Tarot Keys Zero – IV

I’ve just returned from visiting with a friend at The Random Order. This is a great name for a coffeehouse—an oxymoron you can really sink your teeth into, one that sets a caffeine-fueled brain racing. As I turned the phrase this way and that in my mind, one of the many ideas that surfaced was that very few things in this universe are truly random. There’s usually a pattern or method to be found if you look hard enough.

The order of the tarot major arcana keys is not random. Unfortunately, due to their complexity, you can see many patterns, some more useful than others. To me, the pattern of the first five keys is polarity, positive and negative, yin and yang.

The Fool , key zero, is the androgyne, both masculine and feminine, yin and yang. The fool is each and every one of us. As the song says, “Everybody plays the fool,” and we are all on a fool’s journey.

Zero is the shape of the cosmic egg, and when it hatches, it breaks apart and becomes I and II, The Magician and The High Priestess. The sterile duality between logically formed ideas (The Magician) and innate knowing (The High Priestess).

The sterile dyad unites and give rise to the fecund dyad of III and IV: The Mother—the ever fruitful, abundant earth (The Empress), and The Father—leadership, law and order, protection (The Emperor).

A kingdom is the combination of the Empress and The Emperor. The land and it’s abundance becomes useful and cherished when a strong leader assures protection and law and order. This is the probable origin of the “divine right of kings”. The true king got his mandate from the Goddess, Mother Earth herself. It was this marriage of the divinely designated king (The Emperor) with the Sacred Earth (The Empress) that created a fruitful kingdom.

The king is the divine spark that ignites the fecundity, fertility, and creativity of the earth and brings its prosperity and abundance to the people. When the king was no longer perfect/virile/potent, the kingdom suffered and he had to be replaced. Back in the day he was sacrificed or killed by a rival; today he doesn’t get re-elected.

The thing to remember is that the cards are archetypes, not personalities. No one is just The Empress or just the Emperor. We all contain both. Everyone needs to be assertive as well as patient, active as well as passive, severe as well as gentle, tough as well as nurturing. Because of our different genders and personalities, each of us has different proportions of yin vs yang. It is these differences that add interest, spice, and conflict to relationships. If everyone was the perfect balance of yin and yang as shown in the Taoist symbol, the world would be a peaceful, boring place.

This is a cool picture, but it misses the point. This image is made up of two beings intertwined, the yin-yang symbol is a representation of the duality within one being.