Winter Ends

This concludes the First Season of Dee Dee & Salvador Dali's exploration of Tarot Universal Dali based upon a card selected each week -- so far randomly. Next posting will open the Sign of Aries, the start of the Zodiac year.

This initial Winter Season opened in the waning Cusp of Capricorn with the callow Knight of Pentacles pursuing wealth. In the Sign of Aquarius -- first the Eight of Wands then the Two of Cups -- he struggles with the definitions of Victory and against Restraints.

Still in the Sign of Aquarius appears La Luna -- The Moon -- the power of the subconscious. It feels good slipping out of definitions an restraints into what lurks beneath.

As the Cusp of Pisces approaches Diane the Huntress on the Seven of Swords appears. Winter deepens, but still it seems a genuine victory to see such confidence arrive.


Short lived.


Opening Day of the Sign of Pisces. La Torre. Total destruction. The Go-Back-to-Start of the traditional Tarot symbolism. This is one of The Tower's messages: You Can't Have It All. This is the card that tells of false Idols. Of false Gods. This is the card where the you that is you is lost. Lost and gone forever. This is the card that makes us clutch at life in the face of absolute destruction. This is the card that demands Rebirth. This is the Phoenix.

Nicely followed with the gentle Sota de Bastos -- Batons yes, Wands more traditionally, but regardless they are wood and thus combustible -- Wands resentative Fire. Ignition. Yet the ignition brings next week the frightening Six of Swords with its promise -- soon to be broken -- of fair skies ahead.


Indeed. Days later Tarot Universal Dali's Seven of Coins arrives with Caravaggio's Mary Magdalen. The painting is of The Virgin who has died -- in contradiction to a recently changed church policy -- on Earth.


By now unusual coincidences are showing up in unusual places as this endeavor evolves. On the day Siete de Oro posts, the long-lost remains of Caravaggio are returned upon the 400th anniversary of his disappearance.

Only one card is left to draw in this First Winter of this Endeavor of Dee Dee & Salvador Dali. Pisces swims upstream as the selected card is turned: The World. The final card of the Major Arcana.

Auspicious. Even propitious in a traditional Tarot deck or in a classic read.

But all is always askew in Tarot Universal Dali. It is an important lesson The Magician offers. In this time when so very much is askew.

Comment: Might we come out of this winter and make askew The World's sad tradition? Might we use The Magician's optical opportunities to see the tears of blood locked out and retreating? Might we be able to focus on the tiny remains of innocence in Tarot Universal Dali's El Mundo? They are, after all, in the forefront.

Nueve de Copas

It is as though parents sit in judgment in this Tarot Universal Dali Nine of Cups. Indeed, there seems always to be a tinge a guilt in this card of compromise. It is the mixed message of accumulation as successful and indulgence as despicable.


Traditional decks, such as the Rider deck, show a man bursting with earthly bounty. Appearing in a read, representing yourself, of course this card can be embarrassing, disclosing an unfettered celebration of the earthly self and an indifference to the deeper life, the spiritual path, others' want.



Dali the Magician, the Transformational, chose "Circe (or Melissa)" painted ca 1520 by Dosso Dossi as the satisfied center of the Nine of Cups. She appears a transformation between bad and good.

JudithYarnall insisted in Transformations of Circe: The History of an Enchantress, that this painting of Dossi's is not Circe the enchantress, it is perhaps, at best, Melissa. But is possibly the much worse Alcina, the beautiful sorceress who seduces knights then tires of them and turns them to stones or into animals or plants. It is Melissa who changes them back. Magic worthy of a Magician is this Sorceress of Transformation.

What can be made of that? Today, in the waxing fullnes of Aires, the Prince of the Celestial Signs, there appears the fullness of the Nine of Cups, Nuevo de Copas. And within this Tarot Universal Dali there is even a tenth cup -- a chalice above the Sorceress and deeply embedded in the minds of the elders that surround the Sorceress.

Comment: Today's arrival of the Nine of Cups -- a cup of fullness and reward and pleasure -- both closes the Gregorian calendar's first quarter and opens what ancients believed the first of the Celestial year with Aires.

The struggle of parental/societal bonds and bondage continues past the close of the winter quarter and through this Nine of Cups into Spring -- this struggle with societal restraints presented itself as early as the movement from Aquarius into Pisces with Dos de Copas http://deedee-salvadordali.blogspot.com/2010/01/dos-de-copas.html. Now, still today the ectoplasmic images entomb the Sorceress.

Spring is the time to outgrow this.

XXI El Mundo

El Mundo. The World. The culmination of the Major Arcana. Tarot Universal Dali strays far from contemporary tradition which suggests The World symbolizes the ultimate immersion in the all-knowing. The World, writes Rachel Pollack in the Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, suggests "freedom and rapture beyond words."

El Mundo of Tarot Universal Dali cries blood.

A deep darkness stares -- over an offering? a sacrifice? -- into the persimmon chamber where the Goddesses are chained.

"Probably the most radical of Dali's images," Pollack writes in Salvador Dali's Tarot. "Perhaps ... the true world ... remains always overpowering, even terrifying."

Tarot Universal Dali plucks Hera, Athena and Aphrodite from Lucas Cranach the Elder's "Judgment of Paris." Are they imprisoned here? Does Salvador Dali perhaps puts them in their rightful spot? Their vanity unleashed ten mortal years of bloodshed.

