This podcast episode concludes an in-depth exploration of the Major Arcana tarot cards by analyzing the final stage of the Fool's Journey, focusing on self-integration, facing mortality, and achieving enlightenment through archetypal understanding.
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you're listening to root lock radio [Music]
[Music]
hello and welcome to root lock radio a
podcast for uncloaking
learning and exploring the tarot cards
my name is weston
i live in new york city and i am your host
host
in today's episode we'll conclude our in-depth
in-depth
exploration of the cards of the major arcana
arcana
by looking at what we'll call the final
leg of the fool's journey and we'll see
how the fool has
one final struggle and this is a
struggle with himself
as he works to fully integrate the
lessons he's learned over the course of
his journey
and reaches enlightenment as he goes
through the experiences of dying
and death after that we'll try to make
sense of the fool's journey and look at
the ways that archetypes play into the story
story
and how we can use those archetypes to
help us make sense of the world
around us thank you so much for
listening and i hope you enjoy this fifth
fifth
episode of root lock radio [Music]
[Music]
in our exploration of the cards of the
major arcana we've established
three distinctive legs of the fool's journey
journey
the first is conception through adolescence
adolescence
represented from the cards magician
through the chariot and we see a theme
of development
in which the fool is struggling with society
society
to establish an individual identity the
leg of this journey
ends with the achievement represented in
the chariot card which is a societally
accepted and supported individuality
so what happens is the battle between
the fool and society
is integrated rather than one by one side
side
in the second leg which represents
adulthood we see a theme
of refinement and this is where the
fool is battling over forces in the universe
universe
for control over his light and this leg
ends with the temperance card
in which we see a emotional stability
that stems from a deep
acceptance of the fact that you can't
control the forces of these so again
neither of the sides really win and
instead we have an integration
of the two sides of the battle in the
final leg which we'll explore today
the leg of the journey that we're
looking at is the end of life
and the theme here is of understanding
and the battle
that the fool is having in this final
leg of the journey
is with himself as he struggles
to integrate fully the lessons that he's
learned over the course of his journey
and is put to some of the strongest and
hardest tests
yet and this leg of the journey
culminates with the world card
which represents enlightenment and a holistic
holistic
integration of the various lessons that
the fool has learned so that said
let's start looking at these cards in
depth now recall that we're leaving
at a place of deep emotional stability
represented by the temperance card
that's where we last left the fool on
his journey he has accepted
that he can't control things outside of
himself and
that the universe ultimately will support
support
him the next card is the devil and when
we look at this card we see an echo of
the lovers card but sort of a perversion
of the imagery we have the figure of the
devil instead of the figure of the angel
and we see fiery imagery he's pointing
one hand up towards the sky and holding
a flaming
torch down towards the ground which
reminds us of the
magician's posture and he also has a
pentagram which represents
magic that is used for evil purposes
floating above his
horned head and we also see the lovers
from the lover's card but rather than
being free
and natural instead they're enchained
and they have
horns on their heads but when you look
at the chains they're not particularly tight
tight
it looks like they could probably just
slip them over their heads if they chose to
to
so they're actually in a chosen
state of enchantment and so this card
speaks of addictions of all kinds
whether sexual or materialistic or
substance abuse or even just routines
anything that kind of prevents yourself
from having spiritual growth any sort
of thing that enchains you so that you
are stuck
and in the course of the fool's journey
i consider this the beginning of a
three-card sequence that i call the divorce
divorce
sequence and this is where the fool realizes
realizes
that he is stuck and i think that
marriage is a perfect way to think about
this because what we see on the card
is an echo of the romantic lovers card
so what happens often is that people stay
stay
in something like a marriage long after
it fulfills them spiritually just
because it's the routine and it seems
kind of unfathomable to break out of
something that's such a foundation
of your earthly existence but at this
point the fool
has learned lessons that when things change
change
and when he takes a leap of faith that
the universe will ultimately support him
and so
i see the devil card as sort of being
this turning point
