Tarot Goes to the Movies:
Soul & Universal Becoming
Soul & Universal Becoming
Top-down or Bottom-up, the Tarot is
The Great Work &
Path of Initiation
The Great Work &
Path of Initiation
The Symbol is the Reality
Imagination is an Active & Creative Faculty
Imagination is an Active & Creative Faculty
DIGITAL TAROT: MAJOR ARCANA
The 22 Tropes
A new naivete, veiled by an ambiguous layer of complex irony.
"The world is a universal trope of the mind -- a symbolic image of it." --Novalis
The 22 Tropes
A new naivete, veiled by an ambiguous layer of complex irony.
"The world is a universal trope of the mind -- a symbolic image of it." --Novalis
Sean P. Barnett
Have you ever been curious about the Tarot? Is it already part of your spiritual practice, or are you scared to venture into the world of the occult? Did you know that occult simply means "hidden?"
I know that Tarot cards have been used as a source of "fortune-telling" for centuries. But through my exposure to the work of Aleister Crowley and James Hillman, I have come to see the Tarot as a gateway to a place betwixt this world and the other world, a tool to explore the hidden crevices and caverns within the psyche.
James Hillman, in a Q & A session he gave on his book, "A Blue Fire," cautions explorers of dreams to refrain from grasping at the meaning of the images that arise in the land betwixt worlds. To attempt to label and make sense of the image is to snatch up a puff of smoke. To grab at it is to destroy it.
By allowing the image to BE for as long as it is entertained by the observer's attention, provides a well of infinite data.
My mentor, spirit-mother, and muse Iona Miller has doggedly produced another captivating body of ART. I am already using this in conjunction with my Tarot practice. Each day I will provide one of the 22 tropes of the Major Arcana through a series of videos that use Hollywood to explore the chasms of the psyche.
Do as you will with it...I enjoy bringing myself to a state of centered presence, letting go of all thought or desire to "figure it out." I enjoy allowing the sounds and images of these videos to dance into the shadows and reveal parts of the psyche that haven't seen the light for a while.
Starting with the 0 card (The Fool), allow the wisdom, the nonsense, and the hilarity of the fool within, to be seen, honored, welcomed, and celebrated.
Enjoy
Have you ever been curious about the Tarot? Is it already part of your spiritual practice, or are you scared to venture into the world of the occult? Did you know that occult simply means "hidden?"
I know that Tarot cards have been used as a source of "fortune-telling" for centuries. But through my exposure to the work of Aleister Crowley and James Hillman, I have come to see the Tarot as a gateway to a place betwixt this world and the other world, a tool to explore the hidden crevices and caverns within the psyche.
James Hillman, in a Q & A session he gave on his book, "A Blue Fire," cautions explorers of dreams to refrain from grasping at the meaning of the images that arise in the land betwixt worlds. To attempt to label and make sense of the image is to snatch up a puff of smoke. To grab at it is to destroy it.
By allowing the image to BE for as long as it is entertained by the observer's attention, provides a well of infinite data.
My mentor, spirit-mother, and muse Iona Miller has doggedly produced another captivating body of ART. I am already using this in conjunction with my Tarot practice. Each day I will provide one of the 22 tropes of the Major Arcana through a series of videos that use Hollywood to explore the chasms of the psyche.
Do as you will with it...I enjoy bringing myself to a state of centered presence, letting go of all thought or desire to "figure it out." I enjoy allowing the sounds and images of these videos to dance into the shadows and reveal parts of the psyche that haven't seen the light for a while.
Starting with the 0 card (The Fool), allow the wisdom, the nonsense, and the hilarity of the fool within, to be seen, honored, welcomed, and celebrated.
Enjoy
‘Fool’s Cap Map of the World’ (1580–1590),
Latin inscription reads: ‘the number of fools is infinite.’
Latin inscription reads: ‘the number of fools is infinite.’
