Tag: the fool

Nothing is Infinite

Major Arcana, Numerology, Tarot, Tarot Trumps Individually

We’re still on The Fool here, but first I want to draw attention to a few typical opposites:

Male – Female
Up – Down
Happy – Sad
Wet – Dry
Day – Night
Odd – Even
Light – Dark
Old – Young
Old – New
Right – Left
Right – Wrong
Good – Evil

Some of these we might think of as opposite poles on a sliding scale: Happy/Sad, for instance, and Light/Dark, and Old/Young. Others seem to be mutually exclusive: Old/New, for instance, and Odd/Even, and Right/Left.

Some are difficult to categorise in this way because, although they are not really opposite poles, there is an in-between state:  dusk between Day and Night, damp between Wet and Dry.

And what about Male and Female? That’s an interesting one! And it brings us to Yin and Yang. Let’s see what someone else lists as opposites under the Yin and Yang headings.

These are all mixed up and many of them a bit too definite for me. And notice that the Yin-Yang symbol above has been straightened out, emphasising and symbolising this definiteness. The one below is more to my taste.

And so we come to the point of all this: what about nought/zero as opposed to a number – any number? Nothing as opposed to something? And is that any different from nothing and everything?

I am a practical person. To me, numbers are not abstract – one means one thing, two means two things, three means three things – you get the idea. And so, to me, just as nill means no goals scored in football and love means no points scored in tennis, so nought/zero means no things – nothing. To a child, when I open my hand, it holds one sweet (one thing) or two sweets (two things) or no sweets (nothing).

Let’s have another look at that sliding scale. Add happiness, you decrease sadness, and vice-versa. Likewise with light and dark, heat and cold, easy and difficult, wet and dry, fast and slow. But this certainly doesn’t apply to odd and even, or left and right or old and new. Does it apply to nought/zero and a number – to nothing and something/anything? Of course not.

Zero/nothing is not part of the something/everything. It is empty space. Nothing there. Something is finite. Everything is finite. Nothing is infinite.

“Nothing is infinite” – the title of this post.

At first glance, that statement seems to be ambiguous, can be understood in two – or three? – ways. Either “There is no such thing as (the) infinite – infinity does not exist” or “No thing is infinite” or “Empty space, the void, is infinite.”

But in fact, if you think about it carefully, you will see that what it really means is any thing which exists is by definition finite. But the nothingness within which things exist is infinite. That ONLY nothing can be infinite.

Getting in a bit deep here. But I am particularly interested in the numerology of the Tarot, and The Fool is clearly the odd one out, the one with no number.

In effect, all the cards except The Fool depict or reflect various aspects of finitude. The Fool alone reflects or depicts an aspect of the infinite.

I will return to The Fool and the infinite, but in my next few posts I shall be saying more about numerology and its application to the Tarot in general.

The Soul’s Journey: The Beginning – The Fool Steps Out

Hinduism, Major Arcana, Mysticism, Reincarnation, Tarot, Tarot Trumps Individually

To Start at the Beginning, with The Fool

The Fool is actually the Soul stepping into the unknown at the moment of reincarnation. And I do mean the unknown. I do not subscribe at all to the view that the discarnate soul chooses (in any sense) its own next incarnation.

Nor, as I mentioned in my previous post, do I subscribe to the notion that there is justice in the sense of punishment involved – punishment for sins committed in a previous life.

Is Karma then simply a matter of cause and effect? What goes around comes around? In any one life – in this life – if you smoke too much, you might get lung cancer. On the other hand, you might not. And someone who doesn’t smoke might. Reckless drivers can live to a ripe old age, while careful drivers are killed every day on the roads – often by those same reckless drivers, who themselves emerge unscathed.

And from life to life? If we were smokers or reckless drivers, there is no reason whatsoever to think we will suffer the consequences of that in a subsequent life. But if we did in fact die as a result of a car-crash or lung-cancer, we might very well be reincarnated with a fear of fast driving or an aversion to cigarette smoke.

In the same way that a fear, an aversion – even a full-blown phobia – might accompany us into a new life, so might guilt. And this is what might seem at first glance to be some form of justice or punishment. But we don’t suffer from guilt, in this life or a subsequent one, if we don’t feel guilty. A Hindu who eats some beef, even accidentally, may be consumed by guilt; may believe that he will be reborn as a cow – or as a pig or a dog. May in fact be reborn as a cow or a pig or a dog, I suppose. But I believe he would be much more likely to be reborn as a human with a horror of eating beef (or perhaps any meat) even if not now Hindu.

This is where we must decide what we mean by “sin” and the significance of a guilty conscience. Eating beef, for that Hindu and all those hundreds of millions like him, is a “sin”. We can all think of countless other examples deeds considered “sins” at various times in history and in different parts of the world today. “Sins” vary from culture to culture and even from era to era. Guilt, then, is subjective. What I might feel guilty about, you might not, and vice-versa.

Like Love, Guilt is personal, not universal, and feelings of guilt not subject to any “laws of nature”.

But is there anything that is always and everywhere considered a “sin”? Possibly everyone everywhere would consider matricide a sin. Note the way Orestes is pursued by the Furies after he kills his mother in revenge for her killing of his father.

Orestes Pursued by the Furies by William-Adolphe Bouguereau. Clytemnestra was murdered by Orestes and the Furies torment him for his crime

What I am getting at here is that while perpetrators of atrocities like genocide and human-trafficking might very well never suffer from a guilty conscience, and such monsters (in our view) as the torturers and heretic-burners of the medieval Inquisition and the present-day ISIS might sincerely believe they were/are doing the will of God/Allah, anyone at all who kills his own mother, for whatever reason, is bound to be condemned, not only by society but by his own conscience.

Guilt is only one aspect of Karma, one relatively minor part of the baggage we bring with us (see that bag the Fool is carrying?) when we step out once more into the unknown. (This is an archetypal image, and must be what John Bunyan had in mind when he gave Pilgrim that burden to bear on his pilgrimage through life.) In that bag, too, are Love and Hate along with traumas like the ones I mentioned earlier. But more of that, and of this whole subject, in other posts still to come.