of recognizing the chains and recognizing
recognizing
the stuckness of being in a situation
that is no longer
feeding his spirit and having the strength
strength
and the trust in the universe to get out
of it so the devil card is this important
important
turning point that draws on the strength
that we see in the
strength card and the emotional
stability and trust
that we see in the temperance card when
the devil card comes up in a tarot
reading you want to think about things like
like
addiction or materialism or any sort of
unhealthy pattern anything that sort of
enchains you
and is not good for your spiritual
growth the next card
card number 16 is the tower and this is
one of the most intense
cards in the tarot deck and i consider
this card to be
probably actually the scariest card more
so than the hanged man
or the death card or the devil card now
when you look at the tower card you can
kind of see why that is we see an
image of a tower being struck down by
the forces of the universe
so archetypally a tower is something
that is built
over time it's sort of a fortress but it
can also
symbolize stuckness or isolation when we
think about rapunzel
right she's stuck up in her tower she's
isolated from the rest of the world
and a lot of times marriages can
become a sort of tower that isolates you
from the rest of the world and that's
been built over so much time that it's
so structured
and so rigid and that's where the tower
comes into this divorce sequence
we see a lot of air energy but it's
being destroyed by
fire energy right the stone tower is
being struck down by
fire so we have a spiritual rupturing
of sort of what we think is right the
the passion
comes through and destroys what our
knowledge or our mind or our logic
tells us is what we're supposed to be doing
doing
and then we see these two figures in a
free fall
right falling out of the windows of the
tower and they don't know where they're
gonna land or even if they're gonna survive
survive
so the tower represents a total collapse
of systems
that we've come to rely on and a really apt
apt
situation to think of in relation to
this is of course 9 11
where we saw towers fall and the whole world
world
changed because of it it rearranged reality
reality
because when those towers fell all the
systems that we had come to rely on
as a society were called into question
and rearranged so in the course of the
journey i consider this the moment of
divorce and this is sort of where the
rug is pulled out from under you
but it's much bigger than a rug right
it's your entire life
structure and you're thrown into this
freefall where you don't know where
you'll land
or even if you'll really survive so when
you lose
your life partner and your home life and
you have to start over
completely all of these structures that
you've come to rely on
collapse and that's what the moment of
the tower card
is if you pull the tower card in a
reading it
speaks to this sort of collapse or
massive restructuring and the universe
forcing you out of a situation
now this can seem really traumatizing
right but you want to look at the big
picture when you pull a card like the
tower and look at the sequence
in the major arcana in which it fits
right so before the tower we have the devil
devil
so the thing that we're stuck in is
actually not serving us spiritual it's
not helping us grow
so it needs to end even if it is
something that we
have become so used to and reliant on
and then when we look at the card
after the tower we have one of the most
beautiful and peaceful and serene cards
in the entire
tarot deck which is the star so if you
ever pull
the tower in a tarot reading for
yourself or someone else
it's important to emphasize that what is
ending what is collapsing
needs to collapse and that what comes
after will be
peaceful and serene and beautiful and
the payoff
will be worth it and that brings us to
this beautiful card
the star which is number 17. on the card
the star
we see an echo of the temperance card
it's also a maturation
of the temperance card so we see a nude woman
woman
and so we have this nakedness which represents
represents
the layers between you and the world and
the universe being stripped away
when you are able to be nude uh
especially in a natural environment like
she is you you
suddenly feel and understand how you are
actually a part
of nature a part of the universe as a
whole rather than something separate
from it which is often how we think
about ourselves
so that's where the nakedness comes into
play in the star card
and we also see water and earth imagery which
which
we'll remember from the temperance card
has a lot to do with emotional stability
but there's even more of a trust in that
there's this nudity
and the emotions are free-flowing
they're not so contained
right she's not containing the water and
pouring it between
two cups she's pouring it out into the
water and onto the earth so the emotions
no longer need to be
contained in order to be stable
in fact the free-flowingness of the
emotional energy
is part of the stability in this card
and then we also see these stars shining
