H. R. GIGER TAROT

THE SPREAD SYSTEMS

Our symbol is the pentagram. It is also known as the witch’s foot, because it could either repel witches and Druids – or attract them (if reversed). It is still used today in rural areas to keep evil away from cattle stalls, thresholds, beds, and so forth. Whenever this is done, the purpose is to activate the collective spiritual structures, which symbolize protection against evil (the good banishes the repressed part of itself into evil to legitimize the struggle of the good against evil and remain unrecognized as it lives out the repressed part within evil). Consequently, a conscious confrontation with deliberately produced pentagram visions represents a possible form of therapy in the future. This suggests not only the defense of the shadow, but also the defense of defense, the questioning of the defense, and dealing with the inner fears that have only been produced by this defensive behavior in the first place.

We use two interwoven pentagrams to consult the oracle. The white pentagram, with the head and limbs of the white goddess, symbolizes white magic or the victory of the spirit over the material world. On the other hand, the black pentagram, which points upwards with its two tips and leads to the Devil’s goatee, represents black magic or the victory of the material world over the spirit. Here we have a tool in our hands or before our eyes that polarizes all of the values: There are no questions outside of the polarized values; depending on the type of question, we can decide which psychological explanatory model we want to transfer to the pentagram.

In order to understand how the two first spread groups (spread systems I–VI) function, we must understand that they show us no external reflection of life. This means that they say less about external events than about who we are and why things happen as they must. They do not show us what we can do but allow us to see things in a more comprehensive way and within a broader context. However, if we begin with the assumption that everything we experience in the external world reflects our inner being, examining these series offers us the opportunity for knowing ourselves. As a result, unused energies can be set into motion and become available to us in our external lives. This brings us into the realm that esotericism calls inner inspiration or cosmic consciousness. However, this is not a voice from above but an inner concept that is more than we believe ourselves to be - but less than we believe that God is. It is the threshold over which everything that we have removed from ourselves with all our might can flow back into the soul. It doesn’t matter whether we have raised it up to heaven or sent it down to hell so that we can use this detour to play off God and the Devil against each other through our projections, true to the motto: Evil is always in others!

Warning

Before we begin the spread, which means drawing cards as we hold them in our hands like a fan or from cards spread out on a surface, we shuffle all of them so that some of the trumps are “reversed.”

If this is new to you, it is advisable to begin with the third spread group (spread systems VII–IX). These emphasize what the past or present state of a certain situation and what can or must be done in a specific situation.

I BAPHOMET

Questions

This spread is very useful if you have no specific questions and simply want to ask your subconscious mind what portions of your self should be developed beyond the normal way in which you perceive yourself. Here we find ourselves in the realm of paradoxical processes of the inner nature that normally cannot be understood by means of logic thought. They reveal portions of the soul that are inaccessible parts to the conscious mind, at whose mercy we often feel ourselves to be (even though they are a part of us). As a result, we often battle against them in their external projections. The focus here is on questions such as the following:

• What do my own inner images bring into a situation?

• How do I build (reconstruct) the given situation with the help of my senses and what contribution do I make towards the development of this situation?

Allegory (Baphomet’s Invocation)

In the first eon, I was the Great Spirit.

In the second eon, Men knew me as the Horned God,

Pangenitor Panphage.

In the third eon, I was the Dark One, the Devil.

In the fourth eon, Men know me not, for I am the

Hidden one.

In this new eon, I appear before you as Baphomet

The God before all gods, who shall endure to the end of the Earth.

Peter J. Carroll: Liber Null – Psychonaut

York Beach, Me. (Samuel Weiser)

1987, page 131f.

Interpretation

1 The Great Spirit (The Self)

This card shows the great self, which is more than you are, yet nothing that exists outside of you. It may be what you call God, but perhaps it also disguises itself as the shadow. In any case, it looks after your interests and you can therefore call upon it in a personal way.

2 The Horned One (The Other)

In this card you encounter the unconscious fears lurking deep inside you. In the deepest levels of your brain, you are still enmeshed with the primitive forms of consciousness from the primal stage of human evolution. All dragons, spiders, and snakes, as well as the concepts of monsters and demons, are the patterns of past experiences, which emerge once more from the older parts of your brain. They have not disappeared because they are psycho-energetically charged. Deep within the subconscious you are still linked with them because they represent a portion of your psychological inheritance.

