Spirituality/Paganism & Magick: The Tarot: The Fire Of The New Aeon - by Christine Hall

Traditionally, the twentieth Tarot trump has been called Judgment. Then Aleister Crowley came along and renamed the card The Aeon. This should come as a surprise to no one. After all, Uncle Al renamed half the pack. But while some of his changes were easy to understand, and others not so much changes as refinements, substituting The Aeon for Judgment might seem downright confounding.

So which is it, Judgment, The Aeon, or some esoteric combination of both?

The card is attributed to the Hebrew letter Shin, which means a tooth. Shin is one of the three “mother letters” of the Hebrew alphabet, along with Aleph and Mem, and represents the element Fire, which is energy, change and transformation. On the Kabbalah, Shin is the path that runs between the earthy Malkuth and Hod, the sphere of the intellect. Therefore, this card can be seen as the biting tooth of the intellect.

The card is Fire, pure and simple. Fire at its most transformative. As a friend of mine says, the card represents “a baptism by fire.” In a way, this is the Fire of the alchemist. In every way it's the fire of the smelter. This is the burning away of the dross to expose the pure precious metal that is contained within the ore.

Because of its connection with Hod, the energies of this card can bring about a complete change in thought or perception, and exposes the connection that everything has with the divine. Examples: burn away the dross at the supermarket and you have a Harvest Temple or burn away the dross at the bank and you have a Commerce Temple.

The idea of Judgment, especially as depicted in the Rider-Waite deck, is a peculiarly Christian idea. The reasons for the Christianization of this card in traditional decks are twofold. First, the Tarot was developed at the time of the inquisition and adding Christian images was a blind to hide the fact that the Tarot holds deep occult secrets. Second, the Gnostics, who came up with the original design of the Tarot, were mystical Christians, although their take on Christianity was far different from the Pauline theology that now holds a monopoly on Christian thought.

In Waite's version, the Archangel Michael is blowing his horn, announcing the commencement of “judgment day,” and the spirits of all who have lived are rising up from their graves. But the biblical “lake of fire” is absent, which is strange, considering the fact that this card is all about Fire. It seems that Waite well understood the difficulties in reconciling the Christian's connection between Judgment and Fire.

In Christian theology, there is no “burning away of the dross” to expose the pure metal, at least not after one has died. The ones thrown into the lake of fire, the ungodly who are not “saved,” are barren; the ore is all dross with no gold. To Paul and his followers, once the Archangel blows his horn, it's all over. If you aren't already “saved” then you might as well abandon all hope.

But Waite was limited in his understanding of this particular card because he was very much a man of the preceding age. For a somewhat clearer understanding, we must turn to Aleister Crowley, who was very aware of the passing of the Aeons. In fact, several incidents had convinced Crowley that the new Aeon, which he called “The Age of Horus,” had begun during the first decade or two of the 20th century and by the time he was working on the Thoth deck, in 1930s England, it must have seemed as if “judgment day” was at hand. Europe had been brutally wasted by the First World War and Hitler was garnering his troops to unify Europe under Nazi rule. Jews were already being sent to concentration camps, where they would slowly become living corpses before being gassed to death. It was obvious that the old world was already undergoing a baptism by fire.

By most accounts, however, Crowley missed the mark on the beginning of the “new age” by nearly eighty years. Today, most occultists believe that the new aeon began in the late 80s, at about the time of the Harmonic Convergence, as we moved out of the Piscean age into the age of Aquarius. This matters little since eighty years is but an instant in the procession of the ages and no matter when it occurred a change of aeons is certain to bring about some sort of “baptism by fire,” since the old order rarely gives-up power willingly. Certainly at this evolutionary juncture for mankind, the still-dawning age of Aquarius, the card has a new prominence and a new meaning in our daily lives. When well aspected, “baptism by fire” no longer speaks to a personal transformation, for a change that is transpersonal.

For better or worse, we have, indeed, entered a new aeon.

©Copyright 2005 by AlternativeApproaches.com

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