"What is the creature that walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon and three in the evening?"
Eliphas Levi put forth the Four Powers of the Sphinx and these powers were deeply related to the Magi of old. These powers became the baseline traits for anyone working magic and in the realm of the spiritual to gain wisdom. In Levi's own words he writes:
“To attain the SANCTUM REGNUM, in other words, the knowledge and power of the Magi, there are four indispensable conditions an intelligence illuminated by study, an intrepidity which nothing can check, a will which cannot be broken, and a prudence which nothing can corrupt and nothing intoxicate. TO KNOW, TO DARE, TO WILL, TO KEEP SILENCE such are the four words of the Magus, inscribed upon the four symbolical forms of the sphinx.”
To Levi, the Magi were carriers of wisdom and magical traditions and to be a magician one needed to aspire to be like the Magi because Levi also stated," magic is the traditional science of the secrets of nature which has been transmitted to us from the magi.”
So, in translation for one to be proficient in their craft they need to know what they are doing and theory behind it, they need to be fearless on that study, possess exceptional stamina and a strong inner strength, and to understand when to keep silent about their practices in addition to idle talk. Even though Levi brought these into modern light the wisdom of the Four Powers can be found in much older Hermetics and other mystery schools. These Four Powers also have elemental correlations:
TO KNOW - Air
TO DARE - Water
TO WILL - Fire
TO KEEP SILENT - Earth
The Four Powers of the Sphinx made it into ceremonial magical traditions (such as the Golden Dawn) and countless other craft traditions around 1950. Around that time it became known as the Witches' Pyramid (it is almost exclusively known by this today).
During the same time period Aliester Crowly also incorporated this into his Thelema and added a 5th power known as TO GO, which correlates to the element of Spirit. TO GO means that we must put our souls into our work and apply the other Powers to our every day life. This would in turn help us to create a balanced life both materially and spiritually. This addition is considered optional by many people and some traditions use it while others don't.
As stated before that this Witches' Pyramid has been incorporated into countless traditions and been written about in countless books. Though, some of the more notable appearances are in Paul Husan's Mastering Witchcraft, Lady Sheba's Book of Shadows, and Christopher Orapello's Besom, Stang, and Sword.
Even though this is commonly used for magical practices, I think the Witches' Pyramid is a pillar that should be used and put into practice with any spiritual path regardless of that paths use or views on magic.
Our ancestors and people today have been conducting sacrifice since time immemorial. The English translation of sacrifice comes down to give something up for the greater good. Though, the origin of the word is derived from Latin, meaning, to make sacred. The literary and historical evidence of animal sacrifice are extensive except where the actual ritual is concerned. The ritual aspect is mentioned in several Norse sagas, the Heimskringla, and portions of the Poetic Edda. Many observers mention sacrifice in their manuscripts as well.
The word and idea if sacrifice has gained a negative connotation in today's world. This is because of modern media, Hollywood, the Christian ideas of good and evil, ignorance, and an extreme disconnection with our food. Even though farmers and people in rural communities do this everyday without spiritual significance.
The truth is, the art of sacrifice is a very solemn, intimate, and respectful affair. The animal in question before the ritual is pampered and made comfortable as possible. This includes being calm around the animal as not to stress it out. During the ritual, the animal is thanked for its sacrifice and it can be asked to deliver messages to the Gods during this time. Then the animal is offered water and sometimes baptized by the water before its life is ended. The ending of the animals life is done is the most humane and respectful way possible. Then, the animal is prepared and cooked for the feast, and thus consumed by all.
It is truly amazing to me that even when presented with the truth about sacrifice people still repel against it and harsh judgements are made. It is sad that some of these judgements come from people that run in similar spiritual circles that have never experienced sacrifice themselves.
This situation has caused people who honor this practice to come up with a different term other then sacrifice. The most common alternate term is "Sacred Slaughter", which has led to a schism between it and the definition of sacrifice. Both words still mean to make sacred, but sacrifice is now considered the act when you do not feast on the animal after the ritual.
"Why did the chicken cross the road?" Is the wrong question that we have been asking for to long. What we should be asking instead is, "What's the chicken for?".
The chicken is for reconnecting with nature.
The chicken is for connecting with your kin.
The chicken is for connecting with your Gods.
The chicken is for connecting with the universe.
The chicken is for becoming part of the cycle of life.
The chicken is to truly understand sacred.