"You would not find out the boundaries of the soul, even by traveling along every path: so deep a measure does it have." (Heraclitus in G.S. Kirk and J.E. Raven’s The PreSocratic Philosophers, 1984)
"It became increasingly plain to me that the mandala is the center. It is the exponent of all paths. It is the path to the center, to individuation.” -Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections
"It became increasingly plain to me that the mandala is the center. It is the exponent of all paths. It is the path to the center, to individuation.” -Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections
TROPOLOGICAL HERMENEUTICS
THE 22 Tropes & The Tarot Mandala
THE 22 Tropes & The Tarot Mandala
Engaging the Numinous
All tropes use recognizable visuals, language, and sounds to easily convey ideas. The term trope derives from the Greek τρόπος (tropos), "turn, direction, way", derived from the verb τρέπειν (trepein), "to turn, to direct, to alter, to change"...twists and turns in pathways through the major metaphors of the Epoch. The Tropes are synonymous with the Tree of Life paths.
A literary trope is the use of figurative language, via word, phrase or an image, for artistic effect such as using a figure of speech. The word trope also describes commonly recurring literary and rhetorical devices, motifs or clichés in creative works. any literary or rhetorical device, as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony, that consists in the use of words in other than their literal sense. A "trope" is a "figure of speech." In storytelling, a trope is a conceptual figure of speech, a storytelling shorthand.
"To the extent that I managed to translate the emotions into images – that is to say, to find the images which were concealed in the emotions – I was inwardly calmed and reassured. Had I left those images hidden in the emotions, I might have been torn to pieces by them."
--Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Page 177
"I want very much to tell, to talk about, the wholeness inside every human being. It's a strange thing that every human being has a sort of dignity or wholeness in him, and out of that develops relationships to other human beings, tensions, misunderstandings, tenderness, coming in contact, touching and being touched, the cutting off of a contact and what happens then." --quoted in Ingmar Bergman Directs (1972) by John Simon
"We have to see what our own living psyche proposes as a symbolic life form in which we can live. Hence, Jung often insists on something which he did in his own life: when a dream symbol comes up in a dominating form, one should take the trouble to reproduce it in a picture, even if one does not know how to draw, or cut it in stone, even if one is not a sculptor, and relate to it in some real manner. One should not go off from the analytical hour forgetting all about it, letting the ego organize the rest of the day; rather one should stay with the symbols of one's dreams the whole day and try to see where they want to enter the reality of one's life. This is what Jung means when he speaks of living the symbolic life.” --ML von Franz, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales
"The most effective weapon against the flux of nature is art. Religion, ritual, and art began as one, and a religious or metaphysical element is still present in all art. Art, no matter how minimalist, is never simply design. It is always a ritualistic reordering of reality. The enterprise of art, in a stable collective era or an unsettled individualistic one, is inspired by anxiety. Every subject localized and honored by art is endangered by its opposite. Art is a shutting in in order to shut out. Art is a ritualistic binding of the perpetual motion machine that is nature. The first artist was a tribal priest casting a spell, fixing nature’s daemonic energy in a moment of perceptual stillness. Fixation is at the heart of art, fixation as stasis and fixation as obsession. The modern artist who merely draws a line across a page is still trying to tame some uncontrollable aspect of reality. Art is spellbinding. Art fixes the audience in its seat, stops the feet before a painting, fixes a book in the hand. Contemplation is a magic act." —Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae.
"Everyone who becomes conscious of even a fraction of his unconscious gets outside his own time and social stratum into a kind of solitude." -Carl Jung, CW 14, Page 258.
Archetypal symbolism is an aesthetic experience, as is symbolic interaction with our ancestors, the archetypal background, and primal states of consciousness of the life-world. We interact through the meaning of symbols, by interpreting and reacting.
Is there a difference between meaning and satisfaction response? Transliminality, "going beyond the threshold", is “susceptibility to, and awareness of, large volumes of imagery, ideation, and affect – these phenomena being generated by subliminal, supraliminal, and/or external input” (Thalbourne et al., 1997, p. 327).Aug 15, 2008
We each have symbolic meaning to be revealed. Symbols bridge the gap between perceptual reality and and what we understand. Archetypal images reflect objective truths about the decisions we make in everyday life. Blake called imagination "the Divine Body," summoning the notion of magism, uniting original nature and the present universe.
James Hillman’s aesthetic approach to dream images translate directly to imagery as scene, as context, as mood. Hillman noted the image doesn’t lead somewhere else like a story. We can find nowhere to go but more deeply into the image.