above which speaks
not just to a connection with the earth
but a connection with the universe
and we also see a bird in the tree and birds
birds
with their flight represent freedom and
with this card i like to think about
those times where you are out in nature
far far away from the city in any light
pollution and you look up at the sky
and you see the milky way and you see
all those stars
and it's such an awe-inspiring sight to
see isn't it
and it makes you feel very small but also
also
very in awe with the fact that you're a
part of it it's a very humbling and
wondering and awe inspiring experience
and so the star card speaks to this sort
of channel
opening between yourself and the
universe a full
opening of the spiritual channel where
your soul integrates into the universe
as a whole and you wouldn't be able to
achieve this if you had stayed
in the stuckness so this is the
spiritual growth
payoff of acknowledging the stuckness in
the devil card
and going through the collapse of the
tower so in the journey
this is sort of the calm after the storm
so after the fool goes through this divorce
divorce
where all the structures that he had
come to rely on have collapsed
he finds this new calmness and openness
and the fact that this figure on the
card is naked
really is different from the nudity that
we see
in the devil card where they have chains
around their necks
that nakedness speaks to the addiction
that can come with things like sexuality
whereas this nakedness is a true freedom
and openness
so if you pull the star card in a
reading this is
representing sort of this opening of the
spiritual channels
this connection to an awareness of the fabric
fabric
of the universe and i like to think of
the carl sagan quote where he says we
are made of star stuff
right our bodies are made of the same
things that the stars are made of and
it's this beautiful
idea that we too are part of the fabric
of the universe
that god or whatever way you want to
conceive of the greater force of the universe
universe
is not separate from us we are as much a
part of it
as the stars are so going from the lovely
lovely
star card into the moon card is a moment
of trial
and this is where we see a contradiction
or a
reaction against the previous card and
this is one of few cards where we don't see
see
any human figures right so we look at
this card and we see some dogs we see a
crab we see the moon but there's no
human which is rare
in these major arcana cards the only
other place we've seen that was the
wheel of fortune which
introduced us to this idea that there
are forces in the universe that we
cannot control
and the lack of a human in the moon card introduces
introduces
us to the idea of illusion
in this card the moon is an archetype of
illusion so it's not actually a producer
of light like the sun is but it's a reflector
reflector
so when we look up at a bright full moon
in the sky
it's not the same thing as having light
shining down on us directly from the sun
there's an illusion there's kind of a
smoke and mirrors
scenario happening and the moon that we
see in this card is between two towers
which is just as we saw the sun setting
in the death card
so it's sort of saying if you take a
closer look at that sun
it might actually just be the moon what
you saw is not what you thought it was
and we also have the same blue washing
across the land which is a wave
of emotion and the dog's howling at the
moon which
makes us think of like craziness or lunacy
lunacy
and a crab or some sort of lobster
emerging from a body of water
and if we remember that the body of
water is often a representation of the subconscious
subconscious
this is some nasty little memory or idea
emerging from our subconscious so what
this card represents
is illusion or this sort of craziness or lunacy
lunacy
that we can have not seeing things for
what they are
and it's very different from the star
card in the star card you look up the
universe and you feel like you're a part
of it
in the moon card you look up at the
universe and you feel afraid
so in the in the course of the fool's
journey this is the beginning of the
death sequence
and this is where the fool is told that
he's going to die
maybe he is diagnosed with a terminal illness
illness
or otherwise facing some sort of
imminent death
and this puts all of this to a test
right because death is the true unknown
everything else
we kind of at least know life will go on
so if you get divorced or
if you lose a loved one or if your life
changes in some big
significant way you at least have the
comfort of knowing
that the knowable the life will continue
but when facing your own death it's the
first time that you can't rely on the comfort
comfort
of what is known so this is where fear
truly crops up and that's why the moon card
card
represents this moment it's this
illusion of
thinking that you had a grasp on what
part you play in the universe
but that all coming into question again
when you're told that you will die
so if you pull this card it means often
things like illusion
or fear madness or craziness
and it's urging you to look wider and deeper
