Arta ,

Saw some PANDA-s on my way home from the store,

this morning of the second cross-quarter day 2012

Later around the corner I saw this:

A connection with the DRAGON,the Chinese Emblem of the Year 2012,
And on the main drag, Thames St. another Dragon / Panda reference

Panda Bear reflects the theme of the DAY,
ARTA , MOTHER BEAR GODDESS

The Bear Goddess, Mother Honey Paw

Can you think of a caption for the BEAR on THAMES St.?
It would go on the Mailbox image above.

See: Cavern's Wise Woman: The Bear Goddess, Revised byAnnie Welch

and

Eternal Haunted Summer: interview with Anne Welch

for more info on the Mother Bear Goddess

For Equinox Ritual, Northern Hemisphere

Goddess Mabon

Website of the Grove of Manannan Mac Lir of the Order of Bards, Ovates, and Druids
"Continuing to harvest and complete what has been created and worked upon. This might be done again by sharing what one is proud of and what they have accomplished and then acknowledging that. Ritualistically, descending into the underworld and bringing the Mabon back into this world. Sharing or focusing on what aspects of one's own child that you wish to bring back into this world for yourself. Celebrating the harvest by pouring wine or whisky upon the earth and spreading seed from the harvest upon the earth. Sharing of food and wine from the harvest. Calling in the earth good from the wilderness into the warmth of hearth and home, preparing for winter. This is symbolic of moving from the outer world towards the safety and security of the inner world. The inner world maybe the spiritual circle, one's friends, families, or one's own inner self."

"We shift to the lunar circle during the autumn equinox. We celebrate in the Monarch Bear Grove using the lunar circle. It is associated with the element of sea and water and the direction of the west. It focuses upon harvest and its completion. It is a time of balance between dark and light and a shift towards darkness. It is a time we move past the mid-point between the dark and light. It is the time of the full ascendancy of the earth god over the sky god. It is a time of connecting to the underworld. It is the time of the liberation of the spirit, preparing for death, to transcend death. Autumn is about retrieving the spirit of the child-god from the unconscious, before death. Autumn is the time of full adulthood. As we move from adulthood to old age, it is important to retrieve those positive child-lie qualities such as creativity, imagination, idealism, spontaneity, freedom, openness, purity, honesty, being in awe of life, wonderment, being active and creating and doing things, many people have lost their connection to the Mabon and their sacred youth. It is the time to go into the unconscious to retrieve the spiritual child, reconnect to it, bring it back into our lives, before we move to the next stage of death. This retrieval of the eternal child needs to happen constantly, at each Mabon season, and needs to be emphasized for spiritual development. This is an essential aspect for an elder to do before their death because they need to complete the cycle. They need to reclaim and return the child within before death. This is not acknowledged in our society, but this is a very important phase. If someone dies without connection and reclaiming their eternal child, they enter at death into a very dark and dreadful place. It is the Mabon energy of the eternal youth that transcends our physical death, therefore we need to nurture our connection to this throughout our lives in order to be prepared for our death. It's the Mabon who is reborn at the winter solstice.

If we are not connected to our Mabon, how will this occur?

Part of this mythos is how it is essential to keep the Mabon alive.
Above Text FROM: Website of the Grove of Manannan Mac Lir of the Order of Bards, Ovates, and Druids

click for larger version.

FOOL MONKEY TAROT ARGOT by Indigo Merovingian

Synchronystically, at the same moment my fellow and fellah rearch comrades were matching TAROTTE to Movie Posters, grand researcher and scientist of Ojai CA, Indigo Merovingian, created this series on the Monkey and the FOOL card of Tarot.

Cat Concert - David Teniers

Again the figure of the fool mon-key with the apocalyptic trumpet
Cat beast cocert and the Owl/Molech/Satan figure directing the concert.
Same vesica piscis / 3 fish table

Apes celebrating in the ( alchemical ) kitchen by Ferdinand Van Kessel, as always the fool mon-key present.

