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Terrific minimalist synth music from Melbourne, where robotic electronics lock into rigid beats to make a Kraftwerkian wonder.

Flykt by Forndom. Very calm, soothing, yet strong and evocative melodies. Great introduction into the world of Forndom and a true, even if a bit short, escape from the world of men. Anders Kvistr. Bandcamp Daily your guide to the world of Bandcamp. Get fresh music recommendations delivered to your inbox every Friday. We’ve updated our Terms of Use. You can review the changes here. Tags alternative dark wave neoclassical oriental industrial ambient Sweden.

As Bright as a Thousand Suns. Jordan Vauvert go to album. Anders Kvistr go to album. Quite early, however, the names and numbers became standard, more or less as they appear in the Haindl Tarot.

The only exceptions are cards 8 and 11, which Haindl has switched, following a modern practice that began with the influential occult group, the Order of the Golden Dawn In the Tarot de Marseille, Justice is 8 and Strength is 11, but in the Golden Dawn Tarot, Strength is 8 and Justice The Fool, however, presents something of a problem. As card 0, it would seem to belong before card 1.

In the Tarot card game, however, it does not occupy a fixed place. Some esoteric commentators place the Fool as first, others last, and others between cards 20 and The sequence becomes important when we see the cards as links to the Hebrew letters. Some of the other esoteric links contain 21 stages, so that the Fool becomes the pilgrim, or initiate.

However, the Hebrew alphabet has 22 letters, and therefore 22 paths on an important diagram known as the Tree of Life. This requires the Fool to occupy a particular place. If that place comes at the end, then the first letter of the alphabet, and the first pathway, belongs to the Magician, the second to the High Priestess, and so on. But if we make the Fool the first letter or card, then the second goes to the Magician, the third to the High Priestess, and so on down the line.

There are two basic approaches to interpreting the Major Arcana. One is to see each card for itself, with its own special qualities. The other is to see the cards as a sequence, building a kind of story. Often this story depicts the Fool as a journeyer through the cards or as an incarnate soul making its way through life.

When we look at the cards as a sequence, the meaning of each card depends not only on its own qualities but on its place. We also look ahead, saying that the explosion leads to the openness and renewal of card 17, the Star. This method of interpretation resembles the way we look at the cards in Tarot readings. In a reading, we examine the position of the card in the spread as well as its actual meaning.

For example, the Lovers in the position of Past Experience may mean something very different than the Lovers in Near Future, and something else again in Hopes and Fears. Also, in a Tarot reading we assess the meaning of all the other cards to see the meaning of a particular one. In the past, students and writers on the Tarot tended to dismiss readings: however, Tarot readings have become much more complex—and more popular—over the years.

It is probably not a coincidence that the sequential method of interpreting the Major Arcana has become almost standard in this age of renewed readings. The Haindl Tarot like most really valuable decks combines the two approaches. Hermann Haindl painted these cards as individual images, each with its own theme.

In each painting, however, a definite story evolved, as if by itself. Haindl did not plan these stories deliberately, nor did he plan a certain line of images that developed step-by-step, from the Fool to the Universe. The themes and pictures emerged because the artist had a very clear and coherent vision. Hermann did not plan what he wanted to say; the ideas came from his experiences, his spiritual studies, and his deep conviction.

Many people, when interpreting the Major Arcana, separate it into two or more parts. Those who see the cards as two halves usually describe the first half as looking outward in life and the second as being concerned with introspection and spiritual development, which is often the theme with Jungian interpreters.

There is often a debate about which card is the turning point. The Hanged Man, card 12, can also serve as a turning point, for it symbolizes a reversal of previous values. And card 11, either as Strength or Justice, can mark the midpoint, for Strength implies a readiness to go beyond past achievements, while Justice shows past and future balanced in the scales. Another method of dividing the cards sees trumps 1 to 21 as three groups of seven with the Fool as the pilgrim going through all of them.

This approach gains meaning from the ancient symbolism of numbers three and seven. Three signifies a whole range of ideas, many of which we will touch on when we discuss trump 3, the Empress. One of the most important of these interpretations is the three phases of the Moon—new, full, and old—which represent youth, maturity, and old age. We can see these in the cards: The first seven cards show the concerns of youth, learning about the world; the second batch of seven depicts the problems of maturity—self-knowledge, psychological transformation, and awareness of deeper values; the final batch goes beyond the individual personality, as the soul becomes aware of universal principles.

In traditional cultures, such attitudes often go with old age, when the woman beyond childbearing age or the man too old for hunting concern themselves with wisdom. Perhaps an even more basic meaning of three is mother, father, and child. Out of this fundamental triad comes many of the trinities of religion and mythology.

The significance of seven is more subtle, however. Seven, therefore, becomes a number of completion. In other words, the end of each sequence indicates a victory, for the soul has confronted various challenges and passed through them.

Seven is significant in many modern cultures, especially in that of native North Americans who place great emphasis on the four directions. But there actually are seven direction, for we must add above, below, and the center, in which we stand. In the musical scale each octave contains seven notes; the eighth note repeats the first at a higher level. Therefore, we sometimes refer to each group of seven cards as an octave. This is not just a figure of speech.

Very often, special meanings link the harmonics. Strength and the Devil 8 and 15 both bear a relation to the Magician, card 1. Each of these cards—1, 8, and 15—begin a line of seven cards.

In the third row, the sixth card is 20, Aeon goes beyond Death to indicate a rebirth shown in traditional decks as the dead rising from their graves for the Last Judgement, and in the Haindl Tarot as a baby floating down to Earth in a cosmic egg. Therefore we can see a link between the Devil and the Lovers; the link is sexuality. Similarly, we call the Hermit a lunar card, partly because the Hermit is 9, and the Moon is People often try to connect the Major Arcana to some specific doctrine—Kabbalah, or alchemy, or Tantra.

Actually, it fits all of these because it does not really belong to any one concept or set of values. The trumps show us the story of the soul as it confronts life, develops consciousness, and ultimately finds mystic enlightenment.

The story begins with the Fool as the innocent. The 0 trump symbolizes an ideal state, a lost paradise. The first two numbered cards, the Magician and the High Priestess, depict the two poles of existence: male and female, light and dark, action and stillness, conscious and unconscious, setting up the basic structure of the cards.

In a way, we can describe all the other trumps as the means of bringing these two poles together. The baby in card 20 represents the new unified consciousness, while the final card, 21, shows the way this consciousness experiences the world. The Haindl Tarot, like all others, presents this ancient story while developing its own themes.

The Tarot reaches beyond the individual to the suffering and redemption of the Earth itself. We might expect such a method to produce chaotic work. This is clearly not the case. These cards are very organized, usually around a vertical structure or in terms of distance, with a central image in the foreground and then others farther back. The organization in the cards comes from several sources.

Second, he had his own themes, which came through in the images. Third, and just as important, the Major Arcana itself has such a strong message that the cards could be said to have guided him. For example, he painted the camel on the card of the High Priestess before he learned that the Hebrew letter for this card means camel. The same thing happened with the hand in the Wheel of Fortune. The cards also contain a great deal of conscious design as well, especially in recurrent symbols. The use of color, of left and right, of diagonal lines, of aged rock, of rivers, of male and female—all carry the ideas from one card to the next.

As well, the images are highly symbolic. Haindl painted each card separately, but when he looked at them as a group, he discovered a clear development. If you have the Haindl Tarot at hand, lay out the trumps in a row, beginning with the Fool.

The scales themselves form half circles. In the next card, the Hanged Man, we see another half circle in the shape of the Earth appearing at the bottom. At the end, card 21, we again see the Earth as a half circle, but now at the top of the picture. The number 21 is 12 backwards. In card 21 we see the half circle of the Earth, but also a number of smaller circles, which are actually the planets.

Now look back at the Fool. There we see the planets and also cosmic bubbles, symbols of spirituality and new life. In the High Priestess we see a great sphere of light.

We find a similar image in the Empress. The Emperor holds a gold ball; the sphere has become solid, losing its cosmic meaning. For several cards we lose the image, but it returns subtly in the Hermit, card 9, where we see him looking up to a half-circle of light.

The bubbles return in card 10, filling the card as they did in the High Priestess. In card 11, as we discussed, we find both whole circles and halves. The two halves, symbol of the two poles of existence, make a unity. Card 14 shows interlocking circles as the poles begin to move together.

