Excerpt from Meditation on the

Tenth Major Arcanum of the Tarot

THE WHEEL OF FORTUNE

______________

LA ROUE DE FORTUNE

Vanity of vanities! All is vanity ...

What has been is what will be,

And what has been done is what will be done;

And there is nothing new under the sun.

(Ecclesiastes i, 2, 9)

Qui propter nos homines et propter nostram

salutem descendit de coelis. Et incarnatus est

de Spiritu Sancto ex Maria Virgine, et homo

factus est ... et ascendit in coelum, sedet ad

dexteram Patns.

(For us men and for our salvation he came

down from heaven: by the power of the Holy

Spirit he became incarnate from the Virgin

Mary, and was made man... he ascended into

heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father)

(from the Creed)

And I applied my mind to know wisdom

And to know madness and folly.

I perceived that this also is

but a striving after wind.

For in much wisdom is much vexation,

And he who increases knowledge increases

sorrow.

(Ecclesiastes i, 17-18)

Blessed are those who mourn,

For they shall be comforted.

(Matthew v, 4)

Dear Unknown Friend,

We have before us a wheel which rotates, and three figures in animal form of which two (the monkey and the dog) turn with the wheel, whilst the third (the sphinx) is beyond the movement of the wheel: he is seated on a platform above the wheel. The monkey descends in order to rise again; the dog rises in order to descend again. First one and then the other pass before the sphinx. Simple and natural questions, which arise spontaneously when one looks at the Card, are:

Why do the monkey and the dog turn with the wheel? Why is the sphinx there?

How many times will the monkey and the dog pass before the sphinx? And why are there these meetings with the sphinx?

Once having posed these simple questions, we find ourselves already at the heart of the tenth Arcanum, plunged into the very sphere of notions and ideas which it is called to awaken.

In fact, the wheel alone, without its two passengers and without the sphinx seated above it, evokes only the idea of a circle or, at most, that of circular movement. The wheel with the two animals, the one rising and the other descending without the sphinx above it — evokes the idea of a vain and absurd game. But the wheel turning with its two passengers and the sphinx dominating the whole makes the onlooker ask himself if this is not an arcanum, i.e. a key that one has to know in order to be able to orientate oneself, in this case in the domain of problems and phenomena relating to the circular movement of living beings. It is especially the sphinx above the wheel which gives us an intellectual shock and which impels us to seek out the Arcanum of this Card.

Now, there are two categories of ideas concerning the genetic relationship and the general genesis of the four kingdoms of Nature — the mineral realm, the plant realm, the animal realm and the human realm — which have their root in the intellectual life of humanity. The one is based on the idea of the Fall, i. e. degeneration and descent from above below. According to this class of ideas, it is not the monkey who is the ancestor of man, but rather, on the contrary, it is man who is the ancestor of the monkey, which latter is a degenerate and degraded descendant. And the three kingdoms of Nature below the human kingdom are, according to this set of ideas, the projected residue or exteriorisation of the comprehensive being of primordial man, or Adam, who is the original prototype and synthesis of all the entities comprising the four kingdoms of Nature.

The other class of ideas comprises the idea of evolution, i.e. progress transforming from below above. According to this category of ideas, it is the most primitive entity — from the point of view of consciousness as well as biological structure — which is the origin of all beings in the four kingdoms of Nature and which is their common ancestor.

The Card of the tenth Major Arcanum of the Tarot represents a monkey — i.e. an animal with a face still preserving features that one cannot fall to recognise as human — who is falling. For it is not the monkey who is climbing down, but rather it is the movement of the wheel which carries him along. In descending, the monkey raises his head because he is not descending of his own accord. From where does he descend — this animal with a head bearing human features?

He descends from the place where the sphinx is sitting. The crowned and winged sphinx, with a human head and an animal body, and holding a white sword, represents the plane and the stage of being from which the monkey is moving away and towards which the dog is approaching.

Now, if you had had the task of portraying the idea of the Fall in the sense of degeneration from the comprehensive being — the prototype of all Nature — wouldn't you have shown the sphinx crowned above, as the only possible figure representing the unity of the human and the animal kingdom, the latter in turn being the synthesis of the plant and mineral kingdoms? And wouldn't you have portrayed one figure descending in the course of animalisation, deprived of the crown, the sword and the wings, but yet still with features bearing witness to its origin, i.e. would you not have chosen the monkey to represent the transition from the prototype state of comprehensive being to the state of reduced and specialised being? Does not the monkey lend itself marvellously to serve as a symbol of the animalisation which is effected at the expense of the Angelic and human elements of the prototype being?

On the other hand, if you had wanted to give visual expression to the nostalgia of fallen and fragmented beings for the lost state of fullness and integration, would you not choose the dog, the animal most passionately drawn and attached to the human element, as a symbol of the aspiration of animals towards union with human nature, i.e. the aspiration towards the sphinx, where animal nature is united to human nature?

The Card of the tenth Arcanum therefore teaches, through its actual context, an organism of ideas relating to the problem of the Fall and the Reintegration, according to Hermetic and Biblical tradition. It portrays the whole circle, including ascent as well as descent, whilst the "transformism" of modern science is occupied with only half of the circle, namely the half of ascent or evolution. The fact is that certain eminent scientists (such as Edgar Daqué in Germany and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in France) advance the postulate of the pre-existence — be it only potentially — of a prototype for all beings, which is the ultimate as well as the effective cause of the whole process of evolution, and this postulate alone renders evolution intelligible. However, it in no way changes the fact that science works on the basis of the fundamental supposition that the minimum is the ancestor of the maximum, the simple is the ancestor of the complicated, and that it is the primitive which produces the more developed organism and consciousness, although for thought (i.e. reason) this is absolutely unintelligible. This basic scientific presupposition renders evolution unintelligible because it disregards half of the circle, namely all that which precedes — be it only in ordine cognoscendi — the state of primitivity from which science takes its point of departure. Because one has to renounce thought and reduce it to lethargy in order to be able to sincerely believe that man evolved from the primitive and unconscious particles of a primordial mist which was once our planet, without this mist bearing within itself the seed of all possibilities for future evolution, which is the process of "eclosion", i.e. the process of transition from a potential state to an actual state. Thus Arnold Lunn, editor of the book Is Evolution Proved?, writes that he would certainly like to believe in evolution and accept it as proved, if he could surmount four difficulties, including the following:

It is my painful duty to have to add to the above quotation the reply by William S. Beck, author of Modern Science and the Nature of Life, to the difficulty to which Arnold Lunn draws attention. He says:

Metaphysical brocade or not, it does not matter, the fact of the unintelligibility for human thought of the theory (not the facts!) of evolution advanced by science nevertheless remains a fact. It is and always will be unintelligible in so far as it takes consideration of only half of the whole circle of evolution, and refuses to accept the other half of the circle, that of involution, or the Fall, which would make it intelligible.

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