Pope Joan

"I am more afraid of my own heart than the Pope
and all his Cardinals. I have within me the great pope, Self."
~ Martin Luther

 

 

 

 

The Pope is the spiritual leader of Roman Catholicism, the 'Vicar of Christ,' God's right hand on Earth. According to orthodox Roman Catholic doctrine, the Pope is infallible - his word is divinely inspired, and so cannot be in error (the Muslim prophet Mohammed, in what you may see as an echo or evolution or reflection of this, remarked in the Hadith that "my people cannot agree on error;" as a result, ijma, or 'consensus,' is considered in scholarly Islamic circles to be a basis of religious authority. Authority, and fallibility, have not been explicitly discussed as yet, but of course they are centrally important to a parasimplistic worldview). One might expect that in the spiritually symbolic Major Arcana, one would find a Pope, and one does (his number, as Malaclypse the Younger could tell you, is 5, and we'll come to a discussion of his import later); but first, one finds a Popess.

 

The reason for this is tied in with the numerology we talked about a while ago, the arithmetic underpinning of the Law of Fives. The Magician, numbered 1, represents the apotheosis of the Self in this moment (allegorically, the Self in the moment of satori, the Self in the moment of awareness of itself qua self) - but this Sein-in-der-Welt is, of course, not the parasimplistic self, which is both itself and something more than itself. The Magician is identity, and Identity is an illusion.

 

The Popess, numbered 2, is duality; this is represented most clearly by her obvious femininity, by contrast with the foregoing two cards (respectively showing Man in the folly of ignorance, and Man in the folly of self-knowledge). In Rider-Waite, she is shown with a crescent Moon at her feet - this is also the iconographic depiction of the Virgin in Roman Catholicism, in reference to the Book of Revelations (and, intriguingly, according to one theory, in reference to Catholicism itself, and what came before it) - and wears the diadem of Hathor, the Egyptian "Mistress of the West." Both allusions identify the Popess with motherhood, with the divine, and with the yin energy of the taijitu. In Rider-Waite, she is depicted holding the Torah and seated between the pillars of the Temple of Solomon, reinforcing the syncretism of the imagery.

 

(The Popess also has a historical imagery to it, a very early and subversive element of proto-feminism, but despite her appearance in the title, Pope Joan is not a subject for discussion in this metanow.)

 

The Popess can be understood as the apotheosis of the female, which is more than mere Identity because the female can nurture and birth new beings. The female explicitly has something of the divine energy of Creation in her, which the male can merely ape with construction of unliving devices. The symbolism of the Virgin is significant here; the Popess powerfully alludes to the Pagan Triple Goddess of Maiden, Mother, and Crone, and the biologically necessary role of the male in conception is not to be understood here as part of the Divine Mystery of creation. Where the Fool represented blind faith, and the Magician self-knowledge, the Popess betokens intuition - a sense of things unseen, complementary to and cumulative with the Magician's arid knowledge of what is clearly before him. The Popess makes the connections between things without needing to know what those things-in-themselves are; the Magician understands things in their nature without appreciating the wholeness of the world. Thus the necessity of union between the energies for balance, and for enlightenment.

Six Blind Men and an Elephant

"We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself,
but nature exposed to our method of questioning."
~ Werner Heisenberg

 

 

 

 

There is a famous parable that comes down to us from India, the land that birthed the zero, that concerns six blind men and an elephant. I shall repeat it here, after my fashion, because among its many facets this parable is a fine illustration of parasimplicity - and parasimplicity thrives on repeated illustration, as Lord Ravenhurst observed.

 

So: there were in a certain village six blind men, whose lack of sight they were determined not to keep them from knowledge (this is an illustration-within-the-illustration of the difference between knowledge and wisdom). They hear that a merchant has brought an elephant to the village, and they are very eager to learn what an elephant is like. None of them wishes to miss the opportunity to experience the elephant directly; all of them hurry out to greet the beast.

 

The first approaches the elephant, reaches out and touches it upon its leg. "Lo!" he cries. "An elephant is like a tree!"

 

The second, grasping its tusk, disagrees. "An elephant," he sagely observes, "is like a spear."

 

"No," says the third, feeling its ear," an elephant is like a sheet."

 

"You mean a rope," says the fourth, feeling its tail.

 

"What are you talking about?" demands the fifth, feeling its side. "An elephant is like a wall!"

 

"Aaaaiiieeee!" screams the sixth, feeling its trunk. "The elephant - it is just like a snake!"

 

And the six blind men fall into squabbling, while the elephant goes on its way.

 

***

 

An alternative version of this story features six blind elephants and a man... the first elephant feels the man, and determines that men are flat. The other five blind elephants agree.

 

Whether that's just a joke (only just, at that) or a reflection of the aphorism that elephants never forget is something you'll need to decide for yourself. The parable is another parasimplex: it becomes something different as your understanding of it grows, without ever changing from what it always was. Elephants are again elephants.