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.

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.

Mountains and Rivers

"Before enlightenment, mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers.
During enlightenment, mountains are not mountains and rivers are not rivers.
After enlightenment, mountains are again mountains and rivers are again rivers."

~ Zen Koan

 

I have a fondness for Zen koans. Cynics will suggest that this is the foolishness of the man who mistakes his own failure to find meaning for the presence of profundity; or perhaps that it is the foolishness of the man who professes profundity in the exhibition of his own emptiness. To these, I remark that there are worse things than being a Fool; and they, I'm sure, shake their heads in disgust and go on. They do not want to be taught by me.

It is very important to understand, before we go further, that I do not wish to teach, either. I wish to express, and it is possible that what you gain from your willed interaction with that expression manifests to you as learning, but that is not my purpose. More: it is not within my power. I cannot teach you, because the tao that can be taught is not the Tao. I can only be.

I'm sure this sounds very pretentious. It's difficult to find the right place to start with this... expression. There is what the late Douglas Adams, through the able mouthpiece of Dirk Gently, referred to as the Fundamental Interconnectedness of All Things (which I abbreviate to FIAT; Latinists or Liverpudlians among you may appreciate the happy accident of the acronym) - we'll be returning to this, insofar as we ever really leave it, which, when you come to consider it, is difficult to do without abdicating the Dasein - that both reassures and confounds one in the effort to find a starting place. The temptation to evoke a Joycean solution is strong, and the slew of references that will, I suspect, flavor if not pepper this treatise and the ones that follow is perhaps evidence that this temptation was not wholly resisted.

If you're confused, please take that as an indication that I haven't begun to properly express myself yet. Imagine this series of writings as a Seurat painting in progress - at present, the dots are disconnected, and you are still too close. But the day will dawn when there is a sufficient proliferation of them, and you are sufficiently distant, when you can look upon them with older and newer eyes, and see what has been made. Persevere, I urge you.