3 The Devil (The Id)

This picture depicts the Devil, frightening you because you repress him as the unacceptable part of yourself and because he compensates for your shortcomings – hidden from yourself – with his threatening behavior.

4 The Hidden (The Superego)

The fourth card represents what you recognize that you do not understand. This aspect feels sorry for itself because although it perceives the truth, no one listens to it. It is the mysterium magnum, which penetrates all the material bounds, understands all secrets, demands the truth, and recognizes God.

5 Baphomet (The Light)

This card shows everything-that-is, namely the cosmic consciousness that is aware of itself as a part of its own self and therefore points to itself. Cosmic consciousness represents the highest level of spiritual perception available to us.

II THE GREEN ANGEL

Questions

Just like the first spread, this second method of laying the cards is appropriate when you have no concrete questions but would simply like to forage in the primal ooze of your unconscious mind. Use it to discover who you are outside of who you believe you are – beyond the ego with which you only identify to a limited degree because you suspect that someone else also exists here. If “Baphomet” (I) shows you what portion of your inner images you bring into a situation, “The Green Angel” personifies the images that the subconscious mind reflects back to you from the situation: These are the dark unconscious formations that are dramatized through your directions in the past.

Allegory (The Green Angel)

For a moment I am once again the one who sits at the writing desk staring into the crystal ball. Just for a brief fleeting moment I once again change into my forefather, John Dee, and stray into the oldest and most depraved quarter of Prague, not knowing where my feet will take me. I have the vague need to dive down into the muddy bed of the nameless, unscrupulous, irresponsible rabble that passes its mindless days in the pleasure of smoke-enveloped instinct and is only happy when belly and lechery are satisfied. What is the end of all endeavor? Weariness … loathing … doubt. The feces of nobility and the excrement of the mob are one and the same filth. The King digests the same things as the sewer sweeper. What an error to look up to the imperial in the Prague Castle as if looking up to Heaven! And what comes from the heavens? Fog and rain and the endless filthy watery snow. For hours I have waded through heavenly excrement that fell down sticky from the leaden heights. Heaven’s digestion: repulsive, disgusting, revolting. I notice that I have descended into the ghetto, to the exiled among the expelled: the asphyxiating stench of a people mercilessly assembled into a couple of laneways who beget, give birth, grow, and then die layered upon the putrefying dead in its graveyard. Living soul stacked upon living soul like herring in darkened spires. And they pray and await and crawl until the knees are bloody, and wait and wait … hundreds and hundreds of years for the Angel … for the fulfillment of their promise …

What is your praying and waiting, John Dee, your belief and hope in the promises of the Green Angel, when compared to the waiting, believing, praying, expectation and hope of these wretched Hebrews? And God, the God of Isaac and Jacob, Elias and Daniel – is he no less a faithful God than his servant from the west window?

A burning desire overcomes me to seek out the great Rabbi Löw and question him about the terrible secret of waiting for God …

I know, somehow I know: I stand incarnate in the humble room of the cabalist Rabbi Löw. We have spoken of the sacrifice of Abraham and the unavoidable sacrifice God that demands from those who he wants to make his blood relatives... Dark and secretive words I have heard concerning a ritual knife that can only be seen by those whose eyes have been opened to those things of the other world invisible to the mortal human being: things more real and of greater consequence than things on Earth, which can only be suggested to the blind seeker through the signs of letters and figures. These mysterious words from the toothless mouth of an old madman cut me to the quick! Mad? Mad like his friend high up there in the castle … the imperial Rudolph von Hapsburg! Monarch and ghetto Jew: brothers in the secret … both gods in the laughable trumpery of their appearance … what is the difference?

