Ride the Snake

Thoth Tarot 

I blogged about this card this time last year: The Snake Charmer. I'm no closer to coming to grips with its imagery now than I was then. To be honest, I don't think anybody is. Lon Milo DuQuette devotes more pages to this trump than any other (8!) and says, 'It is one of the most mysterious and complex cards in the deck. There are several elements in the card I don't understand at all.' Tell me about it!

So what is this Universe card from Thoth Tarot all about? Who knows! There's a naked golden girl wrangling in mid-air with a big snake. An eye beams down. She's holding a fish hook in her right hand, and her left hand does not so much grapple with the snake as point toward the eye. The finger is actually pointing. Squint at it. The four kerubic beasts snort, wild-eyed, in the four corners. Below the Little Lady (as Harris calls her), there is a building of some kind. I wonder what it represents. And the overall shape of the entire card has to do with 'squaring the circle', and is a shape called a vesica piscis. Bewildering.

Marina of Saturness links the song to 'The End' by The Doors, which is a great connection, look at this:

'This is the end
Beautiful friend
This is the end
My only friend, the end

Of our elaborate plans, the end
Of everything that stands, the end
No safety or surprise, the end
I'll never look into your eyes again

Can you picture what will be
So limitless and free
Desperately in need of some stranger's hand
In a desperate land

Ride the snake, ride the snake,
To the lake, the ancient lake baby
The snake is long, seven miles
Ride the snake, he's old and his skin is cold'

Which all works very well, until  the song describes a killer walking through his house murdering his sister, brother and parents one by one, and then it urges us all to catch the blue bus that is callin' us, after telling us to 'kill kill kill kill kill kill'. Well. It was Jim Morrison after all. Who knows what he was on when he wrote it.

The Universe card is the culmination of the Fool's journey. Angel Paths (a great resource for working with Thoth) says, 'recap your achievements on a Universe day, remember where you came from. Then turn your face to the future and decide where you're going!' That makes good sense for me today, because it is the last day of my old timetable (I'm not counting working this weekend because working weekends shouldn't count! It shouldn't happen! I shun it! ;) )