I The Magician

In “The Tarot Journey of Enlightenment,” I offer you on a tour through the Tarot’s Major Arcana, presented as a map of the archetypical mind, as a guide to the full potential of our development.

I humbly offer this series as my interpretation of the Tarot archetypes, one among the many that exist in the world.

With The Magician we have stepped off the cliff and landed in the material world, the field opposites, the field of duality. What do I mean by that? The spirit world that the Fool left behind was undifferentiated and harmonized. There, all was one. But here in the material world, in the space/time plane, our view is distorted and we see things as dualities, as polarities: day/night, good/evil, man/woman, us/them and so on.

One advantage of a material world, as opposed to a purely spiritual one, is that we have the ability to act. And action is what the Magician is all about. In his right hand he raises the wand, through which he receives divine energy, to heaven and directs it, with his left hand, into the world.

What this means is that we are conduits between the spiritual and material worlds, who can bring divine energy and inspiration to bear in the physical world as meaningful action.

The realms in which we can bring this power to bear are represented by the four tools of the Magician’s trade laid out on the table: the wand, the cup, the sword, and the pentacle. Wands represent the realm action, passion, and desire. Cups represent the realm of emotion. Swords represent the realm of intellect. And Pentacles represent the material world. These four realms of action form the basis of the Minor Arcana. They represent realms of experience in the material world, as opposed to the archetypal experiences expressed in the Major Arcana.

Let’s look more at the symbolism within the card. Instead of the one, iconic flower held by the Fool, we see the Magician in a garden filled with flowers. These flowers represent the beauty of the experience of life growing and grounded in the physical world. They are colored red and white like the Magician’s robe. White is the color of spirit and purity. Red is the color of action. These colors speak perfectly to his role of transforming spiritual energy into action.

The infinity symbol above his head indicates that the divine energy he taps into is infinite. There’s another interesting thing to note about this symbol. It is a clue, here on the first card, that shows us how to carry the divinity of the spirit world into the material one. As I said, in the spirit world all is one but here on the physical plane our view distorts what we see into a field of opposites, into dualities. The way to maintain the divine is to embrace both poles of the duality.

Imagine that one pole of a duality sits in one side of the infinity symbol, action for example. And imagine that the other pole sits in the other side, say, contemplation. This suggests that the way to engage dualities like this is to loop in between them back and forth, first experiencing the one, then the other, indefinitely. This way we don’t become unbalanced and stuck on one of the two poles. By so doing we come as close as we can in the material world to carrying the oneness of the spirit world.

In the case of dualities like good and evil going around the “evil” pole might mean having an understanding of things that we may consider evil. Really, I would say there is no good and evil. In my view there is only actions and karma. But that’s for another card, a later step in the journey.

One other note: as The Magician channels power from the divine into the material, he lets it flow. He doesn’t hang onto or try contain the power. He just channels and discharges it. In life, I feel it’s important, if we feel an energy or desire, to do the same. If that’s not advised for some reason, for example, if acting on our desire would abrogate the free will of another, then I recommend acknowledging the energy and discharging it into ground and letting it go. That way we don’t retain the energy within us where it can accumulate, undirected, and do damage.

And that is how the Magician turns divine energy into action.

Thank you for joining me on this journey. I wish you well on yours.