In the Devil, card 15, we find another half-circle—this time as a dark hole at the bottom of the card. Card 19 traditionally shows two children, a boy and girl or two boys, holding hands. On card 20 we find the egg; then in card 21 the Earth actually becomes the Sky by appearing above the dragon. To those who know the traditional cards, the images in this Major Arcana may appear radical. They are radical, of course; Haindl has reimagined all of the images but not done so with any desire to overthrow the past.

Some cards still contain subtle references to the more traditional symbols, such as the Grail emblems on the Magician. We mentioned that the Haindl Tarot contains its own story. This becomes very clear in the individual explanations as it must have become clear, I suspect, to Hermann Haindl himself, while working with the pictures.

We can summarize these themes simply, as a return to the ancient wisdom and respect for nature, a need to renew the Earth as well as to restore the female principle to its true place—in daily life, in society, and in the cosmos. The Empress shows us Woman as dynamic and creative—as Mother but also as Thinker. The story of the Haindl Tarot deals with the rejection of the Goddess and the Earth.

The young Emperor denies Her, setting himself up as the sole power and authority. Like a great many people today, Hermann Haindl sees our twin dangers—destruction of nature and the arms race—as connected to the masculine principle, conquering and denying the feminine. The Emperor shows us the God Odin from Scandinavian mythology. We see him as young and arrogant. Later, Odin appears again, as the Hanged Man, now an old man and figure of wisdom.

And now he returns to the Earth. This is the great reversal, overturning past mistakes and restoring the balance. We then see this image of reversal echoed in the Star, where the woman bends forward—in Aeon, where the baby descends upside down remember, a baby must emerge from the womb head first , and in the Universe, where we see the bottom half of the Earth.

The movement of the cosmic bubbles described earlier tells the same story in abstract images. With each card we find a Hebrew letter, a Rune, and an astrological symbol. For each of these representations, Haindl consulted earlier decks and commentaries. The borders around the cards join them to the four medieval elements, Fire, Water, Air, and Earth. This, too, connects with astrology, for each of the 12 signs belongs to a particular element.

In extending these elemental designations to the planets, Hermann Haindl has made his own choices based on his interpretations of the qualities of the cards. The use of the Runes is an innovation in the Haindl Tarot. He had several reasons for doing this. First of all, he wanted to show how the Tarot expresses various traditions. The teachings do not contradict each other but work together.

A similar impulse led him to set his Court cards in different cultures. Second, he also chose the Runes because they expressed a German esoteric tradition, native to his own people. Finally, Haindl wished to place the Runes alongside the Hebrew letters as a sign of hope for reconciliation between Germans and Jews. They form an alphabet—actually several alphabets, for they varied from country to country.

We can use them just like ordinary letters to spell words see the Runic spelling of Tarot on the Father of Cups , but unlike our modern alphabet, each letter carries a particular meaning. In this way, they resemble the Hebrew letters, which also have meanings as well as esoteric, even mystical, religious ideas attached to them.

Unlike the Hebrew letters, the Runes are traditionally used for divination. Some people have begun to use the Hebrew letters this way as well, but this is a modern development. A Runemaster carves them in wood or stone; when a question is asked, the master casts the Runes, similar to laying out Tarot cards. Because each Rune carries magical properties, people also use them for protection or as charms for love, strength, protection, or money.

In the Middle Ages, people inscribed Runes on swords, boats, or the frames of their houses. According to the myth, Odin brought the Runes forth from the dark well at the base of the World Tree.

Although the poems do not tell us, we assume Odin must have been hanging upside down if he reached down to snatch the Runes from the well. This tale from the story of Odin must have been hanging upside down becomes a central myth as well for the Haindl Tarot. At one time the Runes were a major feature of Northern European culture, but they faded from use and public interest until the beginning of the twentieth century.

During that period a movement called Pan-Germanism became popular, as well as an interest in the occult including Tarot. In a writer named Guido von List had a new of vision of the Runes. The idea spread, and soon societies grew up to study and work with Runic lore and magic.

Along with its cultural interests, Pan-Germanism developed ultra nationalist, racist, and especially anti-Semitic doctrines. When the Nazis extended Pan-Germanism to horrible proportions, they adopted and corrupted the Runes, which had become very popular by the s.

Some of the most terrible Nazi groups and programs used Runes as symbols. By bringing the Runes into the Tarot, Haindl has sought to help cleanse them of this corruption. Although Haindl did consult Spiesberger, he worked more closely with a contemporary system, that of his friend Zoltan Szabo, author of Book of the Runes.

For the other four cards—the Fool, the Sun, Aeon, and the Universe—he consulted Spiesberger as well as the older alphabets. Rune 8 appears on card 11, and Rune 11 on card 8. However, the cards themselves are switched around from their traditional order, partly because of the meaning of the Hebrew letters for those cards.

Therefore, we can say that Kabbalistically, Strength is 8 and Justice 11, while for the Runes Strength remains 11 and Justice 8. In my own interpretations of the Runes, I have referenced a number of books that use the literal medieval meanings for each of the letters. The Runes are a vast subject, with much of it still unexplored. Where I may have inadvertently made a mistake or given a particular Rune a distorted interpretation, I apologize.

As with all other aspects of the Haindl Tarot, the Runes will inspire others to much deeper explorations than those I have described here. These involve a certain shift in perspective. The images on the cards portray universal spirituality. For example, card 21, the Universe, depicts the realization of a new consciousness and a restoration of the Earth. We have attempted to go a bit further, showing something of the complex ways the cards influence each other in actual readings.

Hermann Haindl has created these pictures; following his guidance I have interpreted them. Both of us hope and expect that each person who enters their world will find a fresh meaning. With its curved horns the bull symbolizes the Moon, and so the bull became known as the male partner of the Moon Goddess see the High Priestess and the Empress. The bull represents active life energy. Unlike all of the letters in the Roman alphabet, Aleph is actually silent, a carrier for vowel sounds.

This means that it symbolizes the mystery of the spirit, which cannot be described in ordinary words. Thus, when God declares Himself to humanity, the first letter is silent, symbolizing that knowledge of God cannot be spoken in human terms. Some people describe it as the mouth opening to speak, or the drawing in of breath in preparation for sound. Look at the shape of the letter. We can imagine it turning, like the blades of a fan.

Think of it as the whirlwind of pure existence before Creation set everything in order. So it is with consciousness. The silent aleph symbolizes the state of total awareness before ego and conditioning put everything in categories. This is the state of the Fool. To look at the world as the Fool does 31 32 0.

The Rune also means to bind forces together, or to bind people into a community. The Fool, the Aleph, is the silent force that binds together all the varied experiences of the Major Arcana. The white border around the card indicates that the element is Air. Usually Air means thought, but it also symbolizes Spirit. Though the card is filled with symbols and ideas, the image is direct.

We see in the foreground the Fool himself. He stands outside the border, as if he has not yet entered the world of the trumps with all their challenges. He wears a multicolored coat with one sleeve entirely brown; he also wears six bells.

Behind and slightly above the Fool, we see the swan, and beyond that six planets in a night sky. When we think of the term archetypes we tend to imagine stories, or dreams, or encounters with mysterious old men or strange children. We call an idea or an image an archetype because of its importance to daily life.

Archetypes are found not only in mythology but in social and cultural institutions. The Fool is reality as much as story. Countless myths and fairy tales present to us the image of the Fool—an innocent, who lacks education or worldly sophistication, yet ends up winning the treasure or the princess because of a pure heart and an instinctive sense of what to do in every situation. But virtually every society has made a place for real-life Fools as well. The Haindl Tarot card of the Fool shows us a medieval court jester.

In our time we see the archetype in the television comedian. In many cultures the archetype takes a more basic, perhaps more powerful, form—that of the sacred clown who breaks down all rules and social conventions. In medieval Europe the lord of the carnival, chosen for his foolishness, presided over a temporary disintegration of the rigid rules that governed society.

In some Native American cultures the society of clowns deliberately broke the most fundamental laws, dancing naked, telling jokes during the solemn ceremonies, cross-gender dressing, even defecating in public. Through their bizarre behavior they reminded people that the rules and customs of society, even the holy rituals, are merely a set of conventions, like clothes we learn to put on as we grow up.

Reality, strange and unknowable, remains underneath these 34 0. Perhaps because we become more conventional or more rigid as we get older, the Fool in fairy tales usually appears as a child.

In the Haindl Tarot we see a young person, eyes wide with wonder at life yet without emotion, for the Fool touches something deeper than ordinary feelings.

