|
Two months ago in this column we looked at two basic ways people do readings, based on the terms "Ignorance" and "Knowledge" from the Tao Te Ching, the Chinese wisdom text. Last month, we considered three kinds of readings, Fortune-Telling, Psychological Insight, and Spiritual Wisdom. Obviously, it's time to do something with the number four!
The Tarot contains quite a few structures based on four, from the four suits of the Minor Arcana, to the four elements (Fire, Water, Air, and Earth), to the four Court cards, to the four worlds of Kabbalah. For this column, however, we are going to borrow an older system of four levels of interpretation, based on the Hebrew word pardes, from which we get our English "paradise." Pardes, which actually means "orchard," comes from a Persian word, paradeiza, which means an enclosed space, in particular a garden. In Hebrew, only consonants count as official letters; vowels are either understood, or else included just as marks under the consonants. What this means is that the word pardes is spelled PRDS (if English was written without vowels, paradise would be spelled exactly the same, prds). In ancient times the rabbis who developed ways to interpret the Bible used this word, PRDS, to represent four ways to look at a Biblical story, or event, or even a single word. Each way had its own value, but if you put them together you entered the "paradise" of true understanding.
This was not just an intellectual metaphor. A great deal of early Jewish mysticism focused on meditations and other spiritual practices that would allow a person to travel an actual journey to a mystical Paradise where he could experience the divine presence. The use of all four levels of awareness was one of the ways to do this. To truly comprehend the four levels of the Holy Scriptures would mean to enter a Paradise of awareness.
Can we say the same about Tarot? What does it mean to really understand a Tarot card? Can we get it just by looking at the picture? Can we get it by knowing the stated meanings of the card in a little white booklet (lwb)? Can we get it by seeing how it fits in with the rest of the cards in the reading? Can we get it by seeking a mystical or esoteric "secret" in the symbolism? What would it be like to experience all these levels at once? This is the Paradise, the PRDS, the rabbis sought in the Biblical texts.
I mean no disrespect to Jewish traditions by this comparison, and certainly no suggestion that the Tarot is in fact Jewish, or people must learn Jewish ideas in order to read or study the cards. In my recent writing, especially my book The Forest of Souls, I have sought ways to play with sacred truths, to adapt many different traditions to Tarot in order to get a clearer sense of what we do with the cards.
The word PRDS becomes an acrostic, that is, each letter begins a word that represents one of the four approaches. P stands for peshat, a Hebrew word that means "plain, simple." In the Bible this means the actual words, the literal description or statement, such as the creation of the world in six days. In Tarot it means the picture itself-a king sitting on a throne holding a sword, a priestess in front of a veil, with a rolled up scroll, a hand coming from a cloud holding a cup.
In certain religious circles, especially in the United States, it often seems that people want only the peshat. In other words, they cling to the simplest literal meaning and ignore any more subtle approaches. Thus, they insist that God really did make the world in six twenty-four hour days, even though the Sun and Moon, and therefore the day and night themselves, did not exist until the fourth "day."
In Tarot, however, we often find the opposite. That is, people instantly want to interpret what the card means and ignore the actual picture. In Tarot classes, if you give someone a card, say the Six of Wands from the Rider deck (designed by A. E. Waite, and drawn by P. C. Smith),
and ask them what they see, they may say something like "This is about a victory." If you then say "No, not what it symbolizes, just what it shows," they may answer "Oh, well, it shows someone confident," and again you will have to say, "No, not the feeling, just the actual image."
The R in PRDS stands for Remez, a Hebrew word that means "wink, hint, allusion." This is the intellectual understanding of the text, or the picture. With Tarot I would say that remez means the concepts that go with this card, from the formula given in the lwb, to the longer texts in some modern books on Tarot. But it also can mean ways we interpret the actual picture. Does the Six of Wands really show confidence? Where is that in the card? Clearly, it's an interpretation.
Look at the ten of Rivers from the Shining Tribe Tarot (designed and drawn by myself).
