IGNORANCE AND KNOWLEDGE-A TAROT READING


Knowing ignorance is strength.
Ignoring knowledge is sickness.

These sentences open chapter 712 of the Tao Te Ching, as translated by Gia Fu-Feng and Jane English. The "Classic of Tao," attributed to the sage Lao Tzu, describes in simple elegance the tenets of the understanding of the world called Taoism, which tells us to "do nothing" by ego but only feel the flow of energy in the universe, the Tao. The two sentences also state, as succinctly as possible, two basic ways we can read Tarot, through intuition or symbolism.


When we read Tarot intuitively we react directly to the pictures. We ignore any traditional meanings and simply allow the image to suggest possibilities. These possibilities may take the form of psychic information, or a kind of story about the figures in the picture, and what they suggest to the reader and the querent. When we read symbolically we know the systems of thought that have gone into the construction of the cards. We understand the meanings of the numbers and the suits, and all the details of the trump cards, including their correspondences with astrology, Kabbalah, and other systems.


Now, these are two extremes, and most Tarot readers will combine them in different degrees. For instance, most will know some of the historical meanings, if only from a book or two that explains the symbolism. At the same time they will react to the pictures, and also choose-intuitively-one or more meanings from the many possibilities their books will list for each card. But what does Lao Tsu teach us about these matters? And what might the Tarot itself say about the subject?


"Knowing ignorance is strength." Most commentators have considered this statement a description of how to comprehend the world. Other translations often make it something like "Knowing by not-knowing is the best way of all." In other words, we should try to perceive the world directly, without intermediaries of ego or learning. It has long seemed to me, however, that at least the Fu-Feng/English translation lends itself to at least one other interpretation. "Knowing ignorance" can mean that we gain strength when we recognize that we are truly ignorant of something. If we accept that there are things we simply cannot know, by their very nature, we stop wasting our time and our strength pursuing something we can never discover. We also end any view of ourselves as inferior for not knowing something we believe others know, and that we need to know. Instead, we "know" our ignorance, and become strong.


People often look at the Tarot as secrets they should know but don't. They accept the Tarot myth that somewhere there exists an original, true, Tarot that contains all the secrets of the universe. They believe that others possess and understand this genuine Tarot, and they do not. They may spend years searching for the information, or else think of themselves, and the decks they are using, as second-rate. Others may reject this absolutist view but still believe that a book somewhere contains the full and correct meanings for the cards, and that they cannot really go forward until they have memorized all the messages. They also may come to believe that the cards have precise meanings, and if they see something that contradicts the meanings in the book, they must have made a mistake.


If we can let go of all these ideas, if we can recognize that there simply are no absolute or perfect meanings, we become much stronger. We free ourselves, and can use our intuition more powerfully. This brings in that other meaning of "knowing ignorance," to grasp truth directly, without intellectual or emotional projections.


If it helps us so much to know our ignorance, how does "ignoring knowledge" sicken us? Quite simply, in any important area of life there are always things we can in fact know. With Tarot there is a history and a tradition. The may be no absolute meanings, but the card designers have indeed put in very specific symbols. For the past 225 years people have studied, pondered, and written about the Tarot. For the past several thousand years people have explored divination. To ignore such collective knowledge and intent can "sicken" our ability to read the cards.


We need to bring both together, ignorance and knowledge. We need to understand what we do not know, and what we can know, so that we feel at ease with both aspects. To recognize, and use, both "ignorance" and "knowledge" in their appropriate ways will lead us to wisdom.


These questions arose during my monthly class in New York City (for information about these classes, and others, see my website, www.Rachelpollack.com). After we had discussed the issues, we decided to ask the Tarot itself, "the instrument of our wisdom," as I called it in my book The Forest of Souls. We asked five questions: what are the benefits and drawbacks of both knowledge and ignorance, and how might we synthesize the two. Here are the five cards that came up. See what you make of them yourself before you read our interpretations. The cards are from the Shining Tribe Tarot, designed and drawn by myself.

Ignorance is strength
Benefit		Drawback
4 of Stone		8 of Trees
Ignoring knowledge is sickness
Benefit		Drawback
6 of Trees		Awakening
Synthesis
High Priestess

If you do not know these pictures you can, if you like, approach them through ignorance. Or, you might consider that Stones are the suit of the element of Earth, similar to Pentacles, and Trees are the element of Fire, like Wands. What do you know of the qualities of Earth and Fire, or the numbers 4, 8, and 6? What do you know specifically of the 4 of Pentacles, the 8 of Wands, and the 6 of Wands? This is the approach of knowledge. But be careful, for you need as well to use your ignorance, that is, the fact that you do not know these particular versions, and they may differ from whatever deck you personally consider the standard.


Now here are some of the issues raised in our class.