The Fool launches us into the Major Arcana. Traditionally the Fool represents the child, the seeker about to journey through life, the soul as it incarnates into a body. The other 21 trumps then signify the various challenges of life, practical as well as spiritual.

Like the child in fairy tales, the Fool moves from one task to the next, until he reaches the unification, the final triumph trump of the Universe. The Fool bears the number zero. This sets him before and apart from all the other cards. It also symbolizes the intuition of the sacred clowns, that we are not any of the things we think we are. If we are not any specific things, then we are no-thing. Reality can never be pinned down to any specific explanation or philosophy.

Therefore reality itself remains—nothing. Whereas the other Major cards, with their fixed places in the sequence 1 through 21, represent particular states or stages of life, the Fool, zero, can become anything. In modern number systems we write zero in the shape of an egg, 0, indicating that all life, all experience emerges from an unknowable nothing. Originally zero was written as a point to signify the same idea.

In Kabbalist tradition creation begins as a point of light from a Nothingness beyond all comprehension see also the Sun. Zero can be described as the other side of infinity divide any number by zero and the answer is infinity.

Mathematicians signify infinity by the same Hebrew letter, Aleph, that represents the Fool. And in modern cosmology we can trace the universe back billions of years, almost to the precise instant of the Big Bang.

But what existed before that moment? THE FOOL 35 The Fool symbolizes instinct and innocence, a sense that we contain within us something pure, something that reaches back before culture, before conditioning, before ego, even before personality. We think of ourselves as particular people, with character traits that make us different from everyone else. The Fool, with his blank expression, reminds us that something lies below all those visible characteristics, a universal life energy, beyond thought, beyond individuality, that is shared by all life.

In fairy tales the older brothers or sisters plot and scheme. Their plans fail because life does not run according to their expectations. But the Fool plans—nothing. He or she does not know how to scheme. The Fool can only respond to life as it is. The sacred clowns break all the rules in order to remind us that human beings made those rules, that reality remains something else. Culture is to humanity what personality is to individual humans—something constructed but that becomes so ingrained we confuse it with the essence of life.

We become so used to our images of ourselves that we think of all those character traits—such things as smart, or popular, or hardworking, or loving—as the sum of our individual existence.

Similarly with culture, we learn our cultural assumptions, our beliefs about the world and morality and the proper roles of men and women, so deeply that we consider them universal truths, refusing to believe that in other times and places people believed differently. Personality and culture become like masks we wear over our faces. And because we never remove them—and because everyone around us is wearing a similar mask—we consider them our true faces.

But the Fool reminds us that we can never hold life to a set of rules. Life remains always something else. No specific thing. All this does not imply that we should think of the Fool as perfection. If the Fool represents freedom it also carries its own limitations.

We cannot maintain such a state of nothingness. In reality we cannot dance through the world, reacting purely on instinct. There are times when we need to plan, think ahead, even to scheme. We also need to fit into society, to get along with other 36 0. And there is something else intriguing about the Fool. He can never know himself; this is his paradox. Because the Fool is not separated from the world around him, he cannot step back and look at himself. Therefore we cannot stay with the Fool, but must travel through the different stages of the Major Arcana—through life—carrying the Fool inside us as the instinct that pushes us onward, as the reminder that reality is always something different, as we learn, through each step, to become conscious of ourselves and the universe.

In virtually every culture we find a myth of the Fall. The human unconscious produces a story of a lost paradise, where no one died, no one suffered or quarreled, no one had to work or go hungry. Sometimes, as in Genesis, the Fall comes through disobeying the gods. In other, less moralistic cultures, a simple mistake loses paradise. Somebody goes to sleep at the wrong time, or drops something, or eats from the wrong basket.

These stories reflect more than a complaint that life is too difficult. They spring from a sense that we have lost something true and perfect. Inside us we feel that we somehow belong in that place of love and delight, and something terrible must have happened to make us lose it. Probably in reality no such perfect innocence ever existed.

Most likely human beings were always pretty much the same as now, bound to their egos, struggling with each other and with life. But if paradise never existed, that does not make the myth a lie, or a simple wish fantasy. The truth of the story does not lie so much in its picture of perfection as in its image of loss.

We carry within us the intuition that life can be different, spontaneous, joyful, and loving. To believe we have lost this makes us hope that we can get it back. The Tarot goes beyond regret or nostalgia. It says that we must fall into consciousness and separation, so that the individual self can emerge.

At the end of the Major Arcana, in the Universe, the yearning for innocence becomes transformed into wisdom. You do not have to be a Christian to see a psychological truth in this story. If we remain in childlike innocence, we will never have to change to go through life. In many cultures the swan symbolizes purity and love. The Hindu creation gods, Brahma and Saraswati, rode upon swans.

People have often linked the swan to the planet Venus, and thus to the Goddess of love the Empress. More particularly, a wounded swan appears in the legend of the Holy Grail, a myth vital to the Tarot, for the symbols of the Minor suits—Cups, Wands, Swords and Disks—are exactly the symbols connected to the Holy Grail.

We see these symbols in the trump of the Magician. In the Grail story the innocent hero, Parsifal, shoots a swan. Parsifal wounds the swan, but wounds himself as well. He becomes conscious of suffering for the first time and so begins the quest that will result in the discovery of love and redemption. Now we tend to think of the animal in us as savage and cruel, but in fact, humans become most destructive when they separate themselves from the animal level of feeling.

Nuclear bombs, concentration camps and the extinction of vast numbers of species one species per hour is the current rate have all been done in a mood of cool rationality. So the Fool points to a wounded beast to remind us that we must heal that broken connection between ourselves and our animal existence, between ourselves and the world.

Christian moralists have taught that we must overcome the animal within us; modern psychologists that we need to acknowledge 38 0. But the esotericists and the mystics of all religions speak of a further level of awareness, a direct connection between all beings and the cosmos.

Isolation is an illusion, for we are linked to every atom and to the most distant stars. And so, in the Fool, we see the swan behind the jester, but also the heavens behind the swan. Medieval theology described humanity as halfway between the angels and the beasts. The Tarot turns this around. We must discover and join with the animal in us in order to reach cosmic awareness, for only by exploring the hidden truths in ourselves can we find the truth in creation.

Therefore, the animal lies between the human and the stars. We can view the card vertically as well. At the bottom we see the green-brown mass representing the Earth. The swan rises from this shapeless area and reaches above, to the sky—a movement that follows the evolution of life and consciousness. The first creatures arose from the seas and the dirt. As animals evolved and became more complex, consciousness evolved, leading finally to that sense of unity with the heavens.

This movement forms a circle, or rather a return, because the Earth itself emerged out of material thrown off by exploding stars. We might also describe the vertical ascent as the development of individual awareness. We begin life without any real sense of who we are. We do not separate ourselves from our parents or the world around us, so we see only a vague mass of color.

As we mature we gain more of a sense of uniqueness. The sexual instinct plays a large part in this, showing us our own needs and leading us away from our parents. Therefore we see an animal— the swan—that sacred to the Goddess of love.

But the animal is wounded, because we cannot fully understand love until we experience the reality of suffering. The wound points upward and downward toward that universal knowledge, symbolizing the double-sided quality of suffering. Though the neck twists in pain it forms a spiral curling into the sky.

The golden beak, however, does point almost straight up, as a sort of arrow directing us to the stars and planets.

The Fool wears six bells; we see six planets in the sky. This reminds us of the Greek myth of the music of the spheres, representing the harmony of existence. The number six also connects us to the Lovers, card 6. The Fool, in his aspect of the innocent, perceives this harmony but only intuitively.

Just as the swan indicates wounded nature, so Christians believe that Christ, who joined the spiritual and the physical, redeemed the suffering world through his own pain. The ecological dangers of our time probably derive in part from the belief that humanity is separate from, and even opposed to, nature.

Western theology teaches us that God expects us to dominate nature, to use it for our own comfort and wealth. This attitude led to the wonders of technology and medicine, giving vast numbers of human beings a far better life than ever before possible.

It also led to unchecked destruction, and the death of species as well as whole bodies of water and huge stretches of land. We cannot turn our backs on everything we have accomplished in 40 0. Like the Fallen Fool, we must travel through the crisis, to bring together the achievements of individual consciousness and the sense of union with nature and the divine. The brown hood and sleeve suggest the Christian monastic orders, with their vows of humility and renunciation of wealth and power.

