I - The Magician - El Mago

I am packing for a journey to Dali's home in Cadaqués, Spain: How could it be anything but a day for The Magician?

Or in Tarot Universal Dali's Spanish, El Mago. No matter the language or the contrivances of this Tarot's creator, El Mago remains the opening card of the active Major Arcana.

By that adjective -- active -- I refer to a technique prevalent among Tarot readers and alluded to in the first post of this new venue:

0 - The Fool http://deedee-salvadordali.blogspot.com/2010/06/fool-el-loco.html

The technique uses The Fool (-- El Loco in Tarot Universal Dali --) as the subject. The Fool is considered an infant, without imprint, an unformed psyche and proceeds to traverse the rest of the Major Arcana's 22 cards. (The full Tarot consists of 78 cards. This includes the 56 cards of the Minor Arcana which more closely resemble contemporary playing cards than do the 22 of the Major Arcana.)

Taken from the deck in this manner, this odd man out and carrying the number zero, this Fool, El Loco, faces the challenges of three rows of seven cards. Imagine it as a virgin psyche moving through three levels of self-awareness.

The first row of seven cards represent that which is Universal and beyond Human contrivance; the second row is that which Life imparts and imprints upon us; the third is that which we use to act upon Life.

The Magician is the complete and all seeing, the One, the Father; all knowing and thus the keeper and dispenser of the mysterious life-giving force of inspiration that powers creativity. It is this unknowable hugeness that first greets the innocent, unformed and uninformed who like The Fool is thrown naked into Life.

No surprise who Dali casts in the role of the Omnipotent, the Creator.

In her Complete Illustrated Guide to Tarot (published by Element, a HarperCollins imprint), Tarot authority Rachel Pollack describes the first seven cards of the Major Arcana as representing higher consciousness, the next seven the unconscious and the final seven the conscious.

(This is a very abbreviated gloss of Ms. Pollack's much more profound elaboration in her chapter on Symbols and Structures that Tarot readers access.)


Ms. Pollack notes the typically open stance of the Magician depicts "the body as a channel for power. Artists and writers -- like ritual magicians -- know that the ego,
the conscious self, does not really create anything. Instead, all our training and preparation serves to allow us to get out of the way. Something moves through us. Something that wants to be created. This is what it means to experience."


In her Salvador Dali's Tarot, (published by the Rainbow Publishing Group Limited) Ms. Pollack reaffirms that El Mago "represents the creative principle, the spark of light that begins existence." But she notes in this card, one of two self-portraits in Tarot Universal Dali, the Magician Dali's "crossed arms, a sign that the artist retains his inner mysteries."

And she proffers a warning regarding another variance in Tarot Universal Dali from the more contemporary benchmarks, the Rider-Waite Tarot or Aleister Crowley's Thoth Tarot (shown, respectively, above).

The flames, she writes, "remind us that the creative, or 'masculine' principle ... perceived as a flame ... can either destroy or transform."

"On the table," Ms. Pollack continues, "... bread and wine, Christian symbols of transformation ... and Dali's famous melted watch, symbol of eternity."

This last bit first struck me as an odd take.
Dali named the work, The Persistence of Memory.

Then Realization:
Memory is as eternal as it is persistent.
Only cultural habits cast eternity as exclusively an Unknowable Future.
Eternity is now.
Our lives are played out in its midst.

This re-casting seems an important lesson from El Mago. A lesson I suspect passed along to La Sacerdotisa via the scroll she holds so similar to that upon Magician Dali's table.

The High Priestess, La Sacerdotisa, balances, conducts, guides the wild and untempered creative force; she is the channeler of unleashed flames.

The Magician is Fire.The High Priestess is Water. And they are connected by words. Words. Merely mnemonics once you get down to it.

Siete de Espadas - Again - and Cinco de Espadas Anew

You've seen her before, the Roman virgin huntress, Diane. But this past week's end she coupled with the Five of her same suit, Cinco de Espadas.