deeper
and to understand the innate illusion of everything
everything
everything that we see even our bodies
and our brains
everything we know about life is an
illusion because life
is temporary and the only thing that's
permanent is the
greater fabric of the universe but we're
still a part of that so the moon card is
urging you to
to widen the scope and to see these things
things
rather than fear the illusion and
when we come to terms with that this
brings us to card 19 which is the sun
and again we have a strong reaction
against the moon card
and when you look at this card you see
the sun shining brightly in the sky
and if you compare it to the moon it's a
more direct
type of light so on the moon card we
have this face looking down on the sun
it's looking right at us in the moon we
have these little rays
poking out in the sun they're waving and
filling the entire sky
so where the moon represents illusion
the sun represents
pure truth we also see a baby riding on
a horse
and the baby is naked right which
represents again
this comfort this nakedness this unity
with the universe
that we saw on the star card but it's
also represented
in a child here which is sort of an innocence
innocence
and the child is on a horse waving a
banner which makes us think of victory
and the child also has open arms pure
ready to embrace sort of posture and
behind the child we see the stone wall
right this airy intellectual energy of a
stone wall but these sunflowers have grown
grown
higher than the wall so that is sort of this
this
overcoming of the illusion the intellect
is what drives us to fear something like death
death
something unknown because we can't
really conceive of it with our earthly minds
minds
and while it's the job of the intellect
to try to understand
everything philosophy cannot explain death
death
so in the sun card the sunflowers tell
us that we've
finally overcome this illusion and we've
accepted that we cannot explain or
understand it but we can face it and
trust it
so what happens is spirituality outgrows
intellectuality and spirituality offers
us this deep
trust in that which is beyond our human lives
lives
so in the fool's journey this is sort of
the return to innocence
at the end of life and a lot of times
very old or terminally ill people
if they truly accept their imminent
death will
have this sort of childlike joy and
wonder at the world
even if they've been sort of stiff or
cold people in life so this is sort of
the ebeneezer scrooge
situation right where he's been this
person who's very
stuck on the earthly successes
of his life while at the same time being
rather spiritually devoid
but as soon as he sees beyond himself
he sheds all that and comes into a sort
of pure
joy so in a tarot reading this
represents a return to innocence
a pure childlike joy rooted in a trust
of the universe
and that we cannot understand you can
expect this card means happiness
or enlightenment and when you look at
that word right enlightenment
it has the word light in it and one way
to think of enlightenment
is as this flooding of light spiritual
light that comes in and
fills the dark crevices that your
earthly intellect cannot
access and the sun is the source of
light it can mean
appreciation or joyful mindfulness so
the sun card represents about as
enlightened as you can be
still being a physical earthly human but
there's still
more of the journey to go as we cross over
over
to the other side and out of our human lives
lives
and that's what happens in card 20
judgment and i consider
this card 20 judgment to be the true
death card but it's an enlightened death without
without
fear or resistance so whereas the death
card represents
approximation to death or reckoning with
or grappling with the idea of death the
judgment card
represents the true moment of death once you've
you've
come to terms with the temporality of
life so on this card we see
bodies standing up in graves and we see
men women children and other people in
the background
and this shows us that death unites humanity
humanity
so all else is trivial because we don't
really know what happens beyond our
human lives
but it's something that we all are
connected by every one of us
will die we see the trumpeting angel in
the sky
and this is the call of god or the
universe for us to cross over
and see what we cannot see in our
earthly bodies the sky is blue so we
know this is
joyous and then we have these mountains
in the background which means that there is
is
some knowledge to be obtained here so
we're moving
past our earthly knowledge and into the
type of knowledge that only the
enlightenment that comes with
death can bring so in the journey this
represents the moment in which the fool dies
dies
but he dies bringing the joy of the sun card
card
into that moment and the total
acceptance and lack of fear
about what's going to happen next he
brings all that he's learned
into that moment of death and he trusts
the universe
completely and this is how you'd
preferably like to die right
no fear total trust and embracing
as we see in the figures of this card of
this moment
