H. R. GIGER TAROT
AKRON
H.R. GIGER TAROT
H.R. Giger’s “Baphomet” The Spell IV, 1977, Work No. 331, 2.40m × 4.20m
Laid out in the style of a triptych, the work has three panels that represent the various spheres of creation. To the right of Baphomet (and to the left of the viewer) is “Paradise.” Its luminous spheres are embodied by the bright, upright pentagram. To his left is “Hell,” symbolized by the dark inverse pentagram. Baphomet himself, in the center, represents the human plane of existence, the “reality” in which polarities intersect, engage in conflict, or counterbalance each other. This concept is depicted by the two interwoven pentagrams, which express the connection between the microcosm and the macrocosm. The symbolic and allegorical references of the portrayed figures refer to the realm of death and rebirth.
List of Paintings
The 22 illustrations opposite the card motifs (pen and ink and airbrush) were originally prepared by H.R. Giger as a cycle of illustrations to the mystical phantasmagoria in the original edition (‘Oracle of the Underworld’).
EVERGREEN is an imprint of TASCHEN GmbH
© 2000 TASCHEN GmbH
Hohenzollernring 53, D–50672 Köln
© 2000 Akron & H.R. Giger
All rights reserved
The original edition was published with the title of Baphomet in 1992 by Urania AG, Neuhausen/Switzerland.
Publisher: Akron/H.R. Giger
Overall layout: Akron
Cover design: H.R. Giger
Translated by Yvonne Chapman, Phil Goddard, David Hefford, Monique Simmer and Simon Wiles and edited by Christine M. Grimm in association with First Edition Translations Ltd, Cambridge, UK
ISBN 978-3-9053-7289-2
Château St. Germain
CH-1663 Gruyères
Tel:++41(0)26 921 22 00
Fax:++41(0)26 921 22 11
http://www.hrgiger.com
CONTENTS
Cover
Title
List of Paintings
Copyright
Warning
Preface
Introduction
The Spread Systems
IBaphomet
IIThe Green Angel
IIIThe Mirror of the Soul
IVThe Big Bang
VMephisto’s Hammer
VIThe Norns’ Wheel
VIIThe Five-Ray Spread (The Path of Decision)
VIIIThe Nine-Ray Spread (The Relationship Game)
IXThe Ten-Ray Spread (The Celtic Cross)
The Tarot Meditation
The 22 Major Arcana
0The Fool
IThe Magician
IIThe High Priestess
IIIThe Empress
IVThe Emperor
VThe Hierophant
VIThe Lovers
VIIThe Chariot
VIIIStrength
IXThe Hermit
XThe Wheel of Fortune
XIJustice
XIIThe Hanged Woman
XIIIDeath
XIVAlchemy
XVThe Devil
XVIThe Tower
XVIIThe Star
XVIIIThe Moon
XIXThe Sun
XXJudgement
XXIThe Universe
About the Authors
Endnotes
Warning
This is not a tarot book in the usual sense. It has not been written for people who seek the truth without questioning themselves or who hide behind the mask of the “positive.” Nor is it for those who are addicted to the quest for enlightenment, believing that they have long overcome the darkness within themselves and only looking for (and finding!) it in others. As the ultimate “shadow tarot,” the cards and book provide a panoramic view of the psychological and mental underworld. They reveal that true darkness lies in repressing the shadow – by “striving for the light.” The search for enlightenment is actually like an addiction: The drug that enslaves us is the shadow itself! So this book is intended for people who first want to discover why they should seek the truth before they try to find this truth.
PREFACE
From “Baphomet” to the “H.R. Giger Tarot”
After completion of The Crowley Tarot (© 1995 by U. S. Games Systems, Inc., Stamford), I felt both relieved and frustrated. I was relieved at having finished such a voluminous and well-researched book. Yet, I was dissatisfied because the book could not delve deeply enough into the mechanisms of the emotional depths if it was to remain salable. It suddenly occurred to me that, instead of helping people understand themselves, the marketing of esoteric texts as guides to self-realization serves to create varying degrees of identification with commercial models of self-realization. The pattern is always the same: People are encouraged to suppress their own evil and project it on to others, to hide the shadow in themselves either by denying it completely or at least giving it another name. I thought it was strange that today’s seekers of the truth go to self-realization workshops where they are given crash courses in the same divine plan that they found completely ridiculous when these were taught to them in religion classes. On the other hand, it could hardly be in humanity’s collective interest for people to find answers to life’s ultimate questions and redeem their souls. Once they are redeemed, they would stop spending their money on “models of self-realization.” At the very least, this would jeopardize the entire financial basis of human development.