Anthony Van Dyck's 1634 portrait of Charles I shows the king as "master of his world" in the words of Rachel Pollack in her Dali Tarot. Except, she says, in Salvador Dali's re-casting there are the butterflies.

The Magician's butterflies migrate throughout Universal Tarot Dali. Here, says Pollack, "they represent the secret thoughts and emotions ... fantasies and unacknowledged desires ... undermining the pose..."

For them both, Charles and Diane -- as it were -- the ectoplasm seduces these indivisible numbered Swords and draws them each forward.

It is beyond even Renewal that these cards speak. It is Awakening. All is Anew. Untested. Not yet contrived. Something base and sexual and unacknowledged, calling us into our futures.

Are you listening? Are you hearing?

The journey -- and the cards seem to hint it has only begun -- appears to promise great difficulties. So say the swords upon swords. And also deep singularity exists in the coupling of mystical number 7 and 5, the card of loss. Both are prime numbers. Neither able to divide into equal quotients.

Using Numerology, as is the way with Tarot, the combination of the cards is the already heavily weighted and freighted number 12. 12 disciples, 12 virtues, 12 vices, 12 months, 12 gods of Egypt. Then the numbers 1 and 2 are added together. Three, 3, the number of harmony.

Harmony develops as the numbers progress; it is a future state. Rightly so. Harmony is not associated with Swords. There is no particularly pleasant state of affairs found amongst Swords. The suit bespeaks difficulties. But also resolutions in action.

Swords are the Element of Air, the very stuff of the words we speak, songs we sing, thoughts we think. The passions we express. Swords are the wildly swirling Element of Air -- they shriek: Alive! Alive! Alive!

The Magician chose that dark Van Dyke to say: No! to repressed "romanticism" -- plucking again from Pollack's work with Tarot Universal Dali. Dali, indeed, demands No! to all repression. Cinco de Espadas under The Magician's hand demands repression transform. These 12 Swords demand Metamorphosis.

These cards came to me from a woman whose randomly drawn Significator -- Sieta de Espadas, Diane -- appeared here Feb. 11, 2010. At my request, because of the duplication, she selected at random a second card. The famous portrait of Charles I by Van Dyke emerged.

Van Dyke's self-portrait at 15 shows him a prodigy as was The Magician.

Before week's end transitioned to week anew, http://www.metamorphosiscenter.com came to me, as unanticipated as Charles and Diane. Metamorphosis emerges. Investigate at your pleasure. Enjoy the layers upon layers of life; enjoy their laying and their lifting.

Dali chose amongst the other Masters in his lineage, the European Masters, to layer the Tarot he created for his Muse Gaia. The Magician used crutches on his own canvases. But here he used his ancestors' Christian, civic and mythological visages and visions to introduce new realities into the conventional symbolism of the Tarot. And The Magician did more. He used these Masterpiece troves to redirect, perhaps even deliver a pathway around a destiny better averted.

In the Cinco de Espadas, The Magician softens the blow of Rider/Waite's emphasis, which is upon the gloating victor, the defeated relegated to the background.
Thoth goes straight to "Defeat," erasing even the victor.


Charles does not gloat, though he is self-satisfied and self-absorbed. The Magician does not seek a lesson built upon that. He seeks the lesson of Metamorphosis from the butterflies. Surely, suggests The Magician, there is nothing gained casting ourselves into the game of Victory or Defeat.

It is a very difficult time, a very complicated time. Everywhere, for everyone. We must become butterflies, develop as our instincts instruct, accept metamorphosis as the true change that brings Harmony, which demands the 3rd leg, the teeter-tottering of victory and defeat cannot achieve balance.

Visualize the Chinese handcuff toy, feel the woven tube fitting both index fingers nail toward nail. Pull and pull and it tightens. Relax and all falls loose and free.
We must open ourselves to new worlds, frightening only from unfamiliarity. Just like the caterpillar, it is unlikely we always visualize what is to come.

Relax, Diane. Relax, Charles. Just Breathe.