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.

The Elan Vital

"Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist
but the ability to start over."

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

 

 

 

 

Where the Popess is identified with the intuitive Virgin, the feminine yet unsullied by the masculine, the fourth Tarot card - the Empress - is identified with the fecund Mother; her association is with Isis, where the Popess is with Hathor. The second aspect of the Triple Goddess, she is the Queen of Heaven; she is the vessel of the lifeforce, the elan vital.

 

Numbered 3, the Empress represents the common energy between the One and the Two, the energy of increase, the parasimplistic urge to be more than one's mere being-in-the-moment. In Rider-Waite, she is seated with crown and scepter, and her throne is carved with a heart-shaped design: because love can be understood as this energy of increase, the motivating force that makes an individual seek to become part of something more. The Empress is both a signifier of love and of fertility.

 

Although she restores balance to the first four cards of the Tarot, being a second female after the first two males, the Empress is not a union of the energies, a divine androgyne; she is not a parasimplex. She does, however, embody the parasimplicity principle: her presence in a drawing indicates a desire for increase, and generally the gratification of that desire. 'Increase' here could be material, although usually a somewhat more spiritual development is implied.

 

The energy of the Empress is universal; it is undirected, but it flows inevitably between living things. It is identifiable with qi in Chinese belief: the acupuncturist places needles at key meridians in the human body to identify and redirect the flow of qi, just as the feng shui practitioner orients the furnishing of a room to promote harmonious flow through the building (qi, accordingly, is self-similar and so partakes of the character of transcendence). Although these examples indicate that the energy can be controlled, it would be a mistake to think of it as something that ought to be harnessed. The principle of wei wuwei recognizes this implicitly.

 

 

 



The unforgettable fire

“Unity can only be manifested by the Binary.
Unity and the idea of Unity are already two.”
 ~ Siddharta Gautama

 

A word, before we delve into the very simplest sort of numerology, about my avatar. I fell in love with this design many years ago because of its symbolism. It may not be immediately apparent, but the avatar depicts a fiery phoenix, wings outspread, against a backdrop of flame. To me, at least, with the eye of faith, it also depicts the taijitu of the Taoists. These are both symbols of unity and opposition; Cusanus would recognize his coincidentia oppositorum and be glad. That the symbols are themselves the products of wholly different cultures, using wholly different representations, yet conveying the same meaning, makes this synthesis of the phoenix and the taijitu especially pleasing to me: a coincidence of coincidences, and therefore a Gateless Gate.

For me, the expression ‘Gateless Gate’ has a particular meaning associated with transcendence as I defined it before. I’d suggested that the subjective realm is essentially ‘walled off’ from the objective realm, but that two subjectives can be connected by an intersubjective ‘bridge’ – it follows, although this was not stated, that the intersubjective entity makes not only a bridge but a doorway at both ends: it opens the mind it reaches, but only in a limited fashion and only into the objective realm. Nevertheless, such doorways in this model afford us an analogy to the qualitatively different doorways that must connect all realms within the transcendent, which relates to the ideal in the same way as the objective relates to the subjective. The Gateless Gate is the opening of the ideal – of the extrapolation of the intersubjective appreciation of the property-relation matrix – upon the transcendent.

It is very important to understand that Gateless Gates, in this model, are the only links to the transcendent. It is impossible to pass into transcendence save through a Gateless Gate. We should also note that the Gateless Gate is strictly abstracted from either property or relation – our idea of the Gateless Gate, necessarily tethered to property and relation and so to the world, cannot be the Gateless Gate itself. Indeed, the Gateless Gate cannot in any way partake of any property of Gate as we understand that term, neither can it bear any relation to Gate as we understand it: this is why the Gate is Gateless, and why we cannot approach it from within the edifice of our Reason. Nevertheless, the Gateless Gate is universal: the transcendent is perpetually immanent upon the subjective.

The Phoenix recounted in legends by Herodotus and Ovid was a mythical firebird: a creature born in flames that lived 500 years and then immolated itself only to re-emerge from the flame. Herodotus tells us that the newborn Phoenix conveyed the ashes of its father to Heliopolis; Ovid remarks that the newborn Phoenix, uniquely among all the Earth’s creatures, is its father remade. It can be seen from these expressions of the Phoenix that it represents both the unity of Life and Death, and the unity of Self with Other.

The Taijitu (which, roughly translated into English, means “diagram of ultimate power”) originated in China, and represents the twin forces of Yin and Yang. Formed by the exact division of a circle into equal parts black and white, entwined around one another like two fishes, the taijitu shows us that there is light in darkness; and, in darkness, light. The complementary elements are necessary and essential to the whole, but inviolate. Yin is never yang, and never without yang; yin without yang would be a mirror without reflection. From the interactions of yin and yang emerge the Five Phases of qi: fire, earth, water, wood, and metal.

Within the context of a symbol that unites the Phoenix and the Taijitu, it may or may not be interesting to observe that there exists within Chinese mythology a bird analogous to the Phoenix: the Fenghuang is itself a unity of the male Feng bird, and the female Huang bird. Moreover, it Is a union of all birds in one bird, and so a representative restatement of Borges’ Argumentum Ornithologicum. It is considered the feminine counterpart to the masculine Dragon in Chinese mythology: the All-in-One, as opposed to the One-in-All.