More specifically, they connect the Fool to St. Francis of Assisi. Like a shaman or a Lakota visionary, St. Francis went out into the wilderness where he learned to speak to the animals. Francis could serve as a symbol for contemporary culture struggling to unite the concept of the individual with the older truth of harmony with the world around us. Together they form a cross. The corners of the mouth turn down, symbolizing his Fall and his sadness at the wound in himself and in the world.

The image of talking with the beasts, and especially with the birds, forms a further archetype. To speak with birds and beasts both joins human consciousness—for speech and language are very much human attributes—to all these levels.

In the Haindl Tarot we see this union as well in the swan, whose feet vanish into the brown-green mass of the earth and whose wing arches upward while its neck spirals among the planets. Despite his link to St. Francis, the Fool does not actually speak. His mouth remains closed. We can look at this in two ways.

Language belongs to consciousness. Existing in a pre-conscious state, the Fool has not yet learned to speak. Through speech he will become more human. In the Parsifal legend, Parsifal encounters the Grail at an early stage in the story but loses it because he does not say anything. The journey through the Major Arcana is a journey of learning to speak. But we can also look at silence as a form of speech that reaches beyond words, beyond human language, to an instinctive 0.

As a creation of cultures, words limit our understanding to only the ideas shaped by whatever language we happen to speak. European languages think differently than Native American or African languages for example, and tend to limit us to a rational explanation of life.

Silence, as an aspect of Nothing, contains the potential for all languages, plus an understanding of experiences and intuitions that cannot be expressed in any language. With his Rune of Joy, the Fool embraces all life, including suffering. He dances through experience, finding the secret joy in the heart of all existence. The Fool indicates a situation where planning ahead is not possible or not desirable and the person needs to react intuitively.

More generally, the Fool indicates a time in life when a person needs to act impulsively, to follow her or his feelings. It advises us to leap into new experiences and to trust that things will work out in a good way. The Fool can signify a time of surprise, of wonder, and excitement at life.

If opportunities come, the Fool says to take them. Do it; do not hesitate. The Fool insists on acting on impulse, but the Fool is only one card. The meaning of a reading depends on all the cards taken together. If the outcome appears undesirable and other cards, such as Temperance, suggest a more cautious approach, then the person might think again about following the Fool.

The person may desire to do something but doubt the value of it, especially if it may appear foolish or if others point out practical problems. The person may fear to step into the unknown. Alternatively, depending on the other cards, the reversed Fool may warn against recklessness.

This comes from the phallic shape, and also from the idea of masculinity as single-minded, direct, forceful. The number one signifies willpower and directed consciousness. But a house can also isolate us from nature—cities began as collections of houses.

The shape of the Beth is a little like an open mouth, out of which all creation pours forth. The Rune is Peoh, P. It literally means cattle and, by extension, property and wealth. Peoh was sacred to the God Frey, a Norse God of sexual potency and peace, as well as wealth and the enjoyment of life. We will look more closely at this change in the Emperor.

Peoh signifies cosmic fire, the male principle of creative force. In Norse myth the world begins with fire melting ice, and it will end in the fiery destruction of Ragnarok see Aeon and the Universe.

Haindl has discovered various word plays with this syllable. Pa is father. It also suggests fa-che, German for torch, and fa-cere doing, and thus action , and phallus for maleness. The astrological planet for the Magician is Mercury. Mercury was the God of magicians but also of healers, writers, swindlers and thieves. In other words, Mercury represents mental and magical power. His Egyptian form Thoth invented writing as well as magic. As we saw in the introduction Thoth, as Hermes Trismegistus, supposedly gave his Book of Thoth to the first Egyptian magicians.

Thus, the Magician signifies both Frey and the more aggressive God who overthrew him. The element for the card is Air. The Magician represents the creative power of the intellect. We see in this card various axes crossing each other. The spear and the sword create diagonal axes as they crisscross each other. In traditional versions of this card the four symbols lie on a table before the Magician.

Here, however, they occupy the forefront of the card and, instead of lying apart, they join together, the male sword and spear penetrating the female stone and cup. To the left of the Magician we see a field of crystals, and above that the Sun. To the right we see a group of eyes set in a nighttime sky, shining above them is a crescent Moon. The occultist sees the universe as built upon polarities. These include light and dark, conscious awareness and unconscious 45 I.

The occult description is actually more complex, for it recognizes as well the trinity of body, mind, and spirit, and the fact that some forms of matter, such as stars and rocks and onecelled organisms, lack sexual polarity.

More important, the poles are ideal abstractions. In reality they never exist separately, but join together, with one side more dominant than the other. The day is never entirely light, and the night is never entirely dark. Card 0, the Fool, has an androgynous quality. But the Fool exists outside normal experience, in a kind of perfect innocence. And so, the numbered cards of the Major Arcana begin with the Magician and the High Priestess, male and female. Traditionally, the Magician signifies light and consciousness, the ability to analyze and create, while the High Priestess represents darkness, or the unconscious with its sense of wholeness and mystery.

When we look at the Haindl cards we see a more subtle blending because, although the High Priestess shows a night scene, the card is filled with light. This suggests that the Magician, the creator, must struggle with the dark mass of matter in order to release the light hidden within it.

Though the official church stamped out organized Gnosticism, the Gnostic ideas remained as an underground influence on such later teachings as Kabbalah and the Hermetic tradition in Europe. The Gnostics believed that God, and all existence in its true state, consisted of pure light. This light became broken up and trapped in the gross darkness of the physical universe. Gnosis consists of recognizing the truth and attempting to release the light so it can return to God.

The Magician wears a tiara, symbol of the crowning power of the intellect; he represents thought, while the High Priestess represents intuition. But out of this mental crown we see the dark figure, as if the Magician has not integrated his own darker emotions with his intellect. His ideas can become distorted and he can lose his ability to perceive the pure forms of existence, here symbolized by the field of crystals radiating from I.

Notice that the dark face looks the other way. The Magician can fall from the truth, perhaps through such temptations as the desire for power over knowledge or the distractions of physical needs such as sexuality, which he may think he has left behind or overcome. The lumpen face bears a scarred hole, as if something were torn from its forehead, perhaps symbolizing the archangel Lucifer who lost the emerald that had blazed light from his face into the heavens when he fell.

The light existed as a pure force, an archangel, but when it entered into the physical world it became buried, and the beautiful Lucifer devolved into the shapeless lump we see in the card. Apart from the rituals and the complex theories, what does the Hermetic Magician try to do, and why? Human beings possess a desire for joy, a desire to transcend the problems of life. But the world resists our efforts with the sluggishness of a great mound of dirt pushed at by a small child.

We find ourselves hungry, weak, prey to sickness, loneliness, and death. Our efforts to join with others are often misunderstood, and no one seems to care or recognize the truth about us. More subtly, we find we cannot know ourselves, for that most basic knowledge remains locked in the unconscious.

At this most basic level, the Magician seeks to overcome this separation from self. Like the scientist, the Magician seeks to become a master of the physical universe. The four objects in the foreground of the card symbolize the elements of creation. They are also the tools used in magical rituals. Many magicians, like many scientists, seek power for its own sake. In orthodox Christian mythology not the Gnostic version Lucifer fell because his lust for power caused him to rebel against God.

The magician seeks truth—an awareness of the inner nature of reality, a confrontation with the self, and finally a reunion with 48 I. How could he have rebelled against God if he had considered himself part of the divine? So the Fall the great mistake is not just the desire for power, but rather the separation of the ego from the rest of existence.

Therefore, the Magician seeks to overcome the illusion of isolation. Just like the court jester or modern comedian with the Fool, the ritual magician is a person acting out an archetype. The archetype appears in the card as a wise old man. The Grail itself appears as the cup in the front of the card. At the end of his story Merlin allows the sorceress Nimue to imprison him—some say in a cave, others say in the heart of a tree.

Either way, we can see this as the light imprisoned in matter. A master of prophecy, Merlin knew this would happen. Yet his lust for Nimue made him powerless to stop her. The intellect alone cannot deal with life.

If we separate thought from desire then that desire may overtake us and destroy all our grand plans. The reading will outline this explicitly, so that the person can understand and agree with what is said. And yet, most people will continue in the same direction.

Desire overpowers knowledge. The Magician seeks to become a master of his destiny. But he cannot do this simply by willpower or intellect. Instead, he needs to raise up the unconscious, allow it to become conscious of its power and transform it into liberating energy. The Gnostic methods involved sexual magic possibly influenced by Tantra, the esoteric branch of Hinduism mentioned in the Introduction , and their teachings included the idea that rebirth into heaven demanded a psychological merging of male and female.

