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.

Sota de Bastos

This dandy irritates. Is that a smirk on this Page of Wands' face? Tarot Universal Dali appears to pull this from a prior century's advertisement for foppish men's wear. Yet Rachel Pollack in Salvador Dali's Tarot (the preeminent authority on Tarot Universal Dali) seems pleased with the elegance and pleasure inherent in the card, the framing in bright lights, the gentleness with which the master handles the masculine Wands with both the page and queen.


Yet that smokiness in the lower right -- a woman? a butterfly? a bird? That ectoplasmic green growth and red life blood -- that is connected to the fire around the sota. There is much unformed around this page.


The Pages of the four suits of the minor arcana represent the "simplest state," in Pollack's words taken from her Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom. In readings and divinations the page is the child, the childlike state, the beginnings, the young student.
And the wands are fire -- fire of imagination, fire of life, the core energy. Tarot Universal Dali shows the fiery leaves on the wand, fire's fuel. Wands are the spark, the ignition.
And Tarot Universal Dali honors that beginning, ignition, flash of a starting point by turning from the pattern of plucking images from past masterpieces and starting afresh. This card, among but a handful, is attributed directly to the artist Dali in Gala's Grail by Kora Silver -- another remarkable study of Tarot Universal Dali.
Comment: Embrace the child. Do not drape the genuine wonderment of the childishness of beginning with a cloak of sophistication. Embrace the efforts of this Sota de Bastos to cloak what is yet undeveloped within inside something larger, older. Not the foppish clothing but the light of life that surrounds us all. And then step beyond the bright light of imagination and make real what is now only an ember. Turn it to fire, inspiration, great and mature life.

XVI - La Torre

The Tower. La Torre. So soon. In merely the passing through Aquarius. Already, all falls apart.

And another Number Seven – from the one plus six of this XVI of the Major Arcana – Seven – Seven which demands opening, experimenting, risk.

Tarot Universal Dali offers no new twist on Le Torre. The Tower represents that made from human hands. Tarot Universal Dali repeats the truth that all so wrought will crumble. Is crumbling.
All that is known, has been known, all that held true, all that has been safe for what seems so long as to be our own personal forever – but it is not, Our Time is only a piece of this short spell called Lifetime – all of this, all of what we hold will shatter. We will fall from our towers. We are falling.

“This is the tower of ambition,” writes Eden Gray.

But it is not only that. Resurrection requires death. For when all crumbles and disintegrates, something is born anew. The Tower counsels passive acceptance of the flimsy material foundations, acceptance of resurrection anew.

Tarot Universal Dali takes first from the master himself – The Tower itself is snatched from Suburbs of a Paranoiac-Critical Town Afternoon on the Outskirts of European History (1936) and allows that almost all of that elaborate and complicated scene of a world facing the Spanish Civil War has already lost root and all that still stands is the small central tower, and it has lost its grounding. The snatching left Gala behind, Tarot Universal Dali instead centering the crutch which Dali used to prop up reality, one world midst another.

And also falling through those clouds is the pinnacle feat of America ripped from Dali’s own, Poetry of America (Cosmic Athletes) (1943). There is always falling. Failure. Loss. Disintegration. Decay.

There is no way to prepare. There is only willingly accepted defeat, true manly beauty shining forth through passive, even ecstatic response to martyrdom – as Dali believed of his revered St. Sebastian. And there, falling with all the rest of the material world, is St. Sebastian, from Pietro Perugino, perhaps inspired from Madonna and Child Enthroned with .St. John the Baptist and St. Sebastian (1493).

Tarot Universal Dali reminds us, as with the better known Christian resurrection story, that St. Sebastian promises Good News emerging from the shattering of what was known and believed before.

Comment: Dedicate this week to search for the core of life, the kernel inside that is true. Feel the prodding of the sharp Seven of Swords that led to The Tower. Accept La Luna guidance and dig below the conventional and consciousness. Trust that the duality of the Two of Cups exists even within a single heart.

