismembers It into individual individuals and with their universal totality gives birth to the consciousness of dismemberment in the Beginningless Being Itself.
This mode of Self-Consciousness of Reality, as a true noumenon, affirmed in three hypostases, is opposed to Its Self-Consciousness in Its Nature, and is transformed into a secondary quasi-reality - the external appearance of the Absolute Substance. Celestial Nature, like Divine Nature, is One, but it is precisely this unity, having a different nature in them, that binds them by involving analogy.
If the Divine Nature in Itself contains Unity as a category inextricably linked with the category of homogeneity, then the Heavenly Nature, on the contrary, is saturated with creatureliness and only anticipates Its potential Unity in the Substance that gave birth to It.
In the Upper World, every thing is both a part and a Whole, for everything penetrates each other; in Heavenly Nature, each part recognizes itself as a part and lies on the verge of unity and multiplicity; on the one hand, she feels the possibility of joining the Cosmic Existence of the Mountain World, and on the other hand, she feels the opportunity to become an individual figure, exercising her individual will at her own peril and risk. Each individual oscillates between these two opposites, and therefore the doctrine of Celestial Nature comes down to its supreme principle - the Principle of free choice.
The second Turner of the Arcana is the doctrine of the Created Cosmic Spirit - the universal aggregate of individual monads, as a complete analogue, an external reflection of the Triune Homogeneous Spirit. Primary Divine Creativity ends with Arcanum VI; it is the last stage of cosmogonic changes in the Self-Consciousness of Reality. The Birth of Celestial Nature is the exhaustive affirmation of the Created Cosmic Existence as the kinetic Analogue of the Divine in Extension.
The Primary Substance begins to simultaneously contemplate Itself in two aspects: in Its Undivided Unity and in the totality of substances of the second kind, quasi-independent realities that form His Created Nature. In this dilemma, each aspect of Her Self-Contemplation mutually affirms and conditions the other; only from this moment the very feeling of the Unity and Primacy of Her Nature is transformed from an abstract dogma into a directly felt reality. On the other hand, the dilemma of Divine Nature and Heavenly Nature brings into existence a new principle - the Supreme Law of Analogy.
Celestial Nature lies outside the Pure Nature of the Cosmic Spirit - it is a mode of His Self-Contemplation, but by no means a category of His Existence, for the latter is prior to the very concept of quality in categories. Being a creation, Celestial Nature is, however, in direct communication with the Creator; being the first-born child, it, at the same time, as His analogue, exhausts the Primary Cosmic Creativity. She is the perfect expression of the Creator, as His external reflection, but still she is not He, to Whom alone belongs the exhaustive fullness of Being. From here follows the doctrine of Arcanum VI: The World is the true and perfect likeness of the Triune Creative Deity, and this Biner is the highest expression of the Integral Absolute.
"This universe is in essence Brahma, since it emanates from Him, breathes in Him and enters into Him. Adore it therefore." - Vedanta
“He is the universe, but the universe is not He” - this is how the teaching of the Kabbalah can be summarized according to Léon Meurin
“The Divinity is the All-pervading Πνευμα, the Soul of the World, which is the living sphere: God is One, but He is not, as others believe, outside the universe, but is entirely in it, ruling everything; He is the Mind and Soul and the Movement of all spheres, He is the Vital Heat emanating from the sun and enlivening the world." -Pythagoras
The doctrine of Arcana VI is expressed in tradition by the ancient pentacle symbol of a six-pointed star, called the Seal of Solomon, the Mystic Hexagram, the Obverse of the Great Pentacle of Solomon, the Sign of the Macrocosm. This symbol consists of two triangles nested inside each other, of which one involutive - white - expresses the Triune Deity, and the other involute, black - His shadow - the world." [Vladimir Shmakov, "The Holy Book of Thoth: The Great Arcana of the Tarot", c. 1916]
See Also