We will look at these ideas again in the Empress and the Lovers. But there is I. For the patriarchal mind such a return may seem like defeat or imprisonment.

But we can imagine an earlier form of the tale of Merlin and Nimue, in which the Wizard joyously gives himself to the Earth Goddess. The Grail-like objects of the Magician derive originally from Celtic mythology, as do the stories of King Arthur and Merlin. In his famous book The White Goddess Robert Graves described how the ancient Celts in Britain practiced a system of magic—and a philosophy and a poetics—based on trees.

Not only did the trees represent the life force, they also formed a language which the magician learned in order to compose poems to the Goddess. Thus we see a vital connection between thought—for poetry means speech and speech, remember, comes from the intellect— and nature. Merlin submits to Nimue, indeed becomes joined to her in the form of a tree.

And if we look again at the dark face above him we will see that it indeed metamorphoses into a tree trunk. When we first glance at the crystals on the left side of the card they suggest intellect released from the physical world, for they appear cool and abstract. These stand for all the polarities described earlier—light and dark, male and female. For the Fool to become a true Magician he must overcome the false polarity created when 50 I. Ultimately, magic is as androgynous as the Fool, its power found in the union of male and female.

Eyes appear in the dark below the Moon. Perhaps they symbolize instinctive knowledge and a yearning for truth and release, for they look up toward the blocked sun. The four Grail symbols dominate the card. The lance and the sword create diagonal movement, one upward, the other down. Crossed, they also form two triangles, one pointing down, the other up, meeting at the apexes. We will see, in the card of the Lovers, that the two triangles signify matter and spirit, the Earth and the sky, female and male.

At the same time the lance and the sword form phallic symbols and therefore signify the masculine principle, while the cup and the stone disk represent the feminine. In each pair the two symbols have interpenetrated, again showing the necessity of union.

In older versions of the Grail story, however, the Grail was a stone rather than a cup. In later centuries the Grail came to symbolize the presence of the Holy Spirit giving life to the world of matter. Christians saw the lance as the spear that wounded Christ in the side. Many people believe that the cup and the spear go back before Christianity: the cup symbolizings the Goddess and her gift of life pouring onto the world; the spear symbolizes her male consort.

We can say the same for the sword and the stone. The four symbols form some of the tools used by the Hermetic magician, with a wand substituted for the lance, and a disk or pentacle for the stone. The four also stand for the suits of the Minor Arcana, and the four elements which make up the physical world.

This name can be spelled but not pronounced and so signifies the unknowable, that which cannot 51 I. At the same time tradition tells us that God used these four letters to create the physical universe. The sword of spirit penetrates the stone disk of matter. In many Grail stories a woman appears carrying the cup on a disk, while others carry a sword and a lance. We have already mentioned that the appearance of the Grail required a response and that Parsifal failed by keeping silent.

We cannot expect that we will automatically move through the different steps of the Major Arcana to evolved consciousness. We must make an effort. On a more mundane level, the problems of the ordinary world will not simply go away.

We must not hold ourselves back like Parsifal, but must commit ourselves to life. By doing so we will find that life responds and we will learn to recognize the divine spirit that lives within nature and our daily existence as well as the exalted realms of the Magician. For both men and women it signifies feeling strong and in control of your life. Rather, it means the power to direct your life in positive ways.

Magical power means transforming old situations and bringing new ones into existence. The Magician signifies creativity. They have understood that art and magic share an underlying experience—that of a spiritual energy literally flowing through the body.

Musicians, writers, and others often say that they do not create their works. A force works through them to bring the work into the world. This creativity is not just for artists. The Magician tells a person that he or she can begin new projects or further develop projects 52 I. The card signifies imagination, the ability to take a fresh approach to problems, and to come up with new ideas.

The Magician is a card of focused will. It shows someone persuasive, dynamic, able to excite others and bring them along on his or her projects and ideas. The Magician overcomes resistance in other people, but also in himself. The magical power transforms situations. It breaks down obstacles. The Magician is a card of wisdom.

But it is also a card of service to others. Merlin was strong when he used his magic for the sake of Arthur and the kingdom. When he cared only about himself—when he gave up his duty for Nimue—his power vanished and he became trapped. This may happen if outside resistance prevents the person from realizing his or her potential. The reversed card may also show an inner resistance. The powerful Magician energy requires openness; if the person carries repressed fear or emotional pain, these may close off the flow of creative force.

The trapped energy may show itself as physical troubles, depression, or anxiety. Notice that the repressed material itself does not cause the trouble, but rather it prevents the Magician archetype from its natural expression. At another time old fears or long-buried pain might not disturb the person in the same way. Although the Magician shows a time of power, that power will need to flow openly. Alternatively, the reversed Magician can signify arrogance or the misuse of personal power to dominate others.

The person has the magical power to overcome resistance. However, he or she lacks the wisdom to use it for a good purpose. Just as one is phallic, so two, or II, suggests the vaginal lips. Does this mean the Priestess is simply a sexual or fertility symbol? Absolutely not. More than someone who simply leads rituals, the High Priestess is keeper of the mysteries of life itself.

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Though the structure has stayed the same throughout its history, the pictures on the cards have changed a great deal. There actually exist a set of images people think of as classic or traditional. Known as the Tarot de Marseille because of a publishing connection to the French city of Marseilles, they became standardized around the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, many of these vary quite strongly from those earlies pictures left to us by Bembo.

People who know the Tarot may look at the cards created by Hermann Haindl with some surprise, for he has radically redesigned almost all the images.

Interestingly, the Haindl card that remains closest to the older decks is the famous Hanged Man. And it is the Hanged Man, with its image of sacrifice, reversal, and spiritual union, that often seems to convey the strongest suggestion of secret, or esoteric, ideas. In the correlation of the Tarot trumps to astrology, the planet and god Mercury belongs to the card of the Magician.

Ever since the Middle Ages, Kabbalistic ideas had fertilized the wider Hermetic and magical philosophies. In a man named MacGregor Mathers, who had written about the Tarot and fortune telling, joined with others to found the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. This organization existed for only a few decades but its influence remains strong even today.

It also led to use of the cards as aids in study, meditation, and ritual. This idea of individual creation may have helped foster the modern renaissance in Tarot, with literally hundreds of new decks, many of them vastly different from earlier designs.

Both designed their own Tarot decks. Because of this—and because of the stunning pictures painted by Lady Frieda Harris—the Book of Thoth has influenced a great many Tarot artists of the last forty years.

One of these is Hermann Haindl, who consulted Crowley as a source when he decided to paint his own cards. By most estimates, only a few of these decks, worthy as they are, reach the levels of complexity, beauty, and depth of meaning as the Haindl Tarot. Though the Haindl Tarot contains much esoteric information, including Hebrew letters, Runes, astrological symbols, and I Ching hexagrams, we should not think of it as an occult deck, at least not in the sense of Crowley.

We do not find the precise details of Hermetic symbolism, or the references to doctrines and rituals, or the complex use of magical signs and formulas coded into the pictures. Rather than an occult work, Hermann Haindl has created a sacred Tarot, one which reaches back to ancient spiritual traditions of many cultures.

The Haindl Tarot certainly contains a great deal of information. Most importantly, however, it opens our minds. It leads us to see the world in a new way or perhaps a very old way , as a vessel filled with spiritual power and truth.

Many people in recent decades have sought this understanding. Through its powerful images, and because we use the Tarot rather than just look at it, the Haindl Tarot helps them experience this understanding.

It also draws on the different mythologies and religions of diverse peoples, from Europe to Native America, from India to China and Egypt. And it takes inspiration from sacred art, from prehistoric statues and temples, and even Wagnerian opera. None of these things becomes a doctrine, not in the narrow sense of a fixed ideology. Rather, as an artist, Hermann seeks to create an inner understanding rather than promulgate a particular theory.

The deck certainly does contain ideas. Though Hermann Haindl worked to a large extent unconsciously—not planning the symbolism so much as allowing it to emerge in the painting—the pictures present a complex yet, at the same time, unified vision. We will explore this vision and its concepts in the individual cards. Here, however, we can describe the central theme of the Haindl Tarot as the renewal of the Earth—not just the material resources but the spiritual Earth.

For thousands of years people have seen the Earth as a living being. In the years before the Haindl Tarot, people became conscious of two great dangers facing our world. One is the possibility of technological war ending all life, whether in the fire of explosions and the darkness of nuclear winter, or through biological weapons.