The chicken is to connect with your inner self.
The chicken is for becoming the focal point for vibrations and energy and feeling it channeled through you.
Although many tarot practitioners apply a Jungian psychological approach to their tarot work, there’s been a question as to whether Jung himself knew anything about tarot. In fact he did, and he would have liked to explore it more deeply but for a lack of hours in the day. Here are some of his references to the cards, although his tarot knowledge, especially of its history, was sorely lacking.
On 16 September 1930, Jung wrote to a Mrs. Eckstein:
“Yes, I know of the Tarot. It is, as far as I know, the pack of cards originally used by the Spanish gypsies, the oldest cards historically known. They are still used for divinatory purposes.”
[Jung was not always right: Current historical research does not support an original use of the cards by gypsies, nor were tarot cards the oldest known. The ordinary playing card deck (with many variations) preceded tarot by approximately 50 to 75 years. Tarot appeared first in Northern Italy roughly around 1440.]
On 1 March 1933, Carl Jung spoke about the Tarot during a seminar he was conducting on active imagination, demonstrating that he was a little more familiar with these images than we would have thought from just the preceding letter. This is a transcript of his actual spoken words:
“Another strange field of occult experience in which the hermaphrodite appears is the Tarot. That is a set of playing cards, such as were originally used by the gypsies. There are Spanish specimens, if I remember rightly, as old as the fifteenth century. These cards are really the origin of our pack of cards, in which the red and the black symbolize the opposites, and the division of four—clubs, spades, diamonds, and hearts—also belongs to the individuation symbolism. They are psychological images, symbols with which one plays, as the unconscious seems to play with its contents. They combine in certain ways, and the different combinations correspond to the playful development of events in the history of mankind. The original cards of the Tarot consist of the ordinary cards, the king, the queen, the knight, the ace, etc.,—only the figures are somewhat different—and besides, there are twenty-one cards upon which are symbols, or pictures of symbolical situations. For example, the symbol of the sun, or the symbol of the man hung up by the feet, or the tower struck by lightning, or the wheel of fortune, and so on. Those are sort of archetypal ideas, of a differentiated nature, which mingle with the ordinary constituents of the flow of the unconscious, and therefore it is applicable for an intuitive method that has the purpose of understanding the flow of life, possibly even predicting future events, at all events lending itself to the reading of the conditions of the present moment. It is in that way analogous to the I Ching, the Chinese divination method that allows at least a reading of the present condition. You see, man always felt the need of finding an access through the unconscious to the meaning of an actual condition, because there is a sort of correspondence or a likeness between the prevailing condition and the condition of the collective unconscious. Now in the Tarot there is a hermaphroditic figure called the diable [the Devil card]. That would be in alchemy the gold. In other words, such an attempt as the union of opposites appears to the Christian mentality as devilish, something evil which is not allowed, something belonging to black magic."
“If one wants to form a picture of the symbolic process, the series of pictures found in alchemy are good examples. . . . It also seems as if the set of pictures in the Tarot cards were distantly descended from the archetypes of transformation, a view that has been confirmed for me in a very enlightening lecture by professor [Rudolph] Bernoulli. The symbolic process is an experience in images and of images. Its development usually shows an enantiodromian* structure like the text of the I Ching, and so presents a rhythm of negative and positive, loss and gain, dark and light.” [*a Greek term used by Jung to mean ‘things turning over into their own opposite.’]
Dierdre Bair recounts in Jung: A Biography (Little, Brown, 2003, p. 549) that in 1950 Jung assigned to each of the four members of his Psychology Club an ‘intuitive, synchronistic method’ to explore. Hanni Binder was to research the Tarot and teach him how to read the cards. They determined that Grimaud’s Ancien Tarot de Marseille “was the only deck that possessed the properties and fulfilled the requirements of metaphor that he gleaned from within the alchemical texts.” Hanni Binder’s work amounted to very little as can be seen from her report preserved at the Jung Institute in New York. The group disbanded around 1954.