While working on The Crowley Tarot, it occurred to me that all this dependence on models (in this case, the model provided by the tarot) was essentially nothing more than a spiritual dream cinema. Consequently, we bore ourselves to the point of exhaustion by repeatedly viewing our own dreams. Because humans want to live lives based only on goodness, the striving for truth corresponds with the childlike desire to perceive our own wishes in everything we see – and this is not the truth but infantile wishful thinking. So I asked myself whether it was time to question my own belief systems. I felt that the way in which I had structured “nuggets of knowledge” reflected my attempts to get a grip on life, add my own version of it to the flood of published books, and earn money in the process. This approach was far removed from the desire to gain knowledge. An inner voice somehow told me that this was exactly how some authors make fools of themselves: They court the respect of readers in order to distance themselves from their own lack of understanding.
As a result, in 1991 I began thinking about a tarot that would penetrate the mechanisms of human expectations a little more deeply and hold up a mirror to our unconscious images and concepts. It became clear to me that the tarot is a map with symbols so that we can look at our deeper psychological landscapes from the outside. As long as we do not place ourselves at the mercy of these models by considering the map to be the truth, there can be no objection to this approach. However, if we treat this model as our perceived truth, we will be at the mercy of our expectations. If we see the world only as we experience it in our thoughts, the models we use will convince us of our expectations.
On the other hand, this mechanism forces authors of tarot books to live up to their readers’ expectations if the books are to be successful. Everything must be depicted from an esoteric perspective, which believes it can even see signs of “spirituality” in extreme negativity and views the world through rose-colored glasses. This approach may be effective, but I dislike the assumption of basically using a creative trick to ultimately cut us off from the darker aspect of our instinctive values, which are a part of the greater whole and of our development. Or, if forced to confront them, we are told that we should always view these aspects as a means to the higher goal of self-realization. We know that collective imbalance is a precondition for dynamic development. This development must remain in a fluctuating state of unrest so that it can constantly rebalance itself if any type of growth is to occur. Yet, we continuously defend ourselves against this “unredeemed” condition without realizing that this act of defense is actually the foundation and therefore our creative contribution to growth. Even if we must “suffer” as a result, this cannot be deemed negative. But as long as we don’t allow these insights to flow into the models that we use, they cannot be expected to reveal the truth. Instead, the result is the suppression of this truth. If our expectations include models that are unable to understand themselves, then these models will lead us away from the truth. In other words: Our models can only reflect our expectations – but the expectations are derived in turn from these models!
Inspired by these critical impulses, I began thinking of creating a tarot that would penetrate more deeply into the unconscious mechanisms of our behavior patterns. I thought that if a critical book could bring to light the shadows of our lives and souls, it might spark a similar inspiration in the readers so that they could recognize their own thought patterns and inner concepts. One fundamental question that arose was how this concept of a “shadow tarot” could be translated into visual terms. What artist would be willing and able to implement such a demanding project?
It was precisely at this time that I came across H.R. Giger’s great book of paintings, Necronomicon. The title picture showed a fascinating monster: Baphomet, the symbol of the connection between the rational and irrational world. As I looked through Giger’s other pictures, it struck me that they were hardly bathed in the glow of psychological illumination. Each picture encapsulated the interconnected nature of human suffering with an absolutely grotesque, tortured perfection. These eruptive, delicately drawn, and closely interlocked visions complemented and overlapped each another in a bizarre panorama of Eros and Thanatos, of dream and reality. But before rejecting Giger as a mere conjurer of demons, I tried to recognize myself in the mirror of his pictures and asked whether he had something important to convey with his art. Didn’t these monstrous, corroded, crippled, and mutilated figures conjure up fears that are very real in view of the everyday horrors? These are fears that we refuse to face, so they fail to fulfill their natural task of confronting us with the effects of our own actions. From this perspective, Giger appears to be anything but a cynic or nihilist with no feeling for the harmony, beauty, and perfection of creation. Instead, I saw him as a very modern educator who could put his finger on the wounds of our way of life. Even if he didn’t do this in the classical humanistic manner by using logic, critical reason, and rational arguments but in the form of irrational, mystic visions, this was because the threat to our world also has deeply irrational traits at its innermost core.