At my request, the cabalist drew my soul into his. I asked him to transport my soul. He refused; he said that it would crumble if he did so. It had to cling to his soul, which had become transcendental from the body belonging to the mortal world. Oh, how these words made me think of the silver shoe of Bartlett Green. Then Rabbi Löw touched me on the collarbone, like the petty thief in the prison of the Tower had once done. Then I see … see with the tearless, peaceful, imperturbable eyes of the old Rabbi … I see my wife Jane kneeling before Kelley in the same room of the house opposite “am Ring.” She believes she is struggling with him for my happiness, for gold, and the Angel. Kelley does not have access to the keys in my safekeeping, and therefore wants to use a crowbar to take the book and bullets from my trunk. He wants to slip out of Prague with his spoils under the cover of darkness and fog, leaving us in the grip of poverty and wretchedness. Jane protects the trunk with her body. She negotiates with the scoundrel. She pleads, and does not know what she is doing.

I … smile!

Kelley makes all sorts of objections. Blatant threats alternate with cunning; coldly hatched plans with feigned compassion. He sets conditions. Jane says “yes” to each one of them. Greedier glances touch my wife. The cloth covering her breast tears open as Jane kneels before him. Kelley fights her hands as they seek to restore order. He looks down at her Fire bathes his head.

I … smile!

He lifts up Jane. His grip is lascivious, shamelessly. Jane weakly admonishes him. Her fears for me steal her courage away.

I … smile!

Kelley is persuaded. He makes all things of the future dependent upon the commands of the Green Angel. He makes Jane swear that, like him, she will pledge obedience, obedience to the command of the Angel until death and beyond, no matter what this may be. Only in this, he threatens, would there be rescue. Jane takes the oath. Fear lends her face a deathly pale color

I … smile; but a keen and acute pain slices through me like a razor-sharp slaughter knife. I feel it … through the lifeline. It is almost like a deathly thrill...

Then, I see the ancient, peculiarly tiny child’s face of the High Rabbi Löw, furrowed by fear, suspended freely before me in the air. He says:

“Isaac, the knife of God is at your throat. But in the thornbush writhes the lamb in your place. Be as merciful as ‘He’ if you one day take a sacrifice; be compassionate like the God of my forefathers.”

Darkness passes over me like an army of blind nights, and I feel the memory of what I have seen with the eyes of the Rabbi’s soul fade and disappear. It stirs me like a bad dream.

Gustav Meyrink: The Angel of the West Window.

(The First Look in the Magic Mirror)

Interpretation

1 John Dee (The Image of the Ego)

The first card shows the ego that acts from its own center and perceives and constitutes itself in its own actions.

2 Jane (The Image of the Other)

The second card describes the unconscious attraction to the aspect of the opposite sex that you have estranged within yourself. It is not the feminine that John Dee loves in Jane, but rather the feminine part in himself. That is why this card is less representative of the hope of capturing others than of the lost part of ourselves, which we hope to recapture in others.

3 Edward Kelley (The Image of the Id)

Here you meet the shadow or your dark inner specter, which you do not willingly want to acknowledge. Only people who have already encountered their own shadow feel secure in being close to the devil. For he embodies an element of truth deeply rooted in our instinctive nature.

4 Rabbi Low (The Image of the Superego)

The fourth card corresponds to the inexorable striving for freedom from natural compulsions. It allows you to search unflinchingly for the pure form of love that ultimately can only be found in the divine. This card also shows you the mask behind which your repressed drives and instincts are concealed. It is the conscious self that fights Evil behind the mask of the father figure (card 3), who is only attributed with wrong so that the self can feel justified in destroying him.

5 The Green Angel (The Darkness)

In the search for an all-encompassing love, you encounter here – in spite of your personal illusions – the multifarious primal perversions in the realm of instinct all too often concealed behind the pretty mask. For the Angel is the mirror into which you encounter what is deeply founded and glimpse the ogre through which you now recognize yourself.

III THE MIRROR OF THE SOUL

Questions

The Mirror of the Soul is the appropriate spread to use when there are two different things you want to know: first, what inner images of your own are you projecting onto the situation (spread I). Second, what external experiences arise out of it (spread II)? This means that this is a matter of recognizing in which form what you have evoked is translated into reality from the reflection and/or in what guise you encounter your inner images in external life.

Background

This method of laying the cards combines spreads I and II.

Interpretation

1 The Ego

The first card represents the consciousness of your own self (The Great Spirit). It is the way the subject expresses and perceives itself as such: this is your own conscious identity at this time.