Tarot is a soul-making art, a sacred participatory act correlating experiences in the world with universal symbols, a process of remembrance of the soul’s journey and calling. Each spread reflects the soul's passage through a unique archetypal structure, each time living, growing, and creating from that specific archetypal matrix.
Tarot us the confluence of a person, object, and event. We are central to the mysteries we search for through matter in the objective world, as well as soul and spirit in the subjective world -- nature exposed to our questioning method.
Even a 3-card spread has half a million possibilities to reveal potential of combinations. permutations, and placement based on the situation and way the question is asked. All our words come from just 26 letters.
The images do not become pinned down by any particular interpretation, are never literalized into any single fixed concept or "meaning. Instead we return, drawn again and again to an experiential "living in the image," with new meanings potentially emerging over time as we go "more deeply into the image." Hillman suggests that images acquire autonomy and operate according to their own will, similar to gods.
Hillman’s approach to image is deeply rooted in the work of the French phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard. The image is a free expression created not from pressure but from play, not from necessity but from inventiveness -- the way we engage and embrace the world. Imagination is more than the stuff-sack of trauma; it is the cradle of renewal, a genesis, rather than effect. Imagination mobilizes the potencies of transformation.
In his Poetics of Space, Bachelard says, "By the swiftness of its actions, the imagination separates us from the past as well as from reality; it faces the future. To the function of reality, wise in the experience of the past, should be added a function of irreality, which is equally positive. Any weakness in the function of irreality will hamper the productive psyche. If we cannot imagine, we cannot foresee."
Our self-reference rests on a perceptual dimension of presence-openness not ‘closed’ within any conceptual system. As long as the images are not trapped in a single meaning, they continue as an animating, enlivening presence. You will quickly discover the ancestors various aesthetic preferences. These are forms, styles and archetypes that are inherent in their makeup. Aesthetic satisfaction validates the process.
Joseph Campbell said, "The object becomes aesthetically significant when it becomes metaphysically significant." Clarity is the "aha" quality -- privileged 'moments of grace.' Transient moments of grace and transformation put meaning into aesthetic arrest and creativity that is an intuitive awareness of the required action. The innocent viewer is stopped dead in their tracks and has no choice but to stare in awe at their relationship with the living world.
Aesthetic engagement is active engagement with the process -- engagement with the element of beauty and systemic wisdom. Aesthetic arrangement and metaphorical thought squeeze out the real meaning and value of our experience and the comprehensive properties of our relationships through 'wise relating.'
Art is significant life activity and a way to access systemic wisdom and connectiveness. We cultivate inner beauty in the life-changing play of our own natural history. Information is the stuff of relationship and the living world of context, relevance and integration. The conjunction of the spiritual and aesthetic is a Royal Marriage -- a grand synthesis of wholeness, our frail and mortal selves, revealed in their beauty over the epic panoply of history and myth.
All tropes use recognizable visuals, language, and sounds to easily convey ideas. The term trope derives from the Greek τρόπος (tropos), "turn, direction, way", derived from the verb τρέπειν (trepein), "to turn, to direct, to alter, to change"...twists and turns in pathways through the major metaphors of the Epoch. The Tropes are synonymous with the Tree of Life paths.
A literary trope is the use of figurative language, via word, phrase or an image, for artistic effect such as using a figure of speech. The word trope also describes commonly recurring literary and rhetorical devices, motifs or clichés in creative works. any literary or rhetorical device, as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony, that consists in the use of words in other than their literal sense. A "trope" is a "figure of speech." In storytelling, a trope is a conceptual figure of speech, a storytelling shorthand.
"To the extent that I managed to translate the emotions into images – that is to say, to find the images which were concealed in the emotions – I was inwardly calmed and reassured. Had I left those images hidden in the emotions, I might have been torn to pieces by them."
--Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Page 177
"I want very much to tell, to talk about, the wholeness inside every human being. It's a strange thing that every human being has a sort of dignity or wholeness in him, and out of that develops relationships to other human beings, tensions, misunderstandings, tenderness, coming in contact, touching and being touched, the cutting off of a contact and what happens then." --quoted in Ingmar Bergman Directs (1972) by John Simon
"We have to see what our own living psyche proposes as a symbolic life form in which we can live. Hence, Jung often insists on something which he did in his own life: when a dream symbol comes up in a dominating form, one should take the trouble to reproduce it in a picture, even if one does not know how to draw, or cut it in stone, even if one is not a sculptor, and relate to it in some real manner. One should not go off from the analytical hour forgetting all about it, letting the ego organize the rest of the day; rather one should stay with the symbols of one's dreams the whole day and try to see where they want to enter the reality of one's life. This is what Jung means when he speaks of living the symbolic life.” --ML von Franz, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales
"The most effective weapon against the flux of nature is art. Religion, ritual, and art began as one, and a religious or metaphysical element is still present in all art. Art, no matter how minimalist, is never simply design. It is always a ritualistic reordering of reality. The enterprise of art, in a stable collective era or an unsettled individualistic one, is inspired by anxiety. Every subject localized and honored by art is endangered by its opposite. Art is a shutting in in order to shut out. Art is a ritualistic binding of the perpetual motion machine that is nature. The first artist was a tribal priest casting a spell, fixing nature’s daemonic energy in a moment of perceptual stillness. Fixation is at the heart of art, fixation as stasis and fixation as obsession. The modern artist who merely draws a line across a page is still trying to tame some uncontrollable aspect of reality. Art is spellbinding. Art fixes the audience in its seat, stops the feet before a painting, fixes a book in the hand. Contemplation is a magic act." —Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae.
"Everyone who becomes conscious of even a fraction of his unconscious gets outside his own time and social stratum into a kind of solitude." -Carl Jung, CW 14, Page 258.
Archetypal symbolism is an aesthetic experience, as is symbolic interaction with our ancestors, the archetypal background, and primal states of consciousness of the life-world. We interact through the meaning of symbols, by interpreting and reacting.
Is there a difference between meaning and satisfaction response? Transliminality, "going beyond the threshold", is “susceptibility to, and awareness of, large volumes of imagery, ideation, and affect – these phenomena being generated by subliminal, supraliminal, and/or external input” (Thalbourne et al., 1997, p. 327).Aug 15, 2008
We each have symbolic meaning to be revealed. Symbols bridge the gap between perceptual reality and and what we understand. Archetypal images reflect objective truths about the decisions we make in everyday life. Blake called imagination "the Divine Body," summoning the notion of magism, uniting original nature and the present universe.
James Hillman’s aesthetic approach to dream images translate directly to imagery as scene, as context, as mood. Hillman noted the image doesn’t lead somewhere else like a story. We can find nowhere to go but more deeply into the image.
Tarot is a soul-making art, a sacred participatory act correlating experiences in the world with universal symbols, a process of remembrance of the soul’s journey and calling. Each spread reflects the soul's passage through a unique archetypal structure, each time living, growing, and creating from that specific archetypal matrix.
Tarot us the confluence of a person, object, and event. We are central to the mysteries we search for through matter in the objective world, as well as soul and spirit in the subjective world -- nature exposed to our questioning method.
Even a 3-card spread has half a million possibilities to reveal potential of combinations. permutations, and placement based on the situation and way the question is asked. All our words come from just 26 letters.
The images do not become pinned down by any particular interpretation, are never literalized into any single fixed concept or "meaning. Instead we return, drawn again and again to an experiential "living in the image," with new meanings potentially emerging over time as we go "more deeply into the image." Hillman suggests that images acquire autonomy and operate according to their own will, similar to gods.
Hillman’s approach to image is deeply rooted in the work of the French phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard. The image is a free expression created not from pressure but from play, not from necessity but from inventiveness -- the way we engage and embrace the world. Imagination is more than the stuff-sack of trauma; it is the cradle of renewal, a genesis, rather than effect. Imagination mobilizes the potencies of transformation.
In his Poetics of Space, Bachelard says, "By the swiftness of its actions, the imagination separates us from the past as well as from reality; it faces the future. To the function of reality, wise in the experience of the past, should be added a function of irreality, which is equally positive. Any weakness in the function of irreality will hamper the productive psyche. If we cannot imagine, we cannot foresee."
Our self-reference rests on a perceptual dimension of presence-openness not ‘closed’ within any conceptual system. As long as the images are not trapped in a single meaning, they continue as an animating, enlivening presence. You will quickly discover the ancestors various aesthetic preferences. These are forms, styles and archetypes that are inherent in their makeup. Aesthetic satisfaction validates the process.