At that moment, it become clear to me that Giger, and nobody else, must be the creator of the “Shadow Tarot.” However, although Giger was quite familiar with the Crowley Tarot and had also drawn inspiration from it as a painter and graphic artist, he did not feel strong enough to create a completely new tarot deck. But we talked, and after some thought, decided to select twenty-two of his paintings and link them together in our minds to create “The Tarot of the Underworld.” There was certainly no shortage of choices when it came to devising a tarot cycle in which the artistic value matched the psychological value. Many of Giger’s paintings, with their archetypal and highly symbolic pictorial language, seemed almost predestined for this purpose. His version of Baphomet provided the focus of our inspiration, the sun around which the planets of the other cards revolved until they had all been given their fixed orbits within the iconographic cycle. In 1992, Urania published the 500-page book as part of a set, together with the cards and a poster, under the name Baphomet. Seven years later, the Taschen-Verlag publishing company approached us with the idea of producing a shorter paperback edition. The prospect of making the Giger cards available to a broader international public was very appealing, but we thought that the idea of shortening the original work was neither convincing nor particularly original. This approach would not only break up a self-contained work; it would also fail to meet the expectations of the market.
Since the Giger paintings are documents of their time in their own right, and an homage to the tarot as a source of the artist’s spiritual inspiration, the relationship between the cards and the philosophy was different than the usual one. The cards were not “explained” in the common sense of the word; rather, their meaning was crystallized in a kind of “modern talk” between the philosophical questioning of the collective content and the creative depiction of deep fears. The explanations were therefore “mythologized” into the selected pictures to enable an alchemical symbiosis between the two. For the reader of Baphomet, interpretation did not mean simply being given a menu of oracular pronouncements from which to choose as they drew the cards. Rather, it referred to lines of psychological development that are reflected in the mirror of the picture that they look at. If we had watered down this approach by complying with the suggestion that we abbreviate the work, without simultaneously expanding the interpretation component (which had been deliberately neglected in the original work), we would have lost the philosophical superstructure without compensating for this by providing a useful book of interpretations.
We therefore managed to persuade the publisher not simply to produce a shorter version of Baphomet, but to work on a whole new concept with us. We sacrificed the “Mephistophelean” stories, brain twisters and mental games that often tackled the duality of collective thinking. We either left these out completely or included abbreviated versions of them in the description of the cards. But to compensate for this, we expanded the interpretation section into the main focus of the work. Although we lost the Baphometic philosophical superstructure, this meant that we gained a compact book of tarot interpretations that was easier to understand. We have therefore called it simply, but appropriately, The H.R. Giger Tarot.
Lake Constance, Walpurgis 2000
Akron
INTRODUCTION
If a piece of roofing tile falls on a person’s head, and he is a “realist,” he will blame the incident on the owner of the house and possibly even hold this person responsible. The “realist” can therefore begin with the externally perceivable effect, such as a head injury, and relate it to an externally perceivable cause, which is a roof in need of repair. However, an “esotericist” would draw the reverse conclusion: this individual would begin with the externally perceived effect to an inner, suspected cause. For example, such a person might wonder what his “Higher Self” was trying to tell him by causing him to pass by the house at the exact moment when the tile fell down.
Which of these is the correct approach? Both are right – at least from the perspectives of the “realist” and the “esotericist.” The roof was in need of repair, and this fact undoubtedly represents one reason for the described effect. But the fact that the injured person was passing at the exact moment when the tile fell just as unequivocally represents a major factor in this occurrence. So we see that these two causes together produced the effects of the accident. In this respect, it is quite possible that the event is an example of what the psychologist C.G. Jung termed “synchronicity.” In everyday language, this denotes a meaningful coincidence. We have probably all experienced such an occurrence at one time or another. Synchronicity of events means that the two occurrences are not joined by causality; instead, they are related to each other by some means, which cannot be rationally fathomed or explained. This means that an inner relationship might exist between outwardly unrelated factors: a relationship of synchronicity. This could be expressed as a “whenever-then” relationship. Whenever I am particularly drawn to card XVI, the Tower (when it surfaces in the spreads with conspicuous frequency), then one of my own ideas collapses in the world around me.
This certainly does not mean that the tarot should receive some type of rational justification. Yet, Jung’s attempt is trailblazing in expanding our linear and causal ways of thinking. As long as we remain aware that images are only images, even on the symbolic level, and agree with Goethe that everything visible is merely an allegory, then we can think of the pictures and symbols of tarot as a door behind which is the numinous or unspeakable.
The Tarot as a Model of Our Hopes and Fears
So let us imagine the tarot as a door that reveals a different panorama each time we reshuffle and lay the cards. The cards represent their own particular cosmos, a miniature model of all sequences of events in the world. They provide us with the pattern for a reality, which we then interpret from our own personal point of view. At any moment in time, the world and human beings form a complex fabric of cause and effect. But because the world is not simply as it is in our eyes, but only becomes what it is through our own imagination, we can consider reality as a complex fabric that takes form only as a result of the interplay of all its components, including human understanding.
