The sixth card is translated from the visual language of the Tarot into the poetry of Solomon. For a dark-haired woman with an impudent face clad in a red robe seizes the shoulder of the young man while another, with fair hair and dressed in a blue mantle, makes appeal to his heart with a chaste gesture of her left hand.
At the same time, above, a winged infant archer, standing out against a white sphere emitting red, yellow and blue flames, is about to let fly an arrow directed at the other shoulder of the young man. Does one not hear a voice which says: “I have found you”, and another which says : “Those who seek me find me” ?
The choice before the young man, the Lover, is between the vows of obedience, poverty and chastity and the way of power, richness and debauchery. The three vows are in essence memories of paradise, where man was united with God (obedience), where he possessed everything at once (poverty) and where his companion was at one time his wife, his friend, his sister and his mother (chastity).
One is chaste only when one loves with the totality of one’s being. Its flashes of fire are the flame of the Eternal.
The arrow of fire, of the flame of the Eternal brings about true celibacy as well as true marriage. The heart of the monk is pierced just as the heart of the fiancé on the eve of the wedding.
Other beings surrounding us may seem to have a less real existence than ourselves. Yet it is love that awakens us to the reality of ourselves, of others, of the world and of God.
All forms of love (charity, friendship, paternal love, maternal love, filial love, brotherly love) derive from the same primordial love root of the fact of the couple Adam-Eve.
Love is a cascading current that tends to fill and inundate all.
This is the inverse of Sigmund Freud’s pansexual doctrine. For Freud “libido” or sexual desire is the basis of all human psychological activity. However the whole of love is to sexual desire as white light containing the seven colours is to the colour red. Freud’s libido is only a single colour seperated from the whole.
There are six more aspects to love that Freud ignores.
Just as Karl Marx saw homo oeconomicus, so Sigmund Freud saw homo sexualis as the basis of homo sapiens.
Knowledge of the beginning, initium in Latin, is the essence of initiation. The first or Hermetic initiation is a conscious descent – or enstasy – into the depths of the human being. Here one becomes more and more profound until one awakens within oneself to the primordial layer – the “image and likeness of God”.
One can compare it to a chemical experiment undergone on the psychic and spiritual level.
The second or Pythagorean initiation is based on the sense of spiritual hearing. It is essentially musical. It is by ecstasy – or rapture, going out of oneself – that the ‘spheres’ or ‘heavens’ are revealed to oneself.
Sounds, numbers and geometrical forms were the three stages of mentally visualising the ineffable experience of the music of the spheres.
This is what the apostle Paul said of his own experience of the ‘spheres’ or ‘heavens’ in ecstasy:
One can compare it to a chemical experiment undergone on the psychic and spiritual level.
The second or Pythagorean initiation is based on the sense of spiritual hearing. It is essentially musical. It is by ecstasy – or rapture, going out of oneself – that the ‘spheres’ or ‘heavens’ are revealed to oneself.
Sounds, numbers and geometrical forms were the three stages of mentally visualising the ineffable experience of the music of the spheres.
This is what the apostle Paul said of his own experience of the ‘spheres’ or ‘heavens’ in ecstasy:
Grace is the doctrine concerning chaste relationship between what is above and what is below. God is the source of illuminatory and revelatory grace. He cannot be grasped, but He can reveal Himself. Conscious breathing in of the reality of grace is Christian Hatha-yoga. Hatha-yoga is the vertical breathing of prayer and benediction.
In other words one opens oneself to grace and one receives it.
The Antichrist, the ideal of biological and historical evolution without grace, is not an entity created by God, but rather the egregore or phantom generated by the evolution opened up by the serpent – that science studies and teaches.
He appeared to Karl Marx and showed him “in an instant all the kingdoms of the world” where all the slaves of the past are transformed into sovereign masters, who no longer obey God, having dethroned him; nor do they obey Nature, having subjugated her.
The third temptation is directed at the vow of holy obedience.
This time it is a matter of the will-to-power.
The choice here is between the pinnacle of evolution, the superman who is “as God”, and between God himself.
The Sixth Arcanum of the Tarot, “The Lover”, evokes the three temptations and the three vows. One cannot be “chaste” without being “poor” and “obedient”; just as one cannot renounce the divine ideal in favour of the ideal of the superman, without at the same time falling into the region of trial (experimentation) where there is no immediate certainty, and into the region of the law of the serpent;
This response belongs to the range of ideas of the Seventh Arcanum, “The Chariot”, whose card represents a man standing on a triumphal chariot drawn by two horses.
