Excerpt from Meditation on the
Thirteenth Major Arcanum of the Tarot
DEATH
______________
LA MORT
And the woman said to the serpent,
"We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden;
but God said, 'You shall not eat of the fruit of the
tree which is in the midst of the garden,
neither shall you touch it, lest you die."
But the serpent said to the woman,
"You will not die.
For God knows that when you cat of it
your eyes will be opened,
and you will be as gods,
knowing good and evil."
(Genesis iii, 2-5)
O dry bones, hear the word of the LORD.
(Ezekiel xxvii, 4)
Dear Unknown Friend,
Have you ever been struck by the contrary statements concerning death made by God and the serpent in the narrative in Genesis on the Fall? Because God says there, "You shall not eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, for on the day when you eat from it you will die", and the serpent says, "You will not die". Here God is categorical; the serpent is just as much so.
Did the serpent quite simply lie? Or is it a matter of a fundamental error on the part of the serpent? Or again, did he state a truth from the range of truths proper to the domain of the serpent which are untruths in the domain of truths for God? In other words, are there two immortalities and two different deaths — one from the point of view of God, the other from the point of view of the serpent? Thus, is it simply that the serpent understands by "death" what God understands by "life" and that he understands by "life" what God understands by "death"?
Now, I invite you dear Unknown Friend to set to work with a view to finding an answer to this question, whilst bringing to your attention fruits of the work that I have made towards the same end. For the answer to this question is the Arcanum of the thirteenth Card of the Tarot, "Death", which represents a skeleton who reaps only what pushes up from the black soil and rises above it — hands, heads, etc.
Our empirical experience of death is the disappearance from the physical plane of living beings. Such is the fact of our experience from without, that we have by means of our five senses. But the disappearance as such is not confined to the domain of outward experience of the senses. It is experienced also in the domain of inner experience, in that of consciousness. There the images and representations disappear just as living beings do so for the experience of the senses. This is what we call "forgetting". And this forgetting extends each night to the totality of our memory, will and understanding -of a kind such that we forget ourselves entirely. This is what we call "sleep".
For our whole experience (outer and inner) forgetting, sleep and death are three manifestations of the same thing — namely the "thing" which effects disappearance. It is said that sleep is the younger brother of death. It is necessary to add: forgetting is the brother of sleep.
Forgetting, sleep and death are three manifestations — differing in degree — of a sole principle or force which effects the disappearance of intellectual, psychic and physical phenomena. Forgetting is to sleep as sleep is to death. Or again: forgetting is to memory as sleep is to consciousness, and sleep is to consciousness as death is to life.
One forgets, one goes to sleep, and one dies. One remembers, one awakes, and one is born. Remembering is to forgetting as awakening is to falling asleep, and awakening is to sleeping as birth is to death. One forgets oneself when one goes to sleep, and one remembers oneself when one awakes. It is also the mechanism of forgetting which is at work when one dies, and it is the' mechanism of remembering which works at birth. When Nature forgets us, then we die; when we forget ourselves, then we fall asleep; and when we lose active interest in something, then we forget it.
Nevertheless, it must not be forgotten that the respective domains of forgetting, sleep and death are more vast and more profound than intellectual forgetting, organic sleep, and clinical death. Apart from intellectual forgetting there is also forgetting in the domain of the soul (psychic forgetting) and a forgetting in the domain of the will, just as there is memory in the domain of the soul and memory in the domain of the will — beyond intellectual memory. Thus, for example, one can retain a clear and precise intellectual memory of a friend from the past but at the same time have completely forgotten him psychically. One recalls, but without the living friendship of former times. Similarly, one can remember a person intellectually and psychically, i.e. with vivid feeling, but at the same time have forgotten him in the domain of the will. One remembers him with tenderness perhaps, but one does nothing for him.
Beyond organic sleep, i.e. when one is in bed and oblivious of everything including oneself, there is psychic sleep and a sleep of the will. During the sixteen or eighteen hours that we are in the waking state there are layers of out psychic being which are asleep. During the waking state one is "asleep" to many things facts, people, ideas, God...
And if the Buddha is considered — and venerated — as "fully awake" to the facts of human life such as sickness, old age and death, it is because those who are not Buddhas know that they are asleep with regard to these facts — not intellectually, but psychically and in their will. They "know" it and they do not know it at the same time. For one knows truly when one understands what one knows, when one feels what one has understood, and when one has put into practice what one has understood and felt.
Similarly, beyond clinical death there is a psychic death and a moral death. During our seventy or eighty years of life we bear within us layers of death in our psychic being. There are things which are missing from our psychic and moral being. The absence of faith, hope and love cannot be remedied either by arguments or by exhortations or even by a living example. An act of divine magic — or grace — is necessary to accomplish the infusion of life into that which is dead. And if Christ is worshipped as the Risen One, it is because those who bear death within them know that it is only divine magic which can raise what is dead within them and that the risen Christ is the guarantor of this.
Forgetting, sleep and death — like remembering, waking and birth — have imaginary and symbolic expressions proper to them. Thus black Is the image of forgetting, tufts of grass are the image of sleep, and a skeleton with a scythe is the image of death ... Black is the symbol both of involuntary and natural forgetting and of that voluntary and supernatural forgetting of which St. John of the Cross speaks — this threefold night of the senses, the understanding and the will, in which the union of the soul with God is accomplished. Tufts of grass or leaves are symbol of sleep, because deep sleep is the state where we live a vegetative life. Organic life — breathing, circulation, digestion and growth — continue during sleep without "animality" and "humanity" being present, We are "Plants" when are deep in sleep. And the skeleton is the symbol of death because it reduces phenomenon of the conscious, mobile, living and material man to that which is mineral in him — the skeleton.
Natural forgetting reduces man to animality; natural sleep reduces him vegetality; and natural death reduces him to minerality. The whole problem death, comprising three degrees — forgetting, sleep and death proper, or the Arcanum of death — must therefore be presented to us as the image of a black sphere, beneath which there are tufts of grass and above which there is a skeleton.
And it is precisely the thirteenth Card of the Tarot which presents us this image. The context of the Card is that of the threefold manifestation of the principle of subtraction by way of forgetting, sleep and death. We have here the black soil, the blue and yellow tufts of grass, and also the skeleton mowing. The Card contains still a fourth element, represented on the Card by the human heads and hands, and one foot, to which we shall return later.
The thirteenth Arcanum of the Tarot is therefore that of the principle of subtraction or death, and is the opposite of the principle of addition or life. It is necessary to subtract the Self from the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body in order to understand the mechanism of forgetting; it is necessary to subtract the Self and the astral body, from the etheric body and the physical body in order to obtain the state of sleep; and it is necessary to subtract the Self, the astral body and the etheric body from the physical body in order to obtain the corpse, i.e. the fact of death. These three degrees of subtraction in their totality constitute the process of excarnation, just as the corresponding three degrees of addition constitute the totality of the process of incarnation. For incarnation is the addition of an astral body to the Self, the addition of an etheric body to the astral body and the Self, and lastly the addition of a physical body to the etheric body, the astral body and the Self.
Now, the scythe which is held by the skeleton of the Card represents the work of subtraction. It is this which symbolises the force of excarnation, i.e. that which severs the ties between the Self and the astral body (forgetting), the ties between the astral body and the etheric body (sleep), and the ties between the etheric body and the physical body (death).