of this crossing over you're ready and curious
curious
and open to what's gonna happen so in a
tarot card reading again
this isn't going to be a prediction of
death and if it
is then it's a very beautiful one but
instead i would read it as sort of a calling
calling
right a moment of truth acting without fear
fear
but with trust and the card is urging
you to follow that trumpet so if you're
kind of considering doing something and
you're not sure whether or not you should
should
and you pull the judgment card it's
saying go for it this is a calling
and you can't understand right now why
you're being called to do this because
you don't know what's on the other side
but you have to follow this calling and
this brings us to the final
card of the major arcana which is the
world and i'd like to say briefly that
i almost never draw this card which is
pretty interesting because it's such a
powerful card
it seems that when you draw it in a
tarot reading
over some earthly situation that you're facing
facing
that it almost trivializes the card so i
find it just sort of
oddly fitting that it hardly ever comes
up in tarot readings
now i'll remind you that this card is
the integration
of the male and female energy the high priestess
priestess
and magician masculine and feminine
energy and this is something we explored
pretty in depth in episode two and this
is where
true integration has been obtained we
can also see it in the number of the
card right
21 is two and one so one is the magician
two is the high priestess and we see
them merging
in this card even in the number so in
the center of this card we have this
floating figure
and as i mentioned when i first
introduced the balance of feminine and
masculine in this card in classic decks
this figure is depicted as intersex than
having a penis
which again we're embodying both the
male and female
in this card but this figure is floating
right so the fool is ascending
beyond the earthly being there's no
gravity there's no
earthly rules applying to this person
and we have this
wreath surrounding the fool wreaths
often represent
victory right so we have this moment of achievement
achievement
and victory but the wreath also looks
like zero
right and zero's the number that
represents god or the universe
so it's sort of like god or the universe
is acknowledging
that you have come the full way and you
have accomplished
everything that you can in this life we
see the four
fixed signs of the zodiac around the
corners of the card which reminds us of
the wheel of fortune
but we no longer have them studying books
books
as we did in the wheel of fortune and
that's because they've learned
everything that they need to learn
right so they're no longer in a learning
phase everything has been
integrated and you'll notice that the
eagle is
in a white cloud unlike the gray clouds
of the other
figures this is because the eagle which
is the
highest level of the scorpio is also a
symbol of spiritual ascendance
which is what's happening in this card
the figure of the fool is floating out
of the earthly life and ascending into a spiritual
spiritual
existence so in the course of the fool's journey
journey
this is the end of our human life and
this is the time
where we cross over into the unknown
but the fool has attained enlightenment and
and
when the fool is absorbed back into the
energetic fabric of the universe
and into this place that is humans we
can no longer follow the fool
we can't really understand what's gonna
happen but we know that that we can
trust it
in a sense the fool is becoming god
because the fool is being absorbed back into
into
the fabric of the universe which in
itself is our
concept of god within the terror so
after death and especially an
enlightened death we just become
the universe ourselves and this is not
unlike the concept of enlightenment
in buddhist philosophy now if you do
draw the world card in a tarot reading
which i mentioned
at least in my experience isn't a very
common thing
you can see it as a major achievement or attainment
attainment
the world card speaks to accomplishment
and achievement
it's a real coronation or culmination moment
moment
but it also comes with a perfect
understanding or enlightenment
so it's a card of clarity as well so in
other words
drawing the world card into tarot
reading is this perfect
blend of achievement enlightenment and clarity
clarity
it's really a capstone moment in the
narrative it cannot be
exceeded or improved upon [Music]
[Music]
an important question to ask after
exploring the fool's journey
is what purpose does this journey serve
to those of us who are studying tarot
and i think there are a few ways to
answer this question
the first is that the fool's journey
provides us with a number of
archetypes an archetype is
sort of a major symbol that we use
to make sense of the world carl young
the renowned psychologist was very
interested in archetypes
and he talked about how they fit into
the collective unconscious
and fed into these ideas that we all
have and inherit from our culture
that determine how we think act and
react to things
a good example in the tarot of this
