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Excerpts:
"The Forest of Souls"
 A Walk Through The Tarot
by Rachel Pollack,
Tarot Grand Master
Any time we do a reading, even if we just ask, "Will Mickey ask me to the prom?" we absorb some measure of the Tarot's symbolic teachings along with the answers. We may learn about Mickey's plans, but also about some small confrontation with our own passivity. We may learn to seek greater self-knowledge. "What keeps me from finding someone?" or "Why do I fall for the same kind of person over and over?"


But why ask only about ourselves? Are we so important that we only want to know about our own destiny? With such a powerful instrument, why not ask direct questions of spiritual wisdom? Some years ago, at the annual class I teach with Mary Greer, I decided to ask for knowledge of the soul. Mary and I had chosen "soul-making" as the year's theme, and it struck me that rather than ponder what the Tarot cards teach about the subject, I could just ask them.


So I did a reading in which I asked a series of questions around the theme, "What is soul?" The deck was the Shining Woman, my own creation, now revised and republished as the Shining Tribe. Here is the reading (see layout on next page).








The Ace of Birds, the answer to "What is soul?", derives from an ancient Egyptian plaque. It shows an owl at night, with bright, piercing eyes that stare right at us. Owls are strong creatures that hunt at night, able to see and attack their prey in the darkness. Special qualities of their wings allow them to fly in complete silence. We can say that the soul hunts truth and meaning in the mysteries and darkness of life. The soul does not announce itself, not even to our own conscious minds. Instead, it soars to high places and dives after what it needs to grow and be strong.
Many of us think of owls vaguely as absent-minded professors. This image comes from Walt Disney and other children's cartoonists or writers who have diminished an ancient idea. The owl's reputation for wisdom comes from an ability to turn its head completely around, so that it can look in all directions. Symbolically, it can see into the past and the future. The owl became the animal familiar of Athena/Minerva, Goddess of wisdom but also of fierce commitment. We might describe wisdom and commitment as qualities of soul. The Algonquin Indians describe the owl as the perfect soul-bird.






Compare the Ace of Birds with its traditional equivalent, the Ace of Swords. Swords symbolize the intellect that can cut through illusion and derive abstract principles of existence. While the suit of birds in the Shining Woman Tarot represents the mind, it focuses less on intellect than on creativity, art, prophecy. When we pursue these things we become like the owl, hunters in the darkness of existence.
The term "soul-making," the title of Mary's and my class that summer, comes from the psychologist James Hillman (who himself borrowed it from the nineteenth-century poet John Keats). Hillman likes to say that spirit goes up and soul goes down, meaning that spirit is the quality in us that ascends to unity with divine consciousness, while soul moves us into hidden depths and complexity. Now think of the owl who soars down from the night sky, and compare this to the Golden Dawn Ace of Swords, where the blade points up and penetrates the crown of material reality to reach pure mind.







The other cards in the reading further enrich our awareness of soul. "How do we make (create) soul?" gives us the Place of Rivers (Page of Cups in traditional decks). A figure sits in meditation by a deep pool of water. One way we enrich our soul is the simple willingness to look deeply into the unknown depths and darkness of our lives, and to do so with peace and acceptance. The Page of Cups in the Rider pack evokes a similar quality, with its picture of a young man who peacefully watches a fish rise from the cup.







When we ask what the soul demands of us, we get card twenty in the Major Arcana, called Awakening in the Shining Woman/Tribe Tarot, and Judgement in traditional decks. The card usually shows the Last Judgment of Christian belief, where the angel sounds his horn and the dead rise from their graves. In Christian doctrine the dead truly receive Judgment, with a few sent to heaven and the majority to hell. In the Tarot card Judgement, however, all rise up joyously. Over the years I have taught Tarot I have seen many people become disturbed at that word, "judgement." This was one reason I changed the title to Awakening. The soul demands of us that we awaken. We must acknowledge our true selves, our connection to divine joy. And we must share it with others. For this reason, we see an urban setting in the card. The buildings show twenty-two windows, while twenty-two rays of light shine around the head of the spirit (both of these correspondences were "accidental," without conscious plan).







