An article of faith

"Doubt is a pain too lonely
to know faith is his brother."
~ Khalil Gibran

 

 

 

 

 

The Fifth Key of the Tarot, known variously as the Pope or, more commonly, the Hierophant (the word literally means 'teacher of holy things'), is the sixth card along the journey of the Fool. The Law of Fives, that false teacher, suggests it should be significant (not only is it the fifth key, but the prime factors of six sum to... five).

 

We've intimated previously that knowledge is bound by unsurmountable limitations, and that transcendental truth cannot be gained through the application of reason alone. What is left is what necessarily underpins any edifice of reason: faith.

 

Faith is what the Hierophant offers - faith, the "substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen," as the Book of Hebrews relates. Faith is often derided in our materialist culture; but the truth is revealed when we consider the foundation of that culture - for it rests on certain axioms of ontology, of epistemology, which in their nature are not and cannot be proven from earlier principles. Faith is the bedrock of rational consciousness: faith, which appears to admit none of the character of reason, turns out to be essential to reason; just as reason, appearing to ridicule faith, depends upon it. This is an intimate paradox, whose nature I shall leave it to the reader to decide.

 

It is tempting to assert that enlightenment, that cannot be accomplished through Reason alone, can be accomplished through Faith. There are even examples that seem to corroborate this assertion; but, in truth, Faith alone fails too. The reason for this is in fact rather subtle; it has to do with the relative plasticity of Reason.

 

Suppose you hold some view derived logically from certain agreed axioms - as a trivial example, suppose you are of the opinion that there are no black swans, based on the empirical observation that you have never seen anything but white swans and the meta-empirical observation that empirical observations are reliable arbiters of actual fact. Suppose you then encounter a black swan. This new datum contradicts a predicate of your hypothesis, and, as a rational thinker, you revise your hypothesis: you accept the existence of black swans (this possibility is why Hume had a Problem with Induction).

 

Now, suppose your belief that all swans were white stemmed from a pure faith, unsullied by Reason. Suppose you encountered a black swan: your faith would not admit its existence. You would rationalize that it was not a swan, or that it was a white swan painted black, or that you imagined it, or any of a hundred other counterfactuals to avoid having to assail your article of faith.

 

Faith in the transcendent is a precursor to enlightenment; faith in the merely subjective is a barrier to enlightenment. And neither Faith, nor Reason, will enable us to tell the difference...

 

This then, is both the power and the peril of the Heirophant: that he offers a reality more permanent than the one we can apprehend through Reason, yet less certainly true.

Clothes maketh the man

"When the power of love overcomes the love of power,
the world will know peace." ~ Jimi Hendrix

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hans Christian Andersen gives us a tale, among many, that concerns a certain Emperor. This Emperor desired clothes suitable for his noble standing and prodigious authority; two wily tailors claimed that they had such garments, possessed of this property - that only persons of the wit and nobility of the Emperor would be able to see them. Accepting the Emperor's gold, they proceeded to drape him in entirely imaginary raiment, before leading His Imperial Majesty to a mirror. Unable to admit that he saw himself naked - mindful that only a mean and ignoble mind would see him thus - the Emperor confessed himself delighted, and went forth among his courtiers. They, like their Emperor, were unwilling to admit what was right before their eyes; bound by convention, by fear, by orthodoxy, they all gathered round and praised the wholly fictitious new clothes. A parade was arranged, the better to display the Emperor's wonderful new clothes to his subjects; as it happened, one of these was a small boy, too foolish to have accepted the conventional wisdom, who cried out "the Emperor is naked!" Horror turned to hilarity as the crowd accepted the boy was right; the power of the Emperor was broken, and he was humiliated.

 

There is a lesson here when we consider the Fourth Key of the Major Arcana, also The Emperor. Where the Empress denotes the natural energy of qi, the Emperor represents the shaping and harnessing of energy, the imposition of will upon the world, the establishment of order. Malaclypse the Younger might remark that the Empress reflects upon the Eristic Illusion, while the Emperor reflects upon the Aneristic Illusion. The truth, as we might guess, is neither of these illusions, and also both.

 

Although the Emperor is the Fourth Key, he is the fifth card in the Major Arcana. The Law of Fives tells us that he should have some significance as a result, but we should be alerted by the presence of the Zeroeth Key that the significance here can be misleading. Parasimplicity necessarily entails doubt, which is another restatement of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. All the same, the stability - the permanence - of The Emperor is another characteristic of the transcendent, and it is interesting to note that the card, self-similarly perhaps, has undergone rather less transformation down the ages than other members of the Arcana. The hidden weakness beneath the apparent strength of The Emperor is the one alluded to in that Andersen fairy tale: namely, that his belief in his own power blinds him to the existence of anything beyond it. Being merely puissant, the Emperor believes himself to be, in King James' memorable phrasing, a "little God on Earth." His inflexibility in a world of flux renders him susceptible to obsolescence.

 

The Emperor is a cautionary tale; emblematic of structure, he carries the implicit reminder that all that can be made, can be unmade. As Solomon's ring reminded him: Gam Zeh Ya'avor.