Hermann Haindl, like many others, sees this as a spiritual struggle as well as an ecological and political one. For Haindl, the roots of our current dangers originate in a masculine-dominated mentality, one based on hierarchies and dominance, rather than cooperation and mutual respect. Hermann Haindl is not a feminist, nor does the Haindl Tarot attack men. Rather, it seeks a balance between different qualities, and it roots this balance in the ancient view of the female as the primary principal of creation.

Though Haindl has worked in the Green Party, he has reached his ideas more through his own experiences, primarily working with the native peoples of North America. Hermann Haindl and his wife, Erica Haindl, have traveled among the Native Americans; they have stayed in their homes and taken part in their rituals.

They did not go to the Native Americans out of curiosity. They went to learn and to awaken in themselves a genuine respect for the Earth and for the Spirits who share our world.

From this experience they understood that the Spirits are not just symbols or concepts or stories; the Spirits are as real as people or trees. This knowledge, too, has gone into the making of the Haindl Tarot. The Haindl Tarot does not spell out Native American teachings any more than it does occult doctrines. Above all, he has created a sacred work of art, one which speaks to us through the power of its images. At one time, the symbolism in a Tarot deck counted more than the pictures.

People concerned themselves less with the quality of the art and more with specific references to some teaching, such as the Kabbalah or Freemasonry, which may help to explain why relatively few professional artists have created Tarot decks.

Perhaps the subject was too restricted, even for those artists with esoteric interests. In recent years, however, a vast number of new decks have returned the images to a primal place. Now, people look first to the pictures for meaning, not just to the doctrines. Other people have begun to re-imagine the Tarot, creating new pictures out of their own lives and beliefs. The strongest of these pictures have gone beyond the personal to archaic and mythological levels. We find this kind of power in the Haindl Tarot, especially in such cards as the Chariot, or the Star, or the very beautiful Court cards, which derived from religious traditions around the world.

Once again, trained artists have begun to explore the Tarot. Along with such famous figures as Salvador Dali and Niki de St. Phalle, a whole group of young artists, again primarily in Italy but also in the United States, have created their own decks. The Haindl Tarot goes deeper than most, for it forms the life testament of an artist dedicated to spiritual understanding. The Haindl cards are obviously symbolic. Each card, but especially those of the Major Arcana, contains an entire structure of symbolism based on a set of ideas and images derived from tradition, but ultimately belonging to this particular deck.

Because Haindl is first and foremost a painter, the meanings become part of the picture rather than the picture being formed only to serve a theory. These ideas then create a new relationship with each other. The card has brought them together.

We find this technique in many of the trumps, notably the Fool, but also in the Minor Suit and Court cards. I asked him to send me some of the pictures.

The moment they arrived they struck me with their conceptual beauty, their daring designs, and their sense of mystery. I had recently done some writing on the Runes, so it seemed to me a wonderful idea to bring this ancient system into the Major Arcana.

Shortly afterward, I met Hermann and Erica Haindl for the first time. We sat for several hours, looking at the cards, talking about the symbolism, and discovering the many ways in which we all shared the same concepts of the Tarot, of politics, of mythology, and of archaic beliefs.

When they left they gave me a kachina doll, a sacred image to bring favor to the house. In return, I gave them a rock I had found containing a natural Rune. The next time I saw them, in their home in Germany, they presented me with a rock from a beach in Tuscany that had a six-pointed star etched by nature into its surface. Hermann had searched among the pebbles on the beach until he found one containing an appropriate symbol.

At the same time I have brought to them my own ideas and experiences, not in contradiction to the message in the pictures, but to explore them and all of their possibilities.

Hermann Haindl and I come from different cultures, different generations, different genders, different religious backgrounds, and different creative disciplines. Yet we can experience the world in a similar way.

Working with the Haindl Tarot has taught me a great deal. I hope that this book will enable others to enter this new and ancient labyrinth.

One theory of the Tarot holds that the trumps began as a gallery of typical early Renaissance characters, such as an alchemist in his laboratory, combined with moral virtues and lessons. However, certain images would seem to suggest some sort of esoteric, even heretical, message: The alchemist may have been a stock Renaissance character, but alchemy is the occult art par excellence!

In the early decks, a woman is often shown dressed as an abbess but wearing the the triple crown of a pope. This character became known as the Papess or Female Pope. Medieval legend tells of a Pope Joan, a woman who disguised herself as a nun, entered the Church, and rose to the top position only to have a mob attack her when she gave birth during an Easter procession. Toward the end of the thirteenth century, an heretical group named the Guglielmites elected a woman who would rule as pope when Christ returned in the year When that date actulally arrived, the Church burned this woman to death.

Her name was Manfreda Visconti. Interestingly, some of the earliest Tarot decks—approximately years later—were painted for the Visconti family. During the fifteenth century, Europe had once again discovered the Classical Age, the Church continued to use Latin as its common tongue, and the Holy Roman Empire was the model.

An emperor would therefore seem an obvious figure for inclusion in a card game based on social types. The number four in occult philosophy represents divine law and the four worlds of creation. From the very beginning, the decks have included the strange image of a man hanging upside down, usually by one foot with the other crossed behind, again in that figure four.

According to myth, St. Peter was crucified upside down, supposedly so he did not commit the sin of imitating Jesus an explanation so unconvincing it suggests some concealed meaning.

Stewart sees this story as a screen for ancient Celtic rebirth rituals. Whether this can be proved or not, the story itself predates the earliest Tarot decks by more than two hundred years. We must recognize, however, that the Kabbalist theory of the Tarot did not appear until the nineteenth century and, in all the thousands of pages of Kabbalist writings, we find no reference to any sort of pictures or cards. There are many theories concerning the origin of the Major Arcana.

It is interesting to note that most theories of the Tarot deal only with the trumps, as if the four suits the Minor Arcana were tacked on later. An historian named Gertrude Moakley has suggested that these might have inspired early Tarot cards. Whether or not it actually came out of Tantra, writers such as Barbara Walker have allowed us to make that connection. In recent years the images of the Major Arcana have been reinterpreted and redesigned, joining them to Mayan mythology, Native American beliefs and social traditions, pantheons of ancient Goddesses, the Arthurian legend, and so on.

All these influences and many more have come into play in the Haindl Tarot. If Hermann Haindl had deliberately planned to include these various ideas his cards might have ended up a hodgepodge.

The earliest Tarots displayed no numbers. If the cards did originate as a game at least on the surface , we can assume they must have had some sort of ranking. Quite early, however, the names and numbers became standard, more or less as they appear in the Haindl Tarot. The only exceptions are cards 8 and 11, which Haindl has switched, following a modern practice that began with the influential occult group, the Order of the Golden Dawn In the Tarot de Marseille, Justice is 8 and Strength is 11, but in the Golden Dawn Tarot, Strength is 8 and Justice The Fool, however, presents something of a problem.

As card 0, it would seem to belong before card 1. In the Tarot card game, however, it does not occupy a fixed place. Some esoteric commentators place the Fool as first, others last, and others between cards 20 and The sequence becomes important when we see the cards as links to the Hebrew letters.

Some of the other esoteric links contain 21 stages, so that the Fool becomes the pilgrim, or initiate. However, the Hebrew alphabet has 22 letters, and therefore 22 paths on an important diagram known as the Tree of Life.

This requires the Fool to occupy a particular place. If that place comes at the end, then the first letter of the alphabet, and the first pathway, belongs to the Magician, the second to the High Priestess, and so on. But if we make the Fool the first letter or card, then the second goes to the Magician, the third to the High Priestess, and so on down the line.

There are two basic approaches to interpreting the Major Arcana. One is to see each card for itself, with its own special qualities.

The other is to see the cards as a sequence, building a kind of story. Often this story depicts the Fool as a journeyer through the cards or as an incarnate soul making its way through life. When we look at the cards as a sequence, the meaning of each card depends not only on its own qualities but on its place.

We also look ahead, saying that the explosion leads to the openness and renewal of card 17, the Star. This method of interpretation resembles the way we look at the cards in Tarot readings. In a reading, we examine the position of the card in the spread as well as its actual meaning. For example, the Lovers in the position of Past Experience may mean something very different than the Lovers in Near Future, and something else again in Hopes and Fears.

Also, in a Tarot reading we assess the meaning of all the other cards to see the meaning of a particular one. In the past, students and writers on the Tarot tended to dismiss readings: however, Tarot readings have become much more complex—and more popular—over the years.