What was behind Jung’s attempt to gather all this material? Marie-Louise von Franz recounts in Psyche and Matter(1988) that toward the end of his life:
“Jung suggested investigating cases where it could be supposed that the archetypal layer of the unconscious is constellated*—following a serious accident, for instance, or in the midst of a conflict or divorce situation—by having people engage in a divinatory procedure: throwing the I Ching, laying the Tarot cards, consulting the Mexican divination calendar, having a transit horoscope or a geomantic reading done. If Jung’s hypothesis is accurate, the results of all these procedures should converge. . . . [*a Jungian term meaning ‘the coming together of elements in the unconscious so that they form a consciously recognizable pattern of relationships.’ Christine Houde adds, “The constellated material is activated in the psyche of the individual where it attempts to erupt into the field of experience.”]
“[This investigation would consist of] studying an incident (accident) by the convergence . . . of a multitude of methods, with the help of which we could try to find out what the Self “thought” of this particular accident. . . . The generally rather vague formulations of divinatory techniques resemble these “clouds of cognition” that, according to Jung, constitute “absolute knowledge.”
Von Franz further explains that Jung’s “clouds of cognition” represents an awareness on the part of our conscious intelligence of a far vaster field of information, an “absolute knowledge,” within the collective unconscious. These images, on the part of a “more or less conscious ego,” lack precise focus and detail. Thus, the realization of meaning has to be “a living experience that touches the heart just as much as the mind.” She continues:
“Archetypal dream images and the images of the great myths and religions still have about them a little of the “cloudy” nature of absolute knowledge in that they always seem to contain more than we can assimilate consciously, even by means of elaborate interpretations. They always retain an ineffable and mysterious quality that seems to reveal to us more than we can really know.”*
On 9 February 1960, about a year before he died, Jung wrote Mr. A. D. Cornell about the disappointing end to his grand experiment:
“Under certain conditions it is possible to experiment with archetypes, as my ‘astrological experiment’ has shown. As a matter of fact we had begun such experiments at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich, using the historically known intuitive, i.e., synchronistic methods (astrology, geomancy, Tarot cards, and the I Ching). But we had too few co-workers and too little means, so we could not go on and had to stop.”
“Such an experiment fits our description of not being forced, controlling, or manipulating, but it presents its own difficulties. How, for example, can we convincingly show that the divinatory procedures in fact converge, that appropriate subjects were chosen when an archetype was actually constellated, that the data was taken without biasing the interpretation, and that other extraneous factors are not distorting the outcome? These problems are not insurmountable, but to do more than “preach to the converted,” this experiment or any other must be done with sufficient rigor that the larger scientific community would be satisfied with all aspects of the data taking, analysis of the data, and so forth."
In 1984, Art Rosengarten (here shown with Tarot author, Eden Gray), as research for his doctoral dissertation, conducted an experiment very similar to the one described by Jung, in which he compared the tarot, TAT and dream interpretation. You can read about this experiment in his book, Tarot and Psychology: Spectrums of Possibility. I think Jung would have been pleased.
Adding it all together...
Though not a direct focus of his energies, Carl Jung, nevertheless, recognized tarot as depicting archetypes of transformation like those he had found in myths, dreams and alchemy, and as having divinatory characteristics similar to the I-Ching and astrology. Most of all, Jung believed a person could use “an intuitive method” to understand—through tarot’s reflecting the collective unconscious into a “cloud of cognition”—the meaning in a present, prevailing condition.
Here’s another statement by Jung on “clouds of cognition,” from the chapter, “On Life after Death,” in Memories Dream, Reflections, p 308. He states that i sen the “space-timelessness” surrounding an archetype there exists a diffuse cloud of cognition that contains “primorial images with many aspects” or “a “diffuse omniscience” but no discrete contents (that is, subjectless). For cognition to happen these potentialities [my word] have to be brought into space-time coordinates. Reading this entire chapter is absolutely essential to getting at what Jung saw as the source material for divinations.
“As I see it the three-dimensional world in time and space is like a system of co-ordinates, what is here separated into ordinates and abscissae may appear “there,” in space-timelessness, as a primordial image with many aspects, perhaps as a diffuse cloud of cognition surrounding an archetype. Yet a system of co-ordinates is necessary if any distinction of discrete contents is to be possible. Any such operation seems to us unthinkable in a state of diffuse omniscience, or, as the case may be, of subjectless consciousness, with no spatio-temporal demarcations. Cognition, like generation, presupposes an opposition, a here and there, an above and below, a before and after.”
For a different take, here is a bit of an interview with Jung on alchemy and predicting the future: “We can predict the future when we know how the present moment has evolved out of the past.”
Disclaimer: This article is a repost from Mary K. Greer's research on the subject.