The final card, for what the soul gives us, returns us to the Bird suit, with the Knower (equivalent to the Knight of Swords, though in fact more mature in its wisdom). The card depicts Tsang Chieh, the legendary Chinese inventor of the I Ching. If we are willing to look deep into the mysteries, to sit quietly and to awaken, then the soul will give us wisdom and inspiration. In the myth, Tsang Chieh created writing when he saw images fall from the sky and combined them with the tracks of tortoises and birds. The story involves oracular visions. Tortoises and birds are divinatory animals. They represent the systematic side of oracles, for people study the flight patterns of birds and the marks on tortoise shells for divinatory clues. The images from the sky signify the prophetic or visionary aspect of the seer. The soul gives us both knowledge and inspiration.


This was the first experiment in what I came to call Wisdom readings. Notice that it does not ask for personal information, but for understanding about an important issue. We could make a personal spread from the question. We could ask, "What is my soul? What does it demand of me?" But with such a powerful instrument, why ask only about ourselves? Artists and interpreters have spent centuries pouring knowledge and ideas and visions into the cards to make them a true instrument of wisdom. Why not let them speak to us about issues beyond our own circumstances?


We should remember that the ancients considered Wisdom an actual being. The Bible names her Hokhmah, a name later adapted for the second sephirah on the Kabbalah's Tree of Life. The Greeks named her Sophia; she remained in Christianity as Hagia, or Saint, Sophia. When we envision an abstract quality as a person, we make it more real. To call the Tarot an instrument of Wisdom allows us to see ourselves in direct communication, through the cards, with Hokhmah/ Sophia. Our study and meditation and readings become more intense when we allow ourselves to visualize Wisdom in this way.





Several days after "What is soul?" I decided to ask another question. "What is Tarot?" The answer was the Six of Trees (Six of Wands in traditional decks). The picture shows a jaunty, cartoon like woman walking through strange, distorted trees with painted trunks. There are varied meanings for this card, such as the ability to defuse a dangerous situation by moving through it with great confidence. When we consider that people very often read the cards in times of fear or pain or anxiety, we can see the Tarot as a guide through unknown and fearful territory. Think of all the people who say Tarot scares them.


Sometimes, however, the most significant meaning of a card lies in some literal image. The paintings on the trees contain owl eyes (the picture derives from a series of five-thousand-year-old carved bones dug up in Spain). Owl eyes appear in the air, and an owl face, with other symbols, lies under the ground where the woman walks. If the soul is an owl, then these woods become a forest of souls, and the Tarot, as the title of this book says, a walk through the forest of souls.


We are each a mysterious creature, unknown to ourselves as much as to others. We are hunters, fierce in our desire for meaning and love. Together we form a complex and dangerous landscape. The Tarot helps us move through that landscape. It teaches us at the same time that it helps us find our way. It allows us to look at ourselves, to see how lives fit together, and also what possible meaning lies behind, or inside, events. And if we choose, we can use it to look at those deeper mysteries under the surface of our everyday lives, the symbols that lurk under the woman's confident feet.

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Rachel Pollack,
Tarot Grand Master

Rachel Pollack is a poet, a double award-winning novelist, a visual artist, and a Tarot Grand Master.


Her first book on Tarot, 78 DEGREES OF WISDOM, is often called "The Bible of Tarot readers."


About her SHINING TRIBE TAROT, designed and drawn by Rachel herself, Caitlin Matthews wrote: "The deeper levels of creation run through this pack, with a delightful freedom and wise love."


Her most recent book, THE FOREST OF SOULS, sold out its first printing in less than two months.
In 1988 Rachel's novel, UNQUENCHABLE FIRE, won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. The New York Review of Science Fiction described it as "not only the best fantasy novel of the year, possibly the best of the decade."


In 1997 her novel GODMOTHER NIGHT won the World Fantasy Award. Kirkus reviews wrote of it "It grows inexorably into a magical exploration of the deepest roots of life and death...Tender and disturbing, down-to-earth and wildly inventive."


Rachel's books are sold on six continents, in nine languages.


Rachel first encountered the Tarot in the spring of 1970, when a friend read her cards. She began teaching the Tarot six years later, while living in Amsterdam (where she lived for seventeen years). Since then, she has taught Tarot, and mythology, and creative writing all over Europe and North America. Her monthly class in New York City has been meeting now for eleven years.


Rachel describes her approach to Tarot as "loving the images," a way to constantly return to the pictures, to enter them and allow them to work their magic on us. Her "Wisdom Readings," asking the cards for spiritual truth, have opened the practice of Tarot beyond personal readings to use the cards for what Rachel calls "a navigation system for the soul."





rachel@rachelpollack.com
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