In terms of the tarot’s model of reality, this means that no card exists of its own accord or just on its own. Nor should it be seen independently from the observer since it only exists in relation to other cards. And in each of these possible relationships it exists – depending on the observer’s viewpoint – in a different form. Conversely, the observer has no objective standards of value or overall perspectives, despite the fact that these are only objects, which are what they are. Because we do not see the objects as they are, but rather merely as we are able or willing to see them, each act of seeing can only ever be the perspective of our own imagination. But the roots of this concept are our hopes and fears. Our feelings are what make us “recognize” everything that we observe through the subjective lens of our inner state of mind. Nevertheless, we give the name of reality to what we ultimately see.
Consequently, we are only able to see the cards in relation to our hopes and fears. So there is no view of the cards that would not change as soon as our hopes and fears changed. The individual imagination consists of unconscious yearnings and anxieties that are attracted precisely to those events (cards) in the world that confirm them. It is therefore clear that tarot does not in any way question the law of cause and effect; on the contrary, it simply provides a broader perspective within this law. If we shuffle and lay the cards, we are creating a reflection of our own small portion in the overall situation. In the process, we suppose that even so-called “coincidence” is essentially determined. That is to say, it is decided by the force field of the will that arises from the center of feeling and in turn is bound to the contents that present themselves to the will in the form of destiny. Through the filter of the imagination, the eternal now becomes commonplace. And this eternal quality, which is integrated into everyday life, always imparts a sense of yearning: a yearning for God.
This is particularly apparent in the tarot. When laying the cards, experts try to find certain forms and structures so that they can recognize the spirit of the eternal beyond everyday meaning. This is because they instinctively know that their yearnings are only the shadow of the spirit that sits enthroned beyond the perceivable.
Synchronicity of the Internal and External
It is therefore in no way true that the cards “predict” destiny. Rather, we transfer our present state of mind onto the cards and then, by transferring it back, read the unconscious expectations that we initially projected onto them. The use of tarot cards makes it possible for us to observe the world in the mirror of our inner expectations, and to understand these as a true illustration of the ideas and convictions surrounding our inner meaning. The cards alone can never be destiny; they merely indicate how our inner sense approaches the world. We could say that they try to draw attention to those symbols that are the mirror of our internal and external processes in a synchronic form. When external events occur, they must first take place on the level of the soul before they can actually be translated into the material level. The explanation offered by the cards is one of the many possible ways of feeling these inner currents and recognizing them as the original source of all action, as the plans whose materialization is what we subsequently call experienced reality.
The Internal Reality!
In other words, the world as it portrays itself to us always corresponds to the sum of our experiences that we are consciously able to comprehend. We create our levels of reality through the effects of our actions; these effects of our actions simultaneously create the identity of our ego. Each of us creates our destiny through our unconscious traits, and our destiny is then separated from these traits and perceived as an external event. In this way, we can avoid recognizing that our human strivings are directed not towards knowing the world, but rather at constantly affirming ourselves in our inner patterns of destiny. Each moment in time therefore represents only a part of our time/space continuum, while our present attracts the patterns of experience that we are still lacking in order to integrate them into our consciousness. Consequently, each of us creates a quality to life that we realize through our unconscious inner intentions and then call it “destiny.” We would like to recognize these “higher” workings, which form both the basis and the goal of our path through life. But we are playing with fire when we do this because as soon as we think about how we feel inside, we surrender either to limitations in our own patterns of thinking or to the dangerous world of philosophical models.
The External Path
Only when we understand that we can never know purely from within ourselves can we put our faith in religious or esoteric models without being consumed by them. This is because the collective creative spirit has established altars in the world upon which we offer our concepts of the images or our own imprinted image patterns (to the spirit that has drummed into us how we must perceive the world if it is to be our world). Only when we know that all answers are in us alone and not in the models, and that these answers cannot be found through external descriptions but only triggered by them, can we discover that these models do not hold any truth: On the contrary, they are a structured form of searching that has been elevated to a quest for the Holy Grail in the minds of the seekers. We must first ask ourselves what inner yearning compels us to select a few similarities out of something that is actually an endless chaos. Why do we give these a structure and an interdependence, conjuring up clusters of notions of the world? Then we can see that only thinking itself is perceived in thought and we can simultaneously regard symbols as tools for expressing our creativity. We could say that the symbols are mirrors of what we project from the unconscious onto the conscious plane. The next chapter outlines various techniques and ways of laying the cards that can bring us one small step closer to the unknown that hides from itself within us because of our incessant thinking.