It is probably not a coincidence that the sequential method of interpreting the Major Arcana has become almost standard in this age of renewed readings. The Haindl Tarot like most really valuable decks combines the two approaches. Hermann Haindl painted these cards as individual images, each with its own theme. In each painting, however, a definite story evolved, as if by itself. Haindl did not plan these stories deliberately, nor did he plan a certain line of images that developed step-by-step, from the Fool to the Universe.

The themes and pictures emerged because the artist had a very clear and coherent vision. Hermann did not plan what he wanted to say; the ideas came from his experiences, his spiritual studies, and his deep conviction. Many people, when interpreting the Major Arcana, separate it into two or more parts. Those who see the cards as two halves usually describe the first half as looking outward in life and the second as being concerned with introspection and spiritual development, which is often the theme with Jungian interpreters.

There is often a debate about which card is the turning point. The Hanged Man, card 12, can also serve as a turning point, for it symbolizes a reversal of previous values. And card 11, either as Strength or Justice, can mark the midpoint, for Strength implies a readiness to go beyond past achievements, while Justice shows past and future balanced in the scales.

Another method of dividing the cards sees trumps 1 to 21 as three groups of seven with the Fool as the pilgrim going through all of them. This approach gains meaning from the ancient symbolism of numbers three and seven. Three signifies a whole range of ideas, many of which we will touch on when we discuss trump 3, the Empress.

One of the most important of these interpretations is the three phases of the Moon—new, full, and old—which represent youth, maturity, and old age. We can see these in the cards: The first seven cards show the concerns of youth, learning about the world; the second batch of seven depicts the problems of maturity—self-knowledge, psychological transformation, and awareness of deeper values; the final batch goes beyond the individual personality, as the soul becomes aware of universal principles.

In traditional cultures, such attitudes often go with old age, when the woman beyond childbearing age or the man too old for hunting concern themselves with wisdom.

Perhaps an even more basic meaning of three is mother, father, and child. Out of this fundamental triad comes many of the trinities of religion and mythology. The significance of seven is more subtle, however. Seven, therefore, becomes a number of completion. In other words, the end of each sequence indicates a victory, for the soul has confronted various challenges and passed through them. Seven is significant in many modern cultures, especially in that of native North Americans who place great emphasis on the four directions.

But there actually are seven direction, for we must add above, below, and the center, in which we stand. In the musical scale each octave contains seven notes; the eighth note repeats the first at a higher level. Therefore, we sometimes refer to each group of seven cards as an octave.

This is not just a figure of speech. Very often, special meanings link the harmonics. Strength and the Devil 8 and 15 both bear a relation to the Magician, card 1. Each of these cards—1, 8, and 15—begin a line of seven cards. In the third row, the sixth card is 20, Aeon goes beyond Death to indicate a rebirth shown in traditional decks as the dead rising from their graves for the Last Judgement, and in the Haindl Tarot as a baby floating down to Earth in a cosmic egg. Therefore we can see a link between the Devil and the Lovers; the link is sexuality.

Similarly, we call the Hermit a lunar card, partly because the Hermit is 9, and the Moon is People often try to connect the Major Arcana to some specific doctrine—Kabbalah, or alchemy, or Tantra. Actually, it fits all of these because it does not really belong to any one concept or set of values. The trumps show us the story of the soul as it confronts life, develops consciousness, and ultimately finds mystic enlightenment. The story begins with the Fool as the innocent.

The 0 trump symbolizes an ideal state, a lost paradise. The first two numbered cards, the Magician and the High Priestess, depict the two poles of existence: male and female, light and dark, action and stillness, conscious and unconscious, setting up the basic structure of the cards.

In a way, we can describe all the other trumps as the means of bringing these two poles together. The baby in card 20 represents the new unified consciousness, while the final card, 21, shows the way this consciousness experiences the world. The Haindl Tarot, like all others, presents this ancient story while developing its own themes.

The Tarot reaches beyond the individual to the suffering and redemption of the Earth itself. We might expect such a method to produce chaotic work. This is clearly not the case. These cards are very organized, usually around a vertical structure or in terms of distance, with a central image in the foreground and then others farther back. The organization in the cards comes from several sources. Second, he had his own themes, which came through in the images.

Third, and just as important, the Major Arcana itself has such a strong message that the cards could be said to have guided him. For example, he painted the camel on the card of the High Priestess before he learned that the Hebrew letter for this card means camel.

The same thing happened with the hand in the Wheel of Fortune. The cards also contain a great deal of conscious design as well, especially in recurrent symbols. The use of color, of left and right, of diagonal lines, of aged rock, of rivers, of male and female—all carry the ideas from one card to the next. As well, the images are highly symbolic. Haindl painted each card separately, but when he looked at them as a group, he discovered a clear development.

If you have the Haindl Tarot at hand, lay out the trumps in a row, beginning with the Fool. The scales themselves form half circles.

In the next card, the Hanged Man, we see another half circle in the shape of the Earth appearing at the bottom. At the end, card 21, we again see the Earth as a half circle, but now at the top of the picture. The number 21 is 12 backwards. In card 21 we see the half circle of the Earth, but also a number of smaller circles, which are actually the planets. Now look back at the Fool. There we see the planets and also cosmic bubbles, symbols of spirituality and new life. In the High Priestess we see a great sphere of light.

We find a similar image in the Empress. The Emperor holds a gold ball; the sphere has become solid, losing its cosmic meaning. For several cards we lose the image, but it returns subtly in the Hermit, card 9, where we see him looking up to a half-circle of light. The bubbles return in card 10, filling the card as they did in the High Priestess.

In card 11, as we discussed, we find both whole circles and halves. The two halves, symbol of the two poles of existence, make a unity. Card 14 shows interlocking circles as the poles begin to move together. In the Devil, card 15, we find another half-circle—this time as a dark hole at the bottom of the card. Card 19 traditionally shows two children, a boy and girl or two boys, holding hands. On card 20 we find the egg; then in card 21 the Earth actually becomes the Sky by appearing above the dragon.

To those who know the traditional cards, the images in this Major Arcana may appear radical. They are radical, of course; Haindl has reimagined all of the images but not done so with any desire to overthrow the past.

Some cards still contain subtle references to the more traditional symbols, such as the Grail emblems on the Magician.

We mentioned that the Haindl Tarot contains its own story. This becomes very clear in the individual explanations as it must have become clear, I suspect, to Hermann Haindl himself, while working with the pictures. We can summarize these themes simply, as a return to the ancient wisdom and respect for nature, a need to renew the Earth as well as to restore the female principle to its true place—in daily life, in society, and in the cosmos.

The Empress shows us Woman as dynamic and creative—as Mother but also as Thinker. The story of the Haindl Tarot deals with the rejection of the Goddess and the Earth. The young Emperor denies Her, setting himself up as the sole power and authority. Like a great many people today, Hermann Haindl sees our twin dangers—destruction of nature and the arms race—as connected to the masculine principle, conquering and denying the feminine.

The Emperor shows us the God Odin from Scandinavian mythology. We see him as young and arrogant. Later, Odin appears again, as the Hanged Man, now an old man and figure of wisdom. And now he returns to the Earth. This is the great reversal, overturning past mistakes and restoring the balance.

We then see this image of reversal echoed in the Star, where the woman bends forward—in Aeon, where the baby descends upside down remember, a baby must emerge from the womb head first , and in the Universe, where we see the bottom half of the Earth. The movement of the cosmic bubbles described earlier tells the same story in abstract images. With each card we find a Hebrew letter, a Rune, and an astrological symbol. For each of these representations, Haindl consulted earlier decks and commentaries.

The borders around the cards join them to the four medieval elements, Fire, Water, Air, and Earth. This, too, connects with astrology, for each of the 12 signs belongs to a particular element. In extending these elemental designations to the planets, Hermann Haindl has made his own choices based on his interpretations of the qualities of the cards.

The use of the Runes is an innovation in the Haindl Tarot. He had several reasons for doing this. First of all, he wanted to show how the Tarot expresses various traditions. The teachings do not contradict each other but work together.

A similar impulse led him to set his Court cards in different cultures. Second, he also chose the Runes because they expressed a German esoteric tradition, native to his own people. Finally, Haindl wished to place the Runes alongside the Hebrew letters as a sign of hope for reconciliation between Germans and Jews.