The peshat-the simple action-shows us two people standing in water, holding hands, and raising their outside arms up towards the sky. We see a house in the distance, and a bird above them. But what are the people doing? Are they celebrating their lives? Waving goodbye? Calling to people in the house? Calling to the bird? Have they just been baptized? Have they been shipwrecked, made it to shore, and are thankful to find a house and therefore people to help them? All these, and more, have come from actual suggestions made by people in my classes when I've asked what they think is going on in this picture.
The third letter, D, stands for Drash, which means "exposition, sermon, homily." This is a level of wider context. The rabbis would compare the phrase in the bible to other places where the same text occurs. They would look at it more symbolically, or allegorically. Often, they composed elaborate stories, called midrashim (plural of midrash), based upon characters and scenes from the Bible. This practice actually has been revived in recent years, with wonderful new stories about say, Moses's sister Miriam. A number of feminist Christian writers have written midrash stories or novels about Mary Magdalene.
In Tarot, drash can mean both an elaboration of the picture-the suggestion above that the people in the Ten of Rivers have escaped a shipwreck is really a midrash-but also the wider intellectual knowledge of what a card means. Some people will go into the card's astrological correspondences, or its place on the Tree of Life, or they will cite the meanings given in more elaborate books. Drash also refers to seeing the individual card in the context of the rest of the reading. How do the other cards modify what this particular one means? Look at the Eight of Swords and the Queen of Swords from the Rider deck.
In the Eight we see a woman tied up and seemingly helpless. But notice the tassel hanging from the wrist of the Queen. Can we say that she is the same woman as in the Eight but she has managed to cut herself free? And what would that say about the person who got these cards in a reading? This is drash because it creates a context for both cards, but also because it makes up a midrash-a story of what happens to the woman that illuminates what the cards can mean.
Drash also can mean that we look at a card in the context of previous readings. If this card meant something special in an earlier reading, can that meaning apply now? Once in a reading with the Shining Tribe deck I asked the cards "What is the soul?" The card that came up was the Ace of Birds.
Therefore, as well as all the possible meanings for this card, it now can in some way refer to the soul of the person getting the reading.
The final letter, S, stands for Sod, or "secret." This refers to the mystical meaning of the text-or in our case, the picture-that goes beyond all the intellectual explanations. In a certain way, the psychic flashes that some people get from the cards are a kind of sod (rhymes with "road," not "rod"). To make up an example, nothing in the picture of, say, the King of Wands, actually indicates a man named Russ who loves the questioner but is afraid to say so. And yet, the reader looks at the card and that is what comes into her mind.
As exciting as such flashes are, however, they are not the full meaning of sod. This comes with the sense that the picture can draw us in, can open up other worlds to us. Intuitively we know that the card teaches great mysteries if only we fully surrender to it. Look at the cosmic dancers in two versions of the World card, the Rider and the Shining Tribe.
Let yourself sense what it might be like to actually become those beings, so that they are not just moral lessons or grand ideas but a condition you yourself can enter. For most of us, we will get only a small intuition of what that might be like, but there are times-and we cannot predict when that might happen-when the intuition gets larger and we sense a great truth hidden in the picture. This, and not any concealed doctrine, is the real secret, or sod, of Tarot.
Notice that both the literal and the mystical levels, the P and the S of PRDS, involve simply looking at the picture. We often assume that the more we know of a card intellectually the more we can approach its deepest truths. But there is a limit to intellectual knowledge. The true experience lies in direct involvement with the image. If we think of P-R-D-S as a circle rather than a line, then the P and the S touch each other.
As mentioned above, many people ignore the peshat, that is, the literal picture, when they see a Tarot card. They want to jump right to the remez, the intellectual knowledge, and the drash, the overall concept. But without the literal we can never get to the mystical, for the mystical "meaning" of a card lies very much in the actual image. Put another way, if we take out the P and the S, all we have left is R & D. With inventions, research and development are very important, and yet, they are neither the original inspiration nor the final creation.
Should we then turn it around and dismiss the more intellectual approaches to Tarot? Should we seek only the direct experience of the picture? The lesson of PRDS tells us otherwise, for it takes all four letters to create PaRaDiSe.
|
|
