13 February 2004: The Inanna Dialogue, Part Three

Welcome to the third installment of The Inanna Dialogue, the ongoing public conversation between me and fellow online journaler Lila, of Guttergaunt  fame (she's the one in purple). Note that this installment will make no sense unless you've first read Part One and Part Two.

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Hey Nicky,

After reading your latest contribution to this conversation, my determination to keep up my end of it actually led me to go out and buy Crowley’s Book of Thoth Tarot, the first Tarot deck I’ve ever owned, along with a couple of books to help me understand it. These past few days, I’ve spent most of my spare time giving myself a crash course. Interesting stuff. I can see why it appeals to you. It really is an amazingly rich symbolic language for talking about the psyche.

Good thing that it’s so interesting, because this is a whole lot of work to go to, learning a whole language, considering that you and Ace are the only people I know with whom I’ll be able to converse in it. Oh, well, maybe someday I’ll meet Alan Moore and be able to impress him with my knowledge.

The connection between the Art card and the “polarity” work you do in those ritual labs is immediately obvious just from looking at the card. I guess that’s an example of where this Tarot stuff is useful: the whole “picture is worth a thousand words” idea. Looking at the Art card, I think I understand something about the work you do that it would probably actually take me much more than a thousand words to get at. Likewise with the Lovers card: it seems very clear how it describes your Inanna/Erishkigal ritual.

I have to confess, though, that the whole Judgment/Aeon business totally confuses me. Major Arcana Number 20, according to every source I’ve found except Crowley, is called Judgment. Crowley calls it The Aeon. Crowley seems to have renamed a few of the Major Arcana, but this is the only one where it seems like it’s just a totally different card from the version in other decks. Also, not only do you still call the card Judgment, but Alan Moore, who faithfully uses Crowley’s Tarot images and names all through Promethea, also calls the card Judgment, and uses the traditional, non-Thoth images to portray it, which seems like it might be the one and only time where he doesn’t do things Crowley’s way. So what’s up with that?

Besides, I’m not sure I understand either the traditional Judgment card or Crowley’s Aeon version. You said in your last contribution to this conversation that your ritual lab work involves “accessing Hod via the Judgment path.” From what I’ve read about the ritual lab work, I don’t see how it relates to either the traditional Judgment images of fiery angels in the sky, or to Crowley’s image of the adorable little baby Egyptian god. I also checked out your own version of the card. You seem to have also gone with the angel-and-fire motif, though more sexily than in the traditional versions. Yours is my favorite so far, but it doesn’t make any more sense to me than the others.

 

Dear Lila,

The traditional version of the Judgment card uses classic Book of Revelations “Judgment Day” imagery: the fiery angel in the sky, resurrecting the humans below. The Christian imagery, and the word “judgment,” both tend to trigger people’s worst knee-jerk reactions, in a way that interferes with their ability to understand the card. It is, in fact, one of the least-understood cards in the deck, because the imagery and the concept of “judgment” are especially loaded for the sort of newage flakes who make up the largest percentage of Tarot users. So loaded, in fact, that most of them resist even thinking about the card, to the point where they don’t think about it enough to notice that they don’t understand it.

It’s pathetic (or ironic, or hilarious, or something like that), because 99 percent of these people would look down their noses at you and give you a patronizing lecture if you showed an aversion to the Death card stemming from an overly-literal interpretation. And yet that’s just how they react to the Judgment card: “Four legs good! Two legs baa-aad! Tolerance good! Judgment baa-aad!”

In other words, most Tarot users can’t understand the Judgment card because they’re too judgmental about it. See my rant “On Judgment,” orignially posted as a journal entry but now enshrined in the Notes section, for further mockery of such imbeciles.

Crowley, too, had trouble seeing past the Christian imagery. It was a pretty loaded subject for him: he was the victim of an oppressive fundamentalist Christian upbringing, and despite all his extraordinary accomplishments he never quite outgrew his adolescent rebellion against the values of his parents. He had a whole personal mythology built up, in which he was the Great Beast, the Prophet of the New Aeon , the Aquarian Age that would supplant the Piscean Age of Christianity. That’s what The Aeon, his version of the 20th Major Arcana, represents: the birth of the New Aeon. His point being that Judgment Day, for Christianity and the Piscean Age, had already come – their time was as good as done, and the turmoil of the 20th Century (and maybe the few centuries after that) was a combination of the desperate drawn-out death throes of their world, and the equally drawn out birth pangs of the new world of the Aquarian Age. It’s actually a plausible and sometimes quite appealing way to look at 20th Century history and current events.

Crowley’s intent, with the Book of Thoth, was to create a deck suited for use in the New Aeon. He wanted imagery that would be relevant after this whole “death throes of the old, birth pangs of the new” period of history was over. What better image than the New Aeon depicted as a child god taking its first steps?

Unfortunately, as a depiction of the nature of the work that takes place on the corresponding path on the Tree of Life, Crowley’s Aeon card is no more helpful than the traditional Judgment card.