Their tale lies at the feet of Zeus, the God in Charge, whom they asked to declare which among them the fairest. Zeus, a wise fellow if not a very responsible god, hands the task off to Paris, a charming mortal. Each Goddess makes promises. Paris considers the offerings and goes with Aphrodite who gives him the love of the fairest mortal woman alive. Helen of Troy.

And thus is launched the Trojan War, over the countenance of a woman and the frivolities of the Gods.

Does Tarot Universal Dali leave us there, alone, with Goddesses oblivious to their folly?

The Magician Salvador Dali takes liberties with Cranach -- as Cranach did in his own time and as he did to himself as he aged, as he gained the world. Salvador Dali readjusted Cranach's "Judgment of Paris" painted in 1512 with something of Cranach's 1530 "The Golden Age." Cranach himself made the connection.

Do you see her? There in the heart of both of his paintings Cranach has her watching you. Still watching you.

Who is she? Is she Aphrodite herself?

The King of Coins, The Magician, Salvador Dali has reversed her stance. Has she learned in El Mundo? Unlike in Cranach's depictions she stands in El Mundo as do the traditionally celebratory women of the culminating card of the Tarot's Major Arcana. Her right foot is grounded, of this world, her left uplifted her soul released and free -- she is the world's dancer mirroring both the Rider and Crowley Thoth decks. It seems Adjustments can be made.


Comment: Seek reversal. In El Mundo the Master of the Illusion has not precluded that it is the all-knowing Goodness/Goddess holding that thin chain, that it is the darkness and the bloodshed locked outside, held at bay.

Siete de Oros

Seven of Coins. Tarot Universal Dali mocks tradition and embraces it. Mary Magdalen takes a moment -- her fruit of accomplishment cerebral and ready to turn back into the earth.

Dali plucked this mourning Mary Magdalen from Caravaggio's Death of the Virgin turning her into an Earth Mother of Tarot Universal Dali.

The Caravaggio was the last Catholic painting to depict the Virgin Mother as clearly dead before assumption. It was rejected by the parish for which it was commissioned in the early years of the 1600s. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_the_Virgin_%28Caravaggio%29.

Caravaggio was already notorious. So notorious that he surfaces again today in synchronicity with this Friday posting of one of only two Caravaggio-inspired Tarot Universal Dali cards (Siete de Oros selected five days ago by a blood relative)

-- Caravaggio surfaced in Italy just in time to attend the celebratory 400th anniversary of his disappearance. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/news/csi-caravaggio-the-cold-case-gripping-the-art-world-1920127.html

Mary Magdalen, chosen by the Tarot Universal Dali to weep within a cave -- as Caravaggio intended -- is also placed in some type of optically alluded helmet -- with blood. There weeps Mary Magdalen behind the face plate of gold and beneath the bleeding helmet of overripe fruit. It appears Tarot Universal Dali made parts of Caravaggio's Still Life With Fruit On a Stone Ledge topple.

A bat is prying into the cranium. And at your back, Mary, the tree and that damn apple, right there over your shoulder as it must always seem to be.

Tarot Universal Dali rejects gentle reads on the Seven of Coins, falls back on the harsher traditions suggesting taints of avarice in the suit, a shunning of the suit's bold accumulation of coins -- something the Master of the Tarot Universal Dali did not shun in his suit. A contemporary gloss suggests coins are but the material symbol of that which is tangible of our lives, that which is rooted, that which is the earth. But the earth is a tomb as well. And there weeps Mary Magdalen, in Tarot Universal Dali, entombed in the heart of the earth.

Comment: Time marches on. Pick yourself up, Mary. Step past the tiny armor of coins -- so flimsy compared with the weight of the earth on your shoulders. Gold cannot protect you from the earth that hovers above you. Stand and step out from under and from behind. The time for mourning the past is over. The virgin had to die sometime. That's just the way the story goes.

Seis de Espadas

The Six of Swords -- never an easy card to accept, though divinations give fair outcome to this solemn and frightening journey card.

The Wizard of the Tarot Universal Dali includes a fair land ahead by taking liberties with the Barque of Dante byEugène Delacroix.

The Tarot Universal Dali puts Dante in control of the vessel. Virgil and so many of the souls of the River Styx are cloaked in butterflies; sheltered by butterflies, propelled by butterflies.
The vessel is verily turned around no longer fore to the City of the Dead as depicted in this Delacroix's rendition of Dante's Inferno.

Working with the Rider deck as a starting point in Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, Rachel Pollack called the Six of Swords a "strange and powerful image" and she notes in her text, "like the silence of Salvador Dali's paintings." Elucidating further on the meaning of the card she writes, "Usually this card does not signify death, though it can indicate mourning . . . it depicts a quiet passage through a difficult time."

Ms. Pollack writes also of "long sorrows" inherent in this card, sorrows of such duration their presence is no longer felt as separate from one's self and soul.

Tarot Universal Dali's ship is larger than Delacroix's -- the Magician's vessel carries all of Dante's Hell toward a different shore, a shore of light not darkness.

Charon, in myth and in Dante and in Delacroix struggles to hold back the living from the City of the Dead. Here, in the hand of the Magician of the Tarot Universal Dali, Charon appears dragged back toward life.

But tentacles of the heart of Charon's Hell are rooting in the air, overspilling the Magician's vessel. The same darkness emanates as well from the ectoplasmic woman leading the vessel onward and away from black clouds.

Comment: Focus on the shore across this middle swath of Pisces -- a sign of endurance and persistence. There is not time, midstream as it is right now, to lengthen sorrow any further. Do not push back. There is more life ahead.