The Tarot of Political Philosophy
Video version of the essay below.
Introduction
“In our tarot deck of political philosophy we cannot rest content with any one card, whether fool, magician, or emperor. Only the entire deck permuted will do.” -Beginning with Heidegger
Tarot cards are a symbolic system, a language. They can be used to describe, and evoke, states, situations, and experiences; hopes, longings, fears. A single card tells a story. The entire deck resembles a Torah: “turn it over and turn it over, for everything is in it.”
When Leo Strauss examined the corpus of Platonic dialogues in The City and Man, he derived the importance of the political for Plato partly by observing that the names of several dialogues had a political character, not only when they named famous men of politics, but especially when they named great themes of political life: the Republic and the Laws, for instance.
Turning to the major Arcana of the tarot, the 22 cards at the head of the four suits, do we find traces of the political in their names? The cards traditionally numbered III and IV are the Empress and Emperor. Cards VIII and XI vary by deck but often refer either to Justice or Strength. Temperance, a classical virtue, is card XIV. Judgment - still a political good, however much lacking at any time - is card XX. Let us say that the justice, judgement, strength, and temperance of the Emperor and Empress have a right to be considered matters of political concern (we are proceeding naively: we don’t yet know the meaning of the cards).
Other cards among the 22 recall the theological side of the theologico-political dimension, including both the gods of the city and the gods not of the city. There are those who guard the mysteries and those who participate in them: the Magician (I), the High Priestess (II), the Hierophant (V). Note that the first self-evidently political cards to appear (Empress, Emperor) are both preceded and immediately followed by the theological ones. Divine offices, Aristotle said, are sixth and first in order of importance.
Strauss once wrote: “The greatest literature of the past has so many interesting devils, madmen, beggars, sophists, drunkards, Epicureans, and buffoons.” The tarot has its version: the Fool (0), the Hermit (IX), the Hanged Man (XII), the Devil (XV).
Card VI is the Lovers; has there been a question fitter for political philosophy than what one loves: wisdom, honour, pleasure, power, the good, one’s own? A problem more at the heart of political affairs than the problem of eros? Destruction, or downfall, has its depiction in the Tower (XVI); growth and prosperity in the Sun (XIX). Other celestial figures - the Moon (XVIII) and the Star (XVII) - remind us that the World (XXI) is deeper than the day. Death (XIII) and the Wheel of Fortune (X) round out the azure bell.
Thus at a glance do the cards reveal a concern with the broad scope of human and political life, from death and destruction, to good rule, to the private life of the hermit or fool, to the public religion with its mysteries. I propose the task for an encompassing soul: to read in the Tarot a story of philosophy and law, the city and man. The tarot-ouroboros links the Fool (oh, holy fool!) to the World (oh, holy world!) only through the holy ring of the Arcana.
Politics. Rule. Virtue. Will. Knowledge. Mystery. Power.
The Fool
The most obvious way to begin a study like this one is not the only defensible way. It is as natural to start with the first card of the major Arcana, the Fool, as it is to start from what is more familiarly political in the ordinary course of affairs, where we would search the deck to find a card about which we have something obviously political to say.
Don’t think the Fool is the right starting point precisely on the basis of familiar experience, simply because there are fools aplenty in political life: the foolishness of the Tarot’s fool is nothing ordinary. The card is often read as signifying the carefree joy, exuberance, and excitement of new beginnings that remain blissfully unaware of, or unconcerned by, dangers ahead. As a Dionysian card, it is also Zarathustrian, embodying the love of eternal life and the dancing virtue. It is a card of spontaneity, but also, in the thoughtful interpretation of Waite, “unwisdom,” “the zero or negative which is presupposed by numeration.” In the famous Waite-Rider deck, the fool “pauses at the brink of a precipice among the great heights of the world,” where “he surveys the blue distance before him - its expanse of sky rather than the prospect below.” “He is,” Waite writes, “the spirit in search of experience.” Perhaps there is something of revolutionary significance in this card, which resets the days to zero so that the count may start anew, which it does when it turns from the Fool to the Magician, zero to one.
We could have started not with the Arcana but with the suits — cups, wands, swords, coins — to delimit the political dimension of the Tarot, or the way in which in intersecting with human life as such it cannot help but involve the political side of our lives. Cups, in short, are our emotions. Wands, our energy, passion, will. Swords can depict clarity, decisiveness, pain, danger, intellection. Coins, finally, are the whole familiar world of material woe and well-being. Arguably, coins and swords circumscribe the realm we traditionally consider political: economy and war, guns and money. But of course that is only half the story of the suits, poorly told, and it remains oblivious of everything higher, symbolized in the Arcana, including the Fool and Magician. Let us permit the foolish zero to accompany us to the breaking point of political mathematization.
The Magician
The Magician, or Magus, “means activity, self-realization, striving for power, and he shows an extraordinary vitality.” It is a card of focused energy and creative will. If the fool could remind us of eternal life, eternal return, the ever-present and ongoing return to beginnings, and to the concealed precondition of manifestation (the unwisdom that lies behind wisdom, the zero that lies behind numeration), the Magician could remind us of will to power, control, and mastery, an interpretation of oneself and the world that positions one as master of the world. Together with the last card of the major Arcana, the World, you could tell a large part of the dramatic story of political philosophy, and thus of human destiny, using the relationship of these first two cards of the deck. Consider, for instance, that mode of world-interpretation that culminates in a project of uninhibited technological mastery. Such an attitude is well figured by the Magician (whose meaning is still not therefore bound by that reading alone), provided he sees himself and not the Fool as the true origin. A technological attitude has lost, forgotten, or suppressed the Fool’s relationship to the World. It would be incorrect from every perspective to resolve the difficulty by negating or demeaning the assertive drive of the magician. We could propose that the Fool and the Magician represent, to an extent, what Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik called the Adam A and Adam B of our natures, neither one self-sufficient, both integral to the human being, though this connection is only approximate, since the deeper meaning of the Fool is not simply identical with redemptive man and there is more to the magician than creative mastery of the outer world. The Magician wills, but he does not see his will as thrown projection, in Heidegger’s words. He does not see the Self behind his self-assertiveness. He cannot say “I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live, yet not I but Christ liveth in me”: no one liveth in the magician, who alone commands the seen and unseen forces and powers of existence, shaper of space and time.
The political Magician is enthralled with what he can do and what he has done, but he is at risk of mistaking his magical power for mystical insight into the nature of political affairs. The realm of the political appears for him as material upon which he can impress the forms of his will to power. In Crowley’s deck, there is a symbolic connection between the Magician and the Devil, where the “dark, chthonian part of the creative power” is shown. The Magician is the Founder. Everything depends on how he understands the Nothing in relationship to which he founds Something. Is his Nothing the source of the gift of his creativity, which he honours, shelters, and preserves in his creations? Is it the rich, generous no-thing that is the womb of all everything? Or is it the empty, lawless, abyss, over which he reigns like a God?
Fool and Magician, zero and one, thus embody two crucial aspects of political power and creativity at its most basic root. The Fool without the Magician, the Magician without the Fool, and the Fool and Magician together should signify three basic attitudes towards origin and establishment, chaos and order.
To be continued…perhaps.