They form an alphabet—actually several alphabets, for they varied from country to country. We can use them just like ordinary letters to spell words see the Runic spelling of Tarot on the Father of Cups , but unlike our modern alphabet, each letter carries a particular meaning.

In this way, they resemble the Hebrew letters, which also have meanings as well as esoteric, even mystical, religious ideas attached to them. Unlike the Hebrew letters, the Runes are traditionally used for divination. Some people have begun to use the Hebrew letters this way as well, but this is a modern development. A Runemaster carves them in wood or stone; when a question is asked, the master casts the Runes, similar to laying out Tarot cards.

Because each Rune carries magical properties, people also use them for protection or as charms for love, strength, protection, or money. In the Middle Ages, people inscribed Runes on swords, boats, or the frames of their houses. According to the myth, Odin brought the Runes forth from the dark well at the base of the World Tree. Although the poems do not tell us, we assume Odin must have been hanging upside down if he reached down to snatch the Runes from the well. This tale from the story of Odin must have been hanging upside down becomes a central myth as well for the Haindl Tarot.

At one time the Runes were a major feature of Northern European culture, but they faded from use and public interest until the beginning of the twentieth century. During that period a movement called Pan-Germanism became popular, as well as an interest in the occult including Tarot. In a writer named Guido von List had a new of vision of the Runes. The idea spread, and soon societies grew up to study and work with Runic lore and magic. Along with its cultural interests, Pan-Germanism developed ultra nationalist, racist, and especially anti-Semitic doctrines.

When the Nazis extended Pan-Germanism to horrible proportions, they adopted and corrupted the Runes, which had become very popular by the s. Some of the most terrible Nazi groups and programs used Runes as symbols. By bringing the Runes into the Tarot, Haindl has sought to help cleanse them of this corruption.

Although Haindl did consult Spiesberger, he worked more closely with a contemporary system, that of his friend Zoltan Szabo, author of Book of the Runes. For the other four cards—the Fool, the Sun, Aeon, and the Universe—he consulted Spiesberger as well as the older alphabets.

Rune 8 appears on card 11, and Rune 11 on card 8. However, the cards themselves are switched around from their traditional order, partly because of the meaning of the Hebrew letters for those cards.

Therefore, we can say that Kabbalistically, Strength is 8 and Justice 11, while for the Runes Strength remains 11 and Justice 8. In my own interpretations of the Runes, I have referenced a number of books that use the literal medieval meanings for each of the letters.

The Runes are a vast subject, with much of it still unexplored. Where I may have inadvertently made a mistake or given a particular Rune a distorted interpretation, I apologize. As with all other aspects of the Haindl Tarot, the Runes will inspire others to much deeper explorations than those I have described here.

These involve a certain shift in perspective. The images on the cards portray universal spirituality. For example, card 21, the Universe, depicts the realization of a new consciousness and a restoration of the Earth. We have attempted to go a bit further, showing something of the complex ways the cards influence each other in actual readings. Hermann Haindl has created these pictures; following his guidance I have interpreted them.

Both of us hope and expect that each person who enters their world will find a fresh meaning. With its curved horns the bull symbolizes the Moon, and so the bull became known as the male partner of the Moon Goddess see the High Priestess and the Empress. The bull represents active life energy. Unlike all of the letters in the Roman alphabet, Aleph is actually silent, a carrier for vowel sounds. This means that it symbolizes the mystery of the spirit, which cannot be described in ordinary words.

Thus, when God declares Himself to humanity, the first letter is silent, symbolizing that knowledge of God cannot be spoken in human terms. Some people describe it as the mouth opening to speak, or the drawing in of breath in preparation for sound. Look at the shape of the letter. We can imagine it turning, like the blades of a fan.

Think of it as the whirlwind of pure existence before Creation set everything in order. So it is with consciousness. The silent aleph symbolizes the state of total awareness before ego and conditioning put everything in categories.

This is the state of the Fool. To look at the world as the Fool does 31 32 0. The Rune also means to bind forces together, or to bind people into a community. The Fool, the Aleph, is the silent force that binds together all the varied experiences of the Major Arcana. The white border around the card indicates that the element is Air. Usually Air means thought, but it also symbolizes Spirit. Though the card is filled with symbols and ideas, the image is direct.

We see in the foreground the Fool himself. He stands outside the border, as if he has not yet entered the world of the trumps with all their challenges. He wears a multicolored coat with one sleeve entirely brown; he also wears six bells. Behind and slightly above the Fool, we see the swan, and beyond that six planets in a night sky.

When we think of the term archetypes we tend to imagine stories, or dreams, or encounters with mysterious old men or strange children. We call an idea or an image an archetype because of its importance to daily life.

Archetypes are found not only in mythology but in social and cultural institutions. The Fool is reality as much as story. Countless myths and fairy tales present to us the image of the Fool—an innocent, who lacks education or worldly sophistication, yet ends up winning the treasure or the princess because of a pure heart and an instinctive sense of what to do in every situation.

But virtually every society has made a place for real-life Fools as well. The Haindl Tarot card of the Fool shows us a medieval court jester. In our time we see the archetype in the television comedian. In many cultures the archetype takes a more basic, perhaps more powerful, form—that of the sacred clown who breaks down all rules and social conventions.

In medieval Europe the lord of the carnival, chosen for his foolishness, presided over a temporary disintegration of the rigid rules that governed society. In some Native American cultures the society of clowns deliberately broke the most fundamental laws, dancing naked, telling jokes during the solemn ceremonies, cross-gender dressing, even defecating in public.

Through their bizarre behavior they reminded people that the rules and customs of society, even the holy rituals, are merely a set of conventions, like clothes we learn to put on as we grow up. Reality, strange and unknowable, remains underneath these 34 0. Perhaps because we become more conventional or more rigid as we get older, the Fool in fairy tales usually appears as a child.

In the Haindl Tarot we see a young person, eyes wide with wonder at life yet without emotion, for the Fool touches something deeper than ordinary feelings. The Fool launches us into the Major Arcana. Traditionally the Fool represents the child, the seeker about to journey through life, the soul as it incarnates into a body. The other 21 trumps then signify the various challenges of life, practical as well as spiritual.

Like the child in fairy tales, the Fool moves from one task to the next, until he reaches the unification, the final triumph trump of the Universe. The Fool bears the number zero. This sets him before and apart from all the other cards. It also symbolizes the intuition of the sacred clowns, that we are not any of the things we think we are. If we are not any specific things, then we are no-thing. Reality can never be pinned down to any specific explanation or philosophy. Therefore reality itself remains—nothing.

Whereas the other Major cards, with their fixed places in the sequence 1 through 21, represent particular states or stages of life, the Fool, zero, can become anything. In modern number systems we write zero in the shape of an egg, 0, indicating that all life, all experience emerges from an unknowable nothing.

Originally zero was written as a point to signify the same idea. In Kabbalist tradition creation begins as a point of light from a Nothingness beyond all comprehension see also the Sun. Zero can be described as the other side of infinity divide any number by zero and the answer is infinity.

Mathematicians signify infinity by the same Hebrew letter, Aleph, that represents the Fool. And in modern cosmology we can trace the universe back billions of years, almost to the precise instant of the Big Bang. But what existed before that moment? THE FOOL 35 The Fool symbolizes instinct and innocence, a sense that we contain within us something pure, something that reaches back before culture, before conditioning, before ego, even before personality.

We think of ourselves as particular people, with character traits that make us different from everyone else. The Fool, with his blank expression, reminds us that something lies below all those visible characteristics, a universal life energy, beyond thought, beyond individuality, that is shared by all life.

In fairy tales the older brothers or sisters plot and scheme. Their plans fail because life does not run according to their expectations.

But the Fool plans—nothing. He or she does not know how to scheme. The Fool can only respond to life as it is. The sacred clowns break all the rules in order to remind us that human beings made those rules, that reality remains something else. Culture is to humanity what personality is to individual humans—something constructed but that becomes so ingrained we confuse it with the essence of life.

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At different times in his life a man will experience the deep wonder and stillness of the High Priestess, while a woman may act with the creative force of the Magician. In the Grail story the innocent hero, Parsifal, shoots a swan. This light became broken up and trapped in the gross darkness of the physical universe. Instead of trying to conquer the world, seek peace with yourself. We have spoken of the Goddess as the Moon and the water, but the Earth belongs to her as well. In the Haindl Tarot we see this union as well in the swan, whose feet vanish into the brown-green mass of the earth and whose wing arches upward while its neck spirals among the planets.❿
 
 

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