The Power of Tarot as Visual Image, by Pamela Eakins

By Sarah Taylor

This week, I hand you over again to Pamela Eakins, co-creator of Tarot of The Spirit and someone whom I feel embodies the idea of the wisdom of the feminine. Somehow, this excerpt communicated a message to me that lay beyond the words she writes; the words are a gateway rather than the destination itself.

In a moment that was valuable to me this morning, my therapist said that it felt important to be able to feel part of forces that are greater than us. She had responded to what I had told her about a close friend: he had looked at me in a slow-dawning incredulity, and not a little fear, when I had mentioned to him that I was aware of the potential consequences of having to sign a rental agreement during Mercury Retrograde. In that moment, I realised that my own connection to something greater than myself was so important that I was prepared to be judged as mentally unstable because of it, and that I was prepared to stand by it even if other things that I considered precious fell away.

In describing what she does below, Pamela Eakins speaks to me of the same thing. She talks of the need to find something that breathes life and meaning into what, without consciousness, feels lifeless. Tarot does this for me — as does Astrology, in a much more embryonic form. Both of them connect me to something that feeds and nourishes, but which also asks that I give it expression in order for it to exist in the particular way that I describe it. I feel this power asks all of us to do this in the way that we are best able to, and that it can be our life’s work to open ourselves to it. But that might simply be my own reaction to it. I’d be interested in hearing yours.

— Sarah

” [W]ords are but skeletons — pale, rigid, lifeless pieces of bone — while the pictures conjured up by our powers of imagination are as living flesh, elastic muscle and circulating red blood.”  — Edmond Bordeaux Szekely [philologist, philosopher]

How do you walk the spiritual path? Perhaps your spiritual knowledge is a set of words intellectually assimilated via the books and teachings of the great masters. Or, perhaps your knowledge has been gained through your own deep emotional experience, learned by feeling as it were.

We receive two kinds of education, says E. B. Szekely, the one someone else gives us and the one we give ourselves. [The Art of Study, 1973] Anyone can read a book and intellectually assimilate its contents. That is the kind of education provided for us by schools. In school, we sharpen our skills at intellectual abstraction. We learn to play back what we have been taught. After the test, we often forget what it was we knew.

The education we give ourselves is deeper. That’s because it is driven by emotion. Our deepest memories are cradled in powerful currents of feeling. That which we feel is emotionally, rather than intellectually, assimilated. Emotionally assimilated memories are tenacious. While intellectual memories easily fade, emotional memories cling to our consciousness. That which has an emotional base becomes the force which drives our actions. Observe your own process. You will see that your actions are the result of your most powerful feelings.

It is the education we give ourselves that gets us inside of the teachings of tarot and gets the teachings of tarot inside of us. If we wish to assimilate, know, and retain the spiritual lessons of the tarot at the deepest level — particularly if we wish to change our spiritual, or even daily or mundane, lives through tarot — the power of our emotions must be activated. We must set the emotional process in motion and cultivate it. This is the central key to following the tarot as a spiritual path. We do this through activating our creative imagination.

Creative imagination transforms abstract thoughts and ideas into visible, audible, palpable and concrete realities. Using our creative imagination, we think in pictures or images. Through visualizing, we can attain the deepest levels and ways of knowing. We can penetrate the deepest meanings of a text. We can come to understand the essence of an idea as a living dynamic life-unit. We thereby begin to achieve a deep quality and intensity of inspiration. Says E. B. Szekely: Words are like two-dimensional drawings, while images are like life itself. Images are three-dimensional living realities which appear in color. Color we can respond to. Through experiencing the word as a living reality, we are carried deeper and deeper into the center of consciousness.

Aleister Crowley, occultist and tarot master, once referred to the Tarot cards as “alive.” he said, “each card is, in a sense, a living being; and its relations with its neighbors are what one might call diplomatic. It is for the student to build these living stones into his living Temple.”

Crowley is referring to the inner spiritual temple which each one of us builds “stone by stone.” Each student, to attain full knowledge, must bring the cards to life. It is not enough to read a book and memorize the words said about the tarot. Upon the skeleton of tarot, the serious student hangs skin, meat, and muscle. The student floods the form with circulating blood. The student inspires the form with the breath of life. Only then can the death of empty words be escaped. Only then can the words be magically transformed into living entities. Only then will the student become emotionally exhilarated. This, then — this imbuement of the skeleton with life — is the key to the student’s inner transformation.

Thus, knowledge, attained through feeling, which derives from the image-making of the creative imagination, becomes fully and completely internalized in every cell of the body at every step of the way. This is of critical importance. So, then, we witness the unfolding of the first mystery of tarot. The first step is to teach ourselves to breathe life into a thing that, at first glance, appears to be dead.

Excerpt taken, with thanks, from Tarot of The Spirit by Pamela Eakins, Ph.D., companion to the tarot deck painted by Joyce Eakins.

If you want to experiment with tarot cards and don’t have any, we provide a free tarot spread generator using the Celtic Wings spread, which is based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread. This article explains how to use the spread.