What the Judgment card is really about is the alchemical fusion of the somatic intelligence (Malkuth, the physical body, represented by the humans in the traditional card) with the linguistic/conceptual intelligence (Hod, represented by the angel in the traditional card).

This fusion awakens, or gives birth to, a new sort of intelligence, in which the body is attuned to the Logos, such that Logos can inhabit and transform the body, which also allows the Logos to inhabit and transform the mind. I guess one could call it the Logosomatic Intelligence. Kabbalistic Tarot scholar Paul Foster Case calls it the Perpetual Intelligence, presumably because it’s a perpetual and self-perpetuating Logos/body feedback loop that, once activated, creates a condition of perpetual physical transformation.

This phenomenon is what allows some sorcerors to do such interesting things with their bodies, and also what makes them prone to peculiar physical transformations, and to having such distinctive physical movement signatures.

The reason the card is called Judgment is that, as part of the process, the body is “judged” by the Logos – i.e., in transforming the body into a more and more suitable vessel for itself, the Logos puts the body through changes that include, over time, “burning away” anything that makes the body a less-than-ideal vessel for whatever manifestations of the Logos that particular magician is best suited to embody.

Which is why, when people ask me how I stay so slim, the honest answer is “magic.”

For this reason, the card, and the path it describes, are associated with the element of Fire. They’re also attributed to the Hebrew letter Shin, which means “tooth,” for the same reason: the analogy of the “teeth” of the Logos chewing away physical impurities being not much different from the analogy of the “fire” of the Logos burning away said impurities.

In an amusing linguistic coincidence, the word Shin, in Japanese, means “mind,” and is generally the term for “mind” that is used when one is talking about the mind/body connection (as in the martial arts term zanshin, which describes a state in which one moves with spontaneous grace because of the quality of one’s awareness).

In a further amusing linguistic coincidence, if one looks at the Tree of Life as a picture of a human body, with Kether as the head, Tiphareth as the Heart, and Malkuth as the feet, then the Judgment path would be one of the body’s shins.

The traditional card uses the image of the Resurrection of the Dead on Judgment Day to represent the process of physical renewal that takes place on this path. A bit hard to figure out if one hasn’t already experienced the path for oneself.

Crowley’s Aeon card addresses the same concept in a different way: the infant god, in addition to symbolizing the New Aeon, can be taken to symbolize the magician’s body renewed, “rebirthed,” and sanctified. Again, though, this is an interpretation unlikely to occur to anyone who hasn’t already had the experience.

In my own version of the Judgment card, I chose to show the deep intimacy and ecstasy of the Logos/Soma marriage. The Angel of the Logos and the Earth-Goddess of Malkuth passionately in love with each other. Replacing the “raising of the dead” image with a “waking of Sleeping Beauty” image.

Showing them sculpted in stone was my way of making the following points:

1.) The work of this path is not a single event, like Judgment Day or the birth of the New Aeon, but, rather, as Paul Foster Case pointed out, a perpetual process.

2.) Much of the work of this path takes place on a very concrete, physical level, as do many of its results. The process is not abstract – it’s a physical “sculpting” of the body.

3.) In magic, anytime there are two things, such as Logos and body, acting upon one another, it is sometimes good to remember that ultimately both things spring from the same source (“are carved from the same stone”), and their discrete existence is a matter of perception (“is it two figures, or a single piece of stone?”)

Did that help?

Okay then - let’s get back to talking about kinky sex. One of the topics I want to address in this dialogue is the commonality of themes and elements between BDSM games and mystical initiation rites.

Your own early bondage experiences were initiatic experiences – not only initiations into particular sexual practices, but also into your own sexuality, and into aspects of that sexuality that had been unkown you. This fits with Sherpa’s description of initiation as being the experience of “that which has never occured to one before and for which one can never truly be prepared.”

In your memoir of your first bondage experience, you start out fully clothed (well, fully pajama-d, anyway), and one of the climactic events is having your butt exposed – this being as close to nudity as you get in that story. In your memoir of your second bondage experience, you start out sans pants (but with panties on), and one of the climactic events is having your shirt unbuttoned. You retain bra and panties throughout the story. Back in one of your November blog entries, when you hadn’t yet related either story and were first broaching the subject of your teenage bondage experiences, you wrote, “The whole tying me up thing started out as a joke, and I guess it just got more sexual over time...” Considering how intense and erotically-charged the initial “joke” incidents were, and how much more exposed you were in the second one than in the first, I’m guessing that, in subsequent incidents, there was a continued progression in terms of your degree of exposure (both in the sense of “exposed skin” and in the sense of having your vulnerabilities and physical/emotional responses exposed).

Assuming that this is the case, I see a parallel between your own progressive stripping/humiliation, over the course of your gradual initiation into the depths of your sexuality, and the progressive stripping/humiliation of Inanna, over the course of her gradual initiation into the depths of the Underworld.

Care to comment on this?

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The Inanna Dialogue
will continue in Part Four,
as soon as we write it.