Mon-key smoking(fire) and drinking with an owl by Ferdinand Van Kessel.

A tavern interior with monkeys smoking and drinking by Ferdinand Van Kessel.
Different authors but same theme - the fool mon-key.

David Teniers prodigal son and the fool mon-key

Wake up time !

Waite gives the Fool the number 0, but in his book discusses the Fool between Judgment, no. 20, and The World, no. 21.

White Sun - may refer to the KETHER, the Crown. In the Golden Dawn system, the Fool corresponds to a path leading downward from KETHER.

Mountains - probably refers to the long mystical journey through the stark mountains. This is one the ways that Waite describes the mystical journey in his other works.

Laurel Wreath - an obvious symbol of Victory, but why does it appear on the Fool, at the beginning of his journey? The answer may be that Waite saw the Fool’s journey as circular, and the Fool is beginning again after completing a previous cycle.

The 8-spoked wheel is a symbol of Spirit, thought of as a fifth element. So perhaps Waite thought of the Fool as the symbol of the spiritual journey.

Flames - same as the flames on the Tree of Life on the Lovers card.

The Hebrew letter Shin can be found in one of the wheels on the tunic. This is possibly a reference to the letter correspondence used by Eliphas Levi. Levi placed the Fool between Judgment and World and gave it the letter Shin. In the Golden Dawn system, the Fool is assigned to Aleph.

However, considerable caution is required before drawing any connections between the Hebrew alphabet and the Waite-Smith cards. A. Grinder points out that Waite stated in a number of places that he did not believe in any systematic correspondence. For example, “But wherever it (Fool) is placed in the series, the correspondence between Trumps Major and the Hebrew Alphabet is ipso facto destroyed” (Shadows of Life and Thought, 190-191), and “It may be well to add that I am not to be included among those who are satisfied that there is a valid correspondence between Hebrew letters and Tarot Trump symbols” (Intro to The Book of Formation, trans. by Knut Stenring, Ktav Publishing House, 13-14).

The symbol on the Fool’s wallet is not clear. It may be a shell and represent the 'good luck' scallops that were carried on pilgrimages. It may be a bird and refer to the Golden Dawn attribution of the Fool to the element of air. Paul Foster Case (The Tarot, p 34) says that it is an eagle. If he is correct, the symbolism is appropriate because Waite says (The Book of Destiny, p 249) “To dream of an eagle in a high place ...is good for those who are starting on some great undertaking.”

This card is assigned to the element Air in the Golden Dawn system. This may explain the hair and tunic blowing.

The white rose may refer to Fool setting off on a Rosicrucian journey. Waite was quite fascinated by the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross. He wrote two books on the subject and regarded the Golden Dawn as a latter day Rosicrucian society. The three founders of the Golden Dawn were members of the “Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia,” the inner order of the Golden Dawn was the “Rosae Rubeae et Aurae Crucis,” and Waite’s own revised Golden Dawn group was the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross. Roses appear on many of the cards (Fool, Magician, Empress, Strength, Death) and seemed to have represented a rich symbolic complex for Waite.

He presents extended discussions, with significant overlap, in “The Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross” p 85ff, “Real History of the Rosicrucians” p 11ff and an article in “New Encyclopedia of Freemasonry.” Elsewhere (“Lamps of Western Mysticism,” p 327), he refers to “the beginning of discernment ...which lies within the centre of the Rose of Dante.” He also makes the interesting comment in “The Occult Sciences” that the Rosicrucian symbol “has no connection with the sublime symbolism of the Oriental world: Egypt, Thebes, Eleusinia and the sanctuaries of antique initiation are innocent of its import. It is a development of the monogram of the monk, Martin Luther, which was a cross-crowned heart rising from the center of an open rose.”

The Cliff in the foreground of the card may be another reference to Rosicrucianism. The mountain or cliff appears on the Fool, Emperor, Lovers(?), Strength (?), Hermit, Death, Temperance(?), Tower, Moon (?), and Judgment. So this forms an important symbolic element in the background of many of the cards.

