10 The Light (The Shadow of the Darkness)
The last card shows the higher understanding through which the human spirit rises above itself and can become aware of its own bicephalous nature (Baphomet) by recognizing itself from both inside and outside of its own ways of thinking. He is the Janus-headed figure who unites an inward view with an outward glance in a dual perspective: “I am the Devil who has overcome polarities by looking God in the eye and only seeing himself.”
IV THE BIG BANG
Questions
Every creative idea, every flash of genius is a miniature repetition of the “big bang” with which our universe began its existence. For beyond the cosmic struggle is also hidden the universal relevance of the same eternal question: What does it mean? That is why this spread is for asking about the basic creative potential in an idea, or about a notion that you have concerning where the basic creative potential lies. How will this matter develop? What is the objective?
Allegory (The Big Bang)
“In the beginning God created Heaven and Earth. And the Earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep...” These are the first lines of the Book of Genesis in the Bible; we could say that receives a certain amount of confirmation by the Big Bang theory of modern physics. According to this theory, the universe began its existence with the primal explosion – the big bang. Prior to this event, the spirit of matter had only been present in something like homeopathic amounts since matter was compressed into an infinitely high density within an infinitely small space. Jahveh’s act of creation, giving birth to being out of nothingness (creatio ex nihilo) developed so incredibly quickly after the big bang that it passed through the chaos, quark, and hadron eras in the first milliseconds; seconds later, it went through the lepton and radiation eras. But it took several million years for the era of matter to begin.
Interpretation
1 Chaos (The Beginning)
Chaos is shapeless primal matter out of which everything emerges. It is the first act of the creative force that “generates itself” and then ignites its own idea. It is an eruption of flames, the overflowing power of which destroys existing forms so that the life force can flow into new forms. In spiritual cosmogony, chaos represents the bridge between the spirit and the idea. It is a symbol of the inner firepower underlying outer endeavors as an invisible inner impetus.
2 The Quark Era (The Creative Quality)
This era corresponds to the absolute primal idea of the divine manifesting itself as matter and penetrating into the world of forms. It is the spirit of the will, and of God’s spark, which conceal itself in form. Even during those first milliseconds of the young universe, it laid the cornerstone for continual development right up to the present day. The Quark Era only lasted about one ten-thousandth of a second. On our level of human creation, this means that the second card reflects the creative quality underlying our idea.
3 The Hadron Era (Dynamic Energy)
The third card shows the dynamic quality of our idea on the energy plane, meaning how the potential energy may assert itself (in the world) within the entire whirlwind of creation. Even in our inner experience, we must also accept the hectic phases that accompany outward changes and upheavals. Inner unrest originates in a creative urge to burst the framework that has become too constricting to the awakened spirit of fire. This corresponds with the cosmogony of the Hadron Era when, for some ten-thousandths of a second, the universe consisted almost exclusively of hadron, the smallest component detectable to physics in the atomic nucleus.
4 The Radiation Era (Compression)
The fourth card symbolizes the arrival of the atomic nucleus comprising simple chemical elements; namely, nuclear synthesis or genesis. The Radiation Era stands for the genesis of things from the unchanging, complete, divine oneness and for the slow compression of energy in time and space.
5 The Material (The Appearance)
Approximately half a million years after the big bang, energy had compressed so much that electrons were taken up by the atomic nuclei and were therefore able to form the first stable elements. The universe became visible: “And there was light!” This phase represents the spirit of creation in its most concrete form since divine ideas now appear in visible form and reflect back upon the creator in the act of giving birth to creation. On the psychological level, the fifth card therefore reflects the point in time when our ideas become manifested in the material world as miniature symbol of God’s creative presence (creatio continua). However, this occurs in the form of transcendental – and not causative – effects.
V MEPHISTO’S HAMMER
Questions
Let us just suppose that we are sad, depressed, and distressed. Nothing succeeds and we are blocked in everything we do. This is the appropriate precondition for this spread because depression is the key to clearer understanding (What is this crisis trying to tell me?). The cards point to an insight we require in order to recognize the meaning of our failure (What unconscious meaning is at the root of my failure?). Perceiving the unknown motivation, and not overcoming the crisis as quickly and painlessly as possible but without gaining in experience, is the meaning behind every failure.
In short: We do not perceive because we enjoy understanding, but perception is frequently the only experience that help us become acquainted with the conditions and basis of our self-deception. As a result, it becomes the precondition for eliminating it. If we do not willingly accept what wants to achieve realization within ourselves, it will be forced upon us. This way of fulfilling our destiny is naturally not particularly pleasant. Yet, it always also initiates healing, a process of development so that we can find our own center. Because they are the results of our own actions, personal catastrophes not only force us to be honest: They also make us complete because they bring into the world that very part of ourselves to which we are most blind. The cards therefore permit greater consciousness: through them we perceive the circumstances that make “sense” of our failure.
Allegory (The End of Creation)
John Faust looked intently through the ocular of his telescope and furrowed his brow. He did not like what he saw there at all. Not far from Pluto, the most distant planet from the sun, he had discovered a comet, one of those unfathomable wanderers in the universe forced by the gravitational pull of the distant planets into an orbital path around the sun. This in itself was nothing remarkable, but in this particular case it was such a titanic size as to present a danger, for it steered a direct path toward the earth. “I tell you, it’s going to cause problems. And why, I ask myself, has no one already sighted this stray from the depths of nothingness?” He pointed to the cosmic monster as it plowed through the night sky outside.
His colleague, M.E. Phisto, lit up a cigarette pleasurably and merely said: “Yes, yes … humanity has its little secrets that it likes to hide from itself What will it do now that everything is about to dissolve? Do you want to hear the truth, brother, without the inherited genetic blindness, which is such a mark of the human brain?”
He laughed: “They will do nothing at all. First they will panic, and then repress it all once again. They will become slower and slower and stop, just like the mechanism of a broken clock! The spirit, a quasi-conscious being, grown weary of the Earth and is preparing to abandon this tumbling spaceship. For it is already written in the Bible: ‘and the stars will fall from the heavens.’”