Joseph Campbell said, "The object becomes aesthetically significant when it becomes metaphysically significant." Clarity is the "aha" quality -- privileged 'moments of grace.' Transient moments of grace and transformation put meaning into aesthetic arrest and creativity that is an intuitive awareness of the required action. The innocent viewer is stopped dead in their tracks and has no choice but to stare in awe at their relationship with the living world.
Aesthetic engagement is active engagement with the process -- engagement with the element of beauty and systemic wisdom. Aesthetic arrangement and metaphorical thought squeeze out the real meaning and value of our experience and the comprehensive properties of our relationships through 'wise relating.'
Art is significant life activity and a way to access systemic wisdom and connectiveness. We cultivate inner beauty in the life-changing play of our own natural history. Information is the stuff of relationship and the living world of context, relevance and integration. The conjunction of the spiritual and aesthetic is a Royal Marriage -- a grand synthesis of wholeness, our frail and mortal selves, revealed in their beauty over the epic panoply of history and myth.
- Metaphor and aesthetics
- Metaphor and performance
- Metaphor and affect
- Metaphor and embodiment
- Perceiving and understanding metaphor
- Metaphoric meaning making
- Narrativity, figuration and metaphor
- Metaphor and expression
- Metaphor and representation
- Metaphor and temporality
- Motifs, representations and metaphor
- Rhetorics and metaphor
- Actions, applications and metaphor (e.g. art therapy, media pedagogy)
- Metaphor and creativity
- Multimodal metaphor (advertisement, comics, music, face-to-face communication including gesture with speech, film, television, video games etc.)
- Conceptual metaphor in media and the arts
arcane cinema
THE BODY OF IMAGES
IS COMPELLING
PERSONAL UNCONSCIOUS
Our idiosyncratic body of images are our personal tropes.
COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS
Tarot is composed of universal tropes of the collective mind.
IS COMPELLING
PERSONAL UNCONSCIOUS
Our idiosyncratic body of images are our personal tropes.
COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS
Tarot is composed of universal tropes of the collective mind.
THE FOOL BECOMES THE WORLD
AN INNOCENT
DISCOVERS THE INFINITE
DISCOVERS THE INFINITE
Foolish Wisdom
The More-Than-Human World
“The fool is subversive because she threatens to reveal that existence is a dream, and that the language of the mundane, of the world of everyday consciousness, is a curtain drawn by ‘normal’ people to shield their eyes from the abyss.”
(David Kennedy, “Child and Fool in the Western Wisdom Tradition”)
We affirm ourselves by enthusiastically plunging into life. Inspired folly can end in disaster or collapse, but doesn't break our human spirit. In the process we explore both creative and destructive sides of folly. We cycle through joy and delight, horror and disgust, disbelief to belief, shame, embarrassment and humiliation.
Impulsively, we jump in, flashing with insight & thriving on fantasy & creativity. Two very different ways of encountering the world are oddly dependent on one another. We can never exhaust the paths potentially available to us: comic to tragic, horrific to sublime, life-affirming to death-dealing, from play to murder, from deception to truth. Our follies keep our youthful illusions with us. We learn to laugh at the otherwise unbearable and ridiculous. The old fool is the embodied fool.
The More-Than-Human World
“The fool is subversive because she threatens to reveal that existence is a dream, and that the language of the mundane, of the world of everyday consciousness, is a curtain drawn by ‘normal’ people to shield their eyes from the abyss.”
(David Kennedy, “Child and Fool in the Western Wisdom Tradition”)
We affirm ourselves by enthusiastically plunging into life. Inspired folly can end in disaster or collapse, but doesn't break our human spirit. In the process we explore both creative and destructive sides of folly. We cycle through joy and delight, horror and disgust, disbelief to belief, shame, embarrassment and humiliation.
Impulsively, we jump in, flashing with insight & thriving on fantasy & creativity. Two very different ways of encountering the world are oddly dependent on one another. We can never exhaust the paths potentially available to us: comic to tragic, horrific to sublime, life-affirming to death-dealing, from play to murder, from deception to truth. Our follies keep our youthful illusions with us. We learn to laugh at the otherwise unbearable and ridiculous. The old fool is the embodied fool.