In the Adeptus Minor Ritual, the mountain is referred to “This is the symbolic Mountain of God in the centre of the Universe, the sacred Rosicrucian Mountain of Initiation, the Mystic mountain of Abiegnus.” Jung (Aion, p 203) says “The Mountain means ascent, particularly the mystical, spiritual ascent to the heights, to the place of Revelation where the spirit is present.” The mystic, Richard of St. Victor, advises: “Ascend that Mountain and learn to know thyself.” In Lamps of Western Mysticism, (p 269) Waite says “...that process which I will call Ascending the Mountains of the Lord.”

In the "Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross," Waite goes through "The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz" ~1616. On page 161, he says the main character is presented with a choice of roads - the first is the short and dangerous, rocky road (Implied in the Fool card?).

A remarkable insight into Waite’s vision of the Fool symbolism is provided by Waite's poem, “At the End of Things,” published in The Collected Poems of Arthur Edward Waite. Access to the poem has been provided by the research of A. Grinder at his A. E. Waite website. Grinder is providing an invaluable service to the Tarot community by locating and posting the Miscellaneous Writings of A. E. Waite.

The poem says:
When I heard that all the world was questing,
I look'd for a palmer's staff.

"Palmer" is a Medieval term that refers to a pilgrim to the Holy Land.

I cast around for a scrip to hold
Such meagre needs...
An old worn wallet was that they gave me,
With twelve old signs on its seven old skins.

The 12 and 7 probably refer to the Zodiacal Signs and the traditional Planets. In other words, the pilgrim started off with the traditional Occult knowledge that Waite refers to as Transcendental Science. (See “The Threefold Division of Mysticism” from the periodical The Unknown World Volume one, number one; Aug. 15, 1894, accessible at http://www.adepti.com/.)

Waite points out that because of the lies and deceits of past occultists, many pilgrims were misled:

The fools fell down in the swamps and marshes;
The fools died hard on the crags and hills;
The lies which cheated, so long repeated,
Deceived...

But the present pilgrim is protected:

But me the scrip and the staff had strengthen'd...
The paths I've taken, of most forsaken,
Do surely lead to an open sea...

And the pilgrim reaches the mystical goal:

Which then was wisdom and which was folly?...
The fool, as I think, at the chasm's brink...
Did, even as I, in the end rejoice...

It has been suggested that W. B. Yeats assisted Waite and Smith in designing the cards. (See Magician footnote #2 for more detail.)

It is interesting therefore to look at the character of the Fool as it appears in Yeats's early plays. The following is from Graf, W. B. Yeats: Twentieth Century Magus (Weiser, 2000), quoting Yeats himself.

I had my Wise Man humble himself to the Fool and receive salvation as a reward... The Fool...wears a mask...which makes him seem less a human being than a principle of the mind.

Later, Graf herself notes These fools possess a wisdom so corrosive that it strips them of their ability to behave appropriately or to be members of the status quo...They appear to be mad, but Yeats, following Plato, suggests that theirs is a divine madness.

In one of his poems, Yeats says I would be - for no knowledge is worth a straw - ignorant and wanton as the dawn.

The appearance of the Rose on the Fool card may also have been influenced by W. B. Yeats. Graf points out tht Yeats often used the symbol of the rose in his writings. She quotes from the Variorum Editions of the Poems (Allt and Alspach, eds., Macmillan, 1987) # 811:

He saw the garden of Eden...and...came to a tall, dark tree..and told to go up...near the top of tree a beautiful woman, like the Goddess of Life...gave him a rose. The reference is to the Shekinah of the QBLH Tree of Life, and the Fool is positioned at the top of the tree in the Golden Dawn system.
Based on original research by (in alphabetical order) A. Grinder and R. O'Neill. To add to this collection of information, please email Robert V. O'Neill.