comes in the empress and emperor cards
which represent the archetypal mother
and father
in the tarot we associate the empress
card with nurturing and we associate the
emperor card with
disciplining so archetypally the mother
is the nurturer and the father is the disciplinarian
disciplinarian
and we can see in our culture how these archetypes
archetypes
feed into our everyday experiences
if a mother is a disciplinarian and a father
father
is a nurturer this is seen as sort of
some kind of exception
and people find it very interesting or upsetting
upsetting
or exciting depending on their stance about
about
traditional values and this also feeds
into the roles that society
expect men and women to play out women
are expected to be nurturing and more gentle
gentle
whereas men are expected to be powerful and
and
in charge and you need to look no
further than the
2016 presidential election to see
how fascinated and stuck on these roles
our culture is that election can be read
not only as a battle between a man
and a woman but also as a battle between
those that accept and those that reject
the archetypal roles that men and women
are expected to play now a lot can be
said about the archetypes that you see
in the major arcana cards of the tarot
and of course i've said
quite a bit over the last three episodes
if you're interested in learning more
or going more in depth with this a great
resource is a podcast called the
archetypal tarot
podcast it's created by two women named
sendera quackenbush and julian javeaux
and in each episode they pick a
particular major arcana tarot card
and explore the ways that the archetype
of this
card play out in our culture and our
ideas and the way we think about the world
world
so if you have an interest in the
archetypes of the major arcana
i would recommend checking out that
podcast again it's called the archetypal tarot
tarot
podcast and i've put a link in the show notes
notes
now most of us are interested in using
the tarot
as a tool to help us through life and
the archetypes
in the major arcana cards are a resource for
for
that it's unlikely that anyone's life
will actually play out
exactly like the fool's journey but the
nature of archetypes is that they give us
us
a sort of template to understand the
phases of our lives
which are in some ways universal
you can think of a single card and how
it relates to
a particular situation you're going
through or a particular phase in your
life that you are
in but i also think that the major
arcana urges us to zoom
out and to look at the big picture to
expand the scope with which
we look at the situations we are in
and for this reason i think it's helpful
to think of
the major arcana as being a series of overlapping
overlapping
three-card sequences similar to the past
present future spread that we talked
about in a previous episode
i hinted at this when i talked about the
the divorce
sequence with the devil tower and star
cards and in that sequence the devil represents
represents
the pre-divorced time where the people
involved in the relationship
are stuck in toxic patterns and don't
really know
how to get out of it of course they can
choose to end
the relationship at any time but they're
chained by their own reliance
on the relationship and they're also
afraid of what the tower
will bring that collapse of the things
that they've come to rely on
but if you're in a sort of devil situation
situation
fearing the tower the star card on the
other side of the tower
offer some motivation and solace
for what you are going through if you know
know
that you will ultimately get to a calmer
more peaceful
and more open place you're more
likely to endure the trauma of the tower
car the trauma of that collapse
with some sense of a light at the other
end of the tunnel
so anytime you draw a major arcana card
whether it's
positive or negative i urge you to think
about the card that comes before
and the card that comes after it as well
and this will give you an idea of sort of
of
where you are in the arc of the narrative
narrative
so there's some therapeutic value to
using the major arcana cards in this way
and whether you choose to draw cards at random
random
or select cards to sort of meditate on
and focus on
while you're going through something the
archetypes presented in these cards can
help us make sense of our lives
the major arcana cards are urging us to zoom
zoom
out and see the big picture which is a
very useful tool when you're feeling
very stuck in the moment
in our next episode we'll start talking
about the minor arcana cards
root lock radio is written and produced
by me westin
music for today's show was provided by
shenandoah davis and giaray
you can find both of their informations
in the show notes
you can also find a link to the rootlock
tarot website where you'll find
notes about each of the cards that we
discussed in today's episode as well as
previous episodes
and if you'd like to reach me send me an
email at rootlocktaro
gmail.com thank you so much for
listening and i hope you'll join me next
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