Every Tarot Card Magician, Strength, Devil

They've finally done it. They've talked me into trying to write about every single tarot card. Specifically, Rev. Erik and Nick Chapel egged me into this. So, as always, blame absolutely everything on them.

With that said, I should say what I'm doing though, huh? The thing I'm setting out to do is to write about every tarot card. The catch is that I don't like that. I don't like reading cards individually, and at this point in my life I don't even like reading books that do it, you know, going card by card and explaining everything in it, and so on. We need those books, and I've certainly read enough of them, but I just don't like reading them myself anymore. I guess I've read a number already and so I feel tired. So here's my catch: I'm going to do the cards in sets of three (mostly). For the trumps, I'm going to use the "tableau" arrangement to group the cards, and for the pips I'll use the decanic arrangement, followed of course by the aces and the courts.

The Tableau

What's that, you might ask? It's a way to arrange the trumps just to look at, to contemplate and consider connections. Some people say Paul Foster Case invented it, and some say he merely popularized it. I don't know which is which. Honestly, I first saw it in one of Rachel Pollack's books anyway,[^1] so it's fairly common at this point. Simply, you take the Fool out of the trumps and set it aside, and then arrange the other cards, in order, in three rows. The rows are seven cards each. That means you've got three tiers or layers of cards, running in order, and making connections with cards above and below them.

For instance, in this piece, I'll be discussing the Magician, Strength,[^2] and the Devil. You could shuffle the cards and do this and create interesting connections too, but this arrangement was popularized by writers who felt tarot had an inherent mystical structure.

The Magician

The Bataleur, the Juggler, Aleph or Beth, depending on who you ask, and Mercury. He's quick, witty, with the ability to go up and down, in and out, just like Hermes was the only Olympian with free passage into and out of the underworld. His table of stuff is transformed in esoteric tarot into a table of elemental tools, but in the oldest packs he's clearly a con artist on a street corner hustling. He's holding the ball for the cups and ballsin one hand, and a wand in the other, like every magician who's learned how to use a wand and flashy hand movements to distract the eye while the ball is palmed.

These seams of meaning are not inherently conflicting. Magic is a trick, one we play on ourselves, the universe, the matter and spirits around us. One way of reading Solomonic texts is that the operator is pretending to be a priest, because if you wear a priest's robe and use a priest's tools, the spirit can't tell the difference. Crowley's writing on gods talked about how we go from the god as commander to god as lover and eventually god as self, and invocations do that. Check out Nick Chapel's translation of a Coffin Text about Heka to see what I mean.

The Magician is cunning and sly, and points to Mercurial powers in the quesited topic. As Beth, the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet, they indicate being in a house, which is what the letter means. Esoterically, it means you stand in the center of power, the locus between inside and out. I haven't seen the card mean "it's literally your house," but I could see it, though I 'd be more likely to think that if the card were paired with the 10 of Cups, which, rather succinctly, meant "roof tiles" in one old manual.[^3]

Strength

Strength, Fortitude, Samson, Teth, and Leo. She's powerful, either closing or opening a lion's mouth depending on the deck, and sometimes, in some older decks, actually Samson, awkwardly clutching one of the pillars he uses to bring down the temple. Everyone will tell you this card means inner strength, and sure, that's true, but it also just means being strong. No other card in the deck points to "being fucking ripped*, so why not let the card that says it on the tin represent that?

Strength is Leo's card, and thus ruled by the Sun, so if you ever get it alongside The Sun, you have a definite solar vibe in the quesited topic. As with all zodiacal cards, it's worth while knowing the querent's zodiacal houses, as sometimes zodiac cards can be pointing to the associated house. So if someone's first house is Cancer, then Leo is the second, and the card could be pointing to matters related to money and finances. This is true for every zodiac card, so I won't go into it every time.

Strength is sometimes called Fortitude, and some people don't like that, but in French it's La Fort, so we might as well, right? It's a bit of a false cognate, but it's pretty close, especially when the card's pointing to that "wellspring of inner strength" it can often mean.

It's associated with Teth, which is the Hebrew letter meaning a serpent, and there's a lot of Kabbalah you have to get into to make that make sense, but in short, there's a strength to snakes, a single driving push forward, no matter how many bends and twists it takes to get there.

It also connects Strength with the Magician and the Devil. It connects to the Magician because Hermes' caduceus bears twin serpents. And the Devil, well, it's a little more obvious, right?

The Devil

The Devil, the Lord of the Gates of Matter, the Witchfather, Cernunnos, Ayin, and Capricorn. Yes, I've seen decks that call this card all those things. Old Scratch, the Devil himself. He doesn't always mean sin and perdition, but he can. He's the goat of Capricorn (who's really a sea-goat but close enough), and as the angel very interested in the material world, the Devil stands in for material things. It helps that Capricorn is often very matter-minded, earthy, nocturnal, and cardinal as it is. The Devil could mean you have to mind your Ps and Qs (pints and quarts, if you've ever wondered), or to take a break from that dissertation and drink some good beer and have some good (hopefully) sex (or something else very physical, my ace-aro friends).

Ayin means an eye, and so the Devil is the card that sees, and you'll often see esoteric tarot packs give the Devil a third eye. Traditional French packs sometimes give him a face or just a mouth on his stomach. There's the Vieville, which covers him in extra faces, which doesn't seem comfortable. Of course, Dante depicted Satan as having three heads, the better to munch three traitors (which means you can draw a connection between this card and the Hanged Man, often called The Traitor).

You can see that if Strength really does sometimes mean "physical strength" then the Devil is a great card to go in the same stratum, as the way you get beefy is to work those muscles and eat that protein -- revel in matter while still taking careful stock of it. The Devil is rarely depicted as a hedonist, if you think about it. So knowledgeable about matter, he picks and chooses, which is another Capricorn trait. Everything has to be just right. Not sumptuous, not necessarily, but just right.

The Devil loops back around to the Magician for a variety of reasons: some magicians work with the Devil, and many were thought to whether they did or not. Magicians are concerned explicitly with drawing the immaterial into the material -- it's why the Waite-Smith deck has the figure pointing upwards and downwards, to act as a conduit between high and low. And so the Devil is the low.

[^1]: Tarot, an Illustrated Guide [^2]: just as often in my daily practice the Justice card would be below the Magician, as it was 8 in the original French packs, but since PFC is broadly responsible for this arrangement, and he believed the switch to make Strength 8 was correct, I'm following that arrangement here. [^3]: c.f. Huson's Mystical Origins of the Tarot