Remember. Aquarius began with hard struggle. And now, all that has been clutched and carried forth shall be loosed. Enter Pisces swimming in a new element, unfettered and free.

Siete de Espadas

Siete de Espadas -- a very sneaky card -- Tarot Universal Dali follows Rider tradition again -- plucking the coy "Diane Chasseresse" from the School of Fontainebleau and pasting her into the sky. Why should the Roman virgin huntress throw such a coy look out to you? Why does she echo the man stealthily carrying-off five of Rider's seven swords?

Seven seven seven -- how could such a good luck number turn so devious?
Seven is the card of wisdom, of cycles and completion: seven days in a week; astrology's seven personal planets, there are seven virtues, vices and sins. Juliet Sharman-Burke of The Center for Psychological Astrology
www.cpalondon.com/staff/juliet.html writes, "Inherent in this number is a sense of completion of a phase."

Old divinatory readings speak of New Plans; Wishes nearing Fulfillment; Confidence and Endeavor. Old divination also demands Reverse Readings meaning the Seven of Swords also carries Arguments. Quarrels and Uncertain counsel.

And that is where it gets sneaky -- in the blending with the swords -- Swords, Epees, Espadas -- they are all Air. Swords is not the suit of action, the cards do not denote clashes of metal upon metal, skin or bone. Do not think clashing swords and clinking battle. Do not think of sound at all. Think silently of the Air swooshing invisible and mute. Think of the Swords as slicing and slashing the air into curls and eddies all about you and through you..

Think M.C. Esher's "Bond of Union."

Think of Salvador's "Raphaelesque Head Exploding."

Think. Think. Think. The message of the Swords is Cerebral. Go forward but beware uncertain counsel. The Tarot Universal Dali offers the ectoplasmic woman of fire and blood, tiptoeing out of this frame, gesturing for you to follow. Can this possibly be safe?

Comment: Cerebral action as Aquarius enters its cusp with Pisces. Fire and Water ahead. Whether this coming week's flight is wrapped in Wisdom or Ignominy all is entangled and full of complicated strategy and perhaps even duplicitous diplomacy.
Beware, warns Diane, of that uncertain counsel nagging over your shoulder. Beware as Tarot Universal Dali draws you with heat and passion from this certain frame and into the Air.

XVIII - La Luna

Midstream in the great celestial sea of Aquarius a postcard-arrives of New York, Night from O’Keeffe’s urban period. Randomly selected but inevitably drawn from the Tarot Universal Dali is La Luna of the same skyline. Different perspective.

O’Keeffe’s black city fills her painting, close buildings warmly and modestly lit, set on terra firma no doubt.

Klieg lighting makes void and vacant La Luna’s distant city, not even fully skeletal, spindly, disintegrating roots, themselves already overtaken by the ectoplasmic claw overshadowing the skyline.

Ectoplasm (from the Greek ektos, "outside", + plasma, "something formed or molded") is a term coined by Charles Richet to denote a substance or spiritual energy "exteriorized" by physical mediums. (sayeth Hellboy Wiki.)

Undercurrents and crustaceans, baying hound and wolf, even the crescent moon links La Luna to the traditions of Card XVIII of the Major Arcana. But Tarot Universal Dali puts an angry, startled face inside the crescent making a full moon at full powers. And the gateway is not merely fraught with baying canines, but blocked by the great ectoplasmic claw climbing out of the subterranean.

Tarot Universal Dali’s La Luna is simply too much. It is more than the indication of an awakening into the subconscious – for that is who the Moon is. She is not rationale, she does not see this world or any other in the light of Sun. It can be no other way for the creator of the Paranoiac-Critical Method which demands drawing forth the Subconscious.

Comment: La Luna is the card of letting go, embracing all that is unseen but must be embraced; Accept this night that there exists no road map for your journey. Embrace the scuttling of your dreams and your denials. Claw beyond the baying at the gates of and even above all that is organized and well lit.

Moon time.