The benefit of Ignorance is the 4 of Stones. 4 is the number of structure, and Stones are the element of Earth, that is, solid matter. And so we see stone gateways. And yet, they open the way to a kind of emptiness, a pure energy, for in the center we see only light and a spiral. So the approach of ignorance acts like gateways through all the structures we think of as solid and real, straight to an encounter with the essence of the cards.


The gateways are old, a suggestion we move back in time, through layers of culture and myth and belief. The outer gateway is shaped like an Egyptian arch, the inner like a prehistoric dolmen. We think of Egypt as the first great flowering of esoteric knowledge, and in fact the occult tradition in Tarot has designated Egypt as the source of the cards. Historically, there is no evidence for this idea, except perhaps in a roundabout way, through the influence of Egyptian ideas in the early Renaissance. This lack of information frees us to recognize our ignorance of the Tarot's conceptual origin. Through ignorance we let go of the question, we see through the grand gateway.


Dolmens represent one of humanity's oldest structures, two upright stones with a stone laid across the top. The image in the card takes us back through deeper layers than the Egyptian, to a time when humans began to create symbolic images on cave and rock walls, such as the magnificent bulls and horses of Chauvet cave, 35,000 years old. Here too we might look for an "origin" of Tarot, at least the origin of the power of pictures. And yet, ignorance takes us beyond this stage as well, for what do we really know of the thoughts and purposes of the cave artists? And so we come to the spiral in the light, a symbol of the inspiration for all our attempts to capture truth in images.


For the drawback of Ignorance we drew the 8 of Trees. A woman flies through the air, above a burning house. Here we actually took a largely "ignorant" approach, and reacted primarily to the picture. One person described it as flying by the seat of our pants. The expression refers to early aviators, who flew without instruments or maps. In a fog, or at night, they could lose direction and crash. Sometimes they believed they were flying in a straight line when in fact they were flying right into the ground. Only with the invention of the gyroscope could pilots learn to keep their bearings. So a purely ignorant approach to the cards can lead us astray, even to a disastrous misinterpretation.


In the card, the burning house suggests that an approach of willful ignorance destroys all the structures of meaning people have built up over centuries. The picture also suggests escapism. Rather than seek the meaning of the card we indulge ourselves in whatever strikes us as exciting. We may run away (or fly) from something difficult. Finally, someone suggested that an approach of pure reaction to the pictures actually may work too well, for it can burn us up with psychic energy.


For the benefit of knowledge we drew the 6 of Trees. This card is a variant of the 6 of Wands, and for many that card indicates confidence and firm action. The woman in the picture moves jauntily through a strange landscape. We might think of this as the complex world of Tarot symbolism. Through knowledge of the cards and meanings we move confidently through the difficult and confusing territory of the reading.


This card has a special meaning in the Shining Tribe Tarot. The practice of Wisdom Readings, and the title for my book The Forest of Souls, come from two readings I did several years ago. In the first I asked "What is soul?" and got the Ace of Birds, a card that shows an owl with penetrating eyes.


Several days later, when I asked "What is the Tarot?" I got the 6 of Trees, in which a woman walks through a group of otherworldly trees painted with the faces of owls. This made the Tarot "a walk through the forest of souls," that is, a way to navigate through the density of people's lives and dreams.


If we ask what is the Tarot, and get the 6 of Trees, and then ask the benefit of knowledge and get it again, the answer suggests that knowledge-tradition-is the Tarot. The Tarot is, from this point of view, the sum of its traditional knowledge. And it is knowledge that can guide us through the difficult realities of readings about people's lives.


The card for difficulties is Awakening, called Judgement in traditional Tarot decks. Though I changed the name to indicate that no one actually is judged, we can use our knowledge of the older title to suggest that a traditional approach can lead us to make improper judgments about the reading or the person. We can think we know more than we actually do.


The picture shows a street between two high buildings. Compared to the open gateways of the 4 of Stones, Awakening suggests the confinement of tradition, where we feel closed in by all the "official" meanings of the cards.


The name implies that we awaken to some truth. We can easily believe that we have reached the end of the journey, in other words, have gained all the truth possible from the cards. In fact, this is not the last card, but the next to last. To believe that the state pictured in Awakening is the attainment of complete truth can be a great mistake. It is not truth, but knowledge.


Finally, the synthesis card is the High Priestess. What better choice? As the priestess of a tradition she contains all knowledge within herself. Older decks showed her with a book in her lap, or a scroll (often marked "TORA" the Hebrew law). But the books are closed, the scrolls rolled up, for she sits in silence, aware of the understanding that we cannot easily put into words. In the Shining Tribe version the snake below her (based on the Australian Aboriginal Rainbow Serpent) coils inward. The High Priestess understands that tradition and knowledge take us to a point where we can only let go and embrace ignorance.


She sits between two pillars, sometimes black and white, here red and green, for the two strands of life, animal and plants. We can see these pillars as the very issues we are exploring, ignorance and knowledge. The High Priestess sits calmly between them, the keeper of both, the embodiment of Wisdom.