2 The Image of the Ego

The second card shows you the aim of your identity (John Dee); this is the inner intention, which is the basis of the course you are following and leads you to your conscious identity.

3 The Other

The third card describes the challenge created by the encounter with the world (the Horned God): this is what confronts you from the outside as your environment.

4 The Image of the Other

The fourth card symbolizes the part of you that you have distanced from yourself and projected onto the opposite sex (Jane), which is reflected in the image of the partner.

5 The Id

The fifth card describes – in contrast to the conscious ego – the deeper layers of the personality (The Devil): the level of the soul that includes the unconscious, the emotions, feelings, drives, and strivings (“endothymus function”).

6 The Image of the Id

The sixth card shows the circumstances or the person through which evil surfaces in life (Edward Kelley), the clothing in which the Id is manifested.

7 The Superego

This card embodies the superego in the Freudian sense, the controlling authority (the hidden one) placed above the ego, which accepts that the laws of society are valid and binding. It therefore includes the moral regulations and opportunistic aspirations of our spiritual life.

8 The Image of the Superego

In the eighth card you encounter father figure (Rabbi Löw), who is inspired by the endeavor for a better solutions. He breaks through the barriers of perception and grows within the transcendental spaces of limitless levels of consciousness. As an authority that passes judgment according to your conscience, he mainly demands that we renounce the goals for which the id strives (cards 5 and 6) and places himself in opposition to the ego (card 1). In unresolved conflict situations, this can lead to repression of the desires or emotions unacceptable to the superego.

9 The Darkness (The Shadow of the Light)

The ninth card shows us the purposeful currents rising from the endothymus function (card 5); these are often tied to feelings. As motivating forces, they determine the dynamics of experience, desires, and action. On the archetypal level, this is the Great Unknown or the dark archetype (the Green Angel), which attracts you and places you at its whose mercy if you fall into its hands.

10 The Light (The Shadow of the Darkness)

The last card shows the higher understanding through which the human spirit rises above itself and can become aware of its own bicephalous nature (Baphomet) by recognizing itself from both inside and outside of its own ways of thinking. He is the Janus-headed figure who unites an inward view with an outward glance in a dual perspective: “I am the Devil who has overcome polarities by looking God in the eye and only seeing himself.”

IV THE BIG BANG

Questions

Every creative idea, every flash of genius is a miniature repetition of the “big bang” with which our universe began its existence. For beyond the cosmic struggle is also hidden the universal relevance of the same eternal question: What does it mean? That is why this spread is for asking about the basic creative potential in an idea, or about a notion that you have concerning where the basic creative potential lies. How will this matter develop? What is the objective?

Allegory (The Big Bang)

“In the beginning God created Heaven and Earth. And the Earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep...” These are the first lines of the Book of Genesis in the Bible; we could say that receives a certain amount of confirmation by the Big Bang theory of modern physics. According to this theory, the universe began its existence with the primal explosion – the big bang. Prior to this event, the spirit of matter had only been present in something like homeopathic amounts since matter was compressed into an infinitely high density within an infinitely small space. Jahveh’s act of creation, giving birth to being out of nothingness (creatio ex nihilo) developed so incredibly quickly after the big bang that it passed through the chaos, quark, and hadron eras in the first milliseconds; seconds later, it went through the lepton and radiation eras. But it took several million years for the era of matter to begin.

Interpretation

1 Chaos (The Beginning)

Chaos is shapeless primal matter out of which everything emerges. It is the first act of the creative force that “generates itself” and then ignites its own idea. It is an eruption of flames, the overflowing power of which destroys existing forms so that the life force can flow into new forms. In spiritual cosmogony, chaos represents the bridge between the spirit and the idea. It is a symbol of the inner firepower underlying outer endeavors as an invisible inner impetus.

2 The Quark Era (The Creative Quality)

This era corresponds to the absolute primal idea of the divine manifesting itself as matter and penetrating into the world of forms. It is the spirit of the will, and of God’s spark, which conceal itself in form. Even during those first milliseconds of the young universe, it laid the cornerstone for continual development right up to the present day. The Quark Era only lasted about one ten-thousandth of a second. On our level of human creation, this means that the second card reflects the creative quality underlying our idea.